A Holistic Framework to Support ICT-based Early Childhood Education Processes

Transcription

1 Session T3H A Holistic Framework to Support ICT-based Early Childhood Education Processes Ruben Miguez, Juan M. Santos, and Luis Anido University of Vigo, rmiguez@det.uvigo.es, jsgago@det.uvigo.es, lanido@det.uvigo.es Abstract - Modern societies have recently changed their point of view about childhood education. Nowadays, kindergarten teachers are not only responsible for children s upbringing but they complement the educational role of families at home. In this new educational scenario, families and teachers present novel demands as real-time information about centers and its services, tools to track children progress or recommend new activities, new ways of communication, etc. Integration of ICT tools can offer a solution to those demands. Some electronic devices and software applications are being applied to this educational domain. However, they are used in isolation, lacking integration mechanisms that would improve their efficiency. This paper proposes a holistic framework that provides a set of ICT-based services designed taking into consideration the distinctive features of early care settings. We present the main design guidelines of a standard-based Reference Architecture that fosters interoperability and convergence between diverse technologies and heterogeneous systems. The deployment of such a system, based upon Standards and Specifications for Learning Technologies, facilitates the development and integration of ICT tools. It supports early childhood education processes, encourages parents involvement and fosters the cooperation between families and practitioners. Index Terms - Early Childhood Education, ICT, Reference Architecture, Learning Technologies Standards INTRODUCTION In the last years, modern societies have changed their perception of the processes involved in early care settings. Nowadays we do not talk anymore about kindergarten but childhood school as an environment where education and learning are possible and supported by a well-defined pedagogical strategy that complements all the previous caring activities. In this new scenario, families and teachers demand novel requirements: real-time information about centers and its services, tools to track children progress, tips about the upbringing of children, etc. The use of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can offer a proper solution to this situation. Their use has been established in primary, secondary and high schools for a number of years now and their benefits have been well documented, in terms of task management (administrative and educational ones), improved motivation, subject knowledge and so forth [1]. Currently, different ICT-based resources as video and audio equipments, interactive whiteboards [2] or digital toys are being used in the domain. However, they have been used in isolation, lacking integration mechanisms that would have improved their efficiency. In this paper we discuss the main design guidelines of an architecture aimed at facilitate the building of such integration environments, taking into account the needs and specific features of both scenarios: education at home and activities carried out in childhood schools. First of all we briefly describe the distinctive features of early childhood education and the state of art of the ICT in the domain. Next, we present the main goals of our specific proposal and the supporting technologies, initiatives and projects closely related to it. Following, we present the identified user domain requirements and briefly discuss the different submodels that compose the final system architecture. Finally, some conclusions are presented to the reader. EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION Nowadays, there are an increasing number of wellestablished early childhood educational policies supported by national governments and educational institutions. Despite their different points of view and methodologies, these policies are based on the same idea: to provide an interactive and social learning experience based on children s interest and experimentation. In such a way, the early care main goal is to fulfill the Delors principles [3]: Learning to be, learning to do, learning to know and learning to live together and to live with others. Early care settings gather a set of particular issues that must be taken into account. The most relevant issues and the current state of the art of ICT integration in childhood education are briefly described below. I. Distinctive Features One of the most relevant issues in early care settings is the existence of a fragmented and heterogeneous educational scenario [4]. A broad range of centers, nursemaids, community groups and institutions provide educational services from birth to six years old. As a consequence, the quality of this education is very diverse. It highly depends on the qualification grade of educators, available resources T3H-1

