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 …

The first thing they asked us was to come up with as many people influencing our daily work as possible. Additional to the names of the respective persons we had to specify our relationship (e.g. internal colleague, project partner, family …), the strength of the tie between us and the tools/technologies we use to connect to them. Also, we had to specify what we feel we learn from the person. This task was very challenging and given more time than twenty minutes, I’d come up with many more than my 15 people. A thing that would really help with such tasks would be  regular triggers that ‘force’ you to reflect about your relation to someone you interact with (mail, twitter, facebook). If some tool would regularly ask the above learning-related questions that would certainly help in raising self-awareness and awareness about your connections. The organizers will now analyze the persons the workshop participants entered and come up with a visualization of that.

After that they asked us three questions we answered on Twitter using the #plntweet hashtag (see the archive in our Twapperkeeper).

1. What motivates you to engage through your network?
2. Why do you feel you learn from your peers?
3. What do you learn from your network?

Not only that the discussion attracted many people from outside the workshop (some people came into the workshop room because of the engaging twitter stream), the tweetstorming method also created a vast number of responses and ideas. I’m interested in the analysis of the tweets and what Eleni and Nino can extract from the data.

The experiment also let me reflect about the power of my professional / learning network (moreover supported by Steve Wheeler’s article on his awesome PLN). The people I follow on Twitter and Facebook and Mendeley and all the other social networks are so creative and a continuous source of information supporting me, my awareness, triggering my reflection about issues that are related to my work and beyond. They bring objects (people, events, artefacts, communities) to my consciousness that would remain hidden otherwise. They comment on ideas that I share and come up with different perspectives and various answers to questions I ask. Steve Wheeler said: “I’m relying on you PLN. Without you I am just a single mind” and I added to this by saying

why do I learn from my peers? they are much smarter than I am #plntweet #ple_sou

13.07.2011 3:15 pm via SeesmicReplyRetweetFavorite

@wollepb

Wolfgang Reinhardt

After all, I’d like to thank you all for being essential part of my daily learning, for sharing resources and giving feedback. YOU ARE AWESOME.

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 …

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

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?

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?

I think the purpose of education is to engage our students to be critical thinker and to look outside the box #purposed

02.02.2011 10:46 am via KiwiReplyRetweetFavorite

@wollepb

Wolfgang Reinhardt

Steve Jobs once said in a speech at Stanford University “you’ve got to find work you love”. You should not settle for someone’s idea of what you should do in life.

Okay you say, but where is the connection to (higher) education? For me it means that we should challenge our students to not only execute tasks we assign to them. Students, the upcoming working force and hopefully research elite should be able to think outside the box. We should engage them to say “No. I don’t think this the best way to do it.” The purpose of education should be making our students responsible beings that try their own way. We should be there and guide their way without disrupting their creativeness. We should give them possibilities to try new things. They will fail sometimes but they will learn and succeed. This way we will give them time and opportunity to find something that they truly love to do, what challenges them and that keeps them motivated.

After formal education, work is going to fill a large portion of their time. They will most probably face problems that we didn’t prepare them for. They will use technologies we have no access to in the educational system. The pace of the real world will be much faster than in any educational setting. What we educators can do to prepare them? We have to equip them with the skills and know-how to solve novel problems and to stay focused. Our courses have to be embedded in real-world scenarios so they keep being motivated. We have to bring the variety of tools, techniques and opinions into the classroom. THEY have to make decisions and they have to deal with the results.

In my courses and with all the theses I supervise I am led by Steve Jobs’ words: You gotta find something that you love, that inspires and challenges you. So tell me what you are interested in, what problems you want to solve, what technologies you find hip. After having a picture of my students’ goals, I adapt my research goals and do you know what? Most of the times they produce awesome results. I am convinced they would never produce the same high quality if they would need to do something that they didn’t like. Never ever.

So what is the purpose of education? Engage them. To try. To fail. To fail often. To succeed and learn. Give them opportunities to find something they truly love.

