Paul Sharples

There is a mismatch between the enthusiasm of policy makers and other actors for initiatives to support the validation of informal learning, and the lack of adoption of systems in practice. This problem is explored, with reference to the creation of the Informal Learning Collector in the European Commission TRAILER project. It is proposed that formality in learning can be usefully understood as a measure of the degree of managerial control over the learning process. It is then argued that the use of managerial tools, such as validation and competence catalogues, runs the danger of constraining the scope for informal learning. Analytics techniques offer the possibility of providing insight into practice by examining documents, without the need for formal description or tagging. However, these methods raise problems of surveillance (by companies and the state), confidentiality, and security of data. A prototype system is described which tests the feasibility of the approach.

The placements and internships are one of the main paths to get professional background and some skills for students, especially in areas like informatics and computer sciences. The European-funded VALS project tries to promote the virtual placements and establish a new initiative in virtual placements called Semester of Code. This initiative binds higher education institutions, students, companies, foundations and Open Source projects in order to create virtual placements and solve needs that they have in relation with those placements. This paper introduces some projects about virtual placements that other institutions and companies perform, also the paper describes the needs, opinions and considerations about the virtual placements for each stakeholder involved in the placements, to finally explain the design decisions and actions behind the Semester of Code, and how they are intended to get better virtual placements and successful results.

In order to provide interoperable services to a range of applications, platforms and devices a number of open source applications have been developed, many of them within the Apache Software Foundation. We analyse the way that these relate to research and development in education, which has also informed the functionality which they offer, providing a case study of the relationship between generic open source infrastructure development, and the discourse around pedagogy. The functionality foreseen for Personal Learning Environments and for the learning design approach to face-to-face learning is identified. The capabilities of Apache Wookie (incubating) W3C Widget Server are compared with this desired functionality, and the unfulfilled functionality identified with a particular focus on the need to support teachers control over their technological environment in response to emerging conditions in the classroom. The application store ('app store') is identified as a key software paradigm for meeting the unfulfilled functionality, and the ways in which it can support teaching practice are explored. A number of current software projects, and collaborations between them, are described which are contributing to providing a coherent infrastructure for building app stores. Finally some areas of functionality which remain pending future research and development are identified.

Apache Wookie (incubating) has generated considerable interest within the context of Technology Enhanced Learning where it was developed, as well as in mobile applications. The origins of the system in providing services for IMS Learning Design are described, together with an introduction to the system's design and functionality. However, the areas where it has had success are distinct from the application area for which it was designed and developed. The implications of this for understanding user needs is analysed by using ideas drawn from sociology. The complexity of the relationship between the context of use and user needs, and the feedback loops between them is discussed, and the role of technological interventions as an element in a discourse is considered. It is proposed that this understanding of users needs, together with the experience of the development and use of Wookie, argues in favour of an interoperability strategy which focuses on relatively small sets of functional requirements, and avoidance where possible of specifications developed for particular application domains: an approach which may be characterised as piecemeal rather than Utopian.

Since the IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) specification was published in 2003 (IMS Global Learning Consortium Inc. 2003) it has been recognised that the provision of effective and easy to use tooling is essential if the specification is to be widely adopted. Progress on tooling was discussed in Griffiths et al. (2005) and a more recent review of tooling and the wider achievements of the specification is available in Griffiths and Liber (2008), and it is in this wider context of IMS LD tooling that we situate the development of the ReCourse Learning Design Editor.

Current systems used in education follow a consistent design pattern, one that is not supportive of lifelong learning or personalization, is asymmetric in terms of user capability, and which is disconnected from the global ecology of Internet services. In this paper we propose an alternative design pattern for educational systems that emphasizes symmetric connections with a range of services both in formal and informal learning, work, and leisure, and identify strategies for implementation and experimentation

IMS Learning Designs provide a specification for the activities undertaken by learners within an environment; currently the definition of the environment is typically a set of web resources and files, with the potential to add two basic types of tool: conferencing and mail. In this paper we describe our initial findings on using a lightweight approach to the addition of small applications (‘widgets’) to the palette of options available for Learning Design environments.

The Reload Learning Design Editor (LDE) is an Open Source, close-to-specification, treebased Learning Design (LD) editor written in Java using the Eclipse platform. The editor tools are complemented by a LD Player, which provides a familiar and user-friendly interface to the CopperCore LD runtime engine. This paper will describe the history and design rationale underpinning the tools, show how they fit into the LD authoring tools framework devised by Griffiths et al. (2005) and consider their suitability to various user roles and design approaches. The paper will conclude by outlining future versions of the software and how these new developments should facilitate the creation and manipulation of Units of Learning by staff in all user roles.