CoFFEE
Encyclopedia
CoFFEE is an open source
software for computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) in a digital classroom. Unlike most CSCL envirmonments, CoFFEE is not designed for and indeed does not currently support distance learning, but is rather focused on facilitating group interaction within the classroom.
CoFFEE offers customisable tools for group collaboration, knowledge sharing and representation, such as a threaded discussion forum, a graphical concept mapping tool, dynamic voting and others. It has so far been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and (experimental version) Hebrew and is being used in schools, colleges and universities in the UK, France, Italy and the Netherlands.
CoFFEE is open source
and free software
released under the Eclipse Public License
(EPL). The CoFFEE project is hosted at Sourceforge
and offers all the regular tools (SVN, bugtracker, forum etc.) that you might already be familiar with when working with Sourceforge.
The activities can be performed by the whole classroom (class step) or by dividing the students in small groups (group step). In the latter case, each group may have a different configuration of tools and perform separately by the other groups. Alternating class steps and group steps appears as a promising direction in research
CoFFEE Discusser is the learner's interface to access the various tools.
CoFFEE Controller is the teacher's runtime tool. It allows the teacher to load a lesson plan, run it step by step, manage groups, block and unblock learners and of course access each group's tools (except private workspaces) in order to monitor, facilitate or participate in the discussions.
CoFFEE Lesson Planner is a tool that allows the teacher to plan the session ahead of time. Planning a session can begin from editing a pre-configured template to creating everything from scratch in the advanced Session Editor, or specifying the list of learners, their names, password (in case this is required) and group affiliation in the CoFFEE Class Editor.
The Replayer allows researchers (but also curious teachers) to play back traces of an entire CoFFEE session.
The threaded discussion tool allows discussion on several topics to occur simultaneously, each dealing with one 'category' or aspect of a problem under discussion. On every aspect there may be several threads, and every single contribution can be applied a 'type' - e.g. an Argument, a Claim or a Rebuttal. The teacher can configure those types in the Lesson Planner.
The Graphical tool represents the discussion spatially. It too can accept different contribution types, as well as different types of relations between contributions (e.g.: 'oppose' or 'support').
The Co-Writer tool allows all the learners in the classroom to write a collaborative text. The teacher assigns writing permission.
The Repository tool provides file sharing functionalities. A repository stores files that can be shared between the teacher and the learners. Learners too can upload files and submit them to the repository. The teacher then decides whether to share them or not.
The Positionometer lets the learners position their opinion about a question, posed by the teacher during the lesson, along a scale that can be configured on a range of 2 to 10 values. Learners can change their position as long as the positionometer is on. They can either do so in private mode (with only the teacher seeing all the votes), shared mode (with all learners seeing each other's shifting positions), or anonymously - i.e. sharing with their peers their opinions, but not their names (although th teacher always knows...)
The Presence tool simply lets the learners see who else is in their group. It's also possible to configure it so that it shows who was in a learner's group in a previous step. In that case, those who were not in the learner's group will be coloured differently.
The Chat tool is unique to each group within the classroom and can support group coordination on a meta-task level, e.g. discussions about tool usage, or in combination with turn-taking enabled tools, for group members to discuss a topic while one of them is writing.
With the Quick Communication tool, which is always present in the teacher's CoFFEE Controller and the learner's CoFFEE Discusser, teachers and individual learners can communicate discretely.
The Notes tool is a simple private space to keep notes. The learner can, for example, paste previous contributions into this tool, edit and develop them and copy to the current step.
The potentials of bringing computer-mediated communication within the face-2-face activities in the classroom are presented in .
The learners' appropriation of CoFFEE tools is analyzed in
van Diggelen,W. & Overdijk, M. (in press, 2008). Grounded design: Design patterns as the link between theory and practice. Computers in Human Behavior.
Iannaccone, A. Tateo, L. Mollo, M. Marsico, G. (In press, 2008) L’identité professionnelle des enseignants face aux changement, Travail & Formation en Education;
Ligorio, M.B. Tateo, L. (2008) “Just for passion”: dialogical and narrative construction of teachers’ professional identity and educational practices. European Journal Of School Psychology, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 115–142;
Overdijk, M. & van Diggelen, W. (2008). Appropriation of a shared workspace: Organizing principles and their application. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 3, 165-192.
Akkerman, S., Overdijk, M., Admiraal, W. & Simons, R.J. (2007). Beyond Imprisonment of Meaning: Technology that Facilitates Redefining. Computers in Human Behavior, 23, pp. 2998–3011.
Dyke, G., Girardot, J.J., Lund, K., Corbel, A., (2007) Analysing Face to Face Computer-mediated Interactions EARLI'07 , Budapest, Hungary.
