COLAB: A PLATFORM DESIGN FOR COLLABORATIVE LEARNING IN VIRTUAL LABORATORIES

摘要

Nowadays collaborative educational platforms are producing an important impact in our society showing this influence in a huge number of researching projects. The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has gained its prominence in the building of collaborative environments for educational purpose providing new ways of producing learning. So, in order to obtain an educational system which fits with the educational purposes, it is necessary to join pedagogical and technical efforts. More concretely our developments are focused on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) systems, in which the ground of the knowledge building is the user collaboration. In this paper we are going to deal with the design and implementation of a platform for supporting collaborative learning using tools such as whiteboard, chat, posting tools, modeling experiments tools and other tools which allows view the results from the experiments. Regarding the design of this platform it is has been used J2EE technologies for supporting the asynchronous communication and Elvin notification server like to support the synchronous communication. In this paper it will be also described how it has been developed the architecture, showing as well how the tools can exchange events delivered in the communication channel. Finally, we will show an example of collaboration inside this system, and it will be explained how the user can move in this platform as well as how users can coordinate the use of some resources.