Paul Lefrere

Producing guidelines for learning, teaching and tutoring in a mobile environment

We review the research on mobile learning and theories of learning in order to produce a pedagogically sound set of guidelines for learners, teachers, and policy makers who are considering adopting m-learning technology. The guidelines are not primarily intended as requirements for systems design, but they will be of use to systems designers, in alerting them to the settings in which the technology will be used and issues arising from deployment with teachers and learners. The paper offers an interpretation of the nature and utility of the guidelines, and describes a process for producing new guidelines. We propose an initial set of guidelines for deploying, managing and teaching with mobile technology.

Extending eductional metadata schemas to describe adaptive learning resources

This paper describes a generic technique for representing Adaptive Learning Resources by extending current metadata schemas. The requirement for the work described here has grown out of the necessity to facilitate accurate discovery and integration of Adaptive Learning Resources, namely Adaptive Hypermedia Services.

On the application of rule-based techniques to the design of advice giving systems

Abstract This article attempts to assess how much is known about building systems whose advice actually benefits users. We review current approaches to the provision of on-line help, and suggest that the most promising are those which represent a users intentions explicitly. Following this lead, we examine recent work on speech acts, planning and meta-level inference for clues as to how a users inputs could be interpreted in the context of his current aims and activities. We conclude that the appropriate context of interpretation for an input is supplied by hypotheses concerning the current state of a users plan. Next we suggest that the techniques developed in rule-based systems could be used to implement an advisor capable of generating and revising plan hypotheses, and outline what we consider to be the outstanding problems of control associated with such an implementation. Finally, we show how such a system might help a user to structure his activity, so that he can iterate towards his goal while avoiding common errors.

A European research agenda for lifelong learning

It is a generally accepted truth that without a proper educational system no country will prosper, nor will its inhabitants. With the arrival of the post-industrial society, in Europe and elsewhere, it has become increasingly clear that people should continue learning over their entire lifespans lest they or their society suffer the dire consequences. But what does this future lifelong learning society exactly look like? And how then should education prepare for it? What should people learn and how should they do so? How can we afford to pay for all this, what are the socio-economic constraints of the move towards a lifelong-learning society? And, of course, what role can and should the educational establishment of schools and universities play? This are questions that demand serious research efforts, which is what this paper argues for.

An Architecture for Layering and Integration of Learning Ontologies, Applied to Personal Learning Environments and Cloud Learning Environments

Extensible Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) and Cloud Learning Environments (CLEs) that facilitate the lone or collaborative study of user-chosen blends of content and courses from heterogeneous sources, including Open Educational Resources (OERs), are gradually gaining ground in the landscape of distance learning. In this paper, we examine the use of ontologies for modelling and supporting learner activities within a PLE or CLE that draws upon sources whose ontologies may vary a lot. In particular, we propose an architecture for layering and integration of learning ontologies modelling various aspects of the learning process and facilitating the production of recommendations to learners.

Activity-based scenarios for and approaches to ubiquitous e-Learning

This paper presents scenarios for ubiquitous e-Learning in heterogeneous networks. It concludes by arguing for the development of a learning-focused analogue, activity-based e-Learning extensions (ABLE), of activity-based computing (ABC). The goal would be to offer the learning-support/performance-support equivalent of ABC’s support for human activities in a ubiquitous computing environment, relevant to areas that are hard to model today: informal on-the-job learning; peer-to-peer support and informal sharing of content in ad hoc work groups; formal and informal ways to capture and share knowledge-focused insights and processes; content and systems to aid reflection. Just as ABC supplements traditional computing approaches (in ABC, data- and application-oriented) to suit “multiple, parallel and mobile work activities” (Bardram et al. in Support for ABC in a personal computing operating system. CHI 2006 proceedings. Montréal, Québec, Canada, 22–27 April 2006, pp 211–220), so ABLE could supplement traditional e-Learning approaches (often largely content-focused, sometimes little more than page-turning) to suit those same work activities, and make e-Learning potentially more resilient to interruptions, more fun and more memorable.

Visioning and Engineering the Knowledge Society - A Web Science Perspective

This book, in conjunction with the volume CCIS 49, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second World Summit, WSKS 2009, held in Chania, Crete, Greece, in September 2008.The 62 revised full p ...

The Coming Revolution in Competence Development: Using Serious Games to Improve Cross-Cultural Skills

Approaches to competence development have tended to focus on training to reach a required level of performance in simple and reproducible contexts, rather than in the more complex and hard-to-replicate contexts that characterize real-world projects, especially projects that involve people from other cultures. This paper explores how the Serious Games approach can be exploited to create skills in dealing with cross-cultural issues in project management. The degree of difference this can make to real-world performance is so dramatic that managers who have experienced it are seeing it not as a way to add Incremental Improvements to TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) but as more of a Radical Innovation --- a revolutionary change. Some of the main skills required in project management are reviewed, and different models of cross-cultural analysis applied to understand how the challenges of managing projects are increased by cultural issues. Our testbed for this is an EU project TARGET that is developing the next generation TEL approach. We describe its approach and look at how the TARGET serious game can be designed to achieve enhanced cross-cultural skills in users.

Do you need that second color

When money is short, two-color printing is often the first thing to go from technical manuals and instructional texts. Does their effectiveness suffer as a result? Conversely, when a second color is used, is it often just a waste of money? This paper sets out, first, the main purpose for which a second color can be used; second, technical and perceptual constraints on the use of color; and, third, research findings on color and learning. The purpose of the paper is to provide practical guidelines for decisions about the use of a second color in texts.

Towards a Reference Architecture for Smart and Personal Learning Environments

Personal learning environments (PLEs) evolved as a response to the limitations on self-regulated learning posed by institutional control of learning environments, such as Learning Management Systems. Smart learning environments (SLEs) have more recently come to refer to various technological enhancements of learning environments. However, there is a tension between ‘personal’ and ‘smart’, which this paper investigates through the experiences of the TELL ME project. The project focused on the learning of blue-collar workers in Europe’s manufacturing sector. The resulting aim was to support the awareness of ‘intentions’ and ‘realizations’ and the reciprocities between these across five phases, collectively referred to as MEMO-E: mix, enquire, match, optimize, and experience. Perspectives of the project on the themes, interactions, and philosophy of SLEs and PLEs are explained, a framework for intentions and realizations is introduced, and the characteristics of an evolvable reference architecture for smart and personal learning environments are presented.