Metacognition and lifelong e-learning: a contextual and cyclical process

Metacognition is arguably an important conceptualisation within the area of lifelong e- learning, with many theorists and practitioners claiming that it enhances the learning process. However, the lifelong, cyclical and flexible aspects of 'before', 'during' and 'after' metacognitions within lifelong e-learning (inclusive of whether an 'input' necessarily leads to a completed 'output') seem marginal within current areas of practical and theoretical debate. This article analyses Reeves's (1997) model of web-based learning in the context of the ADAPT project; a study of lifelong learners based in small and medium sized enterprises. The article focuses upon an analysis of this model's view of metacognition, and in the light of the project findings and literature review, aims to put forward an extended and expanded version of the model with reference to lifelong e-learnin

IdeaTracker: An Interactive Visualization Supporting Collaboration and Consensus Building in Online Interface Design Discussions

Part 2: Long and Short PapersInternational audienceWith the rapid growth of open source and other geographically distributed software projects, more interface design discussions are occurring online. Participation in such discussions typically occurs via issue management systems or similar interactive discussion forums. While such systems have a low learning curve, they do not support key elements of design discussion such as comparing alternatives, maintaining awareness of the arguments for and against the alternatives, or building consensus. To better understand these and other challenges, we conducted a study of online interface design discussion. The study consisted of analyzing a large corpus of online discussion content and conducting interviews with designer and developer participants. We discuss the findings of our study and use them to motivate the implementation of an interactive visualization tool - IdeaTracker. The tool offers explicit support for tracking and comparing ideas and gaining an abstract summary of the overall discussion as well as specific alternatives. It also provides a voting system to support consensus building. The tool extracts and visualizes useful information from the discussions that would otherwise be hidden but without interfering with the current method of participation. Our tool is compatible with the issue management system of one open source project but can be extended for others. Initial user feedback is positive and confirms the need for an alternative visual representation of interface design discussions online

Recognising and recommending context in social web search

Paper presented at the International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP-11). Girona, Spain. 11-15 July, 2011In this paper we focus on an approach to social search, HeyStaks that is designed to integrate with mainstream search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. HeyStaks is motivated by the idea that Web search is an inherently social or collaborative activity. Heystaks users search as normal but benefit from collaboration features, allowing searchers to better organise and share their search experiences. Users can create and share repositories of search knowledge (so-called search staks) in order to benefit from the searches of friends and colleagues. As such search staks are community-based information resources. A key challenge for HeyStaks is predicting which search stak is most relevant to the users current search context and in this paper we focus on this so-called stak recommendation issue by looking at a number of different approaches to profling and recommending community-search knowledge.Science Foundation IrelandHeyStaks Technologies Ltd.Ministry of Higher Education MalaysiaUniversiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka12M embargo - release after August 2012 Book URL: http://www.springer.com/computer/database+management+%26+information+retrieval/book/978-3-642-22361-7 - AV 6/12/11 ti, sp, ke, ab - kpw8/12/1

DEBORA: developing an interface to support collaboration in a digital library

Abstract. Interfaces to library systems have largely failed to represent the inherently collaborative nature of information work. This paper describes how collaborative functionality is being implemented as part of the DEBORA project to provide access to digitised Renaissance documents. Work practices of users of Renaissance documents are described and the collaborative features of the client software are outlined. Functionalities discussed include annotation, the creation of virtual books and the inclusion of user-supplied metadata.

Making Holes in Leaves: Promoting Cell State Transitions in Stomatal Development

Any software development project is based on assumptions about the state of the world that probably will hold when it is fielded. Investigating whether they are true can be seen as an important task. This paper describes how an empirical investigation was designed and conducted for the EU funded APOSDLE project. This project aims at supporting informal learning during work. Four basic assumptions are derived from the project plan and subsequently investigated in a two-phase study using several methods, including workplace observations and a survey. The results show that most of the assumptions are valid in the current work context of knowledge workers. In addition more specific suggestions for the design of the prospective APOSDLE application could be derived. Though requiring a substantial effort, carrying out studies like this can be seen as important for longer term software development projects