Socio-Cultural Adaptation Approach to Enhance Intercultural Collaboration and Learning

Although the growing interest in the development of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments, major existing systems ignore the variety of learners and their socio-cultural differences, especially in the case of distant learning. Usually, only one and common system is provided to all users whatever their cultural backgrounds are. More than ever, it becomes challenging issue to provide socio-cultural aware collaborative environments able to support intercultural groups in their learning or working activities. Since each learner has her(his) specific socio-cultural values and behaviors, the groupware should adapt to each member's resulting preferences. The main goal of this paper is to present a novel socio-cultural adaptation approach based on and guided by ontologies to adapt CSCL environments to the socio-cultural profiles of its effective users.