Supporting the development of a national constellation of communities of practice in the scholarship of teaching and learning through the use of intelligent agents

• Authors: Darren Cambridge
• Venue: CSCL '99 Proceedings of the 1999 conference on Computer support for collaborative learning
• Year: 1999

This paper describes the WebCenter, a CSCL tool being developed to support the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Campus Program, an effort to strengthen local communities of practice performing the scholarship of teaching and learning and to create a national constellation of communities of practice that transverses them. The WebCenter provides a suite of groupware tools for the use of Campus Program participants. The WebCenter uses two analysis systems to act as social agents to stimulate activity. First, a collaborative filtering system is used to encourage national and cross-disciplinary collaboration between scholars of teaching and learning. Second, an automated peer-review and invitation system, based on the model of a consensus journal, is being developed for three purposes: to support the development of national consensus on the criteria for assessing the scholarship of teaching and learning, to stimulate the production of scholarship meeting these criteria, and to lend credibility to scholarship published on the WebCenter.