Paper Title:
An Architecture of an Environment for Cooperative Learning (AmCorA)
 

Authors:

Crediné Menezes (UFES); Davidson Cury (UFES); Orivaldo Tavares (UFES); Gilda Campos (USU); Alberto Castro (UA).

E-mail: credine@inf.ufes.br dede@inf.ufes.br tavares@inf.ufes.br gilda@openlink.com.br alberto@dcc.fua.br
 

Abstract:

In a learning community, real agents cooperate performing different roles in the search for knowledge construction. To support the tasks of information access and manipulation, these agents use  tools that are diverse, complex and in general, lacking proper operations to assist intellectual activity.

In conventional teaching-learning environments, tools to support agent interaction are, in general, inappropriate to improve agent relationship in terms of time, space, technology, psychology, social and economic factors. Constraining these interactions to the physical space of the school and occasional meetings outside the school, exclude a large amount of possible collaborators.

We propose the construction of an environment for constructivist and cooperative learning using the Internet, supporting interaction between agents involved in the learning process by recording, organizing and facilitating the retrieval of interaction results. We will adopt an architecture based upon multiagents that allow modeling of real and virtual agents.

In this system, we emphasize the following components: a) Assistants to Explore and Consolidate Instructional Resources – Tools able to perceive the environment in which they are inserted, interacting with other agents and acting always considering their specific goals, performing tasks that, although requiring intelligence, do not interfere in the body of forming knowledge; b) Assistants to Support the Understanding Process – Tools to group questions based on content, to retrieve answers already produced through evaluation of the contents of a specific question, and to interact to help the construction of contextualized questions and answers; c) Tutoring Assistants – Tools that provides the teacher a computing support suitable to individual and contextualized tutoring; d) Message Translation Assistants – Tools to allow the use of the system in different idioms, supplying facilities to support translation by human collaborators.

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Contact:
Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (UFES)
Department :   Informática
Address:      Campus Universitário de Goiabeiras, CT-VII
                  Vitória - ES  CEP:29060-900
Country :      Brazil
Phone:         +55 27 335 2654
Fax :            +55 27 335 2850
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UFES - Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo
USU - Universidade Santa Úrsula
UA - Universidade Federal do Amazonas.