First, the user receives the subject’s educative contents and ontology (conforming ADL SCORM) from the contents provider, and the DiTV programs (conforming TV-Anytime).

As you could read previously, the programs should be tagged by the viewers, improving in this way the semantic tagging. This means that the user should be given an interface in which they could write the tags. The developed interface is seen over the program screen and it offers some facilities as suggestions to avoid writing the whole word (we must keep in mind that the user has only the TV remote control to manage the interface), previous assigned tags and popular tags for that program, as you can see in this screenshot from the article:

Now, the big question is: how can the system use the tags to provide programs related to a topic?

As the number of repetitions in global assigned tags grows, the relationships among them are computed, and also the relationships among the programs assigned popular tags. By means of these relationships, a main subset of programs can be built up, being the relevant tags those appearing in the ontology. Related programs can be added to this set, if they have been assigned some (though not all) of the relevant tags, enhacing the experience of the user. Popular tags are also sent to the provider, so that they can be delivered together with the program.

As the computation of relationships is too heavy for a simple device as a set-top box, it is done in a remote server, leaving for the device the only task of filtering the programs according to the set of relevant tags.
This server + local device system runs AVATAR, and you can read more about it in the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, Special Issue on Personalization Techniques for Recommender Systems and Intelligen User Interfaces, 21(2), pages from 397 to 422.

So… that’s all! I hope you enjoyed the reading and learned a bit about t-learning and this proposal :)

A folksonomy consists of a series of pieces of information of any kind classified by users with labels. The labels space is plain – without hierarchy, in contrast with an ontology or taxonomy – and common among all the users. So, the term would explain this “classification made by people”, as marked by Quintarelli, though the term is attributed to Van der Wal and made popular by Gene Smith. Van der Wal defines it like this:

Folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for one’s own retrival. The tagging is done in a social environment (usually shared and open to others). Folksonomy is created from the act of tagging by the person consuming the information.

So, this proccess has two dimensions or steps – personal and social. First, the user marks a piece of information to have an easier access to it later. This kind of selfish behaviour would be the personomy. Then, and more interesting for the rest of the world, it also contributes to a wider classification of articles – the folksonomy.

It’s worth noting that there are two kinds of indexation made by humans – the tagging done by the creator and the one done by the community of viewers. Examples of the first are YouTube (videos), Flickr (pictures), or Tagzania (places). Examples of the second, which would be the more accurate folksonomy, are mainly bookmarking sites as del.icio.us or ma.gnolia. Now we are interested in the second type.

What do we achieve by doing this? It is clear that ambiguation and synonims may give some problems. Selfish tags like “important” or “mine”, that only helps a user to find their marked items, don’t give any benefit to the community. However, the greatest amount are describing tags that give an average view of what we can find in that item.

But who performs such annotation?

It would be nice that the same people designing the course also annotated the programs. This, though, is impractical and maybe impossible, and the original idea is to achieve the matching automatically, so that new programs can be added to the course without new revision.

The simplest way would consist in letting the TV channels include this information by themselves. But here we face a potential problem: TV providers might not worry about t-learning, spending little time and effort in doing this correctly – we could find wrong tags, scarce or even no information at all, worse than using syntactical search.

The approach that Rey et al. propose is the use of social tagging, and it is, in fact, the main contribution of the article of discussion for this blog. Being the actual viewers the ones that assign tags to the programs, the most popular tags for a specific one should be highly accurate.

In the next posts we’ll have a look on social tagging, which is called folksonomy, and how it can be applied to t-learning in practice.

Please keep tuned in to know more about t-learning and Rey’s approach on the subject.

The home is clearly one of the preferred places for learning, along with schools and workplaces. As I highlighted in the previous post, this is a favourite mean for people who would like to learn something new, but they are not able because of lack of time (e.g. they work) or accessibility (like handicaped people). Also, the high flexibility and adaptability it presents is a good point for even those who are not constraint by the above factors.

In the case of children, the learning process at home is a key factor for their education as a whole. However, they tend to find ‘boring’ anything that has to do with education and their homework.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) makes it possible to change from demand driven to supply-led learning. But the most important part is the ability to stimulate motivation. Does television meet this requirement? Well, it depends highly in the way that information is provided, and there is still a lot to be researched in this sense.

Anyway, there are studies that focuses on the impact TV has on viewers. Most of them study the way advertisement modifies behaviours and attitudes. Some have also noted that television may help develop cognitive skills as spatial abilities, visual skills or image storehouse. It has also been noted that, from the user’s point of view, understanding TV content is easier than understanding print content.

What is sure is that interactivity plays a major part in the success of learning, as it leads to more attention, practise development and personal discovery. It is important to remark that it is not a matter of replicating human-human communication of ideas, but device-human interaction. The discussion about the types of interaction that may be needed for each topic is long, and must be taken into account when developing a learning object.

