ARV 2011 - Third Biennial Alpine Rendez-Vous

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Category ARV 2011

Deadline: August 01, 2010 | Date: March 27, 2011-March 30, 2011

Venue/Country: La Clusaz, France

Updated: 2010-07-09 11:24:18 (GMT+9)

Call For Papers - CFP

Alpine Rendez-vous Call for Workshop Proposals ? new deadline August 1st, 2010

What is the Alpine Rendez-vous?

The Alpine Rendez-Vous (ARV) is supported by the STELLAR Network of Excellence

(www.stellarnet.eu) and aims at building a Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) researcher

capacity on a European level. You do not have to be a STELLAR member to respond to this call.

The ARV is an atypical, informal gathering, lasting three and a half days. The two previous ARVs

were held in Villars (Switzerland) in 2007 and Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Germany) in 2009. The

ARV is not a standard conference, but a set of independent workshops located at the same time in

the same hotel. Four workshops run in parallel during the first part of the week and four during the

second part. It's called "Rendez-Vous" because shared events are organized in the middle of the

week (Tuesday evening) and because we set up breaks and meals in a way that promotes informal

encounters between participants from the different workshops. Finally, it is called "Alpine" because

it gathers scientists in the Alps, away from their workplace routines, in a place where snow is used

as “social facilitator."

The international Reviewer Board of the Alpine Rendez-Vous gathers together members of the TEL

community from all over the world and in particular European researchers who were active

participants of the former Networks of Excellence Kaleidoscope and Prolearn. The Reviewer Board

includes both members of the present Network of Excellence STELLAR as well as researchers

outside of the network. The goal of STELLAR is to continue the community building process

initiated by Kaleidoscope and Prolearn. The ARV is also supported by the executive bodies of

TELEARC and EATEL, the associations stemming from the two former networks of excellence.

Important dates

Workshop proposals (see below for requirements) should be sent by August 1st, 2010 to Kristine

Lund and Pascale Pauly at ARV2011ens-lyon.fr

Authors of accepted workshop proposals will be notified by the last week in August, 2010.

Workshop calls for participants should go out at the latest by September 15th.

Potential participants should apply at the latest by October 1st.

Workshop leaders will notify chosen participants and inform the Reviewer Board of their

organization by October 15th.

The ARV 2011 will be held March 27th to March 31stst, 2011

Where?

The third biennial ARV will take place in the French Alps in the Massif des Arravis at a beautiful

ski resort called La Clusaz (hotel Alpen Roc): http://www.laclusaz.com/hiverwinter10/

index.php?lang=_uk . There will be some free time in the afternoons for TEL community

building during winter activities.

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What should the workshop proposal include?

Submissions, preferably in PDF format, should include the following items:

1. Identification

? Contact information of the workshop proposer including: name, affiliation, address,

email, phone, fax and homepage URL (these last two optional);

? Workshop title;

? Expected number of participants.

2. Description Abstract (2 pages)

? Brief description of the workshop explaining the topic and the goals (especially as it

relates to one or more of the grand challenges ? see below);

? Brief description of the general structure of the workshop, e.g., whether it will include

paper presentations, whether a call-for-papers will be issued or whether it will be

invitation-only;

? A clear publishing strategy needs to be described: whether the contributions to the

workshop will be published in a book, a special issue for a journal, etc. Please indicate

the targeted journal(s) or book publisher;

? Brief statement how this workshop will contribute to the integration of different TEL

research communities in Europe and beyond;

3. Let us know if you could have any funding for your proposed workshop coming from

another instrument within STELLAR or from any sources outside STELLAR (EU project,

etc.).

? Note, that there is a limited number of additional slots for workshops related to the topic

but funded by other grants. If you are interested in organizing such an externally funded

workshop, please send a description of your plan.

4. Plan for promoting the workshop and disseminating results (Website etc.)

5. Plan for selecting workshop participants

? One main goal of the Alpine Rendez-Vous is to bring together the different scientific

communities doing research on Technology-Enhanced Learning.

What are the criteria for choosing workshops?

Between 6 and 8 workshops will be chosen by the Reviewer Board and the extent to which the

workshop proposer responds to the five points above will be evaluated. Each workshop proposal

will be sent to three reviewers (one internal to STELLAR and two external). A workshop would

typically include 20 participants. About half of them should be members of labs that belong to

STELLAR and will hence have their own funding to come. The second half should come from

outside STELLAR (this is a requirement). The participation of 10 of these external participants (2

or 3 nights + food) will be covered by the budget of the Alpine Rendez-Vous (10 people per

workshop regardless of workshop size), but they must cover their own travel expenses. Workshop

size can vary, depending on room distribution (5 rooms of 21m2 each, 1 room of 110 m2, 1 room of

70 m2, 1 room of 35 m2).

Workshops should encourage information sharing and discussion amongst groups of participants,

rather than mere presentation of information by the organizers and presenters.

