KOI SCHOOL

Towards the Next Level of Communication, Organization and Integration

in Education

Jonas Schulte, Reinhard Keil, Dominik Klaholt and Jannis Sauer

Heinz-Nixdorf-Institute, University of Paderborn, Fuerstenallee 11, 33102 Paderborn, Germany

Keywords:

CSCW, Education, Integration, Knowledge, Organization, School, SOA.

Abstract:

Information technology plays a central role in early school education of pupils, since the information society is

continuously changing and developing. Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Flickr, blogs, YouTube, and Google Earth

are just some of the new technologies that bombard us from all directions since the genesis of the Web 2.0.

Although there is a broad offer of educational software, yet an integrated solution for continuous support does

not exist. In this paper, we present KOI, a collaborative school management system, that combines typical

administration tasks with document management and social networking features. In our opinion, modern

school software has to comprise both, educational software and those new technologies that are particularly

popular among pupils. Thereby, private interests (e.g. social networking or instant messaging) and those

functions supporting the schooling can be combined.

1 INTRODUCTION

An increasingly cross-linked digital world changed

the society and especially the young generation that

grew up with smartphones, the Web 2.0, and a mass

of interactive media in everyday life. The MacArthur

Foundation launched a ﬁve-year, $50 million digital

media and learning initiative in 2006 to help deter-

mine how digital technologies are changing the way

young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in

civic life. Especially the increasing participation of

young people in online worlds (Kafai et al., 2007),

and the read/write culture of Web 2.0 is the subject

of ongoing discussion and debate in educational cir-

cles (Ito et al., 2008; Jenkins, 2008). The willingness

of young people to participate as proliﬁc consumers

and producers of digital content is high as never be-

fore. For example, the Pew Internet & American

Life project identiﬁed in a study from 2005 that more

than one-half of all teens have created media content,

and about one-third of all teens who use the Internet

have shared content they produced (Lenhart, 2005), as

videos on YouTube or pictures via Flickr. Young peo-

ple change more and more to participatory cultures

where media, and in particular visual and social me-

dia, play an increasingly important role. Moreover, a

shift in their relationship to the media can be recogni-

zed; from being an audience and users to becoming

participants and creators as well (Svoen, 2007).

For this participatory cultures video and music

mashups and remixes of existing content are the way

of proﬁling and personalizing the new digital world.

However, beside the desire to emphasize themselves,

young people act more collaboratively and coopera-

tively than before. The fast growing number of blogs,

forums, and newsgroups points up these changes.

Furthermore, most Web 2.0 platforms require a so-

called critical mass to become successful. In our

opinion today’s education has to include bit by bit

the range and variety of internet-based tools, plat-

forms, and practices adopted by young learners. Mod-

ern school software must not be an isolated appli-

cation for administration, but an open infrastructure

allowing the integration and adaption of those tools

and platforms the pupils use to support technology-

mediated learning in schools. The success of Apple’s

iTunes U project, with more than 600 participating

universities and more than 250,000 lectures, presen-

tations, videos, readings, and podcasts from all over

the world, make clear that an easy online access to

teaching materials is desirable (Rugg, 2009).

Nevertheless, fancy Web 2.0 tools did not ﬁnd

the way in everyday school life, even though these

technologies have the potential to facilitate teachers

Schulte J., Keil R., Klaholt D. and Sauer J..

KOI SCHOOL - Towards the Next Level of Communication, Organization and Integration in Education.

DOI: 10.5220/0003469800430052

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2011), pages 43-52

ISBN: 978-989-8425-56-0

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

in performing their daily work. There are numerous

possibilities for the teacher to interact with the pupils

and a systematic and efﬁcient storage and retrieval of

their students’ class materials using web-based school

management tools and Web 2.0 technologies. Cur-

rent school IT-infrastructures mainly focus on educa-

tional software to support solely the training of pupils.

Moreover, there are cumbersome administrative task

a teacher is often faced to especially when he or she

wants to differ from the original plan. An example

is an unheralded room reservation for audio-visual

display. First, the teacher has to check which room

is equipped with the necessary hardware. Second, a

reservation has to be done and ﬁnally the pupils has

to be informed about the room change.

In this paper we work out the requirements on a

modern IT platform for early school education. Es-

pecially, the social changes and technical evolutions,

mentioned above, have to be considered when plan-

ning a new system to support processes in education.

