An Event-Based Approach to Support A3: Anytime, Anywhere, Awareness in Online Learning Teams

Abstract

With the fast development in mobile technologies and ever-increasing use of smart phones in everyday activity, researchers and developers are paying attention to exploit the advantages of mobile systems to support online teams. One important advantage would-be to implement the A3 paradigm: Anytime, Anywhere, Awareness, that is notifying users about ongoing activity in their online workspace. However, due to the computational limitation of mobile devices, the extension of web-based systems to systems that support also mobile clients require specific design and implementation to make the system usable, efficient and scalable. In this work we present an event-based approach to extend web-based applications to support Anytime, Anywhere, Awareness in Online Teams. It should be noted that the A3 paradigm is meant not only as informing channel but also for social support and scaffolding. The key feature here is the definition of events linked to state changes of the objects in the common workspace. The events are then processed and send to mobile clients for consumption. We present the main requirement analysis, the building blocks of the architecture for efficient event management and the prototype implementation.