Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning

Learning and teaching resource are available on the Web - both in terms of digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other learners, experts, tutors). They can be used to facilitate teaching and learning tasks. The remaining challenge is to develop, deploy and evaluate Social information retrieval (SIR) methods, techniques and systems that provide learners and teachers with guidance in potentially overwhelming variety of choices. The aim of the SIRTEL’09 workshop is to look onward beyond recent achievements to discuss specific topics, emerging research issues, new trends and endeavors in SIR for TEL. The workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners to present, and more importantly, to discuss the current status of research in SIR and TEL and its implications for science and teaching

Study on contexts in tracking usage and attention metadata in multilingual Technology Enhanced Learning

Vuorikari, R., & Berendt, B. (2009). Study on contexts in tracking usage and attention metadata in multilingual Technology Enhanced Learning. In S. Fischer, E. Maehle & R. Reischuk (Eds.), Im Focus das Leben, Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) (Vol. 154, pp. 181, 1654-1663). Informatik 2009, Lübeck, Germany: Gesellschaft für Informatik.In order to exploit usage and attention metadata, one needs to define what properties of usage to use and why, second, how to gather data on that property, and third, what to do with that information. In this paper, we propose to consider usage and attention metadata as an example of the wider notion of context and give an overview of dimensions of context that are relevant in technology enhanced learning (TEL). We consider the intersection of the areas of digital learning resource repositories, digital libraries, and other Web environments including social tagging systems. Specifically, we argue that context comprises the usage situation and environment as well as persistent and transient properties of the user. Therefore, we distinguish between the macro-context and the micro-context of TEL. We further subdivide the latter into user models, material/environment models, interaction models, and background knowledge, showing that usage and attention metadata are of different types and play different roles for learning about context. We then concentrate on teachers using learning-resource repositories as an important use-case example of TEL and focus on language and country as context variables. We describe different ways in which these variables can be measured, i.e., ways of operationalising the construct and data gathering to provide values for the variable. Finally, we outline how TEL can use such context information to improve the use and reuse of repositories by making them more useful in a multilingual and multicultural context. A key theme of our article is the central role that social tagging can play in this process: on the one hand, tags describe usage, attention, and other aspects of context; on the other hand, they can help to exploit context data towards making repositories more useful, and thus enhance the reuse

Tags and self-organisation: a metadata ecology for learning resources in a multilingual context

Vuorikari, R. (2009). Tags and self-organisation: a metadata ecology for learning resources in a multilingual context. Doctoral thesis. November, 13, 2009, Heerlen, The Netherlands: Open University of the Netherlands, CELSTEC.This thesis studies social tagging of learning resources in a multilingual context. Social tagging and its end products, tags, are regarded as part of the learning resources metadata ecology. The term “metadata ecology” is used to mean the interrelation of conventional metadata and social tags, and their interaction with the environment, which can be understood as the repository in the large sense (resources, metadata, interfaces and underlying technology) and its community of users. The main hypothesis is that the self-organisation aspect of a social tagging system on a learning resource portal helps users discover learning resources more efficiently. Moreover, user-generated tags make the system, which operates in a multilingual context, more robust and flexible. Social tags offer an interesting aspect to study learning resources, its metadata and how users interact with them in a multilingual context. Tags, as opposed to conventional metadata description such as Learning Object Metadata (LOM), are free, non-hierarchical keywords that end-users associate with a digital artefact, e.g. a learning resource. Tags are formed by a triple of (user,item,tag). Tags and the resulting networks, folksonomies, are commonly modelled as tri- partite hypergraphs. This ternary relational structure gives rise to a number of novel relations to better understand, capture and model contextual information. This thesis first provides two exploratory studies to better understand how users tag learning resources in a multilingual context and to find evidence on the “cross-boundary use” of learning resources. The term cross-boundary use means that the user and the resource come from different countries and that the language of the resource is different from that of the user’s mother tongue. The second part introduces a trilogy of studies focusing on self-organisation, flexibility and robustness of a social tagging system using empirical, behavioural data captured from log-files and user’s attention metadata trails on a number of learning resource portals and platforms in a multilingual context

The 3A Interaction Model and Relation-Based Recommender System:Adopting Social Media Paradigms in Designing Personal Learning Environments

We live in a rapidly changing digital world marked by technological advances, and fraught with online information constantly growing thanks to the Internet revolution and the online social applications in particular. Formal learning acquired in traditional academic and professional environments is not by itself sufficient to keep up with our information-based society. Instead, more and more focus is granted to lifelong, self-directed, and self-paced learning, acquired intentionally or spontaneously, in environments that are not purposely dedicated for learning. The concept of online Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) refers to the development of platforms that are able to sustain lifelong learning. PLEs require new design paradigms giving learners the opportunity to conduct autonomous activities depending on their interests, and allowing them to appropriate, repurpose and contribute to online content rather than merely consume pre-packaged learning resources. This thesis presents the 3A interaction model, a flexible design model targeting online personal and collaborative environments in general, and PLEs in particular. The model adopts bottom-up social media paradigms in combining social networking with flexible content and activity management features. The proposed model targets both formal and informal interactions where learning in not necessarily an explicit aim but may be a byproduct. It identifies 3 main constructs, namely actors, activities, and assets that can represent interaction and learning contexts in a flexible way. The applicability of the 3A interaction model to design actual PLEs and to deploy them in different learning modalities is demonstrated through usability studies and use-case scenarios. This thesis also addresses the challenge of dealing with information overload and helping end-users find relatively interesting information in open environments such as PLEs where content is not predefined, but is rather constantly added at run time, and differ in subject matter, quality, as well as intended audience. For that purpose, the 3A personalized, contextual, and relation-based recommender system is proposed, and evaluated on two real datasets