monika’s w e b l o g

Last week I had the great opportunity to take part at Prishtina Summer University 2008, organised by the University of Prishtina and SPARK. I have taught the course “European Models of Information Society and E-Governance” together with Blerim Rexha and Johann Günther, where my focus was on Web 2.0 and e-learning 2.0.

A dense week with varicoloured impressions – city life, buildings, hospitality, omnipresent internet, international exchange, culture, and many more.

The course:

We worked on 2.0 concepts (participation, wisdom of crowd, software as a service, long tail, etc) and Web 2.0 applications at first, and then related these to e-learning (learner-centered approaches) and learning theories (constructivist learning, social learning, collaborative learning). As a very useful add-on, all students were (thanks to the Department of Interactive Media and Educational Technology at Danube University Krems) provided with accounts for the e-portfolio software Mahara, hosted at Danube University. This formed both an example application for e-learning 2.0, and a platform for collecting and sharing course material and information.

Course impressions:

It appeared that students use all kinds of web 2.0 tools (by the far majority, social networking sites), but they are not concerned with any of the concepts that scientists discuss about. Hence, they showed interest in concepts, and surprise that there is broad scientific research going on in this field.

For the e-learning part, I made the experience that students liked to use Mahara, for sharing material, but also for connecting with others. They could also think of many possible application fields for web 2.0 tools such as social bookmarking or RSS feeds.
At the same time I wonder how students and teachers can aggregate various services into their learning landscape (or, personal learning environment), to make it a good learning space, up to date, sustainable, flexible, exchangeable. Like dragging, dropping, remixing personal information units and activities – mashing them up in a user friendly way. I have just experienced this in its beginnings, so far.
At present, it seems to be that either (from point of view of teacher)
- we use some (new) technologies in our own courses, other teachers use their favoured technologies, and so on. For instance, a teacher might use a course weblog. Tomorrow the course is over and the blog is old; instead, in the new course a wiki or a google group might be used. While communication within the course might work, no continuation afterwards is given.
- or, we use (in the best case) a modern e-learning platform with a series of integrated (web 2.0) tools, with a lack of possibilities for individual adoption, aggregation and transfer.
None of the two seems to reflect the flexibility and modularity which I think is inherent in web 2.0.

[Update on 2008-08-05: Jochen Robes points to a blog entry by Elena Benito Ruiz dealing with this discussion. I agree with the statement that "e-Learning 2.0 is not about allowing teachers or students to set up their own blog within the VLE..."; if I interpret the proposed concepts "OpenSocial + OpenID + OpenCourseware" right, this is a focus away from categorising services, towards modularising basic activities in an environment of openness and participation. Interesting approach.]

Assessment in a “2.0″ context:

To assess practical works and exercices, we applied a peer review method. Experimental to a certain degree, I thought this might apply to the 2.0 concepts we had discussed for the entire week. Also, I was inspired by peer review processes when submitting scientific papers, as we had discussed in Cyprus. Students liked the method and actively participated in discussions on their own and their colleagues’ projects.
Some optimisation is still necessary to relate peer review to allocation of credit points, but in general I’d say this concept was successful.

Relating the experience to my research project:

Besides the experiences described above, preparation of the lectures was a bit like doing some steps in setting up the literature review for my thesis. I went back to some “core” articles in the subject,
Web 2.0, by Tim O’Reilly;
E-Learning 2.0, by Stephen Downes;
Deeper review on Web 2.0 concepts, for instance with
Participative Web and User Generated Content, by OECD-Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development;
The 7 things you should know about… -series, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative;
And found the vey nice article on Universities and Web 2.0: Institutional Challenges by J.Freire – and thus, the portal of elearningeuropa.info.

[1-city view with city hall in front, 2-street view, 3-street view, 4-green market, 5-cafe, 6-mother theresa street, 7-national library, 8-faculty of electrical engineering]

August 4th, 2008. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: seminars. .

It’s been a week since we returned from Cyprus, so perhaps a good idea to take a second to reflect on the event?
I’ll keep it down to the learning outcomes and compare them with my original goals.

1… “Working on Publishing a Paper”
I’ve started drafting a paper which I would like to propose to an e-journal for review. There is still a lot of work in writing it out. But the workshop with Reinhold has helped me a lot by proposing the steps to follow.

