Marcus Specht

National Workshop on Seamless Learning Support with SURF Academy

2013-04-06T14:09:53Z

The videos are now online and the talk is recorded very nice! Thanks SURF Academy!

Today I gave a keynote at the Symposium:

"Altijd en overal vertrouwd toegang tot de leer- en samenwerkingsomgeving"

"Anytime and Everywhere Personal Access to your Learning and Collaboration Facilities"

About 100 persons mostly from higher education are participating in the event, you can download my introdoctury keynote here:

Specht, M. (2013, 21 March). Seamless Learning Support. Keynote given at the Seminar Altijd en overal vertrouwd toegang tot de leer- en samenwerkingsomgeving organized by SURF Academy, De Glazen Ruimte, Maarssen, The Netherlands.

http://hdl.handle.net/1820/4841

In the introduction I talked about "the seams" in learning and how we can bridge these gaps with different technologies.

In the parallel session there have been very interesting presentions both on technological questions as sharing hardware and network facilities, or usage of 4G for the mobile learning of the future as also more requirements analysis or user oriented design issues.

New Publication

2013-01-17T09:32:48Z

Keywords: Wireless networks and mobile devices are widely

available.

This allows not only for education independent from

time and place. Also, adaption to individuals, places, and situations

may be realized, and different scenarios are seamlessly

converging.

http://portal.ou.nl/documents/95536/45126184-b9f4-4166-a450-4b9c5af7bd61

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Lucke, U., Specht, M. (2012). Mobilität, Adaptivität und Kontextbewusstsein im E-Learning. i-Com 1.2012.

Instant gratification and slow food ?

2012-07-22T09:41:07Z

Tony Shin has recently created an infographic on instant gratification and changes on the time of feedback and reward in an information society.

I think this gives an interesting perspective on our perception of time, our patience and asks you some reflection.

Some facts from the infographic are:

when the replies to Google Searches would be reduced by 4/10ths of a second this would bring down the searches by 8 mil a day from the total 3 bil
if your webpage takes more than 4 secs to load 1 in 4 will kill the load
40% of shoppers will abandon the shoppage when it takes longer than 3sec
and this is not only visible for information but also for food, half would not return to a restaurant where you would need to wait, 1 in 5 would become rude to the person serving too slow ...

So in general I think there are some important problems we will face when looking forward into an ever faster consumption and delivery of information and we need to tackle these points earlier or later:

Ever faster delivery of information leads to impatience of users, but was this like that before? I was in Turin last week and me and my colleague Fred de Vries went to a very nice restaurant, we did not have a reservation before but the waiting in the cue and becoming an appointment for half an hour later was not a sign for the bad quality of the restaurant. In the contrary the full restaurant was the high quality! In the low quality stuff you can get everything everytime, of course in low quality. So you can argue that in the digital age there is an other economy of scale and another relation between the quality of service and the delivery of digital and physical goods. I would be inline with that partly for the level of digital services but I think we tend to forget the human part in information consumption and ... learning and making use of delivered information. So I think one should reflect about the quality of human decision making, learning, and we need to define a new quality of human knowledge in an age of instant infromation delivery.
I think it is somehow scaring if humans loose awareness of when they transfer ways of interacting with digital goods onto everyday environments and human-to-human interaction as also their own behavior. I a sense through this human tend to forget about their "unique selling point" in a world where robots alreay win rock-paper-scissors 100%
http://youtu.be/3nxjjztQKtY
A certainly related topic is notification and I think one qualitative change in computer systems that has an important impact Technology Enhanced Learning is the ability to use and feedback real time data to humans from ambient and ubiquitous sensor systems. This will definitely leed to an overflow of notification and feedback systems, so shortening the feedback cycles for humans also has a big drawback, i.e. doing that over a longer period of time they loose their tolerance of frustration (btw a basic point of discussion in the education of kids ;-P)

Of course lots of other things to say about this. Thanks Tony for the nice infographic you can find at www.onlinegraduateprograms.com/instant-america/

Slow food mobile learning

2012-07-22T09:26:27Z

Last week I was participating in a very inspiring workshop at ITC ILO in Turino. With a very interesting group we have been discussing issues around technologies, policies, trends, and questions of mobile learning in a global context. I have learned quite a lot about the use of mobiles in Africa and trends and developments in South Africa.

