Mapping web personal learning environments

A recent trend in web development is to build platforms which are carefully designed to host a plurality of software components (sometimes called widgets or plugins) which can be organized or combined (mashed-up) at user's convenience to create personalized environments. The same holds true for the web development of educational applications. The degree of personalization can depend on the role of users such as in traditional virtual learning environment, where the components are chosen by a teacher in the context of a course. Or, it can be more opened as in a so-called personalized learning environment (PLE). It now exists a wide array of available web platforms exhibiting different functionalities but all built on the same concept of aggregating components together to support different tasks and scenarios. There is now an overlap between the development of PLE and the more generic developments in web 2.0 applications such as social network sites. This article shows that 6 more or less independent dimensions allow to map the functionalities of these platforms: the screen dimensionmaps the visual integration, the data dimension maps the portability of data, the temporal dimension maps the coupling between participants, the social dimension maps the grouping of users, the activity dimension maps the structuring of end users–interactions with the environment, and the runtime dimensionmaps the flexibility in accessing the system from different end points. Finally these dimensions are used to compare 6 familiar Web platforms which could potentially be used in the construction of a PLE

End-to-end adaptation scheme for ubiquitous remote experimentation

Remote experimentation is an effective e-learning paradigm for supporting hands-on education using laboratory equipment at distance. The current trend is to enable remote experimentation in mobile and ubiquitous learning. In such a context, the remote experimentation software should enable effective telemonitoring and teleoperation, no matter the kind of device used to access the equipment. It should also be sufficiently lenient so as to handle the rapidly evolving wireless and mobile communication environment. While the current Internet bandwidth allows remote experimentation to work flawlessly on fixed connections such as LANs, mobile users suffer from both the versatile nature of wireless communications and the limitation of the mobile devices. These conditions impose that the remote experimentation software should integrate adaptation features. For effective ubiquitous remote experimentation, it should ideally be guaranteed that the information representing the state of the remote equipment is rendered (to the end user) at the same pace at which it has been acquired, yet possibly at the cost of a somewhat minimal time delay between the acquisition and rendering phases. In this respect, an end-to-end adaptation scheme is proposed that explicitly handles the inherent variability of the connection and the versatility of the mobile devices considered in ubiquitous remote experimentation. Instead of relying on a stochastic approach, the proposed adaptation scheme relies on a deterministic mass-balance equivalence model. The effectiveness of the proposed adaptation scheme is demonstrated in critical conditions corresponding to remote experimentation carried out using a PDA over a Bluetooth lin

Tackling Engineering Education Research Challenges: Web 2.0 Social Software for Personal Learning

This paper focuses on Engineering Education Research on Technology Enhanced Learning carried out at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), and on its current focus on personal and collaborative learning. After some thoughts on the distinctive nature of Engineering Education Research, the interplay between engineering education practice and professional engineering practice is analyzed. In particular, it is demonstrated how the actual engineering practice of the faculty members influenced the acceptance and the success of new learning approaches and solutions. Finally, the impact on the current Web 2.0 paradigm is discussed and illustrated with the example of project-based collaborative learning activities supported by innovative social software that can be considered as a Personal Learning Environment. A vision of how to shape and exploit personal learning environments to tackle engineering education research challenges is also presented; this deals especially with the importance of user-driven recommendation mechanisms relying of proper trust models

Developing Interoperable Collaboration Services to Sustain Activities of Communities of Practice

Communities of Practice (CoPs) have attracted the interest of professionals and researchers as successful environments for enhancing, developing and improving practices through collaboration between their members. More and more, CoPs are choosing virtual environments and services to support their activities. However, recent research has underlined the lack of adequate scaffolding in terms of technical support and appropriate use of technology for communication and collaboration. The paper argues in favour of a collaborative design methodology for the development of services based on new technologies, open-source or open-source minded . Producing interoperable, evolutionary, flexible and truly collaborative services appears of major interest to sustain activities of distributed CoPs. The paper uses as a case study the description of collaboratively designed services addressing the needs of distributed CoPs within the European Project PALETTE. The example of PALETTE shows that in complex project situations, collaborative design sustained by Actor-Network Theory is a helpful framework to reach the goals of the project

Fluent coordination of autonomous vehicles at intersections

In this paper we introduce a new decentralized navigation function for coordination of autonomous vehicles at intersections. The main contribution is a navigation function designed for vehicles with predefined paths that uses expected time to intersection for collision avoidance. In such way, deadlock situations are avoided. Different inertias of the vehicles are taken into account to enable on-board energy optimization for crossing. Heavier vehicles that need more energy and time for acceleration or braking are given an indirect priority at intersections. The proposed decentralized coordination scheme shows a significant improvement in energy consumption and in motion smoothness compared to traditional crossing with human drivers

Information sharing among autonomous vehicles crossing an intersection

In this paper we compare the performance of autonomous vehicles at intersections with respect to the type of information shared. For this purpose we consider the cases where vehicles share or not information about their inertia and their intention at the intersection. An existing control method based on navigation functions is modified in order to take into account such information. The results show that if autonomous vehicles know each other’s inertia they achieve significantly smoother paths, use less fuel and more often avoid full stop

Challenges in Remote Laboratory Sustainability

Remote experimentation facilities have been accessible from the Internet for more than a decade. However, sustainability of such services is not adequately ensured in many academic institutions. The major challenge lies in moving from a single research setup available occasionally to a professional remote laboratory infrastructure with many setups accessible worldwide and 24/7. Not only are the technical aspects demanding but also the usability of the solutions and the support of the customers are to be considered. On the technical side the solution should be robust to students and external malicious attack. It should be fully autonomous and capable of self-diagnosing. In case of problems it should be able to set itself back to a known stable state and report problem to the administrator. On the educational side, the learning environment should be reworked to consider the drawback inherent to the distance to make the student interaction with the distant system as close as possible as the actual work on the real equipment and enable collaborative work