is it just me

After all the buzz around Foursquare, Facebook Places and Co. and my (initially) rather restraining attitude towards such services, I will try Foursquare for a week starting today. In the context of my Ph.d. thesis I am thinking about how such location-awaren systems could be used to enhance researchers awareness and I need to figure out how the systems work. So I will probably spam you (my Twitter followers and Facebook friends) with some check-in stuff. I hope you understand it’s on her majesty’s service for advances in sciences

Btw: You can see my check-ins at Foursquare

Popularity: 1% [?]

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!

Popularity: 4% [?]

After the successful Science 2.0 workshop at last year’s EC-TEL conference, there will be another cool workshop where you can present your cool ideas and applications about what Science 2.0 and Research 2.0 could look like. Spread the word and hand in your stuff. We’re pretty much looking forward to see what you are doing…

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!

Popularity: 10% [?]

One of my students is exploring the value of social software for communication, collaboration and co-operation in (distributed) teams. He is developing a classification and rating scheme for the tools and aims at recommending tools for several application scenarios and the integration into the model of Artefact-Actor-Networks.

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.

Popularity: 8% [?]

After the WCC 2010 decided to cancel all workshops we could place our publication in another track of the WCC 2010 conference (Key Competencies in the Knowledge Society). The title of the paper is: “Getting Granular on Twitter: Tweets from a Conference and their Limited Usefulness for Non-Participants”.

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

Popularity: 5% [?]

Today I came across a cool tool for visualizing co-authorship networks and it’s from Microsoft. Microsoft describes the product as:

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.

Popularity: 21% [?]

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):

Popularity: 4% [?]

Today I received the invitation to join the PC of the “Research 2.0 and Software Engineering (R20SE)” workshop, organized by Jean-Marie Favre and his colleagues Dragan Gasevic and Pieter van Gorp. They describe Research 2.0 as:

Research 2.0 (aka e-Science or e-Research) refers to new approaches, techniques and tools to support collaborative research efforts taking profit of new Information Technologies. From an historical point of view, Research 2.0 (R2.o) can be considered as an evolution of Small Research (aka Research 1.0) and then Big Research (aka Research 1.5). In terms of goals, Research 2.0 lies however between Small and Big Research: through unprecedented means of connectivity, computing power, storage space, and tool versatility/flexibility, R2.o adds scalability to Small Research but also agility to Big Research. Simply put, R2.o allows emerging and agile groups of researchers to communicate, collaborate, share scientific information and scientific tools in new modes. This impacts not only the way research is done, but also on how research is perceived and managed.

In practice, Research 2.o corresponds to the progressive emergence of new scientific repositories, new scientific networks, new research products (including new form of “publications”), new research processes, etc. It is likely that this will lead in the future to new evaluation schemes and new research policies. Though Research 2.0 should be considered as a medium to long term vision in an historical perspective, short term vision are also of interest. In fact current practices already exibit some R2.o flavors. For instance Web 2.o technologies such as blogs, wikis, social networks and twitter already have an impact on collaborative research. We can only expect this impact to grow in the future. Interestingly, in the last couple of years, Research 2.0 has received much more attention in disciplines such as Physics, Biology, Mathematics or Social Sciences than in Computer Science. Building on the great success of the IBM CASCON workshop on Research 2.0 and Software Engineering 2.0 (SER2009), this workshop aims to further explore how Research 2.0 could benefit the Software Engineering (SE) community and vice versa.

The topics of the workshop include:

• Integrated Research Environment (IRE) and personal research portfolio,
• Collaborative and distributed repositories of software artifacts or information about research eco-systems.
• Techniques and tools for on-line demonstration, collaborative experimentation, collection and archiving of research information, etc.
• Interoperability and standardization of research repositories, tools, platforms, and standards  for research collaborations
• Mining research repositories, analysis of software engineering communities and their history
• Ontologies and classifications of software engineering fields and their evolution
• Usage/development of Web 2.0 tools for the software engineering research community
• Concepts and techniques that goes beyond the notion of Software Engineering “publications”
• Analysis of R2.0 success stories or failures (in SE but also in other fields) including lessoned learned and recommendation.
• Social, political, economical and ethical analysis of past and/or current research practices and recommendations for the future

Furthermore contributions that are not directly connected to the domain of software engineering are also welcome. You can submit your contribution until April, 20 2010 at the workshop site.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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…

Popularity: 3% [?]

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.

Popularity: 12% [?]