Abstract
E-Learning frameworks are conceptual tools to organize networks of e-learning services. Most frameworks cover areas that go beyond the scope of e-learning, from course to financial management, and neglects the typical activities in everyday life of teachers and students at schools such as the creation, delivery, resolution and evaluation of assignments. This paper presents the Ensemble framework - an e-learning framework exclusively focused on the teaching-learning process through the coordination of pedagogical services. The framework presents an abstract data, integration and evaluation model based on content and communications specifications. These specifications must base the implementation of networks in specialized domains with complex evaluations. In this paper we specialize the framework for two domains with complex evaluation: computer programming and computer-aided design (CAD). For each domain we highlight two Ensemble hotspots: data and evaluations procedures. In the former we formally describe the exercise and present possible extensions. In the latter, we describe the automatic evaluation procedures.

Abstract
The aim of the research presented in this paper is the development of a novel approach to predict programming aptitude. The existing programming aptitude tests rely on the past academic performance of students, on their psychological features or on a combination of both. The novelty of the proposed approach is that it attempts to measure student capabilities to manipulate abstract concepts that are related with programming, namely time, state and causality. These concepts were captured in Oh Balls - a physical simulation of the path taken by a sequence of balls through an apparatus of conveyor belts and levers. An engine for this kind of simulation was implemented and deployed as a web application, creating a self-contained test. that was applied to a cohort of first-year undergraduate students to validate the proposed approach. This paper describes the proposed type of programming aptitude test, a software engine implementing it, a validation experiment, discusses the results obtained so far and points out future research.

Abstract
eLearning has been evolved in a gradual and consistent way. Along with this evolution several specialized and disparate systems appeared to fulfill the needs of teachers and students such as repositories of learning objects, intelligent tutors, or automatic evaluators. This heterogeneity poses issues that are necessary to address in order to promote interoperability among systems. Based on this fact, the standardization of content takes a leading role in the eLearning realm. This article presents a survey on current eLearning content standards. It gathers information on the most emergent standards and categorizes them according three distinct facets: metadata, content packaging and educational design. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.

Abstract
Extracting the semantic relatedness of terms is an important topic in several areas, including data mining, information retrieval and web recommendation. This paper presents an approach for computing the semantic relatedness of terns in RDF graphs based on the notion of proximity. It proposes a formal definition of proximity in terms of the set paths connecting two concept nodes, and an algorithm for finding this set and computing proximity with a given error margin. This algorithm was implemented on a tool called Shakti that extracts relevant ontological data for a given domain from DBpedia - a community effort to extract structured data from the Wikipedia. To validate the proposed approach Shakti was used to recommend web pages on a Portuguese social site related to alternative music and the results of that experiment are also reported.

Abstract

Abstract
Experiments on cognitive processes require a detailed analysis of the contribution of many participants. In the case of cognitive processes in writing, these experiments require special software tools to collect gestures performed with a pen or a stylus, and recorded with special hardware. These tools produce different kinds of data files in binary and proprietary formats that need to be managed on a workstation file system for further processing with generic tools, such as spreadsheets and statistical analysis software. The lack of common formats and open repositories hinders the possibility of distributing the workload among researchers within the research group, of re-processing the collected data with software developed by other research groups, and of sharing results with the rest of the cognitive processes research community. This paper describes the development of Hand Spy, a collaborative environment for managing experiments in the cognitive processes in writing. This environment was designed to cover all the stages of the experiment, from the definition of tasks to be performed by participants, to the synthesis of results. Collaboration in Hand Spy is enabled by a rich web interface. To decouple the environment from existing hardware devices for collecting written production, namely digitizing tablets and smart pens, Hand Spy is based on the InkML standard, an XML data format for representing digital ink. This design choice shaped many of the features in Hand Spy, such as the use of an XML database for managing application data and the use of XML transformations. XML transformations convert between persistent data representations used for storage and transient data representations required by the widgets on the user interface. Despite being a system independent from a specific collecting device, for the system validation, a framework for data collection was created. This framework has also been highlighted in the paper due to the important role it took in a data collection process, of a scientific project to study the cognitive processes involved in writing.