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).

The International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL) invites paper submissions for a special issue targeting young researchers in the community of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). This call for papers encourages a review of state-of-the-art of TEL topics, topped with a description of the current and future work carried out by the authors doing research on these topics.

This special issue is directed to all young researchers such as PhD students, post-graduate students, and post-docs working in topics related to TEL both in academia and industry, and from different disciplines of the community (technologists, educationists, psychologists, etc.).

The purpose of this special issue is manifold: (a) to provide a better overview on TEL research lines; (b) to investigate and expand current TEL research themes; (c) to promote international and multidisciplinary collaboration and exchange of ideas among young researchers; (d) to encourage young researchers to formalise their research questions, topics, and methodologies.

The International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL) recognizes the value and importance of the reviewing process in the overall publication process both in shaping the individual manuscript and in highlighting the reliability and reputation of a journal. Within this framework, the identification and selection of reviewers who have expertise and interest in the topics appropriate to each manuscript are essential elements in ensuring a productive review process.

Reviewer profiles

We are inviting:

• Junior reviewers (post-graduate students, PhD students, recent post-docs) working in research related to TEL in both academia and industry, who would like to get experience in being a reviewer and participate in a workshop on article reviewing;
• Experienced reviewers working in research related to TEL who would like to participate in the reviewing process for the special issue.

Workshop for junior reviewers

We will hold a workshop on initiation to article reviewing focusing on the subject of the special issue. The workshop will be online and it will take place on late February. The participation of junior reviewers is mandatory since it is the core of their mentoring process. Experienced reviewers are welcome to join in order to provide advice from their experience.

Review process

Contributions to the Young Researcher Special Issue of the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL) will undergo a double blind review process. All submissions will be reviewed by two or three reviewers, including at least one experienced reviewer. Junior reviewers must have participated in the workshop in order to get assigned articles to review.

How to apply

Please use this form to apply as a reviewer.

Important dates

• Application deadline: 01/02/2012
• Review of full papers: 01/04/2012
• Publication of the special issue: second half of 2012

However, to my knowledge there is no official translation of the System Usability Scale into German. Many people have come up with their own translations but they differ largely in the details. This results in the fact that SUS values stemming from the different translations cannot be compared. In order to provide my German colleagues and especially my students with an widely accepted translation I’m starting this experiment.

With this blog post I try to overcome this situation by crowdsourcing the translation of SUS into German. Therefore I need your help in translating the 10 items of SUS into German. You can use the comment feature of the blog or just send your translation to wolle[at]upb[dot]de. I will also ask some German-Speaking HCI experts to provide their translation of the items. From those submissions I will compile a first draft of the German SUS version. This first draft will then be reverse-translated into English by some experts in order to find out if we changed the meaning with the first translation. If we, indeed, changed the meaning with the translation we will need to re-iterate the translation and create another draft. After the whole process we will arrive at a translation of the SUS into German that is widely accepted and that can serve as the standard translation. After all, this might result in SUS values that are much better comparable as before.

Here are the 10 SUS questions that I would like to receive your German translations for:

1. I think that I would like to use this system frequently
2. I found the system unnecessarily complex
3. I thought the system was easy to use
4. I think that I would need the support of a technical person to be able to use this system
5. I found the various functions in this system were well integrated
6. I thought there was too much inconsistency in this system
7. I would imagine that most people would learn to use this system very quickly
8. I found the system very cumbersome to use
9. I felt very confident using the system
10. I needed to learn a lot of things before I could get going with this system

I’m looking forward to this experiment and hope for active participation.

my papers

an open-source system for visualizing time series data, built on MongoDB, Node and D3. If you send Cube timestamped events (with optional structured data), you can easily build realtime visualizations of aggregate metrics for internal dashboards. Cube speaks WebSockets for low-latency, asynchronous input and output: new events are streamed in, and requested metrics are streamed out as they are computed. (You can also POST events to Cube, if that’s your thing, and collectd integration is included!) Metrics are cached in capped collections, and simple reductions such as sum and max use pyramidal aggregation to improve performance. Visualizations are generated client-side and assembled into dashboards with a few mouse clicks.

They also share a video on building an analytical dashboard in 60 seconds (the video is actually only 31 seconds long though), which shows the capabilities and speed of Cube.

I think it could be a strong candidate for future visualizations in the learning analytics / research analytics applications. What do you think?

• Achilles and the tortoise
• The grandfather paradox
• The Chinese room
• Hilbert’s infinite hotel
• The twin paradox
• Schrödingers Cat

There is more similar content on the Free learning website from The Open University.

There are also Word and PDF versions of the post available.

IJTEL invites paper submissions for a special issue targeting young researchers in the community of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). This call encourages a review of the state-of-the-art in TEL topics, accompanied by a description of the current and future work carried out by the authors researching within these topics.

This special issue is directed at all young researchers such as post-graduate students, PhD students and post-docs working in topics related to TEL both in academia and industry, and from different disciplines of the community (technologists, educationists, psychologists, etc.).

The purpose of the issue is manifold: (a) to provide a better overview of TEL research lines; (b) to investigate and expand current TEL research themes; (c) to promote international and multidisciplinary collaboration and the exchange of ideas among young researchers; (d) to encourage young researchers to formalise their research questions, topics and methodologies.

Young researchers are invited to submit articles with reviews of state-of-the-art research in any TEL-related area. Each focal area covered in this issue shall provide an authoritative, timely, accessible and critical overview on recent developments that are pertinent for TEL. The reviews should not only summarize existing literature, but also analyze, synthesize and interpret the state-of-the-art in a novel framework for thought. For example this can be done:

• by identifying different theories and/or approaches;
• by classifying different research waves (see e.g. Lesk 1995);
• by elaborating different dimensions (see e.g. Sire et al. 2011);
• by developing a taxonomy;
• or by elaborating tensions, disagreements, etc. between the different works of the past.

It is furthermore expected that reviews are written from an interdisciplinary point of view. This means that every article is expected to provide references from at least three disciplines: education, psychology and technology. Furthermore, articles are required to include a section on research challenges that emerge from the state-of-the-art. These challenges must be substantiated by a concrete scenario. Articles that do not follow these basic guidelines will not be considered for publication.

References

Lesk, M. 1996. The seven ages of information retrieval. UDT Occasional Papers, 5.
Sire, S., Bogdanov, E., Gillet, D., Palmer, M., et al. 2011. Introducing qualitative dimensions to analyse the usefulness of Web 2.0 platforms as PLEs. International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 3(1).

Subject Coverage

Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

• Effective learning strategies, models and methodologies
• Deployment of ICTs in educational practice
• Web 2.0 and TEL
• Semantic web and TEL
• Computer-supported collaborative learning
• TEL and knowledge management
• Emotional and motivational aspects of TEL
• Adaptive and personalised hypermedia for TEL
• Ubiquitous and pervasive technologies for TEL
• Intelligent tutoring systems and automated feedback
• TEL practices in different educational/learning contexts
• Policies for the promotion of TEL in education
• Educational games
• 3D virtual environments
• Augmented reality in TEL
• Connecting learners through TEL
• Orchestrating TEL
• Interoperability in TEL
• Learning analytics and educational data mining
• Formative assessment and feedback
• Ambient displays and wearable devices
• Visualisation techniques for learning
• Awareness and reflection in TEL

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper was not originally copyrighted and if it has been completely re-written).

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page.

Important Dates

Submission deadline for full paper: 28 February, 2012

Authors’ notification for full paper: 16 April, 2012

Final paper submission: 5 June, 2012

Editors and Notes

All articles submitted for this special issue will be subject to a one-stage review process. Authors should submit a full article which will be subjected to a double blind peer review before publication. Articles must not exceed 15 pages,and in alignment with common standards for literature reviews, they are expected to include 50 or more references.

Authors may also register on TELeurope, login, and join the group “IJTEL Young Researcher Special Issue”. This call, as well as the submission instructions, can then be found on the group’s page “Call for Papers YRSI 2012″. Additionally, authors can use the group’s discussion section to outline, discuss, and get feedback on their initial ideas. Furthermore, the clinic provides a platform for furthering cross-fertilisation among authors. Authors who would like to invite co-authors to submit a joint paper can indicate that fact when discussing their ideas. People who are interested in a collaboration can then express their interest and leave their contact information, so that the proposal’s responsible authors can contact them.

I created my profile and was surprised by the inconsistent UI and how difficult they made the process of adding my publications. I could not just upload a BibTeX file or link to my Mendeley profile. No, I had to search for my publications in Google Scholar. There is no intelligent support to ease that process (e.g. looking at the co-authors of my already added publications and then do better recommendations). However, the features of Google Scholar Citations are very helpful in assessing your own work. I’m looking forward to what the Google Scholar team is doing with the service in the future….

The really cool think about Reference.me is that it allows you to visually create networks of people that you trust (or worked with or just want to have in that network). There is no such thing as messaging or activity streams, in the first place it’s just a mere interactive network builder. Adding people to your trusted network, however, is big fun. It reminds of adding people to Google+ circles but each circle (actually it’s a box) is divided in four categories: 1) my co-worker, 2) my boss, 3) my report and 4) other). Reference.me calls those circles “skills groups” and aims at creating sub-networks of skillful people. Another interesting feature is to see which other people have in their trusted networks, check their profiles and check what they are looking for.

The third pillar of Reference.me are “Postings” where users can share what the are looking for (typically jobs). While the idea is good, the realization is not that helpful yet. There is no search available, no recommendations of jobs fitting my profile and so on. As the service is still in beta, I guess the folks at Reference.me are currently working on that. By all means, Reference.me is one of this recent startups that we should have an eye on, as it may add value to the way we connect to people and become aware of their relations and opportunities that may arise from our connections

There are four parts of the introduction of the Top 40:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

From the list I especially like the following projects as they could really help making science more open, using alternative metrics or innovative approaches of approaching the whole science business:

• ReaderMeter
• PaperCritic
• ScienceCard
• Total-Impact

What are your favorites?

• The Role of Reflection in Maturing Organizational Know-how
• Computer Support for Collaborative Reflection on Captured Teamwork Data
• An Architecture for the Automated Detection of Text Indicators of Reflection
• Stimulating Reflection through Engagement in Social Relationships
• Affective Metacognitive Scaffolding for the Enhancement of Experiential Training for Adult Training
• Awareness Support in Scientific Events with SETapp
• Ad Hoc Transient Groups: Instruments for Awareness in Learning Networks
• Enhancement of traditional Business Process Management with reflection – a new perspective for Organisational Learning?

