IJTEL Young Researcher Special Issue 2012

With this year’s IJTEL Young Researcher Special Issue close to being printed, we are already starting a second iteration. The theme for the next issue are state-of-the-art papers. These papers should be written from an interdisciplinary point of view, and they should contain a section on research challenges that arise from the state-of-the-art. As last year, submissions from PhDs and young post-docs are welcome. If you are interested, don’t forget to join our group on TELeurope, and discuss your idea with other interested young researchers. We are looking forward to your contributions! Full CfP below.

International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning  (IJTEL)

Call for Papers

Young Researcher Special Issue on: “State-of-the-Art in TEL”

Guest Editors:
Peter Kraker, Graz University of Technology, Austria
Moshe Leiba, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Martina Rau, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Derick Leony and Israel Gutiérrez Rojas, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Dirk Börner, Open Universiteit in the Netherlands, The Netherlands
Antigoni Parmaxi, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus
Wolfgang Reinhardt, University of Paderborn, Germany

IJTEL invites paper submissions for a special issue targeting young researchers in the community of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). This call encourages a review of the state-of-the-art in TEL topics, accompanied by a description of the current and future work carried out by the authors researching within these topics.

This special issue is directed at all young researchers such as post-graduate students, PhD students and post-docs working in topics related to TEL both in academia and industry, and from different disciplines of the community (technologists, educationists, psychologists, etc.).

The purpose of the issue is manifold: (a) to provide a better overview of TEL research lines; (b) to investigate and expand current TEL research themes; (c) to promote international and multidisciplinary collaboration and the exchange of ideas among young researchers; (d) to encourage young researchers to formalise their research questions, topics and methodologies.

Young researchers are invited to submit articles with reviews of state-of-the-art researchin any TEL-related area. Each focal area covered in this issue shall provide an authoritative, timely, accessible and critical overview on recent developments that are pertinent for TEL. The reviews should not only summarise existing literature, but also analyse, synthesise and interpret the state-of-the-art in a novel framework for thought. For example this can be done:

• by identifying different theories and/or approaches;
• by classifying different research waves (see e.g. Lesk 1995);
• by elaborating different dimensions (see e.g. Sire et al. 2011);
• by developing a taxonomy;
• or by elaborating tensions, disagreements, etc. between the different works of the past.

It is furthermore expected that reviews are written from an interdisciplinary point of view. This means that every article is expected to provide references from at least three disciplines: education, psychology and technology. Furthermore, articles are required to include a section on research challenges that emerge from the state-of-the-art. These challenges must be substantiated by a concrete scenario. Articles that do not follow these basic guidelines will not be considered for publication.

References
Lesk, M. 1996. The seven ages of information retrieval. UDT Occasional Papers, 5.
Sire, S., Bogdanov, E., Gillet, D., Palmer, M., et al. 2011. Introducing qualitative dimensions to analyse the usefulness of Web 2.0 platforms as PLEs. International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 3(1).

Subject Coverage

Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

• Effective learning strategies, models and methodologies
• Deployment of ICTs in educational practice
• Web 2.0 and TEL
• Semantic web and TEL
• Computer-supported collaborative learning
• TEL and knowledge management
• Emotional and motivational aspects of TEL
• Adaptive and personalised hypermedia for TEL
• Ubiquitous and pervasive technologies for TEL
• Intelligent tutoring systems and automated feedback
• TEL practices in different educational/learning contexts
• Policies for the promotion of TEL in education
• Educational games
• 3D virtual environments
• Augmented reality in TEL
• Connecting learners through TEL
• Orchestrating TEL
• Interoperability in TEL
• Learning analytics and educational data mining
• Formative assessment and feedback
• Ambient displays and wearable devices
• Visualisation techniques for learning
• Awareness and reflection in TEL

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper was not originally copyrighted and if it has been completely re-written).

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page.

