PROLEARN/BTW

Over the past 2 weeks I´ve been attending 2 nice events:


The PROLEARN internal review and the thematic workshop on social software in Vienna, organized by PROLEARN in cooperation with the project iCamp, the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Culture and the PRO-LC. 6 Keynote talks were on the workshop programme. The talk that I liked most was the one given by Ralf Bendrath on Social Software and Privacy which is indeed a crucial issue. In the afternoon there have been 2 parallel workshops, a case study workshop and a teacher workshop. I´ve attended the first one to get an idea about social software in business (Enterprise 2.0). I have the feeling that everyone is seeing the need to integrate/use Web 2.0 technologies though there is no agreement on how to do it or sometimes why to do it. Actually I´m still not sure if the current explosive growth of Web 2.0 will not be followed by a dramatic decline, as it is always the case with new technologies!


The BTW conference (12. GI-Fachtagung für Datenbanksysteme in Business, Technologie und Web) organized by our chair and chair of computer science 9. It was a great opportunity to get an overview on current research directions in the areas of database systems technologies, experiences and applications. I was and I´m still very interested in this research field which was also my specialization area during my Diploma studies under the supervision of Prof. Theo Härder. I was very happy to get the chance to talk to him at the conference. I also met some of my old colleagues in Kaiserslautern. I have also to mention that the conference was nicely organized by my colleagues David and Christoph. They really did it well!