Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Making the interactions with a digital user interface disappears into and becomes a part of the human to human interaction and conversation is a challenge. Conventional metaphor and underlying interface infrastructure for single-user desktop systems have been traditionally geared towards single mouse and keyboard-based WIMP interface design. On the other hand, people usually meet around a table, facing each other. A table setting provides a large interactive visual surface. It encourages collaboration, coordination, as well as simultaneous and parallel problem solving among multiple people. In this talk, I will describe six particular challenges for the design of direct-touch tabletop environments, and present solutions and experiences to these challenges.

This paper is authored by Fabrizio Cardinali, the CEO of Giunti Interactive Labs (www.giuntilabs.com), provider of Europe’s leading SCORM based eLearning and Mobile Learning Content Management Solution, learn eXact. The paper introduces how new generation Learning Content Management Services and Solutions for rapid and massive content production and personalization can better manage changes needed in the professional and vocational training methods and tools for global corporations entering the new Millennium. Skills based Content Tagging and Mobile, Location Based, Learning Content management are presented as two possible possible trends towards learning personalization to accelerate time to competency in global economies needing to cope with the the demographic and up skilling chellanges launched by New World Economies such as China and India.

Existing adaptive learning systems use various user characteristics for preparing personalized presentation of educational material for each user (a student). In the process of learning limited capacity of the human memory plays important role. The student often forgets part of knowledge acquired during the learning. In this paper we discuss implications of remembering and forgetting for the adaptive learning systems. We present a proposal of modeling forgetting process in adaptive learning systems that enables including knowledge repetition into an educational course. We implemented proposed model within the web-based adaptive system AHA! and demonstrate its viability on domain of learning English-Slovak vocabulary. This includes also a technique for inserting concepts for knowledge repeating into a running direct guided course. Using this technique it is possible to dynamically adapt the sequence of presented concepts to the actual state of the user model.

AHA! is an Open Source adaptive hypermedia platform, resulting from 10 years of experience with creating, using and improving on-line adaptive courses and presentations. This paper focuses on some recent additions to AHA! that are especially important for adaptive educational applications, namely , and . We not only describe the technical aspects of these parts of AHA! but also illustrate their use in educational applications. We describe some fundamental limitations of Web-based adaptive applications, and show how AHA! deals with them in order to provide adaptation to in the way one would expect.

Traditional learning content management systems have minimal support for awareness among learners, and tend to support only loosely coupled collaboration features. This paper shows how we have integrated user model-based awareness features and collaboration features into our learning content management system for both learners and instructors.

Due to the information growth, distributed environments are offered as a feasible and scalable solution. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have become one of the most important and used distributed environments inside (and outside) the e-learning community. They bring many advantages such as high flexibility for peers to dynamically join or leave the network, scalability, autonomy and high resilience against peer failures. However, every single one of them typically uses an interface specifically developed for that network, and it requires every peer to implement it in order to join. This is leading to increased development costs for potentially new participants of the network, and usually makes different P2P networks unable to interact with other systems and environments, isolating the network as a whole. In this paper, we report on a solution based on a proxy-based architecture and semantic mappings in order to allow the sharing of content between the set of peers inside a P2P network and other systems outside the network. Furthermore, we present an open-source implementation of the modules described in the paper.

In this paper we describe the main lines of a teacher preparation model aiming to promote a culture of sharing and re-use of educational resources. Our methodology is based on the analysis of conceptions of trainee teachers as concerns the production and re-use of educational modules and on the use of a collaborative environment, especially designed to support the construction and development of a community of practice of teachers working on Learning Objects. This approach is meant as a means to support in a collaborative way the construction and diffusion of pedagogical innovation.

In this paper, we introduce a new, formal model of learning object metadata. The model enables more formal, rigorous reasoning over metadata. An important feature of the model is that it allows for ’fuzzy’ metadata, that have an associated confidence value. Another important aspect is that we explicitly address context dependent metadata.

Adaptive Hypermedia builds upon the annotation and adaptation of content. As manual annotation has proven to be the main bottleneck, all means for supporting it by reusing automatically generated metadata are helpful. In this paper we discuss two issues. The first is the . In this setup, the semantic desktop environment provides a rich source of automatically generated meta-data, whilst MOT provides a convenient way to enhance this meta-data manually, as needed for an adaptive course environment. Secondly, we also consider the , as semantic desktop metadata are generated through a lot of different tools and at different times, so that schemas are overlapping and evolving. Explicitly taking into account all versions of these schemas would require a combinatorial explosion of generation rules. This paper investigates a solution to this problem based on malleable schemas, which allow metadata generation rules to flexibly match different versions of schemas, and can thus cope with the heterogeneous and evolving desktop environment.

There is a natural alliance between learning and personal mobile technology, making it feasible to equip learners with powerful tools to support learning in many contexts, emphasising the skills and knowledge needed for a rapidly changing society. eMapps.com, under IST EC FP6 in the New Member States, is demonstrating how games and mobile technologies can be combined to provide enriching experiences for children in the school curriculum and beyond, using Advanced Reality Games, played ‘live’ in the individual territory using Internet, GPRS/3G, SMS and MMS technologies.