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Top1. Introduction
Among the key factors to reach good quality and effectiveness, personalization of the learning experience is universally recognized to play a special role. This is even more crucial in the context of web-based learning, where maintaining the motivation and involvement of learners is a continuous challenge. Learner Centred Design (Quintana, Carra, Krajcik, & Elliot, 2001) requires considering a variety of learners’ characteristics, including different personal learning strategies, different experiences in the learning domain, and different motivations in undertaking the learning task. Activity delivery according to an accurate learner’s model is important, since learner’s motivation can be greatly influenced by the experienced success or frustration. It is then necessary to pay particular attention to the amount and quality of aids that are provided and to the acknowledgement of the improvements attained. The provided aids must be tuned on the learner’s assessed abilities, in order for the former to be neither oversized, which would dull the learners’ initiative and efforts, nor undersized, which would be useless if not counterproductive. Learning experiences devised according to LCD aim at filling the gulf of expertise between the learner and the learning domain (Quintana, Carra, Krajcik, & Elliot, 2001), by making the learner acquire all the knowledge and abilities related to a given topic. In this context, it is necessary that technological issues rely on a consolidated educational theory (Soloway et al., 1996).
The constructivist theory is widely adopted nowadays, recognizing learning as a process concretely involving the active participation of the learner. Following the ‘‘learning by doing’’ strategy, the learner is guided to cognitively manipulate the new learning material and to create cognitive links between newly acquired and prior knowledge. According to this approach, any task must always be included in an actual and collaborative context, where learners should be assisted in finding their personal way to construct and refine concepts. To this aim, social confrontation with learning companions and teachers must be supported. In this way, learners take responsibility for their learning, while becoming more aware of their own knowledge. The social perspectives on the learning process expressed by “situated learning” (Anderson, Reder, & Simon, 1996), have further extended the constructivist approach. A situated view of learning implies that effects of learning activities will depend on the context in which they are performed, with all the components of a learning environment (people and artefacts) interacting and contributing to the learning process. An amalgam of the principles of constructivism and situated learning is often referred to as “socio-constructivism”.