Fessakis G., Petrou A., Dimitracopoulou A., «Collaboration Activity Function: An interaction analysis’ tool for Computer Supported Collaborative Learning activities», In 4th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2004), August 30 - Sept 1, 2004, Joensuu, Finland (http://lttf.ieee.org/icalt2004/) Collaboration Activity Function: An interaction analysis tool for Computer Supported Collaborative Learning activities George Fesakis, Argiro Petrou, Angelique Dimitracopoulou LTEE laboratory, University of Aegean, GR-85100, Rhodes, Greece {gfesakis, petrou, adimitr}@rhodes.aegean.gr Abstract During the last years an increased interest has been observed on tools analyzing collaborative interactions that could be useful for researchers, teachers, or even students. The paper presents such a tool, based on the formally defined Collaborative Activity Function (CAF). The empirical evaluation of CAF is also presented. The evaluation is focused on teachers using CAF during and after sessions of synchronous collaborative problem solving among students. 1. Introduction Collaboration is the co-construction of knowledge with the mutual engagement of participants [3]. Computer supported collaborative learning is focused on the enhancement of peer interaction, groups‟ working, and the facilitation of knowledge sharing and distribution [3]. Consequently, collaborative learning environments should analyze collaboration and provide this information to participants in order to really support them. This includes both the content level and the interaction/collaboration level. Some collaboration analysis‟ methods process the collaborative discussions or dialogues facing natural language understanding problems [4], [5]. In [6] a different approach is described, in which the collaboration analysis uses dialogues along with common workspace‟s information. Finally, in [7] learners‟ human computer interface actions in combination with problem solving plan recognition techniques have been used as input material, without any dialogue analysis. As far as the limitations of the above analysis method are concerned, the linguistic analyses are of different nature, and depending on a classification of dialogue acts, which is not fully automatic [1]. In addition, plan recognition techniques cannot be applied to all domains and are not so usable. In this paper, we focus on teacher‟s role during synchronous collaborative problem-solving, where the teacher observes students‟ interaction in real -time and intervenes in order to help them. This area of study is worthwhile because teachers need a tool to attend many groups at the same time and estimate quickly the evolution of the collaboration. For the above need, we propose a collaboration analysis tool, which fulfills the following initial requirements: (1) Easy detection of interesting groups‟ situations, (2) Real time availability during the collaboration, (3) Adaptable abstraction level on demand, (4) Adaptable information volume presentation, on demand. This tool is to be used independently or in conjunction with other analysis‟ tools that collaborative systems may incorporate, such as MODELLINGSPACE [9], or COOLModes [1]. 2. CAF definition 2.1. The collaboration framework model In order to prepare the CAF definition justification, it is useful to describe the collaboration schema for which CAF was initially designed. CAF has been devised during pedagogical validation research of MODELLINGSPACE * (MS). This is a collaborative modeling environment for distributed development of models that supports the logical collaboration topology of figure 1. * [http://www.modellingspace.net]. The environment development as well as the present research is supported by the project ModellingSpace / School of Tomorrow / IST-2000-25385