Conceptual Design of a Collaborative Calendar

Conceptual Design of a Collaborative Calendar – Javier Lanchang – May 5, 2008 – Page 1

Conceptual Design of a Collaborative Calendar

Javier Lanchang

Information 608

May 5, 2008

This paper is intended to describe a collaborative calendar system to allow researchers as well as educators to collaborate more effectively. Borrowing from the fields of business management research and educational psychology, it is obvious that group composition and size are considerations for Computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL). The proposed system is to add a learning management system (LMS) to the collaborative calendar. As a group (developed as a group with Gabyo Jose, Cristina Trebour, Sarah Westley), we had decided the interface should be a calendar because many of the difficulties initially encountered involved scheduling synchronous activities, as well as maintaining activity schedules that took an inordinate amount of time away from actual productive processes. In addition, assuming this would be a tool for higher education or at a minimum a literate core of participants; this is a familiar interface for many.

Proposed System

The proposed system will evaluate individuals for group assignment as well as determine group size. The basis of individual evaluation could be selected based on the collaboration being sought.

If the collaboration being sought is oriented towards development of an artifact similar to a business product development, then an initial survey would be conducted of potential participants to assess their familiarity with the area being discussed, their personality and preferred working style. Perhaps a Five Factor Model (FFM) test could be used to score each individuals agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, openness, and stability. The software could assign individuals based on their score and based on their score for familiarity with the material. Of course, the software could be overridden if desired by the person(s) setting up the particular development. Under these circumstances, preference would be given to a survey that is set up using a Likert scale for easy classification.

However, if the collaboration being sought is geared towards development of ideas and learning, the initial survey will be based on an ability assessment created by the instructor and an assessment of the individual’s ability to interact within a group based on their learning styles (Alfonseca, et al., 2006.)

The survey should be pre-populated with questions perhaps based on Felder and Silverman model (Felder and Silverman, 1988) questions on learning style or customized depending on the particular project need. The survey would be on such measures of Active/reflective; Sensing/intuitive; Visual/verbal; Sequential/global; Inductive/deductive learning styles. The survey should be as simple as short as possible to do an appropriate assessment and to assign the appropriate learning style of individuals as are necessary for a group composed of complementary individuals. More study would be required to determine the appropriate mixture of individuals and their abilities to be an effective collaborative team. This would provide a mechanism to avoid creating homogenous groups which Alfonseca, et al. indicate are not as productive for overall project productivity unless geared towards a very specific task.

Due to potential size constraints, the software would first determine the total number of participants and the desired number of groups to assign individuals based on their scores but also randomly from the instructor. Should the instructor wish or need to assign individuals beyond the initial software assignments, s/he would be able to do so as well.

Based on the personality traits of each individual, one individual per group would be assigned an initial task during the first week. As a component of the system, a quick tutorial would be provided in how to mediate/facilitate within a group so that there would be at least one member per group able to facilitate intragroup activities throughout the project or class. This individual would be provided with individual coaching if necessary as the group dynamics develop during the first few weeks. Upon group assignment, this person would be formally designated as a facilitator, not as a team leader necessarily. Under the above scenario, the instructor’s are a natural choice for this role and would be provided with this additional support to provide a true CSCL experience to the students.

Another potential tool for this management system would be the ability to create a dictionary of terms which would be required of all participants. This would serve two purposes, coercion (Kirschnera, 2008) towards common ground for everyone building trust, as well as serving as a logistical solution to creating a common language to individuals who might have differing definitions for the same term.

The survey conducted for the Spring 2008 HCI class (Appendix A) addressed many of the above concerns but required manual group assignment. Depending on the collaborative project and the potential candidate pool, this is feasible. However, if collaborative projects involve a significant number of participants such as a large international project might, then this system would provide a tool to facilitate group assignment while accounting for skills assessment, possible group dynamic factors such as age/gender, and/or language skills, thereby allowing instructors to concentrate on the topic, curriculum, and formalisms to encourage collaboration rather than accounting for possible group dynamic factors.

In addition, the calendar collaborative system is based on a calendar model interface. This would allow scheduling of synchronous activities more effectively as well as accounting for time zone differences automatically. If a location and work time preference questions were added to the survey, it is possible to assign individuals to groups based on such considerations as time zones programmatically. This would avoid possible end user confusion about time zones. The calendar itself provides several mechanisms via cell phone voice and/or text messaging services to facilitate scheduling as well.

Scenario 1 (Group F collaborative project):

John has to create for his students a curriculum that celebrates diversity and international unity. He has written to several educators worldwide and several have agreed to participate from Europe, Australia, Brazil and China. However, the different time zones, languages and schedules are preventing any further development. As a primary component, an educator mentor will be provided for each student. Each of the educators will have students participating as well. Students will be provided with the opportunity to interact with their mentoring professors as well as their student counterparts.

Student schedules have many conflicts as each student has a wide range of activities. Their schedule also changes rapidly as activities may be canceled or they may be running late. Students can use their cell phones to connect to the calendar and block and unblock times of availability. Students can use the Rolodex feature to create a profile to share with their local and international classmates. Students as well as teachers will be reminded throughout the program of important dates pertaining to class and meetings that they need to attend. Each user can choose how the reminder will be provided, within the program, to their cell phone, pda, or twitter. The program will use a calendar standard such as ical, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar to communicate easily between itself, the web, cell phones, etc.

