is it just me

Maybe you have already seen Recognizr, a TAT prototype of an augmented ID concept. If not here is the pretty stunning video.

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…

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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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On wednesday our workshop Social Software Engineering takes place and we finished the program. You can see it online at the website for the workshop.

Presentation 1: Towards Social Information Systems

Presentation 2: weHelp: A Reference Architecture for Social Recommender Systems

Presentation 3: Towards Assisting Software Engineers in Switching Artifacts by using Personal and Shared Context

Presentation 4: Bringing Semantics into Social Software Engineering: Applying Ontologies to a Community-oriented Requirements Engineering Environment

Presentation 5: Diagnosing Inconsistent Requirements Preferences in Distributed Software Projects

Presentation 6: User-Driven Requirements Engineering for Mobile Social Software

Keynote: The use of social engineering in software projects

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It is my pleasure to announce the call for paper for the first workshop on Using Microblogging to enhance communication within Communities of Practice (MicroECoP) which will take place at the WCC 2010 conference in Brisbane, Australia. I organize this workshop together with my colleagues Steve Wheeler, Graham Attwell and Johannes Magenheim. You’ll find all the necessary information at the workshop website.

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.

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Yesterday at the JTEL WinterSchool in Innsbruck, Erik Duval asked me

If you only could follow one person on Twitter, who would that be?

I gave my answer (which I cannot tell you here…) and thought it would be a cool thing to explore with a wider public. That’s why I put up a really simple questionnaire over at Google Spreadsheets and would be really happy if you could distribute it to your fellow Tweeple.

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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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The latest presentation of Steve Wheeler on Slideshare contains a very good quote of Paulo Friere:

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).

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Tags are the new classification systems for nearly all current web applications. But how do you keep track on where you posted, linked, commented or uploaded stuff. Florian Bailey posted a simple but effective idea to do this (HT to René Sprotte for linking me to this):

My problem is how to aggregate everything I publish easily. I tried various ways to do this. For comments there are services like disqus but sadly only a few sites actually integrate it, Facebook and Friendfeed are partly an answer to it but even with them I can only add sites where I have an account ( or that allow me to use my facebook account) or a public RSS Feed is available.

At the end, all of these services only work with some sites, the only global services that work on every site are search engines.

So I’m now trying to aggregate everything I publish with google.

For this I created my personal tag, it’s a unique string I will add to every kind of content I publish anywhere on the internet. And Google will do the rest.

My Personal Tag is: #ptfjib80
# – as identifier of a tag
pt – personal tag
fjib80 – as unique string

I like the idea because it so simple, clean and pretty straightforward. I’ll try to use my personal tag #ptwollepb999 from now on. What about you?

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Image via Wikipedia

Thanks to a tweet by George Siemens I came across Tim Kastelle’s Blog today. Besides a general recommendation forhis blog, I’d like to point out some posts explicitly that where very inspiring. The post Networks and the Information Glut discusses how “new” the phenomena of information overload really is:

Or think about Charles Darwin – over the course of scientific career he sent over 15,000 letters. It’s safe to assume that he received just as many. Think about how much time he would have spent reading & writing letters, and how much new information and ideas would have been included in that – it’s probably more than we’re spending writing our blogs, updating our statuses and twittering.

Furthermore he links to an interesting video that show the social network of 18th century scientists such as Voltaire (by Dan Edelstein)

Another post discusses the common prejudice that new media leeds to being less smart people and invoke Plato’s argument that writing down things would result in making us stupid. Tim shows all the false assumptions and even calls Plato’s arguments dumb. Great one. Give him a read…

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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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