FLEXible

The last day of the WMUTE conference was dedicated to a session on Evaluation and Analysis in Mobile Learning and thus one of the great challenges in this research field. The session included the presentation and discussion of a multimodal analysis of spatial characteristics of a realworld learning field, the case of a mobile business game, the evaluation of interaction with mobile devices in mobile inquiry-based learning, and the support of place/space based patterns of citywide mobile learning through a multi-agent framework. Finally Prof. Masahiko Tsukamoto from the University in Kobe concluded the conference with his special keynote on A Perspective on Wearable and Ubiquitous Computing: How Does It Impact on Daily Life?

Notably the presentation on the mobile business game by the University of Auckland illustrated nicely the complete workflow from developing an idea, over the actual implementation, to the prototype evaluation. The game uses location-based anchors to augment business cases with real-world interactions and also includes an authoring environment. The whole approach reminded me a bit of the EMERGO toolkit, almost like a possible mobile extension. Another interesting presentation dealt with an offen neglected aspect of mobile learning – the evaluation of the interaction with mobile devices. Within the mVisible Outdoor Activity project the researchers developed an interaction evaluation framework that can be used to refine activities and tasks given.

If you are interested in one of the presentations or would like to have some more information, please do not hesitateto contact me.

Throughout the week at the WMUTE conference a range of presenters from different international universities and institutes presented their research on mobile and ubiquitous learning in sessions on Context-aware and Personalized Learning Approaches, Mobile Human-Computer Interaction, as well as Mobile Social Media and Emerging Mobile Technologies in Education.

In the first session the prototypes [MY]story and hi[STORY] were presented. Both mobile digital storytelling systems were developed with the overall goal to facilitate new media literacy as key competence and promote creative collaborative learning. More technically oriented the Open Device Control (OpenDC) framework for interactive applications in ubiquitous environments, an architecture for supporting heterogeneous multi-device learning environments, and the concept of a decentralized and self-adaptive system for mobile learning applications were introduced.

In the second session a device-free personal response system based on fiducial markers, the mobile applications Lotus, Uz, and Touch & Read for the cognitive support of children with disabilities, and a gesture-based interaction system to support the collaborative exploration of visualizations using Microsoft Kinect were presented. Interestingly the response system utilizes augmented reality (AR) markers in reverse, similar to what we did when implementing our social learning game and the AR business cards. More information on the response system can be found at http://ist.mns.kyutech.ac.jp/miura/awareresponse/index.php. Furthermore the timer based cognitive support applications Lotus and Uz are available for iOS in the App Store.

Finally in the last session new approaches for nomadic inquiry, the recommendation of helpers based on personal connections, and a folksonomy-based indexing for retrieving resources were presented. Furthermore a study on a augmented reality based butterfly ecology learning system and (especially interesting) the utilization of IMS LD to author authentic learning examples in a mobile context were presented. If you are interested in one of the presentations or would like to have some more information, please do not hesitate to contact me.

The first day of the WMUTE conference was opened by a keynote of Prof. David Cavallo from the University of Maryland iSchool and College of Education on Liberating Learning: How Ubiquitous Access to Connected Computational Devices Releases Education from the Tyranny of Information Recall. In his keynote he explained why the focus on mostly trivial information recall is the wrong educational focus for the ubiquitous age and that different approaches are needed. Furthermore he showcased some projects where he guided students to solve real-world problems using open engineering environments to foster their expression, construction, design & collaboration rather than presenting and recalling information.

The following sessions were then devoted to Mobile Learning Activity Design and Mobile Collaborative Learning. In the first session a design for mobile activity support across learning contexts, a scaffolded participatory and collaborative reading application, as well as the results of a survey covering the possibilities and challenges in mobile learning for K-12 teachers were presented. In the second session 3 collaborative system prototypes (i.e., SCROLL a context-aware ubiquitous learning-log system, LETS GO a system to support ecology field work for upper secondary schools, and SMS-HIT an approach to integrate SMS components into CSCL scripts) as well as a conceptual framework towards the support of field and in-class collaborative learning were presented. If you are interested in one of the presentations or would like to have some more information, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Next week I will attend the 7th IEEE International Conference on Wireless, Mobile, and Ubiquitous Technologies in Education (WMUTE) in Takamatsu, Japan. Beside some interesting keynotes from Prof. David Cavallo (University of Maryland, USA) and Prof. Masahiko Tsukamoto (Kobe University, Japan) on liberating learning and the impact of ubiquitous computing on the daily life, the conference presents an interesting program with the following workshops and sessions around mobile learning:

