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.)

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)

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?

I am pretty excited this week as the first PLE Conference finally is about to begin. On Thursday and Friday many people interested in the PLE concept and networked learning are meeting in Barcelona.

My colleague Ilona Buchem asked me to co-chair a workshop at the conference that will focus on the collaborative definition of the term PLE (see her blog post & the update about the workshop). While there are many definitions out there (see for example the mentions at Beat’s Biblionetz) we try to focus on four concepts that are (at least for us) mainly relevant for the understanding of PLEs and try to make them the starting point for a discussion:

1. Content (moderator: Ilona Buchem)
2. Learning (moderator: George Couros)
3. Technology (moderator: me)
4. Social Interaction / Social Change (moderator: Cristina Costa)

In fact four groups will have the chance to work on their own Mindmeister mindmaps and add their point of view regarding the four main concepts that we figured out. We are looking forward to the creativity and power of the participants of the workshop regarding our main concepts and wether people agree with them, if they’ll add or remove main concepts, which subconcepts they’ll add etc. Within the workshop four local groups and all remote participants can work out their own mindmap which we’ll compare at the end of the workshop. We all agree there is not the ONE definition of what a PLE is, but with the workshop we try to figure out diverse dimensions and digg into the different understandings of different people.

Graham Attwell already tried to give a 140 character definition you can start to think about:

PLEs are the spaces in which people interact, communicate and whose result is learning and development of collective know-how

Here are the motivational slides Ilona put online, see also George Couros’ post on the workshop (look at the comments!!!)

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..

Together with my colleague Tobias Nelkner I wrote a white paper on our work in progress on self-descriptive widget and the design of an interaction language for widgets. This Widget Self-Description and Interaction Language (WSDIL) will allow the easy orchestration of widgets (for example in a PLE or PLME) and the data exchange between widgets. We tend to let users create their own “pipeline” of interactive widgets that auto-update their content depending on events and actions in other widgets.

This video presents how the drag and drop and data exchange between widgets can work. In the example we show a tag cloud widget, a widget that incorporates the Google search and a widget that represents a chat. If we attach widgets to each other they change their content/representation based on the content of attached widgets.

The next steps will include the realization of filters and selectors to let users choose what kind of data is exchanged between widgets.

The presented work is part of the EU funded project MATURE.

Here you find the white paper on WSDIL. Just tell us what you think (remember it is work/research in progress). Maybe you can point us to similar approaches or ask questions that let us explain our proposition more deply.

[scribd id=19500314 key=key-1zu8w3hrn45fwkefzqay]

Steve Wheeler has published a must-read article on Personal Learning Environments (PLE). If you are interested in PLEs and want to know how they eventually will replace VLEs and LMS in educational settings read the article here.

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.