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More than 200 faculty members and doctoral students from universities around the world in fields such as computer science, educational psychology and instructional technology will hear the latest research on everything from virtual worlds to mobile and wireless technologies for learning at an international conference University of Georgia July 6-8.

The 11th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, considered to be one of the world’s premier events in the field of educational psychology, features three invited speakers.

McGreal

Rory McGreal, the Associate Vice President of Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada, one of Canada’s leaders in online and distance education, will be the keynote speaker at the conference hosted by the UGA College of Education.

McGreal, who is also the UNESCO/COL Chairholder in Open Educational Resources, will deliver an address titled, “Creationism, Evolution and Advanced Learning Technologies” at 9 a.m. on Thursday, July 7 in the Georgia Center for Continuing Education’s Mahler Auditorium.

McGreal is an expert in the implementation and management of distance education systems and networks from technological, pedagogical and policy perspectives. His present research focuses on the use of Open Educational Resources and standards in technology assisted learning, particularly in the development and application of learning objects. He is also researching how these would be applied and formatted on mobile devices for M-learning.

McGreal was previously the Executive Director of TeleEducation NB TeleEducation, a bilingual (French/English) province-wide distance learning network. He led a team that implemented the world’s first distance education website, a learning management system and the TeleCampus, a comprehensive learning object metadata database of online courses. He received the prestigious Wedemeyer Award for Distance Education Practitioner in 2002.

Before that, he was a supervisor at Contact North/Contact Nord, a bilingual distance education network in Northern Ontario where his team implemented distance learning sites in more than 100 community centers, schools, aboriginal centers, and other institutions in the remote vastness of that area.  He has also worked abroad in the Middle East, Seychelles (Indian Ocean) and Europe as a teacher, ESL technological training coordinator, instructional designer, language and computer laboratory coordinator, and educational advisor.

McGreal received his Ph.D. in computer technologies from Nova Southeastern University’s School of Computer and Information Science.

Brzakovic

Dragana Brzakovic, a senior staff associate of the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technology Centers (STC), will speak on “Advanced Learning Technologies: Opportunities and Challenges” at 3 p.m. on Thursday, July 7 in Mahler Auditorium.

Brzakovic provides oversight of six centers in the STC program, coordination of various activities in the program, and coordination of the NSF Centers Forum. She is also involved in various other cross-disciplinary activities. During 2007, Brzakovic was Brookings Legislative Fellow on Capitol Hill. She coordinated the Major Research Instrumentation program for the NSF from 2003-06. Brzakovic started in the NSF’s Office of Integrative Activities in 2000 by running the STC: Integrative Partnerships competition.

Prior to the NSF, Brzakovic was a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Lehigh University from 1992-2000 and associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville from 1989-92.  Her research interests were in the areas of computer vision and image understanding.

Brzakovic received her Ph.D. and M.E. degrees from University of Florida, and her B.S. degree from University of Belgrade, all in electrical engineering.

Marsella

Marco Marsella, an Information Society and Media Directorate General with the European Commission, will speak on “Technology-Enhanced Learning in Europe” at 9 a.m. on Friday, July 8 in Mahler Auditorium.

Marsella contributes to policy development, innovation and research strategies in the area of digital content and access to knowledge. He serves in the Cultural Heritage & Technology Enhanced Learning unit supporting European Union research activities that aim to improve our knowledge of how we learn when using information and communication technologies, enhancing the meaning and experiences we can get from cultural and scientific resources when these resources exist in electronic form, and preserving digital resources so that our past and present remain available in the future.

Marsella has specific responsibilities in coordinating the work of technology-enhanced learning, including definition of research agendas, the supervision and monitoring of research projects, and dissemination activities.

In addition, dozens of workshops, parallel sessions and doctoral consortiums will be held each day of the conference on a wide range of technology-enhanced learning topics including:

• Learning Systems Platforms and Architectures
• Rethinking Pedagogy in Technology-enhanced Learning
• Adaptive and Personalized Technology-enhanced Learning
• Intelligent Educational Systems
• Computer Supported Collaborative Learning
• Wireless, Mobile and Ubiquitous Technologies for Learning
• Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments for Learning
• Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning
• Web 2.0 and Social Computing for Learning and Knowledge Sharing
• Sematic Web and Ontologies for Learning Systems
• Affective and Pervasive Computing for Learning
• Human-Centered Web Science and its Applications to Technology-enhanced Learning
• Virtual Worlds for Academic, Organizational, and Life-Long Learning
• e-Assessment and new Assessment Theories and Methodologies
• Data Mining and Web Mining in Education
• Knowledge and Competencies Management
• Technology-Enhanced Language Learning
• Advanced Learning Technologies for Disabled and Non-Disabled People
• Technology-enhanced Science Education
• International Alliance for Open Source, Open Standards, and federated repositories
• School of the Future and Future Classrooms
• E-learning in the Workplace
• Cloud-based Learning and Assessment

Michael Spector, professor and research scientist in the UGA College of Education’s Learning and Performance Support Laboratory, is the conference co-chair.

UGA Provost Jere Morehead, David Lee, UGA Vice President for Research and Noel Gregg, Associate Dean for Resesarch in UGA’s College of Education will welcome conference participants with brief remarks to kick off the conference.

The conference is sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the IEEE’s Computer Society and the IEEE’s Technical Committee on Learning Technology. It is being hosted and organized by the University and UGA’s College of Education’s Office of Research.

Conference Website

Conference Program