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 
Hi everyone, for those who are interested in what I’m doing for a living, I know started a work blog at our newly created Open University Elgg system, you can find my profile here:
http://elgg.ou.nl/tjo/profile/
This also means that most of my work-related stuff will not appear anymore on this blog, as sometimes happened before. I will focus on personal things and hobbies here now, which basically means not much will change.
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….
Well, it’s already more than a week since we have back, so I figured I owed you a wee update. Winterschool 2008 went by just too fast; The Namesake, Ali Nadeem, the Skippyboy, Blondie, and I all had a great time there. Unfortunately, this year’s programme didn’t contain that much relevant information for me, and while I also feel some parts could be improved (for example the overcrowded schedule), I still look back with many happy feelings to the week spent in Innsbruck. Again it was a week of getting to know people in the field of e-learning and meeting again with people we met earlier at the previous Winterschool or Summerschool; luckily most of the people were splendid company, which we also noticed at the Wednesday, when we formed bonds sledging down a mountain and on Thursday, going into Innsbruck for the evening for a jolly night full of laughter, pints of vitamine G, and crappy pizza’s. It seems to me that these events were even most important, because these are were real contacts are made; first getting to know each other personally, can lead to lasting contacts and maybe even joint work in a later period. Apart from this, I think for me, the very last lecture, given by Scott Wilson about Notification/Awareness systems and OpenId, was most useful and interesting. Luckily, this year we did not have to drive back all the way from Innsbruck and the plain ride was far more relaxed than the twelve and a half hour journey(inclusive two hours of traffic jam in the middle of nowhere) back then.
Finally, I do not want you to miss the Namesake’s account of my great sledging skills, which resulted in the two of us almost dying, me from almost hitting a tree, and him from sheer laughter, so here we go:
Wednesday and what a day! I almost never have laughed so hard, or have been scared for my life! This of course alludes to the sledding day! The Namesake, I, Danish and Enrique forged a bond of men, as we sledded down the DEEP incline! Of course nothing comes easy and there were mistakes a plenty, one of which had the Namesake hurtling down the mountain his arms flailing, him shouting “oh f*ck” as he hurtled with the help of good ol Newton, on his sled. I doubled and nearly fell down, laughing my ass off. Till now that memory of the Namesake flailing around as he hurtled half-way down the mountain, really makes me laugh my butt off. Well done m8! [from: http://tim.sodhis.net/2008/02/24/back-from-innsbruck/ ]
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.
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