Education/Projects/JetpackForLearning/Profiles/MUPPLE

MUPPLE II

MUPPLE II is a Firefox Jetpack extension, with which you can record and replay the Web. The following page will show you all the things you need to Mupple the Web and a bit more.

Get it

MUPPLE II is designed as Firefox Jetpack extension. Its open source and you get it for free to boost your learning experience. If you have not already switched to the “World’s Best Browser”, download it from http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/ (recommended version: 3.6 and upwards). MUPPLE II runs within Jetpack. To get your own Jetpack download it at https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/index.html (bottom of the page). You are one-step away from the MUPPLE II experience. Get the newest version at http://purl.org/ou/mupple (see install button at the top right side of the page). You are now ready to record and replay the web!

How to MUPPLE the Web

Wouldn’t it be great to have a recorder of all the pages and steps you have to walk through if you want for example write collaboratively a paper?

Wouldn’t it be great, if you can share this recorded steps with someone else and you do not have to guide them step by step through the Web?

Wouldn’t it be great, if you get guidance of how to write collaborative a paper simply by following the records of someone else?

With MUPPLE II it’s easy to do all of this.

In the following section, I will show you how you can turn your browser into a recorder of activities and how you can replay them.

Record the web: The recording and replay cockpit of MUPPLE II is realized in the slidebar on the left side of the browser window. Click on the MUPPLE Icon and the slidebar opens. The slidebar section is divided into two sections. The first section contains all recorded activities (see “Open Workflows”). Click on one of the activities. In the lower section of the slidebar, you will see all the steps/actions needed to fulfil your activity, guiding you through the Web. Click on one of the actions and you see in your browser window (right side) the spots with the information what you should do there.

To record an activity you create a new activity and give it a name. Go to the page where your activity starts. To add an action to the activity right click on the page and in the appearing context menu you can select an action. The new action appears in the slidebar. Step by step you record all the necessary actions.

In the next section, we will go a bit more into the details of recording the Web with MUPPLE II. Further down the text you find a demo video of MUPPLE II showing all features in detail.

Overview of the MUPPLE II interface

Recording in Detail:

The following picture shows how you can record a link “FM technologies”. It is one step of the activity “collaborative paper writing” which we defined by clicking on “new activity” in the slidebar. To record a link make a right click over the link (1) and select in the context menu the entry “add link action”. The slidebar shows as action step of the activity the newly added link (3). With MUPPLE II you can define besides the “add link action” “add note action”, and “add form field action”. The link action records the selected link, while the note action adds selected text and the form filed action saves text fields, button clicks, and check-box and radio-box selections. These are the basic elements, you need, to record all actions of an activity.

MUPPLE II Recorder

The Booking an Online Conference Screencast Tutorial

MUPPLE II is all about recording, replaying and sharing activities on the web. Have you ever had the problem that you wanted to do something on the web and record this activity so that you can later on replay it and maybe to share it with your friends?

By now, you probably sent your friends a couple of links and told them what they should do. This is quite tedious, because you have to give for every page an explanation of how to use this page – like click here and there, login here, or don’t do that...

With MUPPLE II, you just share with your friends your pre-recorded activity. They will then be able to follow your “footsteps” on the web.

In this tutorial, we will show you the basic of how to record the web. We use a simple activity that will get you going for scenarios that are more complex. In our scenario, we want to record “how to book an online conference” with FlashMeeting. We will show you how you can record this activity using the basic recording elements “add link action”, “add form action”, and “add note action”. With these basic actions, you can already record your activity “book an online conference”. You then can share the activity with your friends, who can replay your activity.

First of all we show you how to record the activity, and in the following video how to replay it. Click on the link to see the video: link title

After you have recorded the activity you can now replay it. See the following video at: link title

Future Jetpack features for MUPPLE II

The MUPPLE concept encompasses a broader vision than implemented in the MUPPLE II Firefox Jetpack Extension. The core of MUPPLES (Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments) is the learner interaction scripting languages (LISL). LISL is a domain-oriented design language to specify actions, interactions with others, with artefacts and with tools. The semantic model behind MUPPLE describes the learning situation as activity consisting of actions, which refers to Objects and/or requires tools.

Scripting learning activities: We see high potential to apply the LISL concepts within MUPPLE II using Mozilla Ubiquity. Mozilla Ubiquity also allows binding actions to objects and tools. It could serve as the foundation for a learner tailored domain specific language.

Collaboration: Another aspect of the MUPPLE concept is the strong notion of collaboration of learners. Collaboration implies sharing of data. Mozilla Weave could serve as the underlying database infrastructure for sharing data in a secure way.

