Extended deadline: The 10th International Conference on Web-based Learning

Full Paper Submission Deadline: Jun 30, 2011

The conference program consists of high quality technical papers that are reviewed and selected by an international program committee. Papers are solicited on all technical aspects of web-based learning and related technologies, including but not limited to the following topics:

• Technology Enhanced Learning
• Personalized and Adaptive Learning
• Computer Support for Intelligent Tutoring
• Intelligent Tools for Visual Learning
• Web-based Learning for Oriental Languages Learning
• Game-based Learning
• Personal Learning Environments (PLE)
• Computer Supported Collaborative Learning
• Web 2.0 and Social Learning Environments
• Intelligent Learner and Group Modeling
• Human Factors and Affective Computing for Learning
• E-Learning Platforms and Tools
• Design, Model and Framework of e-Learning Systems
• Deployment, Organization and Management of Learning Objects
• E-Learning Metadata and Standards
• Semantic Web and Ontologies for E-learning
• Mobile, Situated and Blended Learning
• Pedagogical Issues
• Practice and Experience Sharing

Authors are invited to submit original papers reporting on research results or novel applications in web-based learning. All accepted full papers presented in the conference will be published as a volume in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). Selected papers will be recommended for possible publication in some international journals, including IEEE Trans. on Learning Technologies. Papers for submissions should be formatted in single column of no more than 10 pages in single line spacing according to the Springer LNCS Authors Guideline for a double blind review. Any identification information about the authors should NOT be included in the manuscript to facilitate double blind review. All papers should be submitted in PDF format. Please refer to the conference website (http://www.hkws.org/conference/icwl2011/) for more information and send us email at icwl2011@cs.cityu.edu.hk for any inquiry.

Building awareness in learning networks

"I just joined the PC of the workshop "Awareness and Reflection in Learning Networks" at #ectel11 #arnets11 http://teleurope.eu/arnets11". What a great way to "build awareness", I was invited to join the PC and at the same time to let ppl know about it! Way to go, very clever ! :)

Questions for eTwinning conference in Slovenia

Questionnaire: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22C8CJBYPCX/

Why we need big, authentic datasets for education?

In the world of consumer recommender systems, it is a common practise to use different data sets as benchmarks to evaluate new recommender systems algorithms (e.g. MovieLens, Book-Crossing, EachMovie data set).

In TEL, there are no standardised data sets publicly available, so that the outcomes of different recommender systems within TEL are hardly comparable.

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CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Workshop: dataTEL- Data Sets for Technology Enhanced Learning
Date: March 30th to March 31st, 2011
Location: Ski resort La Clusaz in the French Alps, Massif des Aravis
Funding: Food and lodging for 3 nights for 10 selected participants
Submissions: For being funded, please send extended abstracts to
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=datatel2011

Deadline for submissions: October 25th, 2010
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1st workshop on ëData Sets for Technology Enhanced Learningí at the 2nd STELLAR Alpine Rendez-Vous in La Clusaz, France

SCOPE
Personalisation and analysis of user interaction data is a key approach to overcome the plethora of information in the knowledge society. It is expected that personalised learning has the potential to reduce delivery costs, to create more effective learning environments and experiences, to accelerate study time, and to increase collaboration between learners.

Recommender systems and information filtering are some of the promising technologies to support people in finding most suitable information and peer learners. They are increasingly applied in Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) in various European projects in order to personalise learning content and connect suitable peer learners according to their context (e.g., individual needs, preferences, and learning goals).

In the world of consumer recommender systems, it is a common practise to use different data sets as benchmarks to evaluate new recommender systems algorithms (MovieLens, Book-Crossing, EachMovie data set). In TEL, there are no standardised data sets publicly available, so that the outcomes of different recommender systems within TEL are hardly comparable.

So far, no universally valid knowledge exists on algorithm that can be successfully applied in a certain learning setting. Having such data sets could be a first major step towards a theory of personalisation within TEL that can be based on empirical experiments with verifiable and valid results.

Therefore, the objective of this workshop is to explore suitable data sets for TEL ñ with a specific focus on recommender and information filtering systems that can take advantage of these data sets. In this context, new challenges emerge like unclear legal protection rights and privacy issues, suitable policies and formats to share data, required pre-processing procedures and rules to create sharable data sets, common evaluation criteria for recommender systems in TEL and how a data set driven future in TEL could look like.

