Seit dieser Woche halte ich nun endlich meine beiden Autorenexemplare der zweiten Auflage von Informatik Macchiato in Händen. Die zweite Auflage unseres Cartoonkurses beinhaltet inhaltliche Überarbeitungen sowie zwei neue Kapitel mit recht hoher Aktualität: zum einen haben wir ein Kapitel zu “Web 2.0 und Soziale Netzwerke” hinzugefügt. Zum anderen beschäftigt sich das Kapitel “Datenschutz und Urheberrecht” mit den Herausforderungen digitaler Fußspuren und der Weitergabe von persönlichen Daten.

Wir freuen uns wie immer über Rückmeldungen jeder Art und natürlich über Rezensionen auf Amazon.

This is maybe the most awesome story I ever heard about the One Laptop Per Child project:

We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.

Source: http://www.dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php

Ich weiß schon, was ihr jetzt denkt: “Dreht er jetzt vollkommen ab?”. Nein, ganz im Gegenteil, heute war mal wieder so ein echter “Is it just me?”-Moment. Es wird langsam wirklich Frühling und die Fenster sehen doch ein wenig dreckig aus… Nun hat wirklich niemand Lust auf Fensterputzen und Männer ja schon mal prinzipiell gar nicht. Mit Wasser säubern, Fensterputzzeug aufsprühen, verreiben, abziehen und dann streifenfrei abwischen  - das ist nichts für uns. Und für männliche Geeks schon mal gar nicht. Nun gut, es gibt schon Jungs, die es voll raus haben…

Doch da gibt es seit letzter Woche ein nettes kleines, gelbes Tool in unserem Haushalt, das verspricht Fensterputzen cool zu machen. Heute habe ich den Kärcher Fenstersauger WV50 plus endlich ausgetestet und muss sagen: WOW, warum habe ich den nicht eher gekauft? So macht Fenster putzen endlich Spaß: das Fenster wird nun nur noch feucht gereinigt und dann kommt der Fenstersauger zum Einsatz, der das Schmutzwasser ganz einfach absaugt. Der geekige Fensterputzer kann so im Handumdrehen die Fenster und Spiegel des Hauses reinigen und dabei sogar eine Hand in der Hosentasche lassen. Geschwitzt wird nicht mehr.

Wer auf Videos und gut aufbereitete Informationen steht, hier ist ein aktuelles vom Testmagazin, das dem WV 50 plus auch glatt ein “Sehr gut” bescheinigt. Ich kann nur sagen, ich habe selten 50 Euro so gut angelegt und kann den Fenstersauger uneingeschränkt weiterempfehlen. Wer über Sprossenfenster oder ähnliches verfügt, dem sei an dieser Stelle der große Bruder WV75 plus ans Herz gelegt, es gibt aber auch einen schmaleren Zusatzaufsatz für den Fall der Fälle.

Einer meiner Studenten aus dem HCPA-Projekt beschäftigt sich mit der Analyse von Referenzen in Literaturverzeichnissen in wissenschaftlichen Publikationen mit dem Ziel daraus gezielt Literaturvorschläge zu unterbreiten. Wie bei jeder unserer Arbeiten ist es relevant die Ergebnisse mit Hilfe (einer hoffentlich großen Menge von) echten Testpersonen zu evaluieren.

Dazu hat Adrian eine webbasierte Umfrage eingerichtet, die mit Hilfe seines Tools INSPIRE beantwortet werden soll. Die Umfrage enthält nur 14 Fragen und lässt sich in 5 bis 10 Minuten beantworten. Das Vorgehen ist zudem recht einfach: 1) auf INSPIRE nach einer Publikation oder einem Autor suchen, 2) aus den Suchergebnissen eine Publikation auswählen, 3) Literaturvorschläge ansehen und dann die Umfrage ausfüllen. Easy, oder?

Ich freue mich über eine breite Teilnahme, sehr gern auch außerhalb des üblichen Netzwerks :)

Every now and then you might want to delete all the hidden rows or columns in an Excel sheet. You could do this by hand but obvioulsy there is an automated solution to do so. Simply copy the below Marco, create a new one in your Excel sheet, run it and be happy.

If you want to delete Columns instead of Rows, simply replace

Row resp. Rows

with

Column resp. Columns

and


Sub DeleteHiddenRows()
Dim Row As Range
For Each Row In ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Rows
With Row
If .Hidden Then
.Hidden = False
.Delete
End If
End With
Next Row
End Sub


I blogged about PINGO before but since it has become a tool that is now used by teachers from more than 100 universities all over the globe, today I present an update.

With PINGO, we have developed a free-to-use prototypical web-based classroom response system at the University of Paderborn that we want to offer you for applications in teaching and research. The system is called PINGO („Peer Instruction for very large groups“). Similar to the ask-the-audience life-line in “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”, students can be involved in the lecture by answering (conceptual) questions posed by the instructor using their Internet-enabled devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops etc.). PINGO may be used to implement constructivist teaching designs, such as Peer Instruction, Classwide discusions, Three-Questions Sequence approach and many others. We are working on extending PINGO (e.g., in terms of question formats) and want to use it also as an artifact to conduct experiments in the area of teaching and technology use. If you are interested in joining us, please do not hesitate to contact us. We plan to offer PINGO as open source in fall this year.

PINGO is currently offered in an English and a German version (Spanish will follow soon). PINGO is offered as a hosted service free of charge to universities world wide.

A virtual tour that illustrates the features and how to use PINGO is offered at http://pingo.upb.de/?tour=true

To register as instructor, please click here.

The project website can be accessed here. There, we also offer some instructional videos on peer instruction and the use of PINGO.

We are looking forward to your feedback on how to improve PINGO and hope that you will find it valuable for your own teaching.

Yesterday, I had a lively discussion on Twitter with some of the organizers of the MOOC-Maker Course 2013 (#mmc13) about the question “When can a MOOC can be considered being massive?” Their point was that a MOOC is massive when it has more than 150 participants. This point of view goes back to a presentation by Claudia Bremer (here is the video of that talk, in German) where she says: “ah and I talked to Stephen Downes by the way and he said a MOOC can be considered massive when there are more than 150 participants”. I immediately thought: HERESAY … and tried to find out more about the magical 150 (right, that is the Dunbar number as well).

In my opinion, an online course can be considered massive, when it offers more opportunities for social interaction than the single participant can deal with. As a participant (or facilitator for that matter) you simply cannot connect to all 2000 members of a MOOC. But wait, of that 2000 members how many are really active? So how many of them contribute to the MOOC with own contributions? By reading, digesting, mixing and sharing content and thus contributing to that special MOOC experience? Is it 10%? 5%? I would say that if 1% of the registered participants of a MOOC are really active throughout the course you can be very lucky (for reference: the number of active Wikipedians in 2010 was around 0.07%). That means that if your MOOC has 2000 registered participants around 20 of them will be very active, another 180 will be somewhat active and the remaining 1800 will be lurking around, consuming and maybe once say hello or present their 2 cents on a specific topic (also see the 1% rule of online communities). Don’t get me wrong, this is absolutely okay…

So I tried to find out if Stephen Downes has written about that 150 participants milestone somewhere and found this blog post in which he says:

Another problem: the size. And again, it’s the same sort of thing. People feel for some reason that they need to make a personal connection with all 2000 people in the MOOC. And then they worry that they can’t. And they worry that they’re missing out on the important people. As though there are important people. And the larger the MOOC gets the more difficult this becomes.

We would like to see this model apply not just to 2000 but to 10,000 or 100,000 people, but if people go into it with the expectation that they have to develop a personal relationship with 100,000 people it’s not going to work.

Again, we need this middle point between the solo and the social. We need this middle point – maybe aimed at Dunbar’s number of getting to know 150 people – a middle point that allows us to network without necessarily becoming a part of this whole crowd of 100,000 people.

If I interpret these three paragraphs it reads to me: the active participant of a MOOC can maybe connect to 150 other active participants of the MOOC but not more. And he should not be disappointed not being able to connect to all the others. First, Dunbar’s number has been validated in several experiments. Second, be happy having found 150 likeminded people that you can connect to and learn from/with. Carpe Diem. Go ahead and make the most out of your new network, learn and improve. In the next MOOC you will probably connect to another 150 new people and learn from them.

However, I cannot read that Stephen said: congratulations, when the registration list of your open online course has 150 entries you are officially allowed to call yourself a MOOC. If you manage to motivate all those 150 people to be an active part of the course, to contribute, share and discuss with the others: congratulations and well done. Because then you have met my criteria for calling your OOC a MOOC: offering each active participant the opportunity to connect to 150 other active participants.

As this is a very personal point of view, I would like to get to know your understanding of “massive” in the context of MOOCs. What are your criteria to call an open online course “massive”?

Ya, that’s the truth… At the end of this year, I’ll be leaving academia and the University of Paderborn and will start working as project manager in an international Paderborn-based company. While I’m looking forward to learn a lot of new things and to having new impressions of how collaborative work can be carried out, I am also a bit sad to leave the environment I worked and lived in the last 8 years.

During my studies at the University of Paderborn, I became student assistant at the Computer Science Education Group of Prof. Magenheim and quickly began to take responsibilities in the teaching activities of the group. In 2007, I became research associate in the group and had the opportunity to start supervising bachelor and master thesis, to develop new courses and to teach in the area of TEL, Social Media, Knowledge Management and E-Learning (and many more topics, see the list). I became the supervisor of several project groups at our group and learned a lot about project management, they dos and don’ts of collaborative software development and agile development techniques.

When my PhD project at the University of Paderborn didn’t went as I hoped for, it were Hendrik Drachsler and Peter Sloep that motivated me to carry on and to finish that PhD. So I became external PhD at the Open Universiteit’s CELSTEC and successfully defended my thesis “Awareness Support for Knowledge Workers in Research Networks” in April 2012 after 18 months of hard work. Hendrik, Peter, I thank you again for being the supervisors you were and for guiding me through the process. It was a gift being able to work with you.

Together with many brilliant minds, I published a lot in the past years and had the opportunity to travel a lot. I met many smart researchers and some of them became friends. Every September, the European Conference on Technology Enhance Learning (EC-TEL) was the meeting point for the smart TEL community and I will certainly miss many of the people involved in making EC-TEL a great conference. It was the EC-TEL conference and my participation in several other EATEL-sponsored events that made me interested in becoming deeper involved in the European TEL community and I decided to run for election for the post of secretary of EATEL in 2011. Ever since my election, I enjoy working for the association and will carry on to work as secretary in the future.

I want to thank all of you that accompanied me throughout the last 8 years, all the colleagues at the University of Paderborn and at CELSTEC. I am grateful for all the students that decided to take my courses, to join my project groups, to write their final theses with me or that worked as students assistants for me. I know that I always brought in new ideas and changed existing plans but you always did your best to deliver great products (“Wolle always brings the cool ideas and I implement them” is something they used to say…). All the products we delivered have been well received, discussed by smart people all over the world and not uncommonly used as benchmark for their new developments. I want you to know that you are AWESOME and the best peers I could imagine. It was a great pleasure and honor being your “boss” and I will surely miss our brainstorming and darts sessions.

They say every new beginning is one beginning’s end. I’m looking forward to the new beginning and hope it will be as fruitful as the last one…

Yesterday, I received word that the University of Paderborn will honor me with the “Teaching Award of the University of Paderborn for Junior Academic Staff” (Lehrpreis der Universität Paderborn für den wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchs). The committee decided to present this award to me mainly for the pedagogic concept and the three triple implementation of the “Future Social Learning Networks” seminar series. The price will be presented on 20.01.2013 within the scope of the New Year reception with the chancellor of the University.

I am very pleased and honored by the award and happy that the committee perceived the concept of FSLN as a valuable endeavor to enhance and open up university courses.

I conceived the FSLN seminar concept in 2010 while being at the Computer Science Education Group of the University of Paderborn. The first two implementations of the course were carried out in cooperation with Nina Rebele (a.k.a. Nina Heinze), who then was with the University of Augsburg’s Institute for Media and Educational Technology. This summer, the third implementation of the course was carried out with six partners and about 90 students from Germany and Israel. In detail we collaborated with Ilona Buchem (Beuth University of Applied Sciences Berlin), Moshe Leiba (Holon Institute of Technology), Alexander Perl (University of Braunschweig), and Timo van Treeck (Cologne University of Applied Sciences). The main aim of the FSLN courses always have been to foster international and interdisciplinary collaboration of student teams working on real-world problems while communicating with social media tools and services alone. This way, the students should be supported in gaining first-hand experience in using these tools purposeful and to the team’s benefit. The tasks have always been challenging and related to top notch research projects, such as STELLAR or MATURE.

If you want to know more about FSLN, you can check the following references:

• Buchem, I., Reinhardt, W., van Treeck, T., Leiba, M. & Perl, A. (2012, in print). Designing and Developing Mobile Learning Applications in International Student Teams, eLearning Papers, (32).
• Heinze, N. & Reinhardt, W. (2011). Educating Educators with Social Media. Cutting-edge Technologies in Higher Education, Chapter: Future Social Learning Networks at Universities — an Exploratory Seminar Setting, (1), 153–170.
• Reinhardt, W., Moi, M. & Heinze, N. (2011). Analysis of Twitter usage in an exploratory seminar setting. Form@re, (74).

Since last week, the proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Technology-Enhanced Learning (ARTEL12) are available as free download on CEUR-ws.org. The proceedings contain11 papers, where four papers specifically deal with awareness and awareness support and seven papers have their focus on reflection.

The workshop, which took place at the EC-TEL conference in Saarbrücken was a great and inspiring one. It brought together some smart people that shed light on awareness and reflection from several different TEL perspectives. Thank you again for your participation. I would also like to thank my co-organizers and the reviewers for their great job.

If you want to refer to the proceedings, please use this reference: A. Moore, V. Pammer, L. Pannese, M. Prilla, K. Rajagopal, W. Reinhardt, T. D. Ullmann, and C. Voigt (Eds.). Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Technology-Enhanced Learning, available online at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-931/. 2012.

• Proceedings website
• Proceedings as one single PDF
• Editorial of the proceedings

Last week we presented the public alpha version of PUSHPIN to interested researchers at the University of Paderborn. As part of the seminar series “Computer Science and Education”, the developers and supervisors of PUSHPIN introduced the service to more than 20 attendees. Since being in public alpha, PUSHPIN already has more than 100 users that contributed more than 4000 publications to the PUSHPIN corpus.

