Supporting collaborative knowledge building with intelligent agents

In the process of collaborative knowledge building, it is usually difficult for students to be aware of others' activities, for instructors to overview the process and to regulate the collaboration In order to facilitate collaborative knowledge building, intelligent agents were developed to support the awareness and regulate the collaboration. This paper discusses the role of intelligent agents and how they support both students and instructors in collaborative knowledge building. By monitoring the collaboration, the agents compute the statistics, detect possible problems and give advice synchronously and asynchronously to the students and instructor based on their activities and requests.