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

• publicly available data sets for educational systems
• dealing with legal protection rights towards data sets on a European level
• privacy preservation for educational data sets
• methods of effective anonymisation of educational data sets
• management and pre-processing procedures for educational data sets
• future scenarios for educational data sets
• impact of educational data sets for learners and teachers
• mash-ups based on educational data sets
• recommender approaches that are based on educational data
• evaluation methodologies and metrics for educational recommender systems

SUBMISSIONS
Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research as papers (4-8 pages). Demonstrations and Hands-on sessions are explicitly encouraged. All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three members of the program committee for originality, significance, clarity, and quality. Re-worked versions of accepted submissions will be published in the Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Learning and Learning Objects (IJELLO). In addition, the authors are asked to contribute short summaries of their submissions to the dataTEL group space at TELeurope to encourage early information sharing and discussion also with third persons.

Submission will be available through the EasyChair submission system:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=datatel2011

All questions and submissions should be sent to: dataForTEL@gmail.com

WORKSHOP STRUCTURE
Based on workshop submissions, the organisers will identify 4 most pressing research challenges. For each of the challenges, we will allow around 2 hours discussion, started off through about two short submission presentations or keynotes. The final 2 hours of the last workshop day will be utilised to bring the results of the individual discussions together and to chart a vision of the future of TEL amplified by publicly available data sets.

FUNDING
Participants pay for their own travel and lodging. But we are able to fund food and lodging for 3 nights as well as the community event on Tuesday, March 29th for 10 participants. Please indicate your funding needs with your submission.

ORGANIZERS
Katrien Verbert (K.U.Leuven, BE)
Riina Vuorikari (European Schoolnet, BE)
Stefanie Lindstaedt (KnowCenter, AT)
Martin Wolpers (Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology, DE)
Miguel-Angel Sicilia (University of Alcal·, ES)
Nikos Manouselis (Greek Research and Technology Network, GR),
Hendrik Drachsler (Open University of the Netherlands, NL)


IMPORTANT DATES
Submission of extended abstract (1000-2000 words): October 25th, 2010
Notification of acceptance of abstracts: November 15th, 2010
Submission of papers: December 17th, 2011
Workshop: March 30th to March 31st, 2011

IMPORTANT WEBSITES
dataTEL group space: http://www.teleurope.eu/pg/groups/9405/datatel/
The Alpine Rendez-Vous: http://www.stellarnet.eu/programme/wp3/rendez-vous
La Clusaz: http://www.laclusaz.com/hiver-winter10/index.php?lang=_uk

VENUE DETAILS
The second STELLAR Alpine Rendez-Vous (ARV) will take place in the French Alps in the Massif des Arravis at a beautiful ski resort called La Clusaz (hotel Alpen Roc). There will be some free time in the afternoons for TEL community building during winter activities. Funding for lodging and food will be available for a limited number of participants.

THE ALPINE RENDEZ-VOUS
This 2011 STELLAR Alpine Rendez-Vous is the second event of a series. It is organized and funded by STELLAR, a European network of excellence on learning technologies (http://www.stellarnet.eu/). The ARV is not a standard conference, but a set of independent workshops located at the same time in the same hotel. Four workshops run in parallel during the first part of the week and four during the second part. It's called "Rendez-Vous" because shared events are organized in the middle of the week (Tuesday evening) and because we set up breaks and meals in a way that promotes informal encounters between participants from the different workshops. Finally, it is called "Alpine" because it gathers scientists in the Alps, away from their workplace routines, in a place where snow is used as social facilitator."

Interesting opportunity: Professor of Digital Ecosystems

I've always enjoyed the drive of Tallinn University. This job application shows that they have both a good hunch of what is going on, but also style. Application deadline already on June 10, 2010. Tallinn - why not?

The Institute of Informatics invites applications for a position of Professor of Digital Ecosystems.

http://htk.tlu.ee/~priit/ecosystems_prof/prof.html

The Institute of Informatics has undertaken a major development by evolving international programmes and research groups in ICT.

The significant part of ongoing research in the institute is focusing on social media ecosystems in the context of e-learning, e-governance, e-participation and network enterprise. Our international R&D team is using mainly participatory design research approach and intervention studies to envisage and develop prototypes of the next generation social media tools, with the special attention to their semantic interoperability, identity management, user experience design, activity pattern mining and semantic annotation for metadata.

The successful applicant for a professorship is expected to make a significant contribution to the development of the Interactive Media and Knowledge Environments master curriculum as well as of the Information Society Technologies PhD curriculum. (S)he is also expected to supervise PhD and master students, to be a mentor for less experienced teachers of the institute, to develop new initiatives and to start a research programme related to the field of professorship.

