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Technology supports for distributed and collaborative learning over the internet

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Published:18 February 2008Publication History
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Abstract

With the advent of Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) technologies, distance education (e-learning or Web-based learning) has enabled a new era of education. There are a number of issues that have significant impact on distance education, including those from educational, sociological, and psychological perspectives. Rather than attempting to cover exhaustively all the related perspectives, in this survey article, we focus on the technological issues. A number of technology issues are discussed, including distributed learning, collaborative learning, distributed content management, mobile and situated learning, and multimodal interaction and augmented devices for e-learning. Although we have tried to include the state-of-the-art technologies and systems here, it is anticipated that many new ones will emerge in the near future. As such, we point out several emerging issues and technologies that we believe are promising, for the purpose of highlighting important directions for future research.

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  1. Technology supports for distributed and collaborative learning over the internet

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        Barrett Hazeltine

        A survey, this paper lists and describes state-of-the-art technologies useful in distance learning. It is organized in sections about different aspects of distance learning: distributed and collaborative learning, distributed content management, mobile learning, situated learning, and advanced devices. It describes representative software for these aspects. For example, the section on distributed content management systems (CMS) includes Moodle, the ANGEL management suite, and ATutor. Problems and solutions in various aspects appear, to a large extent, to be common across the aspects. For distributive and collaborative learning, the categories of solutions listed are: standards, system hosting, content delivery for multimedia data, and support for both asynchronous and synchronous learning. Mobile devices allow situated learning?learning applied to a particular context, such as a food distribution site. Because of performance limitations of mobile devices, middleware is needed between the content server and the mobile device. One advanced device presented is augmented paper, which is ordinary paper enhanced with hyperlinks to audio, video, and Web sites. The student uses an optical character recognition (OCR) based pen device to recognize customized tags on the paper. Future directions listed include ubiquitous learning, Web 2.0, structuring of shared content and repositories, applying structure while creating content, distance learning on the grid, and peer-to-peer (P2P) and online learning communities. The paper is worthwhile because it brings some structure to an emerging and important field. It would be even more worthwhile if it included more evaluation and critical comments about the various systems listed. Online Computing Reviews Service

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