I regularly get questions from folks who want to start blogging: now there’s nice, simple, clear advice on how to start your own blog. I strongly agree with:

Figure out what to write about, and write it.

Don’t worry about a plan; it’s going to change, anyway. Just think about what your point of view is, and what audience you want to reach (just visualization people? technical people? business folks? everybody?).

Think about what you are doing, what you are thinking about, what keeps you up at night, why you do the work you do. You have to find your niche, but if you’re working in visualization, you likely have that, anyway. Think about what the world doesn’t know about the work you do, the value of your work, and visualization in general.

Write it up, hit submit, done.

It really is that easy.

This is just as true for blogs that do not focus on visualization!

Now if only I could find some similar good advice on how to write a book – have been circling around that goal for too long… Suggestions, anyone?

Time does fly! (I must be having fun.) It’s been almost three weeks since I had the honor and pleasure to present in the round table on Personalization and Learning.

Martin, Cristina and Graham had asked me to talk about my experience with Personal Learning Environments, a concept that is receiving a great deal of attention these days.

As I wrote in the abstract:

Learning is personal. So, learning environments should be personal too… Many (not all!) of our students do not expect anything less. Yet, organization-wide support for learning environments seems to be incompatible with personalization as witnessed by the one size fits all approach of dominant LMS’s. I will share some of my experiences in this domain: I once chaired the group that helped my university to decide to adopt Blackboard. That university wide system now has more than 90.000 users. Yet, my courses in it only contain a link to a wiki or a blog or a facebook group. In my talk, I will try to provide a happy twist to this ironic story.

In the presentation – slides below and recording available – I focused on my ongoing course on multimedia, where the learning environment is a combination of twitter (try the #mume09 hash tag), delicious (mumeo9 tag), facebook (facebook group) and blogs (bundle of the student blogs).

Basically, the students have weekly studio sessions with me where we discuss projects they work on in groups of 3 or 4. They are asked to

• tweet whenever they work on their projects, so as to provide a ‘pulse’ of what is happening in the course in between face-to-face sessions;
• post a bookmark on delicious that relates their work to an external web resource, so as to make them reflect on the relevancy of what we do in ‘the real world’;
• blog at least once a week with a status update of what they have done, so that the different project groups (and I) maintain an overview of project progress.

So, what does this have to do with Personal Learning Environments? In my view, the essence is to connect with the personal life of the students: that is very hard to do in a rigid environment that acts as a walled garden in the way that Blackboard does. This is not even a Blackboard problem: I think that the same is true for Moodle and other LMS’s or VLE’s! If the students already live on facebook, then that is where I think we should be when we want to help them learning in an authentic way. Moreover, if their teacher, like me, lives in twitter and RSS land, then that is where he ought to be able to follow and provide feedback on their work! I guess that this is as much about being open as it is about being personal!

I think that I may have some anecdotal evidence that this approach works, as students have developed their assignments into projects that continue after they finished the course: my first year engineering students have adopted a facebook based calendar alternative for their standard blackboard one, developed by my master students in CHI last year. Another student developed a mash-up to rally student protest against the decision by my university to effectively block gmail:

By the way, this makes learning personal for teacher too: feedback on twitter can be quite direct, and the students generate some 200 tweets in the first 3 weeks, I get some 60 suggestions for additional course material per week, and the blogs regularly trigger feedback on-line or in the next face-to-face session. This is learning with the firehose open, not only for the student

I already mentioned open: why don’t you come have a look and leave some feedback for my students: here, or in twitter or in their blogs… You might learn something too !

ResearchGATE just sent me the following message:

Dear erik duval,

on your profile you’ve listed yourself as an author of the following papers, which are eligible for self-archiving:

Standardized uniqueness: oxymoron or vision of the future? IEEE standards

Please visit https://www.researchgate.net/profile.ProfilePublications.html to upload your full papers.

Over 90% of journals now allow self-archiving, and with ResearchGATE you can easily upload full-text versions of your published work to your profile page. Self-archiving is an important part of the open access movement and helps you to increase your impact as a researcher by making your work more visible and accessible. To date, our members have uploaded several thousand full-text versions of their work.

We welcome your suggestions and feedback!

