Support online social interaction with Context-Awareness

Abstract

Social interaction is critical to knowledge building and sharing in online learning. This paper identifies knowledge, social and technical contexts as the three essential elements of the context space for online social interaction, and accordingly proposes a three-dimensional context-awareness (CA) model to support online social interaction, including Awareness to Knowledge Context, Awareness to Social Context, and Awareness to Technical Context. The activity context, the mediator in the context space, is highlighted in CA implementation. CA map is employed to visualise CA information. A case study (caLDT) is provided to test if the CA model is helpful for online social interaction. Copyright © 2007 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.