Informal learning with PDAs and smartphones

Abstract There has been increasing interest in informal learning in recent years alongside interest in how such learning can be supported by technology. However, relatively little is known about the extent to which adults make use of their own mobile devices to support informal learning. In this study, a survey was used to investigate whether, and to what extent, experienced users of mobile devices use their mobile devices to support intentional informal learning. If so, do they make use of mobile device connectivity to support opportunistic informal learning and does such connectivity support or encourage collaborative informal learning? Experienced mobile device users were recruited from web forums and business, and asked whether they used their devices to support informal learning. A pattern of learning uses emerged, some of which deployed the mobile device capabilities relatively unchanged, others triggered adaptations to typical learning activities to provide a better fit to the needs of the learner. These informal learning activities provided the basis for the design of a flexible mobile learning framework that can be extended to support developments in mobile technology, and increasing use of Web 2.0 technologies by informal learners.     

Tolerating deviations in process support systems via flexibleenactment of process models

Process support systems (PSSs) support business organizations in modeling, improving and automating their business processes. Thanks to their ability in enacting process models, they can be used to guide people in performing their daily work and to automate the repetitive tasks that do not require human intervention. Given these potential benefits, it is surprising to observe that PSSs are not widely adopted. This is especially true in case of highly flexible and human-intensive processes, such as design processes in general and software processes in particular. This fact can be explained by observing that currently available PSSs do not fulfil some crucial needs of modern business organizations. One of their major drawbacks is that they do not offer adequate mechanisms to cope with unforeseen situations. They are good at supporting business processes if all proceeds as expected, but if an unexpected situation is met, which would require one to deviate from the process model, they often become more an obstacle than a help. This paper deals with the problem of managing unforeseen situations that require deviations from the process model during enactment in the context of the PROSYT (PROcess Support sYstem capable of Tolerating deviations) PSS. During process model enactment, PROSYT is capable of tolerating deviations from the process model by supporting users even when unexpected situations arise. Furthermore, it supports users in reconciling the process model with the process actually followed, if necessary     

A reference model of virtual service production networks

Virtual organisation of collaborative networks frequently demands for information and communication technology to support coordination of cross-organisational business process chains. Service-oriented software technologies provide promising means to regulate and enforce coordination of cross-organisational software service interactions but miss organisational abstractions and methodology. This paper proposes a conceptual reference model of collaborative network coordination that satisfies flexibility and agility requirements of virtual organisation by building on common software service abstractions and lifecycle methodology. In particular, the model focuses collaborative service networks and introduces the concept of virtual business service that represents business service processes as software service abstractions and supports flexible regulation and agile enforcement of their coordination by means of software service lifecycle methodology. For demonstration and evaluation purpose, we present a case study of service-oriented systems analysis for virtual organisation of a collaborative e-science network that adopts our conceptual reference model.     

一种基于模型精化的业务流程开发方法

如何高效组织建模过程和提高业务流程的重用效率是现代业务流程建模和再造过程中亟待解决的问题。传统的业务流程建模方法面向角色组织建模人员、面向单一实例组织流程制品,无法有效组织多人协作、降低流程重用成本。讨论了基于模型精化的流程建模方法,该方法基于流程模型的抽象级别组织建模人员和流程制品。研究还设计实现了使用该方法进行流程开发的分布式业务流程开发平台DMRB-BPMA,用于帮助企业规范和优化建模过程,通过内置的任务分发和流程合并机制有效地组织建模人员进行协作,指导其高效完成业务流程制品的重用。     

以项目为中心的三维建模课程教改实践

分析当前三维建模技术课程存在的问题,提出在课程中引入以项目为中心的实践方法。在初期阶段,采用案例教学及任务驱动的方法,使每个学生学会如何分析问题、解决问题;在深入阶段,采用协作学习方式完成课题,促进团队合作并发挥个人特长;在强化阶段,采用产学研结合及参与各级各类竞赛的方法,以增强团队合作意识、自我效能感和创新能力。通过这种以项目为中心的实践方法,学生的学习兴趣得以激发,主动性得以提升,教学效果显著。     

Sage,guide, both,or even more? An examination of instructor activity in online MBA courses

