A cloud-based learning environment for developing student reflection abilities

Students learn new knowledge effectively through relevant reflection. Reflection affects how students interact with learning materials. Studies have found that good reflection abilities allow students to attain better learning motivation, comprehension, and performance. Thus, it is important to help students develop and strengthen their reflection abilities as this can enable them to engage learning materials in a meaningful manner. Face-to-face dialectical conversations are often used by instructors to facilitate student reflection. However, such conventional reflection methods are usually only usable in classroom environments, and could not be adopted for distance learning or after class. Cloud computing could be used to solve this issue. Instructor guidance and prompting for initiating reflection could be seamlessly delivered to the students’ digital devices via cloud services. Thus, instructors would be able to facilitate student reflective activities even when outside the classroom. To achieve this objective, this study proposed a cloud-based reflective learning environment to assist instructors and students in developing and strengthening reflection ability during and after actual class sessions. An additional experiment was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in an industrial course. Results show that the learning environment developed by this study is able to effectively facilitate student reflection abilities and enhance their learning motivation.     

Learning analytics tasks as services in smart classrooms

A smart classroom integrates the different components in a traditional classroom, by using different technologies as artificial intelligence, ubiquitous, and cloud paradigms, among others, in order to improve the learning process. On the other hand, the learning analytics tasks are a set of tools that can be used to collect and analyze the data accumulated in a smart classroom. In this paper, we propose the definition of the learning analytics tasks as services, which can be invoked by the components of a smart classroom. We describe how to combine the cloud and multi-agent paradigms in a smart classroom, in order to provide academic services to the intelligent and non-intelligent agents in the smart classroom, to adapt and respond to the teaching and learning requirements of students. Additionally, we define a set of learning analytics tasks as services, which defines a knowledge feedback loop for the smart classroom, in order to improve the learning process in it, and we explain how they can be invoked and consumed by the agents in a smart classroom.     

ASM-based formal design of an adaptivity component for a Cloud system

The request of formal methods for the specification and analysis of distributed systems is nowadays increasing, especially when considering the development of Cloud systems and Web applications. This is due to the fact that modeling languages currently used in these areas have informal definitions and ambiguous semantics, and therefore their use may be unreliable. Thanks to their mathematical foundation, formal methods can guarantee rigorous system design, leading to precise models where requirements can be validated and properties can be assured, already at the early stages of the system development. In this paper, we present a rigorous engineering process for distributed systems, based on the Abstract State Machines (ASM) formal method. We rely on the foundational notions of ASM ground model and model refinement to obtain a precise model for a client-server application for Cloud systems. This application has been proposed to tackle the problem of making Cloud services usable to different end-devices by adapting on-the-fly the content coming from the Cloud to the different devices contexts. The ASM-based modeling process is supported by a number of validation and verification activities that have been exploited on the component under development to guarantee consistency, correctness, and reliability properties.     

Informal learning recognition through a cloud ecosystem

Learning and teaching processes, like all human activities, can be mediated through the use of tools. Information and communication technologies are now widespread within education. Their use in the daily life of teachers and learners affords engagement with educational activities at any place and time and not necessarily linked to an institution or a certificate. In the absence of formal certification, learning under these circumstances is known as informal learning. Despite the lack of certification, learning with technology in this way presents opportunities to gather information about and present new ways of exploiting an individual’s learning. Cloud technologies provide ways to achieve this through new architectures, methodologies, and workflows that facilitate semantic tagging, recognition, and acknowledgment of informal learning activities. The transparency and accessibility of cloud services mean that institutions and learners can exploit existing knowledge to their mutual benefit. The TRAILER project facilitates this aim by providing a technological framework using cloud services, a workflow, and a methodology. The services facilitate the exchange of information and knowledge associated with informal learning activities ranging from the use of social software through widgets, computer gaming, and remote laboratory experiments. Data from these activities are shared among institutions, learners, and workers. The project demonstrates the possibility of gathering information related to informal learning activities independently of the context or tools used to carry them out.     

Multimedia application to support distance learning and other social interactions in real-time

Supporting social interactions, in distance learning situations for example, with modern technology is very difficult. Generally Internet, networked PC, document handling and communication services and applications are not designed from a multiple user perspective but to support a one-person-one-device (or tool) interaction. This approach creates problems for supporting awareness of, and communication with other people while simultaneously working on documents. Such simultaneous activities have been identified as essential by CSCW and CHI studies, where users are reported to move promiscuously between media and devices, and combine applications and media intuitively, while maintaining awareness of others and their activities. In this paper, we present a scalable architecture for handling multiple media (Web, VR, video, audio, text and documents) and devices where awareness of others/activities is provided both inside each, and across all, media.     