Inspired by the Summarizr features I was thinking about some analytics tools that would be easily usable during conferences (on a tablet or mobile) or in educational settings where we use Twitter a lot. Luckily two of my undergraduate students decided that they wanted to implement something like it and decided to build two competing applications. One is using PHP, while the other is built on top of node.js. Both of them use jQuery mobile for the UI. However, both students took very different roads to analyze the hashtag communities in yourTwapperKeeper archives and so they are able to present different data as well. I can’t tell you which my favorite is right now but you can test the two apps yourself. The PHP-based app is called Twapperlytics while the node.js app is called Twapperlyzer. Both have some features in common like

• list of users in the archive
• list of mentioned people in the archive
• list of messages / live messages from Twitter
• word cloud of the content (with filters on certain time spans)
• overview of the used hashtags in the archive

I am very interested in your feedback (and so are my students). You can use the comments here or the respective contact sections in the applications

WARNING: The analysis of large archives (> 10.000 tweets) takes long (mainly caused by the analysis of short URLs). In fact we never tried analyzing one of the 1.000.000 tweets archives. Both apps are to be considered as proof of concept, so if something is not working immediately, be patient …

This is Plagiarism Explained by Common Craft.

You have something in common with the smartest people in the world. You see, everyone has ideas. We use our minds to create something original, whether it’s a poem, a drawing, a song, or a scientific paper.

Some of the most important ideas are published and make it into books, journals, newspapers and trustworthy websites that become the building blocks for things we all learn.

But ideas are also very personal, and we need dependable ways to keep track of the people behind the ideas we use because they deserve credit for their contribution, just as you do if someone uses your idea. Passing off another person’s ideas or words as your own, without credit, is called plagiarism. Whether it’s your friend’s term paper or words of a well-known author, plagiarism is cheating and dishonest.

Meet Cassie, a university student. She has an assignment to write a paper about changing weather patterns. Cassie’s project involves building on other people’s ideas that she finds in books, magazines, and websites.

She’s not the kind of person who would plagiarize by turning in someone else’s work, but she is aware that plagiarism can happen accidentally, so she follows some basic rules:

First, when she quotes an author directly, she uses quotations marks around the words to show that they are not hers, alongside a mention of the author’s name. She even does this in her notes to make sure she doesn’t forget.

Second, she’s careful to use only her own words when she’s not quoting directly. She can summarize or paraphrase an idea, as long as she’s accurate and references the original source. For example, she begins with “As Smith found”.

Third, ideas like drawings, speeches, music, structural models, and statistics can also be plagiarized. Like words, she can use them as long as she gives credit.

And lastly, she’s aware that some ideas are common knowledge and don’t need a source. For example, the idea that rain falls from clouds is common knowledge and doesn’t need a source, but rainfall measurements by a weather agency does require credit.

A few weeks later Cassie turned in her paper with the confidence that she had avoided plagiarism and maybe even provided some new ideas that other students in her field could use in the future, with credit, of course.

I’m Lee LeFever, and this has been Plagiarism Explained by Common Craft.

interactive visualization can help increase end-user interest in data exploration

If you have a look at what the designers at NY Times have created, you’ll be very impressed by the way the let you interact with the data. The used metaphor is very clear and it continuously incorporates new data. The available filters let you easily find a question that YOU are interested in, rather than the question(s) that the visual designers did want to answer. On the other hand, it is not so easily aware how many percent of the answers are in which area on the chart. Also, it is not clear how they decided which feeling would be “good”, “bad” or “neutral”. However, this kind of interactive visualization would be a very interesting type of awareness and exploration support for all stakeholders involved in Learning Analytics.

• Social Mention
• Google Alerts
• Twitter Alerts
• Addictomatic
• Board Tracker
• Keotag
• Kurrently
• Topsy
• Twoolr
• Paper.li
• Sysomos
• Radian6
• Klout
• Attensity360
• Tweetfell
• Context Sense
• Rank Speed
• Brand Monitor
• Trackur

However, we are looking for more tools to be part of our analysis. The only restriction is that the tool should be able to monitor Social Media and to provide analytical features that can be used as input for decision support. Can you help us in suggesting more tools (incl. links)?

A Call for Papers (CfP) is a small, but well-structured and information-rich message with a relatively short lifespan. CfP play an important role in academic life, not just as an advertisement format, but also as a trigger of and advance organiser for collaborative academic writing. This paper explores the possibilities to create a comprehensive ontology for CfP so that is would be relevant and useful in Research 2.0 context for two main target groups: authors involved in collaborative writing of academic papers, and conference organisers or journal editors. Our study is conducted in three phases. First, we identify existing ontologies and other representation frameworks, which could provide concepts relevant for CfP. Next, a sample of conference CfPs is analysed and compared, to find out the common structures and peculiarities, which could be used for extending the existing ontologies. Finally, we propose Call ontology together with two usage scenarios.

So far, CfPs are mainly distributed via e-mails, event websites, dedicated blogs or CfP-aggregators like wikicfp. In this paper, authors from Estonia, Serbia and Germany joined forces and described what we think could be the future of CfP semantic annotation, distribution and retrieval. In one of the next iterations of ginkgo we plan to incorporate a RDFa annotation of our CfPs as well as the provision of an SPARQL endpoint that allows gathering of CfPs available in the system. Vladimir presented the paper and put this slides online. If you’re interested in the paper get in touch with me.

Based on a literature study we identified different roles and phases that are typically found in the management of scientific events such as conferences, symposia or workshops. ginkgo’s aim is to support all of them in a easy-to-use and socially connected way. We acknowledge the great power of dedicated tools like EasyChair, Twitter or Lanyrd in the context of scientific events but see the need for an integrated solution that combines social networking features and those of classic conference management systems. ginkgo is our approach to overcome the still existing silos in what makes an important part of researchers’ work.

The presentation was received pretty positive with lots of good questions and possible extensions towards recommendations, mobile applications and open science. We know that we still have a long road ahead but we are tensioned where ginkgo will lead us.

• Mendeley: http://www.mendeley.com/
• TELEurope: http://www.teleurope.eu/
• ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/
• Academia.edu: http://academia.edu/
• Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/
• Microsoft Academic Search: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/
• BiomedExperts (mainly as stimulus for UI design in the Research 2.0 context): http://www.biomedexperts.com/

while others have plenty of other applications areas, but my main usage is for science. Those are

• Twapperkeeper (an archiver of Tweets): http://twapperkeeper.com
• Delicious: http://www.delicious.com
• Google Books: http://books.google.com/
• PaperC (German startup of the year 2010): http://paperc.de/
• Etherpad: http://piratepad.net/
• Dropbox: http://www.dropbox.com/
• Google Docs & Forms: http://docs.google.com
• Flashmeeting: http://flashmeeting.open.ac.uk
• BibDesk (the best BibTeX editor for Mac): http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/

I’m sure I missed some sites that I go to regularly (Google & Facebook, can you help me please?). What are your favorite Research 2.0 tools and places?

Back in 2010 we asked for participation in an online questionnaire that tried to find out the existence of distinguishable roles of knowledge workers and the particular knowledge actions they perform. Today — after a long to-ing and fro-ing with the publisher — the results of the study have been published in the Journal of Knowledge and Process Management operated by Wiley as Knowledge Worker Roles and Actions — Results of Two Empirical Studies.

This paper proposes a typology of knowledge workers and their respective knowledge actions. The extant literature on the definition of knowledge work actions is examined and evaluated. The existing classifications of roles of knowledge workers are evaluated and extended with additional literature and empirical findings on the definition of a typology of knowledge worker roles. The empirical data in this paper comes from two studies. In the Task Execution Study 20, a knowledge worker had to carry out a selection of prepared tasks. The computer system that the participants were using was equipped with sensors, so that the execution steps of the tasks could be traced and analyzed. The data from the second study comes from a questionnaire survey of knowledge workers, which yielded 43 responses. The paper shows that the sampled users take on all identified knowledge worker roles, and that the knowledge work actions can be recognized in the sensor data from the first study. This paper contributes to the literature by proposing a new way of classifying the roles of knowledge workers and the knowledge actions they perform during their daily work. Furthermore, the paper provides a preliminary understanding of the relation between knowledge-intense work tasks, the roles they are executed in, and the tools that are used to accomplish the respective tasks.

In the paper we present 10 roles of knowledge workers and 13 knowledge actions. The knowledge worker roles are:

1. Controller,
2. Helper,
3. Learner,
4. Linker,
5. Networker,
6. Organizer,
7. Retriever,
8. Sharer,
9. Solver, and
10. Tracker

The identified knowledge actions are

1. Acquisition,
2. Analyze,
3. Authoring,
4. Co-authoring,
5. Information search
6. Dissemination,
7. Expert search,
8. Feedback,
9. Formal & Informal Learning,
10. Information organization,
11. Monitoring,
12. Networking and
13. Service search

I hope you find the results presented in the article relevant for your own research. If you are not able to access the article due to paywall restrictions please let me know.

Today I received word that I’m invited to speak at the conference; an invitation that I happily accept. Steve Wheeler describes the CONCEDE (CONtent Creation Excellence through Dialogue in Education) as a project that

is investigating the uses of user generated content in higher education, and seeks to discover who creates and uses this content. [They] are also interested in how we can benchmark the quality of such content.

I’m really looking forward to the conference and the exchange with like-minded people. Thanks to the jury and for the invitation ;)

The first thing they asked us was to come up with as many people influencing our daily work as possible. Additional to the names of the respective persons we had to specify our relationship (e.g. internal colleague, project partner, family …), the strength of the tie between us and the tools/technologies we use to connect to them. Also, we had to specify what we feel we learn from the person. This task was very challenging and given more time than twenty minutes, I’d come up with many more than my 15 people. A thing that would really help with such tasks would be  regular triggers that ‘force’ you to reflect about your relation to someone you interact with (mail, twitter, facebook). If some tool would regularly ask the above learning-related questions that would certainly help in raising self-awareness and awareness about your connections. The organizers will now analyze the persons the workshop participants entered and come up with a visualization of that.

