A Framework to Foster Diversity in Collaborative Activities

Dynamic lectures are collaborative settings in which learners and educators interact with each other and among them to produce, learn, and consolidate knowledge. To take part into collaborative settings, individuals must be able to communicate with others, be aware of the artifacts used and of the objects of interest, among others. On their foundation, these requirements depend on motor and cognitive-related abilities such as arm movement, perception, recognition, and memorization. Impairments may influence these abilities and consequently pose challenges to the participation in collaborative settings. To the best of our knowledge, there is not a guide, a method nor a framework to orient anyone who wants to analyze the scenario of collaborative settings in order to create conditions for the inclusion of individual in such activities. In this context, this paper presents the Colab4All -Collaboration for All, a framework created to support the analysis of collaborative settings involving people with impairments. The framework uses the well known Human Processor Model with two complementary objectives: first, to derive questions that must be asked to support the analysis previously mentioned, and then to combine these questions with a collaboration model in order to establish the way potential challenges can be addressed. In order to test the proposed framework, we used it to orient a research on the inclusion of individuals with blindness in a class activity based on graphical notations. The results of such research were tested in a real setting and presented promising results. We consider that the framework proposed in this work is a first step to orient research, derive collaborative and inclusive models, and to define requirements for technology that supports such collaborative settings involving people with impairments.