Conversational agents that participate in or mediate group interaction introduce challenges that extend beyond supporting individual users, raising new questions about how agents participate in and influence groups. To characterise this emerging design space, we present a systematic review of 53 peer-reviewed studies on group conversational agents (GCAs). We analyse how GCAs intervene in group-level processes, including participation regulation, conflict mediation, task alignment, and execution support. Using concepts from group research as an analytic lens, we organise prior GCA work around recurring group interactional challenges (orientation, conflict, alignment, and execution), and examine the roles agents are designed to play in addressing these challenges. We find that GCAs are predominantly designed as short-term, role-bounded interventions targeting isolated challenges in bounded interactional contexts. We further identify recurring structural tensions in GCA design, including tradeoffs between visibility and discretion, proactivity and group autonomy, and agent authority and group ownership. Together, these findings clarify how current GCAs are positioned within group interaction, surface the implicit assumptions embedded in their designs, and outline open questions for future research on conversational agents as group-level interventions.

Pointing transfer functions define the mapping between input devices and onscreen cursor movement. Despite being used by millions daily, only marginal improvements in pointing performance have been achieved by tuning transfer functions since the introduction of acceleration-based gains. We present TFTune, a reinforcement learning-based approach for improving pointing by automatically tuning personalized transfer functions. We show that TFTune-generated functions outperform operating system defaults, improving movement times by 7% on macOS when using a trackpad (7 minutes of tuning) and 8% on participants’ personal Windows computers with hardware (i.e. mice and monitors) of varying characteristics (after just 1 minute of tuning). Further, we show that TFTune generalizes beyond traditional pointing devices, providing 16% improvement for a muscle-computer interface (2 minutes of tuning). TFTune demonstrates an initial approach for scalable and meaningful performance improvements in input–output mappings, opening a new direction for exploring the use of machine learning for improving fundamental computer inputs.

Athletes of all levels can find drills repetitive, tedious, and unengaging. Sport training games address this, aiming to make practicing techniques fun. However, there is little information about what feedback athletes need to support skill acquisition and improve engagement. To address this, we develop a game for training the optimal shooting arc technique for basketball free throws, and compare several scoring mechanics based on: 1) adherence to technique, 2) results (successfully making a shot), and 3) a combination of technique and results feedback. We find that technique feedback is essential to adopting a new technique, while results feedback improves engagement. We also find that combining technique and results feedback is effective, but can be overly complex for novices. Our results allow us to make recommendations to designers and researchers on how they can effectively scaffold skill development and engagement in sport training games.

Generative AI tools can provide people with the ability to create virtual environments and scenes with natural language prompts. Yet, how people will formulate such prompts is unclear—particularly when they inhabit the environment that they are designing. For instance, it is likely that a person might say, “Put a chair here,” while pointing at a location. If such linguistic and embodied features are common to people’s prompts, we need to tune models to accommodate them. In this work, we present a Wizard of Oz elicitation study with 22 participants, where we studied people’s implicit expectations when verbally prompting such programming agents to create interactive VR scenes. Our findings show when people prompted the agent, they had several implicit expectations of these agents: (1) they should have an embodied knowledge of the environment; (2) they should understand embodied prompts by users; (3) they should recall previous states of the scene and the conversation, and that (4) they should have a commonsense understanding of objects in the scene. Further, we found that participants prompted differently when they were prompting in situ (i.e. within the VR environment) versus ex situ (i.e. viewing the VR environment from the outside). To explore how these lessons could be applied, we designed and built Ostaad, a conversational programming agent that allows non-programmers to design interactive VR experiences that they inhabit. Based on these explorations, we outline new opportunities and challenges for conversational programming agents that create VR environments.

Recent combinations of interactive technology, humans, and water have resulted in “WaterHCI”. WaterHCI design seeks to complement the many benefits of engagement with the aquatic domain, by offering, for example, augmented reality systems for snorkelers, virtual reality in floatation tanks, underwater musical instruments for artists, robotic systems for divers, and wearables for swimmers. We conducted a workshop in which WaterHCI experts articulated the field's grand challenges, aiming to contribute towards a systematic WaterHCI research agenda and ultimately advance the field.

