Learning in the Synergy of Multiple Disciplines

In this keynote presentation I discuss some of the exciting phenomena and challenges that are emerging as the digital universe evolves to become a more social medium that supports more complex information-seeking and learning activities. This discussion emerges from attempts to extend previous work on Information Foraging Theory [1] to address these new trends in online information-seeking and sensemaking. Information Foraging Theory is a theory of human-information interaction that aims to explain and predict how people will best shape themselves to their information environments, and how information environments can best be shaped to people. The theory has mainly focused on information seeking by the solitary user, but as the Internet and Web have evolved, so too must the theory, and so I will discuss recent studies of sensemaking and the social production, sharing, and use of information in areas such as wikis, social tagging, social network sites, and social search. The opportunity (and challenges) are enormous for developing a scientific foundation to support online groups and communities that are engaged in creating, organizing, and sharing the knowledge produced through social sensemaking.

In a world of increasing complexity, confronting global environmental and social challenges, there is an urgent need to enable people of all ages to learn about themselves, their society and their environment. Yet, there is a surprising lack of attention to what this involves. The study of human learning does not form a major part of teacher education programmes and is disappearing from university Psychology courses. It is as if human learning is just too diffuse and difficult a topic to be studied and taught.

Knowledge acquisition is no longer mainly restricted to classical institutions and formal learning (as in schools and universities) but is also connected to informal learning settings at home in leisure time or at the workplace. Thus, the interplay between formal and informal learning is developing in a new way, mainly in connection with the development of Web 2.0 and the appearance of “social software”. Within these new social software environments different developments are especially interesting, as they offer new ways of learning, knowledge building and use of knowledge. A very special feature has to do with the possibility of externalizing knowledge. Even more, social software (e.g. bookmarking) makes not only externalized knowledge available, but together with the externalized knowledge of other people, resources can be created which are most meaningful for oneself.

Reusable adaptation specifications for adaptive behaviour has come to the forefront of adaptive research recently, with EU projects such as GRAPPLE1, and PhD research efforts on designing an adaptation language for learning style specification [1]. However, this was not the case five years ago, when an adaptation language for adaptive hypermedia (LAG) was first proposed. This paper describes the general lessons learnt during the last five years in designing, implementing and using an adaptation language, as well as the changes that the language has undergone in order to better fulfil its goal of combining a

high level of semantics with simplicity, portability

as well as being

flexible

. Besides discussing these changes based on some sample strategies, this paper also presents a novel authoring environment for the programming-savvy adaptation author, that applies feedback accumulated during various evaluation sessions with the previous set of tools, and its first evaluation with programming experts.

The MiGen project is designing and developing an intelligent, exploratory environment to support 11–14-year-old students in their learning of mathematical generalisation. Deployed within the classroom, the system will also provide tools to assist teachers in monitoring students’ activities and progress. This paper describes the conceptual and architectural design of the system, and gives a detailed technical explanation of a working proof-of-concept prototype of the architecture, motivating in particular the technologies and approaches chosen to implement the necessary functionality given the context of the project. We also discuss how the prototype will be used as a basis for developing the first full version of the MiGen system, in the context of ongoing knowledge acquisition and analysis within the project’s iterative, stakeholder-centred design, development and testing methodology.

This paper describes the design and evaluation of an adaptive museum guide for families. In the Kurio system, a mixture of embedded and tangible technology imbues the museum space with additional support for learning and interaction, accessible via tangible user interfaces. Families engage in an educational game where family members are assigned individual challenges and their progress is monitored and coordinated by the family member with a PDA. After each round of challenges, the family returns to a tabletop display to review their progress. In this paper we present the overall evaluation result of Kurio and, using the model discovery approach, we determine which experience structuring factors have a substantial influence on the learning experience.

Personalization of learning has become a prominent issue in the educational field, at various levels. This article elaborates a different view on personalisation than what usually occurs in this area. Its baseline is that personalisation occurs when learning turns out to become personal in the learner’s mind. Through a literature survey, we analyze constitutive dimensions of this inner sense of personalisation. Here, we devote special attention to confronting learners with tracked information. Making their personal interaction footprints visible contrasts with the back-office usage of this data by researchers, instructors or adaptive systems. We contribute a prototype designed for the Moodle platform according to the conceptual approach presented here.

Adaptive course generation is more flexible if it includes mechanisms deciding just-in-time which exercises, which external resources, and which tools to include for an individual student. We developed such a novel delivery framework (called Dynamic Items) that is used by the web-based platform

ActiveMath

. We describe the framework and discuss several new applications of Dynamic Items for an individual student.

Work-integrated learning (WIL) poses unique challenges for user model design: on the one hand users’ knowledge levels need to be determined based on their work activities – testing is not a viable option; on the other hand users do interact with a multitude of different work applications – there is no central learning system. This contribution introduces a user model and corresponding services (based on SOA) geared to enable unobtrusive adaptability within WIL environments. Our hybrid user model services interpret usage data in the context of enterprise models (semantic approaches) and utilize heuristics (scruffy approaches) in order to determine knowledge levels, identify subject matter experts, etc. We give an overview of different types of user model services (logging, production, inference, control), provide a reference implementation within the APOSDLE project, and discuss early evaluation results.

This paper explores the impact of adaptive navigation support on student work with parameterized questions in the domain of object-oriented programming. In the past, we developed QuizJET system, which is able to generate and assess parameterized Java programming questions. More recently, we developed JavaGuide system, which enhances QuizJET questions with adaptive navigation support. This system introduces QuizJET and JavaGuide and reports the results of classroom studies, which explored the impact of these systems and assessed an added value of adaptive navigation support. The results of the studies indicate that adaptive navigation support encourages students use parameterized questions more extensively. Students are also 2.5 times more likely to answer parameterized questions correctly with adaptive navigation support than without such support. In addition, we found that adaptive navigation support especially benefit weaker students helping to close the gap between strong and weak students.

Current educational systems use advanced mechanisms for adaptation by utilizing available knowledge about the domain. However, describing a domain area in sufficient detail to allow accurate personalization is a tedious and time-consuming task. Only few works are related to the support of teachers by discovering the knowledge from educational material. In this paper we present a method for automated

metadata

generation addressing the educational knowledge discovery problem. We employ several techniques of data mining with regards to the e-learning environment and evaluate the method on functional programming course.

