UT Institute of Computer Science Graduation Theses Registry

Name

Jaana Metsamaa

Abstract

Courses in schools and universities are changing. We are drifting away from traditional static teaching aids towards a new era of interactive content. Some time ago one might have published a book on paper and after sufficient time had past (and hopefuly most of the books had been sold) there would have been another relase of the book. With e-learning technologies like BlackBoard [1] and Moodle [2] getting more and more popular we are able to constantly update and improve our teaching aids. But we are not limited only to web, today almost anything might be seen as an e-learning platform – e-readers, smartphones, PDAs, web-browsers or eaven gameconsoles. All of these also make it possible to include interactivity like multimedia, polls and animations in our lectures. As technology has brought new possibilities it has also built new expectations. We have reached the day where the thing that matters the most is the freshness of information. In the English version of Wikipedia there are about 150000 edits made each day [3]. For every major event, there is a Wikipedia article created for it almos instantly. Companies no longer worry about polishing their newsletters to very last detail. Instead they use 140 characters in a socialnetwork like Twitter [5] or Facebook [4] to provide accurate and operative information to their clients. The same expectations for information accuracy and freshnes has moved to training materials. Users expect that, the lectures they are attending and books they are reading, always contain the most up to date information. Constant updating and improving of training-materials is an owerwhelming task for only one person to maintain. That is why many are starting to use collaborative methods known from Wikipedia and open-source software projects to tackle those tasks. Collaborative writing is a well reasearched topic [5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. However there has not been much reasearch done about using everyday software and services for getting through such projects. RAJU keskus [16] is a group of LEGO Mindstorm NXT robots [17] enthusiast in Institute of Computer Science in University of Tartu. They are responsible of training teachers for using LEGO robots in education. Today they have a lot of tutorials, slides and videos for that purpose. For the first time last year, about 10 bachelour theseses were written that were later meant to be adapted to this big LEGO Mindstorms teaching aid. Today this one big book does not exist, because the process of collaboration and the materials both have some problems. This paper researches the different problems in collaboration and its management, looks at software and services to support collaboration and anayzes the specific case of RAJU keskuse teaching aids and proposes how to improve the materials and the process of creating them. This paper consists of four parts: the first part describes the exact collaborative writing problem to be solved, the second part gives an extensive overview of collaborative writing area, the third chapter concentrates on choosing software and services to support the collaboration. The fourth part gives exact guidelines to RAJU keskus for improving their process of collaboratively writing their book. One of the results of this thesis is a combined teaching material about LEGO Mindstorms NXT robots (Appendix 1). The book was put together according to the framework prooposed in this thesis.

Graduation Thesis language

Estonian

Graduation Thesis type

Master - Information Technology

Supervisor(s)

Anne Villems

Defence year

2010