After that they asked us three questions we answered on Twitter using the #plntweet hashtag (see the archive in our Twapperkeeper).

1. What motivates you to engage through your network?
2. Why do you feel you learn from your peers?
3. What do you learn from your network?

Not only that the discussion attracted many people from outside the workshop (some people came into the workshop room because of the engaging twitter stream), the tweetstorming method also created a vast number of responses and ideas. I’m interested in the analysis of the tweets and what Eleni and Nino can extract from the data.

The experiment also let me reflect about the power of my professional / learning network (moreover supported by Steve Wheeler’s article on his awesome PLN). The people I follow on Twitter and Facebook and Mendeley and all the other social networks are so creative and a continuous source of information supporting me, my awareness, triggering my reflection about issues that are related to my work and beyond. They bring objects (people, events, artefacts, communities) to my consciousness that would remain hidden otherwise. They comment on ideas that I share and come up with different perspectives and various answers to questions I ask. Steve Wheeler said: “I’m relying on you PLN. Without you I am just a single mind” and I added to this by saying

why do I learn from my peers? they are much smarter than I am #plntweet #ple_sou

13.07.2011 3:15 pm via SeesmicReplyRetweetFavorite

@wollepb

Wolfgang Reinhardt

After all, I’d like to thank you all for being essential part of my daily learning, for sharing resources and giving feedback. YOU ARE AWESOME.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/h-k-d/4733395781/

Next week I’ll be at the PLE conference in Southampton. I’m chairing a pre-conference workshop together with my colleague Thomas Ullmann (Open University UK) on Awareness and Reflection in Personal Learning Environments (#arple11 on Twitter). We asked people to submit position papers that should be door opener for discussions and activities in the workshop. Each participant is asked to give a max 5 minutes presentation answering 4 simple questions:

1. What are you researching?
2. What are the challenges of your research?
3. What should we, as the participants of this workshop, focus on?
4. What would be on the research agenda of the next 5 years (regarding awarenss & reflection in PLEs)?

I already uploaded my slides to Slideshare and I am keen to know your position. If you are in Southampton on Monday already, jon us for the workshop. That will be highly interactive, using scissors, glue and stuff to build PLEs and so. If you’re not around, we’d be happy if you would answer the questions and upload the slides to the Slideshare event page (just upload your slidedeck to Slideshare, copy the URL and use the “Paste URL” option to add your slides to the event.)

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/visionnewspaper/314107087/

Thanks Tim Bartel for this very nice presentation covering the recent plagiarism cases in Germany and how to how not to  deal with it.

Now, we are interested in how the criteria are perceived in an international context, in different working domains and under gender aspects. Therefore, we set up a slightly adapted version of our survey and aim at reaching out to international companies that use wikis for knowledge management purposes. The survey is available in English and German and tends to medium and large companies. If you work in such a company and use wikis in your daily working routines or if you know of such companies, feel free to take the survey yourself or forward it to colleagues.

Here are the links again

• English version of the study: http://bit.ly/studyiqwikis2011-en
• German version of the study: http://bit.ly/studyiqwikis2011-de

Once the survey is evaluated, I will report about the results here…

Ein offenes Blog könnte die Barriere zum Informationsaustausch und zur Kooperation senken, denn man muss nun ja nur einen Blogpost über die eigene Arbeit und den Fortschritt machen und vielleicht ein paar Kommentare schreiben. Ich bin gespannt, ob das Experiment Studentenblogs DDI@UPB aufgeht und die Abschlussarbeiten und die jeweiligen Studenten stärker miteinander vernetzt werden. Ich würde mich darüber freuen. Zudem erzeugt das öffentlich zugängliche Blog vielleicht auch etwas Interesse an unseren Arbeiten außerhalb der Uni Paderborn.

Ok, time to turn those notifications of. Log in to your account, go to settings, click on notifications (here’s a shortcut) and deselect the checkboxes “I’m sent a reply or mentioned” (btw: is this correct English?), “My Tweets are marked as favorites” and finally “My Tweets are retweeted”. Your setting might look like this afterwards and your inbox receives less bacn.

There might be occasions where having those settings turned on, but I suggest to carefully decide when to turn them on …

Generell ist meine Aussage jedoch, dass jeder Student bei einer 1.0 beginnt und sich diese Note durch das Ausbleiben von Erläuterungen, nicht hergestellten Bezügen, unsauberer Arbeitsweise, fehlenden Implementierungen etc. nach unten verschlechtern kann. Fragt Euch also nicht, wie ihr die Arbeit bestehen könnt, sondern wie ihr die 1.0 behaltet.

Prinzipiell setzt sich bei mir die Note zur Abschlussarbeit aus den folgenden Komponenten zusammen:

1. Arbeitsweise
2. Schriftliche Ausarbeitung
3. Vortrag
4. Implementierung (optional)

The workshop aims to build an interdisciplinary understanding of issues regarding awareness and reflection in networked learning. It will attract participants from social science, computer science, design, psychology, and learning sciences to challenge the understanding of the fields of awareness and reflection in Technology Enhanced Learning. The participants will present and discuss their papers and work together on an integrated roadmap for future research in this field.

Background

In today’s economy, knowledge is one of the most important resources for both individuals and organizations. People invest significant efforts in the design and development of learning resources and software that strives to enhance the learning successes of individuals and groups. Networking, exchanging ideas and using tools for research on the Web are essential parts of their learning practice. While learners are, to a certain degree, aware about their relations in these networks and the partners of their communication, technology can make explicit related activities beyond the individual focus of attention. Additionally, technology can help learners bring knowledge and knowledge needs from their individual learning space into networked environments. It is important to note that not all activities relevant for learning already happen in online networks. Rather, motivated individuals engage in these networks, but there are lots more learners who could profit from such an engagement, but just never take the necessary steps. Here, technology can help e.g. by raising awareness about learner’s activities or those of others, related communities, information needs, etc.

Computer-mediated communication has the advantage that it can create mirroring artefacts, which capture learning analytic data to help learners to become aware and to reflect. These can be (1) via mirroring information, which would normally be visible in face-to-face situations, but which can be viewed as a highlight or learning-focused selection, and (2) mirroring information, which is normally invisible in face-to-face situations, but that has the potential to improve the working or learning process. This information could help learners to become aware of their constantly changing connections and interactions beyond their individual context and help them to reflect upon.

Please visit the workshop website to find more information on the workshop’s background and motivation: http://teleurope.eu/arnets11

Topics of interest

The ARNets workshop focuses on current research trends and challenges in the field of awareness and reflection in the domain of learning networks / networked learning. The topics include, but are not limited to:

• Awareness and reflection in learning networks
• Awareness and reflection for lifelong learning.
• Different views on awareness and reflection, depending on discipline, and goal
• Awareness of and reflection about social context, knowledge, artefacts and processes
• Awareness and reflection in organizational learning
• Semantic Web and awareness
• Orchestration of awareness and reflection
• Awareness and reflection in online learning / research environments
• Activation of reflection processes
• Awareness of pivotal events and their reflection support
• Awareness and reflection tools
• Pedagogical/didactic arrangements
• Awareness and reflection analytics
• Challenges in researching awareness and reflection
• Awareness and group formation, peer-support
• Future scenarios

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished work. Demonstrations are encouraged:

• Full papers: (12-16 pages) that describe problems, needs, novel approaches and frameworks within the scope of the workshop. Empirical evaluation papers and industrial experience reports are welcome for submission.
• Short papers (6-10 pages) that state the position of the authors within the scope of the workshop and describe solution concepts and work in progress.
• Posters and demo papers (1-2 pages) that summarize preliminary work results

Please submit your proposal via the ginkgo event management system at http://gkgo.me/arnets11

All submitted contributions will be peer-reviewed by at least two members of the program committee for originality, significance and quality. The papers will be published in the CEUR-WS.org workshops proceedings (a publication series with ISSN). Furthermore selected papers will be part of a Special Issue in a well-known international Journal (currently in negotiations). Submissions should use the Springer LCNS template. We encourage you to produce your submission using LaTeX as typesetting tool and the respective LaTeX template.

Important dates

Deadline for papers: 11 July 2011
Notification of acceptance: 10 August 2011
Deadline camera-ready: 01 September 2011
Dates of the workshop: 20 or 21 September 2011
Dates of the conference: 20-23 September 2011

Organizers

Wolfgang Reinhardt, University of Paderborn (Germany), @wollepb
Thomas D. Ullmann, The Open University (UK), @thomasullmann
Peter Scott, The Open University (UK), @peter_scott
Viktoria Pammer, Know Center (Austria), @contextgroupkc
Owen Conlan, Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), @oconlan
Adriana Berlanga, Open University of the Netherlands (Netherlands) @adrianaberlanga

Background and Motivation

The workshop is intended to discuss and build an interdisciplinary understanding for the role of awareness and reflection in Personal Learning Environments. While different researchers have stressed the importance of awareness and reflection support in PLEs there is no agreed set of such functionalities in existence yet. Also we lack a structured overview of awareness ans reflections issues that learners are facing in their daily learning activities. As both researchers and developers interested in the PLE domain seem to be in need of such information in order to best tailor their R&D activities this workshop aims at collecting requirements and open issues in the domain.

The workshop aims to attract participants from educational science, psychology, social science, computer science, and design to challenge the understanding of the research fields of awareness and reflection in Personal Learning Environments. We also aim to attract developers from academia and economy that implement personalizable learning environments. The workshop might attract researchers from the projects ROLE, MATURE, MIRROR, ImREAL, LTfLLL, STELLAR.

Goal of the workshop

The concept of the workshop is target to collaboratively develop an integrated roadmap for future research and development in the domain. Therefore we designed the workshop as a highly interactive session. Starting with a short introduction of the work of the participants and their statements about the future challenges of their research we will work towards a roadmap of research in awareness and reflection with focus on Personal Learning Environments. For more information please visit the workshop website at TELeurope.

