During the last week I was attending the EC-TEL 2009 in Nice. I really met great people there (some for the first time, some finally again) and the location was
marvelous. It was a conference for the TEL researches, had a good Wifi performance and I was prepared for the luck of plugs.

I was attending two pre-conference workshops on tuesday (Science 2.0, TEL-CoPs) and could listen to cool keynotes and interesting sessions. During the Science 2.0 (other post) workshop we discussed how we can use technology in beforehand of a conference, at the conference and afterwards. Graham Attwell, who was not attending the conference also added some notes and Erik Duval and Martin Weller wrote dome some notes or uploaded videos.

We all agree that currently conferences heavily differ in their application of technology and attendee-support. At EC-TEL I first saw a conference planning tool that basically is a social bookmarking tool and simple recommender system (see Hendrik’s slides). All talks with their respective authors and keywords are placed in the system and you can assemble your own conference schedule by selecting the most interesting abstracts, tag them and propose these talks to groups of users. The conference planner is a great starting point for making conferences more interactive and transparent to the (online | offline) attending researchers. But for me it is still pretty much Web 1.0 -ish… I’m thinking of some cool conference website that not only presents the CfP and Venue information but shows the main themes from accepted papers, emerging clusters and top referenced papers. If there was some tag cloudy visualization of a conference’s content (coming from Blogs, Flickr, Twitter, Slideshare, and accepted papers of course) that can be individually browsed we come to a point where we not only support the offline attendees but also interested people from the community that aren’t able to come to the conference. I totally agree with Graham that we can motivate students and young researchers to focus on a conference even if they can’t go there.

During the week I was able to tell a bit about the concept of Artefact-Actor-Networks and the possibilities it offers to store and analyse dynamic communications. Maybe there will be an option to use the concept for a tool for upcoming conferences like the conference planner was tested this time. What I learned from the keynote of Mike Sharples is that good design-based research must include early user involvement and user studies that may turn all your implementation around. From the TEL-CoP workshop we learned that visualizations that are created by us computer scientists very often are worth null because we don’t note cognitive theories or aren’t sure about our visualization goals.

It also was a great pleasure to see all the STELLAR guys wearing their t-shirts. They really did great dissemination work and I kind of like their approach to establish TEL as an standalone research discipline that must bring closer together computer science, didactics and pedagogics.

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