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Chapter 18
INTRODUCTION
Collaborative learning is a common activity in
architecture education, e.g. for university students
studying architecture. Often collaboration takes
place during group assignments because learning
is based on the interaction of group members.
Often it also involves access to suitable and often
freely accessible educational resources. Yet few
tools exist that support such collaborative learning
in this architectural educational environment. In
Martin Wolpers
Fraunhofer FIT, Germany
Martin Memmel
Deutsche Forschungszentrum für Künstliche
Intelligenz, Germany
Alberto Giretti
Universita Politecnica delle Marche, Italy
Miquel Casals
GRIC Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya,
Spain
Katja Niemann
Fraunhofer FIT, Germany
Marcus Specht
Open Universiteit Nederland, The Netherlands
Supporting Collaborative
Learning in the
Architectural Domain
ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the use of technology in supporting the study of architecture and design in Higher
Education. Digital (often open) educational architecture resources are widely spread throughout a num-
ber of repositories that do not interoperate with each other. This means that no single point of access or
support for potential collaborative learning exists. The potential impact of these barriers on education in
architecture, in terms of its availability as a series of digital objects through the Web, is strongly limited.
The authors introduce Metadata for Architecture in Europe (MACE), a Web based support system for
architecture education that has been designed as a means of creating a collective external memory of
architecture content that reduces those barriers to knowledge-sharing in architecture. After introducing
MACE, the chapter presents the results of an evaluation of the MACE system that was carried out in
architectural design courses in four European universities by a total of around 200 students. Much of
the analysis focuses on the collaborative learning aspects of the architectural design courses.
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-0300-4.ch018