Personalised trails and learner profiling within e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on personalisation and personalised trails. We begin by introducing and defining the concepts of personalisation and personalised trails. Personalisation requires that a user profile be stored, and so we assess currently available standard profile schemas and discuss the requirements for a profile to support personalised learning. We then review techniques for providing personalisation and some systems that implement these techniques, and discuss some of the issues around evaluating personalisation systems. We look especially at the use of learning and cognitive styles to support personalised learning, and also consider personalisation in the field of mobile learning, which has a slightly different take on the subject, and in commercially available systems, where personalisation support is found to currently be only at quite a low level. We conclude with a summary of the lessons to be learned from our review of personalisation and personalised trails

Genetic Programming for Smart Phone Personalisation

Personalisation in smart phones requires adaptability to dynamic context based on user mobility, application usage and sensor inputs. Current personalisation approaches, which rely on static logic that is developed a priori, do not provide sufficient adaptability to dynamic and unexpected context. This paper proposes genetic programming (GP), which can evolve program logic in realtime, as an online learning method to deal with the highly dynamic context in smart phone personalisation. We introduce the concept of collaborative smart phone personalisation through the GP Island Model, in order to exploit shared context among co-located phone users and reduce convergence time. We implement these concepts on real smartphones to demonstrate the capability of personalisation through GP and to explore the benefits of the Island Model. Our empirical evaluations on two example applications confirm that the Island Model can reduce convergence time by up to two-thirds over standalone GP personalisation.Comment: 43 pages, 11 figure

Personalisation and its implications for work and employment in the voluntary sector

This report assesses the impact of personalisation on social care, particularly focussing on implications for the workforce. Personalisation is often presented as being transformative in the manner in which it empowers both people who use services and employees. The report considers the latter aspect in particular by assessing some of the workforce implications of personalisation. It reports research drawn from policymakers and three voluntary organisations, with interviews with managers, employees and people who use services. The main findings from the research are: Policymakers were enthusiastic about the potential benefits of personalisation with regard to the opportunities for the independence of people who receive services and enhancement of workforce skills. Policymakers feared the impact of public spending cuts and recognised the cultural and operational barriers within local authorities to the implementation of personalisation. Policymakers were enthusiastic about the role of the voluntary sector and its workforce in terms of its contribution to delivering personalised services, whilst recognising concerns about skills gaps among employees and the impact of deteriorating terms and conditions of employment on worker morale. Management in the three organisations largely embraced the principles of personalisation, whilst also recognising the pressure from local authorities to use the personalisation agenda to cut costs. Employees in the main understood the principles of personalisation but revealed limited awareness of the implications for the changes in service budgets. Organisations were changing their approach to staff recruitment in order to develop a better fit between the interests of people receiving services and employees delivering them. Management anticipated significant changes to the working hours of employees providing personalised services, which was met with a degree of anxiety among some employees. Management recognised the need to address skills gaps among employees in areas such as risk enablement, decision-making and community connecting. Employees generally welcomed the potential enhancement of their skills through personalisation. Job security concerns were apparent among the majority of front-line employees as a consequence of personalisation. Organisations were balancing the move towards risk enablement and cutting costs with the need to protect service user and worker health and safety, particularly in relation to managing challenging behavior. Personalisation brings with it the potential to fragment pay and conditions away from collective terms towards linking them more closely to the value of individual service budgets. People who receive services revealed limited awareness of changes to service budgets, their choices over the service provider, choices over who provides their services and there was limited evidence of empowerment and greater choice

The danger of impersonalisation in mass personalised learning

This paper discusses the dichotomy between socialisation and personalisation, and questions whether the two can coexist. It presents evidence that socialisation does lead to improved student achievement and that there is a significant issue with personalisation, in that it limits social discovery because it does not cater for the development of an energetic learning community to share and exchange information. This is particularly relevant in the context of mass personalisation and must be a key consideration when developing personalised learning environments

Security architectures in mobile integrated pay-TV

This paper presents the design and describes the advantage of the state-of-the-art Mobile Integrated Conditional Access System (MICAS) concerning interoperability, personalisation, security and operational costs in Pay-TV systems. The Message Handling Subsystem is proposed and outlined together with ‘Follow-Me’ service, which proposed herewith to extend mobility and personalisation concepts on Pay-TV service

User context and personalisation

The importance of user context as a means of delivering personalised and context-sensitive systems is discussed. Relevant aspects of personalisation and context technology are covered. The intention is to inspire those interested in Case-base reasoning and personalisation from background and experience in other disciplines such as information retrieval, adaptive user interfaces, user modelling and mobile computing. Descriptions of personalisation and context are followed by their use in information retrieval and their importance and use in ambient computing. Relevant literature that may be a motivating source for interested readers are provided. Various questions are also raised in initiating discussion on this topic

Personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries

Widespread use of the Internet has resulted in digital libraries that are increasingly used by diverse communities of users for diverse purposes and in which sharing and collaboration have become important social elements. As such libraries become commonplace, as their contents and services become more varied, and as their patrons become more experienced with computer technology, users will expect more sophisticated services from these libraries. A simple search function, normally an integral part of any digital library, increasingly leads to user frustration as user needs become more complex and as the volume of managed information increases. Proactive digital libraries, where the library evolves from being passive and untailored, are seen as offering great potential for addressing and overcoming these issues and include techniques such as personalisation and recommender systems. In this paper, following on from the DELOS/NSF Working Group on Personalisation and Recommender Systems for Digital Libraries, which met and reported during 2003, we present some background material on the scope of personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries. We then outline the working group’s vision for the evolution of digital libraries and the role that personalisation and recommender systems will play, and we present a series of research challenges and specific recommendations and research priorities for the field

Self-directed Support: Personalisation, Choice and Control

Since the late 1990s, there has been a concerted policy drive across social care towards cash based modes of support and strategies to personalise services. Support for this shift was initiated by the disabled peoples’ movement, both in the UK and globally. Policies introducing direct payments in lieu of provided services have been secured gradually as a central plank of the campaign for independent living. Successive governments have promoted a shift towards personalisation as part of a wider focus to develop local care markets and to facilitate enhanced choice and control in service provision. In Scotland, this has been pursued through new legislation for self-directed support. The authors examine some of the key themes and debates emerging from the implementation of this policy. These include a look at the evolution of this concept and its development within the wider personalisation agenda, as well as the changing roles for users, carers, local authorities and service providers. The authors focus on the impact of change for front-line workers and reassess the progress of personalisation across the UK and in Europe during a time of widespread austerity and financial cuts. Written for professional and academic audiences Self-directed Support: Personalisation, Choice & Control will stimulate those wrestling with these themes from policy and professional perspectives and provide essential analysis for those studying health and social policy

Personalisation, Participation and Care

Personalisation services are developing in England as a social policy response to user demands for more tailored, effective and flexible forms of health and social care support. Across England and Wales, this process is being implemented under the personalization which is also seen as a vehicle for promoting service user rights through increasing participation, empowerment and control while also promoting self-restraint by having users manage the costs of their health and social care. This paper reviews the existing research evidence for personalization, albeit limited, and identifies themes for future research