http://www.prolearn-academy.org/Events/steg08

The STEG workshop is held in conjunction with the 3rd European Conference on  Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL'08 - http://www.ectel08.org/),  Maastricht School of Management, Maastricht, The Netherlands, September  17-19, 2008.

CONTEXT AND MOTIVATION
Stories and story-telling are cultural achievements of significant relevance even in modern times. Nowadays, story-telling is being enhanced with the convergence of sociology, pedagogy, and technology. In recent times, computer gaming has also been deployed for educational purposes and has proved to be an effective approach to mental stimulation and intelligence development. Many conceptual similarities and some procedural correlation exist between story-telling and educational gaming. Therefore these two areas can be clubbed for research on Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). Many facets of story-telling and educational gaming emulate real life processes, which can be represented either as complex story graphs or as interleaved sub-problems. This model is congruent with that used for Technology Enhanced Learning in vocational training. TEL in vocational training requires learning models that focus more on the process and less on the content.

The main difference between educational games and story-telling lies in the users motivational point of view. Story-telling aims at reliving real life tasks and capturing previous experiences in problem-solving for reuse, while educational games reproduce real life tasks in a virtual world in an (ideally) engaging and attractive process. Nevertheless, educational games require highly specialized technical and pedagogical skills and learning processes to cover the topics in sufficient depth and breadth. Imbalance between depth and breadth of study can lead to producing trivial games, which in turn can lead to de-motivating the learner.

While the integration of learning and gaming provides a great opportunity, several motivational challenges (particularly in vocational training) must also be addressed to ensure successful realization. Non-linear digital stories are an ideal starting point for the creation of educational games, since each story addresses a certain problem, so that the story recipient can gain benefit from other user experiences. This leads to the development of more realistic stories, which then provide the kernel for developing non-trivial educational videogames.  These stories can cover the instructional portion of an educational game, while the game would add the motivation and engagement part.

In summary, this workshop aims at bringing together researchers, experts and practitioners from the domains of non-linear digital interactive story-telling and educational gaming to share ideas and knowledge. There is a great amount of separate research in these two fields and the celebration of this workshop will allow the participants to discover and leverage potential synergies.


Workshop topics
* Story-telling and game theorie
* Story and game design paradigms for Technology Enhanced Learning
* Augmented story-telling and gaming
* Story-telling and educational gaming with social software
* Story-telling and educational gaming with mobile technologies
* Cross-media/transmedia story-telling and gaming
* Computer gaming for story-telling (Game design for narrative architectures)
* Multimedia story and game authoring
* Story-telling and educational gaming applications
* User experience and empirical research in story-telling and gaming for TEL

SUBMISSIONS
Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research as full papers (max. 10 pages) or work-in-progress as short papers (max. 5 pages). All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by three members of the program committee for originality, significance, clarity and quality. Accepted papers will be published online as EC-TEL workshop proceedings as part of the CEUR Workshop proceedings series. CEUR-WS.org is a recognized ISSN publication series, ISSN 1613-0073.

Moreover, the two best papers of the workshop will be published in a special issue of the International Journal of Technology-Enhanced Learning (IJTEL - http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalCODE=ijtel)

Authors should use the Springer LNCS format (http://www.springer.com/lncs). For camera-ready format instructions, please see "For Authors" instructions at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.

All questions and submissions should be sent to: steg08@dbis.rwth-aachen.de

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submission: June 30, 2008
Notification of acceptance: July 15, 2008 Camera Ready Submission: August
20, 2008 Workshop date: September 17,18 or 19, 2007

ORGANISERS
Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aaachen University, Germany
Nalin Sharda, Victoria University, Australia
Baltasar Fernandez Manjon, Complutense University, Spain
Harald Kosch, University of Passau, Germany
Marc Spaniol, Max Planck Institute for Computer Science, Germany