Publikationen

Recognizing the need for addressing the rather fragmented character of research in this field, we have held a workshop on learning analytics for workplace and professional learning at the Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) Conference. The workshop has taken a broad perspective, encompassing approaches from a number of previous traditions, such as adaptive learning, professional online communities, workplace learning and performance analytics. Being co-located with the LAK conference has provided an ideal venue for addressing common challenges and for benefiting from the strong research on learning analytics in other sectors that LAK has established. Learning Analytics for Workplace and Professional Learning is now on the research agenda of several ongoing EU projects, and therefore a number of follow-up activities are planned for strengthening integration in this emerging field.

This deliverable reports on first usage experiences and evaluations of the STELLAR Science 2.0 Infrastructure. Usage experiences were available predominantly for the "mature" part of the infrastructure provided by standard Web 2.0 tools adapted to STELLAR needs. Evaluations are provided for newly developed tools. We first provide an overview of the whole STELLAR Science 2.0 Infrastructure and the relationships between the building blocks. While the individual building blocks already benefit researchers, the integration between them is the key for a positive usage experience. The publication meta data ecosystem for example provides researchers with an easy to retrieve set of TEL related data. Tools like the ScienceTable, Muse, the STELLAR latest publication widget, and the STELLAR BuRST search show already several scenarios of how to make use of this infrastructure. Especially a strong focus on anlytical tools based on publication and social media data seem useful. In order to highlight the relevance of the infrastructure to the individual capacitiy building activties within STELLAR, the usage experiences of individual building blocks are then reported with respect to Researcher Capacity (e.g. Deliverable Wikis, More! application), Doctoral Academy Capacity (e.g. DoCoP), Community Level Capacity (e.g TELeurope), and Leadership Capacity (e.g. Meeting of Minds, Podcast Series). Here we draw from 11 scientific papers published. The reader will find an overview of all these papers in the Appendix. Based on the usage experiences and evaluations we have identified a number of ideas which might be worth considering for future developments. For example, the experiences gained with the Deliverable Wikis show how the modification of the standard Wiki history can provide useful analytical insights into the collaboration of living deliverables and can return the focus on authorship (which is intentionally masked in Wikis, because of their strong notion on the product and not on authors). We conclude with main findings and an outlook on the development plan and evaluation plan which are currently being developed and which will influence D6.6. Particularly, we close with the notion of a Personal Research Environment (PRE) which draws from the concept of Personal Learning Environments (PLE).

Research2.0 is in essence a Web2.0 approach to how we do research. Research2.0 creates conversations between researchers, enables them to discuss their findings and connects them with others. Thus, Research2.0 can accelerate the diffusion of knowledge.ChallengesAs concluded during the workshop, at least four challenges are vital for future research.The first area is concerned with availability of data. Access to sanitized data and conventions on how to describe publication-related metadata provided from divergent sources are enablers for researchers to develop new views on their publications and their research area. Additional, social media data gain more and more attention. Reaching a widespread agreement about this for the field of technology-enhanced learning would be already a major step, but it is also important to focus on the next steps: what are success-critical added values driving uptake in the research community as a whole?The second area of challenges is seen in Research 2.0 practices. As technology-enhanced learning is a multidisciplinary field, practices developed in one area could be valuable for others. To extract the essence of successful multidisciplinary Research 2.0 practice though, multidimensional and longitudinal empirical work is needed. It is also an open question, if we should support practice by fostering the usage of existing tools or the development of new tools, which follow Research 2.0 principles. What makes a practice sustainable? What are the driving factors?The third challenge deals with impact. What are criteria of impact for research results (and other research artefacts) published on the Web? How can this be related to the publishing world appearing in print? Is a link equal to a citation or a download equal to a subscription? Can we develop a Research 2.0 specific position on impact measurement? This includes questions of authority, quality and re-evaluation of quality, and trust.The tension between openness and privacy spans the fourth challenge. The functionality of mash-ups often relies on the use of third-party services. What happens with the data, if this source is no longer available? What about hidden exchange of data among backend services?