The focus is on setting up a platform that supports

teachers in doing administrative tasks and in addi-

tion allows pupils to interact and discuss in their usual

manner. We present KOI school, a web-based appli-

cation supporting communication, organization, and

integration tasks in everyday school life. The imple-

mentation of KOI bases on WasabiBeans, a frame-

work for setting up collaborative learning and work-

ing environments. Another strength of WasabiBeans

is to act as an integration platform. Thanks to the

microkernel architecture and ﬂexible interfaces it is

quite easy to couple different applications with the

framework working as an integration layer.

This paper is structured as follows. We start with

a research about typical e-learning systems in sec-

tion Related Work and follow up with a requirements

analysis in section Knowledge Management in Every-

day School Life. Based on the requirement analysis

we present our results and particularly the KOI school

application. We close the paper with a discussion

about our results and possible points of contact for

future work.

2 RELATED WORK

On the one hand there are a few open source soft-

ware solutions for cooperative working and data ex-

change like wiki systems (MediaWiki, Foswiki, etc.),

e-learning platforms like Moodle, and also concepts

where groupware goes to school by adapting BSCW

to the classroom. Wikis are one of many Web 2.0

components that can be used to enhance the learn-

ing process (Stahl, 2004; Ebersbach et al., 2008). A

wiki is a web communication and collaboration tool

that can be used to engage students in learning with

others within a collaborative environment (Parker and

Chao, 2007). Wikis are fully editable websites with

options to read or add content (Augar et al., 2004).

Moodle is a free and open-source e-learning software

platform, extendable with serveral modules for text

editing, for document management, wikis, and com-

munication. All these systems support a multi user

environment with cooperative data collection or coop-

erative data exchange in terms of documents, images,

papers, links etc. and a few simple features to com-

municate and interact together like message boards or

email systems (Dougiamas and Taylor, 2003).

On the other hand there are indeed no open source,

but plenty of commercial software solutions to man-

age the everyday school life. This means these soft-

ware solutions manage room planning, appointments

e.g. for exams, class schedules or pupils and their ad-

dress data or marks. However, a solution to ﬁll the

gap between those applications for supporting coop-

eration among pupils and teachers and those for per-

forming administrative tasks is missing. For example

a global system, which supports the teacher to book

or to change a classroom, marks this classroom as oc-

cupied for other users and informs the pupils about

the classroom change. Specialized and isolated ap-

plications are suitable for single task, yet an execu-

tion of continuous workﬂows as required for a mod-

ern school IT infrastructure is not possible.

3 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

IN EVERYDAY SCHOOL LIFE

In several countries pupils are grouped as classes in

primary school and high school. The concept be-

hind doing so is the Knowledge Building Community

(KBC), broadly deﬁned as an environment that en-

courages pupils into knowledge creating culture in ad-

dition to their competencies in certain subjects (Bere-

iter and Scardamalia, 2003). Usually these classes

have their own classroom. Only lessons, like physics

or sports that require special equipment take place

in different rooms. Beside compulsory subjects the

pupils may choose between optional subjects. Ac-

cordingly, those pupils who attend a certain optional

subject may not belong to the same class. Thus, new

groups for optional subjects are formed. Due to this

fact the ﬂexible composition of participants to groups

is an important requirement on school software.

ICEIS 2011 - 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

3.1 Virtualization of Classrooms

The establishment of a digital reproduction of the

real school environment helps pupils to orient them-

selves. Hence, our demand is to combine the idea of a

room-based virtual world with basic document man-

agement and social networking functionalities to sup-

port processes in everyday school life. Rooms func-

tion not only as social meeting places and centers of

virtual learning community, but also as a collective

external memory, providing media functions as a ba-

sis for cooperative learning (Hampel and Keil, 2001).

Particularly with regard to cooperative work environ-

ments, virtual knowledge spaces facilitate users to

aware each other as well as to structure documents

freely and follow up changes via a notiﬁcation mech-

anism based on events.

The basic concept of virtual knowledge spaces

includes room, container, and document objects to

structure data. In addition every of these so-called

data objects can be annotated with attribute objects.

Attributes are supposed to be real objects rather than

simple strings. Managing awareness in virtual knowl-

edge spaces is of particular importance for the user in-

teraction, teamwork, as well as computer-aided learn-

ing and collaboration (Prinz, 2001; Prinz et al., 2008).

