ICOPER Project - Deliverable 4.3 ISURE: Recommendations for extending effective reuse, embodied in the ICOPER CD&R

The purpose of this document is to capture the ideas and recommendations, within and beyond the ICOPER community, concerning the reuse of learning content, including appropriate methodologies as well as established strategies for remixing and repurposing reusable resources. The overall remit of this work focuses on describing the key issues that are related to extending effective reuse embodied in such materials. The objective of this investigation, is to support the reuse of learning content whilst considering how it could be originally created and then adapted with that ‘reuse’ in mind. In these circumstances a survey on effective reuse best practices can often provide an insight into the main challenges and benefits involved in the process of creating, remixing and repurposing what we are now designating as Reusable Learning Content (RLC). Several key issues are analysed in this report: Recommendations for extending effective reuse, building upon those described in the previous related deliverables 4.1 Content Development Methodologies and 4.2 Quality Control and Web 2.0 technologies. The findings of this current survey, however, provide further recommendations and strategies for using and developing this reusable learning content. In the spirit of ‘reuse’, this work also aims to serve as a foundation for the many different stakeholders and users within, and beyond, the ICOPER community who are interested in reusing learning resources. This report analyses a variety of information. Evidence has been gathered from a qualitative survey that has focused on the technical and pedagogical recommendations suggested by a Special Interest Group (SIG) on the most innovative practices with respect to new media content authors (for content authoring or modification) and course designers (for unit creation). This extended community includes a wider collection of OER specialists. This collected evidence, in the form of video and audio interviews, has also been represented as multimedia assets potentially helpful for learning and useful as learning content in the New Media Space (See section 4 for further details). Section 2 of this report introduces the concept of reusable learning content and reusability. Section 3 discusses an application created by the ICOPER community to enhance the opportunities for developing reusable content. Section 4 of this report provides an overview of the methodology used for the qualitative survey. Section 5 presents a summary of thematic findings. Section 6 highlights a list of recommendations for effective reuse of educational content, which were derived from thematic analysis described in Appendix A. Finally, section 7 summarises the key outcomes of this work

Reviews

Brian Clegg, Mining The Internet — Information Gathering and Research on the Net, Kogan Page: London, 1999. ISBN: 0–7494–3025–7. Paperback, 147 pages, £9.99

On the evolution of hyperlinking

Across time, the hyperlink object has supported different applications and studies. This is one perspective on the evolution of the hyperlinking concept, its context and related behaviors. Through a spectrum of hyperlinking applications and practices, the article contrasts the status quo with its related, broader, conceptual roots; it also bridges to some theorized and prototyped hyperlink variations, namely "stigmergic hyperlinks", to make the case that the ubiquitousness of some objects and certain usage patterns can obfuscate opportunities to (re)think them. In trying to contribute an answer to "what has the common hyperlink (such an apparently simple object) done to society, and what has society done to it?", the article identifies situations that have become so embedded in the daily routine, that it is now hard to think of hyperlinking alternatives.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An MPEG-7 scheme for semantic content modelling and filtering of digital video

Abstract Part 5 of the MPEG-7 standard specifies Multimedia Description Schemes (MDS); that is, the format multimedia content models should conform to in order to ensure interoperability across multiple platforms and applications. However, the standard does not specify how the content or the associated model may be filtered. This paper proposes an MPEG-7 scheme which can be deployed for digital video content modelling and filtering. The proposed scheme, COSMOS-7, produces rich and multi-faceted semantic content models and supports a content-based filtering approach that only analyses content relating directly to the preferred content requirements of the user. We present details of the scheme, front-end systems used for content modelling and filtering and experiences with a number of users

Multimedia authoring, development environments, and digital video editing

Multimedia systems integrate text, audio, video, graphics, and other media and allow them to be utilized in a combined and interactive manner. Using this exciting and rapidly developing technology, multimedia applications can provide extensive benefits in a variety of arenas, including research, education, medicine, and commerce. While there are many commercial multimedia development packages, the easy and fast creation of a useful, full-featured multimedia document is not yet a straightforward task. This paper addresses issues in the development of multimedia documents, ranging from user-interface tools that manipulate multimedia documents to multimedia communication technologies such as compression, digital video editing and information retrieval. It outlines the basic steps in the multimedia authoring process and some of the requirements that need to be met by multimedia development environments. It also presents the role of video, an essential component of multimedia systems and the role of programming in digital video editing. A model is described for remote access of distributed video. The paper concludes with a discussion of future research directions and new uses of multimedia documents

Semi-automated mobile television interactive application generation based on XHTML and Java ME

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 11/02/2011.Mobile Digital TV (MDTV), the hybrid of Digital Television (DTV) and mobile devices (such as mobile phones), has introduced a new way for people to watch DTV and has brought new opportunities for development in the DTV industry. Nowadays, the development of the next generation MDTV service has progressed in terms of both hardware layers and software, with interactive services/applications becoming one of the future MDTV service trends. However, current MDTV interactive services still lack in terms of attracting the consumers and the service creation and implementation process relies too much on commercial solutions, resulting in most parts of the process being proprietary. In addition, this has increased the technical demands for developers as well as has increased substantially the cost of producing and maintaining MDTV services. In light of the aforementioned situation, the Thesis has contributed to this field, by proposing an innovative MDTV service creation and consumption system based on XHTML and Java ME. On the head-end it introduces a semi-automatic creation mechanism to facilitate a less technical and more efficient interactive service creation process. This enables designers and creative individuals to be actively involved in the MDTV service creation process and to develop interactive-rich MDTV service. On the client-end it employs an open-source software environment as the interactive service MDTV consumption platform, rendering the MDTV service implementation process as less proprietary as possible. Furthermore, the Thesis offers a discussion on the different MDTV interactive application models currently used and based on the proposed software, a novel MDTV service presentation method is further introduced and adopted instead of the Rich Media and ECMAScript based methods. Finally, a series of qualitative testing procedures have been implemented with regards to conducting an essential evaluation on the operability of the proposed software system

An architecture for integrating learning object repository resources into web videoconference services

Reusing Learning Objects saves time and reduce development costs. Hence, achieving their interoperability in multiple contexts is essential when creating a Learning Object Repository. On the other hand, novel web videoconference services are available due to technological advancements. Several benefits can be gained by integrating Learning Objects into these services. For instance, they can allow sharing, co-viewing and synchronized co-browsing of these resources at the same time that provide real time communication. However, several efforts need to be undertaken to achieve the interoperability with these systems. In this paper, we propose a model to integrate the resources of the Learning Object Repositories into web videoconference services. The experience of applying this model in a real e-Learning scenario achieving interoperability with two different web videoconference services is also described