Organisers 
Pierre Dillenbourg (EPFL) and Chia Shen (Harvard University)
Contact: Pierre.dillenbourg@epfl.ch

Review Committee
Michel Beaudouin-Lafon (Paris Sud)
Pierre Dillenbourg (EPFL)
Michael Horn (Northwestern University)
Frédéric Kaplan (EPFL)
Yvonne Rogers (Open University)
Chia Shen (Harvard University)
Daniel Wigdor (Microsoft Surface)

Call for Participation
Interested researchers, practitioners and educators should submit a 2-page abstract to the organizers by August 25, 2009. Twenty five participants will be selected by the review committee.
Acceptance letters will be sent out on September 15, 2009.

The Alpine Rendez-Vous
This 2009 Alpine Rendez-Vous is the second event of a series. It is organized and funded by STELLAR, a new European network of excellence on learning technologies (http://www.stellarnet.eu/). It is not a conference but a set of independent workshops held in the same hotel during the same week. Four workshops will be held on the Monday-Tuesday and four other workshops on the Wednesday-Thursday. On the Tuesday afternoon, all workshop participants are invited to join a common section, the Rendez-Vous, ending up with a social event.

Financial aspects
Participants will be selected based on their submissions. There are no registration fees.
Participants pay for their own travel and lodging. Funding for hotel and food will be available for a number of participants.

Location
The Alpine Rendez-Vous will be held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a mountain village in the South of Germany (http://www.garmisch-partenkirchen.de). Closest airports are Munich and Innsbruck (in Austria).

Workshop Format
This is a two-day workshop. All participants are expected to have read and written a oneparagraph review of each of the accepted abstract statements which will be distributed 4 weeks before the workshop. Day 1 of the workshop will be 5-minute presentations of each participant followed by a 7-minute question and answer period. Presentations can be in the form of a video or a live demonstration of an experimental system. The last hour of Day 1 will be a workshop-wide brainstorming session with the objective to formulate five grand challenge questions. Day 2 is the "Grand Challenge" day. In the morning, we will divide the workshop into 5 groups, each working on one Challenge. In the afternoon, each group will present its approaches, solutions and insights. The last hour of the workshop will be devoted to discuss ideas for future collaborations, publications and projects.

Abstract
Multi-touch, multi-user digital table is an emerging technology with the potential to transform the way in which learning is experienced in formal and informal education. This technology offers human-computer interaction affordances by coupling the visual output with the touch input control. Tangible artefacts can be incorporated strategically as a horizontal tabletop which afford convenient physical object placements. These touch and tangible platforms have the potential to enhance learning by combining visualizations of scientific and other data and phenomena with intuitive, multi-user interaction. On the other hand, multi-touch interaction offers challenges for application designers and education software developers since it goes beyond single-user control, and shoulder-to-shoulder style collaboration afforded by desktop interfaces. Multi-touch tabletop encourages multi-user collaboration around a shared computer display, which in turn may change the dynamics of teaching and learning. Groups of learners will be able to engage and learn together through multi-layered and multi-modal interactive exploration.

Given these new affordances and challenges, experimental research and development on applying digital touch tables to education, and in particular, on determining the effectiveness and impact of this new technology on learning are a necessary step before wide deployment of this technology to classrooms and informal education.

This workshop call solicits submissions of 2-page abstracts describing ongoing experiments, investigations, studies, projects or visionary narratives on the application of interactive tabletops in education and training. The intended outcome is two-fold. First, we hope to bring researchers who are already actively working in this field together, to provide a new and growing forum where we can share and discuss our visions and ongoing research. Second, best papers from the workshop, and a summary of the discussions and presentations will be proposed as a special issue for IEEE Transactions of Learning Technologies.