Jacqueline Batchelor and Adele Botha have been sharing some of their projects and experiences and I think this is very innovative and interesting work and opens a lot of new perspectives also in my perception on mobiles and their potential in an African and world wide context. As I noted earlier in some of my talks often we make the mistake of seeing technology in general too stongly from our cultural context and the development therein. This is perfectly fine as a user as a research in technology development and the use of the technology it is an absolute necessity to reframe ones perspective on the technology and it's function in a cultural context. This is definitely what you have to and can learn from intercultural research exchange.

Furthermore Turin is a lovely place and one can feel the mood of slow food there this links to another cultural difference and recent reading I have came across. (see next post)

Dual Screen iOS apps and synchronization of media channels

2012-06-27T07:49:11Z

In my model on ambient learning support called AICHE I have described several processes important for learning with ambient and embedded information technology.

The main processes that I have foreseen in 2009 have been aggregation, enrichment, synchronisation, and framing. See the complete paper here.

Every now and then I see new apps or model popping up that support this idea but yesterday I really saw a nice fit and I think some quite nice interactive way of developing dual screen apps for iOS with Airplay for Apple TV.

Brightcove introduced a cloud-hosting service for apps which support the development especially of dual screen applications, a model that can recently be seen in several new hardware and software concepts introduced. New home entertainment consoles as the Nintendo Wii U which brings a tablet with additional meta-information and controller options of the introduction of the "My Xbox Live for iPhone" for the XBOX360 follow a comparable model. SYnchronize different screen real estate and adapt the information adapted to the functionality needed of the function best supported by the device.

I think this is a general trend that can be seen in entertainment and mobile technologies that can be pretty useful for learning support. In the video of the introduction of the brightcove app cloud for dual display apps even educational applications are introduced as one model. The example is having multiple choice questions displays on a tablet while watching TV.

http://youtu.be/A1RjXsLZ2Ik

BTW from the Appleinsider article: "A recent survey by Razorfish and Yahoo of more than 2,000 smartphone users found that 80 percent of respondents use their mobile device while watching TV."

Seminar on Tablets in Education

2012-05-22T07:19:47Z

On the 16th of may I gave a keynote at the "seminar on the use of tablets in het onderwijs". There have been about 250 people from Basisschool, Secondary School, en Higher Education interested in the use of tablets in education.

I gave an overview of why tablets make a difference and what characteristics you should think of when designing the use of tablets in schools. Find my presentation in space for download:

Specht, M. (2012, 16 May). Tablet technologie in het onderwijs. Presentation given at the session on tablets in education at PH Limburg, Hasselt. Belgium.

URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1820/4293

The following presentation by Bart Boelen (Apple Distinguished Educator) gave an overview of the Apple Ecosystem and all iPad related services, apps, and functionalities. Learn more about his activities at -> www.schoolbytes.be

The third talk demonstrated the use of Android tablets and the Google EcoSystem as Google apps for education and how these can be used in the classroom. (Wouter Bouchez, http://www.tabbled.com)

Fourth talk was a presentation of Windows 8 and it's cross platform capabilities. Lots of setup seems to be quite similar to what Apple is doing: Cloud based documents and apps, app store, consistent touch well interface. One difference is well that the interface design seems to be consistent for all devices. Presented by Jurgen van Duvel, Microsoft Education.

Last talk was about if kids and teenagers are actually waiting for tablets in school. This was a great and inspiring talk from Pedro De Bruyckere, see his blogpost at: http://xyofeinstein.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/tablets-in-het-onderwijs-mijn-presentatie-voor-de-studienamiddag-van-phl/

Pedro is a great speaker keeping a fine balance between critical perspective on technology and constructive and inspiring recommendations on the use of technology.

TEL dictionary Adaptive Learning Environment

2012-05-05T12:04:30Z

Thanks to Nicolas Balachef who is Chair of the STELLAR TEL dictionary, I have provided a new netry on the TEL deictionary about Adaptive Learning Environment.

In the entry I give a high level view on Adaptive Learning Environments and components. I did quite some research on this topic whi h actually started in my Doctoral Thesis at the University of Trier.

