The Open Unviversity, Milton Keynes

Theme: Releasing Potential: learning through people and technology

Background:

There is increasing emphasis on learning, skills and qualifications and positioned at a high level on the national agenda. This places considerable responsibilty on the learning and develoment profession to consider ways in which new and potential learners can develop and release their potential through the learning process; whether as existing employees increasing their knowledge and skills for their job or for career and leadership development in the workplace. This conference provides the opportunity for Learning and Development professionals to update their knowledge of a range of initiatives to better equip and engage learners and increase the impact of learning.

Speakers confirmed so far include:

• Peter Hawkins, Liverpoool University
• John Hayes MP, Shadow Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education
• Sir John Whitmore
• Liz McCann, BBC
• Jim Potts, Defence Academy
• Laura Overton, Towards Maturity
• Charles Jennings
• Chalres Elvin, The Open University
• Paul Sealy, Kier Group
• Clive Shepherd, eLearning Network
• Professor David Clutterbuck

Conference fee:

• £99 + VAT BILD members
• £250 + VAT Non members (Includes one year individual membership with the BILD)

For more information about this event, please visit the BILD website: www.thebild.org

To book a place for this event, please contact: swills@thebild.org

The first Announcement and Call for Participation

Joint European Summer School on TEL 2009

Venue: Terchova, Slovakia

Date : May 30 - June 6, 2009

Deadline for Applications : March 16th, 2009

Objectives

STELLAR, the Network of Excellence in Technology Enhanced Learning (building on the achievements of the previous PROLEARN and KALEIDOSCOPE NoE) and the EU ICT TEL research projects APOSDLE, MATURE, PROLIX, ROLE, ICOPER, GRAPPLE, LTfLL and the B-IT Research School together with the EATEL Association are pleased to announce their Joint European Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning.
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 Fourth European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning in Cannes, France, September, 2009 (http://www.ectel09.org), and to participate in EATEL thematic workshops.

Programme Topics

• Creation of and Access to Knowledge & Learning Resources
• Practice Modelling, Management & Mining
• Personalisation & Adaptation in Learning Environments
• Story-Telling & Educational Gaming
• Web 2.0 and Social Software
• Open Responsive Learning Environments
• Learning communities & communities of practice
• Privacy & Security
• Disagreement Management
• Pedagogy, Life-Long Learning, and TEL
• Individual, Social & Organisational Learning Processes
• Interoperability: TEL Standards, Models, Processes, Tools
• Research Techniques
• The Future of TEL

Workshop of the GLDV Working Group on Hypermedia

Date: October 1st, 2009, 13:30-17:00h
Location: University of Potsdam/Germany
Registration: Please register for the main conference.

The workshop is organized as part of this year’s Conference of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology (GSCL), hosted by the Applied Computational Linguistics group in the Department of Linguistics at Potsdam University. The GLDV Working Group on Hypermedia is offering a one-day workshop dedicated to usability aspects for hypermedia systems and applications in the E-Humanities (corpus retrieval frontends, web information systems, community grids etc.).

Suggested topics include but are not limited to:

• Web design and usability in the E-Humanities: Context, productivity/performance, and acceptance
• (Multimodal) reception research: Methods and test procedures
• Visualization, navigation, and orientation in complex information systems
• Interactive and collaborative aspects of hypermedia systems
• Standards and guidelines on software ergonomics, user-oriented design, and accessibility

Since Jakob Nielsen pointed out the main criteria for user-friendly hypermedia systems - Easy to learn, efficient to use, easy to remember, few errors, pleasant to use – in the mid-nineties, usability research is engaged in the statistical investigation and empiric validation of ranking methods. One goal is the improvement of usability on the internet, currently focusing on up-to-date topics like Web 2.0 and multimodal interfaces.

The goal of this workshop is to create a forum for researchers and practitioners interested in hypermedia systems in the context of natural language processing. By offering paper presentations (30 min.) and discussion panels , we hope to stimulate and facilitate an active exchange on unique and interdisciplinary ideas, practices, and methods.

The workshop features English or German paper presentations and extended demos. Authors are invited to send abstracts which may not exceed two pages of text. All submissions will be peer-reviewed (please place author’s name and affiliation on a separate page for anonymous review). The final papers are limited to 12 pages, including figures and literature. They will appear in a special issue of “SDV – Sprache und Datenverarbeitung/International Journal for Language Data Processing”.

