Pattern-Based Tool Design for Shared Knowledge Construction - Collaborative Technologies and Applications for Interactive Information Design - page 33

template is used to enable re-use in different
learning gadgets. Apart from the question, such
a page consists of a number of correct answers, a
question category, the specification of the course,
and a helping text that is used by the good ghosts
to provide hints about the correct answer of the
question.
The question and answer pages are elements of
a shared question repository in CURE and define
the topics that are available for a game. To ensure
the quality of the questions, CURE , implements
a combination of the patterns Q u a l i t y i n s P e C t i o n
and V o t e .

using a question overview page CURE provides.
The ratings of all students are accumulated and
shown as stars. Additionally, students can act as
quality inspectors by removing questions from
the repository that are of low quality.
Summarizing, Fountain of Wisdom increases
social interaction, as students can meet on the
marketplace to form teams and during a game the
different chats allow cross-group interaction. It
allows students to self-organize their learning and
their interaction, as each user can create rooms
in CURE and define the interaction possibilities
of a room. Finally, Fountain of Wisdom supports
shared knowledge construction by creating a
shared question repository that can be used by
all students of the CURE environment.

Q u a l i t y i n s P e C t i o n

Problem : Members participate in a community
to enjoy high-quality contributions from
fellow members. However, not every con-
tribution has the same quality. Low-quality
contributions can annoy community mem-
bers and distract their attention from high-
quality gems.
Solution : Select users as moderators and let
them release only relevant contributions
into the community's interaction space.
Give moderators the right to remove any
contribution and to expel users from the
community.

nomadic Work and learning

Nowadays, more and more users make use of web-
based collaborative systems. Users participate in
communities or search for and provide informa-
tion in web-based systems. They access shared
resources which they need for their professional
life or for learning. One of the major prerequisites
of such web-based systems is that users have to
be connected to the network. But life has become
much more mobile over the last years. While
traveling, e.g. to the office or the university, users
often are disconnected from the network. This
makes it difficult to interact with other users or
to access shared resources. An application sup-
porting a seamless transition between connected
and disconnected phases would allow users to
work at any time and place while maintaining the
advantages of a web-based collaborative system
once they are online again. For that purpose, we ex-
tended CURE with a communication interface and
an independent application, called offlineCURE
(Lukosch, 2008), that allows users to interact
with the system while being disconnected. In the
following, we describe offlineCURE while again
highlighting the patterns form computer-mediated
interaction that influenced its design.

V o t e

Problem : It is hard to work out the distribution of
opinions in the community. However, good
understanding of other users' attitudes can
be important when making decisions.
Solution : Provide an easy means of setting up
and running a poll. Show a virtual ballot in
a prominent place in the community. After
the vote is over, present the result.

Due to the implementation of the patterns Q u a l i t y
i n s P e C t i o n and V o t e , students can rate the qual-
ity of a question and the corresponding answers