Social Software and more…

Since we just had our 3rd International scil Congress (and I will hopefully write a little bit about this later today) where one of the topics was Personal Learning Environments, I find this collection of PLE illustrations quite interesting (via edtechpost). The illustration that I like most is the following: source: http://thand.wordpress.com/2007/05/28/ple-2/ I like this one so much because it includes a number of dimensions, e.g. teacher-mediated, more instituionalized instruments, rather personal instruments. I’m don’t think that the dichotomy of formal vs. informal resp. declarative vs. tacit knowledge is consistent but nevertheless this way of structuring the PLE seems a good start What we did in a postconference workshop with Graham Atwell was to think about our own PLEs. I quite liked this idea to start from the personal point of view and then try to come up with a more general idea what the PLE might be about.

Tags: PLE, scil, Congress08

I just listened to an online lecture on E-Learning 2.0. The lecture was organized by the German e-learning portal e-teaching.org.

Tanja Jadin & Jürgen Wageneder from the Universities of Linz and Salzburg presented their thoughts on E-Learing 2.0 which are also available on their website.  After talking about some more general issues about the difference between web1.0 and web2.0, and some learning scenarios, they came to Personal Learning Environments towards the end of the lecture. I found this graphical reprensentation quite interesting:

 They also deducted competencies they find necessary for the prospective students learning in such personal learning environments:

• ICT-competence
• Net-competence
• Time-management
• Competence to learn self-regulated
• Collaboration competence
• Competence to deal with content
• Information competence
• Competence to deal with publicity
• Learning Design
• alternative ways of assessing (source: Jadin/Wageneder, 2007, online-lecture)
  

I just found out about a very interesting networking event which took place last Thursday via a skype conference. More information can be found on the organizer’s website. The documentation on the event is very comprehensive and can be found here or here.

Anja Wagner’s slides can be found in slideshare.  

Thanks to all for sharing this. And I’ll try to participate next time… 

via the CSCL-Community

Last week, I was wondering how much the CSCL community is involved in web2.0-applications. One of my guesses was that social software is too trivial for this community. However, there is some web2.0 during the CSCL-pre-conference in July 2007. But my guess seems to be confirmed nevertheless since Erik Blankinship’s afternoon session on Wiki Video seems quite sophisticated. I’m curious how the rest of the conference program will look like. But I guess, I have to wait a few more days when the conference program is available at the conference website

Any opinions on this question?

Web 2.0-Technologien zwischen E-Learning und Wissensmanagement

von Gabi Reinmann & Thomas Sporer - Universität Augsburg

Folien können hier abgerufen werden (Achtung: recht grosses File).

• E-Learning –> Ziel: Kompetenzen aufbauen für Leistungen in realen Situationen
• WM –> Ziel: sichtbare Performanzen mit dazu erforderlichen Kompetenzen

E-Learning und WM tun sich recht schwer miteinander wg. unterschiedlichen Auffasungen von Wissen, Lernen, Zielen sowie verschiedenen Disziplinen, Sprachen, Kulturen, Erwartungen

–> praktische Verbindung über Web 2.0

Was sind Web 2.0 Technologien?

• Verschwinden der Trennung von lokalen und zentralen Daten und Anwendung, z.B. Flickr, Google-Video, YouTube
• Verschmelzen der Grenzen zwischen Produzenten und Konsumenten von Medieninhalten, z.B. Wikipedia
• Personalisierung von Information durch die Kombination von Push- und Pull-Diensten, z.B. Blog

Drei Sichtweisen auf das Thema

• Informationsmanagement
• Beziehungsmanagement
• Identitätsmanagement: Werkzeuge zum Ausdruck und Präsentation des eigenen Selbst im Netz

Beispiele:

Webcasts

• im Kontext E-Learning: Inhalte über Webcasts  [Harvard University]; Seminare über Webcasts [Uni Augsburg]; ourmedia.org
• im Kontext Wissensmanagement: Einsatz ubiquitärer IuK-Technologien –> Explizierung der Webcasts als Informationsträger; kollaborativer Umgang mit Informaation, Verifizierung des Erfahrungswissens in der Community, situativer Zugriff auf den gemeinsamen Wissenspool (Fallbeispiel Xerox)

Social Software

• im Kontext e-Learning: elgg.net (Expertennetzwerk im Bereich "Social Software", Kommunikationsmöglichkeiten); blogg –> Information über jeweils aktuelle Forschungsaktivitäten, Postitionierung asl Experte in bestimmten Wissensdomänen, Kommunikationsmedium zwischen Experten, Diskurs zwischen Experten im virtuellen Raum
• im Kontext WM: Blog: Organisation von persönlichen Informationen, Instrument zur Reflexion und Sammlung von Erfahrungen, chronologische Dokumentation von Ideen und Texten
• Social Bookmarking: del.ico.us: kollaborative Organisation von Information, öffentliche Sammlung, auffinden von Kontakten
• citeULike: Suchen & Finden

