Call for Papers: ICCE 2016 Sub-Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ALT), Learning Analytics and Digital Infrastructure

ICCE 2016 Sub-Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ALT), Learning Analytics and Digital Infrastructure

Mumbai, India

November 28 - December 2 (Monday-Friday), 2016

Organized by the Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education http://www.apsce.net/
Hosted by Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India

In response to emerging research diversity, ICCE2016 will be a meta-conference, comprising seven co-located theme-based conferences. This is the Call for Papers for the theme-based conference, C3: Sub-Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ALT), Learning Analytics and Digital Infrastructure

All accepted papers will be published in proceedings which will be indexed by Elsevier Bibliographic Databases (e.g., Scopus, Engineering Village and others). Authors of accepted distinguished full papers will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers for consideration of publication in Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning (RPTEL), the official academic journal of the Asia Pacific Society for Computers in Education.

This sub-conference of ICCE 2016 will focus on recent and emerging directions in aligning digital infrastructure requirements with innovations in digital learning. In particular, it focuses upon advancements in learning technologies due to new and inventive use of data as representations of learning activities and also as a resource for learning. This brings into scope learning analytics and its sub-processes of capturing, collecting, storing, analyzing, visualizing and using data to improve learning, and processes that enable it, such as educational data mining, open educational resources, interoperability standards, and digital infrastructures.

This theme-based conference of ICCE will provide an opportunity to present and exchange ideas and results about recent research in the application of digital technologies in education and training. This conference focuses also on innovation that spans open educational resources and interoperability standards, both of which are important driving forces of sustainable digital technology adoption in education and training. The conference aims to inform standards development in the area of systems and resource interoperability and to report on and inspire design of new and advanced learning technologies.
The scope of the conference will cover but not be limited to the following topics

• Implementation and organisational development of advanced learning technologies
• New generations of educational technologies
• Design and application of learning analytics systems
• Data sharing for learning analytics
• New repository technologies and network systems
• Pedagogical models and learning analytics
• Gathering diverse learning data, e.g., related to linked and open data
• Development and management of algorithms for analytics based on gathered data
• Predictive models, visualisation and statistical analysis
• Privacy concerns and policy aspects related to learning analytics
• Open platforms, Open Educational Resources (OERs), Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), open data, and open learning methods
• Evaluation and Assessment, including E-testing and new test theories
• International developments in open source and open standards
• Technology standards for content, portfolios, learner information, and competencies
• Life cycle management of technical learning objects
• Organizational readiness
• Social media and learning
• Personalized educational and learning systems
• Learning systems platforms and architectures
• E-learning, knowledge management and their organizational management
• Automated assessments
• Recommender systems
• Open Educational Resources (OER) – systems and application
• Learning content retrieval and recommendation 
• New directions for standards development in the field of digital learning
• Digital Badges and open badging systems
• Design Thinking & Human Computer Interaction
• The Internet of Things and the future of learning

Paper categories(Note the revised page limits)

• Full paper (8-10 pages)
• Short paper (5-6 pages)
• Poster paper (2-3 pages)

The paper template is available here. For past authors of ICCE, please note that the template has been substantially revised since ICCE 2015. Do download the latest version of the template when preparing your manuscript.
All the accepted full papers are eligible for the competitions of

• Best Overall Paper Award
• Best Student Paper Award (restricted to papers whose first authors are graduate or undergraduate students)
• Best Technical Design Paper Award

In addition, all the accepted poster papers are eligible for the competition of Best Poster Design Award(s). Please visit this URL for the award rules and criteria.

