Archive for the ‘Conferences and events’ Category

Yesterday we were discussing our 3 years project work and our final results with Vladan Devedzic, Graham Atwell and Martin Majek, our Porject officer from the European Commission, in our final review meeting.

The presentations and discussions went extremely well, we got very constructive comments and officially finished the EC-funded period of the iCamp project very successfully.The whole iCamp team is very proud of this great feedback that we got and we are all committed to continue this work in one or the other way.

The review was performed in a very “iCampish” way: Graham was twittering during the meeting and collecting also questions from the wider audience on the Web. Antonio Fumero was broadcasting part of the event live. Probably the first EC project review with so much live presence on the Web!To get a short summary of our project so far, here is the executive summary of the final public report: An Open Virtual Learning Environment for Europe’s Higher Education Driven by continuous socio-economic changes, such as the increase of knowledge intensive jobs or the demand for new skills and competencies, iCamp started over 3 years ago with the vision to create an open virtual learning environment for specific competence advancements. An additional motivation for the project has been to contribute to the establishing of an inclusive information society in an enlarged Europe. During the course of the project the research team in iCamp followed a design-based research approach with a strong focus on designing for real life trials, getting feedback from practitioners and feeding this knowledge into advanced pedagogical concepts and new technological developments.

An educational intervention model

The educational work in iCamp started out by defining a conceptual framework to describe activity patterns and intervention strategies for facilitators along the contextual constraints of cross-cultural collaboration in digitally mediated environments. Facilitators were intervening into current teaching and studying practices with the aim of advancing competencies in certain areas of challenge, namely self-directing personal learning projects, collaborating with peers and social networking.The final educational intervention model that is heavily based on the experiences from the field studies describes strategies as to how facilitators may intervene in order to advance competences. The iCamp educational intervention approach can now be applied within a certain range of convenience.

Social Software Technologies for Higher Education

With regards to the technological advancements the main focus in iCamp has been set on social software technologies and its usage and adaptations for specific educational needs.A set of tools, including ready to use elements, up to rather experimental technologies that need further research before they can be implemented in practice, have been developed. The iCamp team has committed itself to an open source policy and has published all code developed during the project under creative commons licence at Sourceforge.Finally, from the practical experience of applying innovative pedagogical intervention strategies in combination with social software technologies we derived a handbook that is mainly targeting educational practitioners in higher education.One of the main strengths of iCamp has definitely been the large fieldwork that was performed during the three years and that made us aware of current highly restrictive institutional policies with regards the use of technologies. Such restrictive polices are hindering factors when it comes to educate autonomous and self-organized citizens. The democratization of institutions remains an important move that we need to take in Europe and we believe that the iCamp approach may be one small step in this process.

iCamp project has been extensively presented in The International Conference “Adult Learning and e-Learning Quality” that was held in November 25-26, 2008 in Lithuania. Conference was organized by Vytautas Magnus University in the framework of Lithuanian Virtual University program. There were 4 presentations dedicated to iCamp technology and tools in the section “New trends in e-learning development and practical applications”. Another section “e-Learning curriculum technological (re)designing methodology” dedicated to new project REVIVE was also based on iCamp methodology. All presentation of the Conference was also broadcasted live on the internet and will be available for review on demand.

Two of our Spanish facilitators from the University in Murchia recently published their experiences of the iCamp trial in a conference paper. Those who are interested in reading about the iCamp experience in Spanish, here is the reference to the paper:

Castañeda, L. & Sánchez, M. (2008) SOFTWARE SOCIAL Y APRENDIZAJE AUTÓNOMO EN LA EDUCACIÓN SUPERIOR: LA EXPERIENCIA DEL 3er TRIAL DEL PROYECTO EUROPEO iCAMP. In XI Congreso Edutec 2008: Las TIC, puente entre culturas: Iberoamérica y Europa. Santigo de Compostela –Spain. September 2008.

