AN OVERVIEW ON USING THE BSCW WEB-BASED PLATFORM IN THE FRAME OF THE FISTE PROJECT

At present various resources are interconnected through different communication networks, having particular characteristics in terms of performance. Cooperative platforms are distributed resources interconnected through heterogeneous communication network that can be accessed and configured by users having Internet connectivity. As an example, the BSCW Shared Workspace system is an extension of a standard Web server through the server CGI Application Programming Interface. It can manage a number of shared workspaces and generally a BSCW server can manage workspaces for different groups. Consequently, the BSCW users may be members of several workspaces. Having as an objective to provide the cooperation among partners with a shared workspace on the Internet, the partnership of the Comenius 2.1 European Project FISTE (“A Future Way for In-Service Teacher Training across Europe”) agreed to use a BSCW shared platform, the server being installed by the project coordinating institution in January 2005. The paper emphasizes the way in which the platform was used by the project partnership and by the participants involved in two on-line courses developed in the frame of the mentioned project