Social, Personalized Lifelong Learning - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 119

them to test the various functionalities. Another
issue is that the question referred in MOT 1.0 to
an author's own items, whilst in MOT 2.0, items
belonged to a group. The next version will set
various rights within a group, having members
only allowed to edit, or to read (and this implies
link without change), or copy and change the item.
Also individual rights on items and modules will
be enabled. Another student commented on the
possible redundancy of information - “repetitive
lessons”. This student however did not under-
stand that the two concepts pointed to the same
information item, in order to avoid exactly this
type of redundancy. The issue here is however to
differentiate between linking to content and copy-
ing and re-editing content. This will be taken into
consideration in the next version of the system.
For Q6 on creating a lesson based on someone
else's domain map(s) , students who gave lesser
marks were commenting on the speed being “a
bit lazy”. However, another student commented
that the speed was “quick”. Disregarding the
discrepancies in opinions, the speed issue needs
to be checked in the next version of the system.

“Leverage” on Thursday, just because a colleague
has added a tag to that item, or because the rating
of the item has increased. Other issues that have
been picked up by our experiments and evalua-
tions are the issues regarding copyright and rights
of use in general — when we refer to one user
only, there is no problem in allowing that user
to edit, change, move or link their own material.
However, when there is a cooperative effort, the
issues of ownership appear. Editing rights have
to be carefully granted, in order not to allow
destruction (removal, or permanent change and
damage) of content created by others. Even in an
ideal, cooperative world, there needs to be a clear
differentiation between linking to an item created
by others, and editing it. As items are reused in
different contexts, changing an item for one context
may render it unusable for another context. This
is in contradiction to Web 2.0 techniques, such as
in Wikipedia, where the content is permanently
changing, stopping only when it represents a
common denominator. In adaptive, personalized
systems, the permanent change is useful, but the
representation cannot be a common denomina-
tor. Personalization also means addressing the
outliers, creating versions of content for various
types of users, usage and context. Thus, in such
a case, if changes are desired for a particular type
of context, a user would have to make a copy of
the original item, and edit this copy, instead of the
original. Only in the case in which no changes are
necessary could a user link to the original item.
This however brings with itself the same issue as
linking to Internet pages: the owner might change
the content, thus changing the relevance to the
source of the link, or even remove the concept,
in which case empty links could appear.
Another issue that is inherent in Web 2.0
applications, and which personalized, adaptive
lifelong learning enhancing Web 2.0 applications
share, is that of quality of content. In this chapter,
we have shown how this issue can be solved by
a progressive increase in contribution rights (be
they tagging, rating, commenting, or even editing

DISCUSSION

Moving personalization for lifelong learning into
the realm of Web 2.0 raises interesting issues.
Personalized environments have in the past been
centred on a single user. In the new type of environ-
ment, users interact and collaborate, and this can
lead to the adaptation to one user influencing the
adaptation process for another. For instance, the
same user, Mary (in scenario 1) could be recom-
mended Jane, if she finishes her reading on the
“Banking crisis” on a Monday, or another student,
Mark, if she finishes on Wednesday. Similarly, a
student studying about “Speculative bubbles and
crashes” on a Tuesday could be recommended
“Strategic complementarities in finance”, because
they are both tagged “Financial crisis” (see Fig-
ure 4), but that student might be recommended