Sustaining TEL: From Innovation to Learning and Practice

This paper explores two classes of emerging technology that offer the promise to provide radically improved ways to support lifelong learning. We particularly focus on the human computer interaction (HCI) challenges that must be addressed if that promise is to be realised. One technology is

personalisation

, based on a

long term learner model

which captures the learner’s knowledge, preferences and other attributes. We discuss the roles of an

explicit learner model

that is a first class software entity, with APIs for programmers as well as effective user interfaces that can give users control over their model and its use. We present the PLUS framework that provides the infrastructure for personalised learning, and how its Accretion-Resolution representation supports both flexible reasoning for personalisation by programs and provides the foundation for users to control the whole personalisation process. We link the PLUS framework to a second class of technology, the fast-changing and increasingly ubiquitous

personal mobile devices

and the emerging

embedded surface computing devices

, such as tabletop and shared wall displays. We show how we have tackled several of the HCI challenges that are key to both these technologies.

An inquiry-led investigation with technology was designed and implemented, aiming to enhance our understanding of how inquiry learning takes place within a personal, socio-cultural and institutional context. Children used personal technologies across contexts, to plan and collect evidence, analyse and share their work. These technologies are boundary objects, connecting students’ experiences across the classroom, out-of-class activities, a fieldtrip and the home, and enabling students to carry out inquiry activities autonomously. The science teacher aimed to maintain a sense of continuity across contexts by utilising specific management strategies: interchanging between highlighting and constraining technology use, ensuring that all students know what they need to do in and out of class, communicating interdependencies among groups and by translating group data to an overview of the whole class data. These strategies are identified as prerequisites for any successful inquiry learning experience to take place.

Agents are autonomous software components that work with one another in a decentralized fashion to achieve some end. Agent systems have been used in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) before, but these applications seldom take advantage of the fact that each agent may have its own goals and strategies, which makes agent systems an attractive way of providing personalized learning. In particular, since agents can solve problems in a decentralized way, this makes them an attractive way of supporting informal learning. In this paper we use scenarios to examine how common problem solving techniques from the agents world (voting, coalition formation and auction systems) map to significant challenges for personalized and informal learning in the TEL world. Through an agent simulation we then show how an agent system might perform in one of those scenarios and explore how different agent strategies might influence the outcome. Based on this work we argue that agent systems provide a way of providing ultra-personalization of the learning process in a decentralized way and highlight equitability and scrutability as two key challenges for future investigation.

Scaffolding is a well-known approach to bridge the gap between novice and expert capabilities in a discovery-oriented learning environment. This paper discusses a set of knowledge representations referred to as Learning Spaces (LSs) that can be used to support learners in acquiring conceptual knowledge of system behaviour. The LSs are logically self-contained, meaning that models created at a specific LS can be simulated. Working with the LSs provides scaffolding for learners in two ways. First, each LS provides a restricted set of representational primitives to express knowledge, which focus the learner’s knowledge construction process. Second, the logical consequences of an expression derived upon simulating, provide learners a reflective instrument for evaluating the status of their understanding, to which they can react accordingly.

The work presented here is part of the DynaLearn project, which builds an Interactive Learning Environment to study a constructive approach to having learners develop a qualitative understanding of how systems behave. The work presented here thus focuses on tools to support educational research. Consequently, user-oriented evaluation of these tools is not a part of this paper.

In order to understand whether conceptual obscurity is truly the reason for the slow uptake of IMS Learning Design (LD), we have initiated an investigation into teachers’ understanding of IMS LD outside of technological environments. Using paper representations (“snippets”) of IMS LD component and method elements at levels A and B, 21 higher education teachers from nine countries recreated a prescribed textual learning design. Results showed that the teachers achieved an average conformity of 78% with a prototypical expert solution after watching a 45-minute IMS LD introduction. Despite successfully using IMS LD’s elements, teachers reported having difficulties understanding the concepts environment, property, role-part, and condition. We conclude that the specification per se does not present an insuperable obstacle for teachers, and that from a usability perspective the calls for a new or modified LD specification might be premature, since most obstacles can be overcome with appropriate abstractions in LD tools.

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) offer the potential to facilitate collaborative learning in new ways. This paper presents an empirical study that investigated the effects of a TUI in a classroom setting on task performance and learning outcomes. In the tangible condition, apprentices worked together around an interactive tabletop warehouse simulation using tangible inputs. In the paper condition, they performed the same activity with only paper and pens. Results showed that the tangible condition resulted in better task performance (more alternative solutions explored and better final solution) but did not affect learning outcomes, i.e. understanding of important concepts and applying them to a problem-solving question. We discuss reasons for this in terms of task structure and type, nature of tangible user interfaces and effective interaction requirements.

