Nowadays, data analysis is getting more and more important also in health environments, because medical teams need to obtain statistical information when monitoring patients’ conditions. This is especially true in e-health systems, where patients are de-hospitalized and followed through remote controls. In this context, the implementation of a data warehouse, which automatically collects daily monitoring data stored in medical records and, then, provides historical information about patients, supports medical teams when performing data analyses devoted both to discover hidden data correlations and to optimize health business processes. In this paper, we present the data warehouse developed for UBI-CARE, a project whose aim is to support medical teams in the remote management of patients affected by peritoneal dialysis and chronic heart failure.

The introduction of ICT in health care has two main goals, on the one hand, to have high quality performances for patient management and, on the other, to contain health care expenses. Usually the reduction in health care spending corresponds to a low quality of care service. The use of new technologies for health care can mitigate the cutbacks by providing innovative solutions able to maintain high level of quality at a low cost. This is the main challenge of the UBICARE project that aims at supporting the Hub & Spoke model in medicine, fostering the empowerment of local hospitals, general practitioners, nurses and families. In other words, the UBI-CARE project is aimed at creating a social network to share clinical data and knowledge in order to favor the de-hospitalization of patients suffering from peritoneal dialysis and chronic heart failure. In this context, the paper describes the Knowledge Management Service component aimed at managing all the resources and functionalities that can support the empowerment process of both the patients and the medical and paramedical staff involved in managing a patient.

A challenge in the recommender systems currently available for the tourism domain is how to suggest tourist itineraries in a specific geographical area (city or region). The proposed theoretical model allows items of intangible cultural heritage (events) such as processions, festivals, special markets, etc. to be characterized and correlated. The model features both a set of functions characterizing the events and a space-time relation that defines whether two events are correlated. The model allows itineraries to be constructed by computing the transitive closure of the space-time relation on the set of events. It can be used to construct itineraries at different grain sizes. This capacity makes the model scalable and easily applicable in the development of several applications. It has been implemented in a first order logic knowledge base in order to make an empirical evaluation of the model.

The value of cultural heritage is widely recognised both at national and international level, because it allows the cultural roots, memories and identity of a territory to be discovered. For this reason it is not limited to historic sites, monuments or churches, but must necessarily include a knowledge of the traditions, legends and religious rites which are part of the culture of a place. Web portals for the promotion of tourism usually offer information limited to only one category of items and this information is not sufficient to gain a deeper knowledge of a place or event. Moreover, it is rare to find on the Net solutions that are able to support teachers choosing the sites to be visited in an educational tour. The paper describes a recommender system for cultural heritage that is able to support both tourists and teachers selecting items (tangible or intangible) to visit, and that is able to offer indepth material, selected according to the interests of the target users, that can consolidate the knowledge of the places visited. The main features of the system are: the use of a user-centred and collaborative approach to promote knowledge; a set of metadata that allows the resources to be contextualised in the culture of a territory; the use of a recommender method that takes into account the user’s preferences, multi-criteria user feedbacks and the semantic relationships among the items.

The ever growing importance of e-learning over the last decade has triggered an explosion of resources available on the Web. Although this multiplicity of available resources can foster the development of a critical spirit, discernment and the student’s ability to weigh up the merits of different points of view, it can also induce disorientation in the search for the resources best suited to her/his needs and learning style. This issue has driven research into recommendation systems, already well known in fields such as e-commerce, applied to e-learning environments. However, in such environments the recommendations can only be efficacious if the system is able to deal with the many different factors involved in the learning process, such as the learning goal and the student’s cognitive features. This work proposes a recommendation strategy that combines, by adopting a hybrid cascade approach, two knowledge-based techniques that can take these factors into account in the recommendation process.