Submission

People interested in the workshop are required to submit discussion papers (min 5; max. 6 pages) that will be used to structure the hand-on activities and discussions in the workshop. The discussion papers can elaborate existing issues with awareness and reflection in PLEs, sketch ideas for supporting functionalities or discuss the results of ongoing research in the domain. The participants in the workshop will shortly (5 minutes) present the content of their papers and then work together on the following topics:

1. Requirements on awareness and reflection support in PLEs
2. Awareness and reflection widgets (implementations, visions)
3. Awareness and reflection Mash-Ups
4. Awareness and reflection scenarios for formal or informal learning
5. Awareness and reflection support for researchers
6. Theory on awareness and reflection
7. Methods researching awareness and reflection

Important dates

Submission deadline: 20.06.2011
Notification of acceptance: 27.06.2011
Camera-ready version: 04.07.2011

Submission system and format

Please submit your paper via the ginkgo event management system: http://gkgo.me/arple11

Submissions should use the Springer LCNS template. We encourage you to produce your submission using LaTeX as typesetting tool and the respective LaTeX template.

Organiziers

Wolfgang Reinhardt (University of Paderborn, Germany, @wollepb)
Thomas Daniel Ullmann (Open University of the UK, @thomasullmann)

I’d like to thank Samsung for supporting our unconventional idea and a bachelor thesis project.

Call for Papers

Science 2.0 has become an umbrella term for 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 three 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. 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.

This one-day special track is a program item of i-KNOW 2011, the 11^th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies which takes place in Graz, Austria from September 7^th to September 9^th 2011. The workshop provides an interdisciplinary forum for international scientists and practitioners to discuss theoretical and practical aspects of Science 2.0. i-KNOW 2011 brings together international researchers and practitioners from the fields of knowledge management and knowledge technologies. The conference will cover relevant aspects from the fields of Knowledge Management, Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Services, Social Media, Enterprise 2.0 and the Social Web. i-KNOW 2011 will be held concurrently with I-SEMANTICS 2011, the International Conference on Semantic Systems.

Please note that there is a related call for participation in the dataTEL Challenge. Powered by STELLAR & TEAM (Mendeley) presenting the respective approaches.

Topics

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

Important Dates

30 April 2011: Submission of full papers (8 pages)

31 May 2011: Notification of acceptance

30 June 2011: Camera ready version (8 pages)

7 Sept.-9 Sept. 2011: i-KNOW 2011 Conference

Submission Procedure

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

Notification of Acceptance and Publishing

Authors of accepted papers will be notified by 31 May 2011. Accepted papers will be published within the i-KNOW 2011 conference proceedings. The conference proceedings of i-KNOW 2011 will be published by ACM ICPS and available in the ACM Digital Library. At least one author of an accepted paper must register for i-KNOW 2011 before the deadline for camera ready versions (30 June 2011) in order to get the paper published in the conference proceedings.

Chairs of RDSRP 2011

The organization team of the special track on Practices, Recommendation, and Data Sharing in Science 2.0 consists of the following people:

• Michael Granitzer, Know-Center Graz (Austria)
• Stefanie Lindstaedt, Know-Center Graz (Austria)
• Peter Kraker, Know-Center Graz (Austria)
• Kris Jack, Mendeley Ltd (UK)

Program Committee

• Hendrik Drachsler, Open Universiteit Nederland (Netherlands)
• Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
• Denis Gillet, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland)
• Greg Grefenstette, Exalead (France)
• Nina Heinze, Knowledge Media Research Center (Germany)
• Eelco Herder, L3S Research Center (Germany)
• Min-Yen Kan, National University of Singapore (Singapore)
• Daniel Lemire, LICEF Research Center (Canada)
• Michael Nentwich, Institute of Technology Assessment (Austria)
• Wolfgang Reinhardt, University of Paderborn (Germany)
• Dario Taraborelli, Wikimedia Foundation (USA)
• Katrin Weller, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (Germany)
• Fridolin Wild, The Open University (UK)

Getting a paper accepted into an academic journal requires passage through the often opaque process of peer-review. Scientists make a big deal of peer-review, because it is supposed to be the filter that separates mere opinions from trusted, citable sources. However, the peer-review process in science has close analogs in any “old-media” field, such as TV or radio. Like academic journals, these are mediums of limited capacity, and there are always more submissions (or ideas for submissions) than there are openings.  Selecting content worthy enough for distribution is made by the field’s establishment, which effectively silences what they don’t choose. This is especially true of peer-review as practiced in prestigious journals, defined as the ones that get their contributors faculty jobs.

He goes on with explaining how GitHub changed the way Open Source Software is developed and how contributing gems to the Rails community gives the contributor prestige and reputation.

Similarly, anyone can publish a gem to GitHub, and published gems are prioritized by the numbers of developers “watching” for updates or “forking ” new development lines.  This is the social web at work, where the audience gets to decide what and whom to pay attention to all by itself, without requiring assistance from all-powerful editorial committees.  One can complain that lowering barriers to publication leads to content that on average is of lower quality.  But the abundance of non-significant projects in GitHub does not detract from its usability, because those projects are never brought to anyone’s attention.

Finally, he also talks about an important factor for developers to participate in Open Source Software development and contributions to the community.

Gems on GitHub are not just code.  They also have authors whose relative contributions are automatically catalogued by Git, as shown in this impact graph for the popular and open source jQuery project.  If you’ve visited a web application recently, chances are you’ve benefitted from jQuery, which makes it easy for a web engineer to turn static web sites into responsive web applications (think interactions with buttons instead of navigation through links).  This impact graph can let you know precisely which developers are responsible for this awesome-ness. In this way, GitHub acts as an efficient, incorruptible “central bank” of the prestige supply. Furthermore, unlike in Google, great contributions in GitHub bring prestige to their creators, not their domain names.  If you wanted to hire a contractor to work on a web application, GitHub can let you know who has publicly demonstrated the skills you’d need.  It’s thus not surprising that GitHub profiles are supplanting traditional resume items, such as a CS degree, for discerning employers looking to hire top talent.

I’m wondering if we see some of those GitHub features in OpenScience in the next years. Maybe the STELLAR dataTEL theme team will come up with an usable solution for sharing TEL data sets, that others could reuse and thus give reputation to the contributors of the data set. Maybe we will see real Open Archives of publications that will provide Open Data of the usage metrics. And finally I hope to see a real change in how scholarly communication as a whole is taking place – without content sitting behind paywalls but still being considered for your “professional record”. For me it’s a shame that it’s still the fact that

[...] at the beginning of an academic’s career, before citations accumulate, reputation rests largely on what journals they have published in.

In my case I was interested in the topic “open science” and this is what came out. Cool, right?

Abstract:

The increasing agility of business requires an accelerated adaptation of organizations to continuously changing conditions. Individual and organizational learning are prominent means to achieve this. Hereby learning is always accompanied by the development of knowledge artifacts. For the entire of learning and artifact development the term knowledge maturing has been introduced recently, which focuses on these three manifestations of knowledge: cognifacts, sociofacts, and artifacts. In this paper we will focus on sociofacts as the subject-bound knowledge manifestation of social actions. Sociofacts are rooted in respective cognifacts play an independent role due to their binding to collective actions and subjects. These are particularly difficult to grasp but play a decisive role for the performance of organizations and the collaboration in there.The presented paper approaches the notion of sociofacts, discusses them on a theoretical level and establishes a first formal notation for sociofacts. We use the case of a merger between two companies to describe the advantages of sociofact analysis for such process. Some sociofact related problems during a merger are described and possible solutions are presented. We identify technical approaches for seizing sociofacts from tool-mediated social interaction and discuss open question for future research.

Reference:
Riss, Uwe, Magenheim, Johannes, Reinhardt, Wolfgang, Nelkner, Tobias, and Hinkelmann, Knut. “Added Value of Sociofact Analysis for Business Agility” AAAI Spring Symposium Series 2011. Available at: http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/SSS/SSS11/paper/view/2444.

Bookmark it on Mendeley

Anyone who can point me to examples of where visualizations are used to directly support communication between people?

09.04.2011 2:37 pm via KiwiReplyRetweetFavorite

@wollepb

Wolfgang Reinhardt

I am looking for examples of visual communication but not in the sense of art pedagogy, visual metaphors or visual messages. I am searching for examples for visualizations that directly support the communication between people. One example that I have in mind are interactive organizational structure diagrams, where you could directly send messages to people in the diagram. Another example would be a visualization of a Twitter network where you easily could send out tweets to that community.

Have you seen anything like this or are you willing to share other examples of this “visual communication” that you’d like to have yourself?

Tonight we started the closed beta of ginkgo, a cool new tool for the management of scientific events.

ginkgo is no classical conference management system. It rather combines conference management functions with those known from social networking sites. The goal of ginkgo is to raise awareness of researchers, make the organization of scientific events easier and more fun. We are currently working hard on getting the last pieces together and providing you with a fresh approach to the management of scientific events pretty soon. In the meantime you might want to join the beta list, follow ginkgo on Twitter or Facebook or follow Julian and me on Twitter for latest updates.

Informatik macchiato macht es einfach, über Informatik, die fast alle Bereiche unseres täglichen Lebens durchdringt, Bescheid zu wissen. Es werden mit Analogien aus dem Alltag und mit Cartoons Grundkonzepte veranschaulicht. Der Humor überwindet so manche abstrakte Hürde. Auf diese Weise werden wichtige Inhalte und Fachmethoden der Informatik vermittelt, die in Schule, Studium und Berufswelt zunehmend gefragt werden.

Zusammen mit dem Pearson Verlag starten wir nun eine Verlosungsaktion zum Buch. Dazu haben wir ein Probekapitel zu Algorithmen (oder auch “Das Informatik Kochstudio“) online gestellt, für welches wir von Euch Feedback erwarten. Jede Rezension muss auf diesen Blog-Eintrag verlinken und unter allen “Einsendern” verlosen wir 3 Exemplare des Buches. Die Gewinner werden per E-Mail kontaktiert und die Versandadresse wird dann ausgetauscht. Nach ein paar Tagen erreicht die Gewinner dann kostenfrei ein druckfrisches Exemplar von Informatik Macchiato nach Hause. Die Verlosungsaktion läuft bis zum 30.04.2011. Die Gewinner werden bis spätestens 06.05.2011 benachrichtigt.

Researchers are the archetype of knowledge workers.

For me this so obvious that it is even hard to argument for it. If you look at the typical job descriptions of researcher positions, they have to create new knowledge using a multitude of methods. Researchers are carrying out non-linear and non-routine tasks that require a lot of cognitive effort, combination and recontextualization. From my point of view that’s exactly how I would describe knowledge workers.

