My colleague Michael Derntl used paper.li to visualize the hottest TEL Roadmaps content of our TELMAP MediaBase in a frame. You can just grab the code and embed it in your own web site. We use the new TEL portal Learning Frontiers and the already established PROLEARN Academy.
Showing posts with label TELMAP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TELMAP. Show all posts
Thursday, 22 November 2012
Thursday, 4 October 2012
The European TEL Projects Community from a Social Network Analysis Perspective from Michael Derntl
In the frame of the ROLE project I gave this presentation on "The Social Requirements Engineering (SRE) Approach to Developing a Large-scale Personal Learning Environment Infrastructure" at the EC-TEL 2012 in Saarbrücken Germany, on September 21, 2012.
Abstract. In this paper, we first reflect on the limitations of applying traditional requirements engineering (RE) approaches to the development of a large-scale PLE infrastructure, which is precisely the aim of a technology-enhanced learn-ing project called ROLE. The Social Requirements Engineering (SRE) ap-proach has been proposed as an appropriate alternative. Early SRE prototypes based on an agent- and goal-oriented conceptual model conceived across a five-staged requirement lifecycle (elicitation, negotiation, selection, development and feedback) were implemented. We report results of preliminary evaluation and lessons learnt. Several relevant issues have been identified, including the lack of a consensual understanding of key concepts, lurking within Community of Practices (CoP), and cultural differences. Possible solutions are proposed to address the issues such as templates, mandatory voting, and prioritization model
The Social Requirements Engineering (SRE) Approach to Developing a Large-scale Personal Learning Environment Infrastructure from Ralf Klamma
I was also co-chair of the PDSG'12 Workshop at the conference. Proceedings and Program of PDSG 2012 are online! PDSG 2012 took place in Saarbrücken, Germany, on Tuesday, September 18, 2012. The workshop was held in conjunction with the Seventh European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2012). In the program we had paper presentations of accepted papers of the workshop, three invited speeches and a panel. The proceedings are edited by Stefano Bocconi, Yulia Bachvarova and me. There are published as Volume 898 of CEUR-ORG.WS workshhop proceedings. The workshop was supported by several projects, in particular by the Network of Excellence in Serious Games GALA.
I was also co-chair of the PDSG'12 Workshop at the conference. Proceedings and Program of PDSG 2012 are online! PDSG 2012 took place in Saarbrücken, Germany, on Tuesday, September 18, 2012. The workshop was held in conjunction with the Seventh European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2012). In the program we had paper presentations of accepted papers of the workshop, three invited speeches and a panel. The proceedings are edited by Stefano Bocconi, Yulia Bachvarova and me. There are published as Volume 898 of CEUR-ORG.WS workshhop proceedings. The workshop was supported by several projects, in particular by the Network of Excellence in Serious Games GALA.
Friday, 21 September 2012
Friday, 14 September 2012
The 11th International Conference on Web-based Learning ICWL 2012, Sinaia, Romania is over. Our Advanced Community Information Systems (ACIS) group at RWTH Aachen University has made some contributions to the program.
In the learning analytics track we had a paper on "Learning Analytics for Learning Blogospheres" . It combines research from the TELMAP as well from the TELLNET project.
Abstract. In blogospheres the learning process is characterized by evolving roles of bloggers and dynamic change of content. Existing approaches for learning blogospheres do not provide a comprehensive solution to dealing with these dynamics. In this paper, we propose a learning analytics approach for learning blogospheres unifying two complementary perspectives: (1) structural analysis of the blogosphere to identify learners' social capital; and (2) content analysis to capture dynamics in blog content over time. To support both types of analysis, social network analysis methods are applied as a fundamental approach to analyzing and visualizing knowledge sharing on learning blogospheres. We exemplify the learning analytics approach using two real-world learning blogospheres: the Mediabase - a large blog collection for technology enhanced learning, and the European eTwinning Network - a lifelong learning blogsphere. Results show that both analytics perspectives in combination advocate an advanced learning analytics approach to understanding and assessing learning processes in learning blogospheres.