We present a study which compares human-human computer-mediated tutoring with two computer tutoring systems based on the same materials but differing in the type of feedback they provide. Our results show that there are significant differences in interaction style between human-human and human-computer tutoring, as well as between the two computer tutors, and that different dialogue characteristics predict learning gain in different conditions. We show that there are significant differences in the non-content statements that students make to human and computer tutors, but also to different types of computer tutors. These differences also affect which factors are correlated with learning gain and user satisfaction. We argue that ITS designers should pay particular attention to strategies for dealing with negative social and metacognitive statements, and also conduct further research on how interaction style affects human-computer tutoring.

A key concern in game-based learning is the level of authenticity games require in order to match what learners can expect in the real world, what keeps them engaged in the game, and what they need to learn. We examined authenticity or credibility in a game from the learner’s perspective. There are very few studies on this aspect. We propose that authenticity is the result of a compromise between external authenticity (perceived likeness with real life reference), internal authenticity (perceived internal coherence of proposed situations) and didactical authenticity (perceived relevance about learning goals). Our empirical exploratory study investigated undergraduate students’ perceptions of authenticity in healthcare game LoE. First, we suggest some attributes for learning games expected to favour game authenticity. We present the choices made for LoE as result of the compromise between the three aspects of authenticity. Second, we analyze students’ behaviour and judgments on authenticity.

IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) is an open specification to support interoperability of advanced educational designs for a wide range of technology-enhanced learning solutions and other units of learning. This paper analyses approaches to model personalised learning experiences with and without explicit adaptive features in IMS LD. The paper has two main parts. The first part analyses the relation between orchestrating learning and IMS LD’s semantic features. The second part compares modelling strategies for educational designs for personalised learning in non-collaborative learning units using IMS LD Level A and IMS LD Level B features. The analysis is based on two worked-out IMS LD units. The paper concludes with a comparison of the two modelling approaches and addresses gaps when integrating adaptation concepts at the levels of the specification.

This article tries to shed some light over the management of assessment resources in a repository of educational resources from an outcome-based perspective. The approximation to this problem is based on the ICOPER Reference Model, as a model to capture e-learning data, services and processes, addressing an interoperability approach. To demonstrate this proposal, a prototype has been implemented. This article also describes the design and development of this prototype that accesses a repository of educational resources (the Open ICOPER Content Space - OICS), the main features of the prototype, the development environment and the evaluation that is being performed.

Knowledge work is performed in all occupations and across all industries. The level of similarity of knowledge work allows for designing supporting tools that can be widely used. In this paper an activity-based perspective towards knowledge work is taken. Based on findings from a previous ethnographically-informed study, we identified valuable activities to be supported in order to increase knowledge maturing inside companies. The goal of this paper is to contribute to which knowledge maturing activities are deemed important, so that they can be supported by IT services. Quantitative and qualitative data have been collected in 126 organisations of different size, sector and knowledge intensity. Important feedback and issues emerged and need to be managed in order to support success in the knowledge maturing activities that allow improvement of organisational learning through the dissemination and application of the most appropriate knowledge.

We present basic concepts and an outlook on current approaches and techniques of personal learning environments to point out their demands, focussing on recommendations in self-regulated learning scenarios as a major basic functionality of PLEs. In the context of the ROLE project, we explain how we plan to meet these demands by using user observations stored in the format of the contextualized attention metadata schema.

ARIADNE is a European foundation that aims to foster “Share and Reuse” of learning resources. To support this goal, ARIADNE has created an infrastructure for managing learning objects in an open and scalable way. This paper describes the technical approach behind our open, standards based infrastructure, how content providers can connect to it, and the value they can derive from doing so. As such, the abundance that we help to unlock will act as a platform for innovation by tool developers, trainers and teachers and learners themselves.

The IMS Learning Design specification is acknowledged as the most promising option available presently for the implementation of collaboration scripts in e-learning. Nevertheless, it has been criticized for a number of shortcomings, and, specifically for its lack of support for constructs that would enable comprehensive adaptive support to be effected over the collaborative learning process. In this paper we propose concrete extensions to the specification, which build upon prior work and address a wide range of problems and omissions. The most important modifications introduced include: explicit support for groups, and run-time member assignment; addition of a run-time model; introduction of concrete artefacts; introduction of an event-handling model; and, a modified sequencing and script organization model.

