iGoogle and gadgets as a platform for integrating institutional and external services

Workshop on Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLE’08)

Oskar Casquero

Javier Portillo

Jesús Romo

Ramón Ovelar

Manuel Benito

Index

Our vision of a PLE Why do we focus on the institution? Architecture of a PLE Our prototype Open issues Conclusions

Our vision of a PLE

The environment every teacher and student uses everyday, at least within an institution. A hub to route learning resources on a one2one

or one2many basis.

Controlled by the final user but influenced by: Other classmates (teachers or students) Tutors Institutions

Our vision of a PLE

A kit for every learner/teacher that provides:

Search

Create

Distribute

Contact

Our vision of a PLE

The artifact to encourage social networking.

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Network of PLEs Network of people, resources… knowledge !

Why do we focus on the institution? An effective way to create a network of PLEs.

The institution is the link to lots of people and resources implied in the learning process.

Why do we focus on the institution? Personal in PLE means that the user decides

but other agents should advice and provide materials.

Architecture of the PLE

Architecture of the PLE

Kernel

Our prototype

Widgets gadgets as the glue for the integration of services

Start page iGoogle as the frame for the widgets iGoogle within Google Apps

locally controlled environment (set of tools, group of users) administrator can configure a default PLE for everybody

Our prototype

Cloud-computing Google App Engine to extract and analyze the collective

intelligence that emerges from the network of PLEs

Network of blogs Elgg or Wordpress as a framework for creating the

blogs that backup the data exchanged within a group of users who use the PLE

Authoring tool: eXe learning

Our prototype

Repositories for: Documents Google Docs + Sites (wiki) Images Flickr Videos Youtube Bookmarks Delicious RLOs own server Posts network of institutional blogs

Vertical search engines Google CSEs

Our prototype

We use software from Google because it masks many technical issues it offers a flexible infrastructure

Google Apps is a propietary platform, but other products can also be used open nature of gadgets allow their placement in

any container

Open issues

Widgets that connect institutional services Development of collaborative widgets Real integration (data flow) of services inside

iGoogle, not just an interface integration Manage different user groups within Google

Apps (teachers, students, research groups…) Get experience with the standards we need

(SAML, OpenID, Oauth, OpenSocial, …) Integration of eXe learning and iGoogle

iGoogle and gadgets as a platform for integrating institutional and external services

oskar.casquero@ehu.es