is it just me

Der Blog heißt ja “Is it just me” (Geht es nur mir so) und das aus gutem Grund. Ich frage mich manchmal sehr oft, ob nur ich gewisse Sachen cool, wertvoll oder eben voll daneben finde. Dieser Fall hier ist besonders interessant, da es um die Universität geht an der ich studierte und nun arbeite. Die Universität Paderborn hat es irgendwie verschlafen sich hinsichtlich der Raumsituation auf gestiegene Studierendenzahlen einzustellen und ist nun massiv am bauen, um den seit Jahren bestehenden Mangel mit Geldern aus verschiedenen öffentlichen Töpfen und Eigenkapital zu bekämpfen. Wenn ich richtig informiert bin, werden derzeit mindestens vier neue Gebäude gebaut und auch an der Fürstenallee entsteht mit der Zukunftsmeile Fürstenallee ein Projekt der Universität Paderborn.

Diese heutige News der Uni schießt dann jedoch den Vogel ab: die Uni stellt über den Winter 4 voll ausgestattete und beheizte Zelte bereit, in denen jeweils bis zu 80 Personen Platz haben und wo Lehre stattfinden wird. Es seien in der näheren Umgebung keine Räume gewesen, die man für diese Zwecke hätte anmieten können, deshalb habe man sich dazu entschlossen die Zelte aufzustellen und weist darauf hin:

Ähnliche Zelte werden auch ganzjährig für Ausstellungen und Messen verwendet.

Ich schätze dieser Hinweis soll den letzten Zweiflern an der Ernstheit der Angelegeheit zeigen, dass man hier von wohlerprobten Raumkonzepten spricht. Besonders interessant fand ich dann jedoch den Ausblick auf die nähere Zukunft der universitären Raumplanung:

Er [der Kanzler] gehe aber davon aus, dass spätestens ab dem Sommersemester 2011 der benachbarte Baumarkt für die Seminarveranstaltungen umgebaut und betriebsbereit sei und somit neue Raumkapazitäten zur Verfügung stünden.

Wie jetzt? Es werden Unmengen an Gebäuden gebaut und ab dem kommenden Sommersemester sollen Seminare im Baumarkt stattfinden. You must be kidding guys…

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As I my have noticed I’m giving Foursquare a spin in order to find out about its usefulness for awareness in research communities. I’m on Foursquare since last Friday and have like 10 friends now. I checked in around 20 times and I am mayor of my home. Wow. Maybe I am missing some essential part of the service, but what exactly is the gain of Foursquare? And when does it come into being? I noticed that you get coupons for Starbucks in the US if you are the mayor of one store. What do you get in Germany or the UK or elsewhere? Do you see any added value of checking in everywhere you go? Is Foursquare more than a game that at some point will provide you with personalized and local ads? Maybe you can help me with some input…

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After all the buzz around Foursquare, Facebook Places and Co. and my (initially) rather restraining attitude towards such services, I will try Foursquare for a week starting today. In the context of my Ph.d. thesis I am thinking about how such location-awaren systems could be used to enhance researchers awareness and I need to figure out how the systems work. So I will probably spam you (my Twitter followers and Facebook friends) with some check-in stuff. I hope you understand it’s on her majesty’s service for advances in sciences

Btw: You can see my check-ins at Foursquare

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In his first public blog post (he must be kidding) Frank Kaufer from the HPI in Potsdam writes that

…being a computer scientist these days and neither blogging nor twittering evokes serious doubts about whether you have ever used a computer except an abacus at all.

He links to an article from 2006 where the Notificator is introduced; a mid 1930s robot that displays messages to their friends. The newspaper article from 1935 says:

To aid persons who wish to make or cancel appointments or inform friends of their whereabouts, a robot message carrier has been introduced in London, England. Known as the “notificator,” the new machine is installed in streets, stores, railroad stations or other public places where individuals may leave messages for friends.

Doesn’t that sound like a 1930s version of Twitter (and Foursquare) to you?

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This post is in German for once.

