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Expression Widgets
for Learning Environments0.1.1by Marcio GalliTaboca Labs and FriendsThis document proposes ideas that enhances the current Web browsing experienceand allows users to participate collaboratively to build open learning resources. In thescope of this document, the term
learning session
relates to a synchronous learningevent that has a team of participants involved for a period of time. Examples of learning sessions can be a lecture, student tests, discussions, and more. The term
expression widgets
refers to browser enhancement tools that allows participants tocreate data content that can be shared and re-purposed into online documents thatsupports the said learning session.
Motivation
This section offers a brief overview about a few areas that are considered the mainmotivation points in this proposal:
Web Quests
The Web Quest [1] model proposes that the web itself can be used as aresource of experiences that supports inquiry-oriented tasks. This modelsuggests the use of real-life online data as a means to enhance engagement anddiscussions among students. The wide aspect of the web has the value of theunexpected and ever changing real-life data but it also presents potentialchallenges as a participant could loose its focus. To help with this challenge, thismodel proposes that guidelines can exist as part of a web quest. These can varyfrom using tools, such as a video conference applications, or guideline requestssuch as a list of pre-determined Web links to follow. These parameters are usedto support participants to achieve the goals associated with the tasks. In asimilar analysis, the Mozilla Design Challenge project can be considered anexample of quests that uses certain parameters to motivate developers to getinvolved.
Open Educational Content
The Open Textbook project [2] identifies barriers at educational institutions andthe need to raise awareness and knowledge about open educational resources.The project suggests that the strong preference of publisher's textbooks isassociated with assumptions that instructors prefers to adopt these materials.The existing culture and dependencies with traditional publishing are keychallenges for open education. In this scenario, this project proposes a morenatural way in which users can participate and express their input as part of ongoing leaning events. The idea is to get participants more involved in theprocess of content creation without a strict authoring structure that can beconfused or compared with traditional textbooks - such as processes thatrequires heavy writing. Instead, it is proposed that the content creation can bemore like a free form browsing experience and feels like the action of referencing and re-purposing Web content. The more users are involved incontent creation, more likely they are to accept the general use of openeducational resources in future learning conditions.
 
Social-aware Web 2.0
At educational institutions, the general use of e-learning systems may raisesecurity questions related to information security governance [3]. Governanceaspects may demand complex maintenance solutions to keep e-leaningecosystems up to date. Social Web 2.0 apps can fill certain gaps when learningsystems are not as up-to-date and when groups of individuals wants to takeadvantage of emerging social systems in team-driven projects.As an example, a study about an online tutoring using Second Life [4], showsthat a community of learners used wiki systems as a resource to support theircommunication during the course. This model suggests cases where teams candecide to use external systems that can affect the interaction dynamics beyondthe initial definitions given by a learning session or framework, specifically if theinitially defined learning framework defines complex rules.This aspect motivated the proposition to use wiki as the remote repositorieswhere learning resources are created. The ideis is to keep the aspect whereusers can build together and create rich learning resources in a team-basedapproach - the server system should not add too many rules and at the sametime should allow social conventions.
Expression Widgets with JetPacks
In the scope of this project, a learning session is a synchronous event such as alecture of 1-2 hours given by a tutor. While some of the ideas can be used forasynchronous sessions, such as an assignment task that lasts one week, thesynchronous scenario seems to be a good candidate for an implementation that couldgo along with a future evaluation test program in real classes. The basic scenario is atraditional lecture with a number of learners following notes from a tutor. It isassumed that the participants are also using laptops or other types of devices so theycan directly use a Firefox browser that has a JetPack infra-structure pre-installed.An expression widget is defined as a JetPack-based application that lets participants touse Web content and applications as resources to create and repurpose Web data astheir expression notes, and share into a repository that represents the leaningsession. As mentioned earlier, the remote repository should not enforce too manyrules. Similarly to the way that a wiki page works, the repository should supportparticipants to create social conventions. In some cases the wiki can start empty whilein other scenarios the learners may access a repository that has prior information.The infra-structure provided by Jetpack supports the direction of a free form and easyto use browsing/editing experience that allows manipulation over Web-based content.As an example, a student could write in a hand book and easily put arrows to connectobjects of information previously written. The expression widgets could function in asimilar way and support participants to create Web content, or to manipulate of elements from existing Web sites or applications, or elements previously shared in thewiki repository. The following table enumerates the main capacities for expressionwidgets:CapacityDescriptionExamples, Comments
 
Web Content - Re-purposeWidget code may offerinterface elements thatallow participants to re-purpose existing webcontent from pages. Inthis case, re-purposingweb content means thatuser can identify sectionelements that are part of pages, and the systemshould create a set of meta-data that refers tothis section elements,and also maintainsreferences and variouspossible views associatedwith the content focussection - original pageURL, text information if any, screenshot for thecontent area, associatedtags, and more.* possible to getanything from the Web;* examples are: takescreenshot, take textfrom pages, takenumbers from pages,takes mathematicalexpression from pages,takes SVG elements frompages, and more;Web Content - CreateWidgets to allowparticipants to simplecreate new content notexactly tied to existingpages on the web.* local app can havegood performance;* remote input, over thewiki, can also carryreference to the JP-based script; Maybe oneapproach is to keepsome sort of URIresolution scheme wherea JetPack script can beuniquely identified on theweb from any page;* as an example, picturea canvas-based drawing;Conventions - ShareGeneral idea is to haveparticipant createdcontent to be shared in away that is friendly withthe general posting rulesof a wiki repositories andyet offers a dynamicinteraction so users canbuild associationsbetween theirexpressions;Example in wiki learningsession document:== User A Expressions==* [01:00] {text: "hello"}== User B Expression==
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