Designing for change: mash-up personal learning environments

Institutions for formal education and most work places are equipped today with at least some kind of tools that bring together people and content artefacts in learning activities to support them in constructing and processing information and knowledge. For almost half a century, science and practice have been discussing models on how to bring personalisation through digital means to these environments. Learning environments and their construction as well as maintenance makes up the most crucial part of the learning process and the desired learning outcomes and theories should take this into account. Instruction itself as the predominant paradigm has to step down. The learning environment is an (if not 'the�) important outcome of a learning process, not just a stage to perform a 'learning play'. For these good reasons, we therefore consider instructional design theories to be flawed. In this article we first clarify key concepts and assumptions for personalised learning environments. Afterwards, we summarise our critique on the contemporary models for personalised adaptive learning. Subsequently, we propose our alternative, i.e. the concept of a mash-up personal learning environment that provides adaptation mechanisms for learning environment construction and maintenance. The web application mash-up solution allows learners to reuse existing (web-based) tools plus services. Our alternative, LISL is a design language model for creating, managing, maintaining, and learning about learning environment design; it is complemented by a proof of concept, the MUPPLE platform. We demonstrate this approach with a prototypical implementation and a – we think – comprehensible example. Finally, we round up the article with a discussion on possible extensions of this new model and open problems

Collaborative trails in e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on collaboration within groups of learners, and hence collaborative trails. We begin by reviewing the theoretical background to collaborative learning and looking at the kinds of support that computers can give to groups of learners working collaboratively, and then look more deeply at some of the issues in designing environments to support collaborative learning trails and at tools and techniques, including collaborative filtering, that can be used for analysing collaborative trails. We then review the state-of-the-art in supporting collaborative learning in three different areas – experimental academic systems, systems using mobile technology (which are also generally academic), and commercially available systems. The final part of the deliverable presents three scenarios that show where technology that supports groups working collaboratively and producing collaborative trails may be heading in the near future

A workbench to support development and maintenance of world-wide web

The World-Wide Web is one of the most dominant features of the Internet. In its short life it has become an important part of information technology, having a role to play in all sectors. Unfortunately, it has many problems too. Due to its fast evolution, World-Wide Web document development is undisciplined and has resulted in the appearance of much poor quality work. This is also widely due to the inexperience of authors, the lack of conventions, standards or guidelines and useful tools for development and maintenance of Web documents. One solution to the major problems of poor quality of World-Wide Web documents is the improved maintenance of such documents. Maintenance is an important area that, similar to software engineering, receives little attention compared with development. In order to address the problems of World-Wide Web document maintenance, research into the area was carried out through a literature survey and case studies of the organisations that manage World-Wide Web sites. The results of this research led to producing a workbench which provides support to both developers and maintainers of Web documents. This workbench consists of methods, guidelines and tools for World-Wide Web development and maintenance

Semi-automated creation of converged iTV services: From macromedia director simulations to services ready for broadcast

While sound and video may capture viewers’ attention, interaction can captivate them. This has not been available prior to the advent of Digital Television. In fact, what lies at the heart of the Digital Television revolution is this new type of interactive content, offered in the form of interactive Television (iTV) services. On top of that, the new world of converged networks has created a demand for a new type of converged services on a range of mobile terminals (Tablet PCs, PDAs and mobile phones). This paper aims at presenting a new approach to service creation that allows for the semi-automatic translation of simulations and rapid prototypes created in the accessible desktop multimedia authoring package Macromedia Director into services ready for broadcast. This is achieved by a series of tools that de-skill and speed-up the process of creating digital TV user interfaces (UI) and applications for mobile terminals. The benefits of rapid prototyping are essential for the production of these new types of services, and are therefore discussed in the first section of this paper. In the following sections, an overview of the operation of content, service, creation and management sub-systems is presented, which illustrates why these tools compose an important and integral part of a system responsible of creating, delivering and managing converged broadcast and telecommunications services. The next section examines a number of metadata languages candidates for describing the iTV services user interface and the schema language adopted in this project. A detailed description of the operation of the two tools is provided to offer an insight of how they can be used to de-skill and speed-up the process of creating digital TV user interfaces and applications for mobile terminals. Finally, representative broadcast oriented and telecommunication oriented converged service components are also introduced, demonstrating how these tools have been used to generate different types of services

SmartBook – the future E-book and educatonal hypermedia

Доклад по покана, поместен в сборника на Националната конференция "Образованието в информационното общество", Пловдив, май, 2009This paper presents a vision for the future of the e-books as part of the growing collective intelligence. The vision entails further development of technologies that will facilitate the creation and use of a new generation of ‘smart’ books: e-books that are evolving, highly interactive, customisable, adaptable, intelligent, and furnished with a rich set of collaborative authoring and reading support services. The proposed set of tools will be integrated into an intelligent framework for collaborative book authoring and experiencing called SmartBook. The paper also discusses the opportunities to use SmartBook as a educational hypermedia.Асоциация "Развитие на информационното общество", Институт по математика и информатика при БАН, Пловдивски университе

SmatBook – a vision for the future e-book

This paper presents a vision for the future of the e-books as part of the growing collective intelligence. The vision entails further development of technologies that will facilitate the creation and use of a new generation of ‘smart’ books: e-books that are evolving, highly interactive, customisable, adaptable, intelligent, and furnished with a rich set of collaborative authoring and reading support services. The proposed set of tools will be integrated into an intelligent framework for collaborative book authoring and experiencing called SmartBook. The paper also discusses the opportunities to use SmartBook as a vehicle for building professional virtual communities of practice in the framework of a University 2.0 organization dedicated to industry-university cooperation

SmartBook: The New Generation e-Book Meets University 2.0

This paper presents a vision for the future of the e-books as part of the growing collective intelligence. The vision entails further development of technologies that will facilitate the creation and use of a new generation of ‘smart’ books: e-books that are evolving, highly interactive, customisable, adaptable, intelligent, and furnished with a rich set of collaborative authoring and reading support services. The proposed set of tools will be integrated into an intelligent framework for collaborative book authoring and experiencing called SmartBook. The paper also discusses the opportunities to use SmartBook as a vehicle for building professional virtual communities of practice in the framework of a University 2.0 organization dedicated to industry-university cooperation