O AMBIENTE AMANDA: uma referência para intensificar a interatividade em fóruns com mediação automatizada

Abstract

This article presents the characteristics of AMANDA - Ambiente de Mediação à Análise de Discussões Argumentativas, a virtual environment developed to mediate group discussion and improve interactivity during forum discussions. AMANDA is an innovating system that organizes, in structured trees, the argumentative discussions of the members of an exchange information group, using the asynchronous mode of Computer Mediated Communication - CMC, by applying computational intelligence techniques. It is considered an intelligent virtual environment since the mediation of the discussions is done by algorithms, free of continuous human interference, therefore helping teachers with the activities of collaborative learning. One of the main advantages of AMANDA is the possibility that people have to debate different subjects at the same time, using different discussion cards. In order to measure how mediation automated by AMANDA could intensify student's interaction and externalization of knowledge, using forums for collaborative learning activities, we realized, at the year of 2000, an experiment with a group of students from the Masters of Education program at PUCPR. At the experiment we have considered the importance of some mechanisms introduced by Nonaka's Theory of Organization Knowledge Creation. The experiment showed that AMANDA presented satisfactory results on the automatic delivery of the questioning and resulting arguments, without the need for teacher's interference, and helped challenge the externalization of knowledge from the students, by means of requesting agreements or disagreements answers, complete or partial, among them.