The document summarizes the EC-TEL'07 conference on technology enhanced learning. It discusses how the conference (1) confirmed the success of the previous year's conference, (2) established itself as a leading European forum for high-quality TEL research with a less than 25% acceptance rate, and (3) involved participation from 16 European countries and beginning global outreach.

1. PROLEARN - Professional
Learning for Europe
Creating New Learning Experiences on a Global Scale
EC-TEL’07 Wrap-Up
Matthias Jarke
RWTH Aachen University & Fraunhofer FIT, Germany
President, German Informatics Society (GI)
Program Chairs:
Erik Duval, KU Leuven
Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen University
General Chair:
Wolfgang Nejdl, L3S
Organizing Chair:
Martin Wolpers, L3S

2. Forum for TEL Communities
The success of EC-TEL ’07 confirms and in some
regards exceeds the success of EC-TEL ’06 as a
leading TEL community forum
In very short time established as the European outlet for top-
quality TEL research
Acceptance rate below 25% for full papers
Work-in-progress in short papers, posters, workshops
Special focus on young researcher promotion (doctoral consortium
complementing successful Summer School)
Not only scientific quality has re-confirmed the high standard
Conducive setting for relaxed productive debate and excellent local
arrangements
Financially sustainable beyond ProLearn start-up funding
… under certain assumptions
© Matthias Jarke

3. Forum for TEL Communities (2)
The success of EC-TEL ’07 confirms and in some
regards exceeds the success of EC-TEL ’06 as a
leading TEL community forum
Successful involvement across the full scope of the extended EU
16 European countries represented in the 28 full papers, including
several accession states
Beginning outreach to global participation and networking
Important forum for experience sharing and strategy discussion
forum among European projects
At least four associated project meetings associated (PROLEARN,
COOPER, PALLETTE, PROLIX)
Technology upgrade in the conference software to link into
offsite/offline sharing (recording, blogs, wikis, …)
Dialogue between TEL community and EU on future needs and
opportunities
© Matthias Jarke

4. Trends in the E-TEL `07 Debate
information explosion and community creativity
Increase personal, situated relevance of search
Use of keywords and ontologies
Dynamic preferences, multi-faceted ranking
Accessibility of time-eating objects (e.g. video), multi-media
and multi-lingual collections
Empower communities and embed community tools in TEL
Social bookmarking, social software paradigms, media-
theoretic foundations
A few ventures into organizational learning and KM
De-construction of “pearls” (key services) from formerly
monolithic systems as a basis for sharing, re-configuration,
re-purposing TEL tools
© Matthias Jarke

5. Trends in the EC-TEL `07 Debate (2)
“Traces (in media or human brain) are left by absent activity
so this activity is actually constituted as a concept by
transcribing the trace, and this transcription changes future
reality as well as the trace itself”
© Matthias Jarke

6. Trends in the EC-TEL `07 Debate (2)
“Traces (in media or human brain) are left by absent activity
but this activity is actually constituted as a concept by
transcribing the trace, and this transcription changes future
reality as well as the trace itself”
Many contributions in EC-TEL `07 enrich the realm of
tracking, tracing, creating new abstractions and putting
them to work
Attention and motivation management (students and teachers)
Error analysis and recommender systems
Lifecycle tracking for learning objects
Ontology extraction
Guidance by formal policies, indicators, accessible standards
© Matthias Jarke

7. Trends in the EC-TEL `07 Debate (3)
Important open issues come to the foreground, challenging
us for EC-TEL `08 and many years to come!
Empirical background research on workplace context and
learning needs (WHAT and WHEN to learn)
… including the concern for valid research methods
… and the need for considering the impact of changing user
populations (e.g. from NerdNet to WomenNet)
Societal impact on privacy, IPR/plagiarism/distortion, and
dependence on critical infrastructure
© Matthias Jarke

8. User-generated content
• Comment and improve EC-TEL’07!
Upload materials on the wiki!
Blog your experiences! Like http://tihane.wordpress.com/
• Audio streams will be available from the conference
• Flickr Photo Stream (Tag: ectel07)
• Proceedings still available online after the conference for
two weeks
• Workshop Proceedings, Poster Proceedings, Doctoral
Consortium Proceedings available on www.ceur.org
© Matthias Jarke