Searching for “People Like Me” in a Lifelong Learning System

Abstract

Abstract. The L4All system allows learners to record and share learning pathways through educational offerings, with the aim of facilitating progression from Secondary Education through to Further Education and on to Higher Education. It allows users to create and maintain their timeline (a chronological record of their learning, work and personal episodes) and share it with other users, aiming to foster collaborative elaboration of future goals and aspirations. This paper describes the design of the system's facility for searching for "people like me", presents the results of an evaluation session with a group of mature learners, and discusses outcomes arising from this evaluation.

Flexible Querying of Lifelong Learner Metadata

“…A key aim of the L4All system is to allow learners to search over the timeline data, and to identify possible choices for their own future learning and professional development by seeing what others have done. In particular, [22,21] describe a facility for searching for "people like me" which takes users through a three-step process in searching for timelines that may be relevant to them: (i) The user specifies which attributes of their profile should be matched with other users' profiles, which acts as a filter of possible candidate timelines. (ii) The user specifies which parts of their own timeline should be matched with other users' timelines, by selecting the required categories of episode.…”