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Groupware-Mediated Cooperative Programming
Teaching Web Technology to Non-Scientists
One consequence of the rapid growth of the Internet is the
corresponding rapid increase in the demand for teams of software and
Web site developers to support the creation of Web content and
services. Complicating matters is the need to train large numbers of
workers with non-technical backgrounds for the growing electronic
workplace. This research explores groupware-mediated cooperative tools
to teach IT skills to novices. In this project we are building a same time/different place groupware
system that supports collaborative learning of Web development and applet
programming for a computer science general service course serving
social science, humanities, and fine arts students.
Deliverables
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the GrewpEdit collaborative editor.
This application provides both a multi-user, non-blocking, collaborative editor and
a rendezvous mechanism to simplify group creation and formation. It has been extensively
tested in teaching situations from small study groups of 3-4 students up to Computer Science
lab courses with around 20 students.
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Web Programming pedagogical materials
An interactive website
for learning HTML, CSS, servlet programming, and applet programming/.
This curriculum has been developed over the past eight years and has been successfully used
to teach fairly sophisticated (and useful) programming techniques to non-scientists. This courseware
has been released under a creative commons licence that allows others to contribute sections
and to improve the presentation.
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the GrewpTool platform for studying collaborative learning.
GrewpTool is a platform for studying collaborative learning. It combines a few
collaborative editors (for Scheme, HTML, and Java) with a comprehensive logging and playback
facility. In VCR mode, the researcher can replay a session (with forward and reverse controls
and various speeds) as well as search forward or backward for high level events (such as
chats, cobrowser activity, collaborative edits, etc.) This tool has been used for a large
scale study of 50 pre-novice students working in pairs and solo. We are in the process of
analyzing the results now.
The source code for all of these deliverables is available at the
groupscheme.sourceforge.net website.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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