Beginning with July I have startet my new website. Last week I have removed my URL form this site. With http://www.peter.baumgartner.name you will arrive at my new German Weblog/Homepage. This website is deprecated.

You will find all the important material (e.g. articles for download) on my new page. If you looking for a older material which is not so relevant anymore (like slide shows presented at a certain conference) than try the following construction of the URL: http://bt-mac2.fernuni-hagen.de/peter/gems/ + Name of the pdf file.

If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact me at peter dot baumgartner at fernuni-hagen dot de.

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The last week I was very busy in prepearing my new German homepage. I wanted to launch it with my URL peter.baumgartner.name exactly on my birthday. But as you can see; I didn't succeed. :-) In the meanwhile this problem is settled and my new German homepage can be found under my (old) URL http://www.peter.baumgartner.name/

I still need to find a solution for people looking for my (old) English homepage coming from google or other links. So the change of URLs has to wait for some more days.

But you can access already my homepage under the URL http://www.blended-education.net/ now! But you can access already my homepage under the new and old URL http://www.peter.baumgartner.name/ now! 18th July 2005. She is open and has over 40 of my articles to download and a new weblog which I started last week.

Well my new homepage is in German. This will exclude some of my readers. I apologise, but an analysis of my referrers showed that most of my regular visitors are German speaking people. But in the article section you may find interesting material as well: I describe and offer my English papers for download as well.

Please note that the blended-education URL is just provisional: The new homepage will get my name domain in the next few days.   7/1/05; 6:31:54 PM #

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A serious change in our life is fast approaching: Our move from Innsbruck to Hagen. We have given already notice that we're moving out of our flat in Igls. A new flat in Hagen - just 100 meter from the University - is already rented and haulage companies were invited to make a offer for the transfer of our stuff. Even the new car has already a German registration. (The photo was taken last week in our garden in Igls/Innsbruck. My new license code "BT" is the abbreviation of our department. In Austria you have to pay around 300 Euros for this, but in Germany only 10,20. Lower and simple numbers like 1 or 10 were not available anymore, so had to choose 700. ) I'm sure we will miss the beautiful surroundings here in Innsbruck and the Austrian style of living very much. But travelling all the time between Innsbruck and Hagen (more than 750 km) is not a charming alternative either. We are planning the actual transfer end of August, so we can still enjoy the summer in Austria.   6/12/05; 1:52:29 PM #

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Recently we made an important decision on our infrastructure: We will change in the near future from Manila to Plone. This concerns our own internal sites as well our practical educational research and development on CMSes.

This is just a first announcement. I will explain this move and its consequences in more details later. We will come up with a hosting and transfer strategy for our C3I sites. If you have a website at our server don't panic. As our own sites will be affected as well, we will provide a time period (approximately until the end of 2005), where the transfer should take place. But the unrestricted and free possibility to create a new Manila website will be stopped in the near future (next week or so).   6/12/05; 1:16:25 PM #

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eleaningeuropa.info has published on May 17th a summary of my article The Zen Art of Teaching - Communications and Interactions in eEducation (pdf, 304 KB). It has already more than 13.000 hits. This summary was translated into 19 languages! (To choose another language than English you have to call the article section and look for my article. Hint: date = 17. May 2005)

elearningeurope.info provides a link to my full (English) article as pdf on their website as well. Unfortunately is this a version without information where it was published originally. This happens as I offer the articles on my website as soon as I've them written. I need to make a mental note to change these contributions when they are published to include the bibliography reference.   6/12/05; 1:01:50 PM #

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Under the title "Towards a Learning Society" the European Commission is organising a conference on eLearning which will take place in Brussels on 19-20 May 2005. The conference will bring together a cross section of the various stakeholders involved in eLearning in Europe, and will provide a forum for sharing experiences, exchanging good practices and taking stock of the added value of using ICT in education and training.

I will give an invited talk on Communication and Interactions (pdf, 1020 KB) in eLearning supported by a slide show (pdf, 2.3 MB).   5/16/05; 1:33:11 PM #

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The coming 17th week will be another almost exclusively Austrian week:

• Monday and Thuesday (25/26th April) I'll give an eLearning Course at the MCI.
• Thuesday I'll present my ideas on Educational Technology in pedagogical settings (pdf, 196 KB): Learning Management- and Content Management Systems in eEducation. The talk is in relation with the eLearning Certificate - an Initiative of several important Austrian institution of Higher Education. This Programme for Further Teacher Training uses material of the project PlaNet-ET, a project I participated in.
• Wednesday is my presentation at the ePortfolio Conference in Salzburg (cf. my post and material for this event.)
• Thursday night I'll leave by air-plane to Berlin for an expert workshop on Friday for the new German BMBF funding initiative eLearning Services.

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I will give an invited talk at the ePortfolio Forum Austria 2005 at Salzburg (April 27, 2005). The slogan of the conference: My ePortfolio - Challenges, Trends and Experiences of introducing a Digital Knowledge Backpack for individual and organisational learning in German speaking countries.

My talk is titled "Comptetency-based Education with Weblogs and ePortfolios: A Challenge for Developing a New Learning Culture". My paper draws on some theoretical considerations of the learning process: In addition to abstract knowledge and practical skills we need abilities and competencies on a meta-level. Especially the capability to control the own learning process and to develop the aptitude of an autonomous learner gains increasing importance. I claim that a combination of Weblogs and ePortfolios provides an excellent tool to build up these educational requirements.