Important dates:

• Submission of abstracts:  June 30th, 2009
• Notification of acceptance: July 31st, 2009
• Final paper submission: September 4th, 2009

Websites:

• Workshop Homepage: http://hypermedia.ids-mannheim.de/gscl-ak/workshop09en.html
• GSCL Working Group on Hypermedia: http://hypermedia.ids-mannheim.de/gscl-ak/
• Main Conference Homepage: http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/acl-lab/gscl09/

Program Committee:

• Dorothea Kugelmeier, Fraunhofer FIT.ICON Usability Lab
• Dr. Hans-Christian Schmitz, Fraunhofer FIT.ICON Usability Lab
• Dr. Roman Schneider, IDS Mannheim
• Prof. Dr. Bernhard Schröder, Universität Duisburg-Essen
• Prof. Dr. Angelika Storrer, Universität Dortmund
• Dr. Heinz J. Weber, Universität Trier

Organization Committee:

• Dr. Hans-Christian Schmitz, Fraunhofer FIT.ICON (hans-christian.schmitz@fit.fraunhofer.de)
• Dr. Roman Schneider, Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) Mannheim (schneider@ids-mannheim.de)
• Prof. Dr. Bernhard Schröder, Universität Duisburg-Essen (bernhard.schroeder@uni-due.de)

The second BELIEF international symposium will be held at the Escola Politécnica of the Universidade of São Paulo, Brazil on 16th-17th July 2009. The event will focus on the theme of Future trends in e-Infrastructures applications: towards sustainable development.

The Symposium, organised with the support of the GLOBAL project, will revolve around the questions on how existing EU–Latin American e-Infrastructure links should evolve in a way that will bring benefits to Latin American development and to the e-Infrastructure cooperation between both regions. The symposium’s discussions will shape a position paper to be sent to key stakeholders and decision makers. Your participation would therefore add considerable value in  advancing the agenda of e-Infrastructure in Latin American and Europe in a way that can sustain development in both regions.

The symposium will start with opening plenary speeches given by keynote representatives from the EC Delegation to Brazil, the government of the State of São Paulo and R&D sector, followed by three parallel sessions. These will address issues such as how to sustain e-Infrastructure use between connected research communities in Latin America and Europe; whilst specific user community areas shall be addressed such as eScience, e-Health and e-Education. Thanks to the support of the GLOBAL consortium, interactive remote participations are most welcome. Those who wish to give a presentation remotely via internet (as a remote site via ISABEL), should confirm participation through http://isabel.dit.upm.es/mediawiki/index.php/BELIEF-6CHOICE_Brazil_Symposium.

Exploitation of Usage and Attention Metadata (EUAM 09)

Workshop organised as part of Informatik 2009, Sep 28, 2009 in Lübeck, Germany

The Workshop Proceedings will be included in a volume of the Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI), published by the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI).

Workshop Purpose and Topics:

Information systems provide an almost unlimited number of information in numerous environments. Users in diverse contexts need support to deal with the new challenges in information acquisition and use. Today, such support is rather limited as it does not take into account the user’s tasks and goals. A promising way of dealing with this challenge is provided by approaches that determine adequacy and relevance on the basis of the user’s actual behaviour and attention as recorded in server log files or on the individual user’s computers. Frameworks and data formats - like the Contextualized Attention Metadata (CAM) format - have been developed for capturing, storing, exchanging and analyzing metadata on usage and attention. However, the effective exploitation of such metadata is still a desideratum, specifically in the more life science oriented research directions (medical staff, for example, can neither afford a lack of information nor an overflow with irrelevant information in emergency cases). Another example is the application of personal learning environments in higher and lifelong education where individual educational support is scarce. The workshop objective is to discuss new ways of exploiting usage and attention metadata in different application areas like technology enhanced learning, recommender systems, collaborative systems, etc.

