is it just me

wondering what’s up in my world…

05.05.2013
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
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2. Auflage von Informatik Macchiato

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Seit dieser Woche halte ich nun endlich meine beiden Autorenexemplare der zweiten Auflage von Informatik Macchiato in Händen. Die zweite Auflage unseres Cartoonkurses beinhaltet inhaltliche Überarbeitungen sowie zwei neue Kapitel mit recht hoher Aktualität: zum einen haben wir ein Kapitel zu “Web 2.0 und Soziale Netzwerke” hinzugefügt. Zum anderen beschäftigt sich das Kapitel “Datenschutz und Urheberrecht” mit den Herausforderungen digitaler Fußspuren und der Weitergabe von persönlichen Daten.

Wir freuen uns wie immer über Rückmeldungen jeder Art und natürlich über Rezensionen auf Amazon.

28.04.2013
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
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Awesome OLPC story

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This is maybe the most awesome story I ever heard about the One Laptop Per Child project:

We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.

Source: http://www.dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php

28.04.2013
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
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Fenster putzen like a pro

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Ich weiß schon, was ihr jetzt denkt: “Dreht er jetzt vollkommen ab?”. Nein, ganz im Gegenteil, heute war mal wieder so ein echter “Is it just me?”-Moment. Es wird langsam wirklich Frühling und die Fenster sehen doch ein wenig dreckig aus… Nun hat wirklich niemand Lust auf Fensterputzen und Männer ja schon mal prinzipiell gar nicht. Mit Wasser säubern, Fensterputzzeug aufsprühen, verreiben, abziehen und dann streifenfrei abwischen  - das ist nichts für uns. Und für männliche Geeks schon mal gar nicht. Nun gut, es gibt schon Jungs, die es voll raus haben…

Doch da gibt es seit letzter Woche ein nettes kleines, gelbes Tool in unserem Haushalt, das verspricht Fensterputzen cool zu machen. Heute habe ich den Kärcher Fenstersauger WV50 plus endlich ausgetestet und muss sagen: WOW, warum habe ich den nicht eher gekauft? So macht Fenster putzen endlich Spaß: das Fenster wird nun nur noch feucht gereinigt und dann kommt der Fenstersauger zum Einsatz, der das Schmutzwasser ganz einfach absaugt. Der geekige Fensterputzer kann so im Handumdrehen die Fenster und Spiegel des Hauses reinigen und dabei sogar eine Hand in der Hosentasche lassen. Geschwitzt wird nicht mehr.

Wer auf Videos und gut aufbereitete Informationen steht, hier ist ein aktuelles vom Testmagazin, das dem WV 50 plus auch glatt ein “Sehr gut” bescheinigt. Ich kann nur sagen, ich habe selten 50 Euro so gut angelegt und kann den Fenstersauger uneingeschränkt weiterempfehlen. Wer über Sprossenfenster oder ähnliches verfügt, dem sei an dieser Stelle der große Bruder WV75 plus ans Herz gelegt, es gibt aber auch einen schmaleren Zusatzaufsatz für den Fall der Fälle.

14.04.2013
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
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Evaluation von INSPIRE – Literaturvorschläge für wissenschaftliche Publikationen

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Einer meiner Studenten aus dem HCPA-Projekt beschäftigt sich mit der Analyse von Referenzen in Literaturverzeichnissen in wissenschaftlichen Publikationen mit dem Ziel daraus gezielt Literaturvorschläge zu unterbreiten. Wie bei jeder unserer Arbeiten ist es relevant die Ergebnisse mit Hilfe (einer hoffentlich großen Menge von) echten Testpersonen zu evaluieren.

Dazu hat Adrian eine webbasierte Umfrage eingerichtet, die mit Hilfe seines Tools INSPIRE beantwortet werden soll. Die Umfrage enthält nur 14 Fragen und lässt sich in 5 bis 10 Minuten beantworten. Das Vorgehen ist zudem recht einfach: 1) auf INSPIRE nach einer Publikation oder einem Autor suchen, 2) aus den Suchergebnissen eine Publikation auswählen, 3) Literaturvorschläge ansehen und dann die Umfrage ausfüllen. Easy, oder?

Ich freue mich über eine breite Teilnahme, sehr gern auch außerhalb des üblichen Netzwerks :)

28.03.2013
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
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Delete hidden rows or columns in an Excel sheet

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Every now and then you might want to delete all the hidden rows or columns in an Excel sheet. You could do this by hand but obvioulsy there is an automated solution to do so. Simply copy the below Marco, create a new one in your Excel sheet, run it and be happy.

If you want to delete Columns instead of Rows, simply replace 

Row resp. Rows

with 

Column resp. Columns

and


Sub DeleteHiddenRows()
Dim Row As Range
For Each Row In ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Rows
With Row
If .Hidden Then
.Hidden = False
.Delete
End If
End With
Next Row
End Sub

10.03.2013
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
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PINGO: Peer Instruction for very large groups – an update

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I blogged about PINGO before but since it has become a tool that is now used by teachers from more than 100 universities all over the globe, today I present an update.

With PINGO, we have developed a free-to-use prototypical web-based classroom response system at the University of Paderborn that we want to offer you for applications in teaching and research. The system is called PINGO („Peer Instruction for very large groups“). Similar to the ask-the-audience life-line in “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”, students can be involved in the lecture by answering (conceptual) questions posed by the instructor using their Internet-enabled devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops etc.). PINGO may be used to implement constructivist teaching designs, such as Peer Instruction, Classwide discusions, Three-Questions Sequence approach and many others. We are working on extending PINGO (e.g., in terms of question formats) and want to use it also as an artifact to conduct experiments in the area of teaching and technology use. If you are interested in joining us, please do not hesitate to contact us. We plan to offer PINGO as open source in fall this year.

