Impressions from ECTEL 2009

During last week I was attending ECTEL in lovely Nice. It was indeed an excellent event, well organized by the dream team: Katherine, Marcela, Florianne, Clementine, and Sylvie. I witnessed the sleepless nights they had over the last week to make from ECTEL a big success. It was amazing to see how such a big event with more than 300 participants, was organized by a small team of 5 persons. I remember other conferences with much more people on the organization committee, where the result was far less good than ECTEL 2009. Chapeau les filles!

On Tuesday, I attended the pre-conference ROLE MUPPLE workshop, well organized by my dear friends Fridolin Wild, Matthias Palmer, Daniel Müller, and Marco Kalz. I presented there our paper "SMashup Personal Learning Environments". You can find the proceedings of the workshop here. I much enjoyed the talks and discussions on how to leverage mashups to develop PLEs and other closely related topics such as widgets and recommendations. I also met great young researchers whom I know well from their blogs and online activities, but I didn't get the chance to meet before, such as Hendrik Drachsler, Behnam Taraghi, and Wolfgang Reinhardt. Hope to get the chance to cooperate with you guys!

On Wednesday afternoon, I attended the Future Learning Landscapes workshop, that I organized together with my dear friends Serge Garlatti, Yvan Peter, Marcelo Milrad, and Mike Sharples, who also delivered a very interesting and inspiring keynote talk on the first day of the conference. Thanks a million Serge and Yvan for giving me the chance to work with you. I really enjoyed every moment with you at the conference and I'm looking forward to further collaboration with you in the near future. It was also great to meet Jim Hensman and Amel Bouzeghoub, who also had a nice contribution to the workshop.

On Thursday and Friday, I attended some selected sessions at the main conference and presented our other paper "NetLearn: Social Network Analysis and Visualizations for Learning". I will share the slides on Slideshare soon. I listened to several interesting talks at the conference such as the one given by Stefanie Lindstaedt on work-integrated learning environments.

ECTEL was indeed an excellent event for networking. I met great people there. Many for the first time...