2 (material, environment, adult-child ratio) and parents involvement [5]. The starting point for all learning is the child. This is a time of rapid growth in all aspects of children s development fostered by their natural curiosity and adult support. Of course, children will greatly vary in the pace at which they develop and progress [6]. Practitioners need to provide daily opportunities that encourage children to practice new developed skills and to plan for experiences through which they will acquire confidence and competence. In this way, personalized learning is of paramount importance to enhance children s skill development and motivation [7]. Play is, of course, a central part of learning at this stage but many young children may still need encouragement and help from adults in order to learn how to interact with peers and playing together [8]. During early childhood, children s attention and memory are also developing. They have difficulty in focusing on details and tend to be easily distracted. Videogames and multimedia resources, especially those that combine education and entertainment features (edutainment) are well-accepted by young children [9]. Finally, parents' occupations and education, as well as other aspects of the home learning environment, have a significant impact on children's cognitive development [10]. Families and practitioners are co-responsible for children s education during this stage, so a strong link home-center is needed. II. ICT in the Early Years Currently, a limited collection of ICT technologies are being used in early childhood settings to strengthen many aspects of early childhood educational practices. Some research projects consider the utilization of devices as interactive whiteboards and smart tables in kindergartens to foster cooperative work and learning through hands-on [11]. However, TV programs and other popular media products as DVDs are the most broadly used devices in these settings. Specifically designed tools as digital toys, social robots or videogames [12] are also commonly used in childhood schools. Children collaborate, play and interact with these devices to obtain some kind of response. In this way, they foster the development of motor, language and social children s skills. Other projects as KidSmart [13] allow children to use specifically designed computers (easy to use, adapted ergonomics, durable furniture) whereas other initiatives are aimed to familiarize them with gadgets as mobile phones or video cameras. ICT are not only used as educational tools but also as supporting ones. Nowadays, there are a wide range of online communities targeted to children, families and teachers that offer different services as discussion forums, search engines, educational resources, etc. However, all of these tools are standalone devices and services that cannot interoperate in a straightforward way. There is a lack of integrated environments where different devices can be used together. Additionally, as development does not happen in the same way, at the same time, for all Session T3H children, personalization issues have great relevance. In order to support personalized learning, systems that keep track of children s progress must be developed and deployed. Besides, most of the electronic devices being used are suitable to classroom settings only (e.g. interactive whiteboards), but emergent technologies as interactive television (itv hereafter) gathers a set of features (accessibility, easiness, low cost, great multimedia capability, adult-child co viewing) especially well adapted to be used at homes. In the next sections of this paper we present the main design guidelines of a holistic system proposal aimed to cope with these needs. TOWARDS AN INTEGRATION ENVIRONMENT The main goal of this proposal is to develop a serviceoriented reference framework that fosters interoperability and convergence between different technological domains and heterogeneous systems (itv, digital toys, personal computers, etc.) used in early care settings. Those services related to the interactive television area (e.g. tv programs recommenders or program recorder services) are of special relevance for us. In order to achieve this general goal, a set of partial objectives have been defined: Definition of a Business Model that characterize the stakeholders, actors and data flows involved in the domain. Development of a standard-based formal description of the most relevant entities, interfaces and service functionalities identified. Development of a semantic model in order to support interoperability issues, improve efficiency of personalized searches and recommendation agents. Definition and development of a set of distributed services and a modular agent-based architecture that facilitates the integration of interaction and results of different devices used in the domain. I. Supporting Technologies To achieve these objectives, a broad collection of technologies, standards, specifications, frameworks and reference models must be considered. For brevity's sake only the most relevant ones are described below: e-framework [14] - International initiative whose primary goal is to facilitate technical interoperability within and across education and research. It promotes the use of Service Oriented Architectures and allows the various stakeholder communities to document and publish their requirements and processes in a coherent way using a set of commonly agreed technical vocabulary terms. Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) [15] - It is an open and extensible architecture for learning technology. It defines and promotes specifications that describe how the components of a software environment communicate with each other and with other enterprise T3H-2