There is some material available:

• A paper in German: Weblogs und ePortfolios (pdf, 165 KB)
• A shorter version of this paper in English: Weblogs and ePortfolios (pdf, 168 KB)
• Weblogs & ePortfolios Slides (pdf, 1.5 MB)

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The Learning Technology Research Institute (LTRI) at London Metropolitan University views learning objects as micro-content for learning that encapsulate content and appropriate interactivity. Each object is focused on one educational goal - cf. our paper Wiederverwendung von Lernobjekten aus didaktischer Sicht (pdf, 171 KB) where we critically review different definitions of learning objects.

The LTRI applies principles from software engineering to ensure effective design for reuse. Combined with a constructivist pedagogy they have developed learning objects which are reusable and pedagogically rich. These learning objects were winners at the European Academic Software Award (EASA) held in Switzerland in September 2004. Unfortunately just some of these learning objects are open for the public.   4/22/05; 8:16:07 AM #

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Invited by the internal advisory group of the ZFE together with Leif Pullich we presented our idea to incorporate weblogs into distance education. We had a very exciting discussion. In several occasions we had no convincing argument why discussion via weblogs are different from news groups. The productive atmosphere today (oops: yesterday) generated a new argument:

News Groups are topics oriented where as weblogs are learner centered. This has many consequences: In news groups the goal is a structured discussion between peers ; in weblogs the individual learner determines focus and interaction with peers.

There is a slide show of our talk available: Weblogs ZFE Presentation (pdf, 1,9 MB).   4/21/05; 12:32:54 AM #

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I have submitted a paper for the GMW 05 Conference (Rostock September 13 - 16th 2005). The article Wiederverwendung von Lernobjekten aus didaktischer Sicht (pdf, 171 KB) - written together with Marco Kalz - discusses different approaches to Learning Objects (LOs). It conceptualizes LOs in a different way, distinguishing between the informational part (Technical Object or TO) and the educational part (Educational Object or EO). Both parts consist of one or more information objects (IO) and both are described by metadata.

The crucial point of our approach is that the contextual information is encapsulated as task description and learning goal in the EO and that the properties of the LO is an emergent feature of the organisational structure and relation of the different informational and educational objects. Not every EO fits to every IO of the same subject area.

Based on the theory of ontological stratification by Michael Polanyi we assume that there exist different levels of reusability (for instance: media object, information object, educational object, learning object, interaction pattern, educational scenarios, learning style, learner type, institutional settings, educational paradigm) which has to be investigated in more detail.

To test our idea we would need real life examples: We are looking for informational objects which have the same subject (for instance: they all explain the functionality of a pump) but are prepared for different educational settings (e.g. primary school, university). Send us URLs, quotes or even copies from book pages where the same content is adapted for different educational contexts. Especially we would need different task descriptions or learning goals based on the same subject. In the framework of our project CampusContent we will follow our approach and try to build LOs from your information. (Confer also the precursor of this idea: The ROI Paradox, a paper written for GMW 04 .   4/17/05; 11:48:51 PM #

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This weekend I had a seminar at the EuroStudyCentre Bregenz for students of our degree course on Educational Scenarios in E-Education.

The students analysed several research papers from different authors (Robin Mason, Gabi Reinmann, Rolf Schulmeister, Jasmina Hansanbegovic, and Ulrich Iberer & Ulrich Müller) In these papers the concept of educational scenario is discussed from different perspectives.

Sorry, some of these papers are internal and therefore not available for the public. But there is other material online produced during the seminar:

• Photos
• Szenarios of Social Activities (German pdf, 46 KB)
• Seminar Slides at EuroStudyCenter Bregenz, April 2005 (German pdf, 757 KB)
• Websites mentioned at the seminar

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The coming week I'm having some kind of Austrian week.

1. Monday I will travel in the morning by train to Vienna for a meeting in the Austrian ministry of education bm:bwk, preparing some activities of the coming and the next year, especially my keynote at the EDEN conference (May 15th-17th 2006 in Vienna)
2. Thuesday and Wednesday I will have an expert workshop in Vienna on the evaluation of the call for papers for the new Austrian funding programme eLearning Strategies
3. Wednesday afternoon I will travel by plane to Altenrhein (Switzerland border to Austria) because at night I will give a talk in Bregenz in the series of lectures Science - made in Vorarlberg (PDF, 804 KB) on Educational Issues on eLearning. There is a slide show (PDF, 692 KB) available. 
4. And on the weekend I will have a seminar at the EuroStudyCentre Bregenz for students of our degree course on Educational Scenarios in E-Education.

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I was invited by the EC commission to participate and contribute to an eLearning Conference to be held in Brussels on 19-20 May, 2005. For this event I wrote an abstract (pdf, 740 kB).

The registration for this conference is already closed. The Conference Proceedings will be produced immediately after the conference. The printed version as well as a DVD should be available by the end of June.   4/3/05; 3:12:11 PM #

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There are some important news concerning the Creative Commons Licences:

1. The launch of the Creative Commons Licenses for Austria happened September last year.
2. Creative Commons Licenses for Germany were already launched as well.
3. There is a special Creative Commons Licence for Science in preparation. This should encourage scientific innovation by making it easier for scientists, universities, and industries to use literature, data, and other scientific intellectual property.

for Austria and Germany are launched.   4/3/05; 2:51:52 PM #

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