I started the thesis in 1995 and worked for about 3 years very intensively on the topic. Mainly implementing systems and doing experiments on adaptive hypermedia approaches. In this time also Peter Brusilovsky was a visiting scholar in Trier and I enjoyed this time very much and I think it was a very intense working group on the topic.

Also this time had quite some impact on research and market for adaptive educational systems I would say.

Peter Brusilovsky off course is "Mister Adaptive Hypermedia" and still doing lots of interesting research in this area. My doctoral supervisor Prof. Gerhard Weber developed the system we have been working on (based on CL-HTTP, Common Lisp Hypermedia Server from MIT) into a very powerful adaptive learning environment with authoring tool which is marketed under NetCoach as a commercial learning solution. Gerhard Weber also provides lots of very good online courses and materials on the PH Freiburg Learning Server. And still the grand father of all these systems is online the LISP tutorial so if you want to get in AI and learn some LISP this is the place to go ;-).

In my research there I explored some issues on adaptive annotation of hypertexts, adaptive recommender systems, adaptive user interfaces, and others. I have implemented prototypes for adaptive task sequencing, adaptive task selection and user models with different algorithms for modeling user knowledge. Interestingly a lot of the personalisation and adaptation discussion still circles around the basic concepts we have discussed in these days, but of course there are new ways to aggregate and collect data about users, environments and other sources for adaptation.

See Nicolas Blog post about the entry at http://theo-rifortel.blogspot.fr/2012/05/adaptive-learning-environment-new-entry.html.

Some of my main papers about the works in adaptive hypermedia are:

Specht, M. and A. Kobsa (1999). Interaction of Domain Expertise and Interface Design in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia. Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Adaptive Systems and User Modeling on the World Wide Web at WWW-8, Toronto, Canada, and UM99, Banff, Canada, 89-93.

Specht, M., Oppermann, R., (1998). ACE - Adaptive Courseware Environment. The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 4 (1998), 1, 141 -161.

Specht, M., (1998). Adaptive Methoden in computerbasierten Lehr/Lernsystemen. In: GMD research series, 98, 24, GMD, Sankt Augustin, (1998), 149 pages , ISBN 3-88457-348-9

Schoech, V., Specht, M., Weber, G., (1998). ADI - An Empirical Evaluation of a Pedagogical Agent. World Conference on Educational Multimedia, ED-MEDIA98. 1998. Freiburg, Germany

Specht, M. (1998). Empirical evaluation of adaptive annotation in hypermedia. In T. Ottmann and I. Tomek, editors, Proceedings of the 10th World Conference on Educational Telecommunications, ED-MEDIA & ED-Telecom '98, Freiburg, Germany, pages 1327--1332, Charlottesville, VA, 1998. AACE.

Specht, M., Weber, G., and Brusilovsky, P., (1995). Episodische Benutzermodellierung zur individuellen Interfaceadaptation. Workshop Adaptivität und Benutzermodellierung in Interaktiven Softwaresystemen. München: Siemens AG.

Matchmaking TopSectoren Media & ICT

2012-04-25T06:00:08Z

Yesterday I participated in the Media and ICT matchmaking meeting in Hilversum. I did four pitches and as the organisers told I was the most busy pitcher ;-). In the pitches you could not make use of any slides and had 2 minutes to present and 3 minutes to answer questions.

The areas for pitches and my short stories have been:

Business Innovation Media and ICT: The Open University is busy with a new kind of educational model and business model behind it. We have to think out of the box to make the OER models happen but there are more and more success examples (flat world, coursera with Stanford courses of 200.000 participants, online MOOC, ...) I am reall y curious to get this off the ground in the Netherlands so my pitch was to find the best partners to launch new initiatives for HE and CPD based on OER and online learning networks.
Design thinking: I started of with the long history of CELSTEC/OTEC on instructional design and new developments in orchestration of learning. There are new needs and ways for designing learning in an always on, always available, always information world. We look at real time data streams from sensors, build artefacts and media representations that help users/learners to understand their environments and their own learning processes. We look for partners in this endeavour as also for companies that want to apply our research results to create new environments for performance support, active learning and curiosity.
Big Data: Starting with my history in user modelling, learner modelling and adaptive systems. The OU has a long history in personal learning support via online media. Nowadays the game has changed in social media you have lots of data. In our focus topic Learning Analytics we aggregate all these data sources and do research on how to mirror these data to learners to understand how can we support personal learning, reflection, performance support, and individual developments. In our pitch I was calling for partners to implement systems in their daily practice based on our models and technologies in LA. Furthermore I pitched for our activity on shared research data sets based on the DataTEL project.
Smart and Social Media: I was talking about some of our experiences with learning media and metadata for media. Dropping numbers as that in 2011 mobile gaming was about 11 bil dollar business and a forecast for mobile learning is a 6.8 bil EUR business in 2015. Offerng opportunities for cooperation in research, laboratories, and education on new media. Based on current research programmes on learning networks and learning media CELSTEC is adding value in understanding how to use serious games, social media, and mobile media for learning and professional development.

