Paola Salomoni

WWW recycling for a better world

Web 2.0 is affecting the structure of our society by creating new spaces of freedom, giving voice to any opinion, easing interpersonal relationships, and encouraging the creation of collaborating collectivities. Technologies such as blog, podcasting, wiki, and news feeds have the power to transform every user from a mere information consumer to a potential producer, from a spectator to an actor. The success of YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and Wikipedia is under everybodys eyes. Generally speaking, Web 2.0 is seen as a powerful tool that, by exploiting Internet technologies, supplies services to the society, helping the entire socio-cultural system to develop and to move toward a democratic direction.n Unfortunately, this imagery is partially distorted: first, Web 2.0 and Internet technologies are differently accessible by different parts of the society and, second, as many sociologists pointed out, their applications often appeal to users egoistic purposes and self-celebration spirit. Although we cannot dismiss the value of current Web 2.0 applications, we are convinced there is a much more valuable potential that has not been exploited yet. By comparing the immense benefits that Web 2.0 could bring to the whole society, with its factual employment, one could provocatively change the meaning of the acronym WWW into World Wide Waste. We are hence convinced that it is necessary to redesign the utilization paradigm of Web 2.0 and, in general, of the Internet in order to recycle unused parts of Web 2.0 into altruistic bricks that could be appropriately rerouted and composed for alternative, unselfish employment.

E-learning 2.0: you are We-LCoME!

The Internet is turning into a participating community where consumers and producers of resources merge into prosumers, dialectically sharing their knowledge, their interests and needs. This Web 2.0 archetype is now strongly impacting on e-learning methodologies and technologies, by enforcing the participation of students in creating and sharing materials and resources. Overcoming latent alarms introduced by the coming out of new complex tools, e-learning 2.0 represents a new challenge for accessibility. The production of accessible contents can now be turned from an impossible mission centrally managed by teachers and institutions to a joint work of people improving learning materials.n In this context, we present an e-learning 2.0 tool, designed and developed to support users in editing educational resources and compounding multimedia contents through a collaborative work. Starting from a multimedia resource provided by the lecturer, an entire community can contribute in adding alternative contents and views, creating a multidimensional information structure. The resulting enriched resource can be tailored to a specific user by resorting to automatic adaptation mechanisms. This system can be used to transform the content production workflow, involving all the different actors (lecturers, learning technologists, student support services, staff developers and students) playing a role in improving accessibility and, more generally, effectiveness of learning materials.

Notes for a Collaboration: On the Design of a Wiki-type Educational Video Lecture Annotation System

In this paper, we propose a novel method for generating engaging multi-modal content automatically from text. Rhetorical structure theory (RST) is used to decompose text into discourse units and to identify rhetorical discourse relations between them. Rhetorical relations are then mapped to question-answer pairs in an information preserving way, i.e., the original text and the resulting dialogue convey essentially the same meaning. Finally, the dialogue is acted out by two virtual agents. The network of dialogue structures automatically built up during this process, called DialogueNet, can be reused for other purposes, such as personalization or question-answering.We describe a collaborative annotation system for the production of rich media e-learning contents. Our system exploits a wiki-like interface that allows cooperative users to enrich didactical multimedia lectures with additional information, such as captions, annotations and comments. Before delivering them to users, these additional contents are automatically adapted and integrated with video lectures based on user profiles and requests. This way, the additional contents collaboratively provided by users not only represent an effective alternative that students may follow to better understand the lecture, but also allow for a fine-grained customization of the didactic material. This is an important aspect which represents a step forward towards the Web(2.0)-ification of e-learning technologies. An experimental assessment shows the viability of our approach.

Profiling learners with special needs for custom e-learning experiences, a closed case?

Contrary to what commonly thought, profiling users and devices is still a complex issue, especially in the case of learners with special needs, who deserve a customized access to e-learning platforms. A plethora of languages, protocols and tools have been proposed which can be exploited to create users and devices profiles, separately. Unfortunately, none of them is really effective in capturing the fundamentals of a learner profile, when used in isolation. Here we discuss a practical approach we devised to profile e-learners, which is able to meet the variety of requirements providing educational experiences. Our approach is based on the idea to put together the strengths of ACCLIP and CC/PP protocols, while avoiding specification conflicts. A few examples are provided which show the efficacy of the approach.

Monitoring accessibility: large scale evaluations at a Geo political level

Once we assumed that Web accessibility is a right, we implicitly state the necessity of a governance of it. Beyond any regulation, institutions must provide themselves with suitable tools to control and support accessibility on typically large scale scenarios of content and resources. No doubt, the economic impact and effectiveness of these tools affect accessibility level. In this paper, we propose an application to effectively monitor Web accessibility from a geo-political point of view, by referring resources to the specific (category of) institutions which are in charge of it and to the geographical places they are addressed to. Snapshots of such a macro level spatial-geo-political analysis can be used to effectively focus investments and skills where they are actually necessary.

