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

Last week I attended the ICALT 2008 Conference in Santander. I have always enjoyed the nice environment of this conference which provides an opportunity for meeting many colleagues (now also friends) working aroud Technology-Enhanced Learning. Some of these friends attended also the LAMS conference in Cádiz, so that we could continue going out after the conference for dinner, etc. We really had fun! I still keep laughing because one of the (many) jokes by Lluis Vicent (U. Ramon Llull) talking about Ernie Ghiglione (LAMS project manager) when being in Cádiz: (for Spanish people) “¿Cuál es el colmo de dedicarse al eLearning? Llamarse “el’Ernie”

My contributions to the conferences have ranged from two full papers (“Supporting Distance Learning Activities and Social Interaction: a Case Study“, “InstanceCollage: a Graphical Tool for the Particularization of Role/group Structures in Pattern-based IMS-LD Collaborative Scripts“) and one short paper (“Social Structures Representations as aid for effective creation and reuse of CSCL scripts according to a problem-solving approach to ID“) to the participation in the workshop “Crafting didactic materials based on IMS LD: from requirements to evaluation” This is the presentation I used in the workshop:

Eloy Villasclaras (from Valladolid) completed the presentation with a demo of webCollage, a new version of Collage which is Web and includes new patterns (not only at the level of the learning flow, but also at the level of activities and resources) of assessment.

I’m now at the 2008 European LAMS Conference in Cádiz, Spain. I’m enjoying the presentations, the place (Cádiz is wonderful) and the community of people working around Learning Design that is participating in the conference. I’m looking forward to today’s conference dinner; we will be watching the European football Championship match Spain vs. Russia!

I’ve presented (in Spanish on Wednesday and English today) some innovations on which GTI is working with the support of the TENCompetence project.

This is our short paper: D. Hernandez-Leo, A. Moghneih, T. Navarrete, J. Blat, S. Gilabert, P. Santos & M. Perez-Sanagustin, From planning learning paths to assessment: Innovations to the practical benefits of Learning Design, 2008 European LAMS Conference, Cádiz, Spain, pp. 139-140. (Slides)

Abstract: The Interactive Technologies Group is working on several research lines (mainly in the context of the TENCompetence project) aiming at innovating and enhancing the technological support to Learning Design. In particular, GTI is working on three main topics: planning learning paths, flexibility in the enactment of learning designs and innovative forms of assessment. With the explosion of educational offers, keeping track and planning learning paths has become a real challenge. GTI’s approach to tackle this problem consists in a tool that visualizes educational units and enables the exploration of large datasets. It considers three levels of interaction (overview, planning, close up) with enables the user to converge on proper options. On the other hand, learning paths are composed of educational units which should be designed considering appropriate methodologies. GTI has selected the dialogic learning approach to study flexibility issues. This methodology entails that the learners are able to participate in the (on-going) design of the units. This situation demands a different approach to the current IMS LD implementations in which editors are not integrated in runtime systems and where the designs need to be planned in advance. To approach this problem GTI has developed an LD template (based on dialogic learning) that can be directly integrated in runtime systems. Moreover, IMS LD can be jointly used with IMS QTI to incorporate test-based assessment. GTI has extended the existing support for enacting QTI tests and is currently integrating this support into an LD system. Furthermore and with the aim of providing new forms of interaction beyond those provided by QTI, GTI has proposed to integrate Web 2.0 services with QTI items. As a first example, GTI has developed a QTI assessment engine enhanced with web maps from Google Maps, which enables the user to interact with the map to answer questions.

Next week (11.4.2008) our paper, Hernández-Leo, D., Pérez-Sanagustín, M., Santos, P., Sayago, S., Griffiths, D., Blat, J., “Dialogic learning and interactive groups: an IMS LD template integrated in runtime systems”, will be presented at the TENCompetence Open Workshop in Madrid, Spain.

Abstract

Dialogic learning and interactive groups have proved to be a useful methodological approach appliedin educational situations for lifelong adult learners. The principles of this approach stress the importance of dialogue and equal participation also when designing the training activities. This paper adopts these principles as the basis for a configurable template that can be integrated in runtime systems. The template is formulated as a meta-UoL which can be interpreted by IMS Learning Design players. This template serves as a guide to flexibly select and edit the activities at runtime (on the fly). The meta-UoL has been used successfully by a practitioner so as to create a real-life example, with positive and encouraging results.

