Towards Mobile Learning Support for the Transition from School to the Workplace

Glahn, C., Specht, M., & Wishart J. (2010). Towards Mobile Learning Support for the Transition from School to the Workplace. Paper presented at the MATEL Workshop in conjunction with the 5th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2010): Sustaining TEL: From Innovation to Learning and Practice. September, 28 - October, 1, 2010, Barcelona, Spain: Stellar-project.This paper analyses the requirements for supporting young people in placements, who are using a mobile widget framework. Placements are a way to smoothen the transition from an educational system into working life, that allow young people to connect the competences they have developed in formal education with professional practices. The wide adoption of mobile devices among young people suggests seeking for a mobile learning solution for supporting learning processes during placements. Widget based PLEs introduced attractive concepts that were adapted to work with mobile devices. This paper discusses three perspectives on aspects that influence the application of mobile technologies for workplace based learning. Each of these aspects adds a requirement for the development of a mobile learning solution. Given to the special nature of learning during placements, the paper identifies four challenges for future research.The research presented in this paper has been partly sponsored by the GRAPPLE project (www.grapple-project.org) and the STELLAR Network of Excellence Towards Mobile Learning Support for the Transition from School to the Workplace 7 (www.stellarnet.eu) funded by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme

QuiiQ automation foundation

Tese de mestrado. Engenharia Informática. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

A dynamic dashboarding application for fleet monitoring using semantic web of things technologies

In industry, dashboards are often used to monitor fleets of assets, such as trains, machines or buildings. In such industrial fleets, the vast amount of sensors evolves continuously, new sensor data exchange protocols and data formats are introduced, new visualization types may need to be introduced and existing dashboard visualizations may need to be updated in terms of displayed sensors. These requirements motivate the development of dynamic dashboarding applications. These, as opposed to fixed-structure dashboard applications, allow users to create visualizations at will and do not have hard-coded sensor bindings. The state-of-the-art in dynamic dashboarding does not cope well with the frequent additions and removals of sensors that must be monitored—these changes must still be configured in the implementation or at runtime by a user. Also, the user is presented with an overload of sensors, aggregations and visualizations to select from, which may sometimes even lead to the creation of dashboard widgets that do not make sense. In this paper, we present a dynamic dashboard that overcomes these problems. Sensors, visualizations and aggregations can be discovered automatically, since they are provided as RESTful Web Things on a Web Thing Model compliant gateway. The gateway also provides semantic annotations of the Web Things, describing what their abilities are. A semantic reasoner can derive visualization suggestions, given the Thing annotations, logic rules and a custom dashboard ontology. The resulting dashboarding application automatically presents the available sensors, visualizations and aggregations that can be used, without requiring sensor configuration, and assists the user in building dashboards that make sense. This way, the user can concentrate on interpreting the sensor data and detecting and solving operational problems early

Exploration of programming by demonstration approaches for smart environments

The number of smart electronic devices like smartphones, tablet computers and embedded sensors/actuators in our domestic and work environment is constantly growing. Some of them work as a stand along devices while others already collaborate with each other. It is apparent that once a common layer for device intercommunication between major consumer device manufactures has been agreed upon, a new class of networked smart applications will rise. These applications will dynamically utilise required sensors and actuators of a smart environment to optimally achieve tasks for us human users. Inhabitants of such environments are already interacting with dozens of computers per day. A lot of research has addressed many issues in hardware and software for the future smart environments But few have focused on the users. An important research topic lies in finding simple, intuitive yet powerful enough approaches to allow end-users to create and modify the behaviour of smart environments in which they live and work according to their needs. I believe that for the ubiquitous computing environments to reach its full potential, enabling end-user programming is one of the important criteria. This thesis describes the exploration of various approaches for "Do It Yourself" philosophy in smart environment applications by providing inhabitants with the appropriate tools which empower them to build their environments in accordance to their needs and with enough room for personal creativity. To this end, I choose speech as the main input by the end users along with demonstration of certain parts of over all approach in building applications for smart environments. The resulting application is built on top of the meSchup platform developed during meSchup FP7 EU project at the VIS institute in Stuttgart which provides a middleware for seamlessly interconnecting heterogeneous devices. The resulting web application is called "Speechweaver" which combines speech, programming by demonstration and automatic code generation into usable and intuitive approach for creating and modifying the rule based behaviour of smart environments in place

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

A component-based approach to human–machine interface systems that support agile manufacturing

The development of next generation manufacturing systems is currently an active area of research worldwide. Globalisation is placing new demands on the manufacturing industry with products having shorter lifecycles and being required in more variants. Manufacturing systems must therefore be agile to support frequent manufacturing system reconfiguration involving globally distributed engineering partners. The research described in this thesis addresses one aspect within this research area, the Human Machine Interface (HMI) system that support the personnel involved in the monitoring, diagnostics and reconfiguration of automated manufacturing production machinery. Current HMI systems are monolithic in their design, generally offer poor connectivity to other manufacturing systems and require highly skilled personnel to develop and maintain them. The new approach established in the research and presented in this thesis provides a specification capture technique (using a novel storyboarding modelling notation) that enables the end users HMI functionality to be specified and rapidly developed into fully functional End User HMI's via automated generation tools. A novel feature in this HMI system architecture that all machine information is stored in a common unified machine data model which ensures consistent accurate machine data is available to all machine lifecycle engineering tools including the HMI. The system's run-time architecture enables remote monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to be available to geographically distributed engineering partners using standard internet technologies. The implementation of this novel HMI approach has been prototyped and evaluated using the industrial collaborators full scale demonstrator machines within cylinder head machining and engine assembly applications

A Dialogue and Social Software Perspective on Deep Learning Design

This article considers projects in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) that have focussed on designing digital tools that stimulate and support dialogue rich learning. These have emphasised collaborative thinking and meaning making in a rich and varied range of educational contexts. Technically, they have exploited AI, CSCL and HCI techniques, and ongoing projects are incorporating social software and semantic technologies. To address the particular challenge of extending this line of work within the Web 2.0 landscape and beyond, where the pace of technological change is profound, we will introduce the original notion of Deep Learning Design (DLD). This is a paradigm that we hold is important to both better understanding and realising learning in the digital age that counters the sort of technological determinism that is unhealthy for the field of learning. So this article will: consider the current challenges of designing dialogue rich learning; explain why the challenges raised necessitate the introduction of an original conceptualisation of design; and, exemplify and map this new notion of design to two large-scale TEL initiatives. These are projects in Digital Dialogue Games (DDGs) and MATURE: Continuous Social Learning in Knowledge Networks, where the latter includes a particular strand of research that brings both projects together. Finally some implications are considered and some conclusions are drawn