FLEXible

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1st International Workshop on Enhancing Learning with Ambient Displays and Visualization Techniques (ADVTEL-2011)

http://sites.google.com/site/advtel2011/

Held at the 6th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL11) in Palermo, Italy, September 20, 2011

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RATIONALE

Visualization techniques have been researched as a way to help people deal with the abundance of information. It makes use of the principles in Gestalt Theory that explains the human visual capacity, such as proximity, similarity, continuity, symmetry, closure and relative size. They rely on the design of effective and efficient interactive visual representations that users can manipulate to solve specific tasks themselves. This approach is especially useful when a person does not know what questions to ask about the data or when (s)he wants to ask better, more meaningful questions. At the same time displays have become a pervasive part of our environment in various manifestations. While they were traditionally used to (mainly visually) present information they also become more and more important as interfaces to access and interact with digital information. Following these developments, researchers have recently started to exploit the potential of ambient displays for learning purposes, research cognitive effects, and promote the interaction of learners with their environment.

In this workshop, we are looking for contributions in the intersection of Technology Enhanced Learning and

# Information visualization; that concentrates on the use of interactive visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition.

# Visual analytics; that aims to support analytical reasoning by interactive visual interfaces.

# Knowledge visualization; that uses visual representations to improve the transfer and creation of knowledge between people.

# Ambient Display Design; that supports individual and collaborative learning processes, problem solving and sense making.

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TOPICS OF INTEREST:

We believe that the intersection of both fields – i.e. visualization and Technology Enhanced Learning – can provoke exploration, insight and understanding. Therefore, suggested topics for contributions to our workshop include the use of existing and novel visualization techniques to the following, not limited list of application domains in TEL:

# Personalization, user modeling and adaptation,

# Science 2.0,

# Learning analytics,

# Self-reflected learning,

# Recommendation techniques,

# Mobile technologies,

# Tabletop technologies,

# Learning Object Repositories and its federations,

# Evaluation methods for visualization techniques,

# Social awareness,

# Practices of diverse Technology Enhanced Learning disciplines, and how visualization techniques can influence them,

# Exploration and exploratory search

# Design dimensions and patterns

# Theoretical approaches for embedding ambient learning displays in educational environments

# Evaluation methodologies

# Prototypical Implementations

# Experimental validations of ambient learning displays

# Sense making scenarios

# Problem Solving scenarios

# Information Awareness

# Personalization and Contextualization

# Feedback and changes in behavior

# Distributed Interaction

# Embodiment (into the physical environment)

# Ambient Intelligence

# Design guidelines

# Ambient Information Channel

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WORKSHOP FORMAT

Prior to the workshop, a dedicated group on TEL Europe (http://teleurope.eu/) will be opened to: facilitate discussions among participants before and after the conference; post submitted papers for an open peer review; post access to prototypes and applications; publish information and news about the workshop; collect reactions through social media on the workshop; create a special interest group that can be used after the workshop to collect ideas, evaluation subjects, etc.

Each presenter will be linked to related papers from other presenters and will be asked to compare how the works of others relate to their own work. We encourage the presentation of the work by giving a live demo to provoke true interactions within the workshop in an attempt to get away from the mini-conference format.

The results and discussions from the workshop will be summarized and analyzed in a short paper. Podcasts of the presentations will be disseminated through STELLAR.

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SUBMISSIONS

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished work. The following types of contributions will be possible:

# Short papers (3-5 pages) that state the position of the authors within the scope of the workshop and describe solution concepts, prototypes and work in progress, even when in very early and not yet mature state.

# Full papers: (8-12 pages) that describe problems, needs, novel approaches and frameworks within the scope of the workshop. In this category, empirical evaluation papers and industrial experience reports are welcome for submission.

The presentation of unfinished ideas, tools under development and especially failures is explicitly encouraged. This includes the presentation and discussion of tools and their real-world usability.

