CoLPE: Support for Communities of Learning Practice by the Effective Embedding of Information and Knowledge about Group Activity

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, they lack of 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 group’s participation by means of providing appropriate awareness and feedback. In this chapter, we first describe the main guidelines that conducted the requirements and design of this. Then, we employ this tool in a real on-line learning environment to support a collaborative activity based on an asynchronous discussion. Finally, the experience and the evaluation results of using this application are reported, showing promising opportunities to support the formal and also informal discussion processes occurring in current communities of learning practice.