Preface

Technology enhanced learning (TEL) aims to design, develop and test socio-technical innovations that will support and enhance learning practices of both individuals and organisations. It is an application domain that generally addresses all types of technology research & development aiming to support teaching and learning activities. Information retrieval is a pivotal activity in TEL, and the deployment of recommender systems has attracted increased interest during the past years. Recommendation methods, techniques and systems open an interesting new approach to facilitate and support learning and teaching. There are plenty of resources available on the Web, both in terms of digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other learners, experts, tutors) that can be used to facilitate teaching and learning tasks. The challenge is to develop, deploy and evaluate systems that provide learners and teachers with meaningful guidance in order to help identify suitable learning resources from a potentially overwhelming variety of choices. The 1st Workshop on Recommender Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning (RecSysTEL) builds upon the tradition of a series of workshops on Social Information Retrieval for Technology Enhanced Learning (SIRTEL), Context-Aware Recommendation for Learning and Towards User Modelling and Adaptive Systems for All (TUMAS-A)a. RecSysTEL was organised jointly by the 4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2010) and the 5th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2010), on 29-30 September 2010 in Barcelona, Spain. Its main goal was to bring together researchers and practitioners who are working on topics related to the design, development and testing of recommender systems in educational settings as well as present the current status of research in this area and create cross-disciplinary liaisons between the RecSys and ECTEL communities. Overall, its contributions outline the rich potential of TEL as an application area for recommender systems and identify the challenges of developing such systems in a TEL context.status: publishe