Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The conception and production of Web Based Training (WBT) is still too difficult for instructors. Semantic and didactic features are diluted during WBT development by teachers, due to the technical focus of the production task and the corresponding tools. Therefore, we claim a collaborative production as way to meet instructors’ skills for an efficient WBT production. In addition to the content modeling and authoring, the proposed methodology points out so called “macro design” as an independent task to be supported. The macro design is innovative in two ways. First, it extends the existing way of content design by supporting instructors in expliciting their intentions and instructional design. Second, it demonstrates the possibility to use the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) as a communicative mechanism for the instructional design in order to give an explicit perception of the expected content.

We present a service-oriented personalization system, set in an educational framework, based on a semantic annotation of courses including prerequisites and learning objectives. The system supports users in planning personalized curricula and in verifying the compliance of curricula against a model describing the designer goals. We have developed a prototype of the planning and validation services, by using SWI-Prolog and the SPIN model checker as reasoning engines. The services are supplied and combined in the Personal Reader framework.

When a curriculum is proposed, it is important to verify at least three aspects: that the curriculum allows the achievement of the user’s learning goals, that the curriculum is compliant w.r.t. the course design goals, specified by the institution that offers it, and that the sequence of courses that defines the curriculum does not have competency gaps. In this work, we present a constrained-based representation for specifying the goals of “course design” and introduce a design graphical language, grounded into Linear Time Logic.

At the workplace, learning is often a by-product of working on com plex projects, requiring self-steered, need-driven and goal-oriented retrieval of infor mation just in time from documents or peers. The personal desktop provides a rich source for learning material and for adaptation of learning resources. Data with in that personal infor mation space enables learning from previous exper ience, sharing tacit and explicit knowledge, and allows for estab lish ing con text and context-aware delivery of learning materials and all relevant information. Results from personal desktop studies and the corresponding technologies thus have great poten tial to en hance TEL. Therefore, this paper (1) provides a short overview of desktop orga ni za tion and search studies as well as appli ca tions and (2) sug gests tighter incorpo ration of desktop research for innovative TEL infra structures.

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the reuse of digital content, as video documents or PowerPoint presentations, by exploiting existing technologies for automatic extraction of metadata (OCR, speech recognition, cut detection, MPEG-7 visual descriptors, etc.). The multimedia documents and the extracted metadata are then indexed and managed by the Multimedia Content Management System (MCMS) MILOS, specifically developed to support design and effective implementation of digital library applications. As a result, the indexed digital material can be retrieved by means of content based retrieval on the text extracted and on the MPEG-7 visual descriptors (via similarity search), assisting the user of the e-Learning Library (student or teacher) to retrieve the items not only on the basic bibliographic metadata (title, author, etc.).

Pervasive learning systems must define new mechanism to deliver the right resource, at the right time, at the right place to the right learner. This means that rich context information has to be considered: time, place, user knowledge, user activity, user environment and device capacity. As context is based on numerous information which may change frequently (coming from a collection of captors), a more aggregate view is defined to work on more abstract objects: the situations. Context information and situation information have to be widespread into all the models of learning systems: context preferences have to be handled in the learner model, well-adapted situation and situation scenarios have to be memorized in learning resource model. The adaptation process is enriched too.

This paper presents an engineering process in order to build pedagogical on Web 2.0 applications. This engineering process relies on three tasks: modeling the , defining its context and building it. The main feature of our process is to wrap the building functionalities of a Web Application by Web Services. To consume these services, we use the Model Driven Engineering approach. This approach guarantees the easy implementation of every specific Web application modeler and constructor considered. Experimental results have already been obtained on the WikiniMST platform.

Project-centred learning is increasingly used both in academia and in companies; universities train students to master complex tasks, often suggested by real-life situations, while companies train users to learn about new products, methods, technologies. This paper introduces a model-driven, extensible environ-ent, delivered on the Web, which is able to support long-distance collaboration of teams working on complex projects. The main merit of this proposal is the ability to self-organize processes, by using a simple Web interface and a library of activities and templates which cover most of the needs of this well-defined class of applications. This paradigm for dynamic workflow management is very general and can be applied to other application contexts, after understanding and modelling the relevant collaboration activities and templates.

In this paper we propose a distributed scenario in which users may express their comments about Learning Objects (LO), and point out relationships among them. Considering comments we associate ranks to each LO. The relationships allow users to evolve from a local view, based on the analysis of a single LO, to an enlarged perspective of a network of them. The implementation of such environment in a Super Peer Network is outlined.

A novel approach to algorithm animation consists in displaying algorithms based on their design technique. In this paper, we describe a framework to generate these animations without effort from the instructor. We describe a preprocessing phase that modifies the source code of the algorithm to visualize. When the transformed code is executed, a trace is stored and then used to generate an animation. We also describe the architecture of the animation subsystem. Finally, we outline the main features of SRec, a system that we have built to illustrate the feasibility of this approach. It is aimed at visualizing multiple views of recursion, namely traces, the control stack and activation trees.