ARV 2011 - Third Biennial Alpine Rendez-Vous

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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 ARV2011-AT-ens-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.Specht-AT-ou.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!