 | Good morning [NAME],
We are glad to present you the Palette Newsletter This newsletter will bring you news and informations about events regarding Communities of practice and learning technologies. Palette is a FP6 project dedicated to improve the tools and methods of the COPs. |  Editorial
       | The European project ‘PALETTE – Pedagogically sustained Adaptive Learning through the Exploitation of Tacit and Explicit Knowledge’, partially funded by the European Commission- Unit E3 Cultural Heritage and Technology Enhanced Learning, aims to develop a set of innovative, interoperable and standard-based services that enhance learning in communities of practice.
A community of practice is a frequently interacting group of people (the community) who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic (the domain of the community), and who deepen their practical knowledge and expertise in that domain (the practice of the community). Such communities are recognized as effective environments for supporting the learning of professionals, organizations and educational institutions. They have several characteristics that distinguish them from formal organizations. Collaborative learning is a key issue: members learn from each other by making their knowledge and practices explicit, sharing them with their peers, and reflecting on them.
The rapid development of new technology (Web-based platforms, wireless communications, mobile devices and multimedia content) offers a great potential. However, recent research underlines a lack of adequate scaffolding in the form of technical support.
The PALETTE project activities will result in a set of services classified into three categories: information, knowledge management and mediation services that will provide the community’s participants with enhanced support for: - data production, exchange and reuse between autonomous and heterogeneous applications
- reification of explicit and tacit knowledge about practices
- advanced communication and collaboration between communities.
With a good balance between technological and pedagogical experts, the consortium intends to provide innovative learning models as well as technical solutions that increase the overall quality of learning in communities of practice. In addition, it is expected to contribute to the development of standards in this area. | News | ePrep - a new Cop in PALETTE - October 30, 2006 The ePrep community of practice (CoP), arisen from the existing ePrep community of interest, has been officially launched today in Sousse, Tunisia, on the occasion of an international workshop organised by ePrep, a member of the PALETTE project. Members of the ePrep CoP are teachers in French “classes préparatoires” (a first higher education cycle that prepare students for the competitive entrance exams to the "Grandes Ecoles"), and representants from universities, research institutes, training organisations, etc. The PALETTE project will support the first steps of this emerging CoP, analyse the needs of their members and propose them to use advanced PALETTE tools in order to more efficiently work together in the development of the various ePrep projects identified during the workshop in Sousse. For further details, please visit http://www.eprep.org/thematic_workshops.htm | Trainings | Several internal training occurred during the previous months. The last one, in March 2007 in Liège, was dedicated to the “CoPs mediators” and aimed at making them participate in the development and assessment of scenarios presenting situations and uses of Palette services.
The trainings planned for the coming months are the following: - an internal training for the developpers of learning resources within Palette, in May 2007 in Luxembourg; the objective of this training is to enable participants designing courses that will be available on the Palette online learning system.
- the Summer School 2007 in June in Lausanne, a plenary face to face meeting where various presentations and discussions related to Palette thematics will be held. All Palette partners will be invited to participate.
- an awareness seminar on “ CoPs within companies: current situation and perspectives” will be held in June 2007 in Luxembourg
All the training resources produced within Palette will be available online through a dedicated learning management system. A direct access to this platform will be provided by the end of the summer. | Cops | Learn-Nett This community gathering researchers and teachers in the field of educational technology from five universities started in 1997 in Belgium to build and share collective practice. Since then, two new universities joined the network that now covers Belgium, France and Switzerland. Read more... Form@HETICE
Form@hetice is a network of teachers of 23 High Schools of the French Community of Belgium. It mainly concerns contact persons in Information and Communication Technologies in Education (ICTE) working in the educational department of these schools where the training of future teachers is organised. Read more... | Events | ePrep Conference in Educ@TICE event – November 17, 2006
A presentation of the PALETTE project and of the newly integrated ePrep CoP has been made at the Educ@TICE event in Paris, on November 17, 2006. An abstract of this Conference is available, in French, at: http://www.eprep.org/evenement20.htm
TEL-CoPs’06 – October 2, 2006
The first PALETTE scientific workshop, TeL-CoPs’06, has been organised in collaboration with EC-TEL 2006 in Crete - Greece, on October 2, 2006 - http://palette.cti.gr/workshops/telcops06.htm Learning and working in CoPs: theoretical and technological issues – June 26, 2007
The second PALETTE scientific workshop, Learning and working in CoPs, will be organised in collaboration with EIAH 2007 in Lausanne - Switzerland, on June 26, 2007 - http://www.unifr.ch/didactic/eiah07/ | Tools & Publications | Towards an Ontology for Knowledge Management in Communities of Practice"
The work presented in this paper is about learning in Communities of Practices (CoP). It is situated in the context of Knowledge Management (KM) services that we are developing in the Palette project dedicated to learning in CoPs. The approach is made on several models detailed in this paper. These models constitute the theoretical grounding upon which the KM services will be based; they are organized in order to constitute a generic meta-ontology, from which a CoP-dependent ontology can be built, so as to annotate the CoP knowledge resources. Read the paper (pdf) |
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