Knowledge management in learning communities

Collaborative learning motivates active participation of individuals in their learning process, which often results in the attaining of creative and critical thinking skills. In this way, students and teachers are viewed as both providers and consumers of knowledge gathered in environments where everybody teaches and learns, by interacting with each other. Peer-to-peer networking reflects and supports this non-hierarchical relationship between teachers and students in a collaborative learning community. In this paper, we present Help and Learn, an agent-based, peer-to-peer helpdesk system to support extra-class interactions among students and teachers. Help and Learn expands the student's possibility of solving problems, getting involved in a cooperative learning experience that transcends the limits of classrooms. To model Help and Learn, we have used AORML (Agent-Object-Relationship Modeling Language), an UML extension for agent-oriented modeling. The aim of this research is twofold. On the one hand, we aim at exploring Help and Learn's potential to support collaborative learning, discussing its knowledge management strategy, and on the other we aim at showing the expressive power and the modeling strengths of AORML.