The STEG workshop is held in conjunction with the 3rd European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL'08 - http://www.ectel08.org/), Maastricht School of Management, Maastricht, The Netherlands, September 17-19, 2008.

Context and motivation

****EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE - July 7th, 2008****

Stories and story-telling are cultural achievements of significant relevance even in modern times. Nowadays, story-telling is being enhanced with the convergence of sociology, pedagogy, and technology. In recent times, computer gaming has also been deployed for educational purposes and has proved to be an effective approach to mental stimulation and intelligence development. Many conceptual similarities and some procedural correlation exist between story-telling and educational gaming. Therefore these two areas can be clubbed for research on Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). Many facets of story-telling and educational gaming emulate real life processes, which can be represented either as complex story graphs or as interleaved sub-problems. This model is congruent with that used for Technology Enhanced Learning in vocational training. TEL in vocational training requires learning models that focus more on the process and less on the content.

The main difference between educational games and story-telling lies in the user's motivational point of view. Story-telling aims at reliving real life tasks and capturing previous experiences in problem-solving for reuse, while educational games reproduce real life tasks in a virtual world in an (ideally) engaging and attractive process. Nevertheless, educational games require highly specialized technical and pedagogical skills and learning processes to cover the topics in sufficient depth and breadth. Imbalance between depth and breadth of study can lead to producing trivial games, which in turn can lead to de-motivating the learner.

While the integration of learning and gaming provides a great opportunity, several motivational challenges (particularly in vocational training) must also be addressed to ensure successful realization. Non-linear digital stories are an ideal starting point for the creation of educational games, since each story addresses a certain problem, so that the story recipient can gain benefit from other users' experiences. This leads to the development of more realistic stories, which then provide the kernel for developing non-trivial educational videogames. These stories can cover the instructional portion of an educational game, while the game would add the motivation and engagement part.

In summary, this workshop aims at bringing together researchers, experts and practitioners from the domains of non-linear digital interactive story-telling and educational gaming to share ideas and knowledge. There is a great amount of separate research in these two fields and the celebration of this workshop will allow the participants to discover and leverage potential synergies.

Goals and Objectives

This one-day workshop covers a wide range of research issues about story-telling and educational games including story and game design paradigms, Web 2.0 based story-telling and gaming scenarios, advanced story-telling and educational gaming technologies and platforms for technology enhanced learning. It aims at a state-of-the-art discussion on advanced research and open issues on story-telling and educational gaming among multimedia communities, with special focus on how both approaches can be combined.

Workshop topics

• Story-telling and game theories
• Story and game design paradigms for Technology Enhanced Learning
• Augmented story-telling and gaming
• Story-telling and educational gaming with social software
• Story-telling and educational gaming with mobile technologies
• Cross-media/transmedia story-telling and gaming
• Computer gaming for story-telling (Game design for narrative architectures)
• Multimedia story and game authoring
• Story-telling and educational gaming applications
• User experience and empirical research in story-telling and gaming for TEL

Submissions

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research as full papers (max. 10 pages) or work-in-progress as short papers (max. 5 pages). All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by three members of the program committee for originality, significance, clarity and quality. Accepted papers will be published online as EC-TEL workshop proceedings as part of the CEUR Workshop proceedings series. CEUR-WS.org is a recognized ISSN publication series, ISSN 1613-0073.

Moreover, the two best papers of the workshop will be published in a special issue of the International Journal of Technology-Enhanced Learning (IJTEL - http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalCODE=ijtel)

Authors should use the Springer LNCS format (http://www.springer.com/lncs). For camera-ready format instructions, please see "For Authors" instructions at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.

All questions and submissions should be sent to: klamma@dbis.rwth-aachen.de

Important Dates

Paper Submission: ****EXTENDED DEADLINE***** July 7th, 2008
Notification of acceptance: July 15, 2008
Camera Ready Submission: August 29, 2008
Workshop date: September 17,18 or 19, 2007

Organisers

Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aaachen University, Germany
Nalin Sharda, Victoria University, Australia
Baltasar Fernández Manjón, Complutense University, Spain
Harald Kosch, University of Passau, Germany
Marc Spaniol, Max Planck Institute for Computer Science, Germany

Local organisation

Yiwei Cao, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Anna Glukhova, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Program committee (tbc)

Amanda Gower (British Telecommunications plc, UK)
Anna Glukhova (RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany)
Ansgar Scherp (UC Irvine, CA, USA)
Armin Weinberger (LMU, Munich, Germany)
Bailing Zhang (Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia)
Baltasar Fernández Manjón (Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain)
Dietrich Albert (Unversität Graz, Graz, Austria)
Daniel Burgos (ATOS Origin, Spain)
Carlos Delgado Kloos (Carlos III University, Spain)
Christian Guetl (Institute for Information Systems and Computer Media (IICM), Graz University of Technology, Austria)
Fernando Ferri (Multimedia & Modal Laboratory, CNR Italy)
Frederick Li (University of Durham, UK)
Griff Richards (Athabasca University, Canada)
Harald Kosch (University of Passau, Germany)
Hermann Maurer (Institute for Information Systems and Computer Media (IICM), Graz University of Technology, Austria)
Howard Leung (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR)
Irma Lindt (Fraunhofer FIT, St. Augustin, Germany)
Jose Luis Sierra (Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain)
Kinshuk (Athabasca University, Canada)
Lionel Brunie (INSA de Lyon, France)
Marc Spaniol (MPI, Saarbrücken, Germany)
Marius Preda (Institut National des Télécommunications, France)
Martin Haller (TU Berlin, Germany)
Mathias Lux (Klagenfurt University, Austria)
Michael Granitzer (Know Center, Graz, Austria)
Michael Hausenblas (Joanneum Research, Austria)
Michael Ransburg (Klagenfurt University, Austria)
Nalin Sharda (Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia)
Pablo Moreno-Ger (Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain)
Qing Li (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR)
Raphaël Troncy (CWI, The Netherlands)
Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany)
Richard Chbeir (LE2I Laboratory (UMR - CNRS) - Bourgogne University, France)
Romulus Grigoras (ENSEEIHT, France)
Rynson Lau (University of Durham, UK)
Stamatia Dasiopoulou (ITI Thessaloniki, Greece)
Stephan Lukosch (Fernuniversität Hagen, Hagen, Germany)
Timothy K. Shih (Tamkang University, Taiwan)
Vedran Sabol (Know-Center Graz, Austria)
Victor Manuel Garcia-Barrios (University of Technology Graz, Austria)
Vincent Charvillat (ENSEEIHT, France)
Vincent Oria (NJIT, USA)
Werner Bailer (Joanneum Research, Graz, Austria)
Werner Klieber (Know-Center Graz, Austria)
Wolfgang Gräther (Fraunhofer FIT, St. Augustin, Germany)
Wolfgang Prinz (Fraunhofer FIT, St. Augustin, Germany)
Yiwei Cao (RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany)