Writing and collaboration are crucial skills in professional and academic settings. However, assessments of collaborative writing often focus only on the final text, overlooking individual contributions and the diverse strategies students employ during the writing process. To support teachers in interpreting and assessing student behaviour, we propose analysing writing data at a granular level, down to individual characters, and using user sessions as observation units to capture coherent interaction patterns. This paper introduces three methods for identifying interaction patterns in collaborative writing. The first method classifies session types by analysing features such as writing, reading, and communication behaviours, session length, and the number of group members collaborating synchronously. The second method identifies frequent sequences of session types by examining their order, enabling process analyses at an abstract yet manageable level compared to using log data. The third method focuses on text-level collaboration by evaluating the frequency of text passage modifications made by the original author or other group members. This approach quantifies individual collaboration and, at the group level, identifies isolated versus closely connected group members, shedding light on the mode of collaboration and degree of group cohesion. We demonstrate these three methods in a case study involving two cohorts, K A = 294 and K B = 242 groups of up to 9 learners (N A = 1, 848, N B = 1, 463). The interaction patterns identified using these methods are intended to help teachers understand collaborative writing processes and identify situations where the participating learners require support.

Knowledge work in modern organizations is increasingly performed collaboratively by distributed teams. Such collaboration involves dynamically changing situations. Making the collaboration environment fit the needs of these situations is supported by system-initiated adaptation based on the user and

Collaborative work is characterized by frequently changing situations and corresponding demands for tool support and interaction behavior provided by the collaboration environment. Current approaches to address these changing demands include manual tailoring by end-users and automatic adaptation of single user tools or for individual users. Few systems use context as a basis for adapting collaborative work environments, mostly focusing on document recommendation and awareness provision. In this paper, we present, firstly, a generic four layer framework for modeling and exploiting context. Secondly, a generic adaptation process translating user activity into state, deriving context for a given focus, and executing adaptation rules on this context. Thirdly, a collaboration domain model for describing collaboration environments and collaborative situations. Fourthly, examples of exploiting our approach to support context-based adaptation in four typical collaboration situations: co-location, co-access, co-recommendation, and co-dependency.

Due to the separation of project management systems and workflow management systems, there is a gap between project plans and process support used to implement them. Often, managers could not see what was going on in their businesses until it was too late to react. In this paper, a cooperative hypermedia approach and an integration framework are developed to provide an integrated support for project planning, workflow management, information management and teamwork. The cooperative hypermedia-based process model has many desirable computational properties. The cooperative hypermedia tools built on this model can support distributed project teams to create, analyze, execute, monitor and adapt a project plan cooperatively. Case studies and user experiences of the cooperative hypermedia system demonstrate that the cooperative hypermedia approach can facilitate team members to identify emerging problems, to discuss and adapt the plan cooperatively. It is a promising approach to bridge the gap between project management and workflow management systems so as to support flexible business processes of real-time project teams.

Group formation and access rights management become crucial issues when shared workspaces are used to support flexible, emerging group work. End-Users should be able to form groups and adapt access rights for changing groups and workspaces. Current shared workspace systems do not support this sufficiently. Our approach combines a room metaphor-based shared workspace with the key-metaphor for facilitating both, end-user controlled flexible group formation and access rights management. An evaluation of this approach during four month of use has indicated that end-users can form groups and manage the access rights of their shared spaces.

Work processes in team based software development need to be structured to minimise and resolve conflicting or divergent work. Current software development methodologies propose ways for dividing the whole task of software development between team members. This paper suggests a different way of working by introducing modes of collaboration (MoCs), which support concurrent and collaborative work. A MoC defines how tight two people can work together and how much the rest of the group can demand to know about a programmer. Different MoCs are ordered in a spectrum from single user’s offline usage up to concurrent editing of the same source code. Special emphasis is put on balancing gains and efforts that are related to a specific MoC. The second part of the paper presents how MoCs are implemented in the distributed co-operative software development environment TUKAN. TUKAN includes synchronous co-operative tools and awareness widgets, which operate on a spatial representation of the software under construction. TUKAN provides tools for each MoC and allows programmers to switch between MoCs. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Shared workspaces are an important means for supporting long-term synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. Shared workspaces themselves become difficult to manage due to increasing size and constant change. This is especially true for shared hypermedia workspaces. Thus means for managing the shared hypermedia workspace in terms of keeping an overview of the group's work and coordinating changes become necessary.

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This paper introduces COAST, an object-oriented toolkit for the development of synchronous groupware, which enhances the usability and simplifies the development of such applications.COAST offers basic and generic components for the design of synchronous groupware and is complemented by a methodology for groupware development.Basic features of the toolkit include transaction-controlled access to replicated shared objects, transparent replication management, and a filly optimistic concurrency control.Development support is provided by a session concept supporting the flexible coupling of shared objects' aspects between concurrent users and by a fully transparent updating concept for displays which is based on declarative programming.

This paper describes DOLPHIN, a fully group aware application designed to provide computer support for different types of meetings: face-to-face meetings with a large interactive electronic whiteboard with or without networked computers provided for the participants, extensions of these meetings with remote participants at their desktop computers connected via computer and audio/video networks, and/or participants in a second meeting room also provided with an electronic whiteboard as well as networked computers. DOLPHIN supports the creation and manipulation of informal structures (e.g., freehand drawings, handwritten scribbles), formal structures (e.g., hypermedia documents with typed nodes and links), their coexistence, and their transformation.

Today, most cooperative systems support primarily either asynchronous or synchronous (real time) cooperative work.We feel that both synchronous and asynchronous cooperation are extremely important aspects of working in groups, and to ignore one or the other is to supply only half a solution to users.In this paper, we describe the extension of the hypertext authoring system SEPIA developed at GMD-IPSI to support cooperative work among hypertext authors.Cooperative SEPIA is unique not only in its ability to support cooperative work in both of these categories, but also in how smoothly and naturally it supports the transition between these two categories.