On-line collaborative learning for in-service teacher education

This article brings some of the results of a study that analyzes a hybrid course for in-service teachers in the Project Teletandem Brazil: foreign languages for all. In this project, Brazilian teachers of Spanish as a foreign language took part in a blended tandem learning course, communicating via videoconferencing with Uruguayan teachers of Portuguese as a foreign language. The aim of the study was to verify Brazilian teachers' concepts and beliefs concerning language and culture and how the teletandem interactions affected them. After the interactions, teachers' views of culture seemed to also incorporate aspects of culture as an interpersonal process, instead of the factual and static view which was previously predominant. Therefore teacher education programs must consider the possibility of conjugating theory and reflective practice through the use of videoconference tools in order to allow teachers to experience culture rather learn facts about it. © 2011 ACADEMY PUBLISHER.

Convergência digital de sistemas de aprendizado colaborativo, considerando ambientes da web e da TV digital no Brasil

Pós-graduação em Ciência da Computação - IBILCE

Wikis semânticos: da Web para a Web Semântica

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Reliability of Web-Based Information in Inquiry Projects

This case study aims at identifying how a community of secondary school students selects web-based information and factors associated with the reliability of online reference sources during their collaborative inquiry (co-inquiry) projects. This study, conducted in a public secondary school in Brazil, focused on information literacy skills for collaborative open learning (colearning). The research is based on qualitative content analysis implemented on the online platform weSPOT. Although students are mindful of the importance of comparing different sources of information they seem not to be aware of reliability in online environments. Teacher's guidance is essential to support co-learners in developing competences, particularly related to critical thinking.

Formação continuada de professores de matemática com enfoque colaborativo: contribuições para o uso reflexivo dos recursos da Web 2.0 na prática pedagógica

Pós-graduação em Educação - FCT

Building Leadership: The Knowledge of Principals in Creating Collaborative Communities of Professional Learning

Research literature is replete with the importance of collaboration in schools, the lack of its implementation, the centrality of the role of the principal, and the existence of a gap between knowledge and practice--or a "Knowing-Doing Gap." In other words, there is a set of knowledge that principals must know in order to create a collaborative workplace environment for teachers. This study sought to describe what high school principals know about creating such a culture of collaboration. The researcher combed journal articles, studies and professional literature in order to identify what principals must know in order to create a culture of collaboration. The result was ten elements of principal knowledge: Staff involvement in important decisions, Charismatic leadership not being necessary for success, Effective elements of teacher teams, Administrator‘s modeling professional learning, The allocation of resources, Staff meetings focused on student learning, Elements of continuous improvement, and Principles of Adult Learning, Student Learning and Change. From these ten elements, the researcher developed a web-based survey intended to measure nine of those elements (Charismatic leadership was excluded). Principals of accredited high schools in the state of Nebraska were invited to participate in this survey, as high schools are well-known for the isolation that teachers experience--particularly as a result of departmentalization. The results indicate that principals have knowledge of eight of the nine measured elements. The one that they lacked an understanding of was Principles of Student Learning. Given these two findings of what principals do and do not know, the researcher recommends that professional organizations, intermediate service agencies and district-level support staff engage in systematic and systemic initiatives to increase the knowledge of principals in the element of lacking knowledge. Further, given that eight of the nine elements are understood by principals, it would be wise to examine reasons for the implementation gap (Knowing-Doing Gap) and how to overcome it.

XWiki Mobile: architetture collaborative per device mobili

Studio di una interfaccia mobile web per la piattaforma XWiki.

Collaborazione real-time in una piattaforma web di sviluppo software

La diffusione dei servizi cloud ha spinto anche il mondo degli IDE verso questa direzione. Recentemente si sta assistendo allo spostamento degli IDE da ambienti desktop ad ambienti Web. Questo è determinante per quanto riguarda gli aspetti legati alla collaborazione perchè permette di sfruttare tutti i vantaggi del cloud per dotare questi sistemi di chat, integrazione con i social network, strumenti di editing condiviso e molte altre funzionalità collaborative. Questi IDE sono detti browser-based in quanto i servizi che mettono a disposizione sono accessibili via Web tramite un browser. Ne esistono di diversi tipi e con caratteristiche molto diverse tra di loro. Alcuni sono semplici piattaforme sulle quali è possibile effettuare test di codice o utilizzare tutorial forniti per imparare nuovi linguaggi di programmazione; altri invece sono ambienti di sviluppo completi dotati delle più comuni funzionalità presenti in un IDE desktop, oltre a quelle specifiche legate al Web. Dallo studio di questi ambienti di sviluppo di nuova generazione è emerso che sono pochi quelli che dispongono di un sistema di collaborazione completo e che non tutti sfruttano le nuove tecnologie che il Web mette a disposizione. Per esempio, alcuni sono dotati di editor collaborativi, ma non offrono un servizio di chat ai collaboratori; altri mettono a disposizione una chat e il supporto per la scrittura simultanea di codice, ma non sono dotati di sistemi per la condivisione del display. Dopo l'analisi dei pregi e dei difetti della collaborazione fornita dagli strumenti presi in considerazione ho deciso di realizzare delle funzionalità collaborative inserendomi nel contesto di un IDE browser-based chiamato InDe RT sviluppato dall'azienda Pro Gamma SpA.

