Cultural Heritage learners can highly benefit from ubiquitous learning approaches that connect in-classroom activities with active on-site learning opportunities. However, teachers face the problem that the current landscape of technological support for learning Cultural Heritage mostly consists of mobile applications for informal contexts, completely decoupled from curricular activities. This paper presents the results of an exploratory-sequential mixed-methods study that focuses on the feasibility, for non-technical expert teachers, of repurposing an existing mobile application in formal Cultural Heritage ubiquitous learning situations. Such feasibility is explored from the perspective of the orchestration metaphor. More specifically, we used the “5+3 aspects orchestration framework” to understand the orchestration challenges of four ubiquitous learning situations about Cultural Heritage carried out in two secondary schools. These situations involved five teachers and 139 students who used a mobile application called Casual Learn for several weeks. The results of the study suggest that, after a brief training, teachers can design, enact, and orchestrate ubiquitous learning situations that involve both in-classroom and out-classroom activities. The teachers were able to transfer to the students most of the orchestration load of out-classroom activities. The results also showed that the flow of learning artifacts and information between in- and out-classroom activities is a critical issue that needs to be addressed by developers of ubiquitous learning technological solutions.

New generations should learn about the Cultural Heritage (CH) that surrounds them to value and preserve it. Common strategies for learning CH include lectures, textbooks, and also cultural visits to CH sites. Cultural visits allow very rich learning experiences but are quite challenging to prepare and carry out. This paper presents Cultural Heritage Educational Semantic Tool (CHEST), a web application that enables teachers to identify monuments of interest and annotate them with learning tasks. The created learning tasks will be carried out by students using an existing application, named Casual Learn, that makes use of a dataset of learning tasks created from information available as Linked Open Data. CHEST overcomes an identified limitation of Casual Learn by giving the teachers the possibility of enriching the existing semantic dataset of monuments and associated learning tasks with customized content while hiding the technical complexity of Semantic Web technologies. Additionally, CHEST promotes the reusability and adaptation of learning tasks by different teachers. An early version of CHEST was used by two secondary school teachers in real-life situations to design customized tasks for their students. These tasks were then carried out by the students via Casual Learn. These teachers gave a high usability score to CHEST and were interviewed to obtain further feedback. They were keen to publish new tasks, share them with other teachers, and reuse tasks from other teachers.

This paper presents SLEek, an ontology for the context-aware recommendation of learning activities in Smart Learning Environments (SLEs). SLEek creates an actor-artifact network that is especially suitable for the context-aware recommendation of activities across spaces in formal and informal contexts. SLEek implementation reuses vocabularies from the Web of Data and is currently used in a dataset of 17K learning activities.

Learners have ubiquitous informal learning opportunities, but it is difficult to take advantage from them and relate them to their formal education. The connection of formal and informal learning is one of the aims of SLEs, but how to do it is still a question. This paper explores such connection by integrating the mobile application Casual Learn to the SLE SCARLETT and it discusses the challenges faced in such integration.

Linked Data is a methodology to publish data on the Web that facilitates the federation of data sources. Following this methodology, a huge quantity of data is being published on the Web of Data, but very little is currently consumed by educational applications. This paper proposes to overcome this situation by relating educational vocabularies to the ones already used on the Web of Data. This way, educational applications can take advantage of the data published on the Web even if such data was not published for educational purposes. As a case study, the vocabulary used by an educational tool search system, called Ontoolsearch, is related to ICT tool descriptions published by DBpedia and Factforge. Evaluation results show that 2905 tool descriptions can be retrieved from the Web of Data to be consumed by Ontoolsearch. In addition, most of these descriptions have a similar quality to the ones manually published by an educational tool expert.

The integration of existing educational computer-based tools is a current research trend aimed at increasing the range of learning situations that can be supported by most widely adopted Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). Nevertheless, due to the technological and functional heterogeneity of both tools and VLEs, there is an integration cost that must be assumed and that varies depending on several design issues. This paper identifies the issues to be tackled when designing a VLE or a tool and the effects that the different alternatives may have in the integration cost. Besides, the paper discusses the advantages and drawbacks of previous research proposals when dealing with such issues. The final goal is to understand the impact of design decisions in the chances for acceptance of the adopted integration approaches.

This paper presents the design of a new simulation environment based on the well-known ns-2 network simulator with two significant characteristics. First, it enables the possibility of running a large number of simulations even if the computational and storage resources locally available are scarce. Second, it provides a number of features in order to facilitate collaboration among students. In this way, the proposed simulation environment enables the realization of many collaborative learning scenarios with pedagogical interest for computer networks education.

CSCL systems can benefit from using a grid, since it offers a common infrastructure allowing an extended pool of resources that can provide supercomputing capabilities as well as specific hardware resources. Adopting a service oriented architecture such as OGSA can further benefit CSCL systems, enabling increased flexibility to adapt and reuse learning software. However, proliferation of services enormously challenges the search of appropriate ones. Common service discovery mechanisms, such as the Index Service or UDDI, perform poor searches since they rely on keyword matching and do not properly describe service functionality. To address these difficulties, ontologies can be used to formally describe services allowing for semantic searches. This paper proposes an ontology that describes learning services using educators abstractions in order to support the search. This way, service providers can describe their services in terms of the ontology, while educators can search for them using domain concepts. The integration of this enhanced service search mechanism in Gridcole, a real grid-based CSCL system, is described to illustrate its performance.

Research in the computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) field is currently tackling three important problems which are closely related: difficult integration of CSCL tools, scarce software reuse and technification. This work presents a Grid Collaborative Learning Environment (GRIDCOLE) that combines IMS learning design (IMS-LD) and Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) technologies in order to address these issues. More specifically, GRIDCOLE allows users with no technical skills easy integration and use of applications that effectively support collaborative learning processes. IMS-LD is employed to formally describe the design of these collaborative learning processes while applications are built using tools provided by third-party suppliers as OGSA-compliant Grid services. With this aim, the GRIDCOLE architecture and its main functionalities are introduced. A simple prototype is also presented in order to show the feasibility of the most important concepts introduced in this paper. Furthermore, a real collaborative learning scenario in which we plan to validate GRIDCOLE is introduced.

This paper describes the integration of the Grid topic within a computer architecture engineering course. Students are engaged in a project of design and evaluation of computing systems for a specific customer/market sector. The contents of the course and the case studies have been adapted in order to motivate the study of the Grid. In particular two case studies have been analyzed: one concerns an Internet-based music distribution enterprise, while the other is related to the assembly of genome sequences. A preliminary analysis of this experience shows that most of the students chose to evaluate the suitability of the Grid for their case study, and were able to argue on the benefits and drawbacks of this and other alternatives. In the future, we plan to set up a Grid-based learning environment so the Grid is not only the object of study, but also a tool for learning.