August 7, 2008

DECOM 2008: An Open Consultation Workshop on Building Digital Educational Content Marketplaces

DECOM 2008 is organised in partnership by the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG) and its member, Giunti Labs, the leading European provider of online and mobile learning content management solutions. It will be held on 23rd of October, in Sestri Levante, North West Italy. The invited delegates will be able to improve their understanding of new generation learning content production, management, sharing and distribution models which will empower the Educational Publishing Industry in this new millennium.

More at http://www.decom2008.com/

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August 5, 2008

Sharing Vocabularies on the Web via SKOS

On 21 July 2008 an event "Sharing Vocabularies on the Web via SKOS", was held in the UK. It is now possible to take part of the presentations and recordings from that event. Some of them seem to be really interesting. In fact, the phenomenon Simple Knowledge Organization System is interesting.

This event, the third in ISKO UK’s KOnnecting KOmmunities series, was an opportunity to learn more about SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System), the up-and-coming standard for publishing controlled vocabularies on the Web.

The topic proved to be enormously popular. There were 94 people present coming from government, publishing and broadcasting agencies, public service organisations, commercial companies and academia. Reassuringly many practitioners were present including subject matter experts, librarians, information architects, software developers etc.
We were fortunate in having speakers from the forefront of SKOS development and implementation who were able to draw a general picture of the role of knowledge organization systems in the Semantic Web development but also guide us through the intricate details of what it means to express controlled vocabularies in such a way so that they their semantics can be exploited in information integration and discovery.

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August 4, 2008

The Ultimate Guide to Using Open Courseware: 70+ Apps, Search Engines and Resources for Free Learning

 Gartheeban Ganeshapillai is writing the Ultimate Guide to Using Open Courseware:

While you can’t get college credit for taking open courseware classes, you can make the most of the information and education they offer both in personal and professional aspects of your life. After all, even if you’re not working towards a degree, taking the same courses as those in the ivy league can’t possibly hurt you and may even be able to better keep you informed and on the cutting edge of what’s going on in your field. So how can you make the most of these free online courses? Here are resources we’ve collected that can help you search for classes, find information and learn everything you need to know about how open courseware works.

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August 1, 2008

A goldmine

I have pointed out Smashing Magazine before and I feel an urgent need to do so again:) It is a goldmine for anyone working with the web. They point at a lot of free resources (and some that are not free as well), such as fonts, images, illustrations etc. Today Smashing Magazine review 15 desktop blogging tools.

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July 6, 2008

Free icon collections

Smashing Magazine lists "55 Free High Quality Icon Sets" that look very nice and that can useful as a free resource for education. Besides, Smashing Magazine is a good source for web developers in general.

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June 19, 2008

Extended deadline for the Second International Workshop on Search and Exchange of e-le@rning Materials (SE@M’08)

The deadline for submitting papers to the Second International Workshop on  Search and Exchange of e-le@rning Materials (SE@M’08) has been extended to the 30th of June.

Second International Workshop on Search and Exchange of e-le@rning Materials (SE@M’08)
(Formerly Learning Object Discovery & Exchange - LODE1)
 
 
CALL FOR PAPERS — NEW DEADLINE: JUNE 30, 2008 
 
The SE@M workshop is held in conjunction with the 3rd European Conference on
Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL’08 - http://www.ectel08.org/), Maastricht School
of Management, Maastricht, The Netherlands, September 17-19, 2008.
 
CONTEXT AND MOTIVATION
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.
 
Over the past few years, researchers and practitioners have started to address these
issues. Several initiatives worldwide (such as the EUN Learning Resource Exchange,
GLOBE, CORDRA) are developing solutions for federating e-learning systems and
unlocking the educational content hidden in repositories. Started last year, the work of
the IMS Group on Learning Object Discovery & Exchange aims at supporting these
initiatives by developing a set of specifications that facilitate the discovery and
retrieval of distributed learning resources.
 
The main goals of the international workshop on search and exchange of e-learning
materials are to bring together researchers and practitioners working in the field of
learning resource retrieval, facilitate the exchange between them and foster future
collaborations. It aims at offering a forum where these researchers and practitioners
can discuss theoretical aspects, open issues, and innovative approaches and share the
latest advances in the state of the art and practices for discovering and exchanging
learning content.
 
The dominant focus of this year’s workshop will be on the presentation of both long
and short refereed papers. We also plan to include a keynote speech and a panel
discussion.
                                                

Note: It has been decided to rename the workshop: “international workshop on
search & exchange of e-le@rning materials (SE@M)” to avoid any confusion with
the work of IMS on Learning Object Discovery and Exchange (IMS LODE). 
 