We present a work-integrated learning (WIL) concept which aims at empowering employees to learn while performing their work tasks. Within three usage scenarios we introduce the APOSDLE environment which embodies the WIL concept and helps knowledge workers move fluidly along the whole spectrum of WIL activities. By doing so, they are experiencing varying degrees of learning guidance: from building awareness, over exposing knowledge structures and contextualizing cooperation, to triggering reflection and systematic competence development. Four key APOSDLE components are responsible for providing this variety of learning guidance. The challenge in their design lies in offering learning guidance without being domain-specific and without relying on manually created learning content. Our three month summative workplace evaluation within three application organizations suggests that learners prefer awarenss building functionalities and descriptive learning guidance and reveals that they benefited from it.

Local reuse detection is a prerequisite for a multitude of tasks ranging from document management and information retrieval to web search or plagiarism detection. Its results can be used to support authors in creating new learning resources or learners in finding existing ones by providing accurate suggestions for related documents. While the detection of local text reuse, i.e. reuse of parts of documents, is covered by various approaches, reuse detection for object-based documents has been hardly considered yet. In this paper we propose a new fingerprinting technique for local reuse detection for both text-based and object-based documents which is based on the contiguity of documents. This additional information, which is generally disregarded by existing approaches, allows the creation of shorter and more flexible fingerprints. Evaluations performed on different corpora have shown that it performs better than existing approaches while maintaining a significantly lower storage consumption.

Design characteristics constitute a promising approach to support researchers and practitioners in designing, selecting, and evaluating Virtual Learning Environments in order to prevent costly misconceptions in every phase of the software application process. Hence, the current paper aims at providing a rigorous and relevant model for assessing the success of Virtual Learning Environments so that researchers and practitioners will be enabled to a) better understand particular information- and system-related success drivers, b) systematically evaluate Virtual Learning Environments, and c) have a means for management interventions, task prioritizations as well as effective and efficient resource allocation.

The MiGen project is designing and developing an intelligent, exploratory environment to support 11–14-year-old students in their learning of algebraic generalisation. Deployed within the classroom, the system is also providing tools to assist teachers in monitoring students’ activities and progress. This paper describes the architectural design of these Teacher Assistance tools and gives a detailed description of one such tool, focussing in particular on the technologies and approaches chosen to implement the necessary functionality given the context of the project.

Collaboration scripts formulate flows of orchestrated groups and learning activities. When these scripts are computationally supported they are called Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning scripts. Several modeling languages have been proposed to computationally represent the scripts so that they can be interpreted by learning environments. In this paper we address how the definition of these scripts can be influenced by the impact of the space characteristics, including the electronic and non-electronic devices available to support the learning activities. The use of portable and electronic devices is increasing the importance of the role of educational spaces, which become an agent able to shape users’ interactions and, therefore, the way collaboration and learning is produced. This paper introduces a model that enables the specification of the space as a conditioning factor in the design and enactment of scripting processes. Two real scenarios and a web-based prototype application for the design of learning spaces illustrate the value of the proposed model.

Supporting learning activities during work has gained momentum for organizations since work-integrated learning (WIL) has been shown to increase productivity of knowledge workers. WIL aims at fostering learning at the workplace, during work, for enhancing task performance. A key challenge for enabling task-specific, contextualized, personalized learning and work support is to automatically detect the user’s task. In this paper we utilize our ontology-based user task detection approach for studying the factors influencing task detection performance. We describe three laboratory experiments we have performed in two domains including over 40 users and more than 500 recorded task executions. The insights gained from our evaluation are: (i) the J48 decision tree and Naïve Bayes classifiers perform best, (ii) six features can be isolated, which provide good classification accuracy, (iii) knowledge-intensive tasks can be classified as well as routine tasks and (iv) a classifier trained by experts on standardized tasks can be used to classify users’ personal tasks.

Take up of Web 2.0 applications in formal Education and Training is still in an experimental phase and scientific evidence on Learning 2.0 practices in schools and universities is scarce. To gather more insights on the current use and potential impact of Learning 2.0, IPTS conducted an exploratory study on the use of social media applications in formal Education and Training to enhance learning activities and promote innovation and inclusion. The study employed a triangulation of research methodologies, drawing on a literature review, a collection of 250 cases, 16 in-depth case studies and an expert workshop. This article presents and discusses the main findings of this study. The evidence gathered suggests, among others, that Learning 2.0 approaches require and facilitate technological, pedagogical and organisational innovation and can thus contribute to the modernisation of European Education and Training institutions deemed necessary for facing the challenges of the 21st century.

