The Roles of Electronic Books in the Transformation of Learning and Instruction

In order to better meet the needs of classes with Ebooks being involved in, Ebooks must be designed with a lot of special functions, which is called eTextbooks by the authors. The functions of eTextbooks, the class preparations and responsive teaching by incorporating formative assessment would help to transforming learning and instruction. Note-taking, bookmarking, annotating, and highlighting, working on assignments are the key functions of eTextbooks to follow students' study habits and to meet the requirement of instruction. The relevant management is the key issues to keep eTextbook running smoothly in class. Such as assignment distribution, note management, assignment management, searching, dictionary, synchronizing functions, copy contents or notes, print contents or notes, Internet connection, communicating with parents via Internet, eTextbook control by teachers, and contents transmission between teachers and students. If the teachers had more experiences with instructional design, they would be able to conduct better class preparation. Through integrating materials, devices and software compositely, learning outcomes would optimally meet the instructional objectives. Responsive teaching through Ebooks/eTextbooks, which meet the individual needs and strengths of diverse learners, takes the stance that curriculum developers in general and Ebook designers in particular must play a larger role in rendering the burden of customization manageable for teachers

S-RDF: A New RDF Serialization Format for Better Storage Without Losing Human Readability

International audienceNowadays, RDF data becomes more and more popular on the Web due to the advances of the Semantic Web and the Linked Open Data initiatives. Several works are focused on transforming relational databases to RDF by storing related data in N-Triple serialization format. However, these approaches do not take into account the existing normalization of their databases since N-Triple format allows data redundancy and does not control any normalization by itself. Moreover, the mostly used and recommended serialization formats, such as RDF/XML, Turtle, and HDT, have either high human-readability but waste storage capacity, or focus further on storage capacities while providing low human-readability. To overcome these limitations, we propose here a new serialization format, called S-RDF. By considering the structure (graph) and values of the RDF data separately, S-RDF reduces the duplicity of values by using unique identifiers. Results show an important improvement over the existing serialization formats in terms of storage (up to 71,66% w.r.t. N-Triples) and human readability

Heavy meta: model-driven domain-specific generation of generative domain-specific modeling tools

Software is so prevalent in all areas of life that one could expect we have come up with more simple and intuitive ways for its creation by now. However, software development is still too complicated to easily and efficiently cope with individual demands, customizations, and changes. Model-based approaches promise improvements through a more comprehensible layer of abstraction, but they are rarely fully embraced in practice. They are perceived as being overly complex, imposing additional work, and lacking the flexibility required in the real world. This thesis presents a novel approach to model-driven software engineering that focuses on simplicity through highly specialized tools. Domain experts are provided with development tools tailored to their individual needs, where they can easily specify the intent of the software using their known terms and concepts. This domain specificity (D) is a powerful mechanism to boil down the effort of defining a system to relevant aspects only. Many concepts are set upfront, which imposes a huge potential for automated generation. However, the full potential of domain-specific models can only unfold, if they are used as primary artifacts of development. The presented approach thus combines domain specificity with full generation (F) to achieve an overall pushbutton generation that does not require any round-trip engineering. Furthermore, service orientation (S) introduces a ‘just use’ philosophy of including arbitrarily complex functionality without needing to know their implementation, which also restores flexibility potentially sacrificed by the domain focus. The unique combination of these three DFS properties facilitates a focused, efficient, and flexible simplicity-driven way of software development. Key to the approach is a holistic solution that in particular also covers the simplicity-driven development of the required highly specialized DFS tools, as nothing would be gained if the costs of developing such tools outweighed the resulting benefits. This simplicity is achieved by applying the very same DFS concepts to the domain of tool development itself: DFS modeling tools are fully generated from models and services specialized to the (meta) domain of modeling tools. The presented Cinco meta tooling suite is a first implementation of such a meta DFS tool. It focuses on the generation of graphical modeling tools for graph structures comprising of various types of nodes and edges. Cinco has been very successfully applied to numerous industrial and academic projects, and thus also serves as a proof of concept for the DFS approach itself. The unique combination of the three DFS strategies and Cinco's meta-level approach towards their realization in practice lay the foundation for a new paradigm of software development that is strongly focused on simplicity

