Villars (CH), February 2007 - Kaleidoscope has announced the winners of three major European awards for outstanding research in computer-supported collaborative learning, a sub-field of technology-enhanced learning that investigates social interactions between learners in educational settings.
The awards were recently presented at the "CSCL Alpine Rendezvous", in Villars, Switzerland. The event brought together over 150 leading education researchers from numerous disciplines. More than twenty high-quality papers were nominated, and so the awards represent a significant achievement for the winners, whose work was subjected to the scrutiny of a critical jury.
The winners were:
Dr. Davinia Hernández Leo and Dr. Miguel L. Bote-Lorenzo (University of Valladolid, Spain) - the European Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) Award for the development of "Collage" and "GridCole" (http://gsic.tel.uva.es/collage).
Dr. Hans Christian Arnseth (ITU, University of Oslo, Norway) and Dr. Sten Ludvigsen (Intermedia, University of Oslo, Norway) - won the European CSCL Award for Excellence in the Field of CSCL Research and/or Development for their paper "Approaching institutional context: Systemic versus Dialogic Research in CSCL ".
Dr. A. Hannie Gijlers and Dr. Ton de Jong (University of Twente, Netherlands) - claimed the European CSCL Award for Excellence in PhD Research for "Confronting Ideas in Collaborative Discovery Learning".
Commenting on the awards, Dr. Pierre Dillenbourg, the well-known Swiss education researcher from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland and one of the initiators of the "CSCL Alpine Rendezvous" said, "These awards represent the best in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. The standard of all researchers who entered the competition was very high. We hope that this award will grow to be recognised as representing not only excellence in our field of computer-supported collaborative learning but within research in education in general."
Dr. Frank Fischer from the University of Munich, Germany, leader of the CSCL Special Interest Group and co-organizer of the meeting, emphasized that both the meeting and the awards are meant to be sustainable outcomes of Kaleidoscope: "We are already planning the next 'CSCL Alpine Rendezvous', and the nomination procedure for the 2008 awards will soon be launched."
