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Tatiana will provide support for researchers who want to analyze user's actions and interactions. The twofold orientation of the tool - teachers/students and researchers as users - should increase the success of the LEAD system.
The actions students perform within the LEAD electronic environment (Coffee) are stored as (inter)action data (the traces). This (inter)action data can be used for research purposes. It can provide researchers with valuable insights about students' actions and interactions. However, to be really valuable, the (inter)action data has to be aggregated, analysed and transformed into meaningful information.
 

The users of the trace-analysis tool are researchers and educationalists. It's quite a new kind of tool, which makes it difficult to ask users "what do you want?". Some partners learned from previous projects (as SCALE or DUNE) that it is hard to specify in advance the full-range of requirements. Additional requirements emerge when researchers and teachers use the tool.
So we decided to start exploring the needs with DREW and DIGALO, collaborative tools (developped during the previous projects SCALE and DUNE) that provide trace files of interactions. Some partners have already gained experience with these tools and can give some feedback on their analysis practices. Thus, the interaction design of the trace-analysis tool will start with a small community of researchers providing their traces and their analysis requirements, and will be enriched by further requirements and by the use of other tools of interest when suggested by the partners.

Moreover, the face to face situation of the experiments that will be carried out implies that, in addition to the DSS (Coffee) traces, video and/or audio recording will be performed. So the analysis tool not only needs to manage the computer mediated interactions performed through the Discussion tool but will have to synchronize these electronic traces with the transcriptions of the video/audio records. It has not yet been decided if all the transcriptions will be done with the same tool.