Social media are increasingly popular platforms for collaboration and quick information sharing. This volume is a collection of reports on how these technologies are being used to educate educators with social media in creative and effective ways. Social networking technologies enable the integration of students and alumni in co-curricular activities in exciting and still evolving ways. The use of wikis, blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, Yahoo Pipes, Diigo, Second Life, Moodle, and other Web 2.0 technologies are shown in vivid examples and insightful critiques. The processes, design, delivery and evaluation of instruction using social media are examined in detail and include such topics as: the use of social media in developing countries for new approaches to teaching as support for individual and peer-based learning; new teaching orientations premised on social media such as focused distraction; enhancing in-class participation; how instructors are increasing the technical expertise that is needed by educators to develop their own 21st century curricula projects; and, creating an ecosystem for life-long learning through social media.

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.

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.

…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!

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?

http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-research

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

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.

If you only could follow one person on Twitter, who would that be?

I gave my answer (which I cannot tell you here…) and thought it would be a cool thing to explore with a wider public. That’s why I put up a really simple questionnaire over at Google Spreadsheets and would be really happy if you could distribute it to your fellow Tweeple.

Google Wave vs. Twitter at conferences

The lists feature obtained mixed feedback. Some people like it that they can put their followers in lists according to their location, community, language or any other criterium, others are saying it was a snapshot of the Twitter team. If you look at the profile of Tim Berners-Lee you’ll see he is listed nearly 1200 times. A lot of these lists are  related to technology, the WWW and semantic web. Unfortunately (or luckily) there is not the One technology lists where anyone you get started (mainly because such a list is pure imagination). On the other hand, if you look at the lists that Stephen Downes is on, you’ll get 90 lists, all dealing with education and learning in the web 2.0. Like so often each coin has to sides and we will need to sit and wait what Twitter lists will be useful for. For me I like it that now I can sync my lists with several tools and the Twitter website – a great gain in mobility and consistency.

If you are developing applications built on the Twitter API maybe the experimental Twitter Streaming API is interesting for you.

I was attending two pre-conference workshops on tuesday (Science 2.0, TEL-CoPs) and could listen to cool keynotes and interesting sessions. During the Science 2.0 (other post) workshop we discussed how we can use technology in beforehand of a conference, at the conference and afterwards. Graham Attwell, who was not attending the conference also added some notes and Erik Duval and Martin Weller wrote dome some notes or uploaded videos.

We all agree that currently conferences heavily differ in their application of technology and attendee-support. At EC-TEL I first saw a conference planning tool that basically is a social bookmarking tool and simple recommender system (see Hendrik’s slides). All talks with their respective authors and keywords are placed in the system and you can assemble your own conference schedule by selecting the most interesting abstracts, tag them and propose these talks to groups of users. The conference planner is a great starting point for making conferences more interactive and transparent to the (online | offline) attending researchers. But for me it is still pretty much Web 1.0 -ish… I’m thinking of some cool conference website that not only presents the CfP and Venue information but shows the main themes from accepted papers, emerging clusters and top referenced papers. If there was some tag cloudy visualization of a conference’s content (coming from Blogs, Flickr, Twitter, Slideshare, and accepted papers of course) that can be individually browsed we come to a point where we not only support the offline attendees but also interested people from the community that aren’t able to come to the conference. I totally agree with Graham that we can motivate students and young researchers to focus on a conference even if they can’t go there.

During the week I was able to tell a bit about the concept of Artefact-Actor-Networks and the possibilities it offers to store and analyse dynamic communications. Maybe there will be an option to use the concept for a tool for upcoming conferences like the conference planner was tested this time. What I learned from the keynote of Mike Sharples is that good design-based research must include early user involvement and user studies that may turn all your implementation around. From the TEL-CoP workshop we learned that visualizations that are created by us computer scientists very often are worth null because we don’t note cognitive theories or aren’t sure about our visualization goals.

