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.

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

I hope you like them! 

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?

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.

Hello! (¡Hola, hola!)

I inaugurate this blog one month and a half after the defense of my doctoral dissertation As you may imagine this is one of many things I have in my to-do-list-after-the-thesis. I’m afraid that I’ll not complete most of them… but here you have the weblog!

This is me with the certificate, more than a month ago, in the GSIC/EMIC lab at the School of Telecommunications Engineering in Valladolid! (Many thanks to Andi Harrer for the picture)

In short, my PhD thesis tackles several challenges around the problem of facilitating teachers the design of potentially effective CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning) situations that make use of learning ICT (Information and Communication Technology) environments. To do so, it combines three main topics: CSCL scripts, patterns and IMS Learning Design. If you are interested, you can have a look to the corresponding page in this blog, post a comment there or contact me!

Ufff! I feel now extraordinarily relaxed! Do you know? The picture that is now in the header (I plan to change it in the future) shows a wonderful place in Spain, it is “El Cabo de Peñas” in Asturias, Spain. The fact is that I like very much Asturias in general. I spent a week there in July travelling around the region, enjoining the nature and drinking sidra Watching landscapes such as “Los Lagos de Covadonga” (on top of the mountain, part of “Los Picos de Europa”) is an outstanding medicine to recover from the thesis (mmmm, well together with other things such as some days at home in Plasencia sleeping and eating my mother’s delicious meals, etc, etc. ):
(Lagos de Covadonga: Lago “La Ercina”)