In the last few years the tourism industry has profoundly changed. Today, a large number of tourists use the internet to find destinations, itineraries, services or travel packages, rather than asking experts in the field. For this reason, Information and Communication Technologies play an important role in tourism promotion. In particular, recommendation systems are interesting because they are able to offer more appropriate support than traditional search engines to the user seeking places to visit. Recommendation systems, in fact, are able to suggest a personalised set of options according to the user’s needs and preferences. But, as widely recognized in the literature, with these systems the quality of the recommendation is closely linked to the description of both resources and users. For them to become effective tools for promoting the knowledge, culture and traditions of a territory, it is necessary to integrate semantic information into the descriptions of resources, that can capture relationships among them. In this way, it is possible to enrich the list of recommendations by adding those resources which, although not explicitly related to the user’s request, have some semantic relationships with those included in the list. This can help to promote the discovery of new scenarios and the spread of knowledge about the cultural heritage of a territory. In this scenario, the paper presents a semantic approach amplifying cultural resources recommendations. This approach was used to enrich the list of recommendations of CulTuRek, a system that promotes the exploration of tangible and intangible cultural heritage in the Apulia Region.

One of the most closely investigated topics in e-learning research has always been the effectiveness of adaptive learning environments. The technological evolutions that have dramatically changed the educational world in the last six decades have allowed ever more advanced and smarter solutions to be proposed. The focus of this paper is to depict the three main dimensions that have driven research in the e-learning field and the evolution of the technological approaches adopted for the purposes of building advanced educational environments for distance learning. Then, the three different approaches adopted by the authors are discussed; these consist of a multi-agent system, an adaptive SCORM compliant package and an e-learning recommender system.

Learning Objects differ from the usual digital resources because they include both learning contents and assessment. In this paper we propose a methodology that can make an adaptive assessment of the knowledge/ability level achieved by the learner, and is thus less boring for primary school pupils than most of those produced up to now. The methodology, based on the ideas of Game Based Learning, Adaptive Systems, and Item Response Theory, allows tests to be created that can adapt the difficulty level of the questions to the individual learner. The preliminary phase in building a CAT is the calibration of the items in the bank item. This consists of assigning a level of difficulty to each item to be proposed to the student. Different psychometric models are used to scale the items. Usually, the IRT is employed because it uses the same metric to measure both the item difficulty and the student’s level of ability, so the two measures are comparable. Usually, the main problem in building a quiz game is the choice of what question to pose to the student. The CAT theory allows automatic selection of the question to ask, according to both its difficulty and the individual student’s abilities.

Virtual environments have proved to be successful for educational purposes in different fields. They are particularly useful when learner experience is necessary but impossible in a real context, like learning type 1 diabetes management, for example. When a diagnosis is made, in fact, the young patient is asked to learn, in a short time, how to control blood sugar levels and adopt a healthy life style. The paper describes a virtual environment in which young users are trained to control the balance between energy/physical activity, one of the main issues in diabetes care. Moreover, a pilot study aimed at measuring the users’ learning achievement reveals that the active learning approach is successful even if users have poor motivation.

The growing employment of Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) in several domains of everyday life has provided the impetus for much research into new tools and methodologies for their design and implementation. But up to now, few works have focused on evaluation of these MASs, and none of these considered characteristics such as the rationality, the autonomy, the reactivity and the environment adaptability of the agents in the MAS. We believe these characteristics affect the whole performance of these systems and are connected to the complexity of the environment where the agents act. In this paper we propose an evaluation method for static multi-agent systems. The method, based on the Goal-Question-Metric approach, allows evaluation of these same MAS characteristics and combines two analysis perspectives of these systems: intra-agent and inter-agent. We also report the use of the defined approach to evaluate the GeCo_Automotive system's MAS.

Assessment is one of the basic issues in both formal and informal educational contexts. Current online courses are massive and online, thus it is important to find new strategies for improve the effectiveness of evaluation. In MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), indeed, there is also the certification of knowledge and skills acquisition that requires more formal and trustworthy methods. Researchers should work to combine pedagogical and technological solutions to guarantee the effectiveness of learning measures. In this context, the Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT) could be useful to better measure the knowledge acquisition using a quiz, as usually happens in MOOCs. These are the premises of this research work that, in order to understand if CAT could be suitable for assessment in MOOCs, proposes a first algorithm to measure the acquired knowledge using a quiz-game. The pilot study attests the appreciation of users.

