García-Peñalvo et al. 12c]. This special session joined
international educational projects that highlight the socio-semantic
technologies to improve and innovate the teaching and learning
processes.
Nowadays, topics regarding open knowledge
[García-Peñalvo et al. 10], involving both open contents and
open education (with a special mention about Massive Online Open
Courses - MOOCs [McAuley et al. 10]), communities of practice
[Wenger and Snyder, 00] and social networking [Rennie and Morrison,
13], informal learning management [García-Peñalvo et al. 12a]
and learning analytics [Ferguson, 12], among others, are mainly
tackled in the current research project proposals. SIIE has a
tradition of publishing selected papers [Ortega and Bravo, 01;
Llamas-Nistal et al. 03; Bravo et al. 05; Fernández-Manjón et
al. 07; Mendes et al. 08; Velázquez-Iturbide and
García-Peñalvo, 09a; Velázquez-Iturbide and
García-Peñalvo, 09b; Velázquez-Iturbide and
García-Peñalvo, 09c].
Combining the best papers presented in the conference sessions with an
open call, we have selected 9 projects that are introduced in Section
2.
2 Special issue contents
The first project is so called Teaching Innova. It is devoted to
incorporate adaptive systems into LMS systems, which will be used both
in academic learning processes and at workplace training
activities. The most useful lesson learned from this experience is its
great potential to be incorporated these ideas to MOOCs development in
order to substitute the human effort and avoid the same orientation to
the different user profiles that a MOOC joins. Following with adaptive
systems, the second contribution, by Mahnane Lamia and Laskri Mohamed
Tayeb, explores the relationship of thinking style and pedagogical
activities to validate this specific psychological construct in the
context of an Adaptive Educational Hypermedia System.
The third proposal is mEducator Project that exploits Linked Data
principles for semantic integration and social interconnecting of
educational data, resources and actors. It introduces a general
approach to take advantage of the wealth of already existing
educational data on the Web by allowing its exposure as Linked Data
and by taking into account automated enrichment and interlinking
techniques to provide a rich and well-interlinked graph for the
educational domain.
Pais and Tasistro consider some issues concerning the role of formal
logic in Software Engineering education. They promote the learning of
formal proof through extensive, appropriately guided practice,
proposing to adopt natural deduction as proof system and to make use
of an adequate proof assistant to carry out formal proofs.
Santarosa et al. discuss the Brasil National Policy of the Inclusive
Education and the distribution of Laptops - PROUCA, with a double
aim, first operating under the logic of inclusion in the context of
education and the other at digital inclusion. The results of the
research project show that the distribution of laptops, labeling the
offered tool under the concept of technological homogeneity and
uniformity, imposes barriers to the care for diversity in a
socio-digital inclusion scenario.
The sixth project is SLRoute devoted to create an integrated Massively
Multiuser Online Learning (MMOL) platform that enables the creation,
development and deployment of contents and activities for teaching
Spanish in an ad hoc educational virtual world. Such environment
promotes an immersive, creative and collaborative experience in the
process of learning a foreign language. Also, the paper assesses the
validity and reliability of this technology throughout a Technology
Acceptance Model (TAM).
Feidakis et al. propose a system that provides emotion awareness, both
explicitly, by self-reporting on emotions through a usable web tool,
and implicitly, via sentiment analysis. The system has been proved
with university students, validating the explicit mechanism in real
education settings.
The eighth proposal is called TRAILER, a project oriented to build a
dialog interface between the companies and their employees to
recognize the informal learning activities and take advantages in both
sides of the problem. First, the employees, making visible their
hidden informal learning acquired competences, could obtain benefits
due to promotion in their professional development. On the other side,
the company increases its internal knowledge just in order to make
decisions and to improve its own knowledge management strategy.
The last paper, by Šošvić et al. of this special issue is
devoted to implement a support platform for learning about multimodal
biometrics so called elBio. The paper also introduces a research study
oriented to compare the traditional learning method with a learning
method based on their support platform. Results of this research study
speak in favour of using elBio support platform as a teaching tool.
Acknowledgements
This work is partially supported by Spanish Science and Innovation
Ministry through the oiPLE project (ref. TIN2010-21695-C02) and also
by the Regional Council of Education of Junta de Castilla y León
through the projects GR47 and MPLE (ref. SA294A12-2). Also, with the
support of the Lifelong Learning Program of the European
Union. Project Reference: 519141-LLP-1-2011-1-ES-KA3-KA3MP. This
project has been funded with support from the European
Commission. This publication only reflects the views of the authors,
and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use that may be
made of the information contained therein.
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