EMUSIM: an integrated emulation and simulation environment for modeling,evaluation, and validation of performance of Cloud computing applications

Cloud computing allows the deployment and delivery of application services for users worldwide. Software as a Service providers with limited upfront budget can take advantage of Cloud computing and lease the required capacity in a pay‐as‐you‐go basis, which also enables flexible and dynamic resource allocation according to service demand. One key challenge potential Cloud customers have before renting resources is to know how their services will behave in a set of resources and the costs involved when growing and shrinking their resource pool. Most of the studies in this area rely on simulation‐based experiments, which consider simplified modeling of applications and computing environment. In order to better predict service's behavior on Cloud platforms, we developed an integrated architecture that is based on both simulation and emulation. The proposed architecture, named EMUSIM, automatically extracts information from application behavior via emulation and then uses this information to generate the corresponding simulation model. We performed experiments using an image processing application as a case study and found that EMUSIM was able to accurately model such application via emulation and use the model to supply information about its potential performance in a Cloud provider. We also discuss our experience using EMUSIM for deploying applications in a real public Cloud provider. EMUSIM is based on an open source software stack and therefore it can be extended for analysis behavior of several other applications. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于“云计算”环境的翻转课堂学习探究

云计算技术不止在商业领域被广泛应用,因为其灵活性和普及性,也广泛在教学领域发挥其功能。翻转课堂是一种以学生为主体的学习方式,学生由被动接受变为主动学习。为了提高学生的学习效率,使学习不再是填鸭式的被动学习,将云计算与翻转课堂相结合,主旨是把强大的云平台和主动学习的翻转课堂相结合,使学生的学习环境和学习思维发生根本性的转变,充分调动学生学习的积极性,也可使得学生对知识的吸收更深入和扎实。     

Anatomy of a mobilized lesson: Learning my way

With the mass adoption of mobile computing devices by the current school generation, significant opportunities have emerged for genuinely supporting differentiated and personalized learning experiences through mobile devices. In our school-based research work in introducing mobilized curricula to a class, we observe one compelling mobilized lesson that exploits the affordances of mobile learning to provide multiple learning pathways for elementary grade (primary) 2 students. Through the lesson, students move beyond classroom activities that merely mimic what the teacher says and does in the classroom, and yet they still learn in personally meaningful ways. In deconstructing the lesson, we provide an in-depth analysis of how the affordances of mobile computing enable personalized learning from four facets: (a) allowing multiple entry points and learning pathways, (b) supporting multi-modality, (c) enabling student improvisation in situ, and (d) supporting the sharing and creation of student artifacts on the move. A key property of mobile technology that enables these affordances lies with the small form factor and the lightweightness of these devices which make them non-obtrusive in the learning spaces of the student. This article makes a contribution on the design aspects of mobilized lessons, namely, what the affordances of mobile technologies can enable.     

Anatomy of a mobilized lesson: Learning my way

With the mass adoption of mobile computing devices by the current school generation, significant opportunities have emerged for genuinely supporting differentiated and personalized learning experiences through mobile devices. In our school-based research work in introducing mobilized curricula to a class, we observe one compelling mobilized lesson that exploits the affordances of mobile learning to provide multiple learning pathways for elementary grade (primary) 2 students. Through the lesson, students move beyond classroom activities that merely mimic what the teacher says and does in the classroom, and yet they still learn in personally meaningful ways. In deconstructing the lesson, we provide an in-depth analysis of how the affordances of mobile computing enable personalized learning from four facets: (a) allowing multiple entry points and learning pathways, (b) supporting multi-modality, (c) enabling student improvisation in situ, and (d) supporting the sharing and creation of student artifacts on the move. A key property of mobile technology that enables these affordances lies with the small form factor and the lightweightness of these devices which make them non-obtrusive in the learning spaces of the student. This article makes a contribution on the design aspects of mobilized lessons, namely, what the affordances of mobile technologies can enable.     

