Supporting teachers' intervention in collaborative knowledge building

In the context of distributed collaborative learning, the teacher's role is different from traditional teacher-centered environments, they are coordinators/facilitators, guides, and co-learners. They monitor the collaboration activities within a group, detect problems and intervene in the collaboration to give advice and learn alongside students at the same time. We have designed an Assistant to support teachers' intervention in collaborative knowledge building. The Assistant monitors the collaboration, visualizes it and provides advice to the teacher on the subject domain and the collaboration process. The goal of the research present in this paper is to explore the possibilities of enriching Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments with tools to support collaborative interaction.