Analysis and Intelligent Support of Learning Communities

Conventional discussion environments provide the technical platform for distributed discussion and collaboration, but apart from some statistical data collected, rarely provide information about the collaborative interactions taking place within the environement or even support the discussion by stimulating the learning setting according to the current situation. In this article we present our approach for intelligent support of groups of learners in distributed webbased discussion environments. First we show how the state of a conversation can be monitored using a classification of the respective contributions and describe the design of a user interface specifically tailored for that end. Then we present an implementation of this type of interface and of a proof-of-concept agent supporting the discussion processes actively. That agent analyses the current state of a conversation and makes contributions acording to the current situation.