Drachsler, H., Pecceu, D., Arts, T., Hutten, E., Rutledge, L., Van Rosmalen, P., Hummel, H. G. K., & Koper, R. (2009). ReMashed - Recommendations for Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments. In U. Cress, V. Dimitrova & M. Specht (Eds.), Learning in the Synergy of Multiple Disciplines. Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2009) (pp. 788-793). September, 29 - October, 2, 2009, Nice, France. Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 5794. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.The following article presents a Mash-Up Personal Learning Environment
called ReMashed that recommends learning resources from emerging
information of a Learning Network. In ReMashed learners can specify certain
Web2.0 services and combine them in a Mash-Up Personal Learning Environment.
Learners can rate information from an emerging amount of Web2.0
information of a Learning Network and train a recommender system for their
particular needs. ReMashed therefore has three main objectives: 1. to provide a
recommender system for Mash-up Personal Learning Environments to learners,
2. to offer an environment for testing new recommendation approaches and
methods for researchers, and 3. to create informal user-generated content data
sets that are needed to evaluate new recommendation algorithms for learners in
informal Learning Networks.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

Arts, Tanja

Drachsler, Hendrik

Hummel, Hans

Hutten, Edwin

Koper, Rob

Pecceu, Dries

Rutledge, Lloyd

Van Rosmalen, Peter

DSpace at Open Universiteit Nederland

 U. Cress, V. Dimitrova, and M. Specht (Eds.): EC-TEL 2009, LNCS 5794, pp. 788–793, 2009. 
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 
ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up Personal 
Learning Environments 
Hendrik Drachsler1, Dries Pecceu2, Tanja Arts2, Edwin Hutten2, Lloyd Rutledge2, 
Peter van Rosmalen1, Hans Hummel1, and Rob Koper1 
Open University of the Netherlands, 1 Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies &  
2
 Computer Science Department, PO-Box 2960, 6401 DL Heerlen, The Netherlands 
{hendrik.drachsler,lloyd.rutledge,peter.vanrosmalen, 
hans.hummel,rob.koper}@ou.nl,  
{pecceu,ekh.hutten,tg.arts}@studie.ou.nl 
Abstract. The following article presents a Mash-Up Personal Learning Envi-
ronment called ReMashed that recommends learning resources from emerging 
information of a Learning Network. In ReMashed learners can specify certain 
Web2.0 services and combine them in a Mash-Up Personal Learning Environ-
ment. Learners can rate information from an emerging amount of Web2.0  
information of a Learning Network and train a recommender system for their 
particular needs. ReMashed therefore has three main objectives: 1. to provide a 
recommender system for Mash-up Personal Learning Environments to learners, 
2. to offer an environment for testing new recommendation approaches and 
methods for researchers, and 3. to create informal user-generated content data 
sets that are needed to evaluate new recommendation algorithms for learners in 
informal Learning Networks.  
Keywords: recommender system, mash-up, personalisation, personal learning 
environments, MUPPLE, informal learning, emergence, learning networks. 
1   Introduction 
Nowadays, Internet users take advantage of Personal Environments (PEs) like 
iGoogle or Netvibes to create a personal view on information they are interested in. 
The existence of PEs inspired researchers in Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) 
to explore this technology for learning purposes. As a consequence Personal Learning 
Environments (PLEs) were invented for learners [1, 2]. Because of the combination of 
various Web2.0 sources in a PLE they are also called Mash-Up Personal Learning 
Environments (MUPPLEs) [3].  
MUPPLEs are a kind of instance of the Learning Network concept [4] and there-
fore share several characteristics with it. Learning Networks consist of user-generated 
content by learners who are able to create, comment, tag, rate, share and study learn-
ing resources. Due to the large amount of learning resources and learners the Learning 
Network can show emerging patterns. Learning Networks are from the bottom-up 
driven because their content is not created by paid domain experts but rather by their 
 ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments 789 
 
members. These networks explicitly address informal learning because no assessment 
or accreditation process is connected to them.  
MUPPLEs also support informal learning as they require no institutional back-
ground and no fees. Instead the focus is on the learner independent from institutional 
needs like student management or assessments. Although, they are most appropriate 
for informal learning, educational scenarios are imaginable where MUPPLEs become 
integrated into formal courses as well. MUPPLEs are used to combine different in-
formation from the web that is supportive to the individual learner regarding the per-
sonal competence development. Most of the time, the sources are free to use and 
selected by the learner.   
A common problem for PEs and MUPPLEs is the amount of data that is gathered 
in a short time frame. The learners can be overwhelmed by the information they re-
ceive or they might have problems selecting the most suitable learning resource for 
their personal competence development. Therefore, we developed a recommender 
system that offers advice to learners to find suitable learning resources for their indi-
vidual competence development.  The main purpose of recommender systems on the 
Internet is to pre-select information a user might be interested in. The motivation for a 
recommender system for MUPPLEs is to improve the ‘educational provision’; to offer 
a better learning goal attainment and to spend less time to search for suitable learning 
resources [5].  
In the following section we first discuss related work (section two). After that we 
introduce the ReMashed system (section three) and finally discuss future research 
(section four). 
2   Related Work 
Nowadays, ‘mashing’ information becomes a widely used activity on the Internet. 
Various tools (Yahoo Pipes, Dapper, Openkapow etc.) provide the opportunity to 
combine information from other websites in a new way. Users do not need special 
programming skills to use the tools in order to combine different Internet sources. The 
users can make advantage of public APIs of Web2.0 services and standardized XML 
formats like Jason to mash data in a new way.  
In TEL several European projects address these bottom-up approaches of creating 
and sharing knowledge. The TENCompetence project addresses learners in informal 
Learning Networks [6]. The iCamp project explicitly addresses research around 
MUPPLEs [3]. They created an easy programmable and flexible environment that 
allows learners to create their own MUPPLE for certain learning activities.  
However, these systems face the problem that the emerging behavior of these bot-
tom-up approaches gathers large amounts of data. With the ReMashed system we 
want to offer navigation support for such emerging bottom-up MUPPLEs to help 
learners to find the most suitable data for their learning goals.  
In recommender system research, extensive studies is going on to take advantage 
of tags for recommendations [7, 8]. Single systems like Delicious or Flickr offer rec-
ommendations to their users based on their data and also researchers take advantage 
of single Web2.0 services to create recommender systems [9]. However, the combina-
tion of different Web2.0 services to recommend information based on mashed tag and 
790 H. Drachsler et al. 
 
