CfP: EFEPLE11 Workshop
1st Workshop on Exploring the Fitness and Evolvability of Personal Learning Environments (EFEPLE’11)
Held at the 2nd STELLAR Alpine Rendez‐Vous (ARV) in the French Alps, March 27‐31, 2011
Introduction
In the recent decade a plethora of interactive software tools, be they open source or proprietary, have emerged and perished in the realm of technology‐enhanced learning (TEL). Concomitantly, there have also been surge and demise of contents, social networks, and activities associated with the use of these TEL tools. It is intriguing to understand what factors contribute to their rises and falls, and how. While controversies on the viability of making an analogy between the evolution of natural and artificial objects prevail, it is deemed worthwhile to explore its potential for analysing the changes in TEL and charting the future.
In accordance with evolutionary theory, the fitness of an environment or tool can be defined with respect to its purpose and depends on the ‘genes’ from former generations. In context of TEL, these genes can be understood as features of existing tools and functionality being reused from software libraries or developed over multiple lifecycles thus leading to new generations of software artefacts. Personal learning environments (PLEs) aggregate these functionalities to enable learners to connect to peers and shared artefacts along their learning activities. Consequently, the success of a PLE can be measured by its uptake and usage within different communities of practice, its perceived effectiveness and efficiency in supporting the attainment of learning goals, its application beyond pre‐defined purposes, its distribution and outreach beyond single communities, and its evolution to new PLE generations through active developers. Moreover, data mining of so‐called variables of evolvability (e.g., perceived pragmatic/learning and hedonic/fun value) will enable the derivation of specific guidelines for designing and developing PLEs. Such empirically grounded guidelines, supplementary to those for generic IT applications, are currently lacking and much desired.
Overall, the main aim of the workshop is to explore the fitness and evolvability of PLEs in order to identify and understand characteristics and mechanisms for successfully evolving PLEs.
Background
In principle, for a software system to be sustainable, it needs to be able to adapt to the changing requirements[1] in terms of use contexts, user goals, organizational cultures and technological opportunities. Specifically, in the field of TEL, there has been a shift from the pioneer work on designing and implementing full-featured, organisation-driven learning management systems (LMSs) to the emerging trend of developing specialised tools, which then can be assembled by users to extend/create personal learning environments (PLEs, Attwell, 2007)[2]. Not least due to the Internet, users have access to a seemingly innumerable amount of content and software tools, which are useful and partially even necessary to achieve the learning goals driven by the demands of job tasks, higher, and further education, or even private activities.
In the context of PLEs, the selection of tools is at the discretion of individual users, their organisations and the communities of practice (CoP) where users engage in a variety of collaborative activities. It is observed that some software tools, after being used for a few typical tasks by a few people only, unexpectedly spread out within a CoP widely as well as wildly through good practice sharing, convincing peers of the benefits of these tools for particular lifelong learning activities. In a very short period of time such tools can become as must-have infrastructure for collaborative work (e.g. various Google services). These tools and the environments built on them are not only intensively used but are also modified and sustained by active developer communities. On the other hand, some tools are endangered to be rejected by end-users and to die out after a few successful cases of application, even though they have undergone several iterations of redesign. Apparently, these observations manifest the notions of descent with modification, heritable variation and selection, sensitivity to changing environmental or contextual requirements, and “control of and types of variability” (Nehaniv, 2003[3]; Wernick et al. 2006[4]) that characterize Darwinian evolution. In the context of PLEs, it is relevant to understand the processes leading to successful tool uses, create respective models and learn how to control respective processes to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of modern individual learning environments.
The assumption that changes in PLEs can be modelled by Darwinism underpins this proposed workshop, which aims to explore several pertinent issues:
- Nahaniv et al[5] (2006) define the notion of evolvability as “the capacity to vary robustly and adaptively over time or generations in digital and natural systems”. This definition leads to a basic question: What is evolvable? Is it a matter of the complexity of a system that is quantifiable such as lines of codes, number of modules? Or is it more a matter of quality-in-use manifests in terms of user experience[6] (i.e. a non-functional requirement)? Another key question: Why does a system evolve? It can be instigated by changes in a system’s environment, user requirements, usage, implementation methodologies and technologies. Answers to these what and why questions can shed some light onto the question How to effectively and reliably evolve a system (Ciraci & van den Broek, 2006; footnote 3)? Addressing these questions in the context of PLEs will instigate stimulating discussions.
- Fitness for survival is a widely known but poorly understood concept of Darwinian evolution. Paradoxically, the idea of heritable variation and selection is necessary but not sufficient to explain inherent phenotypic expression of fitness (Nehaniv et al. 2006; footnote 5). It hinges on the rigidity (or flexibility) of the genotype-phenotype mappings. The main difficulties lie in drawing analogies between biological concepts and artificial artifacts (e.g. What constitutes an “individual”, a “species”, or “interbreeding”). Insights can be gained from the notion of fit-for-purpose in the field of HCI (e.g. Wong et al., 2005)[7] and the fitness model of nodes in the science of (social) networks (Barabasi, 2002)[8]. Nonetheless, it remains an open question on how to define and measure the fitness of PLE tools.
