Collaborative learning and ICT: A prototypal learning environment

Abstract

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education have become a fieldof interest for both scholars and practitioners involved in learning activities. Today, thereis a general agreement on the role of ICT as a necessary tool for adapting education andtraining systems to the knowledge society. ICT for learning has the potential to transformthe learning and teaching processes, and to offer innovative and alternative ways ofeducation and training next and together with more conventional teaching methods.However, even though ICT has the potential to enhance teaching and learning,interdisciplinary endeavours are required in order to fully exploit the potential of ICT ineducation and training. Specifically innovative pedagogical and didactical approaches areneeded, as well as technological environments capable of supporting learning processes.On the basis of empirical evidences that collaborative learning is the "royal road" toknowledge acquisition, a European project entitled "Social networks and knowledgeconstruction promotion in e-learning contexts" investigated educational practices andtechnological artefacts in collaborative e-learning contexts.As technological environments for collaborative distance learning, Multi-AgentSystem (MAS) - a set of autonomous, pro-active, and interacting computational entitiescalled agents, situated in an environment where they interact typically producing acoherent global system behaviour - seemingly provide a suitable computationalparadigm for the engineering of distance learning systems. Based on the conceptualframework of the Agents & Artefacts meta-model (A&A), a prototypical MAS-basedcollaboration environment with ad hoc designed collaboration tools is proposed as aresult of the project activity. © 2013 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.