rating data has not been attempted so far and especially not for learners in MUPPLEs. 
Thus, ReMashed offers a new approach by mashing data of learners from various 
Web2.0 services to provide pedagogical recommendations. 
3   The ReMashed System 
A prominent example of ReMashed from a different domain is the MovieLens project 
created by the GroupLens research group. They offer a movie recommender service 
where people can rate movies and get recommendations for movies. Besides this 
attractive services GroupLens created a frequently used data set for the development 
of recommender systems and related research [10]. Likewise ReMashed has three 
main objectives: 1. to provide a recommender system for MUPPLEs to learners, 2. to 
offer an environment for testing new recommendation approaches and methods for 
researchers, and 3. to create informal user-generated-content data sets that are needed 
to evaluate new recommendation algorithms for learners in informal Learning Net-
works. 
 
Fig. 1. The user interface of the ReMashed system. On the left side, the mashed information 
from delicious and blogs are shown. On the right side, the rating based recommendations for 
the current learner are presented. 
In order to test our recommendation approach for MUPPLEs we designed a Mash-
Up that enables learners to integrate their Web2.0 sources (see Fig 1). The system 
allows the learners to personalise emerging information of a community to their pref-
erences. They can rate information of the Web2.0 sources in order to define which 
contributions of other members they like and do not like. ReMashed takes the prefer-
ences into account to offer tailored recommendation to the learner. ReMashed uses 
 ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments 791 
 
collaborative filtering [11] to generate recommendations. It works by matching to-
gether users with similar opinions about learning resources. Each member of the sys-
tem has a 'neighborhood' of other like-minded users. Ratings and tags from these 
neighbors are used to create personalised recommendations for the current learner. 
The recommender system combines tag and rating based collaborative filtering algo-
rithms in a recommendation strategy. Such a recommendation strategy reacts on cer-
tain situations by using the most suitable recommendation technique. The recommen-
dation strategy is triggered by certain pedagogical situations based on the profile of 
the learner or available learning resources [12].  
In the initial state of ReMashed, learners have sign up for the system and have not 
rated any learning resources. ReMashed identifies the cold-start situation of the re-
commender system [11] and recommends resources based on tags of the Web2.0 
sources of the current learner. It computes the similarity between the tag cloud of the 
current learner with other learners and learning resources. After the learner started to 
rate resources above a certain threshold a rating based Slope-One algorithm  provides 
additional recommendations to the learner.  
ReMashed is an Open Source project based on PHP5, Zend Framework 1.7 with 
the Dojo Ajax framework, MySQL database, Apache Server and the Duine recom-
mendation engine. ReMashed is following the Model-View-Controller programming 
concept and is therefore fully object oriented. It consists of five sub-systems  
(see Fig 2), a user interface, a data collector, a user logger, a recommender system and 
the Duine prediction engine [13]. 
 
Fig. 2. Technical architecture of the ReMashed system 
792 H. Drachsler et al. 
 
─ The User Interface is responsible for user interaction, authentication of users, 
registration of new users and updating of user data.  
─ The Data Collector establishes the connection between the Web2.0 services and 
gathers new data into the ReMashed database via a CRON job that runs every hour.  
─ The Logger offers logging methods to the other subsystems. It stores log mes-
sages and monitors user actions in the system. 
─ The Recommender System composes the recommendations for every user and 
puts them into the database. It allows implementing new recommendation algo-
rithms in PHP but it also provides a connection to the Duine 4.0 prediction en-
gine based on JAVA that can be used to compute recommendations for the 
learning resource.  
─ The Duine Prediction Engine offers extensive options for configuring various 
recommender algorithms. It provides a sample of most common recommenda-
tion algorithms that can be combined in algorithm strategies, thus it is possible 
to create new recommendation strategies that follow pedagogical rules.  
We tested the system in an usability evaluation in a group of 49 users from 8 dif-
ferent countries [14]. The evaluation phase ran for one month and was concluded with 
an online recall questionnaire. In that timeframe 4961 resources were collected, 420 
resources were rated and 813 recommendations were offered. The overall satisfaction 
with the system was positive. Nevertheless, the participants suggested particular im-
provements we will take into account for the future development of the system.   
4   Conclusions and Future Research 
This article presented the ReMashed system, an evaluation tool for recommender 
systems for learners in informal Learning Networks. The article showed the design 
and implementation of a recommender system for MUPPLEs.  
The future developments of ReMashed rely on an end-user perspective and on a re-
searcher perspective. Regarding the end-user perspective ReMashed needs to inte-
grate additional Web2.0 features (i.e. integrating social networks like facebook). This 
may improve the isolation of informal learners towards the organisation of learning 
communities. Retrieved information from social networks can be used to improve the 
recommendations and strengthen the communities; for instance, learners that have 
certain social relationships will likely want to share their learning resources with their 
community. The type of relationship between learners can affect which kinds of rec-
ommendations are given. In addition, ReMashed should provide a widget interface to 
enable learners to integrate recommendations from ReMashed into their MUPPLEs. 
Such a widget has to provide the recommendations and the possibility to rate learning 
resources to further personalise the needs of the learners.  
From a researcher perspective, ReMashed opens the possibility to provide user-
generated-content data sets of various domains. Comparable to the famous MovieL-
ens data set, a standard for the evaluation and development of recommender system 
algorithm in TEL can be created. Further, when considering different ReMashed 
communities in health, education or public affairs, data sets from theses domains can 
be used to develop solutions for the cold-start problem of recommender system by 
providing an already rated data set for a particular domain.    
 ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments 793 
 