• Mobile/ubiquitous learning strategies and applications
• Scalability and interoperability dimensions for mobile learning
• Mobile language learning
• Mobile learning activity design
• Mobile collaborative learning
• Context-aware and personalized learning approaches
• Mobile human-computer interaction
• Mobile social media and emerging mobile technologies in education
• Evaluation and analysis in mobile learning
• Mobile learning in formal educational settings

More details about the conference and the complete program can be found here: http://wmute2012.info/

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1st International Workshop on Enhancing Learning with Ambient Displays and Visualization Techniques (ADVTEL-2011)

http://sites.google.com/site/advtel2011/

Held at the 6th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL11) in Palermo, Italy, September 20, 2011

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RATIONALE

Visualization techniques have been researched as a way to help people deal with the abundance of information. It makes use of the principles in Gestalt Theory that explains the human visual capacity, such as proximity, similarity, continuity, symmetry, closure and relative size. They rely on the design of effective and efficient interactive visual representations that users can manipulate to solve specific tasks themselves. This approach is especially useful when a person does not know what questions to ask about the data or when (s)he wants to ask better, more meaningful questions. At the same time displays have become a pervasive part of our environment in various manifestations. While they were traditionally used to (mainly visually) present information they also become more and more important as interfaces to access and interact with digital information. Following these developments, researchers have recently started to exploit the potential of ambient displays for learning purposes, research cognitive effects, and promote the interaction of learners with their environment.

In this workshop, we are looking for contributions in the intersection of Technology Enhanced Learning and

# Information visualization; that concentrates on the use of interactive visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition.

# Visual analytics; that aims to support analytical reasoning by interactive visual interfaces.

# Knowledge visualization; that uses visual representations to improve the transfer and creation of knowledge between people.

# Ambient Display Design; that supports individual and collaborative learning processes, problem solving and sense making.

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TOPICS OF INTEREST:

We believe that the intersection of both fields – i.e. visualization and Technology Enhanced Learning – can provoke exploration, insight and understanding. Therefore, suggested topics for contributions to our workshop include the use of existing and novel visualization techniques to the following, not limited list of application domains in TEL:

# Personalization, user modeling and adaptation,

# Science 2.0,

# Learning analytics,

# Self-reflected learning,

# Recommendation techniques,

# Mobile technologies,

# Tabletop technologies,

# Learning Object Repositories and its federations,

# Evaluation methods for visualization techniques,

# Social awareness,

# Practices of diverse Technology Enhanced Learning disciplines, and how visualization techniques can influence them,

# Exploration and exploratory search

# Design dimensions and patterns

# Theoretical approaches for embedding ambient learning displays in educational environments

# Evaluation methodologies

# Prototypical Implementations

# Experimental validations of ambient learning displays

# Sense making scenarios

# Problem Solving scenarios

# Information Awareness

# Personalization and Contextualization

# Feedback and changes in behavior

# Distributed Interaction

# Embodiment (into the physical environment)

# Ambient Intelligence

# Design guidelines

# Ambient Information Channel

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WORKSHOP FORMAT

Prior to the workshop, a dedicated group on TEL Europe (http://teleurope.eu/) will be opened to: facilitate discussions among participants before and after the conference; post submitted papers for an open peer review; post access to prototypes and applications; publish information and news about the workshop; collect reactions through social media on the workshop; create a special interest group that can be used after the workshop to collect ideas, evaluation subjects, etc.

Each presenter will be linked to related papers from other presenters and will be asked to compare how the works of others relate to their own work. We encourage the presentation of the work by giving a live demo to provoke true interactions within the workshop in an attempt to get away from the mini-conference format.

The results and discussions from the workshop will be summarized and analyzed in a short paper. Podcasts of the presentations will be disseminated through STELLAR.

