#OEB15 liveblogging robots in education

Presentations of 3 robotics builders and developers. nice conversation with some informative links. 

iCUBE is first project introduced by Giorgio Metta .

1 robot 250000 euro, built in 6 months and the robot is open source, so you can do it (if you have the financial means)

http://www.icub.org/

Balancing, recognizing objects, can point to the objects when asked, manipulation (using the object) which depends on feedback.

Challenges: materials (very fragile), AI, energy, cloud,

Manfed Hild: neurorobotics reseach laboratory (NRL)

http://www.neurorobotik.de/index_en.php

little 15 EUR robotset + 2 to 3 hours you can make a walking spider robot. This allows students to get an idea of a robot.

Step by step robot learning is explained by Manfred: first simulations limited to two or a limited amount of parameters, after that e-robot simulation is stated (all the circuits within the network).

Cognitive robotics: with a really difficult platform (dense one), you can only allow a couple of students on the platform, but if you use a less expensive platform, it allows you to add more students to the platform.

Question: which robot would you buy: mindstorms from lego is really good, but as an entrance to robots any robot (cheap) will do to allow learning the necessary elements that come along with the idea of robots.

Seed Robotics http://www.seedrobotics.com/

Robotics in education: right now only in universities students get opportunities to work with robots. Some initiatives within high school, but there is a big gap related to robotics in education.

Robotics is a very differentiated field: maths, design, physics… which gives it diverse practical fields of study. There can be multiple real world tasks that can be investigated across fields.

But it does (mostly) use a top down approach

With using the visual programming language Python it is possible to visualy build a pogram you have in mind, and then get a coded result. 

#OEB15 Chairing the New versus Old Schools session #SPL07

This Friday I am chairing a session on New versus Old schools during Online Educa Berlin, looking at the emerging schools and learning centres. In the session I have the opportunity to listen to, and moderate debates with Maurice de Hond and David Cummins. If you are interested, or if you are an un-schooler, new educational thinker... join the session on Friday 4 December, between 12 - 13 o'clock on the spotlight stage room Potsdam III.

Now in preparing this session, I contacted both speakers. And admittedly when I was reading the name of Maurice's new school (The Steve Jobs School), I was thinking "oh no, wondering why they used that name... marketing!" .... but in less then a minute that man enlightened me and got me enthusiastic. This is not just a hyped name, it is a truly well-build concept. Maurice's school concept is actually making a start of personalised learning from primary school onward. While still checking the boxes and demands asked by government (mandatory curriculum) he manages to refurbish established schools into a new concept school that allows young pupils to choose their own focus of subjects, plan their week, and learn by slowly (or quickly) building autonomous learning skills. In order to achieve this, he has twisted the school lessons a bit (e.g. using stamgroepen (something like kernel groups)) and he has built software that enables planning, assessment, and scheduling including learners, teachers and parents alike. Nice one! To give an idea of what one of the schools looks like, I am embedding a nice video (English subtitles). 

David Cummins will focus on the Hacker school, which has also stolen my heart by their conscious aim to attract the less common learners as future programmers. They really put energy and zest into the concept of diversity and culture. Which to me is always a positive action. 

@AaronESilvers on the Vocabulary of xAPI and Implementation

To me xAPI stays one of the most exiting bits of Tech for understanding the learning experience of both individual and groups of learners (prior blogposts). The difficulty is to understand xAPI's mechanics, potential and reach. In come Aaron Silvers (the visionary behind xAPI) and Megan Bowe (the xAPI monger) with a nice set of slides that describe the vocabulary of xAPI, which are a set of simple words, but which definitions can be interpreted in different ways.

And after that set of words and wisdom, Aaron shared a slidedeck of 59 slides, illustrating what it takes to implement xAPI within industry or technological partners (questions for the team/tech partners, data alignment, todays adoption challenges...).

At the end of the industry/tech partner slidedeck Aaron also refers to the launch of the 2016 Data Interoperability Standards Consortium (DISC) with certification, workstreams, and a potential roadmap to implement xAPI. 

Here are the links to both xAPI slidedecks:

The Vocabulary of xAPI from Aaron Silvers

xAPI Making Sense of Industry and Practice from Aaron Silvers

Changing the #twitterheart to X via simple coding

When twitter first changed the star into heart, I could not be bothered. Although I must admit I did follow some of the discussions (one from Kate Bowles here).

Software is always biased and represents the cultural and philosophical background of the developer/s (nice overview paper from Friedman and Nissenbaum, 1996, but also a lot articles, latest one from Gizmodo on job application software). This is also true for the symbols socmed companies use, in this case the #twitterheart. But when tweaking of those symbols becomes really simple it becomes a pleasure to change the symbols used... oh Yes.

