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SmartChat – An Intelligent Environment for Collaborative Discussions

Using Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Environments (CSCLE) two or more participants can build their knowledge together, through reflection, collaborative problem resolution, information exchange, and decision-making. The majority of these environments provide tools for communication (e-mails, chats, and forums). However, there are no mechanisms for the evaluation of the interaction contents. The lack of a mechanism to evaluate the interactions could prevent the users from discussing about a specific theme or collaborating among themselves.

A contextualised Learning Interaction Memory

The interaction is the key element used in Collaborative Learning Environments to understand the process of knowledge building and the role played by each student in it. Interaction analysis can provide support for the students’ reflection and self-regulation processes as well as for the teachers’ activities. But to perform the analysis process, it is important to discover and register the context where each interaction has occurred, in order to understand the meaning of user interactions. However, although there are several approaches for Interaction Analysis in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, there is a lack of methods and tools that consider: (1) the context where the interactions have occurred; (2) the different needs of feedback from the point of view of teacher and students; and (3) the necessity of contextualized historical information to produce more complete and semantically rich reports for students and teachers. In this light, this paper presents a Learning Interaction Memory (LIM), used to store the learning interactions occurred in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Environments, taking into account the context where they have occurred. The LIM was modelled in a multidimensional structure so that interactions can be viewed from different perspectives and can be presented selectively, according to users’ needs. This paper also presents the process of construction and exploration of the LIM and a Context-Based Analytical Environment called SmartChat+: an environment for collaborative discussions of specific subjects that uses the LIM. In order to show the feasibility of the LIM, a series of exploratory studies was carried out, yielding good initial results, especially in what concerns feedback from the users.