Computer-facilitated Community Building for E-Learning Panel Introduction

This is a short survey of tools and ideas that are helpful for community building for E-learning. The underlying assumption in the survey is that community building for students and teachers in a joint learning and teaching situation is useful. Especially student-student interaction in student life is important. Can we introduce tools that do not only ‘allow’ student-student interaction in an E-learning environment, but also stimulate such interaction and permit students to design their own way of interaction, including several degrees of implicit or explicit access to information they possess, their ideas, their attitudes and feelings, their appearance, etc. Apart from allowing more natural interaction between individuals, this information may help in building and providing group knowledge, knowledge that has been constructed from frequency, characteristics from interactants, and from the contents of interaction. Members of the community can profit from such information as well. What is known about a particular teacher, which student usually gives useful advice, what are the characteristics of students who take a particular course, etc? Tools can help to: assign reputations to individuals, provide recommendations based on frequent interactions, extract information from individuals (based on their interactions or based on questioning), promote awareness of others in the community, etc. In order to design tools that are effective we cannot restrict ourselves to tools that ‘just’ allow statistical analysis of interactions. We need to interpret interactions from an intelligent and affective point of view. We need modalities that allow students to display knowledge and subjective feelings about the learning environment and about themselves. Our aim in this paper is to motivate the readers to build on the ideas that are available in the literature. Ideas are available, but certainly not in a way that allows an integrated viewpoint from which to start the design of an e-learning community with student interaction that resembles interaction in real-life student life communities.