is it just me

Good news from Graham Attwell: the website for The PLE conference in Barcelona is online. You can find the Call for Contributions here.

The PLE Conference is intended to produce a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, experience and research around the development and implementation of PLEs including the design of environments, sociological and educational issues and their effectiveness and desirability as (informal) learning spaces.

Whilst the conference includes a traditional research paper strand, we also encourage proposals for sessions in different formats including workshops, posters, debates, cafe sessions, hands on sessions and demonstrations. There will be a Spanish strand, so contributions in Spanish are also welcome!
We will also provide opportunities for unconferencing events, including the provision of spaces for informal meetings and discussions. Although the main conference takes place on 8th and 9th of July, there will be an informal launch event (with wine and tapas!) on the evening of Wednesday 7th.

As well as the face to face sessions, the conference will be supported by a variety of different online spaces. You can join the YouTube group for the PLE conference at
http://www.youtube.com/group/PLE2010CONF

Selected papers will be published by the International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments..

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Together with my colleague Tobias Nelkner I wrote a white paper on our work in progress on self-descriptive widget and the design of an interaction language for widgets. This Widget Self-Description and Interaction Language (WSDIL) will allow the easy orchestration of widgets (for example in a PLE or PLME) and the data exchange between widgets. We tend to let users create their own “pipeline” of interactive widgets that auto-update their content depending on events and actions in other widgets.

This video presents how the drag and drop and data exchange between widgets can work. In the example we show a tag cloud widget, a widget that incorporates the Google search and a widget that represents a chat. If we attach widgets to each other they change their content/representation based on the content of attached widgets.

The next steps will include the realization of filters and selectors to let users choose what kind of data is exchanged between widgets.

The presented work is part of the EU funded project MATURE.

Here you find the white paper on WSDIL. Just tell us what you think (remember it is work/research in progress). Maybe you can point us to similar approaches or ask questions that let us explain our proposition more deply.

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A new research question just came to my mind: how does wiki articles mature? We are currently writing on a paper on defining what a PLME can be and while I was thinking about maturing in general, I thought about the special case of wikis.

Is it feasible to assume that a part of a wiki article that haven’t changed for a period of changes is somewhat static, good, matured? And if, how could you express the maturity level of that part? How would a metric look like, that meassures the influence of the number of edits, the size of the diff, whether there were only little changes or large rearragements, the discussions about the article and all the other stuff that may influence the maturing of an article?

I think we need some statistical data on how articles change in order to say something about the maturity levels of (parts of) wiki articles.

Popularity: 6% [?]