Andrés at Joensuu

Mekrijärvi Summer School
Originally uploaded by andresfib.

I have already adapted myself to the routine of a summer school in autumn: getting up at 08:15, having breakfast at 08:30, having coffe and cookies at 11:00, having lunch at 12:00, having coffe and cake at 15:00, having dinner at 17:00, going to sauna at 20:30, and finally having supper at 23:00. You can fill the gaps with all the lessons and working group sessions as you may please, and I happily will attend any work camp.

Alexandra talks of these day has been related to the hisroty of adaptive systems and the usage of MOT, My Online Teacher. We have had the possibility to see how a real adaptive system is designed, and how it tries to ease the work to the author of adaptive courses. The system seems that can implement any learning strategy according to any learning theory. Current courses developed with this system do not really take it to the full potential, and base its decission in things as the number of visits a given page has had. Finally, Javier, also comments about the possibility of using Javascript + CSS to implement such system. I find the idea quite nice and full of possibilities, but its drawbacks, mostly compatibility problems with different browsers. Nonetheless, using CSS will also improve accesibility by giving users the flexibility to adapt the presentation to their needs.

In the context of adaptive systems Wolfram has suggested that “Repetitive tasks may benefit from adaptation”, which seems quite an interesting research question, or at least an initial point of an study.

In his lecture Wolfram has been discussing the costs of E-learning and distance education in general. I have remarked the following key points :

• When calculating costs we have to put an output (e.g. graduated students) as an important factor.
• Economic Efficiency against Academic Efficiency
• Break Even Point Profit(R)= Turnover-total cost
• Opportunity costs for the society to let a young student educate to enter the labour market
• Characteristics of digital goods
• Minimal distribution costs
• Network goods
• The more users of a netwoked good (online software??) the more value for the user as more knowledge is created around
• The open source model as a basis for distance education, offering bundled services: thus not only giving tutorial but providing support to it

One of the preliminary conclussions of the summer school is the need to add “justus” as fully qualified verb in the mainstream dictionaries. Another conclussion is how good Uranus surname it could be, especially if you are called Jussi.

First day has been “Introduction Way”. We have managed to know each other better, students and professors. Alexandra Christea will tell us about Adaptivity, and Wolfram Lasser will introduce us in the Distance Education world. Each student has also told the others about his/her current research. From my point of view and research interest, Maram Meccawy’s research seems pretty interesting, as she tries to merge current adaptive (and adaptable) systems with modern Learning Management Systems (LMS). That’s pretty close to what I plan to do with Jeliot 3 when it is adaptive, I want it to be able to cope with LMS and to retrieve content from them. Pasi Silander’s research is also interesting as it can provide me with some nice methodological grounds for my work.

After the formal presentation, we have had the lectures from the professors. Wolfram has talked about quality issues in the Distance Education (or eLearning) field, mostly in the European context and its Bologna process. He seems quite pessimistic about the existence of a market in the EU for international on-line/virtual degrees issued by universities. It would be nice to know the figures of IMPDET, and its relative performing during its first year running. Alexandra has given us the background on adaptive hypermedia. She understand hypermedia as nodes+links, which seems to me pretty restrictive, or at least I cannot see my idea of adaptive animation with voice in it represented by that term, should I use adaptive hyper-multimedia??. However, I liked the term “Personalization” as it includes both Adaptive and Adaptable approaches.

Group work for the courses has started after this lecture. Both approaches has been taken in the group work. Wolfram has preferred a more open ended work, with only some initial question and material. While Alexandra is following a task based approach. Anyway, both have lacked of the required time to do it properly … And that has been all about the academic duties. However, there is not such a thing as a Mekrijärvi day without sauna. So there we have gathered to enjoy some Karjala beer and nice conversations before going to bed.

Good night