A middleware model for telecollaboration systems in education

The internationalization and visualization of both educational institutes and workplaces around the world is driving the development of technology that supports remote collaboration. Telecollaboration is aimed at bringing participants together into a virtual co-location where these participants can collaborate with each other. Over 2003 and 2004, several groups of students from the University of Technology, Sydney attempted to modify an existing conferencing package. This resulted in the development of a prototype telecollaboration system. In this paper, we re-evaluate the architecture of the prototype, making a number of observations about the system and giving rise to a list of key features for a middleware that is capable of masking the heterogeneity of telecollaborative services and also provides for pervasive and ambient access to resources and services throughout such systems.