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.
Today I came across a nice TiddlyWIKI about Prince 2 project management approach. Check out http://www.microupdate.net/cms/doc/PrinceII.html and contribute if you like.
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. – Plutarch
“Experience is not what happens to a man;
it is what a man does with what happened to him.” Aldous Huxley
Richard Etter hat in seiner Diplomarbeit einen Ansatz fuer das kontedxtualisierte Hoeren von Music mit einem einfachen PDA/MP3 Player entwickelt. ich habe die Arbeit betreut. Durch Melodious Walkabout bekommen Menschen ueber das Panning von Musik und die Filterung des Sounds ein Feedback darueber ob Sie sich in Richtung auf ein festgelegtes Ziel bewegen. Das gesamte System benoetigt nur einen PDA und ein GPS Geraet. es wurde erfolgreich mit Nutzern evaluiert.
mehr dazu auf Richards Seite:
Melodious Walkabout
a navigation system that leads a person with his favorite music
The approach of Melodious Walkabout is that explicit instructions are not necessary to navigate a person. Melodious Walkabout is a wearable system that implicitly guides a user by providing him with awareness where the destination is located. It navigates users in a completely new way. It doesn’t use speech and allows the user to listen to his own audio contents while being aware of the location of the destination.
http://www.plazes.com/ ermoeglicht Menschen zu verorten und in Orten nach Menschen zu suchen. Ein schoenes Beispiel wie Location Based Services sich nicht nur auf Contents sondern auch auf Menschen beziehen koennen.
Plazes puts physical presence to the web. Plazes automatically detects your location and connects you to things nearby. See people in your area, discover other Plazes nearby and keep an eye on the whereabouts of your friends. It’s free!
Peter Brusilovsky, Jon Dron, and Jaakko Kurhila are organizing a workshop at the Adaptive Hypermedia Conference in Dublin, the proceedings for that workshop are online at the workshop site.
The 4th IEEE International Workshop on Wireless, Mobile and Ubiquitous Technologies in Education (WMUTE 2006) will take place in Athens Greece on 16-17th of November 2006.
Consider submitting something the deadline has been extended until 20th June.