Background on Colloquia
"Colloquia is an online tutoring and group learning system.... designed to support group and individual learning, and enables access and management of learning resources, group and individual discussions, the setting and assessment of assignments, and the development of student learning profiles. Students can also use the system to set up their own study groups, thus ensuring that despite the problem of physical separation, learning can still take place collaboratively "(Holyfield, Liber, Richardson, and Smart, 2002).
Colloquia, an asynchronous collaboration platform, was designed in conjunction with the Toolkit for the Management of Learning project at the University of Wales, Bangor. Developed in Java, the application runs on any Java-enabled machine.
Colloquia's primary author, Oleg Liber, assembled the application in response to his observation that the education sector has been slow to adopt the structures and methods through which the business world has exploited information and communications technology (ICT) (Liber, 1999). He feels that education has mistakenly placed its technology emphasis "more on the role of technology in developing and providing new content, rather than on interaction between teachers and learners" (Liber, 2000).
Colloquia was designed with this idea in mind. Liber's intention in building Colloquia was to deviate from two accepted tenets of educational technology platforms, the classroom paradigm and a centralized structure. Colloquia's design emphasizes a conversational model of learning and provides "a personal and mobile tool that supports working offline, only connecting when necessary for mutual updates between co-participants" (Liber, 2000). Holyfield states that this approach "runs directly counter to the standard (perhaps extreme) view of distance learning as being primarily content-based, involving the receipt of a large pack of materials... to be worked through individually at one's own pace, before perhaps being assessed through a multiple choice automated system" (2002).
Liber, Olivier, and Britain cite managing complexity as a key problem facing education (2000). Their response to this need seems to be a shift in focus from insisting that all students learn from the same material to ensuring that each student is given the choice to assemble a meaningful learning experience individually. Colloquia attempts to maximize the variety of materials and conversations offered to students in order to provide them more opportunities to find something that suits their individual learning styles, needs, and interests. The system "represents a move away from the didactic model of teaching and learning towards an approach which recognizes the diverse needs of individual learners, allowing them to take greater control over their own learning" (Richardson, 2001). It also serves to diversify the methods through which students receive instruction. "If all we have is lecture rooms, then all we will do is lecture," Liber believes (1999).
The system is in use within the University of Wales, Bangor at the School of Nursing, the School of Higher Education, and in the Bachelor of Arts in Internet, Learning, and Organizations (BAILO) program (Colloquia, 2003; Richardson, 2001; Holyfield, Liber, Richardson, and Smart, 2002). Colloquia was formerly called Learning Landscapes (Colloquia, 2003).
Description of the system
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Installation
Colloquia is available at http://www.colloquia.net/ for free. As mentioned above, the application can run on any Java-enabled platform. I found it very easy to install; within only a few steps, I had added a profile for myself with which to login to the application. To build a profile, users enter their name, email address, and incoming and outgoing mail server information. Additionally, users can include a picture, configure the Colloquia browser to their preferences, and choose a place for their personal files. All of these items can be completed or updated later through the Preferences button on the toolbar of the main interface.
Profile Form
Because messaging is the primary functionality behind Colloquia, the user manual suggests that users obtain or designate a separate email address specifically for use within the system (Colloquia 1.4 User Guide, 2002, p. 5). Colloquia uses standard email protocol for its messaging, and warns that when Colloquia is not active, incoming Colloquia activities, resources, and other messages will be claimed by the user's email client.
Components of the Colloquia Interface
The primary Colloquia interface (above) consists of three areas:
The toolbar
The toolbar contains the following pull down menus:
- File
- Edit
- Insert
- Activity
- View
- Communications
- Help
Additionally, it contains several navigation icons:
- Save
- Back/Forward
- Prefs
- Msgs
- Get Mail
- Import Mail
- Send Mail
- Complete Send
The available menus selections depend on what is highlighted in the tree view (discussed below), at any give time, the majority of the items from the pull down menus are unselectable.
