Social, Personalized Lifelong Learning - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 120

of new items), dependant on the overall quality of
an individual's (e.g., student's) contribution. Thus,
poor contributors would lose their contributing
rights, and may at some point only be allowed to
read content, whereas high quality contributors
would be possibly achieving similar rights to
authors, or even teachers.
We have focused on personalization and
adaptation as a key strategy to support lifelong
learning, but we should not lose sight of the other
technologies and pedagogic developments which
will be important in the future. For example, the use
of Learning Management Systems in institutions
and beyond is pervasive, and effective delivery
of educational tools typically takes place through
such systems. However, the effective incorpora-
tion of educationally rich tools and frameworks
(such as those presented in this chapter) within
such systems is mainly unresolved (Rößling et
al ., 2008). The integration between “mainstream
learning platforms” and “advanced- (often AI-
based) solutions” is beyond the scope of this
chapter, but is the main scope of research such
as targeted by us and the partnership in the EU
projects such as ALS and GRAPPLE.
Web 2.0, as a representative of the informa-
tion society, can provide more information and
knowledge to a broader audience and the audience
does not have to be in a classroom. This makes
Web 2.0 an optimal candidate for lifelong learning,
where we do not have to depend only on schools,
libraries and experts to gain deeper understanding.
However, e-learning is not a means to an end,
and schools, libraries and experts are still very
important. The two approaches will work together
more in the future. For instance, in the context of
Web 2.0, experts play an important role as part of
the Web 2.0 e-learning system as well - they can
help students, interact with them, etc. The added
benefit is that of bypassing distance issues, on
one hand, and allowing software systems to more
easily (automatically, adaptively) pair needs with
offers (between learners and experts), to perform
scheduling functions, etc.

Web 2.0 could be said to be a means of cre-
ating equal opportunities for different learners
from different backgrounds and conditions. Also,
specifically in the context of lifelong learning,
it creates opportunities for people who have no
time to participate in the formal learning settings.
Finally, the specific features of lifelong learning
— such as allowing people to communicate via
various information channels — support a broader,
information and people-richer access to such clas-
sic learning paradigms as the Socratic dialogue.
From a broader social web perspective, the
user model as built in MOT 2.0 can be extended
towards a distributed user model, able to track
users' activities not only within one system (MOT
2.0), but also on the broader Social Web (e.g., the
groups a user is member of on LinkedIn , the tags
they used on del.icio.us, the (educational) videos
they watched on YouTube , etc.). These types of
mash-ups would harness the power of not only
one social web system, but several. From a model-
ling point of view, the Social LAOS framework is
perfectly compatible with such an extension — it
would only mean that user model variables may
be set by calls to external sites, instead of locally
— which are implementation details and do not
interfere with the framework.

RELATED RESEARCH

Related research into supporting adaptation and
personalization in collaborative learning environ-
ments is relatively limited. Adaptive collaborative
tasks support is addressed, for instance, in WebDL
(Boticario et al., 2000). The system allows anno-
tations and tagging, and then selects information
based on these tags for personal student needs. No
specific rules that guide the collaboration process
in an adaptive way are envisioned.
Work by Tsovaltzi et al. (2008) promotes col-
laborative adaptation based on scripts of interac-
tions of pairs of students. Prompts about contacting
the peers and explaining, talking about consensus,