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. .

The provider for this blog has recently upgraded from MySQL version 4 to version 5. This is generally corresponding to a longtime wish of mine.
However, the update messed up all the speical characters of my weblog – a very well known problem in the wordpress community, I found out.
The nicest tutorial about how to fix the errors, I found on konzentrat.org:
Change wp-config.php and wordpress settings to UTF-8;
Change all the database tables to latin1_german1_c in PHPmyAdmin;
With the presented script, convert all the üöé and so forth to the appropriate characters.
äüößÄÜÖ

Followed all the steps and it worked
Thanx!

November 4th, 2008. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: administrational things. .

13. Europäische Jahrestagung Gesellschaft für Medien in der Wissenschaft – Offener Bildungsraum Hochschule: Freiheiten und Notwendigkeiten
(13. European Conference of GMW – Open Educational Space University: liberties and necessitities):
I have for the last two days attended the conference, hosted this year by the Danube-Universtiy Krems and the Fachhochschule Krems.

While the lectures that I picked on the first day did not convince me too much, the second day held some very interesting lectures for me. In particular:

Tom Reeves: ‘Open Learning Requires Open Minds: The Challenges of Online and Blended Learning Environments for ‘Generation Me’ Students and their Instructors’

The lecture starts off with a view on the “net generation”. Authors like Don Tapscott (‘Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation’), Neil Howe & William Strauss (‘Generations’, ‘13th Gen’) and Marc Prensky (‘Don’t bother me Mom – I’m learning’), have written about the net generation which grew up with digital devices and digital communication channels, and, thus, their thinking patterns might have changed and with that the demands for education (Prensky 2001, ‘Ditigal Natives, Digital Immigrants). At the same time, “Students may be unafraid of technology, but the don’t necessarily understand it” (Diana Oblinger 2005, Podcast From Diana Oblinger – The Students Are Back!). Today’s students expect wealth, they want to become stars, and at the same time live in an always more competitive world, with student loans, difficult university access, etc. (Jean Twenge 2008, Generation Me).
Universities and also students (reported to have grandious fantasies and being narcistic) are focussed too much on degrees, while the focus should shift on outcomes. 21st century outcomes include: being creative, critical thinking, communication skills, problem solving, etc.
After Tom Reeves, these outcomes can be reached by involving students with authentic tasks. This would lead to restoring the conative domain in Higher Education. While the cognitive domain includes thinking and knowing, and the affective domain includes feeling and emotion, the conative domain includes behaviour, willing, doing.

Martin Ebner, Mandy Schiefner, Walther Nagler: ‘Has the Net Generation Arrived at the University?’

“Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.”
(Source: Marc Prensky 2001 ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants’)
Starting from this quotation, the lecture presents the result of two surveys conducted at the Technical University Graz (A) and the University of Zürich (CH):
About 1100 students (more than 500 students at each university) were asked about their technical equipment (laptops, mobile phone, mp3 players, etc), internet communication practices (email, instant messaging, skype, etc), and use of web 2.0 technologies (active and passive).
It resulted in the insight that most students have a laptop and other digital devices, Internet is almost everywhere, digital communication canals are established, but web 2.0 means mainly passive use of wikipedia and youtube for the new students.
Among the conclusions, Martin Ebner points out that the new generation is a ‘technically equipped generation’, but not a net generation (yet).

Nina Heinze, Thomas Sporer, Tobias Jenert: ‘Projekt i-Literacy: Modell zur Förderung vo Informationskompetenz im Verlauf des Hochschulstudiums’

Once again, this lecture starts with a view on the “net generation”. Nina Heinze reports results of a survey conducted at the University of Augsburg (D), with similar findings than described above – students possess digital devices and use digital technologies with ease. But they also lack information literacy, for instance, in the survey a high percentage of students was not able to solve an internet research task.
Therefore, the university (Institut für Medien und Bildungstechnologie) has started the “information literacy project”, to support students in aquiring skills in handling information and working scientifically. The project implements a combination of self learning materials, lectures and tutorials throughout the different phases of the study, where students can learn to do research (digital and analog), find and process information, etc.
What I liked very much about the project was the notion that students are involved in the design of the material. It becomes “their” material, corresponing to their taste and preferences.