Important Dates

Submission deadline for full paper: 28 February, 2012

Authors’ notification for full paper: 16 April, 2012

Final paper submission: 5 June, 2012

Editors and Notes

All articles submitted for this special issue will be subject to a one-stage review process. Authors should submit a full article which will be subjected to a double blind peer review before publication. Articles must not exceed 15 pages,and in alignment with common standards for literature reviews, they are expected to include 50 or more references.

Authors should register on TELeurope, login, and join the group “IJTEL Young Researcher Special Issue”.  This call, as well as the submission instructions, can then be found on the group’s page “Call for Papers YRSI 2012″. Additionally, authors can use the group’s discussion section to outline, discuss, and get feedback on their initial ideas. Furthermore, the clinic provides a platform for furthering cross-fertilisation among authors. Authors who would like to invite co-authors to submit a joint paper can indicate that fact when discussing their ideas. People who are interested in a collaboration can then express their interest and leave their contact information, so that the proposal’s responsible authors can contact them.

Combining Barcamps and Research: Science Barcamp Vienna

On Sunday, I participated in Science Barcamp Vienna. To my knowledge, this was the first barcamp in Austria dedicated exclusively to science. I was looking forward to the event, as I had thoroughly enjoyed less formal research events, like the STELLAR Alpine Rendez-vous. The schedule for the day offered a broad mix: overviews on certain topics (such as in vitro meat by Vladimir Mironov), service sessions (such as TV/radio handling by Klaus Bichler), software presentations (such as an open source software for pharmaceutical research by Daniel), and a session on visions of research in the 21st century and hackerspaces by Michael Bauer.

My session was somewhere in-between. Originally, I wanted to talk about Science 2.0 and Open Science. Since the latter was already well covered in the course of the event, I limited myself to Science 2.0 and combined that with a proposed discussion on opportunities and threats of using social media as a researcher (ah, the beauty of barcamps!). You can find the slides of my talk below. The discussion was very interesting, including the use of social media for peer review, how to deal with the lack of quality control on the web, and the threat of idea scooping.

All in all, I enjoyed the barcamp very much. I learned a lot, and I got to know many interesting people. Thanks to the organizers Michael Horak und Brigitta Dampier, and hopefully until next year!

Behind the TEL Tweet Visualizations [UPDATED]

If you have been to a TEL event recently, you might have already seen our Tweet Visualizations in the domain of TEL. Stefanie Lindstaedt will be presenting our paper entitled “On the Way to a Science Intelligence: Visualizing TEL Tweets for Trend Detection” at EC-TEL 2011 on Wednesday Thursday. I thought this was a good occasion to tell you a bit more about the background of the visualizations. I should not forget to mention that the system was built in a joint project between Know-Center and Joanneum Research in the context of the STELLAR Network of Excellence. Most of the stuff below is taken from our paper, if you want to know more, you can access the preprint here.

Architecture

Below you can see the architecture of the system. We developed a focused Twitter Crawler, which takes as input either a taxonomy of hashtags, or a list of users, or both. It then queries the Twitter Streaming API for matching data. This allows for adapting the system to a certain domain. The tweets are logged, cleaned, and informative tokens (such as nouns and hashtags) are extracted using TreeTagger. Finally we store the tweets, their metadata, and their associated informative tokens in a Solr index. Therefore, one can access the real-time data, but also go back in time. At the moment, this works only for a couple of weeks, but we are in the process of widening this timeframe drastically.

The Visualization Dataservices are REST-ful Webservices, which  translate the search query into a Solr query and preprocess the Solr result in different ways: the Streamgraph Dataservice focuses on analyzing the temporal evolution of topics over time; the Weighted Graph Dataservice focuses on relations between different topics. The dataservices are used to power two visualizations. One is a weighted graph, a co-occurrence network for analyzing semantic networks of terms based on the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit (JIT).

Visualizations

Below you can see the Weighted Graph Visualization for the hashtag of the 2nd STELLAR Alpine Rendez-vous.

