Providing Social Sharing Functionalities in LearnWeb2.0

Marenzi, I., Zerr, S., & Nejdl, W. (2008). Providing Social Sharing Functionalities in LearnWeb2.0. In R. Koper, K. Stefanov & D. Dicheva (Eds). Proceedings of the 5th International TENCompetence Open Workshop "Stimulating Personal Development and Knowledge Sharing" (pp. 9-14). October, 30-31, 2008, Sofia, Bulgaria: TENCompetence Workshop. [For the whole proceedings please see also http://hdl.handle.net/1820/1961 ]Within the TENCompetence project we are working on an open source infrastructure for the creation, storage and exchange of learning objects and knowledge resources. We implemented LearnWeb2.0 - a prototype, which provides appropriate functionalities for the aggregation and annotation of Web 2.0 resources for lifelong competence development activities. This paper focuses on the next steps planned, describing the main functionalities to be implemented in LearnWeb2.0: resource selection, batch annotation and sharing, notification using SpreadCrumbs, resource aggregation using GroupMe and sequencing, motivated by a knowledge sharing scenario at the University of Pavia.The work on this publication has been sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project that is funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. Contract 027087 [http://www.tencompetence.org

The Learning Dialogue of University Language Students in a Digital Environment for Online Text Annotation

The article discusses how an open access tool for collaborative online interaction (Hypothes.is) can be used to enhance collaborative and individual actions of language awareness and critical multimodal awareness for groups of undergraduate and postgraduate university students of English as a foreign language. The research questions focus on how student online collaboration can contribute to (or hinder) the process of critical analysis of multimodal texts, and to what extent collaboration through a digital environment can promote learner autonomy and peer learning through shared discourse and online/offline actions. The digital environment which is the main digital context of interaction for the study is LearnWeb/CELL: CELL (Communicating in English for Language Learning) is a community hosted within the LearnWeb digital environment developed by the L3S Research Center at Leibniz University (Hanover, Germany) (Marenzi 2014) and it is customized as a collaborative environment for undergraduate and postgraduate language courses at the University of Udine (Italy). The LearnWeb developers have embedded an open access application for website annotation (Hypothes.is) in the LearnWeb/CELL digital environment, so that it can be accessed and used by students and teachers. In the study we focus on the reflective learning dialogue that takes place between students when they analyze texts collaboratively. In general terms, this learning dialogue is usually rather elusive and difficult to capture because it happens informally outside the classroom. Our starting hypothesis was that the digital functionalities and affordances of Hypothes.is in CELL would capture at least a part of that learning dialogue and, more specifically, they would record what the students decide to disclose and reveal through their online annotations. Within the limitations of a small-scale study, the paper discusses the students\u2019 individual and collective process of reflection on multimodal text analysis. This use of the digital environment allows teachers, researchers and the whole class to \u2018see\u2019 the powerful effect of learning with peers and from peers while developing learning autonomy and exploring learning strategies

2nd International Workshop on Evidence-based Technology Enhanced Learning

Research on Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) investigates how information and communication technologies can be designed in order to support pedagogical activities. The Evidence Based Design (EBD) of a system bases its decisions on empirical evidence and effectiveness. The evidence-based TEL workshop (ebTEL) brings together TEL and EBD. The first edition of ebTEL collected contributions in the area of TEL from computer science, artificial intelligence, evidence-based medicine, educational psychology and pedagogy. Like the previous edition, this second edition, ebTEL’13, wants to be a forum in which TEL researchers and practitioners alike can discuss innovative evidence-based ideas, projects, and lessons related to TEL. The workshop took place in Salamanca, Spain, on May 22nd-24th 2013

Towards analytics and collaborative exploration of social and linked media for technology-enchanced learning scenarios

Social Web applications such as "Flickr", "Youtube" and "Slideshare" offer a vast body of multimedial knowledge, discoverable through the appropriate search interfaces and API's. This extensive information source, however, is largely unstructured and the available metadata is typically limited to title, tags and description for a resource. On the other hand, Linked Web Data is both structured and well described through a variety of metadata. Combining those sources opens promising direction for knowledge discovery and, at the same time, new challenges for collaborative searching in various Technology-Enchanced Learning Scenarios. In this paper, we explore how to support (collaborative) search in such scenarios through an initial analysis of the Web data landscape and introduce early results from efforts on exploiting Linked Data techniques to solve critical issues in this context

Learning Analytics for Interpreting

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Pedagogy-Driven Smart Games for Primary School Children

