The changing nature of e-Learning, the Web, and its users that can be observed in the last years results in a need for new approaches and technologies to fully exploit the existing potential for learning with digital resources. Platforms that allow to share learning resources and metadata are intended to support the success of self-steered learning with potentially any kind of information that is available on the Web. The ALOE system, currently developed at DFKI, is an example for the realization of an according framework meeting the needs of open and flexible e-Learning solutions.
With the evolution of the Web 2.0, collaborative systems such as flickr, YouTube and del.ici.ous that allow to share resources and information about them have been widely adopted. For the success of these applications two key factors can be identified: First, users of the systems do not require special skills in order to use them. Second, these systems offer their users direct benefit, e.g., the possibility to store information, and to access a great amount of classified, commented and rated resources. Such systems help to overcome the bottleneck of knowledge acquisition from which centralized approaches, where the description of resources is performed by one responsible institution, usually suffer.
The ALOE1 system is a socially aware resource sharing tool particularly
designed for learning content of arbitrary format. It follows Web 2.0 design
principles [
The requirements that have to be met when realizing a system to share digital
resources and information about these resources involve asking the following key
questions:
1. Which types of resources will be handled by the system, and how can the
resources be integrated?
– For potentially any kind of digital resource (e.g., HTML, PDF, podcasts,
videos), and also for resources created by users themselves, integration
possibilities have to be provided.
– Integration should be possible by inserting the resources directly into
the system or by referencing them via a URI.
2. How can resources be described properly to enable access and further
functionalities?
– Instead of centralised approaches, any attempt to describe resources
should embrace diversity, i.e., take into account any information that
is available about a resource. This also includes information provided by
using social software (e.g., tags and ratings).
– ‘Resource profiles’ instead of single metadata sets [
ALOE stands for Adaptable Learning Object Environment. The system is currently being developed in the project CoMet2 at the Knowledge Management Department of DFKI. The aim of the project is the development of a system which offers possibilities to share learning resources and metadata about them, according to the requirements described in the last section. On the one hand, ALOE provides a rich user interface (see Figure 1) to motivate users to participate, on the other hand, data can also be exchanged via a Web service API. The information gathered in this way can then be used to realize advanced retrieval and personalization techniques.
In the current section, the functionalities of ALOE, and the general system architecture are presented. 3.1
ALOE provides support for multimedia resources of arbitrary types. It offers basic functionalities to contribute and search for resources, and visualizes information about resources that is available in the system.
Contribute: A resource can be registered in ALOE by uploading it as a file or by just using a reference to the resource, i.e., its URI. Besides the contribution of resources users of the system can upload user-defined metadata sets in order to further describe resources which are registered in the system. Search: ALOE provides different search filters, e.g., a user can search for resources which contain certain keywords in their title, description or tags. Further an advanced search is provided that allows to search for keywords in defined metadata terms.
Display: The metadata which has been anntotated for a resource is displayed together with a preview image of the resource.
Furthermore ALOE offers typical Social Software functionalities such as tagging, rating and commenting of resources by users of the system. The information provided by the users allows to browse content via tags (social browsing), and search results can be ranked according to different criteria, e.g., alphabetically, most viewed, best rated, etc.
As additional features, ALOE provides Atom feeds to notify users about new content, e.g., resources annotated with certain tags, as well as microformats for contact and event information.
Fig. 1. Screenshots of the ALOE user interface 3.2
ALOE consists of two components: The FLOR Connector which is the graphical user interface and the FLOR Web Service which is the Web interface to our system. Both components will be presented subsequently.
The FLOR Connector realizes the user interface to ALOE’s Flexible Learning Object Repository. It adheres to design principles which are intended to encourage user participation. The component has been implemented by using the JavaServer Faces3 (JSF) technology. Compared to technologies like JavaServer Pages4 (JSP), JSF offers several advantages. For instance HTTP requests can automatically update the data of user interface components. Also fine grained event handling mechanisms are offered (e.g., for value change events in user interface components like list boxes) that could otherwise only be provided via client-side technologies.
The FLOR Web Service has been implemented using the Apache Axis5 technology thus providing a SOAP6 API. As ALOE offers its data and functionalities as services it may be easily integrated into different applications and contexts. In order to implement the functionalities of the FLOR Web service two underlying technologies have been used: The content repository Jakarta Slide7 and an Oracle8 database. In ALOE the resources which are submitted as files as well as user-defined metadata sets are stored in a Jakarta Slide content repository. Jakarta Slide offers full WebDAV support which enables direct access to the resources and user-defined metadata sets via their URI. Transactions and locking are provided so that data integrity can be ensured. Further data is stored in an Oracle database as this meets best our requirements, e.g., for the aggregation of metadata and the provision of different views on different types of content. 4
Supporting users in sharing learning resources and information about them is a key factor for the success of any modern e-Learning approach. When realizing such a platform that meets the needs of today’s learners, it should be possible to incorporate any kind of resource available in the Web or a local repository, as well as content generated by the learners themselves. To ease the use of the learning resources, information enabling basic functionalities, about technical requirements for the usage, and about the way in which a resource may be used 3 http://java.sun.com/javaee/javaserverfaces/ 4 http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/. 5 http://ws.apache.org/axis/ 6 http://www.w3.org/TR/soap/ 7 http://jakarta.apache.org/slide/ 8 http://www.oracle.com/database/index.html (intellectual property rights) should always be provided. Additionally, the use of resource profiles is recommended to allow an adequate description of resources.
A user interface that stimulates users to participate, options to import and export information in an easy way, methods to aggregate the collected information, and the possibility for users to use functionalities in their usual contexts and applications are very important to ensure that the harnessing of collective intelligence will be successful.
The ALOE system realizes such an approach, and it will be extended in the future to serve as a socially aware resource and metadata hub for various topics and stakeholders.