Abstract:
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Communities of Learning Practice is an innovative
paradigm focused on providing appropriate
technological support to both formal and especially
informal learning groups who are chiefly formed by
non-technical people and who lack of the necessary
resources to acquire such systems. Typically, students
who are often separated by geography and/or time
have the need to meet each other after classes in small
study groups to carry out specific learning activities
assigned during the formal learning process. However,
the lack of suitable and available groupware
applications makes it difficult for these groups of
learners to collaborate and achieve their specific
learning goals. In addition, the lack of democratic
decision-making mechanisms is a main handicap to
substitute the central authority of knowledge presented
in formal learning. From the literature, the provision
of specific support to informal collaborative learning
has, to the best of our knowledge, been little
investigated. To fill this gap, we present an ongoing
work that will result in a democratic web-based
groupware learning system especially designed to
provide support for informal collaborative learning
over the Internet. Moreover, an important purpose of
this software is to provide advanced mechanisms of
information management from the group activity for its
further use in extracting and providing effective
knowledge on interaction behavior. Indeed, this issue
represents a fundamental requirement for current
collaborative learning environments in order to
adequately regulate the learning process as well as to
enhance learning groupâ¿¿s participation by means of
providing appropriate awareness and feedback. In this
paper, we describe the main guidelines that conducted
the requirements and design of this application as well
as introduce the underlying groupware platform,
called CoPE, that provides the essential functional
support for democratic groupware. |