Revising the Framework of Knowledge Ecologies

2011 ◽  
pp. 241-267
Author(s):  
Kai Pata
Keyword(s):  
Collaborative Learning ◽  
Ecological Psychology ◽  
Software Tools ◽  
Ecological Environment ◽  
Social Software ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
Learning Spaces ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Web

This chapter describes the Web of social software tools with its inhabitants as an evolving and ecological environment, discussing and elaborating the connectivist framework coined by George Siemens in his book Knowing Knowledge. This new perspective to ecological learning in social software environments resides on the ideas of Gibson’s and his followers approach to ecological psychology, the rising theory of embodied simulation and Lotman’s theory of cultural semiosis. In the empirical part of the chapter, we focus on the methods of investigating how social software systems become accommodated with their users forming learning spaces. Analysis discusses such ecologically defined spaces for individual and collaborative learning.

Using Social Software for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

2010 ◽  
pp. 1045-1060
Author(s):  
Petros Lameras ◽  
Iraklis Paraskakis ◽  
Philipa Levy
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Collaborative Learning ◽  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Software Tools ◽  
Social Constructivist ◽  
Social Software ◽  
Gradual Introduction ◽  
Beliefs About Teaching ◽  
Constructivist Perspective

This chapter focuses on discussing the use of social software from a social constructivist perspective. In particular, the chapter explains how social constructivist pedagogies such as collaborative learning and communities of practice may be supported by the adoption of social software tools. It begins by briefly discussing the social constructivist perspective considering certain pedagogies such as collaborative learning and communities of practice. Then, it explains how these pedagogies are reflected in actual practice by using a variety of social software tools such as discussion boards, blogs and wikis. Finally, the chapter presents the implications of using social software based on the impact of certain factors such as teachers’ understandings of, and beliefs about, teaching in general. The purpose of this chapter is to support higher education practitioners in theoryinformed design by distilling and outlining those aspects of social constructivism that addresses the use of social software tools. It is perceived that a gradual introduction of social software to institutional Virtual Learning Environments, with a strong focus on collaborative learning processes and engagement in online learning communities, will highlight the need for discursive tools, adaptability, interactivity and reflection.

Using Social Software for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

2010 ◽  
pp. 269-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petros Lameras ◽  
Iraklis Paraskakis ◽  
Philipa Levy
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Collaborative Learning ◽  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Software Tools ◽  
Social Constructivist ◽  
Social Software ◽  
Gradual Introduction ◽  
Beliefs About Teaching ◽  
Constructivist Perspective

This chapter focuses on discussing the use of social software from a social constructivist perspective. In particular, the chapter explains how social constructivist pedagogies such as collaborative learning and communities of practice may be supported by the adoption of social software tools. It begins by briefly discussing the social constructivist perspective considering certain pedagogies such as collaborative learning and communities of practice. Then, it explains how these pedagogies are reflected in actual practice by using a variety of social software tools such as discussion boards, blogs and wikis. Finally, the chapter presents the implications of using social software based on the impact of certain factors such as teachers’ understandings of, and beliefs about, teaching in general. The purpose of this chapter is to support higher education practitioners in theory-informed design by distilling and outlining those aspects of social constructivism that addresses the use of social software tools. It is perceived that a gradual introduction of social software to institutional Virtual Learning Environments, with a strong focus on collaborative learning processes and engagement in online learning communities, will highlight the need for discursive tools, adaptability, interactivity and reflection.

scholarly journals Personalised and self regulated learning in the Web 2.0 era: International exemplars of innovative pedagogy using social software

2010 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine McLoughlin ◽  
Mark J. W. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Web 2.0 ◽  
Social Software ◽  
Learning Spaces ◽  
Self Regulated Learning ◽  
Shift Control ◽  
Regulated Learning ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Learner Agency ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Web

<blockquote><p>Research findings in recent years provide compelling evidence of the importance of encouraging student control over the learning process as a whole. The socially based tools and technologies of the Web 2.0 movement are capable of supporting informal conversation, reflexive dialogue and collaborative content generation, enabling access to a wide raft of ideas and representations. Used appropriately, these tools can shift control to the learner, through promoting learner agency, autonomy and engagement in social networks that straddle multiple real and virtual learning spaces independent of physical, geographic, institutional and organisational boundaries. As argued in this article, however, in order for self-regulated learning to come to fruition, students need not only to be able to choose and personalise what tools and content are available, but also to have access to the necessary scaffolding to support their learning. Emerging practices with social computing technologies, a number of examples of which are showcased in this article, signal the need for pedagogies that are more personal, social and participatory. The authors conclude with a discussion of some of the key implications for practice, including an outline of the current challenges faced by tertiary educators.</p></blockquote><p> </p>

scholarly journals Studying Collaboration Dynamics in Physical Learning Spaces: Considering the Temporal Perspective through Epistemic Network Analysis

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 2898
Author(s):  
Milica Vujovic ◽  
Ishari Amarasinghe ◽  
Davinia Hernández-Leo
Keyword(s):  
Collaborative Learning ◽  
Temporal Analysis ◽  
Learning Design ◽  
Learning Spaces ◽  
Limited Evidence ◽  
Temporal Perspective ◽  
Learning Space ◽  
Collaboration Dynamics ◽  
Collaborative Activities

