In the last decades radical changes have occurred in advanced societies, essentially due to three factors: the diffusion of information technologies, the acceleration of scientific and technological renewal, and globalization. The advanced society model today is characterized by rapid and forced innovation of products to put on the market and by a process where market and innovation feed each other. Information and knowledge are the resources to improve in order to keep the level of skills required to compete high. There is an increasing demand for professionalization which cannot be acquired a-priori and in a single solution. So, people very often learn from practical experience, by facing new situations that require effective solutions and give them a chance to acquire new knowledge. In pedagogy this phenomenon is defined as informal learning based on tacit knowledge. Therefore, the professional person, does not need static knowledge any more; on the contrary, he/she requires new tools "for learning to learn", in order to increase his/her expertise quickly. In this paper we want to propose the community of practice as a flexible and dynamic methodological tool (paradigm) for defining a professional figure. Our intent is to use the community of practice to create a model of a specific professional figure. Such a model, which traditionally includes the conceptual, logic-functional and physical phases, is not pre-defined, but built by analysing the interactions that occur in the community of practice. Thus, it is modifiable on the basis of the new demands identified in the practice of the profession itself. In order to verify our proposal we assumed the creation of a community of practice among the Didactic Managers of our university, a figure required by the Italian University Reform. The expertise necessary for this profile is not well-defined yet, and only through practice it is possible to clarify tasks and aims. Therefore, it seems an excellent environment in which to experiment our paradigm.

Nei processi di formazione a distanza il monitoraggio delle attività è fondamentale sia per gli studenti che per i docenti ai fini della valutazione formativa. E' indispensabile, quindi, predisporre strumenti che, partendo dai dati raccolti dalle piattaforme di e-learning, possano aiutare nel processo decisionale il docente e stimolare la conoscenza di sé e l’autovalutazione dello studente. Tali strumenti, comunemente chiamati dashboard, per essere funzionali agli obiettivi valutativi devono rispondere a specifici principi di progettazione. Partendo dai principi definiti in letteratura, il contributo descrive due dashboard realizzate per la piattaforma Moodle che forniscono una rappresentazione chiara agli attori coinvolti dell'evoluzione del processo formativo.

Dall'esame delle problematiche della cittadinanza digitale e dell'inclusione sociale nel contesto della smart city si evidenzia come il divario digitale rappresenti un vero e proprio ostacolo verso la realizzazione di una città intelligente. Il contributo si propone perciò di definire un modello di smart education, intesa come un "insieme di interventi coordinati e ragionati che educano alla tecnologia con la tecnologia", capace di porsi come uno dei principali pilastri del processo per la definizione e attuazione della città intelligente ed in cui la scuola è chiamata a giocare un ruolo fondamentale.

In this contribution, we argue in favor of the importance of the role that interaction plays in supporting effective e-learning processes. Interaction among peers, in fact, either with real or virtual companions, is the fundamental component of the process of building and sharing new knowledge. In particular, we intend to argue in favor of a constructivist approach to e-learning. We support our view by reporting on our experience in the design of a platform for language learning through dramatization. Finally, we present the direction we intend to follow in our future research, towards the definition of an approach for enhancing effective interaction during collaborative learning and knowledge sharing in online learning environments.

In this contribution, we argue in favor of the importance of the role that interaction plays in supporting effective e-learning processes. Interaction among peers, in fact, either with real or virtual companions, is the fundamental component of the process of building and sharing new knowledge. In particular, we intend to argue in favor of a constructivist approach to e-learning. We support our view by reporting on our experience in the design of a platform for language learning through dramatization. Finally, we present the direction we intend to follow in our future research, towards the definition of an approach for enhancing effective interaction during collaborative learning and knowledge sharing in online learning environments.

The society model of the last years has given a key role to knowledge in terms of economic and social development. On this background, is allocated the success of the communities of practice, and more recently, of the Complex Learning Community model, whose strength is represented by the ability to provide students, educators, and professionals with a common creative space to develop not only knowledge and expertise, but also ideas, synergies, chances. In both cases, particular emphasis is given to the interactions between users as a "place" where knowledge emerges, is built and delivered. Our former paper was dedicated to the communities of practice, and in particular, to the use of an intelligent agent to control and lead the interaction among users; now our research concerns environments for collaborative learning, where the role of the animator is fundamental, but we take into account a blended animator, supported by specific tools to manage the community. Such tools are necessarily connected to the comprehension and elaboration of the natural language which highlights the appropriate knowledge elements to be used. In this paper we intend to analyse the available techniques in order to identify those that are more suitable for designing the supporting tools required by the blended animator. Particular attention will be given to the domain ontology.

Già dal 2009 il Dipartimento di Informatica dell’Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro è coinvolto, in via sperimentale, in progetti di formazione che prevedono attività di Alternanza Scuola-Lavoro presso il laboratorio di ricerca SERLab, per offrire agli studenti della scuola secondaria di secondo grado l’opportunità di integrare il proprio percorso di studi con momenti di formazione situata, collegata alle attività del Dipartimento. Nel presente contributo viene illustrato il progetto Tekhnologhia che il gruppo di ricerca ha realizzato in collaborazione con l’Istituto Tecnico Tecnologico “Luigi dell’Erba” di Castellana Grotte in provincia di Bari e con lo spin-off SER&Practices per la realizzazione di un progetto di alternanza finalizzato alla promozione delle conoscenze e delle competenze dei partecipanti. L’iniziativa ha inteso unire Sapere e Saper Fare ed aprire l’apprendimento al mondo esterno.

In this contribution, we argue in favor of the importance of the role that interaction plays in supporting effective e-learning processes. Interaction among peers, in fact, either with real or virtual companions, is the fundamental component of the process of building and sharing new knowledge. In particular, we intend to argue in favor of a constructivist approach to e-learning. We support our view by reporting on our experience in the design of a platform for language learning through dramatization. Finally, we present the direction we intend to follow in our future research, towards the definition of an approach for enhancing effective interaction during collaborative learning and knowledge sharing in online learning environments.

In this contribution, we describe our preliminary statement towards the long-term goal of creating an intelligent agent for monitoring interaction in the communication environments of the communities of practice. The assumption underlying our research work is that embedding some form of artificial intelligence in these environments enhances effective interaction during collaborative learning and knowledge sharing. We start by providing a description of the theoretical conceptual framework, illustrate the state of the art in the domain and conclude by sketching the guidelines for a method we intend to implement and test in our future work on real data collected through a web forum developed in our previous research

The technology introduction and diffusion operated a transformation in the job market determining the creation of new professional expertise and the development of technologies to support the collaborative building of knowledge. In this paper we analyse the role of the communities of practice and highlight the importance of the intelligent analysis of computer-mediated interactions for the creation of new professional knowledge.

La personalizzazione dei percorsi di apprendimento costituisce uno degli elementi più rilevanti degli attuali sistemi di e-learning sul quale convergono la ricerca pedagogica e quella sulle tecnologie informatiche per l’insegnamento. Questo lavoro propone un modello per l’adattamento dei contenuti multimediali basato sugli stili cognitivi dello studente, ovvero sulle modalità tipiche che ciascun individuo utilizza per affrontare lo studio o risolvere un problema. Per la determinazione degli stili cognitivi è stato utilizzato un questionario teso al riconoscimento degli stili globale, analitico, verbale e visuale dello studente. Il modello così definito è stato applicato nella realizzazione di “Adaptive Multimedia Learning Content”, un ipermedia adattivo incentrato sui contenuti di un corso di Psicologia della Comunicazione Digitale.