Le potenzialità formative assunte dalle nuove tecnologie dell’informazione, di cui sono portavoce gli Adaptive hypermedia learning systems (AHLSs), prevedono l’autonomia e la flessibilità cognitiva dei soggetti. Obiettivo, questo, conseguibile con la creazione di condizioni che favoriscono i processi di autovalutazione attraverso l’adattamento dei contenuti didattici agli stili cognitivi degli studenti. In questa prospettiva, la nostra ricerca ha analizzato la relazione tra stili cognitivi, motivazione e processi di apprendimento in ambiente SCORM. A tal fine 102 studenti, dopo esser stati selezionati in base al proprio stile cognitivo individuato con un appropriato questionario, sono stati suddivisi in due gruppi, di cui il primo, che ha lavorato in ambiente SCORM, ha usufruito dei contenuti di apprendimento adattati secondo gli stili cognitivi, mentre il secondo ha seguito lezioni impostate tradizionalmente. Dai risultati è emerso il chiaro ruolo positivo giocato dall’adattamento dei contenuti di apprendimento allo stile cognitivo, anche in presenza di bassa motivazione intrinseca dei partecipanti.

Current recommender systems can support tourists in choosing travel products (accommodation, activities, means of transport, etc.), in planning long trips, and in profitably spending time in a specific geographical area such as a region (or a city). In the last case, the system should be able to construct itineraries suited to the tourist’s interests. In this paper, a method for generating tourist itineraries in knowledge-based recommender systems is proposed. The method is based on a theoretical model that defines space-time relations among items of intangible cultural heritage (called events) and on transitive closure computation (of the relations), that is able to construct chains of events. The proposed method has been implemented in the T-Path recommender system, that suggests itineraries of cultural events occurring in the Apulia region.

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.

One of the main challenges in teaching and learning activities is the assessment: it allows teachers and learners to improve the future activities on the basis of the previous ones. It allows a deep analysis and understanding of the whole learning process. This is particularly difficult in virtual learning environments where a general overview is not always available. In the latest years, Learning Analytics are becoming the most popular methods to analyze the data collected in the learning environments in order to support teachers and learners in the complex process of learning. If they are properly integrated in learning activities, indeed, they can supply useful information to adapt the activities on the basis of student’s needs. In this context, the paper presents a solution for the digitally enhanced assessment. Two different Learning Dashboards have been designed in order to represent the most interesting Learning Analytics aiming at providing teachers and learners with easy understandable view of learning data in virtual learning environments.

In the context of chronic diseases, in order to guarantee a good quality of life, education is as important as the patient's adherence to a specific therapy. Learning and training processes in these contexts has a dual purpose, on the one hand, to make the patient empowered in order to allow him to recognize the behaviors that might compromise her/his health and, secondly, to train non-specialist medical and paramedical staffs on the procedures for diagnosis and patients follow-up to provide an high quality service. In this context the UBICARE project aims at creating a system that favors the de-hospitalization of patients suffering from peritoneal dialysis and chronic heart failure. The paper describes how the e-learning can be fruitful for patient and medical staff training.

The education in informal learning contexts is spreading over the world. In these contexts, from a pedagogical point of view, the most used approaches is the social learning and, in particular the communities of practice (CoP). From a technological point of view, the social network is the framework most used to allow users to interact and to share resources. Several aspects have been identified as key factors for the success of the community, the engagement is one of the most important. Thus, in order to guarantee a successful learning process in a CoP it is necessary to detect and monitor user’s engagement in a continuous and unobtrusive way. The research proposes a model to detect and measure the engagement in online communities by means Social Learning Analytics from log files. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017.

In the MAS evaluation research field there are still few works devoted to evaluating systems’ efficacy, and none of these aimed to measure the adequacy of the MAS in terms of rationality, autonomy, reactivity and environment adaptability. A reliable evaluation method should be general enough to estimate the success of the multi-agent paradigm in different domains, measuring the performances of each single agent and then of the entire MAS. Moreover, it should be able to relate these measures to the environment complexity, that embodies the complexity of the problem solved by the MAS. In this paper a method for evaluating static multi-agent systems is presented and its validation described. The main novelties of the method are that it allows the MAS to be evaluated in the context of the environment in which it will operate, and its adequacy to the environment to be judged from the viewpoints of both the designer, wishful to measure the quality of the designed MAS, and the evaluator, wishful to verify the adequacy of several MASs in a specific context. A validation of the method is described, carried out by evaluating two MASs: the GeCo-Automotive system and a Multi-Agent Tourism Recommender system.

