Graham Attwell and PLEs

Kai Pata gives a summary of a discussion on the Personal Learning Environment concept between Graham Attwell and some participants at the PROLEARN summer school . Kai writes:

The workshop was a discussion with students and Graham, it was a bit disappointing… I think mostly very general things were brought up by students and Graham’s answers were same general. Anyway, nice experience of how to spend 1,5 hour of making bubbles with some pearls among. Graham’s point of course was that he is not presenting anything but he is here to start the conversation, in the end he said that for those who feel disappointed, there is the slidecast of 20 min is in slideshare and lots of info is under PLE tag in his blog.

According to Graham:

Learning environment is not a program or site in internet - its a series of tools which individual learners use across multiple devices which are used in different ways and different contexts.

Graham here defines a learning environemnt in terms of technology (i.e. a series of tools). I think however that technology is just an enabler. In my eyes a learning environment is an ecology for knowledge networking.

PROLEARN in the News

Powering up IT for professional learning

PROLEARN Roadmap for TEPL

We have created in PROLEARN a roadmap toward professional learning in 2020. We came up with 6 vision statements as follows:

• Vision statement I: “Everyone should be able to learn anything at anytime at anyplace.” The main goal is to provide the right learning experiences at the right time for the right person. The statement is closely linked to the IST challenge. It embraces issues of digital convergence of communication networks, media, content and devices. The new capabilities offered by recent advances in mobile and internet communications can support and facilitate mobility towards a lifelong learning environment, enabling the creation, storage, management and access to knowledge everywhere and every time. The aim is to create and deliver a personalized learning experience to everyone.

• Vision statement II: “Learning as a means to support and enhance work performance.” The main goals are to support human performance improvements and to provide links between business processes, competencies and learning processes; and use TEPL to design high quality work-based learning activities so that learning and working becomes interlocked. The statement is related to specific industry challenges, such as performance support and performance improvements at the work place.

• Vision statement III: “Promote innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship at work.” This vision encompasses a variety of goals such as: a) Learning supporting radical change in an organization and improving ability to change; and b) Competency development (including thinking out of the box, creativity, asking the right questions, leadership). The statement is related to industry challenges such as investment and development of the company’s human capital and use of learning to support ability to change in organization

• Vision statement IV: “Learning as a means to increase employability.” This statement focuses on the Learner’s perspective, the employees’ continuous professional development, and the need to increase employability. The goals in this vision include resilience, employability, getting skilled faster and personal growth. Enhanced mobility, employability and competency of the European workforce. Portability of learning achievements is one of the key-issues to be addressed.

• Vision statement V: Market take-up. “Professional e-learning will be a commodity market in 2015.” This statement focuses on market take up of TEPL and the ability to purchase content and learning services regardless of type and country of the learner supplier in a unified transparent market. The main goals in this vision include market transparency, consumer driven market, one-stop-shopping, wider choice at all levels, and selection optimization. Development of both segments of the market: from the low end commodity market to the high end upscale, high value added segment. There are two alternative ways to achieving this vision. One is about the commodity market being based on the “canned courses” concept, while the other is based on communities of practice and collaborative creation and sharing of professional know-how.

• Vision statement VI: Socially inclusion. “High quality learning for all”. This statement addresses social inclusion issues, such as digital divide, the gap between poor and rich etc. The goal will be to democratize knowledge provision and to support the so-called e-Inclusion and equal opportunities for all in the workplace.

Then, a Gap Analysis phase started during which, a comparison between the state of the art and the vision statements was performed in order to identify the Gaps between what is available today and what is needed for the future, set capability targets and requirements and derive the strategy (Actions/Recommendations) needed to fill these Gaps. Our approach has aimed to identify the current strengths (existing capabilities), weaknesses (missing or inadequate capabilities), opportunities (key future capabilities) and capability-related threats (problematic factors such as competition for sources of capabilities and resources needed to acquire new capabilities or re-direct existing capabilities) and which will contribute to the realization of the visions.

The result of this work is captured in PROLEARN Deliverable D12.5 "Roadmap for TEPL" that can be accessed here.

Comments are welcome.

