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.

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!