Author Archive
With the rise of the Web 2.0, the usage of services has been migrating toward a personalized and decentralized or web-based framework. Such process has also catalyzed the emergence of specialized web 2.0 services found useful by different classes of professionals. We choose to shed a bit of light on the services used by academics and researchers and argue about the framework they constitute.
Nowadays academics are using blogs to share ideas and discuss them among themselves. Commenting and notification services associated with blogs help in keeping academics involved in their blogging networks. Posts and their subsequent comments are found to be highly effective in online knowledge constructivism. This paradigm is different from that of the famous wikipedia where convergence toward common grounds is mandatory and historical evolution of thoughts is not visible.
A quick survey of web-based media sharing tools such as flickr for images and youtube for video reveals that academics do rely on their services both to share media among themselves and to publish media elements for public feedback. Other services used include appointment management tools that facilitate the setting of meetings and conferences by synthesising the preferences of all participants. We also cite collaborative environments for document processing and statistical analysis such as those offered by google document.
Academics also benefit from a web 2.0 toolbox designed for them explicitly. One type of such tools is a special category of social bookmarking services devoted to academic references and citations such as citeulike.com. Connotea.org is another example of such services that allow academics to keep track of online references. It tries to mix both citeulike.com with del.icio.us, a commonly used social bookmarking site that relies on folksonomies to cluster bookmarks collected by users.
The focus on the academic usage of web 2.0 services aims to clarify how free license services form a distributed and personalized framework where academic societies can interactively share and procreate new knowledge. The success of these services puts forward a question about the utility of developing unified locally-hosted frameworks and opens the possibility to contemplate the potential of an integrated online framework that encompasses these services in a personalized fashion.
March 23rd, 2007
It has been noted that the help components associated with online applications suffer from several weaknesses. With the widening breadth of contexts in which online application are used, a need to rethink the way help and support are provided grows vital.
Current help paradigms are based on manuals usually separated from the application, requiring users to consult them independently despite being mostly in digital format. Dynamic help on the other hand, such as Microsoft agents, has been found to disturb the users due to its intrusive nature.
Several research works have identified pro-active approaches to provide new users with the support they require without substantially raising the overhead on the development process of online applications. The basis of such trend is to both provide support upon the user’s request, and to accord it in the context of the application itself.
This is done by dynamically linking the help component with the application in order to deduce the context from which support is being requested. In turn, the support is dynamically provided through digital annotations mined from the digital manuals. Arrows and signs are overlaid on the application’s interface to anchor each annotation in the vicinity of the functionality it targets. The annotations are also arranges in consecutive steps and can follow-up with the user as s/he progresses through the application’s process.
November 6th, 2006
Open specifications for interoperable learning technology should be very useful, because they enable the users to rely on their own systems, without the resources, or the implementation of teaching or learning being dependent on specific proprietary systems. As an example of the usefulness of open specifications, let us recall that the web is based on the HTML language, and this has allowed us to be highly independent of proprietary systems.
IMS is one of the main organisations which develops open specifications for eLearning. Several IMS specifications have become worldwide standards for delivering learning products and services, and the move is going on. However, these specifications are difficult to use by people with rather simplistic technological background such as teachers, small learning institutions, and others.
In order to facilitate the dissemination of these standards, the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona has been working on a set of experimental tools that provide user friendly interfaces for some IMS specifications such as Question & Test Interoperability, and Learning Design. The technical development work is based on libraries which were developed in Java to implement functionalities associated with the specifications such as saving and instance of a schema, verifying the instance’s compatibility with the specifications, and implementing the fields, data structures, and relations defined in the specifications. These libraries mirror in their structure a direct mapping of the specification hierarchy into a set of Java classes.
The QAed tool developed at Pompeu Fabra University is a complete open source implementation that facilitates the creation and management of assessment repositories, based on a user centered strategy. It implements a subset of the IMS Question & Test Interoperability specification known as QTI-Lite. IMS specifications promote coordination between distributed learning environments and content from multiple authors and this is also supported by QAed. The tool relies on a set of QTI-Lite Libraries which could be reused in the context of any e-learning framework and are part of the set of libraries mentioned in the previous paragraph. The QAed tool is a standalone application based on teachers’ needs, and implements some practical functionalities which go beyond the specification.
IMS QTI specification is evolving. The current version is QTI 2.0, and there is a quite developed draft of version 2.1. Current Pompeu Fabra University efforts related to QTI involve the upgrade of the libraries to cover a large part of the 2.0 and the 2.1 draft specifications which have been mentioned. The work is building on that of the JISC funded project APIS, but major additions and restructuring have already taken place. The resulting libraries will be released in the immediate future. In the framework of the European TenCompetence project, QAed, which is a stand-alone application, is also being transformed into an open-source plug-in for service oriented architectures (such as those supported by JISC and DEST eFramework). Current Pompeu Fabra University work also includes an easy to use editor based on templates for the Learning Design specification. Let us mention the related work Collage and the RELOAD Learning Design editor.
Experimentations with these tools are helping to design a way to bring the IMS specifications a visage that can be utilized by novice learners or learning designers in producing, distributing, and consuming learning components in accordance with global specifications.
July 19th, 2006