In 2011, the JTEL Winterschool will be organized together with the ARV. The Winterschool is a

high-level PhD school for the field of TEL in which interdisciplinary PhD candidates come together

and present and discuss their advanced thesis work. Reflection will be carried out on thesis topics in

relation to ARV workshops and the grand challenges of STELLAR (see below). The selected PhD

candidates will be supported by STELLAR grants. Please direct any questions to

Marcus.Spechtou.nl

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Workshops are required to make progress towards issues within at least one of the three ”Grand

Challenges” in TEL research, shaped by STELLAR as:

1) Connecting Learners

On the Web, we can see that self-directed, self-managed and self-maintained communities create

successful new forms of collaboration. A wide range of tools is used by these communities for

knowledge sharing and building, communication, collaboration and networking. Knowledge

sharing and building is facilitated by open and closed forums, Wiki pages and personal or shared

blogs. Multimedia material is shared using popular tools such as FlickR and YouTube.

Communication takes place using forums, annotation, tagging, chat rooms, instant messaging and

video conferences. Collaboration is facilitated by shared media repositories, version management

systems and collaborative text editing systems such as Google Docs. Networking portals, such as

FaceBook and LinkedIn, allow professionals to find, contact and keep in touch with like-minded. In

a Web 2.0 world new communities bring together self-directed, self-managed and self- maintained

users and, thereby, create successful new forms of collaboration. These new communities are open

to all learners at any point in their life of learning. Within successful communities, inherent

incentive mechanisms to motivate and encourage participation exist. The heart of learning and

knowledge consists of people. Replacing the current centralized, static technology-push models

with new interactive models that reflect the continuous, social nature of learning requires a radical

shift from a focus on knowing what to a focus on knowing how and knowing who. Within this

theme key research questions are: What are the characteristics of a network for learning? What are

key enabling and success factors for learner networks? What impact could web 2.0 technologies

have on learning in educational institutions? What impact could web 2.0 technologies have on

learning outside educational institutions? …. [excerpt from STELLAR-Del. 1.1]

2) Orchestrating Learners

The development of digital technologies, their interfaces and association with communication

technology, has opened up the possibility of accessing a large diversity of learning tools and all

kinds of resources, as well as new infrastructures to support interactions and communications

among learners and teachers or trainers -- or in more general terms, among learners and

knowledgeable others. This evolution is supported by the emergence of theoretical frameworks

which provide new means to understand learning and to design more efficient and more relevant

environments to support it. Situated cognition and situated learning theories, collaborative learning,

exploratory learning as well as mobile learning theories are stimulating new approaches to learning,

pedagogy, didactics and assessment. The multiplicity of the resources, the multiplicity of the

devices, the multiplicity of the agents (co-learners, teachers or trainers, artificial or human agents)

contributing to a learning process is the modern mark of TEL. Its practical impact is the

requirement for more and new collaborative competence for using, generating and exchanging

knowledge in a peer-to-peer manner and participating in communities of learning. To face the

emergence of this richer and more complex than ever world of learning resources, the new

challenge is to find methods and principles, as well as concepts and tools, to engineer learning

situations and/or learning environments. Within this theme key research questions include: What is

the role of the teacher/more knowledgeable other in orchestrating learning and how does this relate

to collaboration and the knowledge of students? What is the role of assessment and evaluation in

learning and how can technology play a role? From the point of view of the learner what is the

relationship between higher-order skills and learning of a particular knowledge domain and what is

the role of technology in this respect? How can we identify the current learning trajectory or a

person? Would it be beneficial to make them aware of trajectory switches? …. [excerpt from

STELLAR-Del. 1.1]

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3) Contextualizing virtual learning environments and instrumentalising learning contexts

As learning has become an integrative part of our life, and as it takes place in different learner

communities, so the tools, resources and systems that are used need to be contextualized. The

learning context is the "setting", in a broad sense, in which the learning occurs (see discussion

page). It is continually created by people in interaction with others, with physical and digital

objects, with their surroundings and with everyday tools. Complementarily, the interplay between

formal and informal learning in formal and informal contexts has to be instrumentalized through the

use of physical artifacts, mobile devices and the configuration of physical and virtual space, in order

to create learning opportunities beyond the traditional institutional boundaries. Technologies for

learning must be designed for culturally mediated settings, which include the co-design of

technology and pedagogy for situated learning, simulated environments and support for mobility.

Traditional classroom learning is founded on an illusion of context stability, by setting up a fixed

location with common resources, a single teacher, and an agreed curriculum, which allows a

semblance of common ground. But if these are removed, a fundamental challenge is how to form

islands of temporarily stable context to enable meaning making from the flow of everyday activity.

Within this theme key research questions include: How can new forms of technology-enhanced

learning enable novel experiences for learners and for development of human competences and

capabilities? How can the mobility of the learner in distributed and multi environment learning

settings be supported, to include the transition between a) real and virtual contexts b) informal and

formal learning contexts? Which standards are needed to achieve interoperability and reusability of

learning resources in this field? How can we harmonize the existing learning standards? … [excerpt

from STELLAR-Del. 1.1]

What else do we ask of workshop organizers?

After the event, workshop organizers will be responsible for writing or editing a white paper (8

pages) briefly summarizing the event and how it contributed to one of the Grand Challenges of

STELLAR. Wherever applicable, the workshop contributions should be published in a journal

special issue or book. Workshop organizers should create and maintain a group on teleurope.eu to

communicate their topics with stakeholders. The white paper could include an outline of the special

issue or book proposal. The white paper will be due May 20th, 2011 and instructions for writing it

will be communicated at a later date.

We look forward to your Alpine Rendez-Vous 2011 workshop proposals!