Beyond Management: The Personal Learning Environment

A nice presentation by Stephen Downes on PLEs, delivered yesterday to Ed Media, Honululu, Hawaii.

Beyond Management: The Personal Learning Environment

View more Microsoft Word documents from Stephen Downes.

Informatik 5 wins InfoCup 2009

Last Sunday we won the RWTH Computer Science Faculty Soccer Tournament (InfoCup 2009). below is a photo of our international winner team.

r. to l.

Omar Bouraga

Zhaohui Wang

Christoph Quix

Mohamed Amine Chatti

Sascha Ferrein

Georg Hackenberg

Manh Cuong Pham

Social Network Analysis: An Introduction

Via George Siemens and Stephen Downes.

A nice paper introducing social network analysis by Alexandra Marin and Barry Wellman from the department of Sociology, University of Toronto...

Did You Know?

Via Jon Husband.

Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.

Firefox Add-on Collections

Via Stan Schroeder.

Firefox introduced a new feature: Add-on Collections:

Today, we’re excited to introduce a new feature to our website that will expose the niche add-ons that can be hard to find, and gives users a more active role in helping outstanding add-ons bubble to the top.

Below is a video introducing this new feature.

Add-on Collections: Overview from Justin Scott on Vimeo.

SCIENCE2.0 FOR TEL

Science2.0 for TEL is another interesting workshop at EC-TEL 2009, organized by Erik Duval, a great person, whom I much respect and esteem. Below is the CfP.

---

SCIENCE2.0 FOR TEL: Call for Papers

1st Workshop on Web2.0 approaches, tools and technologies to support
research on Technology Enhanced Learning (TELSci2.0)

at the 4th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning
(EC-TEL09), Nice, France, September 29 - October 2, 2009

http://stellarnet.eu/science2ectel/


SCOPE

In Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), the use of web2.0 technologies is
now actively being researched, under banners such as "Personal Learning
Environments" or "Open Learning Environments" and the like. In this
workshop, we want to discuss how we can leverage the same opportunities
for our research on TEL.

Indeed, as researchers in Technology Enhanced Learning we already know
how to include things like blogs, wikis and forums into the heart of our
work to enhance collaborative working, but a full "Science 2.0"
framework might provide us with a much more powerful framework to make
our research more effective.

This workshop aims to bring together all those who want to turn a vision
of the e-scholar and e-scientist of the 21st Century into reality in our
own domain of TEL.

The core of significant development in a "2.0 world" is
* leveraging web2.0 technologies (that rely on the "social graph") for
improving the effectiveness and efficiency of how we conduct science;
* the capacity to share and reuse data, and to benchmark scientific
activity in the international community.

Key questions for this workshop include:
* How do we mesh social web2.0 technologies with the scientific workflow?
* How do we share the data of our activity wider in our community?
* How do we visualize that data and how do we provide researchers with
powerful new frameworks for their scientific endeavor?

Early generic tools for science2.0 are beginning to appear:
* http://www.scivee.tv/,
* http://www.academiccommons.org/,
* http://www.academia.edu/,
* http://www.researchgate.net/,
* http://www.mendeley.com/,
* http://www.escidoc.org/,
* http://www.authormapper.com/,
* http://www.surfspace.nl/wiki/display/widgetswetenschappers/Home,
* http://www.plos.org/,
* http://www.openwetware.org/,
* http://www.galaxyzoo.org/,
* http://bosch.informatik.rwth-aachen.de:5080/AERCS/
* http://www.rkbexplorer.com/
* http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/edmedia/
* etc.
However, most of these focus more on the sciences. There is some
discussion in blogosphere about how we could make use of science2.0
opportunities for TEL. Yet, there has not been a dedicated workshop or
conference on this theme. That is the missing piece that this workshop
wants to fill in, in the hope of moving forward this idea and
accelerating the evolution that has considerable promise of improving
how we conduct research on TEL.


FORMAT

The workshop will be highly interactive: presentations will be clustered
and presenters will not only discuss their own work, but also to
explicitly comment on the work of the other presenters in their session.
We will make all the papers available beforehand, so as to facilitate
this.

Participants will also be asked to do a 5 min vlog posting to the
workshop web site before the event. (This will be a requirement for
registration!)