Heute ist es soweit, der finale Seminarband zum FSLN10 Seminar ist online gegangen. Unsere Studenten haben das gesamte Sommersemester hart gearbeitet und sich mit Themen rund um Technologie-gestütztes Lehren und Lernen beschäftigt und herausgekommen sind — wie wir finden — sehr gute Vorträge, Präsentationen und nutzbare Prototypen. Der Seminarband fasst nun die obligatorischen Seminarausarbeitungen in einem PDF zusammen.

Wie es sich für ein gutes Seminar gehört sind nicht nur die Folien online, sondern wir machen auch die schriftlichen Teile öffentlich zugänglich und hoffen auf reges Feedback dazu.

Im Detail werden die folgenden Themen im Seminarband behandelt:

• Real-Time Collaborative Learning (Rolf Wilhelm, Universität Paderborn)
• Medienbrüche im Web 2.0 (Dennis Horstkemper, Universität Paderborn und Marie-Luise Zankl, Universität Augsburg)
• Awareness in Learning Networks (Christian Mletzko, Universität Paderborn)
• Interaktive Lernressourcen (Felix Meyer, Universität Augsburg und Alexander Schäfer, Universität Paderborn)
• Soziale Netzwerkanalyse in Artefact-Actor-Networks (Matthias Moi, Universität Paderborn)
• Game-based Learning (Eva Andreeva, Universität Augsburg und Sebastian Lauck, Universität Paderborn)
• Universität 2.0 (Julia Schuhwerk, Universität Augsburg und Manuel Schmidt, Universität Paderborn)

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There it is: the (not yet) official Twitter re-tweet button. Mashable released the story 3 days ago and with lightning speed there are the first WordPress plugins available. H.-Peter Pfeufer released his WP-Twitter Retweet Button plugin and it works like a charm. Great work. Thanks.

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Another great SlideShare find on informal learning in social interactivity systems:

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To all folks feeling a bit lost in the motivational lowlands…

No Dissertation from ticoneva on Vimeo.

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Today we had the final presentations of our Future Social Learning Networks (FSLN) seminar. The seminar took place at the University of Paderborn and the University of Augburg (both in Germany). I have to say that I supervised a number of seminars during my time at the University of Paderborn, but what I experienced today was awesome. I supervised the seminar together with my colleague Nina Heinze, who also works at the KMRC in Tübingen.

The seminar was designed to let students experience the power of Social Media in real-life situations, so we decided to have them cooperating with a fellow student from another university in another city, far away from home. So they HAD to use tools for keeping in sync with their partner, to communicate, coordinate and cooperate (you remember the classification of groupware from Teufel et al.?). So we introduced social media tools in higher education to them (thanks again to Cristina Costa for doing the lovely voicethread) and the students started to test Twitter, Delicious, Mendeley, SlideShare, FlashMeeting and Co for their work. We told them that we’d expect a collaborative presentation, a final report and an computer science artifact that represents what they did. After the first week we scheduled team meeting with the student groups where they presented their first ideas on the focus of their work and how the could design or implement the required artifact. The same thing took place 3 weeks later where we focused the topic even further and decided what artifact should be created. Nina and me were surprised by both the creativity, engagement and quality of the results in such an early phase of the seminar – because we knew different from former seminars. During the following weeks, we had two FlashMeetings with the whole group and some individual talks on Skype and gave little advice where help was needed. We could follow the students’ work from their bookmarks on Delicious and the shared articles in Mendeley (thank you guys for the extended shared collection, you really rock), could follow Tweets and had short ad-hoc face-to-face meetings at the coffee machine. All in all a pretty satisfying work load during the semester with pretty motivated students.

