Reducing Procrastination while Improving Performance: A Wiki-powered Experiment with Students

© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.Students in higher education are traditionally requested to produce various pieces of written work during the courses they undertake. When students' work is submitted online as a whole, both the ethically questionable act of procrastinating and late submissions afect performance. The objective of this paper is to assess the performance of students from a control group, with that of students from an experimental group. The control group produced work as a unique deliverable to be submitted at the end of the course. On the other hand, the experimental group worked on each part for a week, and their work was managed by a wiki environment and monitored by a speciically developed software. Positive efects were noticed in the experimental group, as both students' time management skills and performance increased. Replications of this experiment can and should be performed, in order to compare results in coursework submission.Final Accepted Versio

WEB 2.0 MEDIATED COLLABORATIVE WRITING IN EFL CONTEXT: SURVEY OF EMPIRICAL RESEARCH

The existence of Web 2.0 technology which allows all users to meet, read, and write online provides room for innovations in teaching and learning method. Online collaborative writing tools, a type of the social networking web 2.0, has been increasingly integrated into English language teaching and learning. A number of researches have been conducted to examine the use of this online collaborative writing

GLUE!: an architecture for the integration of external tools in virtual learning environments

La integración de herramientas externas en VLE (Virtual Learning Environments - Entornos deAprendizaje Virtual) tiene como objetivo enriquecer las actividades de aprendizaje que los profesionales de la educación pueden diseñar y poner en marcha. Tradicionalmente, las herramientas externas han sido integradas mediante desarrollos ad hoc, siendo esta solución muy poco eficiente a medida que aumentaba el número de VLE y herramientas utilizados por estos profesionales. Además, aquellas aproximaciones genéricas que abordan la integración de múltiples herramientas en múltiples VLE no han conseguido obtener una amplia adopción, principalmente debido al alto esfuerzo de desarrollo necesario para integrar nuevas herramientas y VLE, y a las restricciones impuestas sobre los proveedores. Algunos trabajos recientes han intentado superar estas dos limitaciones proponiendo una integración ligera de herramientas. Sin embargo, estos trabajos no facilitan la instanciación y puesta en marcha de situaciones de aprendizaje colaborativo, lo que impide de forma significativa que se puedan emplear las propiedades colaborativas específicas que proporcionan los VLE para la gestión de usuarios y grupos. Esta tesis propone una arquitectura middleware de integración denominada GLUE! (Group Learning Uniform Environment - Entorno Uniforme de Aprendizaje en Grupo) que permite la integración ligera de múltiples herramientas externas existentes en múltiples VLE existentes, superando estas limitaciones. GLUE! fomenta esta integración imponiendo pocas restricciones sobre los proveedores de VLE y herramientas, así como demandando un esfuerzo asumible por parte de los desarrolladores. Además, GLUE! facilita la instanciación y puesta en marcha de situaciones de aprendizaje colaborativo desde los VLE, aprovechando las propiedades específicas de éstos para la gestión de usuarios y grupos. Por medio de GLUE!, los profesionales de la educación pueden utilizar herramientas externas como si fueran herramientas nativas de los VLE, y además sin tener que renunciar a los VLE a los que están acostumbrados. GLUE! ha sido evaluado con la ayuda de tres situaciones de aprendizaje colaborativo auténticas, las cuales fueron diseñadas para cubrir las necesidades pedagógicas de tres cursos de educación superior. Estas tres situaciones se utilizaron en cuatro experimentos diferentes con educadores y estudiantes reales. Los resultados de esta evaluación mostraron que GLUE! permite la instanciación y puesta en marcha de situaciones de aprendizaje colaborativo que requieran la integración de herramientas externas, reduce la carga asociada a la instanciación de actividades colaborativas complejas, y facilita a los estudiantes la realización de estas actividades en colaboración. Curiosamente, el esfuerzo de desarrollo necesario por el software de integración fue similar al de otras aproximaciones de integración genéricas que ofrecen un menor grado de funcionalidad.Departamento de Teoría de la Señal y Comunicaciones e Ingeniería Telemática2012-11-2