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SUBMISSIONS

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished work. The following types of contributions will be possible:

# Short papers (3-5 pages) that state the position of the authors within the scope of the workshop and describe solution concepts, prototypes and work in progress, even when in very early and not yet mature state.

# Full papers: (8-12 pages) that describe problems, needs, novel approaches and frameworks within the scope of the workshop. In this category, empirical evaluation papers and industrial experience reports are welcome for submission.

The presentation of unfinished ideas, tools under development and especially failures is explicitly encouraged. This includes the presentation and discussion of tools and their real-world usability.

The recommended format for the contributions is Springer LNCS. Contributions should be submitted through EASY-CHAIR: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=advtel2011

We aim to publish workshop proceedings through CEUR-WS.org

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IMPORTANT DATES

* Paper Submission: July 20th, 2011

* Results Notification: August 17th, 2011

* Camera Ready Submission: September 1st, 2011

* Workshop Date: September 20th, 2011

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PROGRAMME COMMITTEE (to be confirmed)

# Katrien Verbert, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

# Andrew Vande Moere, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

# Boris Müller, FH Potsdam, Germany

# Moritz Stefaner, Germany

# Wolfgang Reinhardt, Universität Paderborn, Germany

# Nikos Manouselis, AgroKnow, Greece

# Xavier Ochoa, ESPOL, Ecuador

# Martin Wolpers, FIT, Germany

# Dan Suthers, University of Hawaii, USA

# Mark van t’ Hooft, Kent State University, USA

# Chee-Kit Looi, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

# Albrecht Schmidt, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany (tbc)

# Hiroaki Ogata, Tokushima University, Japan

# Tom Gross, University of Bamberg, Germany

# Ulrich Hoppe, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany

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ORGANISERS

# Joris Klerkx, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

# Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

# Eelco Herder, L3S

# Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen

# Fridolin Wild, KMi, The Open University

# Till Nagel, FH Potsdam

# Marcus Specht, Open Universiteit Nederland

# Marco Kalz, Open Universiteit Nederland

# Dirk Börner, Open Universiteit Nederland

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ABOUT EC-TEL 11

EC-TEL is a unique setting for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in Technology Enhanced Learning from Europe and other continents to meet together and exchange on the current challenges and advances in the field. At EC-TEL, experts and young researchers in Computer Science, Education, Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Social Science, as well as entrepreneurs have the opportunity to establish collaborations, strengthen their links and cross-fertilize their core disciplines.

EC-TEL 2011 will push further the Ubiquitous Learning paradigm by not only tackling the challenges of exploiting new trendy devices in various contexts, but also by investigating ways to meet and support formally and informally the learners in their learning playgrounds and social environments thanks to innovative scenarios. See http://www.ec-tel.eu/ for details.

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MORE INFORMATION

http://sites.google.com/site/advtel2011/

Contact: joris.klerkx@cs.kuleuven.be

At the 18th International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE), my poster “A Conceptual Framework for Ambient Learning Displays” has been awarded the Best Work-in-Progress-Poster Presentation. The conference under the slogan “Enhancing and Sustaining New Knowledge through the Use of Digital Technology in Education” took place from November, 29 till December, 3 in Putrajaya, Malaysia.

The Work-in-Progress-Poster session aimed to provide opportunities for poster presenters to showcase well-formulated and innovative ongoing work or late-breaking results. 25 submissions were accepted for the poster presentation after undergoing rigorous reviews by at least two reviewers. Out of these 25 submissions, my poster was considered the best. Many thanks to my supervisor Dr. Marco Kalz and my promoter Prof. Dr. Marcus Specht (who actually presented the poster in Malaysia).

In anticipation of the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco later this year, Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle published a whitepaper descibing this years theme: “Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On”.

Reflecting the last five years of this Web 2.0 conference with the main insight that Web 2.0 is all about harnessing collective intelligence they point out that the corresponding applications depend on managing, understanding, and responding to massive amounts of user-generated data in real time. Furthermore through the mobile revolution these applications are no longer being driven solely by humans typing on keyboards but, increasingly, by sensors, while the data is being collected, presented, and acted upon in real time.

With more users and sensors feeding more applications and platforms, developers are able to tackle serious real-world problems. As a result, the Web opportunity is no longer growing arithmetically; it’s growing exponentially. Hence our theme for this year: Web Squared.