The L4

All

system allows learners to record and share learning pathways through educational offerings, with the aim of facilitating progression from Secondary Education through to Further Education and on to Higher Education.This paper describes the design of the system’s facility for searching for “people like me”, presents the results of an evaluation session with a group of mature learners, and discusses outcomes arising from this evaluation.

The paper focuses on the MACE (Metadata for Architectural Contents in Europe) system and its usage in architecture education at the university level. We report on the various extensions made to the system, describe some of the new functionality and give first results on the evaluation of the MACE System. Several universities were involved with significant student groups in the evaluation, so that the indications described here are already highly trustable. First results show that using MACE increases student performance significantly.

Learning Objects are atomic packages of learning content with associated activities that can be reused in different contexts. However traditional Learning Objects can be complex and expensive to produce, and as a result there are relatively few of these available. In this paper we describe our work to create a lightweight repository for the language-learning domain, called the Language Box, where teachers and students can share their everyday resources and remix and extend each others content using collections and activities to create new Learning Objects more easily. However, in our interactions with the community we have discovered that practitioners find it difficult to abstract their teaching materials from their teaching activities and experiences; this results in Phantom Tasks and Invisible Rubrics that can make it difficult for other practitioners to reuse their content and build new Learning Objects.

The recent research demonstrated several important benefits in the use of semantic technologies in development of technology-enhanced environments. The one underlying assumption for most of the current approaches is that there is a domain ontology. The second unspoken assumption follows that educators will build domain ontologies for their courses. However, ontologies are hard to build. Ontology extraction tools aim to overcome this problem. We have conducted an empirical study with educators where they used current ontology tools to extract ontologies from their existing course material. The results are reported for the IT and non-IT educators.

The success of recent Web 2.0 platforms shows that people share information and resources within their social community and beyond. The use of these platforms in an e-learning context has been limited, though. One reason for this is the fact that most of these platforms only support specific media types, and teachers trying to assemble learning resources have to login to and use several Web 2.0 tools at once to access all relevant resources. In this paper, we present LearnWeb2.0, an integrated environment we implemented for sharing Web 2.0 resources, which improves support for learners and educators in sharing, discovering, and managing learning resources distributed across different platforms. LearnWeb2.0 integrates ten popular resource sharing and social networking systems, and provides advanced features for organizing and sharing distributed learning resources in a collaborative environment.

In this contribution we introduce SWeMoF, a semantic framework to discover patterns in learning networks and the blogosphere. Based on a description of the state of the art in data mining, text mining and blog mining we discuss the architecture of the Semantic Weblog Monitoring Framework (SWeMoF) and provide an outlook and an evaluation perspective for future research and development.

Social networks make an essential contribution to knowledge sharing in our fast moving and changing world. However, it is difficult to apply new techniques to the complex, firm and Europe-wide differing educational systems. And this process for technology enhanced learning is still evolving and challenging. This paper presents the research results of applying social network analysis methods to a real and lively social network which intends to enhance the cooperation and knowledge sharing among over 45,000 European schools within the eTwinning network. We developed a web-based tool for network analysis and the visualization of various network views and data mining results as proof of concept. This prototype is evaluated on the educational social network eTwinning coordinated by the European Schoolnet, with special regard to its network structure and collaboration activity.

Online facilitation in a cross-cultural collaborative learning context is increasingly prevalent, but limited research has been conducted on the related issues, especially on facilitation via weblogs, which are increasingly used as an educational tool and becoming a significant component of many web-based learning environments. In this paper we address two issues: (i)

how

facilitators use weblogs as an educational instrument to support the students’ activities in a fully online multi-national collaborative learning course; (ii)

whether

facilitation style plays a role in influencing the learners’ working styles and performance in a setting where weblogs have been heavily used. The analysis results indicate the practicality of deploying weblogs as an effective online facilitation and learning tool, the rather intricate relationships between facilitation and learning styles mediated by some socio-cultural factors, and the usefulness of our proposed weblog analysis scheme.

A very wide range of online interaction analysis staying in the hands of researchers, and tools being implemented in research prototypes, often used only in non-replicated experimentations, we point out the need for TEL research community to reach large scale validation for its results. This paper is a concrete step in this direction. For a deeper collaboration in our community, we suggest to share structured data collections. The Mulce project aims at proposing a structure for teaching and learning corpora (including pedagogical and research context), and especially for interaction tracks. Two main corpora are built according this structure. This paper defines a teaching and learning corpus, shows its main structure and browses some parts of the structured interaction data. We also describe the platform that enables the community to browse and analyze a shared corpus.

The

orchestration

process

consists of managing classroom interactions at multiple levels: individual activities, teamwork and class-wide sessions. We study the process of orchestration in recitation sections, i.e. when students work on their assignments individually or in small groups with the presence of teaching assistants who give help on demand. Our empirical study revealed that recitation sections suffer from inefficient orchestration. Too much attention is devoted to the management of the relationship between students and teaching assistants, which prevent both sides from concentrating on their main task. We present a model of students’ activities during recitation sections that emphasize the issue of mutual awareness, i.e. monitoring help needs and TA’s availability. To tackle these difficulties, we developed two awareness tools. Both tools convey the same information: which exercise each group is working on, whether it has asked for help and for how long. In the centralized version, named Shelf, students provide information with a personal response system and the status of each team is juxtaposed on a central display. In the distributed version, named Lantern, each team provides information by interacting with a lamp placed on its table. The display is distributed over the classroom, the information being spatially associated to each group. We are now comparing these two versions in an empirical study with two first year undergraduate classes in Physics. Preliminary results show that both versions increase the efficiency of interaction between students and teaching assistants. This contribution focused on the distributed version.

