Extending CIAM methodology to support mobile application design and evaluation: A case study in m-learning

Abstract

Traditionally, the development of systems supporting group work has been considered a complex task because multiple aspects have to be considered. As a consequence, it is necessary to apply methodological processes in order to reach successful and usable systems. CIAM is a methodological approach for developing groupware user interfaces by modeling aspects of collaboration and interaction. CIAM addresses the joint modeling of collaboration and human-computer interaction aspects, guiding the engineers through several modeling stages, starting from the analysis of the context of the group work until obtaining an interactive task model. In its initial proposal, CIAM does not deal directly with evaluation mechanisms and processes of the artifacts produced when this methodology is applied. In addition, CIAM is not primarily focused on the mobile computing paradigm. Thus, the objective of this paper is to describe how CIAM is being improved in order to provide more complete support for modeling and evaluation of collaborative applications based on mobile computing and especially the modeling of applications supporting Mobile Learning (or m-Learning).