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 ;)

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.

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.

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..

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…

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

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.

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

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…)

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.

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.

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Together with my former student and now SAP guy Benedikt Schmidt, I wrote a paper on how to apply Task Patterns to the social software engineering process. The paper is submitted for the workshop on Social Information Retrieval in Technology Enhanced Learning (SIRTEL) at the ICWL 2009 in Aachen.

Abstract:

Experience sharing to support software engineering is an important, yet difficult task. This paper presents an integration of the Task Pattern concept to support social software engineering. Thus Task Pattern provide information objects and code examples to support software engineering tasks in a community of developers. They are generated based on information resulting from task-centric software development tools, e.g. the Tasktop system.  As centrally organized and automatically extended information source they give a valuable insight into the process and product of software development tasks.

Ich habe unser Paper für den E-Learning 2.0 Workshop auf der diesjährigen Delfi eingereicht. Mal sehen, wie das Konzept der Artefact-Actor-Networks bei den Reviewern so ankommt.

Soziale Netzwerke spiegeln Kommunikationen, Kooperationen und lose Bekanntschaften in vernetzen Gemeinschaften wieder. Mit Hilfe zahlreicher Metriken lassen sich dann Aussagen über die Zusammenhänge, wichtige Personen oder Kleingruppen in der Gemeinschaft treffen. Weiter lassen sich Netzwerke aufspannen, welche Dokumente, Blogeinträge oder Wiki-Artikel miteinander verbinden. Ein solches Netzwerk wird als Artefaktnetzwerk bezeichnet. In diesem Papier stellen wir den Ansatz der Artefact-Actor-Networks (AAN) vor, bei dem versucht wird soziale Netzwerke mit Artefaktnetzwerken zu verknüpfen, um semantische Aussagen über die Verbindungen von Personen zu vielfältigen Artefakten treffen zu können. Dazu stellen wir zwei Anwendungsfälle für AANs vor und diskutieren die spezifischen semantischen Anforderungen und die entstehenden Mehrwerte durch die Existenz der AAN.

There is another conference for which we are running a Twitter survey. It’s this year Edumedia conference in Salzburg. Please help us with our studies and answer the survey if you attended the Edumedia 2009 live or followed the Twitter stream online. We’re looking forward to your responses.

I just submitted another paper for the special track “MashUps for Learning“ at this year ICL conference in Villach, Austria. Here is the abstract:

Classical tools for supporting software engineering teams (collaborative development environment, CDE) are designed to support one team during the development of a product. Often the required data sources or experts reside outside of the internal project team and thus they are not provided by these CDEs. This paper describes an approach for a community-embedded CDE (CCDE), which is capable of handling multiple projects of several organizations, providing inter-project knowledge sharing and enhancing developer awareness. The approach presented uses the mashup pattern to integrate multiple data sources in order to provide software teams with a sophisticated development environment.

Let’s see what the reviewers think about our community-embedded CDE approach and the architecture of eCopSoft.

I recently presented my paper “Communication is the key. Support Durable Knowledge Sharing in Software Engineering by Microblogging” at the SENSE 2009 workshop in Kaiserslautern.

Abstract:

Communication is undoubtedly one of the key elements of successful software development. Especially in larger groups communication is the critical point in gathering and forming relevant information, share knowledge and create functioning products. Some studies stressed out the fact that informal, ad hoc communication take up a significant part of the developers working time. Nonetheless the support of inter-project and inter-organisational communication seems to play a minor part in the development of IDEs and software development platforms. In this paper we discuss communication and knowledge sharing in software engineering and introduce an approach to support social software engineering by microblogging. This approach is to be studied in future projects.

Here you will find the draft version of the paper.

Good news this evening. Our paper proposal for this year ICL conference was accepted as a full paper.

on behalf of the ICL Program Committee I have the pleasure to inform you, that your proposal for a full paper was accepted.

Now it’s time to wrap things up finalizing the paper. I’m looking forward to the trip to Villach and hope for great discussions on the topic.

Our recent publication on how Twitter is used at conferences caused some stir (also here and here). We’re happy to get feedback on our thoughts and useful hints for further publications.

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

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

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

I was lately attending the Complexity Sciences Winter School at the ISCTE in Lisbon. The Winter School is organized by John Symons, Rui Lopes and Jorge Louçã and deals with topis around the subject “social structures in communication networks”.

As ususal I microblogged via Twitter about the event (the hashtag was #csws09). Unfortunately only one other attendee did use Twitter to blog about it. Nevertheless I created some Wordle word clouds and an animation of how these clouds changed over time. The first cloud is generated from Tweets before the Winter School, the following are for each day of the Winter School and the last one shows an overall word cloud.

We are currently working on techniques for generating these visualizations automatically and adding more interactivity to it. Furthermore we are investigating the emerging social networks and networks of artefacts. Please let me know, if you are interested in this stuff or have something interesting to add to these kinds of visualizations of communication flows.

After the Prolearn Summer School 2008 at Macedonia I wrote a paper on how we experienced the use of Twitter during the event together with some colleagues (Cristina Costa, Martin Silliaots and Günter Beham). We got good feedback at the ECTEL 2008 conference and asked the question “How and why does people at conferences use Twitter?”. We asked Martin Ebner to join us in trying to answer this question and developed a generic survey in order to get responses from conference attendees.

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

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