Program (Preliminary timetable can be found here)

The interdisciplinary summer school is intended for postgraduate students, teachers and researchers specializing in educational technology. The aim of the summer school is to focus on both the technical and educational aspects of the field. The activities in the summer school are based on collaborative projects. Projects are done in heterogeneous groups in order to foster multi-disciplinary approaches to educational technology design. Lectures are planned as a catalyst for motivation and ideation of students work.

Lectures and tutorials will be held by

Dr. Wolfram Laaser, FernUniversität, Hagen, Germany (track 1)
Dr. Alexandra Cristea, Technical University of Eindhoven, Nederlands (track 2)

The supervisor of the summer school is

Dr. Esko Kähkönen, University of Joensuu.

Program Setting

The program of the summer school in 2005 consists of two tracks; Participants take both tracks during the summer school. Each track includes lectures, workshops, and group-based project work.

Track 1: Distance Learning (Dr. Laaser)

A selection of some of the distance learning topics that will be discussed are listed below:
· Quality issues in European distance education
· Learning theories and multimedia
· Estimating the costs of distance learning

Below are some ideas for project work

· Generations of distance learning
· Barrier-free Websites
· Developing multimedia clips with FlashMX
· Comparing software for collaborative learning (Wikis, Blogs and Web Quests)
· Mobile learning - Didactic Scenarios

Track 2: Authoring of Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (Dr. Cristea)

Authoring of Adaptive Hypermedia has been long considered as secondary to adaptive hypermedia delivery. This task is not trivial at all. There exist some approaches to help authors to build adaptive-hypermedia-based systems, yet there is a strong need of high-level approaches, formalisms and tools that support and facilitate the description of reusable adaptive websites. Only recently have we noticed a shift in interest, as it became clearer that the implementation-oriented approach would forever keep adaptive hypermedia away from the ‘layman’ author. The creator of adaptive hypermedia cannot be expected to know all facets of this process, but can be reasonably trusted to be an expert in one of them. It is therefore necessary to research and establish the components of an adaptive hypermedia system from an authoring perspective, catering for the different author personas that are required. This type of research has proven to lead to a modular view on the adaptive hypermedia. One of these modules, which is most frequently used, is the User Model, also called Learner Model in the Educational field (or Student Model in ITS). Less frequent, but also emerging as an important module is the Pedagogical Model (this model has also different names in different implementations, too various to name here). It becomes more and more clear that for Adaptive Educational Hypermedia it is necessary to consider not only the learner’s characteristics, but also the pedagogical knowledge to deal with these characteristics.