In the learning analytics track we had a paper on "Learning Analytics for Learning Blogospheres" . It combines research from the TELMAP as well from the TELLNET project.
Manh Pham, Michael Derntl, Yiwei Cao, Ralf Klamma: Learning Analytics for Learning Blogospheres, in E. Popescu et al. (Eds.): ICWL 2012, LNCS 7558, pp. 255–264, 2012. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012
Abstract. In blogospheres the learning process is characterized by evolving roles of bloggers and dynamic change of content. Existing approaches for learning blogospheres do not provide a comprehensive solution to dealing with these dynamics. In this paper, we propose a learning analytics approach for learning blogospheres unifying two complementary perspectives: (1) structural analysis of the blogosphere to identify learners' social capital; and (2) content analysis to capture dynamics in blog content over time. To support both types of analysis, social network analysis methods are applied as a fundamental approach to analyzing and visualizing knowledge sharing on learning blogospheres. We exemplify the learning analytics approach using two real-world learning blogospheres: the Mediabase - a large blog collection for technology enhanced learning, and the European eTwinning Network - a lifelong learning blogsphere. Results show that both analytics perspectives in combination advocate an advanced learning analytics approach to understanding and assessing learning processes in learning blogospheres.
In the personal learning environments track we had a paper on "A Mashup Recommender for Creating Personal Learning Environments". It presents research from the ROLE project. This paper won the ICWL 2012 best paper award!
Alexander Nussbaumer, Marcel Berthold, Daniel Dahrendorf, Hans-Christian Schmitz, Milos Kravcik, Dietrich Albert: A Mashup Recommender for Creating Personal Learning Environments, in E. Popescu et al. (Eds.): ICWL 2012, LNCS 7558, pp. 79–88, 2012. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012 (Best Paper Award)Abstract. This paper presents an approach and an integrated tool that supports the creation of personal learning environments suitable for self-regulated learning. The rationale behind this approach is an ontology of cognitive and meta-cognitive learning activities that are related to widgets from a Widget Store. Patterns of such learning activities allow for providing the user with appropriate recommendations of widgets for each learning activity. The system architecture follows a Web-based approach and includes the Mashup Recommender widget and its backend service, the ontology available through a Web service, the Widget Store with its interface to retrieve widgets, and the integration into the learning environment framework. The pedagogical approach regarding the usage of this technology is based on self-regulated learning taking into account different levels between guidance and freedom. A quantitative and qualitative evaluation with teachers describes advantages and ideas for improvement.
Monday, 10 September 2012
My colleague Yiwei Cao from my ACIS group at RWTH Aachen University gave a presentation on "Learning Analytics for Learning Blogospheres" at the ICWL 2012 in Sinaia, Romania last week. It combines research from the TELMAP as well from the TELLNET project.
Abstract. In blogospheres the learning process is characterized by evolving roles of bloggers and dynamic change of content. Existing approaches for learning blogospheres do not provide a comprehensive solution to dealing with these dynamics. In this paper, we propose a learning analytics approach for learning blogospheres unifying two complementary perspectives: (1) structural analysis of the blogosphere to identify learners' social capital; and (2) content analysis to capture dynamics in blog content over time. To support both types of analysis, social network analysis methods are applied as a fundamental approach to analyzing and visualizing knowledge sharing on learning blogospheres. We exemplify the learning analytics approach using two real-world learning blogospheres: the Mediabase - a large blog collection for technology enhanced learning, and the European eTwinning Network - a lifelong learning blogsphere. Results show that both analytics perspectives in combination advocate an advanced learning analytics approach to understanding and assessing learning processes in learning blogospheres.
Abstract. In blogospheres the learning process is characterized by evolving roles of bloggers and dynamic change of content. Existing approaches for learning blogospheres do not provide a comprehensive solution to dealing with these dynamics. In this paper, we propose a learning analytics approach for learning blogospheres unifying two complementary perspectives: (1) structural analysis of the blogosphere to identify learners' social capital; and (2) content analysis to capture dynamics in blog content over time. To support both types of analysis, social network analysis methods are applied as a fundamental approach to analyzing and visualizing knowledge sharing on learning blogospheres. We exemplify the learning analytics approach using two real-world learning blogospheres: the Mediabase - a large blog collection for technology enhanced learning, and the European eTwinning Network - a lifelong learning blogsphere. Results show that both analytics perspectives in combination advocate an advanced learning analytics approach to understanding and assessing learning processes in learning blogospheres.
