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The Electronic Laboratory Journal: A Web-Based Collaborative Environment for Remote Experimentation

Georgios Fakas, Denis Gillet

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, {georgios.fakas, denis.gillet}@epfl.ch

1. Introduction

In engineering education, experimentation has always been an essential ingredient to sustain learning activities1. It is recognized as an efficient approach for students to effectively assimilate knowledge and to develop a professional approach to solve real-world problems. Collaboration is also an essential ingredient in the recipe to create an effective learning environment, as it provides students with the opportunity to discuss, argue, and exchange information or knowledge. The collaboration between students working actively in small groups can help them to work more productively in the laboratory and also to learn more easily. The literature seems to be supporting that social interaction amongst learners plays an important part in the learning process. In fact, it can have a significant impact on learning outcomes 2, 3, 4, 5 .

Numerous Web-based collaborative environments are used in education to support Web-based experimentation. For instance, the Electronic Notebook 6 (ORNL) is a Web-based equivalent of a paper research notebook; it supports the recording of information, sketches, text, equations, images, graphs, signatures, and other data on electronic notebook pages, which can be read and navigated in the same way as in a paper notebook. In addition, electronic notebooks allow partners in different geographic locations to share the record of ideas, data and events of the joint experiments and research programs. However, the Electronic Notebook cannot easily be integrated with other Web-based experimentation environments, as it is not developed to be open or reusable. Another widely used cooperative tool in the academic community is the Basic Support for Cooperative Work (BSCW). It uses the Web as a platform for communication and offers a number of functions for supporting collaboration in an educational environment. The basic idea of BSCW is to provide the cooperation partners with a shared workspace on the Internet where they can perform their activities. Although many lecturers and teachers use it, their students find its interface complex and cumbersome to use 7.

In this paper, we define and validate approaches and resources that enable collaborative work in the framework of Web-based experimentation carried out together by students in different geographical locations. We reproduce in a flexible way the teamwork scheme traditionally applied on campus by students running together laboratory experiments or interactive simulation

Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright Ó 2002, American Society for Engineering Education

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Gillet, D. (2002, June), The Electronic Laboratory Journal: A Web Based Collaborative Environment For Remote Experimentation Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--10636