Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Martin Ebner
Computing and Information Services / Division of Social Learning
Graz University of Technology
Graz, Austria
martin.ebner@tugraz.at
Behnam Taraghi
Computing and Information Services / Division of Social Learning
Graz University of Technology
Graz, Austria
b.taraghi@tugraz.at
Abstract: It is obvious that in the future the World Wide Web as a whole together with the many
distributed online applications, tools and services play a very significant role in Technology
Enhanced Learning. The integration of all these possibilities on the web in a Personal Learning
Environment (PLE) in a way that the learners can select, individualize and customize the learning
resources and services according to their needs and interests can support learners and teachers and
enhance learning in general. For this purpose Graz University of Technology has developed a
PLE that bases on mashup of widgets. In this paper the PLE architecture in general is described.
The widget-based approach that follows the W3C standard is pointed out and the first widget
prototypes as well as some student projects for widget development are illustrated.
Introduction
In the last years Technology Enhanced Learning, shortly often called e-learning is switching from content-oriented
learning to a more collaborative-communicative approach. Beginning with the introduction of web 2.0 technologies,
first named by Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly 2005), for teaching and learning purposed, named e-learning 2.0 (Downes
2005), learners get a more active role. The use of weblogs (Luca & McLoughlin 2005), wikis (Augar et al. 2004),
podcasts (Evans 2007) or microblogging platforms (Ebner & Maurer 2009) dominated the recent research on
Technology Enhanced Learning.
Nowadays it can be summarized that all these activities lead not only to strengthen collaboration but also flexibility
and individuality. Learners of tomorrow will be able to choose the application of their choice as well as the content
they prefer for learning. Furthermore an amazing increase of mobile availability of the World Wide Web (WWW)
through mobile devices let users interact on demand. Nielsen (Nielsen 2009) compared the mobile web 2009 with
the desktop web 1998 and named the visible trend towards mobility expected in next years.
Bearing in mind that there are huge amount of different tools and applications, a huge amount of available content
and a huge amount of devices which have access to the Internet, it must be asked how can we deal will this
abundance of information. Regarding this circumstances e-learning is extended by nearly endless possibilities. This
phenomenon is named Ubiquitous Learning (u-learning) and defined by Zhan & Jin as following (Zhan & Jin 2005):
This equation shows that beside of didactical aspects learning depends on lots of different variables and the question
arises “how a future learning environment has to look like?”. Moreover if a future learning environment should be a
physical environment or simply be a space or arrangement of different measurements supported by a Cloud
Computing concept. Downes (Downes 2005) describes it as “an environment, which becomes not an institutional or
corporate application, but also a learning center, where content is reused and remixed according to the student’s own
needs and interests. It becomes, indeed, not a single application, but a collection of interoperating applications – and
environment rather than a system.” This leads to comprehend a future learning behaviour as a MashUp
(Kulathuramaiyer & Maurer 2007) of different resources, as a combination of different social networks for
Originally published in: Ebner, M. & Taraghi, B. (2010). Personal Learning Environment for Higher Education – A
First Prototype. In Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and
Telecommunications 2010 (pp. 1158-1166). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.
communication and as a recommendation from a large pool of information (Drachsler et al 2009) – highly flexible,
highly individual and personal.
This change from a traditional Learning Management System (LMS) to a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is
both – a technological as well as a pedagogical switch. According to Schaffert & Hilzensauer (Schaffert &
Hilzensauer 2008) seven crucial aspects are describing what must be taken into account:
• Role of the Learner
• Personalization
• Content
• Social involvement
• Ownership
• Educational & organization culture
• Technological aspects
In this publication we like to address the research questions, how can a Personal Learning Environment for Higher
Education look like? Especially if the MashUp principle will be an appropriate possibility to enhance learning and
teaching.
Widgets
Widgets are small single applications that run on a client machine. In other words widgets are little windows as a
container for a client side application. This application can either involve pure client side functionality or can act as
a tool to deploy a distributed service or resource. In our case the PLE acts as the widget container and the resources
and application on the web are brought up in to the PLE through widgets.
The widgets can be implemented in any language, which is executable on the client side. The web-based widgets are
normally developed in HTML and JavaScript, but other client side languages such as Flash, Java Applets etc. can
also be applied. There are other types of widgets too: Desktop widgets run only on the desktops. Mobile widgets are
called to the ones that run on the mobile clients. The most common type of widgets is web-based widgets. They run
in a web platform as a widget container and can be viewed by any simple browser.
