-------- Original-Nachricht -------- Betreff: CALL FOR PAPERS ViWo 2009 Datum: Wed, 1 Oct 2008 11:29:27 +0200 Von: Mohammad Smadi msmadi@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at An: Mohammad Smadi msmadi@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at

*** Apologies for Cross Postings ****

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CALL FOR PAPERS

1st Special Track on Virtual Worlds for academic, organizational, and life-long learning (ViWo 2009)

Jordan, Amman, April 23, 2009 http://www.iicm.edu/ViWo2009

In conjunction with 4th International Conference on Interactive Mobile and Computer Aided Learning (IMCL2009)

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ViWo 2009 - 23. April 2009 - Amman, Jordan

First Special Track on Virtual Worlds for academic, organizational, and life-long learning (ViWo 2009)

Online Information: http://www.iicm.tugraz.at/viwo2009

This CfP is also available as PDF: http://www.iicm.tugraz.at/ViWo2009/ViWo2009-CfP.pdf

This special track will take place during IMCL 2009 in Amman, Jordan (22-24 April 2009) as a special programme item.

The Special Track ViWo 2009 provides an interdisciplinary forum for international scientists and practitioners to discuss various aspects of learning and training in virtual worlds.

The 4th International Conference on Interactive Mobile and Computer Aided Learning, IMCL2009, which will be hosted by Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Amman, Jordan. The conference is part of an international initiative to promote technology-enhanced learning and online engineering world-wide organized under the umbrella of the International Association of Online Engineering.

Background

Our society of the 21st century makes great demands on its members caused by rapid developing and ever-changing political, social, economical and technological situations. Consequently, it is expected that members of the society keep pace with these mutable situations, adapt their skills and expertise. As a result, modern instructional design, learning goals and processes as well as appropriate learning environments must support the development of the aforementioned skills and expertises. Consequently, educational approaches have changed dramatically over time from less formal schooling in the agrarian society to remedial repetitive learning in the industrialization age to learning with an understanding in today’s knowledge society. Based on that, different modern educational strategies have been developed which includes aspects such as self-directed learning, collaborative learning, experiential-based learning and actively participating. Educational approaches have also been influenced by technology but have also increasingly applied technology over the last decades, such as motion pictures, radio, television, computers and other emerging information and communication technologies (ICT).

Last year’s hype surrounding the virtual world “Second Life” has also generated significant interest in the education community. Although virtual worlds have been an active research topic for a long time, technology was not ready for complex application scenarios since recent years. New interesting and powerful platforms and tools, such as Second Life, Active Worlds, Multiverse, Open Croquet, OpenSim and Sun’s 3D Wonderland, have been emerged applicable to complement or even replace other knowledge transfer and learning settings. Modern virtual worlds are seen from an optimistic viewpoint as a disruptive and transformative technology. However, it still remains unclear to some extent where the real benefits and limitations of using virtual worlds as knowledge transfer and learning environments are when compared to more traditional methods. In order to avoid the same pitfalls of past e-learning solutions by just applying traditional learning approaches to a new technology, this special track is indented to offer a multidisciplinary platform which brings together international researchers from different organizations in order to share their experience with this technology.

The special track will bring together international researchers as well as practitioners from different organisations who will have plenty of time for networking and real-world knowledge sharing.

We invite submissions of papers in the categories research, development, evaluation and best practices that deal with virtual worlds for academic, organizational, and life-long learning issues including, but not limited to:

* Technological approaches, their limitations and how to overcome them * Virtual worlds and mobile learning * Virtual learning space design and architecture * Modern learning settings * Didactic and cognitive aspects * New learning and teaching activities * Interaction and behavior patterns * Distance and blended learning * Organizational learning, vocational training and certification * Academic learning, assessment and feedback * Collaborative and social learning * Mixed Virtual world and classroom learning * Knowledge Transfer and Collaboration * Artificial Intelligence Approaches * Usability and Human-Computer-Interaction

Important Dates

* 15 November 2008: Submission of the full papers (6 pages) * 15 December 2008: Notification of acceptance * 15 January 2009: Author Registration Deadline * 15 February 2009: Camera ready version (6 pages) * 22 - 24 April 2009: IMCL 2008 Conference

Submission Procedure

File Types: DOC, RTF or PDF-file Language: English (British or US) Style Guides & Template: http://209.61.205.141/form/IMCL2009%20Template.doc Paper Submission System: Please use the Electronic Submission Page http://www.conftool.net/imcl-conference/

In case of problems or questions concerning the submission of papers, please contact the track chairs at ViWo2009@iicm.edu mailto:ViWo2009@iicm.edu.

Notification of Acceptance and Publishing

Accepted papers will be published within the proceedings CD of the IMCL2009 conference. At least one author has to register until January 15th 2009 after the notification of acceptance to be included into the conference program. Authors fee is applicable only once per paper! Some authors will be invited to submit extended versions of their paper for publication in a special issue in J.UCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science, http://www.jucs.org/ .

ViWo 2009 Chairs

Christian Gütl, Graz University of Technology, Austria Frank Kappe, Graz University of Technology, Austria

ViWo 2009 Organization team

Alexander Nussbaumer, University of Graz, Austria Mohammad Smadi, Graz University of Technology, Austria

ViWo 2009 Program Committee (preliminary, to be extended)

* Dietrich Albert, University of Graz, Austria * Vanessa Chang, Curtin University of Technology, Australia * Samir A. El-Seoud, Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Jordan * Baltasar Fernández-Manjón, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain * Larry Johnson, New Media Consortium, USA * Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen University, Germany * Frederic Kleinermann, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium * Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer, University Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia * Guido Lang, City University of New York, USA * Stephanie Linek, Universität Graz, Austria * Michelle Lucey-Roper, Federatoin of American Scientists, USA * Maggie A. McPherson, University of Leeds, UK * Stephe Quinton, Curtin University of Technology, Australia * Peter Reimann, University of Sydney, Australia * Lalita Rajasingham , Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand * Torsten Reiners, University of Hamburg, Germany * Diane Salter, University of Hong Kong, China * Sandra Schaffert, Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft, Austria * Bernd Schmitz, Rheinische Fachhochschule Köln, Germany * Marc Spaniol, Max-Planck-Institut, Germany

Further Information:

* Information about IMCL 2008: http://www.imcl-conference.org/ * Travel Information: http://209.61.205.141/travel_info.shtm * Tourist Information: http://www.visitjordan.com/*

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Mohammad Smadi

PhD Student

Institute for Information Systems and Computer Media (IICM)

Faculty of Computer Science

Graz University of Technology

Inffeldgasse 16c, 8010 Graz, Austria

Tel: +43 (316) 873 5662

Fax: +43 (316) 873 5699

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