PROLEARN in the News

Powering up IT for professional learning

CAMA 2008 - Workshop on Contextualized Attention Metadata

Thanks to the Erik Duval, Jehad Najjar, and Martin Wolpers, I have the pleasure to be member of the program committee of the Workshop on Contextualized Attention Metadata (CAMA 2008), to be held in conjunction with the Intrnational Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications (DC 2008)

The workshop intends to bring together researchers and practitioners from relevant communities (information systems, personalization, ubiquitous computing, activity-driven computing, context-driven computing, information retrieval, database systems, digital libraries, metadata, data mining, user modelling, social networks, psychology and cognitive science, etc.) to share their knowledge, results and expertise about their research on attention metadata. In general, the workshop aims to foster and improve collaboration between communities, e.g. by discussing relevant cross-disciplinary research approaches for attention metadata. In more detail, the workshop aims to discuss suitable models, algorithms, techniques, technologies, architectures and designs to collect, merge and process attention metadata. And finally, the workshop aims to evaluate the current status and progress of work on attention metadata.

More information about the workshop can be found here.

Google Friend Connect at Google Campfire One

Yesterday, Google announced the preview release of Google Friend Connect at Campfire One. "Google Friend Connect enables webmasters to quickly and easily enhance their site with community features; what's more, these features leverage visitors' existing social ties. By simply copying and pasting a few lines of JavaScript, you can implement the social functionality you want, and visitors can connect with their Facebook, orkut and other friends directly on your website."
Here's a video from Campfire One introducing Friend Connect.



From a press release on May 12:

Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social -- and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening's Campfire One), any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming -- picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.

Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.

"Google Friend Connect is about helping the 'long tail' of sites become more social," said David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google. "Many sites aren't explicitly social and don't necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there's an emerging wave of social standards -- OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making 'any app, any site, any friends' a reality."

Here’s also a video provided by Google that explains how developers can add Friend Connect to their websites:



Last week, in the same direction, Myspace and Facebook announced two competing products MySpace Data Availability and Facebook Connect.

Madeira is ... Nature

At the WEBIST conference, I enjoyed some of the keynote speeches and session presentations, but I enjoyed more the terrific landscape in Madeira. Here are some pictures from my stay there...

WEBIST 2008

This week I attended the 4th International Conference on Web Informations Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2008) in Beautiful Funchal, Madeira. I presented there our paper "Towards Web 2.0 Driven Learning Environments". The paper can be downloaded here (.pdf).

Abstract:

Over the last decade, it has been widely argued that technology-enhanced learning could respond to the needs of the new knowledge society and transform the way we learn. However, despite isolated achievements, technology-enhanced learning has not really succeeded yet in revolutionizing our education and learning processes. In fact, most current initiatives do not focus on the social aspect of learning and learning content is still pushed to a pre-defined group of learners in closed environments. Recently, Web 2.0 concepts have started to open new doors for more effective learning and have the potential to overcome many of the limitations of traditional learning models. In this paper we show in which way the community-driven platform Learnr, under development at the University of Münster, puts crucial success factors for future technology enhanced learning into practice, applying well known concepts like networking and social tagging. As a consequence, a Web 2.0 perspective on learners, learning content and learning communities can be derived.

Reference:

M.A. Chatti, D. Dahl, M. Jarke, G. Vossen: Towards Web 2.0-Driven Learning Environments. Proc. 4th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technolgies (WEBIST 2008), May 4-7, Funchal, Madeira.