This study examined faculty characteristics and behaviors in 46 MBA courses conducted over a two-year period. We found that both formal instructor activities, referred to in the online learning literature as teaching presence, and informal instructor activities, known as immediacy behaviors, were positive predictors of student perceived learning and satisfaction with the educational delivery medium. We also found that instructor login intensity, the average amount of time spent per login session, was a negative predictor of perceived learning. Collectively, these findings suggest the need for instructors to structure and organize their courses beforehand so they can focus on efficient engagement with their students while the class is in session. Although teaching presence and instructor immediacy were significant predictors of delivery medium satisfaction, they explained only 6% of the variance. This finding should help instructors avoid taking unnecessary responsibility for students’ attitudes toward online learning. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for training of online instructors and the appropriate use of multilevel analytical tools in online learning and education research.     

Integrating constraints to support legally flexible business processes

Flexible collaboration is a notable attribute of Web 2.0, which is often in the form of multiple users participating different activities that together complete a whole business process. In such an environment, business processes may be dynamically customized or adjusted, as well as the participants may be selected or attend uncertainly. So how to ensure the legitimacy of a business process for both security and business is increasingly critical. In this paper, we investigate this problem and introduce a novel method to support legally flexible business processes. The proposed Constraint-based Business Process Management Model incorporates constraints into the standard activities composing a business process, where the security constraints place restrictions on participants performing the activities and business constraints restrict the dependencies between multiple activities. By the assembly operations, business processes can be dynamically generated and adjusted with activities, that are obliged to the specified constraints. Several algorithms are presented to verify the consistency of constraints and the soundness of the generated business processes, as well as to perform the execution planning to guarantee the correct execution of a business process on the precondition of satisfying all constraints. We present an illustrative example and implement a prototype for the proposed model that is an application of property rights exchange for supporting legal business processes.     

Design and evaluation of planning and mathematical models for generating learning paths

Education research has emphasized the need to develop instructional design tools to facilitate the generation of learning paths for students. Learning paths are important because they enable the personalization and optimization of the learning process. In this work, we present a flexible conceptual framework that allows the representation of curricula information as Artificial Intelligence Planning and Mathematical Programming models to facilitate the generation of learning paths by domain independent algorithms. The resulting models consider a rich set of properties from the education domain, like hierarchical learning structures, enabling conditions, temporal actions, mandatory activities, quality accumulation functions, and metric information. We show that the proposed mathematical models return optimal solutions very efficiently if we relax the total ordering constraints of learning paths. These relaxations allow evaluating greedy planning algorithms to identify the properties from the models that increase the complexity of solution synthesis. We expect that the results of this research can be helpful to education researchers and computer scientists in the quest of scalable systems that capture more flexible standards to model learning and compute more informed learning paths for students.     

基于超媒体思想的课件系统分析与设计

超媒体技术采用非线性的网状结构组织块状信息，信息关联思想类似于人类的联想记忆结构和思维方式。运用超媒体技术设计教学课件系统，以资源共享为基础，可以灵活的编制教学内容，可在教学过程中进行动态的流程选择。     

Collaborative learning using service-oriented architecture: A framework design

Collaborative learning serves as an important part of e-learning, increasing interactivity and accessibility to various learning resources either synchronously or asynchronously among users. Distributed interactivity through Web services thus forms the focus of this paper. The paper reviews related work on service-oriented architecture (SOA), distributed infrastructure, business process management (BPM) and highlights the need to integrate SOA technologies for meaningful and interactive collaborative learning processes. The significance of the study is an SOA approach to enhance the interoperability, flexibility and reusability of e-learning content in a collaborative environment.     

Expectations and reality: Evaluating patterns of learning behaviour using audit trails

Developers of educational multimedia programs have expectations about the way in which they will be used. These expectations can be broadly categorised as either functional (primarily related to the interface) or educational (related to learning designs, processes and outcomes). However, student users will not always engage with educational multimedia in the ways developers envisage and the adoption of a particular learning design, however well implemented, does not guarantee particular learning processes or outcomes. We investigated the relationship between intended and actual user behaviour by analysing detailed electronic records of user activities (audit trails) within a multimedia program in which medical students adopt the role of a doctor in a simulated clinical interview. Audit trails of 294 users across three years were analysed, focussing on two critical learning activities (interviewing and note taking). Cluster and χ² analyses revealed four distinct types of users: ‘confused or strategic’ (12.9%), ‘disengaged’ (40.8%), ‘expected’ (26.5%) and ‘diligent’ (19.7%). Our work in the future will focus on using audit trails in investigations of students learning processes and outcomes in educational multimedia environments.     

