2009 Conference Plan

Here my list of conferences I would like to attend:

• 3DTLC - 3D Training, Learning and Collaboration Conference - is foreseen to become the new leading event for businesses seeking to maximize the added value of their use of virtual worlds. I'd like to give a talk about my research and maybe find subjects for experiments and collaborators. Washington D.C., USA, 20 - 21 April 2009 --> http://3dtlc.com

• FaVE '09: International Conference on Facets of Virtual Environments - This conference provides a venue to research related to the many facets of persistent virtual environments. I would like to present my semiotics-based framework for group interaction in 3D virtual environments, useful both for theory and practice. Berlin, Germany, 27 - 29 July 2009 --> http://www.fave-conference.org/

• ECSCW 2009: European Conference on Computer Supported Co-operative Work - among others, the conference has a focus on new (interaction) technologies for CSCW and new computer-enabled forms of organisation. I'd like to present a poster (or video/demo) showing results of my first virtual world collaboration experiment. Also, the doctoral colloquium would be interesting. Vienna, Austria, 7 - 11 September 2009 --> http://ecscw09.org/

2009 conferences

Here a list of ( :-P more or less) interesting (for me, almost) conferences with the link to their homepage:

• AIED 2009: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education - Building Learning Systems that Care : From Knowledge Representation to Affective Modelling. Brighton Thistle Hotel, Kings Road, 6 - 10 Jul 2009 --> http://www.aied2009.com
  

• UMAP 2009: User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization - concerns interaction with systems that acquire information about a user (or group of users) to be able to adapt their behavior. Trento, Italy, 22 - 26 June 2009 --> http://umap09.fbk.eu

• i-KNOW 2009: International Conference on Knowledge Management - to bring a broad array of these perspectives together, to learn from each other and to jointly find promising ways ahead for the future. Graz , Austria, 3 - 5 September 2009 --> http://i-know.know-center.tugraz.at/

As extra European conference I will be interested in:

• HCI International 2009 - International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: international forum for the dissemination and exchange of up-to-date scientific information on theoretical, generic and applied areas of HCI. San Diego, CA, USA, 19 - 24 July 09 --> http://www.hcii2009.org
  

And to finish, merry Xmas to all of you

E-Therapy

Maybe you already know about this, but I thought it'd fit in here..

This German article reports that online therapy is being more and more used, and will get really important/popular in the future, with the assumption that mental and neurological problems will become more and more important as causes for illnesses.
It is reported that in some countries services like E-Couch already are paid for by health insurance companies. Other services are called Beating the Blues, FearFighter, OCFighter, Shuti, Moodswings and Panic Online.

By the way, also 3D virtual environments are used for therapy, a good example is treating phobia by exposure therapy.

"Why good products can fail, the personal computer is so complex and information appliances are the solutions"

Creeping featurism, is what I called this problem in 1988, the symptom of the dreaded disease of featuritis. By 1992 the word processing program Microsoft Word had 311 commands. Three Hundred and Eleven. That’s a daunting amount, more than I dreamed was possible when I wrote my 1988 book. Who could learn over three hundred commands for a single program? Who would want to? Who would ever need them? Answer: nobody. They are there for a lot of reasons. In part, they are there because this one program must cover the whole word, so, in principle, for every command, there is at least one user somewhere who finds it essential. In part, thought, they are there because the programmers dreamed them up; if it was possible to do, it was done. But the most important reason is for MARKETING. My program is bigger than yours. Better it can do more. Anything you have, I have too, and more besides.

Creeping featurism may be the wrong term: perhaps it should be called rampant featurism. Do you think 311 commands is a lot for a word processing program? Five year later, in 1997, that same word processing program, Microsoft Word, had 1033 commands. One Thousand Thirty three.


Donald Norman, The invisible Computer, The MIT Press,
Cambridge (Massachusetts), 1998, p.80-81.

IBM Next Five in Five

IBM has published their view on what five innovations will lead to the major changes in the next five years:

They say their assumptions are based on actual trends and technical advancements, of course also taking into account what is being developed in IBM's research labs.

METID Day: "The future of eLearning is already over"

Last Wednesday Luca (Mazzola) and I were at the Politecnico of Milan for the METID day.

METID (Metodi E Tecnologie Innovative per la Didattica) is the University Center dealing with design, development and delivery of eLearning services, both national and international; it was born to support teaching innovation through the use of new technologies --> it's the Politecnico big brother of eLab, the eLearning laboratory within which I collaborate here at USI.

