an open-source system for visualizing time series data, built on MongoDB, Node and D3. If you send Cube timestamped events (with optional structured data), you can easily build realtime visualizations of aggregate metrics for internal dashboards. Cube speaks WebSockets for low-latency, asynchronous input and output: new events are streamed in, and requested metrics are streamed out as they are computed. (You can also POST events to Cube, if that’s your thing, and collectd integration is included!) Metrics are cached in capped collections, and simple reductions such as sum and max use pyramidal aggregation to improve performance. Visualizations are generated client-side and assembled into dashboards with a few mouse clicks.

They also share a video on building an analytical dashboard in 60 seconds (the video is actually only 31 seconds long though), which shows the capabilities and speed of Cube.

I think it could be a strong candidate for future visualizations in the learning analytics / research analytics applications. What do you think?

I created my profile and was surprised by the inconsistent UI and how difficult they made the process of adding my publications. I could not just upload a BibTeX file or link to my Mendeley profile. No, I had to search for my publications in Google Scholar. There is no intelligent support to ease that process (e.g. looking at the co-authors of my already added publications and then do better recommendations). However, the features of Google Scholar Citations are very helpful in assessing your own work. I’m looking forward to what the Google Scholar team is doing with the service in the future….

The really cool think about Reference.me is that it allows you to visually create networks of people that you trust (or worked with or just want to have in that network). There is no such thing as messaging or activity streams, in the first place it’s just a mere interactive network builder. Adding people to your trusted network, however, is big fun. It reminds of adding people to Google+ circles but each circle (actually it’s a box) is divided in four categories: 1) my co-worker, 2) my boss, 3) my report and 4) other). Reference.me calls those circles “skills groups” and aims at creating sub-networks of skillful people. Another interesting feature is to see which other people have in their trusted networks, check their profiles and check what they are looking for.

The third pillar of Reference.me are “Postings” where users can share what the are looking for (typically jobs). While the idea is good, the realization is not that helpful yet. There is no search available, no recommendations of jobs fitting my profile and so on. As the service is still in beta, I guess the folks at Reference.me are currently working on that. By all means, Reference.me is one of this recent startups that we should have an eye on, as it may add value to the way we connect to people and become aware of their relations and opportunities that may arise from our connections

There are four parts of the introduction of the Top 40:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

From the list I especially like the following projects as they could really help making science more open, using alternative metrics or innovative approaches of approaching the whole science business:

• ReaderMeter
• PaperCritic
• ScienceCard
• Total-Impact

What are your favorites?

Inspired by the Summarizr features I was thinking about some analytics tools that would be easily usable during conferences (on a tablet or mobile) or in educational settings where we use Twitter a lot. Luckily two of my undergraduate students decided that they wanted to implement something like it and decided to build two competing applications. One is using PHP, while the other is built on top of node.js. Both of them use jQuery mobile for the UI. However, both students took very different roads to analyze the hashtag communities in yourTwapperKeeper archives and so they are able to present different data as well. I can’t tell you which my favorite is right now but you can test the two apps yourself. The PHP-based app is called Twapperlytics while the node.js app is called Twapperlyzer. Both have some features in common like

• list of users in the archive
• list of mentioned people in the archive
• list of messages / live messages from Twitter
• word cloud of the content (with filters on certain time spans)
• overview of the used hashtags in the archive

I am very interested in your feedback (and so are my students). You can use the comments here or the respective contact sections in the applications

WARNING: The analysis of large archives (> 10.000 tweets) takes long (mainly caused by the analysis of short URLs). In fact we never tried analyzing one of the 1.000.000 tweets archives. Both apps are to be considered as proof of concept, so if something is not working immediately, be patient …

interactive visualization can help increase end-user interest in data exploration

If you have a look at what the designers at NY Times have created, you’ll be very impressed by the way the let you interact with the data. The used metaphor is very clear and it continuously incorporates new data. The available filters let you easily find a question that YOU are interested in, rather than the question(s) that the visual designers did want to answer. On the other hand, it is not so easily aware how many percent of the answers are in which area on the chart. Also, it is not clear how they decided which feeling would be “good”, “bad” or “neutral”. However, this kind of interactive visualization would be a very interesting type of awareness and exploration support for all stakeholders involved in Learning Analytics.