Fusion: a system for business users to manage program variability

In order to make software components more flexible and reusable, it is desirable to provide business users with facilities to assemble and control them without their needing programming knowledge. This paper describes a fully functional prototype middleware system where variability is externalized so that core applications need not be altered for anticipated changes. In this system, application behavior modification is fast and easy, making this middleware suitable for frequently changing programs.     

Assessing process in CSCL: An ontological approach

Educational technology innovations enable students to collaborate in online educational tasks, across individual, institutional, and national boundaries. However, online interactions across these boundaries are seldom transparent to each other. As a result, students are not motivated to share their best learning practices. Also, there is no singular basis on which one can compare learning practices of multiple students. In addressing these problems, we offer a solution that encourages students to record and share their learning interactions using our ontology-oriented theory-centric software tool. In doing so, students not only observe the products of their learning but also the process of how they learnt. These unique and computationally formal recordings of learning interactions not only allow educators to observe how learners learn, but also provide opportunities for learners to reflect on their understanding of meta-cognitive processes that they employed or neglected in their learning. Further, these recordings feed our software system to autonomously analyze students’ learning behaviour and to actively promote self- and co-regulation among learners. This article presents the need for such a system, the architecture of the system, and concludes with key experimental observations from software prototypes.     

A case study-based investigation of students’ experiences with social software tools

The term “social software” covers a range of tools which allow users to interact and share data with other users, primarily via the web. Blogs, wikis, podcasts and social networking websites are some of the tools that are being used in educational, social and business contexts. We have examined the use of social software in the UK further and higher education to collect evidence of the effective use of social software in student learning and engagement. We applied case study methodology involving educators and students from 26 initiatives. In this paper, we focus on the student experience: educational goals of using social software; benefits to the students; and the challenges they experience. Our investigations have shown that social software supports a variety of ways of learning: sharing of resources; collaborative learning; problem-based and inquiry-based learning; and reflective learning. Students gain transferable skills of team working, negotiation, communication and managing digital identities. Although these tools enhance a student's sense of community, the need to share and collaborate brings in additional responsibility and workload, which some students find inflexible and “forced”. Our findings show that students have concerns about usability, privacy and the public nature of social software tools for academic activities.     

The effect of previous experience with information and communication technologies on performance in a Web-based learning program

The purpose of the present study was to analyze the influence of previous experience with information and communication technology (ICT) tools on performance in a Web-based course. Online activity was logged. Specifically, total activities carried out and five online activity measures were computed. One hundred and twenty university undergraduates participated in a Web-based course designed to train personnel trainers to apply ICT in training processes. Before starting the study, participants filled out a questionnaire designed to assess their frequency using ICT tools. At the end of the study, participants were asked to complete a questionnaire in order to collect information about their learning experience and their assessment of the virtual environment. Results suggest that previous experience significantly influences how people organize their online activities, but not the quantity of work carried out. Participants with more experience in the use of Internet tools, organize their work in the virtual classroom using less time and visiting fewer pages in each session. Previous experience did not influence the assessment of the virtual classroom as a training tool, since participants with both high and low previous experience gave extremely positive feedback on their Web-based learning experience.     

Caterpillar: A business process execution engine on the Ethereum blockchain

Blockchain platforms, such as Ethereum, allow a set of actors to maintain a ledger of transactions without relying on a central authority and to deploy programs, called smart contracts, that are executed whenever certain transactions occur. These features can be used as basic building blocks for executing collaborative business processes between mutually untrusting parties. However, implementing business processes using the low-level primitives provided by blockchain platforms is cumbersome and error-prone. In contrast, established business process management systems (BPMSs), such as those based on the standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), provide convenient abstractions for rapid development of process-oriented applications. This article demonstrates how to combine the advantages of a BPMS with those of a blockchain platform. The article introduces a blockchain-based BPMN execution engine, named Caterpillar. Like any BPMN execution engine, Caterpillar supports the creation of instances of a process model and allows users to monitor the state of process instances and to execute tasks thereof. The specificity of Caterpillar is that the state of each process instance is maintained on the (Ethereum) blockchain and the workflow routing is performed by smart contracts generated by a BPMN-to-Solidity compiler. The Caterpillar compiler supports a large array of BPMN constructs, including subprocesses, multiple-instance activities, and event handlers. The paper describes the architecture of Caterpillar and the interfaces it provides to support the monitoring of process instances, the allocation and execution of work items, and the execution of service tasks.     

