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 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

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?

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.

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.

Btw: You can see my check-ins at Foursquare

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!

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

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):

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…

Also check out the website of the DOLLI project.

Can you imagine the great impact on scientific conferences that tool could have? You just talked to someone pretty cool and want to stay in contact with him. Normally you would need to exchange analog or digital business cards or use tools like More! where you still need to know a name or use QR codes to identifiy your communication partner… With the Recognizr you’d only need to make a picture of his face and add the person to you network. How cool is that?

I am aware of the privacy issues that arise from such a tool and I am pretty sure many people would be frightend to use it, but for us technical geeks that live in the Social Semantic Web and use all new cool toys and tools it is simply awesome. Seems like I need to get me an Google Nexus somewhere…

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:

Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.

In his presentation Steve shows how the latest technology of smart devices can be used in educational settings. Especially interesting are the Venn diagrams showing the overlaps of virtual and augmented reality and the use of gestures with really smart devices (MIT style).