What is your take on this? Do you agree to the statement or do you think this is pure rubbish?

It was about someone explaining how they made lab experiments reproducible. What I remember is that they compiled a zip file or something similar (was it SCORM?) and that they put detailed information in there so anyone could use their lab package, use the data the provided or collect their own, set up the experiment environment just as they did and simply reproduce the whole experiment.

Have you read a paper that sounds similar to what I described? Could you point me to a resource so I could re-read the paper? Maybe you have read something else in the domain of open science that might be similar to the above described and point me to that? Your help is much appreciated…

Die offizielle Bekanntmachung der Universität liest sich wie folgt:

Die Universität Paderborn hat ein neues Institut: Am Mittwoch, 23. Februar 2011, fand unter Leitung von Reinhard Keil, Professor in der Fachgruppe Informatik und Gesellschaft, die konstituierende Sitzung des Projektrats des E-Learning-Labors (e-lab) statt.

Ziel des e-lab ist es, neue, innovative Lehr- und Lernszenarien im Bereich E-Learning zu entwickeln und möglichst alltagsnah zu erproben. Die im Rahmen des e-lab zur Verfügung stehende Plattform ist mit der in der Lehre an der Universität Paderborn eingesetzten Plattform koaLA weitestgehend identisch. Daher erlaubt sie, Konzepte, Techniken und Methoden unter alltagsnahen Bedingungen zu erproben und zu evaluieren. Auf diese Weise sollen der Transfer von der Forschung in den Universitätsalltag und die Weiterentwicklung der Infrastruktur möglichst eng aufeinander abgestimmt sein.

Das e-lab und seine Technik wird von Marcel Jakoblew als Koordinator betreut. Derzeit gibt es 12 Projekte, die von der Video-Annotation bis zum webbasierten Training reichen. Sie werden größtenteils in Kooperation mit anderen Forschergruppen der Universität oder externen Partnern durchgeführt. Um die Integration des e-lab in die Universität zu  unterstützen, bilden die Projektpartner einen  Projektrat. Mitglieder sind Dr. Bettina Blanck, Andreas Brennecke, Dr. Ferdinand Ferber, Prof. Dr. Johannes Magenheim, Prof. Dr. Dorothee Meister, Prof. Dr. Niclas Schaper und aus Detmold Detlef Schubert.

Das e-lab bietet sich allen Interessierten, die im Bereich E-Learning forschen oder die universitäre Infrastruktur auf ihre Bedürfnisse anpassen wollen, als Partner an, um gemeinsam Projektmittel zu akquirieren oder Umsetzungsstrategien zu entwickeln.

 

We regret to inform our users that on March 20, 2011 we will be removing the “Export and Download” and “API” features of the TwapperKeeper.com website.

While we realize that these features are very important important to many of our users, this change comes at the request of Twitter to bring our service into alignment with the API Terms of Service (http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms) regarding redistribution and syndication of content.

Obviously, there are strange things going on in the Twitter world. Twitter’s ToS state that developers should not develop applications that attempts or encourages others to:

sell, rent, lease, sublicense, redistribute, or syndicate the Twitter API or Twitter Content to any third party for such party to develop additional products or services without prior written approval from Twitter;

The question is how you could analyze hashtag communities in Twitter, if not using methods and tools like TwapperKeeper. Twitter does not provide API access to search results that are older than three two ten days (even less if the hahstag is frequently used). Moreover, recently they stopped whitelisting accounts to have a higher API limit than the usual.

TwapperKeeper’s John O’Brien suggests to set up a yourTwapperKeeper instance to continue the usage of the TwapperKeeper API. As I understand Twitter’s ToS as above, this also would violate the ToS. Does this mean that we no longer can access collections of tweets in an easy way? Does it mean that also tools like Grabeeter will need to shut down their API?

In the past we have done many analyses using data from TwapperKeeper and are currently developing apps that build directly on the TwapperKeeper API. Many of those analyses and tools simply won’t work anymore, if we can’t access the data. Seems like Twitter is silently concocting some serious premium features that will make us pay for accessing – even older – tweets. What do you think?

I think the purpose of education is to engage our students to be critical thinker and to look outside the box #purposed

02.02.2011 10:46 am via KiwiReplyRetweetFavorite

@wollepb

Wolfgang Reinhardt

Steve Jobs once said in a speech at Stanford University “you’ve got to find work you love”. You should not settle for someone’s idea of what you should do in life.

Okay you say, but where is the connection to (higher) education? For me it means that we should challenge our students to not only execute tasks we assign to them. Students, the upcoming working force and hopefully research elite should be able to think outside the box. We should engage them to say “No. I don’t think this the best way to do it.” The purpose of education should be making our students responsible beings that try their own way. We should be there and guide their way without disrupting their creativeness. We should give them possibilities to try new things. They will fail sometimes but they will learn and succeed. This way we will give them time and opportunity to find something that they truly love to do, what challenges them and that keeps them motivated.

After formal education, work is going to fill a large portion of their time. They will most probably face problems that we didn’t prepare them for. They will use technologies we have no access to in the educational system. The pace of the real world will be much faster than in any educational setting. What we educators can do to prepare them? We have to equip them with the skills and know-how to solve novel problems and to stay focused. Our courses have to be embedded in real-world scenarios so they keep being motivated. We have to bring the variety of tools, techniques and opinions into the classroom. THEY have to make decisions and they have to deal with the results.

In my courses and with all the theses I supervise I am led by Steve Jobs’ words: You gotta find something that you love, that inspires and challenges you. So tell me what you are interested in, what problems you want to solve, what technologies you find hip. After having a picture of my students’ goals, I adapt my research goals and do you know what? Most of the times they produce awesome results. I am convinced they would never produce the same high quality if they would need to do something that they didn’t like. Never ever.

So what is the purpose of education? Engage them. To try. To fail. To fail often. To succeed and learn. Give them opportunities to find something they truly love.

For the analyses shown in this article we used Artefact-Actor-Networks (Reinhardt, Moi & Varlemann, 2009, AANs) for obtaining and storing data from Twitter and Gephi for calculating metrics and visualizing the resulting networks. Gephi is an Open Source Software tailored for graph and network analysis. In AANs we distinguish between actor networks that represent each user in a learning service as node. In artifact networks each digital object (e.g. a tweet) is represented as a node. For every learning service that is used we analyze the interactions. If we are interested in a more holistic view about the ongoing interactions, consolidated artifact and actor networks can be analyzed. Moreover, with the AAN approach artifact and actor networks can be combined for even more sophisticated analyses.

Artifact-level analysis

To track interaction and communication in the seminar we asked the participants to use the tag #fsln10 for all course-related issues on Social Media channels. In total we analyzed 431 tweets, 384 Delicious bookmarks, 14 SlideShare documents and 61 documents on Mendeley. In this article we focus solely on the analysis of the social network that arose from the usage of Twitter during the seminar. From the 431 tweets we extracted over 80 keywords using semantic analysis services. Moreover, we extracted all other hashtags that were used. For analyzing the semantic relations of artifacts and actors we are able to apply different measures: the connectedness via shared keywords and hashtags as well as the semantic similarity of the artifacts. Figure 1 shows the artifact network of tweets that are connected via shared keywords or hashtags.

Figure 1: Artifact network of tweets connected via shared keywords and hashtags

The color and size of the node reflect the degree of the respective artifact: the darker and larger the node, the more connections it has to other tweets. The light and small nodes at the bottom left corner have no keyword connection to the other artifacts. Digging deeper in the artifact network, we can identify several clusters of artifacts that deal with special seminar topics. Using the semantic connections between the respective artifacts it is easy to find out how those clusters are formed: clusters between Twitter artifacts arise when they share common keywords or hashtags or are replies or retweets to each other. Figure 2 shows an example visual analysis of tweets connected via the keywords ‘mendeley’, ‘dropbox’, ‘mixxt’, and ‘skype’ which represent learning services used in the seminar. Figure 2 also depicts vertices with the labels ‘stellarnet’ and ‘aan’ referring to projects that were associated to the seminar. Finally, the Figure also shows that artifacts are connected with vertices labeled ‘hasReply’ and ‘isReply’ that indicate the existence of a reply connection.

Figure 2: Detailed inspection of connections between tweets

In its current version Gephi is not able to visualize multiple vertices between two nodes, leading to the impression that tweets are always only connected with one relation. Figure 3 tackles this problem and visualizes the artifact network based on the semantic similarity between tweets. An edge between two tweets thus represents their similarity – the thicker and more colored an edge, the higher the semantic similarity between the tweets. Compared to Figure 2 we do not consider replies and retweets for the calculation of semantic similarity as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Artifact network of tweets connected via semantic similarity

What becomes obvious from the artifact visualizations is the fact that most of the tweets have no structural or semantic connection to other tweets (79% of the tweets are isolated). While this can partly be explained with the process of topic extraction that we applied in this study (it is difficult to extract keywords and meaningful content from only 140 characters), the missing structural connections point to an improvable interaction structure within the educational setting. Analyzing the social relations in actor networks allows us to apply metrics of classical social network analysis (SNA) to the seminar and to investigate the interaction patterns more directly.

Actor-level analysis

We will now investigate the actor network that was formed by the Twitter users that used the #fsln10 hashtag. In this analysis there is a connection between two actors if they have written similar tweets. The more similar the tweets are that they have written, the higher the weight of the edge between them. Regarding this setup we found 21 actors that could be connected in the actor network (9 seminar participants, 2 supervisors, 10 external discussion participants). One seminar participant does not show up in the actor network as he did not write tweets that were similar to others. If we had applied other measures for building up the network (e.g. the following relations, replies or retweets) he would have been included. The network has a density of 0,276, which is above average compared to other Twitter networks.

Figure 4: Actor network of Twitter users connected via semantic similarity

Considering the degree centrality in the actor network, the actor wollepb (a supervisor) is most central. wollepb is called a local hero, as the degree centrality calculates centrality only based on local network properties. A local hero attracts many direct connections on himself; in the context of the seminar he published many semantically similar tweets. The closeness centrality measure (Figure 5a) additionally incorporates indirect connections on shortest paths into the calculation. wollepb still is the most central actor but looses centrality with this measure. Finally, when considering the betweenness centrality (Figure 5b) the centrality of those actors that are on only few shortest paths in the network is declining. Users who act as mediators in the network are becoming more central with this measure. Two participants of the seminar (rolwi and AlexanderPLN) are thus also connecting the other seminar participants.