There are several widgets and widget containers in WWW. iGoogle1, Netvibes2, Protopage3 and Pageflakes4 are
After deploying the Framework and the general integration within the university systems, the next step is to allow
the development of widgets. In winter term 2009/2010 some projects as well as exercises are offered to students of
informatics to bring in their experience as programmers as well as learners. In the following chapter the first
prototypes are described and shown, which are built to enhance the PLE.
Widget prototypes
The implementation of the first PLE prototype is almost over. There are still some tiny performance issues to be
carried out. The development of widgets for the distributed applications is still in progress and would most probably
not end in the near future. Widgets can be categorized to two classes: widgets for the university wide applications
and services that can enhance the formal learning and widgets for the various distributed applications on WWW to
foster informal learning scenarios. Following we describe some examples which are carried out:
• LMS widgets: This widget presents a view to the existing LMS system. The student opens the widget
representing the list of courses he is already booked. Selecting a course would display the e-learning
materials and the eventual podcasts related to that course. If wanted, some supplementary widgets, such as
a time table and a location widget can be auto-synchronized in the background to provide the user with
information regarding the place and the time schedules of the course. An alert widget can inform the
student as soon as a course is canceled or a new notification is received.
• LO widgets: Another case could be the Learning Objects (LO) for different courses, i.e. a widget for the
course “operating systems” that demonstrates the order of tasks and the deadlock possibility for a specific
scheduling algorithm in embedded operating systems. The students can easily set some widget
configurations such as the task periods, task start times, etc and then try out different scheduling algorithms
for better understanding.
• Blog widget: The first prototype of the blog widget is already implemented. The blog widget let the users
read the weblogs from the university wide blogosphere. They can customize the widget to their own blogs,
a specific community or to all items from the blog sphere. Fig. 3 shows the weblogs according to the user’s
settings.
• Twitter widget: The development is still in progress. Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 demonstrate the first prototype
respectively. The first version shows a list of user’s last tweets. It is planned to extend the widget in the
next version so that the user can customize the widget to be able to follow the tweets of every other user. It
is also planed to build a tag-based search module in the public stream of twitter. Fig. 4 shows the
customization screen of the widget.
• RSS Feed Reader widget: This widget is a simple possibility to let users subscribe and follow any RSS feeds
(Fig. 6).
• USTREAM widget: This widget gives the chance to connect to a live broadcast or recorded podcast channel
on the USTREAM5 platform. The user can play a recorded podcast or enjoy a live broadcast (Fig. 7).
• Google Maps widget: This widget brings Google Maps to the learning environment of the user and therefore
any place can be shown or searched for (Fig. 8).
Within the subject “Multimedia Information Systems” for master-students some students are programming widgets
for the forthcoming PLE. Therefore a short introduction about the general development of widgets was given and
asked about which kind of widgets are from high interest for learners. The following list gives an overview about the
widgets that are currently developed by our students:
Conclusion
Due to the fact that the WWW became ubiquitous and influences our daily life it is obvious that also education
reaches a new stage. Learning and teaching of tomorrow should foster individuality, flexibility and personality. A
first step will be to develop environments, which allow the learners to choose the content of their interests and
needs. Graz University of Technology began to develop a PLE following the W3C specifications, a standard that can
be used as basis for all PLE and e-learning applications. Thereby the problem of interoperability would be solved
and a worldwide exchange of widgets will be possible.
It must be pointed out that the current state of the PLE is that a first prototype is running which can be seen as a
framework for widgets that have to be programmed. In this publication first widgets have been shown and described.
The next step is to launch the environment university-wide and to program further widgets to integrate all services
provided by the university as well as further web applications. It is also planed to extend the web-based widgets in a
way that they can also be applied as desktop widgets on the desktop and mobile widgets on the mobile clients. From
a research point of view the next steps are to think about didactical scenarios and to answer questions like how can a
PLE be used in a subject for teaching? Furthermore data of practical experiences must be gathered to see whether
the MahsUp principle lead to a new learning process or not. In the meanwhile a recommendation system should be
implemented in the background to support the users arranging their widgets and contents. It is easily imaginable to
suggest learners learning objects, subjects or further contents because of their study progress.
It must be stated that PLEs have a huge potential to support learners in a meaningful way or to support teachers to
use different applications within their subjects. Learning in future will be much more flexible and learning content
independent from the form how it is presented. The task of tomorrow is to find the appropriate information, which
Originally published in: Ebner, M. & Taraghi, B. (2010). Personal Learning Environment for Higher Education – A
First Prototype. In Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and
Telecommunications 2010 (pp. 1158-1166). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.
fits best to the personal needs.
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