Learning as a Service: A Web-Based LearningFramework for Communities of Professionals on

the Web 2.0

Marc Spaniol, Ralf Klamma, and Yiwei Cao

RWTH Aachen University, Informatik 5, Ahornstr. 55, D-52056 Aachen, Germanymspaniol,klamma,cao@cs.rwth-aachen.de

Abstract. With the advent of the Web 2.0 technologies, web-basedlearning is shifting to new learning community driven requirements.While the success of web-based learning (still) requires a careful selec-tion of appropriate communication/collaboration tools, the underlyingsoftware methodology is shifting from (passive) content consumptiontowards (active) content creation. Even more, the professionals’ socio-cultural background influences the attitude towards the collaberativelycreated learning contents. Thus, successful web-based learning commu-nity hosting for professionals depends on a comprehensive cross-mediasupport such as capabilities to share drawings, animations, pictures, digi-tal videos, texts etc. among users. In this paper, we present the “LearningAs a Service” (LAS) framework. LAS is an approach supporting web-based learning for professionals on the Web 2.0. It employs advancedmultimedia technologies in order to promote a wide range of web-basedlearning community information systems for interdisciplinary, intercul-tural as well as intergenerational learning. We present a set of services onthe basis of LAS showing best practices for various application scenarios.

Keywords: Technology Enhanced Learning, Web 2.0, Multimedia,Metadata, Web Services, SOA.

1 Introduction

Providing learners with the most suitable contents at any time and in any contextis one of the most critical aspects in technology enhanced learning. In particular,the design of web-based learning applications for communities of professionalsis a challenging issue. This problem becomes even more visible when the appli-cations aim at supporting interdisciplinary, intercultural, and intergenerationallearning communities. Furthermore, problems arise if the heterogeneous needsof professionals have to be satisfied. While “classical” E-Learning systems tryto overcome these problems by applying learner modeling strategies like IMSLearning Design in order to select and customize the content delivery within asingle application, “Learning As a Service” (LAS ) aims at the flexible orches-tration of social software within a web-based learning framework according tothe professionals’ needs.

H. Leung et al. (Eds.): ICWL 2007, LNCS 4823, pp. 160–173, 2008.c© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008

Learning as a Service: A Web-Based Learning Framework 161

In addition, multimedia technologies, social software and new Web 2.0 busi-ness models are rapidly developing and giving rise to new hardware and softwarerequirements. Combined with a trend for multidisciplinary work and research,novel approaches for flexible, evolving, adaptable, and interoperable communityengines are required. The success of social software and Web 2.0 depends greatlyon user-generated content, since one of the Web 2.0 business models is “Data isthe next Intel Inside”. But available social software solutions often neglect re-quirements of user communities. Therefore, social software and Web 2.0 need toreflect the nature of the underlying community processes and their discourses fortechnology enhanced learning. Consequently, the first research question is howto exploit the features of the Web 2.0 in order to design flexible, constructableweb-based learning frameworks?

The design of applications for web-based learning for interdisciplinary profes-sional communities of practice (in general) and for web-based learning frame-works (in particular) is a challenging issue [23,27,35]. Principles like legitimateperipheral participation, group knowledge, situated learning, informality, andco-location have to be taken seriously during the design of the learning frame-work. For that reason, the web-based learning framework has to reflect the so-cial learning processes which are very community-specific. Even more, (some)non-technical communities of professionals are usually not able to express theirneeds in the very beginning of technology enhanced learning application usage.Thus, the communities have to gain experiences on their own learning processeswhile using the systems. Additionally, the multimedia technologies are being de-veloped so rapidly that great hardware and network capabilities are required.Consequently, the second research question is how to bring system developersand user communities together in order to jointly develop technology enhancedlearning solutions?

In this paper we present a novel approach to realization of freely constructibleweb-based learning applications in the Web 2.0 era based on our “Learning Asa Service” (LAS ) framework. In order to meet these requirements we combineapproaches from various disciplines such as software engineering, sociology andcultural sciences, led by the transcriptivity idea as a design principle in computerscience [17,19]. The development process of community information systems isbased on ideas of joining usability and sociability [29] by constantly assessingand supporting community needs in a socio-technical information system de-velopment process. From the technical point of view, the server architecture ofthe LAS framework allows communities to add, remove and exchange services intheir community information system from anywhere at runtime. On top of it, wedesign and implement a Web 2.0 community platform, the Virtual Campfire, atechnology enhanced learning environment for communities of professionals e.g.in cultural heritage management.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we give an overviewof recent trends on the Web 2.0 with a focus on courseware management systems.Particularly, we discuss how far web-based learning specific courseware manage-ment systems are capable of community support in a Web 2.0 fashion. We will

