1st European Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Learning Networks (ARNets11)

Proceedings

are online at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-790/

Wolfgang Reinhardt, Thomas Daniel Ullmann, Peter Scott, Viktoria Pammer, Owen Conlan & Adriana Berlange (eds.): Proceedings of the 1st European Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Learning Networks. In conjunction with the 6th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning: Towards Ubiquitous Learning 2011. Palermo, Italy, September 21, 2011. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-790/

Announcement:

TEL-Think-Tank 2011 Workshop: there is a connection between both workshops, with a set of joint actions ahead:

There will be a cross-twitter channel between the workshop: #arnets11 and #telthinktank

And we encourage participants from both workshops interact during the coffee break.

Find out more at the ARNets11 workshop program page: http://www.teleurope.eu/pg/pages/view/120696/

Please join this group to stay updated about the event: Awareness and Reflection in Technology-Enhanced Learning (if you are not a member of TELeurope by now, please register first and then join the group). To receive emails about activities of the group enable the “Group Notifications” in the “Settings” menu on top of the page.

The Awareness and Reflection in Learning Networks workshop aims to build an interdisciplinary understanding of issues regarding awareness and reflection in networked learning. It will attract participants from social science, computer science, design, psychology, and learning sciences to challenge the understanding of the fields of awareness and reflection in Technology Enhanced Learning. The participants will present and discuss their papers and work together on an integrated roadmap for future research in this field. As the workshop topics overlap significantly with those of EU FP7 projects: ImREAL, MIRROR, STELLAR, TELLNET, MATURE, and TELMap the workshop will also act as forum for communication between these communities.

Call for papers and demos

1st European Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Learning Networks (ARNets11)
to be held in conjunction with EC-TEL 2011, Palermo (Italy)
September 21, 2011 (full day)

Twitter hashtag: #arnets11
Short URL: http://teleurope.eu/arnets11

The workshop program is now online: http://www.teleurope.eu/pg/pages/view/120696/

Background

In today’s economy, knowledge is one of the most important resources for both individuals and organizations. People invest significant efforts in the design and development of learning resources and software that strives to enhance the learning successes of individuals and groups. Networking, exchanging ideas and using tools for research on the Web are essential parts of their learning practice. While learners are, to a certain degree, aware about their relations in these networks and the partners of their communication, technology can make explicit related activities beyond the individual focus of attention. Additionally, technology can help learners bring knowledge and knowledge needs from their individual learning space into networked environments. It is important to note that not all activities relevant for learning already happen in online networks. Rather, motivated individuals engage in these networks, but there are lots more learners who could profit from such an engagement, but just never take the necessary steps. Here, technology can help e.g. by raising awareness about a learner’s activities or those of others, related communities, information needs, etc.

Computer-mediated communication has the advantage that it can create mirroring artefacts, which capture learning analytic data to help learners to become aware and to reflect. These can be (1) via mirroring information, which would normally be visible in face-to-face situations, but which can be viewed as a highlight or learning-focused selection, and (2) mirroring information, which is normally invisible in face-to-face situations, but that has the potential to improve the working or learning process. This information could help learners to become aware of their constantly changing connections and interactions beyond their individual context and help them to reflect upon.

Traditionally the concept of awareness is used in the research field of CSCW to re-establish awareness conditions of face-to-face situations with visual cues showing for example, who is online or working on a document. In the field of perception psychology, awareness is the state or ability to focus on certain stimuli of the environment while ignoring others. Here, being aware of something does not necessarily mean to understand it. In marketing, awareness usually relates to the degree consumers knows about a certain product. Generating public awareness is deemed as a task of the media to establish topics the public should know about.

The term ‘awareness’ has several context-dependent meanings; the same applies for the term ‘reflection’. In educational science, reflection could be seen as a critical, rigorous, and evidence based thinking, often activated by a puzzling (new) situation, involving (re-)thinking and a learning of a new understanding. Here, successful reflection leads to learning. Reflection can be also seen as a psychological process, a way of self-reflection, to inspect a way of thinking and may lead to a deeper understanding of one’s learning strengths and weaknesses. In computer science, reflection can refer to the ability of programs to inspect its behaviour to adapt accordingly. The relation between awareness and reflection is that awareness of something may lead to reflection, or inversely, without being aware of something one cannot reflect on it. Especially in our fast-paced, ever dynamic world, where knowledge is a valuable (economic) asset, self-directed and lifelong learning are very important for learners, and for organisations it is important to have members who are able to do that. Through becoming aware of a certain fact, learners can reflect on it and eventually learn something new.

Considering the multitude of views on awareness and reflection one of the questions is what does it mean for Technology Enhanced Learning and how does it relate to Learning Networks? We understand Learning Networks (LNs) as online communities in which users share existing information and cooperatively create new knowledge. This way, Learning Networks help participants to develop their skills and competences in often non-formal, unplanned and ad-hoc learning situations and educational contexts.

