4th International LeGE-WG Workshop - Towards a European Learning Grid Infrastructure: Progressing with a European Learning Grid - Index

TOWARDS A EUROPEAN LEARNING GRID INFRASTRUCTURE is a series of workshops organised by the Learning GRID of Excellence Working Group (LeGE-WG), which is a thematic network sponsored by the Information Society Technologies Program (IST) of the European Commission in order to facilitate the emergence of a European GRID infrastructure for e-Learning. LeGE-WG is funded by the European Commission under the contract IST-2001-38763. Topics The workshop took place in Stuttgart, Germany in April 2004 and focused on Widely disseminating the ongoing developments in GRID technologies Providing experience reports from on-going experimentation from projects for making applications GRID-aware Discussing ways to introduce GRID technologies into teaching practice Demands to GRID technologies arising from teaching practice The workshop was held next to the 7th public international HLRS Metacomputing Workshop and was divided into three separate sessions. A Grid Technology session focused on how new technologies developed and proposed within the relevant standardisation bodies and on how the results gained from other GRID projects influence the adoption of GRID technology for making existing applications GRID aware. Moreover, were welcomed experience reports from national and international projects on integrating existing applications into a GRID infrastructure from different domains such as Application Service Provision and Scientific Applications. Also, demonstrations of existing GRID frameworks such as Globus, Legion, UNICORE or TME were requested. Another topic fitting into this session was Distributed Visualisation and collaborative work. The E-Learning session concentrated on lessons learned from introducing new media into education, on achievements and new demands and how these demands can be integrated into the implementation of a Learning GRID. Another question being raised within this session concerned the forms of learning that can benefit most from GRID technologies (e.g. Distance learning, Mobilelearning, Collaborative Learning). Answers on how GRID technologies can augment current teaching practice were also provided. Finally, the specific roles of teachers, learners, authors, content and service providers in using a Learning GRID infrastructure as well as legal issues (confidentiality, data protection, copyrights) were addressed. The final joint session compared the emerging potential of the Learning GRID with the demands of eLearning applications. Conclusions were drawn and recommendations were given for future implementations of the Learning GRID infrastructure.