Design de objetos de aprendizagem digital do ponto de vista da usabilidade

Technological resources and the media are contributing to socioeconomic development, including the education sector. Application of Digital Learning Objects support learning, serving as a tool for distance learning arrangements and classroom. The quality of design in instructional materials is one factor that implies the motivation of students and support their learning, within this context, the creation of educational interactive multimedia applications should excel the content and good usability, while facilitating user interaction. The aim of this paper was to establish parameters for the creation and management of Digital Learning Objects.

Something’s coming, something good: Identifying TPACK competence in pre-service teachers’ analyses of learning objects

There is a song at the beginning of the musical, West Side Story, where the character Tony sings that “something’s coming, something good.” The song is an anthem of optimism, brimming with promise. This paper is about the long-held promise of information and communication technology (ICT) to transform teaching and learning, to modernise the learning environment of the classroom, and to create a new digital pedagogy. But much of our experience to date in the schooling sector tells more of resistance and reaction than revolution, of more of the same but with a computer in the corner and of ICT activities as unwelcome time-fillers/time-wasters. Recently, a group of pre-service teachers in a postgraduate primary education degree in an Australian university were introduced to learning objects in an ICT immersion program. Their analyses and related responses, as recorded in online journals, have here been interpreted in terms of TPACK (Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge). Against contemporary observation, these students generally displayed high levels of competence and highly positive dispositions of students to the integration of ICT in their future classrooms. In short, they displayed the same optimism and confidence as the fictional “Tony” in believing that something good was coming.

DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND LEARNING OBJECTS REPOSITORIES

Discusses the technological changes that affects learning organizations as well as the human, technical, legal and sustainable aspects regarding learning objects repositories creation, maintenance and use. It presents concepts of information objects and learning objects, the functional requirements needed to their storage at Learning Management Systems. The role of Metadata is reviewed concerning learning objects creation and retrieval, followed by considerations about learning object repositories models, community participation/collaborative strategies and potential derived metrics/indicators. As a result of this desktop research, it can be said that not only technical competencies are critical to any learning objects repository implementation, but it urges that an engaged community of interest be establish as a key to support a learning object repository project. On that matter, researchers are applying Activity Theory (Vygostky, Luria y Leontiev) in order to seek joint perceptions and actions involving learning objects repository users, curators and managers, perceived as critical assets to a successful proposal.

Opening digital learning to deeper inquiry

This chapter presents an historical narrative on the recent evolution of information and communications technology (ICT) that has been, and is, utilized for purposes of learning. In other words, it presents an account of the development of e-learning supported through the Web and other similar virtual environments. It does not attempt to present a definitive account; as such an exercise is fraught with assumptions, contextual bias, and probable conjecture. The concern here is more with contextualizing the role of inquiry in learning and the evolving digital tools that enable interfaces that promote and support it. In tracking this evolution, both multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary research has been pursued. Key historical developments are identified as well as interpretations of the key drivers of e-learning over time and into what might be better described as digital learning. Innovations in the development of digital tools are described as dynamic and emergent, evolving as a consequence of multiple, sometimes hidden drivers of change. But conflating advancements in learning technologies with e-learning seems to be pervasive. As is the push for the “open” agenda – a growing number of initiatives and movements dominated by themes associated with access, intellectual property, public benefit, sharing and technical interoperability. Openness is also explored in this chapter, however, more in terms of what it means when associated with inquiry. By investigating opportunities for the stimulation and support of questioning online – in particular, why-questioning – this chapter is focused on “opening” content – not just for access but for inquiry and deeper learning.

Leveraging the repository infrastructure to curate institutional heritage materials, learning objects and data assets

Developing and maintaining a successful institutional repository for research publications requires a considerable investment by the institution. Most of the money is spent on developing the skill-sets of existing staff or hiring new staff with the necessary skills. The return on this investment can be magnified by using this valuable infrastructure to curate collections of other materials such as learning objects, student work, conference proceedings and institutional or local community heritage materials. When Queensland University of Technology (QUT) implemented its repository for research publications (QUT ePrints) over 11 years ago, it was one of the first institutional repositories to be established in Australia. Currently, the repository holds over 29,000 open access research publications and the cumulative total number of full-text downloads for these document now exceeds 16 million. The full-text deposit rate for recently-published peer reviewed papers (currently over 74%) shows how well the repository has been embraced by QUT researchers. The success of QUT ePrints has resulted in requests to accommodate a plethora of materials which are ‘out of scope’ for this repository. QUT Library saw this as an opportunity to use its repository infrastructure (software, technical know-how and policies) to develop and implement a metadata repository for its research datasets (QUT Research Data Finder), a repository for research-related software (QUT Software Finder) and to curate a number of digital collections of institutional and local community heritage materials (QUT Digital Collections). This poster describes the repositories and digital collections curated by QUT Library and outlines the value delivered to the institution, and the wider community, by these initiatives.

E-sharing: development and use of learning objects repository

— In the new learning environments, built width digital technologies, the need to promote quality of education resources, commonly known as Learning Objects, which can support formal and informal distance learning, emerge as one of the biggest challenge that educational institutions will have to face. Due to the fact that is expensive, the reuse and sharing became very important issue. This article presents a Learning Object Repository which aims to store, to disseminate and maintain accessible Learning Objects.

