In april werd ik door de website leraar24.nl geïnterviewd over het laatste experiment van mijn promotieonderzoek. Hieronder is het videoverslag van dit interview en het experiment te vinden. Erg leuk geworden vind ik zelf 
So much news about the iPad, but of course the most important question is; will it blend? Find the answer below 
In the middle of the now oh so common waste of time of what’s called a windows reinstall, I decided to spend my time a bit more wisely than just waiting for the next “next button” to click. Therefore, I’m typing this post on the macbook pro I borrowed from OUNL’s new medialab, and, to not waste the geeky atmosphere I already created, I decided to tell you about the new media pc I recently assembled and is now the subject of a brand new Vista install.
Before Christmas, the range of multimedia content on my harddrive was already growing; I’m a big music fan, and want to have the my music collection always near me, so basically this meant ripping all my cds to mp3. Furthermore, with my new found hobby of photography, the number of photographs in my photo collection was also growing. Nothing that couldn’t be handled my old pc so far. But then came another hobby of mine….movies…having recently acquired an enormous amount of HD-ready or Full HD movies (some of you might have seen me carrying around with half a terabyte of new movie material in my arms) the need for a separate media machine became clearer and clearer. Not in the least, because my old machine was not able anymore to playback the movies. Therefore, with some advice of my fellow colleague Tally, I decided to assemble a new media pc.
Just found this by accident; quite interesting though as it represents a entirely new way of interaction with a computer. I saw a table like this already when I visited i10 Informatik of RWTH Aachen a couple of months ago, but did not really think of it could be used in real life. This video gives some nice examples. Also I wonder how we could apply this to enhance learning and it would be nice to try out something like this in some kind of ubiquitous pedagogical scenario. So please Marcus, add one of these tables to my wanted list….
Albeit a wee bit delayed, I just heard that the paper ContextBlogger: learning by blogging in the real world has been accepted for the ePortfolio conference.
Here’s the abstract:
In this paper we represent one specific instantiation of contextualised mobile social software for learning called contextualised blogging. Contextualised blogging combines the community aspects and flexible content access of a mobile blog with the adaptation to real-world settings made possible by contextualised computing. By combining both social and physical context information, we aim to improve current informal learning approaches. A special kind of data matrix symbols, called semacodes, is used to relate information from a blog to physical objects. The contextualised blogging application in this paper is developed in three steps. First, a conceptual model of the problem domain will be described. Second, a general technical framework based on this conceptual model will be developed. Finally, a specific instantiation of the technical framework called “ContextBlogger” is presented. The paper concludes with a description of the planned evaluation of the software, a summary, and a conclusion of the results so far.
Nice! For those who are interested, you can find a preliminary draft of the entire paper here.
In the beginning of this week, I started reading the first book in the Discworld series of Terry Pratchet and I really really enjoy it. I knew discworld by the series of computer games that came out in the beginning of the 90s, and when I stumbled into the novels in a book shop in Aachen, on Stephan’s advice I bought the first book in the series. The computer games I really loved because they had this weird sense of humour. But of course this sense of dry über-English humour is even more apparent in the writing.
The story deals of a failed wizard called Rincewind which was expelled from Magic School, mostly because he learnt a forbidden spell, or as Pratchett says the spell learnt him. Moreover, it’s the only spell he knows. Now this failure of a wizard, by some unexpected series of events comes into contact with a tourist from the other side of the Discworld, called Twoflower, and becomes his guide in the city of Ankh Morpork. Obviously, this is a receipe for disaster and soon enough the entire city burns down. Anway, I’m really enjoying this book, even if I only read about 80 pages about now, but the style of writing, the humour and absurdness of the world Pratchett describes makes it a very easy read and nice way to relax after work. For people that like British humour like me, this book is definitely worth the read. Also you can find it around 10 euros, maybe even less, which makes it even more worth trying.
In the last couple of weeks Last.fm seems to become a bit more popular in the office. I think Blondie was the first one to introduce it into the office but now more people are starting to enjoy it. Last.fm is, in scientific terms, a personal recommender system for music; thus, it basically looks at what you listen and recommends new (similar) music to you. Great for discovering new music and new bands. As a total music addict I’ve been using it already for quite some time, ever since Pandora, a similar system, was closed down for European listeners. Even still I like Pandora more, because it basically had better recommendations, but Last.fm is also nice, although the streaming breaks down from time to time. I included a screenshot for your enjoyment
One of the things that really speaks for Last.fm is that it also collects information (called scrobbling) about what you play in other players, like winamp, iTunes and for example your iPod, and uses this to improve your personal profile describing your music taste. Another advantage over Pandora is that the users themselves tag the music (in a way similar to del.icio.us) which really makes it easy to find music, also using non-standard search terms. I also like the descriptions for each artist being displayed when a track is played in the Last.fm player, with handy links to similar music or similar artists. Also, Last.fm displays information about listeners that have similar musical taste (your neighbourhood) and you can add friends to your profile, to see how similar your musical taste is.
So go and try it out and drop me a mail if you like it, so we can compare our musical taste and advice each other about new music. I already bought a couple of cds based on recommendations Pandora gave me, some artists I even never heard of, this is the perfect way of discovering new music. Of course, this way still comes after borrowing cds from your friends or listening to some music together, enjoying some nice beers…
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