Coordinating Collaborative Knowledge Building

Abstract This article presents an instructional assistant agent for FLE2, a distributed collaborative learning environment. The authors discuss the role of this agent and how it supports both the instructor and students in coordinating the distributed collaborative knowledge-building process. They emphasize the supplementary role of the instructional assistant agent, which, on the one hand, observes the distributed collaborative learning process and computes statistics for viewing, and on the other hand, detects possible problems and presents them to the instructor so that the instructor can give feedback to students in order that they themselves can regulate the collaboration. By providing advice and learning from feedback, the agent gradually improves its performance and builds up a trust relationship, until a point is reached where the agent is allowed to perform actions without confirmation from the instructor. With the lessons learned from designing and experimenting with the instructional assistant, the authors hope to move one step further towards a plug-in agent that would be able to fit in any distributed collaborative learning environments.

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