162 M. Spaniol, R. Klamma, and Y. Cao

point out, that the desired solution requires bridging the gap between (passive)content consumption in the Web 1.0 and (active) content creation in the Web2.0. In Section 3 we introduce LAS as a framework to comply with these tasks.Even more, we explain its technical features for the modular composition of ser-vices. After that, we present Virtual Campfire and its core modules in a scenarioof non-linear multimedia storytelling for professionals in the application area ofcultural heritage management in Section 4. The paper closes with a summaryand an outlook on further research.

2 Recent Trends on the Web 2.0 - CMS Reviewed

In a rapidly changing world of Web applications, web-based learning has got inplace recently. Nowadays, the Web 1.0 is shaken by the fundamental changesbrought by the emergence of a new understanding of the Web itself. The term“Web 2.0” is therewith coined. In the Web 2.0 era the attitude towards softwarehas changed dramatically. Projects like Wikipedia create knowledge prosumers,which unify consumers and producers, and participation becomes essential forwikis. They are replacing those now old-fashioned content management systemsin organizations. Interoperability between content and services is realized bysyndications tools such as the RSS. In a similar fashion, this also holds forcourseware management systems. In order to highlight these differences betweenthe “new” and the “old” Web paradigms, we introduce the core Web 2.0 businessprocesses presented in O’Reilly’s seminal article [28]. We will not repeat allfeatures of the Web 2.0 here, but put forward the impact of Web 2.0 technologieson web-based learning. In addition, we discuss whether and how far the mostprominent courseware management systems (CMS) such as Blackboard AcademicSuiteTM [8], CLIX [15] or Moodle [25] “comply” with the Web 2.0 concepts.

2.1 Folksonomies

Tags are user-generated keywords (metadata) describing content (data). Web2.0 uses tagging technologies for the categorization of multimedia content, us-able for search and retrieval of very large collections. So far, the use of content-based retrieval techniques was limited for multimedia content, since they onlywork efficiently enough on a limited amount of material. Even more, in somelarger collections, only a limited amount of retrieved multimedia content has ahigh ratio in terms of precision and recall. However, a “semantic gap” betweenthe technical extraction of metadata and the semantically correct interpreta-tion of content can be recognized [6]. In this aspect, tagging systems have theshortcoming that they only offer plain keywords, where tags carry their seman-tics implicitly only. Despite their potential in improving search and retrieval ofmultimedia contents, tagging systems face the problem inherent in the implicitsemantics of the vocabulary used for tagging [7,24]. Particularly, the semanticsare not accessible for further machine processing. Current trends and evolvingstandards in multimedia technologies are intended for enriching multimedia con-tent with semantic metadata leading to more advanced multimedia management

Learning as a Service: A Web-Based Learning Framework 163

and retrieval methods in order to handle the dramatically increasing amount ofpublicly available multimedia content on the web [5]. Consequently, the tagsthemselves should carry their semantics explicitly in order to make this addi-tional information machine-accessible.

For web-based technology enhanced learning applications, multimedia andWeb 2.0 technologies have to converge on multimedia management. Tagging tech-nologies are needed to retrieve interesting multimedia content, but we also needsome kind of emergent semantics for multimedia using well-established content-based retrieval techniques. In “classical” CMS the concept of folksonomies isunknown. In contrast to the bottom up approach of folksonomies, they mostlystick to a predefined categorization scheme. Nevertheless, CMS like BlackboardAcademic SuiteTM, CLIX or Moodle provide other means to access the contents.While Web 2.0 software allows the exploration of all kinds of multimedia, CMScurrently only cover learning contents. In the future there will be a clear needto cross-walk between multimedia description standards like Dublin Core [2,12]and MPEG-7 [16,21] on the one hand and Learning Objects Metadata (LOM)[14], SCORM [1] and IMS LD [22] on the other hand.

2.2 Syndication

Lately, Web 2.0 is also featured as a kind of attitude with which people handleinteractions on the web. More and more web sites support services like RSS,social bookmarking, and Web site personalization instead of placing a buttonlabeled with “Set this page as your home page”. It has become natural anda kind of fashion to integrate third-party web services like Google, Yahoo anddel.icio.us etc. Web services and syndication will be even more important inubiquitous learning contexts when learners need support based on their loca-tion, their schedule, their connectivity, their device capabilities and their usagecontext. Content has to be adapted to the various unreliable or hardly pre-dictable contexts of the learners instead of delivering the same content to everylearner in every situation.

