TEL-CoPs'06: 1st International Workshop on
Building Technology Enhanced Learning solutions for Communities of Practice

held in conjunction with the

1st European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning
Crete, Greece, October 2, 2006



Description

For more than ten years, Communities of Practice (CoPs) have been recognized as effective environments to support learning among professionals, organisations and educational institutions. Collaborative learning is inherent in such communities, in that their members learn from each other by making their knowledge and practices explicit, sharing them with their peers, and reflecting on them. CoPs have several characteristics that distinguish them from formal organizations and learning situations. In fact, such communities are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic (the domain of the community), deepen their practical knowledge and expertise in the area under consideration (the practice of the community), and interact on an ongoing basis (the community itself). CoPs often emerge in the context of existing organisations or professional networks, in which people are already involved in common professional practices. Throughout their life, CoPs elaborate current (or develop new) practices, though debates and exploration of internal and external knowledge. The evolution of CoPs leads to either their expansion (regarding their domain, their practice and, their community members) or to their disappearance.

It is broadly admitted that the learning value of a CoP is of high importance. The underlying processes of social participation, community building, development of identity, learning and knowing are deeply interconnected, while they are articulated around negotiation of meaning, which is at the base of any individual and collective learning. Moreover, the interacting processes of participation and reification are considered as fundamental to learning. Participation means being active participant of a social community and constructing an individual and a community identity. On the other hand, the reification process gives form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience into think-ness.

It has been recognized that web-based technologies could support the development of virtual CoPs. Consequently, more and more CoPs use virtual environments to support their activities. However, despite the rapidly increasing potential offered by technologies (including web-based platforms, wireless communications, mobile devices and extensive use of multimedia contents), recent research underline the lack of adequate scaffolding in the form of both technical supports and usage of the technology to:

  1. Express, represent and share practices: The elicitation and expression of practices, as recurrent rule-governed behaviour performed in a historical and social context and framed by knowledge resources (formal, explicit and technical, on the one hand, informal, tacit, social, cultural and discursive on the other), are heavily difficult tasks. Existing representation mechanisms and data types are often too poor to represent their complexity. Furthermore, existing multimedia tools currently require inhabiting knowledge in terms of technological skills or extensive learning about their use.
  2. Debate and reflect about the practices and about the life of the CoP: CoPs have to address specific issues and solve poorly structured problems, over which a plurality of views holds. These communities have to exploit the diverse mental models, knowledge resources, skills and competences associated with each of their members in order to create and use problem specific knowledge through the interaction of the different sources of codified and tacit specialist knowledge. They have also to reflect about the life of the CoP itself to represent and develop the bases of their identities: their domain, their practice, and their community itself. Existing, frequently used solutions (such as discussion lists and forums) are ineffective to mediate expression of interests, organise arguments and manage the reflection about the life of the community.
  3. Develop, reify and exploit knowledge inside and outside of the CoP: In CoPs, learning and teaching activities are strongly interconnected with the management of knowledge resources. The learning process implies a series of activities where pieces of knowledge are organized and formalized in such a way that they can be easily transferred to other members of the community. In a living learning community, these processes are continuously occurring at individual and collective levels. However, learning and knowledge management are often considered separately, which leads to potentially important losses of efficiency in the knowledge circulation and construction. For example, in the teaching domain, after some time of living, CoPs try often to create archive but lack of adequate tools and skills to create, use, validate and disseminate their knowledge bases.
  4. Facilitate engagement, participation and learning: CoPs are recognized as effective learning environments for individuals and in particular for novices wishing to enter their new professional community and develop their expertise. However, people often lack the necessary technological and social support to engage themselves in such communities, participate in them and learn through their participation in them. More specifically, conditions for engagement are related to individual skills in the use of technologies and opportunities to access and use these technologies in their usual work environment. Conditions for participation are associated to personal characteristics (such as time available for participation, self-esteem, representations of one’s competencies, etc.), participation support (such as animation and moderation of the community, rules for participation, framework given at the beginning to facilitate the exchanges between participants), feeling of security and trust. Finally, conditions for learning and professional development concern conceptions of learning, conceptions of changes, as well as conceptions of the community, facilitation techniques and scaffolding particularly to support novice movement to expertise, opportunities to reflect on the learning process, and the learning organisation (how does the work organisation supports learning and knowledge building). Having identified these conditions, very little is known about the technological and pedagogical supports which are necessary to create and maintain them in specific contexts.

