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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