The recommended format for the contributions is Springer LNCS. Contributions should be submitted through EASY-CHAIR: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=advtel2011

We aim to publish workshop proceedings through CEUR-WS.org

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IMPORTANT DATES

* Paper Submission: July 20th, 2011

* Results Notification: August 17th, 2011

* Camera Ready Submission: September 1st, 2011

* Workshop Date: September 20th, 2011

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PROGRAMME COMMITTEE (to be confirmed)

# Katrien Verbert, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

# Andrew Vande Moere, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

# Boris Müller, FH Potsdam, Germany

# Moritz Stefaner, Germany

# Wolfgang Reinhardt, Universität Paderborn, Germany

# Nikos Manouselis, AgroKnow, Greece

# Xavier Ochoa, ESPOL, Ecuador

# Martin Wolpers, FIT, Germany

# Dan Suthers, University of Hawaii, USA

# Mark van t’ Hooft, Kent State University, USA

# Chee-Kit Looi, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

# Albrecht Schmidt, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany (tbc)

# Hiroaki Ogata, Tokushima University, Japan

# Tom Gross, University of Bamberg, Germany

# Ulrich Hoppe, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany

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ORGANISERS

# Joris Klerkx, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

# Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

# Eelco Herder, L3S

# Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen

# Fridolin Wild, KMi, The Open University

# Till Nagel, FH Potsdam

# Marcus Specht, Open Universiteit Nederland

# Marco Kalz, Open Universiteit Nederland

# Dirk Börner, Open Universiteit Nederland

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ABOUT EC-TEL 11

EC-TEL is a unique setting for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in Technology Enhanced Learning from Europe and other continents to meet together and exchange on the current challenges and advances in the field. At EC-TEL, experts and young researchers in Computer Science, Education, Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Social Science, as well as entrepreneurs have the opportunity to establish collaborations, strengthen their links and cross-fertilize their core disciplines.

EC-TEL 2011 will push further the Ubiquitous Learning paradigm by not only tackling the challenges of exploiting new trendy devices in various contexts, but also by investigating ways to meet and support formally and informally the learners in their learning playgrounds and social environments thanks to innovative scenarios. See http://www.ec-tel.eu/ for details.

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MORE INFORMATION

http://sites.google.com/site/advtel2011/

Contact: joris.klerkx@cs.kuleuven.be

My project proposal with the title “Energy Awareness Displays – Making the Invisible Visible” is one of the five awarded projects of the SURFnet Innovatieregeling Duurzamheid & ICT 2011.



The main idea is to make the often hidden energy consumption data of office buildings visible and accessible for people working in such buildings – right up to a personal level. To do so the project utilises instruments to measure the employees’ individual energy consumption.



The aim of the project is to raise employee’s awareness on the topic, introduce relevant conservation strategies, and provide dynamic situated feedback when taking actions. The project plans to implement an infrastructure that supports the aggregation of the building’s and the employees’ energy consumption data. Furthermore the project will develop several eco-visualisation interface prototypes that visualise the building’s enriched consumption information.



Using web/mobile apps it will be possible to explore and compare the gathered energy consumption information in relation to fellow employees, departments, floors, and/or buildings. Based on the provided information motivating and persuading conservation facilitation patterns will be used to foster social reflection and corresponding discussions. Thus the project sets up to change the energy consumption behaviour of the individual as well as the attitudes towards energy conservation of employees working in office buildings.

The innovation programme of SURFnet aims to stimulate innovative, sustainable ICT-projects in educational and research insitutions. All project proposals should fit either in the theme ‘sustainability of ICT’ or ‘sustainability by means of ICT’. More information about the innovation programme can be found here (in Dutch).

One of the starting points to foster ubiquitous learning support is the determination of the environmental and personal context of the learning process. A promising way to get there is the use of sensors to measure relevant metrics in situ. Such sensors can be roughly clustered into 2 categories distinguished by the contextual information they convey:

(1) Sensors determining personal context information are usually installed as closely as possible to the measured entity. The most popular ones in this category are currently without a doubt location sensors, e.g. built-in GPS receivers in modern smartphones. These sensors continuously requests the location of the device and thus under certain conditions also the location of the device owner, respectively the learner.

(2) The range of available environmental sensors is wide, starting from sensors measuring the outdoor temperature to indoor motion detectors. An increasing number of these sensors is embedded in the environment in such a way that the collected data can be easily used to determine what is happening in the surrounding, exposing contextual information about the learning environment.

Eventually it becomes interesting when the gathered sensor data from both categories are combined to map the personal and environmental context into one another and thus deduce relevant information to support the learning process. However, a drawback when dealing with different sensors is the complex and non-uniform data they produce. The challenge is to turn each sensor into a valuable independent information source and then ease the aggregation and utilization of the gathered data. Technically this is where concepts like sensor network and information fusion come into play, depicting the integration of sensors into a manageable and extensible network offering the possibility to combine multiple data sources, while still obtaining valuable refined information.