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Call for Papers

The workshop focuses on current research trends in technology enhanced learning solutions that aim at addressing the multiplicity and complexity of needs of Communities of Practice all along their lifecycle. The workshop seeks for quality research papers that propose solutions to the issues identified above. It advocates for approaches that build on the synergy of concepts such as multimedia information authoring and reuse, knowledge management, argumentation and negotiation. It aims to bring together scientists and engineers who work on designing and/or developing the abovementioned solutions, as well as practitioners who evaluate them in diverse real environments. Particular interest will be given to approaches built according to well-established pedagogical principles.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

Two categories of submissions are solicited: full papers (up to 10 pages) or position papers (up to 5 pages). All submissions should be original and not published elsewhere or intended to be published during the review period. They must correspond to the EC-TEL conference format requirements, as they are described at the conference web site (http://www.ectel06.org/topics.html). All accepted papers must be presented by one of the authors. Workshop attendees need to register for the main EC-TEL conference.

All accepted papers will be published online. Authors of the workshop’s best papers will be requested to further elaborate their work and prepare an extended version for potential publication in a special issue of the International Journal of Web-Based Learning and Teaching Technologies (to be published early in 2007).

All submissions should be sent by e-mail to the workshop chair (karacap@cti.gr).

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Workshop Structure

The workshop will be highly interactive and engage participants in fruitful discussions on its topics. Towards this aim, accepted papers will be first clustered according to the topics addressed (3-4 such clusters are foreseen for a 1-day workshop). Each such cluster (workshop session) will contain no more than 5 papers, each of them to be shortly presented by one of its authors (workshop participants will have the full versions of the papers). The duration of the presentation of each paper will be 10-15 minutes. Authors will be asked to follow a structured template for their presentation, focusing on the problem addressed in their approach, the methodology followed, and the results of their work. Each workshop session will be coordinated by a facilitator (session chair), who will be an expert on the topics discussed in the particular session. After the short paper presentations, the facilitator will initiate and coordinate a discussion between the presenters and the audience (on issues raised during the presentations – it is also foreseen that the facilitator will have previously elaborate a set of open issues to be discussed), thus forming an “open” panel (round table) on each session’s topics. It is expected that the duration of each workshop’s session will be between 90 and 120 minutes.

Chris Kimble, co-author of the book entitled Knowledge Networks: Innovation through Communities of Practice, will give a keynote speech entitled "Never Knowingly Undersold" (for a summary of this talk, click here).

A closing session, summarizing the outcome of the workshop and determining future activities is also planned.

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Important dates

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Organisation

Workshop Chair

Nikos Karacapilidis, University of Patras & RA Computer Technology Institute, Greece, karacap@cti.gr

Program Committee

Nikolaos Avouris, University of Patras, Greece

Simon Buckingham Shum, The Open University, UK

Daniel Burgos, Open University of the Netherlands

Bernadette Charlier, University of Fribourg, Switzerland

Vassilis Christophides, University of Crete & FORTH-ICS, Greece

Brigitte Denis, University of Liege, Belgium

Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Christina Evangelou, RA Computer Technology Institute, Greece

Rose Dieng-Kuntz, INRIA – Sophia Antipolis, France

Eric Dubois, Research Center Henri Tudor, Luxembourg

Liliane Esnault, E.M. Lyon, France

Denis Gillet, EPFL, Switzerland

Thanasis Hadzilacos, Hellenic Open University, Greece

Nikos Karacapilidis, University of Patras & RA Computer Technology Institute, Greece

Vangelis Karkaletsis, NCSR Demokritos, Greece

Thibaud Latour, Research Center Henri Tudor, Luxembourg

Miltiadis Lytras, University of Patras & RA Computer Technology Institute, Greece

Dora Nousia, RA Computer Technology Institute, Greece

Vincent Quint, INRIA - Rhone Alpes, France

Cecile Roisin, University of Grenoble, France

Peter Scott, The Open University, UK

Constantine Spyropoulos, NCSR Demokritos, Greece

Manolis Tzagarakis, RA Computer Technology Institute, Greece

Christine Vanoirbeek, EPFL, Switzerland

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Description - Call for Papers - Workshop Structure - Important Dates - Organisation - Programme - Proceedings


Last update: November 14, 2006