• Mendeley: http://www.mendeley.com/
• TELEurope: http://www.teleurope.eu/
• ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/
• Academia.edu: http://academia.edu/
• Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/
• Microsoft Academic Search: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/
• BiomedExperts (mainly as stimulus for UI design in the Research 2.0 context): http://www.biomedexperts.com/

while others have plenty of other applications areas, but my main usage is for science. Those are

• Twapperkeeper (an archiver of Tweets): http://twapperkeeper.com
• Delicious: http://www.delicious.com
• Google Books: http://books.google.com/
• PaperC (German startup of the year 2010): http://paperc.de/
• Etherpad: http://piratepad.net/
• Dropbox: http://www.dropbox.com/
• Google Docs & Forms: http://docs.google.com
• Flashmeeting: http://flashmeeting.open.ac.uk
• BibDesk (the best BibTeX editor for Mac): http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/

I’m sure I missed some sites that I go to regularly (Google & Facebook, can you help me please?). What are your favorite Research 2.0 tools and places?

Today I received word that I’m invited to speak at the conference; an invitation that I happily accept. Steve Wheeler describes the CONCEDE (CONtent Creation Excellence through Dialogue in Education) as a project that

is investigating the uses of user generated content in higher education, and seeks to discover who creates and uses this content. [They] are also interested in how we can benchmark the quality of such content.

I’m really looking forward to the conference and the exchange with like-minded people. Thanks to the jury and for the invitation ;)

Now, we are interested in how the criteria are perceived in an international context, in different working domains and under gender aspects. Therefore, we set up a slightly adapted version of our survey and aim at reaching out to international companies that use wikis for knowledge management purposes. The survey is available in English and German and tends to medium and large companies. If you work in such a company and use wikis in your daily working routines or if you know of such companies, feel free to take the survey yourself or forward it to colleagues.

Here are the links again

• English version of the study: http://bit.ly/studyiqwikis2011-en
• German version of the study: http://bit.ly/studyiqwikis2011-de

Once the survey is evaluated, I will report about the results here…

Ein offenes Blog könnte die Barriere zum Informationsaustausch und zur Kooperation senken, denn man muss nun ja nur einen Blogpost über die eigene Arbeit und den Fortschritt machen und vielleicht ein paar Kommentare schreiben. Ich bin gespannt, ob das Experiment Studentenblogs DDI@UPB aufgeht und die Abschlussarbeiten und die jeweiligen Studenten stärker miteinander vernetzt werden. Ich würde mich darüber freuen. Zudem erzeugt das öffentlich zugängliche Blog vielleicht auch etwas Interesse an unseren Arbeiten außerhalb der Uni Paderborn.

Ok, time to turn those notifications of. Log in to your account, go to settings, click on notifications (here’s a shortcut) and deselect the checkboxes “I’m sent a reply or mentioned” (btw: is this correct English?), “My Tweets are marked as favorites” and finally “My Tweets are retweeted”. Your setting might look like this afterwards and your inbox receives less bacn.

There might be occasions where having those settings turned on, but I suggest to carefully decide when to turn them on …

I’d like to thank Samsung for supporting our unconventional idea and a bachelor thesis project.

Call for Papers

Science 2.0 has become an umbrella term for the involvement of the web in science. It spans from the utilization of Web 2.0 tools and technologies in research to a more open and sharing approach to science. Some definitions of Science 2.0 even include notions of a methodological change due to the abundance of data, and the nature of the socio-technical systems on the web. For this special track, we would like to address three issues in Science 2.0 that have proven both promising and challenging at the same time:

1. The management of scientific data, both primary and secondary data (such as publication metadata, and other scientific content on the web) as a precondition for Science 2.0.
2. The recommendation of people and resources as a consequential next step in an exponentially growing scientific environment.
3. The change in scientific practices due to the involvement of Science 2.0 tools and technologies in the research process and the effects this has on science itself.