Thursday, 6 September 2012
Michael Derntl from my ACIS group (Advanced Community Information Systems) gave a presentation on "An Embeddable Dashboard for Widget-Based Visual Analytics on Scientific Communities" at the I-KNOW 2012 in Graz, Austria. The presentation reports results from the ongoing TELMAP project. But it is also a contribution to the discussion on learning or research dashboards. At least it reports on some already finished research.
Michael Derntl, Stephan Erdtmann, Ralf Klamma: An Embeddable Dashboard for Widget-Based Visual Analytics on Scientific Communities, in Proceedings of 12th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies, I-KNOW '12. ACM Press (2012)
The web hosts massive amounts of data about scientific communities, for instance in bibliographic databases, research project databases, and more recently on the social web. These data sets provide key information on the activities and artifacts relevant to the community. Due to the scattered nature and sheer size of Web 2.0 data sets it is currently difficult for stakeholders to comprehensively and to smoothlessly monitor key indicators hidden in that data. To address this issue, we developed an embeddable, personalizable dashboard, which can be populated with widgets that visualize the results of arbitrary queries over relational databases in real time. As a pilot case the dashboard was deployed at LearningFrontiers.eu, a service and support portal for the European Technology-Enhanced Learning community, to provide access to pre-configured visualizations of queries over their data sources. Community stakeholders evaluated the dashboard and generally responded positively in regard to its usability and usefulness. From a technical perspective the main advantage of the proposed dashboard infrastructure is the simple and seamless integration with a community's existing data sources and web portals.
The work in this paper is based on earlier work by Dominik Renzel from my ACIS group on widget-based dashboards. I gave a presentation last year on this topic. The work was done mostly in the context of the ROLE EU project. A SDK has been developed to support developer.
The work in this paper is based on earlier work by Dominik Renzel from my ACIS group on widget-based dashboards. I gave a presentation last year on this topic. The work was done mostly in the context of the ROLE EU project. A SDK has been developed to support developer.
Tuesday, 28 August 2012
A Mediabase for Technology Enhanced Learning in Europe
Abstract
There is growing interest in analytic techniques and tools for supporting scientific communities, e.g. through visual analytics tools. In the domain of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), one of the first endeavors in this regard started in 2006, when the PROLEARN project [1], a European TEL network of excellence, deployed a “Mediabase” for TEL in Europe. The objective was to overcome fragmentation and propel excellence in the field by providing stakeholder groups like scientists and policy makers with digital information obtained from TEL social media sources (e.g. mailing lists, blogs, RSS/Atom feeds) [3]. From the end-user perspective a key task was the development and provision of easy-to-use tools for extracting and presenting relevant information contained in the Mediabase, e.g. for cross-media social network analysis and self-observation [4]. In the scope of the currently running TEL-Map project [2], a support action funded by the European Commission, the Mediabase idea was adopted to empower TEL stakeholders in Europe and beyond to find relevant information and to obtain a rich overview of different types of actors and artifacts involved in the TEL domain. The main objective is to provide support forroadmapping activities in TEL, which required extending the available data sources and analytics tools.
Data Sources
The TEL Mediabase includes information from three main data sources:
- Blogosphere: TEL related blogs, including the blog entries, comments and analytical information like length, hyperlinks, words occurrences, and word bursts for entries.
- Projects: TEL projects funded by the European Commission, including metadata and information like description, start/end dates, cost, funding, and consortium members.
- Papers: Bibliographic information on TEL related conferences, journals, workshops, authors, and papers.