Important dates (Main Conference)

Paper Submission Due: May 10, 2016
Notification of Acceptance: August 2, 2016

Program Co-chairs

Tore HOEL, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway (executive program chair)
Ulrich HOPPE, Univerisity of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Xavier OCHOA, Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral, Ecuador
Jin Gon SHON, Korea National Open University, South Korea

Program Committee

Irene CHEN, National Changhua University of Education, Taiwan
Jean-Noel COLIN, University of Namur, Belgium
Ingo DAHN, University of Koblenz, Germany
Dai GRIFFITS, University of Bolton, United Kingdom
Seungyeon HAN, Hanyang Cyber University, Korea
Yih-Ruey JUANG, Jinwen University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Fanny KLETT, German Workforce ADL Partnership Lab, Germany
Tatsuhiro KONISHI, Shizuoka University, Japan
Eugenijus KURILOVAS, Vilnius University, Lithuania
Lam-for KWOK, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Chien-Sing LEE, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia
Jerry LEESON, University of Adelaide, Australia
Ching-Jung LIAO, Chung Yuan Christian University, Taiwan
Kin Chew LIM, SIM University, Singapore
Jon MASON, Charles Darwin University, Australia
Kenji MATSUURA, Tokushima University, Japan
Kuo-Liang OU, National Hsinchu University of Education, Taiwan
Luis ANIDO RIFON, University of Vigo, Spain
Robby ROBSON, Eduworks Corporation, USA
Manuel Caeiro RODRIGUEZ, University of Vigo, Spain
Eunice SARI, Univeristy of Western Australia, Australia
Hitoshi SASAKI, Takushoku University, Japan
Marcus SPECHT, the Open University of the Netherlands, Netherlands
Riina VUORIKARI, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, European Commission, Belgium
Maggie M. WANG, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

US Common core state standards and OER that travels well

I've followed the US Common core state standards (CCSS) initiative (http://www.corestandards.org) with some interest. It's not so much from the point of view of harmonising eduction or setting the same standards across the nation, but I'm more interested in it from the Open Educational Resources (OER) point of view.

One of the main problems for educators who want to use OER as part of their lessons is to find good resources that match their curriculum needs at the moment. Interestingly, the US has the same problem here as we have in Europe: each state/country has their own standards, curriculum topics and descriptions. Additionally, in each state/country topics are taught at different times, in somewhat varying order, etc. (and I'm not touching the issue of different styles of instruction/pedagogy here). This makes it almost impossible to find resources related to a certain curriculum topic from the different state/country. Why? Because the metadata descriptions on which many of the search mechanisms rely upon (at least in repositories and referatories) and their meaning differ from state/country to another. In other words, there is little semantic interoperability.

Let's take an example of mathematics and a targeted competency that is described in the national curriculum. It could be formulated as "Pupils know the symbol rules for whole and rational numbers". In Spain, this is only taught at the first year secondary school when students are 13 years old. But in Finland, this is taught in primary school when students are 12 years old. (NOTE, this is only an illustrative example, I'm totally making the specs up). So the Spanish learning resource which teaches "symbol rules for whole and rational numbers" is described in metadata using "secondary education" and 13-14 years, whereas the Finnish one is described in metadata using "primary education" and 11-12 years. So when the Spanish teacher uses her search criteria relevant to her national curriculum, she will totally miss the Finnish piece OER on the same topic because of lack of semantic interoperability.

From the metadata and search point of view, the CCSS initiative has  put the finger on things (i.e. curriculum topics) that are common across the states and also helps increase semantic interoperability across the stats. I came across an example of this at OER Commons. They use CCSS in their metadata to tag resources that originate from different states but that comply to certain given CCSS topics. See the example here: http://www.oercommons.org/browse/collection/common-core-reference-collection.

Another interesting commonality that I see with CCSS and OER in Europe is related to my previous work on finding OER that "travel well" (see for example here). Basically, in Europe, not all the OER are interesting for sharing across the borders, but only the ones that are useful to others (e.g. curriculum match). But how do we sort out the useful ones from the less useful ones? The CCSS work has figured that out in an interesting way. 

Now, what could we do in Europe? If you have ideas on that, I'll be interested in hearing :)

 

From Attention metadata to Participatory metadada

Capturing and taking advantage of users’ actions on the Web has come a long way since business models were first implemented around the idea of clickstream in the ’90 . Instead of having the commercial sites taking advantage of the attention that users pay to different products, in the recent years the tide has turned arguing that interactions with the content (e.g. buying, listening, reading feeds) and users reactions to that content (e.g. ratings, reviews, tags) should be something that the user can control.