Finding semantically similar documents is a common task in Recommender Systems. Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) is an approach to calculate semantic relatedness between terms or documents based on similarities to documents of a reference corpus. Here, usually Wikipedia is applied as reference corpus. We propose enhancements to ESA (called Extended Explicit Semantic Analysis) that make use of further semantic properties of Wikipedia like article link structure and categorization, thus utilizing the additional semantic information that is included in Wikipedia. We show how we apply this approach to recommendation of web resource fragments in a resource-based learning scenario for self-directed, on-task learning with web resources.

For a successful learning organization, it is of crucial importance to have successful methods for stimulation and sharing of working and learning activities of their employees. However, there are two important challenges to be addressed: i) combination of individual and organizational incentives that motivate employees to take part in knowledge building and sharing activities; and ii) structuring of learning and knowledge building activities and their outcomes in a representation that can assure unambiguous knowledge sharing. To address these challenges, we propose a framework of individual and organizational factors for knowledge sharing and a set of ontologies that provides a systematic and interlinked representation of concepts of individual and organizational learning. On top of these proposals, we developed and here present a software solution, which has been evaluated through a case study conducted in a large enterprise context.

We investigate whether

erroneous examples

in the domain of fractions can help students learn from common errors of other students presented in a computer-based system. Presenting the errors of others could spare students the embarrassment and demotivation of confronting their own errors. We conducted lab and school studies with students of different grade levels to measure the effects of learning with erroneous examples. We report results that compare the learning gains of three conditions: a control condition, an experimental condition in which students were presented with erroneous examples without help, and an experimental condition in which students were provided with additional error detection and correction help. Our results indicate significant metacognitive learning gains of erroneous examples for lower-grade students, as well as cognitive and conceptual learning gains for higher-grade students when additional help is provided with the erroneous examples, but not for middle-grade students.

In a Lifelong Learning context, learners often rely on informal learning materials to access and process information. There is a growing interest in accessing educational material on the social web. We have created a system that facilitates learners and tutors in accessing informal knowledge sources in the context of a learning task and describe the results of a summative and formative evaluation of this system. The system consists of a knowledge discovery component and a social learning component. The evaluation shows that with our system informal resources can successfully enhance the learning process within a Lifelong Learning context. The knowledge discovery component assists the learner in identifying relevant concepts, discovering relations between concepts, and mastering the correct vocabulary. In addition the social learning component offers relevant and trusted documents and contacts on the basis of a learner’s social network.

Non-governmental organizations often face the challenge that practical knowledge cannot easily be transferred between practitioners with different degrees of expertise, as there is no way of directly observing good practice, and practical knowledge often only exists in implicit form. In this paper, we describe how patterns may be used to support sharing practical knowledge, and based on the co-evolution model by Cress and Kimmerle, we provide a theoretical framework for describing how an exchange of practical knowledge takes place. We present the results of a case study that supports the efficiency of patterns. Patterns facilitate the exchange of good practice by leading to more explicit and understandable descriptions.

Past attempts at creating stakeholder networks for specific fields of research or industrial sectors have shown to be a resource-consuming and time-consuming process, which requires continuous monitoring and political efforts, as well as the trial-and-error deployment of technological tools. Still, these networks are thought to be an efficient and essential communication instrument for addressing challenges and building capacities. The EU FP7 STELLAR Network of Excellence has the mission of establishing a network for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) stakeholders, and has decided to do so via an online social community called TELeurope. In this paper we provide an overview of some relevant experience in establishing collaborative networks in the fields of business sciences, learning networks and communities of practice and reflect on our experience thus far with TELeurope.

The purpose of this paper is provide an overview of a study designed to investigate the impact of structure on learning activities designed for developing scientific inquiry skills in a scenario-based multi-user virtual environment. The research will compare the results of participants exposed to high-structure and low-structure initial activities. Participants will be 150 year nine high school students who will be studying inquiry learning as part of their set curriculum. Students will complete pre, mid and posttests. The research will focus on the use of

Virtual Singapura

, a scenario-based multi-user environment, in a classroom environment.

Learners increasingly work with virtual laboratories that provide various activities and tools, including sophisticated modeling and simulation systems. The learning environments have to combine traces to establish the most precise diagnosis possible on the learner’s activity. This paper presents a diagnosis tool, called DiagElec, establishing a diagnosis on the learner’s activity. DiagElec integrates a notion of belief, which is related to the modalities in the generated diagnoses. To analyze our model, we have carried out a two-phase experiment, first with learners and then with teachers. From the corpus of diagnosis done by the teachers, we are looking for the emergence of a model of human behavior to recalibrate the degree of belief defined into the diagnosis rules.

