The workshop “Design and Spontaneity in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning” (DS-CSCL) will take place in conjunction with the 19th International Conference on Control Systems and Computer Science (CSCS19), 29-31 May 2013, at the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University Politehnica of Bucharest.

Technical description of the workshop

The DS-CSCL workshop is a meeting place for professionals in collaborative systems and in instructional technologies from academic and industry arenas, aiming to kindle dialogue and productive inquiries of socio-technical communities of learning.

Learning is an omnipresent process in communities of all purposes – from education in formal settings, to sense-making and problem-solving in team projects, and continuous career development (along technical, managerial, commercial dimensions etc). We invite inquiries into learning processes at various scales of time and place: local, ad-hoc solutions to unexpected problems; long-term cumulative knowledge production; learning in small, face-to-face teams, or in large, distributed, online communities; learning that is materialized in durable artifacts, and learning that is observed in fleeting, situated behaviors.

Computers and other information technologies have become backbones of communities of practice – fostering new acquaintances, mediating communication, synchronizing and bridging interactions, archiving and indexing information, supporting identity work and reputations. We welcome contributions that look at how information technology makes a difference in a given project: how does technology open novel possibilities of interaction? How does it bridge (or open) distances in time, space - or social distances? What are the side effects of technological mediation?

We invite full papers and short papers on the following topics, or related subjects of interest:

• Design and practice in CSCL systems: case studies that present actual implementations of CSCL projects and discuss how envisaged functionalities were taken over by participants and adjusted to needs and challenges;
• Designing for diversity: users of any system are unavoidably diverse in interests and approaches; how do CSCL systems take into account, adapt and rely on this diversity? How are inequalities made visible and managed in CSCL projects? 
• Technical challenge: how do social needs challenge engineers to design innovative solutions? How are social needs formulated in design requirements? How are cutting-edge technologies, or other (older, lateral) non-mainstream technologies discovered and re-discovered to tackle specific problems? Some of the envisaged technologies and architectures are: Wikis and other collaborative tools, Social Networking Platforms, Natural Language Processing, Serious Gaming Platforms, Social Networks Analysis, Middleware for Mobile Collaborative Systems, Peer-to-Peer Architectures;
• Dialogue and conflict: the design, implementation and adaptation of a collaborative system requires dialogue and stirs divergence and conflict; how do CSCL systems cope with conflicts in communities of users and developers?
• Design and adaptation: how do participants (designers, students, tutors) diagnose problems in the functioning of a CSCL system, and how do they create adaptive solutions? How do long-term CSCL projects evolve from one edition to another?
• Design and gameplay: what are the challenges and opportunities of serious games and gamification in education? What is the specificity of gameplay as a learning experience for non-game activities?
• Security and fair-use challenges: collaborative systems are vulnerable to malicious behavior from inside and outside; moreover, what counts as ‘malicious’ is often contested – as it is the case with cheating in multiplayer games, or other rule-bending strategies (such as exploiting technical bugs, or relying on collective or automated agency instead of individual agency). How do designers adapt to anticipated challenges, and how do participants adjust locally to suspicious behaviors?
• Learning about learning: how can we foster a literacy of computer-supported collaborative learning for students in computer engineering? How can we together become more aware of challenges and opportunities in the design of CSCL solutions?
• Methods and techniques in evaluating participants’ experiences in CSCL projects: how do we capture satisfaction, richness of interaction, learning on technical and social dimensions, individual and community learning? What are the challenges of observing, measuring, comparing learning processes and outcomes?

Workshop Co-Chairs