Abstract
The evolution of the actual labor market requires people to perform long life learning activities. As people leave the formal education system, the time and place to perform these activities varies according to their private life. Therefore, traditional learning scenarios where students are located in the same classroom as professors at the same time are not the most suitable for people that have left the formal education system. Distance learning programs enable students to carry out learning activities anytime anywhere. This article presents a chat tool that enables users to center the discussion on an artifact; where the artifact can be a report, a map, an image, a slide or any electronic document. During the discussion, users exchange messages and documents. Messages are contextualized using references to: previous messages, documents or document fragments of text and images. These graphical references linking chat messages to observations in the document improve the understanding of messages, reduce the message composition time, enable participants to focus on different threads of information at the same time and introduce 3 different types of context information into the message: temporal, conceptual and observational; which are not available on traditional chats.