marcuspecht’s blog

This week I have been talking at EduMedia Conference in Salzburg. I have been invited to give a keynote and talked about changes in information technology for learning, changed usage patterns when moving from web1.0 to web2.0. One of the interesting things is how freely people give away personal data today while it was one of the main topics in user modelling research how to acquire user information build personal profiles and use that for adaptation trying to avoid the coldstart problem .

I met several very interesting and inspiring people including Jay Cross, Steve Wheeler, Graham Atwell and also participated in a interesting TenCompetence session about self-organized learning with interesting contributions.

Furthermore I met a former colleague Andreas Auwaerter beeing really active in podcasting for education, nice thing!

Garr Reynolds gives a very interesting presentation about how to present at authors@google. How to avoid “death by powerpoint”? What is the relation between Jazz and presentation. Great ideas and lots to learn.

At the german LearnTec 2008 tradeshow I participated in a session on contextualized learning: “Lernen im Kontext, Technologien, Anwendungen und didaktische
Perspektiven:Was bringt das Internet of Things für mobiles und
situiertes Lernen?” you can find my slides in DSPACE at http://hdl.handle.net/1820/1177

The session organized by Prof. Schrader from ISNM Luebeck was on contextualized Learning. Other speakers were Ing. Bashar Al Takrouri and Dr. phil. Thomas Winkler.

Together with Fridolin Wild and Sebastian Kelle at the Prolearn Summerschool in Frejus I gave a workshop on SecondLife:

Second life and educational processes
Fridolin Wild, WUW & Marcus Specht, OUNL & Sebastian Kelle, WUW

Furthermore I gave a lecture on Personalization and Contextualization for Learning you can view in Prolearn TV here.

Hi all I am contributing in 2007 to the following conferences and workshops, with some of them you can also meet me.

Workshop on Contextualized Attention Metadata:
personalized access to digital resources, CAMA 2007 June 23, 2007, Vancouver,
British Columbia, Canada

Fachübergreifende Konferenz “Mensch Computer Interaktion”,
Weimar, Germany.

Second European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning,
17-20 September 2007, Crete, Greece

7th IEEE International Conference on Advanced
Learning Technologies, Niigata, Japan.

Invited Session on Recommender Agents
and Adaptive Web-based Systems (RAAWS 2007) at the 11th International
Conference on Knowledge-Based & Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems
KES 2007, Vietri sul Mare 12, 13 and 14 September 2007, Italy

IADIS International Conference Mobile Learning 2007,
Lisbon, Portugal, 5–7 July 2007

11th International Conference on User Modeling (UM 2007),
Corfu, Greece.

IADIS International Conference Web Based Communities 2007
Salamanca, Spain, 18-20 February 2007.

6th IASTED International Conference on Web-Based education,
Chamonix, Frannce. March 14-16, 2007.

A very nice podcast on the Internet of Things can be found at IT conversations: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail717.html

Sterling contrasts waking up in a Internet of Things in 30 years with todays world which is still struggling to find the right labels for “the internet of things”. Very inspiring! Also you should have a look at “Shaping things” by Bruce Sterling.

Some ideas from his talk:

Are words constraining our imagination and search for the best we could make out of machines? AI went wrong because of those writing words about it. Internet of things is not about Intelligence it is about a new relationship towards objects in the real world. This happes in six components:

1. TAGS (Barcode, RFID),
2. POSITIONING SYSTEMS (GEO-LOCATION and tracking systems),
3. SEARCH Engines,
4. Transparent Production, Cradle2Cradle,
5. 3D virtual models for design,
6. rapid prototyping objects

this will lead to different objects and people will interact differently with, SPIMES (physical instantiations of virtual objects).

BUT WHY SHOULD DO THAT?

it will feel good; external inventarization of my things in a ubiquitous machinery offering me a search engine;

“google my shoes in the morning!”