WWG: a distributed infrastructure for learning in groups

This paper describes the experiences of learning and working in groups on the Computer Science studies at the Virtual Campus of the Open University of Catalunya. Two communities have used a web based shared workspace tool to (a) coordinate the task of tutors of a computer architecture course, and (b) a problem based collaborative learning project with software engineering students. These experiences have lead to the design of WWG: a distributed infrastructure for distance learning in groups on an Internet scale. WWG is based on the distribution of events about the information produced by people. Every participant can be notified and thus be aware of the actions, changes, and progress of the groups he belongs to: synchronous awareness for asynchronous work. There are three classes of components that work together: user agents for collecting and presenting actions to people, meta-information agents for distributing event information, and repository agents for providing distributed storage for group objects