In the center, there is the official hashtag for the event #arv11. The hashtags which are directly related to the event hashtag, are hashtags of individual workshops, such as #datatel11 for the dataTEL workshop, and #arv3t for the workshop “Structuring online collaboration though 3 Ts : task time & teams”. Co-occurring with the individual hashtags are hashtags that describe some of the content of the workshops, such as agency and PLE for the 3T workshop.

The second visualization is a streamgraph based on the Grafico javascript charting library for analyzing trends over time. The graph below shows a screenshot of the Streamgraph Visualization, displaying the co-occurring hashtags for the query ”conferences” from 20/2/2011 to 14/04/2011. On the x-axis, the time intervals are outlined, whereas on the y-axis, the relative number of occurrences is shown. Each colored stream represents one co-occurring hashtag. The visualization shows that the hashtag for the South-by-Southwest conference (#sxsw) is trending around the actual event on March 15. The #pelc11 hashtag was trending around April 7, with the Plymotuh E-Learning conference taking place from April 6-8. Another conference that is trending is the PLE Conference in Southhampton (#PLE_SOU), which took place later but generated a lot of tweets even before the event. The other co-occurring hashtags are not tied to a certain conference (such as #mlearning and #edchat), but they denote hashtags in the TEL area which contain a large amount of tweets about conferences. These hashtags could be used to find out about further conferences in the area.

Due to the fact that the user interface relies on web standards, the visualizations can be easily included in any system that relies on those standards. Apart from the main website http://stellar.know-center.tugraz.at/vis, versions of the visualizations are also available as widgets in TELeurope.

Reception and Outlook

We are quite pleased with the reception of our system. The visualizations have been used as a support in the dataTEL workshop (#datatel11), the RDSRP’11 special track at i-KNOW (#rdsrp11), and the SURF Learning Analytics Seminar (#sa_la). Participants liked the look of the visualizations, and the idea behind them. The system will also be employed as a reflection tool in the Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Learning Networks (#arnets11) at EC-TEL 2011.

Nevertheless, there are several issues we still need to address. As already mentioned, we are working on providing a larger index that goes back to 2010. We are also looking into new zooming and filtering facilities, allowing users to dig deeper into the data. Furthermore, we want to integrate different measures to derive more meaningful terms for longer periods. If you want to know more, especially about the evaluations we have already conducted, please refer to the paper. If you want to use the visualizations in one of your events, just contact me. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome!

Update: The streamgraph now accepts parameterized URLs for easier sharing of individual visualizations. Check out the EC-TEL 2011 stream, or a chart of the RDSRP’11 morning session.

Research 2.0 Communities around the Web

In the spirit of the upcoming RDSRP’11, I decided to list a few Research 2.0 communities that I check with more or less frequently. That means communities specifically on the topic of Research 2.0, not just Web 2.0 tools for science. Without further ado:

• Mendeley: Future of Science and Science 2.0
• TELeurope: Research 2.0
• FriendFeed: Science 2.0
• ResearchGate: Science 2.0 and Publication 2.0
• LinkedIn: Science 2.0
• Science 3.0

I am sure, I missed tons of places here. What are your favourite Research 2.0 hangouts?

Looking at research from the reader’s point of view

Recently I joined the TEAM Project, which focuses on research networks on the web. The project deals with issues like recommendation, text disambiguation, and metadata validation. In my part, I will do something a bit different: I will take a look at how a research fields is represented in such research networks.

So far, academic fields have been analyzed using metadata that came with the published articles. That includes, amongst others co-authorship, categories, keywords, and most importantly, citations. With this kind of metadata, it is possible to map out a research field from the position of the authors. Now, employing user generated data from research networks, it is possible to take a look at a field from a whole new viewpoint: that of the reader.

