Supporting Awareness in a CSCL Environment

This paper describes Knowledge Awareness (KA), a new concept for inducing collaboration in an open ended and collaborative learning environment. To enhance collaboration opportunities in this situation, KA provides information about the activities of the learners within the shared knowledge space. For instance, the messages are “someone is looking at the same knowledge that you are looking at,” “someone discussed the knowledge which you have inputted.” The spontaneous collaboration that is created by the messages facilitates the refinement and evolution of the learners’ knowledge. This paper also describes knowledge awareness map and its design, implementation and evaluation. The map visualizes the relationship between the shared knowledge and the current and past interactions of learners. The map plays a very important role of finding peer helpers, and inducing collaboration. In this map, a mediator agent recommends suitable collaborators who can help the problem solving. SHARLOK II (sharing, linking and looking-for knowledge) has been developed on the web as a testbed of KA map, which has a knowledge building and collaborative learning environment connected via Internet. We have tested and verified the effectiveness of SHARLOK II and KA map through their use.