It’s being an enriching and thoughtful experience in many ways! Besides working on my Fulbright project with Dr. Tatar, I’m participating in the lab meetings, a course on “developing computational thinking” that is associated to a research projects with schools, discussions with J.G. Alvarado (with whom I’m sharing the office) about micro-coordination, effect of technologies, and experimental design, and have given a talk for a research seminar.

Of course, I’m also enjoying a lot the atmosphere of the VT campus! Since Jan. 17th, when the Spring Semester started, Blacksburg is crowed with students, living in the many residence halls concentrated in a section of the campus, using the facilities that the campus offers them in a second section and attending their classes in another set of buildings placed in the third section of the campus. Enjoy some pictures that I’m sharing with you in this small “collage”!

EC-TEL 2012 Seventh European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning
21st Century Learning for 21st Century Skills
http://www.ec-tel.eu
18-21 September 2012, Saarbrücken, Germany

The European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) is a unique opportunity for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to address current challenges and advances in the field. Through EC-TEL, established and emerging researchers as well as practitioners, entrepreneurs, and technology developers explore new collaborations, strengthen networks, and compliment their core experience.

Promoting and developing 21st Century Learning for 21st Century Skills that meet contemporary needs and challenges is a key priority within the European Union and constituent countries. Crucial questions need to be addressed, such as:
• How can schools prepare young people for the technology-rich workplace of the future?
• How can we use technology to promote informal and independent learning outside traditional educational settings?
• How can we use next generation social and mobile technologies to promote informal and responsive learning?

This focus on skills, practice and impact is reflected in EC-TEL itself. EC-TEL 2012 is, for the first time, specifically appealing to Technology Enhanced Learning innovators, creative practitioners and other representatives from e-learning more generally. Extended demonstrations of prototypes and ‘TEL in action’ will spark discussions between different but complimentary groups, and be animated and disseminated through live internet radio broadcasts. EC-TEL 2012 will examine and improve the transitions between research, practice and industry.

We invite contributions for demonstrations, workshops and project meetings as well as academic research papers. A doctoral consortium will also be organized concurrently with the workshops. See the extended call for papers for more details: http://www.ec-tel.eu/call-for-papers

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper, short paper, poster, & demonstration submission: 02 April 2012
Paper, short paper, poster, & demonstration notification: 04 June 2012
Camera-ready versions: 02 July 2012
Room reservation for project meetings deadline: 15 June 2012

Workshop proposals: 02 April 2012
Workshop notification: 30 April 2012

Workshops: 18-19 September 2011
Conference: 20-21 September 2011

Please read about submissions formats, etc. at http://www.ec-tel.eu

Providing design support for orchestration of activities, roles, resources, and systems in Ubiquitous Technology-Enhanced Learning (UTEL) environments is a complex task. This involves not just technology or multi-device issues, but also capabilities to create innovative and engaging experiences. It requires integrated thinking and interweaving of state-of-the-art knowledge in computer science, human-computer interaction, pedagogy, instructional design and curricular subject domains. Consequently, even where examples of successful practice or even standards and specifications like IMS Learning Design or Tools Interoperability exist, it is often hard to apply and (re)use these efficiently and systematically. This interdisciplinary technical session aims to bring together practitioners and researchers from diverse backgrounds such as computer science, education, and cognitive sciences to share their proposals and findings related with the design of activities, resources and systems for UTEL applications involving new technologies and devices.

Detailed list of topics and submission information at http://dbis.rwth-aachen.de/d4utel

• On Monday and Tuesday I will go to Leuven, Belgium, as I’ve been invited to participate in the “Meeting of the Young Minds (MoYM) in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL)”. It’s an action of the STELLAR Network of Excellence, where 11 young participants representative of TEL disciplines and occupations (PhD graduates working in academia, in large public/private organizations, or in SMEs) have been selected to discuss the future of TEL research and contribute to shape the strategic agenda of the European Commission.
• On Wednesday I’ll be in Berlin, Germany, as part of the organizing team (LDG) of an Online Educa Berlin pre-conference workshop “The Theory and Practice of Design for Learning: New Approaches Integrating Methodologies, Representations and Tools”. The presentations and discussions can be also followed on-line, at Cloudworks.

Journal of Universal Computer Science

Special Issue on

Technology for learning across physical and virtual spaces

Introduction

Nowadays education does not happen exclusively face-to-face, in the physical space. Neither does it happen exclusively through online tools in the virtual space, like Virtual Learning Environments, blogs or wikis. There is a continuous transfer from one space to another: certain activities are done in the classroom, some are accessed on a web virtual learning environment or a 3D world, then the students perform the activities and collaborate ubiquitously either physically or digitally.