The role of the learning space is especially relevant in the application of active pedagogies, for example those involving collaborative activities. However, there is limited evidence informing learning design on the potential effects of collaborative learning spaces. In particular, there is a lack of studies generating evidence derived from temporal analyses of the influence of learning spaces on the collaborative learning process. The temporal analysis perspective has been shown to be essential in the analysis of collaboration processes, as it reveals the relationships between students’ actions. The aim of this study is to explore the potential of a temporal perspective to broaden understanding of the effects of table shape on collaboration when different group sizes and genders are considered. On-task actions such as explanation, discussion, non-verbal interaction, and interaction with physical artefacts were observed while students were engaged in engineering design tasks. Results suggest that table shape influences student behaviour when taking into account different group sizes and different genders.

scholarly journals Semantically Linking Specimens and Images

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Hyam
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Image Data ◽  
Application Programming Interface ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
Semantic Data ◽  
Metadata Record ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
The Web

Many of the world’s natural history collections are creating high resolution digital images of their specimens. They often make these available on the web through some form or zoomable viewer. For historical reasons, a hotchpotch of technologies are used to achieve this. This diversity has lead to two issues. Firstly, maintenance becomes costly as technologies need replacing. Secondly there is little chance to share data between institutions or provide a unified user experience. A researcher visiting four different virtual collections may have four very different experiences. Similar issues exist in the archives and libraries disciplines. They also need to share high resolution, annotated images of the physical objects in their care. In response to this issue many have coalesced around the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). IIIF is a set of shared application programming interface (API) specifications for interoperable functionality in digital image repositories. It separates the notion of a viewer, which may be used as part of a website or other application, and the web services that feed data to that viewer. By using a common API for serving data about images, different viewers can be used to view the same images, thus providing an upgrade path that does not require replacement of viewer and server software at the same time and allows different viewers to be used for the same image data. Potentially more importantly, it facilitates the construction of applications that view data from different collections as if they were in the same place. From the researcher’s point of view, the experience could be the same whether the virtual specimen is hosted locally or in a museum on another continent. There is one important thing that has been deliberately omitted from the IIIF standard. This has both enabled its rapid adoption but also makes it incomplete for building research applications. IIIF transmits no semantic data about the subject of the images, only labels. The IIIF data therefore needs to be bound to semantically rich data about the specimens being viewed, in some uniform way. Consortium of Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF ) specimen identifiers are now widely adopted by natural history collections in Europe. Each individual collection object is designated by a URI chosen and maintained by the institution owning the specimen (Groom et al. 2017, Güntsch et al. 2018, Güntsch et al. 2017, HYAM et al. 2012). Under Linked Data conventions, content negotiation is used at the server so that users accessing an object using a web-browser are redirected to a human-readable representation of the object, typically a web-page, whilst software systems requiring machine-processable representations are redirected to an RDF-encoded metadata record. CETAF specimen identifiers are therefore ideal partners for IIIF representations of specimens. But how should we join the two together in a semantically rich way that will be generally understandable? SYNTHESYS+ is a European Commission funded programme that facilitates collaboration and network building among European natural history collections. It is concerned with both physical and virtual access to the 390 million specimens of plants and animals housed in participating institutions. Under Task 4.3 of this project, we have been working to create a reliable way to link between the RDF metadata about specimens and images of those specimens in IIIF as well as from images of specimens back to metadata of those specimens. By January 2021, we aim to have ten exemplar institutions publishing IIIF manifest files linked to CETAF identifiers for a few million specimens and for this to act as a catalyst for wider adoption in the natural history community. This presentation gives an update on the rollout of these implementations, paying particular attention to the challenges of semantically annotating specimens with images.

Evolution and Maintenance of Web Sites

2011 ◽  
pp. 255-271
Author(s):  
Rafael Capilla ◽  
Juan C. Duenas
Keyword(s):  
Web Sites ◽  
Systems Development ◽  
Product Line ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
Software Products ◽  
Software Companies ◽  
Software Engineers ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Architecture ◽  
The Web

In this chapter we describe the product line models, and show how to apply them for developing and evolving Web products. A product line captures the common and variable aspects of software systems as key assets under a common architecture. Software companies are increasingly adopting this approach in order to accelerate the development of families of similar software products. In certain domains, such as the Web systems, development and maintenance operations are required more often. New techniques to engineer Web sites are needed in order to reduce the time to market for the Web products and to maintain the systems afterward. The authors believe that understanding the notion of lightweight product line and the role that the architecture plays will help software engineers in the construction of software products, and they will be able to manage the evolution effectively against future changes.

Models for Cooperative Activities over the Web

2011 ◽  
pp. 245-263
Author(s):  
Bogdan D. Czejdo ◽  
Maciej Zakrzewicz ◽  
Govindarao Sathyamoorthi
Keyword(s):  
Software Architecture ◽  
Software Design ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Interaction Graph ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Team Members ◽  
State Diagrams ◽  
Common Task ◽  
The Web

The Chapter discusses the need and the problems associated with WEB based cooperative activities in which several team members work in parallel on a common task. Models for software systems supporting such cooperative activities are discussed. Our models describe structure of the cooperation object, cooperation modes and the network message synchronization, that are of prime importance when the system members work at different places and communicate over the Internet. We introduce and describe a component requirements graph and show how to translate it into an interaction graph. The state diagrams and the design graphs are the basis for the WEB software design. The discussion of software architecture for implementing cooperative activities over the Web is also provided.

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