The employment period for the position is for 5 years and shall undergo re-elections after that. Tenure at Tallinn University can be achieved after two successful periods. The new position has been established with a significant financial contribution from European Social Fund.

Details of the position and application procedures: Tallinn University Employment Rules Tallinn University, www.tlu.ee. Institute of Informatics, http://www.tlu.ee/informatics Deadline of applications: June 10, 2010. Expected start of the work January 1st, 2011.

Workshop on Recommender Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning (RecSysTEL)

Deadline extended: July 1st

This year's continuation for our previous work on SIRTEL-workshops is a jointly organised workshop called RecSysTEL in conjunction with:

• 4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2010)
• 5th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2010)

It takes place in Barcelona, Spain, 29-30 September 2010

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Joseph Konstan, GroupLens Research, University of Minnesota (USA)

AIM & TOPICS

Technology enhanced learning (TEL) aims to design, develop and test socio-technical innovations that will support and enhance learning practices of both individuals and organisations. It is an application domain that generally addresses all types of
technology research & development aiming to support of teaching and learning activities. Information retrieval is a pivotal activity in TEL, and the deployment of recommender systems has attracted increased interest during the past years.

Recommendation 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 challenge is to develop, deploy and evaluate systems that provide learners and teachers with meaningful guidance in order to help identify suitable learning resources from a potentially overwhelming variety of choices.

The aim of the Workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners that are working on topics related to the design, development and testing of recommender systems in educational
settings as well as present the current status of research in this area and create cross-disciplinary liaisons between the RecSys and EC-TEL communities. Overall, it aims to outline the rich potential of TEL as an application area for recommender systems, as well as expose participants to the challenges of developing such systems in a TEL context.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• User tasks to be supported by recommender systems in TEL
• Focus of recommendation in TEL
• Requirements for the deployment of TEL recommender systems
• Publicly available data sets for TEL recommender systems
• Recommendation algorithms and systems for TEL
• Transfer of successful algorithms and systems from other application areas
• Evaluation criteria and methods for TEL recommender systems

IMPORTANT DATES

• 20 June 2010: Submissions
• 16 July 2010: Notifications
• 1 August 2010: Camera-ready of accepted papers
• 29-30 September 2010: RecSysTEL Workshop in Barcelona

DATATEL CHALLENGE

Published datasets in recommender systems, such as the MovieLens and EachMovie ones, are very often used in experimental testing of new recommendation algorithms.
Very few datasets are publicly made available online for TEL applications.
Thus, it is not possible yet for TEL recommender systems' researchers to apply and benchmark their algorithms on existing, public datasets.

To this end, the dataTEL Theme Team of the European STELLAR Network of Excellence (http://www.teleurope.eu/pg/groups/9405/datatel/) is sponsoring the dataTEL Challenge: a call for TEL datasets that invites research groups to submit existing datasets from TEL applications that can be used as input for TEL recommender systems (e.g. ratings, tags, bookmarks).

The winner of the dataTEL Challenge will receive a best TEL dataset award.

More about the dataTEL Challenge:
http://www.teleurope.eu/pg/pages/view/9519/
http://adenu.ia.uned.es/workshops/recsystel2010/datatel.htm


SUBMISSIONS

The Workshop accepts a variety of submission types:

• Full papers: 12 pages
• Short papers: 6 pages
• System/service demos: 2 pages
• TEL Data sets: 2 pages and data set file (specs/format to be announced soon)

Papers should be original and not previously submitted to other venues.
Submission will be available through the EasyChair submission system:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=recsystel2010

If you haven't an EasyChair account yet, you'll be asked to create it before you can access the RecSysTEL'10 page.


PUBLICATION

Workshop proceedings will be published in a seperate volume by a publisher
that will be announced soon.

In addition, authors of best full papers will be invited to submit a revised version
of their manuscripts for a Special Issue in a prestigious international journal
such as the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies.


