The article explores student experiences of their bodies in an asynchronous on-line learning environment, web-based computer conference (WCC), using hermeneutic phenomenology as a research method. Students in the study experience their bodies to be both here, seated in front of their computers, and there, on-line. The language they use to describe their experience of body includes metaphors aro...

Communication is a critical aspect of any collaborative system. In online multiplayer games and virtual worlds it is especially complex. Users are present over long periods and require both synchronous and asynchronous communication, but may prefer to be pseudonymous or engage in identity-play while simultaneously managing virtual and physical use contexts. Initially the only medium offered for...

A new generation of real-time computer systems performs physically and logically decentralized mission management—such as semi-autonomous entities collaboratively performing manufacturing, maintenance, combat, etc. These entities must robustly accommodate significant run-time uncertainties in their application environment and system resource state, by being dynamically adaptive. In particular, ...

Despite their predominant application in robotics, the utility of methods for information fusion is not limited to sensor-based fusion tasks. The paper presents an information retrieval (IR) system for multimedia weather documents which makes use of linguistic fusion methods and a semantically rich retrieval model based on methods from fuzzy set theory. The computational problem of how to effic...

Does collaborative learning in asynchronous discussion groups result in enhancing academic discourse and knowledge construction? This general research question has been researched in a study involving 300 students, working during six months in 38 electronic discussion groups. The transcripts of the discussions were coded and analysed to test hypotheses related to the impact on knowledge constru...

An investigation was carried out to determine the extent to which evidence of collaborative learning could be identified in students’ textual interactions in an online learning environment. The literature on collaborative learning has identified a range of behaviors that characterize successful collaborative learning in face-to-face situations. Evidence of these behaviors was sought in the mess...

This article has its starting point in a large number of empirical findings regarding computer-mediated work. These empirical findings have challenged our understanding of the role of mediation in such work; on the one hand as an aspect of communication and cooperation at work and on the other hand as an aspect of human engagement with instruments of work. On the basis of previous work in activ...

Commonly used tools for overcoming the time barrier are asynchronous communication systems such as Email, mailing lists, and Netnews (collectively referred to as “E-mail” below). Asynchronous communication systems enable each participant to read messages and write replies when convenient.There is no need for all participants to be present at the same time to achieve communications. Likewise, as...

Partner information systems (IS) must interact to efficiently support collaboration in an enterprise network. One way to reach this goal is to promote IS interoperability. Assuming a service oriented approach of the software architecture of each individual IS, the use of a mediation IS is described to bind the services of individual IS systems. The knowledge captured in collaborative process mo...