Syndication is somewhat a “new” concept to CMS. However, CMS focuson interoperability of learning contents. While systems like Blackboard Aca-demic SuiteTM, CLIX or Moodle “syndicate” their contents in interoperablemetadata standards, they have not yet discovered the multimedia descriptionstandards or even other standards from entertainment, library sciences, scienceand so on. Nevertheless, with the advent of Web Services Blackboard Acad-emic SuiteTM, CLIX or Moodle have got more and more openness and become“service-oriented”.

2.3 Participation

“Everybody’s invited!” is the slogan of social software ranging from the socialbookmarking pioneer del.icio.us to Wikipedia. Users can subscribe to commu-nities in order to make their contributions to a dedicated topic regardless ofsocial background, age or ethnicity. Thus, social networks are facilitated up to

164 M. Spaniol, R. Klamma, and Y. Cao

get a broader perspective on available information (opinion network) instead ofa narrowed-by-personalization piece of information. In the present informationworld, one can get whatever information he wants by finding the right commu-nity. Social navigation, social recommendation and social filtering techniques areeven more important in a multimedia Web, while classical information retrievaltechniques only provide limited support for communities’ participation. For ex-ample, merging and recombination of content is a technique which can be easilyapplied on existing Web 2.0 multimedia repositories. Nevertheless, participationsets new challenges for content retrieval techniques. It is questionable, what in-formation quality can be retrieved from Wikipedia (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org)and Wikimedia Commons (cf. http://commons.wikimedia.org) e.g. related tothe two different architectural styles of Florence Duomo’s cathedral.

Referred to “classical” CMS, Blackboard Academic SuiteTM, CLIX or Moodleare based on participation, too. However, participation of contents is usuallybased on a learner model and sophisticated roles. While Moodle is the pioneerin being more or less the “Wikipedia” of E-Learning, also Blackboard AcademicSuiteTM and CLIX have just discovered the power of bottom up activities. Thus,the trend in CMS goes to collaborative authoring by shifting from consumptionto prosumption. Thus, wikis are providing an approach to contextualization oflearning content as much as possible. However, the wiki approach is different asit tells the story behind the content.

2.4 Sharing Knowledge and Control

Control freaks are worrying about the principal openness of the new social soft-ware applications like diverse wikis, but it turnes out that participation increasesjust by those low barriers. Even if inappropriate content is uploaded or created,or existing content is modified or even vandalized, the communities have someself-repair strategies and developing social norms in place which are more flexi-ble than any technological approach protecting content. But when these repairstrategies do not work anymore, the community may have problems by itself andwill disappear eventually. This openness accepts various types of multimedia. Itis possible to reuse multimedia, which takes advantage of well-rated communitymedia. Rip, mix, and burn as classical multimedia sharing models have to bere-invented for learning communities. While it is relatively easy to forward aYouTube video, it is still a professional task to edit new videos out of existingmaterials for learning purposes, which is not yet well supported by either socialsoftware or CMS.

Digital media allows fast creation, sharing and consumption of interactivecontent. “Classical” CMS like Blackboard Academic SuiteTM, CLIX or Moodleaim at delivering learning objects. Their contents are “valid only” in certainconditions such as a particular status of the learner model. To the best of ourknowledge there is no way in the moment to allow learning designers or learnersto create, share or consume re-contextualized multimedia contents in a Web 2.0manner.

Learning as a Service: A Web-Based Learning Framework 165

2.5 Summary

There is a gap between (passive) content consumption in “classical” CMS and (ac-tive) content creation in Web 2.0. However, the gap is not such big as it might ap-pear at first sight. It canbe recognized that there is an increasing alignment ofCMSlike Blackboard Academic SuiteTM, CLIX or Moodle move towards the Web Ser-vices and Web 2.0 (c.f. Table 1). In this aspect, particularly CLIX has introducedsophisticated features towards Web 2.0 functionalities in its recent version.

