Pattern-Based Tool Design for Shared Knowledge Construction - Collaborative Technologies and Applications for Interactive Information Design - page 30

other, which implies that no collaboration
will be established.
Solution : Make users aware of other users who
are currently performing semantically
related activities on the same or related
artifacts.

In summary, CURE enables shared knowledge
construction as users can meet in a R o o m to start
collaboration. The different communication chan-
nels and awareness mechanisms ensure that users
are aware of changes and the collaboration process.
Finally, the wiki in CURE allows users to capture
knowledge and to organize it in a form that best
fits to the requirements of the group. P e R i o d i C R e P o R t s automatically posted to all users

of a R o o m include all changes made since the last
report was sent. game-based learning

P e R i o d i C R e P o R t s In the default version of CURE, as described

above, students mainly use CURE to form learning
groups upon teacher's request. In these groups,
they discuss course content, solve assignments,
or collaboratively write a seminar thesis. This
cooperation and discussion works well as long as
there is a group task given by the teachers. If the
given tasks are accomplished, the collaboration
in most cases stagnates or even finally stops. A
learning community could increase collaboration
among the students and foster shared knowledge
construction. However, communities cannot
be designed. Instead, learning communities
evolve through the collective building of shared
knowledge and the shifting participation of their
members (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and only the
software that supports the community is designed
(Preece, 2000). There are some key factors for
a successful online community. Participation
and practice are the key factors for developing a
learning community (Haythornthwaite, Kazmer,
Robins, & Shoemaker, 2000; Wenger, 1998) and
community members must have possibilities for
shared knowledge construction (Palloff & Pratt,
1999).
To establish a learning community in CURE,
students have to be motivated to a higher degree
of collaborative interaction and shared knowledge
construction. Game-based learning approaches
(Prensky, 2001) can be used to increase the motiva-
tion for more frequent collaborative interaction and
may result in the construction of shared knowledge
(Lukosch, 2007). Therefore, we extended CURE

Problem : Changes in indirect collaboration are
only visible by inspecting a changed arti-
fact. Users want to react to actions on ar-
tifacts, but they cannot predict when these
actions will take place.
Solution : Inform users periodically about the
changes that took place between the time
of the current report and the previous one.

Additionally, users can lookup recent changes
individually for each R o o m (10) (cf. C h a n g e
i n d i C a t o R ).

C h a n g e i n d i C a t o R

Problem : While users work on independent local
copies of artifacts, their checkout frequen-
cy for the artifacts may be low. As a result,
they may work on old copies, which leads
to potentially conflicting parallel changes.
The conflict is worse if two parallel modifi-
cations have contradictory intentions.
Solution : Indicate whenever an artifact has
been changed by an actor other than the lo-
cal user. Show this information whenever
the artifact or a reference to the artifact
is shown on the screen. The information
should contain details about the type of
change and provide access to the new ver-
sion of the artifact.