Maciej Kuszpa on Mobile Social Networks and Mobile Learning

Matthias, Thomas, Kai, Frank, Sandra, Codruta, Broni and me.

Dinner with my peperoni team

My third christmas party this year was together with my team mates from Peperoni. After doing a secret Santa at the office we went for a nice dinner at the Restaurant International.

Lecture by Angela Schmitz-Axe from Deloitte Consulting.

Social Media in Germany in the early stages

It was my first time joining a BITKOM Social Media Working Committee. After the reception by Florian Koch (BITKOM) we had an introduction into the projected theme, goals and activities. Interestingly we heard that BITKOM itself is not active (yet) in social media, but today I found the BITKOM twitter account with over 200 tweets and 700 followers – quite confusing. The argumentation was to do nothing in Social Media, before you do something halfhearted and fail.

In the first lecture Thilo Többens (Deloitte Consulting) spoke about the “Don’ts” of social media activities, using examples of ryanair.com and bmw.com. Angela Schmitz-Axe (Deloitte Consulting) added the Deloitte point of view on Social Media Eco System. With her statistics she also showed how slow Germany is in terms of using social media in comparison to USA, but also other European countries. Thilo Többens spoke about an adequate and reliable measurement of social media initiatives that needs to consider both quantitative and qualitative metrics for a Social Media ROI. The introduced Key Success Factors for a successful Social Media Strategy were also interesting; e.g. to develop a business case and to establish clear guidelines.

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Lecture and networking.

Best practice in podcasting

By invitation from Dr. Olaf Zawacki-Richter, today Dr. Palitha Edirisingha, a lecturer in E-Learning at Beyond Distance Research Alliance, University of Leicester (UK), visited the University of Hagen. In the afternoons he hold a lecture on “Podcasting, Mobile Learning and Second Life: Some Pedagogical Applications to Support Student Learning in Higher Education”. Palitha Edirisingha spoke about how to best design podcasts in courses, based on his operating experiences that he also wrote about in a book with Gilly Salmon about “Podcasting for Learning in Universities“. Later on he showed us a live demo on their projects in Second Life, but unfortunately didn’t have the time to tell us more about his mobile learning project called WoLF.

Reception, lecture by Shiva and panel discussion.

Boost innovation (with Freelancer) in companies

I joined the event “Innovationskraft im Betrieb organisieren – Beispiele aus Europa” (“To organise the power of innovationin the company – examples from Europe”) at the Federal Employment Office in Hagen. After the reception Andreas Franke (frankepartner GmbH) spoke about best practices cases from Scandinavia. Afterwards Stefan Süß, Shiva Sayah and Johannes Becker (FernUniversität in Hagen) reported on their project “FlinK – Freelancer im Spannungsfeld von Flexibilisierung und Stabilisierung – Innovative Konzepte für den erfolgreichen Einsatz, die Motivation und Bindung sowie die Stärkung ihrer beruflichen Identität und Employability“. And at the end there was a panel discussion with Prof. Dr. Ewald Scherm (FernUniversität in Hagen) and Bo Bäckström (Albatross 78).

One of my xing-contacts that passed away.

Infinitely trapped in the net with web 2.0

What happens with all of your social media profiles after you have left the real world? Today I heard by accident through a mutual contact that one of my over 700 business contacts at xing.com is already dead since almost two years now I didn’t check this information directly at his family and I don’t want to publish untruths, but my deepest sympathies for the passing of Peter Trauth. I met him back in 2006 at the Learntec and I was a little bit surprised that he didn’t respond to my invitations to the Mobile Learning Day 2009, but now I understand. His company 5mo Group AG seems to be deleted and also his domain 5mo.ch and his email don’t work anymore, but his xing-profile is still online.

This incidence makes somehow thought-provoking. What will happen with my content in internet after I have passed away? Will my friends and contents even notice that I am gone? Or will some social media services continue to use my data for business proposes? I mean they can still use my identity to automatically poke other users and send them birthday greetings from my and in this way use my content draw on other people to their services. I suppose even as a nominal member I am still valuable for the social media services; no investor will check if I am alive, but will be happy about one more user in the database. So many questions to answer and the time is running out. It feels a little uncomfortable to use services like mywonderfullife.com and to “plan your funeral, your way”. I think I will keep this blog as my virtual gravesite, but how to hand on all of my social networking profiles to my bequests?