Web-based collaborative inquiry learning

Abstract This study proposes a web-based collaborative inquiry learning system. This system uses the World-wide web (WWW) as a source of knowledge exploration, and provides exploratory problems to guide students to think and explore. A concept map is used as a tool of anchoring and representing knowledge during inquiry process. In the process of learning, learners are allowed to exchange the evidence they have collected, their personal opinions, and the concept maps that they have built. In order to effectively integrate the inquiry learning, collaborative learning, and concept map in the system, this study proposes a collaborative inquiry learning model and related learning activities. Two studies were constructed based on the collaborative inquiry learning model to investigate students' learning processes in the collaborative inquiry learning on the web.     

vSocial: a cloud-based system for social virtual reality learning environment applications in special education

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are spaces designed to educate student groups remotely via online platforms. Although traditional VLEs have shown promise in educating students, they offer limited immersion that overall diminishes learning effectiveness. In this paper, we describe vSocial, a cloud-based virtual reality learning environment (VRLE) system that can be deployed over high-speed networks using the High Fidelity “social VR” platform. vSocial provides flexible control of group learning content and compliance with established VLE standards with improved immersive user experience for both instructor(s) and students. For our vSocial development, we build upon the use case of an existing special education VLE viz., iSocial that trains youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder by implementing the Social Competence Intervention (SCI) curriculum. The vSocial can be used to: (a) implement multiple learning modules using wearable VR technologies, (b) integrate cognitive state sensing devices, and (c) organize learning session data securely using web applications hosted on cloud resources. Our experiment results show that the VR mode of content delivery in vSocial better stimulates the generalization of lessons to the real world than non-VR lessons, and provides improved immersion when compared to an equivalent desktop version. Further, usability study results show that users can successfully use the web application features in vSocial for group learning activities with ease-of-use and consistency.

     

Extending the reach of business processes

A business process is a systematic set of activities by which an enterprise conducts its affairs. Various technologies-including pagers, cell phones, pocket PCs, instant messaging (IM), and the short message service (SMS)-have emerged that people can use to communicate even when they are on the move or far away. Many such devices support synchronous communication as well as proactively "pushing" messages to users. However, these devices have no mechanism to control or structure the information that users are exchanging, and they arc not integrated with business processes based on workplaces. To address these problems, we have designed and implemented PerCollab, a middleware system that facilitates structured collaboration between various communication devices for business processes and pushes tasks to users.     

ProcessAtlas: A scalable and extensible platform for business process analytics

In today's knowledge‐, service‐, and cloud‐based economy, an overwhelming amount of business‐related data are being generated at a fast rate daily from a wide range of sources. These data increasingly show all the typical properties of big data: wide physical distribution, diversity of formats, nonstandard data models, and independently managed and heterogeneous semantics. In this context, there is a need for new scalable and process‐aware services for querying, exploration, and analysis of process data in the enterprise because (1) process data analysis services should be capable of processing and querying large amount of data effectively and efficiently and, therefore, have to be able to scale well with the infrastructure's scale and (2) the querying services need to enable users to express their data analysis and querying needs using process‐aware abstractions rather than other lower‐level abstractions. In this paper, we introduce ProcessAtlas, ie, an extensible large‐scale process data querying and analysis platform for analyzing process data in the enterprise. The ProcessAtlas platform offers an extensible architecture by adopting a service‐based model so that new analytical services can be plugged into the platform. In ProcessAtlas, we present a domain‐specific model for representing process knowledge, ie, process‐level entities, abstractions, and the relationships among them modeled as graphs. We provide services for discovering, extracting, and analyzing process data. We provide efficient mapping and execution of process‐level queries into graph‐level queries by using scalable process query services to deal with the process data size growth and with the infrastructure's scale. We have implemented ProcessAtlas as a MapReduce‐based prototype and report on experiments performed on both synthetic and real‐world datasets.