This one-day special track is a program item of i-KNOW 2011, the 11^th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies which takes place in Graz, Austria from September 7^th to September 9^th 2011. The workshop provides an interdisciplinary forum for international scientists and practitioners to discuss theoretical and practical aspects of Science 2.0. i-KNOW 2011 brings together international researchers and practitioners from the fields of knowledge management and knowledge technologies. The conference will cover relevant aspects from the fields of Knowledge Management, Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Services, Social Media, Enterprise 2.0 and the Social Web. i-KNOW 2011 will be held concurrently with I-SEMANTICS 2011, the International Conference on Semantic Systems.

Please note that there is a related call for participation in the dataTEL Challenge. Powered by STELLAR & TEAM (Mendeley) presenting the respective approaches.

Topics

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Definition of data schemes and interoperability formats
• Semantic Web standards for Science 2.0
• Social mining and metadata extraction in academic resources
• Metadata quality and quality assessment
• Design and architecture of data sharing facilities
• Systems design accounting for standardized data sets
• Applications for recommendation in science
• Specific challenges for recommendation in science
• Information retrieval in academic papers
• Recommendation algorithms and quality indicators
• Changes in scientific practices due to Web 2.0
• Methodological issues and interdisciplinarity in Science 2.0
• Opportunities and threats for researchers and research organizations
• Applications in and for Science 2.0
• Awareness-support for Science 2.0 activities

Important Dates

30 April 2011: Submission of full papers (8 pages)

31 May 2011: Notification of acceptance

30 June 2011: Camera ready version (8 pages)

7 Sept.-9 Sept. 2011: i-KNOW 2011 Conference

Submission Procedure

Paper Submission Details: http://i-know.at/i-science/paper-submission

Notification of Acceptance and Publishing

Authors of accepted papers will be notified by 31 May 2011. Accepted papers will be published within the i-KNOW 2011 conference proceedings. The conference proceedings of i-KNOW 2011 will be published by ACM ICPS and available in the ACM Digital Library. At least one author of an accepted paper must register for i-KNOW 2011 before the deadline for camera ready versions (30 June 2011) in order to get the paper published in the conference proceedings.

Chairs of RDSRP 2011

The organization team of the special track on Practices, Recommendation, and Data Sharing in Science 2.0 consists of the following people:

• Michael Granitzer, Know-Center Graz (Austria)
• Stefanie Lindstaedt, Know-Center Graz (Austria)
• Peter Kraker, Know-Center Graz (Austria)
• Kris Jack, Mendeley Ltd (UK)

Program Committee

• Hendrik Drachsler, Open Universiteit Nederland (Netherlands)
• Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
• Denis Gillet, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland)
• Greg Grefenstette, Exalead (France)
• Nina Heinze, Knowledge Media Research Center (Germany)
• Eelco Herder, L3S Research Center (Germany)
• Min-Yen Kan, National University of Singapore (Singapore)
• Daniel Lemire, LICEF Research Center (Canada)
• Michael Nentwich, Institute of Technology Assessment (Austria)
• Wolfgang Reinhardt, University of Paderborn (Germany)
• Dario Taraborelli, Wikimedia Foundation (USA)
• Katrin Weller, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (Germany)
• Fridolin Wild, The Open University (UK)

In my case I was interested in the topic “open science” and this is what came out. Cool, right?

Abstract:

The increasing agility of business requires an accelerated adaptation of organizations to continuously changing conditions. Individual and organizational learning are prominent means to achieve this. Hereby learning is always accompanied by the development of knowledge artifacts. For the entire of learning and artifact development the term knowledge maturing has been introduced recently, which focuses on these three manifestations of knowledge: cognifacts, sociofacts, and artifacts. In this paper we will focus on sociofacts as the subject-bound knowledge manifestation of social actions. Sociofacts are rooted in respective cognifacts play an independent role due to their binding to collective actions and subjects. These are particularly difficult to grasp but play a decisive role for the performance of organizations and the collaboration in there.The presented paper approaches the notion of sociofacts, discusses them on a theoretical level and establishes a first formal notation for sociofacts. We use the case of a merger between two companies to describe the advantages of sociofact analysis for such process. Some sociofact related problems during a merger are described and possible solutions are presented. We identify technical approaches for seizing sociofacts from tool-mediated social interaction and discuss open question for future research.

