EdReNe 11th Conference

The 11th EdReNe Conference took place on 6/5/2014 at the premises of the Computer Technology Institute and Press "Diophantus" in Athens, Greece. It was co-organized by Agro-Know and CTI, while Angeliki has put a significant amount of time and effort in finalizing the agenda of the meeting, taking care of all the practicalities/logistics ensuring that everything will flow smoothly. It was my 3rd participation in a row in an EdReNe Conference and this time I had the honor to make the introduction and welcoming (short) speech!

Introduction to the 11th EdReNe Conference

Despite the fact that traditionally EdReNe takes place by the end of each year, this time we explored the opportunity to host it a little bit earlier; this would allow us to collocate it with other events and also to investigate funding opportunities in the context of the Horizon 2020 programme. Indeed, the EdReNe 11th Conference took place a day after the ARIADNE foundation General Assembly for 2014 and a day before the LRE Sub-committee meeting, a fact which allowed members of the two networks to attend the EdReNe Conference as well, actively contributing to the agenda of the event and bringing an alternative approach to it.

This time the EdReNe Conference consisted of the following sessions:

1. Learning Resource Exchange panel 
2. Social Data & Analytics: Social Data aggregation for learning recommenders and analytics
3. Linked Data in Educational Repositories
4. Exploiting Data for Educational Purposes
5. Training Academy for Content Providers: An Open Discovery Space session aiming to provide the basic principles to people who wish to create and operate their own repository/metadata aggregator
6. News from Members

Partial view of the 11th EdReNe Conference participants

You may find more information about each session in the agenda of the Conference. What I liked in this Conference is that it included (as usually) a wide variety of topics related to learning resources and repositories within each session; 

• ongoing EU projects, 
• linked data for repository managers (e.g. ARIADNE linked data exposure) and applications of linked data (e.g. Europeana Judaica), 
• social data, platforms and tools (e.g. the demo of the AgLR tool), 
• presentations aiming at repository managers, 
• presentations aiming at content providers, 
• initiatives at national level (e.g. Photodentro) and at international level (e.g. Terena OER aggregator), 
• presentations through Skype (Enayat Rajabi/UAH) and Webex (Karin Whooley), 
• portals (Scoilnet & Green Learning Network / Organic.Edunet), 
• visualization of metadata management workflows (elastic search / Kibana), 
• discussions, panels etc. 

All these in just one day - from 09.00 to 19.30! It is obvious that the day was full and the agenda was packed with presentations, demonstrations and discussions; in order to stick to the program we needed to make several adaptations on the fly and in the end we managed to finish only 30 mins later than planned; however, the discussions were so interesting that noone complained. The day ended with a dinner at Scholarheio restaurant, only a few minutes from the meeting place.

I was really glad to see friends from the previous EdReNe meetings (Henk, Elena, David, Manon), meet new people (such as Elina Megalou, our hostess) as well as to be able to participate among friends and colleagues; it was this collaborative work that brought the nice results of the Conference. Big thanks also to Enayat and Karin for their remote participation! It is nice to see this dedication from the network members to EdReNe, especially taking into consideration that there is no funding for traveling and participation to the events. Overall, the meeting was a success, managing to bring together people from different networks, initiatives and projects, both old EdReNe members and new potential ones, blending the experiences with new ideas.

There was no discussion about the hosting of the next EdReNe Conference; however, there is an opportunity for Italy (which was not represented in this event) to host it - more information to be available soon.

EdReNe 10th Conference

The 10th EdReNe Conference took place at the premises of the European SchoolNet (EUN), Brussels, Belgium between 6 and 7 November 2013. I attended the Conference as a member of the UAH team which coordinates the Organic.Lingua project. I was travelling with Nikos Manolis from Athens on the morning of the 6th so unfortunately we almost completely missed an extremely interesting session on the "Opening Up Education" initative of the EC. We still managed to attend a part of it including an interesting panel discussion between EdReNe members and Mr. Ricardo Ferreira from the European Commission, who provided a lot of interesting information on the new initiative as well as responses to the questions of the participants. This initiative aims to provide EU citizens with a centralized portal for accessing national repository which might be hard to identify by searching on the web and is going to feature open access educational resources only.

After a short lunch break we had the opportunity to attend an interactive session titled "Future Classroom Lab", which was a participatory session including interactive boards, the use of smartphones or tablets (provided by the hosts for the session) as well as smart remotes for providing the responses to predefined questions. The activity was based on the Socrative web-based service, which is free to use for up to 50 participants.

The next session was dedicated to linked data and their application in the educational context, followed by a session dedicated to Europeana. In this session, Breandan Knowlton, Chief Product Officer of Europeana  made a really interesting presentation on the status of the Europeana and related projects, while Jiri Frank demonstrated an adventure game based on Europeana content. The case of Historiana was also presented by Steven Stegers (EUROCLIO, The Netherlands). The first day ended with the session dedicated on the news from the EdReNe members; it consisted of presentations from Karin Whooley (PDST, Ireland), Fernando Rui Campos (DGE, Portugal) and Pascal Craeye (KlasCement, Belgium). This was the session where Mada from AK presented the Educational Discovery Spaces and the Pathway Authoring tools and I presented the multilinguality-related outcomes of the Organic.Lingua project, focusing on AgLR and the MoKi tool and how they offer automatic multilingual services. My presentation was also the last of the first day of the Conference, which ended with a nice dinner at L' Horloge du Sud, a cozy African restaurant.

