Luca Caviglione
Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation (Genoa Branch)
National Research Council of Italy
Via de Marini 6, 16149 Genoa, Italy
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Mauro Coccoli
Department of Computer, Communication and Systems Science
University of Genoa
Via Opera Pia 13, 16145 Genoa, Italy
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Special Session Aim & Scope

E-learning and lifelong learning are keywords of the knowledge society we are living in. Teaching and learning activity and methods are changing in both Schools and Universities. Moreover, education may even happen outside a formal environment, in adult education programmes. Corporations always need to keep their personnel up-to-date with specic training activity. In this perspective, grids in e-learning may enable searching, retrieving, gathering, sharing, and using learning resources in highly distributed environments.

As today, education and training, e-learning, b-learning, m-learning and Open and Distance Learning (ODL) are already deployed solutions. Standards and platforms for e-learning are mature, and the research interest is moving towards high performance and high availability systems. The number of users is rapidly growing and digital content is made up of multimedia resources. Arising problems and open issues are related to scalability and to the availability of high bandwidth networks and communication systems.

Despite new usage patterns, the architecture of most e-learning systems is centralized, reflecting in poor performance and bottlenecks. For this reason, collaboration gets hard when a large amount of data is exchanged, as well as when intensive computational activity is needed. This happens in the case of virtual laboratories, training on remote instrumentation, or simulation of complex systems.

Recent innovations in grid technology can push novel e-learning environments and models, to meet new needs in education. In addition, the digital content delivery is overridden by social aspects, communications and interactions enabled by innovative user interfaces.

In this context, grid-based infrastructures oer now an enriched set of features. Among the others we cite sophisticated and highly interactive Virtual Control Rooms (VCRs), and real-time access and control of remote instrumentation. Such improvements allow to use them also to conduct experiments with didactical and training purposes, enabling to operate on complex, expensive or unique instruments. Lastly, virtual laboratories can be shared across a wide population of users through the Internet, thus reducing the digital divide resulting from the heterogenous distribution of technologies and training facilities.

To take advantages from remote cooperation systems, along with virtualized, remote and shared access to scientic knowledge bases, novel collaborative learning models have to be implemented.

In this Special Session on \Remote instrumentation and grids in e-learning", contributions are expected on theoretical aspects, applications, and visions on future trends of grid-based education.

The topics of interest are (but not limited to) the following:

• tele-presence in virtual and remote laboratories;
• virtual communities and collaborative environments;
• mixed and augmented reality for education and training;
• innovative organizational and educational concepts for remote engineering;
• teaching through experiments on complex instrumentation;
• usage of grid-based technologies to enhance e-learning systems.