You might ask: why is that interesting? Well, meta-data from articles always only give you one part of the story. Co-citation and co-authorship analysis surely are sound ways to look at a field; but what if there are two groups of authors in different fields working on the same topic that just never publish together and never cite each other? In that case you will not get the connection between them. Most probably they will be using different language, so text analysis won’t help either. In come the readers: they might have identified that the authors are working on the same topic despite all the issues mentioned above. Furthermore, they might have grouped them together or used the same tags to describe their articles. If we analyze these groups and tags, we can find the connection, thus extending the field beyond its original borders.

That is not all; other interesting questions include: How are articles shared among researchers, and what does that say about interdisciplinarity in a field? Are the articles that are often read the ones that are often cited? As you can see, I am pretty enthusiastic about this. I could go on why I think that readership analysis is a good idea, but I am more inclined to get some early feedback: What other issues would be interesting to look at? What problems do you see with this kind of analysis?

i-KNOW 2011: Call for Participation

For the 11th time, the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies (i-KNOW) will take place in Graz, Austria; this year from September 7 to 9. In the course of the conference, there will also be a Special Track on Recommendation, Data Sharing and Research Practices in Science 2.0 (RDSRP). We are currently putting together the concrete program, I will keep you posted about that! Please find the full Call for Participation below:

Call for Participation

i-KNOW 2011
International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies

7-9 September 2011
Graz, Austria
http://www.i-know.at

i-KNOW 2011 brings together international researchers (English speaking scientific part) and practitioners (German speaking industry part, Praxisforum) from the fields of knowledge management and knowledge technologies. Opening and closing keynotes, open spaces and a conference-wide exhibition complete the i-KNOW conference program. i-KNOW 2011 will be held concurrently with I-SEMANTICS 2011 – International Conference on Semantic Systems again. This special concept aims at bridging the gaps between the various communities and their technology fields.

i-KNOW will offer its participants a unique platform either to present latest and leading edge developments or to catch up with the developments of most innovative IT technologies, content applications, knowledge management trends and emerging market opportunities.

The program includes about 60 scientific presentations from all over the world. A German-speaking industry track offers further 40 industry presentations and an exhibition. The presentations cover, but are not limited to the following topics…

* Knowledge Management
* Knowledge Discovery
* Knowledge Services
* Social Media
* Enterprise 2.0 and Social Web

For more detailed information please visit the website.

Three internationally renowned researchers will give keynote presentations:

* Gloria Mark, University of California, Irvine, USA
* Daniel A. Keim, University of Konstanz, Germany
* Stefan Rueger, The Open University, United Kingdom

i-KNOW 2011 also offers an additional Industry-Keynote:

* Florian Bauer, Operations & Director REEP (Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Partnership, Austria.

We look forward to welcoming you to Graz in September 2011!

Best regards,
Stefanie Lindstaedt and Michael Granitzer
Know-Center and Graz University of Technology
On behalf of the Conference Co-Chairs

Research Practices on the Web in the Field of Technology Enhanced Learning

Last week, I attended Websci’11, the 3rd International Conference on Web Science. It was a great experience to engage with such a diverse crowd; there were people from computer science, information science, social science, psychology, philosophy (and some others that I probably missed here) representing many different aspects from this multi-disciplinary field. I am still not done with going through my notes, reflecting on all the interesting things that I have learned. Koblenz itself was very welcoming to us as well: we had the pleasure to watch the lunar eclipse while sitting on the banks of the Rhine.

Our contribution to the conference was a poster on Science 2.0 practices in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), originating from our research in the STELLAR Network of Excellence. You can get a full sized version of the poster by clicking on the image below.

For this study, we conducted two focus groups to find out about research practices in TEL, and how they are supported by Web 2.0. You can read the accompanying paper here. In a nutshell, we asked people to list their daily tasks and duties in a classification form of their choice. Afterwards, we discussed the most interesting tasks and duties with regards to Web 2.0. In the analysis, we aggregated the results to model a map of the TEL research process. Then we identified the mentioned practices and assigned them to the process steps. Furthermore, we deduced strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats from the discussion. As the main conclusion, we found that in the early stage (“design phase”) and in the late stage (“publication phase”), researchers are very well supported. This is not the case in those process steps where the actual work is being done (i.e. “development”, “implementation”, and “evaluation”).

