Future Social Learning Networks seminar roundup
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:
- Real-time collaborative learning
- Media disruptions in Web 2.0 environments
- Awareness in Learning Networks
- Interactive Learning Ressources
- Social Network Analysis in Artefact-Actor-Networks
- Game-based Learning
- 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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