Supporting interactive collaboration on the Web with CORK

The World Wide Web has served as a medium for collaboration since its inception. Web-based collaboration has, however, been dominated by systems supporting asynchronous activities such as sharing documents and participating in discussion forums. Supporting interactive, synchronous collaboration on the Web has proven much more challenging. In this paper we describe three of the challenges encountered in the context of supporting network-based collaboration among middle and high school science students: integrating synchronous and asynchronous modes of interaction, minimizing consumption of bandwidth, and adapting noncollaborative software components for collaborative use. We then present the Content Object Replication Kit (CORK), a toolkit for building interactive Java-based collaborative systems for use on the Web.