SIRTEL'07

1st Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning

2nd European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL07)
Crete, Greece,September 17-20, 2007

Draft proceedings

Social information retrieval (SIR) refers to a family of techniques that assist users in obtaining information to meet their information needs by harnessing the knowledge or experience of other users. Examples of SIR techniques include sharing of queries, collaborative filtering, social network analysis, social navigation, social bookmarking and the use of subjective relevance judgements such as tags, annotations, ratings and evaluations.

SIR methods, techniques and systems open an interesting new approach to facilitate and support learning and teaching. There are plenty a resource available on the Web, both in terms of digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other learners, experts, tutors) that can be used to facilitate teaching and learning tasks. The remaining challenge is to develop, deploy and evaluate systems that provide learners and teachers with guidance to help identify suitable learning resources from a potentially overwhelming variety of choices.

Several questions are being researched around the application of SIR methods in Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) settings. The aim of the SIRTEL'07 Workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners who are working on topics related to the application of SIR methods, techniques and systems in educational settings, as well as to present the current status of research in this area to interested researchers and practitioners. It aims to serve as a discussion forum where researchers will present the results of their work, and also establish liaisons between different groups that are exploring related subjects. In addition, it aims to outline the rich potential of emerging SIR methods, techniques and systems in order to better build TEL systems and services.

TOPICS OF INTEREST (but not limited to):

• Defining the scope, purpose and objects of social information retrieval in TEL
• Recommender systems and collaborative filtering in educational settings
• Novel ways of generating input for recommenders (explicit and implicit methods)
  
• Ranking of search results to support individualised learning needs
• Integrating SIR services in existing learning management systems
• Folksonomies, tagging and other collaboration-based information retrieval systems
• Social navigation processes and metaphors for searching information related to teaching and learning
• Analysing social interactions in learning communities and social networks on the Web to facilitate information sharing and retrieval
• Approaches to TEL metadata that reflect social ties and collaborative experiences in the field of education
• Interoperability of SIR systems for TEL
• Visualisation techniques to support social navigation in learning and teaching
• Semantic annotation and tagging for social information retrieval purposes
• Evaluating the performance of SIR systems in educational applications
• Measuring the effectiveness of SIR systems in supporting learning and teaching
• Evaluation the user satisfaction with SIR systems in supporting learning and teaching

WORKSHOP FORMAT

The aim of the workshop is to chart out the current state-of-the-art of SIR in TEL, and to list the main enablers and challenges for the near future and the long term. Each presenter of the workshop is asked to explicitly identify such enablers and challenges. The workshop will conclude with an open discussion listing and prioritising the main enablers and challenges for the short and the long term. One of the aims is to identify the need for new research.

The workshop will be strongly discussion and demonstration oriented. To that effect, all accepted papers and posters will be made available online before the workshop. Presenters will be asked to focus on demonstration of early prototypes, sharing early and on-going evaluation results, discussing the lessons learned, and to focus on identifying the enables and challenges in their respected area of interest, so as to take maximum advantage of the added value of a face-to-face meeting.

SUBMISSIONS

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research as full papers (8 pages), work-in-progress as short papers (max. 4 pages) or position statements (max. 2 pages). All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three members of the program committee for originality, significance, clarity and quality.

Papers will be published online as EC-TEL workshop proceedings, as part of the CEUR Workshop proceedings series. CEUR-WS.org is a recognised ISSN publication series, with ISSN 1613-0073. Authors of papers presented in the Workshop will also be invited to submit enhanced versions of their papers for potential publication in a planned special issue of a relevant journal.

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: sirtel @ cs.kuleuven.be

IMPORTANT DATES

• Paper Submission: June 20, 2007
• Results Notification: July 15, 2007
• Camera Ready Submission: August 15, 2007
• Workshop dates: September 17 or 18, 2007

PROGRAM COMMITTEE (as of May 7 2007)

• Jon Dron, University of Brighton, UK
• Hendrik Drachsler, Open University of the Netherlands, The Netherlands
• Alexander Felfernig, University of Klagenfurt, Germany
• Mikko Laine, WSOY Educational, Finland
• Brian Lamb, University of British Columbia, Canada
• Francisco J. Martin, MyStrands, USA
• David Massart, EUN, Belgium
• Brandon Muramatsu, Utah State University, USA
• Amborn Naeve, KTH, Sweden
• Xavier Ochoa, Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral, Ecuador
• Demetrios Sampson, CERTH/ITI & University of Piraeus, Greece
• Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcala, Spain
• Barry Smyth, University College Dublin, Ireland
  
• Marc Spaniol, RWTH Aachen, Germany
• Gulden Uchyigit, Imperial College, UK
• David Wiley, Utah State University, USA
• Martin Wolpers, KUL, Belgium

ORGANISERS

• Riina Vuorikari, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven & European Schoolnet, Belgium
• Nikos Manouselis, Informatics Laboratory, Agricultural University of Athens, Greece
• Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium & ARIADNE Foundation