A multimedia broker to support accessible and mobile learning through learning objects adaptation

The large diffusion of e-learning technologies represents a great opportunity for underserved segments of population. This is particularly true for people with disabilities for whom digital barriers should be overstepped with the aim of reengaging them back into society to education. In essence, before a mass of learners can be engaged in a collective educational process, each single member should be put in the position to enjoy accessible and customized educational experiences, regardless of the wide diversity of their personal characteristics and technological equipment. To respond to this demand, we developed LOT (Learning Object Transcoder), a distributed PHP-based service-oriented system designed to deliver flexible and customized educational services for a multitude of learners, each with his/her own diverse preferences and needs. The main novelty of LOT amounts to a broking service able to manage the transcoding activities needed to convert multimedia digital material into the form which better fits a given student profile. Transcoding activities are performed based on the use of Web service technologies. Experimental results gathered from several field trials with LOT (available online at http://137.204.74.83/∼lot/) have confirmed the viability of our approach.

Adapting learning environments with AccessForAll

ATutor is an Open Source Web-based learning environment that has accessibility as a guiding development principle. From its beginning, ATutor was created to fill a need for an accessible network-based Learning Management System (LMS) [2] [3].n Continuing with its attention to accessibility, ATutor adds the first implementation of the ISO FDIS 24751 [4] accessibility standards.

Cooperative multimedia management for participative learning: A case study

Web 2.0 has definitively twisted roles and rules within processes leading to the final online resources we all can enjoy on the Internet. Producers and consumers of Web contents merged into “prosumers”, dialectically sharing their knowledge, their experiences, as well as their needs. Such novel dynamics provide a strong spin-off for e-learning methodologies and technologies, by allowing students participation along learning materials life cycle, from simple feedbacks, up to real enrichments of didactical resources. As elsewhere on the Web 2.0 scenario, inclusive aspects of e-learning 2.0 represent either a new challenge or a new opportunity. This paper presents an e-learning 2.0 tool which is able to support users during the collaborative editing of didactical contents, from simple text to compound multimedia. Starting from a resource provided by the lecturer, learners can contribute in adding alternative contents and views, creating a multidimensional information structure. The resulting enriched material can be tailored to a specific user by resorting to automatic adaptation mechanisms. By utilizing typical Web 2.0 interfaces, our system involves all the different actors (lecturers, learning technologists, student support services, staff developers and students) to play a key role in improving the accessibility and, more generally, the effectiveness of learning materials.

Custom E-Learning Experiences: Working with Profiles for Multiple Content Sources Access and Adaptation

It is a common belief that the problem of extracting learners’ profiles to be used for delivering custom learning experiences is a closed case. Yet, practical solutions do not completely cope with the complex issue of capturing all the features of users, especially those of heterogeneous learners, who may have special needs or characteristics (such as disabilities), or are exploiting nonstandard equipment to access services (e.g., mobile devices). For example, the standard ACCLIP (Accessibility for Learner Information Package) specification provides means for describing preferences in terms of user accessibility; yet it lacks methods to manage technical characteristics of the exploited device. Conversely, CC/PP (Composite Capabilty/Preferences Profile) profiles are thought to describe device capabilities, but they are unable to report on users’ characteristics. With this unsolved problem in view, we present an effective approach to profiling e-learners, which allows the extraction and adaptation of multisource didactical content for customized educational experiences. The idea behind this is to unite the strengths of ACCLIP and CC/PP protocols, while avoiding specification conflicts. Several use cases are described that show the viability of our proposal.

WHY LAUGHING IS BETTER THAN SMILING

Dialectically sharing knowledge everywhere, every time and, above all, very fast — as it is nowadays possible — has revealed the existence and importance of a common, distributed intelligence growing with the contribution of many individuals (a community). The iterating refinement of any information resource by a wider and wider community of sharers leads to undoubted advantages on the final quality and effectiveness of use of this information. Following this path and focusing on the e-learning field, we present a novel system, termed LAUGH, for the cooperative creation and sharing of SMIL-based multimedia resources. Such a system allows users (typically learners and teachers) to enrich the didactical material made available to the learning community. Specifically, they can add captions/subtitles and alternative annotations to the original multimedia contents by resorting to a Wiki-type interface. This open process promotes students participation, data decentralization, assemblage from diverse sources, sharing of knowledge as well as an improvement to the efficacy of e-learning materials. Throughout the paper, we will meticulously show that LAUGH extends and improves the functionalities provided by the SMIL standard. This motivates the title of this article.