didactalab µ

This microblog collects short public thoughts about the use, the design and the evaluation of interactive media for learning and teaching. I am both interested in informal and formal settings in all stages of life, although for younger learners I dread screens and mouses - see Waldkindergärten to get an idea of more natural interactive media :) For more detailed blogposts please go to http://blogs.uni-bremen.de/didactalab

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Start of new EduHack at #ecil12

Hi folks,

we do a day-long EduHack session at EduCamp in lovely Ilmenau at the TU Ilmenau campus deep in the Thüringer Forest.

Feel free to use the room MachBar 1 (makeable one) as a kind of shared workspace. Right now two projects are cooking:

@piesi is hacking the Wii remote to use it with this Muvisu project (Pure Data based Open Source GuitarHero/Rockband style music learning app).

@kadewe (aka me) is going to hack QRCodes into the draufhaber.tv website so you can leave a QRCode at a place to link to your draufhaber video.

Join us and do your own hack! Learning media, program or idea, sketch it out and just do it!

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Socrative is a solution to use the mobile phones and gadgets of your students to use them as super-powerful clickers to poll in a class, do small tests etc. Looks like a very nice and easy solution to get rid of dedicated clicker-hardware – assuming your students do have Smartphones and can log into your schools wifi. I will test this over the next few weeks in one of my lectures and report my experiences.

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Recap of EduHack at ecco12

Hi Folks,

we had some interesting projects at yesterday's short EduHack at Educamp Cologne 2012. Tonight most projects will do a demo or die session hosted by Thomas Bernhardt.

We will vote for several price categories: Strongest Reality Distortion Field, Most Epic Demo Fail, Best One Last Thing, Most funny presentation, Most Beautiful Slides etc. Hopefully Thomas will document some of the demos – I have to leave early today.

My own VBadge project progressed a bit, I am currently building my VBadge demo app using Badger2. More info to follow…

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Learning process at EduHack

2 hours in the project, let's see:

I didn't now 

http://vagrantup.com/ - using VMs on the fly for devs

https://browserid.org/ - soon to be called Mozilla Persona browser based IDs

After some reading of the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure GitHub wiki I have decided to build upon a Django project (https://github.com/lmorchard/django-badger)  with great documentation at http://decafbad.com/2010/07/badger-article/ 

A reference django playdoh website installation is available at https://github.com/lmorchard/badger2

I will start to set this up now…

http://playdoh.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

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Hey, they have a wiki with a documentation online at GitHub! Great

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Eduhack in action - what a big group!

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My EduHack project this weekend: VBadge prototype

Starting the project, based on our entry VBadge into the DML Open Badge Competition - we were finalists together with http://www.gamezombie.tv/, but didn't get funding in the finals :( 

VBadge is an extension to the Mozilla Open Badge infrastructure (MOBI) which links badges to a video proof. A VBadge not only displays the badge, but it also gives access to a video in which the badge holder performs the acquired skill. VBadge supports both, visual demonstration of highly complex skills as well as people with low literacy to express their practical abilities. Aim of VBadge is to set up a badge challenge with a clear description of requirements and challenges to be matched, a system to link a video proof to the badge and an administrative backend for badge issuers to grant the badge based on the video proof.

This weekend I want to dig into MOBI and try to get some VBadge prototype running.

Starting with the code at GitHub.

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This is a Google Doc where you can add your project to our EduHack event.

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Great weather in Cologne for our first large scale Speed-Eduhack keeps everyone outside - even hackers long for first spring sunrays :) We start at 4pm local time, feel free to join. More infos about the Eduhack at http://educamp.mixxt.de/networks/events/show_event.53564

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Preparing for EduHack at EduCamp Cologne

Right now we are preparing for an EduHack at Germany's premier educational Barcamp event, have a look at the Mixxt community website for more info.

It's great to see the idea of EduHack moving to a larger audience (please look at this video documentary of one of my earlier EduHacks at University of Bremen). We will do a 1.5 day session with EduHack newbies, so we will offer easy 4 hours hack sprints (as in curate an Education Pinterest board) as well as as a 12 hours hack fulminating in a Demo or Die session on Saturday evening in Colgone. 

I will do a Facebook App prototype for my DML Open Badge finalist project VBadge - probably more on the nerdy side using Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure, Facebook Open Graph, Heroku hosting, Ruby/Sinatra or PHP/Cake frameworks. I will document my EduHack project here, so stay tuned!

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Computer Game Innovation still lives at Nintendo

What a start of the week for the video game industry. All key players (Apple at WWDC, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo at E3) had big keynotes/press conferences to show their new products and strategies for the next year(s). All E3 press conferences can be seen at http://e3.gamespot.com/press-conference, Apple WWDC keynote is found at http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/11piubpwiqubf06/event/.

My summary regarding innovation in interaction design:

Apple is still the platform to watch for innovative indie games getting the spotlight such as Tiny Wings by Andreas Illiger (for gameplay see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6pT_2E5xI0). Nobody has a better app store which generates money for developers and creates a playground for gameplay innovation.

Sony isn't innovating at all right now, they try to catch up Apple's online strategy (emphasis on try). They are successful in improving their game catalog. OK, and they showed a 3D TV with two player "full screen split view" - so that is an innovation.

Microsoft tries to catch lost ground to Nintendo, emphasizing Kinect enhanced games for most part of the press conference. The hardcore press audience hated it, but we will how the casual game consumers will respond to this. While most of the attempts looked a lit bit clumsy, Innovation could be found in the "Minority Report" style user interface enhancements (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwVBzx0LMNQ for the scene from the orginal film) to the media centre functionality of Xbox 360. The voice commands also remind me of Star Trek TNG. Luc Picard: "Computer - turn down the light!" now is "Xbox. Pause movie".

Nintendo lead by Satoru Iwata truly amazes me because of their guts to do things differently and to truly innovate from a hardware perspective. Wii U is full of interesting ideas how to use the "pad"-controller. There were a lot of interesting and/or weird ideas in the Wii U trailer (for example, putting the controller on the ground to see the golf ball in a golf simulation to better swing your virtual golf club; swiping ninja stars from the controller to the screen; swiping a video from the controller to a TV) to show what kind of interesting ideas can be developed on this system. The controller is not a mobile gaming console (the images are rendered on the Wii U and wirelessly transmitted). So they take the iPhone idea (only one hardware button and everything else is software buttons) to the controller. Nintendo says the controller can be both super easy and wildly complex. One of the demos showed a Zelda game with the controller showing the inventory for easy in game access. This clearly shows how a 2 screen gaming experience can benefit the ease and usability of a game. Bringing hardcore into the reach of casual gamers.

From an interaction perspective Nintendo is most innovative. Microsoft shows progress in improving Kinect to let it do the stuff they promised it would do in the first place. Still some way to go. Apple democratize access to the game market for indie developers because the other companies are even more control freaks than Apple is. Sony has a hard time to come up with something truly innovative.

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Restorm seems to be a great solution not only to sell your own music but also to legally license music for Your YouTube skate video. Great for real draufhabers!

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The National Academic Press has decided to give free access to all of its publications. Head over to the link and download great books such as "How people learn", "How people learn: Bridging Research and Practice" and the whole "How students learn…" series. 

The NAP catalog does not have any substantial educational technology literature, though, just a few workshop reports.