PoEML

Draft

Definition

poEML is a visual educational modeling language (EML). poEML stands for perspective oriented EML.

The main idea underlying poEML is to break down the modeling of educational units into spearate parts that can be specified independantly. “PoEML proposes two different kinds of orthogonal concerns: (i) vertical concerns that group related elements in separated parts (named as Perspectives); and (ii) horizontal concerns that consider different modes of characterization of those elements (named as Aspects). Based on this distinction PoEML identifies 12 perspectives and 4 aspects. In conjunction, they enable to approach the modeling of educational units in an incremental and iterative way offering advantages in expressiveness, simplicity, reusability, flexibility and adaptability.” (Caeiro, 2008/preprint).

Note: There is also an XML vocabulary for poems, also called "poML".

Perspectives

Caeiro (2008:189) identified 13 different perspectives for designing or looking at educational units:

1. Structural. It is concerned with the arrangement of the elements involved into well-structured and self-contained components.
2. Functional Goals that have to be attained in an educational unit, i.e. the work that has to be performed by participants
3. Participants involved in the educational unit, defined in terms of roles.
4. Environments, i.e. the combination of data elements, tools and services that can be used by participants to work and to achieve the goals.
5. Data used in educational units. Data are used by other elements and there is also a data flow issue.
6. Tools, i.e. applications and services that can be used in an educational unit (e.g. simulators, editors, communication and collaboration services)
7. Organizational, structure required to carry out an educational unit.
8. Order (or control flow), the order in which activities are intended to be performed.
9. Temporal, time specifications that tell when an activity must be initiated or finished and/or for how long it should last.
10. Authorization, i.e. access rights of participants to environments' elements, mainly to the tools’ functionalities.
11. Awareness is concerned with the processing of runtime information (events) and the notification of relevant situations, e.g. that a teacher knows what is going on.
12. Interaction concerns the invocation of operations in tools, i.e. it deals with the mechanisms required to support the invocation of operations.
13. Causal. It involves competencies, metadata, learning objectives, pre-requisites, etc. It informs participants about why they should perform an educational unit.

poEML models these elements and their relationship with UML models. These models are then used to design the JPoEML graphical scenario editor.

Software

• JPoEML editor

Status

not clear.

Links

• http://www.poeml.com/ (dead link, jan 2009)

Bibliography

• Courses, E. and Surveys, T. (2008). A Proposal for a Component-Based LMS in Accordance with PoEML, Eighth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, ICALT'08.

• Caeiro, M. (2008). PoEML: a separation-of-concerns proposal to instructional design}}, Handbook of Visual Languages for Instructional Design: Theories and Practices. IDEA Group Inc.

• Caeiro-Rodriguez, Manuel; Luis Anido-Rif?, Martin Llamas-Nistal, "A Proposal of Separation of Concerns in EMLs and Its Relation with LD," icalt,pp.76-80, Sixth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT'06), 2006

• J. Fontela, M. Caeiro, M. Llamas, Towards a generalized architecture for the integration of tools in LMSs, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 4 (S1) (2009), pp. 6–11

Acknowledgement: This article or part of this article has been written during a collaboration with the EducTice group of INRP, which attributed a visiting grant to DKS in january 2009.