It is widely recognized that in diabetes to learn the insulin metabolism is essential for ensuring a good quality of life as well as the adherence to the appropriate therapy. For these reasons, it is important to adopt strategies able to motivate and engage teenagers in the educational process. In this context, new technologies can help to make the learning process more engaging. The main idea is to use the game approach in order to make the learning and training process more attractive and intuitive. The goal of the game, Treasure Hunter, herein presented, is to allow the acquisition of self-management skills in children aged between 8-12 years. The challenge of the game is to train young diabetic to self- manage their clinical conditions and especially to prevent serious hypoglycaemic events and reducing psychological burdens. A first pilot study was conducted to measure the learning effectiveness and the usability of the game. The pilot study confirmed the literature evidences about the learning effectiveness: the game dimension and the interactive approach allow young patients to learn with more enthusiasm how to prevent hypoglycaemic events and to handle their therapy.

In the last decades AHLSs have increasingly focused on human factors to develop didactic methods able to personalize learning contents to students' needs and prior knowledge. In agreement with this perspective, the present research aimed at assessing the relationship between cognitive styles and learning process in a SCORM setting. 119 undergraduate students were divided into two groups, e-learners and traditional learners. All participants completed both the Cognitive Style Questionnaire and the Intrinsic Motivation Scale in order to evenly distribute the sample. The e-learners received then the teaching materials adapted to their preferred cognitive style, whereas the traditional learners received the same but non-adapted materials. The research findings indicated the key role of the adaptation of learning contents to cognitive style in a e-learning setting even though participants' intrinsic motivation resulted low.

Learning and training processes in the contexts of chronic disease moves in two directions: to make patients empowered in order to allow them to recognize the behaviours that might compromise their health conditions and, to train medical and paramedical staffs on the procedures for diagnosis and patients follow-up to provide an high quality service. To achieve these goals the learning by doing approach was adopted in UBICARE (Ubiquitous knowledge-oriented Healthcare) project to support training and skills acquisition related to the patient management and to the critical events handling. The final aim is to create a social network for information sharing to: support medical and paramedical staff in diagnosis and monitoring of the patient, train and inform them about diagnostic procedures, therapeutic interventions and follow-up of patients and to empower the patient to ensure a good quality of life.

Technology is pervading every aspect of our daily lives to an ever greater extent. This is borne out by the fact that computers although increasingly powerful, are becoming smaller and smaller, barely more than the size of a cell phone. Cultural heritage institutions are well aware that in order to attract a high number of visitors they now need to offer ever more advanced technology. Many statistical studies, in fact, have shown that most visitors to a museum devote very little time to their visit, racing around the whole building while spending very little time at each single work. One solution commonly adopted nowadays is to install multimedia guides that can stimulate visitors' interest and motivation to acquire a deeper understanding. However, it is not always enough to offer multimedia content to guarantee better learning. Our research aimed to integrate our experience of adaptive learning, gained in the field of e-learning studies, in interactive museum guide systems. This paper presents MoMAT, a system allowing tailored use of multimedia content, based on an assessment of the users' preferred cognitive styles.