One claim of Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) is to support and exploit benefits from distance learning and remote collaboration. On the other hand, several approaches to learning emphasize the importance of hands-on experience. Unfortunately, these two goals don’t go well together with traditional learning techniques. Even though TEL technologies can alleviate this problem, it is not sufficiently solved yet - remote collaboration usually comes at the cost of losing direct hands-on access. The ARiSE project aimed at bringing Augmented Reality (AR) to School Environments, a technology that can potentially bridge the gap between the two goals mentioned. The project has designed, implemented and evaluated a pedagogical reference scenario where students worked hands-on together over large distances. This paper describes the AR learning approach we followed and discusses its implementation and its future potential. It shows a simple and successful distributed AR learning approach and suggests features for improvement.

While reading documents, people commonly make annotations: they underline or highlight text and write comments in the margin. Making annotations during reading activities has been shown to be an efficient method for aiding understanding and interpretation. In this paper we present a comparison of paper-based and online annotations in the workplace. Online annotations were collected in a laboratory study, making use of the Web-based annotation tool SpreadCrumbs. A field study was out to gather paper-based annotations. The results validate the benefits of Web annotations. A comparison of the online annotations with paper-based annotations provides several insights in user needs for enhanced online annotation tools, from which design guidelines can be drawn.

In the last few years, social tagging systems have become a standard application of the World Wide Web. These systems can be considered as shared external knowledge structures of users on the Internet. In this paper, we describe how social tagging systems relate to individual semantic memory structures and how social tags affect individual processes of learning and information foraging. Furthermore, we present an experimental online study aimed at evaluating this interaction of external and internal structures of spreading activation. We report on effects of social tagging systems as visualized collective knowledge representations on individual processes of information search and learning.

The work described is part of an ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration between two research teams of the University of Patras, Greece and the University of Freiburg, Germany, which aims at the exchange of analysis tools and data sets in order to broaden the scope of analysis methods and tools available for Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) support. This article describes the adaptation, generalization and application of a rating scheme which had been developed by the Freiburg team for assessing collaboration quality on several dimensions [1]. The scheme was successfully adapted to suit data gathered by the Patras team in a different CSCL scenario. Collaboration quality is assessed by quantitative ratings of seven qualitatively defined rating dimensions. An empirical evaluation based on a dataset of 101 collaborative sessions showed high inter-rater agreement for all dimensions.

Case Based Reasoning (CBR) methods have been used in various domain specific applications, mainly dedicated to decision making. The aim of this paper is to present how CBR is integrated in an educative project, in order to contribute to life-long teacher training. In fact, the acquisition of professional know-how, for example in the class management domain, can constitute a major difficulty for novice teachers. Thus, the TETRAKAP project (TEacher TRAining by Knowledge cAPitalization) aims to develop a web community platform dedicated to knowledge capitalization and know-how transfer between experienced teachers and beginners.

This papers presents Edushare, a web-based learning environment that has been designed for cognitive remediation applied to autistic children. While existing learning platforms integrate various services in a web-based environment, they meet limitation where specific software must be integrated. Their role is then mostly confined to hosting the external software, without deep integration. Therefore,

Edushare

a service-rich integration platform, was created. It consists in centralizing within the platform a series of services shared by many educational softwares. These services include data logging, logs visualization, media management or parameterization. As a result, software development benefits from these services and focuses on its core goal, learning activities. This approach is described with a case study concerning facial emotion recognition in autistic children.

This paper presents a research realised in the framework of the PALETTE project (FP6-TEL) which aimed at observing and analysing the design in use of web services and tools in the context of Communities of Practice (CoPs). Design in use consists in trialling the prototypes and their scenarios of uses and to observe the instrumental genesis carried out by the CoPs services. We first present our conceptual framework based on the instrumental genesis theory. We then present our methodology for the generation of data and the analysis. Results of a cross-case analysis done on seven cases of design in use of PALETTE services and scenarios by CoPs are then described and analysed. The discussion provides reflection that may inform the use of PALETTE services by other CoPs in other contexts. Finally, in the conclusion, we reflect on our methodological approach and results, and provide guidelines for further research.

The paper aims at presenting and analyzing the implementation of a Participatory Design Methodology within the large multidisciplinary European Project PALETTE. This methodology successfully enabled and supported the development and implementation of a "palette" of interoperable services dedicated to Communities of Practice in order to manage their knowledge asset, support collaboration, communication and decision making, and help to better animate the community life. Finally, it presents some lessons learnt that could be of interest for other multidisciplinary project in the Technology Enhanced Learning community.

The most valuable and innovative knowledge is hard to find, and it lies within distributed communities and networks. Locating the right community or person who can provide us with exactly the knowledge that we need and who can help us solve exactly the problems that we come upon, can be an efficient way to learn forward. In this paper, we present the details of NetLearn; a service that acts as a knowledge filter for learning. The primary aim of NetLearn is to leverage social network analysis and visualization techniques to help learners mine communities and locate experts that can populate their personal learning environments.

Social networking tools have been enthusiastically heralded as a means to support different learning types and innovative pedagogical practices. They have also been recognized as potential tools to promote informal learning. In this paper we describe work carried out using the synergy of social web tools, learning models and innovative pedagogical practices across a Masters Degree Course. Findings suggest that the use of these tools as a means to distribute an open and flexible learning environment fosters informal interactions and such interactions are perceived by students to have a significant impact over their formal learning outcomes.

Research on transactive memory systems has shown the importance of knowledge about

who knows what

. Going beyond the issue of work group settings, the article underlines the importance of such knowledge for finding one’s way through today’s knowledge society. We discuss how social networking sites can be used to manage individual knowledge networks. Therefore, we describe characteristics of social networking sites resulting in the conclusion that user profiles serve as a base for an external transactive memory system. Furthermore, we discuss guiding propositions for self-presentation in user profiles that could promote the establishment of an useful external transactive memory system.

Possibilities are described to affect the feeling of

social presence

and

group awareness

in desktop collaborative virtual environments, also known as virtual classrooms. Social presence is the feeling of being present with another person in a virtual environment. Awareness information of the activities of other group members serves as a background for one’s own activities. In general, virtual classrooms allow various kinds of verbal and nonverbal communication between tutors and learners. The communication channels can be adapted according to the needs of the users in a specific collaborative learning situation. The article provides an overview of the representation of users (

avatars

) and the available communication channels in virtual classrooms. In particular, the possibility of conveying nonverbal information is addressed as it has the potential to affect the feeling of social presence and group awareness in learning situations.