STEERING COMMITTEE

• Jesus G. Boticario, aDeNu - Spanish National University for Distance Education (Spain)
• Peter Brusilovksy, University of Pittsburgh (USA)
• Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
• Denis Gillet, Swiss Federal Institute of Lausanne (Switzerland)
• Stefanie Lindstaedt, Know-Center Graz (Austria)
• Peter Scott, Open University (UK)
• Riina Vuorikari, European Schoolnet (Belgium)
• Fridolin Wild, Open University (UK)
• Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer FIT (Germany)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

• Liliana Ardissono, Universita di Torino (Italy)
• Katrin Borcea-Pfitzmann, Dresden University of Technology (Germany)
• Julien Broisin, IRIT Universite Paul Sabatier (France)
• Carlos Delgado Kloos, Carlos III University of Madrid (Spain)
• Stavros Demetriadis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece)
• Jon Dron, Athabasca University (Canada)
• Rosta Farzan, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
• Alexander Felfernig, Graz University of Technology (Austria)
• Rick D. Hangartner, Strands (USA)
• Eelco Herder, L3S (Germany)
• Tsukasa Hirashima, Hiroshima University (Japan)
• Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen University (Germany)
• Martin Memmel, DFKI GmbH (Germany)
• Pedro J. MuÒoz-Merino, Carlos III University of Madrid (Spain)
• Brandon Muramatsu, MIT (USA)
• Wolfgang Nejdl - L3S & Leibniz Universit‰t Hannover (Germany)
• Xavier Ochoa, Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral (Ecuador)
• Mimi Recker, Utah State University (USA)
• Christoph Rensing, TU Darmstadt (Germany)
• Hans-Christian Schmitz, Fraunhofer FIT (Germany)
• Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcala (Spain)
• Sergey Sosnovsky,DFKI GmbH (Germany)

CO-CHAIRS

• Nikos Manouselis, Greek Research & Technology Network (Greece)
• Hendrik Drachsler, Open Universiteit Nederlands (The Netherlands)
• Katrien Verbert, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
• Olga C. Santos, aDeNu - Spanish National University for Distance Education (Spain)

ABOUT RecSys 2010 and EC-TEL 2010

The 4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2010) is the premier annual event
on research and applications of recommender technologies. It will promote a close interaction
among practitioners and researchers, reaching a wider range of participants
including those from Europe and Asia. See http://recsys.acm.org/2010/ for details.


The 5th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2010) brings together technological developments, learning models, and implementations of new and innovative approaches to training and education. The conference traditionally explores how the synergy of multiple disciplines can provide new, more effective and more especially more sustainable, technology-enhanced learning solutions to learning problems. See http://www.ectel2010.org for details.

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What does it mean for a school to self-organise?

I was taken back to this initial idea, can schools self-organise?, after reading an article by Weston & Blain (2010) called "The end of techno-critique: the naked truth about 1:1 laptop initiatives and educational change". The reading of the article is of course related to my current work where we are running a large-scale 1:1 initiative in 6 European countries. At the end of the article, which I absolutely recommend reading, the authors conclude:

...1:1 initiatives can be fertile ground for the creation of new-paradigm schools, the schools that are self-organizing. The widespread availability of laptop computers can be a driver for the more expansive efforts that must happen in order for schools to meet the educational needs of all students....While the original mission of 1:1 laptop computer initiatives did not include shifting of educational paradigm, turning those initiatives toward the creation of self-organizing schools may be the the way forward for techno advocates and critics alike.

It's a lot about "change" in general, and especially the change that has to take place at the whole school level, not only by individual teachers, which still seem to be a trend when looking at the ICT implementations.

In our eTwinning, for example, we have more than 90 000 teachers signed up in Europe, which can be considered a good success (about 1.85% of all European teachers!). The naked truth comes out, though, when you look at the penetration by schools: about 75% of the schools have only one single teachers signed up in eTwinning, whose mission statement is "The community for schools in Europe". The community of schools build by single teachers who do not collaborate within their own schools?

So back to self-organisation - what would it mean for a school to self-organise? The hypothesis that I used for my PhD to study self-organisation within learning resource repositories was this:

The main hypothesis is that the self-organisation aspect of a social tagging system on a learning resource portal helps users discover learning resources more efficiently. Moreover, user-generated tags make the system, which operates in a multilingual context, more robust and flexible.

In this case, we could hypothesise:

The self-organisation aspect of a school helps learners learn more efficiently. Moreover, it makes the school more robust and flexible.

Bonabeau & Meyer (2001) use the following terms when talking about social insects and how they self-organise:

• Self-organisation (activities are neither centrally controlled nor locally supervised);
• Flexibility (the colony can adapt to a changing environment);
• Robustness (even when one or more individuals fail, the group can still perform its tasks).

Adapted to a school, these would be interpreted as:

• Self-organisation (activities are neither centrally controlled nor locally supervised);
• Flexibility (the school can adapt to a changing environment);
• Robustness (even when one or more individuals fail, the school can still perform its tasks).

