While sitting on the train to Vienna (I'm loving it) today I went through my collection of photos from a week-long family-trip to Barcelona back in February. I have to say I'm always having a hard time sorting through photos to pick out the best ones. With this set for example I started with the ~500 photos which I had taken and quickly narrowed them down to ~250 pieces. That first round of sorting is always quite easy, you remove the obviously bad ones (out of focus, etc.) and that gets rid of quite a lot of them. But afterwards it just becomes tedious. Finding the best shot of the same motive (taken from slightly different angles with different exposure/aperture setting for example) always takes me ages. Anyway, after about 20min I arrived at ~180 photos. It took me another 10min to get down to 156. That's when my notebook ran out of batteries (and Iwas only 5min from Vienna) so now I simply uploaded them to Flickr even though I'm still not 100% with my selection.
You can find the photos by clicking on this link...
Friday, September 28, 2007
What will the perfect mobile device look like?
If you're interested in mobile phones and what these thingies could look like in the (not so) near future then I'd definitely recommend you to read this article [itnews.com.au].
I agree with most of what's being said and I'm actually thinking about getting that Neo 1973 from OpenMoko once it really hits the market towards the end of this year...
I agree with most of what's being said and I'm actually thinking about getting that Neo 1973 from OpenMoko once it really hits the market towards the end of this year...
Thursday, September 27, 2007
The Breakfast Photo Project
I just saw this posting [Photojojo.com] about the so-called "The Breakfast Photo Project". The idea is simply: snap a photo of yourself and a photo of your breakfast and share it with others.
I'll definitely make my contribution (unless I forget that is) once I'm back in Vienna and university has started. And I can already tell you what these photos are going to show:
(a) a pretty miserable looking Christoph who would do everything to sleep for another hour
(b) a big cup of black tea (or a glass of Coca Cola if things are really bad) and a little portion of food, mostly bread with something, something dulce or just a chocolate or muesli bar
Speaking of sleep, it's 4 a.m. - time to turn off this machine and get to bed... Good night!
I'll definitely make my contribution (unless I forget that is) once I'm back in Vienna and university has started. And I can already tell you what these photos are going to show:
(a) a pretty miserable looking Christoph who would do everything to sleep for another hour
(b) a big cup of black tea (or a glass of Coca Cola if things are really bad) and a little portion of food, mostly bread with something, something dulce or just a chocolate or muesli bar
Speaking of sleep, it's 4 a.m. - time to turn off this machine and get to bed... Good night!
My thoughts on technology and education
I found an interesting video on YouTube called "School goes digital with UMPCs" about a school in Scottland which uses UMPCs (ultra-mobile PCs, see the Wikipedia entry for more information). My favourite comment can be found at 4 min 29 sec where it's said that "...the benefits are clearly outweighing the costs..."
Ever since I took an interest in the One-Laptop-Per-Child project back when it was first introduced and even more so since OLPC Austria was formed I've spent quite some time reading up (and thinking) about the effects of (computer) technology on education. Especially in settings such as that school in Scottland the planned implementation of the OLPC project where students spent most of their time working with their computers.
From what I know at this point there's still no real and generally accepted conclusion (as in the result of independent research, not some TV reporter saying something) on what effects, let alone benefits, introducing computers into the classroom has on students and teachers. As always there're are indications for this and that, people claiming one thing or another thing and the media reporting all of it without really looking into matters. The single best article I've found about this topic so far appeared in the Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung (link, unfortunately it's only available in German). Its main comment ("US study shows that the use of electronic media does not improve student performance") is based on the first-year findings of a study conducted by the Texas Center for Educational Research ("The overarching purpose of the study is to scientifically investigate the effectiveness of technology immersion in increasing middle school students’ achievement in core academic subjects as measured by the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS)"). Reading through the TCER's "Findings from the Second Year" report (pdf, 1.25MB, 158 pages) is probably the best thing anyone interested in this field can do. Here is a (fairly long, but it wouldn't make sense to shorten it, after all this blog isn't a media outlet that has to deal with 30-sec or 150 words limits;-) quote from the Executive Summary (pages 7 to 14 of that pdf) that seem to be a good indication of the current findings (emphasize added by yours truely):
Summary of First- and Second-Year Findings
Our first-year report—Evaluation of the Texas Technology Immersion Pilot: First-Year Results (Shapley et al., 2006a)—revealed positive effects of technology immersion on schools, teachers, and students. Findings for the second year relative to these same variables are generally consistent with first-year results. Steadfast outcomes across two evaluation years and two student cohorts show that immersing a middle school in technology produces schools with stronger principal leadership for technology, greater teacher collaboration and collective support for technology innovation, and stronger parent and community support for technology. Additionally, teachers in immersion schools are more technically proficient and use technology more often for their own professional productivity, their students use technology more often in core-subject classrooms, and teachers adopt more integration-oriented and learner-centered ideologies. Students in immersion schools are more technically proficient, use technology more often for learning, interact more often with their peers in small-group activities, and have fewer disciplinary problems than control-group students.
