Knowledge Management in Learning Communities

Collaborative learning motivates active participation of individuals in their learning process, which often results in the attaining of creative and critical thinking skills. In this way, students and teachers are viewed as both providers and consumers of knowledge gathered in environments where everybody teaches and learns, by interacting with each other. Peer-to-peer networking reflects and supports this non-hierarchical relationship between teachers and students in a collaborative learning community. In this paper we present Help&Learn, an agent-based peer-to-peer helpdesk system to support extraclass interactions among students and teachers. Help&Learn expands the student’s possibility of solving problems, getting involved in a cooperative learning experience that transcends the limits of classrooms. To model Help&Learn, we have used Agent-Object-Relationship Modeling Language (AORML), an UML extension for agent-oriented modeling. The aim of this research is two-fold. On the one hand, we aim at exploring Help&Learn’s potential to support collaborative learning, discussing its knowledge management strategy. On the other hand, we aim at showing the expressive power and the modeling strengths of AORML.