Reference:
Riss, Uwe, Magenheim, Johannes, Reinhardt, Wolfgang, Nelkner, Tobias, and Hinkelmann, Knut. “Added Value of Sociofact Analysis for Business Agility” AAAI Spring Symposium Series 2011. Available at: http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/SSS/SSS11/paper/view/2444.

Bookmark it on Mendeley

Anyone who can point me to examples of where visualizations are used to directly support communication between people?

09.04.2011 2:37 pm via KiwiReplyRetweetFavorite

@wollepb

Wolfgang Reinhardt

I am looking for examples of visual communication but not in the sense of art pedagogy, visual metaphors or visual messages. I am searching for examples for visualizations that directly support the communication between people. One example that I have in mind are interactive organizational structure diagrams, where you could directly send messages to people in the diagram. Another example would be a visualization of a Twitter network where you easily could send out tweets to that community.

Have you seen anything like this or are you willing to share other examples of this “visual communication” that you’d like to have yourself?

Tonight we started the closed beta of ginkgo, a cool new tool for the management of scientific events.

ginkgo is no classical conference management system. It rather combines conference management functions with those known from social networking sites. The goal of ginkgo is to raise awareness of researchers, make the organization of scientific events easier and more fun. We are currently working hard on getting the last pieces together and providing you with a fresh approach to the management of scientific events pretty soon. In the meantime you might want to join the beta list, follow ginkgo on Twitter or Facebook or follow Julian and me on Twitter for latest updates.

We regret to inform our users that on March 20, 2011 we will be removing the “Export and Download” and “API” features of the TwapperKeeper.com website.

While we realize that these features are very important important to many of our users, this change comes at the request of Twitter to bring our service into alignment with the API Terms of Service (http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms) regarding redistribution and syndication of content.

Obviously, there are strange things going on in the Twitter world. Twitter’s ToS state that developers should not develop applications that attempts or encourages others to:

sell, rent, lease, sublicense, redistribute, or syndicate the Twitter API or Twitter Content to any third party for such party to develop additional products or services without prior written approval from Twitter;

The question is how you could analyze hashtag communities in Twitter, if not using methods and tools like TwapperKeeper. Twitter does not provide API access to search results that are older than three two ten days (even less if the hahstag is frequently used). Moreover, recently they stopped whitelisting accounts to have a higher API limit than the usual.

TwapperKeeper’s John O’Brien suggests to set up a yourTwapperKeeper instance to continue the usage of the TwapperKeeper API. As I understand Twitter’s ToS as above, this also would violate the ToS. Does this mean that we no longer can access collections of tweets in an easy way? Does it mean that also tools like Grabeeter will need to shut down their API?

In the past we have done many analyses using data from TwapperKeeper and are currently developing apps that build directly on the TwapperKeeper API. Many of those analyses and tools simply won’t work anymore, if we can’t access the data. Seems like Twitter is silently concocting some serious premium features that will make us pay for accessing – even older – tweets. What do you think?

We call the tool GINKGO and it will be launching soon. If you are interested to see what we have in mind, join the mailing list and be informed about all the updates…

What could have the interviewee said when the transcript reads as:

i want to definition demolish is

Got it? No? Well the interviewee said:

Probably the one that I have seen the most is…

You want another try? Well, what is the name of the popular tool for managing scientific publications?

Amandeli

Tush!

Mendeley

would have been the correct answer.

