is it just me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I’m pretty excited because tomorrow is the first meeting of the joint seminar of Nina Heinze (University of Augsburg and Knowledge Media Research Center) and me. Some months ago we talked about a cooperation for STELLAR and came to our teaching tasks in this semester and decided to jointly organise a seminar. What we came up with is pretty cool (at least we think it is) and we described it in a recent paper as:

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):

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Together with my colleague Benedikt Schmidt from TU Darmstadt I am conducting the Knowledge Worker Roles Study in the context of my Ph.D. studies.

In the focus of the study are knowledge workers, the multiple roles they take on during their regular work and the actions they perform during accomplishing their work. A knowledge worker is anyone who develops or uses knowledge in his or her daily working tasks. Furthermore we try to associate application types with the knowledge actions.

We would like to ask you for your participation in the study which will take approximately 25 minutes. Your participation is anonymous and all answers will be treated confidentially.

You can access the survey at http://bit.ly/KWRStudy

Please feel free to forward the link to the survey to your colleagues, retweet or blog about this call for participation.I count on the power of my social network…

We will keep you updated about the results of the study.

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Next week I’ll be in Innsbruck at Grillhof for the JTEL WinterSchool 2010. Luckily I received a funding of the STELLAR Network of Excellence (thx for that) and can enjoy the exchange of ideas with a lot of like-minded Ph.D. students and the crème de la crème of the TEL researchers.

One of our preparation tasks was to prepare a mini Pecha Kucha talk consisting of 6 slides where each of the slides is shown exactly 30 seconds – no matter if you finished what you wanted to say or not. Cristina has uploaded her slides already here.

I hope people will understand what I’m about with Artefact-Actor-Networks and ask good questions. Here are my slides:

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I wish you a happy new year 2010. If you have resolutions for this year I hope you will stay with them and get some things done. For me, I only want to proceed with my Ph.D. and the analysis of online activities of scientific groups with Artefact-Actor-Networks. I hope to cooperate with some cool people and to have fun with what we’re doing. Come on guys, let’s kick ass in the TEL research….

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This week I had the opportunity to present the idea of Artefact-Actor-Networks at the CollaborateCom 2009 conference in Washington D.C. – a conference mainly focussing on collaborative computing and its applications in networking and at the workplace.
Abstract:

Social networks reflect communication, cooperation and loose acquaintances in networked communities. Numerous metrics allow to expose connections, important persons or clusters within these communities. Furthermore, networks can be spanned to connect documents, blog entries or wiki articles. We call such a network an artefact network. In this paper we introduce the approach of Artefact-Actor-Networks that tries to connect social networks and artefact networks in order to make claims on the semantical connections between persons and manifold artefacts. We present practical use cases for Artefact- Actor-Networks and discuss generic and specific semantical requirements and added values through the existence of Artefact-Actor-Networks.

Reference: W. Reinhardt, M. Moi, and T. Varlemann: Artefact-Actor-Networks as tie between social networks and artefact networks. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Collaborative Computing (CollaborateCom’09), November 2009.

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There is much going on these days at Twitter. After they introduced the new lists feature last week and a spanish version of Twitter, today they roll out a limited access to the new re-tweet feature. I can’t wait to see it in action and implemented in Artefact-Actor-Networks – re-tweets will be the next step of mooring Twitter in the Semantic Web. Hopefully they will allow the geolocation for single tweets soon, which would be another great step in a better connected and semantically annotated web world.

The lists feature obtained mixed feedback. Some people like it that they can put their followers in lists according to their location, community, language or any other criterium, others are saying it was a snapshot of the Twitter team. If you look at the profile of Tim Berners-Lee you’ll see he is listed nearly 1200 times. A lot of these lists are  related to technology, the WWW and semantic web. Unfortunately (or luckily) there is not the One technology lists where anyone you get started (mainly because such a list is pure imagination). On the other hand, if you look at the lists that Stephen Downes is on, you’ll get 90 lists, all dealing with education and learning in the web 2.0. Like so often each coin has to sides and we will need to sit and wait what Twitter lists will be useful for. For me I like it that now I can sync my lists with several tools and the Twitter website – a great gain in mobility and consistency.

If you are developing applications built on the Twitter API maybe the experimental Twitter Streaming API is interesting for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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I call the theoretical model behind my current research Artefact-Actor-Networks (AANs) and gave them a dedicated place on the web. From today on there is the domain http://artefact-actor-networks.net where you can stay up-to-date regarding this topic.

Curious about what’s an AAN?

Artefact-Actor-Networks (AANs) are a theoretical model to link social networks and artefact network in order to make claims about the semantic relatedness between users and their respective artefacts. The general goal of AANs is to ease the understanding of how these to knowledge entities (Trier, 2005) are interconnected, how they influence each other and how we can make use of semantic technologies in this field of research

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