Thanks to Linda and Maria del Mar!

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A paper that has been written by our team members from the Vienna University of Economics has also been translated recently to Spanish: Fridolin Wild, Steinn Sigurdarson (2008): Redes de alimentadores distribuidos para el aprendizaje, Novatica 193, Mayo-Junio 2008, ano XXXIV, ATI, Spain

This paper is attached for our Spanish readers: Wild2008

This year Moodle Moot Conference takes place at Alpen-Adria-University in Klagenfurt 18-19 September. iCamp will be there with the presentation about technology solutions for Moodle. We received the information that the abstarct has been successfuly accepted so now is time for the preparations. The full name of the talk is Interoperability in Open Learning Environment – Solutions for Moodle. Anna Danielewska-Tulecka is going to present thee innovative solutions developed in iCamp project: Feedback, SQI and iCal modules for Moodle with a brief description of the way how this innovations were valiadted in the third trial.

Yesterday Barbara Kieslinger gave a presentation on the use of Social Software in educational setting and on the experiences we made in iCamp at the EDUTEC 2008 Conference. The full name of the talk was: Uso de software social en el contexto educativo y desarrollo de entornos de aprendizaje personalizado.Since the conference is a cooperation between various Universities in Spain and Latin America there was a strong participation from Latin American countries, both in Santiago de Compostela where the conference took place as well as online since the conference was also transmitted over the Internet.

Tony Hirst from the Open University is going to talk about ‘Figure:Ground – PLEs and the Flexible Learning Environment’ at this year’s EC-TEL workshop on mash-up personal learning environments (MUPPLE’08).

Coming as we do from the technical side of the ed-tech fence, it’s sometimes worthwhile stepping back for a minute and considering not only potential student users of PLEs, but also the teachers and VLE maintainers.

In his talk, Tony will explore some of the assumptions we make about content availability when putting together PLE recipes, and consider the extent to which approaches to teaching/instruction – and the way in which activities and assessment are structured, and how content is made available to students – need to be borne in mind for PLEs to be useful: maybe the use of PLEs will naturally fall out of changes in the way we teach and make content available? Maybe PLEs will only work if we change the way we teach?

To ground the discussion, Tony will review several OCW/OER projects (including OpenLearn, and the MIT OCW project), showing how the content made available can be disaggregated into a form that affords the possibility of its reuse in a PLE. I will also demonstrate how the use of tagging within a ‘blogged’ course provides an emergent and easily visualised ’self-disaggregating’ mechanism for content in which different narrative strands naturally emerge through category and tag RSS feeds.

iCamp is organising its next and probably last consortium meeting on 1.-2. Sept. 2008 in Tallinn, Estonia.

The programme for the workshop on mash-up personal
learning environments is online now. Click here to see
who is adding which new aspect to the wisdom of our
crowd. Want to be part of it? Register here for MUPPLE’08.

The ED-MEDIA 2008 conference is taking place in Vienna this year. One of the workshops not to be missed is called “How Social is my Personal Learning Environment (PLE)?”

A lot of people working in the area of Technology Enhanced Learning are currently talking about PLEs. But is there a common agreement amongst the experts of what the concept of Personal Learning Environment stands for?

As a joint initiative of the two projects iCamp and Palette we are happy to have a group of international experts together to discuss for approx. 3 hours the recent developments in this area and to have a special focus on the implications that the tendency towards personal environments might have on group collaboration and communities.

We are looking forward to an exciting workshop!

Mash-ups, the ‘frankensteining’ of software artefacts and data, have enabled a new generation of learning tools. Web-applications, services, and data can now be endlessly recombined, no matter where they reside. Really? How? Why? Within this workshop at this years’ European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2008), researchers, developers, and an interested public are brought together to share findings and define the future of mash-up personal learning environments.

Click here to learn more about the call for papers (submission deadline: July 1st, 2008). The workshop will take place on September 17, 2008.