The possibility to step out of the classroom for learning in authentic contexts, that which earlier have been studied in abstract terms in the classroom context, can be an enormous asset to the educational system. A successful realization of this possibility relies, however, on that the designed mobile learning activities provide the pedagogical support learning requires. In this exploratory study, we aim to present findings on how learners can be supported in a mobile learning activity by utilizing resources available in educational settings such as teachers, mobile technology, and the possibility to cross contexts.

Although Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) advocates the use of instant messaging and discussion forums for collaboration between learners, there is a scarcity of tools for leveraging the information in this kind of conversations. Thus, these technologies are primarily used for communication and, once the conversation is over, the raw data is rarely manually analyzed by tutors, teachers and other learners. This paper presents a methodology and a system that can be used for providing feedback and support to learners and tutors that are involved in tasks that make use of chats and forums. In order to achieve this objective, PolyCAFe employs Natural Language Processing and Social Network Analysis techniques to discover polyphony and inter-animation in textual collaborations. To evaluate the proposed approach and the designed system a first validation experiment has been performed and the results are discussed and analyzed in the end of the paper.

We present a simple and extendible framework to collect attention metadata and store them for further analysis. Currently, several metadata collectors have been implemented but the framework allows the easy integration of further data collectors. Analysis results, e.g. recommendations or fostering of self-reflection, can then support the user in her learning.

This paper reports student interaction patterns and self-reported results of using Twitter microblogging environment. The study employs longitudinal probabilistic social network analysis (SNA) to identify the patterns and trends of network dynamics. It is building on earlier works that explore associations of student achievement records with the observed network measures. It integrates gender as an additional variable and reports some relation with interaction patterns. Additionally, the paper reports the results of a questionnaire that enables further discussion on the communication patterns.

Research on professional development (PD) for teachers in technology integration indicates that collaboration is among the key elements contributing for developing relevant competencies and adopting new teaching practices. This paper examines collaboration between teachers within the large-scale PD program “Intel Teach – Advanced Online” in Germany. The external evaluation of the program provides evidence regarding teachers’ teamwork, their use of the collaboration tools of the online platform, the effects of teachers’ collaboration on their learning and the conditions for collaboration. The findings revealed a strong impact of effective collaboration on individual gains from participation in the program. It was however found that in the conditions of school internal training, teachers showed clear preference for face-to-face interactions, than for using the provided online collaboration tools.

In Peoplia, a socially intelligent tutoring agent helps students learn by augmenting learning opportunities with social features. The tutoring agent engages in off-task conversations with the students before and after the instructional activities, motivating them to work with the system more successfully. We describe the tutor’s architecture and early experiments in the domain of middle school mathematics. Students who engaged with the socially intelligent agent liked the system more, and attained higher learning gains.

Informal or free-choice learning has become a well-established means of disseminating knowledge to school classrooms over the last years. Various technology-enhanced public spaces, like science centers and cultural heritage museums, are nowadays equipped with state-of-the-art digital dome theaters, where groups of people (mainly children) attend educational programmes. The overwhelming majority of such ‘shows’ include astronomical phenomena and in few cases cultural heritage. In this paper, we investigate the potential learning benefit of integrating audience interaction with gaming environments in the immersive space of a dome theater. In order to achieve this, we examine how six factors of the Contextual Model of Learning proposed by Falk & Dierking, can be applied in an integrated schema of group interactivity and game design in immersive learning environments.

In this paper, we study the issue of free-riding in collaborative learning. Free-riding occurs when a part of the students lean on the efforts of the rest of their team and do not contribute much to the team work. It impacts negatively on performances of the whole team [1]. We present an experiment of collaborative diagram drawing (through a synchronous collaborative drawing tool, called Shared Drawing tool) in a Software Engineering course, that shows a significant equal participation and suggests that students employ some self-regulatory behaviors that results in fruitful collaboration.

Learning and teaching is often supported using presentation software to display pre-authored slides in sequence over time. We wish to consider the pedagogic implications of Multi-Display Learning Spaces (MD-LS), where multiple partitions of presented information overlay a larger area within the physical environment. We discuss the use in university teaching of the Multi-Slides plug-in for popular presentation software, along with multiple projectors, to cascade multiple slides of information simultaneously across two walls of a seminar room. We use examples derived from postgraduate teaching to argue that MD-LS allow for

enabling

juxtapositions

of visual materials — such as evidence, results, conceptual frameworks and task specifications — which can be used by students and tutors as cognitive tools to promote reasoned, argumentational dialogue. We consider the spatial implications for learning, and relate MD-LS to attempts within the literature to conceive classrooms of the future.

