From the 18th of September I participated in the 2nd European Conference on Technology Enchanced Learning, EC-TEL 2007. It took place in Sissi, Crete, Greece.

18th of September was a workshop day. I took part in SIRTEL (Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning) workshop. It was focused on utilising tools like social bookmarking and social networks in e-Learning. Talks were interesting and some of them was relevant to what I’m currently working on (e.g. visualisation of social bookmarks, recommender systems). What is important from DERI and eLite point of view - participants of the workshop was very often mentioning a need of strong semantic background in their research.

Two next days (19th and 20th of September) were a conference days. I gave my presentation in the first of the sessions. I’ve been presenting the paper: “E-Learning on Social Semantic Information Sources” written together with Sebastian, Bill and Jarosław Dobrzański (our former intern) and Tomasz Woroniecki. The presentation went well, there was some interest of the technologies that I’ve presented (proof…).

In other sessions I have always found something interesting. A lot of papers describe collaborative, social and web 2.0 approach to Technology-Enhanced Learning, which was particularly interesting for me. With respect to key notes - they have been given by: Bruce Sterling American since fiction writer and Herman Maurer - Dean of Faculty of Computer Science, Graz University of Technology which is also which is also a s-f writer. The topic of both talks was similar and was quite a visionary. They were considering how will the world and teaching look like in next 5, 10, 20 years. What threads we (as human beings) are and will be facing, how the technology can help/trouble us. At the end, I must admit that this talks were quite unusual for the international TEL conference, but in the other hand that make it very interesting.

Below, I present two photos. One is from a Coffee break and second from Herman Maurer’s talk.

Coffee break at EC-TEL2007

Herman Maurer’s keynote

To summarise, making long story short - Good conference with a lot of interesting talks in very nice location.

Adam