Also consistent with first-year results, we found no significant effect of technology immersion in the second year on student self-directed learning, and we found a significantly negative immersion effect on student attendance. Moreover, the availability of technology across two years provided no significant increase in the intellectual challenge of immersion teachers’ core-subject lessons.
First-year findings on academic achievement revealed no statistically significant immersion effects on TAKS reading or mathematics scores for Cohort 1, sixth graders. Similarly, second-year results for Cohort 1 students (as seventh graders) showed no significant effects of immersion on TAKS reading, mathematics, or writing achievement. Likewise, achievement results for Cohort 2 students (sixth graders involved in the project for one year) revealed no significant effect of immersion on TAKS reading achievement. However, for TAKS mathematics, students in immersion schools who began the year with higher math pretest scores had significantly higher mathematics achievement than their control-group counterparts. The math achievement gap favoring immersion students over control widened as students’ pretest scores increased. Although TAKS score differences between immersion and control schools usually did not differ by statistically significant margins, second-year achievement trends, in contrast to first-year results, generally favored technology immersion schools.
What does this tell us?
I'm still not quite sure to be honest and adding my thoughts below is of course a mockery of my own complaints about everyone adding their (mostly uneducated) opinion to the discussion. So, here's another uneducated guess:
The way I understand it using computers has the potential to bring (many) benefits to students, teachers and education overall. This however is a "can" and not a "will" type of situation. I believe that just introducing computers to a school will have no real positive effect. Only if all the aspects (one could actually go as far as calling them requirements) such as implementation, teacher training, learning materials, learning methods, etc. are sufficiently executed and available will we see "statistically relevant" improvements on young people's education (or "benefits outweighing costs" as others might put it). Otherwise the only benefit students will have is easier access to porn, as demonstrated by this story about an OLPC trial in Nigeria.
I'll definitely be talking more about this topic over the coming days, weeks, months...
Ever since I took an interest in the One-Laptop-Per-Child project back when it was first introduced and even more so since OLPC Austria was formed I've spent quite some time reading up (and thinking) about the effects of (computer) technology on education. Especially in settings such as that school in Scottland the planned implementation of the OLPC project where students spent most of their time working with their computers.
From what I know at this point there's still no real and generally accepted conclusion (as in the result of independent research, not some TV reporter saying something) on what effects, let alone benefits, introducing computers into the classroom has on students and teachers. As always there're are indications for this and that, people claiming one thing or another thing and the media reporting all of it without really looking into matters. The single best article I've found about this topic so far appeared in the Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung (link, unfortunately it's only available in German). Its main comment ("US study shows that the use of electronic media does not improve student performance") is based on the first-year findings of a study conducted by the Texas Center for Educational Research ("The overarching purpose of the study is to scientifically investigate the effectiveness of technology immersion in increasing middle school students’ achievement in core academic subjects as measured by the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS)"). Reading through the TCER's "Findings from the Second Year" report (pdf, 1.25MB, 158 pages) is probably the best thing anyone interested in this field can do. Here is a (fairly long, but it wouldn't make sense to shorten it, after all this blog isn't a media outlet that has to deal with 30-sec or 150 words limits;-) quote from the Executive Summary (pages 7 to 14 of that pdf) that seem to be a good indication of the current findings (emphasize added by yours truely):
Summary of First- and Second-Year Findings
Our first-year report—Evaluation of the Texas Technology Immersion Pilot: First-Year Results (Shapley et al., 2006a)—revealed positive effects of technology immersion on schools, teachers, and students. Findings for the second year relative to these same variables are generally consistent with first-year results. Steadfast outcomes across two evaluation years and two student cohorts show that immersing a middle school in technology produces schools with stronger principal leadership for technology, greater teacher collaboration and collective support for technology innovation, and stronger parent and community support for technology. Additionally, teachers in immersion schools are more technically proficient and use technology more often for their own professional productivity, their students use technology more often in core-subject classrooms, and teachers adopt more integration-oriented and learner-centered ideologies. Students in immersion schools are more technically proficient, use technology more often for learning, interact more often with their peers in small-group activities, and have fewer disciplinary problems than control-group students.
Also consistent with first-year results, we found no significant effect of technology immersion in the second year on student self-directed learning, and we found a significantly negative immersion effect on student attendance. Moreover, the availability of technology across two years provided no significant increase in the intellectual challenge of immersion teachers’ core-subject lessons.
First-year findings on academic achievement revealed no statistically significant immersion effects on TAKS reading or mathematics scores for Cohort 1, sixth graders. Similarly, second-year results for Cohort 1 students (as seventh graders) showed no significant effects of immersion on TAKS reading, mathematics, or writing achievement. Likewise, achievement results for Cohort 2 students (sixth graders involved in the project for one year) revealed no significant effect of immersion on TAKS reading achievement. However, for TAKS mathematics, students in immersion schools who began the year with higher math pretest scores had significantly higher mathematics achievement than their control-group counterparts. The math achievement gap favoring immersion students over control widened as students’ pretest scores increased. Although TAKS score differences between immersion and control schools usually did not differ by statistically significant margins, second-year achievement trends, in contrast to first-year results, generally favored technology immersion schools.