Figure 5a: Applying different centrality measures on the actor network (closeness centrality)

Figure 5b: Applying different centrality measures on the actor network (betweenness centrality)

Discussion

The impact of our evaluations is that for one we believe we have found a best practice example of how students can be confronted with state-of-the-art technologies and projects while still at university in a way that fosters skills and competencies they will need in the workplace. This type of interconnectedness between institutional, informal and workplace learning is focus of this endeavor. Further we see the possibility to integrate students with their fresh, creative and sometimes unconventional ideas in real-world research and industry projects, which can provide added value for both the students as well as the involved projects.

On the other hand our analyses show that we need to further engage students to use Social Media tools as a means for interacting within a seminar. Realizing that a supervisor is the most central person in a seminar is not surprising; the gap between the Twitter adoption of supervisors and students should give us food for thought on how to better motivate students to use the tools. Noticeably, the students used other tools that seem to be less public and without the need for direct interactions far more frequently. The students were heavily bookmarking web pages in Delicious and uploaded references to Mendeley. Also they used Skype for one-to-one interactions on a regular basis.

Also we see that the artifact networks are not very dense (meaning that the published tweets are rather broad in their contents). While this is partly because of the applied analysis method, it also points to the fact that it might be a good approach to narrow down the seminar topics to espouse a more lively topical exchange. Moreover, the analyses presented in this article were done subsequently to the seminar. In order to react in a timelier manner about the discussed phenomena we would need tools for instant social media monitoring in educational settings. Those tools should then obtain, analyze and visually present the results. Exploring the interactions and topical connectedness of students’ work will help us to better supervise learning designs that make extensive use of Social Media.

The course design has caught much attention during its first round of implementation (see the number of external persons that were involved in communication) and allowed to broaden the scope of the seminar. The seminar is being carried out again in the fall semester of 2010. In the summer term 2011 we will integrate a third partner from another German university into the seminar and focus on the design and development of a Social Media Monitoring tool for educational contexts as described above.

References

Jonassen, D.H. (1991). Objectivism versus constructivism: do we need a new philosophical paradigm? Educational Technology Research and Development, 39(3):5–14.

Jonassen, D.H. (1999). Designing constructivist learning environments. Instructional design theories and models: A new paradigm of instructional theory, 2:371–396.

W. Reinhardt, M. Moi, and T. Varlemann. Artefact-Actor-Networks as tie between social networks and artefact networks. In Proceedings of the 5th International ICST Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing (CollaborateCom 2009), November 2009.

Acknowledgment

Thanks go to my graduate student Matthias Moi for visualizing the networks and applying SNA metrics to them.

We call the tool GINKGO and it will be launching soon. If you are interested to see what we have in mind, join the mailing list and be informed about all the updates…

EC-TEL is a unique setting for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in Technology Enhanced Learning from Europe and other continents to meet together and exchange on the current challenges and advances in the field. At EC-TEL, experts and young researchers in Computer Science, Education, Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Social Science, as well as entrepreneurs have the opportunity to establish collaborations, strengthen their links and cross-fertilize their core disciplines.

EC-TEL 2011will push further the Ubiquitous Learning paradigm by not only tackling the challenges of exploiting new trendy devices in various contexts, but also by investigating ways to meet and support formally and informally the learners in their learning playgrounds and social environments thanks to innovative scenarios.

*** CONFERENCE TOPICS ***

From both research and experience perspective the following topics of interest to the conference include, but are not limited to:

Technological underpinning

* Large scale sharing and interoperability

* Personalization, user modeling and adaptation

* Context-aware systems

* Social computing

* Social media

* Semantic Web

* Mobile technologies

* Serious games and 3D virtual worlds

* Network infrastructures and architectures for TEL

* Sensors and sensor networks

* Augmented reaility

* Roomware and ubiquitous learning

* Data mining and information retrieval

* Recommender systems for TEL

* Natural language processing and latent semantic analysis

* eLearning specifications and standards

* Learning analytics

Pedagogical underpinning

* Problem- and project-based learning / Inquiry based learning

* Computer supported collaborative learning

* Collaborative knowledge building

* Game-based and simulation-based learning

* Story-telling and reflection-based learning

* Instructional design and design approaches

* Communities of learners and communities of practice

* Teaching techniques and strategies for online learning

* Learner motivation and engagement

* Evaluation methods for TEL

Individual, social &organizational learning processes

* Cognitive mechanisms in knowledge acquisition and construction

* Self-regulated and self-directed learning

* Reflective learning

* Social processes in teams and communities

* Social awareness

* Knowledge management and organizational learning

* Sustainability and TEL business models and cases

* Business-learning models

* Trust and reputation in TEL

* Fitness and evolvability of learning environments

Learning contexts and domains

* Applications of TEL in various domains

* Formal education: initial (K-12, higher education), post-initial (continuing education)

* Workplace learning in small, medium and large companies

* Aggregated learning at the workplace Distance and online learning

* Lifelong learning (cradle to grave)

* Vocational training

* Informal learning

* Non-formal learning

* Ubiquitous learning

* Knowledge management

TEL in developing countries

* ICT Inclusion for learning

* Digital divide and learning

* Generation divide and learning

* Education policies

* Rural learning

TEL, functional diversity and users with special needs

* Accessible learning for all

* Visual, hearing and physical impairments

* Psycho-pedagogic support for users

* Educational guidance for tutors

* Adapted learning flow, content and monitoring process

* Standards about accessibility and learning

*** DEMONSTRATIONS ***

The EC-TEL Demonstration is your chance to fully engage EC-TEL attendees at a personal level by letting them see, touch, squeeze, or hear your visions for the future of TEL. We expect that your Demonstration will be a reliably running prototype of your vision ready to be tried out, questioned, and interacted with. In particular, we encourage Demonstration submissions that complement an EC-TEL Paper submission, so that attendees can get a direct experience of your work in addition to the scientific presentation.

*** WORKSHOP ORGANISATION ***

EC-TEL 2011 offers the opportunity to host several workshops. Parties interested to organize a workshop are asked to submit a proposal of max. 4 pages outlining the theme of the workshop, workshop format, expected participants and domains addressed, dissemination activities, programme committee, and organizational requirements. A separate call will be published in parallel. Proposals should be submitted via the EasyChair system of EC-TEL.

*** PROJECT MEETINGS ***

In addition to the regular sessions and workshops, EC-TEL offers a unique opportunity for European Projects in TEL to held face-to-face meetings. Please contact the local organization Chair at your earliest convenience to book meeting rooms.

*** IMPORTANT DATES ***

Paper & demonstration submission: 04 April 2011

Paper & demonstration acceptance: 31 May 2011

Camera-ready final papers: 30 June 2011

Workshop proposals: 04 April 2011

Workshop acceptance: 09 May 2011

Workshops: 20-21 September 2011

Conference: 22-23 September 2011

*** SUBMISSION FORMATS ***

All papers will be reviewed through a non-blind review process. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Proceedings will be published by Springer within their “Lecture Notes in Computer Science” series which is ranked in the ISI Web of Knowledge. The use of supplied template is mandatory: http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-72376-0

* Full Papers (max. 14 pages)

* Short Papers and Posters (max. 6 pages)

What could have the interviewee said when the transcript reads as:

i want to definition demolish is

Got it? No? Well the interviewee said:

Probably the one that I have seen the most is…

You want another try? Well, what is the name of the popular tool for managing scientific publications?

Amandeli

Tush!

Mendeley

would have been the correct answer.

Let’s give it another try. Which of these words can be found in dictionary usual in the trade?

thier, anouther, reguarding, structer, projuct’s, Eoropian, structor’s, alot, contac, useually, fications, bejorn

None. That are the words our interviewees used

their, another, regarding, structure, projects, European, structure (again), a lot, contact, usually, citations, beyond

Next time I use MTurk, I have to be more carefully with accepting transcripts and increment the percentage of the HIT approval rate (to 99% or something).

Abstract:

Scientific writing is an essential part of a student’s and researcher’s everyday life. In this paper we investigate the particularities of scientific writing and explore the features and limitations of existing tools for scientific writing. Deriving from this analysis and an online survey of the scientific writing processes of students and researchers at the University of Paderborn, we identify key principles to simplify scientific writing and reviewing. Finally, we introduce a novel approach to support scientific writing with a tool called SciFlow that builds on these principles and state of the art technologies like cloud computing.

Reference:

Eichler F., Reinhardt W. Simplifying the Scientific Writing and Review Process with SciFlow. Future Internet. 2010; 2(4):645-661.

]]> http://isitjustme.de/2010/12/simplifying-the-scientific-writing-and-review-process-with-sciflow/feed/ 2 http://isitjustme.de/2010/12/freaky-wireless-technology/ http://isitjustme.de/2010/12/freaky-wireless-technology/#comments Sun, 05 Dec 2010 12:15:56 +0000 Wolfgang Reinhardt http://isitjustme.de/?p=460 Continue reading →]]> While all geeks are waiting for even more wireless technologies to arrive (where is the widespread availabilty of wireless power???) there are some folks that might find this a bit freaky…

Thanks T3N for posting the photo in your Facebook stream…

As for the creation of HITs in MTurk I happily link to the blog post of Andy Daio. I followed is step-for-step instructions, reused his template HIT template and learned how to embed a Flash-based audio player that helps your workers to listen to the audio.

Altogether I had 13 interviews with about 11 hours of audio that should be transcribed. The interviews were in English and most of the interviewees were non-native speakers. I split the audio files in equally long parts (between 4:45 and 5:25) so that all workers had to process the same amount of the interview. Furthermore, I remove some organizational chatter at the beginning (“can you hear me?” “yes I can hear you” “thanks very much ….”) and the chatter at the end (“please keep me updated about the results” “sure Iwill, by the way how is your project xyz …”). I uploaded the audio files to a local web server and created the HITs as described in Andy’s post.

I assumed that the workers would need around 2 hours for a 5 minute audio file to transcribe (actually they were much faster) and payed $2 per completed assignment. I let the assignments be automatically approved after 7 days (you might want to change this).