Therefore, every room contains a list of users that

are present in the current room. Finally rooms can

contain ”exits”, links to other rooms, but they may

also contain rooms themselves, so that it is possible

to create hierarchical structures of virtual knowledge

spaces.

The idea is to create a digital world that allows

users to meet, interact, and learn with each other.

Thereby, a school represents a network of various vir-

tual knowledge spaces that makes it possible to appre-

ciate the actions of cooperative partners. Such an en-

vironment that allows users to be aware of the actions

of cooperative partners is the prerequisite for unam-

biguous interaction and collaboration. For example

the cognition of modiﬁcations on certain documents,

attendees within the same virtual space, and the par-

ticipants of a chat discussion are important events to

support the cooperative working process.

3.2 WasabiBeans – A Service-oriented

Framework

WasabiBeans is a service-oriented framework that

supports the assembling of cooperative work and

learning environments (Schulte et al., 2008). The ba-

sic concept is a micro kernel architecture with differ-

ent layers and so-called modules to implement new

functions. Figure 1 gives an overview of the frame-

work’s architecture. The core model (internal core)

implements the concept of virtual knowledge spaces

as introduced above in section Virtualization of Class-

rooms. The persistency layer bases on the JPA

and Hibernate for Object-relational mapping (ORM).

Thereby, the mapping of the data model to a rela-

tional database system is realized, beyond an easy re-

placement of the concrete database system is possi-

ble. WasabiBeans offers different interfaces for inter-

Mail-Module

Event-Module

Seam-API

Modules

JAAS

JCR

JPA / Hibernate

Internal Core

Internal Services

Persistence and

Directory Layer

Service-Consumer

Local Services

Remote Services

LDAP / User Directory

Content / Backend / CMS

Webservices / RMI

WasabiBeans

Figure 1: Architecture Overview of the WasabiBeans

Framework.

action. Firstly, local services, these services are only

accessible from modules and those applications that

are deployed on the same JBoss Application Server

(JBoss AS) and run within the same Java Virtual Ma-

chine (JVM) as the WasabiBeans framework itself.

Secondly, remote services, these services are accessi-

ble via web services and Remote Method Invocation

(RMI) as shown in ﬁgure 1.

In particular cooperative work and learning envi-

ronments are characterized by high user interaction.

Users may hold the membership in different groups

and exchange documents among each other intensely.

The high interaction and the complex allocation to

groups requires a ﬂexible and highly adjustable right

management. WasabiBeans offers a right manage-

ment with a variety of features that support these re-

quirements. As an example WasabiBeans implements

the concept of right inheritance to deﬁne permissions

rapidly. For a detailed explanation of WasabiBeans’

right management we refer to (Schulte et al., 2009).

Java Persistence API, online available:

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2EE/jpa/

KOI SCHOOL - Towards the Next Level of Communication, Organization and Integration in Education

4 RESULTS

The previous sections motivated our goal to create

a school-management system, that combines typical

administration tasks with document management and

social networking features. Further we suggested

that the concept of virtual knowledge spaces is well-

suited to help reach that goal. As a consequence

the WasabiBeans-Framework being an implementa-

tion of the concept of virtual knowledge spaces is

used as the base of our intended school manage-

ment system. In this section we will present the

KOI school-management systems that combines typ-

ical administration tasks with document management

and social networking features. Further we suggested

that the concept of virtual knowledge spaces is well-

suited to help reach that goal. As a consequence the

WasabiBeans framework being an implementation of

the concept of virtual knowledge spaces is used as the

base of our intended school-management system. In

this section we will present the current state of our

progress to create the intended school-management

system as a web application named KOI using state

of the art technology like the Seam framework. First

we will give information about the Seam API that en-

ables a comfortable use of the WasabiBeans frame-

work within a Seam framework based web applica-

tion. Then we will present KOI and its main fea-

tures itself and point out how these features are based

upon the WasabiBeans framework. The last para-

graph of this section deals with performance issues

of the multi-user web application KOI.

4.1 The Seam API – Rapid Seam-based

Development

The KOI school management system, described in

the next section in detail, is a web-based Seam ap-

plication. JBoss Seam is also known as the Seam

framework or simply Seam. Seam is a web appli-

cation framework and was invented by Gavin King,

a lead developer of JBoss. It simpliﬁes the interac-

tion between view and business logic. The view is

represented by JavaServer Faces (JSF) an in terms of

the KOI system with Facelets, an alternative view-

handler technology for the JSF framework replac-

ing the JavaServer Pages (JSP). The business logic

is represented by Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 (EJB3).