Several online repositories make available learning resources known as Learning Objects (LOs), and tasks such as identifying useful metadata, diminishing the annotation effort, and facilitating LOs discovery and retrieval, remain still as open challenges. Advanced searching techniques such as recommending systems have been studied to address these issues, though mainly focused on

students

. We focus on

teachers

and exploit their context in order to identify metadata that describes LOs content. Teachers’ profiles consider also such metadata in a hybrid approach for recommending LOs to teachers and instructors.

Educational systems that model the user enable personalisation. Systems that open the model to the user to prompt reflection are increasingly common. These often offer a single view of the model. We introduce multiple-view open learner models, and show the varied preferences for model presentation.

This paper introduces a modeling language to facilitate the development of e-learning solutions in accordance with different pedagogical approaches, focusing specially in the support of collaborative learning settings. Usually, e-learning systems are very dependent on the technology, that determine or constraint the pedagogical approach that can be used.

Educational Modeling Languages

(EMLs) have been proposed to solve this problem. Typically, they are process-based modeling languages that support the computational modeling of educational units in accordance with different pedagogical approaches. Nevertheless, this solution is very complex as the language needs to cover many issues. The introduced language is named as PoEML:

Perspective-oriented Educational Modeling Language

and it follows a separation of concerns approach to simplify such complexity.

We present an e-learning system based on online forms that allows teachers to easily organise competitions in a classroom. This system is used in a preliminary study to evaluate whether cooperative competition is positive or not in education, and to identify which are the characteristics this kind of activity should have to be no harmful for students, motivating and helping them in their learning process.

In this paper, we describe the integration and evaluation of an existing generic Bayesian student model into an existing computerized testing system within the Projecto Matemática Ensino (PmatE) of the University of Aveiro. The Bayesian student model had previously been evaluated with simulated students, but a real application was still needed. The testing system in PmatE is based in the use of Learning Objects (LO), which are question generators which essentially consist of some parameterized text and sets of parameterized “true/false” questions (at least four). These LO together with the experience of PmatE in using computerized tests with students, gives us ideal conditions for testing the described Bayesian student model with real students.

Accessible and interoperable ePortfolio system improves learning opportunities for users with disabilities by offering flexible learning paths and innovative ways of accessing information. However, most ePortfolio systems are closed systems within organisational boundaries and not accessible. This paper describes the efforts of the EU4ALL project to implement an accessible and open ePortfolio system. The result is a system that allows any user to map his learning journey from grade school to higher education and throughout their lifetime. A system where also disabled users control their own experiences, they choose what to include in their ePortfolio, how to reflect on and assess items, and with whom to share their ePortfolio.

The training of soft skills in organizational settings has become very important for an effective communicative exchange between members of staff. Especially in companies where the line of communication has to be fast and unmistakable, e.g. in crisis management units, the regular training of communication skills is therefore indispensable. The DREAD-ED project proposes a technology-based teaching methodology to meet these needs. The methodology provides a serious game which enables its users to train soft skills in a virtual environment under safe conditions. The current paper presents the results of two trials conducted with crisis managers and university students.

In this paper we describe a social learning game we implemented to evaluate various means of ubiquitous learning support. Making use of game design patterns it was possible to implement information channels in such a way that we could simulate ubiquitous learning support in an authentic situation. The result is a prototype game in which one person is chosen randomly to become “Mister X”, and the other players have to find clues and strategies to find out who is the wanted person. In our scenario we used 3 different information channels to provide clues and compared them with respect to user appreciation and effectiveness.

We have studied the computer based applications of composition, music theory and analysis, software synthesis, and music notation for well over two decades. The most important result of these activities is PWGL, a modern visual computer program with the emphasis on music and sound related applications.

In this paper we give a brief overview of PWGL and discuss how it could be developed into a pedagogical environment. PWGL has many advanced features that would make it ideal for developing study material in the context of music and sound. It should be of interest for both teachers and students in various levels of education.

Vicarious Learning is learning from watching others learn. We believe that this is a powerful model for computer-based learning. Learning episodes can be captured and replayed to later learners: a natural context for this is learning embedded in dialogue. This paper briefly surveys aspects of the theoretical basis of how learning may work in these contexts, and what is needed for a deeper appreciation of the mechanisms involved. A project that applies these ideas is also discussed, in which vicarious learning from tutorial group dialogue supports an online learning community that creates new learning materials as a group activity. We postulate that the resulting combination of shared activity with broader perspectives holds strong promise for online vicarious learning.

Argumentation is omnipresent in our lives and therefore an important skill to learn. While classic face-to-face argumentation and debate has advantages in helping people learn to argue better, it does not scale up, limited by teacher time and availability. Computer-supported argumentation (CSA) is a viable alternative in learning to argue, currently increasing in popularity. In this paper, we present results from a survey we conducted with experts on argumentation learning systems, one which provides a glimpse on future directions.

