TLIR 2008

C A L L  F O R   P A P E R S

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===============================================================             Second International Workshop on Teaching and Learning of Information Retrieval (TLIR'08)

http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~andym/TLIR08/ http://tlir08.soi.city.ac.uk

Workshop in conjunction with IiiX2008 (http://irsg.bcs.org/iiix2008/workshopsp.php#)

Justification, goals and summary of the workshop

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Information Retrieval (IR) is a research area that has generated a great deal of interest in recent years, largely due to the growth of the Internet. Many different problems that have arisen during this time have been tackled by the efforts of thousand of researchers around the world. New advances are spread following the usual scientific channels, i.e. journals and conferences, keeping researchers abreast of new developments in the field.

However we need to ensure that students who study the subject of IR understand the basis of this discipline, not just with the aim of conducting research in the future for example, but also as a way of learning how search engines work - tools that they use for their own benefit on a daily basis. IR is a very useful subject to reinforce the knowledge acquired in other fields, such as programming, data structures, user interface design etc. Postgraduate students who may conduct research in this area also need to know the fundamental aspects of the subject, simply because they may be building new solutions for them.

Therefore as important as research is to IR, one way to improve the profile of the subject is to create a common space where IR lecturers and researchers can share their experiences and opinions in the field of IR teaching at any of the educational levels (primary, secondary and tertiary). The aim of the workshop is to provide this common space.

The first edition of the workshop was held in January 10th, 2007, under the auspices of the BCS-IRSG at the BSC Headquarters in London. The proceedings were published by the BCS 'Electronic Workshops in Computing' (eWIC). We have designed this workshop to provide an event which will strengthen the community, attracting both young and experienced lecturers, who will be encouraged to present their experiences and ideas, obtaining a valuable feedback from an audience with the same interests.

We have a number of broad topics to which we invite position papers on, and will then take the issues to a couple of break out sessions. The breakout sessions will develop positions based on the core questions raised by the position papers. We intend to publish a white paper on our findings from these session, and feedback the issue to the academic community. The outcome therefore is not a set of papers which discuss pedagogical research in the area, but a set of recommendations to those who teach IR on how to improve delivery and quality on their courses, from several perspectives - academic, professional body and commercial.

The scope of this workshop will be all the experiences teaching IR. Possible topics are listed under the following categories, although not restricted to:

Level 1 [A] Technical Level (Non-technical Mid-way to Technical continuum) [B] Educational Goals [b1] Library and information Science [b2] Computer Science [b3] MIS [b3] Linguistics Level 2 [1] Teaching and Learning methods: [1a] classroom; [1b] elearning (distance learning); [2] Assessment and feedback [3] Curricula.

We invite position papers on IR teaching, theoretical or position papers on any of some of the areas mentioned above. For all the areas we identify we will provide a broad overview of them, and a list off issues which will be discussed further in breakout sessions.

Submission

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Papers will have an extension of 3 or 4 pages at most. In http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.7939, the authors may find the Microsoft Windows Template for writing the paper. This will be the only possible format.

The papers will be electronically published by eWiC (BCS electronic Worshops in Computing - http://ewic.bcs.org/). Later, authors of best papers will be invited to submit extended versions as chapters of a book on teaching and learning of IR (as soon as we have the detail of the publishers and series, we shall inform).

The papers will be submitted in PDF format to the following URL: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tlir08

Depending on the number of papers accepted, the presentation of some of them will take place in a poster session.

Important Dates

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Deadline for paper submission: September, 15th, 2008. Notification of Acceptance: September 29th, 2008. Camera ready: October, 6th, 2008. Workshop: October, 18th, 2008.

Workshop Organisers

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Andrew MacFarlane (andym@soi.city.ac.uk), Department of Information Science. City University. London - United Kingdom.

Juan F. Huete (jhg@decsai.ugr.es), Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación e Inteligencia Artificial. Universidad de Granada - Spain.

Juan M. Fernández-Luna (jmfluna@decsai.ugr.es), Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación e Inteligencia Artificial. Universidad de Granada - Spain.

Efthimis N. Efthimiadis (efthimis@u.washington.edu), The information School, University of Washington, Seattle, U.S.A.

-- 	 This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP