JTEL Winter School on Advanced Learning Technologies 2010

For the Interest Groups on Technology Enhanced Learning:
The JTEL Winter School brings interdisciplinary doctoral researchers together in order to provide intense research training and to foster cross-domain collaboration. The event will engage participants in high-level courses and workshops with leading scientists. These workshops and lectures focus on theoretical, methodological, educational, and technological issues of relevance to TEL research, providing space for interaction, group work, and informal discussions. Doctoral students will also be expected to present their own research for constructive feedback from other participants of the Winter School.

Deadline for applications: 14 December 2009

More information

Call For Paper: Mobile Learning 2010

Call for Paper for IADIS Mobile Learning 2010 is open. The conference focus will be User Created Content & Mobile Technologies: From Consumers to Creators bypassing the Learning Opportunity? This is the connecting point from e-Learning to social software.
Important dates:
Paper submission: Dec. 4, 2009
Notification: Jan. 6, 2010
Conference dates: Mar. 19-21, 2010, Porto, Portugal
Topics include:
• Pedagogical approaches and theories for mLearning
• mLearning in formal educational institutions
• Integrating mLearning with broader educational scenarios
• Informal and lifelong mLearning
• Learner mobility & transitions across physical, conceptual, social space and technologies
• User Studies in mLearning
• Mobile social media & user generated content
• Enabling mLearning technologies, applications & uses
• Evaluation and evaluation methodologies for mLearning
• Tools, technologies and platforms for mLearning
• Mobile Web 2.0 applications for mLearning
• Mobile game-based learning

ICWL'09 Program online

Niels and I have finished our ICWL Program in PDF finally. We just extended the program created by Marc, by adding the social program, venue information, and a welcome message from the General Chair Prof. Jarke. A detailed travel information file is also available at the ICWL'09 Web site. The proceedings - Advances in Web Based Learning - ICWL 2009: 8th International Conference, Aachen, Germany, August 19-21, 2009, Proceedings: 5686 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science / Information Systems and) (Paperback) edited by Ralf, Marc and the others - has also been published by Springer. We are looking forward to all participants at ICWL'09 taking place in Building Super C at RWTH Aachen University next week.

ICWL 2009 - Call for Participation

The 8th ICWL 2009 will be hosted by Information System and Database Technologies, RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Authors that submitted to the ICWL 2009 conference came from more than 30 countries. The program will include 2 outstanding keynote talks, plenary sessions with invited papers, technical sessions, and 4 co-located workshops. Participants will explore Aachen with its rich culture, long history, and sightseeing via the social programs. ICWL 2009 is jointly organized by Hong Kong Web Society, RWTH Aachen University, and Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Science.

Keynote talks:

* "Learning in Times of Abundance: The Snowflake Effect" by Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
* "Exploiting User Generated Content to Improve Search" by Wolfgang Nejdl, University of Hannover, Germany

Invited papers:

* "Debating the wisdom of personalisation" by Helen Ashman, UniSA, Australia
* "On Social e-Learning" by Won Kim, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea
* "Web-based Learning - Yes we can!" by Ulrik Schroeder, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Social Events:

* Welcome reception with live Jazz music, August 19, 2009
* Grand Banquette in the old spa house of Aachen, August 20, 2009
* Guided tour to historical Aachen, August 21, 2009

Workshops:

* STEG'09: Second Workshop on Story-Telling and Educational Games
* ViWo'09: Workshop on Virtual Worlds for academic, organizational, and life-long learning
* SIRTEL'09: Social Informational Retrieval for Technology Enhanced Learning
* JEM'09: Joining Educational Mathematics - Final Workshop

A Real Prototype ...

Would you like to learn Chinese Classical Poetry? Would you like learning Chinese by entertaining? Anyway, there are at least six reasons to read poetry stated at Dumb Little Man. It's my pleasure to present the diploma candidate GAO Yan's Web based Chinese Classical Poetry Learning Platform CCPLE (a tentative name).

You could log in with the user name "guest" and the password "guest". You could upload a Chinese Classical poem. We would be grateful for any enrichment action on the poem database. You could also play a game to learn the peom by heart. This evening, I just got to know from GAO Yan that it is also accessible on iPhones.

However, as it is stressed in this blog entry title, it is just a prototype of a six-month's diploma thesis in the computer science faculty at RWTH Aachen University. During the six months, the diploma candidate is also required to finish writing one's thesis. You could not expect a fancy bug-free Web 2.0 platform. For example, two "tricks" of using this Web site are:
1) Double click the menu bar "My Poetry", so that you will see the menu bar "All Poety" at the end of the left pannel. Otherwise, you can not see all poems in the database and select one from it to play with.
2) In the desktop Safari browser, you need to click to tab and shift at the same time to make the menu bar of the games be displayed correctly.

These bugs will be fixed as soon as possible. I just cannot help advertising this platform a little later. GAO Yan will give his final diploma presentation on Feb. 17, 2009. Dr. Ralf Klamma and I keep our fingers crossed for a successful presentation. We will submit a paper on the results to ICWL'09.

STEG'08 Updates

As I posted a CfP for the First International Workshop on Story-Telling and Educational Games (STEG'08) several weeks ago, the workshop was held successfully in Maastricht last Tuesday. Some updates detail can be found at the Web site. A practical example of Storytelling and Technolog-Enhanced Learning is that we used Skype to present Nalin Sharda's presentation live from Melbourne, with 8-hours' time difference. In the wrap-up, Ralf drawed this graph based on a hot discussion of all participants.



My talk could be found here.

Learning World - Der Learning Management Congress (19.-20. Juni, 2008 Berlin)

Letzten Donnerstag und Freitag habe ich mich zum ersten Mal am 9te Learning World - Der Learning Management Congress in Berlin beteiligt. Diese E-learning Konferenz fand in Ludwig-Erhard-Haus statt, das sich neben IHK in der Nähe von zoologischen Garten befindet. Mit dem Motto Empower Learning Innovation. Integration. Inspiration. ist Web 2.0 ein großes Thema geworden. Alle Key Note Speaker reden über Web 2.0 inklusiv Wikis, RSS, und Tagging usw. Es gibt Anzeichen dafür, dass Web 2.0 stark Forschungen in der Domäne E-learning beeinflußt hat und weiter beeinfließen wird. Der 2.0 Spirit zieht immer mehr wissenschaftliche Aufmerksamkeit auf sich. Es führt auch zu Diskussion, worauf man den Wert angesichts Forschungen legen soll. Sind es die benutzerfreundlichen Benutzeroberflächer mit runden Buttons, Einsatz von Wikis und Tagging überall, oder einfach Podcasting? Der Weg zum E-learning 2.0 bzw. Enterprise 2.0 scheint doch noch lang. Zwar fehle es auf dem deutschen Markt viele Informatiker, sowohl Hochschulabsolventen als auch Ausgebilderten, so Prof. August-Wilhelm Scheer. Alle Vorträge und Preisverleihungen bis auf die 10-Minuten-Präsentationen wurden aufgezeichnet und wird bald auf der Webseite veröffentlicht, indem gutes E-Learning Material das Publikum zugängig gemacht wird. Ich habe unsere Virtual Campfire in der Session 10-Minuten-Präsentationen Forschungsprototypen demonstriert. Dabei habe ich auch viele spannende Vorträge gehört.