The need for frequent and brief practice in deep breathing presents challenges in maintaining motivation and consistency. While persuasive technologies have been shown to improve engagement in therapeutic exercises, there is a lack of insight into specific motivational strategies for such intermittent activities. We investigate how idle games can incentivize behaviors like deep breathing and identify specific mechanics for fostering an optimal practice cycle. We illustrate this approach in a game called BreathPurr-suade. After validating the physiological efficacy of the embedded breathing guide, our four-week study revealed idle games are more effective in maintaining deep breathing adherence than a standard breathing guide. Our work highlights the capacity of idle games to foster deep breathing, revealing their efficacy in subtle persuasive game designs that encourage intermittent therapeutic practices.

Athletes often learn suboptimal techniques that place a ceiling on their performance or put them at risk of injury. Adopting a new technique can lead to a short-term dip in performance while learning it, which can be demotivating and cause an athlete to revert to their previous, suboptimal technique. To address the challenge of demotivation in adopting new techniques, we explore technique-oriented sport training games, which aim to improve sport skills by capturing behaviour and providing feedback that motivates adopting a new technique. As of yet, previous work has provided little information on how to design sports training games, and some early research suggests that immersive games may distract players, preventing them from being able to learn a new technique effectively. We designed a study comparing a baseline non-game training system with three versions of a running game, ranging from a simplistic text-based game to a 3D audiovisual game with motion feedback. We find that the games with more immersive elements were as effective as the baseline system for adopting a new technique but were preferred by players and improved their intrinsic motivation. We propose design considerations from these findings and provide new directions for researching effective sport training games.

Electromyography (EMG) has been explored as an HCI input modality following a long history of success for prosthesis control. While EMG has the potential to address a range of hands-free interaction needs, it has yet to be widely accepted outside of prosthetics due to a perceived lack of robustness and intuitiveness. To understand how EMG input systems can be better designed, we sampled the ACM digital library to identify limitations in the approaches taken. Leveraging these works in combination with our research group’s extensive interdisciplinary experience in this field, four themes emerged (1) interaction design, (2) model design, (3) system evaluation, and (4) reproducibility. Using these themes, we provide a step-by-step framework for designing EMG-based input systems to strengthen the foundation on which EMG-based interactions are built. Additionally, we provide a call-to-action for researchers to unlock the hidden potential of EMG as a widely applicable and highly usable input modality.

While there has been renewed interest in the use of myoelectric control for general-purpose applications, the burden of training and maintaining robust models still limits its real-world viability. Online unsupervised adaptation has been proposed to solve this issue by updating the model using predicted pseudo-labels in real time during regular device use. Until now, however, these unsupervised strategies have been limited as they rely on the very classifier outputs they are adapting, making them ill-suited when there is a drastic shift in the input space (e.g., after donning and doffing a device) or there is insufficient training data. In such situations, leveraging context (i.e., task-specific information that can help understand or assess a circumstance) could provide additional guidance for adaptation and improve its robustness. Although difficult to extract in traditional prosthesis control use cases without additional sensors, context may be more readily available in other general-purpose applications, such as in human-computer interaction. In this study, we explore leveraging context, both positive (i.e., reinforcing correct actions) and negative (i.e., correcting poor actions), for conditioning pseudo-label predictions within an adaptive gamified target acquisition setting. The results show that leveraging this additional con-text significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art high-confidence unsupervised adaptation (p<0.05) using both offline and online performance metrics. This pilot work contributes novel findings and contextual approaches that do not rely on additional sensors, and thus outlines a promising direction of study for myoelectric control as a reliable and effective interaction technique.

In Virtual Reality (VR), natural 3D interactions are performed with hand representations - the visualizations and interactors used for manipulating objects. Hand representations in VR games range from abstract shapes, to graphical versions of input controllers, to realistic human-like hands. Hand representations have been shown to have an important effect on play experience and performance. However, previous work has only considered them for individual 3D interactions or an entire game, giving designers little information about how a representation might perform and be experienced across different 3D interactions (like picking up and rotating objects, or opening a container). In this work, we compare three hand representations across 12 different 3D interactions and in a longer game experience in a study of 45 participants. We find that while representation did not affect performance, representations were overall experienced differently across 3D interactions. Our work provides a deeper understanding for VR game designers about how hand representations can be used to shape play experiences.

