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The Nordlet Open Forum is a one day conference in connection to the SC36 plenary meting in Umeå (September 19-25, 2009). The Nordlet Open Forum will be arranged on September 18 and is open for everyone. The main target groups for the conference are researcher, teacher and policy makers. The Nordlet Open Forum is organized by Nordlet (The Nordic Baltic Community for Open Education).

There is a fee of 60 € (650 SEK) if you are not a SC36 delegate or a member of the Nordlet consortium. This fee includes coffee and lunch. The conference is free of charge for Nordlet consortium members and SC36 delegates.

The theme for the conference is ICT, Competency and how this is related to the educational systems:

To cast light on the challenges of competencies the conference will arrange four tracks with a focus on the use of ICT (two in parallel) with the following themes:

Pedagogy

• How would the demand for measurable competencies influence the pedagogical practice?
• In a world where everyone have equal access to education – how to make sure that the chosen pedagogy matches the preferences and needs of the learner?
• Which pedagogical practice leads to a competency proven outcome?

Portfolio

• How to demonstrate your competency?
• Is the portfolio your evidence of how competent you are?
• What is the content of a portfolio?
• Different portfolios for different competencies.

Virtual Learning Environment

• How could the learning environment help development of competencies?
• VLE showcases – different vendors do the same task to demonstrate comparable functionality?

Curriculum

• When the curriculum is competency based – what does that imply?
• How would competencies be expressed in a curriculum?
• Is all competency measurable with regard to the curriculum?
• The relationship between curriculum, competency and assessment?

If you would like to give a 15 min talk within one of these topics, please send a short abstract (max 1 1/2) page to conference@nordlet.org.

See the Nordlet Open Forum website (http://www.iml.umu.se/nordlet/) for more information and for registration!

The call for papers for the 2009 version of SE@M is now out. You find the call at http://www.ectel09.org/

Creating good, pedagogically sound and effective learning resources incurs substantial costs, so avoiding duplication of development efforts is important. The TEL community has been and is still dedicating a lot of energy to the creation of better and more reusable learning resources. Some of these efforts in the sphere of reusability have matured enough to lead to the creation of standards such as the IEEE Learning Object Metadata, the IMS Content Package, or the IMS Common Cartridge. Nowadays, the number of reusable educational resources available online, for free or by subscription, is huge but most of these resources are “hidden” in repositories and cannot be easily found, hampering their potential use and reuse.

*******************************************************************
Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for
Technology-Enhanced Learning (SIRTEL’09)
 http://celstec.org/sirtel
           in
 the International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL 2009)
Aachen, Germany, August 21, 2009
http://www.hkws.org/events/icwl2009/workshops.html
*******************************************************************

IMPORTANT DATES

Contribution Submission: June 14, 2009
Results Notification: July 13, 2009
Camera Ready Submission: July 31, 2009
Workshop date: August 21, 2009

Submissions should be sent to: sirtelworkshop@gmail.com

RATIONALE

Learning and teaching resource are available on the Web – both in
terms of digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other
learners, experts, tutors). They can be used to facilitate teaching
and learning tasks. The remaining challenge is to develop, deploy
and evaluate Social information retrieval (SIR) methods, techniques
and systems that provide learners and teachers with guidance in
potentially overwhelming variety of choices.

The aim of the SIRTELí09 workshop is to look onward beyond recent
achievements to discuss specific topics, emerging research issues,
new trends and endeavors in SIR for TEL. The workshop will bring
together researchers and practitioners to present, and more
importantly, to discuss the current status of research in SIR
and TEL and its implications for science and teaching.

TOPICS OF INTEREST (but not limited to):

* Recommender systems and collaborative filtering in educational
settings
* Defining the scope, purpose and objects of social information
retrieval in TEL
* Novel ways of generating input for recommenders (explicit and
implicit methods)
* Ranking of search results to support individualised learning needs
* Integrating SIR services in existing educational platforms
* Folksonomies, tagging and other collaboration-based information
retrieval systems
* Social navigation processes and metaphors for searching information
related to teaching and learning
* Social networks and interactions in learning communities to
facilitate information sharing and retrieval
* Approaches to TEL metadata reflecting social ties and collaborative
experiences in the field of education
* Pedagogic decisions, recommender systems and how to contextualise
recommender system to support learning processes.
* Interoperability of SIR systems for TEL
* Visualisation techniques in learning and teaching
* Semantic annotation and tagging for social information retrieval
purposes
* Evaluating the performance of SIR systems in educational applications
* Measuring the effectiveness of SIR systems in supporting learning
and teaching
* Evaluation the user satisfaction with SIR systems in supporting
learning and teaching

