e-Taalim

The 6th IEEE international conference on wireless, mobile and ubiquitous technologies in education (WMUTE 2010) started today in Kaohsiung – Taiwan. Under the theme: “Mobile social media for learning and education in formal and informal settings” and for 5 days, this conference is based on shared research interests between the two communities, IEEE WMUTE (International Conference on Wireless, Mobile and Ubiquitous Technologies in Education) and IEEE DIGITEL (International Conference on Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning). Participants of both conferences will be able to interact and exchange ideas which we hope can stimulate more exciting ideas for future research.

The convergence of global adoption of smart phones integrating hi-quality media capture devices and trends in social networking, participatory media and cyber infrastructure provide remarkable opportunities for making mobile social media integral to distributed learning environments. Social networking and user-generated media like YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia and Flickr are moving beyond the stationary PC onto mobile devices like iPhone and low-price netbook computers. Social applications are also becoming a new communication and networking method in sectors such as business, entertainment and education. We expect to see mobile social media, incorporating video, photos, social networking and communication capabilities to be one of the major new applications for the mobile web, and we welcome contributions that help advance visions, technologies, research and theories to better support learning and educational purposes.

Arguably the impact of mobile social media will be universal, augmenting with distributed social media tools the face-to-face social interactions that now enable learning and teaching interactions. Learners may tap social networks and recommendations for learning in pursuit of their interests over informal and formal settings. Students could learn from a broader universe of user-generated content, beyond “prescribed” content provided by teachers or textbooks. The mobile social network can potentially foster richer parent-child interactions for learning, and enable different parent roles supporting education, and more vibrant and productive interactions between learning at school, home and neighborhood. In classroom settings, mobile devices can enrich interactivity and inter-operability of digital expression and potentially provide supervision and decision support for teachers. The well-documented powers of informal learning in workplaces can be served well with social mobile media. Therefore, WMUTE 2010 hopes to initiate a new line of research and practice that highlights both social and technological innovation in order to support and amalgamate contemporary social learning theories. This theme-based conference will expose the results of current research efforts in this field as well as identify future challenges and research priorities. The scope of WMUTE 2010 will cover but not be limited to:

• Mobile social media
• User experiences in mobile social media creation and collaboration
• Specific roles for video in mobile learning and working
• Theories and applications for modeling collaboration in mobile environments
• Emerging mobile video development platforms and user interfaces
• Context-aware learning environments and mobile social media applications
• Open educational resources
• Mobile video story-telling and communities
• Human-computer interaction aspects of technology-enriched classrooms
• Mobile and ubiquitous computing support for collaborative learning
• Mobile Web 2.0 applications for learning and teaching
• Learning scenarios with wireless sensor networks
• Mobile collaborative learning systems
• Implementation of learning models exploiting one-to-one technology
• New devices for learning and instruction
• Game-based learning with ubiquitous and one-to-one technologies
• Adaptive and adaptable learning environments using mobile and ubiquitous devices
• Agent support for ubiquitous learning and one-to-one classroom settings
• Architectures and infrastructures for one-to-one classroom settings
• Methods of interaction analysis in mobile and ubiquitous learning scenarios
• Evaluation and evaluation methodologies for WMUTE
• Small-screen interface design

Keynote speakers include:

Pierre DILLENBOURG, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland
Sherry HSI, Lawrence Hall of Science,UC Berkeley, USA
Gwo-Jen HWANG, National University of Tainan, Taiwan