You are cordially invited to visit ROLE Workshops at PLE conference in Aveiro (Portugal), July 11, 2012

ROLE will organise 2 workshops in the frame of the PLE conference in Aveiro. ROLE project is an FP7 funded integrated project that develops, tests and puts into practice responsive open learning environments.

It consists of 16 partners stemming from EU as well as China. For more information, please visit www.role-project.eu

SDK Workshop

Workshop website: http://rolews.fit.fraunhofer.de/structure.html

Structure: Two parts – theoretical and practical

Requirements: laptop with recent Chrome or Firefox, development skills beneficial

Venue: University of Aveiro Technical Zone

Date and Time: July 11, 2012 at 14:00pm

Workshop Organisers: Kerstin Schmidt & Maren Scheffel

Flyer: PLE conf ROLE

Widget-based PLEs are currently of substantial interest in the TEL community. In such PLEs, teachers and learners combine different mostly single-purpose Web widgets to complete learning applications for their particular learning needs. However, often such PLEs are just sets of widgets put side by side, and there is often no technical support for widget integration as well as for learner communication and collaboration.

In the last year the ROLE project developer team has bundled a set of technologies developed within the project such as learning spaces, local and remote inter-widget communication, tracking and access to learner interaction data, recommendation, etc. into one reference implementation, which is deployed and publicly available as the ROLE Software Development Kit (SDK).

In this hands-on workshop we will introduce, demonstrate and actively work with the ROLE SDK in terms of usage, design, and concrete development. Participants will be given the opportunity to play with a SaaS test installation of the SDK, design new and/or enhance existing widgets with ROLE technologies and learn how to implement their ideas under the guidance of experienced ROLE developers.

Build your Responsive Open Learning Environment

Workshop website: http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/role/pleconf-workshop/

This will be an interactive workshop directed to anyone who wants to build their widget-based Responsive Open Learning Environment (ROLE) and design their own widgets through a set of structured activities.

Background

A Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is an innovative paradigm conceptualizing the aggregation, manipulation and sharing of digital artefacts by learners, within a flexible and versatile online space. The PLE follows a learner-centric approach, allowing the use of lightweight services and tools that belong to and are controlled by individual learners.

The European project ROLE (Responsive Open Learning Environments) is aiming at empowering learners for lifelong and personalised learning within a responsive open learning environment. Towards this goal, ROLE has developed a number of learning tools and services, addressing a variety of learning contexts and requirements.

In this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to experiment with the learning tools and services developed by ROLE. Participants will be presented with ROLE widgets that cover a variety of learning goals and will be able to create mash-ups of these widgets for their particular learning and research purposes.

In addition, participants will be able to design their desired widgets, according to their learning scenarios and requirements. They will also have the opportunity to submit the widget designs produced in this workshop to the ROLE Widget Enchantment contest. The winners of this contest will be supported by the project to implement their designs.

Structure

The workshop will be structured as follows:

1. Introduction to the PLE methodologies and technologies developed by ROLE.
2. First group activity: Use ROLE widgets to find and share learning resources on the web. Participants will be presented with a bundle of pre-selected ROLE widgets and will be able to use them in pairs or small groups in order to find and share online learning resources.
3. Plenary discussion on the outcomes of the first group activity.
4. Second group activity: Build your mash-up of ROLE tools. Participants will be presented with the ROLE Sandbox and Graasp, two facilities for building widget mash-ups in shared spaces. The participants will then be guided into creating mash-ups in these platforms for their own learning or research purposes.
5. Plenary discussion on the outcomes of the second group activity.
6. Third group activity: Design your widget. Participants will be provided with templates and guidance on designing their widgets, by defining the learning scenario, the learning design, the actors involved, as well as the ‘storyboard’ of the widget.
7. Reflections, conclusions and next steps.

Objectives

At the end of the workshop, participants will have acquired:

• A good overview of the different approaches and issues related to PLEs.
• An awareness of the range of resources, tools and methods available to enable PLEs.
• An understanding of how PLEs can be applied in their own learning and research context.
• An understanding of the widget design process and the requirements involved.
• Additionally, participants will be able to take away the following outcomes of the group activities:
• The learning resources that have been shared in the first group activity.
• The mash-ups of ROLE tools created in the second group activity.
• The widget designs and entries to the ROLE Widget Enchantment contest.

Organisers

• Alexander Mikroyannidis – The Open University, UK
• Denis Gillet – Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
• Sylvana Kroop – Centre for Social Innovation ZSI, Austria
• Daniel Dahrendorf – IMC Information Multimedia Communication AG, Germany