Two of the things pointed out repetedly:
- work out the novelty factor of your paper
- connect your thoughts to previous articles/open questions of other researchers

Special attention was given to the abstract. No matter how long the abstract needs to be (often between 150 and 200 words for journal articles), it should contain the following features described by Reinhold:
What makes the problem interesting and relevant > Problem Statement > Approach > Results > Conclusions

It was not new information, but for the first time I followed very strictly these guidelines. And indeed, all the essence of the publishing unit went compressed into few lines, “the abstract says it all”.
However, we also noticed that many abstracts do not follow this guideline and are often not very concise in their statement.

Thus I have to say I’ve reached this goal thanks to Reinhold’s and other student’s great inputs.

July 9th, 2008. von Administrator. (1) Comment.
Kategorie: seminars. .

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. .

My personal goals while being here in Cyprus:

Progress in writing up the dissertation:

- Digitalization of quantitative interviews
- Working out (new) visualisation methods of decision tree model
- Starting to write down the findings of this part of the empirical study

Working on publishing a paper:

- Find a suited conference / journal
- Checking if I find any possible co-authors in the research group
- Starting to draft the paper

Assessment on Certified Programme

June 25th, 2008. von Administrator. (1) Comment.
Kategorie: seminars. .

Searching for conferences and journals which could be outlets for a paper, I found e-teaching.org. This website provides a lot of information on educational technology. Among those, there is a list of leadning journals and e-journals in the field.
Nice source.

June 25th, 2008. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: seminars. .

One of the major programme points in this Intensive Programme is a workshop led by Reinhold Behringer: “Scientific Publishing – A Hands-On Workshop” with the general goal to work out a publishable paper.
The outline for the workshop is provided by Reinhold:

Thus, the first task is to identify outlets – conferences, journals, symposia in the field. This will influence the type: paper, article, poster, position statement, survey paper (mainly in journals).

I am looking forward to work on a paper- mainly because it helps me organise my ideas, summarise first findings, check out whether somebody out there shows a minimum of interest for what I am doing, get in contact with peers, perhaps find some student here for a joint paper…

There is a downside to this as well. The pressure to publish, to e reeferenced, the value of rankings in the scientific world are setting boundaries which might take away some of the freedom in researching – publishing just to be published… anyway, not my problem at present.

June 22nd, 2008. von Administrator. (2) Comments.
Kategorie: seminars. .

10 days of intercultural intensive research, lectures, peer discussions, with the aim to make a big step forward in developing the dissertation. This is why students of Leeds Metropolitan University, University of Cyprus, and Danube University Krems are meeting in Cyprus from today on in an Intensive Programme.

Savvas Katsikides, Antonis C. Kakas, Erwin Bratengeyer and Reinhold Behringer welcome us.
Looking forward to having a good time on this beautiful island and make some progress in my research.

Symptomatic View

June 22nd, 2008. von Administrator. (1) Comment.
Kategorie: seminars. .

The second day was about “Motivational foundation (Grundlagen) in the context of e-learning” by Michael Aysner.

Themes included theory, explanation and examples on: Motivation – Goal orientation (Zielorientierung) – Interest – Attributions – Benchmark – Feedback.
Again, attending the lecture with the aim to draw direct connections to my research work, I was searching for indications on where motivation comes from, and for connections between motivation and learning.

Two themes were particularly useful inputs for me:
1 the Rubikon Model of action phases:
balancing (Abwägen) – Planning of action (Handlungsplanung) – Accomplishment of action (Handlungsausführung) – Evaluation of action (Handlungsbewertung).

2 The introduction to the terms
- learning goals orientation (Lernzielorientierung): aim is to learn for the thing itself; strong connection to intrinsic motivation
- performance goals orientation (Leistungszielorientierung): aim is to accomplish something with the action; strong connection to extrinsic motivation
in connection to balancing (see above).

May 23rd, 2008. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: seminars. .

Yesterday and today, I have attended two seminars in Krems. The first one, “Introduction to Communication Theories”, was held by Thomas Bauer.

The expectation I had before I went to the lecture, was – roughly formulated – to get aware of connections/theories between communication (sciences) – blogging – learning which I might have overseen so far.
I did not find an indication close enough to my research work to “climb on it”.
Still, some details were interesting, eg:
- The interconnectivity between communication – culture – society (or, say, blogging – living context – students). But I am missing, at least at this point, a directly usable path to my research.
- The discussion on media competence, in particular the definition approaches for both terms. As the lecture was highly theoretical, I was not (yet) able to break this down for my research.

May 23rd, 2008. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: seminars. .

“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. .