is it just me

To all folks feeling a bit lost in the motivational lowlands…

No Dissertation from ticoneva on Vimeo.

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Today we had the final presentations of our Future Social Learning Networks (FSLN) seminar. The seminar took place at the University of Paderborn and the University of Augburg (both in Germany). I have to say that I supervised a number of seminars during my time at the University of Paderborn, but what I experienced today was awesome. I supervised the seminar together with my colleague Nina Heinze, who also works at the KMRC in Tübingen.

The seminar was designed to let students experience the power of Social Media in real-life situations, so we decided to have them cooperating with a fellow student from another university in another city, far away from home. So they HAD to use tools for keeping in sync with their partner, to communicate, coordinate and cooperate (you remember the classification of groupware from Teufel et al.?). So we introduced social media tools in higher education to them (thanks again to Cristina Costa for doing the lovely voicethread) and the students started to test Twitter, Delicious, Mendeley, SlideShare, FlashMeeting and Co for their work. We told them that we’d expect a collaborative presentation, a final report and an computer science artifact that represents what they did. After the first week we scheduled team meeting with the student groups where they presented their first ideas on the focus of their work and how the could design or implement the required artifact. The same thing took place 3 weeks later where we focused the topic even further and decided what artifact should be created. Nina and me were surprised by both the creativity, engagement and quality of the results in such an early phase of the seminar – because we knew different from former seminars. During the following weeks, we had two FlashMeetings with the whole group and some individual talks on Skype and gave little advice where help was needed. We could follow the students’ work from their bookmarks on Delicious and the shared articles in Mendeley (thank you guys for the extended shared collection, you really rock), could follow Tweets and had short ad-hoc face-to-face meetings at the coffee machine. All in all a pretty satisfying work load during the semester with pretty motivated students.

Today we had the final presentations; the students in Paderborn were sitting in a room in Paderborn, the students in Augsburg were in Augsburg. We used uStream.tv to stream the presentations from one city to another and Skype desktop sharing to transfer sound and the slides to both places simultaneously. Furthermore we had a Twitter backchannel and my boss was attending from another location via Skype as well. I thought: what a mess, technology will never do this. BUT IT DID. And it did perfectly. Yeehaw. You can see a picture of the Paderbornian setting here:

But then the students started to present their work. All in all we had the following topics:

1. Real-time collaborative learning
2. Media disruptions in Web 2.0 environments
3. Awareness in Learning Networks
4. Interactive Learning Ressources
5. Social Network Analysis in Artefact-Actor-Networks
6. Game-based Learning
7. University 2.0

Our students not only invested a lot of time in their presentations and the writing of well-formulated and substantiated articles, they also presented stunning prototypical implementations and architectural design for IT systems that would really make a difference (see the pictures on Flickr). One team was developing a MashUp real-time collaborative learning environment that combined a whiteboard with video chat, twitter integration and the ability to load any RSS feed. The widget-based environment was running on Django in Python (a language we do not teach in Paderborn) and allows for the creation and storage of differing MashUps that can be used, shared, stored and re-accessed later. Another team analyzed the daily routines of students in Paderborn and Augsburg and modeled the study-related part in EPK models (something we never thought of). The team identified a range of media disruptions during the exam application for example (12 disruption in Paderborn, with 4 different tools involved). Finally, the did paper prototyping for an improved system that could be used at various universities and developed an infrastructure design. Another team was developing an interactive PDF where Flash content from nearly all social media platforms can be integrated. They showed a PDF that incorporated fully functioning SlideShare presentations and YouTube videos, the above-mentioned VoiceThread and even FlashMeeting replays from our meetings. Moreover, they developed an application CommentInAPDF that allows to send tweets from within a PDF (there even was an extended version where they automatically added an a priori defined hashtag to the tweet). The presentation of the PDF was so impressing and opened up so many visions of what to do with such technical options, I’m still stunned. Here is a video of their presentation (in German).

Finally the University 2.0 group did an online survey among 470 German-speaking students regarding their vision of the University in the year 2030 and combined those findings with qualitative interviews with scientific staff. Furthermore they likened their findings with future predictions (e.g. The Horizon Reports) and produced this awesome Prezi presentation.

I have to say that I never had so motivated students, which invested their valuable time and lifeblood into a seminar and produced so cool artifacts. During the feedback session they told us, that the collaboration with others that they couldn’t talk to other than mediated to social software was very motivating for them and that they learned to love the tools we introduced to them. Also they mentioned that the permanent availability of the supervisors via social media tools gave them the feeling safety and encouraged them to ask for help and council.

Students, that was rocket science, thank you so much. I hope to work with you again soon!

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My friend Cristina Costa from the University of Salford (ok, basically she’s from Portugal) contributed to our FSLN 2010 seminar with a pretty cool Voicethread about Social Media in Higher Education.

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?

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Soeben habe ich den sehr motivierenden und cool gemachten Call for Chapters von Martin Ebner und Sandra Schaffert zu einem Lehrbuch der besonderen Art bekommen. Martin und Sandra widmen sich mit ihrer Buchidee einem wichtigen Aspekt der heutigen Bildungslandschaft, der in bisherigen Lehrbüchern deutlich zu kurz kommt: das effektive Lehren und Lernen mit Methoden und Werkzeugen des Web 2.0. Der Name des Projekts ist “Lehrbuch für Lernen und Lehren mit Technologien. Ein interdisziplinäres Lehrbuch (L3T)”

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…

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At this week’s SSE 2010 workshop, Prof. Bernd Brügge from TUM gave the keynote entitled “Opportunities for Social Software in Large-Scale Project Courses”. The talk was really inspiring and introduced the DOLLI project to us. This project was a cooperation between TUM and the airport Munich during which more than 50 students worked on a real-life problem for the airport. Not only the engaging topic but also they way they did project management (starting with RUP and switching to XP after that) and used video during the whole project is worth the viewing.

Also check out the website of the DOLLI project.

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Jana Herwig hat sich in den voestalpine digitalks in der dritten Ausgabe mit Microblogging, Video und Weak ties beschäftigt. Das sehr interessante Video findet sich auf YouTube, die Folien auf Slideshare und ein ausführlicher Beitrag in Jana’s Blog. Enjoy.

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Today I came across a real awesome video presented by Critical Commons.

Critical Commons is a non-profit advocacy coalition that supports the use of media for teaching, learning and creativity, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students, educators and creators. Critical Commons provides information about current copyright law and its alternatives in order to facilitate the writing and dissemination of best practices and fair use guidelines for scholarly and creative communities. Critical Commons also functions as a showcase for innovative forms of electronic scholarship and creative production that are transformative, culturally enriching and both legally and ethically defensible. At the heart of Critical Commons is an online tool for viewing, tagging, sharing, annotating and curating media within the guidelines established by a given community. Our goal is to build open, informed communities around media-based teaching, learning and creativity, both inside and outside of formal educational environments.

The video discusses informal learning through blogs and creative thinking in the context of online/offline learning networks in a rather … extraordinary way. On of the best parts is

Don’t worry Anna. We will always have our informal learning networks.

But see yourself:

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I came across Sikuli today, a MIT User Interface Design Group project that is just awesome and allows to automate or script your computer based on screenshots.

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…

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One of my grad students (Frederik) is developing a great tool for scientific writing in the context of his masters thesis. Today the first screencast of the early alpha version has gone online. Maybe you want to check it out and to subscribe for updates on the tool named SciFlow…

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

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