Towards Collaborative Portable Web Spaces

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.

2009

Mashups have become the driving force behind the development of Personal Learning Environments (PLE). Creating mashups in an ad hoc manner is, however, for end users with little or no programming background not an easy task. In this paper, we leverage the possibility to use Semantic Mashups (SMashups) for a scalable approach to creating mashups. We present the conceptual and technical details of PLEF‐Ext as a flexible framework for mashup‐driven end‐user development of PLEs.

2009

Abstract. A recent trend in education and in web development is to build learning environment on top of web platforms which are carefully designed to host a plurality of software components (sometimes called widgets or plugins) which can be organized or combined (mashed-up) at user's convenience to create personalized environments.

Advanced Technology for Learning, 2004

This paper presents an approach to develop and to integrate highly diverse resources in learning spaces via personalizable interfaces and virtual collaboration areas. Digital libraries comprise vast digital repositories and wide range of services, users' environments and interfaces, all intended to support learning and collaborative research activities. We are developing a distributed learning environments for which services and interfaces include, for example, web-based learning systems using annotation environment, adaptive WBL, agents-based asynchronous virtual classrooms, computer assisted language learning using video and annotation, teacher support environment in web-based training system, authoring systems for WBL/T, videoconferencebased CSCL environments, user agents for video information retrieval, recommendation agents, 3D visualization aids, and access to digital documents that support specific courses and projects. The diversity of these interfaces, plus the volume and dynamism of the digital content's underlying collections, results in a complexity that has the potential to make the digital library unwieldy for the user. In order to assist users in dealing with this complexity, we are designing environments, termed collaborative personal and group spaces, which provide users with means to access and control all available resources in a uniform fashion from a single vantage point. We discuss our ongoing design and development experiences as well as initial usage results.

Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems - MEDES '11, 2011

The mashup era has emerged in response to the challenge of integrating existing services, data sources, and tools to generate new applications. Mashups are usually realized either through a seamless integration, in which only the resulting application is known by the end-users, or through integration of original applications, data sources, and tools, particularly in terms of widgets, into the same graphical space, in which participating applications and data sources are identifiable by the end-users. The former composes a unified functionality or data presentation/source from the original sources. The latter generates a digital environment in which participating sources exist as individual entities, but the true integration can only be realized through enabling widgets to be responsive to the events happening in each other. We call such an integration widget orchestration. In this paper, we provide a holistic view on the mashup era and a theoretical grounding for widget-based digital environments, we elaborate on key challenges for realizing such environments and (semi-)automatic widget orchestration, and we introduce our solution strategies. We identified following challenges: widget interoperability, user-behavior mining, and infrastructure. We introduce functional interfaces (FWI) for application interoperability, exploit semantic web technologies for data interoperability, and investigate the possibility of employing workflow/process mining techniques, along with Petri nets as a formal ground, for user-behavior mining. We outline a reference platform and architecture, compliant with our strategies, to foster re-usability of widgets and development of standardized widgetbased environments. We have implemented a prototype for a Widget-based Personal Learning Environment (WIPLE) for foreign language learning in order to demonstrate the feasibility of our solution strategies, framework, and architecture.