Advances of Scientific Research on Technology Enhanced Learning in Social Networks and Mobile Contexts:
Towards High Effective Educational Platforms for
Next Generation Education
J.UCS Special Issue
Miltiadis D. Lytras
(The American College of Greece - Deree College, Athens, Greece
mlytras@acg.edu)
Leyla Zhuhadar
(Gordon Ford College of Business, Western Kentucky University, USA
leyla.zhuhadar@wku.edu)
Jacky Xi Zhang
(Dept. Information Management and Management Science, College of
Management and Economics Tianjin University, P. R. China
jackyzhang@tju.edu.cn)
Eugenijus Kurilovas
(Centre for Information Technologies in Education; Vilnius University
Institute of Mathematics and Informatics; Vilnius Gediminas Technical
University Vilnius, Lithuania
Eugenijus.Kurilovas@itc.smm.lt)
Abstract: This editorial presents the latest advances of scientific
Research on Technology enhanced learning in social networks and mobile
contexts. It summarizes the key finding and promotes three main
pillars for future scientific contribution to the domain namely:
Enabling Technologies, Educational Strategies, and Next Generation
Social Networks for Educational Purposes. It can serve as a position
document for scientific debate fostering international collaboration
and empirical research in the various aspects of the well-defined
agenda. It can also serve as a reference edition for researchers
interested in the adoption of Social Networks, in the Education
Sector.
Keywords: Social Networks, Mobile Technologies, Education 2.0,
Personal Learning Environments, HORIZON 2020, Technology Enhanced
Learning
Categories: L.2.3, L.5.0, L.6.1
1 Introduction
The advances on mobile technologies, ubiquitous networks, and content
management systems created a new context for the delivery of learning
content in flexible formats. Smartphones, tablets, intelligent
devices, and other portable systems allow access to learning services
anytime anyplace. In this fashion, limited scientific research on the
effectiveness of mobile learning and adoption of social networks in
academia and other forms of training motivated the preparation of this
special issue. We received a significant number of scientific articles
and after rigorous double blind review we summarize in this special
issue nine articles.
The scientific debate about the contribution of mobile learning and
social networks investigates three critical pillars for the
effectiveness of learning in various contexts including academia,
k-12, executive training, vocational training and lifelong learning:
Pillar 1: Enabling technologies
The vast evolution in mobile technologies, cloud computing, web
services and open source tools set critical challenges for the design
of effective learning platforms aiming in exploiting modular
technological systems that can be customized and personalized,
forming, personal learning web spaces.. Many open scientific issues
need a bold answer. The following is a limited list of key, open
questions and potential topics for further research in the context of
master thesis or doctoral studies:
- Design guidelines for mobile personalized educational systems
enabled by social networks and cloud computing
- Open Architectures for learning content delivery including
conversion of old technology enhanced learning systems to Web 2.0
Education
- Integration of Semantic web approaches for enhanced educational
quality and customization
- Representation of Meaning in Social Networks
- Automatic extraction of Learning Profiles and adoption of
learning content based on matching patterns
- Formation of Content 2.0 sphere a collaborative working and
learning spac
e, where content is powered by well-defined standards
beyond the traditional established ones for e-Learning e.g. LOM, SCORM
etc.
- Integration of Data warehouses for micro content learning management
- Advanced techniques for dynamic construction of learning social
networks including identification of similar learning profiles,
matchmaking of profiles with learning strategies
- Advanced approached for visualization techniques of learning
social networks
- Security Models against cheating and fraud
Pillar 2: Educational Strategies
There is an open scientific discussion for the integration of
technologies in the context of specific, targeted, justified
educational strategies. Mobile learning sets many gray areas, in the
sense of unexplored strategies, since sometimes the flexibility of
technologies and the design of learning networks through available
technologies is not based on theories or well tested models. In a way,
there is a common misunderstanding that typical strategies of the Web,
or E-learning domain will work also in the context of Social Networks
and Mobile Technologies.
The following are few open issues related to Mobile Educational
Strategies:
- Self-paced learning educational mobile strategies
- Evaluation of mobile learning outcomes, and adoption of Learning
Objectives in scenarios of varied difficulty
- Justification of Value adding contribution of mobile networks to
well defined learning objectives
- Promotion of collaborative learning through mobile learning
- Justification of selection criteria of smartphones, mobile
devices, and tablets for well-defined educational objectives
- Dynamic composition of Collaborative Learning Spaces, utilizing
the power of social networks to provide significant information for
the skills and capacities of participants
- Linkage of Social Networks Profiles to Learning Profiles with the
integration of additional educational based profiles
Pillar 3: Next Generation Social Networks for Educational Purposes
The global domination of few Social Network platforms a.k.a Facebook,
has developed an increased awareness of social network platforms, even
for educational purposes and "learning". At least this is the basic
assumption of trainers and educators around the world that incorporate
in their teaching learning tools powered by Facebook or Twitter. In
parallel regional initiatives like the programs FP7 or HORIZON 2020,
funded by the European Union, promote the scientific research towards
next generation learning technologies. The paradox in all these
approaches is the limited adoption of the proposed methodologies,
designs and infrastructures from the "relevant markets" e.g. academic
institutions, universities. It is obvious that there is a key
performance gap, derived from the absence of fast response of academic
organizations to this "thrilling revolution" of social
networks. In a way inflexible academic structures and traditional
curriculums provide the resistance to change, where the basic scenario
of the change is that modern students are happier to use their mobile
phones and intelligent portable devices for everything even for
learning than going to a class. In this context there is an
interesting challenge, well predicted, that in the short future there
will be a critical need for next generation Social Networking
platforms for Educational use. The following list provides an
indicative list of topics for further research towards Next Generation
Social Networks for Educational Purposes:
- Dynamic composition of learning spaces based on mobile learning pedagogies
- Personalized apps based on learners profiling and matching
- Dynamic semantic annotation of profiles and content towards the
integration of personal learners entities to qualitative learning
content
- Taxonomies of Learning Objectives for Social Networks
- Artificial Intelligence approaches towards the sustainability of
learning communities powered by social networks
- Mapping of related learners at global scale
- Cloud Services for Learning Spaces
- Security and Evaluation
2 Overview of research articles in this issue
Nine full research articles are presented in this special issues. They
all provide significant insights for the special theme and set an
interesting context for further scientific debate. The main concepts
that are investigated are related to: Prototyping Modeling for
Educational Platforms, Semantic Web Adaptation of Learning Quality,
Management of Digital Elevation Models, Social Knowledge Construction,
Self-learning Approaches, Mobile Databases Management, Smartphones Use
in Social Networks etc:
3 Conclusions
The topic of this special issue is significant. The great majority of
the literature the last three years for learning and knowledge
management is focusing on Social Networks and Mobile Contexts. The
contribution of this special issue is unique. It sets new direction
for future research and provides a full discussion of critical
thinking and comparative studies on the phenomena under analysis. We
are at the disposal of the readears for further analysis and
collaborations in the domain. Currently we are preparing two proposals
for next generation social networks for learning under the HORIZON
2020 program.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the contributors of the special issue for
their excellent collaboration and valuable scientific
contributions. The quality of their research and their passion for
making science valuable to the Society is reflected in every article
of this work. We are also grateful to Christian Gütl, the Managing
Editor of the Journal of Universal Computer and Dana Kaiser from the
editorial office of J.UCS, without whose help this achievement could
not have been possible.
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