 2
 
TOPICS OF INTEREST (include, but are not limited to)
• Infrastructures for learning resource discovery and exchange
o Interoperable content and metadata repositories
o Protocols for exposing content
o Federations of learning resources
o Service registries
• Rich description of resources
o Metadata
o Standards and application profiles
o Automatic metadata generation versus human indexing
o Intellectual property and metadata
o Contextual Attention Metadata
o Mapping and crosswalks between metadata standards
• Discovering content
o User profiling for more accurate resource discovery
o Retrieval of learning resources (searching, browsing)
o Content aggregation
o Interoperable query languages
o Harvesting versus federated searching
o Enhanced search mechanism (sorting, ranking)
o Inclusion of other type of content (library, cultural heritage)
o Recommendation systems
o Quality aspects
• Exchanging content
o Resource identification
o Open content and reusable resource licensing
o Reliable auditing (tracking, reporting) 
o DRM, licensing and content protection
• WEB-2.0 approaches (folksonomies, content syndication) 
• Semantic web approaches
 
 SUBMISSIONS
Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research as full papers (max. 10 pages) or
work-in-progress as short papers (max. 5 pages). All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed
by three members of the program committee for originality, significance, clarity and quality.
Accepted papers will be published online as EC-TEL workshop proceedings as part of the
CEUR Workshop proceedings series. CEUR-WS.org is a recognized ISSN publication series,
ISSN 1613-0073.
 
Moreover, the two best papers of the workshop will be published in a special issue of the
International Journal of Technology-Enhanced  Learning
(IJTEL –  http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalCODE=ijtel )
 
Authors should use the Springer LNCS format (http://www.springer.com/lncs ).

For camera-ready format instructions, please see “For Authors“ instructions at
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html .
All questions and submissions should be sent to: seam2008@eun.org

IMPORTANT DATES
• Paper Submission: June 30, 2008
• Notification of acceptance: July 13, 2008
• Camera Ready Submission: August 10, 2008
• Workshop date: September 17, 2007
 
ORGANISERS
David Massart, Jean-Noël Colin and Frans Van Assche
European Schoolnet (EUN), Belgium
 
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
• Vladimir Batagelj, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia 
• Erik Duval, KUL, Belgium 
• Mike Halm, PennState University, USA 
• Manuel Kolp, UCL, Belgium 
• Robert Kristofl, BMUKK, Austria 
• Eugenijus Kurilovas, SMM, Lithuania 
• Jon Mason, InterCog, Australia
• Cu D. Nguyen, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK-IRST), Italy
• Gilbert Paquette, Teluq, Canada 
• Fredrik Paulsson, Umeå University, Sweden 
• Tomasz Orzechowski, AGH, Poland 
• Alain Pirotte, UCL, Belgium 
• Daniel Rehak, Learning Systems Architecture Lab and Daniel Rehak Consulting LLC, USA 
• Griff Richards, SFU, Canada 
• Bernd Simon, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Austria 
• Stefaan Ternier, KUL, Belgium 
• Tsuneo Yamada, NIME, Japan 

• • •

May 29, 2008

Finnish National Curriculum on a Wiki + Annofolio + CEF = oppurtunity!

Teemu Leinonen at the FLOSSE Posse blog writes about the Finnish National curriculum that has got its own wiki . It is an interesting idea, and it remind a bit about our project, "Marking the national curricula" (paper in PDF-format) where we set up the infrastructure (the Annofolio) needed for annotating the Swedish National Curriculum. I think that a Wiki, in combination with our Annofolio and the forthcomming Curriculum Exchange Format (in Swedish) could provide very interesting opportunities for managing the curricula, as well as for integrating, and linking it into teaching and learning in a transparent way and connecting the curriculum to digital resources used for learning.

This I have to think a little bit more about…Smile

• • •

Avhandlingsgenomslag

Min avhandling (Modularization of the learning architecture: supporting learning theories by learning technologies) har uppmärksammats på flera ställen vilket givetvis är jättekul!

Min förhoppning är att den ska läsas och att det ska bli diskussion. Jag har försökt skriva så att både datavetare och pedagoger kan ha utbyte av att läsa den och jag hoppas att jag har lyckats.

• • •

May 22, 2008

Call for papers: SE@M’08

Second International Workshop on Search and Exchange of e-le@rning Materials (SE@M’08)

This call is open until June 22nd.

CONTEXT AND MOTIVATION
 
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.
 
Over the past few years, researchers and practitioners have started to address these
issues. Several initiatives worldwide (such as the EUN Learning Resource Exchange,
GLOBE, CORDRA) are developing solutions for federating e-learning systems and
unlocking the educational content hidden in repositories. Started last year, the work of
the IMS Group on Learning Object Discovery & Exchange aims at supporting these
initiatives by developing a set of specifications that facilitate the discovery and
retrieval of distributed learning resources.
 
The main goals of the international workshop on search and exchange of e-learning
materials are to bring together researchers and practitioners working in the field of
learning resource retrieval, facilitate the exchange between them and foster future
collaborations. It aims at offering a forum where these researchers and practitioners
can discuss theoretical aspects, open issues, and innovative approaches and share the
latest advances in the state of the art and practices for discovering and exchanging
learning content.
 
The dominant focus of this year’s workshop will be on the presentation of both long
and short refereed papers. We also plan to include a keynote speech and a panel
discussion.

• • •

April 29, 2008

Presentation av Spindeln

Den 31 mars höll jag en presentation av Spindeln för Nätverket för digitala lärresurser . Flera har frågat efter den och jag har därför laddat upp den här [PDF].

