This site contains the call for participation of the workshop that will be organised in June 2005 in Switzerland on the theme of Collaborative Artefacts Interactive Forniture by CRAFT.
This site contains the call for participation of the workshop that will be organised in June 2005 in Switzerland on the theme of Collaborative Artefacts Interactive Forniture . is a laboratory of EPFL in charge of renewing the teaching system developing, testing and implementing new technologies for computationally supporting teaching in the school.
CRAFT is interested in the development of the elements of the architecture that can support learning and collaboration among the students. In our terminology collaborative learning is a coordinated, synchronous activity that is the result of a continued attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem.
The topic of this workshop will be the development of furniture that can support collaboration and interaction of the students in the learning center.
A promising approach to support face-to-face collaboration is not to hinder long-socialized communication and interaction forms. By building interaction environments integrating ubiquitous computing facilities that adapt to the needs of the people working in them, we might enhance, augment, and facilitate natural interaction within face-to-face collaboration.
A key role of these environments will be in how they are realized. Collaborative environments that adapt to the needs of group would allow the computer as a device to disappear in the architecture of office spaces, while its functionality remains ubiquitously available [1, 2, 4].
The architecture of future collaborative environments includes buildings, rooms, room elements such as interactive tables, interactive displays set in walls, or chairs with integrated information technology. Their realization requires an integrated design of real and virtual parts that augment reality and thus combine the natural and intuitive interaction in the physical world with the benefits of an underlying computer infrastructure that disappears in the architecture and ideally only becomes salient on demand [3].
We registered a rising interest within the CSCL and the UbiComp community to research the roles of interaction spaces and the elements they consist of, and their effects on collaboration. Several approaches have been implemented to support group work with adapted office spaces and room elements, but none of them alone seems to be an consistent solution.
Our motivation for this workshop is to bring together researchers, architects, psychologists, and computer scientists who are interested in collaboration and how new kinds of environments can support it. We want to discuss previous results in this area and share our experiences with the ultimate goal of finding emergent research questions and future research directions.
A secondary motivation is that a new project has come to the attention of our unit: the construction od a Learning Centre in the campus area. The Learning Center will: (1) optimize access to information by providing the necessary infrastructure, services and skills to the academic community; (2) provide the resources that students need for their work, i.e., documentary resources, access to technology and workspace, and other various services; (3) give students an environment for living and cultural exchange, for intellectual interaction, and simply for meeting with others.
The workshop will be run for three days beginning with short presentations of the participants. After the presentations, an idea-finding session will be run, where the most interesting issues for the workshop will be discussed. The most interesting topics emerged after the idea-finding session will be elaborated by five sub-groups.
The sub-groups will then work alone discussing important questions and problems as well as trying to work on answers regarding their topic. At the end of the first and the second day, in a plenary session following the sub-group-work each group will present their ideas and discuss them with all the rest of the workshop participants. In a concluding plenary session on the third day, all the participants will have the opportunity to both reflect on the workshop's results and to identify issues that still remain critical or controversial with the need for future research activities.
The schedule of the workshop is here reported.
the expected outcome of the workshop will be three-folded: (1) building a common background and a common understanding of the issues raised during the three days; (2) identifying important open research topics and directions; (3) producing a book for the CSCL series edited by CRAFT and published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in the series Computer Supported Collaborative Learning.
In addition, important parts of the interaction will be registered and reorganised in the form of a running documentation that will help to reflect on the whole workshop process.
The workshop is directed towards psychologists, designers, architects, interaction designer, computer scientists that have an interests in the topics and that eventually have done some work in the area.
20 participants have been invited based on their previous activity and experience in the field. Other 20 participants will be invited based on a motivation letter or design idea submitted prior to the workshop. Each participation letter or design idea should consist of the author's vision of furniture for supporting collaboration, his/her expectations towards the workshop and the author's research activities and bio.
Interested people can email Mauro Cherubini . All the relevant information concerning this workshop will be found on this website .
The workshop location is Château-d’Oex, a typical Swiss village situated in the Alps. The chosen hotel is called 'Roc & Neige'. The closest airport is Geneve, and the place can be reached by train (change at Motreux station). A bus from the airport will be organised in the afternoon (6 pm) of the Sunday June the 19th and back on Wednesday 22nd of June, afternoon.
For directions and a map of the place see Map24. We are organising a bus leaving from Geneva Airport around 6 pm on Sunday. Alternatively you can reach the location using the train: see CFF.ch.
Pierre Dillenbourg and Jeffrey Huang are the workshop chairs. Mauro Cherubini is responsible for the general coordination of the workshop, Florence Colomb for the logistics and praticals. Email address are formatted as name.surname@epfl.ch. Telephone +41 21 6932275.
Registrations are closed at this stage. People interested in the outcomes / follow ups, can contact Mauro Cherubini at the address above.
During the CSCW course offered at EPFL, students were asked to realise a table supporting students' interaction and testing its impact on collaboration. A Short video can be found at this location (32 Mb!).
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