A Grid Approach to Provide Effective Awareness to On-line Collaborative Learning Teams

Providing collaborative learning applications the possibility to offer continuous awareness to on-line collaborative learning teams is a challenging issue since it is essential to keep participants informed of both what is happening and what happened in the learning group. Moreover, awareness is the basis to enhance collaboration and improve the individual and group performance since it allows to track and assess the collaborative learning process more objectively and to model students' behavior more efficiently. In order to provide students and tutors with effective awareness, we consider the collaborative actions registered in log files. It is necessary to process large and considerably complex event log files in a constant manner, and thus it may requires processing capacity beyond that of a single computer. To that end, in this paper we show how a Grid approach can considerably decrease the time of processing group activity log files and thus allow students and tutors to be aware of what is going on in the group activity even in real time. Our approach is based on the master-worker paradigm and is implemented using Globus technology running on the Planetlab platform. To test our application, we used event log files from the Basic Support for Collaborative Work (BSCW) system.