An approach to analyse collaboration when shared structured workspaces are used for carrying out group learning processes

In this paper we present an approach to characterize group and individual behaviour in computer-supported collaborative work in terms of a set of attributes. In this way a process-oriented qualitative description of a mediated group activity is given from three perspectives: (i) a group performance in reference to other groups, (ii) each member in reference to other members of the group, and (iii) the group by itself. In our approach collaboration is conversation-based. Then we propose a method to automatically compute these attributes for processes where joint activity and interactions are carried out by means of semi-structured messages. The final set of attributes has been fixed through an extensive period of iterative design and experimentation. Our design approach allows extracting relevant information at different levels of abstraction. Visualization and global behavior analysis tools are discussed. Shallow analyses as presented in this paper are needed and useful to tackle with a large amount of information, in order to enhance computer-mediated support.