Social, Personalized Lifelong Learning - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 95

a practical point of view. We illustrate this with
a sample implementation, and discuss the results
based on an evaluation with real users (learners
and teachers).
The remainder of this chapter is organized as
follows. The following section discusses related
research from the areas of Web 2.0 and person-
alization, and includes a comparative analysis of
models and frameworks for adaptive personalized
systems. The third section presents a reference
framework for social adaptive e-learning, as an
illustrative example of the merger of the new tech-
nologies and older concepts. The fourth section
instantiates this framework based on a prototype
implementation, and presents and discusses a
sample system. The fifth section presents a case
study evaluation of the new paradigm, e-learning
2.0, in which an implemented system is used
to support experiments with both students and
teachers. The sixth section discusses the findings
of the study, and the seventh section addresses
future research directions. The final section draws
conclusions.

research into personalization as one aspect of
educational Web 2.0 which inevitably overlaps
with other pedagogic research.
Personalization in Web 2.0 brings together a
whole new set of requirements and contexts, and
to differentiate it from single-user based person-
alization, we can call it “Adaptation 2.0”. Web
2.0 is principally defined by the content and the
users. Each user has a profile (such as preferences
and interests), which can be represented by a set
of attributes, and similarly the content also has
a set of attributes (type, size, etc.). Therefore,
Adaptation 2.0 inherits from previous single user
personalization approaches matching between
the user and content attributes (De Bra, 1999).
On the other hand, another important feature of
Adaptation 2.0 is that it can be applied to a group
of users who share similar profiles, and thus, ad-
aptation is no longer only about the individual,
but about the group.
From the point of view of social networks
and Web 2.0 applications, their increasing rise in
popularity means that ever more users must be ac-
commodated, and for some applications millions
of users may need to be supported - for example,
Facebook (2009) announced that it reached a
user base of 200 million people in May 2009,
out of which 70% are outside the US. For such
massive applications, introducing personaliza-
tion and adaptation is a useful way of reducing
the overall search space. Of course, introducing
personalization always raises issues of privacy
(Kobsa, 2007), which are out of the scope of the
current chapter, but it is sufficient to note here that
a balance between personalization and privacy
must be struck, as they both affect each other.

WEB 2.0, PERSONALIZATION
AND ADAPTATION

Web 2.0

The individual technologies which collectively
make Web 2.0 have for several years attracted
the interest of educators, and of these, Blogs
(Downes, 2004) and Wikis (Lamb, 2004; Guth,
2007) have high profiles. More recently, the avail-
ability of such technologies on mobile devices
has contributed to an interest in mobile delivery
of Web 2.0 based educational services (Yau &
Joy, 2008). Web 2.0 is still a controversial term
which encompasses a large number of concepts
and technologies, each of which has to some extent
been applied in an educational context. Whilst a
detailed discussion of all of these is beyond the
scope of this chapter, the reader should view our

Personalization: Models of Adaptive
(Educational) Hypermedia

Past research into personalization for the web
belongs to the larger category of adaptive hyper-
media research - the web being an instance of
hypermedia, where nodes are pages and links are