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i.e. a human actor being a tutor, teaching assistant,
mentor, etc). Though, adaptation of the environ-
ment only takes place to a very limited degree:
the aLFanet project does not foresee to help in
managing a complex set of tools and services out
of an even more complex, not determined portfolio
at run time. Olivier & Tattersall (2005) explain the
possibilities of integrating learning services in the
environment section of LD. Besides the already
mentioned restriction that these components both
in practice and in the guidelines are only touched by
instructional designers, the services are postulated
to be known at design time: they are approved in
the specification (LD 1.0 has four services!), and
additionally they have to be instantiated through
formal automated procedures. From the perspec-
tive of standardization, Olivier and Tattersall
predict application profiles that enhance LD with
the services provided by particular communities,
though interoperability to other LD players then
no longer will be given. Within the TENcom-
petence project, extensions have been proposed
that allow for more bottom-up oriented author-
ing of the units of learning (Vogten et al., 2008):
formalization, reproducibility, and reusability of
learning designs can also be catalyzed through
the use of a personal competence manager that
facilitates the development of learning materials
through learners themselves.
Though in principle people, activities, artefacts,
and services (not tools!) are components of LD, the
standard does not offer support for communica-
tion and reflection on technology use on a higher
granular level, nor facilitates environment building
and maintenance. Moreover, LD is based on the
assumption that the services that can be deployed in
an environment have to be shared by all executing
software players. Hereby, 'services' differ from
'tools', as tools relate additionally to the perceiv-
able surface of a learning network. Both interface
human activity with machine communication (i.e.
digital thus manipulable information). However,
tools also incorporate their user interfaces and
their design influences the processes pursued with
them, as has been shown for example by Pituch
& Lee (2006). Additionally, agreement on the
standardization of services can always only be a
second step after innovating new services. We have
to state that current LD (together with the avail-
able authoring tools and players) fails to support
competence achievement in learning environment
design and does not consider environment set-up
and maintenance within the learning activities.
A third block of research can be identified
in the group of
adaptive hypermedia generators
(Ceri et al., 2005). Cristea, Smits, and De Bra
(2007) report on LAG, a language used to ex-
press information on assembly, adaptation, and
strategies plus procedures of intelligent adaptation
applications. It was developed specifically for
adaptive educational hypermedia. LAG follows
the structure of hypertexts and expresses rule-
based path adaptation (the 'adaptation dynam-
ics') for automatically adapting course contents.
WebML in combination with UML-Guide has
been deployed to realize client-sided adaptation
of e-learning web-applications (Ceri et al., 2005).
WebML follows a generic hypertext model and
contains the structural elements of site views,
areas, pages, and content units. A site view is a
hypertext consisting out of areas which again can
integrate sub-areas and pages. Pages are the actual
containers for information to be given to the user.
They consist out of elementary content units that
extract data with queries from data sources. By
combining it with slightly extended UML state
diagrams (UML-Guide), user navigation through
a system can be modelled, and - through both -
personalized applications can be generated (Ceri
et al., 2005). Though not restricted in principle,
the environmental aspects of a typical design
process are recommended to be executed by a
designer rather than a learner. The environment
design itself, however and again, is restricted to
content and path design.
Although generator technologies could take ac-
count of more recent advancements in end-user de-
velopment (the long tail of software development,
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