Peer-to-peer Face-to-face collaboration
Delfina Malandrino, Ilaria Manno · 2006
Abstract. In this paper, we present a proof of concept application of a technique that is designed explicitly for face to face collaboration software architectures. The objective is to minimize the impact on the installation and deployment of the application, that, while internally keeping a client-server architecture (in order to allow the centralize coordination and monitoring), presents to the user (both teacher and learners) as uniform work environment, integrating client and server components in one piece of software. In order to further limit the impact on the configuration, we define a start and play protocol, to start-up the application with no network configuration; the start and play protocol takes advantage from the particular conditions of the face to face context i.e. LAN setting. The application is built on the Eclipse core (Rich Client Platform), and inherits its plug-in based architecture and its advanced tailoring features. 1 Face2face collaboration systems Current research in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) has produced many studies and several classifications of the situations where the collaboration takes place. The space-time matrix (see Fig.1) is a well-known classification [4] that defines the four basic space-time situations. A lot of works have studied the different-time AND/OR different-place situations to reduce distances (both in time and space), while there are fewer studies about the same-time AND same-space situations. Of course, existing synchronous systems for remote situations can also be used in the co-located situations, but the same-time AND same-space situations is substantially different from the remote ones and the technological support should take in account this difference. Indeed, the tools to support remote collaboration try to achieve a “virtual co-location”