We will ask the editors of the IEEE Transactions on Learning
Technologies to host a special issue of the re-worked papers after the
workshop.


ORGANISATION

This half-day workshop is supported by the STELLAR EU Network of
Excellence in Technology Enhanced Learning; http://stellarnet.eu
The workshop is organized by
* Erik Duval (K.U.Leuven, Belgium)
* Peter Scott (Open University, UK)
* Stefanie Lindstaedt (KnowCenter, Austria)
* Nicolas Balacheff (UJF, France)

SUBMISSIONS
Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research as papers
(4-8 pages). Including demonstrations is explicitly encouraged. All
submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three members of the
program committee for originality, significance, clarity, and quality.

All questions and submissions should be sent to:
erik.duval@cs.kuleuven.be


IMPORTANT DATES

* Paper Submission: July 5, 2009
* Results Notification: July 20, 2009
* Camera Ready Submission: September 1, 2009
* Workshop Date: September 29 or 30, 2009

ABOUT EC-TEL09

After three successful EC-TEL conferences in 2006, 2007, and 2008, the
Fourth European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning provides a
unique forum for all research related to TEL, among them education,
psychology, and computer science. The contributions will cover the
design of innovative environments, the implementation of new
technological solutions, results of empirical studies on socio-cognitive
processes in learning, and field studies regarding the use of
technologies in context.

EC-TEL is a competitive and broad forum for TEL research in Europe and
beyond. In its specialised accompanying workshops and the highlighting
main conference programme, EC-TEL09 provides unique networking
possibilities for participating researchers throughout the week and
includes project meetings and discussions for ongoing and new research
activities supported by the European Commission. See
http://www.ectel09.org/ for details.

Workshop Future Learning Landscapes

I'm organizing a workshop at EC-TEL 2009 together with my dear colleagues Serge, Yvan, Mike and Marcelo. Please do consider submitting a 2 pages position paper to this workshop. If you have questions, please don't hesitate to contact me. below is the CfP:

---

Call for papers

Future Learning Landscapes: Towards the Convergence of Pervasive and Contextual computing, Global Social Media and Semantic Web in Technology Enhanced Learning

a workshop of EC-TEL 2009
NICE, FRANCE
September 29 or 30, 2009

http://conferences.telecom-bretagne.eu/futurelearning09/

Rationale
This workshop seeks to foster discussions and conceptual ideas regarding the convergence of three technologies which will have a major impact on next generation of technology enhanced learning environments, namely; pervasive computing, social media and the semantic web. Each one of these technologies provides its own opportunities and challenges as their convergence has the potential to enable the development of new educational practices in situated andnetworked learning.

This workshop aims at bringing together both practitioners and academics interested in these topics in order to explore and make a first statement on the opportunities and challenges that arise while combining pervasive computing, social media and the semantic web for the design and implementation of future learning landscapes. The workshop will facilitate discussions aiming at identify and summarize main theoretical and technological design concerns related to the increasing use of the technologies mentioned above in a variety of educational settings. It is expected that the main outcome of the workshop will result on a summarizing document (in the form of a white paper) that clearly describe future research directions on the related topics discussed during the workshop.

Relevant topics of interest to be discussed in this workshop include but are not limited to the following aspects:

* Global learning environments
- How can we reuse linked data to suggest activities and/or collaborations with other users on different environments and furthermore, how can we provide guidance to learners?
- How can we help tutors and teachers to understand learning processes and learner progression?
- What will be the contribution of such environments to pedagogical design and activities (e.g., field work, inquiry learning...)?
- What are the possible infrastructure solutions that will enable the aggregation of learning services and data interoperability among them (e.g., facebook, skype and blogs)?

* Institutional and social environment integration
- How can we integrate institutional learning and personal informal learning through the use of social media and mash-up techniques?
- How can we define global scenarios including formal and informal learning in social environments?
- How to support learning activities in context and across contexts?

* User modelling
- How can social data ontological tools like FOAF, SIOC, etc. enrich the user model?
- Can we build and leverage a rich user model, built from linked data on the learning web environments?

* Context and adaptation
- How can we develop new approaches to modelling context, arising from interactions between people, locations and interactive artefacts?
- How can context be dynamically adapted to social environments, to enable local and global adaptivity?
- How can continually changing contextual data be interpreted at the semantic level?

