Contextual Collaboration

In order to support (and not just enable) collaboration a software needs to have some knowledge about the collaboration context. Exemplary questions include: Who are the participants, what is the collaboration goal, how should the collaboration process proceed, what are the expected results, what is actually going on in the collaboration? Based on such knowledge about the planned and actual collaboration a wide range of support mechanisms can be offered by a collaboration software.
Examples include adaptation of tool interfaces, guidance through collaboration processes, automated analysis and feedback on collaboration behaviour. The talk will cover challenges in modeling and capturing collaboration context and provide examples for using the context to support collaboration.

In the workshop the participants will analyse a collaborative learning scenario based on an advanced chat system and then design solutions to support the collaborative learning using context information. This includes designing support mechanisms, identifying relevant context parameters and approaches to model and capture these parameters in a given scenario. We will use the ConcertChat system to explore the scenario and evaluate the solutions.
Ideally, we will have participants with educational, psychological and technical backgrounds to work interdisciplinarily on this challenge.