Lidia Stanganelli

Computer Supported Collaborative Learning in software engineering

Collaboration is one of the keywords in education as well as in computer-assisted instruction. In this respect, e-learning platforms provide users with specific tools, enabling them to collaborate and/or to cooperate so to reach common objectives. Collaboration is considered as a teaching strategy but, in many cases such as in the software engineering classes, collaboration has to be a learning outcome itself, since students must acquire a specific ability in team working. Thus a suited working environment is needed, that has to be much more than just a flexible Learning Management System. Consequently, a specific project has been launched within the Italian Eclipse Community in the framework of the Enforcing Team Cooperation (ETC) activity. The aim of the project is that of enforcing and enlarging cooperation activities among a large number of students, all attending software engineering courses at different Universities in Italy. The main idea behind the project is the implementation of a really effective Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) paradigm, to be used for higher education on team cooperation, in software engineering classes for the analysis, design, and development of software programs along their lifecycle.

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.

The role of big data and cognitive computing in the learning process

In this paper, we investigate how the raise of big data and cognitive computing systems is going to redesign the labor market, also impacting on the learning processes. In this respect, we make reference to higher education and we depict a model of a smart university, which relies on the concepts that are at the basis of the novel smart-cities development trends. Thus, we regard education as a process so that we can find specific issues to solve to overcome existing criticisms, and provide some suggestions on how to enhance universities performances. We highlight inputs, outputs, and dependencies in a block diagram, and we propose a solution built on a new paradigm called smarter-university, in which knowledge grows rapidly, is easy to share, and is regarded as a common heritage of both teachers and students. Among the others, a paramount consequence is that there is a growing demand for competences and skills that recall the so called T-shape model and we observe that this is pushing the education system to include a blend of disciplines in the curriculums of their courses. In this overview, among the wide variety of recent innovations, we focus our attention on cognitive computing systems and on the exploitation of big data, that we expect to further accelerate the refurbishment process of the key components of the knowledge society and universities as well.

Experiences In Collaborative Learning

Cooperative learning is a paradigm of collaboration aimed to reach a common goal. The trend of using social networks and social media to deliver and exchange knowledge let us believe that collaboration skills must be strongly fostered to empower users to learn together and from each other, particularly in academia, to support the educational challenges of this century. In this paper we discuss the primary needs of a modern educational system and we present the ETCplus project, a model of cooperation which has as primary focus the students’ cooperation in an academic environment. Two distinct experiments in ETCplus project which involved cooperative learning and people from two international universities are discussed. The first experiment describes a system in a free environment that is left to evolve autonomously. The second experiment presents a system in a controlled environment that uses accelerator to speed up the learning process. The process of collaboration was designed on top of a shared smart platform. Post questionnaires gathered the students’ feedback and the metric for the evaluation of the collaboration were also given. The observation shows that cooperative learning produces better results when consonance and resonance are reached. The paper discusses the weakness and the strength of the ETCplus project.

Managing a software project leveraging students' cooperation: on the road to Eclipse (OTRE) experience

The world of software analysis, design and development has dramatically changed, owing to the availability of novel patterns and architectures derived from the Internet experience. In particular, the Jazz framework joined to the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment enables programmers working in a collaborative environment, by means of cooperation strategies. This gave birth to the idea of launching an experimental project for the teaching of software engineering disciplines in a collaborative environment. To this aim, students from different Universities are encouraged to conduct software development projects together, exploring new opportunities for intra-university collaboration, and promoting the sharing of knowledge and expertise gained during the projects. This paper reports on the state of the art of the OTRE project. In more details, OTRE stands for On The Road to Eclipse, and its ambition is developing a full-featured software environment for managing the annual conference of the Italian Eclipse Community. The vision, management, achievements and future development of the project will be addressed in this work.

