New Technology Supporting Informal Learning by Stephen Downes

An excellent paper by Stephen Downes who talks about the connectivism course experience, personal learning environments, and gRSShopper as a prototype PLE.

Double-Loop Learning

The concept of double-loop learning was introduced by Argyris and Schön in 1978. Argyris (1991) argues that most people define learning too narrowly as mere “problem solving”, so they focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment. This is what Argyris calls single-loop learning. But, in the words of Argyris: "If learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward. They need to reflect critically on their own behavior, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organization’s problems, and then change how they act". This deeper form of learning is what Argyris terms “double-loop learning”. Argyris and Schön (1996, p20) define single-loop learning as "learning that changes strategies of actions or assumptions underlying strategies in ways that leave the values of a theory of action unchanged", and douple-loop learning as "learning that results in a change in the values of theory-in-use, as well as in its strategies and assumptions". In other words, Argyris and Schön differentiate between learning that does not change the underlying mental models of the learner but merely revises their application scenarios (single-loop), and learning which does affect such changes (double-loop). Double-loop learning starts from a learner's mental model defined by base norms, values, assumptions, and theories-in-use, and suggests critical reflection to challenge, invalidate, or confirm the used values and theories-of-use. The result of this reflection would be a reframing of one's norms and values, and a restructuring of one's theories-in-use, according to the new settings. Double-loop learning requires self-criticism, i.e. the capacity for questioning ones norms and theories-in-use and encourages inquiry into and testing of one's actions.

In my opinion, the ideas behind douple-loop learning hold several important implications for practice and research around learning and knowledge management.

First, double-loop learning explains the need for self-organized learning and personal knowledge management.

 Second, if the concepts behind double-loop learning are applied properly, the line between learning and KM disappears. Learning and KM become then a matter of creating a freeform environment conducive to inquiry and trial-and-error; that is, an environment in which we can make connections, see patterns, reflect, self-criticize, detect/correct errors, inquire, test, challenge and eventually change our theories-in-use.

Third, learning/KM cannot be achieved by a pre-determined process, such as teacher-driven learning design or linear SECI process. Pre-defined processes cannot work within increasingly complex and fast-changing environments. In complex environments, we're confronted with emerging opportunities and challenges that call for a rethinking of the theory or process-in-use in order to match the needs of the new setting.  

References:

Argyris, C., Schön, D. A. (1996) Organizational Learning II: Theory, Method and Practice, Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1996.

 Argyris, C. (1991) Teaching Smart People How to Learn.

EUAM 2009 - Deadline extended

CALL FOR PAPERS

Exploitation of Usage and Attention Metadata (EUAM 09)
euam.fit.fraunhofer.de

Workshop organised as part of Informatik 2009 (www.informatik2009.de),
Sep 28, 2009 in Lübeck, Germany

The Workshop Proceedings will be included in a volume of the Lecture
Notes in Informatics (LNI), published by the Gesellschaft für Informatik
(GI).



>>>>> The deadline for submissions has been extended until May, 6!



Workshop Purpose and Topics:
Information systems provide an almost unlimited number of information in
numerous environments. Users in diverse contexts need support to deal
with the new challenges in information acquisition and use. Today, such
support is rather limited as it does not take into account the user’s
tasks and goals. A promising way of dealing with this challenge is
provided by approaches that determine adequacy and relevance on the
basis of the user’s actual behaviour and attention as recorded in server
log files or on the individual user’s computers. Frameworks and data
formats – like the Contextualized Attention Metadata (CAM) format – have
been developed for capturing, storing, exchanging and analyzing metadata
on usage and attention. However, the effective exploitation of such
metadata is still a desideratum, specifically in the more life science
oriented research directions (medical staff, for example, can neither
afford a lack of information nor an overflow with irrelevant information
in emergency cases). Another example is the application of personal
learning environments in higher and lifelong education where individual
educational support is scarce. The workshop objective is to discuss new
ways of exploiting usage and attention metadata in different application
areas like technology enhanced learning, recommender systems,
collaborative systems, etc.

The workshop deals with the generation and exploitation of usage and
attention metadata for attention aware systems. Topics of interest
include (but are not limited to) the following:

   1. Capturing attention metadata
          * Secure exchange of usage and attention metadata
          * Attention metadata sources
   2. Representing attention metadata
   3. Frameworks for capturing, storing and analyzing usage and
attention metadata
   4. Analyzing attention metadata
          * Combining semantic metadata with usage/attention metadata
          * Contextualizing usage and attention metadata
          * Detection of users’ tasks, goals and intentions based on
their behaviour
          * Attention based task support
          * Identification of preferences
          * Identification of skills and competencies
          * Mental and emotional states recognition
          * Generation of usage-based document profiles
          * Attention and usage based recommender systems, determining
relevancy and informativity of data
          * Generation of user profiles and social network analysis

Keynote speaker: tba.

