Collaborative Authoring of Adaptive Educational Hypermedia by Enriching a Semantic Wiki’s Output

This research is concerned with harnessing collaborative approaches for the authoring of Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (AEH) systems. It involves the enhancement of Semantic Wikis with pedagogy aware features to this end. There are many challenges in understanding how communities of interest can efficiently collaborate for learning content authoring, in introducing pedagogy to the developed knowledge models and in specifying user models for efficient delivery of AEH systems. The contribution of this work will be the development of a model of collaborative authoring which includes domain specification, content elicitation, and definition of pedagogic approach. The proposed model will be implemented in a prototype AEH authoring system that will be tested and evaluated in a formal education context

The Digital Economy: Social Interaction Technologies – an Overview

Social interaction technologies (SIT) is a very broad field that encompasses a large list of topics: interactive and networked computing, mobile social services and the Social Web, social software and social media, marketing and advertising, various aspects and uses of blogs and podcasting, corporate value and web-based collaboration, e-government and online democracy, virtual volunteering, different aspects and uses of folksonomies, tagging and the social semantic cloud of tags, blog-based knowledge management systems, systems of online learning, with their ePortfolios, blogs and wikis in education and journalism, legal issues and social interaction technology, dataveillance and online fraud, neogeography, social software usability, social software in libraries and nonprofit organizations, and broadband visual communication technology for enhancing social interaction. The fact is that the daily activities of many businesses are being socialized, as is the case with Yammer (https://www.yammer.com/), the social enterprise social network. The leitmotivs of social software are: create, connect, contribute, and collaborate

A Framework for Personalized Content Recommendations to Support Informal Learning in Massively Diverse Information WIKIS

Personalization has proved to achieve better learning outcomes by adapting to specific learners’ needs, interests, and/or preferences. Traditionally, most personalized learning software systems focused on formal learning. However, learning personalization is not only desirable for formal learning, it is also required for informal learning, which is self-directed, does not follow a specified curriculum, and does not lead to formal qualifications. Wikis among other informal learning platforms are found to attract an increasing attention for informal learning, especially Wikipedia. The nature of wikis enables learners to freely navigate the learning environment and independently construct knowledge without being forced to follow a predefined learning path in accordance with the constructivist learning theory. Nevertheless, navigation on information wikis suffer from several limitations. To support informal learning on Wikipedia and similar environments, it is important to provide easy and fast access to relevant content. Recommendation systems (RSs) have long been used to effectively provide useful recommendations in different technology enhanced learning (TEL) contexts. However, the massive diversity of unstructured content as well as user base on such information oriented websites poses major challenges when designing recommendation models for similar environments. In addition to these challenges, evaluation of TEL recommender systems for informal learning is rather a challenging activity due to the inherent difficulty in measuring the impact of recommendations on informal learning with the absence of formal assessment and commonly used learning analytics. In this research, a personalized content recommendation framework (PCRF) for information wikis as well as an evaluation framework that can be used to evaluate the impact of personalized content recommendations on informal learning from wikis are proposed. The presented recommendation framework models learners’ interests by continuously extrapolating topical navigation graphs from learners’ free navigation and applying graph structural analysis algorithms to extract interesting topics for individual users. Then, it integrates learners’ interest models with fuzzy thesauri for personalized content recommendations. Our evaluation approach encompasses two main activities. First, the impact of personalized recommendations on informal learning is evaluated by assessing conceptual knowledge in users’ feedback. Second, web analytics data is analyzed to get an insight into users’ progress and focus throughout the test session. Our evaluation revealed that PCRF generates highly relevant recommendations that are adaptive to changes in user’s interest using the HARD model with rank-based mean average precision (MAP@k) scores ranging between 100% and 86.4%. In addition, evaluation of informal learning revealed that users who used Wikipedia with personalized support could achieve higher scores on conceptual knowledge assessment with average score of 14.9 compared to 10.0 for the students who used the encyclopedia without any recommendations. The analysis of web analytics data show that users who used Wikipedia with personalized recommendations visited larger number of relevant pages compared to the control group, 644 vs 226 respectively. In addition, they were also able to make use of a larger number of concepts and were able to make comparisons and state relations between concepts

Semantic Web Application and Framework Development in South African Higher Education Institutions

The evolution of the Semantic Web (SW) and its application marked a turning point in how students could benefit from a range of educational web tools and applications enabled by the SW, also referred to as Web 3.0 technology for academic purposes to meet their demands. This shift afforded students the opportunity to obtain meaningful information, collaboration and data filtering to suit their needs. It also offers freedom in how and where they choose to learn. SW tools and applications are progressively being used at several universities worldwide. However, educators’ ability to integrate the use of these tools and applications in teaching and learning appears to be a major problem in almost every development plan of education and educational reform efforts. Moreover, very few educators integrate web tools to their full potential in teaching. This paper probed the integration and use of SW tools and applications in higher education institutions (HEIs), and developed a framework for its adoption in academic processes. The objectives aimed to establish the credible features and benefits of SW tools and applications in HEIs, and how the integration supports students’ academic goals. It is anticipated to improve learning interaction and collaboration, and build a social presence and cohesion among students. The paper employed a systematic literature review, and information and communication technology theory of adoption. The developed framework ultimately suggests that SW tools and applications are beneficial and useful in positively impacting the pedagogical setting. Findings revealed that certain challenges with human factors (technophobia, beliefs), infrastructure, security concerns, ethical and legal issues were identified as a hindrance to be considered during integration. Despite the challenges, these tools and applications provide variety and a new wave of teaching and learning in South African HEIs, which is crucial for meeting the demand of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) era

