Identifying Middlewares for Mashup Personal Learning Environments

Traditional teaching methods should be adapted to accommodate the learning needs of the new generation of digital native students. One approach is to provide support for social learning by integrating Web 2.0 tools in educational settings. This paper focuses on a platform specifically built to this end: eMUSE (empowering MashUps for Social E-learning), which aggregates several social media components by means of mashups. In addition, the platform provides learner tracking functionality, by retrieving students' actions with each tool and storing them in a local database for further processing. Thus eMUSE offers valueadded services for both students and teachers: common access point to facilitate tools' management; help students keep track of their contributions as well as their peers'; a simple way for instructors to monitor the class activity as well as quickly check, visualize and grade each student's contributions. The paper includes a comprehensive rationale underlying eMUSE, a description of the platform architecture and functionalities, as well as an initial experimental validation.

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.

Mashup Personal …, 2010

Personal Learning Environments have emerged as a complementary, even challenging, paradigm to Adaptive Learning Systems. One can argue that Pervasive Learning Environments aim at replacing the physical learning environment while Adaptive Learning Systems focus on replacing the instructor. We believe that amalgamation of these two approaches in a complementary manner, i.e. through setting an appropriate balance between learner and system control, is promising. Consequently, we consider mash-ups to be crucial for a successful realization of digital personal learning environments. However, mash-ups are also accompanied by critical technical and usability challenges. In this paper, we try to identify some of these challenges, present solution approaches from a conceptual point of view, and describe our Semantic Mash-up Personal and Pervasive Learning Environment (SMupple) proposal along with initial implementation and evaluation details.

The web 2.0, when meeting the virtual communities (VC), creates many issues when communities are closed, but have a great potential if they take advantage of the inheritance mechanism normally implemented in (advanced) virtual communities systems. When a community platform is in place, the system should provide a lot of basic services in order to facilitate the interaction between community’s members. However, every community has different needs, every organization that implemements a VC platform needs some special services, every now and then users or organizations request new services. So, the VC environment is very fertile in terms of personalizations / evolutions / new developments, especially in learning settings. In order to fulfill these growing requests, the developers of e-learning applications have different possibilities: a) build the personalization “from scratch” b) create new web services for the new requests c) using a mashup approach to respond to the requests. In th...

Networks, 2008

The purpose of this paper is to suggest approaches and guidelines for using Web 2.0 tools and services for developing personal learning environments (PLEs) to manage formal and informal learning leading towards a lifelong learning path. This paper considers a PLE not as a particular site or tool that contains all the applications and provides access to users, but rather a framework for incorporating Web 2.0 tools and services chosen by the learner for collecting and processing information, connecting people and creating knowledge.

International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments, 2010

Over the past decade, it has been argued that technology-enhanced learning (TEL) could respond to the needs of the new knowledge society and transform learning. However, despite isolated achievements, TEL has not succeeded in revolutionizing education and learning processes. Most current TEL initiatives still take a centralized technology-push approach in which learning content is pushed to a predefined group of learners in closed environments. A fundamental shift toward a more open and learner-pull model for learning is needed. Recently, the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) concept has emerged to open new doors for more effective learning and overcome many of the limitations of traditional TEL models. In this paper, the authors present theoretical, design, implementation, and evaluation details of PLEF, a framework for mashup personal learning environments. The primary aim of PLEF is to help learners create custom learning mashups using a wide variety of digital media and data.

In this paper we present ALEF, a framework for adaptive web-based learning 2.0 that integrates adaptive learning with key concepts of emerging Web 2.0. We outline framework architecture and describe its basic features. We introduce basic modules built on the framework as a part of a prototype implementation for learning lisp programming. INTRODUCTION AND RELATED WORK Web-based educational systems of today continue in addressing the key concepts of Web 2.0. The "2.0" learning environments allow users to create and edit the content, to annotate it and post comments on the top of it and to support social learning (e.g., Moodle [3]). However, current (non-adaptive) learning environments do not take into account differences among students and provide "one-size-fits-all" instead of personalized learning experience. This is due to the fact that underlying models of a virtual learning environment often miss explicit and rich metadata descriptions used for inferring by ad...

2009

The MUPPLE workshop serves as a forum to bring together researchers and developers from these projects and an open public that have an interest in understanding and engineering mash-up personal learning environments (MUPPLEs). The aim of this workshop is to bring together the various research and development groups in technology-enhanced learning that currently focus on the development of the next

2009

Nowadays, the Semantic Web technologies are exploited also in the e-learning domain in order to provide personalized and adaptive learning experiences, semantic annotation of learning contents and learner profiling. The approaches of the Web 2.0, instead, are used to implement and deploy knowledge exchange services based on the concept of social collaboration. In this work, we propose an approach resulted from the convergence between Semantic Web and Social Web to manage, agilely and easily, the contingent learning needs of workers within organizations. Our intention is to support the use of natural languages to express the learning needs for either driving the automatic generation of learning units or effectively adapting learning pathways.

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