3 systems. OKI specifications enable sustainable interoperability and integration by defining a set of Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs) that provides general software contracts between service consumers and service providers. Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) [16] - It is an initiative aimed to develop an open specification for ensuring that K-12 software applications work together more effectively. It defines an architecture where applications from different vendors can exchange information between them. A specific piece of software, the SIF Agent, is responsible for translating messages from vendor-specific format to SIF XML language, whereas a central element, the Zone Integration Server, controls and monitors the information flow. II. The Global Vision Figure 1 shows the main stages considered in the development of the proposed system architecture. This construction methodology is based on the e-framework guidelines and it reuses the main results from others projects as SIF or OKI in order to maximize the interoperability and standardization features of the final developed applications. At the first stage, we define the system business model. It is an abstract representation of the stakeholders, the services offered to them and the information flows established between the identified entities [17]. Next, at stage 2, we document and formalize those descriptions by means of Service Usage Models (SUMs hereafter). SUMs are core elements of the e-framework used to gather and describe the requirements, processes, workflows and components that cooperate to fulfill a particular system feature. Those SUMs are finally expressed in terms of the set of services and data sources involved in a particular business process. Under the e-framework, services functionality is defined by means of Service Genre, i.e. the description of a generic or abstract capability expressed in terms of its behaviors. Whenever it is possible, SUMs and Service Genres already defined by the e- Framework community are used. Taking these definitions as input, at stage 3, the basic system Reference Architecture is detailed. In the scope of this proposal we understand the term Reference Architecture as an architectural design pattern that indicates how an abstract set of mechanisms and relationships realizes a predetermined set of requirements [18]. Our final applications are made up of independent and modular software pieces (agents) responsible for different issues: user interaction, content recommendation, portfolio management and so forth. Agents exchange information through a central entity using previously agreed common languages. As SUMs summarize the agent main functionalities, they are used as blueprints for its construction (stage 4). Its final architecture is composed by a set of services that collaborate and exchange information through a central entity. Services interoperability is achieved by the definition and publication of their interfaces by means of OSID Session T3H documents. Finally, Service Genres and standardized models are used as a guide to implement those services using specific technologies. The next sections deal with the description of the main activities involved in each stage. FIGURE 1 OVERALL VISION OF THE CONSTRUCTION METHODOLOGY STAGE 1: THE BUSINESS MODEL The construction of the business model takes several sources of information as input: the study of the domain, government educational frameworks, interviews with practitioners, and the authors previous experiences in the domain [19]. As output of this work we identify a set of usage scenarios (composed by one or more business processes) that summarize the main system functionalities. In this case, we have identified the following actors (Figure 2): children (from birth to six years old), families (parents, siblings, grandparents and so on), kindergarten teachers (responsible for planning and carrying on educational activities targeted to children), administrative staff (professionals whose main functions are related to the management and administration of the childhood schools), other staff (personnel members that carry on miscellaneous task), specialists (as pediatricians or speech therapists) and system administrators. T3H-3

4 Session T3H Each one of these actors can interoperate with the system functionalities using a broad set of access devices. The most relevant interactions and environments identified are briefly described below. We consider a scenario where interactive television and web technologies cooperate to provide a holistic set of services to children and families. Mixed with the audio and video stream, high quality multimedia materials, games and educational applications are transmitted by TV channel operators. Through their TV sets, children can play and learn at their homes with their parent s supervision (family environment) or without it (self-learning environment). Children s interactions are sent through the internet return channel to the CMS Educational Server that generates new contents in response (deployed through internet or TV signals). Informative