Next generation Collaboration and Educational portalsMarch 2007

From information …

•Adaptation of P2P systems and social networks to web portal concepts Web 2.0 paradigm

•Users demand participation, personalization and interactivity

•Nowadays collaboration is a differentiation factor for web portals. Shortly it will be become a commodity that will be taken as granted

•New technologies are needed for new necessities: portal frameworks. Open Source takes the lead

•Traditional web portals follow the web newspaper paradigm

•Traditional messages: portal = information, internet as a universal, instant, updated, huge information media

•Traditional portal key values: interest of presented information, graphic design, usability, custom specific services

•Classic approach for institutional and ecommerce portals

… to collaboration

Collaboration as the key to successBasis for a new generation of portals

INTRODUCCIÓNEducamadrid PlatformCollaboration paradigm applied to the educational community

“An expression window in the world wide web for the educative community”

THE GOAL: To transfer to the virtual web world the daily work and experiences of the real educative community

THE KEY: “COLLABORATION”

•Educative centers, teachers and pupils lead the way in this platform.

•Contribution from the educative community users to portal content development is the base for portal growth.

•Educational communities are decentralized, heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed but very active, interrelated and demanding. They are an ideal testbed for the new portal paradigm

•Germinus has designed and developed an education oriented collaborative platform, Educamadrid, sponsored and funded by Consejería de Educación de Madrid and successfully deployed in several other Spanish Public Education Administrations

INTRODUCCIÓNEducamadrid PlatformKey principles of differentiation

Proprietary -> quickly obsolete technologies

High number of users -> High license costs

Traditional educational portal

Little differentiation for users

Different portals for each user profile (children, adults, …)

Open software technologies

Standards J2EE, JSR168, JCR

Educamadrid Platform

Each user has his own interface and usability

One only portal for all of them

Static, passive contents

Contents dependent of administrators

Difficult to update

Dynamic contents

Created by the own users

Facilities for content creation, management and searching

Visuals and layout are static and difficult to manage

Limited set of sites or subportals

One web site for each user, group, community, center, etc.

Easy to manage layout, colors, navigation structure, etc.

The portal is a passive experience

Groups are only used for administrative purposes

Users are spectators

Users feel as part of communities

They collaborate, participate, communicate and work together

Real group experience

Personalization

Content managemen

t

Web site managemen

t

Virtual communities

INTRODUCCIÓN

•The environment automatically adapts to the profile of the user logging in: options, contents, tools, navigation structure

•Teachers and secondary students have their own webtob, a configurable personal desktop which combines personal tools with the necessary administrative tools for their daily work in the portal.

•Primary school students have their own version of the webtop, adapted to their age

•Children browse the portal through cartoon based environments, guided by interactive avatars

Educamadrid Platform Personalization

“A different, personal navigation experience for each user”

Multiple interfaces Only one portal

Educamadrid Platform Content management – virtual resource center

•Contents are stored in a virtual repository which brings cohesion to all portal contents and is managed by the educational communities themselves

•The virtual repository is hierarchically distributed following the community structure (students, classes, centers, communities, etc.)

“Portal contents grow from contributions of all educational community users”

CONTENT CREATION

• All users in the portal contribute to the process, interactive wizards make content creation an easy task

• Content is automatically categorized and visually rendered

• Content publication workflow, version control and internationalization facilities are available

CONTENT INTERACTION

• Contents are not passive but interactive, following educational standards (LOM, SCORM, QTI)

• Search is very precise, leveraging the categorization process

All portal contents are stored in a global resource center

• Creation of web sites is a very easy process totally based on interactive wizards

• Web sites are structured in sections, subsections, and pages. Educamadrid allows the users to create professional looking, multisection web sites

• Pages are organized through columns and windows were contents and applications are selected

•Advanced users may work with their own tools and publish their web sites via FTP

Educamadrid Platform Personal and group web subsites

Further than allowing collaboration through content creation and sharing, Educamadrid allows to publish them in web sites through a very simple but tremendously powerful system. No HTML or graphical design knowledge is required

Each user or user group (students, teachers, classes, centers) can create and manage their own web site in the portal, seen as an independent portal

“Each user and user community have their own expression window”

Never was so easy for a user or a user community to create a web site to express themselves and

collaborate

• Educamadrid allows educational and thematic communities

• Community administrators manage users, contents and visual layout of the web site

• Community web sites complement contents and generic applications with specific collaboration and communication applications such as forums, chats, event calendars, weblogs, eLearning, image galleries, polls, etc.

Educamadrid Platform Virtual communities

The users sense of belonging to a group is a key factor to promote collaboration and contribution to portal contents

For users, specially children, their world is their environment, their community, and this should be what they recognize when they log into the portal

“Users experiment through the portal that they belong to a real community”

Virtual communities bring people together through the portal

•Technical architecture is open, scalable, modular and based on standards

•Ready for deployment on any environment, even in a totally free platform: Linux, OpenLDAP, JBoss and PostgreSQL

•Open software make license costs a non issue, even with potentially millions of users

•Educamadrid keeps updated and getting better every year, upgrading to new versions of the open components upon which it is built

Educamadrid Platform Technology

Educamadrid has been developed based on Liferay Enterprise Portal, J2EE, MVC, XML and open source components

“Educamadrid uses open software ‘state of the art’ portal technology”

Liferay Enterprise Portal allows to build portals designed to grow