Many interesting projects were presented, covering different fields such as: instituitional communication, staff training, promotion of scientific culture among young people, international contexts, didactic innovation.

The main idea of the Centre is the use of the Internet (in the sense of online services) as a "key" to access and to improve the University knowledge.

teaching between giving and receiving

While reading the manual "La filosofia nel Medioevo" (Philosophy in the Middleage) by Étienne Gilson, I ran into a consideration that attracted my attention:

Non c’è una delle sole opere di Tommaso d’Aquino […] che non sia uscita direttamente dal suo insegnamento o che non sia stata concepita espressamente in vista dell’insegnamento. La "Summa Theologiae" di Tommaso e il "Commento in quattro libri alle Sentenze" di Bonaventura […] sono esempi eccellenti di quanto vi può essere di fecondo per il pensiero dello stesso maestro in un alto insegnamento. (pp. 456-457)

trad.: Everyone of Thomas Aquinas‘ works comes out from his teaching or was expressly conceived for the teaching. Thomas’s "Summa Theologiae" and Bonaventura’s "Commentaries on the four books of sentences" are excellent examples of the fruitfulness and value of fine instruction for the teacher himself.

Teaching is „to give and to receive“, as in a gifts exchange.

No more useless conferences!!!!!

I just returned from the ICERI (International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation) Conference in Madrid. It is one if these Conferences that have as a basic motivation...money! New researchers, 'light' professors, Asian people searching networks, pay a quite good amount of money in order to have their work published. Ok, I admit it, I was one of them. It is because in the beginning of your 'scientific life' you need these kinds of pseudo-conferences basically for two reasons: 1)it is easy to get accepted and 2)you get motivated because you see that your work is more scientific than the work of people who have been doing this for years!

Some useful tips in order to avoid 'useless conferences':
- the time of oral presentation has to be at least 20 minutes without the questions (in 10 minutes it is quite difficult to provoke meaningful questions and/or interaction)
- the more specific a conference is, the more useful for you to 'network'
- go to an International Conference only if you are quite sure that you will meet people who can be really helpful for your work
- there have to be key-note speakers! if not, something goes wrong..

Get a look at my presentation by linking to:
http://www.box.net/shared/1daiksexup

I hope I'll have some feedback from you at least! See you at the next GOOD conference ;)

"tecnoager"-the next generation

for the ones, among us, who know italian


at this link you can see the 9' annual report by Eurispes concerning childhood and youth.


the researchers found out that in Italy young people use very much technologies (at six year with a cell phone, at 9 chatting online, etc), but they live their life with too much scare (about loneliness and violence overall)


children are called tecno-agers because, before to became teen-agers (getting a little of infos about knowledge, life and so on), they became confident with technologies


maybe to use a lot of ICT should help young people to getting informed about life in a new, perhaphs safer, way


as me, coming from pedagogical field, I cultivate some doubts, anyway...

cost effectiveness?

Here is a quote from a doc from the government of New Zealand "A Review of the Literature on Computer-Assisted Learning, particularly Integrated Learning Systems, and Outcomes with Respect to Literacy and Numeracy" (2000):

1. Computer-assisted learning, especially an integrated learning system, is a relatively costly option as an intervention. Given that, overall, its effectiveness falls below the mean of all other types of intervention, schools need to think carefully about cost effectiveness, notwithstanding other value added features of technology they may perceive.
(…)
4. Consideration should be given as to whether the pedagogical approach of the software is compatible with classroom methods. Similarly, consideration should be given as to whether the content of the ILS curriculum matches that of the school curriculum and whether the type of knowledge and skills and the way they are assessed on the system matches curriculum assessment tasks.

New technologies?

Here is some Norvegian humor about technological innovations... Not much different from what we do, is it?

ethnography and his neighbourhoods for e-learning

I'm quite sure all of you know this famous video



if you want to know more I suggest you to visit the Micheal Wesch blog

We're trying to discover in wich way students learn using technologies and in wich way they modify their learners'attitudes because of the technological needings asked by their learning cultures...and we'll use ethnographics...

...we'll inform you about our findings!

In the meanwhile, if you are interested, you can take a look at our questionnaire-on-line about using technologies in education (it's the test version). Thanks to Grainne Conole.

Technology or methodology?