Comments welcome!

SIKS course on mobile, ubiquitous, and contextual Learning

2012-04-25T06:01:25Z

Last week thursday friday we co-ordganized a SIKS course on mobile, personal and contextualised Learning: the "Advanced SIKS course on Technology-enhanced learning".

In that context I gave an introduction to mobile and ubiquitous and contextual learning and highlighted some main aspects about mobility, context and what is important about these issues for learning.

The slides are available at http://dspace.ou.nl/handle/1820/4227

After the introduction we did the Invent your App session and did get quite interesting results of new apps that take into account the the students presented their apps as if they are planning for a new company with a highly innovative product. Was quite fun!

Augmented Reality eLearning 2012 talk

2012-04-25T06:02:57Z

Today I gave an expert session on "mobile augmented reality (MAR) in het onderwijs" at the eLearning congres in the Brabanthallen 1931 at the eLearning congress 2012. Background information on the event is on the webpage http://www.e-learningevent.nl/e-blog. The session was full and I had some positive feedback on the session. Basicaly I presented some patterns about how to use MAR from shared perspectives on 3D objects to collaborative notes sharing attached to physical objects. The more I talk about AR and learning i think it is linked to the synchronisation process in AICHE, i.e. the key question for successful use of AR and MAR is how you design the link between the digital media and the physical environment.

The fair is much more focused on business market and professional training compared to IPON. Some interesting talks and demos I have come across. iTour 360 is one of the e-learning award winners that does some stuff quite comparable to what we do with ARLearn, it is a nice tool for building tours and deliver on mobiles and has some aspects about integrating real time information and location-based filtering.

All information from my talk is available online at:

a whitepaper about mobile augmented reality at the eBlog:
http://www.e-learningevent.nl/e-blog

a youtube playlist with examples for augmented reality at:
http://www.youtube.com/ playlist?list=PLA2A5852D66C31396
OpenU Topic Mobiel Leren

http://openu.nl

http://portal.ou.nl/en/web/topic-mobile-learning
follow my blog for updates:

http://www.marcuspecht.de

Mobiele Technologie Talk at IPON2012 (updated)

2012-04-25T06:03:57Z

Just some reflection on my keynote at IPON (ICT Platform Onderwijs) in Utrecht today.

first find my slides in dspace at:

Specht. M. (2012, 29 March). Mobiele technologie in het onderwijs. Presentation at the IPON 2012 ICT Platform Onderwijs, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1820/4207

Basically IPON is a trade show with a variety of podia and stands of all kinds of technology and software companies offering services on the dutch market.

I gave a talk about "mobile technology for learning" mainly following the argumentation line:

A calculator is a mobile device used since ages in the classroom.
smartphones deliver the same functionality and much more!
so but there is one problem …
kids do not want to use it for the things that teachers want them to do.
So as a follow up I showed several apps and some ideas on how to use them in the classroom and beyond as the main power of mobile devices lies in that they
- are a bridge to the world of the users
- these are personal and always with them devices
- they can be used in and outside the classroom
- they can collect media of all sorts
- they can be contextualized (or adaptive to the situation)
some of the apps that I used:
- iStandford, Moodle Mobile
- audioboo, Evernote
- weather, Nike+, bar coo, wikitude
- whatsapp, Twitter, Facebook
- ARLearn, Mooble

Basically one can say already with quite some basic tools you get out of the box you can implement mobile and ubiquitous learning support today. In most cases users should focus on one feature to be introduced at the time, and understand what they can do with it.

After that I watched two other sessions: Guido van Dijk was talking about Connect College and how the school developed a vision leading to the ICT implementation strategy. The result of this project was a quite impressive movie about the vision statement of Connect College which I will post as soon as I get my hands on.