PROLEARN Final Review

Last week, I attended the PROLEARN final review meeting in Hanover, Germany. The review went extremely well and was a real success for the entire network. Our reviewers were very satisfied with the achievements of the network during the past 4 years. These achievements have been summarized in this press release (.pdf). Here is an excerpt:

The Network of Excellence PROLEARN focuses on technology enhanced professional learning. In the period 2004-2007 it brought together the most important European research groups in the area of professional learning and training, as well as other key organizations and industrial partners. In this document we summarize the main outcomes of PROLEARN.
Research in PROLEARN has focused on four main topics that are highly relevant for professional learning: interoperability, competencies and personalization, collaborative learning, and business processes and learning. The results include standards for publishing and querying learning resources as well as a SECI-based framework for learning processes at work. PROLEARN has provided several tools for collaborative learning, with the multifunctional FlashMeeting videoconferencing tool as one of the highlights.
PROLEARN has organized several events that were targeted at different communities. Three main events will be sustained in the coming years. For Ph.D. students in the field of technology-enhanced learning, there is the highly popular PROLEARN Summer School. The annual EC-TEL conference series provides a strongly recognized forum for European research that brings the leading experts in the field of technology-enhanced learning together. The Professional Training Facts series offers a forum for information and exchange to potential users and developers targeting industry.
A large number of tools will remain available to the community after the end of PROLEARN. In addition to FlashMeeting, this includes the Conzilla concept modelling system, PROLEARN TV and the eMersion system for deplyoing innovative pedogical scenarios and flexible learning resources.
In March 2007 the core partners of the PROLEARN established the European Association of Technology Enhanced Learning (EATEL) (see www.ea-tel.eu). The objective of EATEL is to promote education and continuing education in the area "Technology-Enhanced Learning" (TEL) and to support science and research in this area.
Finally, PROLEARN created a roadmap toward professional learning in 2020. Our vision can be summarized as follows: “To support knowledge workers with technology-enhanced learning by promoting motivation, performance, collaboration, innovation and commitment to lifelong learning.”

What I most gained after 4 years in the PROLEARN NoE is the extension of I would call my personal knowledge network with:
- Explicit knowledge nodes, e.g. information in deliverables, reports, research papers, surveys etc.; outcome of face-to-face and virtual meetings; results of brainstorming sessions etc.
- Tacit knowledge nodes, i.e. excellent PROLEARN researchers whom I got to know and work with in the last years. I really enjoyed talking and collaborating with great researchers like Ralf Klamma, Erik Duval, Ambjörn Naeve, Vitali Fedulov, Marcus Specht, Milos Kravcik, Martin Wolpers, Wolfgang Nejdl, Gunnar Martin, Paul Lefrere, Peter Scott, Fridolin Wild, Margit Hofer, Barbara Kiesinger, Denis Gillet, Effie Law, Tomaz Klobucar, Vana Kamitisou, Katherine Maillet, Volker Zimmermann, Paul De Bra, Alexandra Cristea, and many many other great people.

The Future of e-Learning: a shift to knowledge networking and social software

Our journal article "The future of e-learning: a shift to knowledge networking and social software" has been published by INDERSCIENCE PUBLISHERS. The article can be downloaded here (.pdf). Your comments are welcome!

Abstract:
The main aim of Knowledge Management (KM) is to connect people to quality knowledge as well as people to people in order to peak performance. This is also the primary goal of Learning Management (LM). In fact, in the world of e-learning, it is more widely recognised that how learning content is used and distributed by learners might be more important than how it is designed. In the last few years, there has been an increasing focus on social software applications and services as a result of the rapid development of Web 2.0 concepts. In this paper, we argue that LM and KM can be viewed as two sides of the same coin, and explore how Web 2.0 technologies can leverage knowledge sharing and learning and enhance individual performance whereas previous models of LM and KM have failed, and present a social software driven approach to LM and KM.

Reference:
Chatti, M.A., Jarke, M. and Frosch-Wilke, D. (2007) ‘The future of e-learning: a shift to knowledge networking and social software’, Int. J. Knowledge and Learning, Vol. 3, Nos. 4/5, pp.404–420.
Special Issue on Learning and Interacting in the Web: Social Networks and Social Software in the Web 2.0.
Guest Editors: Miltiadis D. Lytras, Sheizaf Rafaeli, Stephen Downes, Ambjorn Naeve and Patricia Ordóñez de Pablos

PROLEARN - PALETTE JOINT TEL SUMMER SCHOOL 2008

THE FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

PROLEARN - PALETTE JOINT SUMMER SCHOOL 2008

http://www.prolearn-academy.org/Events/summer-school-2008

VENUE: Ohrid, FYROM

DATE: June 15 - 21, 2008

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS: March 15th, 2008

OBJECTIVES

PROLEARN, the Network of Excellence in Technology Enhanced Learning for Professionals, now working under the umbrella of the EATEL Association (http://www.ea-tel.eu/) and PALETTE, European Integrated Project aiming at developing interoperable web-services for Communities of Practice (http://palette.ercim.org) are pleased to announce their joint 2008 Summer School.