It also was a great pleasure to see all the STELLAR guys wearing their t-shirts. They really did great dissemination work and I kind of like their approach to establish TEL as an standalone research discipline that must bring closer together computer science, didactics and pedagogics.

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.

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

Gestern waren nun also Landtagswahlen in Sachsen, Thüringen und dem Saarland. Auf die eigentlichen Wahlergebnisse will ich gar nicht eingehen (die sind traurig genug), vielmehr soll es um die Grundsätze unserer Wahlen und den Zusammenhang zu Twitter gehen.

Nachdem Jana Herwig gestern so freudig über die Partei Die Freunde aus Köln berichtet hatte (Bild des Anstoßes), habe ich ein wenig über die Wahlgrundsätze in Deutschland nachgedacht und bin ein wenig ins Stocken geraten. Da heißt es:

Wahlen zu Volksvertretern werden werden in allgemeiner, unmittelbarer, freier, gleicher und geheimer Wahl bestimmt.

Für mein Verständnis und nach Theo Öhlinger’s Verfassungsrecht bedeutet eine geheime Wahl:

Geheim sind die Wahlen, wenn der Wähler seinen Stimmzettel unbeobachtet und unbeeinflusst in einer Wahlkabine selbst ausfüllen und in einem Umschlag in die Wahlurne werfen kann. Es darf nicht feststellbar sein, wie der einzelne Bürger gewählt hat. Die geheime Wahl soll den Wähler nicht bloß vor unerwünschter Einflussnahme auf seine Willensbildung im Zuge des Wahlvorgangs bewahren, sie soll ihm auch die Sorge und Furcht nehmen, dass er wegen seiner Stimmabgabe in bestimmter Richtung Vorwürfen und Nachteilen welcher Art immer ausgesetzt sei.

Ich dachte bisher auch, dass man nach der Wahl seine Entscheidung nicht öffentlich kundtun darf, wofür ich aber keinen Beweis finden konnte. Stattdessen steht in Wikipedia unter Wahlgeheimnis:

Hingegen darf der Wähler nach der Wahl seine Wahlentscheidung öffentlich verkünden.

Also wie ist das denn nun wirklich? Wo sind die Experten, wenn man sie braucht? Das Bild der Partei Deine Freunde zumindest verletzt meiner Meinung nach das Wahlgeheimnis, auch wenn nicht klar ist, wer da genau wählt, aber das ist ja mit vertretbarem Aufwand herauszufinden…

Viel schlimmer (und wahrscheinlich noch großes Thema in Rechtstreiten) ist der Fakt, dass bereits etwa 90 Minuten vor der Schließung der Wahllokale recht zuverlässige Prognosen zu den Wahlergebnissen in Twitter zu lesen waren. Obwohl einer der betreffende CDU-Politiker vehement bestreitet die Updates geschrieben zu haben liegt hier ja dennoch ein grundsätzliches Problem der Indiskretion vor, die unbedingt unterbunden werden muss. Ich verteidige Twitter ja sonst wo es geht, doch wenn durch den unbedachten Einsatz Pflichten und Gesetze gebrochen werden, dann hört der Spaß auf. Warten wir mal ab, was in diesem Fall noch passiert…

Was den Fall der geheimen Wahl angeht, so bitte ich um fundierte Belege für die eine oder andere Möglichkeit. Ich bin gespannt, was sich da ergibt…

Thanks for this Twitter.

ein ungezwungenes Treffen hungriger Twitterer zum Mittagessen. Sei es, um sich kennen zu lernen, mal dem öden Büro zu entfliehen oder einfach nur um Spaß zu haben.

Und so geht‘s: Ich habe auf Twittagessen.de einen Event angesetzt für den 17.08.2009 um 12.30 Uhr im Kampus. Dort treffen wir uns zu einem gemütlichen Mittagessen und schauen mal, was passiert. Dann gibt’s lecker Essen und vielleicht ne nette Unterhaltung. Das war’s…

Ihr wollt dabei sein? Dann bitte HIER die Teilnahme anzeigen (hilft mir auch bei der Tischreservierung…).