This is what has been traditionally understood under the heading of blended learning, but recent technological advances have opened broad opportunities to link these spaces more profoundly, thus enabling the realization of learning activities across spaces that incorporate and coordinate objects from them all. Examples are: the use of augmented reality, that superimposes a digital layer on top of the physical space, providing extra information or linking objects; the use of 3D virtual spaces mirroring the physical space (e.g. showing an image from the physical world coming from a camera); sensors or RFID technology in the physical space that can provide information such as identity or location to digital applications; or tangible computing devices that enable the manipulation of objects in the physical space that have impact on the digital space…

The main different spaces that can be linked to support innovative activities include virtual learning environments, 3D virtual worlds, physical classrooms and open learning spaces that can be integrated with virtual spaces through roomware, mobile and location-aware technologies. New research questions arise in this new technological and learning context: How to design and technologically support innovative learning scenarios across physical and virtual spaces? What are the opportunities and challenges that learning scenarios across spaces pose to the learners’ assessment? Can educational technology specifications offer interoperability solutions to facilitate the transfer between spaces? How can educators orchestrate, adapt, monitor and evaluate the learning process occurring across different virtual and physical spaces?

Topics

Educational scenarios, technological solutions and evaluation studies focused on learning activities happening across spaces, which can include, but are not limited to:

• Virtual Learning Environments
• 3D Virtual Worlds
• Roomware and other pervasive devices for the classroom
• Mobile and location-aware technologies for open learning space

Transversal topics include, but are not limited to:

• Architectures, frameworks, models
• Design of activities, assessment
• Interoperability, educational technology specifications, data flow, linked data
• Orchestration, adaptation, monitoring, evaluation

Related topics include also:

• Augmented reality
• Augmented virtuality
• Mediated reality

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: 15 December 2011 (Extended: 10th January 2011)
• Decision notification after first round of reviews: 15 February 2012
• Submission of revised version: 31 March 2012
• Final decision: 15 May 2012
• Submission of final version: 31 May 2012

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should not exceed 20 pages. All submissions must be in English, formatted according to the guidelines of Journal of Universal Computer Science (JUCS), and submitted as pdf-files. The submission guidelines can be found at http://www.jucs.org/ujs/jucs/info/submissions

Manuscripts should be submitted via email to the guest editors. The subject of the submission email should be: “JUCS SI Submission: Technology for learning across physical and virtual spaces”.

Guest Editors

Carlos Delgado-Kloos, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain), cdk at it.uc3m.es

Davinia Hernández-Leo, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona (Spain), davinia.hernandez at upf.edu

Juan I. Asensio-Pérez, Universidad de Valladolid (Spain), juaase at tel.uva.es

Pérez-Sanagustín, M.; Ramírez-González, G.; Hernández-Leo, D.; Muñoz-Organiero, M.; Santos, P.; Blat, J.; Delgado-Kloos, C. Discovering the campus together: a mobile and computer-based learning experience, Journal of Network and Computer Applications (in press).

De la Fuente-Valentín, L.; Pérez-Sanagustín, M.; Santos, P.; Henández-Leo, D.; Pardo, A; Blat, J.; Delgado-Kloos, C. System orchestration support for a flow of blended collaborative activities. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems. Thessaloniki: 2010.

Aula Planeta: El GTI de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra triunfa en los Premios ITWorldEdu 2011

UPF News: “Descobreix el campus!”, guanya el primer Premi ITWorldEDU

LiderDigital News: El Grupo de Tecnologías Interactivas de la Universidad Pompeu Fabra de Barcelona gana el IV Premio ITworldEdu a la Innovación Educativa

This is the paper that I will be discussing: Hernández-Leo, D.; Abenia, P.; Moreno, P.; Chacón, J.; Blat, J. Let’s shake on it: can we support co-edition and sharing using diverse learning design editors within the same platform?  The Art & Science of Learning Design Workshop, LKL, London, 13-14 October 2011. Paper available at http://www.slideshare.net/yish/asld2011-hernndez-leoabeniamorenochacnblat or at http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/5822.

But the whole workshop is very promising, and I think it will be of high interest. Everything can be followed at http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2349

- the slides of one of the papers I presented at EC-TEL, ” Orchestration Signals in the Classroom: Managing the Jigsaw Collaborative Learning Flow” (slides in pdf, full text), “Remote Collaborative Multi-User Informal Learning
Experiences: Design and Evaluation” (slides in pdf, full text)

- and the proceedings of the AcrossSpaces Workshop (note that in the workshop website the slides of some presentations are also available)

I’m happy that María Jesús Rodríguez Triana, from University of Valladolid won the Best Student Paper Award (“Monitoring pattern-based CSCL scripts: a case study“) Congratulations!

It’s interesting to note that the slides of the conference keynote speakers are also on-line.