Information Technology Reference
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StudyNet (Glover & Oliver, 2008) moves away
from lecturers to harness the power of connections
of the social networks, as it provides the learn-
ing materials in a social network environment.
StudyNet allows connections not only between
staff and students, but also with university alumni.
However, due to licence restrictions, StudyNet is
only available to enrolled students and academic
staff at University of Hertfordshire. In contrast
to this, MOT 2.0, can be used by anybody, as it
is open to public with no restrictions. Moreover,
StudyNet provides neither recommended learning
content nor recommended experts. In other words,
StudyNet does not support personalizationor
adaptation.
Bilge
et al.
(2009) investigated the possibil-
ity of attacking social networks to gain access to
personal information. While the work proved that
it is easy to forge user profiles and create a cross-
site cloning profile, it did not provide a solution
to this issue. The paper advises us to raise the
awareness among users of social networks about
privacy and security risks. In MOT 2.0, the privacy
and security risks are minimised, as the platform
does not support sharing of personal information.
The work of Mislove
et al.
(2008) describes
the detailed growth of data in Flickr, by crawl-
ing the Flickr sites to find out how the links are
constructed, in order to predict how new links will
be created. The study concludes that users tend to
respond to incoming links by creating links back to
the source, and that users link to other users who
are already close within the network. Such work
shows the popularity of Web 2.0 applications, and
the fact that it is timely to invest in researching
the potential such applications bring, including
for the important area of lifelong learning.
and sharing knowledge. In particular, learners
in higher education institutions are using social
tools in their everyday life to support their learn-
ing needs. Moreover, mature people engaged in
lifelong learning are gradually beginning to use
social networks and applications in their work
and daily activities. Therefore, the Social Web
has a potential to support both learners in higher
education as well as in lifelong learners. However,
research on personalizing and adapting social
lifelong learning has not yet been extensively
researched.
In this chapter we aim to close this gap with
this ongoing study on personalized adaptive social
lifelong learning. We have extended the LAOS
adaptive hypermedia framework by integrating
a social layer, and by blending the authoring
and delivering phases (i.e., removing the barrier
between tutors, learners and authors, all of whom
become authors with different sets of privileges).
Our approach allows students to contribute to the
authoring phase with different sets of privileges,
and distinguishes between collaborative author-
ing (editing the content of other users, describing
the content using tags, rating the content, com-
menting on the content, etc.), and authoring for
collaboration (e.g., adding authors activities, such
as defining groups of authors, subscribing to other
authors, communicating with other authors).
In the future, we expect many systems to
take over such a blended approach to adaptive,
personalized and customized education in social
environments, both as a research topic, as well
for commercial systems.
Encouraged by the first set of experiments,
we have already started adding more adaptation
functionality into MOT 2.0 via recommended
learning content and recommended experts based
on the user profile. Another new feature is that the
users within same group can have different sets of
privileges. Moreover, a new communication tool
has been added to the system in order to facilitate
the collaboration among learners via discussion
support. The chat tool recommends expert users
CONCLUSION
The emergence of the Social Web is changing
the way in which people communicate with
each other, as well as the methods of creating
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