Webcast

• Produktion und Rezeption von Wissensobjekten
• E-Learning: Einsatz als Lernobjekt/Content oder als Gegenstand einer Aufgabe
• Wissensmanagement-Masnahme zur Bewahrung/Weitergabe von Wissen/Erfahrungen: Wissensexplizierung beim Experten, Wissensnutzung beim Experten

Social Software:

• Knüpfen und Entwickeln von sozialen Beziehungen
• E-Learning: Einsatz zur Förderung von Dialog /Diskurs unter den Lernenden oder Unterstütztung kollaborativen Lernens und Problemlösens
• Wissensmanagement: Ergänzung von Gelben Seiten/Portalen und Aufbau neuer Expertennetzwerke sowie neue Formen von Wissensgenerieren (in Anlehnung an "klass." WM)

Theoretische Verbindung über persönliches WM

• Webcasts: materiale Wissensumwelt als Interaktionsumwelt
• Social Software: soziale wissensumwelt als Interaktionsumwelt

–> im Mittelpunkt steht die PERSON!!! Deswegen könnte das persönliche Wissensmgm. die Verbindung zwischen E-Learning und WM

Fazit und Folgerungen

• Einstieg über E-Learning und WM einerseits komplementär; andererseits aber auch konträr!!!
• E-Learning macht Anleihen vom Wissensmanagement
• Wegfall von Hierarchien, Inhalts- und Aufgabenhoheit
• Gemeinschaftsleistung statt Individualisierung
• Frage: Kann nicht auch Wissensmanagement Anleihen aus dem E-Learning
• Nutzen von Wissens- und Erfahrungsvorsprung, mehr Qualitätssicherung und -entwicklung

Wir brauchen also mehr "Beziehungsmanagement" und mehr "Identitätsmanagement" –> Beschäftigung mit Dingen und Personen

Diskussion

• Ziel von E-Learning und Wissensmanagement ist nahezu dasselbe; aus konstruktivistischer Sicht zwei Sichten ein- und derselben Sache
• Aber: Realität ist, dass sich die Begriffe bereits verfestigt haben –> wie aber kann dies aufgelöst werden? Vor allem in der Praxis problematisch, aber in die Praxis wird die Unterscheidung durch Berater hineingetragen –> sinnvoll, diese Abgrenzung aufzulösen.
• E-Learning 2.0 eher E-Learning verbunden mit Wissensmanagement; sinnvoll, erstmal alle Begriffe wegzulassen; aber Finden neuer Begriffe ist sehr, sehr schwierig
• Abgrenzung von Phänomenen in der Praxis: Bildungsinstitutionen mit pädagogischen Beziehungen <–> Wissensmgm. für eher informelle Kontexte, in denen auch gelernt wird (–> Generierung von Content steht im Vordergrund und kann von pädagogischen Beziehungen insofern abgegrenzt werden)

Community-Plattformen: Experten finden und Netzwerke organisieren (Dropping Knowledge)

von Prof. Hans Uszkoreit, DFKI, Saarbrücken

Introduction

Situation quite different for

-         emerging knowledge

-         knowledge in a flux

-         alternative hypotheses or schools

-         dynamically developing best practice

–> in these areas the dialogue between PEOPLE has always been the best way to go on

Examples : social and behavioral sciences, humanities, engineering, arts

Also in formal and natural sciences, one can find heated debates

Examples of questions that need discussion: questions on the effects of globalization, cultural tolerance vs. universal ethical culture –> multiple view

What comes together in this research project?

e-learning, web 2.0 + semantic web (noch nicht da): use of semantic metadata for knowledge repositories and use –> ontologies are already in use

Idea: dropping knowledge

• global initiative to support the free and open sharing of knowledge
• start: collection of 50000 questions worldwide (via the internet) –> user rating –> reduction to 100 questions, nomination of 112 persons
• by now: cooperation also with companies to use the process for knowledge management in companies
• results:

• different PR actions (starting with a powerful and highly exciting seed event, audiovisual media, film, exhibition)
• "dropping knowledge living library" of the questions and about 10000 answers –> connection to wikipedia, links to other sources (NGOs, poems, other organizations)
• Beiträge müssen miteinander verknüpft werden, um den einzelnen Nutzer zu leiten (sonst Problem des information overload) –> Ontologie: vieldimensionale Landkarte der relevanten Wissensdomäne, auf der die Inhalte wie Pflanzungen oder Siedlungen angeordnet werden können.

