The ROLE project is the winner of the PLE2010 Mediacast Contest. The video “Improving your foreign language skills - An example for the use of Personal Learning Environments” was produced by our ROLE Partner IMC in cooperation with BILD.
The screencast about the use of widgets for improving language skills in the context of further training received by far the most votes during the voting on YouTube.
ROLE has been announced and awarded as the winner at the end of the PLE Conference in Barcelona.

Please find attached the updated agenda for next week:

ROLE agenda: Next Generation PLE Infrastructure (pdf) (updated 1 July 2010)

The ROLE workshop will take place on Wednesday 7 July from 14:00 – 19.30 and is free for all conference participants.

For more information see at: http://pleconference.citilab.eu/

Last week the ROLE consortium got together for the first ROLE annual review that was successfully hold at the Fraunhofer Institute Center Birlinghoven Castle located between Bonn and Sankt Augustin.

At this meeting we had the opportunity to identify and honor the first winner of the ROLE Dissemination Trophy - the winner is the ROLE partner team at RWTH Aachen University: the team leader Ralf Klamma in behalf of his team was awarded with the ROLE captains head by Sylvana Kroop.

Many thanks to him and his team for all the valuable dissemination activities during the first ROLE project year.

Sylvana Kroop is awarding Ralf Klamma with the ROLE captains hat.

The proud winner of the ROLE Dissemination Trophy Ralf Klamma at the first ROLE annual review in June 2010.

The ROLE Dissemination Trophy is a challenge cup that will be handed to ROLE partners for excellent dissemination work. It is awarded twice a year.

The organiser of the PLE2010 Conference have published a short video about the open voting procedure in the PLE2010 YouTube group. The voting will be closed on July 2nd and the best 3 PLE mediacast awarded at the PLE Conference in Barcelona.

To vote for a video you have to login into YouTube and become a member of the PLEConf group. If you did both you can vote for a video by selecting it from the right video menu. The selected video will appear in a small version on the upper right corner and two links (”love it” / “hate it”) will be displayed below it. Just click on the prefered link to vote.

Don’t be surprised if the number of votes will not increase immediately. You have to reload the whole page to see the updated result.

Have a nice (simple) voting!

Call for Papers
Doctoral Consortium at ECTEL 2010

29 September, 2010

Barcelona, Spain
http://www.ectel2010.org/

OBJECTIVES:
The EC-TEL Doctoral Consortium brings together Ph.D. students working on topics related to Technology Enhanced Learning. The doctoral consortium will offer Ph.D. students the opportunity to present, discuss, and receive feedback on their research in an interdisciplinary and international atmosphere. The Doctoral Consortium will be accompanied by prominent professors and researchers in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning. These accompanying professors will participate actively and contribute to the discussions. The Doctoral Consortium is co-located with and will take place immediately before the EC-TEL 2010 conference. The Doctoral Consortium language is English.

The intention of this doctoral consortium is to support and inspire Ph.D. students during their ongoing research efforts. Therefore, it is necessary that authors will have neither achieved their Ph.D. degree nor officially submitted their thesis before the doctoral consortium (September 2010). To enforce this rule we require authors to disclose their expected graduation date and their advisor’s name when submitting.

FEES, SCHOLARSHIPS for the Doctoral Consortium:
For a limited number of accepted contributions we secure funding either from ECTEL 2010 (http://www.ectel2010.org) or STELLAR (http://www.stellarnet.eu) so that registration fees are waived for participants.

ELIGIBILITY AND APPLICATION PROCESS:
In contrast to regular conference papers, submissions should address specifically doctoral work!

Therefore, the following elements have to be addressed in the papers:

• A clear formulation of the research question,
• An identification of the significant problems in the field of research,
• An outline of the current knowledge of the problem domain, as well as the state of existing solutions,
• A presentation of any preliminary ideas, the proposed approach and the results achieved so far,
• A sketch of the applied research methodology,
• A description of the Ph.D. project’s contribution to the problem solution,
• A discussion of how the suggested solution is different, new, or better as compared to existing approaches to the problem.

Papers will be reviewed by at least two members of the doctoral consortium committee who will be selected from the EC-TEL 2010 programme committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings at http://CEUR-WS.org. Accepted students will be asked to peer-review
two accepted papers prior to the Doctoral Consortium.

Only electronic submissions are accepted. Please use http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dcectel2010 for uploading. Papers describing doctoral work should be submitted in PDF format before July 18, 2010. Authors should use the Springer LNCS format. For camera-ready format instructions, please see For Authors instructions at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. The paper length should not exceed 6 pages. A supporting letter by the supervisor of the PhD
works should be also uploaded.