• • •

March 31, 2008

Spindeln får uppmärksamhet - och blir bättre och bättre

Jag sökte på google för att se om det skrivs någonting om Spindeln. Det visar sig att Spindeln får en hel del uppmärksamhet, vilket är jättekul.

Exempel på Spindelskriverier:

Det blir inte mindre kul av att Spindeln just har blivit lite bättre. Vi har bytt frågespråk och det ger betydligt bättre sökträffar. Dessutom kommer snart syndikeringen  av formulär (för att integrera Spindeln på den egna webbplatsen) att bli bättre. Just nu pågår utveckling för att bli av med den hemska iFramen som för närvarande används för detta.

Tyvärr är det fortfarande dålig kvalitet på mycket av den metadata som finns i de olika arkiven och detta påverkar givetvis sökresultaten. Förhoppningsvis ska vi kunna komma tillrätta med även detta snart. Återkommer i den frågan…

• • •

January 25, 2008

Kunskapsdelning och öppna digitala lärresurser

IT och lärande - KK-stiftelsen

Just nu pågår en hel del arbete för att sätta fart på utvecklingen och spridningen av öppna digitala lärresurser. I början av december skrev jag om The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, ett dokument som är tänkt att fungera som utgångspunkt för konkreta initiativ som rör fri och öppen tillgång till material som kan användas för undervisning och lärande. Igår släpptes den officella versionen av dokumentet, som redan har signerats av drygt 500 organisationer och enskilda. Den som vill skaffa sig en snabb överblick av kommentarer och synpunkter på deklarationen, rekommenderas att läsa David Wileys blogginlägg från igår.

Powered by ScribeFire.

• • •

December 5, 2007

CC-By-SA is THE license of the free/libre/open educational resources

From the FLOSSE Posse blog:

Creative Commons, Free Software Foundation and Wikimedia Foundation are working on to make the FSF’s GFDL and CC’s CC-By-SA compatible. This will mean that in future all the Wikimedia content (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikimedia Commons, etc.), that are licensed under GFLD can be remixed with content using CC-By-SA. The Wikimedia Foundation’s Board made a resolution about this some days ago.

Powered by ScribeFire.

• • •

November 3, 2007

Omvärldsbloggen bloggar om Spindeln

I torsdags skrev Stefan Pålsson om Spindeln på Kollegiets Omvärldsblogg. Kul att Spindeln får uppmärksamhet! Det behövs bra hjälpmedel för lärare att arbeta med digitala lärresurser. Dessutom har vi ju arbetat i flera år med den underliggande tekniska lösningen Wink

Den här veckan har MSU och IML lanserat en preliminär version av söktjänsten Spindeln, som ingår i IT för pedagoger. För närvarande är fem arkiv anslutna, men antalet kommer att växa efterhand. Allt material som är licensierat under Creative Commons kommer att kopplas till MELT.

Just nu går det bara att hitta fria lärresurser via Spindeln, men vi planerar att även erbjuda tjänsten till kommersiella aktörer. Givetvis kommer det då förtfarande att vara möjligt att söka efter fria resurser.

Precis som Stefan skriver så är detta en preliminär version av Spindeln som vi successivt kommer att vidareutveckla och förbättra. Ett av de problm vi har är att kvaliteten på den metadata (beskrivningen av resurserna) som finns i de olika arkiven är på tok för dålig. Tjänsten kommer aldrig att kunna bli än vad metadatat i de ingående arkiven tillåter. Samtidigt visar detta väldigt tydligt på behovet av gemensamma standarder för hur lärresurser ska beskrivas. Det är exempelvis viktigt att vi använder samma ord (gemensamma vokabulärer), att resurser klassificeras på liknande sätt, att det finns gemensamma märkfält och så vidare. Förhoppningsvis kommer detta att bli bättre när vi lanserar SWE-LOM , som är just en sådan gemensam standard.

Nu finns det även en e-postlista för Spindeln . Där kommer vi kontinuerligt att skicka ut information och nyheter om tjänsten.  

• • •

October 31, 2007

Hitta digitala lärresurser med Spindeln

Nu har Spindeln lanserats! Detta har vi (Inst. för interaktiva medier och lärande, IML ) gjort tillsammans med MSU. Spindeln är en söktjänst för digitala lärresurser för skolan. Idén är att göra det enklare för lärare och elever att hitta relevanta digitala lärresurser. Med Spindeln är det ännu så länge möjligt att söka efter fria lärresurser. Tekniken som Spindeln bygger på är en direkt tillämpning av vår och KMR-gruppens forskning om Semanic Web, digitala arkiv och tekniker för att koppla samma arkiv.

Vi kommer successivt att koppla in fler arkiv. Den stora utmaningen just nu är att försöka höja kvaliteten på metadata i de olika arkiven. Den är minst sagt varierande och det finns en hel del att förbättra för att på det sättet få bättre sökresultat…

Här finns pressinformationen från Umeå universitet

Här finns mer information från MSU

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