Addressees and Workshop Format:
The workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from
relevant disciplines (digital libraries, information systems,
personalization, attention aware systems, user modeling, social systems,
psychology, linguistic pragmatics, sociology, technology enhanced
learning etc.) who work on capturing and analyzing usage and attention
metadata. While focusing on the German research communities, which are
already rather fragmented, the workshop encourages submissions from all
world-wide relevant research communities. Therefore, the workshop
language will be English. The workshop will foster the
cross-fertilization between application areas and aid the technology
transfer from basic research into practice.

Submission Details:
Authors are invited to submit full papers not exceeding 6-8 pages until
April 26, 2009. Please use the ConfTool submission system at:
https://www.itm.uni-luebeck.de/conftool-gi09/ (English version
available). For questions regarding the submission procedure, please
contact Hans-Christian Schmitz
(hans-christian.schmitz@fit.fraunhofer.de). Submissions will be reviewed
by the workshop's program committee.

Participants must register for Informatik 2009 (only for the day of the
workshop).

Workshop Proceedings:
Accepted papers will be published in the Proceedings of Informatik 2009
which will appear as a volume of the 'Lecture Notes in Informatics
(LNI)'. Further information can be found at
www.gi-ev.de/service/publikationen/gi-edition-lecture-notes-in-informatics-lni-2005/autorenrichtlinien.html.

Important Dates:

    * May 6, 2009: Submission of full papers (extended deadline)
    * June 7, 2009: Notification of acceptance
    * July 1, 2009: Camera-ready papers
    * Sept 28, 2009: Workshop

Program Committee:

    * Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Brause, University of Frankfurt am Main
    * Mohamed Amine Chatti, RWTH Aachen
    * Prof. Dr. Erik Duval, KU Leuven
    * Dr. Eelco Herder, L3S Research Center
    * Prof. Dr. Thomas Kirste, University of Rostock
    * Dr. Stefanie Lindstädt, Know Center Graz
    * Dr. Jobst Löffler, Fraunhofer IAIS
    * Martin Memmel, DFKI
    * Dr. Jehad Najjar, Synergetics
    * Raluca Paiu, L3S Research Center
    * Prof. Dr. Claudia Roda, American University Paris
    * Prof. Dr. Ulrich Schade, FGAN FKIE
    * Dr. Hans-Christian Schmitz, Fraunhofer FIT
    * Sven Schwarz, DFKI
    * Prof. Dr. Marcus Specht, Open University Netherlands
    * Kai Eckert, University of Mannheim
    * Dr. Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer FIT

Workshop Organisers:

    * Dr. Hans-Christian Schmitz
    * Dr. Martin Wolpers

The paradox of choice

In this video, Psychologist Barry explains how "choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied".

PLE - PKN

A Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is a self-defined collection of services, tools, and devices that help learners build their Personal Knowledge Networks (PKN), encompassing tacit knowledge nodes (i.e. people) and explicit knowledge nodes (i.e. information).

Map of Complexity Science

Via George Siemens.

An interesting interactive map of complexity science by Brian Castellani.

Connectivist Learning and PLEs

A neat presentation by Stephen Downes on connectivism, CCK08 and PLEs...

Connectivist Learning and the Personal Learning Environment

View more presentations from Stephen Downes.

Tim Berners-Lee on the Next Web

Via Oliver Marks.

A video of a talk by Tim Berners-Lee at the TED conference.

According to Berners-Lee, the past was links from single page to single page; the future is linked data.

EUAM 2009

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

Exploitation of Usage and Attention Metadata (EUAM 09)
euam.fit.fraunhofer.de

Workshop organised as part of Informatik 2009 (www.informatik2009.de),
Sep 28, 2009 in Lübeck, Germany

The Workshop Proceedings will be included in a volume of the Lecture
Notes in Informatics (LNI), published by the Gesellschaft für Informatik
(GI).



Workshop Purpose and Topics:
Information systems provide an almost unlimited number of information in
numerous environments. Users in diverse contexts need support to deal
with the new challenges in information acquisition and use. Today, such
support is rather limited as it does not take into account the user’s
tasks and goals. A promising way of dealing with this challenge is
provided by approaches that determine adequacy and relevance on the
basis of the user’s actual behaviour and attention as recorded in server
log files or on the individual user’s computers. Frameworks and data
formats – like the Contextualized Attention Metadata (CAM) format – have
been developed for capturing, storing, exchanging and analyzing metadata
on usage and attention. However, the effective exploitation of such
metadata is still a desideratum, specifically in the more life science
oriented research directions (medical staff, for example, can neither
afford a lack of information nor an overflow with irrelevant information
in emergency cases). Another example is the application of personal
learning environments in higher and lifelong education where individual
educational support is scarce. The workshop objective is to discuss new
ways of exploiting usage and attention metadata in different application
areas like technology enhanced learning, recommender systems,
collaborative systems, etc.

