No abstract

The Walden's Paths Project, as part of our philosophy of continual evaluation, seeks out user communities who may find our tool useful. However, our users, in the last few years, have reported a series of common issues and desired features. In order to support our users, we initiated a redesign of Walden's Paths to solve these problems and enable us to rapidly prototype and experiment with features and interfaces. In order to accomplish these goals, we have created a web service that handles the storage and representation of our Path data structure. This service is isolated from user interface layers, allowing multiple interface designs to be implemented on top of the same Path data structures. Our prototype interfaces also represent new areas for Paths such as collaborative work, offline presentation, and mobile computing.

The World Wide Web contains rich collections of digital materials that can be used in education and learning settings. The collaborative authoring prototype of Walden's Paths targets two groups of users: educators and learners. From the perspective of educators, the authoring tool allows educators to collaboratively build a Walden's Path by filtering and organizing web pages into an ordered linear structure for the common information needs, which can be extended, tailored and modified into a derivative path from its parent version to meet dynamic and evolving educational requirements. From the students' perspective, Walden's Paths provide a shared knowledge space that facilitates collaborative learning. Specifically, collaborative learners can annotate locally and globally on pages and share among group members, where each annotation fosters the initiation of a thread of discussion. Therefore, knowledge transfer can be achieved in the process of social interaction associated with shared annotations.

No abstract

No abstract