barbara’s test weblog

I will be away on summer vacation for 3 weeks now. First we will spend a few days with some friends at the Bodensee, also called lake Constance, and then we will head to Bangkok for the eLearningAP 2006 conference followed by some nice and relaxing days somewhere in Thailand.

Nice summer to everyone!

don’t foget about this workshop:

http://www.l3s.de/%7Eolmedilla/events/2006/L3NCD06/

the deadline is actually today, but I suppose that high quality contributions might even get accepted with a few days of delay…. hurry up!

technorati tags:cfp, prolearn, competence

I am wandering about the natural limits that we have as humans in processing information, adapting to new environments, establishing and maintaining social contacts…. there are limits to all this and we are facing at the same time more and more technology that suggests us a support with these activities.

Actually I have the feeling that I am sometimes even overwhelmed with the amount of technological support and with selecting the best tools for my personal environment. Since I am currently working on these aspects also in the context of our research project iCamp I am reflecting especially on online social networking practices.

Combining my own experiences with some of the recent literature on social networks, social captial , social software, …. I must say that I am currently experiencing more and more the physical limits of networking. There have been these figures around that a person may maintain up to around 150 contacts or so and I think I already reached this limit.

So what’s the point in having technical solutions available that help me to establish more contacts when at the same time I am not able to keep up with the relationsships that I already have? For the moment I wil try to use this weblog to allow some people I know to read from me from time to time. But is this a valid solution? When I think about it and imagine that all of my contacts would be writing weblogs (maybe they already do and I just have not realised it ;-)) I would definitly not be able to follow all of them.

This brings me back to Ton’s statement, which he pronounced at the workshop that we had in Vienna during the EDEN 2006 Conference, where he proposed to do some social filtering. He would not read primary sources anymore, but use people and what they write as filters to get to interesting resources. Will be interesting to hear from Ton when he reaches the point of having too may social filters.

technorati tags:social networks

… although unfortunately I might miss it myself, is the blogtalk reloaded (Oct. 2-3, 2006, Vienna, Austria)
After a short phone conversation with Thomas Burg, one of the main organisers of this event, I just had a look at the conference website and it seems to be a good event for meeting up with researchers and practicioners around the topic of social software. It seems to be also a nice alternative to the highly academic events as I spotted some papers settled in the corporate and business context.

What a pitty that the EC-TEL conference will take place around the same time in Crete.

after a few days in Brussels, I am now back in Vienna. Actually I am already planning my next trip. I am going to be at the eLearning 2006 Conference in Bangkok, where I am going to present a paper on some experiences from the iCamp project. The event is the third one of this series.

The International Conference on Knowledge Management has launched its call for participation. I have attended this event in the past few years and can recommend it. It attracts a good mix of experts and leaves enough room for discussions - formal and informal ones.

6-8
September 2006, Graz, Austria

http://www.i-know.at/

Now in its sixth year, I-KNOW has a tradition of bringing together Europe´s leading researchers and practitioners involved in knowledge management. Attracting more than 450 attendees, I-KNOW is the premier conference on knowledge management in Europe. I-KNOW provides a perfect opportunity to stay abreast of the latest developments in the field. Both the human/organizational perspective and the technology perspective are covered. The novelty and the quality of the accepted contributions are ensured by a high-callibre program committee featuring international experts on a broad range of knowlege management topics. All submitted papers went through a rigorous review process, with a final acceptance rate of 40% only for full papers.

Overall, I-KNOW ‘06 received a total of 154 full paper submissions, with 62 accepted full papers. 11 further submissions were recommended for acceptance as short papers.

I-KNOW
‘06 is hosted by the Know-Center, Austria’s Competence Center for Knowledge Management (http://en.know-center.at/) and it takes place concurrently with the 20th International Conference on Informatics for Environmental
Protection - Managing Environmental Knowledge (EnviroInfo-2006, www.enviroinfo.net).

The program includes keynotes by a number of internationally renowned experts; please visit the Web site for scheduled times and the keynoters’ short biographies:

* Bebo White, Stanford University, US; Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), Fellow of the International WWW Institute

* Franz Josef Radermacher, University of Ulm, GE; Scientific Director, Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing (FAW/n)

* Ronald Maier, Chair in Management Information Systems, Martin-Luther-University Halle Wittenberg, GE

* Peter Scott, Head of the Centre for New Media Knowledge Media Institute Open University, UK

technorati tags:conference, knowledge management

in the iCamp we have been following a group of educational researchers in the UK that are working on issues closely related to our project. Plex is their first prototype of a personal learning environment.

http://www.reload.ac.uk/plex/

This seems to be one of the first prototypes of the Personal Learning Environment developed by the British group around CETIS (Scott Wilson,…)–

Plex - Download Page

technorati tags:personal learning environment, iCamp

the centre for social innovation went on a knowledge walk for two days. somewhere in upper austria, well actually in gösing, most of the staff members of our organisation were discovering their strenghts, some old conflicts, secret football fans, and some nice hiking tracks.

overall, we spent two rather intensiv days, which gave the opportunity to discuss outside the regular office routine.

there are more pictures on flickr provided by sebastian fiedler.