is it just me

As I my have noticed I’m giving Foursquare a spin in order to find out about its usefulness for awareness in research communities. I’m on Foursquare since last Friday and have like 10 friends now. I checked in around 20 times and I am mayor of my home. Wow. Maybe I am missing some essential part of the service, but what exactly is the gain of Foursquare? And when does it come into being? I noticed that you get coupons for Starbucks in the US if you are the mayor of one store. What do you get in Germany or the UK or elsewhere? Do you see any added value of checking in everywhere you go? Is Foursquare more than a game that at some point will provide you with personalized and local ads? Maybe you can help me with some input…

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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

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In his first public blog post (he must be kidding) Frank Kaufer from the HPI in Potsdam writes that

…being a computer scientist these days and neither blogging nor twittering evokes serious doubts about whether you have ever used a computer except an abacus at all.

He links to an article from 2006 where the Notificator is introduced; a mid 1930s robot that displays messages to their friends. The newspaper article from 1935 says:

To aid persons who wish to make or cancel appointments or inform friends of their whereabouts, a robot message carrier has been introduced in London, England. Known as the “notificator,” the new machine is installed in streets, stores, railroad stations or other public places where individuals may leave messages for friends.

Doesn’t that sound like a 1930s version of Twitter (and Foursquare) to you?

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There it is: the (not yet) official Twitter re-tweet button. Mashable released the story 3 days ago and with lightning speed there are the first WordPress plugins available. H.-Peter Pfeufer released his WP-Twitter Retweet Button plugin and it works like a charm. Great work. Thanks.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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With the recent announcement from Twitter to allow arbitrary metadata attached to each tweet (so-called annotations), the Twitter platform is getting even more interesting for tool developers. ReadWriteWeb writes:

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

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Matt McKeon did a nice visualization of how the Facebook TOS changed since 2005 with regard to privacy. Starting as a really closed social network, it became more and more open and Facebook’s default sharing settings are not always as you’d expect them… See the great work yourself.

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Since today Twitter is offering a simple service to embed tweets into blog posts (and other HTML pages). Simply go to http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/ and enter a Tweet URL (okay, this could be done easier in the future, e.g. through integration in the web interface or third party clients) and click generate Bake it.

While it works on the page and for others, the integration in my (simple wordpress) blog fails. Does it work for you?

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