Let’s give it another try. Which of these words can be found in dictionary usual in the trade?

thier, anouther, reguarding, structer, projuct’s, Eoropian, structor’s, alot, contac, useually, fications, bejorn

None. That are the words our interviewees used

their, another, regarding, structure, projects, European, structure (again), a lot, contact, usually, citations, beyond

Next time I use MTurk, I have to be more carefully with accepting transcripts and increment the percentage of the HIT approval rate (to 99% or something).

Abstract:

Scientific writing is an essential part of a student’s and researcher’s everyday life. In this paper we investigate the particularities of scientific writing and explore the features and limitations of existing tools for scientific writing. Deriving from this analysis and an online survey of the scientific writing processes of students and researchers at the University of Paderborn, we identify key principles to simplify scientific writing and reviewing. Finally, we introduce a novel approach to support scientific writing with a tool called SciFlow that builds on these principles and state of the art technologies like cloud computing.

Reference:

Eichler F., Reinhardt W. Simplifying the Scientific Writing and Review Process with SciFlow. Future Internet. 2010; 2(4):645-661.

]]> http://isitjustme.de/2010/12/simplifying-the-scientific-writing-and-review-process-with-sciflow/feed/ 2 http://isitjustme.de/2010/12/freaky-wireless-technology/ http://isitjustme.de/2010/12/freaky-wireless-technology/#comments Sun, 05 Dec 2010 12:15:56 +0000 Wolfgang Reinhardt http://isitjustme.de/?p=460 Continue reading →]]> While all geeks are waiting for even more wireless technologies to arrive (where is the widespread availabilty of wireless power???) there are some folks that might find this a bit freaky…

Thanks T3N for posting the photo in your Facebook stream…

As for the creation of HITs in MTurk I happily link to the blog post of Andy Daio. I followed is step-for-step instructions, reused his template HIT template and learned how to embed a Flash-based audio player that helps your workers to listen to the audio.

Altogether I had 13 interviews with about 11 hours of audio that should be transcribed. The interviews were in English and most of the interviewees were non-native speakers. I split the audio files in equally long parts (between 4:45 and 5:25) so that all workers had to process the same amount of the interview. Furthermore, I remove some organizational chatter at the beginning (“can you hear me?” “yes I can hear you” “thanks very much ….”) and the chatter at the end (“please keep me updated about the results” “sure Iwill, by the way how is your project xyz …”). I uploaded the audio files to a local web server and created the HITs as described in Andy’s post.

I assumed that the workers would need around 2 hours for a 5 minute audio file to transcribe (actually they were much faster) and payed $2 per completed assignment. I let the assignments be automatically approved after 7 days (you might want to change this).

My 120 audio files were transcribed in only about 14 hours. As I mentioned earlier, I’m more than satisfied with the results BUT there are some things that you should consider when doing this yourself:

• Decide on whether you want a verbose (including um, eh, pauses, duplicate words and so on) or non-verbose transcription. If you don’t tell the worker how to transcribe they will do want they like to.
• Give your workers some background about the audio they are to transcribe (it is only a part of an interview, the topic is XYZ and so on)
• When you split your audio files, try to create the files with 2 seconds of overlap, so you don’t miss any words that are right on the cut.
• Check your transcriptions as soon as they’re ready. I had a very busy week and couldn’t check the transcripts right away and only saw some very bad transcripts after they’ve been automatically accepted.
• Be aware that the transcripts may require a lot of manual polishing. Especially if you interview topic is not about public domain knowledge you should consider that the workers may not know what you are talking about and “guess” the right words.
• Workers will try to cheat. They will start to transcribe but not finish their tasks. Whenever you spot this, reject the worker’s transcription.
• Transcripts have varying quality. MTurk worker used to be Americans with an above-average level of university degree. With Amazon’s move to allow workers from other countries doing the job there are some indicators that the transcription quality is decreasing. You will notice those differences in one interview. While the first three parts of an interview may be perfectly transcribed, the next part could be full of [xx] or ?? where the worker didn’t understand the interviewer or just didn’t know the word.

