Alexandros Soumplis

ABSTRACT We present the JDistiller, available as open source software at https://code.google.com/p/jp2k-distiller/. JDistiller tackles the problem of processing, and transforming massive amounts of content, in a fast and efficient manner. JDistiller is a distributed platform where an arbitrary, dynamic number of worker nodes process and transform content, with the coordination of a managing node. The most important present use case is the transformation of born digital content, in order to become available as thumbnails and images over a page by page online reading platform, implemented with the DJatoka Image server platform and Internet Archive Book Reader. JDistiller is interoperable with the Open Journal System and the DSpace platform. Additional use cases, for problems that require massive transformation of content, can be implemented.

The present paper briefly describes the development of a funder repository aiming at the dissemination, reuse and preservation of digital material of diverse types, providing an enhanced user experience, which was produced under the auspices of large scale (multi-billion Euros) funding programmes of the Hellenic Ministry of Education (co-financed by the European Union).

Hellenic Open University, in the context of providing distance education through innovative methods and activities, uses a number of learning environments. The presented platform in this study is the IBM Lotus Quickr, which is an environment that provides information about courses, classes, students' projects of HOU and is based on the distribution and collaboration of learning content and activities.

The unprecedented growth of Web 2.0 has affected learning and has made the growth of learning networks possible. Learning networks are shaped by communities to help their members acquire knowledge in specific areas and are the most notable feature of Learning 2.0, the new learning era that focuses on individual learning needs. The evolution of learning forces traditional Learning Management Systems (LMS) to incorporate more Web 2.0 features and slowly transform to Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). A Personal Learning Environment is a loosely structured collection of tools with strong social networking characteristics, which gives users the ability to create, maintain, and redistribute their own learning content. This paper is a field study of the most well-known and established LMSs and their support for specific features within several categories of tools of Web 2.0. The incorporation of Web 2.0 features within those LMSs differentiates them regarding their ability and potential to be used as PLEs.

Οpen content organisation, distribution and interoperability poses a multitude of challenges in a number of different areas. These include diverse regions like: copyright information management, metadata-bibliographic data management, metadata organisation and interoperability mechanisms, backoffice digitisation processes support, digital content interoperability and reuse frameworks, including persisted identifiers, end user interfaces and intuitive content interaction, along with the required highly efficient storage and ...

This study argues the potential of Personal Learning Environments towards a participatory, a collaborative and in large extent a mobile learning era and presents a case study of deploying HOU2LEARN, a Personal Learning Environment within the Hellenic Open University. As part of the deployment, it is presented the process of choosing the appropriate software along with its installation and configuration. Furthermore, in order to ensure quality in user experience, HOU2LEARN goes through a usability evaluation. This evaluation identifies potential areas of improvement to attract more users and enhance their experience. Also in order to serve as a tool for university professors and high school teachers, an assessment method based on rubrics is deployed and available in the platform.

The unprecedented growth of the Web 2.0 led to the evolution of learning methods and the introduction of the Learning 2.0 as well as Informal Learning. Yet besides the fact that numerous Learning Management Systems (LMS) exist there is a lack of any kind of classification related to the learning era and the learning formality they incorporate. This paper introduces and describes a ranking method both for the Learning Era and the Learning Formality of an LMS and finally introduces the
“twobility” classification factor.

It is argued that a social network can support knowledge transfer to its members with an informal way. It is also argued that a usable, in terms of HCI, social network can do this effectively and efficiently. Therefore, usability evaluation is a significant process that social networks, especially the education-oriented ones, have to undergo in order to be widely accepted and accomplish the task of knowledge transfer. This paper presents a methodology for the usability evaluation of social networks, that was applied to HOU2LEARN, an open educational social network setup in Hellenic Open University for educational and research purposes. The application of this methodology to HOU2LEARN is described and the evaluation results and outcomes are discussed.

In this technical report we present results from the deployment of F/OSS virtualization platform. This platform was used both for providing existing NDC’s services, in a production environment, and for developing additional new services using agile development methods. In greater detail, F/OSS virtualization was selected as the best solution in order to meet a number of different NDC’s requirements, these are in fact quite common in a wide area of IT environments and projects. NDC’s virtualization benefits are quantified while F/OSS specific benefits are especially highlighted. These include, apart from reduced energy consumption and hardware requirements, reduced licensing costs and most importantly significantly increased flexibility due to combining virtualization and F/OSS. This combination leads to project and organization wide benefits. These make F/OSS virtualization a particular well fit for organization using agile development methods and facing a number of strict technical, economic, administrative or regulatory constraints. Similar situations can be found variety of situations, from SMEs to government organizations. Finally, focusing on licensing and maintenance costs, we compare in a general way the benefits for using F/OSS virtualization when compared to closed source virtualization or non virtualized platforms.

