While working on a paper for the MLearn conference I did a brief review of mobile learning support of virtual learning environments (VLEs). As connecting mobile learning and VLEs is not exactly a new topic, I did not expect to find so many new developments in this area. You can find the results of the review here. [more]

Almost one year ago Dirk and I have released the first version of team.sPod. team.sPod is a prototype of a mobile web-based information sharing platform. The first version allowed us to develop a better understanding about translating personalisation and contextualisation of information management to the interfaces of mobile handheld devices. This has lead to a complete re-conceptualised and redesigned of the prototype. The process reflected also the recent developments in the field of web-technologies of the W3C. Consequently, the new version of team.sPod is entirely based on widgets. [more]

I have been busy working on CoFinder around christmas, for those of you who are interested in working with the tool, I have bad news - it is currently on hold. Well, if you were really interested, you have recognized this already ;-) There are three simple reasons for this. The first reason is the Mozilla design challenge. The second are limitations of the current version of Jetpack. The final reason is related to conceptual limitations in Moodle. [more]

I read some fuzz about "identity problems" related to OpenID. However, until Christmas I couldn't really get to the root of the relation between "identity theft" and OpenID. I was quite surprised to see how easy it is to "steal" an identify via OpenID. [more]

CoFindeR got accepted for the Mozilla Jetpack for Learning challenge and so I went on to get comfortable with the jetpack environment. [more]

I just finished the submission of the CoFindeR mockups for the Mozilla Jetpack for Learning challenge. I developed this concept with the great help and feedback of Marion Gruber and Jeroen Storm - and the stimulating and inspiring input of Jon Dron and Roland Klemke from Humance. [more]

In most object-oriented programming languages writing accessor functions for internal properties is a dull and error-prone exercise. This is not the case with Perl if the modules Class::Accessor or Class::Accessor::Grouped are used. [more]

In April I posted a lengthy post on learner support in Moodle. Today, when I revisit this article I feel so stupid, because I forgot about it while being so focused on thinking about writing the actual article. However, more important is that Steinn has released the long awaited first version of our Moodle indicator block in the meantime. [more]

Object oriented programming has become much easier with the recent versions of Perl. One of the strangest things in the "old" days of PerlOO was the @ISA array. This array listed the modules of which a module inherits its functions. However, in order to make really use of an inherited function, one had to load the related package as well. All this looked a bit clumsy and used to confused people who started programming Perl. As I said, things have changed: now there are the base and parent modules coming with Perl's core. [more]

I was watching Matt Trout's (mst) YAPC::NA 2009 presentation on the future of DBIx::Class to get my head around the conceptual ideas behind this nice database abstraction class that did not do the trick I wanted it to do. Well, this presentation was pretty enlightening besides the conceptual models underlying this programming framework. And since I work on my research statements for my dissertation, I picked mst's quote and made it a title for this article. [more]

In just under two weeks our workshop on mobile learning will be held at the ICDE in Maastricht. Currently I prepare the different concepts I want to present and discuss in the workshop. The main focus will be how mobile learning will shape distance education in the future or as the abstract for the workshop states: [more]

Dirk and I worked for some time on team.sPod - a handheld version of team.sPace. This demonstrator is designed to show a touch enabled web-application for handheld devices. It started as a web-application for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, but the intention is to widen the scope to other handheld platforms. Now the first working demonstrator is available at our development server. [more]

Currently I work on a new contribution for this year's ECTEL conference. This paper is again on log-file analysis and how interaction footprints can support personal learning processes. This time I focus on the information that is buried in the activity logs of the Moodle platform. This work is related to the new moodle plugin on that Steinn and I currently work as part of our activities in the GRAPPLE project. In this posting I discuss the role of activity tracking in a learning management systems. [more]

The Surf foundation started on 6th April their Best Widget for Scientists competition. They invite students of Dutch universities to submit their designs for widgets that make the life of scientists easier. [more]

I stumbled across something interesting. I was wondering about the first occurrence of the term e-learning. So I did a small web-research, because wikipedia was not really helpful. According to the search engine of IEEE, the first occurrence of "e-learning" was in June 2000 this interview in ACM's ubiquity. I doubt that this interview was really the first use of the term. [more]