A Web Service Architecture for Social Micro-Learning

In knowledge organizations or a knowledge society learning processes are inherently social and distributed. To enable these processes knowledge artifacts need to be created, updated, and consumed decentralized. Social Micro-Learning is an example for an approach following that paradigm. By proposing a flexible service architecture, this paper addresses the diverse demands that Social Micro-Learners have throughout their learning process. It allows integrating information retrieval, recommender systems, workflow engines and spaced repetition algorithms through a single stream data model. Consequently, we can reuse user interface implementations and provide a consistent, recognizable view. Our evaluations show a good system usability, and stable results across different services. We conclude that our service design can serve as a blueprint for social e-learning systems.