The Navigation Frame/Tree View
The Navigation Frame/Tree View, which runs down the left side of the Colloquia interface, contains four folders representing the system's object classes:
- People
- Resources
- Templates
- Activities
Items within these folders may be cut, copied, pasted, and grouped in user-defined hierarchical levels. However, no additional folders may be added to the top level. Though the functionality is quite different, this design is reminiscent of email clients such as Eudora and Microsoft Outlook.
The Main Frame
The Main Frame serves as Colloquia's workspace. Depending on what is selected in the tree view , the contents of this space change.
When a folder in the tree view is highlighted, the contents of that folder are listed along with three to four items to identify it (First name, Surname, Email for People; Name, Title, URL for Resources; and Activity, Submitter, Start Date, and Messages for Activity). The labels for these fields are a little unclear (e.g., a resource's title vs. its name), and can be used for purposes other than what is stated, including annotation.
When a particular person or resource is selected in the tree view, the main frame displays two sections: Details in the upper part of the frame, and the Colloquia browser window in the lower part of the frame. The user can toggle the upper frame between Notes, Description (for resources), and Activities.
When an activity is selected in the tree view, the main frame also displays upper and lower sections, with a list of messages in the former and the content of the selected message in the latter. Tabs are availible for the user to view Conversations, Description, Notes, People, Resources, and sub-Activities.
Colloquia Object Classes
People
People are other Colloquia users with whom one may collaborate. The user can add anyone they choose to the people folder with just a name and email address. People can be grouped, included in activities, moved around, and deleted (if they are not currently engaged in an activity with the user). When an activity is submitted, the names and email addresses of the people involved are automatically added to the recipient's people folder. Full details on a person are only provided when that person actively decides to do so.
Resources
Resources are any external documents, websites, articles, images, or other media files that are used in an activity. Resources may be named, annotated, grouped, and transferred to an external server via FTP for remote storage. When an activity is submitted, all related resources are automatically added to the recipients' resource folder. Web sites can be saved locally (at multiple levels) to ensure that users will have access to the resource without being connected to the Internet.
Activities
Activities are the items on which users collaborate. Activities can be projects, documents, and discussion or study groups, among other things. Activities include people and resources, and are accomplished though messages (which are kept in context through organization in conversations). Sub-activities and Assignments can be added to Activities by any user to include any or all of the activity's related people.
Templates
Templates are activities that are stored for later use with a different set of people.
Notable Colloquia Features
The Colloquia Browser window
The browser window allows users to view resources within the application itself. When a URL or document location is clicked, if possible, it is displayed in the browser window. Because the window is not a full-featured web browser, many online resources are not properly displayed. Users can select to have their preferred browser handle problematic resources.
Message Center
The Message Center resembles the Inbox of an email client. Because Colloquia messages are automatically sorted into their related context when received, Colloquia has no proper Inbox. The Message Center records all incoming and outgoing messages and allows users to view them in context. Additionally, the Message Center organizes messages and drafts into the following categories:
- Read
- Unread
- Unsent
- Sent
- Unmatched
Private Notes
Users can create and maintain private notes linked to people, resources, and activities that cannot be sent to other users by mistake.
Import Netscape Bookmarks and Internet Explorer Favorites
Users can import and share their bookmarks and favorites as resources.
Discussion of Colloquia's functionality
The functional basis for Colloquia is its messaging capability, within which there are six distinct message types:
- join activity
- activity update
- group messages relating to an activity
- personal messages to or from someone in a shared activity
- assignment or assessment
- details on a person
- new or updated resource
People, resources, and activities are all handled in the same way: users can group, link, annotate, and sub-group each of these items consistently. Each can be given context within messages and conversations.
