Software ecosystems is one promising strategy for organizations to find new market segments, new innovative value propositions creating new value streams. However, understanding internal and external actors, resources and relationships that could be leveraged in a SECO is critical for their strategic decisions. The consequence of mistakes may be costly failures that can force an organization to move out of a market. This paper describes a systematic mapping study that targets description of software ecosystems. Our conjecture is that adequate description support leads to modeling, which will improve information and in turn strategic decisions. The survey searches existing literature for description techniques and their application for comprehensive description. The study identifies and maps 63 primary studies out of 937 candidates according to their degree of modeling support and several other important aspects for SECO description. The analysis indicates that no approach fully supports comprehensive SECO descriptions, supporting domain specific and view specific modeling of ecosystem concerns. The analysis is used to highlight areas for a future research agenda.

Some studies have been reporting encouraging results concerning the possibilities of combining voice and its visual representation for language learning. Following this line of investigation this paper explores the potential impact of two distinct visualization styles for the learning of English pronunciation of syllables for non-native speakers: a) highlighting syllables and b) the visualization of the produced sound wave. In order to evaluate the benefits of the two different styles three distinct digital tool prototypes were created in order to test four study conditions. The conditions under evaluation were a) teaching syllables without the support of any digital tool; b) teaching using a prototype that highlighted the syllables under study; c) using a prototype that displayed the sound wave of the syllable to be learnt and d) a prototype that combined the functionality of b) and c). Results suggest that the combined approach seems to be as effective as the traditional classroom approach of teaching the syllables. However, more research is needed in order to consolidate the findings, being able to explore in more detail how is the learning process occurring and to what extend the tools developed can be integrated into classroom practice.

The increased use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in schools promises up-to-date, interactive and collaborative learning content, However, this has proved difficult to fulfill as the requirements from students and teachers combined with devices in a variety of contexts are expensive to meet. Software reuse is a proven way to decrease development time, and thus promises a way to decrease these costs of ICT. This paper explores the characteristics of a software ecosystem approach to cater for the new digital school and presents a reference model for ecosystems developed for the domain of technology-enhanced learning (TEL).

The amount of software developed for educational purposes has steadily increased over the last years. A growing subset of these developments is intended for use in mobile devices. This puts special requirements on implementations that need to be overcome before mobile learning can be more widely adopted. In this paper we investigate how educational software development community can be encouraged to develop more sustainable and interoperable applications. This investigation is done by first surveying the different aspects of reuse to give a background and motivation. Then, a survey of current practice is performed. The survey provides initial insights into how reuse and interoperability is used in authentic practice. Findings indicate that there is much to be done in terms of interoperability and reuse for mobile learning applications. The result of this study confirms that two of the main challenges that developer of educational software in general and mobile learning in particular face is interoperability and reuse. Finally, some directions to overcome these challenges are proposed.

In this paper, we present our efforts related to the implementation of the prototype that utilizes gesture based interaction for supporting collaborative explorations of visualizations in technology-enhanced learning activities. The prototype enables the visualization of different types of geo-tagged content and sensor data collected using mobile devices. In order to test the novelty and interactivity of our prototype we conducted a user testing study involving university students. The results of this study indicate that participants experienced this prototype as easy to use, with an acceptable overall level of satisfaction. Outcomes from this study show that gesture based interaction become useful when it comes to collaborative explorations of visualizations for supporting learning activities.

In recent years, mobile and context-aware technologies have been used in an attempt to enhance students‟ formal and informal learning experiences both in the classroom and outdoor settings. Such technologies have supported teaching and learning in a variety of subjects. In this paper, we present the ongoing research efforts in our Geometry Mobile (GeM) project, where we conducted a number of trials in the last two years with primary and secondary school students in Sweden. The current trial of our GeM project (April 2011) is discussed together with the data collection method we have used for exploring how Context-Aware learning hints (CA hints) can be utilized to support the different stages of the learning activity. Insights and preliminary results from this trial are described. We also present the motivation of our proposed CA hints, the definition of the requirements of those, and the formulation of a classification thereof.

The ability to carry communication services around, combined with the ubiquitous presence of computing technology, affects everything we do from how we pay for things to how we expect to interact with public institutions such as schools. There are now plenty of systems that convey education by utilizing mobile devices. As an extension of technology moving towards ubiquity, there are efforts aiming to bring this to an educational use as well. Efforts in this direction are channelized in the field of mobile learning. The speed of technological development, and the possibilities it brings introduces a large number of challenges when implemented in educational settings. These challenges can be related to for example pedagogical aspects, tools, implementations and organizations. Recent developments including the notions of learning ecosystems, learning landscapes and organizations suggest that the domain of mobile learning can be negatively affected from the lack of a systematic reuse approach. This thesis pursues these challenges by investigating how systematic reuse can be promoted in mobile learning systems.

A collection of five peer-reviewed publications that elaborates on the different stages of the research process pursuing the main research question forms the core of this thesis. This research process includes a survey stage, elaborating on different aspects related to reuse and mobile learning, an analysis stage that resulted in a descriptive model and several additional domain models; and finally a stage where the descriptive model is refined into a reference model for mobile learning ecosystems. The outcomes of these activities and the analysis of these results provide some fundamental building blocks regarding how to approach the challenge of reuse in mobile learning systems. The proposed reference model can be considered as the first step towards the creation of a common vocabulary that can be used to compare Software Ecosystems within the domain of mobile learning. 

This paper presents a brief overview over some of the conceptual and technical issues associated with reusability and adaptability. The specific orientation of our efforts is oriented towards systems supporting Mobile Learning. The field of M-learning domain has during recent years been suffering from severe configuration problems caused by the plethora of mobile devices present on the market. This paper presents a conceptual architecture that has been conceived to remedy some of these issues. Furthermore, a possible instantiation of this architecture with self-adaptivity features is discussed and a first prototype implementation is presented. The notion of ecosystems is introduced, as we believe it is an important building block towards increasing the reusability of components and content in this field where composition is one of the major issues to be addressed.