Akkerman, S., Overdijk, M., Admiraal, W. & Simons, R.J. (2007). Beyond Imprisonment of Meaning: Technology that Facilitates Redefining. Computers in Human Behavior, 23, pp. 2998–3011.
Ligorio, M.B., Tateo, L., Manno, I., De Chiara R. and Iannaccone, A. (2007), COFFEE: a software to blend face-to-face and written communication in collaborative problem solving-based scenarios, in Summer School "Building Knowledge for deep Understanding" at the institute for knowledge innovation and technology, Toronto, Canada, August 7–10, 2007.
Dumez-Féroc, I. & Baker, M. (2006). Des dispositifs de communication multicanaux au service de l'apprentissage collaboratif en classe : le projet LEAD. Actes du colloque JOCAIR 2006 (Colloque international : Premières Journées Communication et Apprentissage Instrumentés en Réseau), Université d'Amiens (France), 6 - 8 juillet 2006.
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
software for computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) in a digital classroom. Unlike most CSCL envirmonments, CoFFEE is not designed for and indeed does not currently support distance learning, but is rather focused on facilitating group interaction within the classroom.
CoFFEE offers customisable tools for group collaboration, knowledge sharing and representation, such as a threaded discussion forum, a graphical concept mapping tool, dynamic voting and others. It has so far been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and (experimental version) Hebrew and is being used in schools, colleges and universities in the UK, France, Italy and the Netherlands.
CoFFEE is open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
and free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
released under the Eclipse Public License
Eclipse Public License
The Eclipse Public License is an open source software license used by the Eclipse Foundation for its software. It replaces the Common Public License and removes certain terms relating to litigations related to patents....
(EPL). The CoFFEE project is hosted at Sourceforge
SourceForge
SourceForge Enterprise Edition is a collaborative revision control and software development management system. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of free software / open source software applications .While originally itself...
and offers all the regular tools (SVN, bugtracker, forum etc.) that you might already be familiar with when working with Sourceforge.
Origin of the name
CoFFEE stands for Collaborative Face to Face Educational Environment.Awards
- CoFFEE (and its mother project LEAD) have received the Premio Aldo Fabris per la formazione (Aldo Fabris prize for training, promoted by the likes of Formez, Tecnopolis CSATA, Formed, Regione Puglia and others). The prize was delivered at the special session 2008 Anno europeo del dialogo interculturale: una sfida per la formazione (2008 European year of intercultural dialogue: a challenge for training) held in Rome on Oct. 14th 2008.
- Ilaria Manno (one of the main architects of the software) presented CoFFEE at the 3rd Italian Workshop on Eclipse Technologies (Eclipse IT) and won the prize for the best student demo in Educational track on Nov. 18th 2008 (see the picture)
- Vittorio Scarano (team leader of the CoFFEE developers) got the IBM International Jazz Award 2008 for the proposal to integrate CoFFEE tools into Jazz .
Overview of the Software
The architecture of CoFFEE was first presented in , while the technical architecture based on Eclipse was described in .Sessions, Steps and Groups
CoFFEE lessons are called Sessions. A session can be a short part of a whole lesson or span several lessons over a period of several weeks. Such a session is composed of a number of distinct Steps, each with different tools or tool combinations. During the lesson, the teacher can navigates from step to step. A Step may contain a single CoFFEE tool, or a combination of up to 5 different tools.The activities can be performed by the whole classroom (class step) or by dividing the students in small groups (group step). In the latter case, each group may have a different configuration of tools and perform separately by the other groups. Alternating class steps and group steps appears as a promising direction in research
Components
Around CoFFEE's tools, several other components make it possible to plan, run or participate in a CoFFEE lesson (or session):CoFFEE Discusser is the learner's interface to access the various tools.
CoFFEE Controller is the teacher's runtime tool. It allows the teacher to load a lesson plan, run it step by step, manage groups, block and unblock learners and of course access each group's tools (except private workspaces) in order to monitor, facilitate or participate in the discussions.
CoFFEE Lesson Planner is a tool that allows the teacher to plan the session ahead of time. Planning a session can begin from editing a pre-configured template to creating everything from scratch in the advanced Session Editor, or specifying the list of learners, their names, password (in case this is required) and group affiliation in the CoFFEE Class Editor.
The Replayer allows researchers (but also curious teachers) to play back traces of an entire CoFFEE session.