AttentionTrust.org, for example, calls this "attention data" and argues that it is a valuable resource that reflects user’s interests, activities and values, thus serves as a proxy for their attention.

AttentionXML (1) is an open specification to capture individual’s clicks to track user’s behaviour and information consumption on the Web. Contextualized Attention Metadata (CAM) schema was build upon it with an extension that allows capturing observations about users activities in any kind of tool, not just a browser or newsreader (Najjar et.al. 2006a,b).

Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML), on the other hand, offers a way for a user to create a personal Attention Profile, which is portable, sharable and captures users’ attention on self-defined services. Moreover, the social aspect of the Web, where users not only interact with resources, but actually participate in communities and create content, has created a need for users to capture these participatory aspects of their attention.

Thus User Labor Markup Language (ULML) that proposes an open data structure to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. One of the ULML use cases, for example, is around creating metadata (e.g. tagging, voting, commenting etc.) as a way to improve and maintain users’ existence in social web. All these specifications serve the same goal; being openly transparent about one’s interests on the Web in order to make the best use out of them for the user’s own benefit.

I'm currently thinking with my studdy-buddy Nikos Manouselis how we could save such attention profiles from different repositories to have a more holistic picture of what do users do on educational repositories or on federations of them. I think that alone would be a great advance for the research.

Second, it might be that the same user have profiles in different repositories (like I have one in MELT, in LeMill and OERCommons), so this would allow the user to consolidate her interests and resources found in different places, like bookmarks or collections that I have created in these different repositories. It could be nice to have my personal tagcloud based on my attentions in different repositories to allow me to access resources in these different services this way.

Third, there are resources that many of the educational repositories share. Like in MELT, we have most bookmarks on resources from LeMill. It is of interest for LeMill to know that they have fans and users in MELT, so this is the info that can be fed back from MELT to LeMill, and they can boost their stats with this! Not to mention of getting back the participatory information from MELT, e.g. users tags, ratings, etc.

The fourth advantage could be that using this type of profiled information to see what resources from LeMill have been of use to the "extended community" (e.g. outside of LeMill's own user base). This info could help them to boost their reputation in the network of repositories. If we knew that half of the repositories in the federation actually have users who interact with LeMill resources, that would give LeMill a great boost as an interesting repository to play with, a reputable provider of resources (someone pointed out this saying, hey, think of eBay's reputation points for sellers!). I already had toyed with the idea of "travel well" value for each repository in the federation based on the evidence of previous cross-border use of their resources (of course tracked down using something like portable profile).

Of course, finally, such thing could be used for recommendation purposes and to allow users swiftly find resources of interest without noticing that they have to go to a different repository. Like the previous idea of cross-repository tag clouds.


[1] AttentionXML (2004). AttentionXML specifications, Retrieved June 8, 2007, from http://developers.technorati.com/ wiki/attentionxml.
[2] Najjar, J., Wolpers, M., & Duval, E. (2006a), Attention Metadata: Collection and Management. Paper presented at the World Wide Web 2006 Workshop Logging Traces of Web Activity: The Mechanics of Data Collection, May 23, 2006, Edinburgh, UK.
[3] Najjar, J., Wolpers, M., & Duval, E. (2006b). Towards Effective Usage-Based Learning Applications: Track and Learn from User Experience(s). Paper presented at the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2006), July 5-7, 2006, Kerkrade, The Netherlands.

My PhD dissertation, a new take on defining it

How Social Information Retrieval (SIR) can be used to enhance the discovery of large-scale collections of multilingual digital learning resources

The PhD dissertation deals with the discovery of digital learning resources and flexible access to large-scale collections of multilingual digital educational content. The thesis attempts to prove that we can use information deduced from social bookmarks and tags to better select suitable learning resources to users, who come from a variety of countries, speak different languages and whose educational context vary.

