This year our call for the Second Workshop on Mashup Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLE09) has attracted quite some high quality submissions. Recently we have published the programme of the workshop. The proceedings will be published soon. The registration for the workshop is still possible. It will be a very good opportunity to discuss current approaches around the mashup and personal learning environments concepts. We hope to meet you soon in Nice!

I am very happy to announce the call for papers for the Second European Workshop on Mash-UP Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLE09) at the 4th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL09), Nice, France, September 29 - October 2, 2009.

We are asking for contributions dealing with the following topics:

* Visions: Architectures, Frameworks, Strategies, Models

* (Collaborative) Authoring Tools

* Data Interoperability: with e.g. Microformats,
streaming data, mixed media data

* User Interfaces: Concepts, Metaphors, Workflows

* Development Methodologies

* Innovative Widgets and Services: e.g. for instruction,
game-based learning, self-reflection, personal information

* Interoperability Standards for widgets,
content recombination, configuration

* User Studies & Evaluation Methods: evaluating e.g. performance,
usability, specific design features, training methods

The rationale and full call for papers is available here.

 

 

For several weeks the list of Advanced Learning Technologies was not available due to some server problems. The new home for the list is now on the CELSTEC site. We will install a redirect from the old address to the new one. And again: Please propose extensions or changes to the list to the following address: altjournals@gmail.com.

After getting crazy about how slow my system has become my hardware could not stand my moaning anymore so it decided to break on a critical place. Due to a fast reaction from our administration a replacement for my old machine was in place. But before I shuffled my data to an external drive I decided to invest some brains into three problems which I wanted to solve on my new machine:

1.) Ubuntu dual boot

I only wanted to use windows when I really have to. So I installed the latest Ubuntu distribution with a shared drive which can be accessed from Windows and Ubuntu as well. This worked out of the box and both systems are now ready under one minute (my old system took more then 7 minutes to fully boot).

2.) No windows synchronisation as backup solution

I was never happy with the current backup solution which involved the automatical synchronisation of a whole drive before the system shuts down. Since this was never an incremental setup but a full backup it took ages to scan thousands of files and even when it finished it always ran into problems. This was most problematic when I wanted to access my files from home or during travel. The combination of synchronisation and VPN is not a good idea at all. During a short discussion with Stefaan he pointed me to the powerful backup tool rsync which works incrementally. The only problem is that it is only available for Linux and that I did not want to install cygwin to run backups. For this purpose the DeltaCopy application is a perfect solution. With a little help from this description I was able to install a backup solution which I like. A local batch file on windows which can be used to manually invoke the backup or it can be used in a scheduled task. Now I have once put all my important files on my Debian server (which has rsync running) and the next backups will be very fast because only changes will be synchronized.

3.) A new system for reference management

I recently discovered a new application for reference management which is called Mendeley. This cross platform reference management software is one of the best software solutions which I have seen for this purpose. Currently only a Microsoft Word plugin is available but an Open Office plugin is in preparation as well. Since I am currently writing my first paper with Mendeley I will report my experiences in a dedicated posting here.

I am very happy to see that the Dutch government has taken the topic of open access on their agenda for this year. The Dutch Higher Education sector has even announced this year as the Dutch Open Access year. Please find below a short video in Dutch which collects several voices for more open access in the Netherlands.

 

 

In a recent Techrunch article some statistics have been shown that the term "Web2.0" is slowly going away. While I am not in favor of judging about trends based on search terms of the search engine giant I have to admit that I would be happy if this term would gow away. It should go away and take its followers WebX.0 as well. Goodye and never come back!

I have never seen such a massive meaninglessness in combination with an exponential use of the term in educational technology. But my criticism is not only based on this aspect - I also dislike the fact that a very important educational and sociological movement - in which core the empowerment of learners lies - is referenced with a naming convention from software development. This implies such an intense reduction of the empowerment of learners just by introducing a new technology that has the right stamp "WebX.0". I hope that the trend of not using this term anymore is related to the fact that people actually do something with these new technologies and that they realize how wrong this term is.

Another observation I have is that academia just jumped very lately on the bandwagon which is mirrored through the fact that many special issues of scientitific journals have been produced latey, are in production or planning. Not to get me wrong I have to say, that I really like the fact that we have nowadays technology which has the ability to empower learners for self-directed learning. But I dislike the fact that we again think introducing new technology is enough for innovation.

By the way: I have tried to not use the term in all my writings and instead use the term "social software" which is not much better but has at least a social component.

 

 

The answer might be too simple: Out there! In many discussions I hear the argument that there are no learning networks currently available which you can take to study or to do research. Maybe the notion of an institutionally controlled or offered learning network might not be reality yet, but if we take the many self-organized learning networks out there you could also argue that the concept of learning networks has just become reality through the widespread use of social software and that the theoretical ideas behind learning networks (self-organisation, emergence, problem-driven short time cooperation etc.) are their foundations as well. Maybe the following video might support my argument a little: 

 

 Merry Christmas and Happy 2009!

Drupal has become the system of choice for many smaller and larger projects. Since I am receiving from time to time questions about the system and what it is and does I think the following video introduction could be helpful. In this introduction the authors of the book "Using Drupal" explain all important aspects  of the system.

Especially the comparison to other systems might answer a lot of the questions I hear quite often (short side notice: this is the first time I try youtubes deep-link option). The audio is not perfect but sufficient.

 

Something which I wanted to do for a long time with the list of journals for the field of advanced learning technologies is now made quite easy by a new JISC funded service. While the original idea to aggregate feeds from educational technology & psychology journals was initiated first by Doug Holton (the final list has been published here now) the JISC project TicTocs offers a very handy tool to chose from table of contents from 133 publishers. I have composed a list with the service which I could export as OPML, so for you it should be quite easy to download it and import it into your favourite feedreader: altjournals.opml . As a results you can monitor the new publications in the core journals quite easy with your feedreader. It is a pitty that not all journals publish a ToC via RSS, so the OPML covers only 75 % of the journal list.