Colloquia very much resembles an email client, but their are two differences that extend beyond the email metaphor and can be a bit confusing. Unlike an email client, a Colloquia user's identity is highly visible within the application. Users receive messages they themselves have sent. Apart from the sent mail folder in traditional email systems, the user's presence is not a constant focus of the system. This attribute of Colloquia necessitates that the user view the application as workspace rather than a client. While the concept of a shared workspace is clearly the framework for the application, its resemblance to an email client stands out most obviously. Furthermore, an email client serves as little more than a message viewer; when messages are retrieved, they are viewed and sorted, and it is unlikely that the majority of them are regularly referred to again. The Colloquia workspace is a much more active environment: when resources, activities, and people are retrieved, they are instantly put into context. They are then organized, responded to, and annotated, and become essential to related people, resources, and activities. Changes to this interface aremanaged more like changes to a document, and users must actively save these changes.
While the email client metaphor may have its flaws, Liber convincingly justifies it: "I would argue that for the majority of business, it has been the adoption of groupware applications more than databases of content that has been the key to the transformation that is occurring" (Liber, 2000). Emphasizing that communication rather than content (or communication as content) is the goal of the system, and once users get past the initial incongruities with email-centric mental models, Colloquia can be an effective communication and content distribution tool.
Still in its early stages, Colloquia has its problems. Feedback on actions and errors is not informative, and some of the alert boxes contain unclear (and mistake-riddled) messages. The pull down menus (in which most items are unselectable) offer few options that are not available as drag-and-drop functions and toolbar icons. Failure to retrieve messages results in a "No New Messages" alert even when a connection is not made to the email server. The Detail views are clunky and contain redundant labels.
The application includes several helpful features, including the ability to postpone acceptance and denial of activities, delete protection for activity-related people and resources, many tool tips, and data backup reminders. Strangely, though, users can easily exit the program without saving the current view, only to find that they have lost their work upon their next session.
While Colloquia's design creates quite a learning curve, its sound conceptual skeleton and highly customizable nature make it a viable knowledge management tool for education. Mistakes are easily corrected, the conversational learning context is easy to understand, and installation across platforms is easily managed. Because the system serves as a conversation repository, constantly updating, organizing, and archiving messages, it is also easy to preserve lessons learned and compare activities and resources.
Plans for the future of Colloquia include synchronous communication and palm accessibility (Colloquia,2003), both of which seem to contrast with the current model. It will be interesting to see if these features will dilute the utility of the hard-line asynchronous system.
Colloquia's best attribute seems to be its distributed, peer-to-peer structure. As evidenced in the media, the peer-to-peer model has received enthusiasm from users that is unprecedented in recent memory. Users become knowledge collectors, brokers, appraisers, and distributors. If Colloquia can motivate users to contribute resources and insight as actively as they seek it, the system will be a success. Until assessment of participation can be doled out in a form other than that of academic grades, though, Colloquia is likely best suited to education.
Colloquia and Knowledge Management
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Colloquia and the Development of Knowledge
Upon installation, Colloquia can be an intimidating application. Because the focus is on collaboration and conversation, there is little out-of-the box functionality; each of the main folders is empty and there is little that Colloquia can immediately offer users. Richardson explains that this situation implies "that the lecturer and students must devote considerable time and effort into filling this software ‘shell’ with resources" (2001). A clean slate can be both intimidating and empowering, and how well users are able to build a meaningful shared workspace out of this shell will have as much to do with a group's culture as it does content.
Liber, Olivier, and Britain hold that learning is produced by universities and other educational establishments, not by courses or lectures: "it is students that create their own learning," though conversations (2000). The idea of conversation as the knowledge-generating process of learning is given much credence in the Colloquia system. The smallest units of communication are "messages," which can be expanded to include resources, annotate materials, group people, and define activities and assignments. Additionally, all messages are saved and presented in context, which allows for the knowledge and learning within a conversation to remain available in the future. As individual nodes of the Colloquia system rather than anonymous viewers of web contend, users may feel that they have more of a stake in the sytem. Explaining the high participation rates of BAILO students, Holyfield, Liber, Richardson, and Smart offer the following:
Another explanation may be that as a peer-to-peer system, Colloquia creates an impression of privacy. Messages are copied only to participants, and do not sit on a server where there can be more exposed feeling. (2002)
Also in terms of knowledge generation, a certain emphasis must be placed on customization. Independent of specific activities, the Colloquia developers have intentionally eschewed the what-you-see-is-what-I-see framework of more traditional collaboration platforms. In the vein of the peer-to-peer model, users must, above all, seek to fulfill their own very individual goals in order to offer any richness to the other users.