Altogether I paid around $260 (€200) for the transcription of 11 hours of interviews. The whole process with splitting, creating the HITs, the workers’ transcription, my review and creation of aggregated transcripts took me about one week (you could be faster when you check the HITs more regularly and create your aggregated transcripts faster). Now I will need to rehear the interview and do the polishing of the transcripts.

Would I recommend using MTurk in your research? Oh yes, I’d do it every time again.

When you start getting friended by your grandmother, I think that’s when it starts to lose its cool…

No comment…

Today I submitted the first audio of an interview to the service. I allowed the workers two days of time for doing the transcription (52 minutes altogether, split in chunks of 5 minutes). I followed the superb tutorial of Andy Baio, reused his templates and even found out that there is a reusable MP3 player in Google Reader that I used to provide the workers with a Flash-based player for the audio chunks. If you ever wondered about the demographics of the service, the folks  someone from PARC provides a detailed overview about it (here is an earlier version of the demographics data).

I’ll tell you what happens, how satisfied I am and what it cost me in the end in a follow-up post…

We think the time has now come to introduce a set of guidelines for Twitter – ‘Twettiquette’ if you like [...] Here it is below, in all it’s unexpurgated glory. It is, we think, a humourous, lighthearted take on using Twitter. We hope it makes you smile, think and tweet some more.

Dropbox is making the transition back to school easy by giving everyone with an .edu email address double the credit for referrals. That’s 500 MB per friend you invite! That goes for everyone you’ve already referred too.

Yes you read correctly. They give you an additional 250MB for all friends you already invited in the past. All you have to do is to go to the EDU landing page and enter your schools mail address (it doesn’t have to end with .edu as long as Dropbox recognizes your school), they will send you a verification mail and that’s it. That way I got additional 5GB to my account. If you don’t already have a Dropbox account you can join here (which will give me some more space as well…).

NB: If Dropbox doesn’t recognize your school, just drop them a line and they add your school. Cool, isn’t it?

As I am always looking for feedback on the process I implement, let me know what you think in the comments or over at GetSatisfaction.com

Next week I will be in Barcelona for the EC-TEL conference 2010, where already lots of people joined the soharc for the conference. There are also events for the MUPPLE workshop, the RecSysTEL workshop, the Research 2.0 workshop and the MATEL workshop. If you also are at EC-TEL 2010 or any of the satellite events feel free to join the event on soharc and increase your networking opportunities.

We took the accepted papers of the workshop (15 papers) and used ParsCit to extract the references and text content of the papers. Afterwards, we analyzed the references and calculated networks of co-authorship, co-citation and bibliographic coupling (using algorithms we implemented in the latest Artefact-Actor-Network architecture). Finally, we used Gephi and Wordle for generating the visualizations (day-wise, session-wise and paper-wise).

Now we need to investigate how people like the additional representations we provide them before a workshop and if it helps them to be more aware about the papers presented at workshop and their connection. Also we would like to explore how such visualizations could help workshop organizers in better select contributions for workshop/conference sessions…

Here are the (German) slides from the talk

You can also read the whole article (also in German of course…)
Anwendungsszenarien für ein Werkzeug zur Video-Annotation in der universitären Lehre

Driven from the fact that many people in my community are collecting data from social media (you remember all of our Twitter analysis and the cool Delicious visualizations, don’t you?) and always struggling with the question: where to get clean data from, the idea of soharc was born.

What you can do in soharc is fairly simple: you create your online profile with the handles you possess and we’ll create a dedicated page for you. You can create “scientific” events or projects and join them, so everybody who’s interested can see what you are doing. In order to support scientific awareness and solve the problem of how to get clean data, we’ll be soon offering a SWRC export of your social media profile and those of an event’s or project’s participants. This will allow the aggregation of social media data for analyses with multiple tools, done by different people and organizations based on a well-defined and user-generated dataset.

Cool, right? Let me know what you think about the social handle archive in the comments. I’d like to thank Peter Kraker and Gonzalo Parra for the chats we had on soharc and their alpha tests of the service.

