Computer Science Graduate Seminar

Tuesday, July 20, 2021, 10-11am

Scaffolding Decentralized Community Information Systems for Lifelong Learning Communities

 

Abstract

With the rise of the Web 2.0, social networking sites and content management systems enabled professional communities to create Web content. But it simultaneously put the communities at the mercy of the platform operators and software providers. Decentralized community information systems bring in a new perspective by offering self-hosting, self-governing and self-developing communities.

In this dissertation, we followed a design science approach that provides support for communities to create and host their own, decentralized community information systems. On the one hand, we produced several artifacts to provide possible answers to the question of what properties such an infrastructure needs to fulfill. On the other hand, we transfer the metaphor of educational scaffolding to the domain of service development.

We demonstrated and evaluated our open source artifacts on a European scale, with three longitudinal studies conducted within several communities from different areas of technology enhanced learning, such as the European voluntary service, vocational and educational training providers and in higher education mentoring scenarios.

 

The computer science lecturers invite interested people to join.