Special Theme on School of the Future and Future Classrooms in the Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Learning Technology

Call For Articles - BULLETIN OF THE TECHNICAL COMMITTEE ON LEARNING
TECHNOLOGY (ISSN 2306-0212) http://www.ieeetclt.org/content/bulletin
publication of IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Learning
Technology (TCLT)

* Special Theme: School of the Future and Future Classrooms
* Deadline for submission: July 24, 2013.


The Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Learning Technology (former
Learning Technology Newsletter) aims at publishing and disseminating current
research about new and emerging learning technologies as well as their
design, usage, application, and evaluation in different contexts of
technology enhanced learning.

The special theme of this issue will focus on topics related to the school
of the future and future classrooms, including (but not limited to) research
on concepts, design and practical applications of technologies to build
future classrooms and schools, case studies and exploratory studies on
future classrooms and schools, and evaluations of future classrooms and
schools.

Articles that are not in the area of the special theme are most welcome as
well and will be published in the regular article section. The Bulletin of
the Technical Committee on Learning Technology invites short articles, case
studies, and project reports for the April issue. This issue will be
published in Volume 15, Issue 3 (July, 2013).


** The bulletin is of non-refereed nature though the articles will be
selected and edited by the Editors. **


Submission procedure:

1. Authors have to follow the IEEE author guidelines when preparing their
articles (please see http://www.ieeetclt.org/content/authors-guidelines for
further information)

2. The articles in the bulletin are limited to 4 pages. Over-length articles
will not be published.

3. The manuscripts should be either in Word or RTF format. Any figures used
in the contributions would be required separately in a graphic format (gif
or jpeg). The figures should also be embedded in the text at appropriate
places.

4. Please send the manuscripts by email to karagian@uth.gr and
sabineg@athabascau.ca (Subject: Bulletin of TCLT Submission).

5. In the email, please state clearly that the manuscript is original
material that has not been published, and is not being considered for
publication elsewhere.

For further information please see http://www.ieeetclt.org/content/bulletin.

Best regards,
Sabine Graf
Charalampos Karagiannidis
(Editors of the Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Learning Technology)

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Special Theme on Learning Analytics in the Bulletin of TCLT

Call For Articles – BULLETIN OF THE TECHNICAL COMMITTEE ON LEARNING TECHNOLOGY (ISSN 2306-0212) http://www.ieeetclt.org/content/bulletin
publication of IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Learning Technology (TCLT)

* Special Theme: Learning Analytics
* Deadline for submission: March 30, 2013.


The Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Learning Technology (former
Learning Technology Newsletter) aims at publishing and disseminating current
research about new and emerging learning technologies as well as their
design, usage, application, and evaluation in different contexts of
technology enhanced learning.

The special theme of this issue will focus on learning analytics, including
(but not limited to) research on theory and practical uses of learning
analytics; learning analytics algorithms and tools as well as their
evaluations; concepts and applications of learning analytics in formal,
informal and non-formal educational settings; the visualization of results
from learning analytics for students and teachers; the design,
implementation and evaluations of learning analytics techniques; and case
studies and exploratory studies on how to use learning analytics to
facilitated learning and teaching.

Articles that are not in the area of the special theme are most welcome as
well and will be published in the regular article section. The Bulletin of
the Technical Committee on Learning Technology invites short articles, case
studies, and project reports for the April issue. This issue will be
published in Volume 15, Issue 2 (April, 2013).


** The bulletin is of non-refereed nature though the articles will be
selected and edited by the Editors. **


Submission procedure:

1. Authors have to follow the IEEE author guidelines when preparing their
articles (please see http://www.ieeetclt.org/content/authors-guidelines for
further information)

2. The articles in the bulletin are limited to 4 pages. Over-length articles
will not be published.

3. The manuscripts should be either in Word or RTF format. Any figures used
in the contributions would be required separately in a graphic format (gif
or jpeg). The figures should also be embedded in the text at appropriate
places.

4. Please send the manuscripts by email to karagian@uth.gr and
sabineg@athabascau.ca (Subject: Bulletin of TCLT Submission).

5. In the email, please state clearly that the manuscript is original
material that has not been published, and is not being considered for
publication elsewhere.

For further information please see http://www.ieeetclt.org/content/bulletin.

Best regards,
Sabine Graf
Charalampos Karagiannidis
(Editors of the Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Learning Technology)

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The following article is from the  http://www.ieeetclt.org/issues/july2012/IEEE-LT-July2012.htm  of the Technical Committee on Learning Technology (TCLT) and gives a short description of our contributions to the TELMAP project.

