User Modelling and User Adaptive Systems Activity
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Research Group
School of Computing, University of Leeds
People: Zuhoor Al-Khanjari, Vania Dimitrova, Julika Matravers, Chris Tebb, Drew Withworth
Funding: EU, Minerva
Similarly, the libre methodolgy can lead to innovative educational paradigms and will have a great impact on the way the web is used for teaching and learning. Thus, it is extremely important that the educational community becomes aware of the potential of the libre development model. There is a strong demand for studies that examine ways of applying the libre software model in educational settings, as well as for technologies that support the effective deployment of this model. Until recently, technical challenges made it very difficult to support truly open, dynamic, educational resources constructed collaboratively by large groups of teachers and even students. Nowadays, the libre software community has created a vast amount of technologies to support their practices. However, these technologies have not been explored fully in an educational context. Moreover, many of the existing technologies for collaborative development of software suffer from two problems: (1) they are suitable for software developers but are not intuitive enough to be adopted by teachers and students and (2) they normally tackle small tasks, which is convenient for developers who usually use several tools, but is inappropriate for teaching and learning communities.
The main objective of the Edukalibre project is
to examine the connection between libre software development
and creation of open content for education. It involves developers and educationalists from
several European countries working together to study both technological and pedagogical
aspects of the successful deployment of the libre idea in university teaching. The project
a novel, truly open platform to support the creation of free,
collaboratively constructed educational content on the web,
Description of ConDOR
ConDOR is a bespoke groupware application which runs as a modular component of the open
software learning management environment Moodle. ConDOR was designed as a tool to be used
by students or teachers for the collaborative construction of learning resources.
The groupware application allows easy “explorer style”' access to the document repository,
allowing intuitive navigation of the file and folder structures, and simple tools for uploading
files and creating new folders.
The figure shows a screen with the ConDOR interface. To prevent excessive repeated navigation of large folder structures, a My Resources section is provided within the groupware resource area to allow authors to bookmark documents deep within a resource tree of any repository. This allows for a simple list of documents the user has an active interest in.
From either the main Resources browser or the My Resources bookmark area,
authors can download a document in any supported format, upload a new version of the document,
browse the history of the document and add/remove documents from their My Resources list.
Extra features such as format conversion are only available for OpenOffice and LaTeX documents,
but trial users have been using the repository
Extension
Currently, ConDOR is being extended to monitor the group interactions and to capture
the emergent semantics of people working together on the construction of dynamic open resources. Methods for
group modelling and content packaging are being combined to export documents in the form of
learning objects that encapsulate content, semantics, and user context.
Publications
Botturi, L. Dimitrova, V. , Matravers, J., Tebb, C., Withworth, D., Geldermann, J., & Hubert, I. (2005). Development-oriented eLearning Tool Evaluation: the Edukalibre Approach, ED-MEDIA: World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications , Montreal, Canada, 28th June - 2nd July 2005.
Barahona, J.G., Tebb, C., Dimitrova, V., Chaparro, D., Romera, T. (2005). Transferring Libre Software Development Practices too the Production of Educational Resources. First International Conference on Open Source Systems July 11th-15th, Genova, Italy.
Barahona, J.G., Chaparro, D., Tebb, C., Dimitrova, V., Mazza, R. (2005). Producing educational resources in the Libre Way: The Edukalibre Project, IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2005 .