PERSEUS adaptation for Ensemble project
About Ensemble
Ensemble (see http://www.computingportal.org for details) is a new NSF NSDL Pathways project working to establish a national, distributed digital library for computing education. Our project is building a distributed portal providing access to a broad range of existing educational resources for computing while preserving the collections and their associated curation processes. We want to encourage contribution, use, reuse, review and evaluation of educational materials at multiple levels of granularity and we seek to support the full range of computing education communities including computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, information science, information systems and information technology as well as other areas often called “computing + X” or “X informatics.”
Overview
The main goal of enhancing Ensemble portal (http://www.computingportal.org) with adaptation is to provide an extra value to the rich collection of resources that the portal is currently hosting. Out of a large set of possible adaptation techniques we selected the one that captures the social traits of portal users. Namely, visualizes users' browsing behaviors.
In Figure 1 there is a screenshot of an existing portal page with adaptive navigation cues added. Here green bullets of various shades denote the intensity of the users' click traffic: the darker the shade - the more clicks visits the page has. Here users are not distinguished from each other. Instead, a page-viewing behavior of a community of all portal users is visualized. Figure 2 is a more elaborate example where each individual user is contrasted to the rest of the community. The bullet background represents the whole user community, an the foreground person icon denotes an individual user.
