AVANT-GARDE E-LEARNING

E-learning systems have dominated internet based education for past two decades. However, traditional systems fail to keep pace with advances in internet technologies and social interactions online. To support technological diversities, a web based application combining social network and visualization can be developed to enable a better learning environment. This would help tutors and students to improve their participation in online conversation. The overall learning experience can be facilitated with features like simultaneous recording of live conference which would enable a user to drag back on time scale, providing a language based editor on the application and tag based search

A Seven-Layer Model of Collaboration: Separation of Concerns for Designers of Collaboration Systems

Designers of collaboration systems address many interrelated issues in a social-technical context. The volume, complexity, and variety of issues can invoke cognitive overload, causing deficiencies in system designs. We use inductive logic to derive seven key areas of concern for designers of collaboration support systems. We use deductive logic to argue that these areas address collaboration at differing levels of abstraction, and so may be organized into a seven-layer model, affording separation of concerns at design time. The layers are: Goals, Products, Activities, Patterns, Techniques, Tools, and Scripts. Design changes at one layer may not necessitate changes to layers above it, but may require changes to layers below it. At each layer and between each layer there are different issues and outcomes that may be addressed with different concepts, techniques and tools. This separation of concerns may reduce cognitive load for designers and may help to improve completeness and consistency of their designs, yielding higher productivity for collaborating groups