My 120 audio files were transcribed in only about 14 hours. As I mentioned earlier, I’m more than satisfied with the results BUT there are some things that you should consider when doing this yourself:

• Decide on whether you want a verbose (including um, eh, pauses, duplicate words and so on) or non-verbose transcription. If you don’t tell the worker how to transcribe they will do want they like to.
• Give your workers some background about the audio they are to transcribe (it is only a part of an interview, the topic is XYZ and so on)
• When you split your audio files, try to create the files with 2 seconds of overlap, so you don’t miss any words that are right on the cut.
• Check your transcriptions as soon as they’re ready. I had a very busy week and couldn’t check the transcripts right away and only saw some very bad transcripts after they’ve been automatically accepted.
• Be aware that the transcripts may require a lot of manual polishing. Especially if you interview topic is not about public domain knowledge you should consider that the workers may not know what you are talking about and “guess” the right words.
• Workers will try to cheat. They will start to transcribe but not finish their tasks. Whenever you spot this, reject the worker’s transcription.
• Transcripts have varying quality. MTurk worker used to be Americans with an above-average level of university degree. With Amazon’s move to allow workers from other countries doing the job there are some indicators that the transcription quality is decreasing. You will notice those differences in one interview. While the first three parts of an interview may be perfectly transcribed, the next part could be full of [xx] or ?? where the worker didn’t understand the interviewer or just didn’t know the word.

Altogether I paid around $260 (€200) for the transcription of 11 hours of interviews. The whole process with splitting, creating the HITs, the workers’ transcription, my review and creation of aggregated transcripts took me about one week (you could be faster when you check the HITs more regularly and create your aggregated transcripts faster). Now I will need to rehear the interview and do the polishing of the transcripts.

Would I recommend using MTurk in your research? Oh yes, I’d do it every time again.

When you start getting friended by your grandmother, I think that’s when it starts to lose its cool…

No comment…

***************************************
Call for papers and demos

1st International Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Research Communities (ARRC11)
to be held in conjunction with CSCW 2011, Hangzhou (China)

March 19-23, 2011

http://thales.cs.upb.de/arrc11

***************************************

*** Background ***
Traditionally the concept of awareness is used in the research field of CSCW to re-establish awareness conditions of face-to-face situations with visual cues showing for example, who is online or working on a document. In the field of perception psychology, awareness is the state or ability to focus on certain stimuli of the environment while ignoring others. Here, being aware of something does not necessarily mean to understand it. In marketing, awareness usually relates to the degree consumers knows about a certain product. Generating public awareness is seemed as a task of the media to establish topics the public should know about.
This workshop will discuss and build an interdisciplinary understanding of implicit and explicit structures researchers build through their practices using the Web. Considering the multitude of views on awareness we ask: “What does awareness mean for technology-enhanced learning (TEL)? How does it relate to reflection as one of the key abilities of researchers? While researchers are aware of their relations in their networks, technology establishes related activities which are beyond the individuals focus of attention. This is possible due to two advantages of computer-mediated communication: (1) selectively mirroring information that would be visible in face-to-face situations, and (2) mirroring information that would not be visible in face-to-face situations, but that can improve the working or learning process. This information could help researchers to become aware of their constantly changing connections and interactions beyond their individual context and to reflect this. This workshop aims to challenge the understanding of awareness and reflection in technology-enhanced learning.

*** Topic of interest ***
The ARRC workshop focuses on current research trends in the field of awareness and reflection in the domain of research communities. The workshop seeks to attract quality research papers that propose solutions to the issues identified above. The workshop also welcomes papers that comment how the application of social media can impact on real life experiences in such communities. It aims to bring together scientists, designers and engineers who work on designing and/or developing the above mentioned solutions, as well as practitioners who use and evaluate them in diverse authentic environments. We encourage authors to present their interdisciplinary results and such that focused on technical, psychological and/or pedagogical challenges.

# Different views on awareness
# Social awareness
# Knowledge awareness
# Artefact awareness
# Process awareness
# Context awareness
# Awareness-support in research communities
# Awareness in organizational learning
# Semantic Web and awareness
# Orchestration of awareness and reflection
# Awareness and reflection in online research environments
# Bridging formal and informal research environments and their consequences for awareness and reflection
# Activation of reflection processes
# Awareness of pivotal events and their reflection support

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished work. Including demonstrations is explicitly encouraged. The following contributions are possible:

# Short papers (6-10 pages) that state the position of the authors within the scope of the workshop and describe solution concepts and work in progress in a premature state.
# Full papers: (12-16 pages) that describe problems, needs, novel approaches and frameworks within the scope of the workshop. Empirical evaluation papers and industrial experience reports are welcome for submission.
# Posters and demo papers (1-2 pages) that summarize preliminary work results

All submitted contributions will be peer-reviewed by at least two members of the program committee for originality, significance and quality. The workshop proceedings will be published in CEUR-WS.org a publication series with ISSN. Furthermore selected papers will be part of a Special Issue in a well-known international Journal (currently in negotiations).

*** Workshop format ***
Papers presented at the workshop will need to engage participants in discussions on the presented key topics. To achieve this aim, all accepted papers will be clustered according to their topics in (2-4 clusters). Each such cluster will contain not more than 4 papers, each of which will be presented by one of its authors. The presentation of each paper will be 20 minutes. Authors will be asked to follow a structured template for their presentation (focusing on the problem addressed in their paper, the methodology followed, and the results of their work). After the short presentations, each cluster will have 90 minutes for discussion and preparation of a final round table discussion with all clusters. This closing session will summarize the outcomes of the single workshop sessions and determining future activities in the research field of awareness and activation of reflection in learning and research communities.

*** Dates ***
# December 17, 2010 >> deadline submission of 2 pages abstract
# December 30, 2010 >> paper acceptance notification
# January 07, 2011 >> Early bird registration for ARRC11 (please register for the workshop until this date).
# January 21, 2011 >> deadline for the full papers
# February 11, 2011 >> results of the review for the full papers
# February 25, 2011 >> deadline for camera-ready copies
# April 2011 >> publication of selected papers in a Journal’s Special Issue (currently in negotiations with several journals

*** Organizers ***
Wolfgang Reinhardt (University of Paderborn, Germany)
Nina Heinze, (Knowledge Media Research Center, Germany)
Thomas Ullmann, (Open University of the UK)

*** Program committee ***
# Ilona Buchem, Beuth University of Applied Sciences (Germany)
# Cristina Costa, University of Salford (UK)
# Erik Duval, KU Leuven (Belgium)
# Tanja Engelmann, Knowledge Media Research Center (Germany)
# Jean-Marie Favre, University of Grenoble (France)
# Angela Fessel, Know Center Graz (Austria)
# Mark Hahnel, Imperial College (UK)
# Jim Hensman, Coventry University (UK)
# Marco Kalz, Open University (The Netherlands)
# Reinhard Keil, University of Paderborn (Germany)
# Peter Kraker, Know Center Graz (Austria)
# Peter Scott, Open University (UK)
# Paulo Simões, Air Force (Portugal)
# Peter Sloep, Open University (The Netherlands)
# Carsten Ullrich, Shanghai Jiao Tung University (China)
# Riina Vuorikari, European Schoolnet (Belgium)
# Steve Wheeler, University of Plymouth (UK)
# Fridolin Wild, Open University (UK)
# Katrin Wodzicki, Knowledge Media Research Center (Germany)
# Martin Wolpers, FIT (Germany)

Today I submitted the first audio of an interview to the service. I allowed the workers two days of time for doing the transcription (52 minutes altogether, split in chunks of 5 minutes). I followed the superb tutorial of Andy Baio, reused his templates and even found out that there is a reusable MP3 player in Google Reader that I used to provide the workers with a Flash-based player for the audio chunks. If you ever wondered about the demographics of the service, the folks  someone from PARC provides a detailed overview about it (here is an earlier version of the demographics data).

I’ll tell you what happens, how satisfied I am and what it cost me in the end in a follow-up post…

Social media are increasingly popular platforms for collaboration and quick information sharing. This volume is a collection of reports on how these technologies are being used to educate educators with social media in creative and effective ways. Social networking technologies enable the integration of students and alumni in co-curricular activities in exciting and still evolving ways. The use of wikis, blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, Yahoo Pipes, Diigo, Second Life, Moodle, and other Web 2.0 technologies are shown in vivid examples and insightful critiques. The processes, design, delivery and evaluation of instruction using social media are examined in detail and include such topics as: the use of social media in developing countries for new approaches to teaching as support for individual and peer-based learning; new teaching orientations premised on social media such as focused distraction; enhancing in-class participation; how instructors are increasing the technical expertise that is needed by educators to develop their own 21st century curricula projects; and, creating an ecosystem for life-long learning through social media.

A father and son from Brooklyn, New York sent an iPhone and a HD camera into space in order to record a video from the earth’s curvature. You may now think, what the hell… (basically that’s what I thought first). Then I watched the video and was really stunned. Not only because they spent months of planning and sent electronic equipment to space that was worth several hundreds of Dollar risking they’d never see the stuff again and not only about the fact that both camera and iPhone continued to work in space and until safe landing, but also because of such a stunning example of real technology-enhanced learning. I mean this kid has had the opportunity of seeing physics work, he saw a video that his camera captured that proves the earth is round. He was able to GPS-track his e-package on they down to earth (thx Google) and … I wish we had the possibilities of doing such cool things when I was that age (maybe I’d do some other stuff now, being at NASA for example…)

Boy, TEL is great. I’m really looking forward to more of these examples (I’m wondering what my boy will ask me to do some day – so stay tuned).

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

We think the time has now come to introduce a set of guidelines for Twitter – ‘Twettiquette’ if you like [...] Here it is below, in all it’s unexpurgated glory. It is, we think, a humourous, lighthearted take on using Twitter. We hope it makes you smile, think and tweet some more.

Dropbox is making the transition back to school easy by giving everyone with an .edu email address double the credit for referrals. That’s 500 MB per friend you invite! That goes for everyone you’ve already referred too.

Yes you read correctly. They give you an additional 250MB for all friends you already invited in the past. All you have to do is to go to the EDU landing page and enter your schools mail address (it doesn’t have to end with .edu as long as Dropbox recognizes your school), they will send you a verification mail and that’s it. That way I got additional 5GB to my account. If you don’t already have a Dropbox account you can join here (which will give me some more space as well…).

