monika’s w e b l o g

Tim O’Reilly (coiner of the term Web 2.0 a few years ago) held a keynote on the Web 2.0 Expo Conference, taking place from 21 to 23 October 2008 – “Web Meets World”.

In view of the financial crisis that has been irrupting our world, O’Reilly is convinced that many “me-too” Web 2.0-startups will die. A process that is just accelerated by the crisis.
But the deep trends behind Web 2.0 will stay (the internet as platform, harnessing collective intelligence, data as the “Intel Inside”, software above the level of a single device, software as a service). And the tasks for every citizen and every company are huge in the face of the actual global problems. – “How can I make any difference?”

Not at all a talk against Web 2.0, at the end. Instead, O’Reilly advocates the importance of
“Working for stuff that matters”, and “Creating value” – where Web 2.0 can form the basis.

(via Fischmarkt)

November 14th, 2008. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: social software. .

With slight delay I’d like to post a few more findings|thoughts of the Intensive Programme in Cyprus.
Among those, the online survey software SurveyMonkey.com (pointed to by one of our student colleagues of Leeds Metropolitan University). With SurveyMonkey, you can:

- create your own survey online
- make it accessible for interviewees through a link to the online survey, and|or email survey invitations and track who responds
- view results in graphs and download the results in various formats

Our student colleagues made an evaluation of the Intensive Programme in Cyprus. For the questionnaire they used SurveyMonkey. I find it a really simple and intuitive state-of-the-art tool.
The only thing which I am not sure|convinced about yet is, whether it is possible to protect a survey from the view of the whole world, thus make it accessible just to a defined group of people, resp. whether any survey is found by search engines etc. As sometimes it might be nice to keep the frame of a survey in a semi private setting.

July 3rd, 2008. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: seminars, social software. .

“Methods and Techniques of Scientific Writing” was the title of yesterday’s PhD Seminar in Krems, led by Peter Baumgartner.
It was about how to cite and which tools are helpful- with special focus on social software for this.

Although the how was not a new subject since we all, the whole group of students, are reading a lot of scientific literature and have in some form started writing on our thesis, it was still very interesting to discuss our citation problems with an expert and get useful information and inputs.
The three major citing forms are the literal citation, paraphrasing and the inline citation. Paraphrasing (which should be used whenever possible in scientific writing), is providing troubles to me quite a lot at present. It demands to really understand what the respective author wrote, in which context he wrote it, and to set it in relationship to my own argument.
Peter Baumgartner suggested to keep a picture of a discussion with the various authors in mind, where I am moderating the discussion and contributing the own thoughts and conclusions. This can be helpful to conntect the different literature references to each other, and, very important, make an argumentation line.

The tools we looked at were in part new and in part I had stumbled over them before when researching social software. The definite highlight was the literature management tool Zotero, a plugin for Firefox. How nice! With one click one can create a new entry from the current website (being it a book, a blogpost, a website, etc), you can choose the citation style, organise literature with folders or tags, edit the data, and of course embed a bibliography in Word or OpenOffice. The interface is very intuitive.

Technically, the web page whose information you want to store needs to follow a compatible standard. This can be, for instance, the microformat COinS=ContextObjects in Spans. I have immediately experimented with that, adding a Plugin to this Wordpress Weblog (-> just another proof of Wordpress being the right software for me…) – so the citation informations of the posts can from now on be uploaded to Zotero.

Other links:
librarything.com
google booksearch

Peter Baumgartner is going to publish a collection of state of the art tools for scientific writing on his website – will be linked from here as soon as available.

April 18th, 2008. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: seminars, social software. .

It is likely that this movie is disseminated on about 1000 websites at this present moment, still I like to link it. A collection of statements on web 2.0, its fascination, new ways of communicating and networking, enterprises and ideas evolving around web 2.0, etc.
What I found particularly interesting is that founders of all kinds of social networking platforms talk about the work, networks, competition and money involved in such developments. What presents itself as easy-going, out-of-nothing-success, is some happy results of hard development work.
What happens if every day 100 new platforms emerge? Is that the end of the spirit of web 2.0 or does it take it even further? No answer to that question…

Not directly related to learning and thus my research project, but still representing some of what’s going on online…

Link: sevenload.com

Some links:
http://www.web2null-derfilm.de (the blog around this movie)
http://www.web2expo.com/ (however that is going to be)
http://www.deutsche-startups.de/ (startups in web 2.0)

[via weiterbildungsblog.de]

April 10th, 2008. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: social software. .