Metadata Visualization of Cultural Heritage Information within a Collaborative Environment

Cultural content on the Web is available in various domains (cultural objects, datasets, geospatial data, moving images, scholarly texts and visual resources), concerns various topics, is written in different languages, targeted to both laymen and experts, and provided by different communities (libraries, archives museums and information industry) and individuals (Figure 1). The integration of information technologies and cultural heritage content on the Web is expected to have an impact on everyday life from the point of view of institutions, communities and individuals. In particular, collaborative environment scan recreate 3D navigable worlds that can offer new insights into our cultural heritage (Chan 2007). However, the main barrier is to find and relate cultural heritage information by end-users of cultural contents, as well as by organisations and communities managing and producing them. In this paper, we explore several visualisation techniques for supporting cultural interfaces, where the role of metadata is essential for supporting the search and communication among end-users (Figure 2). A conceptual framework was developed to integrate the data, purpose, technology, impact, and form components of a collaborative environment, Our preliminary results show that collaborative environments can help with cultural heritage information sharing and communication tasks because of the way in which they provide a visual context to end-users. They can be regarded as distributed virtual reality systems that offer graphically realised, potentially infinite, digital information landscapes. Moreover, collaborative environments also provide a new way of interaction between an end-user and a cultural heritage data set. Finally, the visualisation of metadata of a dataset plays an important role in helping end-users in their search for heritage contents on the Web.

Generating Awareness from Collaborative Working Environment using Social Data

Nowadays, Internet is a place where social networks have reached an important impact in collaboration among people over the world in different ways. This article proposes a new paradigm for building CSCW business tools following the novel ideas provided by the social web to collaborate and generate awareness. An implementation of these concepts is described, including the components we provide to collaborate in workspaces, (such as videoconference, chat, desktop sharing, forums or temporal events), and the way we generate awareness from these complex social data structures. Figures and validation results are also presented to stress that this architecture has been defined to support awareness generation via joining current and future social data from business and social networks worlds, based on the idea of using social data stored in the cloud.

A Balanced Memory-Based Collaborative Filtering Similarity Measure.

Collaborative filtering recommender systems contribute to alleviating the problem of information overload that exists on the Internet as a result of the mass use of Web 2.0 applications. The use of an adequate similarity measure becomes a determining factor in the quality of the prediction and recommendation results of the recommender system, as well as in its performance. In this paper, we present a memory-based collaborative filtering similarity measure that provides extremely high-quality and balanced results; these results are complemented with a low processing time (high performance), similar to the one required to execute traditional similarity metrics. The experiments have been carried out on the MovieLens and Netflix databases, using a representative set of information retrieval quality measures.

Using online presence to improve online collaborative learning

Social software tools have become an integral part of students? personal lives and their primary communication medium. Likewise, these tools are increasingly entering the enterprise world (within the recent trend known as Enterprise 2.0) and becoming a part of everyday work routines. Aiming to keep the pace with the job requirements and also to position learning as an integral part of students? life, the field of education is challenged to embrace social software. Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) emerged as a concept that makes use of social software to facilitate collaboration, knowledge sharing, group formation around common interests, active participation and reflective thinking in online learning settings. Furthermore, social software allows for establishing and maintaining one?s presence in the online world. By being aware of a student's online presence, a PLE is better able to personalize the learning settings, e.g., through recommendation of content to use or people to collaborate with. Aiming to explore the potentials of online presence for the provision of recommendations in PLEs, in the scope of the OP4L project, we have develop a software solution that is based on a synergy of Semantic Web technologies, online presence and socially-oriented learning theories. In this paper we present the current results of this research work.

Opportunities and Challenges of Implementing P2P Streaming Applications in the Web

P2P applications are increasingly present on the web. We have identified a gap in current proposals when it comes to the use of traditional P2P overlays for real-time multimedia streaming. We analyze the possibilities and challenges to extend WebRTC in order to implement JavaScript APIs for P2P streaming algorithms.

