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Since 2009 public institutions and the business community collaborate within the programme following two lines: Digital skills of the labour force (Digitally Skilled) and Internet safety (Digitally Safe), targeting future employees, working people and jobseekers between 15 and 64 years old in order to enhance the innovation capacity and productivity of the Dutch economy.

The work plan for the year 2013 describes the strategy, approach and activities of Digitally Skilled and Digitally Safe for the upcoming months. Each line of the programme has its own goals, own results envisaged, own activities and own necessary and desired public-private collaboration.

The idea developed by David Mitchell, who teaches at Haworth Primary School, in Bolton, is based on the fact that a blog needs an audience to keep learners engaged. Too often blogs wither away leaving the learners frustrated and bored. Quadblogging gives students’ blogs a truly authentic and global audience.

The system is quite simple: teachers sign up online, and shortly after their class will be allocated a quad with other four schools/classes. Students will then start commenting on each other's blogs in an organised fashion.

Each week one blog is the focus blog, with the other three classes visiting and commenting during that week. Over the course of a month, every blog gets read and commented. Along the way, students learn about respectful online communication. The four week cycle is then repeated. However, this time, pupils know what is coming and they will work harder to have interesting content in their blog.

QuadBlogging has been mentioned very highly in recent OfSTED Reports in the UK and praised for offering opportunities for “profound impact in developing pupils’ team working, communication and problem-solving skills.”

The objective of the ICT for Language Learning conference is to promote sharing good practices and transnational cooperation in the application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to Language Learning and Teaching. Experts in the field of language teaching and learning are invited to submit an abstract of a paper, which   should be written in English (max 500 words) and sent via e-mail to conference@pixel-online.net no later than 24 June 2013. All the papers presented during the conference will be published on an ISBN publication.

The first two conferences have established the range of issues and approaches of concern in leveraging the availability of data about learning with powerful computational, representational and visualization techniques. This third conference will be designed to consolidate the field by bringing these many voices into dialogue in a “middle space” under the overarching theme of “Dialectics in Learning Analytics,” which has these facets:

The Middle Space: The conference will explore the “middle space” within which Learning and Analytics intersect, and seeks proposals for papers and events that explicitly connect analytic tools to theoretical and practical aspects of understanding and managing learning.

Productive Multivocality: Learning analytics is multidisciplinary, drawing on theories and methods from diverse research traditions. Our community includes educators, learning scientists, computer scientists, administrators, and policy makers, among others. The middle space serves as a topical “boundary object”, enabling productive discourse between these many voices.

The Old and the New: We are facing a centuries old problem: to improve learning, but we are trying to solve it using a new set of tools, not available before. We address these problems in the city of Leuven: centuries old, lively new.