this is a call for participation:
Submission by June 29, 2008
Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning (SIRTEL’08)
in
the 3rd European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL08)
Maastricht, The Netherlands, September 17, 2008
http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/sirtel/
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IMPORTANT DATES

· Submission: June 29, 2008
· Results Notification: July 15, 2008
· Camera Ready Submission: August 31, 2008
· Workshop date: September 17, 2008
· Main conference dates: September 18-19, 2008

CALL FOR WORKSHOP CONTRIBUTIONS

After the successful first SIRTEL workshop last year, we are delighted to welcome
exciting new contributions for the 2nd Social Information Retrieval for Technology-
Enhanced Learning (SIRTEL) workshop:
· Research papers
· System demos
· Hands-on proposals
· “Pecha Kucha” talks

RATIONALE

Learning and teaching resources 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 a potentially overwhelming variety of choices.

The aim of the SIRTEL’08 workshop is to look onward beyond recent achievements to discuss
specific topics, emerging research issues, new trends and endeavors in SIR for Technology
Enhanced Learning (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):

Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) and Social Information Retrieval (SIR) techniques such as:
· Recommender systems
· Social collaborative searching, browsing and sharing of queries
· Social network analysis
· Game-theoretic approaches to select learning materials and learning partners in the long tail
· Social bookmarking and tagging, folksonomies
· Annotations, ratings and evaluations

Concepts for Social Information Retrieval (SIR)
· Defining the scope, purpose and objects of social information retrieval in TEL
· Defining user requirements for the deployment of SIR systems in a learning setting
· Current and new trends in SIR methods for TEL
· Approaches to TEL metadata that reflect social ties and collaborative experiences
in the field of education
· Analytical modelling of strategic intentions in TEL communities
· Interoperability of SIR systems for TEL

Implementation of SIR in TEL
· Methods and models of SIR in the area of learning and teaching
· Social processes and metaphors in learning communities and social networks for searching
acquiring and sharing information
· Pedagogical aspects of SIR in TEL; how to scaffold students, activity patterns, etc.
Integrating SIR services in existing learning platforms
· Visualisation techniques to support SIR in TEL
· Successful scaffolding techniques for SIR implementation

Evaluation of SIR in TEL
· Ideas on how can we get more empirical on evaluation
· Best practices
· Evaluation of the success and acceptance of SIR systems in the context of teaching,
learning and/or TEL community building
· Challenges and enablers
· Evaluating the performance and measuring the effectiveness of SIR systems in learning applications
· Evaluation the user satisfaction with SIR system in supporting learning and teaching, etc.

WORKSHOP SUBMISSIONS

The workshop invites several types of contributions which allow a wide level of participation:
· Research papers (upto 8 pages)
· System Demos (upto 2 pages)
· Hands-On proposals (1-pager)
· Abstract for Pecha Kucha style presentation (5min) 

Papers are to be submitted to: https://togather.eu/handle/123456789/274
Accepted papers will be published online as EC-TEL workshop proceedings
as part of the CEUR Workshop proceedings series.

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

All questions and submissions should be sent to: sirtel @ cs.kuleuven.be

PROGRAM COMMITTEE (TBC)

· Alexander Felfernig, University of Klagenfurt, Germany
· Brandon Muramatsu, Utah State University, USA
· Clemens Cap, University of Rostock, Germany
· Hendrik Drachsler, Open University of the Netherlands, The Netherlands
· Frans van Assche, European Schoolnet, Belgium
· Fridolin Wild, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Austria
· Lisa Petrides, ISKME, USA
· Marc Spaniol, Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics, Germany
· Markus Strohmaier, Technical University of Graz, TBC
· Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer, Germany
· Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcala, Spain
· Nikos Manouselis. Greek Research & Technology Network, Greece
· Selmin Nurcan, University of Paris 1, France
· Yiwei Cao, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
· Barry Smyth, University College Dublin, Ireland – TBC
· John Dron, Athabasca University, Canada – TBC
· Rick D. Hangartner, MyStrands, USA – TBC
· Oliver Bohl, Accenture GmbH, TBC
· Martin Memmel, DFKI, TBC