Talking about if and how to build up such a sensor network in the Medialab, we noticed that we already have a couple of sensors in place. Most of them emerged either as integral part or just as side product of our research and development activity. A good example is the use of the built-in location and orientation sensors (compass, accelerometer) for the developed mobile augmented reality prototypes (ARLearn and Locatory) running on Android. There the personal context information is required to map the existing virtual information correctly into the environment surrounding the person using the mobile device. The other way round in my currently running experiment with ambient information displays we make use of motn and a face detection to recognize users in the proximity of the display as well as their interest in the display. Both sensors are implemented in Processing making use of the display’s built-in webcam. The motion detector simply calculates the difference between the single image frames, while the face detector makes use of the open source computer vision library OpenCV for Processing to detect faces within the image.

Back to the envisioned sensor network, we finally decided to start setting up a sensor room within the Medialab, assembling all our available sensors in one place. In addition to that we are currently collecting requirements for a reliable and scaleable backend solution and we started to explore the possibilities of platforms like Arduino, development environments like Processing, tool libraries like openFrameworks, as well as communication specifications like ZigBee. So there is still a lot of interesting work to do and more blog posts to come reporting about the developments towards an ambient sensor network…

At the 18th International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE), my poster “A Conceptual Framework for Ambient Learning Displays” has been awarded the Best Work-in-Progress-Poster Presentation. The conference under the slogan “Enhancing and Sustaining New Knowledge through the Use of Digital Technology in Education” took place from November, 29 till December, 3 in Putrajaya, Malaysia.

The Work-in-Progress-Poster session aimed to provide opportunities for poster presenters to showcase well-formulated and innovative ongoing work or late-breaking results. 25 submissions were accepted for the poster presentation after undergoing rigorous reviews by at least two reviewers. Out of these 25 submissions, my poster was considered the best. Many thanks to my supervisor Dr. Marco Kalz and my promoter Prof. Dr. Marcus Specht (who actually presented the poster in Malaysia).

Beside relevant conferences on mobile learning, the topic is increasingly discussed in a much wider community on internationally occurring BarCamps. These participant-driven ‘unconferences’ are usually centered around a specific topic and try to avoid some negative aspects of traditional conferences (Wikipedia, 2010). So far there has not been a BarCamp focusing solely on mobile learning, but there are EduCamps dealing with education and MobileCamps dealing with mobile technologies.

The events in the immediate vicinity are the EduCamps in France and Germany/Austria (http://educamp.mixxt.de/) as well as the MobileCamps in Brussels and Dresden (http://barcampdresden.mixxt.de/). Although mobile learning is not in the main focus, both events offer at least the opportunity to discuss the topic in self organized sessions mainly with non-expert participants. Last year I attended the MobileCamp trying to track the trends within the community towards mobile learning. As anticipated most sessions either focused on mobile technology or on its commercial exploitation. Although this might change when the technical premises are mature and the focus shifts towards the application area, for the moment it seems to make more sense to incorporate the topic from an educational perspective. Therefore our group plans to participate at the upcoming EduCamp hold 5th – 7th November at the RWTH in Aachen.

The official entry point (including a list of past and upcoming events) to the international network of BarCamp events is http://barcamp.org/. If you plan to attend one of these events, get used to the unofficial rules listed under http://barcamp.org/TheRulesOfBarCamp. Also bear in mind that the majority of events are targeted at an national audience and therefore the sessions most probably will be held in the respective national language. To overcome these barriers and put on an international event addressing specifically mobile learning could be a nice opportunity to meet and involve a larger majority of the community landscape.

Working on an article for Campus Wide Information Systems (CWIS) journal, I came accross an interesting article by John Traxler from the University of Wolverhampton talking about definitions and perspectives of learning in a mobile age.

