Progress report

 on the subprojects

Swedish contribution to MoCA (Modular Content Archives) [PADLR 4.1]
Swedish contribution to PLeaSe (Personalized Learning Sequences) [PADLR 5.1]
PALaTe (Personalized Access to Large Text Archives) [PADLR 5.2]

within the WGLN project PADLR (Personalized Access to Distributed Learning Repositories)

May 23, 2002

Lars Borin, Donald Broady, Monica Langerth Zetterman
Uppsala Learning Lab

In this report, as in our day-to-day work in the projects, these three PADLR subprojects are treated as a unit. They were closely related already at their conception, and we have decided to make them even more so, in the name of efficiency and effectiveness, particularly in view of the fact that the original project budget was to be reduced by approximately one half for the last version of the project proposals. For the same reasons, the focus of the subprojects had to be narrowed somewhat, so that out of the testbeds originally planned, we have concentrated on two, History and Teacher Education, and left most of the work on Language Education for the second project year (although we have managed some work on language learning resources even now, see below).

Project participants

Principal investigators
Lars Borin, Dept. of Linguistics, UU
Donald Broady, Dept. of Teacher Training, UU, and CID, NADA, KTH
(Borin is principal investigator for the Swedish contribution to PLeaSe and for half of PALaTe, Broady for the Swedish contribution to MoCA and for the other half of PALaTe)

Others
Lilian Karlsson, Uppsala Learning Lab, Uppsala University
Monica Langerth Zetterman, Department of Pedagogy, Uppsala University, and and CID, NADA, KTH
Esbjörn Larsson, Department of History, Uppsala University
Kristina Nilsson, Department of Linguistics, Uppsala University
Jan Sjunnesson, Department of Teacher Education, Uppsala University
Jöran Stark, Uppsala Learning Lab, Uppsala University
Hans Melkersson, CID, NADA, KTH

Project participants' areas of responsibility

• The development of tools for text selection, navigation, presentation and metadata markup for Humanities education (Borin, Karlsson, Larsson, Nilsson)
• The creation of new text resources conforming to the PADLR infrastructure, as well as the re-use of existing large text resources with markup following, e.g., the TEI Guidelines (Broady, Sjunnesson, Langerth Zetterman, Melkersson)
• The interface of text tools and digital portfolios (Broady, Sjunnesson, Stark)
• The harmonization of existing markup with emerging e-learning standards (Borin, Broady, Langerth Zetterman)

Current state of the projects compared to the project plan

Up until now the projects has been a little behind schedule because of initial difficulties to recruit collaborators with the adequate qualifications.

Accomplished and ongoing work

• Development of the APE portfolio on the SCAM platform which is built on international standards for metadata and learning technology such as RDF, Dublin Core, IMS and IEEE/LOM. The development of this system for distributed archiving and shared use of educational components is a main effort - coordinated by MoCA - by several of the PADLR sub-projects (and also for some Swedish testbeds within the ongoing WGLN project “Personal Learning Portfolios - Folio Thinking”). The development is co-funded by Skolverket (the Swedish Board of Education), Utbildningsradion, and Nationellt Centrum för Flexibelt Lärande (NCFL). The aim is to enable students and teachers to create and share personal collections of material to be used within, e.g., the Edutella framework. The APE/SCAM application is currently being employed in testbeds at Uppsala University and KTH. SCAM is an open source project; documentation available at http://kmr.nada.kth.se/scam/index.html and the code at http://sourceforge.net/projects/scam/.
• Extensive search for existing software in the domains language recognition, text segmentation, and named entity recognition; a report is in preparation. A simple web interface for trying out and evaluating existing such software has been developed by Lilian Karlsson
• Kristina Nilsson and Lars Borin have worked on the problem of locating reading matter for language learners of Nordic languages. The language, the subject matter, and the difficulty were considered. This research was undertaken jointly with the project on corpus-based computer-assisted language learning of Nordic languages, funded by NorFA. The work has resulted in a prototype application, a paper on which has been accepted for presentation at the EuroCALL 2002 conference (see below).
• A number of existing text materials have been explored and made available to the project: the national edition of the collected works of Swedish 19th century author August Strindberg, in a TEI marked-up version; 17th century Stockholm court records, in a TEI marked-up version; interviews with Hungarian Holocaust escapees, in HTML format.
• We are negotiating about the acquisition and use of other text materials: an 18th century diary, from the Department of Scandinavian Languages at Uppsala University; a digital version of Axel Oxenstierna’s letters, from the Swedish National Archive; Old Swedish texts, from the Bank of Swedish, University of Göteborg.
• Donald Broady, Monica Langerth Zetterman and Jan Sjunnesson are working with creation of educational text collections using markup compliant to the TEIXLITE DTD (the Text Encoding Initiative Document Type Definition, light XML version).
• Educational experiments in several testbeds at Uppsala University Autumn 2001 and Spring 2002 (a report on the experiences in preparation). See the next section.

Testbeds at Uppsala University

 In different case studies we have engaged a number of both undergraduate and graduate students from several disciplines. At Uppsala University approximately 80-90 students/participants have been or are involved in the testbeds. We are currently testing the usefulness of some tools, such as the APE-portfolio/SCAM application along with tests of existing web-based tools for content organization, sharing and annotation. The focus is to explore how students and researchers use these different tools to organize content, annotate and share information. The tests are conducted in natural settings i.e. in physically located or web-based courses that serve as testbeds. We use various methods to collect data such as questionnaires and group interviews.