A second session was announced about Bring Your Own Device, but to be honest as a conclusion of that session one can say: "You need a safe and stable network on which users can log in with different devices!" Yes! and of course you should purchase that with supplier XYZ.

In general there have been quite some interesting sessions on the trade show, further I have not seen so many interactive whiteboards on a trade show ever. Ok the last years I have not been on trade shows in general. So in this sense it seem obvious, lot of vendors want to sell their 80" touch screens that you can use as table or hanging on the wall. This seem to fit quite well with our research works on Ambient Displays and how to use them for learning. Nevertheless most of these solutions are really expensive still, so you can ask: Should I school really invest in screens of 10.000 each? ups.

Toolkit for DIY Sensor Recording

2012-03-16T09:31:12Z

Today I came across a toolkit for building corss platform DIY sensor recording apps on iOS and Android.

AntiMap http://theantimap.com/

"The AntiMap is an Open Source creative toolset for recording and visualising your own data. The project currently consists of a smart phone utility application (AntiMap Log) for data capture, and a couple of web/desktop applications (AntiMap Simple and AntiMap Video) for post analysis and data visualisation.

Our aim is to produce new and creative representations of data. If you would like to contribute or have created a visualisation you would like to share, please contact us."

They have a nice snowboarding video:

AntiMap Video application: Unofficial snowboard edit from Trent Brooks on Vimeo.

Music: The XX - Intro (1984 remix) http://soundcloud.com/the1984/the-xx-intro-1984-remix.

My aim for this project is to aid in the progression of snowboarding and skiing by means of gathering real-time rider data and post analyzing with video synchronization.

HOW IT WORKS:
I used an Android phone (HTC Sensation) with a custom built application (AntiMap Log), placed upright against my lead hip/waist inside my pants to log all the stats and information. This position is the most stable and yields the most accurate results for spinning/rotation when snowboarding. Just placing it in any of your pockets works fine for everything else except rotation as it moves around when loose.

Video was captured with a Go Pro camera. In the first segment of the video I had it attached to my helmet, and in the next segment I'm just holding it (I forgot the camera strap - idiot!). Whilst I decided to film myself for these early tests, having someone else do the filming would be ideal.

So data and video are recorded separately to keep the riding experience as unaffected as possible. Then once your pow riding day is over and you've recorded that perfect run, you can synchronise your video and data easily with the AntiMap Video desktop application and play it all back.

POTENTIAL USES:
- Real time snowboard/ski games. I was originally inspired for this project by playing Shaun White snowboarding on Nintendo Wii.
- Making personal snow/ski movies.
- Training/tutoring tool.
- Competitions. I’d love to see technology like this used in an accompanying role at televised events such as the Winter X Games. Giving spectators a bit more insight through data and stats would be invaluable.
- Whilst I specifically built this application for snow/ski, it could just as easily be adapted to suit other sports such as mountain biking, skateboarding, parkour, gymnastics, even running or walking.

TECHNICAL DETAILS:
Data is gathered through a smart phone utility application built in Processing called ‘AntiMap Log’. The application logs latitude, longitude, compass direction, speed, distance, and time to a standard CSV file at 30fps. Currently Android only, iPhone version is under development.

The post analysis application, ‘AntiMap Video’ is a desktop application built in Openframeworks. It allows the logged data from the mobile application to be synced with video footage (not captured with phone). The standout feature of the AntiMap Video application is spin detection, which uses the compass data to accumulate a rotation value and attempt to determine when a 360, 540, 720, 900, 1080 has occurred and which direction (frontside/backside). The rider’s path and current position is graphically generated from the recorded latitude and longitude into a mini map. Speed, distance, and time stats also update on screen.

AntiMap Video is still an early working prototype at the moment, but I will be continuing development and improving before making it available for download. Application and source code will be released free under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/). This is the first of a few free applications I plan on releasing for the AntiMap project which visualize logged data from the mobile application.

