An intelligent mashup learning environment with social interaction

Social networking sites are being massively used, especially by youngsters, for leisure and fun purposes. In Portugal Hi5 is the Social Networking (SN) site preferred by the majority of high school students. Also Hi5, as member of the OpenSocial platform, is consistently providing interesting and appealing applications, as well as, improving the site functionalities, to increase user's interest and usage. The primary goals of meeting new friends and maintaining the friend's relationships are being reinforced with new and exciting applications that enhance social interaction. The Learning Management Systems (LMS), in particular the Moodle software, on the other hand, are widely used by school teachers, for supporting class activities. However students do prefer the Hi5 environment instead of the Moodle system. The informal learning that can occur in the Hi5 site could be used for doing activities supported by teachers. Unfortunately these social networking sites are not used by the majority of teachers. Therefore there is a difficulty in using SN in learning contexts, when teacher are not involved in it (Ofcom, 2008). With this scenario in mind, our research aims to bridge the gap between students and teachers preferred environments, that is, Hi5 with Moodle, by delivering a hybrid solution, or a mashup application. The starting hypothesis is that technology must be adapted to education and not the other way round in order to reach higher levels of effectiveness, when compared to using available standalone Web 2.0 tools in learning contexts. In fact our research question claims that it is possible to establish bridges between formal and informal learning, supported by social networks, linking school subjects with students' lives. Additionally, a smart mashup ongoing developing tool is mentioned with a server-based architecture that uses Moodle API and OpenSocial RESTful API to get data, store data and perform social operations (such us posts and invites) from and to SN Hi5 site.