Proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET 2013)

"This book contains the proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET) 2013 which was held on 16.-17.September 2013 in Paphos (Cyprus) in conjunction with the EC-TEL conference. The workshop and hence the proceedings are divided in two parts: on Day 1 the EuroPLOT project and its results are introduced, with papers about the specific case studies and their evaluation. On Day 2, peer-reviewed papers are presented which address specific topics and issues going beyond the EuroPLOT scope. This workshop is one of the deliverables (D 2.6) of the EuroPLOT project, which has been funded from November 2010 – October 2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLL) by grant #511633. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies (PLOTS), based on ideas of BJ Fogg. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the findings obtained during this project and disseminate them to an interested audience. Furthermore, it shall foster discussions about the future of persuasive technology and design in the context of learning, education and teaching. The international community working in this area of research is relatively small. Nevertheless, we have received a number of high-quality submissions which went through a peer-review process before being selected for presentation and publication. We hope that the information found in this book is useful to the reader and that more interest in this novel approach of persuasive design for teaching/education/learning is stimulated. We are very grateful to the organisers of EC-TEL 2013 for allowing to host IWEPLET 2013 within their organisational facilities which helped us a lot in preparing this event. I am also very grateful to everyone in the EuroPLOT team for collaborating so effectively in these three years towards creating excellent outputs, and for being such a nice group with a very positive spirit also beyond work. And finally I would like to thank the EACEA for providing the financial resources for the EuroPLOT project and for being very helpful when needed. This funding made it possible to organise the IWEPLET workshop without charging a fee from the participants.

How can the concepts of habitus and field help us to understand the engagement of educational workers in higher Education?

In ‘Making a European area of lifelong learning a reality’, the EU stressed the role of universities in relation to lifelong learning, a role that entails a need for widening access to universities, particularly for those not coming through the traditional direct route of upper secondary education. As teachers play a significant role in the quality of the lifelong learning as well as in motivating future generations to take part in lifelong learning, education and training for teachers becomes important; not only in relation to initial teacher education, but also in relation to a continuous development of knowledge and skills. This paper represents the first stage of a larger comparative project intended to examine and compare educational workers’ (i.e. professionals involved in teaching in the class room) participation in higher education in England and Denmark, their access and interest. In particular, the paper relates participation and engagement to national and international educational policies and frames this work within an examination of the social background of the professional groups. The key research questions at this stage of the work are methodological and can be summed up by the overarching question, “How can the concepts of habitus and field help us to understand levels of engagement of educational workers in Higher Education”? The paper reports the results of our review of current policies and our efforts to identify the structural relations within the educational professional fields in each country. To do so we are developing a theoretical model using the relational analytical approach advocated by Bourdieu. As such, our work is an early stage attempt at operationalising Bourdieu’s observations regarding the dynamics of field. This seems to us to provide an important conceptual approach to understanding the habitus of educational workers in the context of the dynamics of a fast changing policy arena and the complexities of the backgrounds of individuals working in the educational field. The model attempts to build in the reflexivity that Bourdieu demands for a ‘science’ that is not weakened by over-emphasis on either the objective structural relations or the subjective phenomenology of experience. Thus, the paper presents a preliminary contextual analysis of the factors that enable an understanding of engagement or lack of engagement in higher level learning among school-based education workers in the two EU countries and is related to a larger research project that explores habitus (both individual and collective) among these groups of education workers

The Danish Model and the Globalizing Learning Economy: Lessons for Developing Countries

Although Denmark shares with the other four Nordic countries certain attributes, such as pragmatic protestant religion, small and homogenous population, strong social democratic parties and ambitious welfare states, it also has its own characteristics. High degree of specialization in the so-called low-tech sectors, combined with high mobility and income security in labour markets (flexicurity), contributes to making the Danish system unique in the world. Denmark has experienced some stagnation in its growth over the last decade but still ranks among the top ten in the world in terms of GNP per capita, registered unemployment is less than 2 per cent (as of June 2008) while the inflation rate has remained moderate. These goals for economic policy have been realized in an environment with a high degree of income equality. In this paper we use the concepts .innovation system., .the learning economy. and .learning modes. to analyse the evolution of the Danish model and what can be learnt from it.economic development, welfare state, social cohesion, innovation

How to design for persistence and retention in MOOCs?

Design of educational interventions is typically carried out following a design cycle involving phases of investigation, conceptualization, prototyping, implementation, execution and evaluation. This cycle can be applied at different levels of granularity e.g. learning activity, module, course or programme. In this paper we consider an aspect of learner behavior that can be critical to the success of many MOOCs i.e. their persistence to study, and the related theme of learner retention. We reflect on the impact that consideration of these can have on design decisions at different stages in the design cycle with the aim of en-hancing MOOC design in relation to learner persistence and retention, with particular attention to the European context

Report on argumentation and teacher education in Europe

This document will ultimately form part of a comprehensive package of materials for teacher education and professional development in argumentation. The initial deliverable from Kaunas University of Technology described the rhetorical basis of argumentation theory for pre‐ and in‐service teachers, whilst this state of the art report sets out the current and rather unsatisfactory status of argumentation in curricula, initial teacher training/education and teacher professional development, across the fifteen S‐TEAM partner countries. We believe that this is a representative sample and that the report can be taken as a reliable snapshot of the situation in Europe generally