Learn-streaming For Personal Learning Networks

LEARN-STREAMING SUPPORT FOR PERSONAL LEARNING NETWORKS Oskar Casquero, Javier Portillo, Ramón Ovelar, Manuel Benito, Jesús Romo, UPV/EHU, Spain In Learning Management Systems (LMS), students are assigned to closed virtual classrooms that focus the interaction with only those learning resources located there. Communication tools (such as forums, mailing services and blogs), when restricted to the closed space of the platform, do not fit with all the interactions needs of the learning community, specially long-term interactions, and do not allow to link external services. Moreover, Moodle-alike platforms do not completely suit the requirements of the European Space for Higher Education (ESHE) and life-long learning. On one hand, geographical mobility, credit transfer and competence assessment involved in the new learning approach encourages opening up learning systems in order to facilitate the interaction with web services and people inside and outside the institution. On the other hand, learners should be able to retain their contents (evidences of acquired competences) out of a virtual classroom in order to build their personal e-portfolio and curriculum vitae. Within all learning environments, we think that the model based on a Personal Learning Network (PLN) [1] is the one that best accomplishes life-long learning and ESHE’s goals. In a PLN, every learner uses a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) that assists him searching, retrieving, reusing, editing, sharing and publishing Digital Learning Resources (DLR) such as posts, images, videos and learning objects. A PLE is designed as a mash-up of personalized services, both institutional and external, that reflects individual learning preferences and collaborative work, and tracks the learn-streaming of the student. The key artefacts that enable the release of data and web applications are syndication channels (RSS, ATOM) and widgets within a PLE. Therefore, the institution could offer syndication channels and decoupled widgets for interaction with internal web services, and learners could decide which context (PLE) to integrate in (GMail, iGoogle, Netvibes,…). Nevertheless, the institution can also provide of a pre-configured but flexible context in the form of a PLE. Learn-streaming simply means publishing and sharing daily learning activities that constitute life-long learning. It allows students to keep track of what they have done on-line. Institutions can benefit from it as learn-streaming allows to look up the individual activity of the students for curriculum purposes. The aggregation of the learnstreaming of every student allows the teacher to get a detailed picture of the progress achieved by him or her in a particular course or subject. The solution explored in this paper suggests a Network of Blogs for supporting learnstreaming storage. The Network of iBlogs is released as looselycoupled service within the mashup-based framework of the PLN. The nodes that make up this network are iBlogs (a.k.a. invisible blogs), which are the containers for learn-streaming. As it can be seen in the figure, the basic architecture for the Networks of iBlogs considers one blog per subject (teacher and students) and one blog (eportfolio) per person (teacher or student). This blogs communicate with each other and with the PLEs through syndication mechanisms.

References 1. CASQUERO, O.; PORTILLO, J.; OVELAR, R.; et.al. (2008). iGoogle and gadgets as a platform for integrating institutional and external services In First International Workshop on Mashup Personal Learning Environments (Retrieved December 11, 2008, from http://tinyurl.com/5kcsew)