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 
Ok, I admit this is work-related, but I’m really happy about it, and hence sharing it with you here as well. My second journal article seems to have beaten the first one in being published. It’s accessible via the ET&S website. If you’re interested, go here. This again is an important milestone in my PhD, and therefore reason for a small party. So for the coming weekend, I will invite some of my friends, like for example Metallica, KT Tunstall, Counting Crows, and Alanis Morisette over to Landgraaf and together with 90,000 other people I’ll celebrate 
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….
Just arrived at the Grillhof in Igls, Vill, Austria near Innsbruck for the second TENCc Winterschool. So much contrast to last year our travels today were, the only disadvantage this year being to get up at a time in the morning me in big ole party mood usually will hit the bed. This because our train already left at 7.10 in the morning, to head for Rotterdam airport where we caugth our flight; one hour flight only which was quite uneventful and the plane manouvring and landing between the mountains gave us a beautiful look at the area already. So much unlinke last year when we had to drive up to Innsbruck, and tha Drachslaa and me had to take turns behind the steering wheel, the journey totalling in an amazing 10 an a half hours total. Now, the Namesake, Danish and me met at Heerlen station, sat down in the train and took a bus to Rotterdam, where we met Skippyboy…so much easier, so much better… The weather here in Austria is just plain awesome, with lots of sun, no clouds and a terrific view of the mountains. Time for a stroll and taking pics; I’ll try to upload a few later. Anyway, I’ll keep you updated! And of course a small picture for your enjoyment.
Last Monday, we had again a big consortium meeting (which involves all partners) of the European project MACE. This time, the meeting was held at Open University of the Netherlands, in downtown Heerlen. So unfortunately, no nice trips for me, but still it was something to live towards and I can say I really was looking forward to meeting everyone in person again; a video conference just does not give the same feeling as real-life interaction. Also, apart from the meetings themselves, a MACE meeting is often a lot of fun, just talking with my fellow colleagues and having a beer together in the evening. We held the meeting in the OUNL Bologna building, where the Learning Experience (LEX) Centre is located. After my first plans to have the meeting at Terworm Castle, I didn’t think this was a good idea, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. To my big surprise, everyone seemed to enjoy the place a lot! I think especially the hospitality of LEX secretary Barbara made everyone, including me, feel at home immediately, and also the atmosphere was very relaxed from the beginning; maybe also the loungy feeling of the LEX building made us feel that way, I’m not sure. Have a look for yourself below.
Got the news already in the Christmas holidays, that my second journal paper has been accepted. We send the paper to the Eductional Technology & Society (ET&S) Journal already somewhere in August, and got word in around November that the paper was accepted if we would apply a lot of changes. Before my Christmas Holidays, I rewrote a big part of the paper, with the remarks of the reviewers as my guideline. Although I had a good feeling about it when I resubmitted the paper it was still a great relief for me, when I heard the final news. Still I have to apply some minor changes for next Tuesday, but these are quite straightforward. So it will be not a big surprised to you that I’m quite happy now that I have half of the papers needed for my PhD submitted and accepted in a journal.
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.
Stefan Apelt just posted a presentation to the MACE BSCW that contained a picture of a comic called Calvin and Hobbes. The comic reminded me of the old days in Sally o’ Briens, the first Irish Pub that was our “Stammkneipe”. Whenever, you would go the men’s toilet there you would see an entire wall of just that comic in front of you, so going for a “wee pee” was a great enjoyment and always you were hearing someone grinning next to you, about some joke in the comics. Also our local newspaper used to post a translation of these comics which have the most perfect sense of humour. I really regret them not anymore being published in the newspaper anymore and also, that no new ones are made anymore because the author regrettably retired some years ago. Especially, Calvin and Hobbes excelled in addressing some day to day issues and illustrating the sheer absurdness of them. The one I found in the presentation, for example, illustrates a lot of the scientific writing in such a truthful manner, I could not help but laugh, so here we go:
En het is weer maandag…ik verwacht dat deze week, mijn laatste voor de vakantie, een hele drukke week zal worden. Als je namelijk denkt dat je alles eindelijk goed gepland hebt, en de laatste dingetjes voor de vakantie wilt afwerken zodat je met een gerust hart op vakantie kan gaan, is er altijd een begeleider die je plannen in de war schopt, en je een behoorlijk grote hoop werk geeft. Dit keer wordt het een journal paper schrijven in één week; zeker als je bedenkt dat ik over het laatste een paar maanden heb gedaan, snap je dat het een behoorlijke brok werk is om het in ongeveer anderhalve week af te ronden. Gelukkig heb ik al iets van een idee en ik hoop dat het genoeg is om door een journal geaccepteerd te worden. Journals willen namelijk meestal resultaten zien, iets dat we op dit moment niet hebben; naja, ik heb er wel voor gezorgd dat de eerste versie van de ContextBlogger software zo goed als af is, maar een journal wil vooral resultaten van experimenten zien.
Dit en vooral onverwacht een grote brok werk op je bord krijgen (het lijkt zelfs pure willekeur) heeft grote gevolgen gehad voor mijn motivatie vorige week; ik was al kapot van de week ervoor, waarin ik twee papers had afgerond
en op het moment dat je denkt dat het eindelijk wat rustiger wordt, komt er weer zoiets naar boven. Ach jah, ik moet zeggen ik het het lekker rustig aangedaan in het weekend en vooral niet aan werk heb gedacht, dus ik kan er deze week weer met verse tegenzin tegenaan en tenslotte hoef ik nog maar vijf dagen. Daarna hoop ik met wat vrolijkere post te komen over miks avonturen in de vakantie…
|