Submission

Position papers should address one of the topics of the workshop and are limited to 2 pages long.

It outlines the submitter’s view on the workshop theme and the reasons for the submitter’s interest in the particular topic. Based on the analysis of the submissions, the workshop organisers will prepare a short synthesis and issue oriented presentations for the introduction of the workshop.

Send papers to the following email address : futurelearning09@mlistes.telecom-bretagne.eu

Important Dates

* Paper submission deadline: July 31, 2009
* Notification of acceptance: August 14, 2009
* Final camera ready papers due: September 4, 2009
* Workshop date: September 29 or 30, 2009

Organisers:

Serge Garlatti – Telecom Bretagne, France
Yvan Peter – Université Lille 1 – LIFL, France
Mike Sharples, University of Nottingham, UK
Marcelo Milrad, Växjö University, Sweden
Mohamed Amine Chatti, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Below is the CfP for the 2nd workshop on Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLE’09). The same workshop last year was a great success. Please do consider submitting a paper to this very interesting workshop. Looking forward to seeing many of you there!

MUPPLE-09

2nd Workshop on Mash-UP Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLE-09) Interoperable Widgets, Services, and Microformats to facilitate Competence Development held at the 4th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL09), Nice, France, September 29 - October 2, 2009 RATIONALE A change in perspective can be certified in the recent years to technology-enhanced learning research and development: More and more learning applications on the web are putting the learner centre stage, not the organisation. They empower learners with capabilities to customize and even construct their own personal learning environments (PLEs). These PLEs typically consist of distributed web- applications and services that support system-spanning collaborative and individual learning activities in formal as well as informal settings. These PLEs typically complement Learning Management Systems (LMS) with additional widgets, services, and data integrated from and with organization-external learning tools.

STELLAR

Consequently, the aim of this workshop is not to discuss the
concepts ‘PLE vs. LMS’, but to focus more generally on how learning
experiences can be enriched using mash-ups of widgets and services
with microformats and how technology can help to respond automatically
to competence level, need, or context. Moreover, the investigation
of necessary competencies to deploy mash-up technologies, is
dedicated special attention in this workshop.

Technologically speaking, this shift manifests in a learning
web where information is distributed across sites and
activities can easily encompass the use of a greater number
of pages and services offered through web-based learning
applications. Mash-ups, the ‘frankensteining’ of software
artefacts and data, have emerged to be the software
development approach for these long-tail and perpetual-beta
niche markets. Core technologies facilitating this paradigm
shift are Ajax, javascript-based widget-collections, and
microformats that help to glue together public web APIs
in individual applications. Interoperability is the enabler
to allow these different components to be worked
together facilitating the achievement of the underlying
learning task.

In a wide range of European IST-funded research projects
such as ROLE, iCoper, Stellar, LTfLL, Mature, Palette, OpenScout,
and TENcompetence a rising passion for these technologies
can be identified.

This workshop therefore serves as a forum to bring together
researchers and developers from these projects and an open
public that have an interest in understanding and engineering
mash-up personal learning environments (MUPPLEs).

TOPICS OF INTEREST (but not limited to):

• Visions: Architectures, Frameworks, Strategies, Models
• (Collaborative) Authoring Tools
• Data Interoperability: with e.g. Microformats,
  streaming data, mixed media data
• User Interfaces: Concepts, Metaphors, Workflows
• Development Methodologies
• Innovative Widgets and Services: e.g. for instruction,
  game-based learning, self-reflection, personal information
• Interoperability Standards for widgets,
  content recombination, configuration
• User Studies & Evaluation Methods: evaluating e.g. performance,
  usability, specific design features, training methods

WORKSHOP FORMAT

The aim of this workshop is to bring together the various research
and development groups in technology-enhanced learning that currently
focus on the development of the next generation learning environments –
learning environments that put the individuum centre stage and empower
learners with design capabilities by deploying modern mash-up principles
to establish system-spanning interoperability.

As this approach is rather young, the workshop seeks to attract
both research results and work in progress in order to chart out
the current state-of-the-art of MUPPLEs in TEL and to define
main enablers and future challenges. Naturally, it will serve
as a forum for establishing new collaborations.