Table 1. Differences between Technologies for CMS and Social Software

Web 2.0Paradigm

Technologies inSocial Software

Technologies inCMS

Folksonomies Tagging Categorization

SyndicationWeb-Services, RSS,

MPEG-7 SCORM, SOA

Participation CommunityBased on Learner

Models

Knowledge Sharing Multimedia, Stories Learning Objects

Correspondingly, we’ll present an approach that might help developers aswell as learning communities narrow or even close the gap between “classical”courseware management systems and freely adjustable Web 2.0 technologies.The “Learning As a Service” (LAS ) Framework uses Web 2.0 technologies andprovides services for:

• Exploration of multimedia contents (Folksonomies & Participation)• Collaborative authoring ofmultimedia contents (Syndication &Participation)• Re-contextualization of episodic knowledge (Knowledge Sharing & Partici-

pation)

3 The “Learning as a Service” Framework - LAS

With both aforementioned research questions, our research starts from mediatheoretical starting point. Empirical studies have shown that there are consider-able differences in the perception process of learners depending on the mediumthrough which the content has been communicated [11,13]. Even more, dedicatedstudies on the efficiency of computer mediated communication indicate that nota single medium might be considered most suitable, but an almost freely config-urable media mix is the solution of choice [26,30]. That means a singular artifactlacks its context. Thus, it is impossible to create knowledge separately from themedia through which it is communicated. Similarly, media play a crucial role

166 M. Spaniol, R. Klamma, and Y. Cao

LAS Services

HTTP

SOAP

…

…

Fig. 1. Simplified LAS Architecture

in technology enhanced learning. Especially, multimedia processing features arerequired within the community’s collaboration platform because of the variety ofend user devices, network capabilities, and other factors in the learning context.

In order to encourage and enable communities to decide about the featuresand adjust the functionalities of their learning community information systems,a constant self-monitoring and self-reflection process is required. Correspond-ingly, the orchestration of services within the web-based learning framework ispart of the professional communities’ learning process itself. In addition, theinteroperability of multimedia contents is an indispensable prerequisite.

For that purpose, “Learning As a Service” (LAS ) is a framework to simplify thedevelopment of web-based applications in order to support technology enhancedlearning for professionals. It offers an open architecture that helps professionalsto create community information systems in versatile application domains. It em-ploys advanced multimedia standards and database technologies that support therealization of the state-of-the-art community information systems for web-basedtechnology enhanced learning. As a result, LAS bridges the gap between classicalweb-based learning specific coursewaremanagement systems and freely adjustablebut not web-based learning specific community engines.

In addition, advanced multimedia technologies are employed to support a widerange of communities for interdisciplinary, intercultural and intergenerationallearning. The highlights are the incorporation of multimedia content adaptationto the learning communities and a framework of learning services that helpprofessionals create information systems in order to foster knowledge sharingin communities. Its architecture is based on a lightweight application serveras a community engine that supports various services such as user managementservices, MPEG-7 services, database connection services etc. (cf. [20] for details).

In technical details, LAS is a platform-independent lightweight middlewareplatform implemented in Java. It employs principles of service oriented architec-tures (SOA) to provide web-based learning services. The learning services can be

Learning as a Service: A Web-Based Learning Framework 167

shared among various tools to support the work of professionals in communitiesof practice. The LAS API and its concepts are used to build the server’s func-tionality and thus allow open and user-defined server extensions by three basicelement types: connectors, components and services. Figure 1 shows a simplifieddiagram of the LAS architecture and the interrelations among server elements(cf. [32] for details).

What makes the “Learning as a Service” Framework LAS unique is its capa-bility of hosting a large number of overlapping web-based learning communitiesat once. Agents grant a variety of rights for different learning communities. Fur-thermore, the architecture of the server software is able to run either a heavy-weight XML based community engine or a very thin and hardware saving offlineserver on mobile devices for later synchronization in the ongoing development.The main task of LAS is to maintain the clean and orderly service oriented archi-tecture by keeping all learning infrastructure logic on the server side. The mainfocus of LAS is rather server-side development than front-end user interface orrelated functionality like JSP containers, Servlet engines or HTML templates.Through a performance evaluation, LAS is much easier to use and configurethan application servers like Tomcat [3], other J2EE application servers [18] orZOPE/PLONE [36,37] to support web-based solutions. The main difference tosuch frameworks is that LAS tries to offer service programmers as much flexibil-ity as possible. Developers are supported to concentrate on the middleware levelof the overall architecture through a very flexible and fine grained user, groupand rights management. In addition, a LAS environment allows hot deployment,i.e. dynamic reloading of services and components at runtime.