Accepted students should prepare:

1. A firehouse introduction of themselves and their PhD project for the
introductory session.

Duration: 60 sec max. No slides.

2. A poster of their PhD project to be used for introducing their project (15-20 minutes) and its main issues during the small group sessions.

All papers will be reviewed after acceptance by at least two senior researchers and one of the accepted doctoral candidates. A discussant, a member of the doctoral consortium committee, will be appointed to each paper. Discussant comments will be followed by a plenary discussion of the paper. At the end of the consortium there will be a general discussion, including a brainstorming session about current and future research topics in the area.

Research topics for the Doctoral Consortium at ECTEL 2010:

Technological underpinning:

• Large scale sharing and interoperability
• Technologies for personalisation and adaptation
• Context-aware systems
• Social computing and web 2.0
• Semantic web and web 3.0
• Mobile technologies
• Intelligent games
• Network infrastructures and architectures for TEL
• Sensors and sensor networks
• Roomware and ubiquitous computing
• Data mining and information retrieval
• Natural language processing and latent semantic analysis
• eLearning specifications and standards

Pedagogical underpinning:

• Problem- and project-based learning / Inquiry based learning
• Computer supported collaborative learning
• Collaborative knowledge building
• Game-based and simulation-based learning
• Story-telling and reflection-based learning
• Instructional design and Design approaches
• Communities of learners & Communities of practice
• Teaching techniques and strategies for online learning
• Learner motivation and engagement
• Evaluation methods for TEL

Individual, social & organisational learning processes:

• Cognitive mechanisms in knowledge acquisition and construction
• Self-regulated and Self-directed learning
• Social processes in teams and communities
• Social awareness
• Knowledge management and organisational learning
• Sustainability & TEL business models and cases
• Business-learning models

Learning contexts and domains:

• Applications of TEL in various domains
• Formal education: initial (K-12, higher education), post-initial (continuing education)
• Workplace learning in small, medium and large companies
• Aggregated learning at the workplace Distance and online learning
• Lifelong learning (cradle to grave)
• Vocational training
• Informal learning
• Non-formal learning
• Ubiquitous learning

TEL in developing countries:

• ICT Inclusion for learning
• Digital divide and learning
• Generation divide and learning
• Education policies
• Rural learning

TEL, functional diversity and users with special needs:

• Accessible learning for all
• Visual, hearing and physical impairments
• Psycho-pedagogic support for users
• Educational guidance for tutors
• Adapted learning flow, content and monitoring process
• Standards about accessibility and learning

CALENDAR:
July 18, 2010: Deadline for submitting applications to the ECTEL Doctoral Consortium
July 30, 2010: Notification of acceptance, Assignment of Peer Reviews
August 27, 2010: Peer reviews and discussant reviews sent to students
September 17, 2010: Final version of Doctoral Consortium Submission sent for publishing
September 29, 2010: Doctoral Consortium at ECTEL

ORGANISING COMMITTEE:
Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Tomaz Klobucar, Institut Jozef Stefan, Slovenia
Katherine Maillet, Institut Telecom, France

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE (to be announced)

Today the voting for the PLE video contest starts. If you like our video and if you want to support us in the contest, please go to the official PLE 2010 Conference Group on YouTube and vote for the ROLE video. You can find our video, called  Personal Learning Environment from ROLE, on the left hand side.

Please note that the voting will end on July 2, 2010.

Here you find a report from the Learning 3.0 symposium held on 19th March 2010. The report captures the findings of the day including the online conversations that were going on the blog and through Twitter. Karen Velasco joined the meeting, that was organised by Lifelong Learning UK, and focusing on learning technology.

Read more at http://www.lluk.org/learning3.htm
Or contribute in the conversation on http://learning3.ning.com

Call For Papers

Workshop on
Interplay between User Experience Evaluation and Software Development
(I-UxSED 2010)

17th October 2010
at NordiCHI 2010, Reykjavik, Iceland
Deadline for submissions: 25th July 2010

Website:http://users.dsic.upv.es/workshops/i-uxsed10/

BACKGROUND AND CHALLENGES

I-UxSED 2010 is built upon the tradition of I-USED’08 and ’09 (International Workshop on the Interplay between Usability Evaluation and Software Development). It, however, targets at a much broader scope of User Experience (UX) where user’s emotions, affects, motivations, and values are given as much, if not more, attention than ease of use, ease of learning and basic subjective satisfaction - the three traditional usability metrics.