Automating content generation for large-scale virtual learning environments using semantic web services

The integration of semantic web services with three-dimensional virtual worlds offers many potential avenues for the creation of dynamic, content-rich environments which can be used to entertain, educate, and inform. One such avenue is the fusion of the large volumes of data from Wiki-based sources with virtual representations of historic locations, using semantics to filter and present data to users in effective and personalisable ways. This paper explores the potential for such integration, addressing challenges ranging from accurately transposing virtual world locales to semantically-linked real world data, to integrating diverse ranges of semantic information sources in a usercentric and seamless fashion. A demonstrated proof-of-concept, using the Rome Reborn model, a detailed 3D representation of Ancient Rome within the Aurelian Walls, shows several advantages that can be gained through the use of existing Wiki and semantic web services to rapidly and automatically annotate content, as well as demonstrating the increasing need for Wiki content to be represented in a semantically-rich form. Such an approach has applications in a range of different contexts, including education, training, and cultural heritage

Tools and collaborative environments for bioinformatics research

Advanced research requires intensive interaction among a multitude of actors, often possessing different expertise and usually working at a distance from each other. The field of collaborative research aims to establish suitable models and technologies to properly support these interactions. In this article, we first present the reasons for an interest of Bioinformatics in this context by also suggesting some research domains that could benefit from collaborative research. We then review the principles and some of the most relevant applications of social networking, with a special attention to networks supporting scientific collaboration, by also highlighting some critical issues, such as identification of users and standardization of formats. We then introduce some systems for collaborative document creation, including wiki systems and tools for ontology development, and review some of the most interesting biological wikis. We also review the principles of Collaborative Development Environments for software and show some examples in Bioinformatics. Finally, we present the principles and some examples of Learning Management Systems. In conclusion, we try to devise some of the goals to be achieved in the short term for the exploitation of these technologies

Open learning: Advances in the eMadrid excellence network

Proceedings of: 2011 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON 2011): Learning Environments and Ecosystems in Engineering Education. Amman, Jordan, 4-6 April 2011.This Special Session is going to present some of the activities carried out by the Excellence Network on e-learning that is being funded in the Region of Madrid, called eMadrid. They are related to the application of open source principles in the educational context and in opening up the alternatives to the learner.The eMadrid Excellence Network [24] is being funded by the Madrid Regional Government (Comunidad de Madrid) with grant No. S2009/TIC-165. We wish to acknowledge stimulating discussions with our partners in the context of the networkPublicad

The Development of the Web and Its Impact on Libraries and Scholarly Communications

In 2011 when I was given the opportunity of taking a research leave to explore a topic of my choice, I immediately thought of the changes in which we find information today both in our work and home lives. This was a natural reaction for me because ever since I had initiated my studies of librarianship and information science, I had been most interested in technology and its impact on libraries. This started with Professor Susan Artandi at Rutgers when I first learned of systems analysis and library automation and reached greater fruition under Professor Leon Montgomery\u27s instruction on programming languages—learning PIL (Pitt Interpretitive Language) and FORTRAN—and their use in automating library procedures. It continued and gained greater steam as I pursued my career in administering first college and then research libraries. In my administrative career I always tried to either be a pioneer in services enhanced by technology or be close to the curve. This was true when I initiated online database searching in the early days of DIALOG and also became an early adopter of OCLC integrated online services. At Western Kentucky University where I spent the majority of my library leadership experience, it was a priority that we serve as early adopters of technology that showed the potential of enhancing our services in some considerable way. I was fortunate to have a strong and willing faculty and staff corps to lead. As a result, we launched several firsts, including the first web site in Kentucky and also the first digital institutional repository (TopSCHOLAR). Nationally we also distinguished ourselves as we developed one of the first homegrown information portals, and, as mobile technology took fruit, one of the first library mobile sites. With the availability of iPhone apps, we released one of the first university library apps and also an iPad version of our library newsletter. And when social networking gained prominence, we were early Facebook adopters and Twitter tweeters. Hence I lived and breathed the development of technology and social media throughout my administrative career. During my research leave and for awhile afterward, I looked at the background behind these significant contemporary developments in an effort to better understand them both for myself, and for you, the reader. I hope you will benefit from reading this report as much as I did in researching and writing it. Changes in the topics continue to occur regularly and in this hyper-connected instantaneous world in which we live, are reported on almost every minute. I kid you not. Just follow the twitter commentaries of leading technological and social media gurus and you will understand what I mean, if your initial reaction is, really? To maintain the currency of my understanding of developments in the fields encompassed by the report, I will be posting entries in my soon-to-be launched blog, Library and Tech Trends Watcher. I hope you will take a look