Theme and Scope

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Contemporary learning theories strongly emphasize social interaction as a key learning mechanism that provides the basis for skill development and knowledge construction. Consequently, building technologies that adaptively/intelligibly trigger, guide and support peer interaction is expected to help students reap the collaboration-generated benefits both at cognitive and meta-cognitive level. This perspective lies at the crossroads of Intelligent Tutoring, Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), expanding the perspective of the fields and setting innovative research agendas.

Working in this context several research groups have made important contributions resulting to the development of various technologies for adaptive and intelligent collaborative learning support (AICLS systems) (see, for example, http://www.ieeetclt.org/issues/january2012/IEEE-LT-Jan12.htm). In general, these systems are expected to analyze the interaction between human and technological agents in order to extract valuable information regarding the users (individual or group) and the activity. The system can then provide key activity information (for example, activity mirroring visualizations) and/or make “informed” interventions to support either pre-task group formation or peer interactions and domain-specific activities during collaboration. Studies on the learning impact of such interventions have provided encouraging results, however, the agenda is open and several intriguing questions are still far from being adequately addressed.

The scope of the IWASCL-2013 workshop (the third workshop in the series) is to provide the opportunity for an informal meeting which facilitates the dissemination of knowledge in this interdisciplinary field, providing useful insights on existing state-of-the-art research. The workshop sets a broad focus covering all phases of AICLS system development and evaluation; from pedagogical considerations and system architectures to interaction analysis and learning analytics methods to user modeling, interventions design and evaluation of the system learning impact.

We invite contributions presenting methods, tools, formalization approaches, early prototype design and evaluation, pedagogical issues. We especially welcome papers that describe speculative ideas, work in progress, and discussions of challenging issues. The workshop includes (but is not limited to) topics such as:

-- Theoretical/pedagogical approaches on adaptive/intelligent methods addressing needs of group learners.

-- User and group modeling to cater for adaptive/intelligent system design.

-- Adaptive and intelligent forms of tutoring/scaffolding/scripting in CSCL systems.

-- Adaptive collaboration support.

-- Adaptive/Adaptable/Intelligent methods for supporting the orchestration of activities in CSCL contexts.

-- Tools and methods for adaptive/intelligent support of learners in scripted collaboration.

-- Architectures and frameworks for building or testing AICLS systems.

-- AI and Web 2.0 tools & methods to integrate in AICLS systems.

-- Formalization efforts and the role of the Learning Design.

-- Interaction analysis techniques (also learning analytics and educational data mining techniques) to inform the design of AICLS systems.

-- Conversational agents for CSCL support

-- Evaluating various aspects of adaptive/intelligent systems for collaborative learning (e.g. cost/benefit issues)