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…

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)

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!

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.

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?

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):

Also check out the website of the DOLLI project.

Microblogging has become a very popular social networking activity in the recent years. The limitation of 140 characters constrains the user to send concise messages. Twitter and other popular microblogging tools have acted as catalysts for a flurry of new and fast exchange of thoughts and artefacts, and from these activities a new area of research has emerged. There are case studies for the application of microblogging in scientific conferences, educational courses, distributed software engineering teams and corporate project groups.

A number of questions are emerging from the early use of micro-blogs as social networking tools that connect communities of practice and interest. These include: How can microblogs support the development of professional communities of practice? How can microblogs be effectively incorporated into formalised professional learning? How can we measure the optimum levels of engagement necessary for microblogs to be successful social networking tools within professional communities of practice? How are communities of practice enhanced or enriched as a result of the application of microblogs? What about issues of security, privacy and intellectual property – how can these be protected? Do the filtering features on microblogs constitute semantic tools?

The workshop focuses on current research trends in the application of microblogging in various domains. The workshop seeks to attract quality research papers that propose solutions to the issues identified above. The workshop also seeks papers that comment how the application of micro-blogging can impact on real life experiences in diverse communities. It aims to bring together scientists 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.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Design and development of microblogging tools
• Application of micro-blogging in teaching scenarios
• Application of micro-blogging in software engineering scenarios
• Communication and interaction issues using microblogging
• Understanding the dynamics of microblogging communities
• Harnessing the semantic filtering capabilities of microblogging
• Visualization issues of microblogging
• Evaluation issues and case studies
• Smart devices for microblogging in education
• Using microblogging for enhancing creativity in education
• Digital identities and microblogging
• Ethical and safety issue
• Harshtagging and tweckling
• Developing pedagogies around the use of microblogging
• Live microblogging and micro-narratives
• Language Learning with microblogging
• Engagement analysis and microblogging

Papers up to 12 but no less than 8 pages are solicited. All submissions should be original and not published or under consideration elsewhere. Papers must correspond to the WCC 2010 conference format requirements, as they are described at the conference web site (http://www.wcc2010.com/call-for-papers/submission-instructions). All accepted papers must be presented at the conference by at least one of the authors. One of the authors of accepted paper needs to register for the workshop.

Today we had 3 (more or less interactive) talks by Dai Griffiths, Jon Dron, and Marie Joubert that had the overall topic of Orchestrating Learning and Services Used. Gai did an good overview to SOA, WS-* and the applications in industry and learning (have a look at the eFramework) and Jon asked us to think about the possible education use cases of a wooden stick. That was really great fun. The last lecture by Marie covered the tasks of the STELLARnetwork of excellence and what orchestration of learning really means. She asked four questions that you always should keep in mind during your Ph.D. research:

1. What are you researching?
2. How are you researching?
3. For what reason are you researching? and
4. What is going to provide evidence for your research?

The attendees are very active in the social semantic web and thus the Twitter channel for the #jtelws2010 hashtag is very active.

I created a Twitter list for the attendees of the WinterSchool at http://twitter.com/wollepb/jtelws2010 which will be extended as soon as I spot new Tweeple here.

Here are some early statistics: 160 tweets tagged with #jtelws2010 from 27 different users. Here is a wordle of the first (Twitter) day:

Critical Commons is a non-profit advocacy coalition that supports the use of media for teaching, learning and creativity, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students, educators and creators. Critical Commons provides information about current copyright law and its alternatives in order to facilitate the writing and dissemination of best practices and fair use guidelines for scholarly and creative communities. Critical Commons also functions as a showcase for innovative forms of electronic scholarship and creative production that are transformative, culturally enriching and both legally and ethically defensible. At the heart of Critical Commons is an online tool for viewing, tagging, sharing, annotating and curating media within the guidelines established by a given community. Our goal is to build open, informed communities around media-based teaching, learning and creativity, both inside and outside of formal educational environments.

The video discusses informal learning through blogs and creative thinking in the context of online/offline learning networks in a rather … extraordinary way. On of the best parts is

Don’t worry Anna. We will always have our informal learning networks.

But see yourself: