Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
multi-user needs covering many social aspects
and collaboration forms.
Our current knowledge and information
society considers knowledge as intellectual
capital. Knowledge is an important resource
for companies, organizations, and individu-
als. Knowledge is often defined as information
of which a person, organization, or a group is
aware. Implicit knowledge cannot be formalized
and is based on personal experiences, skills, or a
combination of both. Compared to this, explicit
knowledge is more comprehensible as it is often
formalized, e.g. in mathematical expressions.
For constructing knowledge, individuals reflect
on their experiences and organize these experi-
ences. Thus, knowledge is a cognitive learning
process which uses and converts external forces
to structure the environment. Shared knowledge
construction goes a step further as it requires a
group to interact and create a shared understanding
of knowledge. Shared knowledge construction is
a process in social sciences as well as pedagogy.
It enhances traditional knowledge construction
by using tools for computer-mediated interaction.
Due to the popularity of the Web, these tools are
often web-based.
The development of tools for computer-
mediated interaction is difficult as not only the
interaction of one user with the tool but also the
interaction among a number of users has to be
taken into account when designing these tools.
For designing and developing successful tools, it
is crucial to involve end-users in the development
process (Schümmer, Lukosch, & Slagter, 2006).
Involving end-users in the development process
requires that end-users and developers can com-
municate using a common language. This language
has to allow end-users and developers to identify
and specify requirements as well as solution. Of-
ten this language does not exist. Furthermore, the
necessary background knowledge for developing
tools for computer-mediated interaction is often
not part of the professional training for software
engineers. These issues make it difficult to develop
successful tools for computer-mediated interaction
in general and particularly for shared knowledge
construction. We propose to overcome these is-
sues by providing developers and end-users with
a pattern language for communicating with each
other and a development process which involves
the end-users.
In this chapter, we first analyze the problems
when developing tools for computer-mediated
interaction in general. Then, we present a novel
pattern-based approach for supporting developers
as well integrating end-users in the development
process. We report on our experiences when using
the pattern language to design and specify tools for
shared knowledge construction. We conclude the
chapter by giving an outlook on future research
directions.
bACkground
The development of tools for computer-mediated
interaction is a challenging task. Apart from the
actual task of the application, e.g. editing texts or
spreadsheets, developers have to consider various
aspects ranging from low-level technical issues
up to high-level application usage.Among others,
network connections between the collaborating
users have to be established to enable communi-
cation, parallel input from the collaborating users
has to be handled, specific group functions have
to be included to provide group awareness, and
the data has to be shared and kept consistent to
allow users to work on common task at all (El-
lis, Gibbs, & Rein, 1991). These issues are often
not part of the professional training of software
engineers. Instead, software engineers learn the
basic principles that empower them to create any
kind of software.
Development frameworks, like e.g. NSTP
(Patterson, Day, & Kucan, 1996), GroupKit (Rose-
man & Greenberg, 1996), COAST (Schuckmann,
Kirchner, Schümmer, & Haake, 1996), Haba-
nero (Chabert, Grossman, Jackson, Pietrovicz, &
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