Figure 1 shows the component layers of the Mediabase. The web data sources are crawled periodically, and the data is processed and fed into a set of relational databases. The projects database is fed from publicly available information pages on the European Community’s websites (e.g. CORDIS [3]); the papers database is fed by the DBLP [4] data set enriched with abstracts and keywords crawled from the publisher pages (currently we support IEEE, ACM and Springer). The blogs database is fed by a blog crawler and a feed importer. The blogs to be included are specified by community members using web-based tools like the Feed Aggregator on the Learning Frontiers portal (http://learningfrontiers.eu) or the Mediabase Commander available at the PROLEARN Academy homepage (http://prolearn-academy.org).
Figure 1 - TEL Mediabase component layers
Currently the Mediabase indexes almost one thousand TEL related blogs with close to 400,000 blog entries and more than one million distinct hyperlinks. It includes the complete DBLP data set, as of March 2011 consisting of more than 800,000 authors, about 1.5 million papers, and more than 3,700 conferences, journals and workshops. The project data set includes 116 collaborative projects funded by the European Commission during TEL focused calls in FP6, FP7, eContentplus, and eTEN, involving more than 800 different organizations.
End-User Applications
To enable TEL stakeholders to access the data for analytic and roadmapping tasks, we deployed several web-based tools as shown in the bottom layer in Figure 1. In the Learning Frontiers portal, a TEL roadmapping portal hosted by the TEL-Map project, we offer the following tools:
- Projects Space: This portal section (see Figure 2) allows users to browse the project data set. It also presents a map overlay that shows the geographical distribution of project partners and an automatically generated list of predecessor and successor projects. These pieces of information are hyperlinked to provide a seamless browsing experience. A study investigating collaboration networks and project impact based on these features is presented in [2].
- Mediabase Dashboard [1]: A portal section similar to the iGoogle homepage. Users can embed widgets in their personalized dashboard. These special widgets provide real time visualizations of the data in the three databases. Users may also create custom visualizations by using the provided widget creator application.
- Feed Aggregator: Allows users to specify feeds and blogs to index for crawling.
Figure 2: Projects space on the Learning Frontiers portal
In addition we have developed and deployed web tools outside of the Learning Frontiers portal:
- Query Interface: provides the possibility to query the three databases using SQL in a web-based interface. The query results are visualized using different chart types like pie chart, line chart, timeline, table, graph, etc.
- AERCS [5]: enables users to access analytic, visual and comparative functions on the papers database. For instance it allows comparing the co-authorship and citation networks of different conferences, visualize author networks, identify key authors, and similar functions. A study analyzing the development patterns of TEL conferences using these features is presented in [5].
- Mediabase Commander: a Firefox plugin that allows users to browse the TEL blogs database and to add new blogs.
Conclusion
In this article we have presented a Mediabase for TEL, which was built and deployed to facilitate mapping and roadmapping activities in the TEL scientific community. This includes observing key indicators in relevant data sources as well as to contribute to and browse data sources from web-based applications within and beyond their community web portals.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the European Commission through the TEL-Map support action (FP7-257822).
References
[1] Derntl, M., Erdtmann, S., Klamma, R.: A Widget-Based Dashboard for Visual Analytics on Scientific Communities. Proceedings of I-KNOW 2012. ACM (in press)
[2] Derntl, M., Klamma, R.: The European TEL Projects Community from a Social Network Perspective. Proceedings of EC-TEL 2012. Springer Verlag (in press)
[3] Klamma, R., Spaniol, M., Cao, Y., Jarke, M.: Pattern-Based Cross Media Social Network Analysis for Technology Enhanced Learning in Europe. Proceedings of EC-TEL 2006, pp. 242-256. Springer (2006)
[4] Petrushyna, Z., Klamma, R.: No Guru, No Method, No Teacher: Self-classification and Self-modelling of E-Learning Communities. Proceedings of EC-TEL 2008, pp. 354-365. Springer (2008)
[5] Pham, M.C., Derntl, M., Klamma, R.: Development Patterns of Scientific Communities in Technology Enhanced Learning. Educational Technology & Society (in press).
Michael Derntl
RWTH Aachen University
Germany
Ralf Klamma
RWTH Aachen University
Germany
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