After reading this page, you should have an overview of the place of The COOPerator within the field of groupware. The COOPerator can be classified by using the following criteria:
The extend to which The COOPerator supports the continuation of the group task as well as the group communication process helps to classify the tool. The question is, whether the system provides merely enabling technology, or rather tries to improve the productivity of the group by imposing some structure on the interaction process?
Combining task support and process support for The COOPerator leads to the following figure (Meijer [1994]):
According to the figure, The COOPerator supports two tasks: creating a group document, which is the main task, as well as the organisation of a group meeting.
Besides the browser, no other means for structuring the group task are provided by the system. Also, the communication process is relatively unstructured. This was to be expected since cooperation in the context of co-writing is fairly unstructured in practice as well.
Within The COOPerator, interaction may take place by adding annotations to the document, through mail messages and by discussing issues using the issue-space. Besides, an important means for communication is the shared workspace. Within The COOPerator, a graph is used to model the shared environment. The browser makes it possible for the group members to get an overview of their common ground. All accumulations to the common ground, both with regard to the task as well as the communication process, are stored in the graph. Thus, the graph is used as a collective memory for the entire group.
Finally, the communication between the peers is improved by the use of multi media elements because, according to Meijer [1994], it increases the expressiveness of the interaction. Different communication modalities tend to influence the interaction between the co-authors though (known as media effects). For example, as Kraut et. al. [1992] point out, cooperators who only have access to leaner communication channels worked longer and communicated more because their communication task was more difficult.
The COOPerator belongs to the category of systems which focus on asynchronous interaction. The students who are going to work with this system should be able to work at times convenient to the individual student and not be restricted to times convenient to all group members. The system should be able to support remote interaction.
Moreover, the tool is meant to support groups of students working together on a group document. Thus The COOPerator is primarily a co-authoring tool. We aim to provide support for true co-writing, referred to as peer collaboration by McCarthey and McMahon [1992], in which all members contribute equally to the interaction most of the time, and in which each of the peers has equal control over the document as well as within the interaction.
Rodden's classification space for CSCW systems (Rodden [1991]) combines the environmental facets and the task characteristics. Within this framework, The COOPerator can be depicted as follows:
Collaborative writing plays an important role in education because it is a means to convey thoughts about all kinds of subjects. Moreover, according to Rimmershaw [1992], it is seen as an important social practice.
According to Tuk [1994], computer-based tools can be positioned within an educational institute on several levels:
In order to prevent the project from becoming too complicated we decided to build a system that could be used as a part of the educational environment. In that way attention could be focussed on issues related to computer supported cooperative work.
Sjoerd Michels, Tilburg, The Netherlands