TENCompetence

The world in which we live and work is changing ever more rapidly. Citizens and the organisations in which they participate find themselves with a corresponding need to learn and adapt in order to cope with changed jobs, tasks and technologies, and to respond innovatively to the new challenges which face them. The education system, however, has settled into a model which is ill prepared for this dynamic environment. The nature of the principal educational institutions imply, in very general terms, a model in which all children will pass through an educational process which is standardised by the state, and which has much in common in all developed countries. On leaving school they will gain specialised knowledge and skills in post-secondary education, and use these to gain a job in a field in which they will work until retirement. There are however two major problems with this well established approach. Firstly, many young people do not achieve the knowledge skills required for them to participate in a knowledge economy, and they are given little opportunity for a second chance. Secondly, no support is provided for handling changing knowledge requirements, jobs and tasks following post-secondary education. In TENCompetence we refer to this traditional educational process as first road education, contrasted this with second road education, which includes some formal learning, but with the largest role played by informal/non-formal learning. The second road has always been taken by some individuals, but this has often involved some risk, and has not been adequately supported or recognised by education institutions. For more discussion of these issues please explore the proceedings of the TENCompetence workshops and conference strands and public project deliverables. Within this context the aim of the TENCompetence project is to develop a technical and organisational infrastructure, which is both open source and standards based, to support lifelong learning in Europe, to serve the needs of individuals, groups, and organisations. The project runs from December 2005 to December 2009, and is funded by the European commission through the Framework 6 IST Technology Enhanced Learning programme, with 15 partners from throughout Europe.TENCompetence is funded by the European Commission through the IST Programme. It is developing and using infrastructure to support individuals, groups and organisations in lifelong competence development

Digital Libraries as a Social Media

This paper presents an innovative approach for enhancing digital libraries functionalities. An innovative distributed architecture involving digital libraries for effective and efficient knowledge sharing was developed. In the frame of this architecture semantic services were implemented, offering multi language and multi culture support, adaptability and knowledge resources recommendation, based on the use of ontologies, metadata and user modeling. New methods for teacher education using digital libraries and knowledge sharing were developed. These new methods were successfully applied in more than 15 pilot experiments in seven European countries, with more than 3000 teachers trained.The Fourth International Conference on Digital Presentation and Preservation of Cultural and Scientific Heritage—DiPP2014 is supported by the Ministry of Education and Science and is under the patronage of UNESCO

Knowledge Based Tool for Modeling Dynamic Systems in Education

Dynamic systems are often used in education: in physics, chemistry, biology, history, etc. This paper describes a programming tool for modelling dynamic systems which can assist the teaching and training process. The tool aims at supporting the creation of computer models which can be used for educational games and simulations. The tool is built using the logic programming language Prolog

Computing Ontology Creation

In this paper an approach for the development of an Ontology for the domain of Computing Education is presented. This approach was applied in the FP5 IST Project DIOGENE - A Training Web Broker for ICT Professionals. I am outlining our work on the Computing Ontology creation, and am giving some guidelines and hints for further usage of the Ontology

Reusing ontologies in Competence Development programmes: RuleML and its capabilities

We want to solve several tasks with this paper - to show how different domain ontologies can be used in Learning Networks for Lifelong Competence Development (LN4LCD), to design experiments with reusing of a given domain ontology in different LN4LCD, to analyse the existing ontology languages in order to choose a suitable one (supporting the process of reuse of a domain ontology), and to show how how such ontology can be incorporated in different Learning Designs

A Virtual Learning Environment for Doing Business on the Internet

The power of the new Communication and Information Technologies influences human life and economy so deeply that makes all of us learners both as individuals and members of (real or virtual) learning communities and learning organisations in a learning society. Looking back at the communication and information technology history we could clearly observe that the main attention of researchers and technologists has been gradually moved from hardware to software, next - to human-computer interface, and now - to social issues related to global communication and collaboration. The Computer Mediated Communication leads to establishment of virtual communities formed on the basis of common topics of interest, collaborative work, business, or other joint activities. These communities cross the national and cultural barriers and demand for re-conceptualisation of the social life, including education and business

Web-service architecture for tools supporting life-long e-Learning platforms

Dimov, A., & Stefanov, K. (2008). Web-service architecture for tools supporting life-long e-Learning platforms. In R. Koper, K. Stefanov & D. Dicheva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 5th International TENCompetence Open Workshop "Stimulating Personal Development and Knowledge Sharing" (pp. 67-71). October, 30-31, 2008, Sofia, Bulgaria: TENCompetence Workshop. [For the whole proceedings please see also http://hdl.handle.net/1820/1961 ]It is widely recognized that modern European society needs adequate means for lifelong adapted access to facilities that support the creation, storage, use and exchange of formal and informal knowledge and learning resources. A key factor to achieve this is the adoption of Information and communication technologies and the work presented here reports on an approach involving the latest concepts of software engineering into lifelong learning solutions. The paper presents a reusable and extensible service-oriented architecture that supports implementation of different tools that support life-long eLearning platforms.The work on this publication has been sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project that is funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. Contract 027087 [http://www.tencompetence.org

ICT-enhanced Teacher training for Lifelong Competence

In this paper we are giving an example of how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can enhance the process of Teacher training, and how this can be used for Lifelong Competence Development of teachers. We show how one particular methodology for teaching and training soft skills can be further enhanced by the use of ICT. We show how the use of Learning Design centred software platform for lifelong competence development can enhance the in-service training of teachers

Design Issues of a Distance Learning Course on Business on the Internet

The paper presents the main design issues of a distance learning course on Business on the Internet. The instructional design is based on a learner centered instructional stratedy allowing learners get opportunity to construct their own knowledge while solving real business problems and transfer their knowledge to other learners. They learn autonomously taking the responsibility for their learning and following their individual cognitive styles, interests, preferences. The learners have access to the Internet being members of a global cooperatively learning community. The learning community involves students and tutors who collectively take responsibility for the design and evaluation of the course content and the teaching methods to be applied. Both students and tutors inhabit a virtual learning environment that offers different virtual places and services: virtual university, virtual enterprise, auditoriums, workshop rooms, cafes, libraries, etc., where students from different locations can meet, interact, learn and work together, as if they were face-to-face

An Ontological Approach for Multicultural Digital Repositories

The EC funded Share.TEC project aims to provide culturally aware access to resources across Europe related to Teacher Education. The semantic core of the system is the Teacher Education Ontology (TEO), which not only supports the multilingual interface but also underpins fundamental functionalities like searching and browsing. This paper describes an approach that systematically reorganizes the structure of TEO to leverage the existing multicultural dimension. Special attention is focused on representing situations where the semantics of concepts do not map completely across cultures