Collaboration tools
There are two main collaboration tools in CoFFEE: The Threaded Discussion tool and the Graphical tool. In addition, there's a simple tool for turn-based collaborative writing.The threaded discussion tool allows discussion on several topics to occur simultaneously, each dealing with one 'category' or aspect of a problem under discussion. On every aspect there may be several threads, and every single contribution can be applied a 'type' - e.g. an Argument, a Claim or a Rebuttal. The teacher can configure those types in the Lesson Planner.
The Graphical tool represents the discussion spatially. It too can accept different contribution types, as well as different types of relations between contributions (e.g.: 'oppose' or 'support').
The Co-Writer tool allows all the learners in the classroom to write a collaborative text. The teacher assigns writing permission.
Tools for sharing, group awareness and individual work
CoFFEE offers a variety of tools for sharing and awareness (Repository, Positionometer and Presence), communication (Chat and Quick Communication), and individual work (Notes and Personal versions of the Threaded Discussion Tool and Graphical Tool).The Repository tool provides file sharing functionalities. A repository stores files that can be shared between the teacher and the learners. Learners too can upload files and submit them to the repository. The teacher then decides whether to share them or not.
The Positionometer lets the learners position their opinion about a question, posed by the teacher during the lesson, along a scale that can be configured on a range of 2 to 10 values. Learners can change their position as long as the positionometer is on. They can either do so in private mode (with only the teacher seeing all the votes), shared mode (with all learners seeing each other's shifting positions), or anonymously - i.e. sharing with their peers their opinions, but not their names (although th teacher always knows...)
The Presence tool simply lets the learners see who else is in their group. It's also possible to configure it so that it shows who was in a learner's group in a previous step. In that case, those who were not in the learner's group will be coloured differently.
The Chat tool is unique to each group within the classroom and can support group coordination on a meta-task level, e.g. discussions about tool usage, or in combination with turn-taking enabled tools, for group members to discuss a topic while one of them is writing.
With the Quick Communication tool, which is always present in the teacher's CoFFEE Controller and the learner's CoFFEE Discusser, teachers and individual learners can communicate discretely.
The Notes tool is a simple private space to keep notes. The learner can, for example, paste previous contributions into this tool, edit and develop them and copy to the current step.
Personal versions of the collaboration tools
The Graphical tool and Threaded Discussion tool can also be configured for individual use. It's also possible to place, side by side, a personal and a shared version of the same tool, to allow learners to elaborate their contribution for themselves before sharing it with their classmates.Pedagogical work with CoFFEE
Several studies about CoFFEE-based pedagogical based are found in literature.The potentials of bringing computer-mediated communication within the face-2-face activities in the classroom are presented in .
The learners' appropriation of CoFFEE tools is analyzed in
Other useful material
EduTech wiki entryvan Diggelen,W. & Overdijk, M. (in press, 2008). Grounded design: Design patterns as the link between theory and practice. Computers in Human Behavior.
Iannaccone, A. Tateo, L. Mollo, M. Marsico, G. (In press, 2008) L’identité professionnelle des enseignants face aux changement, Travail & Formation en Education;
Ligorio, M.B. Tateo, L. (2008) “Just for passion”: dialogical and narrative construction of teachers’ professional identity and educational practices. European Journal Of School Psychology, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 115–142;
Overdijk, M. & van Diggelen, W. (2008). Appropriation of a shared workspace: Organizing principles and their application. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 3, 165-192.
Akkerman, S., Overdijk, M., Admiraal, W. & Simons, R.J. (2007). Beyond Imprisonment of Meaning: Technology that Facilitates Redefining. Computers in Human Behavior, 23, pp. 2998–3011.
Dyke, G., Girardot, J.J., Lund, K., Corbel, A., (2007) Analysing Face to Face Computer-mediated Interactions EARLI'07 , Budapest, Hungary.
Akkerman, S., Overdijk, M., Admiraal, W. & Simons, R.J. (2007). Beyond Imprisonment of Meaning: Technology that Facilitates Redefining. Computers in Human Behavior, 23, pp. 2998–3011.
Ligorio, M.B., Tateo, L., Manno, I., De Chiara R. and Iannaccone, A. (2007), COFFEE: a software to blend face-to-face and written communication in collaborative problem solving-based scenarios, in Summer School "Building Knowledge for deep Understanding" at the institute for knowledge innovation and technology, Toronto, Canada, August 7–10, 2007.
Dumez-Féroc, I. & Baker, M. (2006). Des dispositifs de communication multicanaux au service de l'apprentissage collaboratif en classe : le projet LEAD. Actes du colloque JOCAIR 2006 (Colloque international : Premières Journées Communication et Apprentissage Instrumentés en Réseau), Université d'Amiens (France), 6 - 8 juillet 2006.