This blog has some posts in portuguese that make sense to be written in portugese and not in English. My excuses to all my friends or readers who cannot read Portuguese, but nevertheless there is always very good translators in the web and I am sure you will not be dissappointed with my decison of making a Blog bilingual.

Thursday 6 December 2007

Social Network Portability

And now my hot interesting subject!!!

Portability with social networks, maybe the FOAF open standard (Friend-of-Friend).
This issues are quite new to me. But it seems quite interesting to use in my own context. Import a learner profile with is own hi5 network...
I have found an interesting workshop.. mediamatic about portability and also a blog which references these issues:
Google groups


Or even in microformats seems worth read it carefully.
Maybe tomorrow...

Wednesday 5 December 2007

Web 3.0

Go beyond Web 2.0!!

In a few years the participation paradigm that Web 2.0 lays on will give way to what Tim Berners Lee has already called GGG as to Giant Global Graph in his blog Tim's blog

But what we expect to be Web 3.0?

http://web3next.blogspot.com/

Well it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL and giving more. Tim Berners Lee compares with what WWW was about giving information, and now is going to be about social. The data in a FOAF file can be read by other applications. Photo-sharing, travel sites, sites which accept your input because you are a part of the graph.
It is about connections and sharing ourselves rather our pages...

Monday 15 October 2007

ELearning INFO

Info

IADIS MCCSIS E-Learning

http://www.elearning-conf.org/
Amsterdam, Netherlands

22 - 25 July 2008

Call for papers
Submission Deadline: 25 February 2008

Saturday 21 July 2007

Sloodle Virtual Environment Learning System

Today i found Sloodle, an interesting tool. It seems it is under development, but i am interested in trying.



It is a hybrid system that uses/merges two concepts: Moodle a LMS system with Second Life a virtual multi-user environment. That is what i really was looking for.

Because of that i have created my avatar at SL.
Name, well it is: Ideia falta, which in portuguese means an ideia is missing

Wednesday 18 July 2007

EU Conference eLearning Lisboa 2007

On 15th-16th October Lisbon will held this elearning conference integrated in the Portuguese Presidency of the EU.

This will be very important, in my opinion, and it is confirmed the presence of Marc Rosenberg, expert in the world of e-learning, knowledge management and performance improvement.

EU Conference url

See you there

Wednesday 4 April 2007

Why Social interaction and Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) are important issues on my research?

This question pops up on my mind very often and I must give a coherent answer in order to put behind my back any doubts for their importance.

First of all one’s must agree our society is changing drastically and we cannot put aside the technology impact, out of our schools . In fact in one hand, many teachers are already experienced, with their classes, the social web usage, namely creating Foruns, Wikis, or even personal blogs to improve their learning activities. On the other hand many institutions have their learning platforms, based on Moodle or Blackboard for instances, and many school teachers’ are using it, with interesting results.

Going a step further some technological solutions, namely Wise or Co-Lab, based on inquiry learning environments provides interesting solutions for CAL, or Computer Assisted Learning. Moreover the scripting usage in, for instances the COLLAGE IMS-LD tool from U. Valladolid- Spain, or the concept grid script with patterns referenced recently by Dillenbourg, P, from EPFL-Swiss, shows to us, again interesting approaches to CAL.

But I feel something is lacking because I still believe all these systems and others fail in one or another point.

If we consider the chats usage, with say the AIM or MSN, we feel these tools are interesting, though they are not often used for collaborative learning activities. Myself, as a teacher, I have experienced with my students that on a one-to-one basis the chat is very useful to get closer the teacher to the student, but when I use it as a room place, well the group effect rules, and any learning activity is very difficult to happen. Of course there are other times the chat rooms work just fine.

The differences between synchronous and asynchronous social tools, say for instances chats and forums are huge, but I am more interested on the first ones. I think the spontaneous of online systems are very interesting. I compare it to my real classes. Even with a detailed planning, we never know how the class will evolve before hand. That’s what I think is magic in giving classes and helping students with their learning.

Therefore how can we use synchronous environments to improve the learning activities even outside the class?

