A Framework for Enabling an Internet Learning Community

We view the Internet as a “virtual laboratory” and have developed a framework to support experiments in web-based community learning. Our system is called the Community of Evolving Learners, or CEL. The target user group is primary school children, therefore we pay particular attention to privacy issues and provide a safe environment in which learners can succeed and fail incognito. This article describes the CEL system, the types of interactions that it enables and the kinds of data that can be collected. We present preliminary results from a pilot study that was used to validate the CEL mechanism.