SNOWBOARDER'S & SKIER'S:
I am looking for testers to help create the first official AntiMap Video. I failed in my search for the perfect run at Mr Ruapehu (1 bluebird day at Whakapapa with no helmet strap for the camera and no park, followed by 3 days of whiteout at Turoa). I just recently left New Zealand, and won’t even be close to snow till at least next winter, so need some help! In short, I just want someone to film their perfect run landing a couple of spins off medium/large jumps whilst running the mobile application. If anyone is interested, drop me an email theantimap@gmail.com. All you need is an Android phone and a camera (preferably a POV helmet cam like the Go Pro).

I’m a little disappointed I was unable to find my perfect run and had to Frankenstein together videos to show different parts of the applications functionality. But overall I’m happy with the results of the tests.

UPDATE:
Applications and source code for iPhone & Android available: http://theantimap.com/

Interesting collection of best practices for CRS

2012-03-12T16:31:49Z

Classroom response systems are often named as a popular way to integrate mobile technology in the classroom. As comprehensive collection of best practices and reflection on educational practices can be found at:

http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/teaching-guides/technology/clickers/
This lists types of questions, types of learning activities, and lots of examples of clicker usage in different domains and application scenarios.

Set of references with underpinning research at:

http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/docs/classroom-response-system-clickers-bibliography/
this lists references structured to introduction, effects, discipline specific etc.

Building Sensor Based Apps for iOS update

2012-03-11T15:19:58Z

Last year I build some apps makeing use of sensors build into the iPhone.

This blog post gives an overview of resources I have explored and found helpful as also examples used.

I tried out some sample code and started to experiment with sensors build into the iPhone.

A first pretty cool example reminded me of the ContextBlogger that Tim once started. Tagging events with timestamp, tags, GPS location. This is basically what you get from TaggedLocations: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#samplecode/TaggedLocations/Introduction/Intro.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40008914. If you want to try yourself beware you can only deploy stuff to phones and not run them in the simulator as you need the sensor stuff in the hardware, so compile and run will give you an error with the "No architectures to compile for (ARCHS=i386, VALID_ARCHS=armv6 armv7)".
Second one was a Teslameter (Hi Stefaan ;-)) this one gives you the Gyroscope data and visualizes them in a kind of simple trikorder user interfaces. https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#samplecode/Teslameter/Introduction/Intro.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40008931
A simple "air level" Wasserwaage is the third one. Interesting in relation to keep balance whilst doing an other activity, so one could use the module in experiments to calm down as in the Air Medic game http://www.airmedicsky1.org/

More example to come, good book is http://programmingiphonesensors.com/

Needed to add this: working with Phidgets on iOS: http://www.phidgets.com/documentation/Tutorials/Getting_Started_iOS.pdf basically it seems to work like Arduino sensors and you can access all kinds of external sensors attached to a machine via an IP address and a socket. They have quite some sensor kits: http://www.phidgets.com/products.php?category=6

OS X Dictionaries for Dutch

2012-03-11T14:50:15Z

So a lot of times I come across the problem that I have to look up a word or check the detailed meaning of a word when reading and writing dutch.

Most of the time until now I used van Dale widget, which gives you a good solution but I never found a good way to integrate with the existing dictionary in OS X. So now solution found.

On the the website http://mysite.mweb.co.za/residents/clasqm/os-x/extra-dictionaries-for-dict/dutch.html

I found several dictionaries as

From Dutch:

Čeština ➠➠ Nederlands (2.8 MB)

Dansk ➠➠ Nederlands (442KB)

English ➠➠ Nederlands (1.6 MB)

Français ➠➠ Nederlands (2 MB)

Svenska ➠➠ Nederlands (1.3 MB)

To Dutch:

Nederlands ➠➠ Čeština (2.5 MB)

Nederlands ➠➠ Dansk (726KB)

Nederlands ➠➠ Deutsch (3.5 MB)

Nederlands ➠➠ English (4.6 MB)

Nederlands ➠➠ English (2.2 MB)

Nederlands ➠➠ Français (3.3 MB)

Nederlands ➠➠ Svenska (1.4 MB)

that you just can download and add to your system folder for dictionaries, after restarting Dictionary.app in OS X you can use these ;-).

Sensors and Biofeedback

2011-12-02T08:05:01Z

We are currently kicking off some cooperation project for the evaluation of bio-sensor feedback for more focused work. I think there are quite some interesting technologies on the horizon in the area of sensors, bio-feedback, and learning and perofrmance support.

