Introduction

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Agent technology has been used in educational environments for some time, and a number of agents and multiagent systems have been designed specifically for educational purposes. In these systems, agents play different roles, such as tutors (Johnson et al., 2000) or co-learners (Chan, 1996). Another role for an agent is that of a facilitator (Chen & Wasson, 2003). For example, in a distributed collaborative-learning environment where users are geographically distributed and collaborate through a Web-based learning environment, an agent can facilitate collaboration processes such as coordination, teacher intervention, group interaction, etc.

In computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW), facilitation was studied in group supporting systems (GSSs) (Hirokawa & Gouran, 1989; Pollard & Vogel, 1991; Antunes & Ho, 1999). The activities of the facilitator in supporting group work have been identified. They are, among others, ensuring member identity and maintaining a discussion focus and a procedure for that focus; ensuring everyone has an opportunity to contribute to the discussion and decision regarding focus, procedures and decision issues; providing structure to focus group limits and boundaries; intervening when appropriate; and maintaining awareness of own feelings as an indicator (Chilberg, 1989; Shelli & Hayne, 1992). The facilitator is thought of as a servant to the group rather than a master (Jay, 1976). In the context of distributed collaborative learning, where students and instructors are geographically distributed, intelligent agents have been developed to support group learning (Okamoto et al., 1995; Ayala & Yano, 1996; Dillenbourg et al., 1997; Soller, 2001). Our research is partially inspired by these previous works and aims at testing the facilitation role of agents in both synchronous and asynchronous environments. It is also inspired by work on awareness within the CSCW field (Dourish & Bellotti, 1992; Gutwin et al., 1995).

In the DoCTA-NSS project (http://intermedia.uib.no/projects/docta), we developed intelligent agents for both asynchronous (Chen & Wasson, 2002) and synchronous (Dragsnes et al., 2002) collaborative-learning environments and used these environments to support student collaboration in a learning scenario on gene technology, where Grade 10 students in two Norwegian cities collaborated through a groupware system.

The chapter is organized as follows. After the background of facilitation agents in distributed collaborative learning, Section 2 discusses design issues of agents in distributed collaborative-learning environments, including problems that often occur in the collaboration process, awareness, and how to present the awareness information and advice effectively and nonintrusively. Sections 3 and 4 describe the agents integrated in FLE3 (asynchronous environment) and in the Mindmap Building Tool (synchronous environment). The design, development, integration with the environments, and evaluation of these agents will be described in detail in these two sections. Related work is discussed and compared with our research in Section 5. Section 6 provides our conclusions and future work.



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Designing Distributed Environments with Intelligent Software Agents
Designing Distributed Learning Environments with Intelligent Software Agents
ISBN: 1591405009
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 121

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