The first step towards proving this thesis statement is to better understand whether there are digital learning resources that afford a good usage also in a context other than the one they were originally intended for. We call this type of educational content “travel well” resources because they cross borders easily; those borders can be national, linguistic, educational or socio-cultural.

Upon better understanding of how users agree on “travel well” resources, we can explore the ways to identify them. Two different sources of information can be used for this purpose: looking at the properties of these resources (e.g. Learning Object Metadata), as well as attentional metadata collected from users interactions with the resources on the portal (Najjar, 2006). Our interest is in attentional metadata that we can gather from users' social bookmarks, from their personal collections of educational resources that they create, and from tags that they add to these resources (Vuorikari and Van Assche, 2007, Vuorikari et Poldoja, submitted).

One major contribution of this thesis is the better understanding of how users (e.g. teachers) tag educational resources in a multilingual environment and whether a multilingual context has any implication on the tagging behaviour (e.g. in what languages do users tag) (Vuorikari, et al., submitted). Secondly, we are interested in the value that a multilingual tagging system provides; on the one hand, we want to know what kind of information multilingual tags can yield about the resources and their possible use in different contexts. On the other hand, we are interested in their value for resource discovery and as a navigational tool to allow cross-language and country exploration of new resources in multiple languages.

Better understanding of tagging behaviour and creation of personal collections of learning resources will help us to create metrics that can be used to calculate “travel well” value of resource. Our hypothesis is that we can define a “travel well” resource when we use information deduced from social bookmarks, users’ personal collections of educational resources, and from tags that they have added to these resources. We will be watching the following variables:

• The resource is from a different country than the user is
• The resource is in a different language than user’s mother tongue,
• The resource has tags in different language(s) than that of the item language

The metrics used to calculate the “travel well” value of digital learning resources would be used to create a TravelRank algorithm that allows identifying learning resources that “travel well”, and which can be used to compliment the LearnRank algorithm (Duval, 2006). Identifying these resources from large collections of digital learning content from different countries and in different languages has a potential to allow a more flexible access to large-scale collections of resources. The final part of the thesis is to validate this claim and to evaluate its usefulness for a large audience of users from different countries.
References:

Najjar J., Wolpers M., and Duval E. Towards Effective Usage-Based Learning Applications: Track and Learn from User Experience(s). IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, (2006) (ICALT '06).

Duval E. LearnRank: Towards a real quality measure for Learning. In U. Ehlers & J.M. Pawlowski (eds.), European Handbook for Quality and Standardization in E-Learning. Springer (2006), 379-384.

other non-published, submitted papers at my site:
http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~riina/

You gotta be careful what you wish for: data portability group

I just read about the Data Portability group, or rather just watched the video (funky music!) on Read/Write web. Philosophy, like explained on http://dataportability.org/

Philosophy As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.

Mission To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.

A year ago, I posted about Fighting read/write web fatique. So, that's what all the traffic on my blog was about ;) (as if...)

SIRTEL'07: la raison d'etre

"We use people to find content. We use content to find people."*

On Sept 18 our SIRTEL workshop takes place. It's gonna be "Serious Fun"! Let me just outline why:

SIRTEL'07: Raison d'etre

Recommender systems, as well as social navigation, have been around since the popularisation of WWW, that's some 15-20 years now. The idea is to help people choose the right stuff from a potentially overwhelming set of choices. To facilitate that users could be helped with information from other users, the choices made before (by themselves or similar users), the ratings or reviews other people had done, etc. (Rescnik et al., 1997)

The field of learning technologies has seen recommenders of some sort being discussed and prototyped since the late nineteens. In the review of the field in Manouselis et al (2008) we identified about 10 recommenders, and even more conceptual papers of them, but very little has matierialised so far.

Since the last few years recommenders have made a second arrival into the discussion topics of technology, or network, enhanced learning. Undoubtedly, this has been influenced by the arrival "Web 2.0" with all its ideas:

- Collaborative tagging, for example, has changed lots of ideas of how metadata should be produced and how static a metadata record should be: it's not anymore one metadata record produced by a librarian, but lots of annotational and attentional metadata by lots of users.

