Web Services for Supporting the Interactions of Learners in the Social Web

Web communication technologies such as instant messaging (chat) and discussion forums have been widely used by learners and people involved in different communities of practice (CoP) in the last few years. With the advent of the Social Web (that is part of Web 2.0), learners have been able to interact and share, exchange, comment and grade resources within their learning community in new ways, especially by using social networking websites and folksonomies. Thus, at this moment learners and members of CoP are connected with their peers and share resources of common interest on different social networking sites and they communicate using technologies such as chats and forums. The main problem is that there is a scarcity of tools designed to analyze and support learners in this new context. In this context, we propose a set of tools that are intended to support learners interacting using chat, forum and social networking platforms. Although the two services are decoupled, they can be used in a coherent scenario as the want proposed in this paper.