Media Technology Conferences

CALL FOR PAPERS: Workshop on Mash-Up
Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLE'08)

at the 3rd European Conference on
Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL08)
in Maastricht, The Netherlands,
September 17-19, 2008

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RATIONALE

A change in perspective can be certified in the recent years
to technology-enhanced learning research and development:
More and more learning applications on the web are putting
the learner centre stage, not the organisation. They empower
learners with capabilities to customize and even construct
their own personal learning environments (PLEs).

These PLEs typically consist of distributed web-applications
and services that support system-spanning collaborative and
individual learning activities in formal as well as informal
settings.

Technologically speaking, this shift manifests in a learning
web where information is distributed across sites and
activities can easily encompass the use of a greater number
of pages and services offered through web-based learning
applications. Mash-ups, the 'frankensteining' of software
artefacts and data, have emerged to be the software
development approach for these long-tail and perpetual-beta
niche markets. Core technologies facilitating this paradigm
shift are Ajax, javascript-based widget-collections, and
microformats that help to glue together public web APIs
in individual applications.

In a wide range of European IST-funded research projects
such as iCamp, LTfLL, LUISA, Palette, and TENcompetence
a rising passion for these technologies can be identified.

This workshop therefore serves as a forum to bring together
researchers and developers from these projects and an open
public that have an interest in understanding and engineering
mash-up personal learning environments (MUPPLEs).

TOPICS OF INTEREST (but not limited to):

* Architectures:
e.g. from cross-domain java scripting
up to to embedding of pedagogy

* Learning Models:
e.g. Activity Models, Environment
Design Models, including their theoretical bases

* Learning Services:
e.g. Concepts and Demonstrators for recombinable
learning services

* Authoring:
e.g. editors, user-interfaces for mash-up creation,
drag&drop mash-up creation, in-place editing

* Data formats:
e.g. microformats, new data models for
fragmented data such as streaming data, recombination models
needed to establish data interoperability

* User Interfaces:
Concepts, Metaphors, Workflows

* Mash-Up Strategies:
cooperative, value-chain oriented, master
and slave

* Development Methodologies: for building and sustaining
communities
and services, including analyses of success factors,
constraints,
characteristics of user uptake including long-tail requirements
engineering and software development

WORKSHOP FORMAT

The aim of this workshop is to bring together the various research
and development groups in technology-enhanced learning that currently
focus on the development of the next generation learning environments --
learning environments that put the individuum centre stage and empower
learners with design capabilities by deploying modern mash-up principles
to establish system-spanning interoperability.

As this approach is rather young, the workshop seeks to attract
both
research results and work in progress in order to chart out
the current state-of-the-art of MUPPLEs in TEL and to define
main enablers and future challenges. Naturally, it will serve
as a forum for establishing new collaborations.

Using the presentations as impulses and continuing post-talk
debates, the workshop will conclude the day with an open discussion
exchanging ideas, summing up, and defining a medium- to
long-term research agenda.

The workshop is supported by the European Commission as a concertation
activity between especially the European Projects iCamp, LUISA,
LTfLL, Palette, and TENcompetence.

SUBMISSIONS

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research as full
papers (8 pages), work-in-progress as short papers (max. 4 pages) or
position statements (max. 2 pages). All submitted papers will be peer-
reviewed by at least three members of the program committee for
originality, significance, clarity, and quality.

The workshop proceedings will be published online as part of the
CEUR Workshop proceedings series. http://CEUR-WS.org is a recognized
ISSN publication series, with ISSN 1613-0073. Furthermore, 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"
nstructions at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.

All questions and submissions should be sent to:
mupple08 @ alice.wu-wien.ac.at

IMPORTANT DATES

* Paper Submission: July 1st, 2008
* Results Notification: August 1st, 2008
* Camera Ready Submission: August 31, 2008
* Workshop Date: September 17, 2008

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE (to be confirmed)

* Abelardo Pardo (University Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)
* Ajith Ranabahu (Wright State University, Ohio)
* Dai Griffith (University of Bolton, UK)
* Denis Gillet (EPFL, Switzerland)
* Effie Law (University of Leicester, United Kingdom)
* Fabrizio Giorgini (Giunti, Italy)
* Felix Mödritscher (Vienna University of Economics and
Business Administration, Austria)
* Graham Atwell (Pontydysgu, United Kingdom)
* Gytis Cibulskis (Kaunas Technical University, Lithuania)
* Mart Laanpere (Tallinn University, Estonia)
* Martin Wolpers (Fraunhofer FIT, Germany)
* Mohamed Amine Chatti (RWTH Aachen, Germany)
* Nikos Karacapilidis (University of Patras, Greece)
* Scott Wilson (University of Bolton, United Kingdom)
* Stéphane Sire (EPFL, Switzerland)
* Tony Hirst (Open University, UK)