L’uso di tecnologie innovative nell’ambito della didattica universitaria contribuisce a motivare e a coinvolgere un numero sempre maggiore di utenti che diventano sempre più esigenti. Occorre, quindi, che l’approccio alla formazione sia flessibile per consentire a ciascun individuo di creare il proprio percorso formativo. In questo scenario l’Università degli Studi di Bari “Aldo Moro” ha attivato diversi progetti con l’obiettivo di sostenere e diffondere l Keywords - Innovazione didattica, piattaforme di e-learning. ’innovazione tecnologica nella didattica universitaria. Tale è la missione del Laboratorio Multimediale ADA delle due Facoltà di Scienze MM. FF. NN. (sedi di Bari e Taranto), che sin dalla sua costituzione nel Luglio 2004, offre tutt’oggi servizi didattici tecnologicamene avanzati. Il contributo presenta le motivazioni dell’adozione di Moodle come piattaforma di e-learning a sostegno delle attività del Laboratorio ADA.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in mobile recommender systems for the tourism domain, because they can support users visiting new places, suggesting restaurants, hotels, attractions, or entire itineraries. The effectiveness of their suggestions mainly depends on the item retrieval process. How well is the system able to retrieve items that meet users' needs and preferences? In this paper we propose a multi-criteria collaborative approach, that offers a complete method for calculating users' similarities and rating predictions on items to be recommended. It is a purely multi-criteria approach, that uses Pearson's correlation coefficient to compute similarities among users. Experimental results evaluating the retrieval effectiveness of the proposed approach in a prototype mobile cultural heritage recommender system (that suggests visits to cultural locations in Apulia region) show a better retrieval precision than a standard collaborative approach based on the same metrics.

The increasing exploitation of the planet's resources has important consequences on the environment. The ecological disasters, that always more often occur, remind to human how important is to foster ecological skills since childhood. In Educational Technology field, there are several of experimental evidences that prove the effectiveness of multimedia technologies in learning processes. In this context, the research herein presented describes two solutions implemented to provide children with the knowledge and skills necessary to promote and enhance environmental awareness. The learning path is composed of an Explainer Video, which illustrates the effects that marine litter can cause to health of both marine species and humans, and a Serious Game, in which the player has to help the characters to avoid junk in the sea. The serious game set is the Mediterranean Sea and the characters are four species estimated to be at risk of extinction. The pilot study conducted in order to evaluate the usability of the Serious Game pointed out the appreciation of both students and teachers.

In the past years learning has evolved from face-to-face to computer supported learning, and we are now entering yet a new phase. The (r)evolution that yielded the knowledge transforming the Web 1.0 into Web 2.0 is now coming to e-learning contexts. Social media are the technologies most widely used to share educational contents, to find colleagues, discussion groups, and so on. But while in the Web 1.0 the most “time-spending” activity was to find suitable learning content, in the Web 2.0 era the search process is focused on different types of resources. This paper proposes a recommendation method that, by using a clustering algorithm, is able to support users during the selection steps. The recommendation is based on the tags defined by the network learners and the items to be recommended include not only contents but also social connections that could enrich the user’s learning process.

In distance education environments, collaborative activities such as wikis, forums and chats play an important role in the e-learning experience because they promote communication among students and so allow cooperative learning settings to be implemented. Nevertheless, it could be difficult for learners to pick out the most interesting and appropriate collaborative activities to meet their learning needs. Recommender systems integrated in e-learning platforms are usually used mainly to help learners choose teaching resources, but they can also be useful to suggest the collaborative activities that best fit their learning objectives from a pedagogical point of view. In this context, the paper presents a recommendation approach able to suggest collaborative activities such as forums, chats, wikis and blogs, that combines dynamic clustering and prediction calculus on the basis of the learners’ profiles and needs.

Over the years, the effectiveness of the learning by doing and the game based learning have been documented by several experimental evidences. In the latest years, the gamification approach has revealed the value of game-based mechanics to create meaningful learning experiences in non gaming systems. For these reasons in the UBICARE (UBIquitous knowledge-oriented HealthCARE) project, aimed at developing an advanced web system that offers different kinds of services to support the management of patients with chronic diseases, the learning component has been realised using both the simulation and the gamification approaches. In particular, the e-learning component starting from real medical records builds on the basis of the user profile a realistic problem, in order to allow specific skills about treatment protocols and diagnostic procedure to be acquired.