Wow, that would be powerful, or what!?? Could 1:1 really ever help schools to self-organise? I guess this is one more reason to keep working hard on our 1:1 pilot. The next questions would be; how can a school self-organise? and what is required for a school to self-organise?

When I first started to think of this question, I was attending The Big Ideas Fest in California organised by ISKME. I was thinking of what would be A REALLY big idea for education. I think this is a pretty darn big one...

Is eTwinning socially contagious?

Last weekend I joined more than 500 eTwinners (www.etwinning.net) in the 5th annual conference that took place in Sevilla. Quite a fiesta! I co-ran 3 workshops which all had something to do with social networks, more or less. I jokingly tell teachers that I'd like them all get an eTwinning virus and spread it around when they go home. This "virus" is, of course, a good one (e.g. innovative use of web in ed.context) and it spreads through the social network that teachers have created by being part of eTwinning. From where my question: is, or can, eTwinning be socially contagious?

Often times nowadays when people talk about social networks, they actually talk about social media tools or web 2.0 stuff, where it is made easy to express your social ties and make them visible to others (can I friend you?). Underneath all that "stuff" lies the structure of the social network which is of interest to me. I consider a network

as a conduit for the propagation of information or the exertion of influence, and an individual's place in the overall pattern of relations determines what information that person has access to or, correspondingly, whom he or she is in a position to influence. A person's social role therefore depends not only on the groups to which he or she belongs but also on his or her position within those groups. (Watts, 2003, p. 48)

Moreover, Watts goes on to explain yet a different way to view the network, namely through weak ties, "which can be thought of as a link between individual- and group-level analysis in that they are created by individuals, but their presence affects the status and performance not just of the individual who "own" them but of the entire group to which they belong." - and this all leads to the new science of networks.

Duncan Watts's book Six Degrees (2003) is one of my favourite science-tainment (like edutainment) book. I always enjoy picking it up and re-reading it, I seem to understand some of the passages in a new light. Today I re-read the stuff about differences of spreading a virus and "social contagion", like a fab that spreads or cascades throughout the whole social network.

There are some similarities, like the fact that each individual has a different threshold (some get the virus easier than others) and that you have people around to spread it to ("to whom she or he pays attention to"). But "social contagion", unlike biological one, does not take place if the network is too well connected!

So when everyone is paying attention to many others, no single innovator, acting alone, can activate any one of them. ... In social contagion, remember, it is the relative number of "infected" versus "uninfected" - active versus inactive - neighbors that matter. (Watts, 2003, p. 240)

Studying fabs or innovations (e.g. the use of web in ed.context), the question is about the moment when the fab stops being a niche thing among early adapters and when it leaps to the larger general population. I too often have a feeling that eTwinning "preaches to the converted". So, I'm keen on understanding how eTwinning can step out of being a nice of early adapters and get the others "contaminated". Someone aired a good comment in the conference, we should not take eTwinners as a representative sample of educational community in general.

Step one: who is infected?


I ran a few analysis to get a better picture. It's hard to find the number of schools or teachers in all eTwinning countries. After some digging I found OECD's Stat extracts which has lots of good data, and was able to find the number of teaching staff for 23 out of 32 countries (close to OECD's definition for EU19). I think that's a pretty good proxy to go by, however, not sure how accurately our data aligns with them. I used the date as described in the image for 2007.

The data says there was 6 210 411.57 teachers (I love the 0.57 teacher!) working in those countries, out of which 76 367 have registered in eTwinning by this date. On average, each country has 1.83% of their teachers infected by the "eTwinning virus", median was 1.42%. The countries above median in descending order are: Estonia, Iceland, Slovak Republic, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Finland, Greece, Poland (still above average, too!), Spain, Luxembourg, Portugal and Sweden. Are you surprised? I am a bit...

The countries below median were: the United Kingdom, Turkey, Norway, Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Hungary, Germany, France, Belgium and Austria.

Well, my question is not about the success of eTwinning initiative itself, but it's more about understanding what are the conditions (globally and locally), what are the individual thresholds and when can we expect the cascading effect to take place (it's all about one or more vulnerable neighbors who have one or more vulnerable neighbors who have...).

These are typical questions that people interested in the new science of networks ask, and I want to know more how it happens within educational context. I think eTwinning is a good virus to study that!

We've just stated the TeLLNet project with some top-notch partners, so I'm looking forward to dwell into this problematic later again!

From what are big educational ideas made?

Silicon valley is an iconic example when people talk about innovation. To breed innovation, it's important to remember that it's not only about individuals with ideas, but about the right conditions, like a "large number of cutting-edge entrepreneurs, engineers and venture capitalists" (wikipedia), in the case of the Valley. On top of that, you add a flavour of Californian sea, sun and wine, and you season it with a bit of pioneering attitude, and voila!