WORKSHOP SUBMISSIONS

The workshop invites several types of contributions which allow a wide
level of participation:
* Research papers (up to 8 pages)
* System Demos (up to 2 pages)
* Hands-On proposals (1-pager)
* Abstract for Pecha Kucha (1-pager)

Submissions should be sent to: sirtelworkshop@gmail.com

Please use the template of the main conference:
http://www.hkws.org/events/icwl2009/submission.html.

The workshop proceedings will be published as CEUR Workshop
Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org is a recognised ISSN publication series,
with ISSN 1613-0073:
http://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/

Past SIRTEL proceedings:
* SIRTEL’07 http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-307
* SIRTEL’08 http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-382

Authors of papers presented in the Workshop will also be invited
to submit enhanced versions of their papers for potential publication
in a planned special issue of a relevant journal.

The workshop participants will have to register for the ICWL 2009 conference.
Early bird registration deadline: July 17, 2009
http://www.hkws.org/events/icwl2009/registration.html

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

* Alexander Felfernig, Graz University of Technology, Austria
* Brandon Muramatsu, MIT, USA
* Frans van Assche, European Schoolnet, Belgium
* John Dron, Athabasca University, Canada
* Lloyd Rutledge, OUNL, The Netherlands
* Markus Strohmaier, Graz University of Technology, Austria
* Markus Weimer, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
* Martin Wolpers, Fraonhofer-Institut, Germany
* Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcala, Spain
* Olga Santos, National Distance Education University, Spain
* Rick D. Hangartner, MyStrands,USA
* Rosta Farzan, University of Pittsburgh, USA
* Styliani Kleanthous, University of Leeds, UK
* Tiffany Tang, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China
* Wolfgang Reinhardt, University of Paderborn, Germany
* Xavier Ochoa, Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral, Ecuador
* Yiwei Cao, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
* Zinayida Petrushyna, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

ORGANISERS

* Riina Vuorikari, European Schoolnet (EUN), Belgium and CELSTEC,
OUNL, Netherland
* Hendrik Drachsler, CELSTEC, OUNL, The Netherlands
* Nikos Manouselis, Greek Research & Technology Network, Greece
* Rob Koper, CELSTEC, OUNL, The Netherlands

ABOUT ICWL 2009

ICWL is an annual international conference on web-based learning.
Since the first ICWL was held in Hong Kong in 2002, it has been held
in Australia (2003), China (2004), Hong Kong (2005), Malaysia (2006),
United Kingdom (2007), and China (2008). The 8th ICWL 2009 will be
held in Aachen, Germany, a city with rich culture, high-tech research,
and a truly European spirit. ICWL 2009 will be jointly organized by
Hong Kong Web Society, RWTH Aachen University, and Max-Planck-
Institute for Computer Science.
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"sirtel09".

Excuses for cross-posting

*******************************************************************
Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for
Technology-Enhanced Learning (SIRTEL’09)
http://celstec.org/sirtel
in
the International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL 2009)
Aachen, Germany, August 21, 2009
http://www.hkws.org/events/icwl2009/workshops.html
*******************************************************************

IMPORTANT DATES

Contribution Submission: June 14, 2009
Results Notification: July 13, 2009
Camera Ready Submission: July 31, 2009
Workshop date: August 21, 2009

Submissions should be sent to: sirtelworkshop@gmail.com

RATIONALE

Learning and teaching resource are available on the Web – both in
terms of digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other
learners, experts, tutors). They can be used to facilitate teaching
and learning tasks. The remaining challenge is to develop, deploy
and evaluate Social information retrieval (SIR) methods, techniques
and systems that provide learners and teachers with guidance in
potentially overwhelming variety of choices.