PUSHPIN is a service that aims at supporting researchers’ awareness of publications, peers and research trends. It is based on an eResearch infrastructure that analyzes scientific publications and combines the extracted data with the social interactions in an active social network. Besides the web application, PUSHPIN is also available on Android smartphones and as multitouch application.

In PUSHPIN, papers and researchers can be tagged and rated, they can be organized in private folders and can be recommended to fellow users of the service (and to others via email). Users can update their researcher profile (see my profile for example) with their research interest and affiliation(s). Doing this helps to be found by fellow researchers and contributes to institutional profiles (see the profile of the University of Paderborn for example). Users of PUSHPIN will receive recommendations for which fellow researchers to follow and which papers might be interesting for them.

Based on one’s publications, PUSHPIN provides facilities to find similar publications based on metadata (references, keywords, authors) and their full text (for example see similar papers to “All I Need To Know About Twitter in Education I learnt in Kindergarten” or similar papers to our own paper about PUSHPIN. Obviously, PUSHPIN is dependent on large corpora of scientific papers, which we’ll analyze using several tools.

For you, PUSHPIN works best when you upload your own publications or connect your Mendeley profile to PUSHPIN. In the latter case, we will synchronize your Mendeley library with PUSHPIN and analyze all your publications in order to give you recommendations and help you to explore your own research network.

PUSHPIN is another IT artefact that builds on the research conducted in my PhD project under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Peter Sloep and Dr. Hendrik Drachsler at CELSTEC. It has been developed by students of the University of Paderborn of the Computer Science Education Group over the last 6 months and received very positive feedback by our early adopters.

We now invite you to make use of PUSHPIN to support you becoming more aware of relevant research in your domain, researchers doing similar research as you do and to get an overview of the scientific output at your institution. Signup is free and can be easily done at http://pushpin.cs.upb.de/signup (you can sign up using Mendeley, Twitter or Facebook or using username and password.)

We’re looking forward to your feedback, either here, via Facebook or by dropping us a mail at pushpin@eim.upb.de

This week the 7th EC-TEL conference takes place in Saarbrücken (Germany) and the crème de la crème of TEL researchers comes together to discuss their latest results and plan for the future (check #ectel2012 if you are interested in following the backchannel discussions).

As you know, I am investigating research networks as well as the collaboration and interactions in such networks in order to support the member’s awareness. One research network is the author community of the EC-TEL conference itself. We not only analyzed them in deep but we are also investigating how we could visualize such networks and the inherent information in appropriate ways.

One of my students (Jörg Amelunxen) at the University of Paderborn works on the topic of visualizations of research networks from authorship information and needs your help in evaluating his prototype (GEXFVizz, a word play of GEXF [the XML format that Gephi is using] and visualization). For the evaluation we used the information about publications in EC-TEL between 2006 and 2011.

Jörg created a SURVEY that has four very small parts. In the first part you will see a co-authorship graph of the EC-TEL conference. Every node represents an author of the EC-TEL community. Within this graph two nodes are connected, if the authors have at least one common publication. You can use this link to open the graph.

In the second part of the survey you will see a bibliographic coupling graph of the EC-TEL conference. This graph connects two nodes (publications), if they have a common references. The coupling strength of two given documents is higher the more references they have in common. You can use this link to open the graph.

The third part of this survey deals with visualizations that have been created with Circos. The Circos visualization that you can find here shows the top 40 co-authorships of EC-TEL between 2006 to 2011. Since Circos visualizations are often full of information, we created this small cheat sheet that will help you understanding the visualization.

We would be very happy if you could support us (mostly Jörg) by participating in his SURVEY. It doesn’t take more than 5 minutes to participate and you’d support an eager young scientist ;)

Just a little more than 18 months after submission [sic!] our book chapter on mining and visualizing content from social networks has now been published by Springer. The book project Computational Social Networks obviously was a big success as they published three books out of the submissions.

Book 1 is on social networking tools, perspectives and applications, book 2 is on security and privacy in social networks and finally book 3 is on mining and visualizations of social networks.

Our chapter is entitled Mining and Visualizing Research Networks Using the Artefact-Actor-Network Approach and took a look at several incipient social networks in Twitter, SlideShare and Delicious.

Here’s the abstract of the chapter:

Virtual communities are increasingly relying on technologies and tools of the so-called Web 2.0. In the context of scientific events and topical Research Networks, researchers use Social Media as one main communication channel. This raises the question, how to monitor and analyze such Research Networks. In this chapter we argue that Artefact-Actor-Networks (AANs) serve well for modeling, storing and mining the social interactions around digital learning resources originating from various learning services. In order to deepen the model of AANs and its application to Research Networks, a relevant theoretical background as well as clues for a prototypical reference implementation are provided. This is followed by the analysis of six Research Networks and a detailed inspection of the results. Moreover, selected networks are visualized. Research Networks of the same type show similar descriptive measures while different types are not directly comparable to each other. Further, our analysis shows that narrowness of a Research Network’s subject area can be predicted using the connectedness of semantic similarity networks. Finally conclusions are drawn and implications for future research are discussed.

Reference: W. Reinhardt, A. Wilke, M. Moi, H. Drachsler, and P. B. Sloep. Mining and visualizing Research Networks using the Artefact-Actor-Network approach. In A. Abraham, editor, Computational Social Networks, pages 233–267. Springer London, 2012.

Last year we’ve been awarded the Award for Innovation and Quality in Teaching from the University of Paderborn for the PINGO project. PINGO stands for “Peer Instruction in Very Large Groups” and is a joint project of our Computer Science Education group with the E-Finance chair of Prof. Kundisch, the Economic Education chair of Prof. Beutner and Dr. Andrea Zoyke of the chair for Economic Education (in part. Media Didactics and Education).

Peer Instruction (PI) is a cooperative teaching and learning approach that is well suited to involve students even in large auditoriums. PI is technically similar to the ask-the-audience lifeline in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?; students get involved in the lecture by using (physical or electronic) clickers to answer multiple-choice questions posed by the instructor. The questions are designed to motivate students and to unveil potential difficulties with the course topics and material. If the questions are not answered correctly, the course participants are encouraged to discuss their answers with their close peers or the presentation is repeated in a modified way (depending on the percentage of wrong answers). The motivational and learning benefits of PI have been shown and reproduced in many empirical studies using varying methods. However, until today, PI has been rarely used in very large groups, i.e., groups of (far) more than 350 students.

One major reason for the comparably slow dissemination of PI is the expensive infrastructure for electronic classroom response systems that is mostly driven by physical clickers and/or software licensing fees. When electronic clickers applications are used, they are often limited to one operating system, only work with a limited number of participating clients or are hard to use. Moreover, there are complaints when students have to buy their own physical clickers. To design a technically and didactically favorable environment for the application of PI to very large audiences, we initiated the PINGO project. The goal of the PINGO project is to develop an open, scalable, web-based and easy-to-use PI application for students and instructors.

We’re going to present PINGO at EC-TEL 2012 and mLearn 2012 in the coming weeks and have prepared some videos that describe 1) the overall Peer Instruction method using PINGO and 2) the peer discussion phase in more detail. Please let us know how you like them in the comments.

If you are interested in using PINGO and the mobile application yourself please let me know.

There are also German versions of the video available: the description of the entire PINGO method can be found here and the German description of the peer discussion phase is available here.

We heard that many interested researchers could not submit their paper to the 2nd Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Technology Enhanced Learning (#artel12) yet as they were busy doing final project reviews or had to attend other great conferences. That’s why we did another (and the final) extension for submissions: you can now submit your long, short or demo paper until 29. July 2012, 23:59 CEST.

Please spread the word. We are looking forward to some more great contributions

During my studies on awareness support for researchers, I often found that the way researchers work with scientific publications is somewhat less than perfect. In fact many of my interviewees said it is a mess (a fact that I can second based on my own experience). In many cases you are not aware of all the related and relevant publications that you should read for that paper you are working on. When doing literature research for your thesis or project, there is a good chance that you miss some important literature, simply because you did not go through all the references of all the papers that you read. There is evidence that todays researchers read far more papers than their 1970s fellows (Renear and Palmer 2009) while spending considerably less time on the single publications. Some people call this information overload others claim that it’s filter failure… Recommender systems seem to be one way of overcoming this issue but they need to be to the point.

When you are organizing scientific events or if you serve as reviewer for such events or journals you have to make sure that the submissions you receive meet several criteria such as correct usage of the provided template, sufficient references and adherence to the page limit. You also want to make sure that the submissions you deal with are not plagiarized. Neither should people have copied from publications from other researchers nor from their own ones without correct attribution. While there are several online services and software tool where you can check writings for plagiarism, most of them are unusable in a setting where you want to include APIs in your own systems and tools or if you deal with large corpora of text documents and are interested in extrinsic plagiarism detection. A similar problem exists when grading seminar, bachelor and master theses in an university setting. Lately, crowdsourced projects like VroniPlag or GuttenPlag have also found severe cases of plagiarism in PhD theses of public figures.

Driven by the above issues, we have brainstormed on how an infrastructure could look like to support the analysis and recommendation of scientific publications on a large scale. We wanted to build on tools that allow for massive scalability and the processing of big data. After some research, we decided to go for Apache Hadoop and its ecosystem as scaffolding for our tools and created the HCPA project (Hadoop Cluster for Large Scale Publication Analyses), which was awarded some money from the University of Paderborn’s young researcher fund. We then investigated which hardware would be suitable for the cluster, did some benchmarks and finally bought the necessary hardware for the cluster. We already had a small cluster of 4 nodes and bought 14 new nodes. We assembled all the hardware ourselves and initialized the software. Currently, our cluster consists of 18 worker nodes with 102 cores (12xCore2 Quad 2,8GHz, 6xIntel Xeon 2,9GHz, 96x AMD FX 6100 3,3GHz), 260GB RAM (3x8GB, 1x12GB, 14x16GB) and 115TB HDD (56x2TB, 1x500GB, 9x330GB). All worker nodes are running Ubuntu Server as operating system. The Hadoop framework is distributed incl. the configuration from the master node and runs on Java 1.6 (because of different string processing).

Tobias Varlemann is the lead developer in the HCPA project and is currently working on his master thesis with the title “Near Copy Detection in large text corpora”. He is blogging about the progress (in German) in our student blog. Moreover, I am supervising three other theses that are using our HCPA cluster: one is dealing with author name disambiguation, the second is calculating similarities between publications, implements an iterative clustering algorithm and deals with classification. The third one, finally, deals with faceted search interfaces (using Apache Solr) for the available data and providing recommendations based on the publications’ content and some scientometric information such as bibliographic coupling or co-citation. Moreover, my current project group PUSHPIN (Supporting Scholarly Awareness in Publications and Social Networks) is using the Hadoop infrastructure in combination with Twitter Storm to do metadata and reference extraction, recommendations and visual analytics of scientific data.

References

A. H. Renear and C. L. Palmer. Strategic reading, ontologies, and the future of scientific publishing. Science, 325(5942), August 2009.

As some of you already know, my contract at the University of Paderborn ends this December and I started to look for a new job. After working in the Computer Science Education Group for more than 7 years, publishing 70+ scientific articles and supervising more than 60 master and bachelor theses and managing several small and medium projects it is time to move on.

You wonder where I’m heading? Basically I will go where the wind takes me (did I mention, we always wanted to go abroad?)… I loved being in the open and creative environment of the university that enabled me to research so many interesting topics and let focus on big data analysis, Research 2.0 and eResearch lately. Together with so many great students, we could develop awesome prototypes for mobile learning apps, awareness support tools, analysis tools for scholarly communications and many more. Thanks again for the wonderful teamwork.

I’m looking for a job in which I can be creative, bring in my knowledge in Research 2.0, Social Media, Data and Information management and knowledge work. The job can be in academia or in economy, I’m looking for personnel responsibility and project management. If you have some hints, I’m always open for input.

In the course of my job search I created a new website that serves as the main information source for people interested in hiring me. You can check the website at www.wreinhardt.de.

One of the shortcuts that I use most often in Safari is ⇧⌘I to send the link of the current page to someone. It has become so natural to me that I was really missing the feature in Firefox. Well, you have a menu entry “Send link…” in the file menu but there is no shortcut assigned to it (for some strange reason). Today I stumbled upon this neat blog entry, which explains how to do it for Firefox 3.6 and I’m happy to say that the way described there still works in version 13.0.1.

Here are the necessary steps:

1. Install the keyconfig extension from here
2. Open the configuration options of keyconfig (to be found at Tools > Keyconfig… OR using the ⇧⌘F12 shortcut)
3. Select “Add a new key”
4. Name the key whatever you like (something like “Send link…” would make sense, however)
5. In the <code> area enter “MailIntegration.sendLinkForWindow(window.content);”
6. Click “OK”
7. Type in the shortcut you want to use (most probably ⇧⌘I)
8. Click “Apply”

That’s it. Now you can send emails with a link to the current page using the ⇧⌘I shortcut from within Firefox.

Auf Einladung von Ilona Buchem habe ich letzte Woche einen Kurzvortrag zum Thema Research 2.0 in Ihrem Seminar “Web 2.0 und die Gesellschaft” gehalten. Der Vortrag bietet einen (zugegeben sehr) grundlegenden Zugang zum Thema und ist bei Slideshare als Webinar zu sehen. Am Ende des Vortrags durfte ich auch auf unsere eigenen Entwicklungen zu ginkgo verweisen und konnte so eine Diskussion über den Mehrwert automatischer Vorschlagsalgorithmen starten…

At this year’s JTEL Summer School in Estoril (Portugal), I will chair a workshop on the TEL-MOOC (Monday from 14:00 – 15:30), a massive open online course focusing on TEL research. The TEL-MOOC will be organized by the European Association of Technology Enhanced Learning starting in the fall of 2012 and will be open for participation by anyone interested in TEL. Participation in the TEL-MOOC will be free.

If you never heard of MOOCs as a new way of (networked) learning, I encourage you to have a look at Dave Cormier’s videos “What is a MOOC?” and “Success in a MOOC“. You also might want to check the Wikipedia article and an Howard Rheingold interview with George Siemens on the topic.

The TEL-MOOC is intended as an open course that introduces and discusses different areas of TEL research and will present ongoing work, research challenges and future directions for research. Renowned international researchers will give presentation on their work in a TEL-related research field and outline strengths, weaknesses, research opportunities and threats (yes, that’s a SWOT analysis of the respective TEL field). Following the basic four principles of MOOCs, the participants of the TEL-MOOC will consume, reflect and share their thoughts on the weekly meeting. This data will be aggregated by the MOOC facilitators; they will select some of the blog posts, tweets, video replies and whatnot and share it with all TEL-MOOC participants (typically as a daily newsletter and on the MOOC’s website). The participants then re-purpose the aggregated and remixed content to fit their particular learning needs and goals and they will feed forward their comments and thoughts again.

There are no pre-defined learning goals or paths on a content perspective. Rather, participants will be supported in becoming independent learners that follow the dots and connect to useful sources of information. The participants will have to  continuously re-evaluate their learning path and will themselves assess their individual learning progress. A MOOC helps developing critical thinking and social skills and might help to improve your digital literacy.

Within the JTELSS12 workshop we will collaboratively work on identifying

• TEL research fields that should be covered in the TEL-MOOC,
• international experts that could serve as speakers,
• engagement and motivational aspects in MOOCs (if needed at all),
• research opportunities investigating the TEL-MOOC itself (technology to use, automatic analysis of shared content, visualizations of connections, awareness support etc.),
• self-assessment strategies of learning progress and
• the desire for supporting formal courses that would help you to get official credits.

As a preparation for the workshop, I ask you to fill in this very short questionnaire on MOOCs in general. It will serve as input for Monday’s workshop. I hope many of you will use the opportunity to collaboratively determine what the TEL-MOOC will look like in the fall of 2012.

PS: What follows is some shameless advertising. EA-TEL is continuously looking for new individual and institutional members. A student membership only costs you 25 Euro/year and the money is used to finance Summer and Winter Schools and gives you access to some more member services. So you might want to become a member here.

I just discovered infogr.am – a new service that let’s you create charts and infographics online. The interface is very nice and reminds me of the MacOS login screen, mixed with iWork in the cloud. It’s very easy to work with the tool and create nice-looking charts that can easily be shared or embedded. I used data from one of my last papers where we analyzed the EC-TEL conference series (link to the publication). As you can see, the chart is interactive, nice and it was created in under a minute.

Nice tool, give it a try…

This semester I’m running the “Future Social Learning Networks” course again (see our organizer blog). After being a seminar with two German universities for two years, this year we are five partners and thus have an online course with more than 80 students from Germany and Israel. The co-organizers of the seminar are Ilona Buchem (Beuth University Berlin, Germany), Moshe Leiba (Tel Aviv University, Israel), Timo van Treeck (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany) and Alexander Perl (Braunschweig University, Germany). Moshe is contributing to the course with two courses he is teaching at the Holon Institute of Technology and the Levinsky Teacher College.

We gave the students the overall topic of “Gamification. Mobile Learning. Contextualized Information Support.” and their task is to design, develop and evaluate mobile applications that try to solve learning problems that they faced before. Based on the interdisciplinary setup of the course, each team consists of developers, learning designers, interaction designers and learning technology experts. The evaluation will be led by Timo’s students from Düsseldorf.

In this blog post I want to share with you the first ideas that our 12 groups have come up with and ask you to give feedback to their ideas. Your feedback is much appreciated and can come from any domain. The teams are happy to know about competitors as well as research that could support their idea. They also want to get feedback on something that you see problematic or have a bad feeling with.

The ideas are

1. A mobile biology identification app
2. The Scheduler app that aims at helping you to get more organized
3. A flag learning application with four different games
4. A mobile interface for a Picture Exchange Communication System
5. Recycling Tetris
6. An app to help you learning traffic rules
7. A museum learning app (part 1 and part 2)
8. The ABC App
9. A nutrition exploration app
10. Vocabulary training in different contexts
11. A Zoo exploration and path-finding mobile game app

I’m very happy with the first results of the students’ brainstorming and idea development process and hope some of them will be receiving feedback from you.

I finally did it. Last Thursday, I defended my Dissertation at the Open University of the Netherlands and have been promoted to Doctor. The ceremony was a truly remarkable experience with all members of the committee wearing Togas and scientific hats. After I gave a short presentation on my PhD project, the committee members asked questions. Everything worked pretty well except that second last question regarding a linear function…

Thanks to The Open Universiteit, CELSTEC, the SIKS Research School and the University of Paderborn for supporting my PhD project. Many thanks to my supervisors Prof. Dr. Peter B. Sloep and Dr. Hendrik Drachsler for their superb support in the last years and finally a big thank you to my wife Carina for always covering my back.

Thanks to the members of the committee — Terry Anderson, Peter Scott, Erik Duval, Johannes Magenheim, Paul de Bra, Lex Bijlsma — for taking the job and asking interesting questions. I am also very grateful that so many of my friends came to Heerlen and attended the defense.

The PDF of my thesis can be downloaded from here.

Here is a transcript of my presentation:

Most honorable chairman, thank you for the invitation to give a brief summary of my dissertation. I’ll first provide some context for my PhD project and then present some selected results. I’ll close this presentation with some conclusions that can be drawn from my PhD project.

Well, you might wonder why someone would spend some years on investigating awareness support for knowledge workers in research networks. Imagine you start exploring a new research topic. For example social media usage in self-directed workplace learning. You will need to get aware of relevant terms and key authors in that context. You need to find out relevant conferences and journals that publish on the topic. Moreover, you will want to identify relevant research streams and you will reflect on who of your peers might have knowledge on the topic. Maybe even someone in your institution might have expertise on the topic. Maybe the person that is now sitting next to you is THE ONE expert on the topic and a chat during the reception might be a very worthwhile investment. Finally, at some stage you might want to be aware of funding opportunities and current research trends to stay up-to-date.

Investigating these tasks and finding approaches for providing awareness support for them was the main goal of my thesis.

The tasks I previously described are knowledge-intense and require well educated workers. As early as 1959 Peter Drucker identified that our society was shifting into a post-industrial age which was going hand in hand with a shift from manual to non-manual work. While all kind of jobs entail a mix of physical, social and mental work it is the perennial processing of non-standardized and non-linear tasks that characterize knowledge work.

It are so-called knowledge workers that are carrying out these knowledge-intense tasks during their daily work and within my thesis we considered researchers to be the archetype of knowledge workers.
If you look at work descriptions of researchers you quickly recognize that they are knowledge workers par excellence. Researchers have to analyze existing knowledge, deconstruct it and put it in new contexts ever and ever again. On a daily basis, they have to make educated decisions. They have to solve non-routine tasks through applying a multitude of problem solving techniques. After all, it’s their job to create ‘new’ knowledge and to contribute it to their community and the overall research domain. Therefore, they need to be aware of their workplace and what is happening in their domain.

Taking this into account, the core research question of my thesis was “How can we best support knowledge workers’ awareness in Research Networks?” I will explore this question a bit further by looking at what we understand by the term Research Network.

A Research Network is a specialized Learning Network where the participants are scholars. Under a Learning Network I understand an online community of knowledge workers that use learning services to reach their individual learning goals. The participants can have both clearly defined learning goals or can be rather unconscious about them. We also need to have a look at the term awareness in order to fully understand the research question.

In CSCW research the term awareness typically relates to re-establishing conditions of face-to-face interactions. In marketing, awareness usually relates to the degree consumers know about a certain product. Generating public awareness is deemed as a task of the media to establish topics that the public should know about. In this research, however, the term is rather related to being conscious about the activities within a certain research domain, being able to identify experts, spotting trends and relevant publications or events. As an organizer of a conference, awareness could also mean to be supported in the decision which colleagues to select as reviewers for the submitted publications.

Awareness of what is happing in a certain domain has become even more difficult with the advent of Web 2.0 tools, methods and techniques in research practice. A plethora of potentially relevant scientific content is published in a considerable number of different channels and many researchers are simply overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data. On the other hand, Research 2.0 also leads to the enhancement of traditional research processes and improved interaction between researchers. Last but not least, the Open Access and alternative metrics movements are backed by Research 2.0 achievements.

I will now present a selection of research results from my thesis. As part of my PhD project we conducted six studies that dealt with scholarly practice as knowledge work. I will give a brief introduction to all of them and then talk in more detail about some selected results. In the first empirical study, we started with a more theoretical approach to scholarly practice and the relation between research and knowledge work.

We explored which roles knowledge workers take on during their daily work. Based on a literature-informed study and an online questionnaire filled out by 43 people we could identify 10 different knowledge worker roles and thirteen knowledge actions. The second empirical study was an international awareness interview series, where we asked 42 researchers from different research domains about their understanding of the term awareness and different facets of it. Moreover, we asked them about situations and contexts where they face awareness issues and feel the need for better awareness support. The study provided us with extensive insight into the working practices of researchers and the awareness problems they face in collaboration with peers and in specific situations.

The results from the first two empirical studies became the guideline for the following work in my PhD project.

In the third study we analyzed perennial Research Networks that can be found in Social Media communities. For the analysis we used the Artefact-Actor-Network model that integrates social network analysis with the analysis of so-called artifact networks. As part of this study we also developed the first reference implementation of Artefact-Actor-Networks that makes use of Semantic Web technologies. The study showed that knowledge workers that rely on Social Media as mean for communication and collaboration, are in need of instant awareness support. The need live monitoring facilities and live analysis of content shared there. Moreover, we could show that the similarity of artefacts and actors in a Research Network is independent from a vivid interaction in the network.

Another study of ours investigated a more mature Research Network stemming from the EC-TEL conference community. Here, we analyzed relations between authors, topics and publications and calculated similarities between them. We used an extended version of the Artefact-Actor-Network reference implementation to compute multiple similarity metrics between the publications. This extended version made use of cloud computing approaches and revealed some peculiarities that would have stayed revealed otherwise. From the analysis of the data, we could derive yet missing awareness support features for conference organizers.

In the fifth empirical study we designed a widget-based awareness dashboard that aimed at supporting researchers while they perform typical tasks. The dashboard has then been evaluated in paper-prototyping with users from the application domain. The features of the dashboard could be derived from the awareness issues reported in the awareness interviews and from the results of the two previous studies.

Finally, we presented a technical artifact that builds on all the results of all previous studies. ginkgo is a novel approach to the organization, management and participation of scientific events that has awareness support for organizers and attendees of scientific events as its main goal.

I will now discuss some selected results from the empirical studies in more detail: One result of the first empirical study is a typology of 10 different knowledge worker roles. The results show that all participating knowledge workers take on all identified roles at least once a month.

While some roles such as Learner are commonly taken on, roles like Tracker and Controller are more seldom. The knowledge worker roles typology helps to distinguish between the different roles that people play in creating, sharing and managing knowledge work. Moreover, the results show that 13 different knowledge actions are carried out in the respective knowledge worker roles. The typology of knowledge work actions provides a vocabulary to describe knowledge work execution. Furthermore, it contributes to a shared understanding and the further investigation of knowledge work practices.

From the analysis of the interviews from the second study, we could derive a layer model of awareness that can serve as a general heuristic of the awareness of objects in Research Networks. The general rule of thumb is: the closer an object is to yourself, the more awareness you have of it. Staying aware of more distant objects requires more effort. Self-awareness refers to a researcher’s consciousness of his own identity as a researchers. It is also about how colleagues assess his work, skills and competencies. On the second layer we have awareness of the local research organization. This refers to the knowledge of what is going on in one’s team, group, institution or department. On the same layer we also find awareness of current projects that a researcher is involved in. Being an active part of a project has major positive impact on the overall awareness. Generally there is less awareness of objects in the personal research network. The Personal Research Network is composed of people and objects that a researcher has worked with in the past or plans to do so in the future. Finally, the fifth layer that we could identify from the analysis of the awareness interviews is awareness of a research domain. Here, insight in the general connections, experts, projects and trends in a domain is relevant. Researchers try to stay aware of what is being done in other projects, what is being published and so on.

The position of objects in the individual awareness space is not fixed, but rather the interviewees made clear that objects may change their position in the awareness space at any given time. A spontaneous talk with a colleague from another research group will have immediate impact on the overall awareness of the colleague. On the other hand, it is often the case that ties to fellow researchers loose their strength once a common project has finished and thus the overall awareness of their activities is declining.

In the fourth study, we analyzed the publications from the EC-TEL conference series. Our analysis showed a very fragmented community that is dominated by some prolific authors. For example, 2% of the authors account for 24% of all papers. Also, we could show that the top authors in the network have only very low social power. Our analysis results in the derivation of scientific recommender systems that would help strengthening the nexus in a Research Network.

Finally, we designed and developed a prototype that incorporates all the previous findings. We selected the context of scientific events for our prototype as many of the identified awareness issues deal with that area.

From our point of view, ginkgo is the solution to best support awareness in the context of scientific events as it considered the reported awareness issues already in the design phase of the system. Ginkgo combines classic features of Conference Management Systems with those very well known from many social media applications. It considers awareness support in scientific events as its highest priority and uses interactions with the system as scaffolding for individual awareness support. Ginkgo will prospectively serve as testbed for the evaluation of several identified scientific recommender systems and awareness support visualizations. Moreover, we are working on mobile interfaces to ginkgo, to better support location awareness of event attendees.

Finally, and in conclusion my PhD project showed that when considering the broad understanding of the term awareness in Research Networks as worked out in the thesis, we can support knowledge workers’ awareness in Research Networks a) using tailored techniques, b) using integrated tools, c) considering their roles and specific knowledge actions and d) providing multiple data representations.

Finally, I would like to thank the Open University and especially CELSTEC, the SIKS Research School and the University of Paderborn for supporting my PhD project.

What others say about my PhD:

• News at the CELSTEC website
• Press release of OUNL
• Harold Jarche about my PhD
• Thomas D. Ullmann’s congratulations post

Für eine eine Befragung, die wir gerade vorbereiten war ich auf der Suche nach einer Liste mit Fächern, die an deutschen Hochschulen gelehrt werden. Im Detail sollen Lehrende gefragt werden in welchem Fach sie hauptsächlich lehren.

Zunächst dachten wir daran, die Fächer-Informationen von HIS zu verwenden. Da diese in jüngeren Publikationen nur noch Zweige unterscheiden und und die Einteilung in

• Sprach-, Kultur- wiss./Sport
• Rechtswiss.
• Sozialwiss./ -wesen
• Wirtschaftswiss.
• Mathematik/ Naturwiss.
• Medizin/Gesundheitswiss.
• Agrar-/Forst-/
• Ernährungswiss.
• Ingenieurwiss

zu ungenau war haben wir weitergesucht.

Das statistische Bundesamt ist mit seiner Einteilung in

• Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaften
• Sport
• Rechts-, Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften
• Mathematik, Naturwissenschaften
• Humanmedizin/Gesundheitswissenschaften
• Gesundheitswissenschaften allgemein
• Humanmedizin (ohne Zahnmedizin)
• Zahnmedizin
• Veterinämedizin
• Agrar-, Forst- und Ernährungswissenschaften .
• Ingenieurwissenschaften
• Kunst, Kunstwissenschaft
• Sonstige Fächer und ungeklät

ähnlich grob. Da wir aber — im Sinne der Auswertbarkeit — auch keine Freitextfrage anbieten wollten, haben wir einen Aufruf auf Twitter gestartet.

