Evaluation of User Practices during Collaborative Processes through Proposed Historical Projection

The paper focuses on the domain of user behaviour evaluation in the collaborative processes performed in a virtual user environment. Proposed historical projection of activities performed in such an environment provides several analytic perspectives materialised in form of different tools, but all of them are based on suitable visualization and extraction techniques. The differences are based on different analytical tasks to be supported by particular analytic tools. We will describe two of these analytic tools, but only one in more details because of our direct involvement in the design and implementation of this tool as project partner in the IST European project called KP-Lab. The main technological output of this project is represented by KP-Lab System as an original platform for support of collaborative working and learning practices based on knowledge creation metaphor. The first analytic approach is based on interactive visualisation of available historical data based on user requirements in simple and user friendly graphical formats as graphs or charts. The second analytic approach provides historical retrospective of performed collaborative processes based on timeline form visualisation of performed events with different selection a patterns’ search capabilities. These two approaches can be used instead of often used manual methods of user behaviour evaluation e.g. in a learning course. Manual evaluation is much more time consuming and tedious for teachers or researchers from several reasons: necessary collection of all materials from students, laborious analysis of their communication channels etc.; e.g. in this case it is difficult to identify the real involvement of each student. Suitable visualisation of automatically collected data with the possibility to define constraints based on users’needs provides easier approach, mainly in the case of large students’ groups. In our paper we will describe our motivation, related works, briefly the first analytical approach and the second one in more details as an important output of our research group.