Adaptability of learning objects by appropriate

1
Adaptability of learning objects by appropriate 
knowledge representation

• Anastas Misev
• Institute of Informatics
• Faculty of Natural Science and Mathematics
• University Ss Cyril and Methodius
• Skopje, Macedonia
• anastas_at_ii.edu.mk

2
Agenda

• The idea
• OpenOffice.org
• Open document format
• Open document presentation
• Management system
• Practical implementation
• Future work

3
The idea

• The usage of open source software is strongly
  motivated, especially in the education process
• OpenOffice is one of the most popular
  representative of the open source software
• Besides the obvious financial advantages over
  commercial packages, most important feature is
  the open document format
• The idea is to extract, store, structure,
  document the knowledge from a open document
  presentation
• Using structured knowledge, one can translate
  that, search through it and most important make
  custom representations of it
• And it all started as an idea for a student
  project

4
OpenOffice.org

• The OpenOffice.org is an open source office
  package
• It is (almost) fully compatible with most popular
  commercial office packages
• Covers all the office needs (word processing,
  spreadsheet, presentations and even personal
  database)
• SUN offers a commercial version (Star Office),
  free for academic usage
• Becomes even more popular, especially in the
  academic and public sector.

5
Open document format

• The open document format conforms to the OASIS
  http//www.oasis-open.org standard for open
  document formats
• Actually, the OASIS format is based on the
  OpenOffice.org XML document format as a proven,
  real life format
• The format supports easy transformations, strong
  separations of content and layout, integration of
  binary data Brauer, OpenOffice.org conf, 2003
• The actual documents represent archives (.zip
  archives) of several xml files and additional
  binary data files (images or other embedded
  objects, if used).
• Format allows easy content extraction from the
  documents and its transformation or different
  representation http//edoc.hu-berlin.de/e_projekt
  e_en/.
• Compatibility issues with MS document format can
  be found in DiDio, IEEE Computing in science and
  eng., sept/oct 2003

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Open document presentation

• Follows the principles of the open document
  format
• For the MS users, most important is the migration
  process
• It has 2 parts the actual file conversion and
  the transitions toward using the OpenOffice.org
  tools and applications
• A nice reference can be found in Becker,
  OpenOffice.org conf. 2004
• Tools for conversion of the MS presentations into
  the open document format
• SUN offers a tool for automatic batch conversion
  of both presentations and templates
• All basic presentation features are converted
  properly
• Some problems may occur with macros and advanced
  features

7
Management system

• The knowledge management system allows users to
  manipulate, translate, search and customize their
  presentations in an easy and intuitive manner.
• Main actions
• Presentation import
• Addition of metadata
• Multilingualism
• Custom presentation building
• Transformation of the knowledge into different
  formats

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Presentation import

• Each presentation can be imported into the system
  using the simple import tool.
• When importing a presentation, the user can
  choose a course, subject and topic for the given
  presentation.
• After that, each slide and its elements is
  imported into the system.
• For each presentation, a template counterpart is
  build during the import.
• At the template, each imported element (slide,
  text box etc.) is replaced by its unique ID in
  the database

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Structuring the information

• During the presentation import, each element of
  the presentation is imported into a simple
  database
• The database maintains the hierarchical structure
  of the open document format
• It also allows addition of metadata, translation,
  etc.

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Addition of metadata

• Metadata can be added for each imported element.
• It can include custom defined key-value pairs
  which will identify in more details the selected
  element.
• It can later be used in the process of
  translating the elements, searching them or
  building custom presentations.
• Metadata can also include slide timing which will
  help in the process of building custom
  presentations

11
Multilingualism

• Since each textual element is identified and
  inserted into the database, it can be very easily
  translated into other language.
• The translation module offers a simple interface
  for translation, language definition and
  comparison of the different languages
  translations
• Unlike other tools (S-Bahn), it is just a basic
  side-by-side translation tool

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Custom presentations

• Having all the information into a database, with
  additional metadata, custom presentations can be
  easily build.
• Slides can be searched for data or metadata, or
  browsed through.
• Each of them can be selected and added to the new
  presentation.
• The presentation language can also be selected
  and different languages presentations can be
  created.
• The presentation timing can also be extracted
  from the metadata, making custom presentations
  that will fit fixed time slots.
• When creating new presentations, slides are
  extracted from the template presentations, having
  the ID of the elements as placeholders for the
  texts.
• Then, depending on the language selected, the
  corresponding texts are inserted into the new
  presentation.
• Finally, the other elements of the presentations
  (styles, images etc.) are added to the
  presentation and its compressed into an open
  format document

13
Practical implementation

• Students projects
• Implemented in Borland Delphi
• Implementation done by Gavrilovska, Dejanovska
  and Gavrilovski
• MOO Manipulate Open Office presentations
• Implements most of the ideas described

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MOO
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Future work

• Advanced import features
• Easier translation
• Searching through information using content or
  metadata
• Advanced methods for new presentations creation
• Templates
• More graphical features
• Transformation into different formats
• Document, web, other.
• Interesting reference about e-Learning objects
  production from OpenOffice.org documents can be
  found in Finsterle, Rotard, OpenOffice.org conf.
  2003
• Open for suggestions