Help&Learn: A Peer-to-Peer Architecture to Support Knowledge Management in Collaborative Learning Communities

Resumo

Collaborative learning motivates active participation of individuals in their learning process, which often results in the attaining of creative and critical thinking skills. 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(p2p) networking reflects and supports this non-hierarchical relationship between teachers and students in a collaborative learning community. Acrucial issue here is the provision of efficient support for the knowledge organization and sharing within such communities. We follow a semantic approach in the organization of resources and propose an agent-based architecture for their management and sharing, taking a user-oriented approach. We illustrate these ideas within the p2p collaborative support system Help&Learn.