is it just me

wondering what’s up in my world…

18.05.2012
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
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TEL-MOOC: introduction to the JTELSS12 workshop

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At this year’s JTEL Summer School in Estoril (Portugal), I will chair a workshop on the TEL-MOOC (Monday from 14:00 – 15:30), a massive open online course focusing on TEL research. The TEL-MOOC will be organized by the European Association of Technology Enhanced Learning starting in the fall of 2012 and will be open for participation by anyone interested in TEL. Participation in the TEL-MOOC will be free.

If you never heard of MOOCs as a new way of (networked) learning, I encourage you to have a look at Dave Cormier’s videos “What is a MOOC?” and “Success in a MOOC“. You also might want to check the Wikipedia article and an Howard Rheingold interview with George Siemens on the topic.

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14.05.2012
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
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Infogr.am – create charts and infographics with style

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I just discovered infogr.am – a new service that let’s you create charts and infographics online. The interface is very nice and reminds me of the MacOS login screen, mixed with iWork in the cloud. It’s very easy to work with the tool and create nice-looking charts that can easily be shared or embedded. I used data from one of my last papers where we analyzed the EC-TEL conference series (link to the publication). As you can see, the chart is interactive, nice and it was created in under a minute.

Nice tool, give it a try…

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14.05.2012
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
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We need your feedback on mobile learning app ideas

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This semester I’m running the “Future Social Learning Networks” course again (see our organizer blog). After being a seminar with two German universities for two years, this year we are five partners and thus have an online course with more than 80 students from Germany and Israel. The co-organizers of the seminar are Ilona Buchem (Beuth University Berlin, Germany), Moshe Leiba (Tel Aviv University, Israel), Timo van Treeck (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany) and Alexander Perl (Braunschweig University, Germany). Moshe is contributing to the course with two courses he is teaching at the Holon Institute of Technology and the Levinsky Teacher College.

We gave the students the overall topic of “Gamification. Mobile Learning. Contextualized Information Support.” and their task is to design, develop and evaluate mobile applications that try to solve learning problems that they faced before. Based on the interdisciplinary setup of the course, each team consists of developers, learning designers, interaction designers and learning technology experts. The evaluation will be led by Timo’s students from Düsseldorf.

In this blog post I want to share with you the first ideas that our 12 groups have come up with and ask you to give feedback to their ideas. Your feedback is much appreciated and can come from any domain. The teams are happy to know about competitors as well as research that could support their idea. They also want to get feedback on something that you see problematic or have a bad feeling with.

The ideas are

  1. A mobile biology identification app
  2. The Scheduler app that aims at helping you to get more organized
  3. A flag learning application with four different games
  4. A mobile interface for a Picture Exchange Communication System
  5. Recycling Tetris
  6. An app to help you learning traffic rules
  7. A museum learning app (part 1 and part 2)
  8. The ABC App
  9. A nutrition exploration app
  10. Vocabulary training in different contexts
  11. A Zoo exploration and path-finding mobile game app

I’m very happy with the first results of the students’ brainstorming and idea development process and hope some of them will be receiving feedback from you.

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08.04.2012
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
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It’s Dr. Reinhardt now

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I finally did it. Last Thursday, I defended my Dissertation at the Open University of the Netherlands and have been promoted to Doctor. The ceremony was a truly remarkable experience with all members of the committee wearing Togas and scientific hats. After I gave a short presentation on my PhD project, the committee members asked questions. Everything worked pretty well except that second last question regarding a linear function…

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15.03.2012
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
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Special Track Science 2.0 at i-Know 2012 (#sts20)

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It is now the fourth consecutive year that we do a dedicated workshop on Science 2.0. This year the workshop will be a special track at the i-know conference in Graz. This year’s organizers are Peter Kraker and Roman Kern from the Know-Center and Kris Jack from Mendeley.

See also the official website for the special track at http://i-know.tugraz.at/i-science/science-2-0

I’m happy to share with you the Call for Papers (submissions are handled using the current alpha version of our ginkgo system):

Science 2.0 deals with the involvement of the web in science. It spans from the utilization of Web 2.0 tools and technologies in research to a more open and sharing approach to science. Some definitions of Science 2.0 even include notions of a methodological change due to the abundance of data, and the nature of the socio-technical systems on the web. For this special track, we would like to address four issues in Science 2.0 that have proven both promising and challenging at the same time:

  1. The management of scientific data, both primary and secondary data (such as publication metadata, and other scientific content on the web) as a precondition for Science 2.0.
  2. The recommendation of people and resources as a consequential next step in an exponentially growing scientific environment.
  3. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of science based on data from scholarly communication on the web.
  4. The change in scientific practices due to the involvement of Science 2.0 tools and technologies in the research process and the effects this has on science itself.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Definition of data schemes and interoperability formats
  • Semantic Web standards for Science 2.0
  • Social mining and metadata extraction in academic resources
  • Metadata quality and quality assessment
  • Design and architecture of data sharing facilities
  • Systems design accounting for standardized data sets
  • Applications for recommendation in science
  • Specific challenges for recommendation in science
  • Information retrieval in academic papers
  • Recommendation algorithms and quality indicators
  • Changes in scientific practices due to Web 2.0
  • Methodological issues and interdisciplinarity in Science 2.0
  • Opportunities and threats for researchers and research organizations
  • Applications in and for Science 2.0
  • Awareness-support for Science 2.0 activities
  • Crowd-sourcing in science
  • Robust methods for dealing with noisy crowd sourced data

Important dates

30 April 2012: Submission of full papers (8 pages) and demos (4 pages)
31 May 2012: Notification of acceptance
30 June 2012: Camera ready version (8 pages)
5 Sept.-7 Sept. 2012: i-KNOW 2012 Conference

Submission procedure

We are inviting research papers of up to 8 pages including references and an optional appendix. Furthermore, we invite demos for the special track. Demo submissions should consist of a 4 page description that allows us to judge the quality of your demonstration. The Conference Proceedings of i-KNOW 2012 will be published by ACM ICPS.

Paper Submission Details: http://i-know.tugraz.at/i-science/paper-submission

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Cover_Reinhardt

12.03.2012
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
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PhD thesis printed

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On Friday I was in the Netherlands for a test presentation as preparation for my public defense on 05.04.  It was also the date on which I finally received all copies of the printed book. After the printer had some issues with my LaTeX document and misprinted 180 copies, I finally had the final books. What a great feeling.

I now started sending printed books to friends, family and interested researchers in the TEL community. After the defense I will also share a download link to the PDF here.

Now it’s time to prepare my 10-minute final presentation and for the following questions by the examiners. I’ll let you know how it was…

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31.01.2012
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
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Looking for junior reviewers for a Special Issue

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Currently, I am co-editor of a Young Researcher Special Issue on the State-of-the-Art in TEL in IJTEL. I was calling for experienced reviewers before and today I’m delighted to announce that we now are explicitly seeking junior reviewers. Junior reviewers are researchers that have just started to review papers from other authors (or those who haven’t reviewed other’s papers at all yet).

As a part of the mentoring process for novice reviewers, we will conducte an online workshop that introduces the basics of paper reviewing. The general goal of the workshop is to provide the required knowledge and skills prior to assigning articles.

If you’re interested in joining us please apply here (until February 10).

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21.01.2012
by Wolfgang Reinhardt
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Call for Reviewers (2012 YRSI in IJTEL)

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The guest editors of the 2012 Young Researcher Special Issue on the State-of-the-Art in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) in the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL) are calling for reviewers. The Call for Papers for the Special Issue can be found here.

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