A CEWebS Component for Facilitating Online Cooperative Brainstorming Processes

Drawing your ideas to a piece of paper is easy, but drawing onto the screen using the mouse appears to be quite complicated. This usually results in some non-formalised, bad-looking scribbling that is hard to extend and which makes it hard to modify or delete fragments. Currently available web-based whiteboard tools support common drawing features. However, in informatics, teams enjoy the advantage of formalised languages (e.g. UML), which whiteboards do not support and, hence, do not make this advantage effective. For supporting brainstorming processes, we developed a simple, extendable chat application that can be embedded into existing learning environments through a Web service framework and focuses on a cooperative modelling approach instead of cooperative drawing.