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13.01.2013
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
10 Comments

When can a MOOC be considered massive?

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Yesterday, I had a lively discussion on Twitter with some of the organizers of the MOOC-Maker Course 2013 (#mmc13) about the question “When can a MOOC can be considered being massive?” Their point was that a MOOC is massive when it has more than 150 participants. This point of view goes back to a presentation by Claudia Bremer (here is the video of that talk, in German) where she says: “ah and I talked to Stephen Downes by the way and he said a MOOC can be considered massive when there are more than 150 participants”. I immediately thought: HERESAY … and tried to find out more about the magical 150 (right, that is the Dunbar number as well).

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24.12.2012
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
4 Comments

I’m leaving academia

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Ya, that’s the truth… At the end of this year, I’ll be leaving academia and the University of Paderborn and will start working as project manager in an international Paderborn-based company. While I’m looking forward to learn a lot of new things and to having new impressions of how collaborative work can be carried out, I am also a bit sad to leave the environment I worked and lived in the last 8 years.

During my studies at the University of Paderborn, I became student assistant at the Computer Science Education Group of Prof. Magenheim and quickly began to take responsibilities in the teaching activities of the group. In 2007, I became research associate in the group and had the opportunity to start supervising bachelor and master thesis, to develop new courses and to teach in the area of TEL, Social Media, Knowledge Management and E-Learning (and many more topics, see the list). I became the supervisor of several project groups at our group and learned a lot about project management, they dos and don’ts of collaborative software development and agile development techniques.

When my PhD project at the University of Paderborn didn’t went as I hoped for, it were Hendrik Drachsler and Peter Sloep that motivated me to carry on and to finish that PhD. So I became external PhD at the Open Universiteit’s CELSTEC and successfully defended my thesis “Awareness Support for Knowledge Workers in Research Networks” in April 2012 after 18 months of hard work. Hendrik, Peter, I thank you again for being the supervisors you were and for guiding me through the process. It was a gift being able to work with you.

Together with many brilliant minds, I published a lot in the past years and had the opportunity to travel a lot. I met many smart researchers and some of them became friends. Every September, the European Conference on Technology Enhance Learning (EC-TEL) was the meeting point for the smart TEL community and I will certainly miss many of the people involved in making EC-TEL a great conference. It was the EC-TEL conference and my participation in several other EATEL-sponsored events that made me interested in becoming deeper involved in the European TEL community and I decided to run for election for the post of secretary of EATEL in 2011. Ever since my election, I enjoy working for the association and will carry on to work as secretary in the future.

I want to thank all of you that accompanied me throughout the last 8 years, all the colleagues at the University of Paderborn and at CELSTEC. I am grateful for all the students that decided to take my courses, to join my project groups, to write their final theses with me or that worked as students assistants for me. I know that I always brought in new ideas and changed existing plans but you always did your best to deliver great products (“Wolle always brings the cool ideas and I implement them” is something they used to say…). All the products we delivered have been well received, discussed by smart people all over the world and not uncommonly used as benchmark for their new developments. I want you to know that you are AWESOME and the best peers I could imagine. It was a great pleasure and honor being your “boss” and I will surely miss our brainstorming and darts sessions.

They say every new beginning is one beginning’s end. I’m looking forward to the new beginning and hope it will be as fruitful as the last one…

06.12.2012
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
2 Comments

Teaching Award from the University of Paderborn

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Yesterday, I received word that the University of Paderborn will honor me with the “Teaching Award of the University of Paderborn for Junior Academic Staff” (Lehrpreis der Universität Paderborn für den wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchs). The committee decided to present this award to me mainly for the pedagogic concept and the three triple implementation of the “Future Social Learning Networks” seminar series. The price will be presented on 20.01.2013 within the scope of the New Year reception with the chancellor of the University.

I am very pleased and honored by the award and happy that the committee perceived the concept of FSLN as a valuable endeavor to enhance and open up university courses.

I conceived the FSLN seminar concept in 2010 while being at the Computer Science Education Group of the University of Paderborn. The first two implementations of the course were carried out in cooperation with Nina Rebele (a.k.a. Nina Heinze), who then was with the University of Augsburg’s Institute for Media and Educational Technology. This summer, the third implementation of the course was carried out with six partners and about 90 students from Germany and Israel. In detail we collaborated with Ilona Buchem (Beuth University of Applied Sciences Berlin), Moshe Leiba (Holon Institute of Technology), Alexander Perl (University of Braunschweig), and Timo van Treeck (Cologne University of Applied Sciences). The main aim of the FSLN courses always have been to foster international and interdisciplinary collaboration of student teams working on real-world problems while communicating with social media tools and services alone. This way, the students should be supported in gaining first-hand experience in using these tools purposeful and to the team’s benefit. The tasks have always been challenging and related to top notch research projects, such as STELLAR or MATURE.

If you want to know more about FSLN, you can check the following references:

03.12.2012
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
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ARTEL12 proceedings are now online

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Since last week, the proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Technology-Enhanced Learning (ARTEL12) are available as free download on CEUR-ws.org. The proceedings contain11 papers, where four papers specifically deal with awareness and awareness support and seven papers have their focus on reflection.

The workshop, which took place at the EC-TEL conference in Saarbrücken was a great and inspiring one. It brought together some smart people that shed light on awareness and reflection from several different TEL perspectives. Thank you again for your participation. I would also like to thank my co-organizers and the reviewers for their great job.

If you want to refer to the proceedings, please use this reference: A. Moore, V. Pammer, L. Pannese, M. Prilla, K. Rajagopal, W. Reinhardt, T. D. Ullmann, and C. Voigt (Eds.). Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Technology-Enhanced Learning, available online at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-931/. 2012.