Background of the MUPPLE II concept

Scaffolding with navigational support (Shapiro, 2007) helps preventing learners from getting lost in hyperspace (Otter & Johnson 2000). Our proposed prototype aims to support learners with structure, enabling Science/Research 2.0 practice (Kieslinger & Lindstaedt, 2009). MUPPLE II offers recording facilities of web activities, as well replaying them. Complex tasks involve many different resources on the web and actions/steps. With MUPPLE II users can record these steps, share them with the community and make them replay-able by other users, who have little or no experience in using the web techniques to accomplish their tasks. MUPPLE II helps users to guide through the set of actions needed to achieve tasks.

MUPPLE II bases on the MUPPLE concept (Wild et al., 2008). Today not only institutions for formal education such as schools and universities but also most work places and vocational training providers are equipped with at least some kind of tools that bring together people and content artefacts in learning activities to support them in constructing and processing information and knowledge.

With increased mobility, with exploding information offers, and light speed in technological innovation, building and maintaining these learning environments has not become easier. More: it has become the responsibility of the individual, rather than an institution. Supporting learners in building and maintaining their personal learning environment (PLE) therefore has drifted into the focus of attention in learning technology. MUPPLEs enable learners to capture, actively manage, and share good (best) learning practice.

The core of MUPPLES (Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments) is the learner interaction scripting languages (LISL). LISL is a domain-oriented design language to specify actions, interactions with others, with artefacts and with tools. The semantic model behind MUPPLE describes the learning situation as activity consisting of actions, which refers to Objects and/or requires tools. Capturing learning activities in scripts makes the learning experiences hidden in them accessible — and helps with learning a better learning environment which will shape future learning experiences. It can additionally help with building up rich professional competences. In addition, it supports emergence of new practices, rather than prescribing.

Practices like writing collaborative a research paper contains several steps, which have to follow a certain order, and involves the usage of several web tools. For each step of the process, learners have to get to know how to make use the provided tool. Help pages are often available, but often the learners only need a small portion of information to become productive. Mupple II includes this information directly into the web page.

Instead of only providing navigational support through hyperlinks to text or multimedia, we extend the scope including web functionalities. The navigational support of this prototype will help learners to replay recorded practices and give them the information they will need to make use of the tools. Learners will be able to “follow in experts’ footsteps”, who defined and order the single activities for efficient practice.

The two fundamental principles of MUPPLE II are capturing and replay of web activities. It provides a recording cockpit that accompanies you at the side of running through a learning activity you recurrently use. The recorder prompts you to explain certain steps in your web handling and to explicate the actions pursued. For example, when navigating to WordPress it allows you to record the action you are performing and with which intended outcome or goal. For example you can record that you are about to ‘register’ a new ‘learning diary’. This way, an activity script can be built from the recorded activity. The script captures action-outcome-tool statements binding the URL of a tool (function) to certain actions while explicating the intended outcomes such as goals, states, or artefacts.

This script can be used to monitor subsequent workflows (and provide task list like workflow navigation). This script, however, can also be shared with others as a kind of activity pattern. Whenever necessary, the recorder provides depersonalisation facilities to remove usernames from URLs, replacing them with placeholders that prompt user input whenever instantiated. As many web applications today support simple in- and output formats, even more complex data processing and data travelling activities can be designed that make sure learning traces created in one application (e.g. literature search engine) make their way to the other (e.g. bookmark sharing service).

MUPPLES are a matter of research on personal learning environments using mash-ups. They are actively investigated in the European IST project “iCamp” as well as in the IST project ROLE of the European Commission.

ROLE is a 7th framework project funded by the European ROLE aims to provide an responsive open learning environment, involving several stakeholders mainly in Europe but also from partners all over the world (e.g. China, Canada, Australia). ROLE builds up on the idea of a personal learning environment, that opposed to virtual learning environments tailors its functionalities and practices to informal learning supporting life long learning.

ROLE targets every person with building their network of experts to learn collaboratively in all sorts of fields. The tools and components as well as the personal learning environment will be openly available through the ROLE software repository. This will enable that interested persons can install their own ROLE instance to support their network of learners facing the challenges of the information age.

Reference

Kieslinger, B., and Lindstaedt, S.: Science 2.0 Practices in the Field of Technology Enhanced Learning. Science2.0 for TEL Workshop. ECTEL 2009, France (2009), 2009.

Otter, M., and H. Johnson: Lost in hyperspace: metrics and mental models. Interacting with Computers, 2000, 13, no. 1 (September), pp. 1-40.

Shapiro, A. M.: Hypermedia design as learner scaffolding. Educational Technology Research and Development, 2007, 56, no. 1 (11), pp. 29-44.

Wild, F., Mödritscher, F. and Sigurdarson, S.: Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments. eLearning Papers, 2008 9. http://www.elearningeuropa.info/files/media/media15972.pdf.

Original Proposal

The initial vision of the MUPPLE II Firefox Jetpack talks more about the motivation and introduces a use case to write collaboratively a paper using Web 2.0 webpages.