- Other annotations by users that express their subjective judgements have seen a huge growth too, we don't only talk about ratings or reviews in their traditional sense, but also tumbs-up or down, giving pokes to people or objects, etc.

- Social bookmarking, which allows users to create easy references to their own collections of digital resources (photos, books, links, music,..), has given a new dimension to the concept of social navigations. The link between resource-user(-tag) allows users to navigate other people's collections and thus find novel resources. Also, the same resource-user-tag link gives researchers an itch to use this information to group similar users for recommendation purposes, as well as to study the emerging networks.

- Expressing social ties between people has also brought new possibilities along. We are not only seeing networks of friends, but there are new possibilities where people can express different networks, ones for professional use, others for personal, recreational, etc purposes. Also, portability of these networks has become an issue discussed for better designs (social-network-portability group, PeopleWeb ,..).

- Something else is also happening behind the scenes. Clicksteam and user behaviour on the Web is not anymore a property of the commercial portal on which users are, but users are starting to take seriously how their "attention" is being used, who owns it, etc. Attentional metadata is a huge source of information that educationalists are also starting to take more seriously and thinking how it could be used for better serving learners and teachers (Contextual Attention Matadata, Attention Profiling Mark-up Language, Attention Trust,..). Attentional metadata can also become crucial when it comes to better understanding the intentions of a user, why are they, for example, looking for some information and for what task at hand!

- Finally, content for educational use, or rather its production, is also seeing a change. Users generate more and more of the content on the Web in general, a trend which is also seen in the e-learning. Of course, traditionally teachers have always produced lots of their own material, but now its re-use also has been facilitated (e.g. repositories/referatories). Also, the collaboration aspect is facilitated by the Web, it has become easier for people to work together on things (e.g. wikis, collaborative platforms,..). Additionally, learners produce plenty of material which also should be seen and used as educational content.

To sum-up: two main topics evolve around social context and social content. Social context is how we express the who, where and with whom, and social content are the objects or digital artefacts that are in the center of the communication, exchange and networks.

All the above has hopefully also changed how we will see the future of social information retrieval for technology enhanced learning. This workshop will all be about that! Serious Fun!

-------

N. Manouselis, R. Vuorikari, F. Van Assche, “Collaborative Filtering of Learning Objects for Online Communities: An Experimental Investigation”, accepted for publication in Computers in Human Behavior, Special Issue on ‘Advances of Knowledge Management and Semantic Web for Social Networks’, 2008.

P.Morville, 2004

Resnick P. & Varian H.R., “Recommender Systems”, Communications of the ACM, 40(3),1997

Vanderwal: Tagging Today & Tommorw

Vanderwal nicely captures the spirit of tagging both for personal use and for the social aspects of it.

Personal      Social

- capture      - share
- hook/copy   - point
- annotate     - collaborate
- refind        - filter
- privacy      - trusted groups


Tagging Today & Tommorw - New Content, on the page 32
http://www.slideshare.net/vanderwal/tagging-today-tommorw

Anyway, the slides are worth taking a look. I'm glad he mentions "i" word - interoperability :)

Connections between working items in EUN, KUL and COSL

Visiting The Center for Open Sustainable Learning (COSL) in Utah State University last week was a very rewarding experience. People there are working on many interesting things regarding the support for the use of open content in education. I had already checked their website (http://cosl.usu.edu/) before going there, but of course it's nothing compared to sitting down with people, talking about my projects and their projects, and, little by little, creating understanding on complimentary approaches and ideas to collaborate (hopefully).

To get the big picture on where I stand between all the work done in European Schoonet (EUN), KULeuven (KUL) and COSL, I created a complicated looking image that hopefully helps me to put pieces of the puzzle together.