The ResearchGATE Team

This is really smart: I just uploaded the paper. It’s really hard to figure out what version of which paper can be shared when and under what constraints, so this is really helpful. (Though I often adopt an ‘I’ll ask for forgiveness rather than permission’ approach…) I wonder whether Mendeley has a similar feature?

Two weeks ago, I had the distinct privilege to give the first lecture to first year engineering students in Leuven.

I always like to take a few minutes to make them think about why they are there. This year, I used the quote that

Scientists study the world as it is;

engineers create the world that has never been.

(See slide 7 below.) And, of course, I had asked my twitter friends for advice about what to say at this somewhat special occasion – I still remember my first day at the university many many moons ago…

And some good advice I got – slide 9 and beyond… Ruben Faelens wrote on Facebook

Studying engineering is not only about studying. The university is a cooking pot of the brightest minds of society; and there will never be so many smart people together in such a free climate. If you ever wanted to go on a trip around the world, build a catapult, create the next Google, or build your own robot: you will find people to do it with at the university!
Just don’t forget to study.

To which Steven Verjans replied:

Go home and get a life ;-0

Michael Goossens was more practically oriented:

“Only a few of you will remain next year” >:-). The ugly truth.

That is actually not accurate: slightly more than half the students pass their first year. I am a glass-half-full kind of person
Robert Farrell’s view is quite similar to mine:

It’s all about mindset discipline. You have to THINK like an engineer

My version of that is that I mentioned that it will take engineering to solve some of the more pressing problems of our time, like Global Warming. OK – one could argue that it is also engineers who created that problem in the first place …
José Palazzo Oliveira suggested something I actually did after my engineering studies:

Why don`t you try a little of Philosophy?

On facebook, Leo Plugge concluded the conversation with … shall I say a philosophical note:

That, by the time they graduate, the economy will probably look brighter but the environment bleaker. They did wise to choose engineering, if they use it wise.

Over on twitter, Till Nagel had a suggestion for a nice story: I duly followed his suggestion and explained the story to the students:

The story about the ceramics teacher (see e.g. http://kottke.org/09/02/art-and-fear) Art & Fear is generally a great read, not only for artists.

I added Art & Fear to my reading list as well…
Wolfgang Reinhard echoed my sentiments about the importance of failure, by suggesting that

would tell them that they live in exciting times,shall try all they can & are allowed to make faults, risk some to realise ideas

Bart Van Loon rightly remarked:

that for the next 5 years, they’ll learn more outside that room, than inside (unless they want to become an academic)

And, finally, Xavier reminded me of an excellent way to put some context around their studies, by suggesting the video below, which I showed in class.

All of these were Great suggestions, a reminder (not that I needed one) that I have some truly Great Friends that are full of good ideas when I want to discuss an important topic… Maybe you want to add your suggestion here as well?

To start with the conclusion, the way Peter formulated it: our Science 2.0 workshop on Tuesday was “Tres Cool”! Kind of appropriate for a workshop at at ECTEL09 in Nice, France…

There were some 25 participants, and you can read or contribute to the conversation through the #science twitter tag.

Some of the themes that stood out for me:

Obtaining and opening up clean data: all of us struggle with that. Even for such a limited exercise as only one conference series (ECTEL) and just authors, titles, affiliation, location and citation data, a group of people spent quite a bit of time and effort to obtain the data. How can we scale this up to all of the research in our domain? It seems to me that the open access movement should really pay more attention to this question: at least as important as making the actual papers available, it seems to me, is making the bibliographical data openly available – they are now locked up by Thomson-Reuters or Elsevier, and even if you do have access to those systems, you cannot easily get the data out to do your own analysis or visualization! It also seems to me that the publishers should be able to understand that this may help people to discover and find relevant papers, so this may actually increase traffic (and thus revenue?) for them…

Demo fear: I’m so often struck by the fear of many presenters to do a demo of their tools. Especially in a smaller workshop setting, I want to see the tools. Rough is fine, but show the tool: we can read the paper, but it is often not so easy to play with the tool! So, a round of applause to Wolfgang Reinhardt for showing twitterVisBT – a tool that helps to analyze twitter conversations. And, of course, I wanted to set a good example, so we did no presentation and just two demonstrations – with presenters skype’ing in from Ecuador and Germany: Xavier presented our ECTEL visualization and Till showed an early version of an alternative visualization (see below).