The 2nd day of the Conference started with a presentation about ICT4IAL by Marcella Turner-Cmuchal (EU Agency for Development in Special Needs Education), followed by a wonderful joint presentation on the Special Educational Needs Network by Leo Hosjsholt-Poulsen (UNI-C, the president of EdReNe), Roger Blamire (EUN) and Elena Shulman (EUN). The next session was the most technical one, including presentations from Manon Haartsen-Geven (Kennisnet, Netherlands) about JSON, Frans Van Assche, the President of the ARIADNE foundation (Belgium) about aggregation of social and usage data and one from my colleague Nikos Manolis on the enhancement of learning content through the aggregation of social data. An additional presentation on the Swedish standardization on theme learning platforms and digital learning resources was given by Peter Karlberg (Skolverket, Sweden), including an amazing YouTube video promoting the WCAG standard!

The last session was the 2nd part of the News from the members. Some of the many interesting tools were the following:

• the iTEC presented by Will Ellis (EUN), which is a highly customizable online platform featuring a number of widgets which can be selected and added based on the needs of the user. 
• Edumoodle, an enhanced version of Moodle, including plugins and components, developed by BMUKK. The LTI approach (Learning Tools Interoperability) developed by MSI Global Talso looks promising for enhancing the interoperability between different educational/learning platforms. Presented by Astrid Leeb (Education Group, Austria).
• Eduvista: A toolkit which enables school leaders, education policy makers, teachers and ICT suppliers to create and implement Future Classroom Scenarios that provide an clear vision of innovative teaching and learning practices. It can be used to introduce or scale up innovative use of ICT in a school or across schools in an education system. Presented by Will Ellis (EUN).
• Edukata: An adaptation of a a research-based design approach for educators to design learning activities for their own educational context. It sounds really promising and is currently under development. Presented by Will Ellis (EUN).
• EMU: A web platform providing access to learning materials (in Danish). The recommendations provided to the users are based on the tagging made by the users.

The 2nd day of the Conference closed with the conclusions and next steps. Agro-Know will probably host the next EdReNe meeting in Greece in 2014 so preparations will need to take place in the meantime.

Overall, it was a really well-organized conference, including sessions closely related to what I am actually working on and it was nice to see again the people from the previous EdReNe Conference in the Hague, the Netherlands about one year ago and what they have been working on during these months. You can find some photos from the event here.

If I had to provide a tagline for this Conference, it would be borrowed from the Danish folkeskole motto (found in Leo's last presentation of this Conference):

Gør en god skole bedre (Make a Good School Even Better)

EdReNe 9th Thematic Seminar

I only recently found out about the existence of the EdReNe (Educational Repositories Network) Thematic Network, which looked really close to what we (as Agro-Know) are involved with in the context of our EU-funded projects like Organic.Lingua, VOA3R and agINFRA, as well as with the Organic.Edunet network. The aim of the EdReNe network is to bring together these web-based repositories of learning resources with content owners and other stakeholders within education in order to share, develop and document strategies, experiences, practices, solutions, advice, procedures etc. on the organisation, structuring and functionality of repositories. The overall goal is to improve the provision of and access to learning resources.

The 9th EdReNe Seminar took place in the Hague, Netherlands, between 10 & 11 of December 2012, hosted by the Open University. The Seminar was themed "Digitisation of the curriculum" and included a number of presentations plus 2 keynote speeches related to various aspects of digital collections and repositories, both from a user and a technical point of view. The Seminar was attended by almost 50 participants from 11 countries, all of them involved in the context of educational repositories such as project and content managers, teachers, technology experts, curriculum and content developers etc. The full version of the agenda of the seminar is available here.

I participated in the Seminar as a member of the Organic.Lingua project and made a presentation titled: "Developing a network of content providers: The case of Organic.Edunet". The presentation provided information on the Organic.Edunet network, the tools and workflows used within the network and focused on the multilinguality aspects provided by the Organic.Lingua project. The presentation included information about the current content providers of the network, the Organic.Edunet IEEE LOM metadata application profile and OA-AE ontology, as well as the Organic.Edunet Web portal. The presentation was well-accepted and there were some questions about e.g. the lack of the Dutch localization and resources, as well as the factors of the success of this portal (presenting the analytics of the portal always draws the attention of the audience - I have noticed that quite a few times in the past!). It was only the second thematic network presented in the Seminar, as the rest of the presentations were more general, discussing tools and applications for a wider audience. You can find almost all the presentations delivered during the Seminar here.

I had a really good time meeting various people who are working on more or less the same area as we do, exchange ideas and find common ground for potential collaboration in the future. Even though I liked most of the presentations of the seminar, I especially liked the following ones:

• EUscreen, by Erwin Verbruggen, which described an EU project that had to do with large collections of audiovisual material. In fact, one of the tools used for the metadata curation was the one that we also try these days, called MINT. In addition, the EUscreen project made an excellent use of Web 2.0 tools, which I really liked.
• Connecting the dots: the pieces we need to digitalize the curriculum, by Dr. Fredrik Paulsson, as he detailed the use of the educational metadata, other than the IEEE LOM ones, which I found really interesting.
• Elevplan in Denmark : 10 years use of digitized curriculum in vocational education, by Folmer Kjær, which described a web-based educational documentation and planning tool for VET, in which we are also interested due to our involvement in EU projects that develop training curricula (in the agricultural context).
• I also liked a presentation by Wim Muskee, who presented an automated way to create metadata records for Wikipedia articles, based on the classification already existing in Wikipedia and enriched with algorithms that provided keywords and other information, based on the frequency of specific terms in the text. It provided almost the same results as the crawler that we started using for the same purpose (creating metadata records for resources that are not described with metadata but are available online) but following a different approach.

Unfortunately I missed the majority of the presentations made on the second day of the seminar, as I had to rush to the airport in order to catch my flight back to Athens. I hope that the presentations will soon be available online, through the EdReNe website. After this short experience, I have to admit that I am already looking forward to the next EdReNe seminar!