The workshop deals with the generation and exploitation of usage and
attention metadata for attention aware systems. Topics of interest
include (but are not limited to) the following:

  1. Capturing attention metadata
         * Secure exchange of usage and attention metadata
         * Attention metadata sources
  2. Representing attention metadata
  3. Frameworks for capturing, storing and analyzing usage and
attention metadata
  4. Analyzing attention metadata
         * Combining semantic metadata with usage/attention metadata
         * Contextualizing usage and attention metadata
         * Detection of users’ tasks, goals and intentions based on
their behaviour
         * Attention based task support
         * Identification of preferences
         * Identification of skills and competencies
         * Mental and emotional states recognition
         * Generation of usage-based document profiles
         * Attention and usage based recommender systems, determining
relevancy and informativity of data
         * Generation of user profiles and social network analysis

Keynote speaker: tba.

Addressees and Workshop Format:
The workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from
relevant disciplines (digital libraries, information systems,
personalization, attention aware systems, user modeling, social systems,
psychology, linguistic pragmatics, sociology, technology enhanced
learning etc.) who work on capturing and analyzing usage and attention
metadata. While focusing on the German research communities, which are
already rather fragmented, the workshop encourages submissions from all
world-wide relevant research communities. Therefore, the workshop
language will be English. The workshop will foster the
cross-fertilization between application areas and aid the technology
transfer from basic research into practice.

Submission Details:
Authors are invited to submit full papers not exceeding 6 pages until
April 26, 2009. Please use the ConfTool submission system at:
https://www.itm.uni-luebeck.de/conftool-gi09/ (English version
available). For questions regarding the submission procedure, please
contact Hans-Christian Schmitz
(hans-christian.schmitz@fit.fraunhofer.de). Submissions will be reviewed
by the workshop's program committee.

Participants must register for Informatik 2009 (only for the day of the
workshop).

Workshop Proceedings:
Accepted papers will be published in the Proceedings of Informatik 2009
which will appear as a volume of the 'Lecture Notes in Informatics
(LNI)'. Further information can be found at
www.gi-ev.de/service/publikationen/gi-edition-lecture-notes-in-informatics-lni-2005/autorenrichtlinien.html.

Important Dates:

   * Apr 26, 2009: Submission of full papers
   * May 25, 2009: Notification of acceptance
   * July 1, 2009: Camera-ready papers
   * Sept 28, 2009: Workshop

Program Committee:

   * Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Brause, University of Frankfurt am Main
   * Mohamed Amine Chatti, RWTH Aachen
   * Prof. Dr. Erik Duval, KU Leuven
   * Dr. Eelco Herder, L3S Research Center
   * Prof. Dr. Thomas Kirste, University of Rostock
   * Dr. Stefanie Lindstädt, Know Center Graz
   * Dr. Jobst Löffler, Fraunhofer IAIS
   * Martin Memmel, DFKI
   * Dr. Jehad Najjar, Synergetics
   * Raluca Paiu, L3S Research Center
   * Prof. Dr. Claudia Roda, American University Paris
   * Prof. Dr. Ulrich Schade, FGAN FKIE
   * Dr. Hans-Christian Schmitz, Fraunhofer FIT
   * Sven Schwarz, DFKI
   * Prof. Dr. Marcus Specht, Open University Netherlands
   * Kai Eckert, University of Mannheim
   * Dr. Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer FIT

Workshop Organisers:

   * Dr. Hans-Christian Schmitz
   * Dr. Martin Wolpers

GWT 1.6 is here!

Google released GWT 1.6 alongside with Google Plugin for Eclipse and Google App Engine for Java. We're using GWT in the PLEF and PLEM projects, and I highly recommend it for the development of your Web applications. 

Web 2.0 Five Years On

Via Jon Husband.

Tim O'Reilly talking at the Web 2.0 Expo.

New Book on Mobile learning by Dr. Mohamed Ally

Via Marcus Specht.

A very interesting new book on Mobile Learning, edited by Dr. Mohamed Ally (Director and Professor at the Centre for Distance Education, Athabasca University Canada). The eBook is licensed under a Creative Commons License and can be dowloaded here. 

Cynefin Framework

A quick explanation of Dave Snowden's Cynefin Framework by Shawn Callahan.

