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 
After a largely uneventful, quite bumpy landing in Lisboa, and eleven hour travel I arrived in the middle of nowhere in Carvoeiro, Portugal. Although, really hard to reach, the whereabouts of the hotel are just beautiful; a room with a view over a bay and the adjacent ocean. Temperatures also far above the current Dutch ones, which after such a long time let me feel how it is to wear a t-shirt again 
. Yesterday, the day after my arrival, we already had one day of conference, and surprisingly, a really interesting one. Especially, the enthousiasm with most of the presenters is amazing to see, and maybe it’s also because it’s the first conference really related to my own work. Finally, seeing some different perspectives on m-learning is really refreshing, especially when realising that on most of the previous conferences/winter/summerschools I was kind of a black sheep in the family; almost the only one doing something mobile. The afternoon was very very nice, we had a guided tour of the vicinity of the Hotel and visited two towns, Lagos and Silje, both pitoreske and quiet Portuguese cities. Most of the time, I spend in good company of Guila(Italian) and Heloisa (Brazilian), and had an amazing time in the evening, during the conference dinner, when the wine rose to our heads and yours truly was even convinced to take part in one of the traditional Portuguese folklore dances (and yes I sucked at it, but it was great fun). Today, the second day of the conference already seems promising again, and I can only hope it will be something like Yesterday. I also hope we will have some time to see some more of the surroundings of the hotel, which seem very pretty. I’ll try to upload some pictures soon for your enjoyment, so stay tuned….
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.
Today I finally got good news after all: the journal paper I wrote a while ago has finally been accepted for publication. The journal it’s accepted for is the “International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education And Life Long Learning(IJCEELLL)”. All I have to do is apply some minor changes and after that I will have my first journal paper published. This is really a relief and now I can focus on the upcoming papers. The paper I published is titled A reference model for mobile social software for learning and provides amongst others a state-of-the-art of mobile social software. Also we classified this mobile social software and identified limitations and possible improvements for learning applainces. Futhermore, we shortly spoke of one of our software solutions called “ContextBlogger”.
Anyway, suffice it to say I’m really happy about it and will have a beer or two this evening to celebrate!
Just got back from an interesting visit to RWTH Aachen. It felt awesome to be back in what I now start considering as my second hometown, alas it was only for a work meeting, which lasted for two hours. But what a meeting it was! Marcus, my supervisor, asked me last week, during the summerschool, if I would be wanting to visit the MediaLab in Aachen together with him; always curious and happy to find out new things and make new contacts I happily replied yes to his question. After a small trip from our beloved OUNL to RWTH (actually it took the GPS receiver longer to get a signal than the trip lasted), Marcus, Wim and I were received by prof. Jan Borchers in what they called Media Space an interactive room containing three smartboards and loads of Apple hardware: I think the namesake would have drooled seeing how much!
First followed an interesting presentation of Tico Ballagas about two of his projects. One, called Rexplorer, was an interactive GPS based city tour that guided the user through the city of Regensburg, Germany and let him or her explore its past. The tour was presented as a game in which the tourist has to wander through Regensburg in search of paranormal activity. On detection of this activity, the tourist had to make a special incantation, swinging his want in a special way, to come in contact with the ghosts of a past long forgotten. The ghosts would tell the tourist something about the past of Regensburg, but also would give him some task to fulfill. Pretty interesting I say.
After that, Tico presented iStuff, a very interesting, though slightly more technical presentation. iStuff is a technical framework for ubiquitous computing that makes it possible to abstract most of the difficulties of using sensor and actuators and thus makes fast prototyping of mobile applications possible, and all that in Java! This part of the presentation was really really interesting for me, because iStuff will probably solve some of my problems. Especially, since I have been struggling to get the ContextBlogger to work and more importantly I start to realise that I cannot do all the programming work on my own, how much I would want to… I just do not get enough time to start everything from scratch. Needless to say that after arriving home, I immediately started checking out the toolkit. Seems promising so far.
Tico’s presentation finished and I would have thought we would go home afterwards, but nothing of the sort. Prof. Borchers took us to a little room besides the Media Space and introduced us to one of his students working on a new way of HCI: a table that displayed a computer-generated image that could be manipulated with your hands. Marcus, Wim and I gazed at the table in delight and tried our best to play the game presented on it. Finally, not succeeding in bringing all lemmings safe to their home, we went back to the Media Space. Another presentation about the capabilities of the Media Space, which might be pretty interesting for OUNL. Actually it turned out to be a fruitful visit, that gave us all enough food for thought. Also, the bonds between RWTH and OUNL might be tightened, because Marcus invited Borchers both for a return visit to OUNL and to give a guest lecture at the next Winterschool in Innsbruck, hope he accepts!
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