IWASCL 2012 - Third International Workshop on "Adaptive Systems for Collaborative Learning" (IWASCL 2012)

Current learning technologies can provide adaptive and/or intelligent support to learners in a collaborative learning situation. 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.
Contemporary learning theories strongly emphasize social interaction as a key mechanism for the development of shared understanding and knowledge construction. Consequently, building technologies that intelligibly trigger, guide and support peer interaction is expected to help students significantly increase the value of collaboration-generated benefits at both cognitive and meta-cognitive level.
Working in this context several research groups have made various contributions leading gradually to the development of systems for adaptive and intelligent collaborative learning support (AICLS systems). In general, these systems are expected to model the users (individual or group), the activity, and the interaction between human and technological agents and make “informed” interventions to support pre-task group formation, in-task peer interactions and domain-specific activities in the collaborative setting. Early studies on the impact of employing adaptive/intelligent forms of support in CSCL 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-2012 workshop (the third workshop in the series) is to provide the opportunity for an informal meeting which facilitates the dissemination of knowledge in the field, providing useful insights on existing state-of-the-art research. The workshop sets a broad focus and invites contributions presenting methods, tools, formalization approaches, early prototype design and evaluation, pedagogical issues, position papers. 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 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.
-- Methods and tools for the design and operationalization of adaptive/intelligent CSCL systems.
-- Adaptive/Intelligent methods for supporting the orchestration of activities in collaborative learning 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 to inform the adaptable/intelligent behavior of CSCL systems.
-- Learning analytics and educational data mining techniques in the CSCL context.
-- Adaptive/Intelligent support of learners in social networking applications
-- Pedagogical issues on the adaptive/intelligent support of group learners
-- Evaluating various aspects of adaptive/intelligent systems for collaborative learning (e.g. cost/benefit issues)