Barely a week into October and there has been a flurry of activity in the TENCompetence camp starting with a series of workshops and papers delivered within the scope of the EC-TEL 06 conference at the Royal Knossos Village Hotel, in Heraklion, Crete. This high profile conference ran from from the 2.1.10 to the 4.10.06 and was organised by the Professional Learning Cluster (PRO-LC) of which TENCompetence is a founding member along with the PROLEARN network of excellence, and the PROLIX and APOSDLE integrated projects.

Included as part of the TENCompetence contribution to the conference was the Joint International Workshop on Professional Learning, Competence Development and Knowledge Management. Eight full papers were presented along 3 tracks that resulted in some good discussions by the 25 participants around the topics of personal learning, virtual communities, ontologies and learning at the workplace. All of the discussions stressed the relevance of competence and knowledge in lifelong learning as a productive way to improve personal skills.

Among the contributions was a presentation from the University of Bolton's Scott Wilson who provided an insight into the benefits of  Personal Learning Environments (PLE) which can be used to help the learner gain greater control over their resources, their work and  their activities while enjoying all the benefits of interaction with a different  institutional systems throughout their studies. The challenge for TENCompetence is to produce and integrate a PLE into the competence development system for use in both formal and informal learning contexts.

More information on the workshop programme is available here.

Workshop proceedings are published here.       

In the context of the project’s goal to share and manage knowledge, P2P technologies are seen as providing a means of decentralizing competence management while ensuring adequate authentication and owner controlled sharing of files for the exchange, organization, storage and retrieval of all types of academic information. In this vein, Daniel Olemdilla and Ingo Brukhorst of L3S presented a full research paper entitled “Interoperability for peer-to-peer networks: Opening p2p to the rest of the world”.

The topic of learner positioning in relation to Learning Networks (mapping learner attributes onto the attributes of learning materials and curricula) was addressed by Marco Kalz of the Open University of the Netherlands (OTEC)  who gave a presentation of his paper “Positioning of Learners in Learning Networks with Content Analysis, Metadata and Ontologies” to ECTEL’s doctoral consortium.

To help raise awareness of the project and the rationale behind the proposed framework, TENCompetence ran a poster session and produced a project outline available as a published paper available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11876663_63

More details of the event and accepted papers will be made available as soon as the proceedings are published.