<p>Various tools and services based on Web 2.0 (mainly blogs, wikis, social networking tools) are increasingly used in formal education to create personal learning environments, providing self-directed learners with more freedom, choice, and control over their learning. In such distributed and personalized learning environments, the traditional role of the teacher is being transformed into that of a facilitator. This change inevitably means a reduced level of control on the part of the teacher. This is evidenced, for example, in difficulties experienced in retaining the necessary levels of control when the learning process moves away from institutionally maintained systems to blog-based personal learning environments. In conducting a course in a formal education setting however, it is still essential for the teacher to retain control over certain learning activities, such as course enrolment, assignments, and the assessment process.</p><p>A course management plug-in for the WordPress blog platform called <em>LePress</em> was designed and developed as a possible solution to this problem. By using LePress, teachers are able to more easily manage and coordinate courses in a distributed blog-based environment. Teachers are able to regain control over some important aspects of online course management, while maintaining the learners’ freedom and choice for self-directed learning. This paper documents the results of a survey of a group of 37 teachers who used LePress for at least six months. The study demonstrates that by using LePress, teachers experienced an enhanced level of control over several aspects of the course and this reinforced their perception about the ease of use of the system.</p>

In most cases, the traditional Web-based learning management systems (e.g. Moodle, Blackboard) have been designed without any built-in support for a preferred pedagogical model or approach. The proponents of such systems have claimed that this kind of inherent "pedagogical neutrality" is a desirable characteristic for a LMS, as it allows teachers to implement various pedagogical approaches. This study is based on an opposite approach, arguing for designing next-generation online learning platforms - so called digital learning ecosystems - with built-in affordances, which promote and enforce desirable pedagogical beliefs, strategies and learning activity patterns while suppressing others. We propose a conceptual and process model for pedagogy-driven design of online learning environments and illustrate it with a case study on development and implementation process of a digital learning ecosystem based on Dippler platform. We also describe the pedagogical foundation of Dippler that was guided by a combination of four contemporary pedagogical approaches: self-directed learning, competence-based learning, collaborative knowledge building and task-centered instructional design.

It is against the dynamically evolving nature of many contemporary media applications to be analysed in terms of conventional rigid ontologies that rely on expertise-based fixed categories and hierarchical structure. Many of these rely on sharing 'folksonomies', personal descriptions of information and objects for one's own retrieval. Such applications involve many feedback mechanisms via the community, and have been shown to have emergent properties of complex dynamic systems. We propose that such dynamically evolving information domains can be more usefully described by means of a soft ontology, a dynamically flexible and inherently spatial metadata approach for ill-defined domains. Our contribution is (1) the elaboration of the so far intuitive concept of soft ontology in a way that supports conceptualizing dynamically evolving domains. Further, our approach proposes (2) a whole new mode of interaction with information domains by means of recurring exploration of an information domain from multiple perspectives in search of more comprehensive understanding of it, i.e. multi-perspective exploration. We demonstrate this concept with an example of collaborative tagging in an educational context.

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