Newsletter (April 2011)

Cristina Costa works at the University of Salford as the Research Technologies development officer. Her role is to champion innovative means of convening and disseminating research activity and promote collaborative research ventures with the use of new web technologies.  Her research focuses on the use of participatory media in a changing environment and she is particularly interested in analysing the advantages and also the implications of using the social web for teaching, learning and research. More recently she has been focusing on Digital Scholarship. She was named Learning Technologist of the Year 2010 by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT).

Riina Vuorikari has worked for European Schoolnet (EUN) since 2002. Her doctoral thesis, completed in 2009, dealt with systems that allow both top-down and bottom-up approaches for information and knowledge management, namely learning resource repositories that use both conventional metadata (e.g. LOM) and social metadata (e.g. tags, ratings, comments). Her continuing research aims at better understanding, capturing and modelling of contextual information within Technology Enhanced Learning in a multilingual and multicultural context. She co-chairs the workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology Enhanced Learning (SIRTEL) and  currently works on a new theme of 1:1 computing in educational setting and manages the Acer-European Schoolnet pedagogical netbook pilot.

Dr Leslie Carr is a senior lecturer in the Web and Internet Sciences Research Group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton. Dr. Carr is a co-Director of the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre, where he studies the impact of Open Access and Open Data on the scientific and scholarly research processes. As well as being the Project Director of a number of JISC projects including dotAC, DepositMO and KeepIt he is also the technical director of the EPrints Repository Software Team, director of EPrints Commercial Services and manager of the ECS research repository.

ABSTRACT

Any realistic debate on the future of Personal Learning Environments will inevitably draw on insights gained from the study of web science; the interdisciplinary research endeavor which tries to understand the interleaved social and technical processes that have produced the open webs of information and data.

The Web has increasingly included people in its activities, starting with the so-called Web 2.0-style social networking and social messaging services. But now a concept of “social machinery” is emerging, where processes, workflows and projects are designed and programmed around people’s activities as well as their computational devices. How will this fundamental re-imagining of ICT impact education? Will the current web consisting of a network of information and services be replaced by an engineered web of contacts, knowledge, experiences and pedagogic requirements? How will the reality of personal learning environments evolve reflecting emerging practices and the social machinery found in the workplace, home or classroom?