Applications that use multiple devices and surfaces provide new opportunities for innovative interaction -- but despite the wide variety of research that has been carried out on multi-surface systems, building these kinds of applications is still difficult. In particular, multi-surface apps that use interactive visual workspaces are complicated because current tools do not provide low-level access to a connected and interactive graphical canvas that is shown on different devices. This difficulty limits the explorations that designers and developers can carry out within the multi-surface design space. To address this problem, we have developed WAMS -- an open-source web-based toolkit that provides several programming abstractions for building visual-workspace applications across multiple surfaces. WAMS uses three main concepts -- a virtual visual workspace, views onto that workspace, and graphical workspace objects -- and provides support for connecting multiple devices, creating and manipulating objects, managing and laying out views, and handling events from multiple surfaces. WAMS simplifies the development of a wide variety of applications including composite display configurations, shared-workspace groupware, systems that place different UI elements onto different devices, and bring-your-own-device applications. We describe WAMS's main abstractions and concepts, provide several examples that show the breadth of the approach, and assess the toolkit in terms of effectiveness, coverage, extensibility, and integration with existing practices and tools.

No abstract available.

Peripheral breathing guides – tools designed to influence breathing while completing another primary task – have been proposed to provide physiological benefits during information work. While research has shown that guides can influence breathing rates under ideal conditions, there is little evidence that they can lead to underlying markers of physiological benefit under interrupted work conditions. Further, even if guides are effective during work tasks, it is unclear how personal and workplace factors affect peoples' willingness to adopt them for everyday use. In this paper, we present the results of a comparative, mixed-methods study of five different peripheral breathing guides. Our findings show that peripheral breathing guides are viable and can provide physiological markers of benefit during interrupted work. Further, we show that guides are effective – even when use is intermittent due to workplace distractions. Finally, we contribute guidelines to support the design of breathing guides for everyday information work.

Designers of instructional software use gamification to help motivate and engage learners. Typically focusing on gamifying a single task, designers aim to provide a straightforward path through learning. In contrast, video games frequently provide optional secondary tasks using collectibles. Collectibles-like coins-are secondary, non-essential goals that encourage players to selectively take on additional challenges and engage more with a game. While research supports the idea that by increasing engagement learning can be improved, exactly how collectibles-an extremely common element in games-might be employed in gamified learning and how it might affect the play experience is underexplored. We present the results of a study comparing a gamified photo-editing training game that uses collectibles to one without collectibles. Our results show that learners choose to engage more when collectibles are present, and that this has a positive effect on software skills applied to a representative out-of-game challenge. Our findings provide a nuanced view of the tradeoffs in motivation and experience when collectibles are used.

Mobile augmented reality - where a mobile device is used to view and interact with virtual objects displayed in the real world - is becoming more common. Target selection is the main method of interaction in mobile AR, but is particularly difficult because targets in AR can have challenging characteristics such as being moving or occluded (by digital or real world objects). Because target selection is particularly difficult and error prone in mobile AR, we conduct a comparative study of target assistance techniques. We compared four different cursor-based selection techniques against the standard touch-to-select interaction, finding that a newly adapted Bubble Cursor-based technique performs consistently best across five different target characteristics. Our work provides new findings demonstrating the promise of cursorbased target assistance in mobile AR.

Exploring and manipulating complex virtual objects is challenging due to limitations of conventional controllers and free-hand interaction techniques. We present the TanGi toolkit which enables novices to rapidly build physical proxy objects using Composable Shape Primitives. TanGi also provides Manipulators allowing users to build objects including movable parts, making them suitable for rich object exploration and manipulation in VR. With a set of different use cases and applications we show the capabilities of the TanGi toolkit and evaluate its use. In a study with 16 participants, we demonstrate that novices can quickly build physical proxy objects using the Composable Shape Primitives and explore how different levels of object embodiment affect virtual object exploration. In a second study with 12 participants we evaluate TanGi's Manipulators and investigate the effectiveness of embodied interaction. Findings from this study show that TanGi's proxies outperform traditional controllers and were generally favored by participants.

Game designers use a variety of techniques that mislead players with the goal of inducing play experience. For example, designers may manipulate data displays of player health-showing they have less health than they actually do-to induce tension. While commonly used, players make decisions based on in-game data displays, raising the question of how misrepresentations impact behavior and performance, and whether this might have unintended consequences. To provide a better understanding of how data misrepresentation impacts play, we compare two versions of a game: one that displays health accurately and one that misrepresents health. Our results suggest that even subtle manipulations to data displays can have a measurable effect on behavior and performance, and these changes can help explain differences in experience. We show that data misrepresentations need to be designed carefully to avoid unintended effects. Our work provides new directions for research into the design of misrepresentation in games.

