Report of the discussion on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for OER

Appendix: FOSS tools for OER development, management and dissemination

Setting the stage – embodied and spatial dimensions in emerging programming practices.

In the design of interactive systems, developers sometimes need to engage in various ways of physical performance in order to communicate ideas and to test out properties of the system to be realised. External resources such as sketches, as well as bodily action, often play important parts in such processes, and several methods and tools that explicitly address such aspects of interaction design have recently been developed. This combined with the growing range of pervasive, ubiquitous, and tangible technologies add up to a complex web of physicality within the practice of designing interactive systems. We illustrate this dimension of systems development through three cases which in different ways address the design of systems where embodied performance is important. The first case shows how building a physical sport simulator emphasises a shift in activity between programming and debugging. The second case shows a build-once run-once scenario, where the fine-tuning and control of the run-time activity gets turned into an act of in situ performance by the programmers. The third example illustrates the explorative and experiential nature of programming and debugging systems for specialised and autonomous interaction devices. This multitude in approaches in existing programming settings reveals an expanded perspective of what practices of interaction design consist of, emphasising the interlinking between design, programming, and performance with the system that is being developed

Project of Developing the Multimedia Software Supporting Teaching and Learning English Vocabulary

Since the Academic Year 2005-2006 we have worked on a project of developing the interactive multimedia software for learning English vocabulary. The software was tested on junior learners in elementary school within the English language course lesson. The results were measured by comparing the test results from the computer-aided lesson with the ones from a traditional one and they showed a great level of disparity both regarding the learners’ knowledge and their motivation. Vocabulary of a language does not only consist of separate contextually independent words, but also of contextually bound lexical items, such as collocations. In 2006-2007 we have expanded the software by adding the feature for multimedia collocations. By terms of imitating reality, we have been designing multimedia animated presentations of English collocations comprising picture, text and sound. Our past, present and future phases of the project have purpose of examining the use of animation in educational settings

Conceptual guidelines for educators in the development of their first educational websites

The Internet is a revolutionary technology that is bound to change every aspect of society and the educational system in particular. Following the rapid spread of the Internet, the new developments in the World Wide Web (WWW) technology have created a high level of interest and enthusiasm among many educators

SlideSpace: Heuristic design of a hybrid presentation medium

The Slide and Canvas metaphors are two ways of helping people create visual aids for oral presentations. Although such physical metaphors help both authors and audiences make sense of material, they also constrain authoring in ways that can negatively impact presentation delivery. In this article, we derive heuristics for the design of presentation media that are independent of any underlying physical metaphors. We use these heuristics to craft a new kind of presentation medium called SlideSpace-one that combines hierarchical outlines, content collections, and design rules to automate the real-time, outline-driven synthesis of hybrid Slide-Canvas visuals. Through a qualitative study of SlideSpace use, we validate our heuristics and demonstrate that such a hybrid presentation medium can combine the advantages of existing systems while mitigating their drawbacks. Overall, we show how a heuristic design approach helped us challenge entrenched physical metaphors to create a fundamentally digital presentation medium with the potential to transform the activities of authoring, delivering, and viewing presentations

Learning through games using multimedia courseware for primary school students

This project presents a preliminary work on examining the importance of incorporating the elements of games, in particular complex games, in the design of an interactive multimedia-learningenvironment to enhance and create an engaging learning experience. A review suggests that computer games have the potential to enhance the learning environment; in part due to its interactive and engagement attributes. The result of an informal survey reveals that "Fraction", one of the mathematic topics taught at schools was identified as one of the most difficult topics to teach. Thus development of the prototype software was based on this topic. An initial examination of two current multimedia courseware CDs used for Mathematic Year 3 under this topic has revealed that most of the contents in the CDs have integrated all the multimedia elements such as text, image, audio and graphics but it lacks interactive games and activities that could stimulate enjoyment and motivation for learning. Activities found consist mainly of simpleor trivial gamesthat do not lend to sustainedengagement. The architecture and the preliminary designof the prototype software that integrate complexgames are described. To form the basis of the courseware development, a pre-survey questionnaire was conducted to find out students interest on computer games. The results of the survey showed that 100% or 60 out of 60 respondent express interest and engage on games. The result of the analysis provides motivations for the development of the learning through games courseware. The development of the courseware is based on the courseware development framework which will analyze the requirement and courseware specification, the initial storyboard, designation of multimedia, the integration of the storyboard and the design itself and also the testing on the courseware. The result of testing on the courseware shows that by integrating complex games elements and multimedia elements on courseware may help students understand and motivate them to learn. In conclusion, a courseware with additional games elements could be an interactive and more interesting usable courseware

Pedagogical Analysis of Educational Digital Storytelling Environments of the Last Five Years

AbstractDigital storytelling, the modern and challenging successor of storytelling, emerged over the last few years as a powerful teaching and learning tool, engaging both teachers and their students. For the evaluation of Educational Digital Storytelling Environments (EDSE), pedagogical aspects of designing or using EDSE are much less frequently studied than technical ones. Thus, taking into account modern, social and constructivist views of learning, a new pedagogical evaluation model was created (Psomos & Kordaki, 2011), using sixteen pedagogical criteria-dimensions. In this paper, the aforementioned pedagogical evaluation model is used to pedagogically analyze EDSE of the last five years

Model-Driven Development of Interactive Multimedia Applications

The development of highly interactive multimedia applications is still a challenging and complex task. In addition to the application logic, multimedia applications typically provide a sophisticated user interface with integrated media objects. As a consequence, the development process involves different experts for software design, user interface design, and media design. There is still a lack of concepts for a systematic development which integrates these aspects. This thesis provides a model-driven development approach addressing this problem. Therefore it introduces the Multimedia Modeling Language (MML), a visual modeling language supporting a design phase in multimedia application development. The language is oriented on well-established software engineering concepts, like UML 2, and integrates concepts from the areas of multimedia development and model-based user interface development. MML allows the generation of code skeletons from the models. Thereby, the core idea is to generate code skeletons which can be directly processed in multimedia authoring tools. In this way, the strengths of both are combined: Authoring tools are used to perform the creative development tasks while models are used to design the overall application structure and to enable a well-coordinated development process. This is demonstrated using the professional authoring tool Adobe Flash. MML is supported by modeling and code generation tools which have been used to validate the approach over several years in various student projects and teaching courses. Additional prototypes have been developed to demonstrate, e.g., the ability to generate code for different target platforms. Finally, it is discussed how models can contribute in general to a better integration of well-structured software development and creative visual design