A cloud computing platform for ERP applications

Cloud computing enables many applications of Web services and rekindles the interest of providing ERP services via the Internet. It has the potentials to reshape the way IT services are consumed. Recent research indicates that ERP delivered thru SaaS will outperform the traditional IT offers. However, distributing a service compared to distributing a product is more complicated because of the immateriality, the integration and the one-shot-principle referring to services. This paper defines a CloudERP platform on which enterprise customers can select web services and customize a unique ERP system to meet their specific needs. The CloudERP aims to provide enterprise users with the flexibility of renting an entire ERP service through multiple vendors. This paper also addresses the challenge of composing web services and proposes a web-based solution for automating the ERP service customization process. The proposed service composition method builds on the genetic algorithm concept and incorporates with knowledge of web services extracted from the web service platform with the rough set theory. A system prototype was built on the Google App Engine platform to verify the proposed composition process. Based on experimental results from running the prototype, the composition method works effectively and has great potential for supporting a fully functional CloudERP platform.     

A framework for establishing trust in the Cloud

Cloud infrastructure is expected to be able to support Internet scale critical applications (e.g. hospital systems and smart grid systems). Critical infrastructure services and organizations alike will not outsource their critical applications to a public Cloud without strong assurances that their requirements will be enforced. Central to this concern is that the user should be provided with evidence of the trustworthiness of the elements of the Cloud without getting involved into infrastructure details. In addition, users should be able to control their outsourced data at public Clouds. Establishing Cloud’s trust model is important but the Cloud’s infrastructure complexity and dynamism makes it difficult to address. This paper focuses on an important angle in this direction. We start by identifying the related challenges for establishing trust in the Cloud, and then propose a foundation framework which can help in addressing the identified challenges. Our focus is on IaaS Cloud type and on organizations as Cloud users.     

CloudSim: a toolkit for modeling and simulation of cloud computing environments and evaluation of resource provisioning algorithms

Cloud computing is a recent advancement wherein IT infrastructure and applications are provided as ‘services’ to end‐users under a usage‐based payment model. It can leverage virtualized services even on the fly based on requirements (workload patterns and QoS) varying with time. The application services hosted under Cloud computing model have complex provisioning, composition, configuration, and deployment requirements. Evaluating the performance of Cloud provisioning policies, application workload models, and resources performance models in a repeatable manner under varying system and user configurations and requirements is difficult to achieve. To overcome this challenge, we propose CloudSim: an extensible simulation toolkit that enables modeling and simulation of Cloud computing systems and application provisioning environments. The CloudSim toolkit supports both system and behavior modeling of Cloud system components such as data centers, virtual machines (VMs) and resource provisioning policies. It implements generic application provisioning techniques that can be extended with ease and limited effort. Currently, it supports modeling and simulation of Cloud computing environments consisting of both single and inter‐networked clouds (federation of clouds). Moreover, it exposes custom interfaces for implementing policies and provisioning techniques for allocation of VMs under inter‐networked Cloud computing scenarios. Several researchers from organizations, such as HP Labs in U.S.A., are using CloudSim in their investigation on Cloud resource provisioning and energy‐efficient management of data center resources. The usefulness of CloudSim is demonstrated by a case study involving dynamic provisioning of application services in the hybrid federated clouds environment. The result of this case study proves that the federated Cloud computing model significantly improves the application QoS requirements under fluctuating resource and service demand patterns. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于SOA的云计算框架模型的研究与实现

云计算是一种能够向各种互联网应用提供硬件服务、基础架构服务、平台服务、软件服务、存储服务的系统,而SOA是一个组件模型,它将依靠各服务之间定义良好的接口和契约的应用程序联系起来。将云计算与SOA紧密地结合起来,形成一种基于SOA的云计算框架模型。实验证明,该模型简单、实用,充分体现了云计算与面向服务的架构的优势。     

泛在计算安全综述

依靠机器学习,传统产业的数字化转型带来了海量数据增长,而产品服务的智能化提升则刺激了算力需求. 云计算的灵活资源调配可以为资源有限的企业和用户提供便宜便捷的外包计算服务,实现机器学习的模型训练和模型托管,加快产品和服务的智能化建设,促进数字经济增长. 然而,数据和模型外包伴随控制权转移,可能带来数据泄露风险和计算安全问题. 近年来,机器学习的外包安全问题受到越来越多研究者的关注,并取得了一些显著成果. 通过对2018—2022年这5年国内外机器学习安全外包研究工作调研,首先对现有主流的外包模型进行分类和特征归纳,依据任务阶段将外包模型划分为模型训练和模型托管模式,以及依据云服务商数量将外包模式划分为单云模式和多云模式. 其次重点从逻辑回归、朴素贝叶斯分类、支持向量机、决策树和神经网络等典型机器学习算法角度对机器学习安全外包计算相关研究进展进行了深入阐述和分析. 最后从不同角度分析和讨论了目前机器学习安全外包研究存在的不足,并展望未来面临的挑战和机遇.

