Guest Editorial-New Directions in Advanced Learning Technologies (2009)

ICALT, the International Conference on Advanced Technologies, brings together people who are working on the design, development, use and evaluation of technologies that will be the foundation of the next generation of e-learning systems and technology-enhanced learning environments. In its 8th edition the theme selected was Learning technologies in the Information with a view to encourage the exploration of the role of learning technologies in the transformation from the information society to the knowledge society where everybody (independently of race, sex, abilities, capabilities, ...) can be benefit from technologies to enhance her learning process. This opens a world of opportunities for analyzing the use of technology in learning environments that take into account the characteristics and expectations of different kinds of users and different kinds of learning experiences, whether formal or informal, individual or cooperative, life-long or short term. total of 98 papers were accepted as full papers in the main ICALT conference, what makes a 23.47% acceptance rate. From these papers the editors of this special issue selected a number of contributions that went through a peer review process. We'd like to thank all the reviewers that contributed with their judgment and comments to select the papers in this issue; their names listed below in recognition of their efforts. After the review process, 12 papers were finally selected to illustrate the advances in three relevant areas: Personalized educational systems, Computer supported collaborative and social learning and New generation of educational technologies. Personalized educational systems are aimed at adapting the educational experience to meet different kinds needs, goals and preferences. This is an important area of research and development where different approaches can be applied to understand how the differences impact the learning process and which kind of tools have to be used, whether computer based or not, to make it more efficient. In this issue two of the papers selected in this category deal with the learning styles of students. Firstly, Sabine Graf, Kinshuk and Tzu-Chien Liu propose in Supporting Teachers in Identifying Students' Styles in Management Systems: An Modelling Approach a tool to identify the learning styles of online students; a valuable information that can assist teachers in understanding how to shape the learning experience for each student. Secondly, in Student Styles Adaptation Method Based on Teaching Strategies and Electronic Media, Ana Lidia Franzoni and Said Assar provide a framework to select the best teaching strategy and electronic materials according to the learning style of the student. The third paper is included in this category, Automatic Recommendations for E-Learning Personalization Based on Web Usage Mining Techniques and Information Retrieval by Mohamed Koutheair Khribi, Mohamed Jemni and Olfa Nasraoui, deals with collaborative filtering for e-learning recommendations. The authors use web mining techniques and scalable search engine technology to obtain the recommendations from a massive repository of educational resources. The second group of papers are related to Computer supported Collaborative and Social Learning. CSCL has been a classical topic in education as in many occasions learning occur when interacting with other peers and the mechanisms to create and motivate the groups, as well as the kind of activities and teaching strategies to apply makes up a broad research area. Two papers in this issue deal with group formation. In A Framework for Semantic Group Formation in Education, Asma Ounnas, Hugh C. Davis and David E. Millard describe a framework that given a number of constraints defined by the teacher proposes groups based on the use of semantic data about the students features. In InstanceCollage: a tool for the particularization of collaborative IMS-LD scripts, Eloy D. …