Visual instructional design languages currently provide notations for representing the intermediate and final results of a knowledge engineering process. This paper reports on a visual framework (called WIND - Web INteraction Design) that focuses on both designers’ creativity and model executability. It only addresses Active Reading Learning Scenarios making use of localized documents (travel stories, travel guides). Our research challenge is to enable the teachers to design by themselves interaction scenarios for such a domain, avoiding any programmer intervention. The WIND framework provides a conceptual model and its associated Application Programming Interface (API). The WIND interaction scenarios are encoded as XML documents which are automatically transformed into code thanks to the provided API, thus providing designers with a real application that they can immediately assess and modify (prototyping techniques). The WIND conceptual model only provides designers with an abstract syntax and a semantics. Users of such a Domain Specific Language (DSL) need a concrete syntax. Our choice is to produce a Web-Based Mashup Environment providing designers with visual functionality.

This paper presents a framework for creating and conducting serious games. It focuses on role-playing game based learning scenarios in 3D environments. The feasibility of the presented approach is demonstrated by a training scenario for apprenticeship job interviews. Based on the assumption that reflection phases as an important part of successful learning processes are to be adequately supported, we show how phases of immersion during the role-play are connected to separate phases of reflection.

Ensuring that students’ interactions with Exploratory Learning Environments are effective in terms of learning requires a significant pedagogic support from teachers. The challenge therefore is to develop intelligent systems which would be entrusted to support either the student directly when appropriate, or provide information to teachers, assisting them in their demanding role in the classroom. This paper presents the design of the tools that enable the provision of intelligent adaptive feedback in the context of eXpresser, an mathematical exploratory learning environment for 11–14 year old students. Additionally, the paper describes the metrics that are used to measure the progress in the development of the adaptive feedback interventions. These metrics provide a clear understanding of the relevance and coverage of the intelligent support provided by the system at every stage of its iterative development.

In this article we present an infrastructure for creating mash up and visual representations of the user profile that combine data from different sources. We explored this approach in the context of Life Long Learning, where different platforms or services are often used to support the learning process. The system is highly configurable: data sources, data aggregations, and visualizations can be configured on the fly without changing any part of the software and have an adaptive behavior based on user’s or system’s characteristics. The visual profiles produced can have different graphical formats and can be bound to different data, automatically adapting to personal preferences, knowledge, and contexts. A first evaluation, conducted through a questionnaire, seems to be promising thanks to the perceived usefulness and the interest in the tool.

Social media technologies offer potential benefits for a variety of scenarios to support access to digital resources. The involvement of users that do not only consume, but also participate and contribute information, allows for promising approaches such as social browsing and crowdsourcing. Yet, a lot of resources and metadata are contained in distributed and heterogeneous repositories that follow a traditional top-down approach in which only experts can contribute information. A social hub that can aggregate such information, while at the same time offering social media technologies, enables new ways to search and browse these contents, and to maintain underlying structures. We will present how the ALOE system that realises such a social backbone was integrated into the MACE portal. First evaluation results provide evidence about the usefulness of the presented approach.

As Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) systems become more essential to education there is an increasing need for their creators to reduce risk and to design for success. We argue that by taking an ergonomic perspective it is possible to better understand why TEL systems succeed or fail, as it becomes possible to analyze how well they are aligned with their users and environment. We present three TEL case studies that demonstrate these ideas, and show how an ergonomic analysis can help frame the problems faced in a useful way. In particular we propose using a variant of ergonomics that emphasizes the expression, communication and use of knowledge within the system; we call this approach Knowledge System Ergonomics.

Professionals in social work practice depend on a high level of skills, intellectual ability and a wide knowledge base to find innovative solutions for the complex problems they encounter. They learn by experience and through social interaction using dialogue and discussion with relevant others to create new knowledge. To support their learning, they search for the most suitable and most relevant dialogue partner available in their extensive personal professional network. This is a difficult, high-skilled task, for which little technological support is available. This paper presents a literature review on the learning needs of these professionals and considers the use of technology as a means of supporting this type of learning. It argues for the need for more insight into the strategies used by professionals in building, maintaining and activating connections in their personal professional network for

learning

purposes.

This paper describes a new approach to designing Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) in the contemporary, or Web 2.0, landscape and beyond. This embraces the new possibilities that emerging technologies provide for learning, and the pace of change in the development and application of these technologies. In addressing this challenge we outline the framework of Deep Learning Design (DLD) and summarise how it has been developed from, and mapped to, four different TEL initiatives. We argue that this adoption of DLD has led to relatively large-scale and sustainable innovations. It also outlines clear directions for near-future emphases in TEL design and related methodology.

