Collaborative learning in the clouds

Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most highly discussed topics both in the academic community and in the computing industry. While most of the work that has been conducted to explore this field focuses either on establishing the basis for cloud computing or almost exclusively on the issues surrounding security and data privacy, this paper takes the first exploratory step into exploring the actual internal working of cloud computing and demonstrates its viability for organizations, more specifically educational establishments . The paper starts by introducing the most important key clouds computing concepts, including virtualization technologies, Web services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), and distributed computing. Light will be then shed on the impact and potential benefits of cloud computing on teaching and learning in educational institutions. The paper closes by describing building a private cloud inside educational institution and highlights its offerings for students, staff and lecturers.     

The Web in education

The Web has spurred our imagination as to how education could be radically transformed and enhanced through the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). While there have been many significant innovations and successes over the last decade there have also been many unrealised aims. Beliefs in technology-driven change for education have been countered by shortcomings in technological understanding by educationalists and in turn by shortcomings in the understanding of educational theories and learning concepts by technologists. The use of the Web in education has revealed issues such as the distinction between formal and informal learning; the packaging and formatting of learning materials for online distribution and use; the management of learning materials and processes in virtual and managed learning environments; solutions offered by the semantic Web; and how the quality of experience in interactive learning environments relates to the quality of the Internet infrastructure. A comparison between the performance of early and current Web technologies from a user perspective is given for an interactive learning environment which has been in use for over a decade. Client, server, network and protocol components which contribute to the quality of experience for the end user are presented and analysed. In summary, this paper examines the use of the Web in education to date and looks forward to new challenges and aspirations such as MOOCs (massively online open coursewares) and the immersive 3D Web as the basis for the next generation of learning environments.     

Representations for semantic learning webs: Semantic Web technology in learning support

Abstract Recent work on applying semantic technologies to learning has concentrated on providing novel means of accessing and making use of learning objects. However, this is unnecessarily limiting: semantic technologies will make it possible to develop a range of educational Semantic Web services, such as interpretation, structure-visualization, support for argumentation, novel forms of content customization, novel mechanisms for aggregating learning material, citation services and so on. In this paper, we outline an initial framework that extends the use of semantic technologies as a means of providing learning services that are owned and created by learning communities.     

Web 2.0: Inherent tensions and evident challenges for education

In upper tertiary educational programmes around the world, the new Web-mediated communication practices termed Web 2.0 are introduced as learning activities with the goal of facilitating learning through collaborative knowledge construction. The aim of this paper is to point to discrepancies in the views of learning, knowledge, and the goals of the practice implicit in Web 2.0 and educational practices and to argue that these discrepancies lead to theoretical tensions and practical challenges when Web 2.0 practices are utilized for educational purposes. The article is structured into four main parts: First, Web 2.0 is characterized from a practice perspective. Second, some conceptual discrepancies between the “practice logics” of Web 2.0 and educational practices are identified. Third, the question of transcending the discrepancies is raised through a discussion of related pedagogical strategies. Fourth, it is argued that the conceptual discrepancies bear out in practice as concrete challenges concerning collaboration, evaluation, and the general aim and status of the material produced by students. These challenges are illustrated with examples from the author’s practical experience with Web 2.0-mediated learning activities in eight courses at the BA and MA levels.     

CUSTOMIZING THE INSTRUCTIONAL GRID

The Web contains hundreds of thousands of educational resources available any time and any place. However no smart technology is available to help teachers and students locate appropriate resources customized to their needs and social characteristics. When educational resources are indexed, it is often done by demographics, such as student age and grade. This article describes customized Grid Learning Services (GLS) that will personalize instruction based on an individual's presumed knowledge and cognitive and learning needs. The customized GLS will use real-time student modeling, the Semantic Web, intelligent agents, and pre-tests of cognitive, affective, and social characteristics to personalize the selection of educational resources and problems. Components of the customized GLS include an ontology construction agent, goal-based retrieval mechanisms, a lesson planner, and student and pedagogical agents.     

Concept mapping your Web searches: a design rationale and Web-enabled application

Although it has become very common to use World Wide Web‐based information in many educational settings, there has been little research on how to better search and organize Web‐based information. This paper discusses the shortcomings of Web search engines and Web browsers as learning environments and describes an alternative Web search environment that combines a concept mapping and a data mining technique to address their drawbacks.     

Use of the Web in undergraduate teaching

The use of the World Wide Web in higher education is increasing at an exponential rate. However, little research has been done on the quality and nature of students' learning in a Web based system. This paper discusses the views of students on an experiment at Aberdeen University in which the Web was used to replace face to face lectures. The results suggest that students exercised greater choice of when to study and experienced few problems of lack of access to computers or of technical failures. The experiment appears to have saved students time and not to have involved them in much financial expenditure. The findings as to how the students actually used the Web materials were less encouraging. Most students appear to have printed a paper copy of the Web documents at the earliest opportunity, while only a minority of students went in search of other relevant Internet sites. The experiment suggests that the transition from a traditional to a computer based system will involve considerable investment of time by lecturers new to the Web, in the acquisition of new skills and the preparation of Web materials. The Web has great potential to benefit students' learning but there are few shortcuts to the realisation of this potential.     

Has Web 2.0 revitalized informal learning? The relationship between Web 2.0 and informal learning

Learning is becoming increasingly self‐directed and often occurs away from schools and other formal educational settings. The development of a myriad of new technologies for learning has enabled people to learn anywhere and anytime. Web 2.0 technology allows researchers to shed a new light on the importance and prevalence of informal learning. However, there are few empirical studies that support the claim that this technology facilitates informal learning. The present study investigates the relationship between Web 2.0 levels and the evaluation of informal learning websites. For this purpose, 287 informal learning websites were selected and their Web 2.0 levels were rated based upon eight criteria proposed in the Web 2.0 exploratory literature. In addition, previously examined informal learning evaluation results were employed. The results showed that current informal learning websites have moderately adopted the most heavily promoted features of Web 2.0. Correlation analyses showed a positive relationship between Web 2.0 features and informal learning website ratings. The implications for the relationship and internal correlations of variables were summarized and discussed.     

Mining the Semantic Web

In the Semantic Web vision of the World Wide Web, content will not only be accessible to humans but will also be available in machine interpretable form as ontological knowledge bases. Ontological knowledge bases enable formal querying and reasoning and, consequently, a main research focus has been the investigation of how deductive reasoning can be utilized in ontological representations to enable more advanced applications. However, purely logic methods have not yet proven to be very effective for several reasons: First, there still is the unsolved problem of scalability of reasoning to Web scale. Second, logical reasoning has problems with uncertain information, which is abundant on Semantic Web data due to its distributed and heterogeneous nature. Third, the construction of ontological knowledge bases suitable for advanced reasoning techniques is complex, which ultimately results in a lack of such expressive real-world data sets with large amounts of instance data. From another perspective, the more expressive structured representations open up new opportunities for data mining, knowledge extraction and machine learning techniques. If moving towards the idea that part of the knowledge already lies in the data, inductive methods appear promising, in particular since inductive methods can inherently handle noisy, inconsistent, uncertain and missing data. While there has been broad coverage of inducing concept structures from less structured sources (text, Web pages), like in ontology learning, given the problems mentioned above, we focus on new methods for dealing with Semantic Web knowledge bases, relying on statistical inference on their standard representations. We argue that machine learning research has to offer a wide variety of methods applicable to different expressivity levels of Semantic Web knowledge bases: ranging from weakly expressive but widely available knowledge bases in RDF to highly expressive first-order knowledge bases, this paper surveys statistical approaches to mining the Semantic Web. We specifically cover similarity and distance-based methods, kernel machines, multivariate prediction models, relational graphical models and first-order probabilistic learning approaches and discuss their applicability to Semantic Web representations. Finally we present selected experiments which were conducted on Semantic Web mining tasks for some of the algorithms presented before. This is intended to show the breadth and general potential of this exiting new research and application area for data mining.     

基于Web的学习环境模型及发展趋势

从课件、协作学习、教学共同体、可视语言和远程教育等五个方面详细阐述了基于Web的教学模型及发展趋势,对课件开发技术和远程教学模式作了进一步探讨。     

基于奇异值分解的中文Ontology自动学习技术

语义Web是一个美好的构想，Ontology在语义Web中起着举足轻重的作用，它不仅能为人类用户而且能为软件agent提供从语法层次到语义层次上的互操作性。目前Web上主要是各种布局的HTML文档，未来的语义Web页面将是各种领域Ontology的实例以及到其它实例上的链接，因此语义Web的成功强烈依赖于Ontology的增殖，方便快捷地构造各领城Ontology是实现语义Web的关健。该文提出一种基于奇异值分解的中文Ontology自动学习技术，这种技术的特点是其简易性以及准确的数学理论基础。     

The need for virtual information managers in education

In this paper, the authors analyse how educational institutions behave in relation with the contents available through the Web. They also reflect on the features of the currently available information managers, from an educational point of view. They found there is a lack of tools for information management at low scale when it has to be used as a resource for teaching and learning whether at secondary or university level. Finally, they propose a solution, which consists of naming a ‘small virtual educational library’ (SVEL), and they show how it works in Physics education context.     