Our ambition is to foster cross-domain training and collaboration opportunities among researchers in Europe and beyond, working in the disparate fields of expertise which promote the advancement of TEL at the workplace. The programme includes lectures and working sessions from leading professors in the field, tutoring, mentoring, and joint research opportunities. Additionally the school will offer practical sessions in research methodology for Technology Enhanced Learning.
Advanced PhD students will be identified to present their research at the Third European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning in Maastricht, The Netherlands, September 17-19, 2008 (http://www.ectel08.org), and to participate in EATEL thematic workshops.

PROGRAMME TOPICS

• Collaborative Design between Educational Scientists and Computer Scientists
• Creation of and Access to Knowledge and Learning Resources
• Practice Modelling, Management & Mining
• Personalisation & Adaptation in Learning Environments
• Privacy and Security
• Pedagogy, Life-Long Learning, and TEL
• Individual, Social & Organisational Learning Processes
• Interoperability: TEL Standards, Models, Processes, Tools
• Research Techniques
• The Future of TEL

In order to increase social contacts among the summer school participants, the programme will include several social events. A variety of sport activities will also be offered to the summer school participants.

Cultural excursions are organised on the Sunday preceding the summer school and the Saturday which closes the summer school.

SUPPORT

This year the PROLEARN/EATEL - PALETTE joint Summer School will benefit from a special grant from SEEERA.NET to promote collaboration with the Western Balkan countries. The summer school has the pro-active support from a growing number of EU IST and eContent funded R&D projects such as APOSDLE, MATURE, iCAMP, PROLIX, MACE, TENCompetence, GRAPPLE, and ARIADNE.

VENUE DESCRIPTION

Magnificent and exciting, mysterious and surprising, Ohrid is one of the most ancient towns in Europe, flavoured with a taste of centuries gone by, full of Hellenistic, Roman, Slavic, Byzantine, and Turkish memories. During the classical and medieval periods Orhid was the artistic, cultural and spiritual centre of the Balkans and has been called a notable bridge of European art. The town is proud of its rich cultural heritage and unique lake which both belong to UNESCO's World Cultural and Natural Heritage (http://www.ohrid.com.mk).

ACCOMODATION AND SOCIAL EVENTS

Accommodation and summer school facilities will be made available at Hotel Granit (http://www.hotelgranit.com.mk). Granit Hotel is located on the coast of Lake Ohrid in St. Stefan, 5 km from the centre of Ohrid. It is 12 km from the Ohrid airport. The Hotel has two harbours which enable access to the hotel and the beach from the lake. The wonderful woods which surround St. Stefan Monastery are located 1 km from the Granit Hotel.

PhD students are asked to share a double room with other PhD students.

COST OF SUMMER SCHOOL

The cost for PhD students is Euro 500 (including accommodation - 7 nights in double room, meals, and excursions). PROLEARN - PALETTE Summer School 2008 will offer 50 scholarships to PhD students to cover summer school accommodation, catering, and events. Please indicate if you are applying for a scholarship in your application.

ELIGIBILITY AND APPLICATION PROCESS

The summer school is intended for PhD students investigating issues related to Technology Enhanced Learning and making progress on their dissertation research.
PhD students are invited to submit applications to mailto:summerschool@i5.informatik.rwth-aachen.de. The application should include a Curriculum Vitae and a summary (not to exceed 5 pages including references and any figures, tables, etc.) describing the student's dissertation. The deadline for submissions is March 15th, 2008. To ensure a high ratio between tutors and students the school will be limited to 60 PhD students. We look forward to seeing you at the summer school!