The image here on the left represent a rather generic lifecycle of a learning resource (this is the connected part of the image) and the greenish bubbles around it are working/research items that people in EUN, KULeuven and COSL work on. With a quick look it seems that all the institutes work in the same field - providing access to learning resources - however, each has its own focus and flavour to give.

Who and what?

KUL is focused on searchability of resources across different repositories (SQI, OAI-PHM) and emphasises the generation (ALOCOM, AMG) and collection of metadata (CAM), both to describe the resource (LOM) and its context of use (Contextualized Attention Metadata).

COSL works on making the content accessible (EduCommons CMS), but is also focuses on tools to support the use of content (MOCSL). Moreover, the relations of content and content, content and users, and users and users seem to have become more important (Didly, Oz). They are also working on a recommender system.

EUN has interest in making the content available (federated search, Minor) and using the social aspects for its retrieval, the main methods being social bookmarking and user annotations (MELT).

Let's take it step by step following the scenario

1. Repositories to make content available

This image depicts a rather typical scenario of learning resources which end up in a repository; first the resource is "created", then"described" (i.e. metadata added) and "approved" (e.g. QA) to be part of a repository's collection where it is "published".

EduCommons, a plone-based CMS created by COSL folks has been developed for this reason.

eduCommons is an OpenCourseWare management system designed specifically to support OpenCourseWare projects like USU OCW. eduCommons will help you develop and manage an open access collection of course materials.

Whereas in EUN MINOR was developed. It's an open source learning resources repository that allows users to manage learning resources and their metadata. Minor comes with a built-in connector to the EUN's Federation of Internet Resources for Education, which greatly facilitates the work of connecting to other repositories and querying their resources.

2. Make the content available for search

Both EUN and KUL has been active in making the resources and/or metadata that reside in distributed collections and repositories accessible. Both have greatly contributed to Simple Query Interface (SQI). EUN and KUL, for example, demonstrated a real-time interoperability between Learning Object Repositories last summer.

Apart from SQI, folks in KUL are also looking into harvesting metadata, which seems like a suitable and complimentary solution for SQI.

3. Accessing the resources

Once the resources are made available in a way or another, there are the users who "discover" them using various methods. This is an area where quite a lot of work in done in all 3 places.

In EUN and KUL, within the MELT-project, the focus is on creating Social information retrieval (SIR) techniques for flexible access to large-scale collections of content. Here we are interested in social bookmarking and tagging, as well as on other annotations like comments, ratings, etc. This work can also lead to an implementation of a recommender system for learning resources within the federation of repositories.

COSL has also been busy thinking of how to use people, and relations that people and content have, to create serendipitous ways to discover resources. Ozmozr (Oz) is, or will be, an identity and content aggregator that leverages the power of social collaborative filtering through tagging. Currently it looks somewhat messy, but try to see for the grand idea that lies behind.

There is also Srumdidilyumptio.us, just didly among friends, that allows users to express relationships, let them between people and people, people and content or content and content, i.e. any two resources accessible by URLs. Didly might not look that cool, but one should think of it rather as an API to make use of that information in another context, I was told.

These two tools/concepts pretty well demonstrate the thinking that COSL folks take forward. One could say that they aggregate s!#t out of everything, to illustrate the Web 2.o thinking. Moreover, COSL will be working on topping up these two "relations aggregators" with a recommender system. The difference to the work in EUN is that they are planning to recommend anything that people have input in Oz, whereas EUN is only talking about recommending learning resources.

More in the same area, novel ways to access resources, one of the PhD students in KUL is working on creating a better ranking system for resources, namely the LearnRank. This will use the Contextualised Attention Metadata framwork (CAM). Another one is busy with information visualization techniques for the same purpose. We are also interested in experimenting on the combo of information visualization and social bookmarking in the future.

4. Support the decision making

Next step in discovering resources is to make the decision upon the piece of content. Usually users are exposed to a list of search results (sortable sometimes, ranked or not) or a list of recommendations. There are different ways the system can support users at this point.

