The workshops hosted in the Maastricht School of Management, brought together researchers and practitioners to discuss about technologies across learning contexts in times of convergence. They aimed at presenting and discussing the current status of research in Social Information Retrieval (SIR) and Technology Enhanced learning (TEL), as well as at facilitating the exchange and fostering future collaborations in the field of learning resource retrieval.

SIRTEL'08

The rationale at the core of the SIRTEL '08 workshop is that the learning and teaching resources that are available online should be better used to facilitate teaching and learning tasks. The workshop focused on Social information retrieval (SIR) methods, techniques and systems that provide learners and teachers with guidance in potentially overwhelming variety of choices.

Therefore, the SIRTEL’08 workshop aimed at looking onward beyond recent achievements to discuss specific topics, emerging research issues, new trends and endeavours in SIR for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). The outcomes of the workshop gather contributions presenting and discussing the current status of research in SIR and TEL as well as its implications for learning and teaching.

The first part of the proceedings is dedicated to tags and folksonomies, while the second part focuses on the impact of SIR in TEL. The "Proceedings of the 2nd SIRTEL'08 Workshop on Social information retrieval for Technology Enhanced Learning" are edited by Riina Vuorikari (European Schoolnet - EUN), Barbara Kieslinger (Centre for Social Innovation - ZSI), Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen University) and Erik Duval (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven - KU Leuven and ARIADNE Foundation).

Proceedings of the 2nd SIRTEL'08 Workshop on Social information retrieval for Technology Enhanced Learning:
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-382

SE@M’08

The context where the SE@M’08 workshop operates shows how creating good, pedagogically sound and effective learning resources incurs substantial costs, so avoiding duplication of development efforts is important. As a consequence, the TEL community has been and is still dedicating a lot of energy to the creation of better and more reusable learning resources. Some of these efforts in the sphere of reusability have matured enough to lead to the creation of standards such as the IEEE Learning Object Metadata, the IMS Content Package, or the IMS Common Cartridge.

But still, there is a large number of free or by subscriptions reusable educational resources available online, but most of these resources are “hidden” in repositories and cannot easily be found, hampering their potential use and reuse. Therefore, the work of the IMS Group on Learning Object Discovery & Exchange aims at supporting initiatives worldwide for federating e-learning systems such as the EUN Learning Resource Exchange, GLOBE and CORDRA, by developing a set of specifications that facilitate the discovery and retrieval of distributed learning resources.

The SE@M’08 workshop represents a unique occasion for researchers and practitioners to discuss theoretical aspects, open issues and innovative approaches, as well as to share the latest advances in discovering and exchanging learning content. The outcomes, "Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Search and Exchange of e-le@rning Materials (SE@M’08)" include five papers and are edited by David Massart, Jean-Noël Colin, Frans Van Assche (European Schoolnet - EUN) and Martin Wolpers (Fraunhofer Insitute for Applied Information Technology).

Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Search and Exchange of e-le@rning Materials (SE@M’08):
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-385