Here is a great video that makes a strong point about technologies in education....

instruction, education, training ... and languages

I attended today a session at the AECT Convention in Orlando, FL, which presented the new edition of Educational Technology: definitions with commentaries. The idea of the book is presnting the definitions of the concept of educational technology.
One of the main issues in the discussion was indeed why "educational" and not "instructional" technology. The discussion developed as we had a chance to compare the concepts of education and instruction in USA, UK, Ghana and Italy.
Education and instruction are different concepts in all places, but they have different meanings (for example "instruction" is broader a concept in the US than in the UK).
Interestingly, I discovered that English has no overarching term for indicating any form of education/instruction/training that encompasses K-12, higher ed and corporate. In Italian, on the other hand, we have formazione which is rather generic and neutral.

This led me to think that the language we use when we think of research in English (and that being not our native language) we run the risk of missing nuances, and see the world like in black and white. This is even more true as we use more and more American English terms in our profession...
Forse sarebbe interessante provare a lavorare seriamente nelle lingue originali :-))

Mixed reality, games, simulations

I visited the Institute for Simulations and Training at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, FL. A great place where they design, develop and do research on low-end virtual simulations, mixed reality and high-end immersive world.
For the first time I tried viewers, body motion sensors. It is organized in labs - check it out!

(especially, have a look at the teacher training project here - a powerful idea!).

first time ever hologram in tv

During the American election journalist Jessica Yellin was recorded in Chicago as a hologram and beamed into the New York CNN studio.

"like princess Leila" (Star Wars)

Conference on e-[everything]

...in Barcelona. Submission Deadline is November 19th!
http://www.esociety-conf.org/

need an avatar?

Hi!
I found a nice Web 2.0 tool: Voki - http://www.voki.com/.
It lets you create a 2D spaking avatar that you can embed into your blog of page. No bad at all if you need to design interactive materials (except for the cold vocal ynthetizer... but that's how technology can go so far...)

Journal of Distance Education

I thought it could be interesting to post here links to free access journals. Here is one, which also has online archives from 1986!
Journal of Distance Education - http://www.jofde.ca/

I tagged this with "open access" - please do the same with all relevant open access journals. thanks!

A very simple and good idea: PHISICAL BAR CHART

visit http://www.lucykimbell.com/LucyKimbell/PhysicalBarCharts.html








In Physical Bar Charts, viewers are presented with five tall see-through tubes containing button badges, each with a specific message on. Visitors are prompted to help themselves to badges. As they do so, the levels in the tubes drop, presenting an inverse bar chart showing the popularity of the badges.




we should copy it for next conference at USI, shouldn't we? :-)


Ema

Teachers and technologies

I want to share a message from a discussion group of the online course I teach for the Open University of Catalunya. It is from a secondary school teacher of Math and Science, and I think there is some truth we should bear in mind: learning is people, and people is always different!

Spanish (original)
Sin embargo, si me interesa la remarcar la importancia de la adecuación de los materiales al nivel de los usuarios. (...) ¿Qué necesita un MDM para ser útil? (...) simplemente adecuarse a las circunstancias particulares del aula!!, unas veces sirve uno y otras veces otro.....
Porqué?, no lo sé y me encantaría saberlo. ¿Porqué el curso pasado he podido utilizar la unidad de los números racionales con el 2º de ESO y este año en las mismas circunstancias, el mismo planteamiento, las mismas actividades... resultó un fracaso?. No lo sé!!!

English
No doubt I'd like to emphasize the importance of adapting hypermedia materials to the level of users. (...) What does an hypermedia material need for bring useful? (...) simply to be adequate to the specific setting of each class!! sometimes it is useful, other times not.
Why? I don't know and i'd love to learn it. ¿Why could I use the unit on rational number with grade 7 last year, while this year, with the same grade, the same schedule and the same activities... it was a mess? I don't know!!!

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference

In Copenhagen to discover how ethnograpics and companies' world meet...

...visit www.epic2008.com.

In few days i'll provide you a resumè of this challenging experience!

:-)


Suggestion for everybody: visit Copenhagen.








Hi,
Ema

The world largest interactive TV

... who was speaking about ubiquity??

Ph.D. positions open

Here is the announcement of more Ph.D. positions open in our field.

