Emilio Julio Lorenzo

An Educational Networking Infrastructure Supporting Ubiquitous Learning for School Students

This paper proposes a pedagogical and technical approach to support the flow of learning activities outside of school and in class. One primary goal is to develop curricula that bring multimedia resources to outdoor settings to enrich the field experience, and to enable students to make connections between what they learn outside and the formal curriculum. A pilot user scenario and the supporting technology for a set of collaborative learning activities involving tasks of preparation, data gathering, data analyzing, visualization and modeling related to a diversity of content areas are described. The background for the mobile infrastructure, including a learning object repository, has been implemented and tested.

CARDS: A Metamodel Approach to Aggregate Outcomes of Learning Tools

CARDS, a metamodel engine to describe and aggregate complex educational content is presented. A Java library and a web interface are available to developers in order to reify or wrap diverse tool outcomes in a declarative way. Data interoperability between heterogeneous tools is facilitated acting CARDS models like an Interlingua among them

Improving Learning Object Description Mechanisms to Support an Integrated Framework for Ubiquitous Learning Scenarios

This paper describes an approach to provide an integrated support for learners across a variety of ubiquitous learning activities, including mobile scenarios. Artefacts generated by students using tools in different devices and localizations are stored in a Learning Object Repository (LOR), enabling search, distribution and reuse of the students? results and products in other tools. As metadata is a key factor for the retrieval task, a framework adaptable to a diversity of tools and capable of auto-metadocumenting the objects in terms of the tools and LOR?s context is discussed, as well as wrapping methods for automatically reify data into objects, for those tools with limited or null interoperability with the LOR.

Using Collaborative Concept Maps for Coordination and Knowledge-sharing in Learning Communities for Science

Concept maps are commonly used as knowledge representation mechanisms to classify a given domain in the scope of a constructivist knowledge building process. In this paper we carry out social constructivist learning experiences using concept maps as a collaborative knowledge-sharing tool with applications in the coordination of virtual communities for learning. In our experiment, the community studies an environmental area-theoretically and in-situ, collects data from a variety of experiments and makes a representation of it. Then, they build a common concept map representing their understanding of this area using a set of tools developed ad-hoc and integrated by a metamodel wrapping approach. Finally, they complete it linking their node with the collected information as a way to organize and to navigate through the different pieces of knowledge that they have been accumulating during several fieldtrips.

A proposal for automatic evaluation in a compiler construction course

Experience in teaching the subject of Language Processors within the degree for Technical Engineering Computer Science, highlights the difficulties developing a compiler, for both students and instructors. The former because they are often disoriented when they are unable to get some feedback on their work and the latter because of the amount of effort and time involved to perform the evaluation. This paper presents a system for assisting evaluation using test cases, aligned with the trends of European Higher Education Area ongoing evaluation methodology. This approach is implemented in four phases where different problems are faced. The first phase consists of designing a test case set, accurate enough to discern whether the student successfully absorbed the different concepts and contents of the subject. The second phase involves the implementation of a runtime environment for the designed tests, so that many of the tasks required by the teaching staff can be automated. In the third phase, automatic assessment, according to different criteria is implemented. The fourth phase is the report of the results of the previous execution like straightforward feedback for both students and teachers

A framework for helping developers in the integration of external tools into virtual learning environments

In this paper we present a lightweight abstract framework to help developers to integrate tools into a learning environment. This approach is based on an abstract declarative layer and an integration library. The proposal follows the cloud computing paradigm, defining and storing the different integration models remotely. Finally, the proposed integration framework has been successfully used for integrating a tool called JBraindead into a real educational web environment. This integration showed how developers reduced the coding time, due to the fact that they did not have to deal with e-Learning standards and techniques and could focus on coding the own tool.

Ubiquitous anotation and a collaborative open mobile augmented reality

Mobile learning is impacting education using different technologies and methodologies. This article introduces two relevant learning experiences at UNED where new mobile technologies and pedagogical methodologies were applied. The first experience was based on a ubiquitous annotation system, while the second one used augmented reality to create an engaging mobile collaborative and open environment where students were learners and teachers at the same time, publishing content and learning from the content published by other peers.

Enhancing authoring, modelling and collaboration in e-learning environments: UNED research outline in the context of E-Madrid excellence network

In the last years, authoring based on e-learning standards has been consolidated as a core factor of industry and development of interoperable and effective virtual learning environments. However, there is a need for further research on abstraction to provide a more instructional view in the context of authoring tools in a variety of ways, in order to avoid being driven by Learning Technology (LT) specifications, facilitate instructional knowledge aggregation, and to provide an appropriate level of clarity and semantics in the design of collaborative activities. We propose a combination of techniques to provide this instructional abstraction in the context of the new European educational model, combining instructional layers and collaborative scripts in authoring tools, and semantic web techniques for extending e-learning material in order to harness the wealth of existing web content and semantically labeled repositories.

Enhancing higher education experience: The eMadrid initiative at UNED university

In this paper we focus on the achievements of eMadrid initiative in some fields of technology-enhanced learning, mainly involving the improvement of the mechanisms for open educational content retrieval from Internet, considering Internet resources as potential learning objects. Also we facilitate the integration of remote laboratories and external tools in virtual campuses architectures supporting enriched capabilities and describe a way to cluster and identify learner weaknesses using a learning analytics approach in combination with the item response theory.