Motivation

Wikipedia, Google, Facebook and the like – all from the family of Web 2.0 – showed us clearly in the last two years, how the transition from the postindustrial era to the knowledge society takes place. The immaterial knowledge has become the primary good; industry looks for knowledge management, computer science looks for the cloud, which is rooted in the idea to access everything, everywhere at every time – and law desperately looks for any borders. As the terms “information” and “knowledge” are often used to sketch the same thing, for the following we will define:  information can be transformed to knowledge by individuals – knowledge construction is perceived to be an intra-personal process; knowledge does not exist outside a person’s mind.

In technology enhanced learning (TEL), a number of buzzwords arose in the last years: ambient, assisted, ubiquitous, pervasive, mobile… learning. All those branches of research have some aspects in common:

•    The borders of technology dissolve (technology becomes invisible, ubiquitous, pervasive),
•    Information is available every time and everywhere
•    Information becomes part of a net of distribution
•    Information is constantly changing and cannot be seen as “ safe” or “secure” anymore: it is liquid, magma, “open” and “in progress”.
•    Information is often depending on contexts
•    Information is not created by a single person but can be the result of a collaborative and social process

Being the central process of information acquisition, learning is influenced by the general change in the knowledge society. Educators observe that no longer the content is of primary interest, but to train abilities of information acquisition, filtering, exchange, production, reflection, usage etc.

Inevitably one of the key functions of ubiquitous and ambient TEL is the support of continuous meta-cognition, meta-reflection and meta-design abilities of the individuals.

This workshop will provide participants with an international audience to present and discuss ideas/concepts to enhance and improve TEL. Based on our experience on previous workshops, we expect that this workshop will lead to fruitful discussions among participants of the workshop as well as potential research collaborations of participants in future research.