EUN and COSL are both interested in user relevance judgments (AnnoRate; use of ratings and evaluations in EUN) and other annotations such as pedagogical comments, to help users to choose the content. EUN has also implemented personal collections of learning resources, so users could see in how many other collections the resource has been added in, to help them to judge its relevance.

After choosing the resource, users in EUN can add it to their favourites collection (bookmark) or choose to "obtain" the resource, its metadata or uri from the repository. Ozmozr, a COSL tool, allows users to bookmark items too, and to share them with other users. Additionally, at the same time, users can also save these bookmarks to their delicous account, for example.

It's good to make here a remark that CAM framework can be used to collect all kinds of user attention when interacting with a repository, for example, to save the search history, what items have been looked at or obtained, etc. This can be fed in again to help the discovery of resources, like is the case of LearnRank.

5. Re-using and re-purposing the content, content collaboration


Once the items have been obtained, there are the users, teachers or learners, who modify, "re-purpose", sequence or rip the resource to make it suitable for their needs.

In this sub-area ,some complimentary approaches have been taken too. Within an EUN-lead project a plone-based collaborative platform called LeMill has been developed by UIAH. LeMill is a web community for finding, authoring and sharing open and free learning resources.

In COSL some tools are under construction to support the use and re-use. Send2Wiki plug-in allows a user to send a webpage to a wiki and modify it there. It will automatically check on the CC licence and bring that info along. User can then modify the page in the wiki as they wish, for example to make a translation of it (hope to pilot this in EUN), or if it's from WikiPedia, modify the content to make it more suitable for K-12, for example (now some researchers in COSL say that Wikipedia is rather graduate level reading, thus the need for different versions).

Make a Path will help users in putting pieces of resource together for a coherent learning path. This tool is like creating your own music playlists. Once the users are using it (I hope EUN will pilot this, for example), some interesting patterns will most like start appearing. One possible way to take this forward to help sequence learning resources could be case based reasoning, like Claudio did for generating music play lists. Additionally, The INSTRUCTIONAL ARCHITECT allows teachers to find, use and share learning resources from the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and the Web in order to create engaging and interactive educational web pages.

Moreover, there is research interest to better understand the collaboration aspects and communication patterns around content, how people work on it, share it, ask questions, help others, etc. In LeMill the collaboration aspect is important, one of the developers is currently conducting his PhD research (UIAH) on collaborative authoring of learning resources. Whereas in COSL, there is interest in looking into Yahoo! Answers, as well as there was some early work around supporting the users of MIT OpenCourseware.

I think KUL ALOCOM framework and AGM could be used here to make sure that a) the smallest possible pieces of content are saved in the repository, too, b) the correct metadata is sucked from the context. Also, CAM could be used to better track users interaction modes and patterns, etc.


6. Actual use of content and its evaluation


After ripping and mashing the content, it it usually "integrated" (e.g. using CMS, etc) to teaching and learning practices (pedagogical methods). "Use" of the learning resource takes place in its own context. Here, the CAM framework becomes useful to know more about how the resources have been used, in what context (e.g. entered by a university prof to a course, all this metadata can be sucked with the help of AGM and CAM).

Following the use, the users are given possibilities to evaluate or rate the content. The challenge here for a federation of repositories is that different repositories use different ways to rate and evaluate the content (different scale, different criteria (ped, technical, suitability in classroom,..), thus interoperability becomes cumbersome and there might be something lost in semantics (EUN). A rating service on a top of repositories like AnnoRate overcomes such hurdles.

To shortly summarise:


Everyone is interested in adding metadata, any kinds of it (LOM, attention, annotations, relations (bookmarks, sequence, ...), to the system












and using it for better retrieval of resources, and the new thing, to connect people.

"We use people to find content. We use content to find people. Information seeking behavior and social network analysis go hand in hand." Peter Morville (2004)

The really interesting part of a folksonomy is not the content item being described, and not the tags that describe the item, but the person doing the tagging. by Greenchameleon

Fighting the read/write web-fatigue with interoperability

My problem with social software sites has long been my short attention span. I love to log-in - but not fully create my full profile as it is soo timeconsuming - I play around for some time to test and understand how some of the features work, and then I forget about it. Some random emails from even more random people wanting to make me their friend sometime remind me of the service. However, it's hard to go back as I can't even remember the password or which email I used to sign up.