All in all, the poster was well received. People were able to situate their research within the process map, and they also confirmed that there was little support in the core research work. I got some suggestions for tools that are used in other disciplines. Some of them are well-known, such as myExperiment. Others I had never heard of, because they are only used within single institutions, such as a self-developed social warning system for large physical experiments. One point of critique was that the core process should be displayed as being more iterative, with the possibility to break off after a few steps (which I totally agree with). Of course, these are only the results of a smale scale study which need to be further validated. Nevertheless, I am very happy with the first feedback, and I am looking forward to exploring the subject of research practices in the context of Web 2.0.

Barcamp Graz 2011 in the Rear Mirror [UPDATED]

Barcamp Graz is now over for almost 1 1/2 weeks, and finally I have found some time to reflect a little bit on it. For the second time, four camps were united under one roof, covering the topics of knowledge management (Wissenscamp), politics (Politcamp), design (Designcamp), and iPhone and iPad development (iCamp).

First and foremost, I have to say that I found it to be simply terrific. There was a much broader range of sessions this year, with the next interesting talk or discussion just around the corner. The whole atmosphere at Grazer Congress was truly engaging, and the terrace – in combination with decent wheather and awesome food – added tremendously to the experience.

My main base naturally was Wissenscamp. Here is a rundown of the sessions which I could relate most to. You can find slides to many of them (and those that I missed) at barcamp.at. Robert Gutounig led an interesting discussion on knowledge management models. Micaela Andrich presented her life as a terminiologist and how she used a terminology tool to learn Chinese. Barbara Kump presented wissensdialoge.de, a blog on organisational learning, knowledge management and psychology, which sparked an animated discussion on these subjects. From the more technical talks, I especially liked Florian Klien‘s talk on URL shorteners, and Stefan Wunder‘s introduction to the semantic web and the Lasso project.

From Politcamp, I closely followed the sessions on open government data (by Julian Ausserhofer) and data retention policy (by marc and andy), two of the most relevant political topics with respect to the web. From Designcamp, I really liked the discussion on interdsciplinarity between engineers and designers from Mario Fallast and Romana Rauter. Finally, Ronen Kadushin made a surprise visit to the barcamp and gave a motivated talk on open design.

I myself had a session on Science 2.0 and how Web 2.0 is changing researcher practice. This led to an engaging discussion on open science, its benefits, drawbacks, and ways to make it possible for everyone to publish research material. I also wanted to show how students can use certain tools for their reports and theses.  Unfortunately, we did not get that far, but some hints are given in the slides which you can find below. Update! Stefan Kasberger did an interesting review of the barcamp and especially the open science aspects on the Open Science blog (in German).

In conclusion, I would like to thank all participants and especially my co-organizers for two amazing days. From the feedback we got some good suggestions for next year: lightning talks for first-timers, and a room that is solely dedicated to ad-hoc sessions. Until #bcg12!

Abstracts and Reviews available for the IJTEL Young Researcher Special Issue

As you know, we are currently running an IJTEL Young Researcher Special Issue on Ground-breaking Ideas in TEL. Now all abstracts and reviews from the first round are available in our group on TELeurope (you need to be registered and logged in to see them). We invite you to explore the visions of the young researchers in the community,  and to get in touch with them by posting your comments into the group blog. We are looking forward to hearing from you!

Mapping Open Science in Technology Enhanced Learning

Derick Leony, Günter Beham, and myself have started a mindmap in order to document all efforts on Open Science in Technology Enhanced Learning. I am not going to conceal from you that we are using this mindmap as input for a publication. So feel free to add whatever you think is missing, and we will mention you in the acknowledgements! Also, co-authors are welcome!