This paper presents the evaluation of an e-portfolio system which has been developed at the University of Augsburg in the context of a study program supporting the acquisition of key competencies. After describing the object of the evaluation and the design-based research approach of the study program’s development the results of the evaluation will be presented. It is shown how the software facilitates the students’ cooperation and collaboration in self-organized project-groups, in what ways the reflection of the project work can be guided and how the software tool should be enhanced in future.

In this paper, we investigate the components of a Research 2.0 infrastructure. We propose building blocks and their concrete implementation to leverage Research 2.0 practice and technologies in our field, including a publication feed format for exchanging publication data, a RESTful API to retrieve publication and Web 2.0 data, and a publisher suit for refining and aggregating data. We illustrate the use of this infrastructure with Research 2.0 application examples ranging from a Mash-Up environment, a mobile and multitouch application, thereby demonstrating the strength of this infrastructure.

Mobile devices combined with sensor technologies provide new possibilities for embedding inquiry-based science learning activities in authentic settings. These technologies rely on various standards for data exchange what makes the development of interoperable mobile and sensor-based applications a challenging task. In this paper, we present our technical efforts related to how to leverage data interoperability using open standards. To validate the potential benefits of this approach, we developed a prototype implementation and conducted a trial with high school students in the field of environmental science. The initial results indicate the potential benefits of using open standards for data exchange in order to support the integration of various technological resources and applications.

In this paper we present an agent-based architecture to monitor and analyse students’ behaviour while working with a simulation tool. This architecture is based on the blackboard principle and implemented using a TupleSpaces approach. The agents are divided into several groups according to their tasks to maximise autonomy and reusability. This separation was done with the idea of perceive-react-cycles in mind. An implemented example scenario that demonstrates how agents interact in generating meaningful context-aware student feedback is described. The visualisation of the agents’ analysis results facilitates a deeper understanding of the learners’ activities.

This paper introduces iAPOSDLE, a mobile application enabling the use of work-integrated learning services without being limited by location. iAPOSDLE makes use of the APOSDLE WIL system for self-directed work-integrated learning support, and extends its range of application to mobile learning. Core features of iAPOSDLE are described and possible extensions are discussed.

In this demo we present a haptic-based framework for the exploration of the electrical surface of molecules. The geometrical models of molecules are extracted from theoretical data using file formats widely adopted in chemical and biological fields. The addition of information computed with computational chemistry tools allows users to

feel

the interaction forces between an explored molecule and a charge associated to the haptic device. The developed tool can be used to explore electrostatic fields of molecules, either for didactic or research purposes due to its reliance on computational data.

We present

Beetle II

, a tutorial dialogue system designed to accept unrestricted language input and support experimentation with different tutorial planning and dialogue strategies. Our first system evaluation used two different tutoring policies and demonstrated that

Beetle II

can be successfully used as a platform to study the impact of different approaches to tutoring. In the future, the system can also be used to experiment with a variety of parameters that may affect learning in intelligent tutoring systems.

This paper concerns the ScenEdit authoring environment, a graphical tool dedicated to design learning scenarios. The environment allows teacher-designers to structure the design of scenarios by eliciting intentions, strategies and interactions included in the ISIS goal-oriented framework. ScenEdit aims to favor sharing and reusing practices by providing patterns for each type of component (intention, strategy and interactional situation). We present here the main functionalities of the environment through an example of a learning scenario.

Already existing open educational resources in management have a high potential for enterprises to address the increasing training needs of their employees. However, access barriers still prevent the full exploitation of this potential. Users have to search a number of repositories with heterogeneous interfaces in order to retrieve the desired content. In addition, the use of search criteria related to skills, such as learning objectives and skill-levels is in most cases not supported. The demonstrator presented in this paper addresses these shortcomings by federating multiple repositories, integrating and enriching their metadata, and employing skill-based search for management related content.

We present a study of integrating an educational game in special math education, to explore challenges faced during the process. The game promotes an unconventional approach supporting students having math difficulties, through visual representations, learn-by-exploration and learn-by-teaching models. Our conclusion is that integration in special education is more challenging than in the main stream counterpart, due to social vulnerability of the students, learning/teaching challenges in content, motivation and attitude, a non-typical learning situation, and the challenge of matching learning peers.

The TAO framework is an open-source project that provides a very general and open architecture for developing and delivering tests for the purpose of technology-based assessments. Besides summarizing the main features of TAO, this paper lists TAO’s advantages compared to other tools and platforms for technology-based assessment, and reports on its capability for integration into highly flexible learning environments.