So far there have been lots of attempts to define mobile learning, such as “learning that happens when the learner takes advantage of learning opportunities offered by mobile technologies” (O’Malley et al., 2003) or “any educational provision where the sole or dominant technologies are handheld or palmtop devices” (Traxler, 2005). The perspectives taken are either technocentric (like in the given examples), consider the mobility of the learners, or rest upon the anytime/anywhere paradigm of existing content (Winters, 2006; Taylor, 2006). Each of these different perspectives is extensively discussed in the literature (Sharples, 2006; Traxler, 2009), but by now there is no generally accepted definition, nor an agreement on which perspective to consider finding one. Especially the technocentric perspective is highly controversial as the underlying development of mobile technologies is continuously progressing, making the attempted definitions highly unstable (Traxler, 2009).

A more promising way towards a theory of mobile learning (Sharples et al., 2005) seems to be the focus on the clarification of significant issues (Sharples, 2006), research challenges (Arnedillo-Sánchez et al., 2007), case studies (Kukulska-Hulme & Traxler, 2007), or motivational or affective aspects (Jones et al., 2006). All these attempts contribute to a definition of key characteristics for mobile learning and sharpen the picture of what constitutes mobile learning rather then finding a precise definition. In his article looking at the definition and evolution of mobile learning Traxler (2009) even suggests replacing the question ‘what is mobile learning?’ by the questions ‘what is learning in a mobile age?’ or ‘what is mobile learning?’ focusing more on the educational part of the domain.

Going in this direction, following this suggestion we decided already a while ago to conduct an explorative case study within the mobile learning domain that is not taking one of the perspectives mentioned earlier. Instead, the focus was set on the educational problems that underpin the expectations on mobile learning, while at the same time trying to find an adequate conceptualization of these problems. For the study the following research questions have been defined:

1. What are the educational problems that mobile learning is trying to solve?
2. Which problem clusters can be identified and how are they emphasized?
3. How are the different problem areas related within the overall research domain of mobile learning?

In a previous blog post “What is mobile learning?” Christian already introduced the resulting expert study. Though the question he asked remained the same, the results enable to see mobile learning from a different perspective. There’s more to come on this, as we proceed with the analysis and evaluation of the results …

References:

Arnedillo-Sánchez, I., Sharples, M. & Vavoula, G. (Eds.) (2007), Beyond Mobile Learning Workshop, Trinity College Dublin Press, Dublin.

Jones, A., Issroff., K, Scanlon, E, Clough, G and McAndrew, P. (2006), “Using mobile devices for learning in Informal Settings: Is it Motivating?”, in Proceedings of IADIS International conference Mobile Learning Dublin, IADIS Press, Barcelona.

Kukulska-Hulme, A. & Traxler, J. (2007), “Design for Mobile and Wireless Technologies”, in Beetham, H. & Sharpe, R. (Eds.), Rethinking Pedagogy for the Digital Age, Routledge, London.

O’Malley, C., Vavoula, G., Glew, J., Taylor, J., Sharples, M. & Lefrere, P. (2003), “Guidelines for learning/teaching/tutoring in a mobile environment”, available at: http://www.mobilearn.org/download/results/guidelines.pdf

Sharples, M., Taylor, J., & Vavoula, G. (2005), “Towards a theory of mobile learning”, in Proceedings of mLearn2005 – 4th World Conference on mLearning, 25-28 October 2005, Cape Town, South Africa, available at: http://www.mlearn.org.za/CD/papers/Sharples- Theory of Mobile.pdf

Sharples, M. (2006), Big Issues in Mobile Learning, Kaleidoskop Network of Excellence, Mobile Learning Initiative, Nottingham.

Taylor, J. (2006), “What are appropriate methods for evaluating learning in mobile environments? Evaluating Mobile Learning”, in Sharples, M. (Ed.), Big Issues in Mobile Learning, Kaleidoskop Network of Excellence, Mobile Learning Initiative, Nottingham.

Traxler, J. (2005), “Mobile Learning- it’s here but what is it?”, Interactions 9, 1, University of Warwick, Warwick.

Traxler, J. (2009), “Learning in a Mobile Age”, International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 1(1).

Winters, N. (2006), “What is Mobile Learning?”, in Sharples, M. (Ed.), Big Issues in Mobile Learning, Kaleidoskop Network of Excellence, Mobile Learning Initiative, Nottingham.

In anticipation of the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco later this year, Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle published a whitepaper descibing this years theme: “Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On”.

Reflecting the last five years of this Web 2.0 conference with the main insight that Web 2.0 is all about harnessing collective intelligence they point out that the corresponding applications depend on managing, understanding, and responding to massive amounts of user-generated data in real time. Furthermore through the mobile revolution these applications are no longer being driven solely by humans typing on keyboards but, increasingly, by sensors, while the data is being collected, presented, and acted upon in real time.