《网页设计与制作》课程的开发与实践探析

《网页设计与制作》网络课程与传统课程相比,在教育理念、教育模式、教学策略、学习评价等方面都有很大改变,突破了教与学的时空限制,提供了良好的学习资源、学习环境和便捷的学习方式。本文重点对网络课程的学习环境构建进行了分析和探讨及教学策略和评价系统的设计。     

基于多Agent的学生程序文件教育系统

随着Internet和WWW的迅速发展,以Web为基础的教育系统越来越受到关注,但是,较之真实生活中的课堂教室,这种以自学成才方式学习的系统在以下几方面仍显不足;常常使学生感到呆板,沉重,目标性差,与人类教师不同,这些系统不可能了解每个学生的实际学习情况,不可能辨别学生学习中的问题,并为特殊学生提供相应帮助,我们项目的主要目的是建立一个学生智能程序文件学习系统,为每个使用Web教学系统学习的学生提供其存储信息和相应的历史记录,该系统将对学生的学习情况进行全程存储,在网上对学生评估,测试学生的学习情况和帮助教师对学生的学习情况进行分析。     

Education on the Web: a rejoinder

It is an error to over generalize from early Web based education to current standards of practice. The state of the art for distance learning projects is based on the use of Web-centric integrated distributed learning environments (IDLEs). Incorporating the application of sound principles of learning/education and appropriate instructional design, IDLEs support extremely high quality, student centered educational programs for remote learners, making extensive use of the synchronous and asynchronous tools available for Web based communications. Most of them reside on the server, requiring no proprietary applications on the client side. Distant learners may use any Web browser to engage in collaborative online activities     

In search of online pedagogical models: investigating a paradigm change in teaching through the School for All community

Following a preliminary evaluation of the Web‐mediated School for All in 2002, this study further examines the online teacher role and explores the possible pedagogical models in this Web‐based informal lifelong learning context through a long‐term innovative e‐learning project over a 2‐year period. The author documents the educational rationale, reviews related literature on Web‐based instructional design, and presents longitudinal in‐depth study results based on empirical data collected from the four Web‐course contests held over 2 years from the perspective of outstanding online teachers. Significantly, three categories of six Web‐based pedagogical models induced from this research project are presented, and the rationale for how and why teachers would prefer to use certain teaching models is discussed. In addition, the characteristics of the outstanding online teachers and issues inherent in this alternative mode of a Web‐based informal educational setting are discussed. Finally, more research issues, questions, and possibilities for future research work are raised or identified for further study.     

E-Science in the classroom – Towards viability

E-Science has the potential to transform school science by enabling learners, teachers and research scientists to engage together in authentic scientific enquiry, collaboration and learning. However, if we are to reap the benefits of this potential as part of everyday teaching and learning, we need to explicitly think about and support the work required to set up and run e-Science experiences within any particular educational context. In this paper, we present a framework for identifying and describing the resources, tools and services necessary to move e-Science into the classroom together with examples of these. This framework is derived from previous experiences conducting educational e-Science projects and systematic analysis of the categories of ‘hidden work’ needed to run these projects. The articulation of resources, tools and services based on these categories provides a starting point for more methodical design and deployment of future educational e-Science projects, reflection on which can also help further develop the framework. It also points to the technological infrastructure from which such tools and services could be built. As such it provides an agenda of work to develop both processes and technologies that would make it practical for teachers to deliver active, and collaborative e-Science learning experiences on a larger scale within and across schools. Routine school e-Science will only be possible if such support is specified, implemented and made available to teachers within their work contexts in an appropriate and usable form.     

Employing virtual humans for education and training in X3D/VRML worlds

Web-based education and training provides a new paradigm for imparting knowledge; students can access the learning material anytime by operating remotely from any location. Web3D open standards, such as X3D and VRML, support Web-based delivery of Educational Virtual Environments (EVEs). EVEs have a great potential for learning and training purposes, by allowing one to circumvent physical, safety, and cost constraints. Unfortunately, EVEs often leave to the user the onus of taking the initiative both in exploring the environment and interacting with its parts. A possible solution to this problem is the exploitation of virtual humans acting as informal coaches or more formal instructors. For example, virtual humans can be employed to show and explain maintenance procedures, allowing learners to receive more practical explanations which are easier to understand. However, virtual humans are rarely used in Web3D EVEs, since the programming effort to develop and re-use them in different environments can be considerable. In this paper, we present a general architecture that allows content creators to easily integrate virtual humans into Web3D EVEs. To test the generality of our solution, we present two practical examples showing how the proposed architecture has been used in different educational contexts.     

RSS-based e-learning recommendations exploiting fuzzy FCA for Knowledge Modeling

Nowadays, Web 2.0 focuses on user generated content, data sharing and collaboration activities. Formats like Really Simple Syndication (RSS) provide structured Web information, display changes in summary form and stay updated about news headlines of interest. This trend has also affected the e-learning domain, where RSS feeds demand for dynamic learning activities, enabling learners and teachers to access to new blog posts, to keep track of new shared media, to consult Learning Objects which meet their needs.This paper presents an approach to enrich personalized e-learning experiences with user-generated content, through a contextualized RSS-feeds fruition. The synergic exploitation of Knowledge Modeling and Formal Concept Analysis techniques enables the design and development of a system that supports learners in their learning activities by collecting, conceptualizing, classifying and providing updated information on specific topics coming from relevant information sources. An agent-based layer supervises the extraction and filtering of RSS feeds whose topics cover a specific educational domain.