Essentially, each user can customise their own space within Colloquia to produce an organised hierarchy of learning resources. At the same time other users undertake the same process, and users interact with each other, sending and receiving activities and resources, and taking part in conversations relating to those activities. This means that while each user has a uniquely customised information resource - and one which reflects their own as well as their tutors' and peers' inputs -resources belonging to different users are clearly related to each other. (Richardson, 2001)
Only within a shared environment of variety will users be able to build groups, relate topics, and "enrich them with their own comments and annotations" (Richardson, 2001).
Colloquia and Communication and Coordination Among Users
Because Colloquia is intended to allow users to capture the conversational side of collaboration, responding to material, people, activities, and assignments is the primary deliverable. Apart from submittal and completion dates and the chronological nature of conversations, Colloquia largely ignores dates and times. Where timetabling plays a major role in most collaborative work, the developers of Colloquia embrace its asynchronous nature:
The benefits of asynchronous communication ... are well documented - by capturing all contributions, and removing the time pressures of face to face communication, it offers the possibilities of reflection and deeper interpretation, which then informs subsequent contribution. (Liber, 2000).
In his case study of Nursing Students using Colloquia, Richardson noticed that the asynchronous aspects of the system were viewed as substantial benefits. Because Colloquia files are stored locally, students needed not to schedule Colloquia sessions, and were able to exploit idle time in ways a centralized system would have prohibited: "This is often the case with students who are at home, using a modem, or on placement in, for example, a hospital ward (Richardson, 2001).
Additionally, users are not inundated with irrelevant information, as can be the case with other email-based knowledge management devices such as listservs. Users only receive notice of activities, people and resources with which they are directly involved (Liber, 2000), which can allow a user to feel a stronger sense of identity as a part of the system. To become involved, however, users must actively distribute their own activities and resources widely.
Within Colloquia, the idea of messaging is more closely linked to the manner in which people interact within a physical class (finding loyalties, sharing with those of similar interests) than it is to traditional email, emphasizing users' control over their collaborative experiences. Of course, this fact can have a negative effect as well, reinforcing isolation if the user does not actively create activities and study groups.
Holyfield's case study of Colloquia use in the BAILO program found that students with a common interest in the medium exceeded participation benchmarks despite being new to the system:
We have been very pleased with how well things have worked so far. Students have been very positive despite the steep learning curves involved, and the level to which the group has gelled and supported each other has been exemplary. Whereas typically it is expected that the highest levels of contribution to online discussions is up to a third we have had almost 100% participation and 'attendance' most of the time. (Holyfield, 2002)
The failures reported in Richardson's (2001) case study of nursing students using Colloquia suggest that active use of a knowledge management system of this sort is more effective when tied directly to the expressed interests group in question. The BAILO students had a vested interest in pushing the system to its full capability; online collaboration is within their desired expertise. To the nursing students, Colloquia may have seemed a more burdensome email client with little conceptual resemblance to their field.
Colloquia and Knowledge Transfer
As discussed earlier, Colloquia is not based on the traditional classroom instruction paradigm (as other collaborative platforms, such as Blackboard are). Liber, in his conceptualization of the application focused not on replicating the classroom experience, but the experience of being a student: "Fortunately, traditional transmissive education has been supplemented not only by seminars and tutorials, but by students discussing ideas with each other in coffee bars and elsewhere" (Liber, 2000).
