Abstract
This article presents the social agent that acts in the AMPLIA’s collaborative editor in order to improve collaboration. AMPLIA is an intelligent probabilistic multiagent environment to support the diagnostic reasoning development and the diagnostic hypotheses modeling of domains with complex and uncertain knowledge, like the medical area. The social agent supports group formation and it makes a search among students of an ITS/ILE looking for suitable students to join in a workgroup. Hence, students can help others during a common learning task. For such, these agents takes into account some affective and social aspects of the students.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Collaborative Bayesian Net Editor: A graphical Bayesian network editor that allows synchronous network construction. It can be also considered as a groupware tool that enables synchronous and asynchronous construction among individuals engaged in a common edition task.
Student Model: Knowledge base that keeps the user (student) information. It also represents the computer system’s belief about the learner’s knowledge.
Collaborative Learning: Method of teaching and learning in which students’ explore a significant question or create a meaningful project. A group of students discussing a lecture or students from different schools working together over the Internet on a shared assignment are both examples of collaborative learning.
ILE: Intelligent learning environments are systems which apply artificial intelligence techniques to learning environments. A learning environment, in turn, is a category of educational software where the learner’s task is not to answer a predefined series of questions but to explore a complex world.
CLE: Collaborative learning environments are informatics systems designed to enable collaborative problem solving and to integrate e-collaboration tools or technologies.
Social Agent: A cognitive agent embodied with human social skills.
CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work): Many authors consider that CSCW and groupware are synonyms. On the other hand, different authors claim that while groupware refers to real computer-based systems, CSCW focuses on the study of tools and techniques of groupware.