Hat zufällig jemand eine Liste mit allen Fächern, die an deutschen Hochschulen gelehrt werden? #followerpower #fb

— Wolfgang Reinhardt (@wollepb) March 18, 2012

Dank Timo von Treeck sind wir dann auf die 16119 Studienangebote im Hochschulkompass gestoßen. Das waren natürlich wieder deutlich zu viele Optionen. Allerdings gibt es in der “Profisuche” die Möglichkeit, Studienangebote nach Sachgebiet zu filtern. Diese Daten haben wir nun aufbereitet und kommen damit auf die folgenden relevanten Hochschulfächer:

• Agrarwissenschaft
• Altertumswissenschaften
• Anglistik
• Archiv/Bibliothek/Dokumentation
• Bauingenieurwesen
• Bergbau
• Biologie
• Bühnenbild
• Chemie
• Drucktechnik
• Elektrotechnik
• Ernährungswissenschaften
• Fahrzeug- und Verkehrstechnik
• Forstwissenschaft
• Gartenbau
• Geowissenschaften
• Germanistik
• Geschichtswissenschaft
• Gestaltung
• Gesundheitswissenschaften
• Haushaltswissenschaften
• Hüttenwesen
• Informatik
• Judaistik
• Kulturwissenschaften
• Kunst
• Lebensmitteltechnologie
• Maschinenbau
• Mathematik
• Medienwissenschaften
• Medizin
• Meerestechnik
• Musik
• Pädagogik und Bildung
• Pharmazie
• Philosophie
• Physik
• Politikwissenschaften
• Psychologie
• Raumplanung
• Rechtswissenschaften
• Regionalwissenschaften und Länderstudien
• Romanistik
• Schauspiel/Film/Fernsehen
• Slawistik
• Sozialwissenschaften
• Sport, allgemeiner
• Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften
• Sprachen und Literaturen
• Theologie
• Umwelttechnik
• Verfahrenstechnik/Chemieingenieurwesen
• Vermessungswesen
• Wasserwissenschaften
• Werkstofftechnologie/Materialwissenschaft
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften

Gibt es denn in dieser Liste etwas Entscheidendes, das wir vergessen haben? An dieser Stelle auch noch mal vielen Dank an all diejenigen, die sich auf unseren Aufruf gemeldet haben.

It is now the fourth consecutive year that we do a dedicated workshop on Science 2.0. This year the workshop will be a special track at the i-know conference in Graz. This year’s organizers are Peter Kraker and Roman Kern from the Know-Center and Kris Jack from Mendeley.

See also the official website for the special track at http://i-know.tugraz.at/i-science/science-2-0

I’m happy to share with you the Call for Papers (submissions are handled using the current alpha version of our ginkgo system):

Science 2.0 deals with 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 four 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. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of science based on data from scholarly communication on the web.
4. 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.

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
• Crowd-sourcing in science
• Robust methods for dealing with noisy crowd sourced data

Important dates

30 April 2012: Submission of full papers (8 pages) and demos (4 pages)
31 May 2012: Notification of acceptance
30 June 2012: Camera ready version (8 pages)
5 Sept.-7 Sept. 2012: i-KNOW 2012 Conference

Submission procedure

We are inviting research papers of up to 8 pages including references and an optional appendix. Furthermore, we invite demos for the special track. Demo submissions should consist of a 4 page description that allows us to judge the quality of your demonstration. The Conference Proceedings of i-KNOW 2012 will be published by ACM ICPS.

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

On Friday I was in the Netherlands for a test presentation as preparation for my public defense on 05.04.  It was also the date on which I finally received all copies of the printed book. After the printer had some issues with my LaTeX document and misprinted 180 copies, I finally had the final books. What a great feeling.

I now started sending printed books to friends, family and interested researchers in the TEL community. After the defense I will also share a download link to the PDF here.

Now it’s time to prepare my 10-minute final presentation and for the following questions by the examiners. I’ll let you know how it was…

Currently, I am co-editor of a Young Researcher Special Issue on the State-of-the-Art in TEL in IJTEL. I was calling for experienced reviewers before and today I’m delighted to announce that we now are explicitly seeking junior reviewers. Junior reviewers are researchers that have just started to review papers from other authors (or those who haven’t reviewed other’s papers at all yet).

As a part of the mentoring process for novice reviewers, we will conducte an online workshop that introduces the basics of paper reviewing. The general goal of the workshop is to provide the required knowledge and skills prior to assigning articles.

If you’re interested in joining us please apply here (until February 10).

Elsevier published its vision of the scientific article of the future and provide some very interesting ideas for making interaction with scientific publications more fun.

The guest editors of the 2012 Young Researcher Special Issue on the State-of-the-Art in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) in the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL) are calling for reviewers. The Call for Papers for the Special Issue can be found here.

The International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL) invites paper submissions for a special issue targeting young researchers in the community of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). This call for papers encourages a review of state-of-the-art of TEL topics, topped with a description of the current and future work carried out by the authors doing research on these topics.

This special issue is directed to all young researchers such as PhD students, post-graduate students, and post-docs working in topics related to TEL both in academia and industry, and from different disciplines of the community (technologists, educationists, psychologists, etc.).

The purpose of this special issue is manifold: (a) to provide a better overview on TEL research lines; (b) to investigate and expand current TEL research themes; (c) to promote international and multidisciplinary collaboration and exchange of ideas among young researchers; (d) to encourage young researchers to formalise their research questions, topics, and methodologies.

The International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL) recognizes the value and importance of the reviewing process in the overall publication process both in shaping the individual manuscript and in highlighting the reliability and reputation of a journal. Within this framework, the identification and selection of reviewers who have expertise and interest in the topics appropriate to each manuscript are essential elements in ensuring a productive review process.

Reviewer profiles

We are inviting:

• Junior reviewers (post-graduate students, PhD students, recent post-docs) working in research related to TEL in both academia and industry, who would like to get experience in being a reviewer and participate in a workshop on article reviewing;
• Experienced reviewers working in research related to TEL who would like to participate in the reviewing process for the special issue.

Workshop for junior reviewers

We will hold a workshop on initiation to article reviewing focusing on the subject of the special issue. The workshop will be online and it will take place on late February. The participation of junior reviewers is mandatory since it is the core of their mentoring process. Experienced reviewers are welcome to join in order to provide advice from their experience.

Review process

Contributions to the Young Researcher Special Issue of the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL) will undergo a double blind review process. All submissions will be reviewed by two or three reviewers, including at least one experienced reviewer. Junior reviewers must have participated in the workshop in order to get assigned articles to review.

How to apply

Please use this form to apply as a reviewer.

Important dates

• Application deadline: 01/02/2012
• Review of full papers: 01/04/2012
• Publication of the special issue: second half of 2012

In our projects we often develop prototypes of systems and need to test the usability of the system. Often we use the System Usability Scale and Technology Acceptance Model to do so. The System Usability Scale is a very commonly used method for assessing the overall usability of technical systems. It consists of only 10 questions and after applying some really easy math it results in an overall usability score that can be used for further improving your system.

However, to my knowledge there is no official translation of the System Usability Scale into German. Many people have come up with their own translations but they differ largely in the details. This results in the fact that SUS values stemming from the different translations cannot be compared. In order to provide my German colleagues and especially my students with an widely accepted translation I’m starting this experiment.

With this blog post I try to overcome this situation by crowdsourcing the translation of SUS into German. Therefore I need your help in translating the 10 items of SUS into German. You can use the comment feature of the blog or just send your translation to wolle[at]upb[dot]de. I will also ask some German-Speaking HCI experts to provide their translation of the items. From those submissions I will compile a first draft of the German SUS version. This first draft will then be reverse-translated into English by some experts in order to find out if we changed the meaning with the first translation. If we, indeed, changed the meaning with the translation we will need to re-iterate the translation and create another draft. After the whole process we will arrive at a translation of the SUS into German that is widely accepted and that can serve as the standard translation. After all, this might result in SUS values that are much better comparable as before.

Here are the 10 SUS questions that I would like to receive your German translations for:

1. I think that I would like to use this system frequently
2. I found the system unnecessarily complex
3. I thought the system was easy to use
4. I think that I would need the support of a technical person to be able to use this system
5. I found the various functions in this system were well integrated
6. I thought there was too much inconsistency in this system
7. I would imagine that most people would learn to use this system very quickly
8. I found the system very cumbersome to use
9. I felt very confident using the system
10. I needed to learn a lot of things before I could get going with this system

I’m looking forward to this experiment and hope for active participation.

Edit (12.05.2013)

As you might have noticed, I never managed to finish this side-project. The reasons are manifold but you’re not looking for excuses, right? In the meantime, two colleagues from SAP have taken into consideration your valuable input and created a German version of the SUS. The German version have been translated backwards by native speakers from the UK and US, making sure the German meaning is congruent with the English original. Bernhard Rummel blogged about it on www.sapdesignguild.org.

Now, here is the German version of the System Usability Scale:

1. Ich denke, dass ich das System gerne häufig benutzen würde.
2. Ich fand das System unnötig komplex.
3. Ich fand das System einfach zu benutzen.
4. Ich glaube, ich würde die Hilfe einer technisch versierten Person benötigen, um das System benutzen zu können.
5. Ich fand, die verschiedenen Funktionen in diesem System waren gut integriert.
6. Ich denke, das System enthielt zu viele Inkonsistenzen.
7. Ich kann mir vorstellen, dass die meisten Menschen den Umgang mit diesem System sehr schnell lernen.
8. Ich fand das System sehr umständlich zu nutzen.
9. Ich fühlte mich bei der Benutzung des Systems sehr sicher.
10. Ich musste eine Menge lernen, bevor ich anfangen konnte das System zu verwenden.

Yesterday evening, at exactly 21:00:41 CET, I submitted my PhD thesis with the title “Awareness Support for Knowledge Workers in Research Networks“. Now it is the committee’s turn to assess it and given they will let me pass, the public defense will be on 05.04.2012. If you are interested in the content of my thesis, you’ll have to wait or read or have a look at the following word cloud…

my papers

Today I stumbled upon Cube, an Open Source system for visualizing time series data. The system is based on Node.js, MongoDB and D3.js. The developers of the “half-baked but still tasty” tool describe Cube as:

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 stumbled upon this great video today, produced by The Open University. The topics covered in the 6:40 minutes video are:

• Achilles and the tortoise
• The grandfather paradox
• The Chinese room
• Hilbert’s infinite hotel
• The twin paradox
• Schrödingers Cat

There is more similar content on the Free learning website from The Open University.

In a recent blog post, Stephen Downes, discussed all you will ever need to know about selecting, submitting to, preparing for, traveling to, attending and coming back from conferences. I doubt that he wrote the article in just half an hour (just because of the sheer length), but this post is a definite must-read. I will try to stick to many of these points in 2012.

There are also Word and PDF versions of the post available.

I’m happy to share the Call for Papers for another Young Researcher Special Issue in the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning with you. This time we are searching for papers that review state-of-the-art topics and technologies in TEL. What is so very special about this Special Issue is the offering of a so-called ideas clinic in which authors can use group discussions to outline, discuss, and get feedback on their initial ideas. Furthermore, the clinic provides a platform for finding like-minded authors and potential co-authors. Potential authors are invited to a dedicated TELeurope group for the Special Issue.

IJTEL invites paper submissions for a special issue targeting young researchers in the community of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). This call encourages a review of the state-of-the-art in TEL topics, accompanied by a description of the current and future work carried out by the authors researching within these topics.

This special issue is directed at all young researchers such as post-graduate students, PhD students and post-docs working in topics related to TEL both in academia and industry, and from different disciplines of the community (technologists, educationists, psychologists, etc.).

The purpose of the issue is manifold: (a) to provide a better overview of TEL research lines; (b) to investigate and expand current TEL research themes; (c) to promote international and multidisciplinary collaboration and the exchange of ideas among young researchers; (d) to encourage young researchers to formalise their research questions, topics and methodologies.

Young researchers are invited to submit articles with reviews of state-of-the-art research in any TEL-related area. Each focal area covered in this issue shall provide an authoritative, timely, accessible and critical overview on recent developments that are pertinent for TEL. The reviews should not only summarize existing literature, but also analyze, synthesize and interpret the state-of-the-art in a novel framework for thought. For example this can be done:

• by identifying different theories and/or approaches;
• by classifying different research waves (see e.g. Lesk 1995);
• by elaborating different dimensions (see e.g. Sire et al. 2011);
• by developing a taxonomy;
• or by elaborating tensions, disagreements, etc. between the different works of the past.

It is furthermore expected that reviews are written from an interdisciplinary point of view. This means that every article is expected to provide references from at least three disciplines: education, psychology and technology. Furthermore, articles are required to include a section on research challenges that emerge from the state-of-the-art. These challenges must be substantiated by a concrete scenario. Articles that do not follow these basic guidelines will not be considered for publication.

References

Lesk, M. 1996. The seven ages of information retrieval. UDT Occasional Papers, 5.
Sire, S., Bogdanov, E., Gillet, D., Palmer, M., et al. 2011. Introducing qualitative dimensions to analyse the usefulness of Web 2.0 platforms as PLEs. International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 3(1).

Subject Coverage

Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

• Effective learning strategies, models and methodologies
• Deployment of ICTs in educational practice
• Web 2.0 and TEL
• Semantic web and TEL
• Computer-supported collaborative learning
• TEL and knowledge management
• Emotional and motivational aspects of TEL
• Adaptive and personalised hypermedia for TEL
• Ubiquitous and pervasive technologies for TEL
• Intelligent tutoring systems and automated feedback
• TEL practices in different educational/learning contexts
• Policies for the promotion of TEL in education
• Educational games
• 3D virtual environments
• Augmented reality in TEL
• Connecting learners through TEL
• Orchestrating TEL
• Interoperability in TEL
• Learning analytics and educational data mining
• Formative assessment and feedback
• Ambient displays and wearable devices
• Visualisation techniques for learning
• Awareness and reflection in TEL

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper was not originally copyrighted and if it has been completely re-written).

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page.

Important Dates

Submission deadline for full paper: 28 February, 2012

Authors’ notification for full paper: 16 April, 2012

Final paper submission: 5 June, 2012

Editors and Notes

All articles submitted for this special issue will be subject to a one-stage review process. Authors should submit a full article which will be subjected to a double blind peer review before publication. Articles must not exceed 15 pages,and in alignment with common standards for literature reviews, they are expected to include 50 or more references.