TERENCE is an FP7 ICT European project, highly multi-disciplinary, that is developing an adaptive learning system for supporting poor comprehenders and their educators. Their learning materials are stories and games, explicitly designed for classes of primary schools poor comprehenders, where classes were created via an extensive analysis of the context of use and user requirements. The games are specialised into smart games, which stimulate inference-making for story comprehension, and relaxing games, which stimulate visual perception and which train the interaction with devices (e.g., PC and tablet PC). In this paper we focus on how we used the pedagogical underpinnings and the acquired requirements to design the games of the system

Sodium chloride vs. sodium bicarbonate for the prevention of contrast medium-induced nephropathy: a randomized controlled trial

Aims The most effective regimen for the prevention of contrast-induced nephropathy (CIN) remains uncertain. Our purpose was to compare two regimens of sodium bicarbonate with 24 h sodium chloride 0.9% infusion in the prevention of CIN. Methods and results We performed a prospective, randomized trial between March 2005 and December 2009, including 258 consecutive patients with renal insufficiency undergoing intravascular contrast procedures. Patients were randomized to receive intravenous volume supplementation with either (A) sodium chloride 0.9% 1 mL/kg/h for at least 12h prior and after the procedure or (B) sodium bicarbonate (166 mEq/L) 3 mL/kg for 1h before and 1 mL/kg/h for 6h after the procedure or (C) sodium bicarbonate (166 mEq/L) 3 mL/kg over 20min before the procedure plus sodium bicarbonate orally (500 mg per 10 kg). The primary endpoint was the change in estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) within 48h after contrast. Secondary endpoints included the development of CIN. The maximum change in eGFR was significantly greater in Group B compared with Group A {mean difference −3.9 [95% confidence interval (CI), −6.8 to −1] mL/min/1.73 m2, P = 0.009} and similar between Groups C and B [mean difference 1.3 (95% CI, −1.7-4.3) mL/min/1.73 m2, P = 0.39]. The incidence of CIN was significantly lower in Group A (1%) vs. Group B (9%, P = 0.02) and similar between Groups B and C (10%, P = 0.9). Conclusion Volume supplementation with 24 h sodium chloride 0.9% is superior to sodium bicarbonate for the prevention of CIN. A short-term regimen with sodium bicarbonate is non-inferior to a 7 h regimen. ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0013059

The TERENCE Smart Games: Automatic Generation and Supporting Architecture

TERENCE is an FP7 ICT European project that is developing an adaptive learning system for supporting poor comprehenders and their educators. Its learning material are stories and games. The games are specialised into smart games, which stimulate inference-making for story comprehension, and relaxing games, which stimulate visual perception and not story comprehension. The paper focuses on smart games. It first shows the current prototypes, then it describes the TERENCE system architecture, thus it delves into the generation of smart games instances, by highlighting the role of the constraint-based module therein. Finally, it ends with short conclusions about the planned improvements.

Answering confucius: The reason why we complicate

Learning is a level-progressing process. In any field of study, one must master basic concepts to understand more complex ones. Thus, it is important that during the learning process learners are presented and challenged with knowledge which they are able to comprehend (not a level below, not a level too high). In this work we focus on language learners. By gradually improving (complicating) texts, readers are challenged to learn new vocabulary. To achieve such goals, in this paper we propose and evaluate the 'complicator' that translates given sentences to a chosen level of higher degree of difficulty. The 'complicator' is based on natural language processing and information retrieval approaches that perform lexical replacements. 30 native English speakers participated in a user study evaluating our methods on an expert-tailored dataset of children books. Results show that our tool can be of great utility for language learners who are willing to improve their vocabulary. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40814-4_45.TERENCEEC/FP

The Design of Learning Material for Poor Comprehenders: Lessons Learnt from Experts

TERENCE is an FP7 ICT European project that is developing an adaptive learning system for poor comprehenders and their educators. The learning material is made of stories and smart games for stimulating reading comprehension. The design of stories and smart games is also based on data collected from experts for the analysis of the context of use of the system, and is incrementally revised via evaluations of prototypes of stories and games, with domain experts of text comprehension or education as participants. In particular, since smart games are semi-automatically generated via artificial intelligence technologies, they contain mistakes that have to be fixed by experts of pedagogy before the games are given to learners. In this paper we focus on the design and evaluations of the TERENCE stories and smart games for poor comprehenders via lessons learnt with domain experts