Supporting Tools for Blended Animators in Complex Learning Communities

The society model of the last years has given a key role to knowledge in terms of economic and social development. On this background, is allocated the success of the communities of practice, and more recently, of the Complex Learning Community model, whose strength is represented by the ability to provide students, educators, and professionals with a common creative space to develop not only knowledge and expertise, but also ideas, synergies, chances. In both cases, particular emphasis is given to the interactions between users as a "place" where knowledge emerges, is built and delivered. Our former paper was dedicated to the communities of practice, and in particular, to the use of an intelligent agent to control and lead the interaction among users; now our research concerns environments for collaborative learning, where the role of the animator is fundamental, but we take into account a blended animator, supported by specific tools to manage the community. Such tools are necessarily connected to the comprehension and elaboration of the natural language which highlights the appropriate knowledge elements to be used. In this paper we intend to analyse the available techniques in order to identify those that are more suitable for designing the supporting tools required by the blended animator. Particular attention will be given to the domain ontology.