I attended the Augmented-Virtual-Mixed Reality Workshop hosted by LDE Centre of Education and Learning and the Leiden Centre for Innovation, where the Aryzon AR Cardboard Headset caught my attention. The Aryzon AR/MR Headset is an interesting alternative to the high-tech AR headsets. It is both available and affordable for average students, schools and universities. Like the Google Cardboard, it uses a smartphone for rendering and displaying virtual models. Different to Google's solution, the Aryzon Headset does not block the field of view.

At the Augmented-Virtual-Mixed Reality Workshop in Leiden we learned about different approaches and solutions for using this technology in higher education. It also hosted a marketplace for sharing ideas and solutions from research and the industry, where I met Ralph van der Meer from Breinwave. Ralph brought some Aryzon Headsets and a bunch of demos that showed possible interactions between HoloLens wearers and cardboard headset wearers. This allowed me to compare the Aryzon Headset directly to the HoloLens 1.

Over the last year I had the great opportunity to work with Chee Kit Looi, Lungs Hsiang Wong, and Su Cai on a new Book about Seamless Learning. This book is a follow up on previous book and it includes 10 interesting chapters that address new insights from research and practice about applying seamless learning in education and offers a much-needed update on seamless learning, reflecting the research and development advances in recent years.

Last week I received the information that it is now available online and as a harcover.

I am honored to chair the EC-TEL Doctoral Consortium for the second time. Like every year, the Doctoral Consortium offers Ph.D. candidates a unique opportunity to present their research, receive rich feedback from senior members of the community, and build their networks. Yet, this year things will be slightly different: Firstly, because we link the Doctoral Consortium to the European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) and the World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning (mLearn), which are both co-located at the LDE-Centre for Education and Learning in Delft, the Netherlands. Secondly, we decided to offer two tracks: the challenge track addresses advanced PhD students that seek to be challenged regarding their state of research, and the ideas track allows early stage PhD students to get early feedback on their research ideas.

This year the EATEL Summer School will be located in Bari, Italy. For Ph.D. candidates who work on educational technologies the EATEL Summer School is a great opportunity to strengthen their research skills and extent their network to peers across Europe. Last week EATEL published the program for the next Summer School and there is still some time left for interested participants to apply for a place.

The application deadline for Ph.D. students is 22 February 2019 to ensure your places!

Among the key issues of bringing students into a for them new learning environment is that they have to learn and understand the concepts and principles of the environment. Introducing students to these concepts has been popularized by Gilly Salmon as "Sparks". Sparks refer to short introductory learning activities that help learners to get used to the environment of the following learning activities as well as helping educators to understand the capabilities of their students in woring in the learning environment. Such activities can be fully automated and in online marketing these fully automated guides to learn about the environment are subsumised as "Onboaring". In this article I elaborate on one onboarding strategy for the Moodle platform and introduce a small moodle plugin to helps in this process.

Scaling educational innovation in higher education is difficult. Besides of managerial support and organizational commitment, developing a practice of learning design as process modelling is among its core success factors. With the increasing digitization and globalization of industrial societies, increasingly there is a demand to develop relevant skills. Among the many slogans related to these new basic skills is computational thinking. In this article, I focus on the question, why is computational thinking not just a learning objective for students but also a capacity of educators?

Last month I posted the call for papers for the ECTEL Conference in Leeds. This year the motto of the conference is Lifelong technology enhanced learning. The ECTEL progam chairs recently announced the keynotes for the conference.

• Allison Littlejohn (Open University, UK) - "Professional Lifelong Learning".
• Carolyn P Rosé (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) - "Lifelong Learning in a Web Scale Opportunity Space".
• David Wortley (CEO and Founder of 360in360) - "The impact of disruptive digital technologies on education, medicine, health and well-being".

The three topics match nicely the scope of ECTEL from lifelong learning through scaling technology enhanced learning all the way to realworld and industry applications. Find more details about the keynotes on ECTEL's website.

If your are working and researching in the field of technology-enhanced learning, there is still a little time left for submitting your contribution. The submission cutoff date is 15 April 2018.

In case your busy with your Ph.D., then you should also consider joining the ECTEL Doctoral Consortium, which has a separate call and a application deadline on 22 May 2018.

This year ECTEL is aligned with the Medical Education Informatics conference (MEI18), which creates a nice opportunity for participating to both conferences with minimum overhead.

In my previous post I announced the EC-TEL Doctoral Consortium.

In addition to the EC-TEL, the European Association of Technology Enhanced Learning (EATEL) also hosts a week-long doctoral training event:

The EATEL Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning

This year the summer school is perfectly aligned with the Doctoral Consortium's submission deadline on 22nd May. Therefore, I will be present at the EATEL summer school and host a workshop on preparing submissions to the Doctoral Consortium and how to prepare for maximum benefit. The workshop targets at Ph.D. candidates in or shortly after their initial orientation phase.

Moreover, the EATEL Summer School awards the first

Martin Wolpers Student Award

to a promising early stage researcher in the field of technology-enhanced learning.

Additionally, the EATEL Summer School has a very interesting program focusing on the burning challenges of technology-enhanced learning. Check the EATEL Summer School's Homepage for more details and the full programme for the week.