Acknowledgement 
Authors’ efforts were (partly) funded by the European Commission in TENCompe-
tence (IST-2004-02787) (http://www.tencompetence.org). 
References 
1. Liber, O., Johnson, M.: Personal Learning Environments. Interactive Learning Environ-
ments 16, 1–2 (2008) 
2. Wild, F., Kalz, M., Palmer, M. (eds.): Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments. CEUR 
Workshop Proceedings Maastricht, The Netherlands, vol. 388 (2008) 
3. Wild, F., Moedritscher, F., Sigurdarson, S.E.: Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal 
Learning Environments. eLearning Papers 9 (2008) 
4. Koper, R., Tattersall, C.: New directions for lifelong learning using network technologies. 
British Journal of Educational Technology 35, 689–700 (2004) 
5. Drachsler, H., Hummel, H., Koper, R.: Identifying the Goal, User model and Conditions of 
Recommender Systems for Formal and Informal Learning. Journal of Digital Informa-
tion 10, 4–24 (2009) 
6. Wilson, S., Sharples, P., Griffith, D.: Distributing education services to personal and  
institutional systems using Widgets. In: Wild, F., Kalz, M., Palmer, M. (eds.) Mash-Up 
Personal Learning Environments, Proceedings of the 1st MUPPLE workshop.  
CEUR-Proceedings, Maastricht, The Netherlands,vol. 388 (2008) 
7. Shepitsen, A., Gemmell, J., Mobasher, B., Burke, R.: Personalized recommendation in  
social tagging systems using hierarchical clustering. In: Recommender Systems 2008,  
pp. 259–266. ACM, New York (2008) 
8. Symeonidis, P., Nanopoulos, A., Manolopoulos, Y.: Tag recommendations based on tensor 
dimensionality reduction. In: Recommender Systems 2008, pp. 43–50. ACM, New York 
(2008) 
9. Garg, N., Weber, I.: Personalized, interactive tag recommendation for flickr. In: Recom-
mender System 2009, pp. 67–74. ACM, New York (2009) 
10. Sarwar, B.M., Karypis, G., Konstan, J., Riedl, J.: Recommender systems for large-scale  
e-commerce: Scalable neighborhood formation using clustering. In: Fifth International 
Conference on Computer and Information Technology (2002) 
11. Herlocker, J.L., Konstan, J.A., Riedl, J.: Explaining collaborative filtering recommenda-
tions. In: Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative 
work, pp. 241–250 (2000) 
12. Drachsler, H., Hummel, H., Koper, R.: Personal recommender systems for learners in life-
long learning: requirements, techniques and model. International Journal of Learning 
Technology 3, 404–423 (2008) 
13. Van Setten, M.: Supporting people in finding information. Hybrid recommender systems 
and goal-based structuring. Telematica Instituut Fundamental Research Series No. 016 
(TI/FRS/016) (2005)  
14. Drachsler, H., Peccau, D., Arts, T., Hutten, E., Rutledge, L., Van Rosmalen, P., Hummel, 
H., Koper, R.: ReMashed - An Usability Study of a Recommender System for Mash-Ups 
for Learning. In: 1st Workshop on Mashups for Learning at the International Conference 
on Interactive Computer Aided Learning, Villach, Austria (submitted) 


ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments

O. Liber

R. Koper

H. Drachsler

A. Shepitsen

P. Symeonidis

N. Garg

Crossref

The following article presents a Mash-Up Personal Learning Environment called ReMashed that recommends learning resources from emerging information of a Learning Network. In ReMashed learners can specify certain Web2.0 services and combine them in a Mash-Up Personal Learning Environment. Learners can rate information from an emerging amount of Web2.0 information of a Learning Network and train a recommender system for their particular needs. ReMashed therefore has three main objectives: 1. to provide a recommender system for Mash-up Personal Learning Environments to learners, 2. to offer an environment for testing new recommendation approaches and methods for researchers, and 3. to create informal user-generated content data sets that are needed to evaluate new recommendation algorithms for learners in informal Learning Networks