Vicky Curtis got me on to this nice and simple Chrome/Firefox extension tweak to change the twitter heart into something you like. (tough part: finding a symbol you want to use... I went for a mobile phone.

The idea comes from Robert McNees who shared a full code via Github here. But this is a bit of work, a simplified version was offered by Adam Clark Estes from Gizmodo in an overview article, focusing on a simple addition of coded lines to a browser extension (either chrome/firefox), which only takes 6 steps to get the twitter heart replaced by an emoji (= character or symbol) of your choice. Neat!

Now, because I combined the article of Adam Clark Estes with the updated coding from Robert McNees = @McNees , I will add the steps I used in this post. Btw, at the end I also choose the "URL's that start with' option to add behind the 'applies to' option inside of the Stylish extension. So here it goes:

Step 1: Download the Stylish extension for Chrome or Firefox. (There are a host of other extensions to restyle the web, but Stylish is super easy to use.)

Step 2: Open Stylish (= click on the 'Manage installed styles' option within the Browser icon of Stylish for a new window to open, then click on 'write new style' - button)

Step 3: paste the wonderful code from Robert McNees into that new style window, find the code here at Github. 

Step 4: change the standard emoji, with the emoji of your preference (you can search for images of emoji and then copy paste them into the code).

Step 5: In the “Applies to:” field below the code, choose the option 'URL's that start with' (otherwise you only get the changes for twitter.com and not your own tweets).

Step 6: Click Save and your twitter should be updated with your own emoji.  

My biggest difficulty was finding the right emoji... still not sure about my simple X... and there seems to be some hearts still not adjusted, but getting there. And in the meantime, chaos in symbols is adding some diversity. 

Great workshop on building #widgets with ROLE app

The wonderful Ralf Klamma (@klamma) got me onto just the thing I needed for today: building my own widgets workshop! If you plan to be in Portugal or there abouts in mid July, you might want to check out a workshop on creating widgets. The ROLE SDK workshop on widgets will be given during the PLE conference in Alveiro Portugal from 11 - 13 July 2012.

Widgets are great for they can give a content overview in just a minimal space. I love to use them to build what I call course dashboards. One page overviews that cover a diversity of online tools via widgets that show the headlines or titles of what is going on in each of these learning spaces.

In the last year the ROLE project developer team has bundled a set of technologies developed within the project such as learning spaces, local and remote inter-widget communication, tracking and access to learner interaction data, recommendation, etc. into one reference implementation, which is deployed and publicly available as the ROLE Software Development Kit (SDK). 

(straight from the ROLE website)
Responsive Open Learning Environments (ROLE) is a European collaborative project with 16 internationally renowned research groups from 6 EU countries and China. ROLE technology is centred around the concept of Self-regulated learning that creates responsible and thinking learners that are able to plan their learning process, search for the resources independently, learn and then reflect on their learning process and progress.  Given this task, ROLE´s main objective is to support teachers in developing the open personal learning environments for their students where they can train each of the phases mentioned.
ROLE has just entered the fourth project year, where our main endeavour is to test the already operating learning environment and widgets. You are invited to follow us on facebook, twitter, linkedin or youtube.
Examples of our work are showcased on following places:

• ROLE Showcase Platform
• ROLE Widget Store
• Need a widget? Add your suggestion here.

To give you an idea on how widgets are build, take a look at the presentation that was given during dev8ed in Birmingham.

How to Build & Develop Responsive Open Learning Environments with the ROLE SDK

View more PowerPoint from Dominik Renzel

#html5 #authoring tools and how you can code it yourself

Html5 is the new magical solution for cross-device publications. It is all the rave for mobile developers and newbies. The amazing thing about html5 however, is that it is not really breathtakingly new. In fact, like Brian Fling (expert in mobile design, so connect to his media to stay updated) mentioned on his blogpost on html5 anatomy: "if you know HTML, then chances are you’ll understand what’s new in HTML5 in under an hour."

Teach yourself html5
For those of you with html5 expertise, simply take the free, online html5 course offered by W3C.
But to make really beautiful html5 accessible webpages, you need to digg into Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as well as they will allow you to produce an eye-catching look and feel. This is also at anyone's fingertips thanks to the W3C tutorial on CSS.

Now you have the basic coding, you have a nice look and feel, this combination will already allow you to publish neat html5 pages. But for those wanting to run the extra mile, the only thing that remains is to add more interactivity and for this you can use JavaScript. Take a look at these 6 free JavaScript books and tutorials from the read and write blog.

Why is html suddenly back as the best webpage coding language?
Let's be honest html is an easy coding language, as such it was put into a corner a bit, pressed away by php, asp, and other more complex coding languages. So I wondered, why did it become cool again to use html?
I feel that with the rise of html5 we see a rise in specialization in instructional design. This makes room for instructional designers that are in fact no longer building designs from scratch, but who use templates and designer tools to put any content in a beautiful and accessible jacket.

