PIPE: a Personal Information Processing Ecosystem for enabling students with information and communication technologies

We propose an e-portfolio framework called PIPE (Personal Information Processing Ecosystem) for helping students work with information and communication technologies. The objective is to provide them with a user-centric environment that they can manage by themselves to access and process information resources for their studies and personal activities. This environment behaves like a hub where students can have an individual entry point to access different types of information: learning material provided by teachers, local and online resources available on the web. They can also process all this information to produce their own. PIPE is based on a hybrid approach that combines local and cloud computing resources such as simple mashups of web services.