Modification of Past Remarks for Activating Discussion in Collaborative Learning

Abstract

In collaborative learning, a discussion sometimes comes to a standstill because no comments have been made or no conflicting opinions have been offered. Activation remarks, which might solve such situations using past discussions, may be effective for similar situations. Our research group proposed a framework that applies the activation remarks of past discussions that were stored in a database to ongoing discussions based on case-based reasoning (CBR). To utilize past activation remarks, they should be modified to fit the current situations. We introduce a method for modifying selected activation remarks that contain situationdependent words about the current discussion especially on remarks that contain words about the remaining time or topics. Our method grasps the time and the topics of ongoing discussions and creates activation remarks by replacing situation dependent words to words of ongoing discussion. Our experimental result showed that our proposed method created valid and effective activation remarks when appropriate past remarks were selected from the only one case-base.