4 Virtual Campfire: Learning as a Service Applied

In this section, we demonstrate a web-based learning approach based on theLAS framework, so-called Virtual Campfire. The starting point is to use story-telling for technology enhanced learning in user communities who share knowl-edge about cultural heritage management. While corporate learning has beenincorporating storytelling approaches for many years [9], the general technologyenhanced learning is not advanced in using stories very much for educationalpurposes on the web. To explore the potentials of social software, Virtual Camp-fire employs a set of community tools including Semantic Zapping Services,Collaboration Services and Storytelling Services all based on LAS to inspirecommunities for storytelling and cultural knowledge sharing.

4.1 Semantic Zapping Services: Metadata Standard DrivenExploration of Multimedia Contents

Semantic Zapping Services in Virtual Campfire try to bridge the gap betweenfolksonomy-style high-level semantic knowledge about multimedia and purelytechnical low-level content descriptions. These services are intended to supportcollaboration in communities by the exchange of multimedia contents and their

168 M. Spaniol, R. Klamma, and Y. Cao

low-level and high-level semantic descriptions. In order to ensure interoperabil-ity among the contents description multimedia metadata standards are beingincorporated. In this aspect, the Dublin Core (DC) metadata standard [2,12]has its advantages, since it is an easy to understand and a concise method formedia annotations in many domains. Nevertheless, DC still has the limitationse.g. not suitable for temporal and media specific annotations of multimedia con-tents. For that reason, we try to surmount these limitations by combining theloose classifications in DC with more sophisticated description elements for timebased media in MPEG-7. Thus, our semantic zapping services are based on anexcerpt of the extensive MPEG-7 multimedia metadata standard. Even more, weprovide services for a semi-automatic conversion from DC to MPEG-7 [34] whilean affiliated FTP server is used for an automated upload and download of multi-media artifacts by the community to the common repository. Consequently, thesemantic zapping services of Virtual Campfire allow the community members tosearch and browse multimedia contents described by MPEG-7 for professionallearning purposes.

4.2 Collaboration Services: Collaborative Authoring of MultimediaContents

Knowledge sharing in Virtual Campfire is supported by annotating, tagging andsharing multimedia contents within the learning community. In contrast to aconventional categorization system, multiple concepts are used for one piece ofinformation. All metadata generated in Virtual Campfire is MPEG-7 compliantby using MPEG-7 LAS service methods. For that purpose, Virtual Campfireoffers two types of tagging: keyword tagging and semantic tagging (cf. Figure 2).

Keyword tagging enables users to assign a set of plain keywords to an image,as it can be done in Flickr (cf. www.flickr.com). However, one prominent prob-lem of plain keyword tagging is the potential risk of semantic ambiguities. Forexample, consider the word “Portrait” being a polysemy of different meanings:A certain kind of painting or a dedicated camera angle. While plain keywordtagging users would assign the identical keyword tag to both media, semantictagging reflects this difference in semantic meanings by assigning two differ-ent semantic tags. Therefore, semantic tagging goes a step further by allowingthe users to define semantic entities and to assign semantic entity referencesto an image or a video. Different from plain keyword tags that are representedby their name exclusively, semantic tags consist of a name, an optional defin-ition, a mandatory type and optional type specific information. Following theMPEG-7 standard, semantic tags are classified into the seven semantic tag typesAgent, Object, Place, Time, Event, Concept and State. Each of these seventypes allows the specification of additional type-specific information of learn-ing contents such as geographic coordinates for locations, time stamps resp.intervals for time, parameter name/value pairs for states, etc. For example, onecould not derive from a plaintext keyword Buddha, that it describes an agent,while for semantic tagging, Buddha has been modeled as a semantic entity oftype agent. Semantic entities are defined based on the methods provided by the

Learning as a Service: A Web-Based Learning Framework 169

Fig. 2. Keyword and Semantic Tagging of Multimedia Contents

SemanticBasetypeService. Semantic references are assigned to images usingmethods of MultimediaContentService. All these high-level content descrip-tions can be cross-walked with any learning standard by fixed mappings or evendynamically by mapping services [10].

Similarly, retrieval is based on the multimedia descriptions. For multimediaretrieval by plain keyword tags users can formulate keyword search expressions inpropositional logic formulae using keywords as atomic propositions. For example,the keyword search expression “Buddha ∧ Bamiyan ∧ ¬(Destroyed ∨ Taliban)”would retrieve all images and videos having been assigned with the keywordsBuddha and Bamiyan, but none of the two keywords Destroyed or Taliban. Theconcepts above are transferable to the more expressive semantic tagging, whichcan be easily realized on the basis of the MPEG-7 services.