Till's visualization of ECTEL

Sharing ideas There was some discussion – prompted by Nicolas’ blog post, about whether it makes sense to share ideas – rather than results. As I mentioned at the workshop, I personally agree that the field of Technology Enhanced Learning is maybe too rich in ideas and not rich enough in hard results, but I think that this is a false dichotomy: sharing ideas does not prevent results from being achieved or shared?! Rather, I would think than an earlier discussion of ideas may make it easier to reach better results earlier? And, even if you worry about people stealing your ideas, you may still want to share early to establish yourself as the first who worked on something? This discussion led Martin to think a bit more about the pedagogy of abundance…

Limits to openness: Barbara asked a question that still has me thinking: are there things we do not want to share? Many of us are involved in preparing bids for the EU funding call late October: do we share openly our plans for such proposals? The answer was a somewhat embarrassed silence. I actually wouldn’t mind to prepare a bid in the open. But I also do think there are limits to what we want to share: for instance, we are interviewing candidates for open positions – I am not comfortable to share even who applied, as it might put some of them in a rather awkward position.

There was much more we discussed – recordings of the sessions will appear on the workshop web site next week (many thanks to Peter for recording!) and there is a lot of follow up activity planned, in my team and elsewhere… “Stay tuned for more!”

BTW, the opening ECTEL09 keynote by Peter Pirolli on social information foraging and sensemaking was very relevant in making explicit the overall context for this science2.0 work: definitely useful to help clarifying why we do what we do…

I’m very excited about the way that our Science 2.0 for TEL workshop at ECTEL09 is shaping up!

We have a nice set of papers, and, of course, in good science 2.0 fashion, they are all available from the Stellar Open Archive:

• Gillet D., El Helou S., Joubert M., Sutherland R., Science 2.0: Supporting a Doctoral Community of Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning using Social Software
• Ebner M., Reinhardt W., Social networking in scientific conferences – Twitter as tool for strengthen a scientific community
• Underwood J., Luckin R., Smith H., Walker K., Rowland D., Fitzpatrick G., Good J., Benford S., Reflections on Participatory Science for TELSci2.0
• Salman Khan M., Ebner M., Taraghi B., Visualizing Research Patterns in the Field of e-Learning
• Kieslinger B., Lindstaedt S., Science 2.0 Practices in the Field of Technology Enhanced Learning

I’m also quite happy that we will have a presentation and demonstration of Mendeley. And, of course, we will also show our visual exploration of ECTEL.

In related news, I also like the way that ResearchGATE now enables you to claim your publications (from existing digital libraries) and indicates itself whether the publisher allows you to make a copy of the article available under open access. I am on ResearchGate and on Mendeley: so far, these tools haven’t really contributed all that much to my research, but I am SO convinced that the potential is huge… In any case, the workshop and this area of science2.0 really looks like a lot of Serious Fun ahead to me.

By the way, you can still register for the workshop!

In the STELLAR network, we are discussing a new podcast series on Technology Enhanced Learning. During these discussions, it became more and more apparent to me that there is a lot I don’t know about podcasts…

• What is an appropriate length for a podcast? I’m not the first one to ask the question (really, seriously), but it does seem that opinions vary wildly. I’ve heard claims that most people listen to podcasts during their commutes (do we know this for a fact?) and that the average commute is about 24 mins. The implication would be that individual podcast sessions should not go over 20 minutes.
  Sounds reasonable… Indeed, I do listen to podcasts mainly while driving – or while I’m cleaning up at home. Yet, I listen most often to TWIT podcasts and they are typically 1 to 1,5 hours long. My commute is a bit longer than average, but not that long. And I’m not that exceptional: the TWIT podcasts are among the more popular tech podcasts.
• What is an appropriate format for a podcast? I like the “let’s put a bunch of interesting people together and have them talk” format. In fact, that is also one of my preferred television formats – see “A Glorious Accident“. (Really: a must-see!) Others prefer the much more structured approach that for instance Nature takes. Oh, and I also adore the slightly more extraordinary ‘you look nice today‘ kind of shows…
• How do we share podcasts we like? I discover music through last.fm and similar applications, books through the likes of amazon, research papers through citations and blogs or twitterers through links, blogrolls or replies. But podcasts? I can’t seem to easily share what I listen to or discover what my friends listen to? Or am I missing something?

