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.

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/ ]

The part I enjoy most of MACE meetings are the social events. This time, we were the ones that planned the meeting so we were also allowed to pick the restaurant We picked the Auberge de Rousch, because we already had a meeting there once, and the food was of very high quality; also it has a very good atmosphere. I think it was also a good decision, food was good and I think we all had a splendid time. I must say I had an amazing time; every meeting we get to know each other a little better, and it seems that every meeting results in more and more laughter. I think our table was certainly the loudest, and I really enjoyed the company of my other MACE colleagues; Tally, Dirk, Christian, Marius, and Elisa, whom I was teasing a bit now and then . Unfortunately, the evening went by too fast, so fast even that Till and Tina weren’t able to join us, and hence all the efforts of Elisa to safe them some coupons for drinks were in vain. Before I noticed it, we were already leaving and I was already travelling back home through a quite heavy hail storm; probably Mother Earth’s way of keeping me awake

Next day, was the main meeting day, and therefore started quite early (too early!) at 9.00 in the morning; I arrived, still sleepy (also because a quite heavy but fun weekend) at 8.30 and Tally and I tried to welcome the new guests as well as possible. Because a lot of new people joined, this day was also the longest, it was not until around 18.00 that people were finishing up, which left me cleaning up and rearranging tables and chairs in hurry. Luckily, Alba, Marius, Christian, Matteo and Furio were so kind to help me, because most of the OUNL stuff left already and I was fearing I had to do most of the cleanup myself. Unfortunately, also my attempt to organise an ad-hoc meeting didn’t seem to get that much enthousiasm at first, most of all I think, because people were not enthousiastic to go to Maastricht, and second because I couldn’t really give them some nice Dutch restaurants in Heerlen (as I explained I’m not too fond of Dutch food ). Therefore, me and Marius came up with a different solution to meet up on the Pancratiusplein in Heerlen and then see who would turn up. Finally, we were joined by Roland and Marion from Humance, Stefan and Christian from FIT, and Stefan from EAAE and had a simple, but nice dinner at Oppidom. When we left Oppidom, only Roland, Stefan and me were left, and not wanting to go home yet we went to Café Bracke, were another big MACE group joined us and made the evening complete (see photograph below, taken by Elena Bogani). It was again a fine evening, which again passed too quickly, and finally leaving me in a hurry to get at least some sleep before the next day.

And then it was already Wednesday, the last day of the meeting. A lot of people left already, which made the group a lot smaller, and most of the discussions a lot shorter. Till gave a nice session for us developers, and I had a couple of nice chats with Alba; even one about work: we are preparing a paper for ICALT 2008 together, and face-to-face some things are just a lot easier to be handled. Around 15:30 the meeting ended, which left me dead tired and also a bit weary that all these nice people were already leaving for home…I really missed their company the day after…but well, we’ll meet again soon, and then again in lovely Ancona…See you there!

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.