Authors may also register on TELeurope, login, and join the group “IJTEL Young Researcher Special Issue”. This call, as well as the submission instructions, can then be found on the group’s page “Call for Papers YRSI 2012″. Additionally, authors can use the group’s discussion section to outline, discuss, and get feedback on their initial ideas. Furthermore, the clinic provides a platform for furthering cross-fertilisation among authors. Authors who would like to invite co-authors to submit a joint paper can indicate that fact when discussing their ideas. People who are interested in a collaboration can then express their interest and leave their contact information, so that the proposal’s responsible authors can contact them.

When the Google Scholar team announced Google Scholar Citations back in July, everyone was kind of disappointed that they only offered very closed access to the service. You could check the h-index of Albert Einstein, but not create an own profile with your very own publications. Last week, Google Scholar Citations finally left closed beta and is now freely accessible for all.

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….

Last week Peter Sloep invited me to his trusted network on Reference.me (here is the official announcement). I was thinking “Oh, no. Not another Social Network thing…” Addicted to all the web-stuff out there, I chose to give it a try and create an account (like so very often). There was the first surprise: no authentication via Twitter or Facebook was available. The only available option was Google. Well, um … I was surprised as normally I don’t use Google for authentication and professional stuff but in the end it worked just fine.

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

When Mendeley started their Binary Battle we planned to submit our SETapp to the competition but due to a lack of time, we did not manage to get involved. However, the submission deadline for entries is over now and the folks at Mendeley have published the Top 40-ish participants that are part of the battle, amongst them very well-known tools like ReaderMeter.

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?

I finally found the time to upload the videos from the ARNets workshop at the EC-TEL 2011 conference. Not all presenters agreed that their video was uploaded, so you will only have access to the following videos (on the very handy Minus tool):

• The Role of Reflection in Maturing Organizational Know-how
• Computer Support for Collaborative Reflection on Captured Teamwork Data
• An Architecture for the Automated Detection of Text Indicators of Reflection
• Stimulating Reflection through Engagement in Social Relationships
• Affective Metacognitive Scaffolding for the Enhancement of Experiential Training for Adult Training
• Awareness Support in Scientific Events with SETapp
• Ad Hoc Transient Groups: Instruments for Awareness in Learning Networks
• Enhancement of traditional Business Process Management with reflection – a new perspective for Organisational Learning?

We have been using TwapperKeeper in many of our Twitter-related analyses over the years and enjoyed using the Summarizr feature that Andy Powell built. After Twitter decided that TwapperKeeper had to shut down their API we switched to the great Open Source version of TwapperKeeper called yourTwapperKeeper where Summarizr was not available anymore.

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 cool people at Common Craft created a new video that explains the basics of plagiarism and how to avoid it. As the video is not allowed to be embedded unless you become a Common Craft member (very uncool policy) you will need to go to their site. However, here is the video transcript:

This is Plagiarism Explained by Common Craft.

You have something in common with the smartest people in the world. You see, everyone has ideas. We use our minds to create something original, whether it’s a poem, a drawing, a song, or a scientific paper.

Some of the most important ideas are published and make it into books, journals, newspapers and trustworthy websites that become the building blocks for things we all learn.

But ideas are also very personal, and we need dependable ways to keep track of the people behind the ideas we use because they deserve credit for their contribution, just as you do if someone uses your idea. Passing off another person’s ideas or words as your own, without credit, is called plagiarism. Whether it’s your friend’s term paper or words of a well-known author, plagiarism is cheating and dishonest.

Meet Cassie, a university student. She has an assignment to write a paper about changing weather patterns. Cassie’s project involves building on other people’s ideas that she finds in books, magazines, and websites.

She’s not the kind of person who would plagiarize by turning in someone else’s work, but she is aware that plagiarism can happen accidentally, so she follows some basic rules:

First, when she quotes an author directly, she uses quotations marks around the words to show that they are not hers, alongside a mention of the author’s name. She even does this in her notes to make sure she doesn’t forget.

Second, she’s careful to use only her own words when she’s not quoting directly. She can summarize or paraphrase an idea, as long as she’s accurate and references the original source. For example, she begins with “As Smith found”.

Third, ideas like drawings, speeches, music, structural models, and statistics can also be plagiarized. Like words, she can use them as long as she gives credit.

And lastly, she’s aware that some ideas are common knowledge and don’t need a source. For example, the idea that rain falls from clouds is common knowledge and doesn’t need a source, but rainfall measurements by a weather agency does require credit.

A few weeks later Cassie turned in her paper with the confidence that she had avoided plagiarism and maybe even provided some new ideas that other students in her field could use in the future, with credit, of course.

I’m Lee LeFever, and this has been Plagiarism Explained by Common Craft.

Today George Siemens shared an interesting link in the Learning Analytics Google Group. He argues that

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.

Today, I stumbled upon a great series of video tutorials for creating Android apps that I need to share with you. I guess they will be very useful more many of you. Check out the playlist on YouTube.

In a current bachelor thesis we are exploring the features of different Social Media Monitoring tools, which we then will apply to a number of brands and products in the 2011 christmas season. Our goal is to find free and paid tools that could be used for small and medium enterprises to be part of the social media startegy. So far we plan to compare and evaluate

• Social Mention
• Google Alerts
• Twitter Alerts
• Addictomatic
• Board Tracker
• Keotag
• Kurrently
• Topsy
• Twoolr
• Paper.li
• Sysomos
• Radian6
• Klout
• Attensity360
• Tweetfell
• Context Sense
• Rank Speed
• Brand Monitor
• Trackur

However, we are looking for more tools to be part of our analysis. The only restriction is that the tool should be able to monitor Social Media and to provide analytical features that can be used as input for decision support. Can you help us in suggesting more tools (incl. links)?

Also at the RDSRP’11 Special Track of i-Know conference, we presented our work towards a comprehensive ontology modeling Call for Papers.

A Call for Papers (CfP) is a small, but well-structured and information-rich message with a relatively short lifespan. CfP play an important role in academic life, not just as an advertisement format, but also as a trigger of and advance organiser for collaborative academic writing. This paper explores the possibilities to create a comprehensive ontology for CfP so that is would be relevant and useful in Research 2.0 context for two main target groups: authors involved in collaborative writing of academic papers, and conference organisers or journal editors. Our study is conducted in three phases. First, we identify existing ontologies and other representation frameworks, which could provide concepts relevant for CfP. Next, a sample of conference CfPs is analysed and compared, to find out the common structures and peculiarities, which could be used for extending the existing ontologies. Finally, we propose Call ontology together with two usage scenarios.

So far, CfPs are mainly distributed via e-mails, event websites, dedicated blogs or CfP-aggregators like wikicfp. In this paper, authors from Estonia, Serbia and Germany joined forces and described what we think could be the future of CfP semantic annotation, distribution and retrieval. In one of the next iterations of ginkgo we plan to incorporate a RDFa annotation of our CfPs as well as the provision of an SPARQL endpoint that allows gathering of CfPs available in the system. Vladimir presented the paper and put this slides online. If you’re interested in the paper get in touch with me.

Last week I attended the RDSRP’11 (Recommendation, Data Sharing, and Research Practices in Science 2.0)  Special Track at the i-Know conference 2011. I presented our ongoing work on ginkgo, a scientific event management tool that combines features from social networks with those widely known in conference management systems.

Based on a literature study we identified different roles and phases that are typically found in the management of scientific events such as conferences, symposia or workshops. ginkgo’s aim is to support all of them in a easy-to-use and socially connected way. We acknowledge the great power of dedicated tools like EasyChair, Twitter or Lanyrd in the context of scientific events but see the need for an integrated solution that combines social networking features and those of classic conference management systems. ginkgo is our approach to overcome the still existing silos in what makes an important part of researchers’ work.

The presentation was received pretty positive with lots of good questions and possible extensions towards recommendations, mobile applications and open science. We know that we still have a long road ahead but we are tensioned where ginkgo will lead us.

Peter posted his favorite Research 2.0 hangouts in preparation for RDSRP’11 next week. I found this to be a good idea and a good distraction from writing my PhD introduction. I use the following tools more or less regularly, some of them are specifically designed for Research 2.0 such as

• 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?

Back in 2010 we asked for participation in an online questionnaire that tried to find out the existence of distinguishable roles of knowledge workers and the particular knowledge actions they perform. Today — after a long to-ing and fro-ing with the publisher — the results of the study have been published in the Journal of Knowledge and Process Management operated by Wiley as Knowledge Worker Roles and Actions — Results of Two Empirical Studies.

This paper proposes a typology of knowledge workers and their respective knowledge actions. The extant literature on the definition of knowledge work actions is examined and evaluated. The existing classifications of roles of knowledge workers are evaluated and extended with additional literature and empirical findings on the definition of a typology of knowledge worker roles. The empirical data in this paper comes from two studies. In the Task Execution Study 20, a knowledge worker had to carry out a selection of prepared tasks. The computer system that the participants were using was equipped with sensors, so that the execution steps of the tasks could be traced and analyzed. The data from the second study comes from a questionnaire survey of knowledge workers, which yielded 43 responses. The paper shows that the sampled users take on all identified knowledge worker roles, and that the knowledge work actions can be recognized in the sensor data from the first study. This paper contributes to the literature by proposing a new way of classifying the roles of knowledge workers and the knowledge actions they perform during their daily work. Furthermore, the paper provides a preliminary understanding of the relation between knowledge-intense work tasks, the roles they are executed in, and the tools that are used to accomplish the respective tasks.

In the paper we present 10 roles of knowledge workers and 13 knowledge actions. The knowledge worker roles are:

1. Controller,
2. Helper,
3. Learner,
4. Linker,
5. Networker,
6. Organizer,
7. Retriever,
8. Sharer,
9. Solver, and
10. Tracker

The identified knowledge actions are

1. Acquisition,
2. Analyze,
3. Authoring,
4. Co-authoring,
5. Information search
6. Dissemination,
7. Expert search,
8. Feedback,
9. Formal & Informal Learning,
10. Information organization,
11. Monitoring,
12. Networking and
13. Service search

I hope you find the results presented in the article relevant for your own research. If you are not able to access the article due to paywall restrictions please let me know.

Some weeks ago, I received the call for participation for the CONCEDE User-generated conference that deals with issues around the use of social media and UGC in the context of higher education and quality-related issues as well. In the CfP they also introduced a contest where the best user contributions could win a free trip (conference fee, travel and accommodation) to the conference near Lisbon in September. I took part in the contest with one experience report on the FSLN seminar we carried out to times in the past and that is going to take place this winter term for the third time (this time in cooperation with the Lewinsky Teacher College in Israel). I also brainstormed about a tool that is currently under development in our group that aims to provide a openly (and freely) usable Learning Analytics tool for use in social media-supported learning designs.

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 ;)

At the PLE conference in Southampton last week (I know my recap is still missing) I participated in the workshop “Tweetstorming PLNs: Using Twitter to brainstorm about Personal Learning Networks”. The workshop was organized by Eleni Boursinou and Nino Pataraia and they used a the really interesting tweetstorming method to let us brainstorm about questions they provided.

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.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/h-k-d/4733395781/

Next week I’ll be at the PLE conference in Southampton. I’m chairing a pre-conference workshop together with my colleague Thomas Ullmann (Open University UK) on Awareness and Reflection in Personal Learning Environments (#arple11 on Twitter). We asked people to submit position papers that should be door opener for discussions and activities in the workshop. Each participant is asked to give a max 5 minutes presentation answering 4 simple questions:

1. What are you researching?
2. What are the challenges of your research?
3. What should we, as the participants of this workshop, focus on?
4. What would be on the research agenda of the next 5 years (regarding awarenss & reflection in PLEs)?

I already uploaded my slides to Slideshare and I am keen to know your position. If you are in Southampton on Monday already, jon us for the workshop. That will be highly interactive, using scissors, glue and stuff to build PLEs and so. If you’re not around, we’d be happy if you would answer the questions and upload the slides to the Slideshare event page (just upload your slidedeck to Slideshare, copy the URL and use the “Paste URL” option to add your slides to the event.)

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/visionnewspaper/314107087/

Thanks Tim Bartel for this very nice presentation covering the recent plagiarism cases in Germany and how to how not to  deal with it.

Thanks to Joyce Seitzinger I stumbled upon this great Prezi presentation by Inger Mewburn and Judy Maxwell the other day. Apart from being just a cool Prezi thing, the presentation contains a lot of important facts to have a look upon before preparing your article. Have a look yourself:

What happens in only 60 seconds on the web? The Shanghai Web Designers put together a great infographic on that question. See also the according blog post here.

About two years ago, we explored criteria for assessing information quality in corporate wikis. At the time we had around 200 employees of 21 German companies answering our online survey. We presented our results at the 14th ICIQ conference and even won a best paper award for it.

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…

Lange habe ich die Idee mit mir herumgetragen und letzte Woche war es dann endlich soweit: ich habe ein Gruppenblog für Studenten eröffnet, die bei mir ihre Abschlussarbeit schreiben. Ich betreue fast immer um die 10 Abschlussarbeiten parallel und habe selbst natürlich ein gutes Gefühl dafür, wie sich die Themen überschneiden und wer von wem profitieren könnte. Bei den Studenten ist das nicht der Fall und anscheinend zieht eine Aussage “sprich doch mal mit XYZ über deine Arbeit” meist keine Handlungen nach sich.

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.

You might have wondered about the bunch of unsolicited mails coming from Twitter since today. The added a new feature to their notification system that allows you to get notified whenever someone mentions you in a tweet, favorites one of your tweets, retweets one of you tweets (can you imaging the number of emails when 10 people retweet your tweet and only 20 of their followers fav them, maybe another 30 mention you in one of their tweets … ).

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 …

Nach den guten Erfahrungen mit meinem ersten Twittagessen in Paderborn, wird es Zeit mal wieder ein Meetup der Paderborner Twitterer zu organisieren. Das Feedback damals war, dass ein Treffen am Abend wohl besser wäre, daher habe ich den Beginn mal auf 19:30 Uhr gelegt. Örtlichkeit ist das Bar Celona in Paderborn (wegen des freien WLAN natürlich). Sonst noch was? Ach ja, tragt Euch beim Event auf twittagessen.de ein –> http://twittagessen.de/events/1332

Ich organisiere ein Twittagessen in Paderborn. Sei dabei ;) #pb #upb #twittagessen-1332 http://twittagessen.de/events/1332

23.05.2011 1:10 pm via KiwiReplyRetweetFavorite

@wollepb

Wolfgang Reinhardt

Da ich immer wieder gefragt werde, was man als Student denn machen muss, um eine 1.0 in seiner Abschlussarbeit zu bekommen, habe ich mich entschlossen das Bewertungsschema unserer Fachgruppe teilweise zu veröffentlichen. Teilweise bezieht sich auf den Umstand, dass bestimmte Einflussfaktoren vom Umfang der vorliegenden Implementierung abhängen.

