Learning Flow Management and Semantic Data Exchange between Blog-based

Personal Learning Environments

Vladimir Tomberg, Mart LaanpereTallinn University, Estonia

Open Universiteit Nederland, June 2010

This research was supported by European Social Fund’s Doctoral Studies and Internationalisation Programme DoRa

Background

Learning is continuously shifting to the Web 2.0:

not just learning resources, but also learning and facilitation activities, social

connections, and educational bureaucracy

WEB1.0: associated with LMS (Learning Management Systems)

WEB2.0: associated with PLE(Personal Learning Environment)

The Gap

• PLE is open, loosely structured environment

• Learning outcomes achieved in PLE are difficult to validate formally

• In the formal higher education context, we need to enhance PLEs with special features in order to orchestrate the the learning flows across distributed system

The Challenge

How we can organize in a blog-based PLE such activities as:•Enrollment to a course?

•Individual and group assignments?

•Formal assessment of learning outcomes?

•Teacher ‘s feedback and facilitation?

•Tracking the activities and results of students?

Course Coordination Space (Wilson 2007)

The Way

• There are thousands of teachers’ blogs used as learning environment

• There are even more students’ blogs, who used them as an (informal) learning portfolio

• We chose WordPress blog platform as PLE base and tried to implement on it simple course implementation scenario

• Our goal is mapping of the formal course workflows to existent blog’s publishing workflow

Scenario for Course Workflow

1. Teacher is establishing a new course in the own blog

2. The teacher is inviting students to the course3. The teacher is opening an assignment for the

students4. Students are implementing the assignment

and submitting results5. Teacher is assessing and grading the

submissions, and providing a feedback

Problem: How to Identify the Course in the Blog?

• Each blog category can be marked (or not) as

a course

• Each post in the course can be marked (or

not) as an assignment for students

• Students can subscribe to the course by RSS

like they can subscribe to blog category (we

introduce also much more secure subscription

scenario)

Mapping of Blog and Learning Concepts

Assignment Workflow

Problems

• Teacher and students can agree about

mapping and workflow can be organized

conventionally, but seems it should be hard to

control an implementation

• Teacher has no tools for tracking results of

students

Our Solution: LePress

• LePress is an experimental plug-in for WordPress that supports organization of course workflow in distributed WordPress blogs environment

LePress as a Course coordination Space

LePress in Layered Architecture

LePress Teacher: Managing Courses

LePress Teacher: Confirming Registration

LePress Teacher Widget: List of Students

LePress Teacher: Writing Assignment

LePress Teacher Widget: Assignments list

LePress Student Widget

LePress Student: List of assignments

LePress Teacher: Managing Assignments

LePress Teacher: Writing Feedback

Enhancing Blogs with Educational Semantics

• Two semantic tools available in a blog by

default: tags and categories

• To support course activities we propose to

adopt semantic tools like microformats, RDFa

or microdata

• At 2009 microformats were more promising

solutions

Exporting Microformats

• Two microformats can be exported right from

the LePress widget

• hCalendar microformat for course data

• hCard for course participants (teacher and

students)

Exporting Assignments and Students List in Chrome with Michromeformats Extension Installed

Why LePress is Special?• There are two other popular plug-ins that declare

the functionality of course management on the

base of WordPress, namely BuddyPress

Courseware and Learninglog, both are based on

BuddyPress

• Accent to formal LMS functionalities (course

descriptions, bibliography)

• Impossibility to conduct courses outside of

WPMU or WordPress3 network (BuddyPress

community)

Conclusions

• LePress acts as PLE Course Coordination

Space;

• LePress demonstrates how formal course

workflow can be mapped onto blog workflow;

• Non-destructive workflow integration using the

typical features of blogs: trackback, categories

and sidebar widgets

• Passing course semantic data to users using

Microformats