4.3 Storytelling Services: Re-contextualization of EpisodicKnowledge

Re-contextualization of episodic knowledge Virtual Campfire provides dedicatednon-linear storytelling services. In order to help learning designers or learners atcreating useful stories (from a structural point of view), the MOD paradigm [31]is being applied as a theoretical basis. For the sake of brevity, we only brieflydiscuss the major principles of this service. A detailed description can be foundin [33].

170 M. Spaniol, R. Klamma, and Y. Cao

Fig. 3. A non-linear Story created in the MIST [33] Service of Virtual Campfire

Two dedicated user interfaces are available for the storytelling services, aneditor and a player. The editor allows users to edit already existing non-linearmultimedia stories or to create a new one. The player is used to consume and in-teract with existing non-linear multimedia stories. Besides the explicit knowledgecontained in the multimedia contents the high-level semantic tags are also acces-sible here. These contents can be thereafter temporally arranged in the way thatthey depend on a certain context. At creating a story authors can create pathscovering different problematic aspects along the contents. Thus, the problemsaddressed depend on the path selected and lead consequently to different resultsin a story. Figure 3 shows the editor consisting of three main elements: story-board (left-hand side), plot (upper right-hand side), and semantic annotations(lower right-hand side). The plot in upper right panel represents the declarativeknowledge captured in a story. It is rendered by a tree hierarchy which allowsthe further decomposition into sub-problems. In addition, problems addressedin a multimedia story can be linked to related multimedia contents. The story-board in the left panel illustrates a visualization of episodic knowledge as pathsbetween content elements. In addition, the decomposition of stories accordingto MOD paradigm into begin (B), middle (M), and end (E) is depicted. Finally,in the lower right panel additional semantic annotations can be added to anymultimedia element. Thus, users may express verbal-knowledge being associatedwith non-verbal knowledge.

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5 Conclusions and Outlook

The rapid growth of Social Software and Web 2.0 has raised new challenges todesign and develop web-based learning applications. Starting from a survey ofthe employment of Web 2.0 technologies in the courseware management sys-tems, we have presented LAS as a framework for web-based learning servicesin professional learning communities. As creation of new knowledge in learningprocesses is a discursive and multistage process, the user requirements are rapidlychanging and several new features need to be integrated into web-based learningenvironments. In contrast to existing implementations the methodology and ar-chitecture Virtual Campfire is more flexible to assess the community needs overtime and to integrate the community members in the community developmentprocess. Even more, the semantic zapping services of Virtual Campfire basedon MPEG-7 provide interoperability and exchangeability of learning contents.Thus, LAS simplifies the support process for communities of practice drasticallyand offers at the same time much more flexibility in the development process.

Based on the LAS framework we can now easily create and deploy MPEG-7services. With the power of the MPEG-7 services realized on top of the uniquecommunity engine LAS we can create web-based learning environments like Vir-tual Campfire in a systematic way. A possibly thin client is the main advantageof our approach against the-state-of-art frameworks such as AJAX [5]. With thegrowing importance of mobile and ubiquitous applications the server still shouldhandle the computational complexity while clients may be able to reduce com-putational load with limited computational power. We will also develop a mobileVirtual Campfire demonstrator for the LAS framework, based on the differentconnectors available.

In our ongoing research work we are going to investigate unsupervised learningalgorithms to unleash fully the power combining low-level and high-level seman-tics of multimedia materials in social software applications. LAS simplifies thelearning community support process. However, the direct support of computerprogrammers and learning designers is still needed. In future, graphical editingsupport for community web sites could leave even more development responsi-bilities to communities.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by German National Science Foundation (DFG) withinthe collaborative research centers SFB/FK 427 “Media and Cultural Communi-cation”, within the research cluster established under the excellence initiative ofthe German government “Ultra High-Speed Mobile Information and Communi-cation (UMIC)” and by the 6th Framework IST programme of the EC throughthe Network of Excellence in Professional Learning (PROLEARN) IST-2003-507310. We thank our colleagues Nalin Sharda and Georgios Toubekis for theinspiring discussions. In addition, we thank our students D. Renzel, H. Janßen,M. Pienkos, P. M. Cuong, D. Andrikopoulos and A. Hahne for the implementa-tion of the Virtual Campfire services.

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