Thursday, December 17, 2009

PLEM for Edublog Ranking

The poll for the Edublog Awards 2009 closed today. While waiting for the outcome of the voting, I tried to use the PLEM ranking algorithm to rank the nominated blogs in the category "Best individual blog" based on the Wisdom of Crowds and different interaction metrics (PLEM saves and ratings, Delicious saves, Friendfeed comments and likes, Yahoo inbound links, Digg votes, Google Trackbacks, and Technorati blog reactions). To see the result, you can visit the PLEM project Website here, hit the "edublog" tag from the "Popular Tags" list, and choose "Most Popular" as the ranking option. Below is a screenshot of the result. Let's see whether the Edublog Awards voting result will be different or not.





Monday, December 07, 2009

The MobileHost CoLearn system: mobile social software for collaborative learning

The paper "The MobileHost CoLearn system: mobile social software for collaborative learning" has been published in the International Journal of Mobile Learning and Organisation (IJMLO) by Inderscience Publishers. A preprint of this paper can be downloaded here.


Abstract:

Learning and knowledge are fundamentally social in nature – as emphasised by many researchers. In the past few years, there has been an increasing focus on social software applications as a result of the rapid development of Web 2.0 technologies. Furthermore, mobile and ubiquitous technologies have provided capabilities for more sophisticated open social systems, where mobile knowledge sharing is the norm. In this paper, we explore the use of Web 2.0 concepts and social software for learning and present the MobileHost CoLearn system; a mobile web services driven social software for mobile collaborative learning.

Reference:

Chatti, M.A., Srirama, S.N., Ivanova, I. and Jarke, M (2010) ‘The MobileHost CoLearn system: mobile social software for collaborative learning’, Int. J. Mobile Learning and Organisation, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 15–38.

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

The 2009 Edublog Awards


The Edublog Awards 2009 are open for nomination!

Monday, November 30, 2009

New Tools for Personal Learning

A nice presentation by Stephen Downes who talked about tools for personal learning, at the MEFANET 2009 conference. Slides and audio from this talk are available.

Monday, November 23, 2009

IJTEL Special Issue on MUPPLE

Call for articles of the
International Journal for TEL
for a special issue on
'Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments'

Submission deadline: January 8th, 2010


The International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL)
seeks original manuscripts for a Special Issue on Mash-Up
Personal Learning Environments to appear in 2010.

A change in perspective can be certified in the recent years
to technology-enhanced learning re-search 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.

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 arte-facts and data, have
emerged to be the software development approach for these
long-tail and per-petual-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.

The International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning
(IJTEL) dedicates a focused issue on col-lecting the research
on understanding and engineering mash-up personal learning
environments.

TOPICS:

- 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,
reflection, personal information
- Interoperability standards for e.g. content recombination
or PLE configuration
- User studies & evaluation methods: evaluating e.g. performance
- Usability, specific design features, training methods

IJTEL fosters multidisciplinary discussion and research on
technology enhanced learning (TEL) ap-proaches at the
individual, organisational, national and global levels.
Its key objective is to be the leading scholarly scientific
journal for all those interested in, researching and
contributing to the technology enhanced learning episteme.
For this reason, IJTEL delivers research articles, position
papers, surveys and case studies aiming:

- Provide a holistic and multidisciplinary discussion
on technology enhanced learning research issues
- Promote international collaboration and exchange of
ideas and know how on technology enhanced learning
- Investigate strategies on how technology enhanced
learning can promote sustainable development

Papers submitted to this special issue must follow the criteria
used by IJTEL and defined by the na-ture of this special issue,
namely by covering the following mandatory items:

- Presenting original research;
- Offering a critical review of the state of the art in the field;
- Providing methodologically sound and innovative
technological insights;
- Illustrating the application in real-world cases;
- Performing the evaluation of the proposed ideas.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published or
be currently submitted for journal publication elsewhere. As
an author, you are responsible for understanding and adhering
to our submission guidelines. You can access them at

http://www.inderscience.com/mapper.php?id=31

The journal is now accepting submissions for this special issue
through its Online Submissions and Peer-Review System at
http://www.inderscience.com/papers, which provides instructions
about formatting and length. If you have any questions,
please contact submissions@inderscience.com or the guest
editors at the addresses listed below. Please include the title
of the Journal in your email and give as much detail as possible
about your query or problem.

IMPORTANT DATES
- Paper Submission: January 8th, 2010
- Results Notification: February 8th, 2010
- Revisions: March 8th, 2010
- Notification of Final Acceptance: March 21st, 2010
- Final versions: April 21st, 2010

BOARD OF REVIEWERS
- 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)
- Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen, Germany)
- Nikos Karacapilidis (University of Patras, Greece)
- Scott Wilson (University of Bolton, United Kingdom)
- Stéphane Sire (EPFL, Switzerland)
- Tony Hirst (Open University, UK)
- Ernie Ghiglione (Macquarie University, AU)

(GUEST) EDITORS

- Fridolin Wild (The Open University, UK)
- Matthias Palmer (University of Upsala, Sweden)
- Marco Kalz (Open University, The Netherlands)