is it just me

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.

Popularity: 1% [?]

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….

Popularity: 2% [?]

This week I had the opportunity to present the idea of Artefact-Actor-Networks at the CollaborateCom 2009 conference in Washington D.C. – a conference mainly focussing on collaborative computing and its applications in networking and at the workplace.
Abstract:

Social networks reflect communication, cooperation and loose acquaintances in networked communities. Numerous metrics allow to expose connections, important persons or clusters within these communities. Furthermore, networks can be spanned to connect documents, blog entries or wiki articles. We call such a network an artefact network. In this paper we introduce the approach of Artefact-Actor-Networks that tries to connect social networks and artefact networks in order to make claims on the semantical connections between persons and manifold artefacts. We present practical use cases for Artefact- Actor-Networks and discuss generic and specific semantical requirements and added values through the existence of Artefact-Actor-Networks.

Reference: W. Reinhardt, M. Moi, and T. Varlemann: Artefact-Actor-Networks as tie between social networks and artefact networks. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Collaborative Computing (CollaborateCom’09), November 2009.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I call the theoretical model behind my current research Artefact-Actor-Networks (AANs) and gave them a dedicated place on the web. From today on there is the domain http://artefact-actor-networks.net where you can stay up-to-date regarding this topic.

Curious about what’s an AAN?

Artefact-Actor-Networks (AANs) are a theoretical model to link social networks and artefact network in order to make claims about the semantic relatedness between users and their respective artefacts. The general goal of AANs is to ease the understanding of how these to knowledge entities (Trier, 2005) are interconnected, how they influence each other and how we can make use of semantic technologies in this field of research

Popularity: 16% [?]

The two workshop I was involved are already over and I really took a lot out of them. In the morning I was able to attend the Science 2.0 workshop where I presented our paper on Twitter in conferences and the belonging tool. Erik Duval and Peter Scott did a great job with the workshop and selected a wide range of papers that represent the problems and chances of Science 2.0. There was a talk about Mendeley and two talks that analysed co-authorship and co-citation in TEL conferences and Erik, Xaver et al. showed some great visualizations (e.g. this one).

I missed the morning session of the TEL-CoPs workshop but the afternoon session was very interesting and Manolis Tzagarakis gave a really interesting talk about “Practical Lessons Learned while Developing Web 2.0 Collaboration Services for Communities of Practice“. One of the major findings was that you have to develop the UI at first and test this with your users and afterwards focus on the architecture. As we are computer scientists, we tend to do it the other way around. The other thing he pointed out is that the later you introduce features to a tool, the more unlikely it is to be used. There I presented my second paper about how to support CoPs with Twitter. I received mostly positive feedback back there was a heavy discussion about the way we visualize things. I take this critics and will improve future visualizations using visual analytics methods.

You’ll find my slides at slideshare and our tweets here and here.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Our second publication from the MASHl09 workshop at the ICL conference 2009 is also available online.

Abstract:

Classical tools for supporting software engineering teams (collaborative development environment, CDE) are designed to support one team during the development of a product. Often the required data sources or experts reside outside of the internal project team and thus not provided by these CDEs. This paper describes an approach for a community-embedded CDE (CCDE), which is capable of handling multiple projects of several organizations, providing inter-project knowledge sharing and developer awareness. The presented approach uses the mashup pattern to integrate multiple data sources in order to provide software teams with an exactingly development environment.

Reference: W. Reinhardt and S.Rinne: An Architecture to Support Learning, Awareness, and Transparency in Social Software Engineering. In: International Conference on Interactive Computer Aided Learning (ICL 2009).

An Architecture to Support Learning, Awareness, and Transparency in Social Software Engineering

Popularity: 12% [?]

My publication about “Tracking the dynamics of social communities – Visualising altering word clouds of Twitter groups” from the MASHL09 workshop at the ICL 2009 conference is available online.

Abstract:

Twitter has gained a lot of attention in the last three years. It is used in various use cases from discussing at conferences, taking personal notes or live coverage of prominent events. Communities in Twitter are forming through the usage of a common tag that is part of the message. This paper presents an application for monitoring and visualising the dynamics in such communities, especially dynamics in the written communication of the community and presents approaches to make this application part of a mashup of services in a Personal Learning Environment.

Reference: W. Reinhardt:Tracking the dynamics of social communities – Visualising altering word clouds of Twitter groups. In: International Conference on Interactive Computer Aided Learning (ICL 2009).

Tracking the dynamics of social communities – Visualising altering word clouds of Twitter groups

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These are my slides for the presentation at MASHL09 Special Track at ICL 2009 Conference later today. Let’s see what the Mashup experts tell me about the idea of connecting several tools in the context of software engineering…

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This morning I had a quick look on the statistics from ALT-C 2009 last week that I gained with our tool twitterVisBT and was impressed: we analysed more than 3800 tweets from more than 680 users. Since some of the attendees asked for more statistics, here is a short screencast of what we analysed…

Popularity: 24% [?]

I recently published the findings of my diploma thesis and the book is now available at Amazon. The book is in german and treats the impact of agile software development methods on competency development. Therefore I did an evaluation of different empirical studies on pair programming and derived instructions and guidance for the use of pair programming in educational settings.

Abstract

Agile Softwareentwicklung ist mehr als ein weiteres neues Schlagwort der Softwaretechnik. Bereits in zahlreichen Praxisprojekten konnte die Leistungsfähigkeit des Ansatzes erfolgreich nachgewiesen werden. Die Rückbesinnung auf erfolgreiche und bewährte Planungs-, Arbeits- und Programmiertechniken sowie die aufmerksame Beachtung und Nutzung ihrer gegenseitigen Einflüsse bieten neue Chancen zu einer erfolgreicheren und effektiveren Entwicklung hochwertiger Software. Agile Methoden der Softwareentwicklung eröffnen zusätzliche Möglichkeiten, die Risiken und Kosten von Projekten besser zu steuern und die zukünftige Wartbarkeit zu verbessern. Pair Programming (PP) ist eine zentrale Arbeitstechnik der leichtgewichtigen Methoden und integrale Praktik des Extreme Programming. Die vorliegende Arbeit führt in agile Vorgehensmodelle zur Softwareentwicklung ein, betrachtet diese kritisch und gibt Hinweise für die Integration in die universitäre Realität. Die Betrachtung der internationalen Kompetenzdiskussion führt hin zur Analyse und Bewertung verschiedener empirischer Studien zum Pair Programming. Abschließend gibt die Arbeit Handlungsempfehlungen für den Einsatz von Pair Programming.

You can buy the book at Amazon here.

Popularity: 2% [?]