Research in Technology Enhanced Learning is multidisciplinary, what means that several disciplines have to share concepts and methods around a shared objective, and that they have also to coin concepts to take into account the specificity of the questions it addresses. Moreover, having to deal with learning and education, it has to face epistemological and cultural issues due to the history of education and the diversity of the relations to knowledge. As a result TEL research must manage linguistic and semantic issues in a much more critical way than it is the case for computer scientist and specialists of technology involved in this field. To respond to this challenge, the Stellar network of excellence in collaboration with the European association TELEARC, has initiated the creation of a thesaurus and a dictionary of the terms and expressions used in TEL research.
1. The TEL dictionary initiative
because beyond words there are concepts
N. Balacheff
J. Zeiliger
E. Manon
With the collaboration of
Jacqueline Bourdeau
Paul Kirchner
Rosamund Sutherland
2. Strategic challenges
• To create the TEL research knowledge base
▫ To remove ambiguity and achieve equivocality
▫ To build on the past, identify results and concepts
▫ To limit the reinvention of the wheel effect
▫ To overcome the rapid obsolescence of trends
• The communication between disciplines
▫ Horizontal multidisciplinarity
Computer science, human and social sciences, life science
▫ Vertical multidisciplinarity
Software engineering, artificial intelligence, HCI, etc.
Pedagogy, psychology, education, epistemology, etc.
• The communication with stakeholders
▫ Learners, parents, employers,
▫ Teachers, trainers
▫ Decision makers, policy makers
▫ Industry, service providers