Generell ist meine Aussage jedoch, dass jeder Student bei einer 1.0 beginnt und sich diese Note durch das Ausbleiben von Erläuterungen, nicht hergestellten Bezügen, unsauberer Arbeitsweise, fehlenden Implementierungen etc. nach unten verschlechtern kann. Fragt Euch also nicht, wie ihr die Arbeit bestehen könnt, sondern wie ihr die 1.0 behaltet.

Prinzipiell setzt sich bei mir die Note zur Abschlussarbeit aus den folgenden Komponenten zusammen:

1. Arbeitsweise
2. Schriftliche Ausarbeitung
3. Vortrag
4. Implementierung (optional)

Today, I’m distributing another Call for Paper dealing with the topic awareness and reflection. This time we were able to bring together several EU-funded projects that deal with the topic. The workshop “Awareness and Reflection in Learning Networks” will be held at the EC-TEL 2011 conference in Palermo, Italy in September 2011. A more detailed description of the workshop can be found at the workshop page on TELeurope. You might be also interested in joining the TELeurope group dealing with awareness and reflection in technology enhanced learning.

The workshop aims to build an interdisciplinary understanding of issues regarding awareness and reflection in networked learning. It will attract participants from social science, computer science, design, psychology, and learning sciences to challenge the understanding of the fields of awareness and reflection in Technology Enhanced Learning. The participants will present and discuss their papers and work together on an integrated roadmap for future research in this field.

Background

In today’s economy, knowledge is one of the most important resources for both individuals and organizations. People invest significant efforts in the design and development of learning resources and software that strives to enhance the learning successes of individuals and groups. Networking, exchanging ideas and using tools for research on the Web are essential parts of their learning practice. While learners are, to a certain degree, aware about their relations in these networks and the partners of their communication, technology can make explicit related activities beyond the individual focus of attention. Additionally, technology can help learners bring knowledge and knowledge needs from their individual learning space into networked environments. It is important to note that not all activities relevant for learning already happen in online networks. Rather, motivated individuals engage in these networks, but there are lots more learners who could profit from such an engagement, but just never take the necessary steps. Here, technology can help e.g. by raising awareness about learner’s activities or those of others, related communities, information needs, etc.

Computer-mediated communication has the advantage that it can create mirroring artefacts, which capture learning analytic data to help learners to become aware and to reflect. These can be (1) via mirroring information, which would normally be visible in face-to-face situations, but which can be viewed as a highlight or learning-focused selection, and (2) mirroring information, which is normally invisible in face-to-face situations, but that has the potential to improve the working or learning process. This information could help learners to become aware of their constantly changing connections and interactions beyond their individual context and help them to reflect upon.

Please visit the workshop website to find more information on the workshop’s background and motivation: http://teleurope.eu/arnets11

Topics of interest

The ARNets workshop focuses on current research trends and challenges in the field of awareness and reflection in the domain of learning networks / networked learning. The topics include, but are not limited to:

• Awareness and reflection in learning networks
• Awareness and reflection for lifelong learning.
• Different views on awareness and reflection, depending on discipline, and goal
• Awareness of and reflection about social context, knowledge, artefacts and processes
• Awareness and reflection in organizational learning
• Semantic Web and awareness
• Orchestration of awareness and reflection
• Awareness and reflection in online learning / research environments
• Activation of reflection processes
• Awareness of pivotal events and their reflection support
• Awareness and reflection tools
• Pedagogical/didactic arrangements
• Awareness and reflection analytics
• Challenges in researching awareness and reflection
• Awareness and group formation, peer-support
• Future scenarios

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished work. Demonstrations are encouraged:

• Full papers: (12-16 pages) that describe problems, needs, novel approaches and frameworks within the scope of the workshop. Empirical evaluation papers and industrial experience reports are welcome for submission.
• Short papers (6-10 pages) that state the position of the authors within the scope of the workshop and describe solution concepts and work in progress.
• Posters and demo papers (1-2 pages) that summarize preliminary work results

Please submit your proposal via the ginkgo event management system at http://gkgo.me/arnets11

All submitted contributions will be peer-reviewed by at least two members of the program committee for originality, significance and quality. The papers will be published in the CEUR-WS.org workshops proceedings (a publication series with ISSN). Furthermore selected papers will be part of a Special Issue in a well-known international Journal (currently in negotiations). Submissions should use the Springer LCNS template. We encourage you to produce your submission using LaTeX as typesetting tool and the respective LaTeX template.

Important dates

Deadline for papers: 11 July 2011
Notification of acceptance: 10 August 2011
Deadline camera-ready: 01 September 2011
Dates of the workshop: 20 or 21 September 2011
Dates of the conference: 20-23 September 2011

Organizers

Wolfgang Reinhardt, University of Paderborn (Germany), @wollepb
Thomas D. Ullmann, The Open University (UK), @thomasullmann
Peter Scott, The Open University (UK), @peter_scott
Viktoria Pammer, Know Center (Austria), @contextgroupkc
Owen Conlan, Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), @oconlan
Adriana Berlanga, Open University of the Netherlands (Netherlands) @adrianaberlanga

Today I stumbled upon a pretty handy tool called mokk.me. It allows you to easily create your mockup mobile app by drag’n'drop. You can save, share and test your mockup on iPhone, Android and webOS and even reuse the HTML, CSS, and Javascript in your productive environment. That’s pretty cool, isn’t it. Go go go and try it yourself…

I’m happy to invite you to submit discussion papers for our workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Personal Learning Environments to be held at the PLE Conference 2011 in Southampton (UK) on 11.07.2011.

Background and Motivation

The workshop is intended to discuss and build an interdisciplinary understanding for the role of awareness and reflection in Personal Learning Environments. While different researchers have stressed the importance of awareness and reflection support in PLEs there is no agreed set of such functionalities in existence yet. Also we lack a structured overview of awareness ans reflections issues that learners are facing in their daily learning activities. As both researchers and developers interested in the PLE domain seem to be in need of such information in order to best tailor their R&D activities this workshop aims at collecting requirements and open issues in the domain.

The workshop aims to attract participants from educational science, psychology, social science, computer science, and design to challenge the understanding of the research fields of awareness and reflection in Personal Learning Environments. We also aim to attract developers from academia and economy that implement personalizable learning environments. The workshop might attract researchers from the projects ROLE, MATURE, MIRROR, ImREAL, LTfLLL, STELLAR.

Goal of the workshop

The concept of the workshop is target to collaboratively develop an integrated roadmap for future research and development in the domain. Therefore we designed the workshop as a highly interactive session. Starting with a short introduction of the work of the participants and their statements about the future challenges of their research we will work towards a roadmap of research in awareness and reflection with focus on Personal Learning Environments. For more information please visit the workshop website at TELeurope.

Submission

People interested in the workshop are required to submit discussion papers (min 5; max. 6 pages) that will be used to structure the hand-on activities and discussions in the workshop. The discussion papers can elaborate existing issues with awareness and reflection in PLEs, sketch ideas for supporting functionalities or discuss the results of ongoing research in the domain. The participants in the workshop will shortly (5 minutes) present the content of their papers and then work together on the following topics:

1. Requirements on awareness and reflection support in PLEs
2. Awareness and reflection widgets (implementations, visions)
3. Awareness and reflection Mash-Ups
4. Awareness and reflection scenarios for formal or informal learning
5. Awareness and reflection support for researchers
6. Theory on awareness and reflection
7. Methods researching awareness and reflection

Important dates

Submission deadline: 20.06.2011
Notification of acceptance: 27.06.2011
Camera-ready version: 04.07.2011

Submission system and format

Please submit your paper via the ginkgo event management system: http://gkgo.me/arple11

Submissions should use the Springer LCNS template. We encourage you to produce your submission using LaTeX as typesetting tool and the respective LaTeX template.

Organiziers

Wolfgang Reinhardt (University of Paderborn, Germany, @wollepb)
Thomas Daniel Ullmann (Open University of the UK, @thomasullmann)

I am currently supervising a bachelor thesis where we explore how the NFC technology can be applied to something else than mobile payment. While mobile payment IS an interesting field, I was more interested in how the technology could be used in the context of (scientific) conferences in order to support social interaction between people and objects there. Tim Messerschmidt is currently working on an Android prototype of an app that we will introduce to you later this summer. As Tim works as an Samsung Developer Advocate, we asked Samsung Germany for supporting the bachelor thesis with some hardware and today we received 6 NFC-enabled smartphones and are in negotiations regarding NFC tags.

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

…then listen to this powerful message delivered by Vinnie Jones. It was the intro to Joss Stone‘s album “Introducing Joss Stone”.

I joined the Program Committee of the RDSRP Special Track at the i-Know conference in Graz. The workshop focuses on recent developments around the Science 2.0 / Research 2.0 theme. Be sure to submit your work to this event.

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)

I’m currently writing an article on OpenScience in TEL together with my colleagues Peter Kraker, Derick Leony and Günther Beham. In the process of this writing I was searching for good examples of OpenScience and requirements that people expressed. Yesterday I found a great post by Marcio von Muhlen (Posterous, Twitter) entitled We need a GitHub of Science. Marcio explains that

Getting a paper accepted into an academic journal requires passage through the often opaque process of peer-review. Scientists make a big deal of peer-review, because it is supposed to be the filter that separates mere opinions from trusted, citable sources. However, the peer-review process in science has close analogs in any “old-media” field, such as TV or radio. Like academic journals, these are mediums of limited capacity, and there are always more submissions (or ideas for submissions) than there are openings.  Selecting content worthy enough for distribution is made by the field’s establishment, which effectively silences what they don’t choose. This is especially true of peer-review as practiced in prestigious journals, defined as the ones that get their contributors faculty jobs.

He goes on with explaining how GitHub changed the way Open Source Software is developed and how contributing gems to the Rails community gives the contributor prestige and reputation.

Similarly, anyone can publish a gem to GitHub, and published gems are prioritized by the numbers of developers “watching” for updates or “forking ” new development lines.  This is the social web at work, where the audience gets to decide what and whom to pay attention to all by itself, without requiring assistance from all-powerful editorial committees.  One can complain that lowering barriers to publication leads to content that on average is of lower quality.  But the abundance of non-significant projects in GitHub does not detract from its usability, because those projects are never brought to anyone’s attention.

Finally, he also talks about an important factor for developers to participate in Open Source Software development and contributions to the community.

Gems on GitHub are not just code.  They also have authors whose relative contributions are automatically catalogued by Git, as shown in this impact graph for the popular and open source jQuery project.  If you’ve visited a web application recently, chances are you’ve benefitted from jQuery, which makes it easy for a web engineer to turn static web sites into responsive web applications (think interactions with buttons instead of navigation through links).  This impact graph can let you know precisely which developers are responsible for this awesome-ness. In this way, GitHub acts as an efficient, incorruptible “central bank” of the prestige supply. Furthermore, unlike in Google, great contributions in GitHub bring prestige to their creators, not their domain names.  If you wanted to hire a contractor to work on a web application, GitHub can let you know who has publicly demonstrated the skills you’d need.  It’s thus not surprising that GitHub profiles are supplanting traditional resume items, such as a CS degree, for discerning employers looking to hire top talent.

I’m wondering if we see some of those GitHub features in OpenScience in the next years. Maybe the STELLAR dataTEL theme team will come up with an usable solution for sharing TEL data sets, that others could reuse and thus give reputation to the contributors of the data set. Maybe we will see real Open Archives of publications that will provide Open Data of the usage metrics. And finally I hope to see a real change in how scholarly communication as a whole is taking place – without content sitting behind paywalls but still being considered for your “professional record”. For me it’s a shame that it’s still the fact that

[...] at the beginning of an academic’s career, before citations accumulate, reputation rests largely on what journals they have published in.

Today I stumbled upon the OpenHeatMap project. You can upload a Excel spreadsheet or connect to a spreadsheet in Google Docs and visualize your data in a heat map. It’s simple as that. While the navigation through the map feels a bit clumsy it works and for me that’s what counts. The developers have also put up an example that connects to Twitter and your personal Twitter stream. The feature I like the most is that you can search for a topic and they create an interactive map where you can easily see where in the world there’s buzz about your topic.

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

A new publication has been published that discusses how sociofact analysis using Artefact-Actor-Networks (or similar techniques) could increase business agility. The publication was written with colleagues from the MATURE project and presented an the workshop on AI for Business Agility in the context of the AAAI Spring Symposium 2011.

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

I need your help again and I already posted a question on Twitter:

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?

Perfect timing. Today I stumbled upon a TED talk by Michael Nielsen on Open Science. I especially like the examples he give… Take the 17 minutes to watch.

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.

Unser Buch Informatik Macchiato ist nun bereits seit einiger Zeit am Markt und wir bekommen sehr gutes Feedback von unseren Lesern. Die Macchiato-Reihe steht für ein pädagogisches Konzept, durch Cartoons und Humor Einsichten und Aha-Momente auszulösen. Dadurch wird aus frustrierendem Büffeln ein Lernen mit Verständnis und Spaß. Im Buch wird grundlegendes Wissen aus der Informatik anschaulich mit Comics vermittelt, oder wie der Verlag es ausdrückt:

Informatik macchiato macht es einfach, über Informatik, die fast alle Bereiche unseres täglichen Lebens durchdringt, Bescheid zu wissen. Es werden mit Analogien aus dem Alltag und mit Cartoons Grundkonzepte veranschaulicht. Der Humor überwindet so manche abstrakte Hürde. Auf diese Weise werden wichtige Inhalte und Fachmethoden der Informatik vermittelt, die in Schule, Studium und Berufswelt zunehmend gefragt werden.

Zusammen mit dem Pearson Verlag starten wir nun eine Verlosungsaktion zum Buch. Dazu haben wir ein Probekapitel zu Algorithmen (oder auch “Das Informatik Kochstudio“) online gestellt, für welches wir von Euch Feedback erwarten. Jede Rezension muss auf diesen Blog-Eintrag verlinken und unter allen “Einsendern” verlosen wir 3 Exemplare des Buches. Die Gewinner werden per E-Mail kontaktiert und die Versandadresse wird dann ausgetauscht. Nach ein paar Tagen erreicht die Gewinner dann kostenfrei ein druckfrisches Exemplar von Informatik Macchiato nach Hause. Die Verlosungsaktion läuft bis zum 30.04.2011. Die Gewinner werden bis spätestens 06.05.2011 benachrichtigt.

