Draft Prototype of a Mash-up PLE

Abstract

Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLEs) comprise PLE solutions which empower learners to design and use their environments in order to connect to learner networks and collaborate on shared artefacts (Wild et al., 2008). In the sense of end-user development, a MUPPLE infrastructure enables users to mash-up existing functionality, i.e. in the form of web applications and widgets, for their personal goals and learning needs. Thus, a MUPPLE solution supports learners through good practice sharing facilities, e.g. by providing pre-defined PLEs for specific situations or recommending tools for concrete goals. This deliverable summarises the four MUPPLE-like prototypes identified in first year of the ROLE project. Section 1 describes MUPPLE II, a JetPack-based Firefox extension which extends the idea of the original, server-sided MUPPLE platform (http://mupple.org) by a learning practice recording tool on the client-side. As outlined in section 2, PAcMan (Personal Activity Manager) is a XUL-based Firefox extension which allows learners to design and manage their personal learning activities, i.e. by structuring their learning contexts through activities and managing the urls of the daily used web applications. Section 3 introduces a PLE infrastructure for language learning developed as the ‘ROLE Christmas Prototype’ (see also Renzel et al., 2010). Finally, section 4 reports about Graaasp, a platform to grab, aggregate, organize and share heterogeneous data from multiple sources. All these prototypes can be understood as a MUPPLE solution, although being realised in very different ways. Additionally, each section points to an online demonstrator of the depicted prototype, if there is one available. This internal deliverable is of the type “prototype” and aims at building preliminary PLE solutions related to the ROLE objectives RO1, RO2, and RO3 (cf. ROLE-DoW, p. 6). Furthermore, the prototypes described in this document address the following WP objectives (cf. ROLE-DoW, p. 58): • Developing a methodology for building and altering networks of actors, artefacts, and activities on the basis of PLEs • Empowering learners with learning environment design capabilities and facilitating learnability for creating PLE mash-ups • Providing regulation and reflection facilities for collaboration in learning networks Overall, the deliverable is a joint outcome of the work packages 3, 4, and 5 as well as the WP7 tasks 7.1 and 7.2 (cf. ROLE-DoW, p. 59).