Angela Maria Sugliano

CADDIE and IWT: two different ontology-based approaches to Anytime, Anywhere and Anybody Learning

The Semantic Web seems to offer great opportunities for educational systems aiming to accomplish the AAAL: Anytime, Anywhere, Anybody Learning. In this scenario, two different research projects are here introduced: CADDIE (Content Automated Design & Development Integrated Editor), developed at the DIST of the University of Genoa, and IWT (Intelligent Web Teacher), developed at the DIIMA of the University of Salerno, each of them characterized by the use of ontologies and semantic technologies in order to support instructional design and personalized learning processes. The former aims to develop a learning resources and instructional paths authoring tool based on a logical and abstract annotation model, created with the goal of guaranteeing the fexibility and personalization of instructional design, the reusability of teaching materials and of the related whole knowledge structures. The latter represents an innovative e-learning solution able to support teachers and instructional designers to model educational domains knowledge, users’ competences and preferences by a semantic approach in order to create personalized and contextualized learning activities and to allow users to communicate, to cooperate, to dynamically create new content to deliver and information to share as well as enabling platform for e-learning 2.0.

Lesson plan archiviation: metadata and Web 2.0 applications

In the present article we illustrate the choices taken by the Italian EPICT Secretariat (European Pedagogical ICT License) in order to archive and share the lessons plans developed by EPICT participants during the EPICT Courses. In particular, we present: 1) a set of metadata able to describe the learning resource lessons plan 2) and the advantages in using Web 2.0 features in order to develop a lesson plan repository. What we want to underline in the present article are two aspects of the development of a resources repository process: the assignation of descriptors and the repository dynamicity. When an author inserts a resource he is doing what we propose to defne as a “primary metadatatation”. From the repository user’s point of view, we consider a repository more useful if it is able to “grow” in accordance with the user’s needs and orientations. We can obtain this kind of dynamicity if the users themselves, after consulting a particular resource, are capable of adding new descriptions to the metadata and of leaving comments regarding the resources consulted. We propose to defne the contribution given by repository users as “secondary metadatation”.

Competency frameworks for the use of ICT at School: from the ISO IEC 19796-1 Standard to the Unesco ICT-CST Italian localization

Which are the concrete competencies for the third millennium teacher invested with the hard mission of educating the 21st century citizens? The present article features the main international frameworks on teachers’ ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) competencies. These frameworks have been analyzed from a procedural point of view; the procedures considered are the ones which characterise the Instructional design process as described by the ISO IEC 19796-1 standard. The main focus of the article is on the framework developed by Unesco with the ICT-CFT (ICT – Competencies Framework for Teachers) project; we also discuss how the variety of competencies identified by the international frameworks may be brought back to the UNESCO framework.

E-learning e scuola: il modello EPICT - Patente Pedagogica Europea sulle TIC

Il lavoro descrive il modello e-learning adottato da EPICT (European Pedagogical ICT licence www.epict.org, www.epict.it) per la formazione professionale di insegnanti che unisce conoscenza pedagogica relativa all’impiego delle ICT e competenza tecnica di uso. EPICT ha origine come progetto eContent, i cui partner sono Danimarca, Grecia, Ungheria, Italia. Con la fne del progetto e stato creato un Consorzio ed i corsi sono distribuiti come Corsi di specializzazione all’Universita di Genova. L’articolo presenta anche risultati sperimentali acquisiti nel contesto italiano.