SoSEA 2009

CALL FOR PAPERS (pdf)

The Second International Workshop on Social Software Engineering and
Applications (SoSEA 2009 http://tutopen.cs.tut.fi/sosea09/) in conjunction
with ESEC/FSE 2009 http://www.esec-fse-2009.ewi.tudelft.nl/ Amsterdam, The
Netherlands, August 24th 2009.

Intention to submit: May 15, 2009.
Paper submission (deadline): May 22, 2009.

Social software has emerged as one of the most exciting and important
phenomenon in today's software and business arena. With social software,
individuals can interact, share, and meet other individuals, presumably with
similar interests, forming large data, knowledge, and user bases. Social
software engineering, in turn, can be defined as the application of
processes, methods, and tools to enable community-driven creation,
management, deployment, and use of software in online environments.

The social software movement can be regarded as both a challenge and an
opportunity for software development. On the one hand, social software
itself brings its own kinds of challenges such as data sensitivity, content
legality, scalability, and performance. On the other hand, the social
software movement is apparently causing a fundamental change in the way
software engineering is practiced, benefiting from the technologies and
experiences gained from Web 2.0 and the expectations of the forthcoming Web
3.0. In the near future, various forms of social software development will
become a reality. Examples include software mashups, intelligent
context-aware software downloads, and online cooperative CASE tools. Such a
cooperative model of software development would also meet the challenges of
contemporary software engineering such as outsourcing, cooperative software
engineering, and open source software.

The second edition will build on the success of SoSEA 2008 and discuss the
latest trends in the field of social software engineering. Focusing on
technology issues, the workshop will offer an opportunity for the
participants to share experiences and discuss challenges involved in
building and using social software. A special emphasis will be put the role
of social software concepts and technologies in shaping up future software
development. The workshop will also identify key research issues and
challenges that lie ahead.

We solicit two kinds of contributions: short position papers describing
particular challenges, experiences, or visions relevant to the scope of the
workshop (not to exceed 4 pages) and full research papers describing
original work in any aspect of social software engineering (not to exceed 8
pages). Articles should be novel, have not been published elsewhere, and are
not under review by another publication. Accepted papers will appear in the
ESEC/FSE proceedings which will be distributed on USB stick to all
participants and made available in the ACM digital library. Papers must
conform, at time of submission, to the ESEC/FSE 2009 Format and Submission
Guidelines. Submission instructions are available at:
http://tutopen.cs.tut.fi/sosea09/.

TOPICS OF INTEREST:
-------------------------------
The workshop will concentrate on two main themes:
* engineering of social software applications;
* the use of social software in software development, exploiting models,
methodologies and technologies.

Workshop topics include (but are not limited to):
* requirements and challenges of building and using social software,
including concerns such as scalability, performance, security, sensitivity
and other legal issues; 
* organization and interaction schemes in social software;
* automated approaches, best practices, architectures, frameworks,
methodologies, technologies, tools, and environments for social software
engineering; 
* industrial involvement in social software: building, managing and
interfacing with communities, opening up software platforms, integrating
social software;
* building social software engineering communities: the role of companies,
research groups, governments, NGOs, and individuals; 
* social software engineering versus other forms of globalization such as
global software development, distributed software engineering, open source,
etc;
* experience reports and lessons on building social software and its use in
software development;
* evaluation of socialness of software;
* teaching social software.

IMPORTANT DATES (DEADLINES):
-------------------------------------------------
Intention to submit: May 15, 2009

Paper submission (deadline): May 22, 2009

Acceptance notification: June 15, 2009

Final camera-ready: June 26, 2009

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS:
---------------------------------------
Imed Hammouda, imed.hammouda@tut.fi
Tampere University of Technology

Filippo Lanubile, lanubile@di.uniba.it
University of Bari

Jan Bosch, Jan@JanBosch.com
Intuit Inc.

Mehdi Jazayeri, mehdi.jazayeri@unisi.ch
University of Lugano

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
-----------------------------------
Cesare Pautasso (University of Lugano, Switzerland), 

Fabio Calefato (University of Bari, Italy), 

Filippo Lanubile (University of Bari, Italy),
Francesco Lelli (University of Lugano, Switzerland), 

Jan Bosch (Intuit Inc., USA), 

Gabriela Avram (University of Limerick, Ireland), 

Imed Hammouda (Tampere University of Technology, Finland), 

Mehdi Jazayeri (University of Lugano, Switzerland), 

Mohamed Amine Chatti (RWTH Aachen University, Germany), 

Pekka Abrahamsson (University of Helsinki, Finland), 

Tommi Mikkonen (Tampere University of Technology, Finland)

Connectivism/LaaN - Learning Theories

In this table, I tried to compare the connectivism/LaaN perspective with dominant learning and social theories. These include behaviorism, cognitivism, (social) constructivism, situated learning, activity theory, and actor-network theory.

Comments and discussions are most welcome!