Because Colloquia serves as conversation repository, both the tacit and explicit lessons learned in activities are made available to the user at anytime. This is yet another way in which the developers have leveraged Colloquia's asynchronous nature against the fleeting (and often overwhelming) nature of synchronous communication methods such as teleconferencing, instant messaging, and physical meetings. This is something that could have been perceived as a deficit of the system, but one of Holyfield's students found this conversation repository aspect to be most helpful:
Another benefit of this method of learning is that the lectures can be viewed as many times as is required to understand the subject. And all this in the (now) comfort of your own home, with a coffee and cigarette, as opposed to a more formal lecture theater. (Holyfield, Liber, Richardson, and Smart, 2002)
The distributed, peer-to-peer framework within which Colloquia is situated encourages active knowledge transfer without emphasis on time; that is, within a user's Colloquia activities, opportunities for learning are preserved.
Colloquia and Knowledge Roles
"In our view, the learning process is facilitated, resourced, co-coordinated and monitored by teachers, but is undertaken by learners" (Liber, Olivier, and Britain, 2000).
Colloquia's open administration allows everyone involved to serve in either of the roles mentioned above. To become a "tutor," users can simply initiate a study group. Students can no longer be viewed as customers, Colloquia's creator explains, the better metaphor is to view them as workers (Liber, Olivier, and Britain, 2000). This metaphor emphasizes the application's business-world frame; Liber's goal is not for every student to receive the same textbook knowledge from an experience with Colloquia, but to receive a specialized and meaningful subset of the knowledge shared.
Within Colloquia, students are encouraged to take ownership of their resources in a number of ways: by enriching them with annotations, by engaging in discussions regarding them (Richardson, 2001), and by distributing them. In Richardson's case study of nursing students using Colloquia, he found that merely asking the students to use the software was not the most troubling challenge of the program, but that using the system properly implied that students must "develop an independent style of learning, to practice a critical judgment of papers, and to work cooperatively" (2001). Richardson in part blames this implicit challenge in the lack of success of the pilot program, in which 68% of users found the Colloquia system "confusing" (2001).
Holyfield describes the ability of Colloquia's peer-to-peer nature to, in effect, flatten the traditional educational hierarchy:
The implications of this are (a) that students have the same software capabilities as teachers - they can initiate activities and discussions, and (b) it provides for a more private and intimate experience than server based systems. (2002)
Holderness agrees that this schism with traditional classroom politics is unique: " so any student should be able to create a seminar. If they want to lock out the lecturer, so what?"(2001).
References
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Center for Learning Technology, The University of Wales. Colloquia 1.4 User Guide. (2002). Retrieved March 23, 2003 from http://www.colloquia.net
Center for Learning Technology, The University of Wales. (2003.) Colloquia, The innovative learning management and groupware system. Retrieved Maech 23, 2003 from http://www.colloquia.net
Holderness, Mike. (2001 October 6) University challenge. New Scientist.
Holyfield, Sarah. (2002.) Elearning doesn't have to be lonely—learning online through Colloquia. Learning Technology 4(1).
Holyfield, Sarah, Liber, Oleg, Richardson, Paul, and Smart, Christina. (2002) BA in the internet, learning, and organizations: a peer to peer approach to distance learning. The proceedings of the Networked Learning Conference 2002. Retreived March 26, 2003 from http://www.shef.ac.uk/nlc2002/proceedings/papers/16.htm
Liber, Oleg. (1999.) Embracing educational media; an organisational perspective. Journal of Educational Media 24(1).
Liber, O. (2000), Colloquia: a conversation manager. Campus Wide Information Systems 17(2), pp 56-60.
Liber, Oleg, Olivier, Bill, and Britan, Sandy. (2000.) The TOOMOL project: supporting a personalised and conversational approach to learning. Computers and Education 34(4) pp 327-333.
Richardson, Paul. (2001.) Colloquia nursing case study, CO-UWB-1-CS, Bangor: University of Wales, Bangor. Retrieved March 26th, 2003 from http://www.eres.ac.uk/source/docs/co-uwb-1-cs.pdf