And ... of course html5 enables designers to come up with cross device designs, even allowing a variety of mobile phones to access material in a pleasing way (well, it is not that standardized yet, but we are getting there).

For those wanting to test there html5 coding
If you do delve into the html5 code and you have come up with some pages, make sure to test drive them through the free W3C markup validation tool. You have two validation tools, one is for html in general: html validation markup.
And one focuses on mobile html (great tool!), which will allow you to feel confident with the coding you are providing (and that it fits specific browser needs): Mobile Validation.

Looking for an easier option? Use html5 authoring tools
Simply take a look at these html5 designer tools:

Rapid Intake Mobile Studio (I really recommend this one, sooo easy!) and it allows publication to both Flash and html5, so really useful and it has scorm compliant quizzes (for the LMS lovers amongst us): http://www.rapidintake.com/products/mobile/mobile-learning-studio/

And an interesting tool from Adobe Labs, Edge (to download it you will need to make an Adobe account if you don't have one yet): there is an Edge 2 preview you can download http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/

For those using Mac, there is a nice app, the Tumult Hype app: http://tumultco.com/hype/

IBM has also launched a html5 authoring tool project, called Maqetta, but to look at this tool you need to upgrade (if needed) your browser to Firefox 4, Chrome 5 or Safari 5. This tool has to be installed on your server. Get more information here: http://maqetta.org

#Moodle #Mobile, the follow up action is called Moodbile

It has been quite a year for mobile devices! So many initiatives, so many actions.
Mid March 2010 some of us volunteers got together and started to work on Moodle for iPhone. After the initial excitement, different people realized that if we wanted to get Moodle mobile, a lot needed to be addressed, including cleaning up the existing code, adding php-recoding, starting native apps....

If all goes well, moodle will be made fully mobile, thanks to the group around Maria Jose Casany, Marc Alier (Ludo) and Jordi Piguillem who are connected to Universitat Polytécnica de Catalunya and the Grual Research group at Universidad de Salamanca (Spain). They have been working on Moodbile, which is a code project that will result in a GNU General Public License.

Many people were active and a lot of progress has been made. As Moodle is a community, feel free to join in anyway you can if you are interested: testing releases, adding your expertise...
Here you will find the latest activities on the Moodbile site.

How to add a retweet and facebook button to your blog

With all the commotion with opening up Moodle to iPhone (and now some android driven phones, but still in the initial try-out phase), I was not keeping up with my blog lay-out. But now, I finaly got the retweet button for blogger embedded in my blog html template, as well as a facebook button.

In order to do this, I relied on the blogger plugins blog: here is the link for the retweet button and this one for the facebook button. But to make things easy, I wrote down what I chose.

For the retweet button, I used this code:

<div style="float:right;padding:4px;">
<script type="text/javascript">
tweetmeme_url = '<data:post.url>';
tweetmeme_source = 'your_twitter_user_name';
script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js">script>
div>


Mind you, I did replace the fourth line with my own twitterame, so that line became:

tweetmeme_source = 'ignatia';

But there are other types of button layouts, so check the post on bloggerplugins if you are looking for something different. Once I got the code, I followed the steps below:

How to install the Retweet Button on your blog?

1.Select the retweet button styles,and copy the corresponding code into a text file.

2.Now in this code replace your_twitter_username with your actual twitter username (e.g. ignatia)

3.Now we have got the final retweet code.Now login to your blogger dashboard and navigate to Layout > Edit Html and expand the widget templates

4.Find this piece of code

< div class='post-header-line-1'>

and immediately after that place our retweet code(from our text file) < div class='post-header-line-1'"> and you are done :)

If you were unable to find this code in your template,then look for the first occurrence of

<data:post.body/>

and immediately before that, place our retweet code(from our text file)

5.Save the template.

For the facebook button, I used this code:

<div style="float:right;padding:4px;">
<a expr:share_url='data:post.url' name='fb_share' rel='nofollow' type='box_count'/>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share"/>
</div>

the mobile project update 1: html + mp4 + mobile moodle

As I started writing the previous week, we are working on a mobile module that is accessible by a lot of (I know it is vague for now, but I will make it more substantial soon) mobile devices.

The models we aim for are currently iPhone 3G, Nokia N95 and HTC TyTn. We have been dabbling with some applications, but let's face it, going back to basics normally gives the best result. It might not be sounding sexy, but it does deliver all: the HTML + CSS + mp4 set will be our main coding set for the mobile modules we are planning to give.