This post, ..(cuz losing passwords is common amongst teens), really made me laugh about how teens use the Web. According to that teens would forget the password to enter to the social network service, and without any hesitation, they start a new profile, and email for that reason. I wonder if this is more the nature of teens than a new trend emerging among young users of Web?

Maybe teens just don't think the whole thing (i.e. social network sites) is that meaningful or worth saving. Or better, maybe they just really don't think about building a consistent profile of themselves, yet. Hell no, I would hate if all the stuff that I once did on the Web would be still available and indexed in Google! Everyone needs to start once in a while from scratch, cuz old habits stick (and stink)! But, maybe once those kids think that it's meaningful enough for them, and they will start remembering the passwords.

Or better, when they are old enough that they really care and want to keep all the digital pieces together, hopefully there are better ways to keep track of "yourself" than separate services with no portability of content that only rely on stupid passwords. There really should be better ways...

Anyway, the two points that I have seeing since I've opened my computer after vacations (yeah, I know how to log off) is Web-fatigue and portability of content, contacts and profile information in social networking sites, but I would really want to bring it to the whole field of social software.

Could 2007 be the year of social network fatigue? by ZDNet's Steve O'Hear --Another driving force for social networks in 07, will be the increasing
number of niche networks which are highly targeted to particular
interest groups or social activities. The question that still remains
however, is how many social networks any one user is likely to join and
remain active in? This is where Read/WriteWeb's prediction of fatigue
has more weight. Unless the time required to sign-in, post to, and
maintain profiles across each network is reduced, it will be impossible
for most users to participate in multiple sites for very long.
Therefore I think it will be essential for social networks to open up, through embracing open standards which allow for greater interoperability between networks.

Hell yeah, that would be lovely! That's what I've been wanting for some time now, well, ever since I started using social bookmarking services. I really like Furl, I think it's far nicer service to use than delicious, which I only use occasionally, because of peer-pressure, everyone else is there - well, to leverage on the crowds. But I just don't like it, for reasons that I won't go in this post.

Nevertheless, what I would like, is that having the profile and bookmarks that I've accumulated in Fulr could be taken advantage of also in delicious. There should be some way of updating my profile at the same time in both services, or that the services would have some way to make a personalised federated search across the services - sort of meta search across social bookmarking sites that would

a) allow me to browse other similar people's profiles,

b) would make active matching of my bookmarks to others in each service and recommend me links. Moreover, there should be some

c) possibility also to tap on my networks and contacts throughout the services, like that my delicious network would be notified of my new bookmarks in Furl.

Of course, now there are ways to do all that, subscribe manually users from one place to another, etc, but it would take ages to do it, and I would never be up-to-date in any of the places, I reckon.

So, this is to say that it would be really important to work on different types of interoperability between social software services. There's been posts regarding portability of contacts information, but also just plain user profile stuff (why can't I still even upload my vCard??), portability of social bookmarks (I once checked how about importing my personal links from delicious and furl to a repository of learning resources and found out that not even the RDF or XML was standard), etc.

The current way of wanting to lock-in people to a social software/service that they've started investing in (I'm thinking of investing time, knowing/inviting people and friends, creating and enriching profile, etc) is ridiculous. Only us, say, 30-years and +, are silly enough to stick around in places where we've started building up our personal portfolio of digital artefacts. We escape behind excuses like "I'm too busy to start a new blog and transfer my blogroll", or "I've lost my password to my domain name server to change it to a new one".. We should start seriously asking the providers for these services, to give us better portability of our data, do more open standards based communication layers to enable federated searches across services, etc.

Voila! My wish for 2007 is better interoperability for social software! Or otherwise, I'll just start behaving like those teens ;)