Portfolio, intelligent agents and Web: professional education in a collaborative online environment

Changes in work and its practice are leading corporations to valorize workers not only for technical competencies but also social ones. This tendency has consequences both for workers who need to improve such competencies (most of the time on the fly), and for students who have to be prepared for such market. The aim of this work is to show how concepts from social learning theory and communities of practice are being used in the design of a learning environment that uses collaborative problem based learning (PBL) and portfolios. The environment encourages social interactions among its users where the development of social competencies is concerned. The work is divided in three parts; the first describes the collaborative learning model, the second describes how implementation evolved and finally considerations of what has been done and what future work is likely to be.