Motivazzioni e soddisfazione di genere nel digital-learning : un studio di caso. 'Motivaciones y satisfaciones generizadas en el digital-learning : un estudio de caso'.

Monográfico con el título: 'Sociedad de la Información, lenguas minoritarias y educación en bilingüismo'. Resumen basado en el de la publicación

The effectiveness of assessment learning objects produced using pair programming

Pair Programming is a technique from the software development method eXtreme Programming (XP) whereby two programmers work closely together to develop a piece of software. A similar approach has been used to develop a set of Assessment Learning Objects (ALO). Three members of academic staff have developed a set of ALOs for a total of three different modules (two with overlapping content). In each case a pair programming approach was taken to the development of the ALO. In addition to demonstrating the efficiency of this approach in terms of staff time spent developing the ALOs, a statistical analysis of the outcomes for students who made use of the ALOs is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the ALOs produced via this method.

Towards a new proposal to evaluate the learning objects quality in learning strategies for education (QEES)

In Computer Science world several proposals have been developed for the assessment of the quality of the digital objects, based on the capabilities and facilities offered by current technologies and the available resources. Years ago researchers and specialists from both educational and technological areas have been committed to the development of strategies that improve the quality of education. At present, in the field of teaching-learning, another important aspect is the need to improve the manner of gaining knowledge and learning in education, which the use of learning strategies is a major advance in the teaching-learning process in institutions of higher education. This paper presents QEES, a proposal for evaluating the quality of the learning objects employed on learning strategies to support students during their education processes by using information extraction techniques and ontologies.

Assessing a Methodological Proposal for the Design, Creation and Evaluation of Learning Objects Oriented to Educators with Diverse Educational and Technological Competencies

This paper describes a methodological proposal for the design, creation and evaluation of Learning Objects (LOs). This study arises from the compilation and analysis of several LO design methodologies currently used in Ibero-America. This proposal, which has been named DICREVOA, defines five different phases: analysis, design (instructional and multimedia), implementation (LO and metadata), evaluation (from the perspective of both the producer and the consumer of the LO), and publishing. The methodology focuses not only on the teaching inexperienced, but also on those having a basic understanding of the technological and educational aspects related to LO design; therefore, the study emphasizes LO design activities centered around the Kolb cycle and the use of the ExeLearning tool in order to implement the LO core. Additionally, DICREVOA was used in a case study, which demonstrates how it provides a feasible mechanism for LO design and implementation within different contexts. Finally, DICREVOA, the case study to which it was applied, and the results obtained are presented

Semantic and context-based retrieval of digital cultural objects [Published in Chinese]

Cultural objects are increasingly generated and stored in digital form, yet effective methods for their indexing and retrieval still remain an important area of research. The main problem arises from the disconnection between the content-based indexing approach used by computer scientists and the description-based approach used by information scientists. There is also a lack of representational schemes that allow the alignment of the semantics and context with keywords and low-level features that can be automatically extracted from the content of these cultural objects. This paper presents an integrated approach to address these problems, taking advantage of both computer science and information science approaches. We firstly discuss the requirements from a number of perspectives: users, content providers, content managers and technical systems. We then present an overview of our system architecture and describe various techniques which underlie the major components of the system. These include: automatic object category detection; user-driven tagging; metadata transform and augmentation, and an expression language for digital cultural objects. In addition, we discuss our experience on testing and evaluating some existing collections, analyse the difficulties encountered and propose ways to address these problems.

The why dimension - opening frontiers for digital learning

Digital learning has come a long way from the days of simple 'if-then' queries. It is now enabled by countless innovations that support knowledge sharing, openness, flexibility, and independent inquiry. Set against an evolutionary context this study investigated innovations that directly support human inquiry. Specifically, it identified five activities that together are defined as the 'why dimension' – asking, learning, understanding, knowing, and explaining why. Findings highlight deficiencies in mainstream search-based approaches to inquiry, which tend to privilege the retrieval of information as distinct from explanation. Instrumental to sense-making, the 'why dimension' provides a conceptual framework for development of 'sense-making technologies'.

Theorizing why in digital learning: Opening frontiers for inquiry and innovation with technology

Asking why is an important foundation of inquiry and fundamental to the development of reasoning skills and learning. Despite this, and despite the relentless and often disruptive nature of innovations in information and communications technology (ICT), sophisticated tools that directly support this basic act of learning appear to be undeveloped, not yet recognized, or in the very early stages of development. Why is this so? To this question, there is no single factual answer. In response, however, plausible explanations and further questions arise, and such responses are shown to be typical consequences of why-questioning. A range of contemporary scenarios are presented to highlight the problem. Consideration of the various inputs into the evolution of digital learning is introduced to provide historical context and this serves to situate further discussion regarding innovation that supports inquiry-based learning. This theme is further contextualized by narratives on openness in education, in which openness is also shown to be an evolving construct. Explanatory and descriptive contents are differentiated in order to scope out the kinds of digital tools that might support inquiry instigated by why-questioning and which move beyond the search paradigm. Probing why from a linguistic perspective reveals versatile and ambiguous semantics. The why dimension—asking, learning, knowing, understanding, and explaining why—is introduced as a construct that highlights challenges and opportunities for ICT innovation. By linking reflective practice and dialogue with cognitive engagement, this chapter points to specific frontiers for the design and development of digital learning tools, frontiers in which inquiry may find new openings for support.