Special Issue Educational Technology & Society published

Marco Kalz & Rob Koper have published together with Veronika Hornung-Prähauser from Salzburgresearch a special issue of the Journal of Educational Technology & Society. After a successful workshop during the Edumedia conference in 2008 the special issue could attract a lot of high-quality submissions. The special issue has a focus on "Technology Support for Self-Organized Learners" and 10 contributions have been selected by the reviewers for publication in the journal.

Here is a short abstract of all contributions:

•    Matuga presents a study undertaken with 58 high school students taking university-level e-learning courses. The study objective was to investigate the relationship between self-regulation, goal-orientation and study achievement when high school students take part in online college courses.

•    Yukselturk and Bultun present a study about gender differences in in motivation and learning strategies in synchronous and asynchronous communication. This was done by regarding 145 volunteer students taking part in an online course in Online Information Technology.

•    Pata presents a conceptual framework for learning design to support self-directed learning at university courses. The framework is based on ecological psychology and introduces the concepts of “learning spaces” and “learning niches”, collectively shared entities which, in the view of the authors, emerge through individually perceived affordances. The niche-approach is being discussed in the light of traditional learning design approaches. The authors present an empirical study in order to demonstrate the applicability of the learning niche conceptualization.

•    Glahn, Specht & Koper focus on contextualised and ubiquitous learning in their contribution. Their paper analyses learner participation as a contextual dimension of adapting graphical indicators of interaction data for engaging and motivating learners in participating and contributing to an open community. The analysis is based on interaction data and interviews with participants in a nine week lasting design study, during which the effect of two indicators on the engagement of the participants in the group activities has been compared.

•    Väljataga & Fiedler argue for a course design in which participants are not simply engaged in developing knowledge, skills and orientations in regard to curricular subject matter and the use of technology but actively involved in self-directing intentional learning projects with the support of social media. This perspective is enriched with some empirical data collected from a pilot course taught at Tallinn University, Estonia.

•    Louys, Hernández-Leo, Schoonenboom, Lemmers & Pérez-Sanagustín describe in their contribution the self-development of competences within a pilot scenario where several usage profiles and tools from the TENCompetence project are applied. A evaluation methodology is introduced and some results and main findings are discussed.

•    In the contribution of Vavoula & Sharples the authors introduce the concept of Lifelong Learning Organisers (LLO). LLOs help learners to capture episodic and semantic aspects of learning events in all kind of learning contexts. Several requirements are defined and refinements for the development of the concept of LLO and also its example implementation KLeOS are discussed.

•    Campbell introduces an exploratory descriptive study that examines how the use of an online journaling environment influenced students’ capacity to adaptively react to self-determined knowledge about the effectiveness of their method of learning and set learning goals.

•    Kirkham, Winfield, Smallwood, Coolin, Wood & Searchwell present a platform on which a new generation of applications targeted to aid the self-organised learner can be presented. The new application is enabled by innovations in trust-based security of data built upon emerging infrastructures to aid federated data access in the UK education sector. Within the proposed architecture, users and data providers (within Virtual Organisations formed for specific learning needs) collaborate in a more dynamic and flexible manner by defining their own data-object-based security policies. This is enabled using a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) that presents trusted services to ensure that these policies are both applied and enforced.


•    Drachsler, Hummel, van den Berg, Eshuis, Waterink, Nadolski, Berlanga, Boers & Koper present a study about the use of a personalised recommender system for navigational support in learning networks. To answer some research questions in respect to efficiency and effectiveness of such a system an experiment is introduced which was set up within an Introduction Psychology course of the Open University of the Netherlands. Around 250 students participated in this study and were monitored over an experimental period of four months.