This paper reports on a review of learning opportunities that are emerging in online networks and communities. Participation in these new virtual spaces is not mandatory, but rather motivated by an interest to know, share, create, connect and find support, and these activities lead to a range of learning outcomes. New technologies offer the tools and means for people to participate in online networks and communities in a personally meaningful way. However, not all individuals are necessarily equipped with the skills or knowledge to benefit from these opportunities for their lifelong learning. It is suggested that educational institutions should find ways to connect with and get inspiration from these new learning approaches and settings in order to bring about their own transformation for the 21

st

century, and also to support competence-building for new jobs and personal development with a learner-centred and lifelong perspective.

The IT and media sector is characterized by rapid changes in market relevant competences. These include "creative", technical as well as other competences. In an ongoing R&D project, we study the interrelation of competence development and innovation in this field. In this context, a study of different interfaces for self-profiling has been conducted with students from two related but different study programs as subjects. The aim was to find dependencies between personal characteristics (especially creativity), self-profiling behavior and the perception of matched job offers with respect to innovativeness, attractiveness and overstrain. Although the different student groups (interactive media and computer science) do not show differences on the personal creativity scale they differ considerably in their competence preferences. More flexible options in the profiling interfaces are not used for a stronger differentiation between competences.

The success of the Learning Design field to help teachers and instructional designers to create technology enhanced collaborative learning activities depends largely on its ability to offer eLearning professionals well-adapted tools. A number of approaches are coming to maturity in this field however, the associated authoring tools are still too difficult for instructional designers to manipulate. This paper presents an authoring tool designed in order to simplify the task of the instructional designers, who are confronted with the design of particular scenarios that are frequently used by teachers, and which are here called

Pedagogical Procedures

.

One of the objectives of this paper is to verify whether it is possible to extract meaningful related tags from a limited set of tagged resources and from resources tagged by only few users. This is the expected situation in a learning community. An additional goal is to assess whether the related tags extracted can be a useful source for enriching an existing domain ontology. A user centered evaluation has been carried out to analyze the effect of the enriched ontology in supporting a learning task in comparison with clusters of related tags. The experiment has been carried out both with beginners and advanced learners.

How much help helps in discovery learning? This question is one instance of the

assistance dilemma

, an important issue in the learning sciences and educational technology research. To explore this question, we conducted a study involving 87 college students solving problems in a virtual chemistry laboratory (VLab), testing three points along an assistance continuum: (1) a minimal assistance,

inquiry-learning

approach, in which students used the VLab with no hints and minimal feedback; (2) a mid-level assistance,

tutored

approach, in which students received intelligent tutoring hints and feedback while using the VLab (i.e., help given on request and feedback on incorrect steps); and (3) a high assistance,

direct-instruction

approach, in which students were coaxed to follow a specific set of steps in the VLab. Although there was no difference in learning results between conditions on near transfer posttest questions, students in the tutored condition did significantly better on conceptual posttest questions than students in the other two conditions. Furthermore, the more advanced students in the tutored condition, those who performed better on a pretest, did significantly better on the conceptual posttest than their counterparts in the other two conditions. Thus, it appears that students in the tutored condition had just the right amount of assistance, and that the better students in that condition used their superior metacognitive skills and/or motivation to decide when to use the available assistance to their best advantage.

This publication describes the work done to allow the instrumentation of a pedagogical method named MAETIC on a collaborative tailorable platform named CooLDA. MAETIC facilitates the apprenticeship of professional skills in universities thanks to a collaborative project approach. This method has been described and modeled according to the CooLDA meta model. The resulting platform has been experimented during year 2007-2008. This article presents the scientific context of this work, the CooLDA platform and its underlying activity model, the MAETIC pedagogical method and the various associated to it students activities.

In project based learning, learning from experience is vital and necessitates reflection.

Retrospective reflection

is as a conscious, collaborative effort to systematically re-examine a process in order to learn from it. In software development student projects it has been empirically shown that project teams’ retrospective reflection can help the teams collaboratively construct new knowledge about their process and that historical data in collaborative tools used in daily project work can aid the teams’ recall and reflection on the different aspects of project work. In this paper, we draw on these results as well as other findings on the use of collaborative tools in a similar setting. We use the framework of distributed cognition to develop a model of retrospective reflection in which collaborative tools used as cognitive tools for daily project work are utilized as cognitive tools in retrospective reflection, aiding the creation of individual and shared representations of the project process.

This paper suggests that there is a lack of pedagogical underpinning relating to the use of virtual worlds in higher education, for example there are currently few research papers that suggest why such worlds are being used. The paper presents a project (Problem-based Learning in Virtual Interactive Educational Worlds (PREVIEW) that sought to combine pedagogy with technology, which has been tested in health, medicine, social care and education, physiotherapy and psychology.

Teaching and learning software design patterns (DPs) is not an easy task. Apart from learning individual DPs and the principles behind them, students should learn how to apply them in real-life situations. Therefore, to make the learning process of DPs effective, it is necessary to include a project component in which students, usually in small teams, develop a medium-sized software application. Furthermore, it is necessary to provide students with means for easy discovery of relevant learning resources and possible collaborators. In this paper, we propose an extensive project-based collaborative learning environment for learning software DPs that integrates several existing educational systems and tools based on the common ontological foundation. The learning process in the suggested environment is further facilitated and augmented by several context-aware educational services.

There are numerous formats of representing good teaching practice, for instance, case study collections, pattern repositories, and experience reports. Yet, none of these representation formats has found broad acceptance among teaching practitioners. In this paper, a new description template for teaching methods is proposed. The template was constructed based on an analysis of previous formats for describing teaching methods, and by synthesizing findings regarding user requirements during browsing, selecting, developing, and implementing teaching methods. The so attained template was then evaluated. In a first evaluation phase, more than twenty international participants were asked to use the template to describe their teaching methods and to judge the template according to validation criteria. In a second evaluation phase, the teaching method descriptions were exchanged and participants suggested modifications. This paper presents the first version of the description template, the results of the two evaluation phases, and a discussion of the findings.