Open University of the Netherlands Research Portal

Open Universiteit www.ou.nl ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up PersonalLearning EnvironmentsCitation for published version (APA):Drachsler, H., Pecceu, D., Arts, T., Hutten, E., Rutledge, L., Van Rosmalen, P., Hummel, H., & Koper, R. (2009).ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments. Default journal.Document status and date:Published: 16/11/2009Document Version:Peer reviewed versionDocument license:CC BY-NCPlease check the document version of this publication:• A submitted manuscript is the version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences betweenthe submitted version and the official published version of record. People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for thefinal version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website.• The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review.• The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers.Link to publicationGeneral rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright ownersand it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.• You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain• You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal.If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the “Taverne” license above, pleasefollow below link for the End User Agreement:https://www.ou.nl/taverne-agreementTake down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us at:pure-support@ou.nlproviding details and we will investigate your claim.Downloaded from https://research.ou.nl/ on date: 16 Jul. 2023 U. Cress, V. Dimitrova, and M. Specht (Eds.): EC-TEL 2009, LNCS 5794, pp. 788–793, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments Hendrik Drachsler1, Dries Pecceu2, Tanja Arts2, Edwin Hutten2, Lloyd Rutledge2, Peter van Rosmalen1, Hans Hummel1, and Rob Koper1 Open University of the Netherlands, 1 Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies &  2 Computer Science Department, PO-Box 2960, 6401 DL Heerlen, The Netherlands {hendrik.drachsler,lloyd.rutledge,peter.vanrosmalen, hans.hummel,rob.koper}@ou.nl,  {pecceu,ekh.hutten,tg.arts}@studie.ou.nl Abstract. The following article presents a Mash-Up Personal Learning Envi-ronment called ReMashed that recommends learning resources from emerging information of a Learning Network. In ReMashed learners can specify certain Web2.0 services and combine them in a Mash-Up Personal Learning Environ-ment. Learners can rate information from an emerging amount of Web2.0  information of a Learning Network and train a recommender system for their particular needs. ReMashed therefore has three main objectives: 1. to provide a recommender system for Mash-up Personal Learning Environments to learners, 2. to offer an environment for testing new recommendation approaches and methods for researchers, and 3. to create informal user-generated content data sets that are needed to evaluate new recommendation algorithms for learners in informal Learning Networks.  Keywords: recommender system, mash-up, personalisation, personal learning environments, MUPPLE, informal learning, emergence, learning networks. 1   Introduction Nowadays, Internet users take advantage of Personal Environments (PEs) like iGoogle or Netvibes to create a personal view on information they are interested in. The existence of PEs inspired researchers in Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) to explore this technology for learning purposes. As a consequence Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) were invented for learners [1, 2]. Because of the combination of various Web2.0 sources in a PLE they are also called Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLEs) [3].  MUPPLEs are a kind of instance of the Learning Network concept [4] and there-fore share several characteristics with it. Learning Networks consist of user-generated content by learners who are able to create, comment, tag, rate, share and study learn-ing resources. Due to the large amount of learning resources and learners the Learning Network can show emerging patterns. Learning Networks are from the bottom-up driven because their content is not created by paid domain experts but rather by their  ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments 789  members. These networks explicitly address informal learning because no assessment or accreditation process is connected to them.  MUPPLEs also support informal learning as they require no institutional back-ground and no fees. Instead the focus is on the learner independent from institutional needs like student management or assessments. Although, they are most appropriate for informal learning, educational scenarios are imaginable where MUPPLEs become integrated into formal courses as well. MUPPLEs are used to combine different in-formation from the web that is supportive to the individual learner regarding the per-sonal competence development. Most of the time, the sources are free to use and selected by the learner.   A common problem for PEs and MUPPLEs is the amount of data that is gathered in a short time frame. The learners can be overwhelmed by the information they re-ceive or they might have problems selecting the most suitable learning resource for their personal competence development. Therefore, we developed a recommender system that offers advice to learners to find suitable learning resources for their indi-vidual competence development.  The main purpose of recommender systems on the Internet is to pre-select information a user might be interested in. The motivation for a recommender system for MUPPLEs is to improve the ‘educational provision’; to offer a better learning goal attainment and to spend less time to search for suitable learning resources [5].  