I'm today in California for theBig Ideas Fest.

The three-day Big Ideas Fest is an immersion into collaboration and design with the focus on inspiring and modeling cutting-edge thinking in K-20 education.

The programme and the names of speakers are pretty impressive! I think there will be an interesting buzz in the air, as the event brings together cutting-edge educationalists, "doers and shakers" who are interested in brainstorming on big ideas that are needed to move education in the right direction. The session is starting in a few seconds, so I'll be reporting back later.

My degree of Doctor at Open Universiteit Nederland

"..you hereby receive all rights associated with the degree of Doctor either by law or custom"

My Doctorate Board and me with the degree and a huge smile - what a day!

From left Prof. dr. G. Conole, Prof. dr. A. Littlejohn, Prof. dr. B. Berendt , me, Prof. dr. P.B. Sloep, Prof. dr. E.J.R. Koper (supervisor), Prof. dr. J. van Marle (chairman) and Beadle E. Vinken. And no, even if I'm a doctor now, I don't get to wear a funny hat!

I thank everyone involved in my research and all who sent me kind wishes and congratulations!

my 10 minutes of fame

View more presentations from Riina Vuorikari.

Slides and PhD download

Future privacy and security resaerch challenges in online social networks

I attended this workshop a couple of days ago. It was an interesting mix of ppl with different backgrounds; computer scientists, researchers, lawyers, some practitioners & users like a SN provider, some artists who run social network services, and my interest was of course teachers' social network services like our eTwinning platform (more than 70000 teachers).

I enjoyed the keynote by Ronald Leenes from Tilburg University. A few projects that he mentioned, PrimeLife (Bringing sustainable privacy and identity management to future networks and services) and BROAD (Broadening the Range Of Awareness in Data protection).

EUN is now running a http://www.dataprotectionday.eu/ campaign, here is my favourite film about it!

Most scholarly opponent - PhD Ceremony in OUNL Nov 13 2009

It's pretty exiting to prepare for the PhD ceremony. There are all kinds of little things to think about. I've never gotten married, but it sure sounds like the same thing. In the Netherlands, for example, we need to have paranymphs at the PhD ceremony.

Yes, I know, it sounds like I need to have two dwarfs by my side there, but apparently they are like a bride's maid or a best man. With a twist that in case there was a heated fight between me and the opponents during the defence, the paranymphs would defend me with swords. Or, you know, something similar. So far, all what I've seen is that they hand over a class of water, but - we've ain't seen nothing yet..

Another thing is the manner of speech, I am, for example, to address the members in my committee by saying "most scholarly opponent", if they are a professor, otherwise just "scholarly opponent" is fine. And they call me "esteemed candidate". Pretty theatrical :)

Finally, I needed to prepare 10 statements in advance, they are called stellingen. 4 of them are about my thesis and the rest are more general (some can even be a bit funny, see #10). But in general, they all should be something that I can defend.

The purpose of this is that when the opponent has not had time to read my thesis and come up with a question, they can read one from the list. This way they can have a well formulated question to ask. My advantage - I can prepare for it in advance. Kind of a funny game! It seems to me that the more bold the statement is, the better chances there are that one of the opponents reads it out loud. Let's see...

1. A learning resource portal in a multilingual context can be made more robust and flexible by interrelating conventional metadata and social tags. (this thesis)

2. Socal tags, represented as a triple (user,item,tag), open more sophisticated avenues for resource discovery across contexts, especially when it applies to cross-language and cross-country discoveries. (this thesis)

3. The triple (user,item,tag) can be used as a parameter to measure links between cross-language content that reside on heterogeneous repositories. It can be created a posteriori to content creation and link-setting, and it can be used to support and enhance a new type of link-following behaviour by end-users. (this thesis)

4. The discovery strategies based on Social Information Retrieval (SIR) methods allow users to spend less effort in finding relevant resources on a multilingual portal. (this thesis)

5. The notion of learning resources as content is too limiting.

6. Even if the current trend in information seeking behaviour is the Web, interpersonal ties still drive and support information seeking. Social search should be considered beyond individual’s Web-behaviour.

7. While studying the impact of new information and communication technologies on education and attainment, studying their out-of-school use should be considered as important as their in-school use.