For several years some researches have concerned the process modelling of learning situations integrating digital technologies. Educational Modelling Languages (EML) aim at providing interoperable descriptions of learning scenarios. In order to generalize the use of EML, it is necessary to provide authoring environments allowing users to express their intentions and requirements. This paper presents the core concepts of one of these, called ISiS (Intentions, Strategies, and interactional Situations), a conceptual framework elaborated to structure the design of learning scenarios by teachers-designers. The framework is based on a goal-oriented approach and proposes a specific identification of the intentional, strategic, tactical and operational dimensions of a scenario. This paper also presents how these concepts have been implemented within ScenEdit, a specific authoring environment dedicated to teachers-designers based on the ISiS goal-oriented framework.

This article argues for a new, user-driven process of developing a classification for teaching methods. First, a previous literature review is summarized that verified the need for a classification of teaching methods. Then, types of classifications are introduced with their characteristics and typical uses in regard to the maturity of knowledge domains. After shortly reflecting the maturity of the knowledge domain “teaching methods”, former classifications’ approaches to mapping this knowledge domain are examined. We argue that previous classifications focused on analyzing the content and did not take user perspectives into account. In the third part of the article, a case study at the University of Vienna is presented. There, twelve representatives of four stakeholder groups were interviewed to determine their needs for organizing teaching method related objects in a repository. Interview results along with considerations on technology and knowledge domain suggested developing a facets classification at the University.

The aim of interactive storytelling is to tell stories with the use of computers in a new and interactive way, which immerses the reader inside the story as the protagonist and enables him to drive its course in any desired direction. Interactive storytelling thus transforms conventional stories from static structures to dynamic and adaptive storyworlds. In this paper, we describe an innovative approach to interactive storytelling that utilizes computer role-playing games, today’s most popular genre of computer games, as the storytelling medium in order to procedurally generate educational interactive stories.

Successful self-regulated learning in a personalized learning environment (PLE) requires self-monitoring of the learner and reflection of learning behaviour. We introduce a tool called CAMera for monitoring and reporting on learning behaviour and thus for supporting learning reflection. The tool collects usage metadata from diverse application programs, stores these metadata as Contextualized Attention Metadata (CAM) and makes them accessible to the learner for recapitulating her learning activities. Usage metadata can be captured both locally on the user’s computer and remotely from a server. We introduce two ways of exploiting CAM, namely the analysis of email-messages stored locally on a user’s computer and the derivation of patterns and trends in the usage of the MACE system for architectural learning.

Learning effectively and efficiently with web resources demands distinct competencies in self-organization and self-motivation. According to the theory of Self-Regulated Learning, learning processes can be facilitated and supported by an effective goal-management. Corresponding to these theoretic principles, a goal-management tool has been implemented in an interdisciplinary project. It allows learners to set goals for internet research and assign relevant web resources to them. An evaluation study is presented that focuses on short-term learning episodes and selected results are shown that reinforce the benefits of our approach.

This work explores the role of students’ motivation and metacognitive skills as moderating factors that influence the impact of an instructional method in the ill-structured domain of Software Project Management (SPM). In order to teach aspects of the SPM domain, we developed a web environment for case-based learning and implemented additionally a questioning strategy to help students focus on important parts of the case material. The paper presents the results from three studies revealing how students’ motivation and metacognitive awareness influenced their engagement in the cognitively challenging situations induced by the method. The implication for instructors and designers is that implementing a promising method, to help students efficiently process the complex material in an ill-structured domain, might not always lead to the desired learning outcomes. Students’ motivation and metacognitive skills should also be addressed, in order to maximize the potential benefits of instruction.

The paper presents the authors’ experience in stimulating the synergy of disciplines via active learning methods; the emphasis being on project based learning. Promoting this method is demonstrated in the context of teachers’ training courses and developing a set of IT textbooks. Numerous examples are presented showing that the synergy of various disciplines is quite natural when performed in the context of studying IT. The project samples developed by teachers are inspired by ideas in textbooks and are accomplished by means of specially designed computer applications. The importance of working on projects tuned to the learner’s interest as a decisive motivation factor is emphasized. In addition authors show that the

bouquet

of projects becomes more colorful with every new issue of the courses thanks to the learners’ creativity and the collaborative knowledge building.

This paper presents a method for the design of intelligent support for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) systems. In particular it deals with challenges that arise from the need to elicit precise, concise, and operationalised knowledge from ‘experts’ as a means of informing the design of intelligent components of TEL systems. We emphasise that theory development and design of such systems should rely on a process, which we refer to as bandwidth and freedom ‘tapering’. We present the application of the methodology and a case study from our work with an exploratory environment. We then discuss the generality of our method and some pragmatic constraints which may be useful in similar research.

This paper presents a system architecture to bridge the gap between the users computing activity in collaborative platforms and the analysis of this activity which is carried out by researchers in human and social sciences. This research work tends to highlight the capacity of a computer-supported observation station, based on a theoretical model called TBS (Trace-Based System), to assist researchers automatically in their activity of analysis using a high abstraction level. We present the modules of a prototype of an observation station called CARTE (Collection, activity Analysis and Regulation based on Traces Enriched) which enable the interoperability between the collaborative platforms, where the users produce raw traces and the analysis environments, where the researchers study traces of a very high abstraction level.

Real walking is often used for navigation through virtual information spaces because of its naturalness (e.g. [1]). This paper shows another advantage.We present a within-subjects controlled experiment in the area of document retrieval. It compares two concepts of navigation: mouse and tracking. The latter was chosen for its naturalness and its feature to create proprioception. Our idea is that this helps users to orientate themselves and recall positions. This would result in better retrieval of previously visited information.The experiment shows a benefit in accuracy of finding content with tracking. This means proprioception improves users capacity of memory. This finding can serve as a decision support for choosing input devices, when designing immersive virtual learning environments. Therefore it can either help to build a base for a new interaction model for learning environments. Or it can broaden the theoretical framework of Chen et al. [2] to include immersive environments.

In order to support inclusive eLearning scenarios in a personalized way, we propose to use recommenddrs systems to guide learners thorugh their interactions in learning management systems. We have identified several issues to be considered when building a knowledge-based recommender system and propose a user-centered methodology to design and evaluate a recommender system that can be integrated via web services with exiting learning management systems to offer adaptive capabilities. We report some results from a formative evaluation carried out with users receiving recommendations in dotLRN open source eLearning platform.

In this paper we present research targeting distant simulation-based practical work in various scientific domains. For the 6 past years, we continuously tried to improve the FORMID environment tools that we have designed and developed for building, running and observing such learning situations. This paper focuses on FORMID-Observer which is the FORMID tool intended to provide teachers with semantic information about the learners’ progress. We present the analysis of teachers’ observation practices during a recent session involving a secondary school group of learners in a practical work in electricity. Throughout the experiment’s results, we aim at showing how teachers’ diagnosis of learners’ domain-knowledge benefit both from the general principles of FORMID-Authoring tool and from the particular features of FORMID-Observer.

The purpose of this research project is to gain an understanding of the initial stage of a productive failure treatment. The research focuses on how learners solve complex or ill-defined problems in Virtual Singapura, a multi-user virtual environment. The research uses a mixed method approach that employs conversation analysis, questionnaires and pre, mid and post-tests. Complex problems, by their very nature, are difficult for learners to connect with, and this project will focus the initial cycle of a productive failure treatment in order to develop a series of design considerations that teachers can implement in an immersive learning environment to help students develop the strategies necessary to engage with complex problems across domains of knowledge. The project aims to inform theory on productive failure, learner processes and learning in immersive environments.

For the learning process with multimedia contents the split-attention effect postulates that learning results are better the higher the spatial proximity of text and picture elements is. This article shows that by the use of an artificially generated relationship between texts and pictures which are far away (according to the new principles of grouping by Palmer[1]), it is possible to attain learning results which are at least equal. The negative impact of the spatial distance between text and picture elements can therefore be avoided in a different way. So an online survey has been conducted and the data of 869 subjects have been evaluated regarding to their retention and transfer performance.

Benchmarking

for educational purposes in the context of computer science can be hindered by the low number and the homogeneity of machines to be assessed, and the inaccuracy of the

benchmarks

to represent specific workloads. Thus, this paper proposes a benchmarking tool developed within a service-oriented grid in order to allow students to benchmark multiple workloads in machines that may belong to several educational institutions. This tool has been validated in a real educational scenario within a course on Computer Architecture.

Virtual Reality (VR) is gaining in popularity and its added value for learning is being recognized. However, its richness in representation and manipulation possibilities may also become one of its weaknesses, as some learners may be overwhelmed and be easily lost in a virtual world. Therefore, being able to dynamically adapt the virtual world to the personal preferences, knowledge, skills and competences, learning goals and the personal or social context of the learning becomes important. In this paper, we describe how an adaptive Web-based learning environment can be extended from a technological point of view to support VR.

The scope of our research is to build a non pedagogical intelligent assistant, I-CAN (Intelligent Coach and Assistant to New way of learning) that supports students during their academic schooling and prevents them from dropout. The management of learner’s motivation is one of the main features for schooling success. A high level of motivation implies more engagement and positive emotion to overcome difficulties. The problematic of this paper is “How to enhance the student’s motivation during his academic schooling?” We propose a motivation management framework for a personal intelligent assistant on a LMS (Learning Management System). This framework takes in input data from learner’s academic schooling (absenteeism, tardiness, marks, tasks, sanction) to diagnose learner’s state and to enhance the motivation to learn through an embodied conversational agent.

We argue that in order to increase knowledge work productivity we have to put more emphasis on supporting this learning dimension of knowledge work. The key distinctions compared to other TEL approaches are (1) taking the tight integration of working and learning seriously, (2) enabling seamless transitions on the continuum of learning practices, and (3) tapping into the resources (material as well as human) of the organization. Within this contribution we develop the concept of

work-integrated learning (WIL)

and show how it can be implemented. The APOSDLE environment serves as a reference architecture which proves how a variety of tightly integrated support services implement the three key distinctions discussed above.

In this paper we describe a novel approach that fosters a

strong

personalized content-based recommendation of LOs. It gives priority to those LOs that are most similar to the student’s short-term learning goals (the concepts that the student wants to learn in the session) and, at the same time, have a high pedagogical utility in the light of the student’s cognitive state (long-term learning goals). The paper includes the definition of a flexible metric that combines the similarity with the query and the pedagogical utility of the LO.

We describe the lessons learned in a hands-on project on instructional design techniques and e-learning technologies. Our experience showed that, though each course designed within this experiment improved its results, the global results of the students were not completely satisfactory. Indeed, the restructured courses absorbed the attention of the students to the detriment of traditional programs. We argue that this side-effect is due to peculiarities of the Italian university system.

Skopje and Novi Sad share several joint courses in Professional Ethics at undergraduate level and at postgraduate level. These courses have been delivered to almost 1000 students from 14 different target groups. For seven years, teaching, learning as well as assessment have been steadily growing from traditional Web supported learning, through blended learning, towards Web 2.0. This paper presents all the stages of the courses evolution using several learning management systems, and the effort to enhance teaching, learning and active contribution of all the actors in the educational process. Particular attention is paid to our latest experience using Moodle and its social networking aspects in education. This survey reveals all the activities during the course delivery including student workload, grading system, and teacher’s efforts to maintain the courses. Student encouraging impressions regarding the content delivery and assessment, their personal opinion about the impact of e-learning 2.0 to quality and quantity of acquired new knowledge, and sincere suggestions to persist in the same direction are the greatest assurance that social networks are currently the best way to deliver computer ethics courses. At the same time, it seems that this approach is the most exhausting and the most challenging for the teachers, but at the same time, the best balance between the effort undertaken and the results obtained.

The Community of Practice of E-learning (CoPE) represents a virtual space for exchanging, sharing, and resolving problems faced by actors in e-learning. One of the major concerns of CoPEs is to favor practices of reuse and exchange through the capitalization of techno-pedagogical knowledge and know-how. In this paper, we present a conceptual model of CoPEs. This model constitutes the theoretical platform upon which an ontology dedicated to CoPEs will be built. This ontology aims to annotate the CoPE’s knowledge resources and services, so as to enhance individual and organizational learning within CoPEs.

