Mapping web personal learning environments

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2011

Personalization is seen as the key approach to handle the plethora of information in today's knowledge-based society. It is expected that personalized teaching and learning will address the needs of the learners more efficiently. The education of the future will change by the influence of Web 2.0 contents and the steadily increasing amount of data. This means that the students of tomorrow will regularly have to deal with sharing and merging contents from different sources. Therefore, mashup technology will become a very important means to focus on individual learning needs and to personalize the access to particular information. The following article describes the challenges of Personal Learning Environments at higher education institutions. In the first section, the concept of Personal Learning Environments is presented, while the second section discusses the new challenges that arise for learning with the help of Personal Learning Environments. The third section of the article describes the technical background of Personal Learning Environments and the widget standard in general. In section four, a first prototype of a personal learning environment will be presented, which is integrated into the Technical University of Graz. A detailed description of the available widgets for the prototype, along with a first expert evaluation, will be provided. Finally, the conclusion of the article will sum up the main points of this paper and present the plans for future research together with the prospective developments.

2011

The learning environment of the future must be more individualised and personalised-for years this is one of the international demands in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) and teaching. Since fall 2010 Graz University of Technology provides a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) based on mashup of widgets connecting various web applications.

… and Technology for a …, 2009

Personalization in e-learning systems is vital since they are used by a wide variety of students with different characteristics. There are several approaches that aim at personalizing e-learning environments. However, they focus mainly on technological and/or networking aspects without caring of contextual aspects. They consider only a limited version of context while providing personalization. In our work, the objective is to improve e-learning environment personalization making use of a better understanding and modeling of the user's educational and technological context using ontologies. We show an example of the use of our proposal in the AdaptWeb system, in which content and navigation recommendations are provided depending on the student's context.

2011 IEEE 11th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, 2011

There is a growing acceptance of the need to move beyond the concept of the traditional virtual learning environment towards a Personal Learning Environment. This paper presents an approach to personalised development of learning applications tp support disabled students. Supported by a community of practice, we produced bespoke open source widgets freely available for use and adaptation by the wider community.

2005

Although there are many Internet-based educational applications available today, they usually do not allow functionality extensions, change or reuse. In this context, this paper presents a framework, based on the J2EE component architecture, for helping the development of more customizable educational applications. In order to reach its goal, it merges significant features from popular CMS (such as pluggable modules) to the MVC architecture, found in most popular frameworks for Web development.

Future Internet, 2009

The common understanding of e-learning has shifted over the last decade from the traditional learning objects portals to learning paradigms that enforces constructivism, discovery learning and social collaboration. Such type of learning takes place outside the formal academic settings (e.g., seminars or lectures) where a learning environment is created by using some kind of web application mashup tools. The use of these mashup tools moves the learning environment further away from being a monolithic platform towards providing an open set of learning tools, an unrestricted number of actors, and an open corpus of artifacts, either pre-existing or created by the learning process -freely combinable and utilizable by learners within their learning activities. However, collaboration, mashup and contextualization can only be supported through services, which can be created and modified dynamically based on middlewares to suit the current needs and situations of learners. This article identifies middlewares suitable for creating effective personal learning environment based on Web 2.0 mashup tools. This article also proposed a general framework for constructing such personal learning environments based on Ambient Learning realized by learning agents and the use of Enterprise Mashup servers.

Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Mashup Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLE09), Nice, France, 2009

Abstract. Due to the enormous growth of distributed applications, services, tools and resources, it is not easy for end users to come across existing services, manage and use them in a matter which is customized according to their personal needs. Mashups can be a very interesting approach to overcome challenges of distributed (unknown) services. Using mashups in a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) can help to connect resources and applications in one environment customized to the needs of individual users. In this paper ...

Interactive Learning Environments, 2008