Whilst there are many standards and technical approaches to overcome silo-boundaries of the used leaning services and tools in terms of re-usability and interoperability, there are hardly any working solutions to enhance awareness and support reflection processes in such infrastructures, and to foster participation in learning networks. Furthermore, most of the tools applied were not designed to engage persons in active participation but to consume and absorb information provided. There is a pressing need to directly support the instrumentation of awareness, and the activation of reflection processes.

More and more companies, (educational) institutions and research projects in which knowledge and knowledge transfer are the core of the daily business are implementing social media in their organizations. Explicating knowledge and their carrier are key features for learning in networks. With the rise of mobile small screen devices, the prerequisites to be aware of the different dimensions of the context of artefacts, like time, location, environment and relations between artefacts would be available. As Social Media, learning services and mobile Internet grow together, those will be one of the main resources for informal learning. Awareness support for lifelong learners in learning networks will help to make sense of the footprints of the usage of social media and mobile environments and will support the reflection about the fast changing dynamics in open research environments. Awareness support about learning activities in general will help learners identify knowledge that can be integrated in such learning networks, and knowledge needs that can be addressed in such learning networks.

Important dates

Deadline for papers: 11 July 2011 25 July 2011
Notification of acceptance:  10 August 2011 22 August 2011
Deadline camera-ready: 04 September 2011 – 14 September 2011
Dates of the workshop:  21 September 2011
Dates of the conference: 20-23 September 2011

Format of the workshop

This full one-day workshop brings together people from different domains to enable multi-disciplinary discussion of the topic. Before the workshop, participants are invited to participate in the awareness and reflection group on TELeurope , and to discuss their papers prior to the workshop. Additionally, they are expected to provide a list of their personal research challenges in the area of awareness and reflection in learning networks. The topics identified online prior to this workshop will guide the discussion of the individual presentations and will be summarized in an open discussion round at the end of the session called “Research Challenges in Awareness and Reflection Learning Networks”.

Topics of interest

The ARNets workshop focuses on current research trends in the field of awareness and reflection in the domain of learning networks / networked learning. The workshop seeks to attract quality research papers that propose solutions to the issues identified above. The workshop also welcomes papers that comment how the application of social media can impact on real life experiences in such communities. It aims to bring together scientists, designers and engineers who work on designing and/or developing the above mentioned solutions, as well as practitioners who use and evaluate them in diverse authentic environments. We encourage authors to present their interdisciplinary results and such that focused on technical, psychological and/or pedagogical challenges.

The topics include, but are not limited to:

# Awareness and reflection in learning networks.

# Awareness and reflection for lifelong learning.

# Different views on awareness and reflection, depending on discipline, and goal.

# Awareness of and reflection about social context, knowledge, artefacts and processes.

# Awareness and reflection in organizational learning.

# Semantic Web and awareness.

# Orchestration of awareness and reflection.

# Awareness and reflection in online learning / research environments.

# Activation of reflection processes.

# Awareness of pivotal events and their reflection support

# Awareness and reflection tools.

# Pedagogical/didactic arrangements.

# Awareness and reflection analytics.

# Challenges in researching awareness and reflection.

# Awareness and group formation, peer-support.

# Future scenarios.

Submission

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished work. Demonstrations are encouraged:
# Full papers: (12-16 pages) that describe problems, needs, novel approaches and frameworks within the scope of the workshop. Empirical evaluation papers and industrial experience reports are welcome for submission.
# Short papers (6-10 pages) that state the position of the authors within the scope of the workshop and describe solution concepts and work in progress.
# Posters and demo papers (1-2 pages) that summarize preliminary work results.

Please submit your proposal via the ginkgo event management system at http://gkgo.me/arnets11

All submitted contributions will be peer-reviewed by at least two members of the program committee for originality, significance and quality. The papers will be published in the CEUR-WS.org (http://ceur-ws.org) workshops proceedings (a publication series with ISSN). Furthermore selected papers will be part of a Special Issue in a well-known international Journal (currently in negotiations). Submissions should use the Springer LCNS template (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0). We encourage you to produce your submission using LaTeX as typesetting tool and the respective LaTeX template.

Organizers

Wolfgang Reinhardt, University of Paderborn (Germany), @wollepb
Thomas D. Ullmann, The Open University (UK), @thomasullmann
Peter Scott, The Open University (UK), @peter_scott
Viktoria Pammer, Know Center (Austria), @contextgroupkc
Owen Conlan, Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), @oconlan
Adriana Berlanga, Open University of the Netherlands (Netherlands), @adrianaberlanga

Program for the 1st Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Learning Networks (ARNets11)
Each presenter will have 15 Minutes for presentation, followed by 10 minutes for discussion. Authors are asked to prepare discussion items that they would like to discuss with the audience.

Introduction
09.00 – 09.10  Introduction to the workshop