Big and little OER

Much of the attention around OERs has been on institutional projects which make explicit learning content available. These can be classified as ‘big OER’, but another form of OER is that of small scale, individually produced resources using web 2.0 type services, which are classified as ‘little OER’. This paper examines some of the differences between the use of these two types of OER to highlight issues in open education. These include attitudes towards reputation, the intentionality of the resource, models of sustainability, the implicit affordances of resources and the context of their hosting sites

Balancing generality and specificity in component-based reuse

For a component industry to be successful, we must move beyond the current techniques of black box reuse and genericity to a more flexible framework supporting customization of components as well as instantiation and composition of components. Customization of components strikes a balanced between creating dozens of variations of a base component and requiring the overhead of unnecessary features of an 'everything but the kitchen sink' component. We argue that design and instantiation of reusable components have competing criteria - design-for-use strives for generality, design-with-reuse strives for specificity - and that providing mechanisms for each can be complementary rather than antagonistic. In particular, we demonstrate how program slicing techniques can be applied to customization of reusable components

OpenML: networked science in machine learning

Many sciences have made significant breakthroughs by adopting online tools that help organize, structure and mine information that is too detailed to be printed in journals. In this paper, we introduce OpenML, a place for machine learning researchers to share and organize data in fine detail, so that they can work more effectively, be more visible, and collaborate with others to tackle harder problems. We discuss how OpenML relates to other examples of networked science and what benefits it brings for machine learning research, individual scientists, as well as students and practitioners.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figure

Repurposing learning objects: a sustainable alternative?

Recent experience shows that reusable learning objects, like the computer assisted learning programmes of the early 1990s, have so far failed to achieve expected levels of integration into educational practice. This is despite technical interoperability, cataloguing systems, high quality standards, targeted dissemination and professional development initiatives. Analysis of this problem suggests that conceptualization of the problem may be limiting the scope of solutions. This paper proposes a sustainable and participative approach to reuse that involves repurposing learning objects for different discipline areas. For some time now there has been a growing awareness that even the most accessible resources have failed to be widely adopted by the educational community and as a result have also failed to fulfil their considerable educational potential. (Campbell, 2003, p. 35

Generating a Catalog of Unanticipated Schemas in Class Hierarchies using Formal Concept Analysis

International audienceContext: Inheritance is the cornerstone of object-oriented development, supporting conceptual modeling, subtype polymorphism and software reuse. But inheritance can be used in subtle ways that make complex systems hard to understand and extend, due to the presence of implicit dependencies in the inheritance hierarchy. Objective: Although these dependencies often specify well-known schemas (i.e., recurrent design or coding patterns, such as hook and template methods), new unanticipated dependency schemas arise in practice, and can consequently be hard to recognize and detect. Thus, a developer making changes or extensions to an object-oriented system needs to understand these implicit contracts defined by the dependencies between a class and its subclasses, or risk that seemingly innocuous changes break them. Method: To tackle this problem, we have developed an approach based on Formal Concept Analysis. Our FoCARE methodology (Formal Concept Analysis based-Reverse Engineering) identifies undocumented hi- erarchical dependencies in a hierarchy by taking into account the existing structure and behavior of classes and subclasses. Results: We validate our approach by applying it to a large and non-trivial case study, yielding a catalog of Hierarchy Schemas, each one composed of a set of dependencies over methods and attributes in a class hierarchy. We show how the discovered dependency schemas can be used not only to identify good design practices, but also to expose bad smells in design, thereby helping developers in initial reengineering phases to develop a first mental model of a system. Although some of the identified schemas are already documented in existing literature, with our approach based on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), we are also able to identify previously unidentified schemas

Generating target system specifications from a domain model using CLIPS

The quest for reuse in software engineering is still being pursued and researchers are actively investigating the domain modeling approach to software construction. There are several domain modeling efforts reported in the literature and they all agree that the components that are generated from domain modeling are more conducive to reuse. Once a domain model is created, several target systems can be generated by tailoring the domain model or by evolving the domain model and then tailoring it according to the specified requirements. This paper presents the Evolutionary Domain Life Cycle (EDLC) paradigm in which a domain model is created using multiple views, namely, aggregation hierarchy, generalization/specialization hierarchies, object communication diagrams and state transition diagrams. The architecture of the Knowledge Based Requirements Elicitation Tool (KBRET) which is used to generate target system specifications is also presented. The preliminary version of KBRET is implemented in the C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS)