Recent developments in emerging and enabling digital technologies have spawned renewed interest and novel methodologies in personalised, collaborative, interactive, and mobile learning from both academia and industry.

In the UK, the research funding councils ESRC / EPSRC is in the process of setting up a joint research programme entitled “Technology enhanced learning,” seeking interdisciplinary collaboration across the disciplines of education, cognition, information and communication technologies (ICT) and the broader social sciences. On the other hand, a recent news release from BT has announced that the company has signed a seven-year contract with the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) for a next generation e-learning platform and services, enabling NCSL to deliver new transformational leadership and development programmes to school leaders across the UK.

At the EU level, EU’s 6th Framework IST Programme has invested massively in the core multimedia content processing and semantic knowledge field http://cordis.europa.eu/ist/kct/projects.htm that in many ways facilitate new forms of e-learning. Elsewhere, in China for example, e-learning is seen as a vital means to provide higher education opportunities to the country’s vast population of school leavers and prepare a skilled workforce for China’s rapid industrialisation and economic growth.

The aim of this two-day symposium is to provide a multi-disciplinary discussion forum, bringing together from both academia and relevant industry sectors, researchers, developers and practitioners working to exploit digital technologies and multimedia content for interactive and personalised e-learning. The focus of this event will be on future trends in e-learning technologies, including devices and networks to support mobile and ambient learning, video coding and streaming technologies, real-time video analysis and semantic events archiving, multimodal human-machine interfacing, smart conferencing cataloguing, grid computing, innovative e-learning tools and applications such as adaptive hypermedia systems. It will also cover recent advances in technologies and delivery platforms and services aimed at providing learning anywhere, at any time to anyone, thereby enabling the creation of flexible social learning networks.

The symposium will consider the pedagogical and human/social dimensions of e-learning and how they can be supported with the innovative use of new technologies. This will include the effective design of new e-learning services through the use pf conceptual frameworks, pedagogical design and learning theories, and tools to support social and informal learning.

It is intended that the technical experts and researchers, e-learning content/service providers and users from all of these areas can get together in one place to network and discuss issues relevant to the e-learning sector. Special sessions will also be organised with invited speakers from relevant industry, e.g., e-learning platform and service providers, EU and national research funding bodies, government initiatives and user communities, etc.

Keynote Speakers