NB: If Dropbox doesn’t recognize your school, just drop them a line and they add your school. Cool, isn’t it?

As I am always looking for feedback on the process I implement, let me know what you think in the comments or over at GetSatisfaction.com

Next week I will be in Barcelona for the EC-TEL conference 2010, where already lots of people joined the soharc for the conference. There are also events for the MUPPLE workshop, the RecSysTEL workshop, the Research 2.0 workshop and the MATEL workshop. If you also are at EC-TEL 2010 or any of the satellite events feel free to join the event on soharc and increase your networking opportunities.

We took the accepted papers of the workshop (15 papers) and used ParsCit to extract the references and text content of the papers. Afterwards, we analyzed the references and calculated networks of co-authorship, co-citation and bibliographic coupling (using algorithms we implemented in the latest Artefact-Actor-Network architecture). Finally, we used Gephi and Wordle for generating the visualizations (day-wise, session-wise and paper-wise).

Now we need to investigate how people like the additional representations we provide them before a workshop and if it helps them to be more aware about the papers presented at workshop and their connection. Also we would like to explore how such visualizations could help workshop organizers in better select contributions for workshop/conference sessions…

Here are the (German) slides from the talk

You can also read the whole article (also in German of course…)
Anwendungsszenarien für ein Werkzeug zur Video-Annotation in der universitären Lehre

Driven from the fact that many people in my community are collecting data from social media (you remember all of our Twitter analysis and the cool Delicious visualizations, don’t you?) and always struggling with the question: where to get clean data from, the idea of soharc was born.

What you can do in soharc is fairly simple: you create your online profile with the handles you possess and we’ll create a dedicated page for you. You can create “scientific” events or projects and join them, so everybody who’s interested can see what you are doing. In order to support scientific awareness and solve the problem of how to get clean data, we’ll be soon offering a SWRC export of your social media profile and those of an event’s or project’s participants. This will allow the aggregation of social media data for analyses with multiple tools, done by different people and organizations based on a well-defined and user-generated dataset.

Cool, right? Let me know what you think about the social handle archive in the comments. I’d like to thank Peter Kraker and Gonzalo Parra for the chats we had on soharc and their alpha tests of the service.

NB: SWRC export is not yet enabled as we are discussing a new version of the ontology together with researchers from STELLAR and FZI.

When you walk around the city it’s fun to spot new places, add them to the map and receive +5 points and another +5 points for being there for the first time. It’s motivating to see the leader board and see that you are not first. It’s cool to see other people checking-in at the same location and being able to talk to them. But Foursquare is targeted on party people (at least it seems to be) and not on scientists. Furthermore, adding friends manually and building-up a new community in Foursquare seems to be a blocker for me. Maybe Facebook Places will add some more value to it. Maybe Mendeley will introduce Places to their mobile application. I’d like to know which people go to which conferences and to which sessions. And I’d like to spot new people to follow, based on their conference attendance and research interests. That would be researcher’s location awareness to me. And Foursquare can’t deliver this.

I quit Foursquare today, so I don’t bother you with tweets and Facebook updates anymore.

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…

Btw: You can see my check-ins at Foursquare

…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?

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)

No Dissertation from ticoneva on Vimeo.

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!

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!!!)

Research2.0 is in essence a Web2.0 approach to how we do research. Research2.0 creates conversations between researchers, enables them to discuss their findings and connects them with others. Thus, Research2.0 can accelerate the diffusion of knowledge.

Topics for this workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Evaluation of existing Research2.0 tools and infrastructures from a TEL perspective
• Development of TEL-related use case scenarios for Research2.0 tools and infrastructures
• Influence of Research2.0 tools and technologies on scientific practices in TEL
• Formats and protocols for Research2.0 data exchange (linked data, RSS, BuRST, …)
• Ownership and privacy of research information
• Practices of the diverse Technology Enhanced Learning disciplines, and how Research2.0 can influence them

Format

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished work. The following types of contributions are possible:

• Short papers (3-5 pages) that state the position of the authors on issues relevant to the workshop or work in progress, even when in very early state.
• Full papers: (8-12 pages) that describe problems, needs, novel approaches and frameworks within the scope of the workshop. In this category, empirical evaluation papers and industrial experience reports are welcome for submission.

Each presenter will be linked to related papers from other presenters and will be asked to compare in the presentation how the works of others relates to their own work.

The presentation of unfinished ideas, tools under development and especially failures is explicitly encouraged. This includes the presentation and discussion of tools and their real-world usability.

Prior to the workshop, a dedicated group on TEL Europe will be opened to:

• facilitate discussions among participants before and after the conference;
• post submitted papers for an open peer review;
• publish information and news about the workshop;
• collect reactions through social media on the workshop.

All presentations and discussions will be broadcast via Flashmeeting to attract more feedback, and to document the event. Online questions and comments will be explicitly taken into account during the workshop.

Important Dates

• Paper submission: 27 June 2010
• Paper acceptance: 11 July 2010
• Main Conference: 28 September-1 October 2010

Paper submission and questions

Please submit your paper at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=research20.

Feel free to contact erik.duval@cs.kuleuven.be if you have any questions!

We created a spreadsheet on Google that is open for editing – so if you are interested in this topic and would like to contribute tools to our list, just go ahead and enter your suggestion here.

Thanks for your support.

With annotations, third-party Twitter developers can add any additional metadata to a Twitter post. [...] And a tweet can have more than one annotation attached to it. This extra data will initially start off small – Twitter developer Marcel Molina said it will “probably” be around 512 bytes. But over time, it will gradually grow larger as Twitter rolls out the feature and scales up in order to support it. The company hopes to have it end up “around 2K,” says Molina. How developers use that extra space is entirely up to them – there can be one giant piece of extra data attached to a tweet or a thousand tiny ones.

In a blog post Raffi Krikorian posted a useful map of the topography of a tweet. The picture could serve as cheat sheet for any developer dealing with Twitter… See also Raffi’s first ideas on what to do with annotations:

map-of-a-tweet

While it works on the page and for others, the integration in my (simple wordpress) blog fails. Does it work for you?

http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-research

Abstract:

Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
Be aware of wonder.

Latest draft version:
All I need to know about Twitter in Education I Learned in Kindergarten

Abstract:

The use of microblogging applications (especially Twitter) is becoming increasingly commonplace in a variety of settings. Today, active conference participants can post messages on microblogging platforms to exchange information quickly and in real-time. Recent research work was based on quantitative analyses in terms of the number of tweets or active Twitter users within a specific time period. In this paper, we examine the content of the contributions and aim to analyze how useful posts are for the “listening” Internet auditorium. It can be shown that only a few microblogs are of interest for non-participants of the specific event and that meaningful usage of a microblogging application requires greater care than previously anticipated.

Final draft:

You can find the final draft of our paper on Scribd.
Getting Granular on Twitter: Tweets from a Conference and their Limited Usefulness for Non-Participants

Cristina blogs:

The presentation aims to be informal and interactive. I welcome your thoughts, questions and reflections about the small chunks of information I have provided in the voicethreads. I also hope we continue this conversation else where. I have some ideas how we could do this, but I prefer to let you to decide where we could ‘meet again’. I’ll be waiting for your suggestions!
And yes, this presentation only barely scratches the surface of Social Media, its advantages and implications. But we do have to start somewhere. I hope this will just be a start of something bigger. Thank you all for taking part in this. I also want to thank those who have helped me with this presentation. You will find them in the voicethread.

I am very thankful for this contribution as it shows not only the power of one’s network but also broadens the scope of our students. They collaborate with students from another University, a different course of studies and in addition they have the chance to listen to the thoughts of Cristina. What else could they ask for?

Microsoft Academic Search is a free academic search engine developed by Microsoft Research Asia, which also serves as a test-bed for our object-level vertical search research. Microsoft Academic Search provides many innovative ways to explore scientific papers, conferences, journals, and authors, connecting millions of scholars, students, librarians, and other users. Objects in the search results are sorted based on two factors: their relevance to the query and their global importance. The relevance score of an object is computed by its attributes; the importance score of an object is calculated by its relationships with other objects.

The tool itself as well as the visualization look pretty mature and are pretty easy to handle: 1) insert the name of an author and see his network. A click on an author reveals his details such as publication count and impact indices. Try it your self at http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer.aspx and also check the help section.

Even if there are heavy transformations in technology, science and society taking place in the recent years, university courses often still emphasize heads-on teaching methods with classic learning methods and learning resources. At the end of a course students had often acquired second hand knowledge, which is often detached from experience-based, constructive learning. The use of new media, the process of working in teams with application of these services as well as problem-solving scenarios remain out of students’ grasp. In this paper we introduce a participative and cooperative seminar setting at two German Universities that tries to overcome those limitations. We report about the pedagogic design and the practical implementation of the course, list objectives and intentions and describe the organizational structure of the seminar.

So if you notice a lot of buzz on Twitter, Facebook and Delicious tagged with #fsln10 – it because of our cool students that rock the social web. A tweetwall for the seminar can be found here

Here are the introductory slides from the seminar (in German):

Im Frühjahr 2011 wird das neue interdisziplinäre Lehrbuch rund um das Thema Lernen und Lehren mit Technologien erscheinen. Es wird aktuelle Themen, Einsatzgebiete, Forschungs- ergebnisse und Technologien aufereiten, die in vorhandenen Lehrbüchern (noch) nicht dargestellt wurden, deren Bedarf aber durchaus gegeben ist. Zudem haben sich die Initatoren des Projektes den freien Zugang auf Bildungsmaterialien an ihre Fahnen gehefet: Dieses Lehrbuch soll nicht nur als Buch, sondern kapitelweise auch frei verfügbar zum Herunterladen aus dem Internet angeboten werden. Natürlich werden dabei auch Verweise auf weitere ausgewählte Online-Ressourcen vorhanden sein. Mit diesem neuen Ansatz sollen die ständig zunehmenden Kurse, Seminare, Vorlesungen und Studiengänge im Bereich des technologiegestützten Lernens im deutschsprachigen Raum gezielt unterstützt werden. Ihre Vorschläge für Kapitel, Themen, Kooperatonen, Autor(inn)en und Gutachter(innen) sind herzlich willkommen!

Und hier noch der ansprechend gemachte digitale Aufhänger für das Projekt. Respekt. Echt cool. Ich würde mal sagen: auf geht’s…