As I mentioned, I’m not sure that I really understand how podcasting works. Not that it will keep me from doing a series – ‘learning by doing’ is supposed to be effective, no?

But ‘learning from others’ is not a bad approach either: please share your insights here! What do you listen to? Why? What do you (not) like in podcasts? Where do you listen? When? Look forward to hearing from you – maybe I’ll do a podcast on the topic

In the STELLAR network of excellence, a Delphi study on the Technology Enhanced Learning is underway. As a Good Boy, I responded to the questionnaire, even though I am not so convinced of the value of such studies. (Do you know one that has really led to a valuable outcome?)

Still, I had fun thinking about the questions, and would like to share my answers here:

Looking at the whole field of TEL in the last couple of years:

Which have been 2-3 prominent research themes and promising results?

- metadata and repositories

- mobile learning

- open educational resources

Which have been 2-3 important changes in education and advances in technology that have had an impact on TEL research?

- ubiquitous computing

- web2.0

Imagine a large international TEL research program to be carried out from 2014 till 2020 is planned:

What should be 2-3 central research themes and questions to be covered by this program?

- leveraging emotions

- scaleability and personalization

What future key technical developments (e.g. increasing use of mobile devices) should be accounted for in the research program? (please name 2-3)

- ambient computing, sensors (geo, time, emotion, other feedback)

- web3.0 (whatever that will mean)

What future key societal demands and challenges (e.g. aging society) should the research program live up to? (Please name 2-3)

- addressing key issues (aids, middle east, energy, war, …)

- making learning relevant again for learners in schools

—

Part III: Predicting the future of TEL

In this part of the questionnaire, we would like to collect some general, visionary and maybe also controversial statements about future developments in TEL, such as:

“Some day, microchips in our brain will help us process information, solve problems and memorize facts.”

“Some day, computers will diagnose the mood of the user and display content adaptively”

“Some day, students will be allowed to use technological devices (including internet access etc.) in all exams”

“Some day, informal learning will be more important than formal learning”

Please suggest two to three (or more…the more the better) interesting, visionary and/or controversial statements regarding future developments in TEL with a high potential impact.

Some day, most 18 year olds will still consider learning as much fun as when they were 6 year olds.

Some day, everybody will have immediate access to all the learning support she needs.

Some day, we will really understand how learning works.

—

Part IV: Opinions and Visions for TEL

One objective of STELLAR is to reduce the fragmentation of European TEL research. In this Delphi study, we would therefore like to collect opinions and visions of TEL researchers in order to identify common goals and visions.

Please share your personal opinions and visions on TEL research:

What is the fundamental purpose of TEL research?

To understand how technology can improve learning.

Which are the characteristics of “good” TEL research?

Relevant, in that it actually makes a difference.

Either evaluated in practice, or at least with a potential to be evaluated – much along the lines of Popper’s falsifiability.

What developments in TEL research would be undesirable?

More new terminology for old concepts.

More fuzzy research with unclear aims and unclear contributions.

—

Part V: General Feedback and Suggestions for Round 2

In this first Delphi round we not only want to test and elicit feedback on types of items to be employed in Round 2, but also ensure that all STELLAR partners can contribute ideas and suggestions for Round 2.

Are there any new questions, topics or sections that you would like to suggest for Round 2?

- What can we do to improve TEL research, also (but not exclusively) by applying some of the technologies that we leverage for learning in research.

Please feel free to share any additional ideas regarding Round 2:

Would it make sense to do this in a more open way, where one gets to see the input from others, maybe immediately after completing the survey?

Which have been 2-3 prominent research themes and promising results?

Which have been 2-3 important changes in education and advances in technology that have had an impact on TEL research?

Imagine a large international TEL research program to be carried out from 2014 till 2020 is planned:

What should be 2-3 central research themes and questions to be covered by this program?

What future key technical developments (e.g. increasing use of mobile devices) should be accounted for in the research program? (please name 2-3)

What future key societal demands and challenges (e.g. aging society) should the research program live up to? (Please name 2-3)

Please suggest two to three (or more…the more the better) interesting, visionary and/or controversial statements regarding future developments in TEL with a high potential impact.

What is the fundamental purpose of TEL research?

Which are the characteristics of “good” TEL research?

What developments in TEL research would be undesirable?

