Ontology-Driven Awareness in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

Abstract

In the Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) system, Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) is applied to Collaborative Learning (CL) and students work together in a learning group and interact with each other in order to achieve their common goal of learning. This study aims to analyze the ontology concept in CSCL and to design the activity awareness for CSLC by using the OWL web ontology language. Besides adopting the workspace awareness from CSCW, we analyze the educational awareness to fulfill the learning needs in CSCL. We defined the learning activity awareness, including presence, role, action, and history, and subsequently used OWL to implement the learning activity awareness. Such ontology-driven awareness is the primary key to a successful CSCL when running in the open and integrated semantic web.