ASK-eEDCOM: enhancing educational portals through capturing collective knowledge of Web-based learning communities

In this paper, we discuss how the learning object paradigm can be exploited to support Web-based learning communities and on-line communities of practice, as a mean to enhance the services already provided by educational portals (EP). It is claimed that this can be achieved by motivating the active interaction of community members with the EPs´ resources and at the same time allowing the dynamic update the available resources taking into account the community´s collective knowledge on the real use of the resources. To this end, we present the ASK-eEDCOM, a Web-based environment for the empowerment of on-line educational communities.