CALENDAR

March 15th, 2008: Deadline for submitting applications to the Summer School
May 1st, 2008: Notification of acceptance
May15th, 2008: Pre-Summer School videoconferences begin
June 15th, 2008: Summer School begins

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Local Chair:
Klime Poposki (St. Kliment Ohridski University), klime.poposki@uklo.edu.mk

Programme Co-Chairs:
Luc Vandenabeele (Centre de recherche public Henri Tudor), luc.vandenabeele@tudor.lu Stefanie Lindstaedt (Know Center), slind@know-center.at
Liliane Esnault (E.M. Lyon), esnault@em-lyon.com
Martin Wolpers (Fraunhofer), martin.wolpers@fit.fraunhofer.de

Summer School Website:
Mohamed Amine Chatti (RWTH Aachen), chatti@informatik.rwth-aachen.de

Summer School Promotion:
Margit Hofer (CSI), hofer@zsi.at,

Collaborative Learning Support:
Ambjörn Naeve (KTH), amb@nada.kth.se
Peter Scott (OU), peter.scott@open.ac.uk

Finances:
Fridolin Wild (Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration), fridolin.wild@wu-wien.ac.at

General Co-Chairs:
Katherine Maillet (INT), Katherine.Maillet@int-edu.eu
Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen), klamma@informatik.rwth-aachen.de Tomaz Klobucar (IJS), tomaz@e5.ijs.si

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Andrej Afonin, Lithunia
Olivier Bohl, Germany
Zuzana Bizonova, Slovakia
Daniel Burgos, Spain
Bernadette Charlier, Switzerland
Mohamed Amine Chatti, Germany
Alexandra Christea, United Kingdom
Hannes Ebner, Sweden
Liliane Esnault, France
Luc Vandenabeele, Switzerland
Denis Gillet, Switzerland
Ashley Healy, United Kingdom
Maurice Hendrix, The Netherlands
Margit Hofer, Austria
Patrick Johnscher, Germany
Anna-Kaarina Kairamo, Finland
Ralf Klamma, Germany
Styliani Kleanthous, Greece
Tomaz Klobucar, Slovenia
Tobias Ley, Austria
Katrina Leyking, Germany
Stefanie Lindstaedt, Austria
Matthias Lux, Austria
Katherine Maillet, France
Mark Melia, Ireland
Ambjörn Naeve, Sweden
Wolfgang Nejdl, Germany
Klime Poposki, Macedonia
Peter Scott, United Kingdom
Steinn E. Sigurðarson, Austria
Martin Sillaots, Estonia
Marcus Specht, The Netherlands
Armin Ulbrich, Austria
Fridolin Wild, Austria

Lessons Learnt on Social Software for Professional Learning

This call is also available on Ralf's blog.

The NoE PROLEARN on professional learning is preparing a final deliverable for the work package "Social Software" called "Lessons Learnt on Social Software for Professional Learning"

The rationales are to invite all the experts in the area of Technology Enhanced Professional Learning to give their lessons learnt on the use of web 2.0 and social software technologies for professional learning and to research what is the current impact on social software on European TEL industries?

* In order to conduct the research we have prepared and sent an internet based questionnaire about the formal structure, the knowledge management & HR pratices, and the leadership culture in European companies. If you haven't got an invitation for the questionnaire, please contact bachwerk[at]i5.informatik.rwth-aachen.de and you will get an email with the invitation.

* In order to have a more Web 2.0 kind of interaction I kindly ask you just to send some comments to this entry, links to your own entries about your lessons learnt, podcasts, wikis, links etc.

CUELC Seminar in Cairo

Over the last couple of days I attended a CUELC seminar at Cairo University, Egypt. It was indeed a very nice event. Undergraduate and postgraduate students from Aachen University, INR Evry, and Cairo University met together to discuss their TEL experience. The fruitful discussions revealed that the cultural background has a great impact on TEL. This will be documented in reports that the students from the different institutions will be preparing over the next days. These reports will also build the basis for the upcoming project deliverable.
It was a also very nice to see again Prof. Samir Shaheen, the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Dr. Nevine Darwish, the head of the computer engineering department, and Dr. Magda Fayek, the associate professor at the same department. We discussed the progress of the CUELC project as well as the current state and future of TEL in North Africa and the Middle East.
We really enjoyed the 3 days we´ve spent there. Besides long discussion sessions and workshops, we visited several great places and monuments like AlJiza Pyramids, Egyptian Museum, Al Hussain Mosque, Khan El Khalili, and Al Azhar Park. We enjoyed the time there with our friendly and professional guide Fayez who provided us with a great overiew of the cultural and natural heritage of different Cairo locations and Wael the awesome chap who took us on a car tour to experiment the nightlife in Cairo. It was amazing how he knows every single place in Cairo and how to get there in a very short time.

