Knowledge access and interaction evolution in virtual learning communities

Interaction among members in Virtual Learning Communities influences the communities' evolution. Starting from this consideration, this chapter provides a discussion on the more widely used software systems that support interaction between virtual communities' members and virtual learning environment underlining the advantages and the disadvantages considering the several processes that characterize the VLCs. Moreover in education environments interactions are important in order to facilitate the learning process, and this chapter describes how the intelligent agent approaches can bean interesting alternative to a human facilitator. The analysis of intelligent agents describes how they allow both analysing interaction and improving the level of participation of members of a Virtual Learning Community.