A Digital Workbook Tool to Support Asynchronous Collaboration

In our Computer Science Department at Universidad de Chile –as in many other departments around the worldevery day more and more students are using TabletPCs as a substitute for their traditional notebooks. In many situations, these students need to interact with instructors, assistants and their partners in both synchronous and asynchronous way in order to carry out the tasks involved in their courses. In this context, a problem occurs when students try to share their digital annotations. This proposal of project intends to develop a digital workbook tool that runs on a TabletPCs and supports the student’s asynchronous work. The digital workbook will use the services provided by OneNote 2007 and it will extend the Conference XP platform in order to integrate the asynchronous work into such tool. The digital workbook will work in both ways, connected to a Conference XP archiver and connected to another peer (TabletPC). Using this tool the students can share and synchronize their annotations with other student’s annotations, and they can work in a collaborative way, which can improve their learning. 1. Institutions details Computer Science Department – Universidad de Chile. Address: Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación. Av. Blanco Encalada 2120, 3o Piso, Santiago, Chile. C.P. 837-0459. URL: www.dcc.uchile.cl, Telephone: (56 2) 978-4965, Fax: (56 2) 689-5531. Systems Department – Universidad del Cauca. Address: FIET, Sector Tulcan, Pompayán, Colombia. URL: www.unicauca.edu.co, Telephone: +57-282-09800, Fax: +57-282-09810. 2. Principal investigator Luis A. Guerrero ([email protected]). Assistant Professor at the CS Department (Universidad de Chile), currently he is in charge of two courses of the software engineering area. His research areas include ComputerSupported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). His current research activities are focused on the use of collaborative mobile devices (PDAs, smart phones and notebooks) to support educative scenarios. He has participated and led several research and development projects in Chile (see more details in http://www.dcc.uchile.cl/luguerre).