Identifying Middlewares for Mashup Personal Learning Environments

Abstract

The common understanding of e-learning has shifted over the last decade from the traditional learning objects portals to learning paradigms that enforces constructivism, discovery learning and social collaboration. Such type of learning takes place outside the formal academic settings (e.g., seminars or lectures) where a learning environment is created by using some kind of web application mashup tools. The use of these mashup tools moves the learning environment further away from being a monolithic platform towards providing an open set of learning tools, an unrestricted number of actors, and an open corpus of artifacts, either pre-existing or created by the learning process – freely combinable and utilizable by learners within their learning activities. However, collaboration, mashup and contextualization can only be supported through services, which can be created and modified dynamically based on middlewares to suit the current needs and situations of learners. This article identifies middlewares suitable for creating effective personal learning environment based on Web 2.0 mashup tools. This article also proposed a general framework for constructing such personal learning environments based on Ambient Learning realized by learning agents and the use of Enterprise Mashup servers

Personal learning environments for language learning

“…It is for these reasons that many believe that the academic community should abandon campus portals and use Ajax-based desktop environments, such as Netvibes, instead (Molina, 2006). Furthermore, for some researchers, PLEs provide the new level of learning that is required by the new type of learners, compared with the traditional VLEs which most educational institutions use (Fiaidhi et al, 2009).…”

“…In both cases mash ups provide to the user an integrated experience. Mash ups perform content or services composition directly from the end user's browser (Fiaidhi et al, 2009). Instead of opening several Web pages, the user is able to create an individual start page pulling the information from different sources (Lamb, 2007).…”

Enhancing Secure Web Mashups Development in Enterprise Environments

“…Currently, most generally available mashup tools, such as IBM mashup Tools and Yahoo Pipes, are mainly data-oriented mashups that aggregate data from different sources and visualize it [11]. In addition, enterprise mashup infrastructure includes two components: mashup builder and mashup enabler [25]. The mashup builder produces the user interface of the resulting mashup and the mashup enabler accesses the mashed-up unstructured data and makes the internal and external resources available for users [25].…”

“…In addition, enterprise mashup infrastructure includes two components: mashup builder and mashup enabler [25]. The mashup builder produces the user interface of the resulting mashup and the mashup enabler accesses the mashed-up unstructured data and makes the internal and external resources available for users [25].…”

Securing AJAX-enriched mobile environment for exchanging SVG-based learning materials

“…Scripting languages and AJAX help build interactive applications. SVG's rich visualization options and the support of interactivity make it a natural candidate for providing graphics and interactive examples in e-learning environments [10,11]. The ability to access the SVG source code and have a glance "under the hood" to see how things are made, is especially useful for learning and sharing purposes.…”