Interactivity, then, can be the key to reach people and stimulate them into learning in its multiple forms through DiTV.

As t-learning is possible due to advances in Digital TV and distance learning, I will give a summary on both aspects, starting today with the former.

So, what is Digital TV? It is the broadcast of contents in a digital format, in contrast with the analogue format that we were used to receive. But not just the broadcast, as we are going to see an evolution in the way we use the TV: it will become more and more personalised, leaving traditional scheduled TV for major live events.

The personalisation of television is mainly task of the set-top box, which will receive signals from the user’s remote control device and adapt the content according to that. This can be used in a number of ways:

• navigation through the high amount of channels
• enhance of existing TV programs, by the addition of more information on demand for example
• channel independent interactive services (such as virtual magazines)
• interacting through the return channel, giving the viewer the opportunity to send information up to the broadcaster: quiz answers, voting…
• video-on-demand: receiving some specific content is totally independent of the current time
• home storage: contents are saved in the set-top box or other local storage device
• the hybrid of the two previous: Pushing content to local storage and Pulling content from remote servers
• meta-tagging

All these features can be of much use in t-learning: additional data can be attached to any program, providing even futher information sheets, and interactive learning can be achieved by the use of real time tests and quizzes, and questions or feedback from the learner. Also, meta-tagging is a crucial tool to easily classify and search contents of interest, be tutor or learner-side.

Other initiatives include:

• Web content on the TV: This has been proved to be not the best approach, as the adaptation is hard and the result is poor. Web content is optimized for a different interface, so that the graphical part is less than it should be and the access to the functionality is difficult when using just a remote control. Therefore, this is still a field for research. A good proposal is to develop general learning objects that can be afterwards adapted to both Internet and TV access, separating both processes, as noted in the article “Enticing learners: Rethinking the relationship between e-learning via DiTV and via the Internet” by Russel et al.
• Live personal video distribution: live demonstrations by tutors can be broadcasted to learners’ homes, in the way iSeeTV (for medical support – one-way) and FastWeb TVCam (TV-based videoconference – two-ways) do.
• Games consoles: given the potential they bring to TVsets, they are capable of presenting rich learning contexts. There has always been little interest in this field from games manufacturers, but fortunately Nintendo is promoting the idea these days.

Regarding standardization, the Home Multimedia Platform is the agreed standard for set-top box by the European Comission but it is unlikely that it will spread widely as there are already many legacy set-top boxes being used by consumers. Also, the TV-Anytime Forum is a global association of organizations, working in the idea of a device that may support a wide range of services – network and standalone games, information and educational packages, entertaining enhanced television, transactional services and utilities such as banking, shopping and smart appliances.

It has traditionally been supported by press, mail, television and radio, but with the spread of the Internet, more and more courses have adopted this new format. It is indeed very appealing, starting from its interactivity to the attractiveness it can achieve.

However, we are facing a new problem: Internet is accessible to a very limited amount of the world population.

For example, in less developed countries it is difficult to find a computer at home, and even in not so poor countries may be a computer but the connection to Internet is missing. That would remove the main advantadge of distance learning, making the student part from home in search of a suitable device, which may be impossible for some. Even more, the learner may be handicapped to use such a complex system as a computer.

So, why not use a really spread and simple device? Maybe it is the time for television again, and its digitalisation can provide new features that may enhance its use for education.

In this sense, the Brazilian government for example is making an effort in the spreading of digital TV among the population. In Spain, analogue TV will soon ’switch off’, forcing channels to broadcast their contents in a digital format, which will surely be enriched rapidly in order to attract the audience.

Proposals for its use are already presented. For example, T-islessia is a very interesting program for Italian children who have been diagnosed dyslexia. Attending an specialized center is very difficult for them, as there are very few and may be far from where they live, the broadband/QoS conditions in the Italian network are not the best for the difussion of the necessary material for them and, whatsmore, handling the computer interface (mouse and keyboard) may be hard for them. DiTV has been proved to be the best approach for their treatment.

Now think of a more general user, maybe someone who might not even have a special interest in learning, although it would be very beneficial: literacy, for example, or studies for children. Then learning should be somehow disguised as entertainment, resulting in what is called ‘infotainment’, ‘edutainment’, or ‘entercation’ (a field open to television as well as -video?-games — see Game-Based e-Learning blog!).

This is the case of a project carried out by NIACE. In this project, television was used to provide Skills for Life to reluctant learners in prisons. The topics were embedded in vocational contexts such as cookery and ‘do-it-yourself’, and supported by workbooks. What if, instead of workbooks, DiTV would have been used? In my opinion, the extra material would have been handed out in a more appealing way.

This kind of ‘disguised’ learning by means of DiTV is the basis of the project I am going to talk about. But that will follow in later posts ;)

Content posts coming soon!