ORGANISERS

* Riina Vuorikari, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven) & European Schoolnet (EUN), Belgium
* Barbara Kieslinger, Centre for Social Innovation (ZSI), Austria
* Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
* Prof. Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven), Belgium & ARIADNE Foundation

ABOUT EC-TEL08

Times of convergence: Technologies across learning contexts
In this age of pedagogical and technological convergence, the two European Networks of
Excellence are also converging. After the two successful EC-TEL conferences organized
in 2006 and 2007 by the ProLearn network, this third edition conveys an explicit invitation
to all researchers across any network and outside any network and intends to offer
a large platform to research across Europe.

17. - 19. September 2008, Maastricht School of Management, Maastricht, The Netherlands

we recently received the confirmation from our project officer at the EC that our project was granted an extension of 3 months. So our official project period will last until the end of 2008.

This gives us the possibility to intensify our dissemination activities for promoting our final results. So watch out for iCamp events!

Together with the PALETTE project we are going to organise a Symposium at the ED-MEDIA 2008 conference.

The symposium is titled “How social is my personal learning environment (PLE)” and we would like to discuss the learning impacts of personalization on the adoption of social software and the consolidation of the sense of belonging to a community. In total, we will have eight individual papers of colleagues from Finland, Estonia, Switzerland, Austria, Uk, Greece, Luxembourg, and Canada.

One paper contribution will be focusing on findings from the iCamp trials.

The symposium coordinators are Barbara Kieslinger and Denis Gillet from EPFL.

At the second TENCompetence Winter School in Innsbruck, Austria (February 18.-22., 2008) Terje Väljataga and Martin Sillaots organised a round table session titled “Social software in learning” to discuss different examples of social software applications in higher education.

From January 28th to February 1st, 2008, Sebastian Fiedler and Terje Väljataga took part in an International School on Educational Research in Jyväskylä, Finland. This event was organised by the Finnish Doctoral Programme for Multidisciplinary Research on Learning Environments in collaboration with the Dutch ICO.

The third field trial of iCamp started on March 2, 2008. The trial is built around a three-months intensive online course on “e-Learning” designed at Tallinn University, Estonia. The 74 international participants are supported by 10 facilitators from Bulgaria, Poland, Croatia, Spain, Lithuania, Finland, and Estonia.

The iCamp consortium held a three-days project meeting (14-16th of February) in winterly Istanbul, Turkey. The meeting was focused on the third iCamp validation trial, strategic planning for the last project year, and dissemination activities. Facilitators from Croatia, Spain, Bulgaria, Poland, Finland joined the meeting to discuss details of the third field trial.

On December 20. the review meeting of iCamp’s second year of project work took place in Vienna, Austria, at the Centre for Social Innovation.

External reviewers were Graham Attwell and Prof.Dr. Vladan Devedzic. The meeting was headed by the European Commission project officer Martin Majek.

iCamp Trial-2 first student flashmeeting was organised on 19th Nov 2007.

Four European Higher Education institutions constitute the trial sites of Trial2, viz.:

• Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Czech Republic
• AGH - University of Science and Technology, Poland
• Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
• ISIK University, Turkey

Academic staff and researchers from each institution play the role of facilitators in the trial. Undergraduates and postgraduates majoring in computer science, electrical engineering, sociology, and management from these institutions form small online groups (2 to 5 members) to work collaboratively on a specific project theme.

It has been developed the new iCamp Help Center which offers guides and tutorials for tools used in Trial 2. This system provides user-friendly assistance during installation and initial utilization of the products. The advantages of the iCamp Help Center are accessibility to everything via the only environment and the possibility of following the guides without interruption of the work with the tool. Moreover, you can register and ask for an additional help. From the administrator point of view, the changes in tools can be very easily and quickly updated.

The present list of supported tools contains:

Doodle
Feed on feeds
Flickr
Google Calendar
ObjectSpot
Scuttle
Sunbird Calendar
VideoWiki
WordPress
X-lite
myDENTITY

The iCamp Help Center has been developed by Petr Dolezel and you can try it out at:
http://helpcenter.icamp.eu/.