The framework also expands the concept of contexts.

Each Seam component exist within a context. To af-

ford more ﬂexibility with respect to life cycle deﬁ-

nition of web applications, Seam extends the stateful

SessionBeans of EJB3 by providing seven different

scope types. These scope types enable the developer

to control the runtime of a SessionBean from a sim-

ple request via a conversation or a session through to

complete runtime of application. This offers an ef-

ﬁcient way to store data for more then one request.

For example the default Seam context, a conversation,

can span multiple pages and usually spans the whole

business ﬂow, from start to ﬁnish. Another exam-

ple is the session context, which captures all actions

of a user until he logs out or gets a session timeout

(e.g. when closing the browser); even though using

the back-button of the browser. Beside the possibil-

ity to conﬁgure Seam components using annotations,

as known from EJB3, Seam introduces the concept

of bijection. A concept, taken from Spring’s depen-

dency injection feature where objects can be in-jected

from or out-jected to assigned variables using the @In

respectively the @Out annotation. This is a simple so-

lution to share data between Seam components (Yuan

et al., 2009).

On the one hand the data storage and exchange

within the Seam framework is realized, as it based

on EJB3, in an usual object-oriented manner. On

the other hand WasabiBeans is consistently designed

as a service-oriented architecture (SOA), hence these

two different approaches of the frameworks do not

match to each other. More precisely, the design

of WasabiBeans does not offer objects to overlying

applications, instead it offers services whose output

and input data are Data Transfer Objects (DTOs).

To support an efﬁcient way of data exchange be-

tween Seam and WasabiBeans, it was necessary to

develop a solution that provides the WasabiBeans’ ob-

jects in an object-oriented way for further process-

ing within the Seam framework. The implementation

of such an application programming interface (API)

can be realized either within the application itself (in

this case the KOI system) or as a component of the

WasabiBeans framework. For a better reutilization of

the API it was integrated into the WasabiBeans frame-

work, since other applications based on JBoss Seam

can be implemented in the object-oriented manner

too. Figure 1 shows the classiﬁcation of the developed

application programming interface called Seam API

between JBoss Seam and the WasabiBeans frame-

work.

Another relevant aspect for the development of

an API between JBoss Seam and the WasabiBeans

framework is resulting from the functionality of KOI.

The WasabiBeans framework offers a set of structures

like documents, attributes, links etc. To project a mes-

sage or an appointment in KOI by the given struc-

tures of the WasabiBeans framework, a relation of this

structures is necessary. A message for example is rep-

resented by a document, its properties like subject or

ICEIS 2011 - 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

sender are represented by attributes, which are con-

nected with the document. The distribution of mes-

sages is realized by links. To project these complex

structures, Seam API was extended with these struc-

tures. With it Seam API is not only an object-oriented

mapping of WasabiBeans framework, but also an ex-

tension of the structures of the WasabiBeans frame-

work.

4.2 KOI – School Management System

KOI is a web application for schools that offers ad-

ministrative, organizational, and social networking

functions for the students, the teachers, and the gen-

eral staff. Though it still has to be considered as a

prototype, it already meets many of the requirements

presented in section Knowledge Management in Ev-

eryday School Life. As stated in the previous section

KOI is implemented with JBoss Seam and uses the

WasabiBeans framework via our Seam API. In this

section we will present concrete functions KOI pro-

vides and we will show how KOI makes explicit use

of the concept of virtual knowledge spaces.

4.2.1 Entering the User’s Room

As described in section The Seam API - Rapid Seam-

based Development, the view-handler, which is an in-

terface to the user of the web application, consists of

xhtml-ﬁles which can be rendered as web-pages and

thus can be displayed in a user’s browser. Each vir-

tual knowledge space of KOI is associated with one

or more of these xhtml-ﬁles. The idea is that when a

user browses through the web application he moves

through virtual knowledge spaces. Upon entering a

virtual knowledge space one of the associated xhtml-

ﬁles is rendered and displayed to the user. A user can

see a virtual knowledge space from different perspec-

tives, so more than one xhtml-ﬁle can be associated

with a virtual knowledge space. For instance in KOI

each user has his own room that represents the user’s

personal area where he can store his data like personal

information, documents or appointments. Now when

a user enters his own room he might have a look at

his documents or at the list of his friends - his docu-

ments on the one hand and the list of his friends on

the other hand are two different perspectives on his

room. When a user enters another user’s room, then

that user’s proﬁle page is displayed - yet again another

perspective of a user’s room. Of course a user is able

to specify what other users are allowed to see when

they enter his room.