In the physical world, teammates develop situation awareness about each other's location, status, and actions through cues such as gaze direction and ambient noise. To support situation awareness, distributed multiplayer games provide awareness cues - information that games automatically make available to players to support cooperative gameplay. The design of awareness cues can be extremely complex, impacting how players experience games and work with teammates. Despite the importance of awareness cues, designers have little beyond experiential knowledge to guide their design. In this work, we describe a design framework for awareness cues, providing insight into what information they provide, how they communicate this information, and how design choices can impact play experience. Our research, based on a grounded theory analysis of current games, is the first to provide a characterization of awareness cues, providing a palette for game designers to improve design practice and a starting point for deeper research into collaborative play.

We designed a videochat experience where one participant can experience a remote environment from a 360° camera. This allows the remote user to view and explore the environment without necessitating interaction from the local participant. We designed and conducted an observational study to understand the experience, and the challenges that people might encounter. In a study with 32 participants (16 pairs), we found that remote participants could actively participate in the experience with the environment in ways that are not possible with current mobile video chat. However, we also found that participants had challenges in communicating location and orientation information because many of common communication resources we rely on in collocated chat are not available. Based on these findings, we discuss how future mobile video chat systems need to balance immersion with interaction ease.

A myoelectric prosthesis (myo) is a dexterous artificial limb controlled by muscle contractions. Learning to use a myo can be challenging, so extensive training is often required to use a myo prosthesis effectively. Signal visualizations and simple muscle-controlled games are currently used to help patients train their muscles, but are boring and frustrating. Furthermore, current training systems require expensive medical equipment and clinician oversight, restricting training to infrequent clinical visits. To address these limitations, we developed a new game that promotes fun and success, and shows the viability of a low-cost myoelectric input device. We adapted a user-centered design (UCD) process to receive feedback from patients, clinicians, and family members as we iteratively addressed challenges to improve our game. Through this work, we introduce a free and open myo training game, provide new information about the design of myo training games, and reflect on an adapted UCD process for the practical iterative development of therapeutic games.

Groupware research has long focused on representing gestures as a means to facilitate collaboration. However, this work has not led to wide support of gesturing in commercial groupware systems. In contrast, Dota 2, a popular MOBA game, provides two frequently-used gesturing tools: annotations - freely drawn lines on top of the gamespace - and pings - a combination of animation and sound indicating a point of interest. While gesturing tools are important for quickly coordinating with teammates in Dota 2, there is little information about how and why people use them. To gather this information, we performed two complementary studies: an interaction analysis of eight game replays, and a survey of 167 experienced players. Our findings include: six distinct motivations for the use of gesturing tools; when and how frequently gesture motivations occur during games; and, that players find pings an essential tool for winning, but not annotations. Our findings provide new directions for the design of gesturing tools in groupware and online games.

Awareness information in shared-workspace groupware is often ephemeral, and when users are interrupted or look away from the system, they can miss important information about others' activities. These attentional disconnections are brief (generally less than ten seconds), are frequent in many work environments, and can occur for many reasons. In this paper, we provide visualization techniques that can help groupware users recover from these short absences. First, we provide a simple attention monitor that informs groupware systems whether a user is looking at the screen and whether the workspace is visible. Second, we provide a framework of catch-up techniques for visualizing missed activity -- including highlighting, motion traces, and replay. We implemented these techniques in three applications that cover different communication methods and interaction speeds, and explored the use of the effects in three studies. Participants clearly saw the value of catch-up techniques, and although different techniques were preferred in different situations, nearly all users strongly preferred the catch-up techniques. Our work shows that helping users deal with periods of attentional disconnection can substantially improve the usability of real-time groupware systems.

People are increasingly using mobile video to communicate, collaborate, and share experiences while on the go. Yet this presents challenges in adequately sharing camera views with remote users. In this paper, we study the use of semi-autonomous drones for video conferencing, where an outdoor user (using a smartphone) is connected to a desktop user who can explore the environment from the drone's perspective. We describe findings from a study where pairs collaborated to complete shared navigation and search tasks. We illustrate the benefits of providing the desktop user with a view that is elevated, manipulable, and decoupled from the outdoor user. In addition, we articulate how participants overcame challenges in communicating environmental information and navigational cues, negotiated control of the view, and used the drone as a tool for sharing experiences. This provides a new way of thinking about mobile video conferencing where cameras that are decoupled from both users play an integral role in communication, collaboration, and sharing experiences.

