The Collaboratory Notebook
not available
Using the WWW to Build Learning Communities in K-12 Settings - Part I. Global Network Navigator
The World Wide Web (WWW) can play a vital role in the formation and successful operation of learning communities. Just 18 months ago, there were but 100 WWW servers online worldwide, while today there are over 10,000 WWW servers. Current estimates predict 100,000 WWW servers a year from now, according to M.K. Gray's Measuring the Size and Growth of the Web. This decentralized development of information resources, which cover everything from scientific databases to corporate products to traffic a
The greenhouse effect visualizer: a tool for the science classroom
The Greenhouse Effect Visualizer (GEV) is designed to help students visualize data sets related to the earth's energy balance. This work was inspired by the benefits scientific visualization have provided to scientists in discovering patterns and presenting the results of their work to broad communities. The hope is that scientific visualization can provide equal assistance to students trying to learn science. The philosophy underlying this approach links learning with practice. Hence, students
Learning Design and Run-Time Resource Binding in a Distributed e-Learning Environment
Nowadays, the need for e-learning systems supporting a rich set of pedagogical requirements has been identified as an important issue in the field of distance learning. Several initiatives take place in order to meet this need.
Maybe, the most important of these initiatives is IMS Learning Design [6] that provides a framework to depict pedagogies. Furthermore, we are aware that the provision of different learning paths tailored on learner's characteristics and preferences guarantees the learner
AstroGrid as an e-Learning Environment
We present the concept of the Virtual Observatory through the AstroGrid project, which is a Virtual Organization making intensive use of the Internet to produce a working data-grid for Astronomical applications.
AstroGrid has implemented a series of tools which facilitate collaborative work such as news, forum and discussion pages, all of them inspired by the open source and licensing philosophy.
Additionally we explore how such an Astronomical Grid project can be used in the future as an e-Le
Reactive Learning Objects for Distributed e-Learning Environments
We present a concept of reactive learning objects that goes away from the hydraulic view of e-learning and gives to students activity a central place. First experimentations suggest that this concept should be enlarged to include distributed computation, distributed storage and Web services.
A Virtual Organisation for e-Learning
We present in this paper the results of an European funded project Diogene, finished in October 2004, whose aim has been the design and the development of a distributed e-learning system able to perform several automatic actions such as course customization and information retrieval on the Semantic Web.
The Diogene architecture is based on a network of specialized Organizations each of which has been realized as an independent Web Service.
The Climate Visualizer: Sense-Making Through Scientific Visualization
This paper describes the design of a learning environment, called the Climate Visualizer, intended to facilitate scientific sense-making in high school classrooms by providing students the ability to craft, inspect, and annotate scientific visualizations. The theoretical background for our design presents a view of learning as acquiring and critiquing cultural practices and stresses the need for students to appropriate the social and material aspects of practice when learning an area. This is fo
GRID Technologies => 'Education' = 'Distance Education'
This paper discusses the new possibilities that Grid technologies create in education, presents current learning paradigms and makes a prediction about the way in which Grid technologies may affect the future of education.
The case of the Hellenic Open University (HOU) is presented and the current educational technologies and tools used are illustrated. The paper also presents a scenario for the utilization of Grid technologies at HOU and discusses the challenges that such infrastructure create
A bootstrapping scenario for elicitating CSCL services within a GRID virtual community
Amongst the various eLearning techniques, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) is of growing interest within the academic world. However, during the first phase of the EleGI project, a noticable fact has been the difficulty to match the user needs with the potentiality of the GRID services.
Thus, through a fictive scenario, this article proposes to walk the path between the idea of creating a new virtual community and the realisation of this objective. This scenario takes the situat
Towards a Domain Specific Application Development Environment for the ELeGI architecture: the Softwa
The Next Generation Grids (NGG) expert group has pioneered the vision of "Invisible Grid" whereby the complexity of Grid systems and architectures is hidden to both developers and users. In this new vision, the Grid has a different role: it will not more provide a virtual computing environment but it will be the basis of a more complex service oriented, knowledge-based and collaborative environment suitable for the specific domains in which citizen and organizations have to operate.
Grid commun
Gathering Requirements for a Grid-based Automatic Marking System
This paper reports on our experiences using a Creative Requirements [1] workshop approach to elicit requirements for a Grid-based automatic marking system. The research was conducted for ELeGI, an EU funded project whose goal is to provide a European Learning Grid infrastructure to promote a learning paradigm shift from a teacher-centred approach to a learner-centred approach.
The automatic marking system uses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to assess the meaning of essays written by computer sc
A Grid Services Implementation for a Virtual Research Environment
In the past, virtual learning and research environments have typically been implemented as monolithic systems. Current research focuses on creating such environments from selected Grid and Web services.
In this paper we describe the Virtual Orthopaedic European University, which was created to support Higher Surgical Trainees to provide evidence for their learning contracts by carrying out experiments and publishing the results.
We use this environment as a case study for the re-implementation
Portfolios and ICT as means of professional learning in teacher education
Teaching portfolios supported by new learning technologies have increased in importance in Norwegian schools and teacher education. However, the learning potentials of integrated e-portfolios have still to be researched and further developed. This article focuses on professional learning in a teacher education programme reorganised by use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), teaching portfolios and assessment. Findings reveal that the portfolios have prompted professional learning
Informatics-based Learning Resources for Patients and their Relatives in recovery
In this paper we describe experiences from design of an informatics-based learning resource for patients and relatives. The prototype, REPARERE (learning REsource for PAtients and RElatives during REcovery), aims to support patients and their family recovering from heart surgery in meeting challenges in to daily living post discharge.
Using recovery experiences and patient teaching material, REPARERE includes examples of textual information, video-clips, images and illustrations relevant to th
Calculators, graphs, gestures and the production of meaning
In this paper we report an analysis of a teaching sequence in which Grade 11 students were asked to produce some graphs corresponding to the relationship between time and distance of a cylinder moving up and down an inclined plane. The students were also asked to carry out the experience using a TI 83+ graphic calculator equipped with a sensor, and to discuss and explain the differences between their own graphs and the ones obtained with the calculator. We analyze the students' processes of mea
La natura della mediazione offerta dai sistemi basati su micromondi all’apprendimento della matema
Questo lavoro analizza il ruolo che ambienti basati sull’uso del calcolatore, ed in particolare i micromondi, possono assumere nelle attività di insegnamento e apprendimento di conoscenze matematiche.
Il lavoro parte dallo studio di alcuni risultati significativi che si sono avuti in questo campo a livello internazionale. Tale studio viene utilizzato come quadro di riferimento per situare e analizzare una ricerca specifica che abbiamo svolto in questo settore.
Tale ricerca riguarda la proge
The Grid Shared Desktop: a bootstrapping environment for collaboration
The paradigm shift from an information sharing infrastructure (i.e., the Web) to a resource sharing infrastructure (i.e., the Grid) has boosted the development of a new generation of online services. In particular, Grid services are stateful, dynamic and operate in a secure environment. Therefore they offer capabilities that are essential to remote collaboration. In this paper, we tackle the problem of bootstrapping and supporting a collaborative environment over a Grid infrastructure. As we tar
The Grid Shared Desktop for CSCL
The Grid Shared Desktop (GSD) is a collaborative environment that provides a multidimensional humans-to-machine-to-humans interface by the means of multiples cleverly intricated desktops. The GSD is a platform independent solution that benefits of the intrinsic advantages of the Grid technology such as scalability and security. In order to verify that our GSD solution meets CSCL requirements, we have conducted experiments in the context of the ELeGI project. As part of the project use cases, the