Today we had the final presentations; the students in Paderborn were sitting in a room in Paderborn, the students in Augsburg were in Augsburg. We used uStream.tv to stream the presentations from one city to another and Skype desktop sharing to transfer sound and the slides to both places simultaneously. Furthermore we had a Twitter backchannel and my boss was attending from another location via Skype as well. I thought: what a mess, technology will never do this. BUT IT DID. And it did perfectly. Yeehaw. You can see a picture of the Paderbornian setting here:

But then the students started to present their work. All in all we had the following topics:

1. Real-time collaborative learning
2. Media disruptions in Web 2.0 environments
3. Awareness in Learning Networks
4. Interactive Learning Ressources
5. Social Network Analysis in Artefact-Actor-Networks
6. Game-based Learning
7. University 2.0

Our students not only invested a lot of time in their presentations and the writing of well-formulated and substantiated articles, they also presented stunning prototypical implementations and architectural design for IT systems that would really make a difference (see the pictures on Flickr). One team was developing a MashUp real-time collaborative learning environment that combined a whiteboard with video chat, twitter integration and the ability to load any RSS feed. The widget-based environment was running on Django in Python (a language we do not teach in Paderborn) and allows for the creation and storage of differing MashUps that can be used, shared, stored and re-accessed later. Another team analyzed the daily routines of students in Paderborn and Augsburg and modeled the study-related part in EPK models (something we never thought of). The team identified a range of media disruptions during the exam application for example (12 disruption in Paderborn, with 4 different tools involved). Finally, the did paper prototyping for an improved system that could be used at various universities and developed an infrastructure design. Another team was developing an interactive PDF where Flash content from nearly all social media platforms can be integrated. They showed a PDF that incorporated fully functioning SlideShare presentations and YouTube videos, the above-mentioned VoiceThread and even FlashMeeting replays from our meetings. Moreover, they developed an application CommentInAPDF that allows to send tweets from within a PDF (there even was an extended version where they automatically added an a priori defined hashtag to the tweet). The presentation of the PDF was so impressing and opened up so many visions of what to do with such technical options, I’m still stunned. Here is a video of their presentation (in German).

Finally the University 2.0 group did an online survey among 470 German-speaking students regarding their vision of the University in the year 2030 and combined those findings with qualitative interviews with scientific staff. Furthermore they likened their findings with future predictions (e.g. The Horizon Reports) and produced this awesome Prezi presentation.

I have to say that I never had so motivated students, which invested their valuable time and lifeblood into a seminar and produced so cool artifacts. During the feedback session they told us, that the collaboration with others that they couldn’t talk to other than mediated to social software was very motivating for them and that they learned to love the tools we introduced to them. Also they mentioned that the permanent availability of the supervisors via social media tools gave them the feeling safety and encouraged them to ask for help and council.

Students, that was rocket science, thank you so much. I hope to work with you again soon!

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I am pretty excited this week as the first PLE Conference finally is about to begin. On Thursday and Friday many people interested in the PLE concept and networked learning are meeting in Barcelona.

My colleague Ilona Buchem asked me to co-chair a workshop at the conference that will focus on the collaborative definition of the term PLE (see her blog post & the update about the workshop). While there are many definitions out there (see for example the mentions at Beat’s Biblionetz) we try to focus on four concepts that are (at least for us) mainly relevant for the understanding of PLEs and try to make them the starting point for a discussion:

1. Content (moderator: Ilona Buchem)
2. Learning (moderator: George Couros)
3. Technology (moderator: me)
4. Social Interaction / Social Change (moderator: Cristina Costa)

In fact four groups will have the chance to work on their own Mindmeister mindmaps and add their point of view regarding the four main concepts that we figured out. We are looking forward to the creativity and power of the participants of the workshop regarding our main concepts and wether people agree with them, if they’ll add or remove main concepts, which subconcepts they’ll add etc. Within the workshop four local groups and all remote participants can work out their own mindmap which we’ll compare at the end of the workshop. We all agree there is not the ONE definition of what a PLE is, but with the workshop we try to figure out diverse dimensions and digg into the different understandings of different people.

Graham Attwell already tried to give a 140 character definition you can start to think about:

PLEs are the spaces in which people interact, communicate and whose result is learning and development of collective know-how

Here are the motivational slides Ilona put online, see also George Couros’ post on the workshop (look at the comments!!!)

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