Publications

This paper discusses FLOSS communities as a prime example of learning networks, i.e. informal, interconnected sets of individuals mutually supporting shared knowledge acquisition and committed to self-defined goals. In particular, it addresses how the incorporation of a web-based, certification platform for Free / Libre Open Source Software in community culture and practice may increase the community impact both as learning network and open, high-quality software producer.

 It can be argued that participating in free/libre open source software (FLOSS) projects can have a positive effect in the contributor's learning process. The need to interact with other contributors, to read other people's code, write documentation, or use different tools, can motivate and implicitly foster learning. In order to  validate this statement we  design  an appropriate questionnaire asking FLOSS contributors  about their experience in FLOSS projects. In this  paper, we illustrate how this questionnaire was  designed and what we expect to learn from the answers. We conclude the  paper with a preview of the results from three cases studies.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Learning Management System (LMS). Following a selection process we analyze the functionalities and characteristics of 8 tools commonly used in formal and informal education. More specifically we focus on the availability of different tools concerning communication and assistance, such as, forum, email, calendar, portfolios, etc. Our analysis showed that despite their similarities, the appropriateness of different FLOSS LMSs can be greatly affected by the specific needs of students, instructors and institutions.

 An on-line survey of former UNU-IIST fellows was made in June-August 2006. 82 former fellows answered the questions in the on-line questionnaire. This report summarises the results from the survey.

Intelligent tutoring systems assist medical faculty in training and equipping students with the required clinical reasoning skills. Plausible student solutions to a given problem are rejected by tutoring systems as being incorrect, if they do not match a specific solution accepted by the tutoring system. This leads to brittleness in evaluating student solutions. In this paper we describe a combination of knowledge base expansion and exploitation of existing knowledge structure to enhance robustness in an intelligent tutoring system for medical problem-based learning using UMLS. We present a tutoring system that enriches the solution space by collating different plausible solutions and exploiting the knowledge structure in UMLS to offer students a broader scope of reasoning.

 The present document covers UNU/IIST's activities in 1999. A brief overview is followed by a description of the status of ongoing research, advanced development, curriculum development and university development projects. This is followed by reports on UNU/IIST's Fellowship programme, advanced courses, events and academic meetings, Off-Shore R\&D projects, and administrative matters. UNU/IIST's Macau-oriented activities are reported, as are its linkages to UNU and other UN organisations. The last section gives an outline of planned activities for 2000.