Language Technologies for Lifelong Learning

Organizer Name

Traian Rebedea, Bernhard Hoisl, Fridolin Wild

Short Description

Every day learners read, write, collaborate, and participate in social networks on the web. Every learner thereby produces and consumes a large amount of textual items along her or his learning journey. These texts can be utilized in automated support and advice services in order to improve learning experiences in both formal and informal contexts such as emerging from schools, universities, or workplaces. Textmining services in support of learning work with the following textual items consumed and produced by the learners:

• Documents read, e.g. summaries, web conversations, tags, social network updates
• Documents that should have been read, such as textbooks or papers
• Documents of other learners

Textmining services for learning today already support the following functionality:

Position the learner with regard to his domain of interest
Monitor the conceptual development of a learner over time, given his interests
Provide feedback, support, and recommendations for the online conversations of a learner
Provide feedback, support and recommendations for the summaries written by a reader after reading course material
Automatically annotate/label learning materials with respect to the content to be better used by the learners and tutors
Provide recommendation and search services based on social network data

The aim of the workshop is to familiarize the participants with using language technology in support of learning first and then to elaborate future facing use cases and technology arrangements (embedded in coheret scenarios) in small group sessions. The widgets developed by the European Commission funded IST project ‘language technology for lifelong learning’ will serve as a starting point to familiarize with didactically sound technology to set off the group work. The small groups will produce a paper pencil mash-up prototype recombining existing data sources, natural language processing services, and widgets. They will discuss utility and relevance of the chosen approach and available as well as proposed technologies.

Pre-Summer School events planned

We kindly ask all the participants to the workshop to familiarize themselves with the LTfLL services by watching the short screen-casts available at this address (http://augur.wu.ac.at/screencasts/v1/) before attending the workshop.