#mlearn2010 Embedding Moodle into Ubiquitous Computing environments by Chris Glahn

Christian Glahn wears a nice suite, and he is nicely shaved with a smooth voice, he mentions at the start of his presentation that this project is about a framework in construction.

Virtual learning environments are basically not aware of the overarching context. And it is fairly difficult to integrate any virtual learning environment in physical learning environments. they were interested in how can we make a context-aware environment and secondly how can we integrate this in a learning environment?

research is based on three pillars:

• adaptation and personalization
• orchestrating learning
• learner mobility

Adaptation and personalisation
Starting from Adaptive presentation (Brusilovsky (thank you very much Mark Melia from Dublin to direct me to the name!). How can we adapt the learning material on different devices or output modes.
Device selection is also possible.
Why do we want to look at contextualization: we want learners to keep relationships across context (their community or knowledge domains), because learning experiences take place across contexts.

Orchestrating learning
Orchestrating learning consists of tasks, roles, rules, and the environment. So they have looked at how knowledge is constructed within the learning environment.
When we look at VLE (particularly Moodle), strong emphasis on learning tasks, and there is a supposed dependency on Moodle. But if we look at the reality of learning, then we see that there is a mutual influence between the environment and the learning task.

Learner mobility
Both laptops and mobile devices have been strongly influenced with the computing metaphore, but contemporary reality is much more social media oriented (and collaborative).
Mobile social interfaces: e.g. they have used a software that recognizes the user of the laptop and then switches to the appropriate learner.
What is important to ubiquitous learning is the diversity of devices for the learner depending on the situation. The learning environment needs to be aware of the changes in time that affect the learner as well.
How did we build an architecture from the Moodle environment
They started with Specht's et al interaction layer.
semantic layer for meaningful layer
(and two others, but i was too far from the screen to read).
What do we have in Moodle
centralized logging function used by all Moodle plugins
This logging function was first made more complex.
On top of this a layer was placed to give meaningful logging information to the teacher.
This context model can be configured by the teachers to make it more meaningful to them.
They added a little database of devices, which enables to build a triggering software to be build.

Another problem which comes from web-based environments: whenever a learner reloads Moodle, but in a ubiquitous environment this push type of output should be enabled for different devices.

Context awareness and context challenges challenge the users.

Abstract (as described in the proceedings)
Over the past years several attempts for connecting Moodle to mobile devices have been made. The past attempts are focused on making the functions of the virtual learning environment (VLE) available on mobile devices. For this particular form of enabling access to learning the mobile device is limited to a special display type.
Features of personalizing learning experiences based on the learners’ mobility and their changing information needs in different contexts is typically not considered by these developments. This conceptual paper analyses the underlying concepts for a system-architecture for device adaption for mobile learning. The analysis focuses on educational and technical perspectives for system design. The results of this analysis are transferred
for integrating Moodle into ubiquitous computing environments.

conclusion (as described in the proceedings)
This conceptual paper analysed the underlying concepts for a system-architecture for device adaption for mobile learning. The analysis focuses on educational and technical perspectives for system design. The results of this analysis are transferred for integrating Moodle into ubiquitous computing environments.
Integrating Moodle into ubiquitous computing environments required the development of new service interfaces for the system. Nevertheless, the central user-tracking component of Moodle has been reused. This has the main benefit that this architecture allows to use other learner activities within the VLE as contextualizing factors for the adaptation process because all operations for contextualization and adaptation are built on top of this component. Furthermore, the architecture can be easily
transferred to other VLE, because most systems have similar learner-tracking components.
Given the technical scope of this study further research is needed with regard to the effect of this extended perspective on device adaptation for personalized learning and instructional design.