Code generation for event-B

Stepwise refinement and Design-by-Contract are two formal approaches for modelling systems. These approaches are widely used in the development of systems. Both approaches have (dis-)advantages: in stepwise refinement a model starts with an abstraction of the system and more details are added through refinements. Each refinement must be provably consistent with the previous one. Hence, reasoning about abstract models is possible. A high level of expertise is necessary in mathematics to have a good command of the underlying languages, techniques and tools, making this approach less popular. Design-by-Contract, on the other hand, works on the program rather than the program model, so developers in the software industry are more likely to have expertise in it. However, the benefit of reasoning over more abstract models is lost. A question arises: is it possible to combine both approaches in the development of systems, providing the user with the benefits of both? This thesis answers this question by translating the stepwise refinement method with EventB to Design-by-Contract with Java and JML, so users can take full advantage of both formal approaches without losing their benefits. This thesis presents a set of syntactic rules that translates Event-B to JML-annotated Java code. It also presents the implementation of the syntactic rules as the EventB2Java tool. We used EventB2Java to translate several Event-B models. The tool generated JML-annotated Java code for all the considered Event-B models that serve as final implementation. We also used EventB2Java for the development of two software applications. Additionally, we compared EventB2Java against two other tools that also generate Java code from Event-B models. EventB2Java enables users to start the software development process in Event-B, where users can model the system and prove its consistency, to then transition to JML-annotated Java code, where users can continue the development process

Evolution of technical debt remediation in Python: A case study on the Apache Software Ecosystem

In recent years, the evolution of software ecosystems and the detection of technical debt received significant attention by researchers from both industry and academia. While a few studies that analyze various aspects of technical debt evolution already exist, to the best of our knowledge, there is no large-scale study that focuses on the remediation of technical debt over time in Python projects -- i.e., one of the most popular programming languages at the moment. In this paper, we analyze the evolution of technical debt in 44 Python open-source software projects belonging to the Apache Software Foundation. We focus on the type and amount of technical debt that is paid back. The study required the mining of over 60K commits, detailed code analysis on 3.7K system versions, and the analysis of almost 43K fixed issues. The findings show that most of the repayment effort goes into testing, documentation, complexity and duplication removal. Moreover, more than half of the Python technical debt in the ecosystem is short-term being repaid in less than two months. In particular, the observations that a minority of rules account for the majority of issues fixed and spent effort, suggest that addressing those kinds of debt in the future is important for research and practice

Event-B in the Institutional Framework: Defining a Semantics, Modularisation Constructs and Interoperability for a Specification Language

Event-B is an industrial-strength specification language for verifying the properties of a given system’s specification. It is supported by its Eclipse-based IDE, Rodin, and uses the process of refinement to model systems at different levels of abstraction. Although a mature formalism, Event-B has a number of limitations. In this thesis, we demonstrate that Event-B lacks formally defined modularisation constructs. Additionally, interoperability between Event-B and other formalisms has been achieved in an ad hoc manner. Moreover, although a formal language, Event-B does not have a formal semantics. We address each of these limitations in this thesis using the theory of institutions. The theory of institutions provides a category-theoretic way of representing a formalism. Formalisms that have been represented as institutions gain access to an array of generic specification-building operators that can be used to modularise specifications in a formalismindependent manner. In the theory of institutions, there are constructs (known as institution (co)morphisms) that provide us with the facility to create interoperability between formalisms in a mathematically sound way. The main contribution of this thesis is the definition of an institution for Event-B, EVT, which allows us to address its identified limitations. To this end, we formally define a translational semantics from Event- B to EVT. We show how specification-building operators can provide a unified set of modularisation constructs for Event-B. In fact, the institutional framework that we have incorporated Event-B into is more accommodating to modularisation than the current state-of-the-art for Rodin. Furthermore, we present institution morphisms that facilitate interoperability between the respective institutions for Event-B and UML. This approach is more generic than the current approach to interoperability for Event-B and in fact, allows access to any formalism or logic that has already been defined as an institution. Finally, by defining EVT, we have outlined the steps required in order to include similar formalisms into the institutional framework. Hence, this thesis acts as a template for defining an institution for a specification language