Dominik Renzel began the workshop by describing the ROLE project and the APIs they have been developing recently. He noted the tremendous shift in education away from “boring” lectures towards more interactive work in groups, where the learners are in control of the learning. The means educators need to create new tools for their specific domains. The ROLE project is facilitating this by creating an SDK and APIs to help create domain-specific widgets for widget-based Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) using Open Social widgets.

The workshop provided participants with some widget basics, including how to create and deploy a widget, then add it to a PLE. It also provided an opportunity to use the ROLE APIs to make a widget manage shared resources and communicate in real-time.

Renzel was joined by Sten Govaert to provide participants with step by step guidance to create a widget in a text editor, host it online using Dropbox, use the ROLE sandbox to build a widget-based PLE for testing, and how to experiment with the ROLE OpenApp and Inter-Widget Communication API.

The resources from this workshop are available here.