A Mediabase for Technology Enhanced Learning in Europe

Abstract

There is growing interest in analytic techniques and tools for supporting scientific communities, e.g. through visual analytics tools. In the domain of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), one of the first endeavors in this regard started in 2006, when the PROLEARN project [1], a European TEL network of excellence, deployed a “Mediabase” for TEL in Europe. The objective was to overcome fragmentation and propel excellence in the field by providing stakeholder groups like scientists and policy makers with digital information obtained from TEL social media sources (e.g. mailing lists, blogs, RSS/Atom feeds) [3]. From the end-user perspective a key task was the development and provision of easy-to-use tools for extracting and presenting relevant information contained in the Mediabase, e.g. for cross-media social network analysis and self-observation [4]. In the scope of the currently running TEL-Map project [2], a support action funded by the European Commission, the Mediabase idea was adopted to empower TEL stakeholders in Europe and beyond to find relevant information and to obtain a rich overview of different types of actors and artifacts involved in the TEL domain. The main objective is to provide support forroadmapping activities in TEL, which required extending the available data sources and analytics tools.

Data Sources

The TEL Mediabase includes information from three main data sources:

• Blogosphere: TEL related blogs, including the blog entries, comments and analytical information like length, hyperlinks, words occurrences, and word bursts for entries.
• Projects: TEL projects funded by the European Commission, including metadata and information like description, start/end dates, cost, funding, and consortium members.
• Papers: Bibliographic information on TEL related conferences, journals, workshops, authors, and papers.

Figure 1 shows the component layers of the Mediabase. The web data sources are crawled periodically, and the data is processed and fed into a set of relational databases. The projects database is fed from publicly available information pages on the European Community’s websites (e.g. CORDIS [3]); the papers database is fed by the DBLP [4] data set enriched with abstracts and keywords crawled from the publisher pages (currently we support IEEE, ACM and Springer). The blogs database is fed by a blog crawler and a feed importer. The blogs to be included are specified by community members using web-based tools like the Feed Aggregator on the Learning Frontiers portal (http://learningfrontiers.eu) or the Mediabase Commander available at the PROLEARN Academy homepage (http://prolearn-academy.org).

Figure 1 - TEL Mediabase component layers

Currently the Mediabase indexes almost one thousand TEL related blogs with close to 400,000 blog entries and more than one million distinct hyperlinks. It includes the complete DBLP data set, as of March 2011 consisting of more than 800,000 authors, about 1.5 million papers, and more than 3,700 conferences, journals and workshops. The project data set includes 116 collaborative projects funded by the European Commission during TEL focused calls in FP6, FP7, eContentplus, and eTEN, involving more than 800 different organizations.

End-User Applications

To enable TEL stakeholders to access the data for analytic and roadmapping tasks, we deployed several web-based tools as shown in the bottom layer in Figure 1. In the Learning Frontiers portal, a TEL roadmapping portal hosted by the TEL-Map project, we offer the following tools:

• Projects Space: This portal section (see Figure 2) allows users to browse the project data set. It also presents a map overlay that shows the geographical distribution of project partners and an automatically generated list of predecessor and successor projects. These pieces of information are hyperlinked to provide a seamless browsing experience. A study investigating collaboration networks and project impact based on these features is presented in [2].
• Mediabase Dashboard [1]: A portal section similar to the iGoogle homepage. Users can embed widgets in their personalized dashboard. These special widgets provide real time visualizations of the data in the three databases. Users may also create custom visualizations by using the provided widget creator application.
• Feed Aggregator: Allows users to specify feeds and blogs to index for crawling.

Figure 2: Projects space on the Learning Frontiers portal

In addition we have developed and deployed web tools outside of the Learning Frontiers portal:

• Query Interface: provides the possibility to query the three databases using SQL in a web-based interface. The query results are visualized using different chart types like pie chart, line chart, timeline, table, graph, etc.
• AERCS [5]: enables users to access analytic, visual and comparative functions on the papers database. For instance it allows comparing the co-authorship and citation networks of different conferences, visualize author networks, identify key authors, and similar functions. A study analyzing the development patterns of TEL conferences using these features is presented in [5].
• Mediabase Commander: a Firefox plugin that allows users to browse the TEL blogs database and to add new blogs.

Conclusion

In this article we have presented a Mediabase for TEL, which was built and deployed to facilitate mapping and roadmapping activities in the TEL scientific community. This includes observing key indicators in relevant data sources as well as to contribute to and browse data sources from web-based applications within and beyond their community web portals.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the European Commission through the TEL-Map support action (FP7-257822).