     

Recent development in multimedia e-learning technologies

Multimedia and networking technologies have significantly impacted on our daily activities, particularly in terms of how we learn. Nowadays, classroom teaching no longer simply relies on chalk and blackboard as the prime medium for course dissemination. E-learning technologies have made it possible to provide a virtual classroom environment on the Web through supporting teacher-student and student-student communications, course material distribution as well as online student assessments. They provide students with more control over their learning schedule and pace. On top of this, multimedia technologies further offer students different forms of media to match their learning styles, leading to enhancements of their learning effectiveness. This extended introduction discusses the latest e-learning specific multimedia technologies, their research challenges and future trends from both pedagogical and technological perspectives. We also summarize the papers included in this special issue.     

How to adapt applications for the Cloud environment

The migration of existing applications to the Cloud requires adapting them to a new computing paradigm. Existing works have focused on migrating the whole application stack by means of virtualization and deployment on the Cloud, delegating the required adaptation effort to the level of resource management. With the proliferation of Cloud services allowing for more flexibility and better control over the application migration, the migration of individual application layers, or even individual architectural components to the Cloud, becomes possible. Towards this goal, in this work we focus on the challenges and solutions for each layer when migrating different parts of the application to the Cloud. We categorize different migration types and identify the potential impact and adaptation needs for each of these types on the application layers based on an exhaustive survey of the State of the Art. We also investigate various cross-cutting concerns that need to be considered for the migration of the application, and position them with respect to the identified migration types. Finally, we present some of the open research issues in the field and position our future work targeting these research questions.     

DRM cloud framework to support heterogeneous digital rights management systems

The DRM(digital rights management) techniques have been rapidly developed to protect the digital media contents. The growth of smart device and cloud computing makes the environment in which various services can be provided anywhere and anytime, so the DRM technologies have to react to such changes. From this aspect, we previously proposed the architecture of DRM-as-a-Service that provides various functionalities of DRM as some services on the cloud environment, and we referred to it as the DRM Cloud. In this paper, we define a reference model of DRM Cloud to represent some DRM functions that are provided by the DRM Cloud, and several service scenarios are proposed on the DRM Cloud. Also we simulate the DRM Cloud on the testbed and then discuss some security issues and how to handle the interoperability in the DRM Cloud. We conclude that the DRM Cloud allows the content consumers to use many contents with various smart devices, also let the DRM developers and the content service providers reduce the costs of development and business.     

融合云课堂的“机械CAD 基础”课程教学改革研究

“机械CAD 基础”是很多工科专业需要学习的课程,其实践性强,多在计算机教室 进行授课。随着“互联网+”技术在高校课程教学中的应用,线上教学的优势逐渐显现,“机械CAD 基础”课程的特点适合线上与线下相结合的教学模式。为此,在校“石大云课堂”线上教学平台建 设了“机械CAD 基础”课程网站,并进行了教学实践,充分发挥了云课堂的课程资源建设、教学 活动设计、互动性学习、学习数据统计、大数据反馈等功能,构建了新型的云课堂及线下教学 相融合的教学模式,对目前“互联网+”在高校教学中的运用提供了有益的探索和实践。     

Risky business or sharing the load? - Social flow in collaborative mobile learning

Mobile learning has been built upon the premise that we can transform traditional classroom or computer-based learning activities into a more ubiquitous and connected form of learning. Tentative outcomes from this assertion have been witnessed in many collaborative learning activities, but few analytic observations on what triggers this collaboration have so far been made. However Social Flow, a concept framework that extends Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, may help us to partially explain the triggering mechanism of collaborative mobile learning. Our case study in this article, where learners together explore a built environment as part of a simulated security guard training programme, describes how the concept of social flow in a collaborative learning space might sketch out what triggers an optimal learning experience in collaboration and what can be additionally achieved in a collaborative learning experience. In this learning context, collaborative mobile learning might be seen to prompt more knowledge generation and extra learning tasks by fostering greater motivation than other learning environments.