During my time here at the JTEL Winter School 2011 in La Clusaz, France I had the opportunity to reflect about my Ph.D. thesis. Tomorrow I will have to give a simulated thesis defense including the presentation of the overall context of the thesis and my overall research question. While the latter seems to be an easy task, I am rather heavily thinking about the first part. My thesis is placed in the middle of knowledge work in the research domain and I was wondering what you would comment on the statement:

Researchers are the archetype of knowledge workers.

For me this so obvious that it is even hard to argument for it. If you look at the typical job descriptions of researcher positions, they have to create new knowledge using a multitude of methods. Researchers are carrying out non-linear and non-routine tasks that require a lot of cognitive effort, combination and recontextualization. From my point of view that’s exactly how I would describe knowledge workers.

What is your take on this? Do you agree to the statement or do you think this is pure rubbish?

Well, I try to find a paper again that I read some time ago and I am asking for your help.

It was about someone explaining how they made lab experiments reproducible. What I remember is that they compiled a zip file or something similar (was it SCORM?) and that they put detailed information in there so anyone could use their lab package, use the data the provided or collect their own, set up the experiment environment just as they did and simply reproduce the whole experiment.

Have you read a paper that sounds similar to what I described? Could you point me to a resource so I could re-read the paper? Maybe you have read something else in the domain of open science that might be similar to the above described and point me to that? Your help is much appreciated…

I found a great presentation on why to study Computer Science. Thanks Erik for pointing me there.

We are still exploring ways to best visualize topical relations between Tweets. This time we used Artefact-Actor-Networks and Gephi to build a zoomable graph of hashtag-connected tweets. We took all the 6800+ tweets that have been tagged with #ple_bcn from Twapperkeeper, looked for additional hashtags that were used and draw edges between the tweets. Each edge is labeled with the common hashtag between two tweets.  With this visualization, clusters of similarly tagged messages become visible. There are clusters for keynotes, special sessions, ukulele sessions, the conference location etc. Go and explore the graph yourself. Tell us what you think about this kind of visualization in the comments. What do you like, what do you miss?

In der letzten Woche hatten wir an der Universität Paderborn ein freudiges Ereignis zu feiern: mit dem e-lab haben wir ein neues Institut konstituiert, dass sich mit der Entwicklung und Erprobung neuer und zukunftsträchtiger E-Learning-Szenarien widmet. Die Fachgruppe Didaktik der Informatik ist dabei mehrfach in das e-lab involviert: Prof. Magenheim ist Mitglied im Projektrat und ich betreue zwei Projekte, die derzeit im e-lab zur Verfügung stehen. Zum einen steht den Lehrenden der Universität unser Video-Annotationswerkzeug ViLM zur Verfügung, zum anderen können mit unserer Erweiterung Rapid Feedbacks durchgeführt werden.

Die offizielle Bekanntmachung der Universität liest sich wie folgt:

Die Universität Paderborn hat ein neues Institut: Am Mittwoch, 23. Februar 2011, fand unter Leitung von Reinhard Keil, Professor in der Fachgruppe Informatik und Gesellschaft, die konstituierende Sitzung des Projektrats des E-Learning-Labors (e-lab) statt.

Ziel des e-lab ist es, neue, innovative Lehr- und Lernszenarien im Bereich E-Learning zu entwickeln und möglichst alltagsnah zu erproben. Die im Rahmen des e-lab zur Verfügung stehende Plattform ist mit der in der Lehre an der Universität Paderborn eingesetzten Plattform koaLA weitestgehend identisch. Daher erlaubt sie, Konzepte, Techniken und Methoden unter alltagsnahen Bedingungen zu erproben und zu evaluieren. Auf diese Weise sollen der Transfer von der Forschung in den Universitätsalltag und die Weiterentwicklung der Infrastruktur möglichst eng aufeinander abgestimmt sein.

Das e-lab und seine Technik wird von Marcel Jakoblew als Koordinator betreut. Derzeit gibt es 12 Projekte, die von der Video-Annotation bis zum webbasierten Training reichen. Sie werden größtenteils in Kooperation mit anderen Forschergruppen der Universität oder externen Partnern durchgeführt. Um die Integration des e-lab in die Universität zu  unterstützen, bilden die Projektpartner einen  Projektrat. Mitglieder sind Dr. Bettina Blanck, Andreas Brennecke, Dr. Ferdinand Ferber, Prof. Dr. Johannes Magenheim, Prof. Dr. Dorothee Meister, Prof. Dr. Niclas Schaper und aus Detmold Detlef Schubert.

Das e-lab bietet sich allen Interessierten, die im Bereich E-Learning forschen oder die universitäre Infrastruktur auf ihre Bedürfnisse anpassen wollen, als Partner an, um gemeinsam Projektmittel zu akquirieren oder Umsetzungsstrategien zu entwickeln.

 

Today TwapperKeeper announced that they will shut down their API as well as the export and download capabilities on March 20, 2011.

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?

There is this interesting question going around right now asking „What is the purpose of education?“ I already posted my point of view on Twitter but I’ll try to extend this here in less than 500 words. Pleas have a look at the project’s page and also Cristina Costa’s and Stephen Downes’ 500 words.

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.

In this post I’ll explore the social interactions in Twitter that were made by participants and supervisors of an exploratory seminar as well as the external experts that joined the discussion. The seminar was designed to let students explore the power of Social Media in a real world scenario with the goal to enable participants to value the strengths and weaknesses of such tools in a co-operative working context. Therefore, one key requirement in the learning design was for students to communicate and collaborate with nothing else than Social Media tools. In accordance to the rationales of constructivist learning theory (Jonassen, 1999), students should actively create their own knowledge about the practical use of Social Media tools in realistic scenarios. We introduced Social Software that can easily be used as learning services and stipulated the use of Twitter for informal communication and Delicious for sharing interesting bookmarks. Other tools that were extensively used were Skype, Doodle, Mendeley, FlashMeeting, and a project space in Mixxt.

For the analyses shown in this article we used Artefact-Actor-Networks (Reinhardt, Moi & Varlemann, 2009, AANs) for obtaining and storing data from Twitter and Gephi for calculating metrics and visualizing the resulting networks. Gephi is an Open Source Software tailored for graph and network analysis. In AANs we distinguish between actor networks that represent each user in a learning service as node. In artifact networks each digital object (e.g. a tweet) is represented as a node. For every learning service that is used we analyze the interactions. If we are interested in a more holistic view about the ongoing interactions, consolidated artifact and actor networks can be analyzed. Moreover, with the AAN approach artifact and actor networks can be combined for even more sophisticated analyses.

Artifact-level analysis

To track interaction and communication in the seminar we asked the participants to use the tag #fsln10 for all course-related issues on Social Media channels. In total we analyzed 431 tweets, 384 Delicious bookmarks, 14 SlideShare documents and 61 documents on Mendeley. In this article we focus solely on the analysis of the social network that arose from the usage of Twitter during the seminar. From the 431 tweets we extracted over 80 keywords using semantic analysis services. Moreover, we extracted all other hashtags that were used. For analyzing the semantic relations of artifacts and actors we are able to apply different measures: the connectedness via shared keywords and hashtags as well as the semantic similarity of the artifacts. Figure 1 shows the artifact network of tweets that are connected via shared keywords or hashtags.

Figure 1: Artifact network of tweets connected via shared keywords and hashtags

The color and size of the node reflect the degree of the respective artifact: the darker and larger the node, the more connections it has to other tweets. The light and small nodes at the bottom left corner have no keyword connection to the other artifacts. Digging deeper in the artifact network, we can identify several clusters of artifacts that deal with special seminar topics. Using the semantic connections between the respective artifacts it is easy to find out how those clusters are formed: clusters between Twitter artifacts arise when they share common keywords or hashtags or are replies or retweets to each other. Figure 2 shows an example visual analysis of tweets connected via the keywords ‘mendeley’, ‘dropbox’, ‘mixxt’, and ‘skype’ which represent learning services used in the seminar. Figure 2 also depicts vertices with the labels ‘stellarnet’ and ‘aan’ referring to projects that were associated to the seminar. Finally, the Figure also shows that artifacts are connected with vertices labeled ‘hasReply’ and ‘isReply’ that indicate the existence of a reply connection.

Figure 2: Detailed inspection of connections between tweets

In its current version Gephi is not able to visualize multiple vertices between two nodes, leading to the impression that tweets are always only connected with one relation. Figure 3 tackles this problem and visualizes the artifact network based on the semantic similarity between tweets. An edge between two tweets thus represents their similarity – the thicker and more colored an edge, the higher the semantic similarity between the tweets. Compared to Figure 2 we do not consider replies and retweets for the calculation of semantic similarity as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Artifact network of tweets connected via semantic similarity

What becomes obvious from the artifact visualizations is the fact that most of the tweets have no structural or semantic connection to other tweets (79% of the tweets are isolated). While this can partly be explained with the process of topic extraction that we applied in this study (it is difficult to extract keywords and meaningful content from only 140 characters), the missing structural connections point to an improvable interaction structure within the educational setting. Analyzing the social relations in actor networks allows us to apply metrics of classical social network analysis (SNA) to the seminar and to investigate the interaction patterns more directly.

Actor-level analysis

We will now investigate the actor network that was formed by the Twitter users that used the #fsln10 hashtag. In this analysis there is a connection between two actors if they have written similar tweets. The more similar the tweets are that they have written, the higher the weight of the edge between them. Regarding this setup we found 21 actors that could be connected in the actor network (9 seminar participants, 2 supervisors, 10 external discussion participants). One seminar participant does not show up in the actor network as he did not write tweets that were similar to others. If we had applied other measures for building up the network (e.g. the following relations, replies or retweets) he would have been included. The network has a density of 0,276, which is above average compared to other Twitter networks.

Figure 4: Actor network of Twitter users connected via semantic similarity

Considering the degree centrality in the actor network, the actor wollepb (a supervisor) is most central. wollepb is called a local hero, as the degree centrality calculates centrality only based on local network properties. A local hero attracts many direct connections on himself; in the context of the seminar he published many semantically similar tweets. The closeness centrality measure (Figure 5a) additionally incorporates indirect connections on shortest paths into the calculation. wollepb still is the most central actor but looses centrality with this measure. Finally, when considering the betweenness centrality (Figure 5b) the centrality of those actors that are on only few shortest paths in the network is declining. Users who act as mediators in the network are becoming more central with this measure. Two participants of the seminar (rolwi and AlexanderPLN) are thus also connecting the other seminar participants.

Figure 5a: Applying different centrality measures on the actor network (closeness centrality)

Figure 5b: Applying different centrality measures on the actor network (betweenness centrality)

Discussion

The impact of our evaluations is that for one we believe we have found a best practice example of how students can be confronted with state-of-the-art technologies and projects while still at university in a way that fosters skills and competencies they will need in the workplace. This type of interconnectedness between institutional, informal and workplace learning is focus of this endeavor. Further we see the possibility to integrate students with their fresh, creative and sometimes unconventional ideas in real-world research and industry projects, which can provide added value for both the students as well as the involved projects.

On the other hand our analyses show that we need to further engage students to use Social Media tools as a means for interacting within a seminar. Realizing that a supervisor is the most central person in a seminar is not surprising; the gap between the Twitter adoption of supervisors and students should give us food for thought on how to better motivate students to use the tools. Noticeably, the students used other tools that seem to be less public and without the need for direct interactions far more frequently. The students were heavily bookmarking web pages in Delicious and uploaded references to Mendeley. Also they used Skype for one-to-one interactions on a regular basis.

Also we see that the artifact networks are not very dense (meaning that the published tweets are rather broad in their contents). While this is partly because of the applied analysis method, it also points to the fact that it might be a good approach to narrow down the seminar topics to espouse a more lively topical exchange. Moreover, the analyses presented in this article were done subsequently to the seminar. In order to react in a timelier manner about the discussed phenomena we would need tools for instant social media monitoring in educational settings. Those tools should then obtain, analyze and visually present the results. Exploring the interactions and topical connectedness of students’ work will help us to better supervise learning designs that make extensive use of Social Media.

The course design has caught much attention during its first round of implementation (see the number of external persons that were involved in communication) and allowed to broaden the scope of the seminar. The seminar is being carried out again in the fall semester of 2010. In the summer term 2011 we will integrate a third partner from another German university into the seminar and focus on the design and development of a Social Media Monitoring tool for educational contexts as described above.

References

Jonassen, D.H. (1991). Objectivism versus constructivism: do we need a new philosophical paradigm? Educational Technology Research and Development, 39(3):5–14.

Jonassen, D.H. (1999). Designing constructivist learning environments. Instructional design theories and models: A new paradigm of instructional theory, 2:371–396.

W. Reinhardt, M. Moi, and T. Varlemann. Artefact-Actor-Networks as tie between social networks and artefact networks. In Proceedings of the 5th International ICST Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing (CollaborateCom 2009), November 2009.

Acknowledgment

Thanks go to my graduate student Matthias Moi for visualizing the networks and applying SNA metrics to them.

Right now we are building a cool new tool that will help you in organizing and taking part in scientific events. Another core focus is to support indiviudal and group awareness processes, so you know what’s going on before, during and after an event took place.

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…

It’s time for the 2011 EC-TEL conference. The sixth edition of the European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning will take place in Palermo (Italy), 20-23 September 2011. Save the date and submit your work. Hope to see you there.

EC-TEL is a unique setting for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in Technology Enhanced Learning from Europe and other continents to meet together and exchange on the current challenges and advances in the field. At EC-TEL, experts and young researchers in Computer Science, Education, Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Social Science, as well as entrepreneurs have the opportunity to establish collaborations, strengthen their links and cross-fertilize their core disciplines.

EC-TEL 2011will push further the Ubiquitous Learning paradigm by not only tackling the challenges of exploiting new trendy devices in various contexts, but also by investigating ways to meet and support formally and informally the learners in their learning playgrounds and social environments thanks to innovative scenarios.