Improving Collaborative Filtering Based Recommender Systems Using Pareto Dominance

Los sistemas de recomendación son un tipo de solución al problema de sobrecarga de información que sufren los usuarios de los sitios web en los que se pueden votar ciertos artículos. El sistema de recomendación de filtrado colaborativo es considerado como el método con más éxito debido a que sus recomendaciones se hacen basándose en los votos de usuarios similares a un usuario activo. Sin embargo, el método de filtrado de colaboración tradicional selecciona usuarios insuficientemente representativos como vecinos de cada usuario activo. Esto significa que las recomendaciones hechas a posteriori no son lo suficientemente precisas. El método propuesto en esta tesis realiza un pre-filtrado del proceso, mediante el uso de dominancia de Pareto, que elimina los usuarios menos representativos del proceso de selección k-vecino y mantiene los más prometedores. Los resultados de los experimentos realizados en MovieLens y Netflix muestran una mejora significativa en todas las medidas de calidad estudiadas en la aplicación del método propuesto. ABSTRACTRecommender systems are a type of solution to the information overload problem suffered by users of websites on which they can rate certain items. The Collaborative Filtering Recommender System is considered to be the most successful approach as it make its recommendations based on votes of users similar to an active user. Nevertheless, the traditional collaborative filtering method selects insufficiently representative users as neighbors of each active user. This means that the recommendations made a posteriori are not precise enough. The method proposed in this thesis performs a pre-filtering process, by using Pareto dominance, which eliminates the less representative users from the k-neighbor selection process and keeps the most promising ones. The results from the experiments performed on Movielens and Netflix show a significant improvement in all the quality measures studied on applying the proposed method.

Aplicación web para la realización de experimentos astronómicos del proyecto GLORIA en la plataforma Facebook

La Ciencia Ciudadana nace del resultado de involucrar en las investigaciones científicas a todo tipo de personas, las cuales pueden participar en un determinado experimento analizando o recopilando datos. No hace falta que tengan una formación científica para poder participar, es decir cualquiera puede contribuir con su granito de arena. La ciencia ciudadana se ha convertido en un elemento a tener en cuenta a la hora de realizar tareas científicas que requieren mucha dedicación, o que simplemente por el volumen de trabajo que estas implican, resulta casi imposible que puedan ser realizadas por una sola persona o un pequeño grupo de trabajo. El proyecto GLORIA (GLObal Robotic-telescopes Intelligent Array) es la primera red de telescopios robóticos del mundo de acceso libre que permite a los usuarios participar en la investigación astronómica mediante la observación con telescopios robóticos, y/o analizando los datos que otros usuarios han adquirido con GLORIA, o desde otras bases de datos de libre acceso. Con el objetivo de contribuir a esta iniciativa se ha propuesto crear una plataforma web que pasará a formar parte del Proyecto GLORIA, en la que se puedan realizar experimentos astronómicos. Con el objetivo de fomentar la ciencia y el aprendizaje colaborativo se propone construir una aplicación web que se ejecute en la plataforma Facebook. Los experimentos los proporciona la red de telescopios del proyecto GLORIA mediante servicios web y están definidos mediante XML. La aplicación web recibe el XML con la descripción del experimento, lo interpreta y lo representa en la plataforma Facebook para que los usuarios potenciales puedan realizar los experimentos. Los resultados de los experimentos realizados se envían a una base de datos de libre acceso que será gestionada por el proyecto GLORIA, para su posterior análisis por parte de expertos. ---ABSTRACT---The citizen’s science is born out of the result of involving all type of people in scientific investigations, in which, they can participate in a determined experiment analyzing or compiling data. There is no need to have a scientific training in order to participate, but, anyone could contribute doing one’s bit. The citizen’s science has become an element to take into account when carrying out scientific tasks that require a lot dedication, or that, for the volume of work that these involve, are nearly impossible to be carried out by one person or a small working group. The GLORIA Project (Global Robotic-Telescopes Intelligent Array) is the first network of free access robotic telescopes in the world that permits the users to participate in the astronomic investigation by means of observation with robotic telescopes, and/or analyzing data from other users that have obtained through GLORIA, or from other free-access databases. With the aim of contributing to this initiative, a web platform has been created and will be part of the GLORIA Project, in which astronomic experiments can be carried out. With the objective of promoting science and collaborative apprenticeship, a web application carried out in the FACEBOOK platform is to be built. The experiments are founded by the telescopes network of the GLORIA project by means of web services and are defined through XML. The web application receives the XML with the description of the experiment, interprets it and represents it in the FACEBOOK platform in order for potential users may perform the experiments. The results of the experiments carried out are sent to a free-access database that will be managed by the GLORIA Project for its analysis on the part of experts.