It was not on purpose I reached the end of my answer with another question. At least I clarified my ideas, and you must agree that social interactions with CAL are definitively important issues for a learning environment. Now I have another dilemma, for using a synchronously collaborative learning tool in an effective manner. Of course the outcome of it can be placed afterwards on a Forun, but the time condition, of having everybody present at the same time and motivating the students and at the same time focusing in the learning activities are real difficulties. Well I will continue later on ….

Wednesday 28 March 2007

Folksonomy

This new buzzword is very related to my research work. In fact by definition, available on wiki, folksnonomys are used to categorize Web Pages and other web content using ended labels called tags. This simple semantic approach is an interesting solution for my structuring knowledge problem. Maybe to simple, but yet an interesting approach. Of course the folksonomy term may occur in other contexts as well, but the process of tagging is considered very useful for searching, discovering, and navigating over time. Moreover a well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is both originated by, and familiar to, its primary users. In a web community the tagging sharing is rather interesting concept, where by sharing user-generated content they reach a common level of knowledge.

Trail Fire

As usual the Web 2.0 Show brought another interesting technology solution, which after hearing the podcast seemed very promising and the people involved what are doing . Well the concept is, based on a social collection of bookmarks; provide a trail of web sites, which can be posted. The interesting aspect is the filter usage, where users could read the posts on every side. Is works as a top layer where we can read the other users comments. The sites remain intact, but for the trailfire users it seems as if they are posted on the web site.

Existing Learner Models


In a recent study1) I came up with a nice way to classify different learner models:

Existing Learner Models

PAPI Learner: describes learner information for communication among cooperating systems. It has six categories

IMS LIP covers information similar to that found in a person’s CV, focusing more on the learner’s history and learning experience. This is due to the fact that LIP was developed to model the lifelong records of learners’ achievement and to transfer their records between institutions. Learner’s information in LIP is presented in eleven categories

eduPerson is a specification released jointly by Internet2 (www.internet2.edu) and Educause (www.educause.edu). Similar to PAPI and IMS LIP, eduPerson was designed to facilitate communication between higher education institutions, in particular to move information about people between US universities . The information covered by this standard is similar to the one found in an employee information system, as most of the elements hold data about the person and the organization they are a member of. Since its main purpose is exchanging data, the descriptions provided are very detailed comparing to other standards. eduPerson associates learner information with forty-three elements classified in two categories

Dolog LP is a learner profile suggested by Dolog et al that uses RDF (www.w3.org/TR/rdfprimer/) and learner ontologies to enable semantically enhanced learning systems to provide personalisation services. It takes advantage of the flexibility of RDF in encoding user profiles to include attributes from multiple schema, and the ability to add more attributes as necessary depending on how it will be used. Since the aim of Dolog LP is to provide personalisation services, the model was based on the combination of PAPI and IMS LIP. It describes a learner in five categories

FOAF is an RDF vocabulary that provides a set of properties and classes to describe people, documents and organizations. It was developed for building communities and social groupings. FOAF distinguishes five categories for describing a person:

Moreover the same paper compares all these five learning models based on a specified taxonomy

1)Towards a Semantic Modeling of Learners for Social Networks

Asma Ounnas, Ilaria Liccardi, Hugh C Davis, David E Millard, and Su A White, presented at AH06

http://www.win.tue.nl/SW-EL/2006/camera-ready/01-AsmaOunas.pdf

Web 2 Learn

The major task in a research PhD programme is the difficulty in tracking all the research flows around a particular topic. In fact even the definition of the topic is itself a daunting task. Well at least this task I have completed because now, after several months of thoughts, I have my Topic.
My research area is Web Based Learning Environments. Of course it is a very wide area, and in order to narrow it, I chose the Instructional Design on adaptive learning environments. That is I am more interested in developing a learning platform, which differentiate users with personalization and profiling properties.

Moreover, I am deeply interested in the new web technologies, namely the so called web 2.0, with the associated e-learning 2.0. This brings a new social dimension, especially the social bookmarking and social networking, which in my point of view will have an interesting usage in learning scenarios. In fact the argumentation theory, from the educational field, will be interesting to analyze using this approach. Another interesting theory, which can support my claims, is the Conectivism theory, presented by George Siemens, and I will be pleased to make my proof of concept based on his explanations to the new learning approaches.

Well my research is just giving it's first steps, but I am sure whatever my conclusions in the end might be, the research itself and the time thinking consumption on these interesting matters is worthy enough.