Leuven2Feb

From Mw

1 Introduction
2 Clarifying the vision
3 Research Challenges
4 Feedback from Participants

Introduction

This workshop, held from 09h30 to 12h30 on 3 February 2006, focused on “Grand Research Challenges for Learning Objects. Metadata and Interoperability” and was organized by the ProLearn network of excellence and the ARIADNE Foundation.

After a first introduction, in order to clarify the goal and purpose of the meeting, we broke out in smaller groups to clarify the vision of why we work on learning technologies and to identify the main research challenges that need to be tackled in order to realize the vision. We then reconvened in a plenary session to discuss and consolidate the results of the different break out groups.

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Clarifying the vision

Groups were asked to brainstorm for 3 minutes on concrete visionary challenges. Examples briefly discussed include the man on the moon vision of Apollo, the X-prize for commercial space travel (and other things too now!) and the DARPA Grand Challenge on autonomous vehicles.

We briefly discussed the characteristics that these challenges share:

They speak to the imagination and can be explained to "the woman in the street".
They seem almost impossible when they are defined - they even retain that aura many years after they have been realised.
They are easy to verify precisely.

The three groups came up with:

By 2014, in the span of one week, 50% of 12-15 year olds will connect with another youngster and have a learning experience (more for group1).
Portable, connected device that is able to provide information related to an object in a negotiated dialogue captured by camera within n seconds by end of 2008 (more for group2).
Ambient learning (more for group3)

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Research Challenges

We then discussed the challenges that research should address, in order to make progress towards realising the visions.

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Connection week

- Rewarding system
- Bridge differences (people, cultures, …)
- How to repair when it goes wrong? (For instance when a Western teenager suggests to discuss “sex” :) )
- How about pre-pare
  - Set context
  - How do you know someone is really interested?
  - Google index of contexts?
  - Translating experiences
  - Promote respect & trust building
- Connection with semantic background: culture, history
- Telling stories on the fly?
  - Live content
  - What is not being told?
- Feedback from the group
  - Not technical, about motivation, social rules
  - Google could help understand experience
  - Make hidden meaning explicit

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Flower Challenge

Context awareness
- Estimate context of question
- Location, time, personal profile, history of activities, FAQ, …
- Filtering
Automatic provision of metadata and reasoning over them to find most likely context and offer most likely answer, with opportunity for user to correct and cycle over that
Federated repositories, application profiles might not include enough metadata
Intuitive input, simplicity, ease of use, short time-to-satisfying-answer: HCI, handheld
- 3 interactions max
Feedback from the group
- More pro- rather than re-active?
- Finding and searching
- Technical challenges are similar to previous: context!

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Ambient Learning

This group reused an existing slideset.
Feedback from the group:
- How to finance technical infrastructure?
  - When there is no electricity, water, …
- Data security
  - What will happen with these data?
  - Trust management
  - Privacy
- Hardware, only continuous storing
- Access to personal data
- How to measure effectiveness
  - From authoring to consuming