and administrative tasks are also supported at home (parental environment). Using devices commonly found in households (as TV or PC) parents can, for example, pay enrollment taxes or look up information about services offered by schools. There, children continue their learning activities with the support and collaboration of other peers and practitioners (classroom environment). Besides, administrative staff and teachers use ICT technologies to look up for information and educational resources, talk to other community members, manage student information and so on (school environment). Other personnel, such as kitchen staff, can also use ICT technologies to access nutritional guides and to publish school daily menus. Finally, system can also be accessed from a broad range of handheld gadgets as PDAs or mobile phones (mobility environment). As children s records are stored by the system, these professionals can easily review children s profile and progression achieved, as well as answering families and educator queries. FIGURE 2 REFERENCE MODEL STAGE 2: IDENTIFICATION OF SERVICE USAGE MODELS AND SERVICES Business needs identified at stage 1 are formalized by means of a collection of SUMs. A knowledge base of officially accepted SUMs is provided by the e-framework (the Service Usage Models Registry) and new proposals can be published and discussed through the e-framework community wiki. Whenever it is possible we reutilize, adapt and extend previously defined SUMs (e.g. Identity and Access Management). In other occasions, especially when domain-specific issues are being modeled, we develop new SUM descriptions. For each one of these defined SUMs we detail: i) business processes involved; ii) identified services their orchestration procedures; iii) data sources used; iv) other related SUMs and v) applicable standards and specifications. Figure 3 shows an excerpt of a defined Recommender SUM that takes into account TV-specific domain features. Taking into consideration previous works carried out in both E-Learning Framework Initiative [20] (now subsumed into the e-framework) and OKI, we have identified a core set of services that captures the system functionality. As an example, in order to model the New TV Channel feature some issues must be considered: a) validating the request and the information source; b) accessing to the Electronic Program Guide to obtain programs metadata description; c) processing that information and match it with the stored user s preferences and his/her agenda; and d) notifying the user of new TV programs that may be of his/her interest. As a result of this modeling we have identified the Validate, EPG, Metadata, User Profile, Schedule and Notify services. T3H-4

5 Session T3H FIGURE 3 RECOMMENDER SERVICE USAGE MODEL EXCERPT STAGE 3: SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE FIGURE 4 SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE We need to give structure to the previously identified components. In order to do so, we followed the design guidelines provided by existing e-learning abstract architectural systems such as IMS Abstract Framework (IAF)[21] and IEEE LTSA. We have hierarchically grouped the identified services into three different tiers where each one relies on functionality provided by services at bottom layers. Over this set of layers we have defined an additional one, the Agent Layer, that group those pieces of software that copes with the most complex system needs. Issues covered by each layer are briefly described below: Infrastructure Services Layer - It provides end-to-end transaction and communications functionalities. Common Services Layer - It provides a broad range of cross-domain functionalities (e.g. authorization, format conversion, group management and so forth). Domain Services Layer - It provides the domain specific functionalities as student assessment, school blogging, children s portfolio management, specialist consultation, and so on. Agent Layer - It provides high-level functionalities to developers (e.g. Planner or Recommendation systems). Final applications are made up of agents that collaborate and exchange different information in order to fulfill some particular system functionality (Figure 4). Taking the SIF architecture as a model, we have defined a special entity in the system architecture, the Core Communication System (CCS) whose main function is to manage and monitor the dataflow between agents. The CCS is also responsible for authorization, logging and agent orchestration procedures. STAGE 4: AGENT DEVELOPMENT SUMs descriptions guide the agent architecture development process. Agents are composed by services (those previously identified in the SUM) that collaborate and exchange data through a central entity, the Agent Communication System, responsible for: i) controlling and monitoring the flows of information at service level; ii) authorization issues; and iii) managing service selection and registry. Interoperability among these components has been achieved by the definition of a set of OSID s documents. Whenever it is possible we reuse OSIDs published by the OKI project (e.g. Cataloging and Authentication OSIDs). Service functionalities are deployed through broadly used web services technologies. OSID descriptions are finally translated