8. In Technology-Enhanced Learning, like in other lo-fi high tech, the next best thing is “good ‘nuf” for most users.

9. Languages both unite and divide people.

10. Anyone involved in decision-making for educational purposes should read science fiction.

Educational take - danah boyd: American Teens & Social Media

danah boyd has put something really important in words in this little video, it's related to the use of social media (applicable to all ICTs and mobile technologies) in education. If in a hurry, fast-forward to about 5.30 of the video:

Teens need to know boundaries, norms and how society works, and this should be taught through using social media, i.e. the tools that they use anyway .

The reason that "because kids are doing it" it not a good reason to start teaching about social media in schools. "Pedagogy and understanding of the tools, are two key pieces of knowledge that teachers must have before entertaining the idea of bringing social media into the classroom. Information sharing is relevant to education..."

A valid point made for teachers continuous professional development!

Invitation to the public defence of my PhD

Hurrah, finally the day when I can announce the public defence of my PhD: Nov 13 2009 at 13.30. You are welcome to join the public defence of my PhD at the OUNL premises in Heerlen, NL!

Today I also submitted my manuscript to print. Here you can see the cover of the publication, which is also downloadable here.

Run of the day:
13.30 Public defence in OUNL
15.00 Reception (all welcome, RSVP)
19.30 Dinner in Brussels (RSVP)

Impact of ICT use on educational performance

The question the top-dog politicians nowadays ask is the impact of ICT on educational performance. Especially in the school sector, this has been the trendy question since a few years, when the policy makers realised that they want to see some return on their investment (i.e. all the hardware put in schools). My favourite EUN report on recent research is The ICT Impact Report (01/2007).

This week at the OECD's New Millennium Learner conference South-Koreans presented another interesting study towards this direction. Prof. Heo's presentation is available here, check the pages from 20 onwards for the results. The study included 10% of the 10th graders in South-Korea (1071 students, random sampling). The design of the study looked at the use of ICT

• Place: in-school and out-of-school use of ICT
• Purpose: learning vs. entertainment use of ICT
• Context: individual use vs. social use of ICT

Educational performance was divided into:

• Cognitive domain
• Affective domain
• Socio-cultural domain
  

Significant impact was found on educational performance with:

• Out-of school ICT use
  
• ICT use for learning
  
• ICT use in individual context

Note, in-school use did not yield any significant impact :/ More interestingly, out-of-school use of ICT for learning purposes had a positive correlation (r=0.520, p= 0.00) with cognitive domain of educational performance, which shows good news for informal context of learning.

Mindmap from Social Information Retrieval for Technology Enhanced Learning workshop

Best Paper Award in ICWL'09

The paper that I presented in ICWL'09, Are tags from Mars and descriptors from Venus? A study on the ecology of educational resource metadata, was awarded the Best Paper Award. That was pretty dam cool! The picture below shows how psyched I was to pick up the award at the gala dinner. You'll find the paper from here and a news release from here.

The picture is by Kevin Chen from RWTH, Aachen.

Ok, this is an inside joke: I've named the pic "la vengeance se mange très-bien froide", for those who know the story, you guessed that the timing of this award could not have been better! Thanks for the co-authors and the jury :)

Obama's OER vs. EU's OER

Checking the news about Obama's announced initiative where a $500-million-dollar online-education plan is outlined with the idea that the money will buy online course material that is made freely available. The person who is pushing the plan within the administration, Mr. Smith, has previously worked with OER in Hewlett Foundation, which has put some $ 70 million in last years to support Open Educational Resources worldwide.

EU has put huge amounts on different research and development progremmes around digital educational resources since late nineteens, and especially under Lisbon 2010 agenda. I checked some figures just for recent times:

• FP7 progrmamme for '09-'10 has €151 million euros for digital libraries and TEL
• LPP puts € 7 billion for the programme from '07 to '13, more than a billion a year
• eContent Plus has significant budgets also
  

The big difference is that the EU seldom actually puts money in developing the content, but actually innovation and services around the content. I think the reasoning is that the content comes from publishers and more and more from end-users, and they do not want to rock that boat too much. I actually cannot think of a single EU-project where the content creation is paid by EU. For example the big OUUK initiative was also funded by Hewlett Foundations, which nowadays gets the world-wide claim to OER fame.

This setting could offer an interesting comparison study in a few years time: do we see more uptake with content that is professionally developed and made available to educators and learners (i.e. Obama's model), or do we see that the EU model, where the focus is on services, but the content is not always up to par, (finally) produces some uptake?