Are there any new questions, topics or sections that you would like to suggest for Round 2?

Please feel free to share any additional ideas regarding Round 2:

Some of the answers may be a bit short, so let me know which ones you would like me to expand upon. More importantly, let me know which questions you would answer differently, or why you disagree… I will pass on the comments to the team that is organizing this study…

Sometimes, I’m a bit surprised and worried when I realize that we have now been working on “share and reuse“, learning objects, metadata, repositories, etc. for about 15 years… However, I am currently at the ICWL conference in Aachen, a city with a slightly longer history: Charlemagne ruled from here some 1200 years ago: I guess it’s all a question of perspective

The conference building is rather spectacular, with a 2.5 kilometer (!) deep drill to capture geo-thermal energy. Quite useful to have good cooling as we have very exceptionally warm weather here in Europe these days!

Yesterday morning, I did the opening keynote about learning in times of abundance and the Snowflake Effect.

As often, I asked folks to provide feedback by email, twitter, slideshare, facebook and … on paper at the end of my talk. This kind of direct, immediate feedback is very useful to me. It helps me understand which of my examples participants were most impressed with (wakoopa this time, so it seems), what they take away (I stressed the importance of design and how the use of standards can never be an excuse for poor user experiences – a point many picked up in their feedback), etc.

I also got a mail from Karen Stepanyan that mentions a point that comes up regularly. I’ve asked him permission to quote, so here goes:

One thought that creeps to my mind, however, is the general feeling that by adding this personalisation/adaptation we detach the people from the great diversity they experience (or should I say, we detach the students from greater opportunities of practicing their skills in adapting to the great diversities). What the effects of this personalization be in the future? And to which extent should we consider this? I would be interested to know your view on this (may be reading in your blog?).

Actually, I think that the personalization can add diversity rather than reduce it! I think many of us have learned about new music through the likes of last.fm or discovered new books through amazon, etc. One recent example in the science2.0 context is how our work on an analysis of the EdMedia conference series helped me to discover people in my own research area that I didn’t know of!

Of course, some will say that a good researcher knows everyone in his area. I’m not so sure: because of the abundance of current research work, it is hard to keep track of all that is going on. And because of the interdisciplinary nature of Technology Enhanced Learning, you may not be aware of some of the relevant work. So, if you could be notified when people you don’t know start citing you or the people you cite, would you not be interested to know? Would that not help us to become a better research community? Would that not actually increase the likelihood that you would fully appreciate the diversity of research?

Let me know what you think! And come discuss this topic with us at the TelSci2.0 workshop at the end of October…

We have two job openings. They’re really interesting. We’re a really nice team. Really. Seriously.

Let me know if you want to know more

The Ariadne/HMDB research unit at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium is looking for new members to join our team!

We invite applications for PhD or post-doctoral positions financed by the European research project ROLE (on Responsive Open Learning Environments) and the network of excellence on Technology Enhanced Learning STELLAR.

• The focus of the research of the first open position is on attention metadata: these describe user interactions with a diverse set of applications and web resources. The basic goal is to gather and process attention metadata in unobtrusive ways, so as to better understand and support the actions and goals of the end user across different applications. In a first phase, the research will focus on the domain of technology-enhanced learning. Typical applications would be a personal or shared dashboard, or a recommender service.
• The focus of the research for the second open position is to develop and validate prototypes of highly responsive technology-enhanced learning environments, offering breakthrough levels of effectiveness, flexibility, user-control and mass-individualization. In this project, we play a significant role in the development of technical specifications that are the basis for enabling the interoperability and personalized mashup of learning services.

Funding is available immediately. The research will be carried out at the Department of Computer Science at the K.U.Leuven, in close collaboration with many of the leading research units on Technology Enhanced Learning in Europe and worldwide.

The candidate has the following profile:

• A degree in Computer Science, Informatics or equivalent with a minimum grade of cum laude
• Interest in technology enhanced learning and metadata.

Because the successful candidate will work as a member of a project group, team spirit is indispensable.
More information about the financial compensation can be found online in Dutch or in English.

Interested applicants should send their CV and letter of application BEFORE AUGUST 20, 2009 to: erik.duval@cs.kuleuven.be

All inquiries for further information can be sent to the same address.

Please feel free to forward to anyone who might be interested!