Recent mobile technology has provided new opportunities for creating remote assistance systems. However, mobile support systems present a particular challenge: both the camera and display are held by the user, leading to shaky video. When pointing or drawing annotations, this means that the desired target often moves, causing the gesture to lose its intended meaning. To address this problem, we investigate annotation stabilization techniques, which allow annotations to stick to their intended location. We studied two annotation systems, using three different forms of annotations, with both tablets and head-mounted displays. Our analysis suggests that stabilized annotations and head-mounted displays are only beneficial in certain situations. However, the simplest approach of automatically freezing video while drawing annotations was surprisingly effective in facilitating the completion of remote assistance tasks.

Collaborative information seeking frequently occurs in an opportunistic and loosely-coupled fashion that is supported by awareness of others' activities on the web. Automatically sharing traces of information about web activity could substantially improve these collaborative information tasks, but conventional wisdom suggests that people are very reluctant to share information about web usage. Because work settings have different rules and practices about privacy, we carried out the first systematic study of people's privacy concerns about sharing web activity within workgroups. To provide a better understanding of privacy concerns about sharing web activity at work, we conducted a two-week diary study with 18 participants. Our study system asked participants to report on their search tasks and privacy concerns. Surprisingly, our results showed that people have little concern about sharing the majority of their activities with their work colleagues, and had even fewer concerns with sharing work-related activities. Our results provide new insights into the possibilities of sharing web activities within workgroups, and provide evidence that tools based on automatic sharing of awareness information can be feasible.

Mobile video conferencing, where one or more participants are moving about in the real world, enables entirely new interaction scenarios (e.g., asking for help to construct or repair an object, or showing a physical location). While we have a good understanding of the challenges of video conferencing in office or home environments, we do not fully understand the mechanics of camera work-how people use mobile devices to communicate with one another-during mobile video calls. To provide an understanding of what people do in mobile video collaboration, we conducted an observational study where pairs of participants completed tasks using a mobile video conferencing system. Our analysis suggests that people use the camera view deliberately to support their interactions-for example, to convey a message or to ask questions-but the limited field of view, and the lack of camera control can make it a frustrating experience.

Physiotherapy patients exercising at home alone are at risk of re-injury since they do not have corrective guidance from a therapist. To explore solutions to this problem, we designed Physio@Home, a prototype that guides people through prerecorded physiotherapy exercises using real-time visual guides and multi-camera views. Our design addresses several aspects of corrective guidance, including: plane and range of movement, joint positions and angles, and extent of movement. We evaluated our design, com-paring how closely people could follow exercise movements under various feedback conditions. Participants were most accurate when using our visual guide and multi-views. We provide suggestions for exercise guidance systems drawn from qualitative findings on visual feedback complexity.

Data surrounds each and every one of us in our daily lives, ranging from exercise logs, to archives of our interactions with others on social media, to online resources pertaining to our hobbies. There is enormous potential for us to use these data to understand ourselves better and make positive changes in our lives. Visualization (Vis) and visual analytics (VA) offer substantial opportunities to help individuals gain insights about themselves, their communities and their interests; however, designing tools to support data analysis in non-professional life brings a unique set of research and design challenges. We investigate the requirements and research directions required to take full advantage of Vis and VA in a personal context. We develop a taxonomy of design dimensions to provide a coherent vocabulary for discussing personal visualization and personal visual analytics. By identifying and exploring clusters in the design space, we discuss challenges and share perspectives on future research. This work brings together research that was previously scattered across disciplines. Our goal is to call research attention to this space and engage researchers to explore the enabling techniques and technology that will support people to better understand data relevant to their personal lives, interests, and needs.

Aim-assistance techniques have been shown to work for player balancing in 2D environments, but little information exists about how well these techniques will work in a 3D FPS game. We carried out three studies of the performance of five different aim assists in an Unreal-based game world. The assists worked well in a target-range scenario (study 1), but their performance was reduced when game elements were introduced in a walkthrough map (study 2). We systematically examined the relationships between realistic game elements and assist performance (study 3). These studies show that two techniques -- bullet magnetism and area cursor -- worked well in a wide variety of situations. Other techniques that worked well were too perceptible, and some previously-successful techniques did not work well in any game-like scenario. Our studies are the first to provide empirical evidence of the performance of aim assist techniques in 3D environments, and the first to identify the complexities in using these techniques in real FPS games.