*** CONFERENCE TOPICS ***

From both research and experience perspective the following topics of interest to the conference include, but are not limited to:

Technological underpinning

* Large scale sharing and interoperability

* Personalization, user modeling and adaptation

* Context-aware systems

* Social computing

* Social media

* Semantic Web

* Mobile technologies

* Serious games and 3D virtual worlds

* Network infrastructures and architectures for TEL

* Sensors and sensor networks

* Augmented reaility

* Roomware and ubiquitous learning

* Data mining and information retrieval

* Recommender systems for TEL

* Natural language processing and latent semantic analysis

* eLearning specifications and standards

* Learning analytics

Pedagogical underpinning

* Problem- and project-based learning / Inquiry based learning

* Computer supported collaborative learning

* Collaborative knowledge building

* Game-based and simulation-based learning

* Story-telling and reflection-based learning

* Instructional design and design approaches

* Communities of learners and communities of practice

* Teaching techniques and strategies for online learning

* Learner motivation and engagement

* Evaluation methods for TEL

Individual, social &organizational learning processes

* Cognitive mechanisms in knowledge acquisition and construction

* Self-regulated and self-directed learning

* Reflective learning

* Social processes in teams and communities

* Social awareness

* Knowledge management and organizational learning

* Sustainability and TEL business models and cases

* Business-learning models

* Trust and reputation in TEL

* Fitness and evolvability of learning environments

Learning contexts and domains

* Applications of TEL in various domains

* Formal education: initial (K-12, higher education), post-initial (continuing education)

* Workplace learning in small, medium and large companies

* Aggregated learning at the workplace Distance and online learning

* Lifelong learning (cradle to grave)

* Vocational training

* Informal learning

* Non-formal learning

* Ubiquitous learning

* Knowledge management

TEL in developing countries

* ICT Inclusion for learning

* Digital divide and learning

* Generation divide and learning

* Education policies

* Rural learning

TEL, functional diversity and users with special needs

* Accessible learning for all

* Visual, hearing and physical impairments

* Psycho-pedagogic support for users

* Educational guidance for tutors

* Adapted learning flow, content and monitoring process

* Standards about accessibility and learning

*** DEMONSTRATIONS ***

The EC-TEL Demonstration is your chance to fully engage EC-TEL attendees at a personal level by letting them see, touch, squeeze, or hear your visions for the future of TEL. We expect that your Demonstration will be a reliably running prototype of your vision ready to be tried out, questioned, and interacted with. In particular, we encourage Demonstration submissions that complement an EC-TEL Paper submission, so that attendees can get a direct experience of your work in addition to the scientific presentation.

*** WORKSHOP ORGANISATION ***

EC-TEL 2011 offers the opportunity to host several workshops. Parties interested to organize a workshop are asked to submit a proposal of max. 4 pages outlining the theme of the workshop, workshop format, expected participants and domains addressed, dissemination activities, programme committee, and organizational requirements. A separate call will be published in parallel. Proposals should be submitted via the EasyChair system of EC-TEL.

*** PROJECT MEETINGS ***

In addition to the regular sessions and workshops, EC-TEL offers a unique opportunity for European Projects in TEL to held face-to-face meetings. Please contact the local organization Chair at your earliest convenience to book meeting rooms.

*** IMPORTANT DATES ***

Paper & demonstration submission: 04 April 2011

Paper & demonstration acceptance: 31 May 2011

Camera-ready final papers: 30 June 2011

Workshop proposals: 04 April 2011

Workshop acceptance: 09 May 2011

Workshops: 20-21 September 2011

Conference: 22-23 September 2011

*** SUBMISSION FORMATS ***

All papers will be reviewed through a non-blind review process. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Proceedings will be published by Springer within their “Lecture Notes in Computer Science” series which is ranked in the ISI Web of Knowledge. The use of supplied template is mandatory: http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-72376-0

* Full Papers (max. 14 pages)

* Short Papers and Posters (max. 6 pages)

Yesterday Christian Mletzko pointed me to some interesting transcriptions we received for our awareness interviews from some MTurk workers. They are so funny I have to share them with you:

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).

Simple question: are you using Apple’s new cash cow?

#poll Let's get down to brass tacks, are you using the Mac App Store? #apple http://twtpoll.com/gywr3h

13.01.2011 1:02 am via Twtpoll by TwtappsReplyRetweetFavorite

@wollepb

Wolfgang Reinhardt

Our article “Simplifying the Scientific Writing and Review Process with SciFlow” (PDF version) in the Journal Future Internet has been published today. The whole review and publishing process in the open access journal only took about three months and the whole team was doing a really good job.

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.

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…

Recently, I stumbled upon a slide deck on SlideShare by Dion Hinchcliffe that deals with the topic of analyzing social media in the context of knowledhe work. I found some slides ver useful, so you might want to have a look yourself:

In two earlier posts I reported about my tests with Amazon’s MTurk for transcribing interviews I did in the context of my Ph.D. First of all, I’d like to mention that all-in-all I’m satisfied with the results of the transcriptions as the saved me a lot of time. On the other hand I’d like to point out some points that you take care of, if you want to use the service yourself.

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.

In a recent post by Graham Attwell I read a cool quote about the declining interest in Facebook that research by WPP Group’s Mindshare suggests. The global director for research said:

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

No comment…

Together with my colleagues Nina Heinze and Thomas Ullmann, I’m currently in the process of organizing a workshop on awareness and reflection in the context of (distributed) research communities. We’d be very happy if you spread the word about the workshop and even more happy, if you manage to submit a paper to the workshop that takes place as satellite event of the CSCW 2011 in Hangzhou, China.

***************************************
Call for papers and demos

1st International Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Research Communities (ARRC11)
to be held in conjunction with CSCW 2011, Hangzhou (China)

March 19-23, 2011

http://thales.cs.upb.de/arrc11

***************************************

*** Background ***
Traditionally the concept of awareness is used in the research field of CSCW to re-establish awareness conditions of face-to-face situations with visual cues showing for example, who is online or working on a document. In the field of perception psychology, awareness is the state or ability to focus on certain stimuli of the environment while ignoring others. Here, being aware of something does not necessarily mean to understand it. In marketing, awareness usually relates to the degree consumers knows about a certain product. Generating public awareness is seemed as a task of the media to establish topics the public should know about.
This workshop will discuss and build an interdisciplinary understanding of implicit and explicit structures researchers build through their practices using the Web. Considering the multitude of views on awareness we ask: “What does awareness mean for technology-enhanced learning (TEL)? How does it relate to reflection as one of the key abilities of researchers? While researchers are aware of their relations in their networks, technology establishes related activities which are beyond the individuals focus of attention. This is possible due to two advantages of computer-mediated communication: (1) selectively mirroring information that would be visible in face-to-face situations, and (2) mirroring information that would not be visible in face-to-face situations, but that can improve the working or learning process. This information could help researchers to become aware of their constantly changing connections and interactions beyond their individual context and to reflect this. This workshop aims to challenge the understanding of awareness and reflection in technology-enhanced learning.

*** Topic of interest ***
The ARRC workshop focuses on current research trends in the field of awareness and reflection in the domain of research communities. The workshop seeks to attract quality research papers that propose solutions to the issues identified above. The workshop also welcomes papers that comment how the application of social media can impact on real life experiences in such communities. It aims to bring together scientists, designers 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. We encourage authors to present their interdisciplinary results and such that focused on technical, psychological and/or pedagogical challenges.

# Different views on awareness
# Social awareness
# Knowledge awareness
# Artefact awareness
# Process awareness
# Context awareness
# Awareness-support in research communities
# Awareness in organizational learning
# Semantic Web and awareness
# Orchestration of awareness and reflection
# Awareness and reflection in online research environments
# Bridging formal and informal research environments and their consequences for awareness and reflection
# Activation of reflection processes
# Awareness of pivotal events and their reflection support

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished work. Including demonstrations is explicitly encouraged. The following contributions are possible:

# Short papers (6-10 pages) that state the position of the authors within the scope of the workshop and describe solution concepts and work in progress in a premature state.
# Full papers: (12-16 pages) that describe problems, needs, novel approaches and frameworks within the scope of the workshop. Empirical evaluation papers and industrial experience reports are welcome for submission.
# Posters and demo papers (1-2 pages) that summarize preliminary work results

All submitted contributions will be peer-reviewed by at least two members of the program committee for originality, significance and quality. The workshop proceedings will be published in CEUR-WS.org a publication series with ISSN. Furthermore selected papers will be part of a Special Issue in a well-known international Journal (currently in negotiations).

*** Workshop format ***
Papers presented at the workshop will need to engage participants in discussions on the presented key topics. To achieve this aim, all accepted papers will be clustered according to their topics in (2-4 clusters). Each such cluster will contain not more than 4 papers, each of which will be presented by one of its authors. The presentation of each paper will be 20 minutes. Authors will be asked to follow a structured template for their presentation (focusing on the problem addressed in their paper, the methodology followed, and the results of their work). After the short presentations, each cluster will have 90 minutes for discussion and preparation of a final round table discussion with all clusters. This closing session will summarize the outcomes of the single workshop sessions and determining future activities in the research field of awareness and activation of reflection in learning and research communities.

*** Dates ***
# December 17, 2010 >> deadline submission of 2 pages abstract
# December 30, 2010 >> paper acceptance notification
# January 07, 2011 >> Early bird registration for ARRC11 (please register for the workshop until this date).
# January 21, 2011 >> deadline for the full papers
# February 11, 2011 >> results of the review for the full papers
# February 25, 2011 >> deadline for camera-ready copies
# April 2011 >> publication of selected papers in a Journal’s Special Issue (currently in negotiations with several journals

*** Organizers ***
Wolfgang Reinhardt (University of Paderborn, Germany)
Nina Heinze, (Knowledge Media Research Center, Germany)
Thomas Ullmann, (Open University of the UK)

*** Program committee ***
# Ilona Buchem, Beuth University of Applied Sciences (Germany)
# Cristina Costa, University of Salford (UK)
# Erik Duval, KU Leuven (Belgium)
# Tanja Engelmann, Knowledge Media Research Center (Germany)
# Jean-Marie Favre, University of Grenoble (France)
# Angela Fessel, Know Center Graz (Austria)
# Mark Hahnel, Imperial College (UK)
# Jim Hensman, Coventry University (UK)
# Marco Kalz, Open University (The Netherlands)
# Reinhard Keil, University of Paderborn (Germany)
# Peter Kraker, Know Center Graz (Austria)
# Peter Scott, Open University (UK)
# Paulo Simões, Air Force (Portugal)
# Peter Sloep, Open University (The Netherlands)
# Carsten Ullrich, Shanghai Jiao Tung University (China)
# Riina Vuorikari, European Schoolnet (Belgium)
# Steve Wheeler, University of Plymouth (UK)
# Fridolin Wild, Open University (UK)
# Katrin Wodzicki, Knowledge Media Research Center (Germany)
# Martin Wolpers, FIT (Germany)

Currently we are running an interview series on awareness issues and visions to overcome them in the context of distributed research communities. During the EC-TEL conference some weeks ago, someone mentioned Amazon’s Mechanical Turk could be a helpful tool in getting all those interviews transcribed. So I looked around in the Social Web, what people said about the service and I found out they were stunned by the accuracy and speed of the “artificial artificial intelligence” service.

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…

Together with my colleague Nina Heinze (KMRC in Tübingen, Germany) I described the goals and design of our exploratory seminar “Future Social Learning Networks” in a book edited by Charles Wankel. The book is entitled “Educating Educators with Social Media” and will hit stores on January 3rd, 2011. From the review process and the table of contents I can tell that there is some interesting content for most of the readers of the blog. If you’re interested hava a look at the book’s page over at Amazon. Here is the book’s abstract:

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.

Tim O’Reilly just tweeted about an experiment that is so damn awesome, I’d like to share it with you (also see the post here).

A father and son from Brooklyn, New York sent an iPhone and a HD camera into space in order to record a video from the earth’s curvature. You may now think, what the hell… (basically that’s what I thought first). Then I watched the video and was really stunned. Not only because they spent months of planning and sent electronic equipment to space that was worth several hundreds of Dollar risking they’d never see the stuff again and not only about the fact that both camera and iPhone continued to work in space and until safe landing, but also because of such a stunning example of real technology-enhanced learning. I mean this kid has had the opportunity of seeing physics work, he saw a video that his camera captured that proves the earth is round. He was able to GPS-track his e-package on they down to earth (thx Google) and … I wish we had the possibilities of doing such cool things when I was that age (maybe I’d do some other stuff now, being at NASA for example…)

Boy, TEL is great. I’m really looking forward to more of these examples (I’m wondering what my boy will ask me to do some day – so stay tuned).

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

The possibly best URL shortener bit.ly not only has cool statistics for each shortened URL, now the also prepare a QR code for your URL. For example the bit.ly URL for the University of Paderborn homepage is http://bit.ly/bVuIbx. By adding a + to the URL you can access the statistics for that specific URL (try http://bit.ly/bVuIbx+). By adding a .qrcode to the URL you get a QR code that will bring you to the shortened URL (http://bit.ly/bVuIbx.qrcode). Cool, isn’t it…

I came across this brilliant animation by theRSA.org today. Not only is the animation stunningly beautiful, also the basis for the animation – Sir Ken Robinson’s talk at the RSA – is brilliant and so true. Take the 11 minutes to listen and watch. More important, reflect on what he says…

At the WCC 2010 in Brisbane we had a paper that dealt with “rules” for using Twitter in educational settings. We named the article “All I need to know about Twitter in education I learned in Kindergarten” based on a novel by Robert Fulghum. My colleague Steve Wheeler presented the paper in Brisbane and gave it the subtitle “Twettiquette” what certainly hits the nail. You can see our slides and the final draft of the paper online at SlideShare. Or, as Steve put it in his blog entry:

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 – THE cloud storage service – runs a back to school promotion right now. On the EDU landing page they describe the promo as follows

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?

I’m attending the EC-TEL 2010 conference right now where Gonzalo Parra introduced his More! application that partly uses soharc data. Gonzalo offered a sheet of paper with QR codes that link to the More! profiles of the present researchers at the workshop. Based on his idea, I created a QR code that will bring you directly to my soharc profile. I think I’ll use that on my slides from now on…

A lot of people asked for a way to edit their data on the Social handle archive and we discussed ways to best support this. As there is no registration needed for putting your data on soharc, we went for a wiki-like way to let people edit there data. You just click on “Edit your data”, change the stuff you like to share with fellow researchers and press “Update my data”. That’s it. Cool, right? I added to security layers to the process: first, you have to prove that you are human and reflect on the changes. Second, there is a manual authoring process in place before your profile is updated. This is done, so we can actually check the changes and if someone likes to plays tricks, we don’t accept the changes. Go ahead and try it out…

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.