The aim of the SIRTEL’09 workshop is to look onward beyond recent
achievements to discuss specific topics, emerging research issues,
new trends and endeavors in SIR for TEL. The workshop will bring
together researchers and practitioners to present, and more
importantly, to discuss the current status of research in SIR
and TEL and its implications for science and teaching.

TOPICS OF INTEREST (but not limited to):

* Recommender systems and collaborative filtering in educational
settings
* Defining the scope, purpose and objects of social information
retrieval in TEL
* Novel ways of generating input for recommenders (explicit and
implicit methods)
* Ranking of search results to support individualised learning needs
* Integrating SIR services in existing educational platforms
* Folksonomies, tagging and other collaboration-based information
retrieval systems
* Social navigation processes and metaphors for searching information
related to teaching and learning
* Social networks and interactions in learning communities to
facilitate information sharing and retrieval
* Approaches to TEL metadata reflecting social ties and collaborative
experiences in the field of education
* Pedagogic decisions, recommender systems and how to contextualise
recommender system to support learning processes.
* Interoperability of SIR systems for TEL
* Visualisation techniques in learning and teaching
* Semantic annotation and tagging for social information retrieval
purposes
* Evaluating the performance of SIR systems in educational applications
* Measuring the effectiveness of SIR systems in supporting learning
and teaching
* Evaluation the user satisfaction with SIR systems in supporting
learning and teaching

WORKSHOP SUBMISSIONS

The workshop invites several types of contributions which allow a wide
level of participation:
* Research papers (up to 8 pages)
* System Demos (up to 2 pages)
* Hands-On proposals (1-pager)
* Abstract for Pecha Kucha (1-pager)

Submissions should be sent to: sirtelworkshop@gmail.com

Please use the template of the main conference:
http://www.hkws.org/events/icwl2009/submission.html.

The workshop proceedings will be published as CEUR Workshop
Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org is a recognised ISSN publication series,
with ISSN 1613-0073:
http://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/

Past SIRTEL proceedings:
* SIRTEL’07 http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-307
* SIRTEL’08 http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-382

Authors of papers presented in the Workshop will also be invited
to submit enhanced versions of their papers for potential publication
in a planned special issue of a relevant journal.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE (TBC)

* Alexander Felfernig, Graz University of Technology, Austria
* Brandon Muramatsu, MIT, USA
* Frans van Assche, European Schoolnet, Belgium
* John Dron, Athabasca University, Canada
* Lloyd Rutledge, OUNL, The Netherlands
* Markus Strohmaier, Graz University of Technology, Austria
* Markus Weimer, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
* Martin Wolpers, Fraonhofer-Institut, Germany
* Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcala, Spain
* Olga Santos, National Distance Education University, Spain
* Rick D. Hangartner, MyStrands,USA
* Rosta Farzan, University of Pittsburgh, USA
* Styliani Kleanthous, University of Leeds, UK
* Tiffany Tang, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China
* Wolfgang Reinhardt, University of Paderborn, Germany
* Xavier Ochoa, Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral, Ecuador
* Yiwei Cao, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
* Zinayida Petrushyna, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

ORGANISERS

* Riina Vuorikari, European Schoolnet (EUN), Belgium and CELSTEC,
OUNL, Netherland
* Hendrik Drachsler, CELSTEC, OUNL, The Netherlands
* Nikos Manouselis, Greek Research & Technology Network, Greece
* Rob Koper, CELSTEC, OUNL, The Netherlands

ABOUT ICWL 2009

ICWL is an annual international conference on web-based learning.
Since the first ICWL was held in Hong Kong in 2002, it has been held
in Australia (2003), China (2004), Hong Kong (2005), Malaysia (2006),
United Kingdom (2007), and China (2008). The 8th ICWL 2009 will be
held in Aachen, Germany, a city with rich culture, high-tech research,
and a truly European spirit. ICWL 2009 will be jointly organized by
Hong Kong Web Society, RWTH Aachen University, and Max-Planck-
Institute for Computer Science.

In september (20-25) we (Umeå University) will arrange the ISO SC36 (Information technology for learning, education and training) plenary meting in Umeå . The meting will be combined with combined pre-meting, Nordlet Open Forum (sept. 18) and pre-conference the week before (e.g. september 15-20). Hopefully we will also be able to combine this with an iCoper event as well. So, there will be a lot of interesting metings, seminars and other things going on related to ICT and learning in Umeå during those two weeks in september.

