Collaboration in the Semantic Grid: a Basis for e-Learning

The CoAKTinG project aims to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for the Semantic Grid. This paper presents an overview of the hypertext and knowledge based tools which have been deployed to augment existing collaborative environments, and the ontology which is used to exchange structure, promote enhanced process tracking, and aid navigation of resources before, after, and while a collaboration occurs. While the primary focus of the project has been supporting e-Science, this paper also explores the similarities and application of CoAKTinG technologies as part of a human-centred design approach to e-Learning

A protocol for multidimensional assessment in university online courses

This paper presents a protocol developed for multidimensional assessment for e-learning experiences based on socioconstructivist principles. First, we describe the structure of an e-learning course where the protocol as been developed and tested; second, we describe the protocol and how it has been used in that course. We believe this protocol is a useful tool for a twofold reason: on the one hand, it takes into account the complexity of the pedagogical architecture of socioconstructivist courses – where many teaching models and learning strategies are mixed, different individual and collaborative activities are proposed and students are asked to build a variety of final products. On the other hand, it promotes students’ assumption of responsibility and active role, with a particular reference to self-assessment competences. Instances of how we have applied the protocol will be described in the paper. The assessment protocol we present here is complex, nevertheless flexible. Therefore, although we have tested it in a specific course, it could also be used in similar or simpler course

Reflections on the use of Project Wonderland as a mixed-reality environment for teaching and learning

This paper reflects on the lessons learnt from MiRTLE?a collaborative research project to create a ?mixed reality teaching and learning environment? that enables teachers and students participating in real-time mixed and online classes to interact with avatar representations of each other. The key hypothesis of the project is that avatar representations of teachers and students can help create a sense of shared presence, engendering a greater sense of community and improving student engagement in online lessons. This paper explores the technology that underpins such environments by presenting work on the use of a massively multi-user game server, based on Sun?s Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland tools, to create a shared teaching environment, illustrating the process by describing the creation of a virtual classroom. It is planned that the MiRTLE platform will be used in several trial applications ? which are described in the paper. These example applications are then used to explore some of the research issues arising from the use of virtual environments within an education environment. The research discussion initially focuses on the plans to assess this within the MiRTLE project. This includes some of the issues of designing virtual environments for teaching and learning, and how supporting pedagogical and social theories can inform this process

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

A grid-based approach for processing group activity log files

The information collected regarding group activity in a collaborative learning environment requires classifying, structuring and processing. The aim is to process this information in order to extract, reveal and provide students and tutors with valuable knowledge, awareness and feedback in order to successfully perform the collaborative learning activity. However, the large amount of information generated during online group activity may be time-consuming to process and, hence, can hinder the real-time delivery of the information. In this study we show how a Grid-based paradigm can be used to effectively process and present the information regarding group activity gathered in the log files under a collaborative environment. The computational power of the Grid makes it possible to process a huge amount of event information, compute statistical results and present them, when needed, to the members of the online group and the tutors, who are geographically distributed.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Designing a novel virtual collaborative environment to support collaboration in design review meetings

Project review meetings are part of the project management process and are organised to assess progress and resolve any design conflicts to avoid delays in construction. One of the key challenges during a project review meeting is to bring the stakeholders together and use this time effectively to address design issues as quickly as possible. At present, current technology solutions based on BIM or CAD are information-centric and do not allow project teams to collectively explore the design from a range of perspectives and brainstorm ideas when design conflicts are encountered. This paper presents a system architecture that can be used to support multi-functional team collaboration more effectively during such design review meetings. The proposed architecture illustrates how information-centric BIM or CAD systems can be made human- and team-centric to enhance team communication and problem solving. An implementation of the proposed system architecture has been tested for its utility, likability and usefulness during design review meetings. The evaluation results suggest that the collaboration platform has the potential to enhance collaboration among multi-functional teams

Application of a virtual scientific experiment model in different educational contexts

E-learning practice is continuously using experimentation in order to enhance the basic information transfer model where knowledge is passed from the system/ tutors to the students. Boosting student productivity through on-line experimentation is not simple since many organizational, educational and technological issues need to be dealt with. This work describes the application of a Learning Model for Virtual Scientific Experiments (VSEs) in two different scenarios: Information and Communication Technologies and Physics. As part of the first, a VSE for Wireless Sensor Networks was specified and deployed while the second involved the specification and design of a collaborative VSE for physics experiments. Preliminary implementation and deployment results are also discussed

The interactional work of configuring a mathematical object in a technology-enabled embodied learning environment

We present a detailed account of interactional mechanisms that support participation in STEM disciplinary practices as an adult and a child explore a technology-enabled embodied learning environment for mathematics. Drawing on ethnomethodological studies of technologyrich workplaces, we trace the process of transforming a vague reference into a mutually available mathematical object: a covariant variable. Our analysis reveals that this mathematical object is an interactional achievement, configured via a reciprocal process of instructing one another's attention. In particular, we demonstrate how participants' explicit responsiveness to indexical and multimodal resources achieves this object

Tangible user interfaces : past, present and future directions

In the last two decades, Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have emerged as a new interface type that interlinks the digital and physical worlds. Drawing upon users' knowledge and skills of interaction with the real non-digital world, TUIs show a potential to enhance the way in which people interact with and leverage digital information. However, TUI research is still in its infancy and extensive research is required in or- der to fully understand the implications of tangible user interfaces, to develop technologies that further bridge the digital and the physical, and to guide TUI design with empirical knowledge. This paper examines the existing body of work on Tangible User In- terfaces. We start by sketching the history of tangible user interfaces, examining the intellectual origins of this field. We then present TUIs in a broader context, survey application domains, and review frame- works and taxonomies. We also discuss conceptual foundations of TUIs including perspectives from cognitive sciences, phycology, and philoso- phy. Methods and technologies for designing, building, and evaluating TUIs are also addressed. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limita- tions of TUIs and chart directions for future research