is it just me

Good news from Graham Attwell: the website for The PLE conference in Barcelona is online. You can find the Call for Contributions here.

The PLE Conference is intended to produce a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, experience and research around the development and implementation of PLEs including the design of environments, sociological and educational issues and their effectiveness and desirability as (informal) learning spaces.

Whilst the conference includes a traditional research paper strand, we also encourage proposals for sessions in different formats including workshops, posters, debates, cafe sessions, hands on sessions and demonstrations. There will be a Spanish strand, so contributions in Spanish are also welcome!
We will also provide opportunities for unconferencing events, including the provision of spaces for informal meetings and discussions. Although the main conference takes place on 8th and 9th of July, there will be an informal launch event (with wine and tapas!) on the evening of Wednesday 7th.

As well as the face to face sessions, the conference will be supported by a variety of different online spaces. You can join the YouTube group for the PLE conference at
http://www.youtube.com/group/PLE2010CONF

Selected papers will be published by the International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments..

Popularity: 4% [?]

If you ever searched for a comprehensive list of e-learning conferences to attend or to submit papers to? Well, Clayton R Wright did such a list for the rest of 2009 and 2010. The list is available at Tony Karrer’s blog…

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The guys at Freshnetworks share their experiences with Google Wave as back-channel at conferences. I like the idea of that approach as the emerging document is a very good summary and social annotation of a given talk. As the usability of Google Wave is rather … not that good at the moment I’d stay with Twitter at the moment, but give it a read:

Google Wave vs. Twitter at conferences

Popularity: 20% [?]

The two workshop I was involved are already over and I really took a lot out of them. In the morning I was able to attend the Science 2.0 workshop where I presented our paper on Twitter in conferences and the belonging tool. Erik Duval and Peter Scott did a great job with the workshop and selected a wide range of papers that represent the problems and chances of Science 2.0. There was a talk about Mendeley and two talks that analysed co-authorship and co-citation in TEL conferences and Erik, Xaver et al. showed some great visualizations (e.g. this one).

I missed the morning session of the TEL-CoPs workshop but the afternoon session was very interesting and Manolis Tzagarakis gave a really interesting talk about “Practical Lessons Learned while Developing Web 2.0 Collaboration Services for Communities of Practice“. One of the major findings was that you have to develop the UI at first and test this with your users and afterwards focus on the architecture. As we are computer scientists, we tend to do it the other way around. The other thing he pointed out is that the later you introduce features to a tool, the more unlikely it is to be used. There I presented my second paper about how to support CoPs with Twitter. I received mostly positive feedback back there was a heavy discussion about the way we visualize things. I take this critics and will improve future visualizations using visual analytics methods.

You’ll find my slides at slideshare and our tweets here and here.

Popularity: 15% [?]

This week I’am in Nice for the 4th EC-TEL (my 3rd) and two workshops. I am at the Science 2.0 workshop chaired by Erik Duval et al. and the TEL-CoPs workshop chaired by Liliane Esnault et al..

Here are my slides for the Science 2.0 workshop

And these are the slides for the TEL-CoPs workshop

Popularity: 19% [?]

Last week I was in Villach, Austria for the first time and attended the International Conference on Interactive Computer Aided Learning (ICL) 2009. The conference was a real international conference as there were participants from over 50 countries including people from Siberia, Sri Lanka, South Africa and many other interesting places. I presented papers on expert finding, Twitter in conferences and ideas on a Community-Embedded Collaborative Development Environment. Furthermore I spread the word about my ideas on Artefact-Actor-Networks.

The conference itself was very interesting as I met some of the people from Twitter, and the Blogosphere live and in color. Even if I could not took so much with me for my further research the trip was worth it. The keynote panel gave some interesting views on the theme of Lifelong Learning and we had great discussions on PLEs and the use of Twitter. The next ICL will take place in Belgium in 2010 and in 2011 in Salzburg.

Thanks Martin, Sandra, Steve, John, Hendrik, and all the others for a great week. See you soon (at least online…)

Popularity: 35% [?]

I’m finally arrived at Villach, Austria for my stay at ICL 2009. Here I will present a paper at the main conference and two papers at the Special Track on Mashups for Learning. I will upload my slides and draft versions of the paper as soon as I have them in their final state

After ICL 2009 I head over to Nice for this-year EC-TEL. There I may present two papers on the analysis and visualisation of communication in communities on Twitter.

I’ll be tweeting a lot, using the respective hashtags, so please excuse any inconvenience this may cause.

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Our paper for the SIRTEL workshop at the ICWL 2009 was accepted. The reviewers were very accurately in reading the paper and pointed out some really useful enhancements.

Thanks.

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We conducted another one of our Twitter surveys at the TNC2009. We received 45 full responses (and 19 responses not completly filled out), what marks the biggest response rate in all our surveys. Even if Twitter was only used as a side channel in the TNC2009 (we only saw 247 tweets from 24 users) the results show some interesting points. The results give new insight on pros and cons of using Twitter as communication channel in scientific conferences. What is somewhat surprising, is the fact that for the use case TNC2009 Twitter does not seem to be of special value. Let’s wait for the results of the ED-MEDIA survey. I guess for ED-MEDIA the responses will be very different.

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

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

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

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

Read more…

Popularity: 2% [?]

I just submitted a paper for the 3rd International Workshop on Building Technology Enhanced Learning solutions for Communities of Practice held in conjunction with the ECTEL2009 in Nice, France.

Here’s the abstract:

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

Popularity: 1% [?]