In a current project with Tim DeJong, and Bashar al Takrouri we build a contextualized blogging system which allows you to attach blog entries and categories, or even tags to physical objects. The connection can be made via bar code, semacode tags, or outdoors via GPS location.
I have supervised two Master Thesis about Mobile and Location Aware Gaming. Martina Unger and Lynn Zielke developed Locatory a location aware games based on WLAN Tracking and a Flash Application enabling two teams to play.
Das Portal des europaeischen Projects MACE ist online.
http://mace-project.eu/
The MACE project sets out to transform the ways of e-learning about architecture in Europe. It will integrate vast amounts of content from diverse repositories created in several large previous projects as well as from existing architectural design communities.
I am a coorganizer of the the TENCompetence Winter School is considered as an intense training and collaboration on the core topics related to the TENCompetence project, building the European Network for lifelong competence development. The programme includes lectures and hands-on sessions from leading experts in the field. Our ambition is to stimulate emergence of special interest groups and learning networks as well as to support joint research opportunities. PhD students from the PRO-LC Cluster as well as from outside are invited to participate and become part of the TENCompetence research community.
Find more information about the Winterschool here.
TENCompetence is funded by the European Commission through the IST Programme. It is developing and using infrastructure to support individuals, groups and organisations in lifelong competence development. Find out more about Tencompetence.
http://www.tencompetence.org/
on 15.11.06 I visisted the Mobile Learning Day at FU Hagen and gave a presentation about contextualized learning with mobile devices.
You can find the slides published under Creative Commons Licence on DSpace of the OUNL here.
Today I participate in the KickOff of the MACE Project (Metadata for Architectural Contents in Europe).
The MACE project sets out to transform the ways of e-learning about architecture in Europe. It will integrate vast amounts of content from diverse repositories created in several large previous projects as well as from existing architectural design communities.
Wenn Du ein Schiff bauen willst, dann trommle
nicht Männer zusammen, um Holz zu beschaffen,
Aufgaben zu verteilen, sondern lehre die Männer
die Sehnsucht nach dem weiten, endlosen Meer.
Antoine de Saint Exuperie
I supervised the master thesis project of Tim Sodhi from RWTH Aachen the project description below is taken from taken from the blog of Amin Chatti:
User-driven annotation of learning content allows the user to interact with it in a flexible and an intuitive manner and hence personalize the content. This interaction, in most cases, follows the “paper and pen” note-taking paradigm. Though not without its advantages, this paradigm does not scale when the courses are delivered online as web pages. These paper notes are not synchronous with the content, hence may seem out of context, they may be misplaced, and don’t make allowances for collaborative learning. In this project we have designed and implemented u-Annotate, a user-driven freeform digital ink annotation application for web e-Learning content which aims at facilitating the learner to annotate the online content with the aid of pen computing devices such as graphic tablets, etc. Learners can freely mark up the content, save the annotations for recall at a later date, as well as share these with other learners.
u-Annotate endeavors to completely replace the paper-and-pen paradigm for the annotating needs. With the aid of alternate input devices, the web page can be thought of as a digital canvas where the user can enter her notes in the marginalia, and draw in a freeform way with a myriad of tools, and enter text via a keyboard into special text boxes.
Flash 8 with ActionScript 2.0 was chosen to be the development tool of choice for the provision of the front-end and rendering/retrieval based on criteria which were a) Support for overlays: SWF files can be transparently overlaid on top of the HTML content. This is the ability to be transparently overlaid in a separate DIV layer with Z Index greater than that of the underlying content. b) Browser Independence: The Flash program once embedded in a web page, can be run on any browser that supports the Macromedia Flash 8 player plug-in. c) Performance: The suitability of the application depends in great part on the basis of how well it performs i.e. speed of rendering, the amount of CPU stress it entails etc. The Flash application performs quite well on these tests.
Project participants are Informatik V, RWTH Aachen University, Germany, bureau42 GmbH in Cologne, Germany and the Open University of Netherlands at Heerlen (NL).
For more informations, please visit the project homepage.