Some Thoughts:

Omnipresent in this conference was the critical discussion about the “net generation”, with the common agreement that today’s students are technologically equipped but not media literate. The presence of Web 2.0 and the – at least partial – use of it does not implicate that today’s students are being media literate. Rather, it is a major challenge for educational institutions to support students on that way.

Another notion, connected to the first one, is that Web 2.0 is perhaps not so much a phenomenon of the net generation. Yes, they share content and connect in social networks, but active participation, content creation, wisdom of crowds?

There is a shift in the discussion: Some years ago, everybody talked about possible learning scenarios with web 2.0, whether it was blogs, or wikis, or social netwiorks. How could you possibly apply some new technologies in your courses? And could you be sure that it makes sense, thus having some positive effect on learning? Now that the technologies have established, the view opens up for the next challenges: media literacy, student involvement, and – just marginally touched in this conference (mainly brought into the discussion by Rolf Schulmeister) – the ever increasing digital devide (within European countries and the US, i’d like to highlight, not just between hemispheres).

The conference was closed by Nicolas Apostolopoulos, hoster of the 2009 GMW conference in Berlin. He suggested that next time also the students should be included more into the discussion/ the conference. I like this idea a lot and am looking forward to it!

September 19th, 2008. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: conferences. .

TU Graz is using weblogs university-wide as well:
“TUGLL is the campus wide blogosphere used by students and staff at Graz University of Technology since october 2006.”
(Source: elearningblog.tugraz.at)
Martin Ebner, Behnam Taraghi and Walther Nagler present a poster showing the plug-ins and extensions developed by TU Graz to “enhance the blogosphere with special needs by department of social learning after a year of experience”.

Just yesterday I browsed through the Wordpress Plugin Directory, to have a look for usefool tools for my weblog (for instance, MyCaptcha, Plugin Central, AboutMe widget, etc) and maybe get inspired to try out some gadgets.

I like the idea of increasing modularisation, both for my individual and for institutional use. The various needs of students in collecting, sharing, publishing different kinds of information can just be fullfilled with such a flexible system. Interested how far “widgetisation” could be driven?

September 5th, 2008. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: e-learning and weblogs. .

As I stumbled over this word twice today, I have to dedicate it a short note:
procrastination.

First, Rolf Schulmeister is talking about it in his essay “Gibt es eine Net Generation?” (via weiterbildungsblog.de). Second, an ENTIRE BLOG is called like this (via riesenmaschine.de).

The phenomenon of defering things has finally a name. For students, Academic procrastination seems to be a common phenomenon.

However. Being a part time student, rather than procrastination, the cronical lack of time for dedicating oneself to research seems to be the major issue.

September 5th, 2008. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: uncategorised. .

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. .

Andrea Back pointed to this website in her Learning Waves:
wordle.net “is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.”
It reminds me a bit about the Webpages-as-Graph-Creating tool which appeared a few years ago, a java applet as well.
Then, like now, it is fascinating to watch how my blog posts transform into visual representations of content or links.
Then, like now, I think about possible uses of such graphics. At the end, every representation is subject to programmer’s priorities.
Is it simply that in heavily text-based research we need, every once in a while, a “visual escape”? Or do these tools point to visualisation possibilities where one could translate a whole research into graphical representations? Imagine you visualise a mixed methods research approach, key features of each approach, interrelationships between them, and later on even the collected data and their interrelationships…. Sounds exciting doesn’t it…

However, I’ve tried the tool with my weblog. This led to the software upgrade, because suddenly all kinds of (otherwise hidden) spamwords appeared in the graphic instead of the contents I thought…
A tool to discover hidden spam messages?

July 15th, 2008. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: visualisation|presentation. .

After heavy problems with spam, and a desire for a better unser interface, I have finally upgraded to the newest version of Wordpress.
Besides the category names which got lost – had to replace them, and therefore they have slightly changed – the procedure went quite smooth.
And the administration interface has much more user friendly over time.

July 15th, 2008. von Administrator. (1) Comment.
Kategorie: administrational things. .

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. .