To help in international scheduling major holidays of the different countries and cultures will automatically be blocked times, although still modifiable by user. An additional aid will be the ability to have multilingual interface displays and entries that can be translated to the language of choice. The program will automatically change date displays to correspond to the appropriate cultural standards of each country.

John and the students can use the GPS and calendar function to see which students are available in the area to discuss various topics in diversity. John can also use the time zone function to see if there are other professors available to join the meeting. John can also schedule future meetings and pre-post a meeting format with the ability to attach documents. He can also use the Rolodex feature to record grades and information about the students.

Additionally John can use his laptop to see how many times students and professors have met and he can download the chats from the program. All students and professors can also see the history of chats they have had personally as well as all information associated with them.

Use Case

In the scenario above, John would input a series of questions to assess students’ skills for the software use. Each student and teacher would be presented initially with a personality trait and the questions John has included as a complete survey before being assigned a group. This is also an opportunity for John to input any cultural/language questions that might be pertinent to group assignment. The software would allow questions to be set up as criteria, where if 2 participants answer the same, whether the software should assign them in the same group or in a different group.

Each participant is also asked to fill out a profile. Each profile would be published upon group assignment as an initial team building effort. Hopefully by providing individual histories or facts, this can serve as a vehicle for building trust and commitment for which there are some indications serve as elements of success (Warkentin & Beranek, 1999.)

The system would provide accountability for the individual groups as well as the individuals (Schellens & Valke, 2004) to encourage collaboration by providing both forms of feedback within a grading system for both. John would provide the scores on an ongoing basis as each stage of the collaboration occurs. An additional component is the ability of the participants themselves to provide feedback to each other either individually or per group which the instructors may consider as part of their grading system.

As a component of the system is the ability to create reports. One possible report is group assignment and composition. Should the need to re-assign groups occur due to students dropping out or the addition of more students, it would provide a mechanism for carrying out this process.

This report ability should not be restricted to the instructor but available to all participants depending on the information sought. Students should be able to monitor their own participation and activities via this reporting mechanism.

Below is a diagram of the conceptual design of this learning management system.

Collaborative Calendar (Collaboratively developed as Group F – Appendix B)

The collaborative calendar system itself is intended as a tool for collaboration. Unlike present calendars and collaborative tools, it is intended to be database driven only to create links. All information will be hypertext, thereby bypassing current 256 character comment fields. The rolodex/profile feature will allow users to enter any information, urls, documents, etc. and be a tool for personalizing and socializing. The starting point for this collaborative tool will be the calendar since one of the major impediments to collaboration is scheduling. It will be set up with a set of standards, similar to ical that allows integration with existing Outlook, Google, etc. calendars. The calendar will allow the sharing of information by all participants from schedules to documents with each participant selecting who will be allowed to view what. Therefore, all participants can view availability but not necessarily the reason for blocked times.

The system was intended to provide a time management system that could be integrated into a GPS as well. The intent discussed as a group was to provide a mechanism where individuals might be able to physically meet if in close proximity. I would add an additional optional feature that the system recognizes when an individual is traveling and consider that available time. This would allow communication when traveling if desirable and feasible with other individuals in similar time zones even if not within physical proximity.

In addition, the calendar was intended to be multi-lingual both in its interface as well as having a translation mechanism for all interactions between participants. The translation mechanism will provide translations that consider the different language styles as well. For example, Spanish frequently uses passive sentence structures while English is frequently written to use the active voice creating cultural misunderstandings. Assignment based on learning style or personality traits may assist in reducing these interactions as well.

The collaborative calendar system is intended to allow the sharing of documents as well. Although formalisms can be set up requiring synchronous activities, the system allows for asynchronous cooperative activities as well. This is necessary due to the international nature of the project and the potential for different time zone activities. Perhaps the individual group activities would be collaborative while the larger group activities would be cooperative to allow regular inter-group exchanges with periodic synchronous activities that are scheduled carefully for maximizing knowledge building.

References

Alfonseca, E. , Carro, R.M. , Martín, E. , Ortigosa, A. and Paredes, P. The impact of learning styles on student grouping for collaborative learning: a case study. Journal User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction (16) 3-4, 377-401.

Big_Five_personality_traits. (2008, April 23). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved May 3, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits.

Big_Five_personality_traits. (2008, April 17). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved May 3, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar.

Kirschnera, P.A., Beersa, P.J. , Boshuizena, H.P.A. and Gijselaersc, W.H. Coercing shared knowledge in collaborative learning environments. Computers in Human Behavior (24) 2, 403-420

Schellens, T. and Valcke, M. (2006). Fostering knowledge construction in university students through asynchronous discussion groups. Computers & Education (46) 4, 349-370.

Warkentin, M. and Beranek, P.M. (1999). Training to improve virtual team communication. Information Systems Journal, 9, 271-289.

Appendix A

Human-Computer Interaction, Spring 2008 (Stahl)

1.  What is your educational focus? (a) Information Library Science, (b) Information Systems, (c) Software Engineering or Computer Science, (d) Other: _____

2.  Are you currently employed? _____

3.  If you are currently employed, is your job related to HCI? _____

4.  What are you most hoping to get out of this course intellectually and professionally? ______