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Since the personal ownership of mobile devices has increased steadily over the last decade, many students own personal mobile devices that can reasonably be integrated into mobile learning scenarios. Besides all the benefits this option brings, there are also drawbacks, such as the heterogeneity of the set of mobile devices that need to be managed and integrated into existing and emerging learning scenarios. In our approach, one key element to address this challenge is an architecture that allows an easy and flexible integration of mobile and non-mobile devices into the same (mobile) learning scenario. We used a well-known group discussion method and an existing tool and extended it based on our approach. A description of this extension is presented in this paper. Finally, the paper reports on a pilot study in which the extended system was evaluated.

Science Created by You (SCY) is a project on learning in science and technology domains. SCY uses a pedagogical approach that centres around products, called 'emerging learning objects' (ELOs) that are created by students. Students work individually and collaboratively in SCY-Lab (the general SCY learning environment) on 'missions' that are guided by socio-scientific questions (for example 'How can we design a CO2-friendly house?'). Fulfilling SCY missions requires a combination of knowledge from different content areas (eg, physics, mathematics, biology, as well as social sciences). While on a SCY mission, students perform several types of learning activities that can be characterised as productive processes (experiment, game, share, explain, design, etc), they encounter multiple resources, collaborate with varying coalitions of peers and use changing constellations of tools and scaffolds. The configuration of SCY-Lab is adaptive to the actual learning situation and may provide advice to students on appropriate learning activities, resources, tools and scaffolds, or peer students who can support the learning process. The SCY project aims at students between 12 and 18 years old. In the course of the project, a total of four SCY missions will be developed, of which one is currently available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobilogue is a tool to support educators and students in authoring and deploying learning support with location awareness and guidance to mobile devices. The application area of the framework covers informal learning settings like field trips, museum visits as well as formal classroom settings. The focus of the framework is on the simplicity and flexibility of the domain independent content authoring and content deployment. We present an authoring tool that uses a graph-based paradigm to model and author a path across different locations. Locations relate to physical places or artefacts through QR codes and provide supportive information. The guidance takes place by identifying the user’s location by scanning the QR codes and visualizing the appropriate information on the smartphone. Finally we describe possible scenarios for such informal learning settings and report on an evaluation of the framework in a museum setting.

Most existing mobile learning environments for supporting field-trip activities are limited to specific domains or contents and do not support authoring. We present a framework for planning and conducting field trips with mobile devices called learning environment for mobile network capable devices (LEMONADE), which provides full-cycle support for authoring and conducting field trips as well as for post-trip reporting and reflection activities. LEMONADE includes a generic graph-based language for authoring task specifications and for querying and presenting field-trip results. It is fully integrated in the graph-based modelling environment FreeStyler, allowing the students' results to be flexibly used in follow-up activities.

Moderating multiple e-discussions at a time puts high demands on teachers as moderators. Therefore, to be able to provide effective moderation, teachers should be given adequate awareness support. We evaluated our e-moderation system called "Moderator's Interface" comparing moderation with and without awareness support. Following a within subject design, our cases were two teachers who were asked to moderate discussions of their students and to choose and prepare a discussion topic compliant with the curriculum. Results indicate that additional awareness support was deliberately used during moderation when available. An analysis of data from the teachers' answers to 120 questions and tasks indicates that in the awareness condition, both teachers performed better on the tasks as compared to moderating without awareness support. However, it could not be corroborated that teachers gained additional knowledge about the discussion solely from using the awareness support in absence of an external task.

In this paper, we describe an architectural framework for the engineering of distributed learning environments with different devices and multi-language agent support. The framework consists of a central Tuple Space server and clients that differ in hardware (PDAs, PCs with projection) and in programming languages (C#, Prolog, Java). The analysis components use state patterns and action patterns to be defined in and interpreted by Prolog. This framework has been used for supporting the design rationale method QOC in a collaborative visual modelling environment.

This paper presents an integration architecture and a technical framework for moderation of e-discussions, a specific type of scenario for collaborative learning. The approach for monitoring and moderating discussions is supported at a generic level and defines interfaces to integrate diverse discussion environments smoothly into the generic framework. The usage of the developed monitoring and moderation system has been tested practically with two different stand-alone discussion environments and first empirical results of the moderation approach have been collected. We conclude with future work on the framework system and additional discussion tools to be integrated into the architecture.

To support the development of distributed learning environments with components programmed in different languages a blackboard architecture based on tuple spaces is proposed. The specific implementation in terms of the "Colmid" middleware supports inter-language communication by adding a Prolog interface to the Java based TSpaces platform. This approach is exemplified by a collaborative discussion environment coupled with an action analyzer written in Prolog.

Learning by inquiry, collaboration, and design are the central didactic principles of the software developed by the Science Created by You (SCY) project. In SCY technology-enhanced learning environments, or SCY missions, students learn by creating products that they can share and discuss with their peers. In order to do this, they make use of textual or multimedia learning materials and perform physical and virtual experiments.