What does this tell us?
I'm still not quite sure to be honest and adding my thoughts below is of course a mockery of my own complaints about everyone adding their (mostly uneducated) opinion to the discussion. So, here's another uneducated guess:
The way I understand it using computers has the potential to bring (many) benefits to students, teachers and education overall. This however is a "can" and not a "will" type of situation. I believe that just introducing computers to a school will have no real positive effect. Only if all the aspects (one could actually go as far as calling them requirements) such as implementation, teacher training, learning materials, learning methods, etc. are sufficiently executed and available will we see "statistically relevant" improvements on young people's education (or "benefits outweighing costs" as others might put it). Otherwise the only benefit students will have is easier access to porn, as demonstrated by this story about an OLPC trial in Nigeria.
I'll definitely be talking more about this topic over the coming days, weeks, months...
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Usability
Back during CeBIT 2007 in March me and a couple of friends ended up having a beer-fueled discussion about technology and usability, mainly with mobile phones and office software. Needless to say it was a good night!
The next day we had the idea to somehow channel our thoughts and feelings about usability into something more useful than another argument. So we discussed setting up a blog about all things usability in order to have a platform where we (and others) could dicuss various aspects of ICT usability.
Of course it never happened. We forgot, were too busy, whatever... We didn't go through with it.
Anyway, the other day my friend Igor from Vancouver (one of the finest geeks I've ever meet!) sent me the following e-mail:
"As it usually happens in the internet age, someone beat us to the idea and executed it better than we ever could =)
http://www.experientia.com/blog/
Complete with articles about old people, user centered design and so on....
Fine read
Igor"
After reading through some of the articles there I can only agree with him that this is significantly better than anything we could have ever produced. So if you're interested in usability then I'd definitely recommend you to check out that website!
For me it's back to the drawing table to come up with another new cool idea... Luckily I do believe that I might have thought of something cool while I was in the Gobi. But I still need significantly more time to think this through before I'm ready to discuss it. So don't stay tuned... ;-)
The next day we had the idea to somehow channel our thoughts and feelings about usability into something more useful than another argument. So we discussed setting up a blog about all things usability in order to have a platform where we (and others) could dicuss various aspects of ICT usability.
Of course it never happened. We forgot, were too busy, whatever... We didn't go through with it.
Anyway, the other day my friend Igor from Vancouver (one of the finest geeks I've ever meet!) sent me the following e-mail:
"As it usually happens in the internet age, someone beat us to the idea and executed it better than we ever could =)
http://www.experientia.com/blog/
Complete with articles about old people, user centered design and so on....
Fine read
Igor"
After reading through some of the articles there I can only agree with him that this is significantly better than anything we could have ever produced. So if you're interested in usability then I'd definitely recommend you to check out that website!
For me it's back to the drawing table to come up with another new cool idea... Luckily I do believe that I might have thought of something cool while I was in the Gobi. But I still need significantly more time to think this through before I'm ready to discuss it. So don't stay tuned... ;-)
ChristophD goes Flickr!!
I know, I know, for someone who spends as much time online as I do I'm very late to the game... But I finally went ahead and got myself a Flickr account, hooray! As a trial I uploaded 25 photos from my weekend-trip to Paris in mid-July which you can find here. I have also added a small "my photos on flickr" badge to the right-hand navigation menu for easy access to my photos in the future.
I hope to be uploading many more photos from some of my recent trips (Peru/Bolivia, Taiwan, Berlin, Barcelona, Granada) and some random shots over the coming weeks. But first I have to sort through the 3609 photos that I took on the TransSib these past 4 1/2 weeks... ;-)
I hope to be uploading many more photos from some of my recent trips (Peru/Bolivia, Taiwan, Berlin, Barcelona, Granada) and some random shots over the coming weeks. But first I have to sort through the 3609 photos that I took on the TransSib these past 4 1/2 weeks... ;-)
Patrick's photos at pbase
While working with Flickr earlier this evening I thought that it would also make sense to link to Patrick's photos on pbase. He'll probably upload some first photos from the TransSib over the coming weeks but for now you can marvel at the stunning photos he took in places such as New York, Toscana, various Dutch cities, etc.
I have to admit that times I'm a bit jealous of him and his Olympus E-300 SLR camera which is significantly better than my trusted Kodak DX-7590 digicam. Plus he has a very good eye for amazing photo compositions. So I'm very much looking forward to his photos!
I have to admit that times I'm a bit jealous of him and his Olympus E-300 SLR camera which is significantly better than my trusted Kodak DX-7590 digicam. Plus he has a very good eye for amazing photo compositions. So I'm very much looking forward to his photos!
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