3rd International LeGE-WG Workshop: GRID Infrastructure to Support Future Technology Enhanced Learning - Index

Abstract

This workshop, which represents one of the Online Educa Berlin workshops, demonstrates how Grid technologies will be able to support and develop learning processes, and focuses on new pedagogical approaches for e-learning, learner models and knowledge representation, knowledge and semantic GRID, virtual learning organisations and communities, advanced web based collaborations systems and service oriented software architectures. TOWARDS A EUROPEAN LEARNING GRID INFRASTRUCTURE is a series of workshops organised by the Learning GRID of Excellence Working Group (LeGE-WG), which is a thematic network sponsored by the Information Society Technologies Program (IST) of the European Commission in order to facilitate the establishment of a European GRID infrastructure for e-Learning. The 3rd International LeGE-WG Workshop, organised by the Italian Node, with the special theme "GRID infrastructure to support future technology enhanced Learning", took place on 3rd December, 2003 in Berlin, in parallel with Online Educa Berlin, 9th International Conference on Technology Supported Learning & Training, the most important European e-learning event. In current practices, learning processes are based mainly on the information transfer paradigm and are devoted to find the best way for presenting contents in order to transmit information to learners. Most of the e-learning solutions available on the market are focused only on supporting the content delivery (content centred approach). This traditional paradigm of Information transfer does not consider that the learning is a non linear process dependent on a great number of variables, so the only good quality of teaching does not determine the effectiveness of the learning phase. For this reason it is necessary to take into account the fundamental importance of the pedagogical component; the learning process, according to recent cognitive theories, can be effective using an approach which considers in a unitary way some fundamental characters of learning such as active, situated and collaborative learning. Grid technologies show many suitable characteristics to achieve an effective learning as they shift the focus from the content delivery ready to use services to the dynamic generation of services tuned with the context. They are the most promising approach to realise an infrastructure that will allow learning process actors to collaborate, to learn in an active and experiential way, to use and share high quality learning data and to innovative solutions of learning and training. Grid technologies will be able to support learning processes allowing each learner to use, in a transparent and collaborative manner, the resources already existing on-line, by facilitating and managing dynamic conversations with other human and artificial actors available on the GRID, that offer services including those resources. For these reasons the workshop was focused, but not limited to: new pedagogical approaches for e-learning learner models and knowledge representation knowledge and Semantic GRID Virtual Learning Organisations and Communities Advanced Web based Collaboration Systems Service Oriented Software Architecture