Tracking actual usage: the attention metadata approach

The information overload in learning and teaching scenarios is a main hindering factor for efficient and effective learning. New methods are needed to help teachers and students in dealing with the vast amount of available information and learning material. Our approach aims to utilize contextualized attention metadata to capture behavioural information of users in learning contexts that can be used to deal with the information overload in user centric ways. We introduce a schema and framework for capturing and managing such contextualized attention metadata in this paper. Schema and framework are designed to enable collecting and merging observations about the attention users give to content and their contexts. The contextualized attention metadata schema enables the correlation of the observations, thus reflects the relationships that exists between the user, her context and the content she works with. We illustrate with a simple demo application how contextualized attention metadata can be collected from several tools, the merging of the data streams into a repository and finally the correlation of the data.