Providing users with a rich, intuitive and meaningful interface for accessing online electronic resources, e.g. books, monographs, journal papers is a significant factor for the adoption and usage of electronic publication systems and for the augmentation of the users’ experience.

Traditionally, electronic journals, and scientific publications, have been published and viewed online, using the widespread PDF format, for the rigid, portable formatting it provides, and HTML for its versatility.

Recently, initiatives such as the “Google Books” and “Google Art” project, the Internet Archive “Open Library” and advanced repository systems, have paved the way for novel online reading capabilities and experience, with features such as “page by page” viewing of electronic resources and tile-based image viewing systems, exploiting advanced codecs such as JP2000 and corresponding online viewers.

These advances are becoming gradually available in electronic publication systems and, if incorporated in Open Access Journals can contribute to even wider adoption by users and publishers. Such incorporation will enable, apart from intuitive reading capabilities, the efficient viewing of large data sets visualisations, maps and/or images of cultural artifacts.

A very promising area concerns page by page reading capabilities, since it presents significant advantages: incremental, less bandwidth-consuming download of material (avoids downloading large pdf files, especially for digitised or media rich content, as well as browser incompatibilities with PDF readers), more attractive and intuitive reading experience. Furthermore, it can provide full-text search with hit highlighting, ability for e-journal hosts to capture statistics of visitor reading patterns, full-text searches, etc (something impossible with off-line reading), ability for a distinct, unique, user friendly URL for each page allowing bookmarking, reference and sharing at the page level, XHTML compatibility and lack of dependence on external closed source readers, and capability of advanced tile based browsing for scientific and cultural data of extremely high resolution.

EKT has integrated in OJS online reading and viewing capabilities. Documents can be read online through a page-by-page reader while full-text search with hit highlighting is supported. Furthermore, supplementary material of publications (e.g. high resolution images which are common as material accompanying research articles particularly in the Humanities) can be viewed in high resolution utilising the progressive transmission features of JPEG2000.

In the full paper, the technologies, open source components and OJS integration mechanisms employed to achieve this functionality will be presented, including among others an interactive online reader with dynamic zooming, thumbnail view, full-text search and hit highlighting capabilities, a JPEG2000 image server, and the highly scalable backend common infrastructure for storage, batch image processing, OCR and access to digital files by multiple applications.

EKT will make available the tools developed for integrating OJS with these advanced open source components. While the full implementation of this functionality requires a substantial backend infrastructure and procedures, it is nevertheless suitable to be provided with a Software as a Service model, which nowadays becomes increasingly popular in electronic publishing, thus providing all open access publishers, independently of their size, advanced on line reading capabilities.

The term e-Learning 2.0 has been introduced right after the appearance of the term Web 2.0, to describe the transformation of e-Learning systems along with the Web 2.0 growth. Even though Web 2.0 is already established this is not the case for e-Learning 2.0. The term e-Learning 2.0 is the result of the blending between e-Learning and Web 2.0 concept and ideas. This paper records the evolution of Web 2.0 and its influence to traditional e-Learning. There is also a survey relating to numerous e-Learning tools and in which extent they fit to e-Learning 2.0. As a final point this paper concludes that the existing tools are not adequate and there is still way to unleash the full potential of e-Learning 2.0

Η ανανεωμένη έκδοση του Αποθετηρίου "Ήλιος" του ΕΙΕ αναπτύσσεται στο πλαίσιο της πράξης "Εθνικό Πληροφοριακό Σύστημα Έρευνας και Τεχνολογίας/Κοινωνικά Δίκτυα – Περιεχόμενο Παραγόμενο από Χρήστες" που υλοποιείται από το Εθνικό Κέντρο Τεκμηρίωσης. Η πράξη εντάσσεται στο Επιχειρησιακό Πρόγραμμα "Ψηφιακή Σύγκλιση" του ΕΣΠΑ (με τη συγχρηματοδότηση της Ελλάδας και της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης - Ευρωπαϊκό Ταμείο Περιφερειακής Ανάπτυξης).