The Portable Document Format (PDF) developed by Adobe can be made accessible, but it very much depends on how the original document is designed. If it is a poster created in a publishing application, scanned or saved from a Word document and locked down for copyright reasons then saved as PDF, it is liable to act in the same way as a picture. This means the text cannot be read by a screen reader or adapted for easier reading. It is appreciated that the concept of the PDF is to ensure that printed or saved versions of a document remain as the author intends, but there are ways to help the reader who uses assistive technologies or requires different formats of the text and graphics.
What are the questions we need to answer to understand the needs and demands of future learners? Particularly in relation to the use of technology and the implications that has for education. List them here.
This site aims to provide a community resource for those interested in ePortfolios and Personal Development Planning (PDP). This site was first set up to document an FDTL4 project in which we built a configurable ePortfolio.
If life were longer I might want to play with this kind of thing. I wonder if in my son's lifetime intelligent tutoring systems will be able to go to university?
F. Abel, I. Marenzi, W. Nejdl, and S. Zerr. Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning (SIRTEL'09) at the International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL '09), Aachen, Germany, Vol-535, CEUR-WS.org, (August 2009)
K. Ala-Mutka, M. Bacigalupo, S. Kluzer, C. Pascu, Y. Punie, and C. Redecker. Report on a validation and policy options workshop organised by IPTS Seville, 29-30 October 2008, EUR 23786 EN. Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg, (2009)
M. Alian, and M. AL-Akhras. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Intelligent Semantic Web-Services and Applications, page 21:1--21:7. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2010)