Life in 25 years - a student wiki activity

Similar to what we did in our online seminar with Maurer and the future, a student task at Elon University (NC, USA) was to create wiki pages. Visit their "place for teaching and learning about technology and society" and see their thoughts about life in 25 years:
http://trumpy.cs.elon.edu/metaverse/wiki/Life_in_25_years

From Japan (Kokoro Co. Ltd's Gynoids): the cyber-baby

What do you think about?

Is this the future forecasted by Maurer?



Interesting, terrifying, fascinating...



Smply a question: how will we teach Repliee-R1?

Repliee R1 is a Synthetik replica of creator Hiroshi Ishiguro's daughter!!!

Repliee R1 and Ando-san
envoyé par Artificialist

SD2 - Servizio di Documentazione Software Didattico

an online service that provides comprehensive updated information on educational softwares >>>

Guided tour

P.S. Sorry, exept the guided tour, the website is in Italian!

Web 2.0 Tools for Instructional Integration for the 21st Century Classroom

a huge compilation of web applications and services, classified into categories.

http://web20guru.wikispaces.com/Resourses

mozilla ubiquity

For the ones amog us that need an all-inclusive tool to surf the web...

(probably you knew it before this post, but as me, I discovered it right now!)

Best to you,
Ema

Designing engaging technology

What about technology and emotions? Again from the EC-TEL conference, a pair of funny tools presented in the keynote of Kristina Höök while discussing the current attempts to design digital products for physical, emotional, and bodily involvement.

- eMoto, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others >>>

- Affective Diary, a means to express inner thoughts and record experiences of past events >>>

Are educational games fun?

Here is an educational game developed in a European project - it's about sustainability and the environment.

http://honoloko.eea.europa.eu

It's quite a classic format for a game of this kind... What do you think? It is really fun? Do you really learn?

Sharing an experience of design - from Stanford

some of you are working on design, others work on different things but will always have to work with people that design technologies, education, media or else.
So here is a nice video that might be of real help!

This is my scientific map. I have 11 contacts until now, related to my Phd (eLearning design+communication). Some of these are Universities and some others companies. Below the map I have put the number of the contact and its relationship with Journals or Conferences. I hope that I will complete it soon..

EC-TEL '08

Last week I took part in the EC-TEL08. Here is a brief report of what I learnt.

WORKSHOP on Story-Telling and Educational Gaming (STEG'08) >>>
what (I realized) is a workshop? a group of people working in the same field of interest who present and discuss together their ongoing works/efforts --> it's like a consortium of ideas whose mottos are: sharing, collaboration, personal involvement!
something about communities: a community rises around an object of interest and then grows like a cobweb --> workshops are key-events for communities: members meet each other spreading and strengthening the cobweb;
personal comment: - research communities work exactly as other communites ("the ballet school c. of my town" or "the c. of mushrooms seekers") --> one can apply the same informal strategies to join a c. of reasearch and find his own way!
- I wasn't part of any of the c. involved in the W. and I didn't know anyone: people looked at me with curiosity and a bit of suspect!
discussed topic in STEG'08: balance between: (story)telling and interactivity, gaming and learning, physical effort and reasoning; modding; formal ad informal learning through games --> proceedings

DOCTORAL CONSORTIUM >>>
what's the good: it's like a general proof of the dissertation defence: you explain your research work in front of experts (to whom you have previously sent a summaryzing paper) and you have to defend it! You receive constructive criticisms and suggetions, and it's a useful way to identify the dark nodes, thanks to non-experts questions (other ph.d. students).
other useful aspects: looking at collgues' works and wondering about methodology, related issues, problems, attitudes
research topics of EC-TEL d.c.: tools and models to help teachers in learning scenarios design, intelligent agents programming (for simulations in crisis situations), new technologies in education and school curricula, adaptive personalized learning environments (indicators).
personal comment: to be repeated at Red-Ink!


CONFERENCE
Three adjectives to describe the EC-TEL community:
- growing: it draws close different research fields which need each other to reach their goals --> from the division to the re-union of knowledge; it's a european "window" to know and to let yourself know
- appealing: it concerns the "rethinking of the education in the knowledge society"!!; it allows to be propositive and proactive because it's an open community
- active: it gathers many worthy studies and interesting projects.
pre-conference tipp: have a mission! e.g. people to get in touch, key-topics to direct your attention to/to inquire, an already started project or study --> it could seem a trivial tipp but it actually wasn't that kind for me! --> the "have a go at it!" or "go and explore" attitude (without having some clear objectives) demands a lot of effort but doesn't garantuee worthy outcomes!

