Reuse of collaborative knowledge in discussion forums

This paper presents an ongoing research on reusing collaborative knowledge in discussion forums as new learning resources. There is a large amount messages posted in a knowledge building process, including problems, hypothesis and scientific material. By adding semantic information into the collaborative knowledge, the reusing mechanism can detect messages and teaching material from the previous knowledge building process which are relevant to current discussion topics and present them to the students. In doing so, a new knowledge building process can be built upon previous accumulated knowledge instead of starting from scratch.