CUELC meeting in Cairo

Over the next couple of days I´ll be attending a CUELC seminar in Cairo. I´ll accompany 4 of our best bachelor and master students to meet other students from Cairo University and INT Evry, France. The main goal of this seminar is the give students from different institutions the opportunity to get to know each other and exchange their experiences in the area of technology enhanced learning. Since the semiar will bring together students from different cultures, intersting would be to study the impact of different cultures on TEL. I´m looking very much forward to this event.

Mobile Web Services for Collaborative Learning

Last Friday, our student Iliyana Ivanaova has successfully defended her master thesis "Mobile Web Services for collaborative Learning". I supervised Iliyana’s thesis together with my dear colleague Satish Srirama. The goal of the thesis was to bring together the research areas of collaborative learning and mobile web service provisioning. The thesis combines the latest developments in the related research domains: collaborative learning, mobile learning, mobile social software, and mobile web service provisioning.

The outcome of this thesis was the design and implementation of the MobileHost CoLearn system which implements different modules to support web services based mobile collaborative expertise finding for learning.

The MobileHost CoLearn system presents a novel approach to expertise finding within a truly collaborative mobile learning environment, including expert finding, literature resource retrieval and multimedia resource broadcasting, based on web service provisioning from mobile phones. The system enables the users to find experts in particular fields, who can provide them with exactly the information that they need and who can solve the specific problems they encounter. The discovery of experts is not targeted only within the framework of the user's social network, but also within the social networks of her acquaintances, and the social networks of the acquaintances of her acquaintances, and so forth. Such an expert finder flow will usually lead to the discovery of more than one potential expert, and the user's subjective decision who of them is the most knowledgeable one can be based either on the rating for the expert's level of expertise in the field, or on the path that the expert finder request has travelled before reaching the respective expert. After having found an expert, the user is provided with all the necessary information in order to be able to contact her for further assistance and to ask her questions regarding particular issues.

Alongside the valuable knowledge that flows within the system from the experts to the non-experienced users, the system supports the retrieval of a variety of resources. Among the most valuable literature types for each learner are the articles, inproceedings, proceedings, books, URLs, master and PhD theses, and unpublished resources. For the easy retrieval of specific resources, users should be able to tag them with particular keywords, and, as tagging is subjective and relevant, the user should be provided the opportunity to set the relevance of a tag to a resource. For this purpose, a three-level scale of relevance of a tag to a resource is employed.

Except retrieving specific resources at the time when they are needed, the system maintains image and audio resources within photocasting and podcasting channels, through which they are automatically distributed to all subscribers, as soon as they become available. This is one of the most suitable ways for sharing up-to-date knowledge, as the amount of information that can be conveyed through such broadcasting channels is enormous. In addition to employing the tagging mechanism, the leaving of feedback to broadcast resources should be also available, as well as the opportunity to retrieve the comments, that other learners have left for a resource.

Regarding the technical aspects, the MobileHost CoLearn system is based on the concept of web service provisioning from mobile phones. It takes full advantage of the latest developments in the telecommunication domain in terms of transmission rates and resource capabilities. The networking technology, which is used for communication between the web service provider and web service requesters, is GPRS, as it provides excellent speed, four times faster than GSM, and allows learners to be always connected, so that services are quick and easy to access.

TEL Journals

My colleague in PROLEARN Fridolin Wild pointed us to an extensive review of journals for Technology Enhanced Learning prepared by OUNL (a PROLEARN core partner). The list can be accessed here.

Social Software for Life-Long Learning

Our article "Social Software for Life-Long Learning" has been published in the journal of Educational Technology & Society, Volume 10, Issue 3, 2007. The article can be accessed at: http://www.ifets.info/issues.php?id=36. My colleague Ralf Klamma did a great work in coordinating the work among a group of PROLEARNERs. It was indeed a nice opportunity to work with great researchers in the PROLEARN Network of Excellence like Erik Duval and Ambjörn Naeve. I would like here to thank both of them for giving me the chance to work and learn from them.

