Guardian Agent / Blog: Recent posts

December 2011
This system was designed to help students to allocate tasks to team members and to agree ground rules for working as a team.
The concept is for a tool that will help student teams in a variety of ways, and the 2 mentioned above are only a start. The rationale for needing such a system, is that Groupware is designed for business use, rather than students to use to learn about team working. Groupware also concentrates on helping with th task parts of the project, and not the softer yeam maintenance roles. Also students are not all full time studying on campus any more, so meetings face to face are difficult to arrange, in order to get to know each other.
I have uploaded a paper published in JITE, which evaluates the students' use of the system over several years. You can read more about the issues in this paper.
The system as it has been uploaded does work, if you want to try it out. It just needs to be installed on a MySQL server, and given a web page for interaction. Best to also download the team member and team leader instructions to get a flavour of how students are intended to work with it.
I would welcome your feedback if you use it with your students. I would like your ideas on additional features, or changes that would enhance its use. If you can code additional features for us all to try, please do so.