The paper presents a discussion on different ways of interaction and collaboration among users of web applications oriented to learning. We discuss whether the recent "social" applications, such as Facebook™ or MySpace™, follow a truly "collaborative" approach, very common after of the advent of Web 2.0, or a more simply "participatory" one. We will argue that virtual communities, if specifically adapted to life-long learning settings and not generalized to social networks, are more suitable for educational purposes, thus allowing a better use of social network tools like blogs, wikis etc.
The work presents our experience as designers, developers and administrators of an e-Learning system (LMS) used by the Faculty of Economics of the University of Trento. The system started its work in the late 90s and was then rewritten under the increasing need of the users to promote new more collaboration-oriented forms of teaching / learning, compared to traditional ones. Currently we are managing the evolution of the system in the direction to provide a better support for cooperative activities among users. In the work we will describe the evolution of this system, showing why the cooperation in an educational environment requires coherent architectural choices.
Abstract. The paper presents the analysis of changes introduced in learning environments through a different approach respect to traditional e-learning. In our experience, the introduction of the metaphor of "virtual community" changed not only the relationship between people involved in educational activities (teachers, students, tutors, administrative staff etc.), but also the technical approach to services supplied by the e-learning platform. Thanks to the "community" approach, all the services of a traditional e-learning system (CBT, LMS, LCMS, etc.) must be re-designed, thus allowing to extend the potentialities of services delivered to the audience. The introduction of the "community" concept allow the e-learning platform a greater flexibility: concepts like "role", "rights", "duties"; "hierarchy", "participant", typical of a community system, allow to use e-learning services in different contexts that help a greater integration between educational services and the information system of the institution. We therefore think that e-learning should evolve (at least) towards "co-learning", meaning not only "collaborative-learning", but (more realistically) "community-learning", i.e., using virtual communities to learn. IntroductionThe subject of this work is the conceptual structure of the architecture of elearning systems when these are employed in complex training activities. We will conduct our research on the basis of our experience in developing an e-learning system that is, at the moment, undergoing for the third time a complete revision with the aim of adjusting it to new tasks and scenarios. Drawn from examples taken from the development of these platforms, we will discuss the effects of metaphors used in e-learning systems, their architecture, the evolution of e-learning processes from a the Knowledge Society; Michael Kendall and Brian Samways; (Boston: Springer), pp. 329-338.learning contexts [11] or the integration between the e-learning worlds and the organizational information system. Our first work (On Line Courses -1998) had been created around the metaphor of "course". Each teaching course carried out by a training institution had been coupled to an "e_course". That is to say, the platform enabled us to define abstract structures called just that "e_courses", and to link them to real structures (the courses carried out by a training institution). An e_course enabled its three actors (student, tutor and teacher) to access a certain number of communication services (synchronous and asynchronous), creating a virtual space suitable for forms of blended teaching. The three actors had freedom of action in the different and rigid communication services. This system had been for some years the e-learning platform of some of the Institutes of our University and of some of the training environments outside it. The experience gained from On Line Courses has shown three aspects that have conditioned the evolution of our present platform.An e-Learning system used in a real training context cannot act like an...
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