[1]Ciraci, S. and van den Broek, P. M. (2006) Evolvability as a Quality Attribute of Software Architectures. In: The International ERCIM Workshop on Software Evolution 2006, 6-7 Apr 2006, LIFL et l’INRIA, Universite des Sciences et Technologies de Lille, France, pp. 29–31.
[2] Attwell, G. (2007). Personal learning environments: The future of eLearning, eLearning Papers, January 2007, 2(1), www.elearningpapers.eu. ISSN 1887-1542
[3] Nehaniv, C. (2003). Evolvability, Biosystems: Journal of Biological and Information Processing Systems, 69(2-3), 77-81.
[4] Wernick, P., Hall, T., Nehaniv, C. (2006). Software evolutionary dynamics modeled as the activity of an actor-network. Proceedings of 2nd Intl. Workshop on Software Evolvability. IEEE computer society press.
[5] Nehaniv, C., Hewitt, H., Christianson, B., & Wernick, P. (2006). What software evolution and biological evolution don’t have in common. In Proc. Of 2nd Int’l IEEE Workshop on Software Evolvability (SE’06).
[6] Law, E. L-C. & van Schaik, P. (2010). Modeling of user experience: An agenda for research and practice. Interacting with Computers, 22, 312-322.
[7] Wong B. L. W, Keith S. & Springett M. (2005) Fit for Purpose Evaluation: The case of a public information kiosk for the socially disadvantaged, People and Computers XIX – Proceedings of HCI 2005, Edinburgh Sept. 5-9. Springer.
[8] Barabasi, A-L. (2002). The Linked: The new science of networks. Cambridge, MA: Perseus.
Workshop Topics
Given the interdisciplinary nature of the workshop, researchers and practitioners from technology‐enhanced learning, software engineering, human‐computer interaction (HCI), bio‐informatics, and evolutionary biology are relevant stakeholders in the discussion. Focussing on PLE software evolvability and the Darwinist theory, the following topics of interest, albeit non‐exhaustive, are identified to invite submissions, and important, stimulating discussions in the workshop:
- • Darwinist models of constructing and evolving personal learning environments
- • Data interoperability requirements for successful learning tools and environments
- • Social requirements engineering and end‐user development
- • Effects of PLE technology on user behaviour and competence development
- • Modelling, capturing, and support of PLE usage contexts
- • User interface and usability issues of evolutionary PLEs
- • Fitness measurement of learning tools and environments
- • Analysis of emergent structures of PLE‐based communities
- • Case studies of successfully evolving (and endangered) PLEs
Workshop Format and Submission Procedure
Participants are invited to submit original unpublished research as one of the two types of contributions: full papers with up to 6 pages describing substantial, completed work or position papers with 2 pages describing either results that can be concisely reported or work in progress. Papers should be formatted with the template (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings‐templates) and submitted as PDF‐file to: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=efeple11. All submissions will be reviewed by the programme committee members according to their originality, significance, clarity, and quality. An open contribution process (i.e. shepherding) will be launched to engage dialogs between experienced and young researchers in the workshop blog (http://augur.wu-wien.ac.at/EFEPLE11/) already at the early stage to facilitate the writing up of papers.
Furthermore, participants will be asked to carry out preparatory work before attending the workshop. Specifically, they should prepare an experiential report to describe how their PLEs have evolved over last three years. Pre‐workshop virtual meetings can be arranged to discuss these preliminary findings. Highlights of these discussions will be documented and further analysed in the workshop.
Accepted submissions will be presented at the workshop (15 minutes) and discussed on a round table format (15 minutes). Additionally, a panel of four discussants with different expertise (software engineering/human‐computer interaction, biology, and mathematician) will be invited to present their views (each 5 minutes) on the following statements: “An inherent property of PLE is evolvability, which can be modelled by Darwin’s evolution theory and parameterized with the notion of fitness.”
Important Dates
- • Paper submission: October 30, 2010 15th November 2010
- • Notification of acceptance: November 30, 2010 7th December 2010
- • Submission of experiential reports: December 30, 2010 7th January 2011
- • Camera ready submission: January 30, 2011
- • Workshop date: March 30 – 31, 2011
Programme Committee
- • Christian Glahn, OUNL, the Netherlands
- • Andreas Holzinger, Medical University Graz, Austria
- • Ebba T. Hvannberg, University of Iceland, Iceland
- • Zinayida Petrushyna, RWTH, Germany
- • Christian Prause, Fraunhofer FIT, Germany
- • Michael Schröder, TU Dresden, Germany
- • Christian Stary, University of Linz, Austria
- • Katrien Verbert, KUL, Belgium
- • Paul Wernick, University of Hertfordshire, UK
- • Dirk Labudde, University of Applied Sciences Mittweida, Germany
Organisers
- • Effie Law, University of Leicester, UK
- • Felix Mödritscher, Vienna University of Economics & Business, Austria
- • Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer FIT, Germany
- • Denis Gillet, EPFL, Switzerland
ROLE Project