When visiting Stanford University I had some talks with Neema Moraveji (http://moraveji.org/) director of the Calming Technology Lab. They do interesting work on breath control, user feedback, and using the state of being calm for more productive and efficient work. I remember the idea of "if you are working with a computer for your body it's like being attacked all the time".

An interesting aspect is how to design these kind of tools so that the distraction from the main activities is not high. Split attention effects for monitoring your calm status on the one hand and being productive on the other hand. One idea would probably be that by monitoring your state for some time reactivates senses that we had before and that we have just unlearned by every day stress and schooling.

In one of the upcoming experiment we will probably look how we can use the monitoring of breath, skin resistance, and/or heartbeat while answering multiple-choice questions.

On ths image see my colleague being hooked up to a sensor controlling a bio-feedback game.

Soon 1700 downloads of Chapter on Mobile and Ubiquitous Learning in L3T

2011-11-02T10:19:46Z

Last year I wrote an article in german to give an overview on mobile and ubiquitous learning developments for the L3T book. Checking out a new visualiation tool if found that the chapter was downloaded nearly 1700 times (1690 to be correct). So I think quite a success. Nice work done together with Martin Ebner from Graz.

So if you speak german and want to read some overview and starting point for mobile and ubiquitous learning get the chapter here:

http://l3t.tugraz.at/index.php/LehrbuchEbner10/article/view/74/36

of browse the whole book at:

http://l3t.eu

1st Workshop on Visualisation and Ambient Displays for Learning

2011-09-20T06:49:02Z

Today we are running the "1st International Workshop on Enhancing Learning with Ambient Displays and Visualization Techniques"
http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=17111&copyownerid=26396

Abstract: Visualization techniques have been researched as a way to help people deal with the abundance of information. It makes use of the principles in Gestalt Theory that explains the human visual capacity, such as proximity, similarity, continuity, symmetry, closure and relative size. They rely on the design of effective and efficient interactive visual representations that users can manipulate to solve specific tasks themselves. This approach is especially useful when a person does not know what questions to ask about the data or when (s)he wants to ask better, more meaningful questions. At the same time displays have become a pervasive part of our environment in various manifestations. While they were traditionally used to (mainly visually) present information they also become more and more important as interfaces to access and interact with digital information. Following these developments, researchers have recently started to exploit the potential of ambient displays for learning purposes, research cognitive effects, and promote the interaction of learners with their environment."

Agenda

13:00 Welcome

13:15 Ambient Displays to Support Supervised Collaborative Learning - Hamed Alavi and Pierre Dillenbourg

13:45 A first approach to “Learning Dashboards” in formal learning contexts - Dominique Verpoorten, Marcus Specht and Wim Westera

14:15 Mapping the European TEL Project Landscape Using Social Network Analysis and Advanced Query Visualization - Michael Derntl, Dominik Renzel and Ralf Klamma

14:45 Coffee Break

15:00 Suggestable, suggesting books in libraries -- Bram Vandeputte, Michaël Vanderheeren and Erik Duval

15:30 The problems with visualizations and the need for visualisation literacy research -- Kamakshi Rajagopal, Wolfgang Reinhardt and Riina Vuorikari

16:00 Group work: "Defining a Research Agenda for ADVTEL" (1 hour) + Groups presentation

17:30 Wrap up: How to proceed from here, Proceedings, …

18:00 Closure

We are looking forward to interesting presentations and a fruitful discussion. If you have any questions or remarks regarding the workshop or the program, please do not hesitate to contact us. You find all information about the workshop on our website: https://sites.google.com/site/advtel2011/

The twitter hashtag for the workshop is #advtel2011

ORGANISERS

* Joris Klerkx, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
* Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
* Eelco Herder, L3S
* Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen
* Fridolin Wild, KMi, The Open University
* Till Nagel, FH Potsdam
* Marcus Specht, Open Universiteit Nederland
* Marco Kalz, Open Universiteit Nederland
* Dirk Börner, Open Universiteit Nederland

Facebook online education centre launched

2011-09-12T14:39:28Z

Facebook launched an Online Education Centre targeting business education. All build around pages, ads and communities. Adding features as your own apps, facebook credits, social media marketing integrated. Sounds quite impressive. Also most focused contents are stories (http://www.facebook.com/business/sponsoredstories/) where different types of stories are presented.

I wonder how this will influence online learning communities.