Abstract:

Life-long learning is a key issue for our knowledge society. With social software systems new heterogeneous kinds of technology enhanced informal learning are now available to the life-long learner. Learners outside of learning institutions now have access to powerful social communities of experts and peers who are together forging a new web 2.0. This paper reviews current work in pan-European initiatives that impact upon life-long learning via views of professional learning, learner competence and social networking. It seeks to provide an overview of some of the critical research questions for the interdisciplinary field of social software research.

Reference:

Klamma, R., Chatti, M. A., Duval, E., Hummel, H., Hvannberg, E. H., Kravcik, M., Law, E., Naeve, A., & Scott, P. (2007). Social Software for Life-long Learning. Educational Technology & Society, 10 (3), 72-83.

ICALT 2007 in Japan

Last week I attended the 7th IEEE Intenational Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2007) in Niigata, Japan. It was indeed an exiting time there. I´ve been once in east Asia when I attended ICALT 2005 in Taiwan, but Japan is somehow different with an amazing mixture of traditional Japanese and modern Occidental lifestyle. I spent the first 2 nights in Tokyo and then moved to the harbor city Niigata one day after the earthquake. The conference was held in nice Toki Messe, Niigata Convention Center. Below are some pictures from my stay in Tokyo and Niigata. In a next post, I´ll write more about my experience there.

ALOA: A Web Services Driven Framework for Automatic Learning Object Annotation

Yesterday, Nanda Firdausi Muhammad successfully defended his master thesis "ALOA: A Web Services Driven Framework for Automatic Learning Object Annotation". Under my supervision, Nanda has designed, implemented, and evaluated a Web Services driven framework for IEEE LOM compliant automatic matadata generation. The primary focus has been on the flexibility and extensibility of the framework, such that new metatata generation services/modules can easily be plugged into the basic system.

The proposed solution and the implemented system fulfill these requirements; the system already implements different modules and is capable of generating a big part of the LOM metadata from different types of learning objects (e.g. HTML, PDF, PPT, Word). The goal of flexibility was achieved as the system provides a public Web Services API that can be used by third party applications and has a SOA based architecture that makes it possible to extend the framework with new components.

The main components of ALOA are Extractors and Generators. An extractor is responsible for extracting text information from a learning object along with more properties about the learning object. Only one extractor can be defined for each learning object type e.g. html, pdf, ppt, word. A generator is responsible for the actual metatada generation. It uses the output of an extractor and applies data mining techniques to generate one or parts of the metadata. Everyone should be able to easily create a new extrator/generator and plug it into ALOA via the admin interface. A detailed documentation on how to implement a new extractor or generator is available. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you would like to create your own component/service/module or need more information about the ALOA framework.

This thesis was a successful cooperation between Informatik 5, RWTH Aachen University and the computer science department of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in the framework of the EU Network of Excellence PROLEARN.


Try it out! Your valuable feedbacks, suggestions, comments, and ideas are welcome!

PROLEARN Summer School 2007

Last week, I attended the PROLEARN summer school in beautiful Fréjus, France. I couldn´t imagine before the amazing time I had there. It was indeed a merry time especially with the 2 Tims, Kien, and Hai. We had a lot of fun together. Tim has written about the nice moments at the summer school in his blog. Erik, who for me was the best speaker at the summer school, has also blogged on the 2 days he spent with us there. It was also a very fruitful time of networking with peers. Different talks, workshops and social events have been organized. PhD students from all over the world who are mainly working in the area of technology enhanced learning have come together to get to know each other, discuss and exchange their ideas and future research plans. It was really a very successful summer school!

PROLEARN General Assembly

During the last 2 days I´ve been attending PROLEARN General Assembly at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. Different issues such as research achievements, future directions, and organization of next PROLEARN events have been discussed. The summer school will be again one of the major PROLEARN events this year. PhD students from all over the world who are mainly working in the area of technology enhanced learning will come together for a whole week to discuss their research ideas and get feedback from more experienced scholars. Lectures from the morning sessions will be recored and made accessible via the PROLEARN Academy Website. I´m really looking forward to this interesting event.

