Virtual communities are a suitable metaphor to put into practice pedagogical approaches that lie ... more Virtual communities are a suitable metaphor to put into practice pedagogical approaches that lie on a social conception of learning. In this paper a state of the art for virtual communities is presented. Within it, a formal definition, a characterization and taxonomy is given. The paper also presents a policy based framework to control the evolution of virtual communities thought as changes on social organization and on collaborative activities.
This paper focuses on the formation and control of virtual learning communities at different leve... more This paper focuses on the formation and control of virtual learning communities at different levels. A social approach is presented. It is based on having a explicit computational model representing the social aspects of the community, which is established by a meta-model and a ruling mechanism. The first one allows a wide range of social structures to be derived from a high-level definition. The latter permits the tuning of the society behaviour. Both aspects are stated in a declarative way, which yields three important advantages: generality, which allows a social structure to be defined easily; flexibility, which facilitates making changes in the society or its behaviour and adaptability, because such a model can cope with a wide range of behaviours. The framework has been implemented in a semantic platform that pays a special attention to the underlying social structure.
This paper describes ongoing work on the issue of exploiting a Learning Object Repository, i.e., ... more This paper describes ongoing work on the issue of exploiting a Learning Object Repository, i.e., a large library of learning resources, which incorporates different and often heterogeneous types of objects, to feed activities to a Virtual Learning Community. These objects include re-usable contents that are described by means of metadata. Our proposal leans on an ontology for interpreting the annotations and suggesting the LO best fitting the community’s necessities for a given activity. The ontology, as a representation mechanism, interprets all the available knowledge and provides adequate ways of exploiting it, which include social navigation and recommendation through enhanced searching capabilities.
25 slides.-- Presentation delivered at the Spanish National Session, Section I: "Development... more 25 slides.-- Presentation delivered at the Spanish National Session, Section I: "Development of CRIS Systems and their integration with OA Repositories in Spain"
Abstract: This paper deals with the design of collaborative support for experimental learning, fo... more Abstract: This paper deals with the design of collaborative support for experimental learning, focusing on the articulation of actions in the lab, either real or virtual, and argumentation. Our approach is based upon a distance learning context where we distinguish between three phases: pre-lab, lab and post-lab. We elaborate on the pre-lab phase. The goal of this phase is to provide students with motivation and context for the lab phase, in order to situate theory and experimentation. We provide an environment where individual and remote ...
Virtual communities are a suitable metaphor to put into practice pedagogical approaches that lie ... more Virtual communities are a suitable metaphor to put into practice pedagogical approaches that lie on a social conception of learning. In this paper a state of the art for virtual communities is presented. Within it, a formal definition, a characterization and taxonomy is given. The paper also presents a policy based framework to control the evolution of virtual communities thought as changes on social organization and on collaborative activities.
This paper focuses on the formation and control of virtual learning communities at different leve... more This paper focuses on the formation and control of virtual learning communities at different levels. A social approach is presented. It is based on having a explicit computational model representing the social aspects of the community, which is established by a meta-model and a ruling mechanism. The first one allows a wide range of social structures to be derived from a high-level definition. The latter permits the tuning of the society behaviour. Both aspects are stated in a declarative way, which yields three important advantages: generality, which allows a social structure to be defined easily; flexibility, which facilitates making changes in the society or its behaviour and adaptability, because such a model can cope with a wide range of behaviours. The framework has been implemented in a semantic platform that pays a special attention to the underlying social structure.
This paper describes ongoing work on the issue of exploiting a Learning Object Repository, i.e., ... more This paper describes ongoing work on the issue of exploiting a Learning Object Repository, i.e., a large library of learning resources, which incorporates different and often heterogeneous types of objects, to feed activities to a Virtual Learning Community. These objects include re-usable contents that are described by means of metadata. Our proposal leans on an ontology for interpreting the annotations and suggesting the LO best fitting the community’s necessities for a given activity. The ontology, as a representation mechanism, interprets all the available knowledge and provides adequate ways of exploiting it, which include social navigation and recommendation through enhanced searching capabilities.
25 slides.-- Presentation delivered at the Spanish National Session, Section I: "Development... more 25 slides.-- Presentation delivered at the Spanish National Session, Section I: "Development of CRIS Systems and their integration with OA Repositories in Spain"
Abstract: This paper deals with the design of collaborative support for experimental learning, fo... more Abstract: This paper deals with the design of collaborative support for experimental learning, focusing on the articulation of actions in the lab, either real or virtual, and argumentation. Our approach is based upon a distance learning context where we distinguish between three phases: pre-lab, lab and post-lab. We elaborate on the pre-lab phase. The goal of this phase is to provide students with motivation and context for the lab phase, in order to situate theory and experimentation. We provide an environment where individual and remote ...
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Papers by BEATRIZ BARROS