So does the application possibility strongly depends on the people at the conference and the type of official incorporation in the conference communication?!

Here are some statistical data and voices from the attendees of the TNC2009:

Did you have a Twitter account before the TNC 2009 conference?

What was your main reason to use Twitter during the TNC 2009 conference? (multiple selections allowed)

Do you think Twitter encouraged the discussion of topics presented during the TNC 2009 conference?

Please tell us why you think Twitter encouraged the discussion of topics during the TNC 2009 conference?

• 1. Getting a second opinion on stuff you hear, while hearing it. 2. Catching stuff that you’d have missed otherwise due to ignorance, bad hearing, noisy neighbours or such.
• Allowed for parallel discussions
• Because I didn’t twitter myself (just didn’t notice the track) but heard there was noticeable usage I assume encourage of discussion. I would have used it if I would have been aware of the track
• brings in participants from outside the conference, easy way to rate other people’s reactions that isn’t possible during short question times in sessions.
• Easy way to send clear and potentially discussion-provoking statements
• For me (in my case) twitter was useful because it gave me the possibility of discussing with my collegues about the topics we suposed were most interesting to us.
• It can be hard to find people physically at the conference in coffee breaks so you discuss with people in real time, but not in person.
• It can do a more interactive relation between the speaker and attendant.
• It was a back-channel for less formal discussion and occaisionally critical/dissenting views that aren’t readily expressed in the context of the session itself
• Tweets make it possible to make brief comments about what is happening right now, and to make topical, focused comments – and it makes it possible for others to get different perspectives on presentations and current topics.

Please tell us why you don’t think Twitter encouraged the discussion of topics during the TNC 2009 conference.

• A discussion should not take place on two different places.
• Not enough delegates were on twitter
• It was not even discussed among the attendees I spoke with.
• the conference is about meeting people – not about reading messages.
• TNC is a small conference. I can talk to each other and there is enough time for questions in the meetings.to send mails I must not travel to Malaga. “networking the networkers” does not mean: send mails!
• Too few people tweeting or following.

Please rate these communication channels according to your frequence of use during the TNC 2009 conference.

In your opinion, what is the added value of tweeting in conferences?

• virtually  meeting new people, added context to the presentations, feedback and evaluation from other attendees
• actually it is at least for some a way to give feed-back
• Another collaboration platform
• Getting hints on good presentations and novel ideas from people you know and trust. Sharing ideas. Learning about things “in real time”.
• Getting to know people interested in the same topics, sharing one’s opinion. Receiving hints about what s going on in other parallel sessions.
• Having fun
• identifying potential starting points of discussions
• In general, as part of backchannel discussion. At this particular conference, sharing news from the conf with people not attending in person.
• It is fast and simple way to communicate.
• low-threshold way of sharing instant impressions
• near real time communication (in the middle between sync and async)
• Quick and easy way to share ideas and raise issues during the conference.
• Quick, easy backchannel. Means of keeping track of other parallel sessions. Permanent record of thoughts and ideas.
• Rapid up-to-date info. Making contact with other ppl. Some fun (i.e. jokes), giving an informal contact.
• short and immediate exchange of thoughts and remarks
• Spontaneous opinion sharing without disrupting by talking.
• spontaneously expressing opinions, ideas, questions
• telling someone something in a quicker way than email during sessions (such as comments, requests, and so on)

In your opinion, what are disadvantages of using Twitter in conferences?