Using the presentations as impulses and continuing post-talk
debates, the workshop will conclude the day with an open discussion
exchanging ideas, summing up, and defining a medium- to
long-term research agenda.

SUBMISSIONS

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research as full
papers (8 pages), work-in-progress as short papers (max. 4 pages) or
position statements (max. 2 pages). All submitted papers will be peer-
reviewed by at least three members of the program committee for
originality, significance, clarity, and quality.

The workshop proceedings will be published online as part of the
CEUR Workshop proceedings series. http://CEUR-WS.org is a recognized
ISSN publication series, with ISSN 1613-0073.

Furthermore, the workshop serves as stage for presenting
a snapshot of the work on contributions planned to be submitted
to the upcoming special issue on mash-up personal learning
environments in the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL,
http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalCODE=ijtel).

Authors should use the Springer LNCS format (http://www.springer.com/
lncs). For camera-ready format instructions, please see “For Authors”
instructions at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.

All questions and submissions should be sent to:
f.wild @ open.ac.uk

IMPORTANT DATES

• Paper Submission: July 31st, 2009
• Results Notification: August 15th, 2009
• Camera Ready Submission: September 15th, 2009
• Workshop Date: September 29th, 2009

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

• Abelardo Pardo (University Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)
• Dai Griffith (University of Bolton, UK)
• Denis Gillet (EPFL, Switzerland)
• Effie Law (University of Leicester, United Kingdom)
• Felix Mödritscher (Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria)
• Graham Atwell (Pontydysgu, United Kingdom)
• Gytis Cibulskis (Kaunas Technical University, Lithuania)
• Mart Laanpere (Tallinn University, Estonia)
• Martin Wolpers (Fraunhofer FIT, Germany)
• Mohamed Amine Chatti (RWTH Aachen, Germany)
• Nikos Karacapilidis (University of Patras, Greece)
• Scott Wilson (University of Bolton, United Kingdom)
• Stephane Sire (EPFL, Switzerland)
• Tony Hirst (Open University, UK)
• Bernd Simon (Knowledge Markets)
• Jad Najjar (Vienna University of Economics and Business)
• Kai Hoever (IMC AG)
• Zuzana Bizonova (INT Paris)
• Jan M. Pawlowski (University of Jyväskylä)

ORGANISERS

• Marco Kalz (Open University, The Netherlands)
• Daniel Müller (IMC AG, Germany)
• Palmer (University of Upsala, Sweden)
• Fridolin Wild (The Open University, UK)

ABOUT EC-TEL09

After three successful EC-TEL conferences in 2006, 2007, and 2008,
the Fourth European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning
provides a unique forum for all research related to TEL, among
them education, psychology, and computer science. The contributions
will cover the design of innovative environments, the implementation 
of new technological solutions, results of empirical studies on
socio-cognitive processes in learning, and field studies regarding
the use of technologies in context.

EC-TEL is a competitive and broad forum for TEL research in Europe
and beyond. In its specialised accompanying workshops and the
highlighting main conference programme, EC-TEL09 provides
unique networking possibilities for participating researchers
throughout the week and includes project meetings and discussions 
for ongoing and new research activities supported by the European
Commission. See http://www.ectel09.org/ for details.

Sessions at Google I/O

You can see here the videos of all Google I/O sessions.

Information Overload Syndrome

Via Luis Suarez.

A video on the "Information Overload Syndrome"...

Google Squared - Bing - Wolfram Alpha

It seems that this week is the week of new search (decision/computational knowledge) engines. After launching Bing and Wolfram Alpha just a few days ago, Google just released Google Squared as "an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet". Google Squared and Wolfram Alpha are quite similar, as both try to "compute" answers in response to a user query. However, unlike Wolfram Alpha which uses an internal database, Google's database is the whole web. Will Google Squared be the Wolfram Alpha (and maybe also Bing) killer...  

The Future Internet

My dear friend Vitali Fedulov pointed me to this video on the vision of the Future Internet by the Service Web 3.0 EU project.

Michelle Obama's plea for education

A video of Michelle Obama speaking at a London's girls' school about education.

Google Wave

Below are videos from the Google Wave demo at Google I/O 2009 and from an interview with the Google Wave founding team. You can find more about Google Wave here and here.