With more users and sensors feeding more applications and platforms, developers are able to tackle serious real-world problems. As a result, the Web opportunity is no longer growing arithmetically; it’s growing exponentially. Hence our theme for this year: Web Squared.

Being constantly asked about the successor of the Web 2.0 they want to use this year’s summit to explore the phenomena facilitated by the mobile and the sensor revolution.

Is it the semantic web? The sentient web? Is it the social web? The mobile web? Is it some form of virtual reality? It is all of those, and more. The Web is no longer a collection of static pages [...] that describe something in the world. Increasingly, the Web is the world [...].

Based on the fact that more and more real world objects have “information shadows” in cyberspace which become thicker and more substantial they promote an alternative way to put the Internet of Things finally into practice.

The assumption is that every object must have a unique identifier for the Internet of Things to work. What the Web 2.0 sensibility tells us is that we’ll get to the Internet of Things via a hodgepodge of sensor data contributing, bottom-up, to machinelearning applications that gradually make more and more sense of the data that is handed to them. [...] Our cameras, our microphones, are becoming the eyes and ears of the Web, our motion sensors, proximity sensors its proprioception, GPS its sense of location. [...] We are meeting the Internet, and it is us. Sensors and monitoring programs are not acting alone, but in concert with their human partners. We teach our photo program to recognize faces that matter to us, we share news that we care about, we add tags to our tweets so that they can be grouped more easily. In adding value for ourselves, we are adding value to the social web as well. Our devices extend us, and we extend them.

Finally they insist that this new direction for the Web [...] opens enormous new possibilities and close the whitepaper with the following statement.

When we started the Web 2.0 events, we stated that “the Web is a platform.” Since then, thousands of businesses and millions of lives have been changed by the products and services built on that platform. But 2009 marks a pivot point in the history of the Web. It’s time to leverage the true power of the platform we’ve built. The Web is no longer an industry unto itself—the Web is now the world. [...] It’s time for the Web to engage the real world. Web meets World—that’s Web Squared.

Last weekend I participated in the first MobileCamp in Germany. Following the principles of a user-generated conference (known as BarCamp) the event dealt with questions around technical trends in the “Mobile Age”.

As it was my first BarCamp I had to get used to some unofficial rules:

1. You do talk about BarCamp.
2. You do blog about BarCamp.
3. If you want to present, you must write your topic and name in a presentation slot.
4. Only three word intros.
5. As many presentations at a time as facilities allow for.
6. No pre-scheduled presentations, no tourists.
7. Presentations will go on as long as they have to or until they run into another presentation slot.
8. If this is your first time at BarCamp, you HAVE to present. (Ok, you don’t really HAVE to, but try to find someone to present with, or at least ask questions and be an interactive participant.)

The two-day event started with a general introduction round. Every participant (out of approx. 230) introduced himself with name and 3 tags to describe his interests. After that the sessions were planned. Everyone was allowed to announce a session, whereas all participants decided if the session should be hold or not. Mobile marketing and advertisement, mobile applications and widgets, mobile communities and services, as well as iPhone and Android development were the most discussed topics among others.

I participated in a lot of interesting sessions, e.g. a discussion about mobile communities led by Willi Schroll, who is dealing with the mobile social semantic (moss) web or a session by Simon Tennant & Matthias Sauer, who introduced the location-based social network buddycloud, where places are seen as a sum of location, meaning and intention.

The quite long first day at the Flashforum Conference (FFK08) has been followed by a shorter one. Again the agenda was well prepared and I visited the presentations listed below:

• Serving Flash – Lösungen mit und ohne Java (Michael Wacker)
• Verzaubert von Design Patterns – Architektur und Entwurfsmuster in der Praxis (Nico Zimmermann)
• Flex und AIR Datenintegration – Was kommt nach XML und WebServices? (Sven Claar)
• Skinning für Flex Komponenten (Sven Brencher)

This time the technical topics determined the day mainly focused on data integration and software engineering. The only exception made photographer Uli Staiger with his presentation “Power Phantasies – Bildgestaltung mit Kopf und Photoshop”, which I missed for the benefit of Sven Brenchers presentation.