“If you are blogging with your students, or you are thinking of blogging with your students, I encourage you to not think of blogs as a writing assignment, but instead to look at them as conversations.”
(Source: Jeff Utecht in Techlearningblog: A Problem with Blogs)

November 30th, 2007. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: social software. .

As described earlier, the e-portfolio-software Mahara is available for PhD students at Donau-Uni Krems now, and I have just received my new account.
It looks promising… intuitive interface, everything being built up around the own account (“personal”), lots of possibilities to store/share files and thoughts (“portfolio”), open or join communities (“networking”), where the level of privacy for all activities can be chosen.

What I really like about this idea is the facilitation of communication in the PhD project: supervisors can look at and directly comment on research documents, peers can follow and comment the own research and vice versa, external persons involved in the project can link to specific documents or entries.

Need I say that a lot of work is involved in making a good e-portfolio?

November 14th, 2007. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: social software. .

Web 2.0 discussed this time not in a learning, but in a cultural context, and geographically “just around the corner”: WebTwoZero_X, a project of the cultural initiative Stromboli in Hall, in the framework of TKI Open 07 on Open Space.
It is difficult for me to grasp who the target audience is (newbies to web 2.0, artists, web 2.0 nerds?), and what the aim of the event is (is it purely informative on diverse aspects of web 2.0, is it a discussion on cultural change, is it a proof of cultural change?).

However, some parts of the programme sound very interesting to me, I’m glad to find such an event in Tirol and looking forward to attend!

November 11th, 2007. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: social software. .

Driven by the strong urge to re-organize my bookmarks and feeds in a most user-friendly way, I have today installed the Sage extension for Firefox. This seems to be the easiest way to add new feeds (and read them on a somehow regular basis), and have one interface to administer all bookmarks, static or dynamic or whichever.
The design is not 100% concise in my opinion, but there might be some possibilities to adjust that.

The only major disadvantage towards FeedReader I’ve found so far is that FeedReader always shows you how many unread items a link has. In Sage you have to select the specific dynamic link first.

October 16th, 2007. von Administrator. (2) Comments.
Kategorie: social software. .

I’ve just joined the Grounded Theory research group on facebook after an invitation of Andrea Gorra from Leeds Metropolitan University.
I am happy about this because
- I get in contact with other researchers facing (probably) similar questions and problems about there empirical study than I do
- it gives me the chance to be more involved in research activities at LeedsMet (a network densifying?)
- it is a good opportunity to experiment with facebook’s community features.
Thanks Janet and Andrea.

June 22nd, 2007. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: research methodology, social software. .

Today I had the chance to interview Peter Purgathofer on his practice and experience with weblogs in teaching at TU Vienna.
I used a similar guideline which I use for interviewing the students. Hearing points of view of “the other side” casts a new light also on the statements of the students. (To compare students’ and lecturers’ practices and opinions on weblogs would be an interesting theme for itself…)

Peter Purgathofer uses weblogs and RSS as an addition and support in his seminars, but never mandatory, in terms of grades, for students. This comes close to a vision where (e-)learning happens on initiative of students, to their support, and not through grade pressure.

One statement by Peter Purgathofer which I found central, was that although there happens a lot of information spread and meta-discussion in his course weblogs, discussions on content do not develop.

Why is that?
I have read some research work where teachers introduced weblogs and wikis in courses. Most of the time pointing at content creation, content discussion or content reflection. Usually it worked to a greater or lesser extent, but always when connected to final grades.
In this interview, we talk about an open and student centered environment, and the struggle with content does not happen. Can I conclude that if there is no assessment pressure, the debate with content is not happening? Does this not correspond to the living context of students? WHY not, and WHAT is this living context instead. Back to some of the root questions of my research, back to understand why I find it so important to interview students.

Link: Weblog Multimedia Produktion 2: Interaktionsdesign

June 4th, 2007. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: social software. .