Mapping web personal learning environments

A recent trend in web development is to build platforms which are carefully designed to host a plurality of software components (sometimes called widgets or plugins) which can be organized or combined (mashed-up) at user's convenience to create personalized environments. The same holds true for the web development of educational applications. The degree of personalization can depend on the role of users such as in traditional virtual learning environment, where the components are chosen by a teacher in the context of a course. Or, it can be more opened as in a so-called personalized learning environment (PLE). It now exists a wide array of available web platforms exhibiting different functionalities but all built on the same concept of aggregating components together to support different tasks and scenarios. There is now an overlap between the development of PLE and the more generic developments in web 2.0 applications such as social network sites. This article shows that 6 more or less independent dimensions allow to map the functionalities of these platforms: the screen dimensionmaps the visual integration, the data dimension maps the portability of data, the temporal dimension maps the coupling between participants, the social dimension maps the grouping of users, the activity dimension maps the structuring of end users–interactions with the environment, and the runtime dimensionmaps the flexibility in accessing the system from different end points. Finally these dimensions are used to compare 6 familiar Web platforms which could potentially be used in the construction of a PLE

First steps towards an integration of a Personal Learning Environment at university level

Ebner, M., Schön, S., Taraghi, B., Drachsler, H., & Tsang, P. (2011). First steps towards an integration of a Personal Learning Environment at university level. In R. Kwan et al. (Eds.), ICT 2011, CCIS 177 (pp. 22–36), Springer-Verlag Berlin: Heidelberg 2011.Personalization is seen as the key approach to handle the plethora of information in today’s knowledge-based society. It is expected that personalized teaching and learning will address the needs of the learners more efficiently. The education of the future will change by the influence of Web 2.0 contents and the steadily increasing amount of data. This means that the students of tomorrow will regularly have to deal with sharing and merging contents from different sources. Therefore, mashup technology will become a very important means to focus on individual learning needs and to personalize the access to particular information. The following article describes the challenges of Personal Learning Environments at higher education institutions. In the first section, the concept of Personal Learning Environments is presented, while the second section discusses the new challenges that arise for learning with the help of Personal Learning Environments. The third section of the article describes the technical background of Personal Learning Environments and the widget standard in general. In section four, a first prototype of a personal learning environment will be presented, which is integrated into the Technical University of Graz. A detailed description of the available widgets for the prototype, along with a first expert evaluation, will be provided. Finally, the conclusion of the article will sum up the main points of this paper and present the plans for future research together with the prospective developments.NeLLL AlterEg

Ontology-driven monitoring of patient's vital signs enabling personalized medical detection and alert

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Design and development of a REST-based Web service platform for applications integration

Web services have attracted attention as a possible solution to share knowledge and application logic among different heterogeneous agents. A classic approach to this subject is using SOAP, a W3C protocol aimed to exchange structured information. The Web Services Interoperability organization (WS-I), defines a set of extensions, commonly called WS-*, which further enhance this knowledge exchange defining mechanisms and functionalities such as security, addressability or service composition. This thesis explores a relatively new alternative approach to the SOAP/WS-I stack: REST-based Web services. The acronym REST stands for Representational state transfer; this basically means that each unique URL is a representation of some object. You can get the contents of that object using an HTTP GET; you then might use a POST, PUT or DELETE to modify the object (in practice most of the services use a POST for this). All of Yahoo’s Web services use REST, including Flickr; del.icio.us API uses it; pubsub [http://www.pubsub.com/], Bloglines [http://www.bloglines.com/], Technorati [http://technorati.com/] and both, eBay and Amazon, have Web services for both REST and SOAP. Google seems to be consistent in implementing their Web services to use SOAP, with the exception of Blogger, which uses XML-RPC. The companies and organization that are using REST APIs have not been around for very long, and their APIs came out in the last seven years mostly. So REST is a new way to create and integrate Web services, whose main advantages are: being lightweight (not a lot of extra xml mark-up), human readable results, easy to build services (no toolkits required). Although REST is still generating discussion about possible implementations, and different proposals have been put forward, it provides enough mechanisms to allow knowledge-representations sharing among heterogeneous intelligent services. In this thesis, a novel way to integrate intelligent Web-services is designed and developed, and the resulting system is deployed in the domain of recommendation. Through a mashup, how different services are integrated and how a simple recommendation system consumes data coming from them to provide relevant information to users is presented. Part of this work has been carried out within the context of the Laboranova European project [http://www.laboranova.com/], and has been deployed to integrate a set of applications to create a virtual space to support innovation processes