We understand the relationship between UX and usability as the latter is subsumed by the former. Usability evaluation methods (UEMs) and metrics are relatively more mature. In contrast, UX evaluation methods (UXEMs) which draw largely on UEMs are still taking shape. It is conceivable that feeding outcomes of UX evaluation back to the software development cycle and instigating the required changes can even be more challenging than doing so for Usability Evaluation (UE). Several challenges are as follows:

• UX attributes are (much) more fuzzy and malleable, what kinds of diagnostic information and improvement suggestion can be drawn from evaluation feedback. How does the evaluation feedback enable designers/developers to fix this experiential problem (cf. usability problem) and how can they know that their fix works?
• Emphasis is put on conducting UE in the early phases of a development lifecycle with the use of low fidelity prototypes. However, is this principle applicable to UX evaluation? Is it feasible to capture authentic experiential responses with a low-fidelity prototype? If yes, how can we draw insights from these responses?
• Irrespective of whether formal or informal evaluation approaches are applied to usability or UX, it is the persuasiveness of empirical evidence that is ultimately the test of its worth. Is UX evaluation feedback less persuasive than usability feedback? If yes, will the impact of UX evaluation be weaker than UE?
• Software Engineering (SE) community has recognized that usability does not only affect the design of user interfaces but the software system development as a whole. Can such recognition and implications be taken for granted for UX, given that the evaluation methodologies and measures of UX could be very different (e.g. artistic performance)?

While the gap between HCI and SE with regard to usability has somewhat been narrowed, thanks to years of endeavour of the researchers in both communities, it may be widened again due to the emergence of UX.

GOALS

The goal of this Workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners from HCI and SE to identify challenges and plausible resolutions to optimize the impact of UX evaluation feedback on the development of systems that should eventually be usable, pleasurable and desirable. With this focus, contributions on the following topics, but are not limited to, are invited:

• Which artefacts of software development are useful as the basis for UX evaluation and how do such artefacts influence the selection of UX evaluation methods?
• What are the forms and characteristics of UX evaluation feedback that are considered or proved useful and necessary for software development (including the UI design)?
• How can UX evaluation methods be integrated in emerging techniques and approaches for software development (including the UI design)?
• How do software designers’/developers’ perceptions of UX evaluation feedback relate to their redesign strategies and approaches (e.g. prioritisation)?
• How can the effectiveness of UX evaluation feedback in improving the software quality be evaluated (i.e. the issue of downstream utility)?

Participants
Participants (max. 20) are accepted on the basis of their submitted papers. The intended audience is primarily SE and HCI researchers and practitioners who are working on and have experiences with the theme.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission Deadline: 25th July 2010
Acceptance Notification: 15th August 2010
Camera-ready Deadline: 1st September 2010
Workshop: 17th October 2010 (one full-day)

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Papers should be submitted in PDF-format to the workshop reviewing system at (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iuxsed2010). Submissions should preferably describe empirical studies of the interplay between UX evaluation and software development, but those addressing theoretical frameworks for this theme are welcome as well.

Two types of submissions are solicited: Full papers with up to 6 pages describing substantial, completed work, and position papers with 2 pages describing either results that can be concisely reported or work in progress. Both types of papers should be formatted according to the SIGCHI ACM template. All papers will be peer reviewed. The workshop proceedings will be published on-line in CEUR-WS.org (ISSN 1613-0073)
Activities Planned and Outcomes
The tentative workshop programme is as follows:

• A keynote speech by a recognized researcher in the field
• Presentation of selected papers
• Small thematic group discussion on major issues
• Plenary report and discussion of main issues
• Future work and collaboration

We plan to contact key HCI journals about their willingness to produce a special issue on the topic of the workshop.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

• Arnold P.O.S Vermeeren, TU Delft, the Netherlands
• Asbjørn Følstad, SINTEF, Norway
• Marianna Obrist, University of Salzburg, Austria
• Virpi Roto, Nokia Research Centre, Finland
• Scott Ambler, IBM Rational (to be confirmed)
• Tiziana Catarci, Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’, Italy (to be confirmed)
• Natalia Juristo, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain (to be confirmed)
• Jair Leite, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niteroi, Brazil (to be confirmed)
• Nuno Jardim Nunes, University of Madeira, Portugal (to be confirmed)

WORKSHOP ORGANISERS

• Effie L-C Law, University of Leicester, UK
• Silvia Abrahão, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain
• Jan Stage, Aalborg University, Denmark

For enquiry, please send email to Effie Law:
elaw@mcs.le.ac.uk OR law@tik.ee.ethz.ch