CfP: 4th International Workshop on Story-Telling and Educational Games (STEG'11)

Stories and story-telling (narration and storytelling systems) represent long-standing cultural achievements of significant relevance even in modern times. Nowadays, story-telling is being enhanced with the convergence of sociology, pedagogy, and technology. In recent times, computer gaming is also deployed for serious and educational purposes and has proved to be an effective approach to cognitive stimulation and development. Many conceptual and procedural similarities and inter-dependences exist between story-telling and educational gaming. For instance, a good story lays the foundation for immersion and emotional involvement in games. Therefore these two areas can be integrated for research on web-based learning. Digital stories are an ideal starting point for the creation of educational games, since each story addresses particular problems, so that the story recipient can benefit from other users' experiences. This leads to the development of more realistic stories providing the kernel for non-trivial educational games involving various types of media. These stories cover the instructional part of an educational game, while the game adds the motivation and engagement part.

This workshop aims at bringing together researchers, experts and practitioners from the domains of digital story-telling and educational and serious gaming to share ideas and generate new knowledge in the context of web-based learning. There is a great amount of disparate research in these fields and this workshop will allow the participants to discover and leverage potential synergies.

Workshop topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Theories in story-telling, learning and games
• Story-telling and its role in digital educational games
• Story and game design paradigms for Web-based Learning
• Augmented story-telling and gaming
• Story-telling and educational gaming with social software
• Mobile story-telling and educational gaming
• Cross-media/transmedia story-telling and gaming
• Computer gaming for story-telling (Game design for narrative architectures)
• Multimedia story and game authoring
• Story-telling and educational gaming applications
• Storytelling and pedagogy
• Storytelling mechanics in serious games
• Narratology and story-telling

Submissions

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research papers (max. 10 pages) according to Springer LNCS format. All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed for originality, significance, clarity and quality. Accepted papers will be published as part of ICWL workshop proceedings in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

To submit your paper please use the STEG submission website hosted at easychair: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=steg2011 (will be open soon)

Important Dates

• Paper Submission: 31 August 2011
• Notification of acceptance: 26 September 2011
• Camera Ready Submission: 15 October 2011
• Author Registration: 15 October 2011
• Workshop date: 8-10 December 2011

Organisers

• Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
• Michael Derntl, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
• Stefan Göbel, TU Darmstadt, Germany
• Sandy Louchart, Heriot-Watt University, UK

CfP: MTAP Special Issue on "Multimedia on the Web"

URL: http://mtap-mmweb.fim.uni-passau.de/

Streaming video has recently surpassed peer-to-peer networks in terms of network capacity hunger. Reports estimate a share of 40% of peak network capacity dedicated to entertainment, mostly streaming video. A large share of this traffic originates from web based services. YouTube alone takes up to 8% of the prime time internet traffic. So multimedia on the web is currently a big issue. While transmission currently works in a best effort system, multimedia information systems on the web are far from being perfect. Retrieval, annotation, validated and useful metadata, reliable and trusted services, and user interaction and context-based adaptation are still under discussion and allow improvement. Currently, the Web itself faces dramatic changes, looking for example at the spread of social networks, Linked Data or the impact of HTML5 or WebM. These activities also have a deep effect on multimedia data and content provider. This special issue shall collect high quality papers from applied and basic research as well as applications for multimedia on the web.

Submissions have to relate to multimedia on the web, or more specifically on the following topics:

• Annotation of multimedia for the Web
• Multimedia databases and metadata models
• Multimedia & metadata adaptation
• Multimedia in the social Web
• Multimedia user communities
• Multimedia semantics & ontologies for the Web
• Proactive delivery and recommender systems
• Semantic multimedia information services
• User interaction & context
• Web based emergence and self-organization
• Web based multimedia search and retrieval