to WSDL files, whereas SOAP is used to facilitate data exchange and UDDI as the service registry standard. Applications belonging to the TV world are being developed using the MHP [22] middleware. Besides, as personalized learning is a key issue, semantic technologies are also used. Semantics descriptions of system entities (child portfolios, activities, programs metadata, etc.) are formalized using OWL-DL semantic language. The Jena framework facilitates the development of semantic software modules and specifically designed SPARQL endpoints and inference engines as Pellet supports semantic queries. Conformance to standards of this semantic modeling is of a paramount importance to improve reusability of achieved results. Standards and specifications from the e-learning domain [23] (LOM, Dublin Core, IMS-LIP, IMS-RDCEO) and TV domain (MPEG-7, TV Anytime) guide the final implementation procedures. Figure 5 shows, as an example, the collaborative diagram with the entities involved in the automated learning activity recommendation usage scenario. T3H-5

6 FIGURE 5 DEPLOYMENT OF THE ACTIVITY RECOMMENDATION USAGE SCENARIO CONCLUSIONS This paper has described the main features of a holistic framework aimed at providing support to ICT-based educational processes in early childhood. This framework benefits from Standards and Specifications for Learning Technologies (SSLT) and also from recently applied technologies, like itv, web 2.0 or semantic-based reasoning. As main contributions we can outline: (1) a Reference Model to facilitate personalized learning and children tracking and assessment; (2) the use of the itv in an integrated environment both at school and home; (3) compliance with the e-framework initiative, profiling it to the early childhood domain; (4) development of an agentbased software architecture compliant with SSLT. Since 2006 the authors have been responsible for the ICT services in the public childhood schools network in Galicia, northwest of Spain. Developed applications are currently being tested by members of this community. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This research is supported by the econtentplus ECP 2007 EDU ( a Community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable. We want to thank Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia for the partial support to this work under grant TIN CO REFERENCES [1] Condie, R., Simpson, M., Payne, F. and Gray, D., Insight2 The Impact of ICT Initiatives in Scottish Schools, Scottish Executive Department, 2002 [2] Barber, D., Cooper, L. and Meeson, G. Learning and Teaching with Interactive Whiteboards: Primary and Early Years, Learning Matters Limited, 2007 Session T3H [4] OECD, Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care, Technical Report, 2006 [5] Layzer, J.and Goodson, B., The Quality of Early Care and Education Settings, Evaluation Review, Vol. 30, No. 5, 2006, pp [6] Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, Early years foundation stage. Profile handbook, 2008 [7] Learning and Teaching Scotland, A curriculum framework for children 3 to 5, Technical Report, 1999 [8] Plowman, L. and Stephen, C., Guided interaction in pre-school settings, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Vol. 23(1), 2007 [9] S. Walldén and A. Soronen, Edutainment. From television and computers to digital television, University of Tampere Hypermedia Laboratory, May 2008 [10] K. Sylva, E. Melhuish, P. Sammons, I. Siraj-Blatchford, B. Taggart and K.Elliot, The effective provision of pre-school education project: findings from the pre-school period, 2003 [11] Ovaska, S., Hietala, P., and Kangassalo, M. Electronic whiteboard in kindergarten: opportunities and requirements, Proceedings of the IDC 03, 2003, pp [12] Bacigalupa, C., "The use of video games by kindergartners in a family child care setting", Early Childhood Education Journal, Vol. 33, No 1, 2005, pp [13] Siraj-Blatchford, J. and Siraj-Blatchford, I., "IBM Kidsmart Early Learning programme European Evaluation", Final Report, 2004 [14] e-framework Web Site: Last access: 20 March, 2009 [15] Eduworks Corporation, What is the Open Knowledge Initiative? Whitepaper, 2002 [16] School Interoperability Framework Association, SIF. Implementation Specification 2.2, 2008 [17] Simon, B., Learning Object Brokerage: How to make it happen, Proceedings of Ed-Media 2003, 2003, pp [18] OASIS, Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture 1.0, Committee Specification, 2006 [19] Anido, L., Miguez, R., and Santos, J., Computers and Advanced Technology in Early Childhood Education, CATE 2008 [20] The E-Learning Framework, Web Site: Last access: 20 March 2009 [21] IMS Global Learning Consortium, IMS Abstract Framework: White Paper, IMS Whitepaper, 2003 [22] ETSI, Multimedia Home Platform Specification 1.0.3, ETSI Specification, ETSI ES V1.1.2, August 2006 [23] Anido, L., Rodríguez, J., Caeiro, M. and Santos, J.M., Observing standards for web-based learning from the web, ICCSA 2004 AUTHOR INFORMATION Ruben Miguez PhD Student, University of Vigo, rmiguez@det.uvigo.es Juan M. Santos, Assistant Professor, University of Vigo, jsgago@det.uvigo.es Luis Anido, Associate Professor, University of Vigo, lanido@det.uvigo.es [3] Delors, J. et al, Learning: The Treasure Within, UNESCO, 1998 T3H-6