Many web-based information-seeking tasks are set in a social context where other people's knowledge and advice improves success in finding information. However, when tightly-knit contacts (friends, family, colleagues) are not available, information seeking becomes more difficult. Inspired by previous work in social navigation, we developed WebWear, a system that collects and displays traces of activity for tightly-knit groups. WebWear allows people to use contextual knowledge of contacts' interests and activities to interpret the meaning of the traces, improving their usefulness. In a comparative study, we found that WebWear helped people complete information-seeking tasks more accurately, without requiring additional effort. A one-week field trial found that WebWear was both usable and useful, and that privacy concerns were reduced in the small-group context. WebWear shows that small-scale social navigation systems are feasible, and that they can improve the effectiveness of information seeking on the World-Wide Web.

Most searchers do not know how to use Web search engines as effectively as possible. This is due, in part, to search engines not providing feedback about how search behavior can be improved. Because feedback is an essential part of learning, we created the Search Dashboard, which provides an interface for reflection on personal search behavior. The Dashboard aggregates and presents an individual's search history and provides comparisons with that of archetypal expert profiles. Via a five-week study of 90 Search Dash-board users, we find that users are able to change aspects of their behavior to be more in line with that of the presented expert searchers. We also find that reflection can be beneficial, even without comparison, by changing participants' views about their own search skills, what is possible with search, and what aspects of their behavior may influence search success. Our findings demonstrate a new way for search engines to help users modify their search behavior for positive outcomes.

In games where skills such as targeting are critical to winning, it is difficult for players with different skill levels to have a competitive and engaging experience. Although several mechanisms for accommodating different skill levels have been proposed, traditional approaches can be too obvious and can change the nature of the game. For games involving aiming, we propose the use of target assistance techniques (such as area cursors, target gravity, and sticky targets) to accommodate skill imbalances. We compared three techniques in a study, and found that area cursors and target gravity significantly reduced score differential in a shooting-gallery game. Further, less skilled players reported having more fun when the techniques helped them be more competitive, and even after they learned assistance was given, felt that this form of balancing was good for group gameplay. Our results show that target assistance techniques can make target-based games more competitive for shared play.

Interactive systems often require calibration to ensure that input and output are optimally configured. Without calibration, user performance can degrade (e.g., if an input device is not adjusted for the user's abilities), errors can increase (e.g., if color spaces are not matched), and some interactions may not be possible (e.g., use of an eye tracker). The value of calibration is often lost, however, because many calibration processes are tedious and unenjoyable, and many users avoid them altogether. To address this problem, we propose calibration games that gather calibration data in an engaging and entertaining manner. To facilitate the creation of calibration games, we present design guidelines that map common types of calibration to core tasks, and then to well-known game mechanics. To evaluate the approach, we developed three calibration games and compared them to standard procedures. Users found the game versions significantly more enjoyable than regular calibration procedures, without compromising the quality of the data. Calibration games are a novel way to motivate users to carry out calibrations, thereby improving the performance and accuracy of many human-computer systems.

Guidelines for designing information charts (such as bar charts) often state that the presentation should reduce or remove 'chart junk' - visual embellishments that are not essential to understanding the data. In contrast, some popular chart designers wrap the presented data in detailed and elaborate imagery, raising the questions of whether this imagery is really as detrimental to understanding as has been proposed, and whether the visual embellishment may have other benefits. To investigate these issues, we conducted an experiment that compared embellished charts with plain ones, and measured both interpretation accuracy and long-term recall. We found that people's accuracy in describing the embellished charts was no worse than for plain charts, and that their recall after a two-to-three-week gap was significantly better. Although we are cautious about recommending that all charts be produced in this style, our results question some of the premises of the minimalist approach to chart design.

Presented at the 2009 ACM SIGCHI international conference on supporting group work, May 10–13 2009, Sanibel Island, Florida

The social semantic Web has recently emerged as a paradigm in which ontologies (aimed at defining, structuring and sharing information) and collaborative software (used for creating and sharing knowledge) have been merged together. Ontologies provide an effective means of capturing and integrating knowledge for feedback provisioning, while using collaborative activities can support pedagogical theories, such as social constructivism. Both technologies have developed separately in the e-learning domain; representing respectively a teacher-centered and a learner-centered approach for learning environments. In this paper we bridge the gap between these two approaches by leveraging the social semantic Web paradigm, and propose a collaborative semantic-rich learning environment in which folksonomies created from studentspsila collaborative tags contribute to ontology maintenance, and teacher-directed feedback.