In the following section we first discuss related work (section two). After that we introduce the ReMashed system (section three) and finally discuss future research (section four). 2   Related Work Nowadays, ‘mashing’ information becomes a widely used activity on the Internet. Various tools (Yahoo Pipes, Dapper, Openkapow etc.) provide the opportunity to combine information from other websites in a new way. Users do not need special programming skills to use the tools in order to combine different Internet sources. The users can make advantage of public APIs of Web2.0 services and standardized XML formats like Jason to mash data in a new way.  In TEL several European projects address these bottom-up approaches of creating and sharing knowledge. The TENCompetence project addresses learners in informal Learning Networks [6]. The iCamp project explicitly addresses research around MUPPLEs [3]. They created an easy programmable and flexible environment that allows learners to create their own MUPPLE for certain learning activities.  However, these systems face the problem that the emerging behavior of these bot-tom-up approaches gathers large amounts of data. With the ReMashed system we want to offer navigation support for such emerging bottom-up MUPPLEs to help learners to find the most suitable data for their learning goals.  In recommender system research, extensive studies is going on to take advantage of tags for recommendations [7, 8]. Single systems like Delicious or Flickr offer rec-ommendations to their users based on their data and also researchers take advantage of single Web2.0 services to create recommender systems [9]. However, the combina-tion of different Web2.0 services to recommend information based on mashed tag and 790 H. Drachsler et al.  rating data has not been attempted so far and especially not for learners in MUPPLEs. Thus, ReMashed offers a new approach by mashing data of learners from various Web2.0 services to provide pedagogical recommendations. 3   The ReMashed System A prominent example of ReMashed from a different domain is the MovieLens project created by the GroupLens research group. They offer a movie recommender service where people can rate movies and get recommendations for movies. Besides this attractive services GroupLens created a frequently used data set for the development of recommender systems and related research [10]. Likewise ReMashed has three main objectives: 1. to provide a recommender system for MUPPLEs to learners, 2. to offer an environment for testing new recommendation approaches and methods for researchers, and 3. to create informal user-generated-content data sets that are needed to evaluate new recommendation algorithms for learners in informal Learning Net-works.  Fig. 1. The user interface of the ReMashed system. On the left side, the mashed information from delicious and blogs are shown. On the right side, the rating based recommendations for the current learner are presented. In order to test our recommendation approach for MUPPLEs we designed a Mash-Up that enables learners to integrate their Web2.0 sources (see Fig 1). The system allows the learners to personalise emerging information of a community to their pref-erences. They can rate information of the Web2.0 sources in order to define which contributions of other members they like and do not like. ReMashed takes the prefer-ences into account to offer tailored recommendation to the learner. ReMashed uses  ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments 791  collaborative filtering [11] to generate recommendations. It works by matching to-gether users with similar opinions about learning resources. Each member of the sys-tem has a 'neighborhood' of other like-minded users. Ratings and tags from these neighbors are used to create personalised recommendations for the current learner. The recommender system combines tag and rating based collaborative filtering algo-rithms in a recommendation strategy. Such a recommendation strategy reacts on cer-tain situations by using the most suitable recommendation technique. The recommen-dation strategy is triggered by certain pedagogical situations based on the profile of the learner or available learning resources [12].  In the initial state of ReMashed, learners have sign up for the system and have not rated any learning resources. ReMashed identifies the cold-start situation of the re-commender system [11] and recommends resources based on tags of the Web2.0 sources of the current learner. It computes the similarity between the tag cloud of the current learner with other learners and learning resources. After the learner started to rate resources above a certain threshold a rating based Slope-One algorithm  provides additional recommendations to the learner.  ReMashed is an Open Source project based on PHP5, Zend Framework 1.7 with the Dojo Ajax framework, MySQL database, Apache Server and the Duine recom-mendation engine. ReMashed is following the Model-View-Controller programming concept and is therefore fully object oriented. It consists of five sub-systems  (see Fig 2), a user interface, a data collector, a user logger, a recommender system and the Duine prediction engine [13].  Fig. 2. Technical architecture of the ReMashed system 792 H. Drachsler et al.  ─ The User Interface is responsible for user interaction, authentication of users, registration of new users and updating of user data.  ─ The Data Collector establishes the connection between the Web2.0 services and gathers new data into the ReMashed database via a CRON job that runs every hour.  ─ The Logger offers logging methods to the other subsystems. It stores log mes-sages and monitors user actions in the system. ─ The Recommender System composes the recommendations for every user and puts them into the database. It allows implementing new recommendation algo-rithms in PHP but it also provides a connection to the Duine 4.0 prediction en-gine based on JAVA that can be used to compute recommendations for the learning resource.  ─ The Duine Prediction Engine offers extensive options for configuring various recommender algorithms. It provides a sample of most common recommenda-tion algorithms that can be combined in algorithm strategies, thus it is possible to create new recommendation strategies that follow pedagogical rules.  We tested the system in an usability evaluation in a group of 49 users from 8 dif-ferent countries [14]. The evaluation phase ran for one month and was concluded with an online recall questionnaire. In that timeframe 4961 resources were collected, 420 resources were rated and 813 recommendations were offered. The overall satisfaction with the system was positive. Nevertheless, the participants suggested particular im-provements we will take into account for the future development of the system.   4   Conclusions and Future Research This article presented the ReMashed system, an evaluation tool for recommender systems for learners in informal Learning Networks. The article showed the design and implementation of a recommender system for MUPPLEs.  The future developments of ReMashed rely on an end-user perspective and on a re-searcher perspective. Regarding the end-user perspective ReMashed needs to inte-grate additional Web2.0 features (i.e. integrating social networks like facebook). This may improve the isolation of informal learners towards the organisation of learning communities. Retrieved information from social networks can be used to improve the recommendations and strengthen the communities; for instance, learners that have certain social relationships will likely want to share their learning resources with their community. The type of relationship between learners can affect which kinds of rec-ommendations are given. In addition, ReMashed should provide a widget interface to enable learners to integrate recommendations from ReMashed into their MUPPLEs. Such a widget has to provide the recommendations and the possibility to rate learning resources to further personalise the needs of the learners.  From a researcher perspective, ReMashed opens the possibility to provide user-generated-content data sets of various domains. Comparable to the famous MovieL-ens data set, a standard for the evaluation and development of recommender system algorithm in TEL can be created. Further, when considering different ReMashed communities in health, education or public affairs, data sets from theses domains can be used to develop solutions for the cold-start problem of recommender system by providing an already rated data set for a particular domain.     ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments 793  Acknowledgement Authors’ efforts were (partly) funded by the European Commission in TENCompe-tence (IST-2004-02787) (http://www.tencompetence.org). References 1. Liber, O., Johnson, M.: Personal Learning Environments. Interactive Learning Environ-ments 16, 1–2 (2008) 2. Wild, F., Kalz, M., Palmer, M. (eds.): Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments. CEUR Workshop Proceedings Maastricht, The Netherlands, vol. 388 (2008) 3. Wild, F., Moedritscher, F., Sigurdarson, S.E.: Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments. eLearning Papers 9 (2008) 4. Koper, R., Tattersall, C.: New directions for lifelong learning using network technologies. British Journal of Educational Technology 35, 689–700 (2004) 5. Drachsler, H., Hummel, H., Koper, R.: Identifying the Goal, User model and Conditions of Recommender Systems for Formal and Informal Learning. Journal of Digital Informa-tion 10, 4–24 (2009) 6. Wilson, S., Sharples, P., Griffith, D.: Distributing education services to personal and  institutional systems using Widgets. In: Wild, F., Kalz, M., Palmer, M. (eds.) Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments, Proceedings of the 1st MUPPLE workshop.  CEUR-Proceedings, Maastricht, The Netherlands,vol. 388 (2008) 7. Shepitsen, A., Gemmell, J., Mobasher, B., Burke, R.: Personalized recommendation in  social tagging systems using hierarchical clustering. In: Recommender Systems 2008,  pp. 259–266. ACM, New York (2008) 8. Symeonidis, P., Nanopoulos, A., Manolopoulos, Y.: Tag recommendations based on tensor dimensionality reduction. In: Recommender Systems 2008, pp. 43–50. ACM, New York (2008) 9. Garg, N., Weber, I.: Personalized, interactive tag recommendation for flickr. In: Recom-mender System 2009, pp. 67–74. ACM, New York (2009) 10. Sarwar, B.M., Karypis, G., Konstan, J., Riedl, J.: Recommender systems for large-scale  e-commerce: Scalable neighborhood formation using clustering. In: Fifth International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (2002) 11. Herlocker, J.L., Konstan, J.A., Riedl, J.: Explaining collaborative filtering recommenda-tions. In: Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, pp. 241–250 (2000) 12. Drachsler, H., Hummel, H., Koper, R.: Personal recommender systems for learners in life-long learning: requirements, techniques and model. International Journal of Learning Technology 3, 404–423 (2008) 13. Van Setten, M.: Supporting people in finding information. Hybrid recommender systems and goal-based structuring. Telematica Instituut Fundamental Research Series No. 016 (TI/FRS/016) (2005)  14. Drachsler, H., Peccau, D., Arts, T., Hutten, E., Rutledge, L., Van Rosmalen, P., Hummel, H., Koper, R.: ReMashed - An Usability Study of a Recommender System for Mash-Ups for Learning. In: 1st Workshop on Mashups for Learning at the International Conference on Interactive Computer Aided Learning, Villach, Austria (submitted) 