NB: SWRC export is not yet enabled as we are discussing a new version of the ontology together with researchers from STELLAR and FZI.

When you walk around the city it’s fun to spot new places, add them to the map and receive +5 points and another +5 points for being there for the first time. It’s motivating to see the leader board and see that you are not first. It’s cool to see other people checking-in at the same location and being able to talk to them. But Foursquare is targeted on party people (at least it seems to be) and not on scientists. Furthermore, adding friends manually and building-up a new community in Foursquare seems to be a blocker for me. Maybe Facebook Places will add some more value to it. Maybe Mendeley will introduce Places to their mobile application. I’d like to know which people go to which conferences and to which sessions. And I’d like to spot new people to follow, based on their conference attendance and research interests. That would be researcher’s location awareness to me. And Foursquare can’t deliver this.

I quit Foursquare today, so I don’t bother you with tweets and Facebook updates anymore.

Btw: You can see my check-ins at Foursquare

…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?

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!

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!

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.

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

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

Abstract:

Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
Be aware of wonder.

Latest draft version:
All I need to know about Twitter in Education I Learned in Kindergarten

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

Cristina blogs:

The presentation aims to be informal and interactive. I welcome your thoughts, questions and reflections about the small chunks of information I have provided in the voicethreads. I also hope we continue this conversation else where. I have some ideas how we could do this, but I prefer to let you to decide where we could ‘meet again’. I’ll be waiting for your suggestions!
And yes, this presentation only barely scratches the surface of Social Media, its advantages and implications. But we do have to start somewhere. I hope this will just be a start of something bigger. Thank you all for taking part in this. I also want to thank those who have helped me with this presentation. You will find them in the voicethread.

I am very thankful for this contribution as it shows not only the power of one’s network but also broadens the scope of our students. They collaborate with students from another University, a different course of studies and in addition they have the chance to listen to the thoughts of Cristina. What else could they ask for?

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.

Im Frühjahr 2011 wird das neue interdisziplinäre Lehrbuch rund um das Thema Lernen und Lehren mit Technologien erscheinen. Es wird aktuelle Themen, Einsatzgebiete, Forschungs- ergebnisse und Technologien aufereiten, die in vorhandenen Lehrbüchern (noch) nicht dargestellt wurden, deren Bedarf aber durchaus gegeben ist. Zudem haben sich die Initatoren des Projektes den freien Zugang auf Bildungsmaterialien an ihre Fahnen gehefet: Dieses Lehrbuch soll nicht nur als Buch, sondern kapitelweise auch frei verfügbar zum Herunterladen aus dem Internet angeboten werden. Natürlich werden dabei auch Verweise auf weitere ausgewählte Online-Ressourcen vorhanden sein. Mit diesem neuen Ansatz sollen die ständig zunehmenden Kurse, Seminare, Vorlesungen und Studiengänge im Bereich des technologiegestützten Lernens im deutschsprachigen Raum gezielt unterstützt werden. Ihre Vorschläge für Kapitel, Themen, Kooperatonen, Autor(inn)en und Gutachter(innen) sind herzlich willkommen!

Und hier noch der ansprechend gemachte digitale Aufhänger für das Projekt. Respekt. Echt cool. Ich würde mal sagen: auf geht’s…

If you want to create cool wordl clouds from your texts you’ll need some other tools in the meanwhile. I created a small list of tools that you can use and analyzed one of my papers on Artefact-Actor-Networks, so you can see how they will look like.

1. TagCrowd, http://www.tagcrowd.com/
2. WordItOut, http://worditout.com/
3. WordSift, http://wordsift.com/
4. Tagul, http://tagul.com
5. ABCya WordClouds, http://www.abcya.com/word_clouds.htm

Here is what the Wordle founder says on his page:

I am seeking pro bono legal advice, to evaluate a trademark claim against my use of the word “Wordle” for this web site. If you’re an intellectual property lawyer, with expertise in trademark law, and you wish to offer professional advice on this matter, please contact me.