• An Undergraduate courses at the Dept. for Teacher Education, “Learning and ICT” (35 ECTS), a course in Technology, Nature and Society (35 ECTS), and a course in Methodology given during the spring term (January-June 2002). 65 students are using the APE-portfolio/SCAM and the user study/evaluation will be done during the first week in June 2002, which means one week before the students complete the courses.
• A graduate course in “Social Science Classics” (7,5 ECTS) October 2001- January 2002 where the platform SenSei was tested. 20 participants
• A course “Correspondence analysis”, November 2001 followed by seminars during Spring 2002, where the aim was to support the sharing of and personalized views on extensive data sets. 17 participants from several Scandinavian universities. The same course will be given during Autumn 2002 which gives the opportunity for more observations.
• Studies on collaboration within an interdisciplinary research program Formation for the public sphere”, where a standard platform (BSCW) is used.
• Swedish participation in the Stanford-based program I-RITE (”Integrating Research Into the Teaching Environment”). The aim is to train PhD students to present their dissertation work in an accessible and compelling form. See http://www.stanford.edu/group/i-rite/ and for the Swedish participation http://www.skeptron.uu.se/broady/dl/irite.htm. This Swedish participation is organized by the MoCA team. A workshop with participation of Rick Reis and Carolyn Gale from Stanford University was arranged in Uppsala 10-11 April 2002.

Dissemination of results

• Uppsala Learning Lab seminars: the monthly Meta Seminar series, led by Lars Borin, September 2001–May 2002.
• Conference, etc., presentations:
            Kristina Nilsson and Lars Borin will present a paper at the EuroCALL 2002 conference, 15–17 August, 2002, in Jyväskylä, Finland (see below)
            Lars Borin will present a paper at the EuroCALL 2002 pre-conference workshop on NLP in CALL, 14 August, 2002, in Jyväskylä, Finland (see below)
• Several presentations at Uppsala University, e.g. at the SVERD autumn conference at Uppsala University, 2-3 October 2001.
• Donald Broady moderator at the conference “Att katalogisera det elektroniska biblioteket. Hur skall det gå till?” (To Catalogue the Electronic Library - How to do it), Kungl. Biblioteket, Stockholm, 22 October 2001.
• Seminar ”Digitalt innehållstöd” (Digital content support), Skolverket (National Board of Education), 21 March 2002, Stockholm

Deliverables, software

The APE portfolio built on the SCAM platform is currently in a testing phase. The first testable beta version was accomplished in February 2002. See above.

Deliverables, accomplished papers

Working papers:  (PLeaSe • PALaTe research reports): a number of research reports are planned for this year. The first two titles ready for publication are:

• (PLeaSe • PALaTe research report #01) Kristina Nilsson and Lars Borin: Living off the land: the Web as a source of practice texts for learners of less prevalent languages [This is the written version of a presentation accepted for the EuroCALL 2002 conference in Jyväskylä, Finland, 15–17 August, 2002 (see above)].
• (PLeaSe • PALaTe research report #02) Lars Borin: What have you done for me lately? The fickle alignment of NLP and CALL [This is the written version of a presentation accepted for the EuroCALL 2002 pre-conference workshop on NLP in CALL in Jyväskylä, Finland, 14 August, 2002 (see above)].

Donald Broady: ”Digitala arkiv och portföljer” (Digital Archives and Portfolios), pp. 11-16 in IT i skolan - mirakelmedicin eller sockerpiller? Rapport 45/2001. Stockholm: IT-kommissionen, 2001.

Deliverables, reports currently in progress

1. Jan Danils, Jöran Stark: SCAM - Standardized Content Archive Management (Draft 2002-05-17 available at the PADLR BSCW workspace)
2. One report on experiences from educational experiments at the Uppsala University testbeds (cf. above).
3. One short report on the experiences of the Swedish participation in I-RITE (cf. above).
4. And more to come.

Collaborations

• Within the subproject Swedish/German co-operation, i.a. several visits of L3S collaborators to Uppsala and KTH and vice versa.
• In the SCAM development cooperation with Skolverket, Utbildningsradion, and Nationellt Centrum för Flexibelt Lärande (NCFL).
• The LingoNet “web-based language laboratory” project at Mid-Sweden and Uppsala Universities (funded by the Swedish Agency for Distance Education)
• The Nordic (University of Helsinki, SINTEF Research Institute in Oslo, Stockholm University) Squirrel project on corpus-based computer-assisted language learning of Nordic languages (funded by NorFA)
• The CrossCheck/SVANTE project on grammar checking of written second language Swedish at NADA/KTH and Stockholm University (funded by Vinnova)
• The IT Based Collaborative Learning in Grammar project at the universities in Uppsala and Stockholm (funded by the Swedish Agency for Distance Education)
• The reference group for digital publication, Carolina Rediviva, Uppsala University.
• The research program and graduate school ”Lärande och IT” (Learn-IT), Stiftelsen för kunskaps- och kompetensutveckling.
• The project Secure Legal Information Management (SLIM), Faculty of Law, Stockholm University.

Created by Lars Borin <lars.borin@ling.uu.se>, Donald Broady <broady@nada.kth.se>, and Monica Langerth Zetterman <monica.langerth@ped.uu.se>
Last updated 2011-08-06