English

Open Universiteit www.ou.nl ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up PersonalLearning EnvironmentsCitation for published version (APA):Drachsler, H., Pecceu, D., Arts, T., Hutten, E., Rutledge, L., Van Rosmalen, P., Hummel, H., & Koper, R. (2009).ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments. Default journal.Document status and date:Published: 16/11/2009Document Version:Peer reviewed versionDocument license:CC BY-NCPlease check the document version of this publication:• A submitted manuscript is the version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences betweenthe submitted version and the official published version of record. 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Cress, V. Dimitrova, and M. Specht (Eds.): EC-TEL 2009, LNCS 5794, pp. 788–793, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments Hendrik Drachsler1, Dries Pecceu2, Tanja Arts2, Edwin Hutten2, Lloyd Rutledge2, Peter van Rosmalen1, Hans Hummel1, and Rob Koper1 Open University of the Netherlands, 1 Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies &  2 Computer Science Department, PO-Box 2960, 6401 DL Heerlen, The Netherlands {hendrik.drachsler,lloyd.rutledge,peter.vanrosmalen, hans.hummel,rob.koper}@ou.nl,  {pecceu,ekh.hutten,tg.arts}@studie.ou.nl Abstract. The following article presents a Mash-Up Personal Learning Envi-ronment called ReMashed that recommends learning resources from emerging information of a Learning Network. In ReMashed learners can specify certain Web2.0 services and combine them in a Mash-Up Personal Learning Environ-ment. Learners can rate information from an emerging amount of Web2.0  information of a Learning Network and train a recommender system for their particular needs. ReMashed therefore has three main objectives: 1. to provide a recommender system for Mash-up Personal Learning Environments to learners, 2. to offer an environment for testing new recommendation approaches and methods for researchers, and 3. to create informal user-generated content data sets that are needed to evaluate new recommendation algorithms for learners in informal Learning Networks.  Keywords: recommender system, mash-up, personalisation, personal learning environments, MUPPLE, informal learning, emergence, learning networks. 1   Introduction Nowadays, Internet users take advantage of Personal Environments (PEs) like iGoogle or Netvibes to create a personal view on information they are interested in. The existence of PEs inspired researchers in Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) to explore this technology for learning purposes. As a consequence Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) were invented for learners [1, 2]. Because of the combination of various Web2.0 sources in a PLE they are also called Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLEs) [3].  MUPPLEs are a kind of instance of the Learning Network concept [4] and there-fore share several characteristics with it. Learning Networks consist of user-generated content by learners who are able to create, comment, tag, rate, share and study learn-ing resources. Due to the large amount of learning resources and learners the Learning Network can show emerging patterns. Learning Networks are from the bottom-up driven because their content is not created by paid domain experts but rather by their  ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments 789  members. These networks explicitly address informal learning because no assessment or accreditation process is connected to them.  MUPPLEs also support informal learning as they require no institutional back-ground and no fees. Instead the focus is on the learner independent from institutional needs like student management or assessments. Although, they are most appropriate for informal learning, educational scenarios are imaginable where MUPPLEs become integrated into formal courses as well. MUPPLEs are used to combine different in-formation from the web that is supportive to the individual learner regarding the per-sonal competence development. Most of the time, the sources are free to use and selected by the learner.   A common problem for PEs and MUPPLEs is the amount of data that is gathered in a short time frame. The learners can be overwhelmed by the information they re-ceive or they might have problems selecting the most suitable learning resource for their personal competence development. Therefore, we developed a recommender system that offers advice to learners to find suitable learning resources for their indi-vidual competence development.  The main purpose of recommender systems on the Internet is to pre-select information a user might be interested in. The motivation for a recommender system for MUPPLEs is to improve the ‘educational provision’; to offer a better learning goal attainment and to spend less time to search for suitable learning resources [5].  In the following section we first discuss related work (section two). After that we introduce the ReMashed system (section three) and finally discuss future research (section four). 2   Related Work Nowadays, ‘mashing’ information becomes a widely used activity on the Internet. Various tools (Yahoo Pipes, Dapper, Openkapow etc.) provide the opportunity to combine information from other websites in a new way. Users do not need special programming skills to use the tools in order to combine different Internet sources. The users can make advantage of public APIs of Web2.0 services and standardized XML formats like Jason to mash data in a new way.  In TEL several European projects address these bottom-up approaches of creating and sharing knowledge. The TENCompetence project addresses learners in informal Learning Networks [6]. The iCamp project explicitly addresses research around MUPPLEs [3]. They created an easy programmable and flexible environment that allows learners to create their own MUPPLE for certain learning activities.  However, these systems face the problem that the emerging behavior of these bot-tom-up approaches gathers large amounts of data. With the ReMashed system we want to offer navigation support for such emerging bottom-up MUPPLEs to help learners to find the most suitable data for their learning goals.  In recommender system research, extensive studies is going on to take advantage of tags for recommendations [7, 8]. Single systems like Delicious or Flickr offer rec-ommendations to their users based on their data and also researchers take advantage of single Web2.0 services to create recommender systems [9]. However, the combina-tion of different Web2.0 services to recommend information based on mashed tag and 790 H. Drachsler et al.  rating data has not been attempted so far and especially not for learners in MUPPLEs. Thus, ReMashed offers a new approach by mashing data of learners from various Web2.0 services to provide pedagogical recommendations. 3   The ReMashed System A prominent example of ReMashed from a different domain is the MovieLens project created by the GroupLens research group. They offer a movie recommender service where people can rate movies and get recommendations for movies. Besides this attractive services GroupLens created a frequently used data set for the development of recommender systems and related research [10]. Likewise ReMashed has three main objectives: 1. to provide a recommender system for MUPPLEs to learners, 2. to offer an environment for testing new recommendation approaches and methods for researchers, and 3. to create informal user-generated-content data sets that are needed to evaluate new recommendation algorithms for learners in informal Learning Net-works.  