ConJunction

Learning from Your Students: Tools for Digital Interactivity in Class

When presenting in class, students in my courses are required to include at least one “interactive part” involving their fellow class mates. The main goal of this rule is to foster experience-based learning and to make student presentations more varied. How the students involve their colleagues is entirely up to them; collateral benefit of this openness is that I profit immensely from the creativity and diversity of ideas and techniques put forward by the students.

Over the course of the past semester, for instance, I not only saw but experienced various tools for digital interactivity – some of which were really helpful in raising attention levels and understanding. Please find below a selection of three such digital tools, all of which are browser-based and work on laptops, tablets and smartphones alike:

screenshot-kahoot

Kahoot: the mobile-friendly tool provides an easy way to set up competitive quizzes, where participants get points for correct and fast answers. In the end, there is a ranking and a winner. According to Kahoot’s website, the tool works with up to 500 participants. In a German blog post, Daniel Giere describes his experiences with Kahoot in the field of history. Continue reading “Learning from Your Students: Tools for Digital Interactivity in Class” →

Video: »Lessons from Copyright in Action for Copyright Reform«

govxborders-hoch At the end of March I was invited speaker at a workshop on “Balancing Intellectual Property Claims and the Freedom of Art and Communication” at Bielefeld University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF). The talk was mainly based upon thoughts sketched out in two posts on “Algorithm Regulation” over at governance across borders:

Please find a video auf my talk and the respective slideshare embedded below:

Slides:

This is a crosspost from governance across borders.

“Clash of Cultures”: re:publica-Panel über Bewegungen und ihre Organisationen

Von 2. bis 4. Mai findet in Berlin bereits zum 10. Mal die als Blogger-Konferenz gestartete re:publica statt, die mittlerweile zur wohl größten Digitalkulturkonferenz Europas geworden ist. Das Themenspektrum ist dementsprechend breit und gemeinsam mit Volker Grassmuck, Kathrin Passig und Monic Meisel bin ich bei einem Panel rund um Bewegungen und digitale Communities sowie mit ihnen verbundene, formale Organisationen mit an Board. Aus der Ankündigung des martialisch betitelten Panels “Clash of Cultures“:

Wikipedia, Freifunk und der öffentlich-rechtliche Rundfunk – drei Wissensinstitutionen, die dem Gemeinwohl, der res publica verpflichtet sind. So unterschiedlich sie sind, besteht das Verhältnis von Basis zu Institution jeweils aus den drei Schritten: Beauftragen, Bezahlen, Begutachten.

Zur Einstimmung auf die re:publica sei an dieser Stelle noch auf das Video meines letztjährigen Vortrags zur “Bewilligungskultur im Netz” verwiesen:

4 Open: Wiki-based Course on “Open Organizations and Organizing Openness”

On February 1st I joined the Department of Organization and Learning at University of Innsbruck as a professor of business administration with a focus on organization. One of the most challenging and, at the same time, tempting tasks as a newly appointed professor is the opportunity to design at least some new courses from scratch. In particular, I was so lucky to being offered to teach the module on “Current Issues in Organization Studies”, which allowed me to design a course I have been wanting to give for a long time: “Open Organizations and Organizing Openness“.

The overall rationale for the structure of the course follows the imperative formulated by Tkacz (2012: 404, PDF) in his “critique of open politics”:

To describe the political organisation of all things open requires leaving the rhetoric of open behind.

As a consequence, the lecture part of the course is organized around different aspects or dimensions of organizational openness such as boundaries, transparency, participation or emergence. The respective readings only peripherally address the issue of openness but rather shall provide the building blocks for arriving at a more precise and theoretically grounded understanding of openness.

Read the rest of this entry at governance across borders >>

Save-the-Date: 1st OS ConJunction Students and Alumni Day on Nov. 25, 2016

The first Organization Studies ConJunction – Students and Alumni Day 2016 will take place on November 25th, 2016 at the SoWi-Campus, University of Innsbruck.

This day is a unique opportunity to connect with current and former fellow students of Universität Innsbruck’s Organization Studies (OS) Master program, to share experiences, to gain new and interesting insights into OS-topics and mainly, to spend a good time together in a relaxed atmosphere.

Inquiries should be sent to osconjunction@uibk.ac.at. Further details on the event will be posted on this blog.