4.2.2 Breadcrumb-trail and Multiple Tabs

To help the user orient himself within the application

KOI provides a breadcrumb-trail. The breadcrumb-

trail reﬂects that the user moves through virtual

knowledge spaces, that he can have different perspec-

tives on one place, and that he always resides in one

place. Furthermore KOI supports independent multi-

tabbed browsing. So, in contrast to a classical web ap-

plication, a user can browse through KOI within mul-

tiple tabs independently at the same time (and may

reside in a different virtual knowledge space in each

tab). As long as no persistent data is changed, the tabs

do not inﬂuence each other (e.g. each tab has its own

breadcrumb-trail).

4.2.3 Virtual and Real Spaces

Virtual spaces like the rooms of users must not be con-

fused with real spaces like the classrooms of a school

that are also represented within KOI. KOI enables

administrative users to manage information about a

real classroom, e.g. the name, the ﬂoor, and espe-

cially the equipment of the classroom. This informa-

tion is stored within a virtual room that represents the

real classroom within KOI. The information stored

about a real classroom can also include appointments

at which the classroom is occupied by a class or a

learning group.

4.2.4 Documents and Appointments

Each user can manage personal documents and ap-

pointments in his room. Personal documents are

stored within a container (the document-container)

which is located in the user’s room. A user can cre-

ate, edit, rename, delete, download and upload docu-

ments in the document-container. Furthermore a user

is able to structure his documents by creating arbitrary

many levels of sub-containers within the document-

container - analogous to folders within a ﬁle-system.

Personal appointments are also stored within a con-

tainer (the appointment-container) which is located in

the user’s room. KOI allows to create, edit and delete

two kinds of appointments: Appointments that take

place exactly once (e.g. a doctor’s appointment) and

appointments that take place repeatedly (e.g. weekly

classes or annual feasts). Internally an appointment

is represented by a document that is extended with

special attributes by the Seam API. An important fea-

ture of appointments within KOI is that they can be

connected to documents and classrooms. So docu-

ments that are of importance for a speciﬁc appoint-

ment are perceived when looking up the appointment.

Classrooms can be booked as meeting points for an

KOI SCHOOL - Towards the Next Level of Communication, Organization and Integration in Education

appointment if the user creating the appointment is

appropriately authorized.

4.2.5 Groups

Users of KOI can be organized in groups, which

are created and administered by authorized users like

teachers (group-administrators). Each group has its

own room, which represents the area exclusive to the

group (analogous to a user’s room). Within the area

of a group, its members, documents, appointments,

and sub-groups can be managed. Documents and Ap-

pointments are stored analogously to the way they are

stored within a user’s room. However, managing doc-

uments and appointments of a group has an additional

level of complexity: multiple members of the group

who access the documents and appointments. There-

fore group-administrators can assign certain rights to

each member of the group. Figure 2 shows the web

page on which a group-administrator can manage the

members of the group and can assign certain rights

to these members by use of toggle-icons behind each

user’s name. So one member can be allowed to cre-

ate appointments whereas another member can only

read them. Corresponding general rights can be as-

signed concerning the documents of the group. More-

over there are even more ﬁne grained rights possible

for the documents (which can be set on the web-page

for managing the documents of the group): For each

document an administrative user can specify which

member of the group may read or edit the document.

The authorization mechanisms used by KOI are based

upon the authorization mechanisms provided by the

WasabiBeans framework (see (Schulte et al., 2009)).

Another capability of a goup-administrator (who, of

course, can also promote other members of the group

to be a group-administrator) is to manage the sub-

groups of the group. Sub-groups again have their own

room and their exclusive area provides the same func-

tions as the exclusive area of the parent-group. So

arbitrary many levels of subgroups can be created.

4.2.6 Asynchronous Communication

Users of KOI can be members of numerous groups

and they can keep a list of friends. To further fos-

ter communities KOI supports both asynchronous

and synchronous communication. The asynchronous

communication is accomplished by a message service

that provides each user with the components he knows

from his regular email client: an inbox, a folder for

sent messages, a trash basket, and an address book.

