is it just me

During the last week I was attending the EC-TEL 2009 in Nice. I really met great people there (some for the first time, some finally again) and the location was
marvelous. It was a conference for the TEL researches, had a good Wifi performance and I was prepared for the luck of plugs.

I was attending two pre-conference workshops on tuesday (Science 2.0, TEL-CoPs) and could listen to cool keynotes and interesting sessions. During the Science 2.0 (other post) workshop we discussed how we can use technology in beforehand of a conference, at the conference and afterwards. Graham Attwell, who was not attending the conference also added some notes and Erik Duval and Martin Weller wrote dome some notes or uploaded videos.

We all agree that currently conferences heavily differ in their application of technology and attendee-support. At EC-TEL I first saw a conference planning tool that basically is a social bookmarking tool and simple recommender system (see Hendrik’s slides). All talks with their respective authors and keywords are placed in the system and you can assemble your own conference schedule by selecting the most interesting abstracts, tag them and propose these talks to groups of users. The conference planner is a great starting point for making conferences more interactive and transparent to the (online | offline) attending researchers. But for me it is still pretty much Web 1.0 -ish… I’m thinking of some cool conference website that not only presents the CfP and Venue information but shows the main themes from accepted papers, emerging clusters and top referenced papers. If there was some tag cloudy visualization of a conference’s content (coming from Blogs, Flickr, Twitter, Slideshare, and accepted papers of course) that can be individually browsed we come to a point where we not only support the offline attendees but also interested people from the community that aren’t able to come to the conference. I totally agree with Graham that we can motivate students and young researchers to focus on a conference even if they can’t go there.

During the week I was able to tell a bit about the concept of Artefact-Actor-Networks and the possibilities it offers to store and analyse dynamic communications. Maybe there will be an option to use the concept for a tool for upcoming conferences like the conference planner was tested this time. What I learned from the keynote of Mike Sharples is that good design-based research must include early user involvement and user studies that may turn all your implementation around. From the TEL-CoP workshop we learned that visualizations that are created by us computer scientists very often are worth null because we don’t note cognitive theories or aren’t sure about our visualization goals.

It also was a great pleasure to see all the STELLAR guys wearing their t-shirts. They really did great dissemination work and I kind of like their approach to establish TEL as an standalone research discipline that must bring closer together computer science, didactics and pedagogics.

Popularity: 39% [?]

Yesterday I attended the Science 2.0 workshop at the EC-TEL 2009 where we had some really interesting talks about future research tasks in the field of Science 2.0. As I like visual representations of content a lot, I wondered if there is a simple way of visualizing the content of a paper and the different research themes of a workshop. I used Wordle to create a very simple visualization of the content of Martin’s and my paper about Twitter in conferences and one of all papers accepted for the workshop:

This is the wordle of my own paper.

This is the wordle of all Science 2.0 workshop papers.

Maybe we can implement some kind of such visualizations in conferences such that BEFORE a conference you can visually browse what will be discussed in workshops and thus select where you go. I also would prefer to have these automatic tag clouds for all papers so I easily figure out the main topics of it.

Sure these simple tag clouds cannot be the final step because there is no interactivity, so you cannot click on a keyword and see its occurrences in the paper or all workshop papers – but hey it’s just an idea so far… Tell me what you think.

Popularity: 25% [?]

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% [?]

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.

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% [?]