is it just me

Another great SlideShare find on informal learning in social interactivity systems:

Popularity: 2% [?]

Today I came across a cool tool for visualizing co-authorship networks and it’s from Microsoft. Microsoft describes the product as:

Microsoft Academic Search is a free academic search engine developed by Microsoft Research Asia, which also serves as a test-bed for our object-level vertical search research. Microsoft Academic Search provides many innovative ways to explore scientific papers, conferences, journals, and authors, connecting millions of scholars, students, librarians, and other users. Objects in the search results are sorted based on two factors: their relevance to the query and their global importance. The relevance score of an object is computed by its attributes; the importance score of an object is calculated by its relationships with other objects.

The tool itself as well as the visualization look pretty mature and are pretty easy to handle: 1) insert the name of an author and see his network. A click on an author reveals his details such as publication count and impact indices. Try it your self at http://academic.research.microsoft.com/VisualExplorer.aspx and also check the help section.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Zusammen mit meinem Kollegen Benedikt Schmidt von der TU Darmstadt führe ich eine Online-Studie zu den Rollen von Wissensarbeitern durch. Die Studienergebnisse sollen in unseren jeweiligen Dissertationen verwendet werden, um einerseits Tool-Support für Wissensarbeit zu leisten (Benedikt) und zum Anderen, um die verschiedenen Rollen und Rollen-Aufgaben in eher  schwach strukturierten Arbeitsumgebungen durch Web-Tools zu unterstützen (ich).

Wissensarbeit zeichnet sich dadurch aus, dass sie größtenteils aus der Nutzung, Verwaltung und Erzeugung von Information besteht. Die Studie beschäftigt sich mit Wissensarbeitern, den Rollen die sie während der regelmäßigen Arbeit einnehmen und den Aktivitäten die sie zur Durchführung Ihrer Arbeit ausführen. Weiterhin wird versucht typische Tätigkeiten in der Wissensarbeit mit Applikationen zu verknüpfen.

Wir freuen uns über Eure Teilnahme an der Studie, die auf deutsch und englisch verfügbar ist. Insbesondere wollen wir Euch bitten, diesen Aufruf in Euren Communities zu verteilen. Die Umfrage ist selbstverständlich anonym.

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Together with my colleague Benedikt Schmidt from TU Darmstadt I am conducting the Knowledge Worker Roles Study in the context of my Ph.D. studies.

In the focus of the study are knowledge workers, the multiple roles they take on during their regular work and the actions they perform during accomplishing their work. A knowledge worker is anyone who develops or uses knowledge in his or her daily working tasks. Furthermore we try to associate application types with the knowledge actions.

We would like to ask you for your participation in the study which will take approximately 25 minutes. Your participation is anonymous and all answers will be treated confidentially.

You can access the survey at http://bit.ly/KWRStudy

Please feel free to forward the link to the survey to your colleagues, retweet or blog about this call for participation.I count on the power of my social network…

We will keep you updated about the results of the study.

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Image via Wikipedia

Thanks to a tweet by George Siemens I came across Tim Kastelle’s Blog today. Besides a general recommendation forhis blog, I’d like to point out some posts explicitly that where very inspiring. The post Networks and the Information Glut discusses how “new” the phenomena of information overload really is:

Or think about Charles Darwin – over the course of scientific career he sent over 15,000 letters. It’s safe to assume that he received just as many. Think about how much time he would have spent reading & writing letters, and how much new information and ideas would have been included in that – it’s probably more than we’re spending writing our blogs, updating our statuses and twittering.

Furthermore he links to an interesting video that show the social network of 18th century scientists such as Voltaire (by Dan Edelstein)

Another post discusses the common prejudice that new media leeds to being less smart people and invoke Plato‘s argument that writing down things would result in making us stupid. Tim shows all the false assumptions and even calls Plato’s arguments dumb. Great one. Give him a read…

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I call the theoretical model behind my current research Artefact-Actor-Networks (AANs) and gave them a dedicated place on the web. From today on there is the domain http://artefact-actor-networks.net where you can stay up-to-date regarding this topic.

Curious about what’s an AAN?

Artefact-Actor-Networks (AANs) are a theoretical model to link social networks and artefact network in order to make claims about the semantic relatedness between users and their respective artefacts. The general goal of AANs is to ease the understanding of how these to knowledge entities (Trier, 2005) are interconnected, how they influence each other and how we can make use of semantic technologies in this field of research

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Here ist the 3rd and last presentation I’ll give at the ICL 2009 conference in the Special Track on Mashups for Learning. It’s about a tool we implemented to track the dynamics in communities on Twitter and treats the CoP at the Edumedia 2009.

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These are my slides for the presentation at MASHL09 Special Track at ICL 2009 Conference later today. Let’s see what the Mashup experts tell me about the idea of connecting several tools in the context of software engineering…

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The video shows extracted terms from the communication of the scientific community on Twitter using the hashtag #edmedia from 2009-06-18 until 2009-06-30. This timeframe contains communication before the ED-MEDIA conference, the conference itself and after the ED-MEDIA conference.

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We are looking for software teams that are willingly to take part in a short online survey on the use of means of communication in their daily project life. It does not matter if you are a large or small team, whether you are on site or distributed, whether you are an EU project, startup or large company.

With the survey we try to find out which means of communication are useful in specific situations of the development process, which means of communication are really used and how they support the problem solving in a team.

If you and your team are interested in taking part in the survey please contact me and I will send you a link to the survey together with a token that identifies your team. Of course we will share the results of the survey as soon as we have them here on the blog.

A note on privacy:
The survey will be an anonymous one. The record kept of your survey responses will not contain any identifying information about you unless a specific question in the survey will ask for this.

Popularity: 2% [?]