Teaching Computer Programming in a Platform as a Service Environment

In this paper we recall a previous research on the future development of the current model of higher education, which highlighted that the labor market is looking for people with competences and skills reflecting a T-shape model. As a consequence, universities should include a wider mix of disciplines in the curricula of their courses. Hence, to overcome existing criticisms and to provide some suggestions on how to enhance universities’ performances, we thought of education as a process with inputs, outputs, and relevant dependencies. We based our research on a smart-city-like model due to the fact that next generation networks and relevant services are going to be more and more integrated with existing infrastructure and information management systems. Thus, it is mandatory that smart solutions are the most prominent assets of modern university environments, to improve the effectiveness of higher education. We called such a university a “smarter university” in which knowledge is a common heritage of teachers and students. In this paper, we report experimental results from a specific case study of collaboration between industry and university, which could be used as a reference for the definition of patterns to be applied in the redesign of the current education systems, even tough it is referred to a technological application scenario. Keywords-cloud computing; smart applications; collaborative systems; technology enhanced learning.

Teaching Computer Programming Through Hands-on Labs on Cognitive Computing.

In this work we report more recent results of a longlasting educational project that we have been carrying on for several years and is evolving continuously. The objective of the mentioned project is making students work on the production of small, yet full featured, software prototypes with a collaborative approach, in a dedicated development environment with suited tools and facilities. At the same time, we seek to lay the foundations to build a pragmatic model to teach cognitive computing programming. We conducted such experience in a programming course at the University of Naples “Federico II” exploiting a software development environment based on the Platform as a Service (PaaS). This made possible to perform a set of cooperative learning activities that we used to demonstrate practically some theoretical concepts, also stressing the use of cognitive computing tools, which introduce a new way of thinking the software design process. From its inception, this educational project has involved a relevant number of students, which has been growing continuously, year after year. At our first attempts, students were assigned a specific activity, which was expected to be concluded within one year. Then, as new classes arrived, we have seen that it was possible to start new activities starting from the precedent achievements, thus requiring further evolutions of the available prototypes. This allowed creating more complex and complete projects, as new tools and services were made available, carrying new opportunities. In the present release, such evolutionary path has led to using the IBM Bluemix platform with its wide range of components, including Watson that is devoted to cognitive computing. This work goes in the direction of developing the smart university model, by using innovative and intelligent services to help raising a new generation of software engineers but also to promote and disseminate a new way for designing and building innovative applications.

Building courses for the training in Jazz: which educational resources for the future?

Jazz is one of the most widely used platforms in the world for the development of collaborative software made by IBM. The formation of a group that learns in a collaborative way needs of innovative teaching resources. The book covers only a small percentage of that training act. What else give interest? Probably a balanced use of visual, kinesthetic and textual resources must be properly balanced. This work is about the experience of Jazz-Hub project and the need to build these learning resources for students of a software engineering course at the Faculty of Engineering of the University Federico II.

Assets and intellectual capital management into the ETC project

One of the important aspects in the software development process is the knowledge transfer between team members. This process exhibits some critical points: the knowledge transfer during the project and, after its conclusion, towards other projects and towards other teams and communities. How this knowledge should be represented, transmitted and reused is still a matter of scientific debate. Something interesting we can draw from observation of how the man has been accustomed to manage it in his recent past to think on how it should happen now, and under the pressure of time and economic constraints. This article shows an innovative way to represent, manage and transfer knowledge through assets. The aim is to give persistence to the memory of the projects and for this purpose, as a case study, we chose a community project called the Eclipse Italian OTRE (On the Road Eclipse) to show how knowledge can flow more easily through the network of those who work there. The work is the result of cooperation between the University of Naples Federico II and IBM Italy and especially with the Rational brand and the Academic Initiative (Academic, 2012) that is responsible for cooperation with the Italian universities.

Ecli-Law: A simulated environment for problem solving in the feld of law

This work begins with a journey through the fundamentals of design when solving legal problems. A fascinating journey that starts in our mind, by the way in which we prepare it to solve problems and to examine our strengths and weaknesses in problem solving. We will defne the underlying concepts and rules useful in problem solving. Finally, we will describe a few key concepts which are useful to the designer as tools are to a craftsman. We apply these concepts to problem solving in legal matters. We also consider the setting up of a simulation environment in the solution of legal problems by using a very powerful open source environment: Eclipse.