1st Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning

I hereby proudly present the call for the first ever workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning!

The complete call can be found from here: http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/sirtel

A few words on the raison d'être of this workshop, what are the drivers for it?

Everyone in the field of e-learning has their ears full of talks of Communities of Practice (CoP) and networks of users, but not very often do we see how they actually are leveraged in practical terms. This workshop focuses on one part of the process, namely on retrieval of useful resources, either learning resources or human resources, for that matter. The tag line could be as P.Morville said "We use people to find content. We use content to find people."

Take that a step further and think of using digital traces to find people, and also leaving digital traces so that you can be found by other people. In this workshop we are interested in both; social navigation systems and recommenders for retrieving resources to enhance learning and teaching.

Social information retrieval (SIR) refers to a family of techniques that assist users in obtaining information to meet their information needs by harnessing the knowledge or experience of other users. Examples of SIR techniques include sharing of queries, collaborative filtering, social network analysis, social navigation, social bookmarking and the use of subjective relevance judgements such as tags, annotations, ratings and evaluations.

SIR methods, techniques and systems open an interesting new approach to facilitate and support learning and teaching. There are plenty a resource available on the Web, both in terms of digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other learners, experts, tutors) that can be used to facilitate teaching and learning tasks. The remaining challenge is to develop, deploy and evaluate systems that provide learners and teachers with guidance to help identify suitable learning resources from a potentially overwhelming variety of choices.

Several questions are being researched around the application of SIR methods in Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) settings. The aim of the SIRTEL'07 Workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners who are working on topics related to the application of SIR methods, techniques and systems in educational settings, as well as to present the current status of research in this area to interested researchers and practitioners. It aims to serve as a discussion forum where researchers will present the results of their work, and also establish liaisons between different groups that are exploring related subjects. In addition, it aims to outline the rich potential of emerging SIR methods, techniques and systems in order to better build TEL systems and services.

Feel free to involve yourself, submit a contribution, blog about this, social bookmark the call (tag sirtel07) and talk about this to your pals!

See you in Crete in Spetember!