References

[1]               Derntl, M., Erdtmann, S., Klamma, R.: A Widget-Based Dashboard for Visual Analytics on Scientific Communities. Proceedings of I-KNOW 2012. ACM (in press)

[2]               Derntl, M., Klamma, R.: The European TEL Projects Community from a Social Network Perspective. Proceedings of EC-TEL 2012. Springer Verlag (in press)

[3]               Klamma, R., Spaniol, M., Cao, Y., Jarke, M.: Pattern-Based Cross Media Social Network Analysis for Technology Enhanced Learning in Europe. Proceedings of EC-TEL 2006, pp. 242-256. Springer (2006)

[4]               Petrushyna, Z., Klamma, R.: No Guru, No Method, No Teacher: Self-classification and Self-modelling of E-Learning Communities. Proceedings of EC-TEL 2008, pp. 354-365. Springer (2008)

[5]               Pham, M.C., Derntl, M., Klamma, R.: Development Patterns of Scientific Communities in Technology Enhanced Learning. Educational Technology & Society (in press).

Michael Derntl

RWTH Aachen University

Germany

derntl@dbis.rwth-aachen.de

Ralf Klamma

RWTH Aachen University

Germany

klamma@dbis.rwth-aachen.de

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Learning Technology Newsletter - Issue on Technology-Augmented Physical Educational Spaces

Call For Articles 

LEARNING TECHNOLOGY NEWSLETTER (ISSN 1438-0625) Special

Theme: Technology-Augmented Physical Educational Spaces publication of IEEE

Computer Society Technical Committee on Learning Technology (TCLT)

http://www.ieeetclt.org/content/newsletter

* Deadline for submission: September 15, 2012.

Learning Technology Newsletter aims at publishing and disseminating current research about new and emerging learning technologies as well as their design, usage, application, and evaluation in different contexts of technology enhanced learning. The special theme of this issue will focus on the improvement and application of information and communication technologies to augment physical spaces for teaching and learning purposes, including (but not limited to) research on mobile and personal devices to augment reality; roomware, large screens, multitouch devices and ubiquitous learning; smart physical objects; indoors and outdoors spaces (classroom, playground, museums, city.); classroom orchestration; informal educational settings; contextual learning in situ. Please feel free to bring forward your ideas and views.

This issue will be published in Volume 14, Issue 4 (October, 2012).

Articles that are not in the area of the special theme are most welcome as well and will be published in the regular article section.

For further information please see
http://www.ieeetclt.org/content/newsletter.


* Special Theme Submission procedure:

1. The articles in the newsletter are limited to 1000 words.
Over-length articles will not be published.

2. The manuscripts should be either in Word or RTF format.
Any figures used in the contributions would be required separately in a graphic format (gif or jpeg). The figures should also be embedded in the text at appropriate places.

3. Please send the manuscripts by email as attachment to
davinia.hernandez@upf.edu (Subject: IEEE Learning Technology Newsletter Submission).

4. In the email, please state clearly that the manuscript is original material that has not been published, and is not being considered for publication elsewhere.

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IEEE Learning Technology Newsletter - Issue on data mining and web mining for educational purposes

Call For Articles - LEARNING TECHNOLOGY NEWSLETTER (ISSN 1438-0625) publication of IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Learning Technology (TCLT) http://www.ieeetclt.org/content/newsletter 

Issue on data mining and web mining for educational purposes

* Deadline for submission: June 15, 2012.


Learning Technology Newsletter aims at publishing and disseminating current research about new and emerging learning technologies as well as their design, usage, application, and evaluation in different contexts of technology enhanced learning. The special theme of this issue will focus on data mining and web mining for educational purposes, including (but not limited to) research on using data mining and web mining approaches and algorithms for improving learning and teaching; concepts and applications of data/web mining in formal, informal and non-formal educational settings, the visualization of results from data mining and web mining for students and teachers, the design, implementation and evaulations of data/web mining techniques for educational purposes, and case studies and exploratory studies on how to use data/web mining to facilitated learning and teaching.
Please feel free to bring forward your ideas and views.

Articles that are not in the area of the special theme are most welcome as well and will be published in the regular article section Learning Technology Newsletter invites short articles, case studies, and project reports for the October issue. This issue will be published in Volume 14, Issue 3 (July, 2012).


** The newsletter is of non-refereed nature though the articles will be selected and edited by the Editors. **


* Submission procedure:

1. The articles in the newsletter are limited to 1000 words. Over-length articles will not be published.

2. The manuscripts should be either in Word or RTF format. Any figures used in the contributions would be required separately in a graphic format (gif or jpeg). The figures should also be embedded in the text at appropriate places.

3. Please send the manuscripts by email as attachment to sabineg@athabascau.ca and karagian@uth.gr (Subject: Learning Technology Newsletter Submission).

4. In the email, please state clearly that the manuscript is original material that has not been published, and is not being considered for publication elsewhere.

For further information please see
http://www.ieeetclt.org/content/newsletter.

Best regards,
Sabine Graf
Charalampos Karagiannidis
(Editors of Learning Technology Newsletter)

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