The paper is available at http://dspace.ou.nl/handle/1820/1213.

I have been travelling (for “B”usiness) the last two weeks to two different cities whose names start with “B”. Birmingham and Berlin, both are really nice cities but I have to say that I feel special attraction to Berlin (it is an interesting city indeed).

In Birmingham I attended the JISC CETIS Conference 2007, Beyond Standards – Holistic Approaches to Educational Technology and Interoperability. It is well-known that there is a lot of activity in the UK regarding innovation in Technology Enhanced Learning and I could testify that participating in some of the interesting discussions that took place during the conference.

Because of the European Award in CSCL with which I was co-honored within the Kaleidoscope Network of Excellence, I was invited to the Kaleidoscope Symposium in Berlin. It was really intensive and interesting (with demos, presentations, discussions, etc.) and there were more than 260 people from 35 different countries. Berlin also provided me with the opportunity to meet people from Valladolid, which made me happy during these days.

BTW, the photo that is now in the header shows a view of “Serra de Cabrera” (in Catalonia), where I also spent one of last weekends…

I have just arrived from a really long, long trip through time: from the 2nd millennium B.C. to the year 2080. Before attending the EC-TEL 2007 conference in Crete I spent a weekend in Athens. There is no doubt that anything is a good excuse to experience The Acropolis. Though crowded of tourist and scaffolds, the shapes, the colors and even the smell of such outstanding ancient constructions enable imagining in situ the evolution, life and destruction which dominated the pre-eminent monument. This time I also manage to visit the Museum of Cycladic Art. Its exhibition includes Greek artifacts from the Bronze Age (2nd millennium BC) through to the Late Roman period (4th century AD). However, the museum is well-known because of the archaeological remains of the Cycladic culture, active on the Cyclades, a cluster of islands in central Aegean, between 3200 and 2000 B.C. The collection contains 350 objects representative of every phase or type of artifact those islanders have left us, be that marble sculpture, pottery, or metal ware. Among the exhibits, the marble figurines, mostly female, claim prime position (see the temporally-available picture in the header). It was simply fantastic to observe the figurines of the 3rd millennium B.C!

After the weekend in Athens I move to Crete to work (arggg, yes! I need to have a less responsible personality in order to fully enjoy the vacation-like locations of some conferences :S). So it is, I attended the whole conference. I would say that the quality of the conference was good in general with papers dealing mainly with social software, metadata and adaptation (among others, of course). You might want to have a look to its related wiki and blog, which I find very useful. However, I am no so content with the organization. I am sure that they have worked a lot and everything run well during the conference. But as far as the management of papers are concerned I am quite disappointed. The fact is that in the CFP states that “Proceedings will be published in Springer LNCS… The page limit is 15 pages for full papers, 6 pages for posters” and that in the e-mail notifying the acceptance of my contribution they said that “it has been accepted for poster presentation at EC-TEL’07, and for publication as short paper (6 pages) in the conference proceedings”. To my surprise, my paper and the rest of papers being presented as posters have not been included in Springer LNCS but on CEUR-WS.org, which is not obviously the same!

Anyway I appreciate the efforts that manage to make the poster session proceedings available, and this is our contribution:

Hernández-Leo D., Burgos, D., Tattersall, C., Koper, R., Representing Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning macro-scripts using IMS Learning Design, Second European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073, online CEUR-WS.org/Vol-280
The poster is also available here and this is an extended report of the research, which I completed in a research stay at the Open University of the Netherlands last year.

One of the original aspects of the conference was the two keynote speakers, Bruce Sterling and Hermann Maurer, both are science fiction writers! We got two books of H. Maurer at the conference. One of them is “The Paranet”. This book makes us think over what would happen if the ‘Net’, the universal computer network of the year 2080, collapses unexpectedly and completely. I am currently reading the book and how the chaos starts to reign all over the world. More about this book would be probably the topic of a future post.