Wie kann diese Technologie in der Bidlung ausgenutzt werden?

• Fundgrube von Inhalte für Unterricht in Sozialkunde, politische Bildung, Ökonomie
• bereits Forderung nach Erweiterung (z.B. "Dossiers" (bereits zusammengestelltes Wissen zu bestimmten Themen), Wissens-Quiz)

Factors for Selection/Prioritzing

• recency, authority, rating, active use (sich darauf bezogen?), passive use, external relevance –> gehen in die Ontologie
• Durch Ontologie werden Einzelthemen unter verschiedenen Schlagworten eingeordnet.

-         user participation in knowledge building (easy submission, more users)

-         input of instances: organizations, people, publications, thematic links

-         input of new relations: aggravating and alleviating factors

Problems

• users are overwhelmed by the number of contributions
• they cannot easily grasp the major opinions and camps
• they have to read through hundreds of postings to get a picture of what’s going on

–> new: new opinions have to be mapped according to opinion

 

 

I admit that I’m way too slow with my blog posts and I promise to be quicker in the future although I still don’t really know how all the other bloggers manage. Anyway, after so many people already commented on the Learntec (e.g. Gabi Reinmann in her E-Denkarium, Peter Baumgartner, and many more), I would like to draw my personal conclusions as well. After this post, I will post a few (German) summaries on the sessions that I attended which I hope some of you will enjoy. Anyway, here are my highlights:

• The keynote by Martin Eppler from the University of Lugano who talked about the possibilities of knowledge visualisation and certainly got me motivated to learn more about this subject (see also his website on Visual Literacy and this blog post).
• My second highlight was Gabi Reinmann’s and Thomas Sporer’s presentation on the connection between knowledge management and e-learning and how web2.0 and the knowledge management of each individual could provide the link between the two domains. However, they also pointed out how important it is to retain the differentiation between the two. Their slides are available here and my summary can be found in this post.
• The introduction to the community platform "Dropping Knowledge" by Prof. Hans Uszkoreit from the DFKI in Saarbrücken which I find quite a fascinating project.

There are a number of Web 2.0 speeches to be held in the St. Gallen Palace - a club in my hometown. So if you’re German speaking and from Eastern Switzerland come along and let’s discuss. More on this can be found at the Palace’s internet site.

via Medienpraxis

Yesterday, SCIL’s first online workshop on social software started. It was planned to be taught only through social software but indeed, we now also use a virtual classroom (Breeze) and of course, we still depend on e-mail. The idea behind it is to engage people in little projects where they plan how to use social software in their own teaching. The focus is on wikis, blogs, and podcasts and most participants want to get to know wikis and podcasts but one participant is about to produce his own podcast for his university, and I’m very much looking forward to this.

The course is supported by a blog (where I also do most of my blogging right now). And we also use a wiki which is protected by passwords to make participants feel more comfortable with putting their work online.

Here’s a graphic of how the workshop will proceed (in German):

More information on the course can be found at the SCIL website and at our course blog. Enjoy! 

Today, I read an article in Vision - Looking at the future of learning (issue 03_2006) which is a magazine issued by futurelab, a UK institution dealing with the future of education. Most of the articles seem to be online but I cannot find this particular article.

The article describes how people are now constantly connected through communication and online access. With speckled and mote computing and sensors in our environment this might even become more so.

Thus, people are connected "to a powerful and flexible information infrastructure" which is changing the nature of knowledge and also how to aquire it because we are now facing an almost ubiquitous access to information which has changed and will change the way we learn and work, so that

• information literacy (esp. with regarding to its processing) will become more important
• our learning will become more flexible due to the delivery of learning opportunities in a more seamless way
• computers will disappear from our gaze and be hidden in other devices
• there will be connections aong people in different locations
• new learning methods will be created that better suit the so-called digital natives (with different behavior patterns and necessities)
• the way people learn in developing countries

 But above all, what’s necessary is a cultural change in teaching and curriculum developement. However, there are also critical views that technology will not change anything. The belief that computers could be essential one day is called "a cowardly cheat by technocrats counting on technical innovation to shield themselves from hard questions about what schools should be" (Michael Schrange of the MIT was cited in the article, p. 3).

Lastly, he article suggests that educationalists will have to worry less about technology.

Isn’t that what social software is already about? That this is easy to use for everyone facilitating being connected, communicating, interacting and collaborating.