Supporting Communities of Learning Practice by the Effective Embedding of Information and Knowledge into 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, 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 group’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.