is it just me

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!

Popularity: 4% [?]

After the successful Science 2.0 workshop at last year’s EC-TEL conference, there will be another cool workshop where you can present your cool ideas and applications about what Science 2.0 and Research 2.0 could look like. Spread the word and hand in your stuff. We’re pretty much looking forward to see what you are doing…

Research2.0 is in essence a Web2.0 approach to how we do research. Research2.0 creates conversations between researchers, enables them to discuss their findings and connects them with others. Thus, Research2.0 can accelerate the diffusion of knowledge.

Topics for this workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Evaluation of existing Research2.0 tools and infrastructures from a TEL perspective
• Development of TEL-related use case scenarios for Research2.0 tools and infrastructures
• Influence of Research2.0 tools and technologies on scientific practices in TEL
• Formats and protocols for Research2.0 data exchange (linked data, RSS, BuRST, …)
• Ownership and privacy of research information
• Practices of the diverse Technology Enhanced Learning disciplines, and how Research2.0 can influence them

Format

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished work. The following types of contributions are possible:

• Short papers (3-5 pages) that state the position of the authors on issues relevant to the workshop or work in progress, even when in very early state.
• Full papers: (8-12 pages) that describe problems, needs, novel approaches and frameworks within the scope of the workshop. In this category, empirical evaluation papers and industrial experience reports are welcome for submission.

Each presenter will be linked to related papers from other presenters and will be asked to compare in the presentation how the works of others relates to their own work.

The presentation of unfinished ideas, tools under development and especially failures is explicitly encouraged. This includes the presentation and discussion of tools and their real-world usability.

Prior to the workshop, a dedicated group on TEL Europe will be opened to:

• facilitate discussions among participants before and after the conference;
• post submitted papers for an open peer review;
• publish information and news about the workshop;
• collect reactions through social media on the workshop.

All presentations and discussions will be broadcast via Flashmeeting to attract more feedback, and to document the event. Online questions and comments will be explicitly taken into account during the workshop.

Important Dates

• Paper submission: 27 June 2010
• Paper acceptance: 11 July 2010
• Main Conference: 28 September-1 October 2010

Paper submission and questions

Please submit your paper at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=research20.

Feel free to contact erik.duval@cs.kuleuven.be if you have any questions!

Popularity: 10% [?]

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

Popularity: 7% [?]

Today I came across a cool tool for visualizing co-authorship networks and it’s from Microsoft. Microsoft describes the product as:

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.

Popularity: 22% [?]

As you may have noticed the great service Wordle.net is offline.

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

Popularity: 3% [?]

One of my favourite web services – Wordle.net – is down because of some weird legal reasons. If you are a laywer specialized in trademark affairs, please help to get Wordle back online.

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.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Maybe you have already seen Recognizr, a TAT prototype of an augmented ID concept. If not here is the pretty stunning video.

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…

Popularity: 3% [?]

There is a logo competition going on for the 2010 EC-TEL conference in Barcelona. Here is my creation:

I took the some (Flickr-CC) pictures of the beautiful city and combined it with the sustainability theme of the conference. The recurring style element is an abstract wing that visualizes the TEL way from innovation to practice.

What do you think?

Popularity: 3% [?]

Image via Wikipedia

Thanks to a tweet by George Siemens I came across Tim Kastelle’s Blog today. Besides a general recommendation forhis blog, I’d like to point out some posts explicitly that where very inspiring. The post Networks and the Information Glut discusses how “new” the phenomena of information overload really is:

Or think about Charles Darwin – over the course of scientific career he sent over 15,000 letters. It’s safe to assume that he received just as many. Think about how much time he would have spent reading & writing letters, and how much new information and ideas would have been included in that – it’s probably more than we’re spending writing our blogs, updating our statuses and twittering.

Furthermore he links to an interesting video that show the social network of 18th century scientists such as Voltaire (by Dan Edelstein)

Another post discusses the common prejudice that new media leeds to being less smart people and invoke Plato‘s argument that writing down things would result in making us stupid. Tim shows all the false assumptions and even calls Plato’s arguments dumb. Great one. Give him a read…

Popularity: 11% [?]