HTML has been around for a longtime and it is the easiest language out there to code in (I think). Thanks to the Mobile Web Initiative, you can also find some guidelines and test your mobile course on its accessibility, so ... what more would one want?

Well, the thing we wanted to add was traceability. We want to be able to track what we have made, and the way the students use the module in order to improve it in the long end. So inevitably we needed to look for a mobile learning platform that would allow us to do just that. Because we are working with a rather tight budget, the cost needed to be limited and so we so Moodle as a possible way to go.
In the past mobile moodle was tried and errored at times, but the new MLE for Moodle (Mobile Learning Engine) looks more then interesting. We did not try it out extensively, we just tried the user testing area and that looks promising at first glance, but I was rather enthusiastic, so I love to share it with you immediately. If you want to take a look, get your mobile, type in http://moodle.elibera.com and login with username: student and pw: student. It really looks nice. The MLE is also free software, great!

follow up on ITC presentation about mobile projects and discussion

In follow-up of a previous mail here is the multimedia result.

Yesterday I delivered a presentation on three mobile projects through the online classroom tool WiZiQ. The presentation is now available as a recording through this WiZiQ-link. In order to view it you need to register for WiZiQ and afterwards link to the link I mentioned.

The slides of this presentation have been uploaded to Slideshare:

SlideShare"> | View | Upload your own

The WiZiQ-presentation became very lively once the introduction was given. All the participants got their questions out there and Tom Wambeke from ITCilo was a great co-moderator.
We talked about instructional design, mobile strategies, mobile research (or the pioneer stage it is in)... The presentation takes a minute to really start going but I think it is worth a look. The session lasted 75 minutes.
This presentation was part of a framework pilot that focused on Lifelong eLearning for an international audience. After hearing feedback from all the participants (Bahama's, Chicago, ...) it became clear that this pilot will know a successful follow-up.

A couple of links of topics that came up during the discussion:
Quick mobile transformation from websites into mobile sites: http://www.mofuse.com/
standards for mobile development, you can read a blogpost on how to recode a successful html-based course into a mobile course.
How to make slides more attractive: with beyond bulletpoints.

Thanks to all the participants and Tom especially!

How would you integrate QR code in eLearning?

And how to win a 2GB USB stick?

Last week I put QR code on my website to allow mobiles to just pick up my website and look at it on their mobile. After that post I got a mail from Roger Smolski who has started an online blog on QR codes. His blog got my mind buzzing with possibilities.

While reading through its possibilites:

The one possibility that blew my mind was the Voice of the Street initiative. They have linked QR code, to Google Maps to Art and with interactivity. Yes, this gets your mind hyper does not it!

There is also an elimination game which uses QR codes on t-shirts which got my attention.

What I was wondering about was: how can we integrate QR code in eLearning? There are a lot of creative ideas possible:

- send out cards with QR codes that send your mobile to different assessments;

- use the QR code for field trips like the Voice in the Street initiative: get your history class or engineering class roaring from one site to another and get QR codes to get them to the pre-defined locations.

- Or just plainly get your students involved in finding a new learning application that uses QR code.

But what about corporate learning?

You could use this type of technology to get some really neat team-building going: find the founders of the company, gather around a mobile water cooler that is mentioned on the corporate flyer…

Or dispense a flyer with all the mobile courses mentioned in QR codes and then disperse it so everyone can zoom in on the course of their interest… All you need to do is get QR codes for locations, buildings, corporations, websites… and you start putting your learning activity together.

What ideas do you have or are you absolutely AGAINST using QR code? Looking forward to your thoughts!

Another nice feature on Roger Smolki’s blog is the fact that you can send your QR codes or 2D ideas to the blog and he will give them blogging attention. So … let’s do it!

Because all of these ideas got me going, I also included an image in this post to win a 2GB usb stick. Just uncode the image in this post and the first commentator that puts in what is written wins the stick. (for the site that generated the code look at my previous post). Good luck.

script for podcasts

Today I was working on a script that would enable podcasts to be delivered straight from ITM to the world. So I got my dreamweaver opened, got some serverspace and started writing my XML file to get going with the podcasts.

It worked from my first trial! That was a nice surprise. The only podcast we have for the moment is a test-one that can be implemented in iTunes ( http://www.itg.be/tempupload\uploadfolder\podcast/podcast_itunes_script.xml )
, so no ground breaking Tropical Health topic yet, but still it is exiting.

But I still have to get some details right:
- lenght of the podcast, is there an easy way to get the length of a podcast (in seconds)?
- image: I had an image loaded up, but it probably is taken over by the multimedia of the podcast from as soon as that multimedia material is downloaded... so I am not sure if I need to put an image in.

The script
It is just an image, because the coding kept giving difficulties in my blogpost (I tried 'code' and 'pre' and 'tt' but to no avail: