Podcasts I listen to

I don’t know which podcast I first started listening to regularly but it might have been Leo Larporte’s famous This Week in Tech while I lived in Washington, D.C. back in early 2008. Since then the list of podcasts I listen to has steadily increased with the possible exception of the sad day when Cranky Geeks ended. These days my list in iTunes contains about a dozen podcasts and plenty of unlistened episodes to keep me busy for quite a while.

So here’s a quick rundown of what keeps me entertained and informed on my commutes (and while I’m doing the dishes):

37 signals: 37signals is a Web services company based in the United States and while I haven’t really used them myself their online products such as Basecamp (project management), Campfire (real-time collaboration), and Highrise (contact management) seem to be very popular with many folks. Their podcast is released about once a month and some of my favorite episodes have focused on things such as 37 signals’ hiring process, a programming roundtable, and dealing with criticism of the company. What I like beyond learning about the individual topics is hearing bits and pieces about the company’s philosophy which (I think) can be summed up as having a lean, no-bullshit approach.

Chaosradio Express: If you’re seriously into computers in Austria, Germany or Switzerland chances are high that you’re listening to Chaosradio Express. The host Tim Pritlove (@timpritlove) is without a doubt the best German podcaster there is which is probably also the reason why he is one of the very few people who can actually make a living of it and do this fulltime. His shows are basically extensive interviews (many of them >2 hours) with people knowledgeable about things such as Android, ARM, board games, Hackerspaces, JavaScript, malware, privacy, etc. Well worth a listen if you understand German and are slightly geeky;-)

IBM developerWorks: While I’ve used the excellent resources provided by IBM on its developerWorks Web site on many occasions it wasn’t until a tweet by fellow Vienna University of Technology colleague @barfooz that I discovered the developerWorks podcast. So far I’ve listened to 3 or 4 episodes of the Andy Glover Java series and I’m definitely hooked.

LabCAST: LabCAST is the official video-podcast of the MIT Media Lab and presents about half a dozen of its projects per year. The episodes are short (often <5 minutes) but always offer an interesting glimpse into what’s going at what is undoubtedly one of the most interesting research facilities in the world.

Meet Mobility: Meet:Mobility is a joint project by three of the leading bloggers in the mobile computing space: Steve Paine (@chippy) from Carrypad.com and UMPCportal.com, @jkkmobile (don’t really know his real name;-) from jkkmobile.com, and Sascha Pallenberg (@sascha_p) from netbooknews.de/netbooknews.com. This is really the only mobile computing podcast that I listen to and given the broad coverage of the field, including analyses of news and conference reports, provided by these three guys I feel well informed.

NPR Science Friday: Ira Flatow’s Science Friday is an absolutely excellent radio show about all things science and technology. Yes, it sometimes is very U.S. centric but the people he interviews on the show always add interesting perspectives and insights to the table. As I write this I’ve got several dozen Science Friday episodes stored on my iPod touch, covering everything from climate change, the Microsoft Kinect, multi-tasking, to oil spills.

PRI’s The World – Global Economy: Unfortunately it looks like the Global Economy podcast won’t be continued, the last episode was published in mid-September 2010, however I’m still keeping it in my list in the hope of hearing more of these stories which always looked at economic developments from interesting angles.

PRI’s The World – Technology: If I only have time to listen to one podcast in a week then it’s always The World’s Technology podcast. Clark Boyd (@worldstechpod) is doing an exceptional job of covering “tech that matters” and regularly beats the mainstream press when it comes to discovering new developments, organizations, and services which use or apply technology in novel ways. Definitely a must-listen!

Raumzeit: After Lukas Lang (@lukaslang) raved about Tim Pritlove’s latest podcast venture Raumzeit for many weeks I finally gave it a listen and have to say his praise was definitely spot-on. Raumzeit is a German podcast sponsored by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and focuses on all thing related to space travel. The two episodes I listened to so far focused on mission planning and space waste and were both very interesting.

Software Engineering Radio: I only very recently stumbled across Software Engineering Radio thanks to a tweet by aforementioned @barfooz. I’ve listened to 3 or 4 episodes from the archive so far and really enjoyed all of them. Definitely well worth a listen for anyone interested in software engineering.

Spectrum: Deutsche Welle’s Spectrum, edited by the Cyrus Farivar (@cfarivar), focuses on European science and technology news and thereby fills a gap in my often very U.S.-centric look at this topic. If I have time for  a second podcast in a week beyond The World’s Tech podcast then I always listen to this one.

I have a number of other podcasts listed in iTunes - e.g. 24 horas, Alternativlos, BackStory with the American History Guys, FLOSS Weekly, GeekNights with Rym + Scott, Green Tech Today, etc. – however I don’t listen to them regularly (anymore) these days or simply haven’t had time to listen to them at all yet.

Keynote on "One Laptop per Child in Latin America and what we can learn from it" [video]

I spent the past four days in Switzerland as the University of Teacher Education Central Switzerland in Goldau had invited me to give a keynote at their "One to One Computing in School" conference. The title of my talk was “One Laptop per Child in Latin America and what we can learn from it” and a recording of it is now available here, plus you can find the accompanying slides here. (Please do note that the keynote was given in German.)

Update (16.02.2011): I just got a copy of an article in the Neue Schwyzer Zeitung which talks about the conference as well as mentions my keynote. I’ve made it available for download here.

Parking App

One of the classes I took this semester was a seminar on Human Computer Interaction. It turned out to be a great and thoroughly enjoyable and interesting class. The goal for all the 3-person teams in the class was to develop a horizontal prototype of a mobile application which uses open data.

CNM Studios, the team consisting of Michael Smolle, Nemanja Dubravac and yours truly, developed the prototype of Parking App which (supposedly) provides information related to parking regulations, tariffs, garages, etc. for Austrian cities. At the end of the class we had to create a video presenting the project and I think ours turned out quite well:

I’d highly recommend you to check out this blog post which includes a longer description of our project as well as information and videos about the work by our fellow colleagues.

Cheating in Computer Science

Thanks to a tweet from XRDS (ACM's magazine for students) I came across a great article by William Hugh Murray. Despite its title it isn’t just about cheating in CS but rather contains a very interesting – and I feel accurate – description of the current status quo in much of the education system.

There’s a short teaser below, you can find the complete article on the Web site of Ubiquity (an ACM publication).

“I suggest that we have gotten the cart before the horse. We are less concerned with whether students learn the right thing than whether they learn in the way that we rely upon to measure how well they learn when compared to their peers. We do this without even having considered whether the measurement is even useful, much less necessary or even counter-productive. We do it without considering whether encouraging sin is a good way to teach morals. We do it for no better reason than tradition, habit, and inertia.”

Good food for though, ey? :-)

Photos from Buenos Aires (and Montevideo)

The week before Christmas I had a chance to travel to Buenos Aires to attend a workshop organized by the Argentinean Ministry of Education within the context of the country’s Conectar Igualdad program. I hope to be able to blog about the workshop in more detail in the future but for now I at least managed to upload some photos which I took while exploring Buenos Aires during my stay. As always you can find the complete album over on Flickr as well as see a selection of some of my favorites below.

"El Metodo" playing on Calle Florida

 Conectar Igualdad poster in Palermo

 Buildings on Plaza del Congreso

Skyline at Cementario RecoletaTrain stop in La Boca

EduTechDebate: OLPC in South America

As people following this blog or my tweets will know I spent my summer traveling through Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru to try and get a better understanding of how the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) projects in these countries are going.

Apart from documenting my experiences over on OLPC News, the OLPC (Austria) blog, Flickr, several OLPC and Sugar Labs related mailing lists, this blog, and plenty of tweets I also had an opportunity to share some of my thoughts during talks I gave in Montevideo, Lima, and Washington, D.C.. However the most important component of these documentation efforts awaited me after my return to Austria and have kept me quite busy over the past few weeks.

The result of these efforts is a series of five articles with a total of more than 15,000 words which was posted over on EduTechDebate.org, a discussion platform about ICT for education in developing countries which is sponsored by The World Bank’s infoDev and UNESCO:

OLPC in South America: An Overview of OLPC in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru

OLPC in Uruguay: Impressions of Plan Ceibal’s Primary School XO Laptop Saturation

OLPC in Paraguay: Will ParaguayEduca’s XO Laptop Deployment Success Scale?

OLPC in Peru: A Problematic Una Laptop Por Niño Program

OLPC in South America in Context of Deployments Around the World

I thoroughly enjoyed the process of writing these articles as it gave me a chance to reflect upon my experiences, go through all of my notes, look at the photos I had taken, etc.

In terms of what happened after the publication of the articles it was particularly interesting to see the reactions to my piece about Peru’s Una laptop por niño. My critical views of the project resulted in a significant pushback by Oscar Becerra (head of DIGETE - the Peruvian Ministry of Education's department which runs Una laptop por niño) who posted a numbered 19-part response to my article in the comments. Combined with two Peruvian media reports which mentioned my article, several discussions threads on Spanish mailing-lists, a Peruvian blogger translating the entire article to Spanish, an honorable (or maybe slightly less so;-) mention in Walter Bender’s Sugar Digest, and a total of 147 comments on the article itself it’s save to say that it created quite a stir and some good discussions.

Sir Ken Robinson - Changing Education Paradigms [video]

Back in July I blogged about a talk from Phil Zimbardo about "The Secret Powers of Time" which the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) had subsequently animated and turned into an absolutely spectacular video.

Now this week I had another RSA Animate video being mentioned by many of the people who I follow on Twitter. This time it's based on a talk by Sir Ken Robinson who many know from his famous TED talk on "schools kill creativity". The focus of this video is Changing Education Paradigms and again it's absolutely well worth watching, both for the content as well as the fantastic presentation.