Each of these components is represented by a con-

tainer that is located in the user’s room. The ad-

dress book-container contains documents in which

the information about contacts is stored. The inbox-

, sent-messages-, and the trash-basket-container con-

tain links to messages. A message is internally repre-

sented by a document that is extended with special

attributes by the Seam API. Messages can be sent,

replied to, forwarded, or deleted. An important detail

of the concept behind the message service is based

upon the above mentioned links to messages. In con-

trast to a classical email-system in which numerous

copies of one message are created the KOI message

service stores each message only once. Therefore

messages are not directly stored within the inbox-

, sent-messages, or trash-basket-containers. Instead

there exists a special container for each user that con-

tains all the messages the user creates (due to sending,

replying or forwarding) and that is located outside the

user’s room. So the inbox-, sent-messages, and trash-

basket-containers contain links that point to the mes-

sages in the special containers.

4.2.7 Synchronous Communication

The synchronous communication within KOI is ac-

complished by a chat. The chat allows a user to di-

rectly communicate with a friend or with the mem-

bers of a group he belongs to. When two friends are

chatting, they are able to invite other friends. So new

contacts who are invited by others can be met and

each conversation can be turned into having multi-

ple participants. Moreover a user can participate in

multiple conversations at the same time. Each con-

versation is shown in a separate tab. Furthermore,

KOI allows you to start the conversation even though

the desired conversation partner(s) is (are) still ofﬂine.

Once they appear online, they will be able to recog-

nize that someone is waiting for them to participate in

a conversation. Another important feature of the chat

is that already ended conversations can be resumed

at a later time, so that references to an earlier discus-

sion are simpliﬁed. As a consequence each conver-

sation must be persisted by KOI. To achieve this the

virtual knowledge space representing the overall chat-

room contains a dialogue-container for each combi-

nation of users and for each group. These dialogue-

containers contain a session-container for each con-

versation the combination of users or the group asso-

ciated with the dialogue-container ever had. Finally

the session-containers contain the exchanged chat-

messages, which are internally represented by docu-

ments.

4.3 Performance Optimization

With the progress of the implementation of KOI, its

performance was decreasing signiﬁcantly. The cause

ICEIS 2011 - 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

Figure 2: Group Management in KOI School.

of the decrease can be illustrated in particular by the

example of users proﬁle page. The users proﬁle page

at KOI provides information about a registered user

in KOI like his name, address, hobbies, proﬁle im-

age etc.. If the users proﬁle page is requested, the

following happens: The users proﬁle page facelet is

requesting information in dependence of the request-

ing user at the corresponding Seam component called

BackingBean. The Seam component is requesting at

Seam API and Seam API calls each single service

at WasabiBeans framework. For each information

or property a service must be called at WasabiBeans

framework. The complete workﬂow of getting infor-

mation by a facelet from WasabiBeans framework is

illustrated in Figure 3.

Furthermore it is possible while passing JSF

lifecycle, that the facelet is rendering multiple

times (Ed Burns, 2010). As a result of that previ-

ously invoked services of WasabiBeans framework

are invoked once more. Hence it is possible that

a simple facelet generates several hundred database

requests by WasabiBeans framework. For example

the users proﬁle page generates over 200 object and

method invocations. If users proﬁle page is called

more than 1000 database request are generated, be-

cause WasabiBeans framework does not only request

information, but also checks weather authorization for

requested information exist. Due to this it is possible

that more than 10 seconds elapse, before the page is

visible in the browser. This is deﬁnitively a exclusion

criterion for a respectable web application that wants

to be taken seriously.

To solve this problem, it is possible to use Seams

concept of contexts with its seven scope types by stor-

ing data over more than one request. This can happen

either directly by the BackingBeans for each facelet

according to requirements or uniformly and central-

ized at one place. The decision was made on a uni-

formly and centralized approach which extends the

Seam API by integrating a cache called Seam Cache.

DatabaseWasabiBeans Core

Facelet

Backing Bean

Seam API

WasabiBeans

Framework

KOI

get / send

object-oriented

data

invoke services

access to

database

Figure 3: Workﬂow of getting information by a facelet from

WasabiBeans Framework.

KOI SCHOOL - Towards the Next Level of Communication, Organization and Integration in Education

Requests by facelets over the BackingBeans do not

longer invoke methods at Seam API in a direct way.