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…

Als einer meiner Studenten eines Tages mit dem Kindle hier stand dachte ich mir so “das Ding ist aber echt ganz schön häßlich… und dann noch dieses umstellen der Kristalle… ich weiß ja nicht”. Dann haben wir ein wenig über Einsatzzwecke im Rahmen der Universitätsausbildung gesprochen und sie da: man findet Anwendungsbereiche in denen ein eBook-Reader für Mitarbeiter und Studenten von sehr hohem Interesse sein kann (Zugriff auf Publikationen oder die gesamte Uni-Bibliothek, Annotation von Hausarbeiten und Synchronisierung mit einem zentralen Repository…). Heute bin ich dann dank Martin Lindner auf einen schon etwas älteren, ehrlichen Test des Kindles gestoßen, der mich sagen lässt. NEIN, kein Kindle.

Und dann kam Polly der iPad. Ein Gerät, auf das wir mindestens schon 10 Jahre warteten is endlich da. Es ist cool und smart und hat den iBookStore und es hat mobiles iWork und und und… Kurzum: eigentlich ist es das Gerät, dass wir alle haben wollen – zum Spielen natürlich, nicht weil wir es tatsächlich bräuchten. Sicherlich wird man auch für den iPad Einsatzszenarien im Lernbereich finden aber momentan ist es ein (gar nicht soooo teures) Spielzeug. Leider stellt man an solche Spielzeuge sehr hohe Anforderungen und da überrascht es nicht, dass es wohl mehr als 5 Gründe gibt, um auf Version 2 des iPad zu warten.

Wie Steve Jobs so eleoquent betont hat, ist das iPad ein mobiles Endgerät, dass sich deutlich von SmartPhones und Netbooks unterscheiden soll und das tut es leider auch. Keine Kamera in einem mobilen Gerät? Was soll das? Nur iPhone OS und kein echtes Betriebssystem mit Multitasking und so? Kein USB-Anschluss oder Karten-Slot. Och komm Steve, warum? Die angekündigten 10 Stunden Akku-Laufzeit sind sicher wieder nur Apple-Stunden (die verhalten sich etwa im Verhältnis 1:3 zur Realität).

Ja sicher, das ist meckern auf verdammt hohem Niveau; aber es ist ja nun mal auch ein Spielzeug. Von Apple. Da darf man doch Erwartungen haben, oder? Und man wird wohl warten, auf Version 2 des tollen Dings. Ich glaube ich werde dieses Mal kein Early Adopter. Danke aber schon mal an die, die es werden und uns alle heiß machen …2010 ist ja noch lang, mal sehen, was die Jungs aus Cupertino noch so aus dem Hut zaubern werden. Stay tuned.

Sikuli is a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots). The first release of Sikuli contains Sikuli Script, a visual scripting API for Jython, and Sikuli IDE, an integrated development environment for writing visual scripts with screenshots easily. Sikuli Script automates anything you see on the screen without internal API’s support. You can programmatically control a web page, a desktop application running on Windows/Linux/Mac OS X, or even an iphone application running in an emulator.

What you do ist basically tell the program which region on the GUI it should click or move or rotate bei making screenshots of the region. Sikuli even let’s you automate the fill in of forms (e.g. IP adresses in the network preferences dialog).

See the demo video they put online for a detailed inspection and give the tool a try. This is really cool…

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).

I still wait for some invites to share but you can go to http://bumptop.com/download.php and sign up for the beta yourself. Give it a try

The coolest thing about the service is the possibility to annotate any passage or save a passage as quote for later usage. You can even do a full text search over the complete content of the book. Great! It would be great to see such tools incorporated in our research communities and to cooperatively annotate papers, see what others have marked at specific passages and so on… Is anyone of you working on something similar?

Google Wave vs. Twitter at conferences

Here are my slides for the Science 2.0 workshop

And these are the slides for the TEL-CoPs workshop

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

Here is my first movie made with xtranormal. It called You cannot store knowledge and is dedicated to my students of #wekm09 at the University of Paderborn.