Self-Development of Competences for Social Inclusion Using the TENCompetence Infrastructure

This paper describes a pilot study centred on the technology-enhanced self-development of competences in lifelong learning education carried out in the challenging context of the Association of Participants Àgora. The pilot study shows that the use of the TENCompetence infrastructure, i.e. in this case the Personal Development Planner tool, provides various kinds of benefits for adult participants with low educational profiles and who are traditionally excluded from the use of innovative learning technologies and the knowledge society. The selforganized training supported by the PDP tool aims at allowing the learners to create and control their own learning plans based on their interests and educational background including informal and non-formal experiences. In this sense, the pilot participants had the opportunity to develop and improve their competences in English language (basic and advanced levels) and ICT competence profiles which are mostly related to functional and communicative skills. Besides, the use of the PDP functionalities, such as the self-assessment, the planning and the self-regulating elements allowed the participants to develop reflective skills. Pilot results also provide indications for future developments in the field of technology support for self-organized learners. The paper introduces the context and the pilot scenario, indicates the evaluation methodology applied and discusses the most significant findings derived from the pilot study.

Supporting life-long competence development using the TENCompetence infrastructure: a first experiment

This paper describes an experiment to explore the effects of the TENCompetence infrastructure for supporting lifelong competence development which is now in development. This infrastructure provides structured, multi-leveled access to learning materials, based upon competences. People can follow their own learning path, supported by a listing of competences and their components, by competence development plans attached to competences and by the possibility to mark elements as complete. We expected the PCM to have an effect on (1) control of participants of their own learning, and (2) appreciation of their learning route, (3) of the learning resources, (4) of their competence development, and (5) of the possibilities of collaboration. In the experiment, 44 Bulgarian teachers followed a distance learning course on a specific teaching methodology for six weeks. Part of them used the TENCompetence infrastructure, part used an infrastructure which was similar, except for the characterizing elements mentioned above. The results showed that in the experimental condition, more people passed the final competence assess-ment, and people felt more in control of their own learning. No differences between the two groups were found on the amount and appreciation of collaboration and on further measures of competence development.

Dialogic learning and interactive groups: an IMS LD template integrated in runtime systems

Dialogic learning and interactive groups have proved to be a useful methodological approach appliedin educational situations for lifelong adult learners. The principles of this approach stress theimportance of dialogue and equal participation also when designing the training activities. This paperadopts these principles as the basis for a configurable template that can be integrated in runtimesystems. The template is formulated as a meta-UoL which can be interpreted by IMS Learning Designplayers. This template serves as a guide to flexibly select and edit the activities at runtime (on the fly).The meta-UoL has been used successfully by a practitioner so as to create a real-life example, withpositive and encouraging results

A context-based methodology for integrating Web 2.0 services in learning scenarios

The emergence of the Web 2.0 technologies in the last years havechanged the way people interact with knowledge. Services for cooperation andcollaboration have placed the user in the centre of a new knowledge buildingspace. The development of new second generation learning environments canbenefit from the potential of these Web 2.0 services when applied to aneducational context. We propose a methodology for designing learningenvironments that relates Web 2.0 services with the functional requirements ofthese environments. In particular, we concentrate on the design of the KRSMsystem to discuss the components of this methodology and its application.

Web containers / portals integrating tools and accessing distributed services

En aquest projecte he avaluat un seguit de plataformes per veure quina era la millor pertal d’integrar les eines que proporcionen serveis del projecte TENCompetence.Per començar el projecte plantejaré el context del projecte. Com se situa al marc del projecte TENCompetence on he desenvolupat aquest treball fi de carrera. Tot seguit es veuen quines eines disposem per tal d’accedir als diferents serveis que ens proporciona el projecte.Comento els escenaris on s’aplicarà la tecnologia que triem i finalment comento les diferents plataformes web on integrarem les diferents eines.A continuació he realitzat un capítol per tal de comentar l’anàlisi de requeriments del’escenari d’aplicació de cada pilot. Per a cada escenari aplico unes determinades eines a un determinat context, i per tant hi han unes necessitats concretes que he de recollir. Per plasmar-ho en paper he realitzat l’anàlisi de requeriments. Un cop recollides totes les dades he pogut feruna selecció de la plataforma contenidora que més s’escau a cada pilot.Amb els requeriments i la plataforma seleccionada, he realitzat un disseny per a cada pilot. Després de refinar el disseny he realitzat la implementació per tal de cobrir les necessitats dels pilots. També he aprofitat per veure quina tecnologia es pot utilitzar per tal d’integrar leseines dins de la plataforma.Amb la implementació feta he realitzat un seguit de proves per tal de veure els resultats aconseguits. Tot seguit he iniciat un procés iteractiu per tal refinar el disseny i millorar la implementació.

Security control brought back to the user

The activity of the Ph.D. student Juri Luca De Coi involved the research field of policy languages and can be divided in three parts. The first part of the Ph.D. work investigated the state of the art in policy languages, ending up with: (i) identifying the requirements up-to-date policy languages have to fulfill; (ii) defining a policy language able to fulfill such requirements (namely, the Protune policy language); and (iii) implementing an infrastructure able to enforce policies expressed in the Protune policy language. The second part of the Ph.D. work focused on simplifying the activity of defining policies and ended up with: (i) identifying a subset of the controlled natural language ACE to express Protune policies; (ii) implementing a mapping between ACE policies and Protune policies; and (iii) adapting the ACE Editor to guide users step by step when defining ACE policies. The third part of the Ph.D. work tested the feasibility of the chosen approach by applying it to meaningful real-world problems, among which: (i) development of a security layer on top of RDF stores; and (ii) efficient policy-aware access to metadata stores. The research activity has been performed in tight collaboration with the Leibniz Universität Hannover and further European partners within the projects REWERSE, TENCompetence and OKKAM.