The present paper illustrates the experience gained within two “twin” online courses, where three collaborative techniques, namely the Role Play, the Jigsaw and the Discussion, were used for triggering collaboration and interactions among students. The use of the techniques in the two courses is analyzed by looking at the

participative

, the

social

, the

cognitive

and the

teaching

dimensions and the way these components vary across techniques and across the two courses. Despite the results are certainly affected by factors that could not be set aside in a real context (the individual differences of students, the topics and sequence of activities, etc.), still it is possible to draw some final considerations concerning the strong points and weaknesses of the three techniques in online learning contexts.

Popular approaches in the learning sciences understand the concept of learning as permanent or semi-permanent changes in how individuals think and act. These changes can be traced very differently, depending on whether the context is stable or dynamic. The purpose of this poster is to introduce a distinction between horizontal and vertical transitions that can be used to describe individual and institutional change in technology-rich environments. We argue that these two types of transitions trace different phenomena: Vertical transitions occur when individuals, technologies, or domains develop in stable and fixed conditions within set boundaries. In contrast, horizontal transitions occur when individuals, technologies, or domains mature in the synergy with other fields. We develop our argument by working through relevant studies in medicine, and close by outlining implications for future research on professional technology enhanced learning.

The organization’s knowledge and competences capital is increasingly crucial. Thus today, organizations are aware of the necessity to become learning organizations and to maximize organizational learning. Such a learning can be supported by information and communication technologies and more particularly by Web2.0 technologies. Within the approach MEMORAe we are interested in these new learning forms. We consider that they are connected to the knowledge management practices and we developed a learning environment based on the concept of learning organizational memory. This environment is a web platform using semantic annotations and Web2.0 technologies.

In this work, we investigate the effect of presenting students with common errors of

other

students and explore whether such erroneous examples can help students learn without the embarrassment and demotivation of working with one’s own errors. The erroneous examples are presented to students by a technology enhanced learning (TEL) system. We discuss the theoretical background of learning with erroneous examples, describe our TEL setting, and discuss initial, small-scale studies we conducted to explore learning with erroneous examples.

Technology enhanced learning environments are characterized by socio-technical interactions. Socio-technical interactions involve individuals interacting with (a)

technologies,

and (b)

other individuals

. These two critical aspects of socio-technical interactions in technology enhanced learning environments are theoretically conceived as (a)

appropriation of socio-technical affordances

and (b)

structures and functions of

technological intersubjectivity

. Briefly, socio-technical affordances are action-taking possibilities and meaning-making opportunities in an actor-environment system with reference to actor competencies and technical capabilities of the socio-technical system. Drawing from ecological psychology, formal definitions of socio-technical affordances and the appropriation of affordances are offered. Technological intersubjectivity (TI) refers to a technology supported interactional social relationship between two or more actors. Drawing from social philosophy, a definition of TI is offered. Implications for technology enhanced learning environments are discussed.

The evolutionary process in which knowledge objects are transformed from informal and highly contextualized artefacts into explicitly linked and formalized learning objects, together with the corresponding organisational learning processes, have been termed Knowledge Maturing. Whereas wikis and other tools for collaborative building of knowledge have been suggested as useful tools in this context, they lack several features for supporting the knowledge maturing process in organisational settings. To overcome this, we have developed a prototype based on Semantic MediaWiki which enhances the wiki with various maturing functionalities like maturing indicators or mark-up support.

The purpose of the study was to explore the relationship between Internet self-efficacy and behavior in integrating the Internet into instruction. Participants in the study were 449 vocational high school teachers in Taiwan. A validation study was conducted with Internet Self-Efficacy Scale (ISES) and Integrating the Internet into Instruction Behavior Scale (IIIBS). The findings revealed that general and communicative Internet self-efficacy might foster behavior in integrating the Internet into instruction. The teachers’ behavior was classified as five aspects: course preparation, teaching activities, learning guidance, assessment, and product sharing. Furthermore, this study employed structural equation model (SEM) to investigate the causal relations among the variables considered in this study. The SEM analysis revealed that teachers with higher Internet self-efficacy showed more Internet integration in their course preparation. In addition, course preparation is a mediating factor between Internet self-efficacy and other four aspects of behavior in integrating the Internet into instruction.

WebQuests are among the most popular techniques to enhance collaboration in learning; they are an inquiry-based activity, grounded on constructivist learning theory, where the information that learners interact with is mostly found on the Internet.

We present here a system that offers computer-support during a WebQuest, by offering a structured discussion and debate space, besides the navigation and resource sharing. We integrate the WebQuest design process with an operational design phase and describe how our system can completely support the design of a computer-supported WebQuest.

The job of the historian is to understand the past like the people who have lived it have comprehended it, but also to communicate it with instruments and techniques that belong to an age and that influence the mentality of whom in that age live. Technologies, especially in the area of multimedia and virtual reality, allow the historians to communicate the experience of the past in a wide variety of senses. In this work we present a case study, that tries to answer the demand to “make history” involving directly the students, engaged in 3D reconstruction of a building from the past, by carefully checking all the problems of authenticity and by using methods of historical research. In this way, students are able to learn history by re-creating the past with information technology instruments.

In this paper we propose to extend the ADDIE (

Analysis

–

Design

–

Development

–

Implementation

–

Evaluation

) process for Instructional Systems Design (ISD) with a new

linguistic

layer. This layer allows developers to provide instructors with

domain-specific languages

to support and guide them through ISD. Instructors use the toolsets associated with these languages to produce technology-enhanced learning systems more effectively. We also describe how to put these ideas into practice by adopting modern model-driven software development processes together with the language engineering principles. This language engineering approach has been applied to <e-LD>, a highly flexible and extensible authoring tool for IMS Learning Design Units of Learning.

In an open innovation environment, organizational learning takes place by means of dispersed teams which expand their knowledge through collaborative idea generation. Research is often focused on finding ways to extend the set of ideas, while the main problem in our opinion is not the number of ideas that is generated, but a non-optimal set of ideas accepted during idea selection. When selecting ideas, coalitions form and their composition may influence the resulting set of accepted ideas. We expect that computing coalitional strength during idea selection will help in forming the right teams to have a grand coalition, or having a better allocation of accepted ideas, or neutralising factors that adversely influence the decision making process. Based on a literature survey, this paper proposes the application of the Shapley value and the nucleolus to compute coalitional strength in order to enhance the group decision making process during collaborative idea selection.