The workshop deals with the generation and exploitation of usage and attention metadata for attention aware systems. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

1. Capturing attention metadata
   • Secure exchange of usage and attention metadata
   • Attention metadata sources
2. Representing attention metadata
3. Frameworks for capturing, storing and analyzing usage and attention metadata
4. Analyzing attention metadata
   • Combining semantic metadata with usage/attention metadata
   • Contextualizing usage and attention metadata
   • Detection of users’ tasks, goals and intentions based on their behaviour
   • Attention based task support
   • Identification of preferences
   • Identification of skills and competencies
   • Mental and emotional states recognition
   • Generation of usage-based document profiles
   • Attention and usage based recommender systems, determining relevancy and informativity of data
   • Generation of user profiles and social network analysis

Keynote speaker: tba.

Addressees and Workshop Format:

The workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from relevant disciplines (digital libraries, information systems, personalization, attention aware systems, user modeling, social systems, psychology, linguistic pragmatics, sociology, technology enhanced learning etc.) who work on capturing and analyzing usage and attention metadata. While focusing on the German research communities, which are already rather fragmented, the workshop encourages submissions from all world-wide relevant research communities. Therefore, the workshop language will be English. The workshop will foster the cross-fertilization between application areas and aid the technology transfer from basic research into practice.

Submission Details:

Authors are invited to submit full papers not exceeding 6 pages until April 26, 2009. Further details will be given soon on the workshop-webpage at euam.fit.fraunhofer.de. For questions regarding the submission procedure, please contact Hans-Christian Schmitz (hans-christian.schmitz@fit.fraunhofer.de). Submissions will be reviewed by the workshop’s program committee.

Participants must register for Informatik 2009 (only for the day of the workshop).

Workshop Proceedings:

Accepted papers will be published in the Proceedings of Informatik 2009 which will appear as a volume of the ‘Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI)’. Further information can be found at www.gi-ev.de/service/publikationen/gi-edition-lecture-notes-in-informatics-lni-2005/autorenrichtlinien.html.

Important Dates:

• Apr 26, 2009: Submission of full papers
• May 25, 2009: Notification of acceptance
• July 1, 2009: Camera-ready papers
• Sept 29, 2009: Workshop

Program Committee:

• Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Brause, University of Frankfurt am Main
• Mohamed Amine Chatti, RWTH Aachen
• Prof. Dr. Erik Duval, KU Leuven
• Dr. Eelco Herder, L3S Research Center
• Prof. Dr. Thomas Kirste, University of Rostock
• Dr. Stefanie Lindstädt, Know Center Graz
• Dr. Jobst Löffler, Fraunhofer IAIS
• Martin Memmel, DFKI
• Dr. Jehad Najjar, Synergetics
• Prof. Dr. Claudia Roda, American University Paris
• Prof. Dr. Ulrich Schade, FGAN FKIE
• Dr. Hans-Christian Schmitz, Fraunhofer FIT
• Sven Schwarz, DFKI
• Prof. Dr. Marcus Specht, Open University Netherlands
• Kai Eckert, University of Mannheim
• Dr. Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer FIT

Workshop Organisers:

• Dr. Hans-Christian Schmitz
• Dr. Martin Wolpers

From April 6th to 8th we had a 3-day-workshop to work on a theoretical framework that connects pedagogical aims with technological possibilities and limitations. The framework focuses on the requirements that are needed for technology to support different learner-centric pedagogical approaches in an effective and efficient way. On Monday, the first day of our workshop, we took a picture from some members of the ROLE consortium who are involved in this work.

The workshop started by presenting the results of two projects that have already been finished: the iClass project and the iCamp project. We were discussing overlappings, similarities, differences and ideas for ROLE.

Afterwards we were collecting and reviewing existing pedagogic models for self-regulated learning that we updated regarding the idea of ROLE. In groups we worked on three very concrete learning scenarios and placed the learner activities vis-à-vis the self-regulated learning processes and vis-à-vis the derived tool requirements. Having introduced the modeling tool TELOS from the Canadian LORNET project, we started to model the first examples of learning sequences. On the last day we had more presentations on available modeling technologies. One nice tool was Conzilla that includes new ways of modeling. We decided to imply this one for our upcoming work. The workshop ended with a roadmap towards producing the survey of existing models as well as a short discussion about the vision on new ways of modeling and its implications on learning.

The workshop has been organized and kindly hosted at the University of Koblenz-Landau. Many thanks to Peter Ferdinand and Ingo Dahn, especially for the lovely winetasting in the Marienberg at Koblenz.