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 6, 2008

Changed my blog tagline

I have change the tagline for frepa.blog. It used to say my blog is about "eLearning and Learning Technology", but it is now changed to be about "Technology Enhanced Learning and Learning Technology". The reason for this is that Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) can be regarded to be a more general name that includes all kinds of learning using technology - as well as eLearning. If you are interested in a more indept diskussion on the subject I recommend you to read my thesis, Modularization of the Learning Architecture: Supporting Learning Theories by Learning Technologies, where I discuss some central concepts (including TEL and Learning Technology) in the introduction. I might as well live as i learn…:)

Anyway, I will probably come back to this topic in the future.

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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 28, 2008

Världens billigaste laptop lanserad

Från Computer Sweden

Det taiwanesiska företaget Carapelli har släppt vad företaget hävdar är världens billigaste laptop. Datorn som kostar endast 130 dollar är riktigt intressant om du inte har för stora krav på hårdvara.

Den bärbara datorn Impulse NPX-9000 levereras med en bildskärm på sju tum och operativsystemet Linux. Datorn har en processor på 400 MHz, 128 megabyte ramminne och 1 GB flashminne som lagringsenhet.

Trådlös internetadapter ingår inte men finns som tillbehör. Open Office programsvit kommer förinstallerat på hårddisken tillsammans med en webbläsare och ett gäng multimedieprogram.

Det finns bara en hake, Impulse NPX-9000 går endast att köpa i bulk bestående av 100 datorer. Något som endast är intressant för återförsäljare eller större företag.

Samt skolor och andra utbildningsinstitutioner skulle man kanske kunna tillägga…?

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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 

• • •

June 16, 2008

En Svensk tiger aldrig!

Filed under: Debate, democracy, eLearning — frepa @ 19:23

En Svensk tiger aldrig

• • •

June 13, 2008

What are Web Services and SOA?

I had almost forgotten about this animation explaining how SOA works. It is very pedagogical and easy to understand, and it explains it from an eFramework perspective.

• • •

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.

• • •

May 10, 2008

Leijonborg kräver it-kunniga lärare

Computer Sweden skriver om Leijonborgs utspel där han framhåller vikten av IT i skolan. Det är givetvis bra att Leijonborg säger detta och ännu bättre om det dessutom visar sig att det omsätts i handling. Vi får bara hoppas att han även pratar ihop sig med skolministern - som dessvärre har visat sig vara mindre framsynt när det gäller IT i skolan.

Leijonborg kräver it-kunniga lärare - Computer Sweden

Sveriges blivande lärare ska bli bättre på informationsteknik. Högskoleminister Lars Leijonborg lyfter nu it-kompetens som ett prioriterat område när lärarutbildningen görs om.

Frågan om lärares kunskaper i it lyfts i ett eget kapitel som läggs till den utredning om en ny lärarutbildning som redan pågår. Kunskap om digitala medier och informationsteknik kan spela en viktig roll i utbildningen, både som ett redskap i skolan och som någonting eleverna måste lära sig för att kunna vara delaktig i samhället, slår regeringen fast.

Det ska bli intressant att få veta vad som egentligen avses med en "it-kunnig lärare". Det är enkelt, och ofta även politiskt korrekt, att konstatera att IT är viktigt i skolan och att lärarna måste bli bättre, men det är desto svårare att definiera hur och varför IT är så viktigt och inte minst att faktiskt omsätta detta i praktiken genom lärare som är duktiga på att använda IT i sitt dagliga arbete.

Det är egentligen en problematik i flera nivåer. Dels finns det många verksamma lärare som behöver lyftas. Dels måste kompetensen på landets lärarutbildningar höjas ORDENTLIGT och IT måste bli ett naturligt inslag i alla delar av lärarutbildningen. Det behövs dessutom mer forskning inom detta område. Det är nämligen inte helt enkelt att faktiskt veta vilka behov som finns just nu och det är framförallt inte enkelt att veta vilka behov som finns på lite längre sikt. Faktum är att vi vet nog egentligen inte ens riktigt var vi befinner oss just nu.

Lärarutbildningen måste blir föregångare när det gäller bra användning av IT om den svenska skolan ska kunna bli riktigt bra!

Att få in IT i skolans och lärarutbildningens styrdokument är dock en bra början som vi har fått vänta på alltför länge!

Se även http://www.regeringen.se/download/efcd42e9.pdf?major=1&minor=104507&cn=attachmentPublDuplicator_0_attachment

• • •

May 8, 2008

SIS ändrar sina regler efter Microsofts pinsamma agerande

Filed under: ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36, Standards, Swedish, TK450, Technology, eLearning — frepa @ 11:53

SIS ändrar nu sina regler efter Microsofts pinsamma agerande inför omröstningen om OOXML i höstas.

Standardorganisationen Sis backar nu från tidigare regler och ställer hårdare krav för att få delta i omröstningar. Detta efter sommarens kontrovers då mängder av företag anslöt sig i sista stund och drev igenom ett ja till Microsofts ooxml-format.

Läs artikeln i CS.
Och på SIS

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