UPDATE: The application deadline has been extended!

Next Monday (12th March 2018) is the deadline for applying for the EATEL Summer School. Be quick and secure your place!

On 3rd September 2018 I have the honour to chair the Doctoral Consortium at the 13th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (ECTEL2018) - please also visit my previous post on EC-TEL.

The ECTEL Doctoral Consortium accepts online submissions until 22 May 2018.

The EC-TEL Doctoral Consortium brings together Ph.D. candidates working on topics related to Technology Enhanced Learning providing them an exceptional opportunity to present, discuss, and receive feedback on their research with experts in the field in an interdisciplinary and international atmosphere. Prominent professors and researchers in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning will provide formative feedback to the selected papers through the review process and contribute actively to discussions at the workshop.

The intention of this doctoral consortium is to support and inspire Ph.D. candidates during their ongoing research efforts. The doctoral consortium is embedded into the main conference through a poster session that provides Ph.D. candidates the unique opportunity to get valuable feedback on preliminary work from the community.

Please refer to the call for contributions on the EC-TEL website.

In November launches the 17th edition of the World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning in Chicago, IL. The conference accepts scientific contributions until 30 April 2018 through its online submission platform.

mLearn is the leading international conference on mobile and contextual learning, organised by IAmlearn. The conference takes place at a different venue each year, and has been hosted in places such as Finland, Australia, South Africa, Qatar, Canada, Cyprus, and Turkey, among other locations. This year's conference will be hosted by Concordia University Chicago.

The overarching theme for mLearn 2018 is:

Mobilized Learning: Pedagogical and Technogical Innovation for Teaching & Learning

Check mLearn's call for papers for more details and topics.

Grab your mLearn Starter Kit and get started with your mLearn submission.

The slides from the ETWG welcome address to the 10th eduhub days, the annual meeting of the Swiss academic e-learning community. How did technology change teaching and studying in higher education over the past 10 years. It raises questions that will concern the community in the coming 10 years.

3-6 September 2018 at University of Leeds, UK.

This week the EC-TEL 2018 has officially released the full call for papers. The EC-TEL is co-located with the Medical Education Informatics (MEI2018) conference. Therefore, EC-TEL has a special track on medical and healthcare education and its technological applications alongside the long list of topics related to Lifelong technology enhanced learning and dealing with the complexity of 21st century education.

Check out full call for papers for all the details.

EC-TEL has four main parts with different submission deadlines:

• Main conference (Deadline for abstract submissions: 15 April 2018)
• Pre- and Post-conference Specialized Workshop proposals (Deadline: 8 April 2018)
• The industry track (Pitch deadline: 15 April 2018)
• The EC-TEL Doctoral Consortium (Submission Deadline: 22 May 2018)

Being one of the main research conferences in the domain of technology-enhanced learning in Europe, EC-TEL is an excellent opportunity for catching up with the latest result of Europe's top research groups in this field.

Traditionally, the EC-TEL conference provides the opportunity for international research projects to arrange meetings alongside the conference. Note the deadline for meeting reservations: 24 June 2018.

During the eduhub days in Luzern I had a workshop to introduce the eduhub SIG Mobile Learning with the great help of Marion. Of course, I gave a little outlook on our past activities, but I found that the workshop participants should better relate themselves to the activities of the special interest group and find out how they might contribute to the work of the SIG. Therefore, I asked the three main questions that drive our little sub-community and let the participants come up with their own ideas and responses. The discussions during the workshop were very fruitful and shed a light at the current state and challenges of mobile learning in Swiss higher education.

Blended learning is insufficient concept for grasping the digital transformation in higher education institutions. This presentation gives a national perspective for Switzerland and an organisational perspective for measuring the transformation at the HTW Chur. It was presented at 27. Oct. 2017 in Bern at the swissuniversities "Tag der Lehre".

Kurzeinführung zur praktischen Konzeption von Blended Learning Angeboten mit dem Churer Modell. Am Blended Learning Canvas werden die didaktischen Gestaltungsprinzipien für Blended Learning Angebote erklärt. Diese Präsentation ist Teil des Weiterbildungsangebots für Dozierende an der HTW Chur.

Eine Kurzeinführung in das Churer Modell für Blended Learning mit Inspirationen für die Umsetzung mit Moodle. Diese Präsentation wurde am 10.08.2017 an der SSTH in Passugg im Rahmen einer Dozierendenkonferenz vorgestellt.

I went through my draft blog entries and I found this one from 2013. It was supposed to accompany my chapter in Ally & Tsinakos' Book on Mobile Learning. Recently, Marion and I worked on a different book chapter, in which we built on the same concepts. This post discusses why I found it necessary to extend Engestöm's Activity Theory model and what insights on learning design re-arranging the activity components yielded.

This presentation provides a brief community update on the status of the Swiss edu-ID Mobile App project at the 2017 SWITCH edu-ID information workshop on 29. June 2017 at University of Berne.

It presents the use cases directly covered by the project as well as the reference architecture. It provides a bunch of links to the different resources related to the project.