PALE 2014 - 4th International Workshop on Personalization Approaches in Learning Environments (PALE)

The 4th International Workshop on Personalization Approaches in Learning Environments (PALE) is held on July 7th or 11th (to be decided by UMAP), 2014, in Aalborg (Denmark) in conjunction with UMAP 2014 Conference.
Personalization approaches in learning environments can be addressed from different perspectives and also in various educational settings, including formal, informal, workplace, lifelong, mobile, contextualized, and self-regulated learning. PALE workshop offers an opportunity to present and discuss a wide spectrum of issues and solutions, such as pedagogic conversational agents, personal learning environments, and learner modeling.
PALE 2014 is a follow-up of the three previous editions of PALE (see details at history). Those editions have shown several important issues in this field, such as behavior and embodiment of pedagogic agents, suitable support of self-regulated learning, appropriate balance between learner control and expert guidance, design of personal learning environments, contextual recommendations at various levels of the learning process, tracking affective states of learners, harmonization of educational and technological standards, processing big data for learning purposes, predicting student outcomes, adaptive learning assessment, and evaluation of personalized learning solutions.
From the past experience, we have identified new areas of interest in this research scope to complement the previous ones. In this workshop we would like to share and discuss the current research on how user modeling and associated artificial intelligent techniques provide the personalization support in a wide range of learning environments, which are increasingly more sensitive to the learners and their context, such as: intelligent tutoring systems, learning management systems, personal learning environments, serious games, agent-based learning environments, and others.
We are especially interested in the enhanced sensitivity towards learners' interactions (e.g., sensor detection of affect in context) and technological deployment (including web, mobiles, tablets, tabletops), and how can this wide range of situations and features impact on modeling the learner interaction and context. Furthermore, we aim to cover the every time more demanding need of personalized learning in massive open online courses (MOOCs).
The higher-level research question to be addressed in the workshop is: "Which approaches can be followed to personalize learning environments??" It will be considered in various contexts of interactive, personal, and inclusive learning environments.
PALE format moves away from the classic 'mini-conferences' approach and follows the Learning Cafe methodology to promote discussions on some of the open issues regarding personalization in learning environments. Two Learning Cafes will be set up. Each one consists in brief presentations of the key questions posed and small group discussions with participants randomly grouped in tables. Each table will be moderated by one expert in the topic under discussion and participants will change tables during the discussion with the aim to share ideas among the groups.
Submissions of original on-going works and previously unpublished research related to the Workshop Topics are requested.