La formazione in campo medico nel particolare contesto delle malattie croniche è importante tanto quanto l’aderenza del paziente ad una determinata terapia per garantirgli una buona qualità della vita. La formazione in questi contesti ha un duplice scopo, da un lato, quello di rendere il paziente empowered rispetto alla sua particolare patologia insegnandogli a riconoscere gli atteggiamenti che possono dare luogo a criticità del suo stato di salute e, dall’altro, quello di formare il personale medico e paramedico, non specializzato, sulle procedure di diagnosi e di follow-up dei pazienti per offrire un servizio assistenziale efficiente con alti standard qualitativi tenendo al contempo sotto controllo la spesa sanitaria. Per questo motivo, nell’ambito del progetto UBI-CARE che mira alla realizzazione di un sistema che favorisca la deospedalizzazione dei malati affetti da dialisi peritoneale e da scompenso cardiaco cronico, il contributo descrive la componente per l’apprendimento situato per la formazione di pazienti e operatori sanitari a diversi livelli.

The fundamental role that ICT plays in the process of modernization of education and training, whether in formal or informal, is now universally recognized. The lifelong learning become increasingly urgent in many areas such as, for example, adult education, innovation and learning in the workplaces, health & wellbeing, cultural heritage, and so on. This requires the creation of learning paths cantered on the specific needs of the individual, for the development of skills and abilities as well as for the acquisition of content. Re-inventing the ecosystem training and re-strengthen the teaching and learning in the digital age, through practices more open and innovative in order to create learning experiences richer, engaging and motivating, is a priority. The article presents some solutions of smart learning environment in e-health domain that combines pedagogical approaches of social learning and game-based learning with technological approaches of the social network and recommender systems in order to provide engaging learning experiences.

L’ideazione di ambienti di apprendimento innovativi è vitale per rispondere alle emergenti sfide della formazione nel contesto della salute e del benessere. Gli Smart Learning Environment possono offrire esperienze di apprendimento coinvolgenti e motivanti per l’acquisizione di competenze e conoscenze anche in ambienti informali. L’articolo presenta uno Smart Learning Environment che coniuga gli approcci pedagogici del social learning e della gamification con quello tecnologico dei sistemi di raccomandazione per offrire un ambiente di apprendimento coinvolgente finalizzato all’empowerment del paziente.

One of the basic conditions to learn is motivation. Thus it is essential for learning environments to motivate the students to proceed into the learning process. Several researches propose the inclusion of new technological trends, such as the Gamification, to engage the users. In this paper the solution adopted in UBICARE system, where the Gamification approach has been used for training and learning purposes, is presented. The Gamification was used in the simulation of clinical cases aimed to both empower the patients to adopt healthy life-style and train the medical and paramedical staff about diagnostic procedures, therapeutic interventions and follow-up of patients. In particular, the paper presents the trainer interaction that is useful in order to keep the system up to date over time and to allow the definition of clinical cases tailored on the basis of users’ needs.

L’esigenza di tenere sotto controllo la spesa sanitaria, la volontà di mantenere un servizio assistenziale efficiente con alti standard qualitativi e l’aumento delle malattie croniche, hanno condotto negli ultimi anni alla sperimentazione di nuovi modelli di cura. Nel caso delle patologie croniche si sta assistendo alla diffusione di modelli di “disease management” in cui continuità assistenziale ed integrazione tra ospedale e territorio consentono una più razionale gestione del paziente a domicilio. Tali modelli si basano sul presupposto che ci sia un’elevato scambio di esperienze e conoscenze fra i centri ospedalieri di eccellenza, preposti alla cura delle fasi acute, i centri di assistenza deputati alla gestione ordinaria della malattia, il malato e i suoi familiari. Il presente contributo illustra il progetto UBI-CARE che coniuga l’approccio mobile e quello social per favorire l’assistenza continua del malato cronico.

Il presente lavoro illustra una tecnica di raccomandazione knowledge-based che permette di suggerire Learning Object in base alle caratteristiche cognitive e meta-cognitive dello studente. È proprio il coinvolgimento di queste due dimensioni a costituire il principale elemento innovativo del lavoro proposto. Dopo aver presentato le ultime tendenze della raccomandazione in e-learning presenti in letteratura, la tecnica knowledge-based definita è illustrata e valutata all’interno di un prototipo.

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.