KEYNOTES (that I listened to) >>>
a) Kristina Höök: "Mind, mouse and body: designing engaging technologies" --> challenges in designing digital products for physical, emotional and bodily involvement;
b) Manu Kapur: "Productive failure" --> well structured problems vs ill-structured problems and the process of learning from one's failure.

FORTHCOMING RELATED EVENTS: - International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL) 2009, 19-21 August, Aachen, Germany

- 23rd ICDE World Conference on Open Learning and Distance Education 2009, 7-10 June, Maastricht, the Netherlands

- "TEN Compentence" Winter School, 1-6 February 2009, Innsbruck, Austria

My triangular (in-progress) map

The domain I'd like to researh in lays on the cross of two fields: computer-supported-learning and argumentation. Here below is illustrated the process from which arised my (starting) research question.

To try to answer to the r.q. I need to identify every element of the following triangular model.

Contents: logics, argumentation, computer supported learning tools

People: - P. A. Kirschner and S .J. Buckingham Shum (tools for c-s learning analysis and visualization)
- G. Conole (sociological aspects in the use of c-s lerning tools + CompendiumLD project)
- F. van Eeemeren and E. Rigotti (argumentation theory, particularly Pragma-Dialectic and fallacies)

communities: - ISSA (International Society for the Study of Argumentation)
- human-centered technology research fields, particularly: CSAV (Computer Supported Argument Visualization), CSCW, CMC, CSCL

conferences: - from June 29 to July 2, 2010, the 7th Conference on Argumentation
- EC-TEL 2009
- Ed-Media 2009/E-Learn 2009

books: -Kirshner, Visualizing argumentation: Software tools for collaborative and educational sense-making
- Andriessen, Arguing to Learn: Confronting Cognitions in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Environments
- Toulmin, The uses of argument
- Engelbart, Augmenting human intellect: a conceptual framework
- some texts of classical logic

website: -
www.visualizingargumentation.info/
Methods: - State of the art of argument-visualization tools and a lot of study!!

My strange map (s)

The first map is a world overview.

The second one shows my links in Europe.
The third one shows my links in America.
The fourth map is about my only link in Asia...

Unfortunately, no links in Africa or Oceanian! (not yet!!!)

Briefly, about my interests...

The focus of my thesis is the adoption process and his influence on dropout phenomenon.

My study object is the introduction of a technological innovation in a learning culture.

My methodology will be -probably- ethographic-oriented; surely I will use qualitative methods.

I used an existing map -drawn in 1689- on wich I pointed my interesting points...

a very initial map of research

This is a map of

• domains
• people
• conferences

related to my research in the field of OLM [Open Learner Model]

A map of visual practices in collaborative 3D environments

And here is my research field map around the blending of collaboration, visual practices and 3D virtual environments. Naturally, it is subject to constant revision.
These maps were created with Freemind, a simple (but also quite limiting) tool to create mind maps.

a map of game-based learning

Here my current view of game-based learning.

Not complete, but I think there is an idea of the main topics in the field + relevant people (at least for me!).

Inspiring lectures

Here is a great resource for inspiring lectures and ideas - including learning, society and technology, but also politics and science.

http://www.ted.com/

TED includes for example a presentation by Will Wright (the creator of The Sims and Spore) and one by Isabel Allende...

Stanford come to Open CourseWare

Following the path of MIT and the OER movement, Stanford decided to put its courses in Engineering online.
as red-inklings, this is a good case both at the institutional/organizational level (including learning cultures!) and at the technological level.

http://see.stanford.edu

Nasa elearning

i think that's worth checking out - from Elliot Masie's newsletter

e-Learning from NASA: The Space Agency is making available a free Web-based educational product to learners of all ages across the country. NASA eClips consists of more than 55 short, 5-10 minute video segments, which are available on-demand via the Internet. NASA eClips features many of the agency's missions and engages learners in the excitement of science and engineering.
Check it out at: http://www.nasa.gov/education/nasaeclips

Phun 4 L3arning

A nice Swedish tool, for a constructivist (and destructivist ;-) learning approach



Visit it at phunland

Debriefing

... wrapping it all together.

When we mean hard work...

... we mean it for real!

Tesserete animoto /1

That's a team! Thanks Emanuele!

welcome!

This is the official blog of the red-ink doctoral school!
See www.red-ink.ch