Learning SWOT

We tried yesterday with our students in the eLearning course to come up with a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)-Matrix for our educational system.




The results of this interactive session are available below:

Rethinking Education Videos

In the eLearning course that we're offering in this semester at RWTH Aachen, we asked our students to produce a short video on how they do see the future of education using new technologies. Some of the videos are now available on YouTube tagged with rwth_elearn11.

Here is an example:

Model-driven mashup personal learning environments

The paper "Model-driven mashup personal learning environments" has been published in the Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (Vol. 3, No. 1). The paper can be downloaded here.

Abstract:

Mashups have become the driving force behind the development of personal learning environments (PLEs). Creating mashups in an ad hoc manner is, however, for end users with little or no programming background not an easy task. Various tools and platforms have been built in an attempt to support mashup creation. These platforms, however, are still considered complex and do not address crucial challenges in mashup development today, such as scalability, interoperability, reuse, and automatic service invocation and mediation. In this paper, we leverage the possibility to use the concept of model-driven mashup development (MDMD) as an approach that can drastically tackle the aforementioned issues and drive the rapid and user-friendly creation of mashups. We then present the conceptual and technical details of PLEF-Ext as a flexible framework for end-user, model-driven development (MDD) of mashup PLEs.

Rethinking Education

Via Stephen Downes.

A video by Michael Wesch on Rethinking Education...

WebTech1011

We offered a Web Technologies course in the past semester. We opted this time for a more self-organized learning event by giving our students more control over the whole learning experience. The students took an active role in the organization and assessment of the course. They gave talks on different emerging Web technologies and worked on their own projects using their preferred technologies. They also evaluated each other talks and project presentations. The result was quite impressive.
To be honest I learned much in this course. You can find slides of the technologies presented in course on Slideshare. Some videos of the developed projects are available on YouTube, tagged with webtech1011.

Below are the topics covered in this course:
- Web Standards
- Server-side Technologies (PHP, ASP.NET, JSP/Servlets, Symfony, Struts, Rails)
- Client-side Technologies (RIA, Flash, JavaFX, Silverlight, AJAX, JQuery, Dojo, GWT)
- Web Services (SOA, REST/SOAP, Web APIs, Mashups)
- Emerging Technologies (Mobile Web, Android, iOS, Augmented Reality, Cloud Computing, Web Mining, Recommender Systems)

It's not that everything went as expected. We got several suggestions for improvement that we will definitely take into consideration in the next iterations of the course.