L’e-learning 2.0 ha ormai permeato tutte le realtà educative nazionali ed internazionali. La possibilità di contribuire attivamente al processo di costruzione della conoscenza per gli studenti è diventata fondamentale. È necessario, però,fornire strumenti tecnologici che supportino questi nuovi approcci cercando di guidare l’utente nella scelta delle risorse più opportune. Il lavoro propone una e-learning social network che, oltre ad offrire gli strumenti per la condivisione delle risorse, fornisce anche un modulo per la condivisione,descrizione e ricerca di Learning Object e un sistema di raccomandazione in grado di suggerire risorse (materiale didattico, gruppi di discussione, contatti) partendo da un insieme di tag utilizzati dagli utenti per descrivere i propri interessi e le risorse da condividere.

I viaggi di istruzione rappresentano per gli studenti un’opportunità per apprendere storie, tradizioni, usi e costumi di culture diverse. Per gli insegnanti costituiscono, invece, un impegno, a volte gravoso, in quanto è necessario individuare quei beni culturali che meglio corrispondono agli obiettivi didattici prefissati dalla scuola e che meglio si adeguano anche al target degli studenti. Non sempre gli insegnanti conoscono approfonditamente i luoghi in cui si svolgeranno le visite di istruzione; in tal caso dovranno effettuare ricerche ed indagini per programmarle. Per agevolare gli insegnanti nella costruzione del percorso da compiere, il lavoro propone un sistema di raccomandazione che, attraverso tre fasi di elaborazione, è in grado di suggerire i beni culturali materiali e immateriali da visitare durante il viaggio di istruzione scegliendoli opportunamente rispetto alle esigenze formative espresse dall’insegnante.

Il diabete mellito di tipo 1 è una patologia che interessa l’età pediatrica e che, per la sua particolarità, necessita che i giovani pazienti siano in grado di prevenire, riconoscere e trattare gli episodi di ipoglicemia. Diventa indispensabile per il loro benessere che, non appena possibile, acquisiscano le conoscenze e competenze necessarie per l’autogestione. Le nuove tecnologie offrono la possibilità di affrontare il processo di apprendimento in maniera più divertente ed interattiva rendendo l’acquisizione più immediata e, quindi, più efficace. Il videogioco educativo, presentato nel lavoro, è destinato a bambini di età compresa tra gli 8 e i 12 anni e ha come scopo l’acquisizione delle capacità di gestione dell’ipoglicemia, dando particolare importanza al riconoscimento dei sintomi e alla prevenzione. Lo studio pilota condotto su un campione di utenti diabetici ha consentito di confermare quanto già ampiamente documentato in letteratura: la dimensione del gioco e l’approccio interattivo aiutano ad apprendere con più entusiasmo che, solitamente, si traduce in efficacia.

One of the most interesting current challenges in the e-tourism field is to offer services that are able to suggest attractions or event itineraries that fit tourist’s needs and preferences. In this scenario, we defined a method for generating itineraries of intangible cultural heritage events (processions, special markets, festivals, and so on) based on a theoretical model and the transitive closure computation. The method was, then, implemented, in a knowledge-based recommender system prototype, named T-Path, which is able to suggest event itineraries in Apulia region (in southern Italy). In this paper we propose an approach to identify the itineraries that best fit the tourist/user preferences. At this aim, first of all the type of each itinerary is discovered, and then the itineraries are ordered on the basis of their adequacy to the tourist preferences.

It is universally recognized that learning is more effective if the didactic content is tailored to the specific user’s needs. Since the advent of Adaptive Hypermedia, research in elearning has always investigated, from a theoretical point of view, the different dimensions involved, and from a technological point of view, the tools helping to integrate more adaptive contents. The problem is that these are often ad hoc solutions which are not interoperable at all. This paper presents a solution that aims at using the SCORM standard in order to build an adaptive content package. The strength of this work is that it applies the adaptation model using some API functions which affect only the client side of the package, without affecting the standard and the interoperability with the LMS. The paper also presents some additional functionalities for the RELOAD authoring environment intended to support non-expert users in building adaptive content packages.