Being constantly asked about the successor of the Web 2.0 they want to use this year’s summit to explore the phenomena facilitated by the mobile and the sensor revolution.

Is it the semantic web? The sentient web? Is it the social web? The mobile web? Is it some form of virtual reality? It is all of those, and more. The Web is no longer a collection of static pages [...] that describe something in the world. Increasingly, the Web is the world [...].

Based on the fact that more and more real world objects have “information shadows” in cyberspace which become thicker and more substantial they promote an alternative way to put the Internet of Things finally into practice.

The assumption is that every object must have a unique identifier for the Internet of Things to work. What the Web 2.0 sensibility tells us is that we’ll get to the Internet of Things via a hodgepodge of sensor data contributing, bottom-up, to machinelearning applications that gradually make more and more sense of the data that is handed to them. [...] Our cameras, our microphones, are becoming the eyes and ears of the Web, our motion sensors, proximity sensors its proprioception, GPS its sense of location. [...] We are meeting the Internet, and it is us. Sensors and monitoring programs are not acting alone, but in concert with their human partners. We teach our photo program to recognize faces that matter to us, we share news that we care about, we add tags to our tweets so that they can be grouped more easily. In adding value for ourselves, we are adding value to the social web as well. Our devices extend us, and we extend them.

Finally they insist that this new direction for the Web [...] opens enormous new possibilities and close the whitepaper with the following statement.

When we started the Web 2.0 events, we stated that “the Web is a platform.” Since then, thousands of businesses and millions of lives have been changed by the products and services built on that platform. But 2009 marks a pivot point in the history of the Web. It’s time to leverage the true power of the platform we’ve built. The Web is no longer an industry unto itself—the Web is now the world. [...] It’s time for the Web to engage the real world. Web meets World—that’s Web Squared.

The quite long first day at the Flashforum Conference (FFK08) has been followed by a shorter one. Again the agenda was well prepared and I visited the presentations listed below:

• Serving Flash – Lösungen mit und ohne Java (Michael Wacker)
• Verzaubert von Design Patterns – Architektur und Entwurfsmuster in der Praxis (Nico Zimmermann)
• Flex und AIR Datenintegration – Was kommt nach XML und WebServices? (Sven Claar)
• Skinning für Flex Komponenten (Sven Brencher)

This time the technical topics determined the day mainly focused on data integration and software engineering. The only exception made photographer Uli Staiger with his presentation “Power Phantasies – Bildgestaltung mit Kopf und Photoshop”, which I missed for the benefit of Sven Brenchers presentation.

The first day of the Flashforum Conference (FFK08) started with a keynote of Adobe platform evangelist Serge Jespers. The keynote mainly focused on Adobes new technical innovations, above all the current development of Flash Player 10 already available as beta version. The probably most significant element out of it is the new programming language Pixel Bender used to define visual filters for images and videos.

Another important part in the keynote was Adobe’s recently started Open Screen Project. The project intends to create a consistent runtime environment for all types of media be it online, offline or even mobile. The two platforms Flash and AIR form the foundation to put this into practice. But the implementation for mobile devices is still a moot question. The currently used Flash Player Lite is obviously not sufficient enough. More likely is therefore a mobile version of the AIR platform.

Furthermore the keynote gave an outlook on Adobe’s VoIP project Pacifica, the collaborative web service CoCoMo and the upcoming new Flash Version CS4, which contains several improvements. One is the tighter coupling of symbols and the timeline which shall enhance the creation of animations and their reusability. The introduction of the in 3D tools already well known “Bone Structures” is heading in the same direction. Shortly mentioned was also a new motion editor to easily edit animations. Another nice feature are the new 3D effects. They can be applied for all symbols and open up manifold scopes for design.

The keynote kicked off a long conference day with numerous presentations, of whom I visited the ones listed below:

• H.264 – der neue Videocodec in Flash (Florian Plag)
• Maximale Performance mit Flash Lite (Thomas Wagner)
• Pure Coding Comfort mit Eclipse FDT 3.0 (Malte Beyer)
• Aufbruch in neue interaktive Welten (Jens Franke)
• Evolve Flash Audio – Adobe, Wake up! (André Michelle)
• The Rest of the Iceberg (Hoss Gifford)