Engage D3.7 Update on the Engage repository and knowledge hub functionality (initial)

This initial report describes the planned functionality and features of the forthcoming Engage wiki and establishes the scope of the ATM concepts roadmap

Distributed Semantic Wiki: Kolflow Project -Task 5- State of the art (D5.1)

This paper presents the state of the art on Distributed Semantic Wikis. This work is part of the Kolflow project, more precisely it is part of the task 5, {\bf D(5.1)}

The genesis and emergence of Web 3.0: a study in the integration of artificial intelligence and the semantic web in knowledge creation

The web as we know it has evolved rapidly over the last decade. We have gone from a phase of rapid growth as seen with the dot.com boom where business was king to the current web 2.0 phase where social networking, Wiki’s, Blogs and other related tools flood the bandwidth of the world wide web. The empowerment of the web user with web 2.0 technologies has led to the exponential growth of data, information and knowledge on the web. With this rapid change, there is a need to logically categorise this information and knowledge so it can be fully utilised by all. It can be argued that the power of the knowledge held on the web is not fully exposed under its current structure and to improve this we need to explore the foundations of the web. This dissertation will explore the evolution of the web from its early days to the present day. It will examine the way web content is stored and discuss the new semantic technologies now available to represent this content. The research aims to demonstrate the possibilities of efficient knowledge extraction from a knowledge portal such as a Wiki or SharePoint portal using these semantic technologies. This generation of dynamic knowledge content within a limited domain will attempt to demonstrate the benefits of semantic web to the knowledge age

Promoting Research through Improved Online Collaboration Software

The purpose of this project was to create an online platform to facilitate and promote research collaboration among faculty and students at the Financial University in Moscow. We gathered data on this problem through holding interviews and focus groups. Using this data we decided which online research collaboration tool would work best for the university, and we developed a prototype SharePoint website that delivers the features we determined to be most essential for successful online research collaboration

A platform for collaborative management of semantic grid metadata

Grid environments, providing distributed infrastructures, computing resources and data storage, usually show a high degree of heterogeneity in their metadata. We propose a platform for collaborative management and maintenance of common metadata for grids. As the conceptual foundation of this platform, a meta model is presented which distinguishes structured descriptions and classification structures. On this basis, the system allows for the user-friendly creation and editing of grid relevant metadata and provides various search and navigation facilities for grid participants. We applied the platform to the German D-Grid initiative by establishing the D-Grid Ontology (DGO)

A framework for increasing business value from social media

Organisations are investing heavily in various social media applications. Several case studies show that such undertakings may be promising at first glance, but often amount to little. More attention has to be paid to the factors that influence the business value of a social media application. The paper proposes a framework which argues that the business value of a social media activity depends on having a correctly identified purpose of its implementation (scope and targeted benefits), on the technological solution and also on user involvement (user groups, users’ motivation and skills). The framework is evaluated with a longitudinal case study of a wiki in a software development company where an assessment of the business value of the wiki at two different points in time was made. The case study shows how the interplay of components led to failure at one time point and success at the other

Collaboratory Digital Libraries for Humanities in the Italian context

The study investigates the approach to collaboration in Humanities, within the Italian context, to test the possibility of collaborative digital library for scholars. The research hypothesis is that collaboration can foster innovation and scienti c development: therefore, within Humanities, digital libraries can be the collaborative laboratory for research. Thus, understanding perception of scholars towards collaboration, especially online, and comprehending if wiki systems could be the framework of collaboration were the objectives of the study. A qualitative approach has been adopted, using case study as research method: in-depth, semi-structured interviews to Digital Humanities scholars provide data integrated with interviews with two key informants (one of which is prof. Umberto Eco). The results of the study show that Humanities, within Italian context, do appreciate collaboration and the concept of a collaboratory digital library, though several issues need to be solved. In fact, Humanities are still tied with individual work and collaboration is not easy to pursue, for cultural, technical and political reasons. Great e ort needs to be done at many different levels to eliminate obstacles and facilitate online collaboration for scholars. The study provides a draft model for a collaborative digital library arisen from gathered data