More information to come…

From time to time I find myself trying to explain OpenID for people (mainly pedagogues) and it is not a very easy thing to explain in an understandable way. By a coincident I found a site called OpenID Explained that explains it in a very good and easy to understand way.

An OpenID is a way of identifying yourself no matter which web site you visit. It’s like a driver’s license for the entire Internet. But, it’s even more than that because you can (if you want) associate information with your OpenID like your name and your e-mail address, and then you choose how much web sites get to see about you. This means that web sites that take advantage of OpenID won’t bother you for the same information over and over again.

I have (after a suggestion by Tore ) installed Category LiveBookmark Plus for Wordpress. This means that it is now possible to subscribe to the RSS-feed of a specific category. This can, for example, be done by clicking on the RSS-icon in Firefox.

Tore blogs about iCoper exploiting the capabilities of widgets to deliver "units of learning". This is an area that we have explored for several years now and I look forward to work on this in iCoper. One of the results of our previous work is the widget for the Spider service for searching Open Educational Resources.This work will be synchronized with the work in EUN and the LRE (Learning Resource Exchange), where a similar widget is needed.

ICOPER exploring the capabilities of widgets to deliver units of learning. We are planning a widget workshop in Vienna on 5th of May, and hopefully we will be able to get a full update on the interesting developments going on in the UK, where the CETIS guys are working on a “Wookie server“. In the meantime, please have a look at this Widget Developer’s Guide that explains a little more what widgets are all about.

via Tore Hoels eBlog Widget developing guide and workshops.

An international workshop on repository infrastructures in Amsterdam 16-17 March

"An international agenda for action on repositories infrastructure"
Background
Networks of open access repositories for research papers have been created in many countries and regions, and subject and funder repositories have been established that are both national and international. Examples include:
 * DAREnet in the Netherlands
 * UK Repositories Infrastructure
 * OA-Network in Germany
 * Digital Repository Federation in Japan
 * APSR and Arrow in Australia
 * DRIVER in Europe
The scope of these activities reflects typical funding streams for infrastructure. However, research is global, and any services for researchers that are likely to be acceptable need to be global. Hence there is a critical need to join up the repositories work across the world.
Relevant global initiatives do exist, such as metadata communities (eg, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative) and a more recent global registries initiative. Where possible and appropriate, a global repositories infrastructure needs to build on this work.
Although the basic architecture for repositories is simple (data providers harvested by service providers), the reality is more complex. Services around rights, authority, access control (eg for deposit), linking between items in repositories, preservation, usage statistics, automatic metadata creation, etc all fall outside this simple model, and will all work best if coordinated at an international level. Added to this, the architecture is evolving, the emergence of OAI-ORE being a noteworthy example.
There are challenges facing the repository infrastructure. Some of these might be described as within the repository community, including recruiting content into repositories, developing and implementing effective policies, resource discovery and increasing the use of material in repositories, establishing a viable and resilient business model for repositories and related services, and ensuring interoperability where that is important. Other challenges might be described as coming from outside the repository community, for example the increasing relevance of the resource-oriented web architecture, user expectations of participation and integration with network services, and the changing ways in which research is undertaken in a networked environment…

See more information at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/ir-workshop-2009/

I have finally come to a decision on the language issue! From now on I will only write in English here. However, I will not give up my writing in Swedish and for that reason I have started a brand new blog in Swedish!

Ett upprop som man gott kan ställa sig bakom!

Lagstadga barns rätt att utvecklas med lust i trygghet! ‎(Barn har rätt‎)

Förra seklets stora slagord – barnets århundrade – försvann snabbt ur makthavarnas och opinionsbildarnas minne. Medieproducenter väljer att sända psykisk misshandel av barn som underhållning. Utifrån Supernannyns ideal får föräldrar lära sig att stöta bort och ignorera sitt barn när det behöver närhet och värme. Skamvrån återinförs men kallas för time-out. Utbildningsprogram lanseras för skola och barnomsorg där personal tränas att disciplinera genom auktoritär avstängning och förnedrande behandling. Istället för att barn får lära sig att respektera sig själv och andra uppfostras det till att satsa på egen vinning: vad kan jag förlora eller vinna på att göra på de sätt som de vuxna vill?