PROLEARN/BTW

Over the past 2 weeks I´ve been attending 2 nice events:


The PROLEARN internal review and the thematic workshop on social software in Vienna, organized by PROLEARN in cooperation with the project iCamp, the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Culture and the PRO-LC. 6 Keynote talks were on the workshop programme. The talk that I liked most was the one given by Ralf Bendrath on Social Software and Privacy which is indeed a crucial issue. In the afternoon there have been 2 parallel workshops, a case study workshop and a teacher workshop. I´ve attended the first one to get an idea about social software in business (Enterprise 2.0). I have the feeling that everyone is seeing the need to integrate/use Web 2.0 technologies though there is no agreement on how to do it or sometimes why to do it. Actually I´m still not sure if the current explosive growth of Web 2.0 will not be followed by a dramatic decline, as it is always the case with new technologies!


The BTW conference (12. GI-Fachtagung für Datenbanksysteme in Business, Technologie und Web) organized by our chair and chair of computer science 9. It was a great opportunity to get an overview on current research directions in the areas of database systems technologies, experiences and applications. I was and I´m still very interested in this research field which was also my specialization area during my Diploma studies under the supervision of Prof. Theo Härder. I was very happy to get the chance to talk to him at the conference. I also met some of my old colleagues in Kaiserslautern. I have also to mention that the conference was nicely organized by my colleagues David and Christoph. They really did it well!

PROLEARN Review

During the next couple of days I´ll be attending the PROLEARN internal review and the thematic workshop on social software which will take place in Vienna. PROLEARNs goal is to achieve a greater focus on questions of European importance and a better integration of research efforts. Therefore PROLEARN will initiate and improve cooperations between various actors of academia and industry in the area of technology enhanced learning. More information about PROLEARN is available at the project homepage. I´m mainly contributing to the following workpackages:

• WP1: Personalized Adaptive Learning
• WP4: Learning Objects, Metadada and Standards
• WP9: PROLEARN Academy
• WP12: Roadmap
• WP15: Social Software
  

PROLEARN Roadmap

During the past couple of days, I’ve been attending a PROLEARN WP12 meeting at Brunel University London. My colleagues Daniel Burogos, Vana Kamtsiou, Lampros Stergioulas, Jacques Dang, and Tapio Koskinen were there. Paul Lefrere and Ambjörn Naeve have joined us via Skype. In the first phase of PROLEARN roadmap, we came up with 6 vision statements:
- VS1: Everyone should be able to learn anything at anytime at anyplace.
- VS2: Learning as a means to support and enhance work performance.
- VS3: Promote innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship at work.
- VS4: Learning as a means to increase employability.
- VS5: Market take-up driven by transparency, wider choice at all levels, selection optimization and consumer driven market.
- VS6: Access to professional learning for all – extending the knowledge based society.

In this meeting we identified and analyzed the gaps of the 6 vision statements i.e. a comparison between the state of the art and the vision statements has been performed in order to identify the gaps between what is available today and what is needed for the future. The results will be presented at the PROLEARN review which will take place in Vienna, February 28-March 1.
The meeting was very productive and has again shown that active participation and collaborative knowledge creation is a very effective way to learn.

Prolearn Thematic Workshop on Social Software - Call for Participation

Prolearn's 4th Thematic Workshop on Social Software (in cooperation with iCamp and the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Culture)

Vienna, Austria, 2 March 2007

http://tws.prolearn-project.org/index.html

The workshop is designed to serve as a forum for researchers, practioners, and intermediaries related to Social Software and its use in Technology Enhanced Learning.The meeting will provide unique networking possibilities. It will enable discussions around innovative research results and findings, experience reports and will address further research needs, as well as case studies describing innovative applications of new Social Software learning environments and approaches.

We welcome all interested researchers, practitioners and intermediaries focusing on the aspect of Social Software for Technology Enhanced Learning to participate in the mornings for high level key note speakers and to contribute actively in the afternoon at the workshop.

Key note speakers morning:

• A Model for Social Software / Community Mining Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen University, GER
  
  
• Social Proxies - John Erickson, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA
  
  
• The rise of Social Software and its technical / philosophical roots - Christina Merle, AUT
  
  
• Social Capital - Volkmar Pipek, University of Siegen GER
  
  
• Wiki Tools for Learning - Anja Ebersbacher, University of Konstanz, GER
  
  
• Integrating Social Software in existing Learning Systems - Guido Grohman, IMC , GER (tentative)
  

Afternoon Workshops:

• Workshop 1: Case study workshop


• Workshop 2: Austrian track workshop


• Workshop 3: Teacher workshop

Detailed Programme and Registration under:
http://tws.prolearn-project.org/index.html

Participation is limited to 100 persons.