messages and implements a limited form of automatic grading (the more messages sent, the higher the score). It also
allows an easier analysis of the amount and content of the
interactions. The application accessed the Twitter service
through its open APIs: for each learner, the list of recent
messages was requested and the content of each message was
downloaded.
How are the Web 2.0 principles previously identied re-
ected in the micro-blogging project? When planning the
project, we expected the following: the stimulation of individual creativity would motivate the students to participate
actively at times suitable for them, using several devices,
i. e., Web interface, instant messenger and SMS. The power
of the crowd and the long tail of interest of Twitter users
would allow the students to nd native speakers with similar
interests. At the same time, being able to see their fellow
students messages, would improve the sense of community.
From a technical site, the architecture of assembly and the
lightweight models would allow to construct the prototype
in a limited amount of time.
Most of our expectations were conrmed and will be reported in detail in Section 4. Regarding the technical eorts
required to use the Web 2.0 as a research tool, they were
indeed low. By building on an existing and open service
(Principle architecture of assembly") we were able to offer the students a environment much more attractive than
would have been possible by implementing it from scratch.
At the same time, due to the open API, we could access all
the data required for investigating our research hypotheses.
Thanks to existing Web frameworks (lightweight models")
such as Ruby on Rails, we were able to build the download
tool in about a person month, a time that includes getting
familiar with the Rails framework.
3.2 Social Bookmarking for Learning Object
Annotation
Authoring learning resources is a time consuming and dif-cult task. In this project, we focused on the question how
lecturers with no or little knowledge of the technical details
of learning resources and metadata standards can be supported while collecting content for their courses. Firstly, to
be accepted by the users, this activity needs to integrate
in their usual work-
ow, without imposing additional load.
Secondly, student research assistants should be able contribute to the collected resources, too. A third constraint
was imposed by the organizational factors: any solution
needed to be integrated in the learning management system
used by the participating organization (the distant university of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, NEC).
Our solution is based on social bookmarking. Not surprisingly, we found that in their daily routine, lecturers search
the Web for resources they can use in their lectures and
mark them with bookmarks. While standard bookmarks
are stored locally and hence only available for a single user
and not reusable by other users, social bookmarking allows
storing bookmarks on a server, accessible by other users and
additionally annotated with user-dened tags. We therefore
encouraged the lecturers to use social bookmarking service
to store their bookmarks. Additionally, we instructed the
lecturers to use a mixture of user-dened and predened
tags (in contrast to purely user-dened approaches as described in [2]).
Figure 1: Part of the domain ontology used for the
lecture on data structures
For each lecture, predened tags were specied in a domain ontology that modeled the concepts and relationships
of the subject domain (a standard technique today, going
back to [40]). Part of the ontology for the lecture on data
structure is shown in Figure 1. Using the terms dened in
the ontologies, the lecturers were able to specify the concepts
a Web resource described.
In addition to the information about the domain concepts,
the lecturers were able to specify the instructional type of
a resource [37] and its diculty level. In order to minimize
the chance that tags of other users of the social bookmarking
service would interfere with our predened tags, we prexed
the tags with our own character sequence. All in all, we used
the following tags (with a dierent prex):
sjtu:type:TYPE, where TYPE is one of definition,
example, exercise, elaboration and introduction.
sjtu:kp:CONCEPTID, where CONCEPTID is the identier
of a concept as dened in the domain ontology.
sjtu:difficulty:VALUE, where VALUE is one of very_
easy, easy, medium, difficult, very_difficult.
The learning management system used by NEC employs
the above domain ontology for the organization and presentation of learning resources. For each concept, the learning
management system presents the available resources on a
dynamically generated Web page. The resources can be especially authored for the learning management system, but
also include resources that were bookmarked in the social
bookmarking service. The learning management system retrieves these resources by using the API provided by social bookmarking service. This simple mechanism allows
the learning management system to include resources found
in the Web.
This work is comparable to previous research on open corpus hypermedia [20]. The basic principle is the same: a domain description is linked with resources that describe the
concepts of the domain. This domain knowledge is then
exploited by the learning management system, which distinguishes our work from usages of social bookmarking as
described in [2], where groups of lectures use a joint collection of bookmarks.
One lecturer who used the prototyped appreciated the
ease of adding and collecting additional resources so much
that she used it in an unexpected way by asking her students
hal-00588757, version 1 - 10 May 2011
to add resources. Her course, computer networks", was a
small course attended by 20 students. Despite the enthusiasm of the lecturer, students made little use of the tool,
only a total of eight resources were added. The lecturer attributed the limited participation to the fact that the course
content followed a comprehensive textbook and there was no
real need for additional resources. Our hypothesis is that in
a course without good textbooks, the degree of participation
will increase. The lecturer will test this hypothesis in a new
lecture.
The important point of this project for this paper is the
eort spent in realizing the prototype: the implementation
was almost trivial. For the basic functionality, we used the
service del.icio.us that allows access via API. On the learning management system side, we only had to add code that
performed the lookup of the additional resources (including
a cache in order to minimize load) and dynamically added
the links to the resources. By building on the functionality
available in the Web 2.0, we were able to assemble a prototype in very little time. Due to the popularity of the tool, it
is now reimplemented within the NEC learning management
system, with the specic functionality identied as relevant
by the lecturers (e. g., extended by a grading system).
The next session summarizes the lessons we learned from
using Web 2.0 services for rapid prototyping of technologyenhanced learning applications.
4. LESSONS LEARNED
The two examples of micro-blogging and social bookmarking allowed us to gain practical experience regarding the
usage of Web 2.0 for learning. We will rst discuss the two
examples from the viewpoint of the analysis of Web 2.0 principles applications for learning done in the rst part of this
paper. Then, we elaborate on the suitability for rapid prototyping of technology-enhanced learning applications (as
described the second part of this paper).
4.1 Learning in the Web 2.0
Our experiments have shown Web 2.0 services indeed stimulate active participation (principle individual creativity").
Participation in the micro-blogging service was high and
continues until four months after the lecture has nished.
Usability of the services was judged as being rather good.
About 75% of the microblogging users reported that registration and usage of the service was easy. This supports our
claim that using existing Web 2.0 services can hold advantages since the burden of designing an easy to use interface
is taken from the researcher.
An analysis of a questionnaire (83 participants) showed
that three quarter of the students liked to use the service;
about 50% used it at least once a day or more often. Only 5%
disagreed to the statement that the usage of the microblogging service improved the overall atmosphere of the course,
and again only 5% did not nd that the microblogging improved the sense of community. 94% had the impression
that they were able to improve their English.
The social dimension (power of the crowd" and long
tail") was important, both within the course and outside.
Within the lecture, we found that the students encouraged
each other to participate: in some weeks they held competitions" who contributes the most. Some of the micro-blogging
messages show that students had conversations among each
other, thus communication was not only one-way. As a