l'information numérique et les enjeux de la ... - smsi :: tunis 2005

Recueil des résumés
de communications
Thème 1 : Les Sciences de l'information à l'ère du numérique
TOWARDS NORMALIZATION IN E-LEARNING FOR COLLABORATIVE WORK
ENVIRONMENTS
The advent of structured digital documents and
recommendations for its treatment, such as metadata
and standardization, have inevitably come to the
education filed. We have been confronted with an everchanging
domain that needs enormous consideration for
granting best practices and results to acquire, to share
and to produce knowledge in the digital age.
Taking into account the works lead by W3C, IEEE, IMS
Global, SCORM, ARIADNE, AICC, among others, our
research aims to link the robustness of XML
technologies with the support of collaborative work
strategies in distance learning environments where
Learning Objects and Content Packages seem to
become the common currency between universities and
educational institutions.
In the beginning, lectures and lessons in digital format
where introduced with support for the Web. Later on,
we witnessed its evolution to what is call today
Learning Objects, whose main advantage was the
decomposition into small data chunks that can be used
or reused in different educational contexts. Today, it
seems necessary to rethink these concepts considering
metadata and information definition to arrive to Content
Packages, which are files containing not only those
digestible chunks, but also an xml manifest file detailing
how, when and by whom the resource should be
employed.
The panorama conceived by Tim Berners-Lee about a
semantic web is not yet well developed, moreover, users
and authors still find trouble when using educational
resources, among the most common are: a) confusion in
the definition of the term "learning object", b) Weakness
of the IEEE LOM learning perspective, c)
Incompatibility between learning design principles and
learning technology specifications, d) Lack of userfriendly
tools that fully comply learning technology
standards, e) Unclear cooperation between the agents
involved in the learning technology specifications
process and on how standards relate to each other.
This article also presents the integration of two software
applications developed at the Paragraphe Laboratory of
the University of Paris VIII: ICRS and HTT Online. The
first one, is a collaborative system for information
retrieval that allows various users to work together in
their researches. It offers community assistance in order
to add aggregated value to the documents found by
Everardo REYES
Abderrazak MKADMI
means of evaluations, comments and annotations. The
second software is an authoring online system for
creating Learning Objects and for dynamically
transforming them into Content Packages.
ICRS propose a collaborative workspace for gathering
and creating XML models through the Web and it
presents the information according to that selected
model. Then, the author is able to include format styles
and media clips through the HTT Online's transparent
GUI, which allows the insertion of metadata and
includes export capabilities in XML format complying
with IEEE LOM. The importance of such integration is
reflected on, in one hand, authors focused on the content
and, in the other hand, the addition of resources and
format that would enhance the learning experience in
students.
Keywords:
e-learning, metadata, standards, collaborative work,
semantic web.
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