1 Tools supporting Collaborative Learning and Interaction Analysis: Synergo and ActivityLens. N.Avouris, G. Kahrimanis, G. Fiotakis, E. Voyiatzaki, M. Margaritis University of Patras, Greece (http://hci.ece.upatras.gr) 1. Introduction This document 1 presents two tools designed and developed by the Human-Computer Interaction Group of the University of Patras to support collaborative learning and collaborative interaction analysis. These are Synergo and ActivityLens. Synergo constitutes a synchronous collaboration support environment that provides integrated tools for analysis of interaction. A large corpus concerning online human interactions is generated and further analysed using Synergo. ActivityLens constitutes an environment that aids analysis of collaborative learning activities using multiple sources of data such as sequential logs, video captures and documents related to the activity, a corpus of oral interactions can be analysed using this tool, and for this reason is considered relevant to generation and analysis of online human interactions. In following, a presentation of the Synergo environment is included accompanied by a study on the use of the tool. Next, ActivityLens as an analysis tool that extends the analysis facilities of Synergo is included, focusing on the manipulation of various sources of analysis data and on the support for qualitative methodological studies. In the third part the context of current use of the two tools is described, mentioning cases of research groups that have used the tools. Finally, this document ends with a discussion on standards on representation of interaction data and the related emergent need to develop widely adopted descriptions of corpora of interaction analysis data and the potential benefits of that approach to the research community in the future, based on some concrete examples from the experience of the Unvierstity of Patras HCI Group and other research groups. 2. Collaborative Problem Solving through Synergo Synergo is a collaboration support environment based on the Abstract Collaborative Applications Building Framework (ACABF). This underlying framework has also been used for building ModellingSpace (Margaritis et al. 2004) and ModelsCreator v3 (Fidas et al. 2002). Synergo architecture supports synchronous collaboration, as well as integration of collaboration analysis and visualization tools. The Synergo environment that can be downloaded from the web site of the University of Patras HCI Group 2 is a client-server distributed application, which comprises a suite of interconnected tools to support collaborative activities supported by textual collaboration tool and a shared workspace in which various diagrammatic representations can be collaboratively built. The architecture of a set of workstations in which Synergo is used is shown in figure 1. In this figure a typical Synergo classroom is shown, which could be made of students who are collocated or are 1 This document contains material from previous publications of the HCI group and is used as handouts for a workshop on EPAL\Symposium with the subject: Designing, re-using and exchanging online learner corpora, Grenoble, June 7 th , 2007. (http://mulce.univ-fcomte.fr/epal_symposium/index_english.html) . 2 http://hci.ece.upatras.gr/synergo