The Seam Cache whether checks for each request the

requested data are stored in the cache. If requested

data are stored, the cache supplies the data. Thereby

no access to a service of WasabiBeans framework

takes place. Because of this there is no access to

the database as well. The cache is realized by a Java

HashMap with a key-value store. A key consists of

following parameters:

• Username of requestor

• Name of the requested service

• Name of the invoked method of the service

• Commited parameters of the method

Depending on the invoked method, for instance a

write operation, an invalidation of the corresponding

cache entry occurs. Figure 4 shows the new data han-

dling with Seam Cache by cache miss and cache hit.

At point 1 in the Figure 4 KOI tries to request data for

instance a document from the Seam API and at point 2

the Seam API checks if requested data exists in to the

Seam Cache. At point 3 the Seam Cache answers the

Seam API, that he requested data does not exist in to

the Seam Cache at this time (cache miss). Therefore

at point 4 the Seam API starts to request the data from

the WasabiBeans Core and consequently from the un-

derlying database. At point 5 the WasabiBeans Core

replies the requested data back to the Seam API. Next

at the same time the Seam API stores the data at point

6 in to the Seam Cache and sends data to KOI at point

7. If KOI requests the same data again the Seam API

requests to Seam Cache, but don’t have to request data

from WasabiBeans Core and consequently from the

underlying database, because the Seam Cache sup-

plies the requested data to Seam API and Seam API

to KOI (cache hit).

The Seam Cache solves especially the problem of

multiple facelet rendering. For the example of the

user proﬁle page it means that the ﬁrst invocation by

WasabiBeans

WasabiBeans Core

Seam Module

Seam API

Seam Cache

2 3 6

5 4

KOI School Management

System

Figure 4: Workﬂow of the new data handling with Seam

Cache (scenario cache miss).

facelet via BackingBean to Seam API and services of

WasabiBeans framework stores all necessary data in

the cache. In case of repeated rendering of the facelet,

all data is loaded by cache and not again by invoca-

tion of services of the WasabiBeans framework. If a

modiﬁcation of the users proﬁle page data occurs, for

instance the address, only this cache entry becomes

invalid. If for instance address is requested again,

Seam API loads only this value into the cache again.

On the basis of Seam Cache the performance of KOI

could increase distinctly, so that no page of KOI loads

longer than 2 seconds on an average.

4.4 Usage Scenarios in School

KOI’s connection and interaction between several

workﬂows simpliﬁes everyday school life. In the fol-

lowing some exemplary usage scenarios in school,

demonstrate the range of functions in KOI.

4.4.1 Classroom Planning

A teacher wants to show a movie at his lesson next

day. He needs a classroom with some technical en-

vironment to show the movie. KOI enables him to

search free and suitable classrooms with a beamer or

a television and a minimum number of seats. After se-

lection of a classroom he books it. But now it is nec-

essary to inform his pupils about the changed class-

room. No Problem, because the teacher has the possi-

bility to inform his pupils by KOI’s message system.

He writes a message to his class, represented in KOI

by a group, and every member of the group receives a

message which informs about the changed classroom.

Additionally it is possible to connect an appointment

with classroom planning and backwards. That means

the teacher has the possibility to create a group ap-

pointment and each member of this group, commonly

the pupils in the class, gets an own appointment in his

schedule.

4.4.2 Submit an Essay

If a teacher wants to enable online submissions of

documents, essays or home work until a speciﬁc date,

KOI supports him with its upload function and pow-

erful right management given by WasabiBeans frame-

work. It is possible to create a speciﬁc folder for

online submissions at groups document management

system and set an allowance to upload documents at

this folder. If submission date expired the teacher

removes the allowance to upload documents at this

folder. An easier way to remove the allowance to up-

load documents at a speciﬁc date are time rights. The

time rights with a start date and end date are able to

ICEIS 2011 - 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

set an allowance between this interval, consequently

the allowance does not exist after end date and no ad-

ditional user interaction is necessary.

4.4.3 Scheduling

Scheduling especially the connection between group

appointments is a helpful organization option in KOI.

Appointments of a group are represented as individ-

ual appointments of a user. But if a group appoint-

ment is changed, the individual appointment of a user

is changed too. Commonly a user is in several classes

or courses represented in KOI by a group. Each class

or course has a teacher which is able to set group

appointments. If a teacher changes the appointment

of an examination the individual user appointment of

this examination is changed too. But the user has the

option to modify his individual examination appoint-

ment in terms of a copy.

