The special track/Workshop on Technology Support for Self-Organized Learners took place in conjunction with the 4th Edumedia Conference “Self-organized learning in the interactive Web – A change in learning culture" on the 2nd and 3rd of June 2008. The shift from institutionally provided isolated learning environments to learning landscapes that consist of a range of different tools and applications is currently right at the beginning. In addition the internet with its huge offer of different software tools and services has always offered a support-infrastructure for self-organised learning and selfdirected learners.
Self-organised learning covers ways of learning, which allow learners -in comparison to traditional educational scenarios-a major dimension of self-determination and selfregulation: self-regulated learning is a self-initiated action that involves goal setting and regulating one’s efforts to reach the goal. Nowadays this way of learning is increasingly supported by interactive learning environments, semantically enhanced content and social software (e.g. Wikis, Weblogs, ePortfolios, Social Bookmarks, Social networks like YouTube, FaceBook, Flickr).
Self-organised learning is pre-requisite for competence based development. This is defined as an activity in which individuals have primary responsibility for the planning, the performance and evaluation of learning activities in order to attain specific learning goals. Although the importance of self-regulated learning has been discussed intensively in the educational field, it has not been an important topic for technology-enhanced learning until today.
The focus of most technological development for learning and competence development was the support of institutions as a provider of learning opportunities. With the widespread acceptance and use of social software this focus is starting to change towards supporting consequently the individual and her/his competencedevelopment throughout life. This change of perspectives has a significant impact on the way learning technologies are envisioned, planned, developed and evaluated. This special track is dedicated to advanced learning technologies supporting the self-directed learner in all phases of competence development.
This special track/workshop was issued under the scientific coordination of the Open University of the Netherlands, the TENCompetence EU Integrated project and Salzburg Research.
We appreciate the work of the contributors to the special track/workshop and we are grateful for the work by the members of the programme committee listed on the next page for their good and accurate reviews.