Copenhagen I: The Research
As many of you know I have taken up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Copenhagen Business School. Two years ago I could not have imagined being here, yet it is clear that it is a good fit. I’m very lucky to be working on the NEXT-TELL project and we have just completed our first deliverable reports across all the work packages. We are reviewing them internally before we compile them for external review.
My contributions was mainly to Work Package 4, which is concerned with Open Learner Models (OLMs). My main responsibility in the project is to design the communication and negotiation layer for the OLMs and my main contributions was to summarize the results of our Participatory Design workshops and to translate those findings into early Design Specifications. It was challenging, but tremendously rewarding! I also got to contribute to the visualization parts of other work packages.
NEXT-TELL keeps me pretty busy but there’s a bit of time left over to pursue other interests.
This week was a deadline for chapter authors to submit drafts of their work for a book that I am editing with Dan Suthers, Kris Lund, Carolyn Rosé, Nancy Law and Greg Dyke. The book is the outcome of a series of workshops that we have co-organized around the topic of “productive multivocality in the analysis of collaborative learning”. We are getting together one more time at the STELLARnet Alpine Rendezvous in La Clusaz, France in a couple of weeks. After that we’re going to put together a symposium at CSCL 2011 in Hong Kong. Dan and I are going to conduct another workshop on “Connecting Levels of Learning in Networked Communities” at CSCL 2011.
| I also managed to finish up edits to the two papers that represent the output of my time in France. ”Productive re-use of CSCL data and analytic tools to provide a new perspective on group cohesion” will be presented at CSCL2011 in Hong Kong and | Réutilisation d’un corpus pour une nouvelle analyse des réseaux sociaux grâce à l’adaptation de l’outil KSV” will be presented at EIAH2011 in Belgium. |
Those are the collaborative projects from the past. One of the advantages to being in a new department is the opportunity to take advantage of new opportunities for collaboration. I am fortunate to be working with a very talented group of researchers at the Center for Applied ICT. One of the projects that I’m working on with Janni Nielsen, Leif Rasmussen, and Thea Bruun de Neergard involves extending the theoretical framework in the paper they presented at the recent Participatory Innovation Conference in Sonderberg, Denmark by adding a practical component provided by my KSV software. We hope to submit the resulting paper to the major Information Systems conference!
Another project that I’m involved in with Kim Balle, Mads Bødker, Jan Damsgaard, Nobuko Fujita, Jonas Hedman, Abid Hussain, Nikhil Srinivasan, and Ravi Vatrapu seeks to understand the use of Social Media in e-Government. We’re still in the exploratory phase of the work we’re planning, but it was exciting for me to finally get a chance to apply Latent Dirichilet Allocation (LDA) to a corpus built up from more than 11,000 Facebook wall posts. I got to see how various topics waxed and waned over several months.
Finally, I was reminded that we need to start moving on a book project with the NordForsk Network on Teaching Problem Based Learning in Virtual Environments (ScandLE).
So… lots to do!