I wanted to find the journal article mentioned in the post, but could not

In January he published an article in the journal Sciencelaying out the dream of "a 21st-century library" composed of Web-based open courses for high-school and college students. The courses would be laced with multimedia features and personalized with feedback from computer programs that track student performance. The language coming out of the White House and Education Department today echoes some of the concepts in Mr. Smith's article.

Social media: narcissism, ADHA, stalking

This is a pretty accurate depiction of the what goes on with the users of social media. It makes a good-looking t-shirt!

Personalisation vs. Social

I've been thinking of this personalisation-thing a lot lately. I quite cannot get my head around it, so this blog post is just to mull over the ideas.

By personalisation it is meant that, for example on a learning resource portal, the offer is tailor made for one of the users of the system. There are three commonly known ways of doing this:

1. Based on self-proclaimed profile (e.g. you say you teach math, so your services are personlised towards math)
   
2. Based on collaborative filtering e.g. ratings (like-minded users, ppl who agree in the past tend to agree in the future) or content-based filtering
   
3. Based on behaviour (e.g. other teachers who used this resource, also used xx)
   

In the cases 1 and 2, the idea is that there is a profile for you, whereas no: 3 can be used for any user (e.g. this is what Amazon does for any user regardless if they are logged in or not). With the first two cases, we can state that this type of personalisation is often cumbersome and labour-intensive, the problem is how to get that information from users (which creates cold start problem for users, and is also related to cold start problem of resources).

Also, not all the users are always interested in doing the work of filling in a profile or rating resources. In one of my studies (Vuorikari, Sillaots, Panzavolta, Koper, 2009) we found very different types of users behaviour, in this case related to how ppl tag (which could be also used for collaborative filtering).

About 33% of ppl tagged content (the arrows going away from the user group in the image), 32% used tags for searching but did not tag themselves (the arrows going towards a user), whereas 35% of ppl did not tag nor used tags at all (in the image the arrow going from LOM towards the group indicating that they used LOM based search methods only).

In this case, I'm interested in the 32% group, who clearly got benefit from tagging that other folks did, but did not do any work themselves (kinda freeriders, if you wish, but I don't mean to be negative).

If we were to use the tagging and bookmarking information to construct a user profile of the users and further use it for personalisation (no: 1 and 2 in the list above), we would be only able to do it for the group of taggers, i.e. 33%. The benefits could only be reaped by that group too, since for the rest of them, we have no profiling information to be used for personalisation.

However, a social tagging system is more about creating "personalisation" for all the users of the system, regardless if we know anything about them and they are willing to put in the time to create a profile and feed it in. It's about making social navigation trails visible to every user of the system, instead of going for "personalisation".

What I think is really cool is that we've shown that we more than doubled the amount of ppl who took advantage of contributions, i.e. from 27% who tag and use tags for navigation to 59% (that is adding the group of 32% who use tags but don't tag).

My assumption is that the rest would not even care about recommendations, etc., as they seem to formulate their searches in a rather acknowledgble way (40% formulate advanced searches; 38% only browse categories and 30% do both).

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Some other thoughts about personalisation:

• There are things that I dig, like Amazon, when it tells me "ppl who bought this book also bought xx". Thing thing is, though, that is the stuff that generally makes any user's life better on Amazon. It is not that they personalise the thing for me only, the unique Riina, the one and only, but it is something that makes any users experience on Amazon better.
  
  
• the problem with personalisation often is that there needs to be a detailed profile of you that is based on detailed user model that is based on some abstract model that some obscure committee came out with in the 70's. Ok, that's maybe a bit exaggerated, but you get the point - there is a model where you are fitted.
  
  
• What if I don't want to be personalised? What if I want to do the same thing as my buddies do; listen to same music as they do, study the same stuff as they do and go shopping with them? I want to share my life and experiences with other people around me because, guess what, through that type of sharing and doing stuff together, I feel related to them, I have things to talk with them and we form a community together. And it is really important for me to be part of that community, because it's part of who I am and helps me to reflect on what's out there.
  
  
• Is peronalisation really personalised? It's not actually. By making things personalised to me, what is actually happening is "un-personlisation" of me. My taste is guided to the direction of all the other users, so I am actually being socialised! My personal music recommendations are actually very similar to other listeners, and eventually, it's all going to be the same taste!! Of course, unless there is randomness which offers serendipity.
  
  
• Lately with all these micro-messaging things where ppl post their "mood" or what they are doing online ( e.g. I should be tweeting right now: "I'm writing a blog post" and simultaneously have it up on my Facebook), it's kinda funny that they feel this urge to yell out to all what they are doing in their über-personlised world.