Event: Rethinking Learning and Employment at a time of Economic Uncertainty

Rethinking Learning and Employment at a time of Economic Uncertainty

Manchester, November 19th – 20th, 2009

The pace of social, technical and economic change in a global environment requires increasing adaptability and flexibility in:
* businesses and organisations,
* the people who work in them, and
* the systems which support them.
This need has been intensified by the current economic crisis.

The TENCompetence project has responded to the need to stimulate and facilitate professional lifelong learning and competence development through the design and development of an organizational and technical infrastructure. Human resource development, e-learning, as well as knowledge management form the pillars underlying this state-of-art infrastructure.

During the last four years the TENCompetence project has been developing and implementing a suite of free, open source and standards compliant applications which together form the Personal Competence Manager.

The vision, rationale, implementation usage of the TENCompetence infrastructure in different contexts will form the focus of a two-day workshop in Manchester, England 19th-20th November 2009.

The workshop will offer a mix of keynotes, research paper sessions, practical workshops focused around the project’s contributions, and round tables.

Location: The TENCompetence Workshop will take place in the Radisson Edwardian Hotel in Manchester (formerly the historic Manchester Free Trade Hall).

Participation is free of charge.

Who should attend this workshop?

This workshop will be of particular interest to HR professionals and consultants, employment specialists, skills development agencies, researchers and anyone with a working interest in professional competence development.

Information & registration

Follow this link for further information and a draft programme
For contributions to the programme please contact Dai Griffiths.
Please follow this link to register for the workshop.
Please note that numbers are limited.

Special Issue on “Technology Support for Self-Organized Learners”

The Educational Technology & Society journal has just published a special issue on “Technology Support for Self-Organized Learners”. I’m the co-author of a paper included in this issue, titled “Self-Development of Competences for Social Inclusion Using the TENCompetence Infrastructure” whose abstract is the following:

This paper describes a pilot study centred on the technology-enhanced self-development of competences in lifelong learning education carried out in the challenging context of the Association of Participants Àgora. The pilot study shows that the use of the TENCompetence infrastructure, i.e. in this case the Personal Development Planner tool, provides various kinds of benefits for adult participants with low educational profiles and who are traditionally excluded from the use of innovative learning technologies and the knowledge society. The selforganized training supported by the PDP tool aims at allowing the learners to create and control their own learning plans based on their interests and educational background including informal and non-formal experiences. In this sense, the pilot participants had the opportunity to develop and improve their competences in English language (basic and advanced levels) and ICT competence profiles which are mostly related to functional and communicative skills. Besides, the use of the PDP functionalities, such as the self-assessment, the planning and the self-regulating elements allowed the participants to develop reflective skills. Pilot results also provide indications for future developments in the field of technology support for self-organized learners. The paper introduces the context and the pilot scenario, indicates the evaluation methodology applied and discusses the most significant findings derived from the pilot study.

This is the reference: Louys, A., Hernández-Leo, D., Schoonenboom, J., Lemmers, R., & Pérez-Sanagustín, M. (2009). Self-Development of Competences for Social Inclusion Using the TENCompetence Infrastructure. Educational Technology & Society, 12 (3), 70–81.

Enhance your audiovisual production competences using the TENCompetence infrastructure

The TENCompetence and the SALERO European projects have established an on-line community pilot where you can develop competences and share knowledge with other professionals around audiovisual production and automatic broadcasting using the new NINOS Platform.

The NINOS Platform is a set of tools for automatic and semi-automatic generation of audiovisual pieces.

The training materials (including video tutorials, 3D characters and animations) can be addressed freely by the members of the community. This service has been already launched and will be available for at least four months. In June assessment activities will also be published. Those completing these activities will receive a certificate.

We would like to inform you about this opportunity to increase your audiovisual production competences and knowledge, and get to know and cooperate with other professionals and scholars in this domain. Registration for the community is free of charge since the pilot will be used to validate the underlying TENCompetence infrastructure and is part of the Training tasks of SALERO.

You can find more information and register to the community at: http://pilot-ninos.upf.edu

For screenshots and videos please follow the links:

http://pilot-ninos.upf.edu/ninosweb/imgs/programEditor%20ScreenShot.jpg
http://pilot-ninos.upf.edu/ninosweb/imgs/ProgramEditor_video.mov

IMS Learning Impact Awards

The TENCompetence LD & QTI toolkit (authoring, runtime) has been honoured with the IMS Learning Impact 2009 Best in Category Award “Most Innovative New Realization of Standards“.

See this video!

The complete list of award winners is available at IMS GLC website.

e-learning conferences

A quite complete list of e-learning conferences can be found here. Thanks to the persons compiling and sharing the list!

e-learning patterns workshop

A promisingly interesting workshop on e-learning patterns will take place in Tuebingen in 4-6 March.

TENCompetence Winterschool 2009

I’m currently at the TENCompetence Wintershool in Innsbruck.
These are the slides I used yesterday in my lecture:

Special issue on Comparing Educational Modelling Languages on the “Planet Game” Case Study

Dec 2008: JIME Special Issue: Special issue on Comparing Educational Modelling Languages on the “Planet Game” Case Study

From the Introduction: “The aim of this special issue is to share and confront approaches (i.e., models, tools and methodologies) through modelling experiences of collaborative learning activities. There is a starting point focused on a common case study, called “Planet Game” or “Astronomy Game”, which is modelled and implemented with a very specific approach in every paper. ” This issue of 9 papers is edited by Laurence Vignollet, Christian Martel, and Daniel Burgos.

Japan

I went to Japan in November 2008. This is a selection of the photos I took there.

I hope you like them! 

Holidays in Extremadura

This summer I’ve spent most of my holidays in Extremadura, the region of Spain in which I was born. The specific city is Plasencia.
It is situated in a wonderful place, part of “El Valle del Jerte” and very close to “La Vera”, “Las Hurdes”…

After months travelling around Europe, I’ve finally managed to discover again Extremadura: “Reserva natural de Garganta de los Infiernos” (or “Los Pilones”, in “El Valle del Jerte”), see this picture I took last week , Trujillo, Mérida or the “Parque Natural del Monfragüe“, see the picture that is now (temporarily) in the header and also this picture Isn’t it outstanding?