Collaborative learning traditionally relies on the arrangement of space and physical artifacts to mediate group activities. Our claim is that CSCL environments should enhance collaborative learning in a complementary way without introducing additional burden to human participants. This paper present research results on how tracking the location of people could be used to incorporate automatic group awareness in existing and new CSCL applications that support mobile cooperative learning. After presenting the requirements and structure of a middleware to handle automatic group awareness based on location information, two applications are presented. Experiments in a real setting on a jigsaw activity, with students using laptops with WiFi on a university course, confirm the validity of using location technology to automatically derive group structure and the positive effect on the learning results.

Peer Reviewed