The first few talks, that I have attended today at the International Conference on Web-based learning 2009, have been about metadata. Erik Duval gave first a powerful keynote talk, and several session speakers have continued on that. We need perhaps some sort of metadata of metadata etc. We already have repositories of repositories, which Duval is promoting.

The main question in my mind is: How all this advanced technology can be made usable by ordinary teachers and students. Here the main challenge is that of social engineering: to come up with the right interfaces for various purposes is not an easy task at all.

Question, to which I want to find an answer here in Aachen is: where the sweet spot of educational technology is today? I believe that this conference has not found that yet. Perhaps the JEM workshop can rectify that.

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