Giuseppina Palmieri

A Tailorable Infrastructure to Enhance Mobile Seamless Learning

The widespread use of mobile devices is leading towards their adoption in the learning process, even if some pedagogical challenges are still not fully addressed when integrating mobile-assisted activities into regular curricula activities. In this paper, we first define some guidelines to design a general, tailorable, and platform-independent mobile learning system. Second, we present the aCME system, a mobile infrastructure, developed by adhering to the defined guidelines, to provide a general-purpose system, easy to start up with and friendly to user, and finally, tailorable, i.e., that can be easily adapted to the needs of different learning environments. The aCME system has been implemented as a Web-based architecture, to provide content and functionalities for different contexts, accessible from any location and by using any communication device. Finally, we describe a tool, deployed into aCME, that allows responding to quiz-based questionnaires during learning activities. A preliminary evaluation was performed to analyze usability and user satisfaction when interacting with the system we developed. The paper is concluded with some comments and future research directions.

Argumentation tools in a collaborative development environment

In the field of Computer Supported Collaborative Work several studies have explored the possibility to improve the collaboration in software development teams by integrating into IDEs tools to support the coordination and sharing of common resources. Similar studies have emphasized the need of integrating into IDEs collaboration and communication functionalities to improve the building of a shared knowledge. In this paper we describe how we enhanced Rational Team Concert (an IBM CDVE built on Eclipse and Jazz) with structured communication tools by integrating a collaborative platform named CoFFEE, that was developed for structured argumentation and discussion in an educational setting.

Computer-Supported WebQuests

WebQuests are among the most popular techniques to enhance collaboration in learning; they are an inquiry-based activity, grounded on constructivist learning theory, where the information that learners interact with is mostly found on the Internet. We present here a system that offers computer-support during a WebQuest, by offering a structured discussion and debate space, besides the navigation and resource sharing. We integrate the WebQuest design process with an operational design phase and describe how our system can completely support the design of a computer-supported WebQuest.

3WPS :a 3D web-based process visualization framework

In this paper, we describe 3WPS, a framework to build distributed systems that are able to monitor and interact with a process via a 3D interface that is accessible via the World Wide Web. 3WPS is easily configurable, easily adaptable to different processes with high reuse of its software components and its distributed architecture leverages on off-the-shelf components of the WWW infrastructure such as Java applets and VRML browsers.

Adaptive Testing by Test

We present the adaptive features of Test++, an adaptive system for training and teaching on the Internet. The system integrates an adaptive training environment for personalized training and a cooperative environment for exams both accessible via Internet and a standard Java-enabled browser.

Engaging Citizens with a Social Platform for Open Data

Open Data are valuable initiatives in favour of transparency. Public administrations are increasing the availability of datasets for citizens, associations, innovators and other stakeholders, by releasing their data with open licenses. Open initiatives are achieving less success than expected, mainly due to the lack of engagement. There is a growing demand for approaches to actively engage citizens in exploiting Open Data. This paper introduces SPOD, a Social Platform for Open Data, which aims to engage citizens, local associations and organizations in forming communities of interests, stimulating the interpretation of Open Data and exploiting their use in Data-driven discussions, something not well-supported on traditional social networks. Social collaboration is the key aspect to increase the public value, where citizens participate in the discussions, co-create knowledge and data. The paper describes the engagement of four communities of citizens, which contributed to the public value by discussing topics in the context of Cultural Heritage, generating information from existing and co-created open datasets, by using SPOD.

Datalet-Ecosystem Provider (DEEP): Scalable Architecture for Reusable, Portable and User-Friendly Visualizations of Open Data

This paper presents the DatalEt-Ecosystem Provider (DEEP), an extensible, and scalable Edge-centric architecture to visualize Open Data, retrieved in real time from institutional open data portals. The aim is to engage citizens and stakeholders through reusable, portable and interactive visualizations, named datalets. The DEEP architecture exploits the increasing computing power and capacity of end-users devices, moving the computation to process and visualize data, from the central server, directly to the client-side ensuring data trustiness, privacy, scalability and dynamic data loading. DEEP and its datalets have been fully exploited, in the ROUTE-TO-PA, HORIZON 2020 funded project, by five public administrations across Europe as pilot projects. The project engages and involves citizens in creating, sharing and commenting existing visualizations of Open Data. DEEP is open source, its source code is fully available on GitHub, thus every single component can be reused by other projects.

Free-riding in collaborative diagrams drawing

In this paper, we study the issue of free-riding in collaborative learning. Free-riding occurs when a part of the students lean on the efforts of the rest of their team and do not contribute much to the team work. It impacts negatively on performances of the whole team [1]. We present an experiment of collaborative diagram drawing (through a synchronous collaborative drawing tool, called Shared Drawing tool) in a Software Engineering course, that shows a significant equal participation and suggests that students employ some self-regulatory behaviors that results in fruitful collaboration.

Face2face social bookmarking with recommendations: WebQuests in the classrooms

In this paper we present SynCoBook, a distributed system that offers the functionalities of a face-to-face cooperative bookmarking system and of a recommendation system. Our overall objective was to design and realize a practical tool that can be used in project-based learning, in the classroom, to participate in the WebQuests [12] or to cooperatively build an annotated Webliography, i.e., a set of URLs, organized and scaffolded with group annotations. Moreover, our system also offers advanced awareness tools as well as recommendations based on the items in the Webliography and their Google-related pages.

Visualizing processes on the web

In this paper, we describe 3WPS, a framework to build distributed systems that are able to monitor and interact with a process through a 3D interface that is accessible via the World Wide Web (WWW). The 3WPS is easily configurable, easily adaptable to different processes with high reuse of its software components and its distributed architecture leverages on off-the-shelf components of the WWW infrastructure such as Java applets and Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) browsers. We describe the characteristics of 3WPS framework by mainly focusing on the issue of programmability and by contextually providing an example tour of its usage.