• Twitter is little bit messy. You have to follow right persons or anyone have to remember use those search tags like #tnc2009.
• Too much typing, too little following the programme.
• There is already so much multi-tasking and so many distractions during a conference that it is hard to listen to what people are saying.  Twitter adds to the noise.
• The need to learn a new tool
• Not enough of the delegates were on twitter.
• Might be distracting on some people.  I personally don’t think I suffer that much.
• It encourages people to make inconsequential remarks of short shelf-life rather than listening to the speaker who is talking.
• May distract attention to presentations
• during sessions pleople keep writing on their laptop. I know of conferences in which the organizers blocked wi-fi in session rooms.
• Could reduce the amount of direct interactions for those who are present in the conference.
• Could distract from potentially more productive means of communication. Although for Twitter, the level of distraction is probably lower than for other media for side conversations.
• anaouthe activity people deal with instead of personal communication

Here’s the abstract:

Communities of Practice (CoPs) have been widely recognized as effective environments to support learning among professionals, organisations and educational institutions. In this paper we introduce an application that analyzes written communication within Communities of Practice on the microblogging platform Twitter and allows the visualization of dynamics of the communiaction. As example we analyze and visualize the Community of Practice of the JTEL Summer School 2009.

For me Twitter became to my main mean of communication because it’s lean, easy, mobile accessible and so fast. Twitter is like a soap opera – you don’t need to watch every episode to not lose the plot. If you attend meetings the whole day, you just look at your timeline and review the last one or two pages, if the other stuff was important you will find it somewhere else very soon. If people wanted to communicate with you, they sent you an @-reply (they call it mention now).

As Steve Wheeler discussed,

[Twitter] employes a number of simple and abbreviated filtering features such as #hashtagging, @names, RT (Retweeting) and DM (Direct messaging) which many social networking tools do not have.

Twitter seems to be a good step in direction of the Web 3.0 aka Semantic Web. Twitter stores some nifty semantic relations for tweets, such as in_reply_to_status_id, in_reply_to_user_id and in_reply_to_screen_name. But they do not store the status_id of a retweet. If I do a retweet (RT) of a foreign tweet it would be great, if Twitter would store this semantical information as metadata. Thus I created an idea at getsatisfaction.com that asks Twitter Inc. to implemented this feature. If you like my idea please vote for it here

Image source: www.redbubble.com

With Microclipse you can send microblogging messages to Twitter or any Laconi.ca instance (including Identi.ca) directly from your Eclipse-RCP-based application.

Change log:

• You only need to enter Twitter or Laconi.ca credentials not both
• PreferencePane checks wheter you entered a tag with at least 3 characters

Please give us feedback on the new version of the plugin.

I’m looking forward to the responses of your conference attendees.

We plan to run our survey at other conferences in 2009 to obtain more data we can evaluate and make general statements on how to apply Microblogging at conferences.

If you use Twitter at your conference (or workshop) please let us know. We are looking for some survey mentors that state themself responsible for spreading the word about the survey at a specific conference. We would prepare the survey and send you a link, which you should distribute amongst the attendees. If you are interested, just let me know.

Edit: In the meantime there are still some more reviews of our article available. Thx for your feedback. See reviews here and here and here

But even with its enormous advantages in speed, shortness and the viral dissemination of news, microblogging has a main disadvantage: it’s simply not made for expressing longer ideas or discussing thoughts in a more deeply way. Don’t get me wrong, I really love microblogging in a lot of settings, but I don’t understand people saying “Twitter killed my blog“. Twitter did kill my feedreader as all the interesting links, photos etc. now come from my friends and followers on Twitter (maybe that’s another reason why you should follow everyone back). But at least for me with starting Twitter the “need” for having a blog to raise some questions, to discuss ideas and thoughts in a more deeply way just became to be.

What about you? Did Twitter kill your blog? Why is it like that? Did Twitter killed your feedreader as well? Where do you get your relevant information from nowadays?

Meanwhile we put up surveys for several conferences and get the first answers:

• Web 2.0 Expo Europe 2008 in Berlin
• Handheld Learning 2008 in London
• ECTEL 2008 in Maastricht
• Online Educa 2008 in Berlin
• E-LEARN 2008 in Las Vegas
• LeWeb ’08 in Paris