Christophe Salzmann

Turning Web 2.0 Social Software into Versatile Collaborative Learning Solutions

In the framework of the European Integrated Project PALETTE, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) is developing the eLogbook Web 2.0 social software. The purpose of eLogbook is to support tacit and explicit knowledge management in communities of practice. It can be customized by the users to serve as an asset management system, as a task management system or as a discussion platform. In this paper, the innovative Computer-Human Interaction features of eLogbook are introduced and its deployment scenario to support collaborative laboratory activities in engineering education is described. The main idea is to sustain interaction for learning purpose within self-organized teams that integrate -on a seamless level- both human actors (students, teaching assistants) and non-human actors such as laboratory equipments or software agents.

A social media platform in higher education

This paper reports on the successful use of Graasp, a social media platform, by university students for their collaborative work. Graasp features a number of innovations, such as administrator-free creation of collaborative spaces, a context-aware recommendation and privacy management. In the context of a EU-funded project involving large test beds, we have been able to extend this platform with lightweight tools (widgets) aimed for learning and competence development and to validate its usefulness in a collaborative learning context.

Towards an Online Lab Portal for Inquiry-Based STEM Learning at School

Nowadays, the knowledge economy is growing rapidly. To sustain future growth, more well educated people in STEM science, technology, engineering and mathematics are needed. In the Go-Lab project we aim to motivate and orient students from an early age on to study STEM fields in their future educational path by applying inquiry learning using online labs. This paper presents an inquiry learning portal where teachers can discover, use and enhance online labs appropriate for their courses and students can acquire scientific methodology skills while doing experiments using the labs. The Go-Lab portal architecture is presented, which contains a repository of online labs, inquiry learning spaces and complementary services. The paper discusses a first version of the portal and our future plans.

Web-Enabled Remote Scientific Environments

A new approach to developing Web-enabled environments for remote diagnostics, maintenance, and experimentation in engineering is based on a middleware layer that uses a Java-lntemet-Labview server to provide communication between Java programs and Labview virtual instruments. The authors illustrate their technique by applying it to the development of a complete Web-enabled application for remote control of a thermal process.

Personalised learning spaces and federated online labs for STEM Education at School

The European Commission is funding a large-scale research project on federated online laboratories (Labs) for education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) at School. The main educational focus is on inquiry learning and the main technological one is on personalized learning spaces. The learning spaces are offered through a single European social media portal supporting simultaneously teacher communities and student learning activities. This paper presents the general technical framework devised to support the construction and the exploitation of learning spaces, as well as the federation of online labs.

The Smart Device specification for remote labs

This paper presents the Smart Device specification to interface with remote labs. To encourage the broader sharing of remote labs, the Smart Device paradigm decouples the client from the server and provides well-defined interfaces between client and server. Such Smart Device services are exposed on the Internet and enable interoperability with client applications, other Smart Devices and external services (e.g. a booking service). This papers presents the extensible and platform-agnostic specification of the Smart Device services and internal functionalities. The Smart Device specification contains sufficient service metadata to enable the automatic generation of basic client applications. The specification is illustrated through an example and first implementations of the specification are presented.

Smart device paradigm, Standardization for online labs

This paper introduce the smart device paradigm and it usage to streamline the development of the next generation of online labs where more intelligence is placed at the server side and little or no assumption is made about the client. The requirements, the standards and protocols for implementation are presented. Finally a possible evolution toward Massive Open Online Labs (MOOLs) is discussed.

Laboratory as a Service (LaaS): A model for developing and implementing remote laboratories as modular components

This contribution introduces a novel model, Laboratory as a Service (LaaS), for developing remote laboratories as independent component modules and implementing them as a set of loosely-coupled services to be consumed with a high level of abstraction and virtualization. LaaS aims to tackle the common concurrent challenges in remote laboratories developing and implementation such as inter-institutional sharing, interoperability with other heterogeneous systems, coupling with heterogeneous services and learning objects, difficulty of developing, and standardization.

Graaasp: a web 2.0 research platform for contextual recommendation with aggregated data

In this paper we describe Graaasp, a social software currently under development to support the creation of a real usage database of social artifacts. Our goals are twofold: First to offer a generic aggregation service and user interface to people and communities. Second, to experiment with recommendation and reputation models and algorithms in e-learning.

Recent advances in remote experimentation

Discusses challenges in meeting quality of service (QoS) requirements in a flexible learning context where students carry out hands-on sessions of remote experimentation on a physical system via the Internet. Novel solutions are developed to overcome the current lack of predictability of the Internet so that QoS can be improved via content adaptation to the available bandwidth. An augmented-reality approach is used to enhance the user perception of the remote system, and a unique simulation-based scheme is proposed to recover from packet losses. The approach is illustrated through the remote control of an inverted pendulum.