Fig. 1. The user interface of the ReMashed system. On the left side, the mashed information from delicious and blogs are shown. On the right side, the rating based recommendations for the current learner are presented. In order to test our recommendation approach for MUPPLEs we designed a Mash-Up that enables learners to integrate their Web2.0 sources (see Fig 1). The system allows the learners to personalise emerging information of a community to their pref-erences. They can rate information of the Web2.0 sources in order to define which contributions of other members they like and do not like. ReMashed takes the prefer-ences into account to offer tailored recommendation to the learner. ReMashed uses  ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments 791  collaborative filtering [11] to generate recommendations. It works by matching to-gether users with similar opinions about learning resources. Each member of the sys-tem has a 'neighborhood' of other like-minded users. Ratings and tags from these neighbors are used to create personalised recommendations for the current learner. The recommender system combines tag and rating based collaborative filtering algo-rithms in a recommendation strategy. Such a recommendation strategy reacts on cer-tain situations by using the most suitable recommendation technique. The recommen-dation strategy is triggered by certain pedagogical situations based on the profile of the learner or available learning resources [12].  In the initial state of ReMashed, learners have sign up for the system and have not rated any learning resources. ReMashed identifies the cold-start situation of the re-commender system [11] and recommends resources based on tags of the Web2.0 sources of the current learner. It computes the similarity between the tag cloud of the current learner with other learners and learning resources. After the learner started to rate resources above a certain threshold a rating based Slope-One algorithm  provides additional recommendations to the learner.  ReMashed is an Open Source project based on PHP5, Zend Framework 1.7 with the Dojo Ajax framework, MySQL database, Apache Server and the Duine recom-mendation engine. ReMashed is following the Model-View-Controller programming concept and is therefore fully object oriented. It consists of five sub-systems  (see Fig 2), a user interface, a data collector, a user logger, a recommender system and the Duine prediction engine [13].  Fig. 2. Technical architecture of the ReMashed system 792 H. Drachsler et al.  ─ The User Interface is responsible for user interaction, authentication of users, registration of new users and updating of user data.  ─ The Data Collector establishes the connection between the Web2.0 services and gathers new data into the ReMashed database via a CRON job that runs every hour.  ─ The Logger offers logging methods to the other subsystems. It stores log mes-sages and monitors user actions in the system. ─ The Recommender System composes the recommendations for every user and puts them into the database. It allows implementing new recommendation algo-rithms in PHP but it also provides a connection to the Duine 4.0 prediction en-gine based on JAVA that can be used to compute recommendations for the learning resource.  ─ The Duine Prediction Engine offers extensive options for configuring various recommender algorithms. It provides a sample of most common recommenda-tion algorithms that can be combined in algorithm strategies, thus it is possible to create new recommendation strategies that follow pedagogical rules.  We tested the system in an usability evaluation in a group of 49 users from 8 dif-ferent countries [14]. The evaluation phase ran for one month and was concluded with an online recall questionnaire. In that timeframe 4961 resources were collected, 420 resources were rated and 813 recommendations were offered. The overall satisfaction with the system was positive. Nevertheless, the participants suggested particular im-provements we will take into account for the future development of the system.   4   Conclusions and Future Research This article presented the ReMashed system, an evaluation tool for recommender systems for learners in informal Learning Networks. The article showed the design and implementation of a recommender system for MUPPLEs.  The future developments of ReMashed rely on an end-user perspective and on a re-searcher perspective. Regarding the end-user perspective ReMashed needs to inte-grate additional Web2.0 features (i.e. integrating social networks like facebook). This may improve the isolation of informal learners towards the organisation of learning communities. Retrieved information from social networks can be used to improve the recommendations and strengthen the communities; for instance, learners that have certain social relationships will likely want to share their learning resources with their community. The type of relationship between learners can affect which kinds of rec-ommendations are given. In addition, ReMashed should provide a widget interface to enable learners to integrate recommendations from ReMashed into their MUPPLEs. Such a widget has to provide the recommendations and the possibility to rate learning resources to further personalise the needs of the learners.  From a researcher perspective, ReMashed opens the possibility to provide user-generated-content data sets of various domains. Comparable to the famous MovieL-ens data set, a standard for the evaluation and development of recommender system algorithm in TEL can be created. Further, when considering different ReMashed communities in health, education or public affairs, data sets from theses domains can be used to develop solutions for the cold-start problem of recommender system by providing an already rated data set for a particular domain.     ReMashed – Recommendations for Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments 793  Acknowledgement Authors’ efforts were (partly) funded by the European Commission in TENCompe-tence (IST-2004-02787) (http://www.tencompetence.org). References 1. Liber, O., Johnson, M.: Personal Learning Environments. Interactive Learning Environ-ments 16, 1–2 (2008) 2. Wild, F., Kalz, M., Palmer, M. (eds.): Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments. CEUR Workshop Proceedings Maastricht, The Netherlands, vol. 388 (2008) 3. Wild, F., Moedritscher, F., Sigurdarson, S.E.: Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments. eLearning Papers 9 (2008) 4. Koper, R., Tattersall, C.: New directions for lifelong learning using network technologies. British Journal of Educational Technology 35, 689–700 (2004) 5. Drachsler, H., Hummel, H., Koper, R.: Identifying the Goal, User model and Conditions of Recommender Systems for Formal and Informal Learning. Journal of Digital Informa-tion 10, 4–24 (2009) 6. Wilson, S., Sharples, P., Griffith, D.: Distributing education services to personal and  institutional systems using Widgets. In: Wild, F., Kalz, M., Palmer, M. (eds.) Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments, Proceedings of the 1st MUPPLE workshop.  CEUR-Proceedings, Maastricht, The Netherlands,vol. 388 (2008) 7. Shepitsen, A., Gemmell, J., Mobasher, B., Burke, R.: Personalized recommendation in  social tagging systems using hierarchical clustering. In: Recommender Systems 2008,  pp. 259–266. ACM, New York (2008) 8. Symeonidis, P., Nanopoulos, A., Manolopoulos, Y.: Tag recommendations based on tensor dimensionality reduction. In: Recommender Systems 2008, pp. 43–50. ACM, New York (2008) 9. Garg, N., Weber, I.: Personalized, interactive tag recommendation for flickr. In: Recom-mender System 2009, pp. 67–74. ACM, New York (2009) 10. Sarwar, B.M., Karypis, G., Konstan, J., Riedl, J.: Recommender systems for large-scale  e-commerce: Scalable neighborhood formation using clustering. In: Fifth International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (2002) 11. Herlocker, J.L., Konstan, J.A., Riedl, J.: Explaining collaborative filtering recommenda-tions. In: Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, pp. 241–250 (2000) 12. Drachsler, H., Hummel, H., Koper, R.: Personal recommender systems for learners in life-long learning: requirements, techniques and model. International Journal of Learning Technology 3, 404–423 (2008) 13. Van Setten, M.: Supporting people in finding information. Hybrid recommender systems and goal-based structuring. Telematica Instituut Fundamental Research Series No. 016 (TI/FRS/016) (2005)  14. Drachsler, H., Peccau, D., Arts, T., Hutten, E., Rutledge, L., Van Rosmalen, P., Hummel, H., Koper, R.: ReMashed - An Usability Study of a Recommender System for Mash-Ups for Learning. In: 1st Workshop on Mashups for Learning at the International Conference on Interactive Computer Aided Learning, Villach, Austria (submitted) 

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