A Knowledge Production Protocol for Cooperative Development of Learning Objects

In a distributed eLearning environment, the development of learning objects becomes a cooperative task. We consider learning objects as knowledge pieces, which are subject to the management processes of acquisition, delivery, and production. We present a two-tier architecture for cooperative knowledge production tasks. In our model, knowledgeproducing agents are arranged into knowledge domains or marts, and a distributed negotiation protocol is used to consolidate knowledge produced in a mart. The architecture can be extended to a multiple-tier architecture, where consolidated knowledge can be negotiated in higher-level foreign marts. This approach is applied to cooperative development of learning objects, although it is proposed to be also applicable to other knowledge production tasks.