ORGANISERS

* Fridolin Wild (Vienna University of Economics and
Business Administration, Austria)
* Matthias Palmer (University of Upsala, Sweden)
* Marco Kalz (Open University, The Netherlands)

ABOUT EC-TEL07

After two successful EC-TEL conferences in 2006 and 2007,
the Third European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning
provides a unique forum for all research related to TEL,
among them education, psychology, and computer science.
The contributions will cover the design of innovative environments,
the implementation of new technological solutions, results of
empirical studies on socio-cognitive processes in learning, and
field studies regarding the use of technologies in context.

EC-TEL is a competitive and broad forum for TEL research in
Europe and beyond. In its specialised accompanying workshops and
the highlighting main conference programme, EC-TEL08 provides
unique networking possibilities for participating researchers
throughout the week and includes project meetings and discussions
for ongoing and new research activities supported by the European
Commission. See http://www.ectel08.org/ for details.

First International Workshop on
Story-Telling and Educational Games (STEG'08) - The power of
narration and
imagination in technology enhanced learning

http://www.prolearn-academy.org/Events/steg08

CALL FOR PAPERS

The STEG 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.=20

CONTEXT AND MOTIVATION

Stories and story-telling are cultural achievements of significant
relevance
even in modern times. Nowadays, story-telling is being enhanced with the
convergence of sociology, pedagogy, and technology. In recent times,
computer gaming has also been deployed for educational purposes and has
proved to be an effective approach to mental stimulation and
intelligence
development. Many conceptual similarities and some procedural
correlation
exist between story-telling and educational gaming. Therefore these two
areas can be clubbed for research on Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL).
Many facets of story-telling and educational gaming emulate real life
processes, which can be represented either as complex story graphs or as
interleaved sub-problems. This model is congruent with that used for
Technology Enhanced Learning in vocational training. TEL in vocational
training requires learning models that focus more on the process and
less o=
n the content.

The main difference between educational games and story-telling lies
in the
users motivational point of view. Story-telling aims at reliving real
life
tasks and capturing previous experiences in problem-solving for
reuse, whil=
e educational games reproduce real life tasks in a virtual world in an
(ideally) engaging and attractive process. Nevertheless, educational
games
require highly specialized technical and pedagogical skills and learning
processes to cover the topics in sufficient depth and breadth. Imbalance
between depth and breadth of study can lead to producing trivial games,
which in turn can lead to de-motivating the learner.

While the integration of learning and gaming provides a great
opportunity,
several motivational challenges (particularly in vocational training)
must
also be addressed to ensure successful realization. Non-linear digital
stories are an ideal starting point for the creation of educational
games,
since each story addresses a certain problem, so that the story
recipient
can gain benefit from other user experiences. This leads to the
development
of more realistic stories, which then provide the kernel for developing
non-trivial educational videogames. These stories can cover the
instructional portion of an educational game, while the game would
add the
motivation and engagement part.

In summary, this workshop aims at bringing together researchers,
experts and
practitioners from the domains of non-linear digital interactive
story-telling and educational gaming to share ideas and knowledge.
There is
a great amount of separate research in these two fields and the
celebration
of this workshop will allow the participants to discover and leverage
potential synergies.

Workshop topics

* Story-telling and game theorie
* Story and game design paradigms for Technology Enhanced Learning
* Augmented story-telling and gaming
* Story-telling and educational gaming with social software
* Story-telling and educational gaming with mobile technologies
* Cross-media/transmedia story-telling and gaming
* Computer gaming for story-telling (Game design for narrative
architectures)
* Multimedia story and game authoring
* Story-telling and educational gaming applications
* User experience and empirical research in story-telling and gaming
for TEL

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: steg08@dbis.rwth-
aachen.de

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper Submission: June 30, 2008
Notification of acceptance: July 15, 2008
Camera Ready Submission: August 20, 2008
Workshop date: September 17,18 or 19, 2007

ORGANISERS

Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aaachen University, Germany
Nalin Sharda, Victoria University, Australia
Baltasar Fernandez Manjon, Complutense University, Spain
Harald Kosch, University of Passau, Germany
Marc Spaniol, Max Planck Institute for Computer Science, Germany
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