Widgets for flexible learning environment and ePortfolio
Education and competence developement circles are becoming active in the widget world. Building systems using these small devices is indeed a means to enhance flexibility and personnalisation.
A widget is essentially a small block of code – using javascript, (X)HTML and CSS – that can be embedded in a web page to display information typically from news feeds (RSS/ATOM) or from distant web services – mail, photo archives, weather, etc.
Until recently, the work of widgets suffered from fragmentation. However, some players like Netvibes and Widgetbox are offering tools to create or convert widgets to run on multiple platforms. Not to mention the current work by W3C on a specification for these small but useful web applications.
So what can we do these with those so-called “gadgets” in Personal Learning Environments (PLE) and ePortfolios? Well, a lot!!
The project TENCompetence is currently involved in groundbreaking work with widgets in their Learning Design Authoring Environment. In a recent interview [here], Scott Wilson explains the rationale:
We’ve been exploring how desktop and web widgets could be used to provide chat, discussion and voting services within a run-time Learning Design environment, so that users could seamlessly be offered the features specified by a particular learning design.
percolab is also experimenting with widgets for the development of an ePortfolio supporting the socio-professional integration of adult immigrants in Quebec. Our challenge was to find a way to integrate learning activities – profiled according to the context of this group of learners – with information gathered from various providers (government, educational institutions, community organisations), all this, without recreating a large unflexible anonymous portal. The idea is a “personal portal” in which learners may choose learning and personal development activities, manage their artefacts and build public pages for friends, family, teachers, etc.
The prototype we built was based on the open source portal POSH (www.portaneo.net) – acting as container and widget framework. We used a small Ruby on Rails application for the learning activities and services back-end.
The prototype testing received much positive feedback from the learners, even if the visual design was quite bare and a few bugs did show early in the testing. Also, we succeeded to render all the activities reusable outside the project environment.
In more ways than one, the use of widgets in the world of learning opens up new opportunities for the development of reusable content, rich applications and useful information services.
First, widgets makes the development of learning applications cheaper, a real case of write once, play “everywhere”. Well, not yet, but soon. It is relatively easy to convert a widget for use on different systems (WordPress, Moodle, Pageflakes, etc.).
Secondly, widgets may help leverage existing API on institutional systems. Why not a widget offering to search all the learning resources repositories, inquiring real time in the library system for books due, displaying schedules, course offers, job opportunities in a specific fields etc.
Finally, widgets make possible the creation of highly flexible PLEs or ePortfolios, for the learner as for the learning designer. And that’s cool!
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 14th, 2008 at 23:52 and is filed under Technologie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.