MATURE has supported the Summer School for technology-enhanced learning, organized by the PROLEARN successor EATEL in Ohrid, with speakers and young researchers, working in the disparate fields of expertise which promote the advancement of TEL at the workplace.

Knowledge & Ontology Maturing

The MATURE presentation Knowledge Maturing - a different perspective on learning by Andreas Schmidt and Pablo Franzolini, MATURE's coordinator team, opened the summer school. The presentation aimed at widening the students' perspective on learning from informal to formal learning and at providing a structure for this diverse learning landscape.

In the afternoon, a joint APOSDLE-MATURE workshop (organized by Simone Braun, Tobias Ley, and Andreas Schmidt) provided students the opportunity for hands-on experience with knowledge maturing and of the emerging MATURE tools (SOBOLEO). Students were asked to use the semantic social bookmarking application to annotate papers on elearningpapers.eu with their own tags and later collaboratively consolidate those tags into a topic hierarchy for the field. The real-time capabilities and AJAX functionality of SOBOLEO proved particularly useful for that purpose. In a third session, students and organizers collectively reflected on observations, experiences, and problems. For the MATURE team, this resulted in a set of interesting ideas and phenomena into which we will investigate further.

Personal Learning Environments

On Wednesday, Graham Attwell (who also successfully introduced the microblogging practice via Twitter at the summer school) stimulated a discussion on personal learning environments and the its role for the generation of digital natives. In the afternoon, the PLE discussion was continued in a workshop in which participants were asked to sketch their own PLE.

Intensive intra-project and inter-project discussions

The MATURE participants (which included also - in addition the presenters - Tobias Nelkner, Wolfgang Reinhardt, and Nicolas Weber) also used the time at Ohrid for exchanging ideas and experiences with other projects (e.g., with PALETTE and its participatory design approach to support Communities of Practice), but also as an opportunity for engaging into discussions to promote project progress, e.g., the notion of a personal learning & maturing environment, or useful maturing services.