This page is a sub-page of our page on CID/NADA at KTH

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Evaluation Setup:

On the Friday, March 28, the technical staff of the CID Competence Centre briefed two of us, the scientific experts Professor Patrizia Marti and Professor Tom Rodden, on the four established scientific programmes on Connected Communities, Interactive Learning Environments, Interaction Forms and User Oriented Design.

The presentations were delivered by a combination of senior scientists, academic staff and PhD students. These presentations were complemented by a series of demonstrations.

On the Morning of Saturday March 29th, we were briefed on these same areas and the surrounding context of the CID Centre. The presentations given complemented those of Friday, with the addition of presentations from the Chairman of the Board and a selection of the industrial partners who described their relationship to CID.

We would like to thank the CID Director, Professor Yngve Sundblad, and all of the industry representatives, scientists and students involved with CID for the presentations describing the Centre and its scientific programmes. We appreciated the openness and warmth of the members of CID, particularly their willingness to answer questions, provide demonstrations and engage in debates and discussions. Our thanks also go to VINNOVA for inviting us, and to Barbro Atlestam and Staffan Hjorth for assistance in all aspects of the review

Evaluation Results for Interactive Learning Environments:

Work on interactive learning environments is the smallest research grouping. It is led by Ambjörn Naeve and involves 4 researchers. The work focuses on exploring new kinds of e-learning architectures. This work involves a wide range of collaborative projects looking at developing new forms of learning environments. A considerable amount of this work has taken place in the context of the semantic web.

The aim has been to focus on the development of very open tools. They constitute important links with leading educational players in Sweden and the projects have a significant impact in the international web community. CID is actively involved in the international standards bodies that will help form the future digital infrastructure.

The work on standards is complemented by publications in major forums for publishing web technologies. These include the World Wide Web conference and web based learning environments.

The work is certainly internationally leading and shows significant contribution to web based technologies and e-learning. This work is based on the construction of a range of compelling demonstrations of interactive learning environments. These demonstrations are all the more compelling because they link with the real world education and learning. For example, the work on Edutella has been deployed across many high schools in Sweden.

The work in CID is in contrast to many existing approaches, which focus on information and content delivery rather than the construction of knowledge. The work in learning environments focuses on tools to allow the construction of knowledge structures and the decentralization and recomposition of content.

This approach is likely to be much more powerful in the longer term than current approaches. A significant focus for this work will be on mathematical subjects although these tools have broader application.

A significant strength of this work is that it demonstrates the work through software. Considerable interest has been shown from a number of different organizations in putting these tools to work. This includes links with other researchers through future EU FP6 bids and educational television broadcasters who are exploring the use of their tools. The grouping is also considering the development of training courses for companies surrounding their approach.

We recommend that the information learning environments grouping focus on ensuring take and use of the tools and monitoring their results rather than further development. Ideally, this should be in partnership with CID partners. This may be done in partnership with other CID projects, for example, the work currently underway with Vattenfall/SwedPower.

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The full 2003 evaluation report on CID can be found here.