Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 143

Figure 9. Conceptual diagram of an action flow within a collaborative activity

exchange on which tool to use for what, MUPPLE
also allows for creating an activity pattern that
contains the relevant actions (e.g. browse litera-
ture, elaborate paper, review paper, and so forth).
This pattern can then be shared with the peers to
instantiate an activity automatically without re-
quiring them to design their own collaborative
actions, set up all relevant URLs to shared arte-
facts, etc.
The conceptual diagram of MUPPLE applied
in a collaborative activity (see Figure 9) also indi-
cates that each actor has a certain role within the
learning flow. These roles are characterized by the
necessary actions (or even within the flow of these
actions) and can be determined for our example
by the main author (the knowledge worker), co-
authors, and reviewers. While the main author is
responsible for setting up the activity and taking
care of other management issues, a co-author
might contribute a single chapter and a reviewer
might improve the paper in form and content or
only give qualitative feedback.
Particularly for attracting new users, the suc-
cess of MUPPLE highly depends on immediately
recognizable benefits for learners. To enable this
sought transparency, we foster good practice
sharing through activity patterns which can be

provided by both facilitators and learners: The
flexible and tested solution of a problem is turned
into an abstraction and put into the form of a
design pattern made available to the community.
Similarly to the idea of scripting collaborative
activities (Dillenbourg & Jermann, 2007), we
use LISL to materialize these activity patterns.
As learning activities are encoded in the form of
LISL scripts, they can be exported into activity
patterns and shared with other learners; vice versa,
peers can use available good practice patterns and
instantiate their own activities from them. Refer-
ring to our scenario, an experienced writer might
prepare patterns for the different roles within the
collaborative activity. Therefore, the knowledge
worker creates a pattern for initiating and manag-
ing the collaborative writing (her own role in this
learning flow). Then, she makes up one pattern
with typical actions relevant for co-authors and
one for reviewing and quality assurance.
Figure 10 gives an overview of the possible
action-object-tool triples for these three pat-
terns. The main author has to complete several
administrative tasks, like assigning the chapters
to co-authors, requesting the (internal) reviews,
and submitting the paper. Furthermore, she has
the same duties like the co-authors, i.e., finding