Project CULT (partially supported by the European Commission with a Marie Curie Fellowship) has released the final project report that highlights some notable achievements.

We are continuing the collaboration with the ArTe project at NTNU (Trondheim, Norway) during February and we have planned to work with them during Summer 2012, too. The main focus of the ongoing collaboration is on course development (software tools for maker events, ubiquitous interaction) and on software engagement with environment issues.

Although the CULT project will be over by the end of the year, we are already working on several other related projects. Firstly, we are excited to announce the School on Open and Usable Learning (SOUL), which is a summer school that continues the successful series of the schoolit workshops. In addition to the SOUL summer school we are also working on other innovative small scale ad-hoc projects in close co-operation with schools and educators that will be shorty announced within this site. In brief, project CULT is soon over, but stay tuned for the follow-up!

During the last few months, the researchers of the project have presented several findings in international conferences. The respective articles have already appeared in the Proceedings of those conferences, as well as in the Publications section. In particular, we have published quantitative and qualitative results on a distance communication system. At the same time, we worked on an extended version of the above findings for publication in a journal article.

We have developed two more participation kits. The D-Kit is a digital cultural probes (photos, micro-blogs) web platform that allows continuous connection between schools-administrators-researchers. The S-Kit is a situated computing video kit that connects remote schools in a seamless way. They are both immediately available as open-source projects on google code.

We are happy to announce that all schoolit11 presentations are now available on video. In the case that you have missed the event you can now enjoy the talks at your own convenience. Moreover, do not forget to check out the video presentations from schoolit10.

We have established a new collaboration with the ArTe and Fabula projects at NTNU (Trondheim, Norway) and we have planned to work with them during August and September 2011. The main focus of the collaboration is the design and impact of educational games developed in the Scratch programming environment, as we as the evaluation of the mobile gaming in informal learning (e.g., museum) settings. In addition to the research collaboration, we have also arranged the exchange of knowledge with guest lectures.

The Department of Informatics and project CULT are happy to present Pablo Cesar from CWI (the Netherlands). Pablo is researcher (tenure track) at CWI (The National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands) and he obtained a doctorate at Helsinki University of Technology (Finland). Pablo has been working on multimedia systems that facilitate end-user video annotations and sharing, as well as social communication between remote users. In this talk, Pablo is going to present his research on group-to-group social communication, focusing on the latest results from the European project TA2. The talk is taking place on Tuesday, June 21st, 2pm, at Aretaios building, classroom 2.

Following the success of schoolit10, we have been organizing a follow-up workshop on ICT and education, under the name schoolit11. The workshops is open to the public, subject to a free of charge registration due to the limited size of the available room. The schoolit11 workshop program features research that has been performed in the context of the project, as well as research that is closely related.