5 DISCUSSION

The WasabiBeans framework implemented as a

service-oriented architecture supports the integration

of external services, yet KOI school does not exceed-

ingly beneﬁt from this background. Future enhance-

ments of KOI will make use of the underlying archi-

tecture. We are currently working on a Facebook con-

nection that allows pupils to import their Facebook

proﬁle, rather than specifying and updating their user

proﬁle within KOI school application itself. The inte-

gration or establishing a connection to recent Web 2.0

services like MySpace or Flickr are imaginable and

may be raise the popularity among young teenagers.

In particular, turning KOI into a central access point

that accomplishes various popular services meets ex-

actly the idea of KOI to be a combination of popu-

lar Web features with educational software features.

Thus, the acceptance of the system among all partici-

pants (teachers and pupils) may be increased.

The KOI system already stores information about

real classrooms within the system. However, this con-

nection between the virtual and the real world could

be extended. For instance, the equipment of class-

rooms could be tagged with RFID chips to enable an

automatic recognition of all relevant devices within

a classroom. So the information stored within the

virtual classrooms in KOI could automatically be up-

dated, especially in the case when a device (e.g. a

television) is moved from one room to another.

Staying with the idea of automatic recognition of

the real world environment, the detection of physi-

cal devices makes different approaches possible. As

presented in (Paulos and Goodman, 2004), each pupil

may equipped with a Jabberwocky to detect the loca-

tion of pupils with similar interests, lectures, etc. Fur-

thermore, more and more pupils have a mobile device,

that is equipped with bluetooth or WiFi interfaces al-

lowing locate the current position of a pupil within the

school. By recognizing the current location of a pupil,

the devices may exchange automatically information

about hobbies and interests in case the pupils are will-

ing to participate and adjust the settings of their de-

vices accordingly.

6 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper we presented KOI, a web-based applica-

tion to support collaboration and administrative tasks

in schooling at the same time. Our main contribution

is that our approach allows an integration of mani-

fold applications or services to build up a complex IT

infrastructure without media disruption between the

single systems. As a result a continuous assistance

in schooling can be realized. Moreover, we identiﬁed

the Web 2.0 developments to be a challenge for state

of the art developments in schooling. The possibility

to integrate these services and fancy applications is

absolutely necessary to address the pupils wishes and

their understanding of modern communication.

We started our research with the intent to offer a

digital representation of a real school to support the

end-users to get along with the digital system. For

that reason we used the concept of virtual knowl-

edge spaces and mapped actual classrooms or rather

the physical structure of a school onto a digital data

model. An important task was to enable the par-

ticipants to be aware of each other, since awareness

is the prerequisite for smooth collaboration and re-

duce misunderstandings. Therefore, the KOI school-

management system offers numerous features to sup-

port the interaction among participants. An example

is the chat component with its conversation history

or the ﬂexible message system of KOI. For our im-

plementation we used the WasabiBeans framework,

since its microkernel architecture allows an easy ad-

justment and the implementation of extensions to ful-

ﬁll changing needs. First, we implemented a Seam

API for WasabiBeans to allow straight forward im-

plementations of Seam-based applications that build

on the framework. A second result of our research

is the KOI school management system that combines

administrative tasks in schooling, as well as functions

to support the communication among participants and

the structuring of teaching materials. The practical

usage of KOI revealed some performance problems

KOI SCHOOL - Towards the Next Level of Communication, Organization and Integration in Education

with the Seam API, thus we implemented a Seam

cache to meet this disadvantage.

A unique feature of KOI school is the ﬂexible

group management. This allows not only administra-

tors to create and organize groups, but also end-users,

like pupils, to create and manage their private learn-

ing groups. In addition, users can be member of dif-

ferent groups and groups may contain other groups.

Thereby a sub-group relation can be realized and self-

administration as well as self-organization can be fos-

tered.

To sum up, KOI school is an application for col-

laboration and offers numerous features that are nec-

essary in everyday school life, like room booking,

calendar management, and document management.

At the same time it is very ﬂexible and adjustable

to sufﬁce future requirements. The open architec-

ture, strengthened by using the WasabiBeans frame-

work, enables the integration of various Web 2.0 fea-

tures and thus complies with the demand of the young

learning generation.

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ICEIS 2011 - 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems