About

Interactive Media 

This work aimed to expand professional learners’ engagement with the best of European Interactive Media research. Corporate training still needs effective competence mapping and performance evaluation tools to support business learners. Indeed, corporate clients need the same access as all learners to an ideal portal learning system: ie. that will offer them a tracked experience with a set of “10 Euro” learning modules, complete with credits and real interaction with peers, tutors and content; anywhere, anytime. This work package did not promise to solve that persistent problem on its own but aimed to show how interactive media research in Europe could help them in that direction. 

Prolearn Concept

A joint framework to integrate PROLEARN concept mapping activities of the Network of Excellence partners. Most partners have their own models of visualizations for knowledge work that are used in a variety of professional and other contexts. This deliverable framework aims to unify this work.

The work was aimed at bringing together some key concept mapping tools from core partners and to start from this to form an integrated joint framework. As part of this process, a series of online videoconferences, using the FlashMeeting tool, were held to help partners discuss the approaches and technologies which they use.  

Prolearn Live

Integrated into the PROLEARN network will be a live telepresence architecture for the streaming of media at scale to professional learners. This work will be showcased in the PROLEARN Academy context – to bring expert academic perspectives on Professional Learning into our community in a live and interactive context. 

The specialist research labs in Universities, like UPM in Spain and the Open University in the UK, produce technologies and systems for live webcasting, which tend not to deploy widely out into other educational and corporate communities. 

For example, the KMi Stadium project has a long-running series of experiments into webcasting models over the last ten years (Scott et al, 1998; 2005). Whilst important lessons have been learnt from this work, widespread deployment has not followed. Both corporate and academic parties in technology enhanced professional learning still see live webcasting as challenging, despite all this innovation. 

In the Prolearn Academy context this work was showcased in a live series of events associated with the Summer School in Bled, Slovenia 2006; run by the Prolearn partner, JSI. The webcast part of this event was very successful, and we are now moving to a set of institutional based trials for late 2006-7.  

Prolearn Create

Empowering professional learners to capture and share their own content 

Overview 

Much work arising from the academic world focuses on empowering the teacher, mentor or facilitator in the formal learning process. From this perspective, the learner is often seen as the relatively passive consumer of learning. When teachers use tools, they typically seek to make ‘teaching’ more productive. In the tradition of constructivist pedagogy, that logic is turned around and those same tools can be repurposed, or simply reused, by the learners themselves to make ‘learning’ more effective. Use of new media tools such as blogs, wikis and other communicative or multimedia assets by learners is relatively new in professional learning contexts.  

Five key concepts where explored:  

• Wikis in the Workplace: The Wiki offers a new collaborative concept for making open contributions to ‘shared web community’. 

• Blogging for Business: This has already attracted significant attention in the corporate and learning communities 

• Podcasting for Professional Learning: Podcasting for Professionals in this specific user-lead context. 

• VideoBlogging Value: to personalise the learner in the workplace 

• Rich Media Content Construction Kits: a very simple analysis of the professional learner use scenarios for the morass of Rich Media Content Construction Kits that are available to learners and teachers alike 

Cooperative Learning Forum

A live cooperative learning forum formed a key “community building” tool for the WP partners and corporate partners were provided with “live” access to pan-European eLearning Media expertise in a synchronous online forum. Various technologies were implemented to achieve the goals of this deliverable. These included: 

• CNM Hexagon: an experimental video IM client.  

• FlashMeeting: a video meeting service.   

• Isabel: an application to host large scale online cooperative workshops.   

• Buddyspace:  a Java based environment will have a live IM DOT for all (enthusiastic) Prolearn partners reflecting their pan-continent IM state and accessibility. 

 

Mobile Learning Showcase

“In this work package we aim to expand professional learners’ engagement with best of European Interactive Media research. We aim to use research in our Academy of partners to create powerful new media activities that is themselves are both a research output and a direct a marketable shared asset in our Competence Centre”. 

This showcase aimed to inform professional learners in our community about the potential of small devices and ubiquitous computing for new models of learning and knowledge work. It sought to find lessons for the professional learner from a wide range of then current mobiles research work within our consortium and beyond. It was not intended to replicate the work of major ubiquitous-centred projects such as Mobilearn, and MLearn but rather to collect a specific set of working examples from our partnership could show the impact of the technology for the short to medium term use of professional partners. There were broadly four categories of case study which were included within the portal: 

1. Interactive Media on the Move: This covered the broad topic of access to learning objects on small devices. This concept is particularly relevant for professional learners who may need to acquire skills in the field. 

2. Ubiquitous Learning Pedagogy: This covered those samples that offer novel ubiquitous concepts for learning. These include new activities that can empower the learner in ways that desk-bound applications cannot and that offer a real possibility of a new mobile pedagogy. 

3. Ubiquitous Presence: The included demonstrations of the power of “Ubiquitous Presence” to transform learning. These examples showed how mobiles that ‘know your state, or location, or activity’ can empower learners to act differently. 

4. Empowering Ubiquitous Communication:  There is a general class of systems that are simply to do with “empowering ubiquitous communication” so that learners can get access to each other or to dynamic sources (such as news) more effectively. 

Prolearn-TV

The Prolearn-TV concept delivered a significant living structure of Professional eLearning support materials which was sourced from the WP members in the first instance, and later from the whole consortium. This material was showcased via a streaming media portal to our community. The Prolearn-TV showcase site was driven by a collection of technologies, developed as part of the Stadium research conducted at KMi, The Open University. At the heart of these technologies was the XO Backlot project, a specialized content management system for delivering live, and video on demand replays of events.