I spetsen för ett hårdnat mode i sättet att möta barn och ungdomar går regeringen. I dess retorik hyllas kunskap. Det vore värdefullt om regeringen använder systematisk kunskap också inom utbildningsområdet. I strid mot vetenskapliga rön förespråkas straff som uppfostringsmetod, t ex i form av kvarsittning. Lärarcentrerad undervisning lyfts fram istället för elevaktivt lärande. De ungas frågor och uppfattningar om vad som är viktigt att lära döms ut. Regeringen ordnar, tillsammans med oppositionen, så att eleverna oftare blir centralt prövade och deras motivation ska styras av tätare betyg och kunskapskontroller. Betygsjakt ska ersätta kunskapstörst som drivkraft för lärande. Man avvisar evidensbaserad kunskap som visar att ungas lust att lära föds i deras medskapande och när de fördjupar sig i lärande.

Unga utvecklas när de ställs inför krav och möter utmaningar i trygga sammanhang, där det är tillåtet och önskvärt att de lär såväl av misstag som av lyckade tilltag. Unga utvecklas bäst när de bejakas och när deras sätt att tänka och känna möts med respekt. Vi uppmanar ministrar och andra opinionsbildare att sluta upp med att behandla barn och ungdomar som mindre värda. Visa dem istället respekt. Använd forskning och beprövad erfarenhet när initiativ tas så att ungdomar får utvecklas utifrån lust och engagemang i trygga situationer. Bemöt barn och ungdomar så som vi önskar att de ska vara – ansvarstagande, företagssamma, samarbetskunniga, kreativa och kritiskt reflekterande

År 1989 antogs FN:s barnkonvention. Den ratificerades av Sverige 1990. Trots detta har vi ännu inte inarbetat den i svensk lag, till skillnad från Norge. Detta innebär att brott mot konventionen inte kan beivras i Sverige. Vi uppmanar våra lagstiftare i alla partier och vår regering att göra barnkonventionen till svensk lag. Nästa höst ska Sverige vara EU:s ordförande. Inordna barnkonventionen i den svenska lagen till dess. Det skulle visa på ett ledarskap värt att ta efter. Våra barn är värda den respekten i lagarna.

På dagens Nordletmöte uppstod en liten diskusion om Creative Commons och eventuella kompatibilitetsproblem med nationella lagar. I mitt sökande efter informtion hittade jag en (till synes) bra guide på IIS som heter "Copyright – Copyleft En guide om upphovsrätt och licenser på nätet"

I have just updated to Wordpress 2.7. Seems to work just fine. A Nice new. admin. interface.

 Mikael Nilsson has made a first draft version of the mapping from IEEE LOM to the DC Abstract Model available.

I’ve finalized an early, but readable, draft of the mapping from IEEE LOM to the DC Abstract Model: http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/DCMIIEEELTSCTaskforce?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=LOM-DCAM-newdraft.pdf The mapping is presented using the DC-TEXT syntax for DCAM, http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-text/ I invite anyone interested to submit comments to the DC-IEEELTSC-TASKFORCE list ( http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/DC-IEEELTSC-TASKFORCE.html ) The mapping assumes a stable version of the RDF vocabularies in http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/DCMIIEEELTSCTaskforce/LomTerm

The Advancement of Computing in Education (ACCE) have started a blog. Probably a good place to find information about calls and conferences, as well as other things. ACCE says that:

As a start, you will find information on:

* IT in Education and E-Learning from guest postings authored by outstanding leaders in the field.

* AACE Conference announcements and Calls for Presentations for the ED-MEDIA, E-Learn, and SITE International Conferences

* EdITLib-Education and Information Technology Digital Library: most popular articles and new features.

* AACE Journals: Calls for Papers and special journal publications.

* AACE Career Center: Connecting IT in Education/E-Learning Professionals and Employers

* AACE Bookshelf: Designed to help you find the best books recommended by topic from community members.

* Awards announcements: Outstanding conference papers, service and achievements, and fellowship awards.

* The "AACE Journal: International Forum on Information Technology and Education" selected articles.