In this paper, we present the conceptual model we propose to specify observation needs. Because our work takes place in a learning scenario re-engineering context, the observation process is prepared while instructional designers define their learning scenarios. Our work aims at helping these designers to specify the informations they want to get by the observation of the learning situation progress in order to improve the underlying learning scenario for future uses. In this paper we show how the observation needs specification can be guided by informations specified in learning scenarios. We will show how we use the Engeström triangle to model the observation context and how, from the context, some observables will be proposed and used by some observation techniques we propose to use, to define the informations to get by the observation process.

Current Learning Management Systems were typically conceived to offer a self-contained “one size fits all” learning environment. Adaptive educational systems have been exhaustively studied and proposed to satisfy the different needs of students, but they have a poor presence in the LMS market due to integration issues. The emerging trend in the web is toward combining very specialised services into highly personalised environments, and LMS are no exception. This paper presents the Generic Service Integration architecture conceived to embed the use of any third party service as a regular resource in a learning experience. A course author includes a description with the required functionality and the appropriate service is searched and instantiated at enactment time. A case study is presented where Google Forms are used to implement assessment in a IMS Learning Design based course, and adapt its content based on the obtained results.

An increasing number of organizations have established presences in Second Life or virtual worlds for organizational learning. The types of activities range from staff training, annual meetings, to leadership development and commercial transactions. This paper reviews relevant literature on how virtual worlds, especially Second Life, are utilized for organizational learning. Specific emphases will be on the translation of applicable learning theories into the pedagogical design of virtual worlds. Furthermore, the paper explores how organizations establish virtual communities of practice. Finally, examples of virtual worlds that are established for organization learning are examined.

One of the major obstacles in developing high quality content for learning is the substantial development cost and effort. In addition, the return on investment is often low, as developed learning materials are difficult to reuse and adapt to new and different educational contexts. In this paper, we present a semi-automatic content assembly methodology to automate, at least partially, the reuse of existing learning content in high quality and effective learning sequences. In addition, we present a case study that integrates the approach into the LAMS learning design environment.

This paper presents a complete visual environment which supports the search and composition of learning objects (LOs). It focuses on the end user, learner or teacher. Learners search for LOs in order to learn a new concept or to follow a lesson. Teachers search for LOs for direct use during their lessons or in order to reuse and assemble them with others, thus creating their own, novel LO. Nevertheless, the inner complexity of an LO makes searching for and reusing composed LOs a complex task as well. The end user has to be assisted during this task. The core of our environment is built with a navigational and iterative query language, and a composition model. An iterative, navigational, query language is a complex language. The end user cannot express search queries directly in such a textual language. In the same way, the teacher cannot use a complex textual language to compose a new LO. Our environment is a suite of visual interfaces, supporting interaction with the end user while hiding the inner complexity of the system. Last, a validation module validates the consistency of a composed LO and provides for the dynamic annotation of metadata.

This paper focuses on the production of authoring tools that teachers may use to prototype interactive geographical web applications. We present some computational models and a toolset that we designed to address some needs of teachers trying to make use of particular localized documents called “travel stories”. Our research challenge is to enable teachers to design interaction scenarios for such a domain, avoiding any programmer intervention. In the design process, the teacher typically faces three activities: (a) Identification of candidate documents, (b) Evaluation of the adequacy of the document and (c) Production of the learning application making use of the selected document. In this paper, we mainly focus on the (c) Production activity. We highlight the necessary use of an “agile” approach to shorten as much as possible the delay between the design and the evaluation step of a prototype. To address the technological challenges raised by such an aim, we present WIND framework and we discuss its capabilities while considering some examples of interactive scenarios generated with WIND framework.

Current Learning Management Systems generically provide online forums for interactions between students and educators. In this article we propose a tool, the iGraph, that can be embedded in Learning Management Systems that feature hierarchical forums. The iGraph is capable of depicting and analyzing online interactions in an easy to understand graph. The positioning algorithm is based on social network analysis statistics, taken from the collected interactions, and is able to smoothly present temporal evolution in order to find communicational patterns and report them to the educator.

This paper presents a system that connects students with complementary profiles, so they can interchange knowledge and help each other. The profile of the students is built by a modified intelligent tutoring system. Every time the user profile is updated, a gateway updates the profile stored in the user’s personal terminal using a web-service based communication mechanism. The terminals (e.g. mobile phones) are able to find and communicate between themselves using Bluetooth. When they find two complementary user profiles, they help the users getting into contact, thus providing the benefits of social network tools but at short-range and with physical context awareness. Two students are complementary when one knows what the other wants to learn and viceversa, so they can be of mutual help.

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.

In an one year lasting project at the University of Applied Sciences in Bremerhaven a digital learning game for the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven was developed. It is targeted to school pupils in the age between 10 and 14 and should explain the importance of the cog for trading activities between Hanse cities in the 14th century. More detailed learning objectives were defined through a survey with history teachers from Bremen. The historical research was done in cooperation with the museum. Another key-interest was the design and building of an easy-to-use and attractive computer terminal including a special control-interface for the game. The resulting game is evaluated in an user-test with 29 school pupil. It shows that the game makes fun and is easy to understand. Approx. 50% of the pupils achieved all learning objectives.

In this paper I will describe a linguistic intelligent software system, using methods from computational linguistics, for the automatic evaluation of translations in online training of interpreters and translators. With this system the students gain an online interface offering them proper translation training. The main aim in developing such a system was to create an e-learning unit which allows the students to translate a given text in a special online environment and afterwards receive an automatic evaluation of the entered translation from the system. This is done on a computational linguistics basis using special analyzing software, model solutions and stored classifications of typical translation mistakes.

e

3

-portfolio is a software tool which supports learning and working in student project groups. Besides features for collaboration via social media, the software offers an electronic portfolio system. The e-portfolio helps to integrate informal project-based learning into the formal curriculum of higher education. This paper gives an overview of how the software tool is designed and relates the design to the underlying didactic concept.