Ulrich Hoppe gives an insight into his involvement in the European research community through Kaleidoscope, the European Network of Excellence. He points out how convergence of the various fields of research could create synergies for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL).

Ulrich Hoppe states that technologists are the ones who have to invent or adapt new instruments; and educational specialists should judge these and appropriate the promising ones. The new aspect of this is that we have to think beyond the single tool. Tools have to be interoperable and have to support educationally meaningful and productive processes.

In a forthcoming Kaleidoscope workshop, three research areas will be examined: mobile learning, collaborative learning and inquiry learning. Mobile learning is a reactive type of research; collaborative learning has to do with how we learn or should learn, and inquiry learning concerns what is worth learning. As these three aspects are complementary, the workshop examines possibilities for convergence – bringing the fields together.

Hoppe also explains how “intelligent tutoring”, the mainstream of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education, has a more difficult relationship with Computer Support for Collaborative Learning (CSCL). A potential conflict may exist between restricting the role of technologies to facilitating human-to-human communication, and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) that are often seen as active agents to steer human learning.

Professor Hoppe is actively involved in research into technology-enhanced learning, as the Chair of “Cooperative and Learning Support Systems” at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He currently leads the research group known as COLLIDE (“Collaborative Learning in Intelligent Distributed Environments”), which has been engaged in European projects on distributed classroom technology for both virtual and face-to-face scenarios.