FabLab Workshop
After the workshop last week Friday on experimenting with Lego Mindstorms and Arduino open source hardware, I returned to the ProtoSpace FabLab in Utrecht today. This time around it was all about learning to work with the machines the FabLab is equipped with: a laser cutter, a vinyl cutter, a milling machine and a full colour 3D printer.
The impressive bit of FabLab is not the fact that the type of machines it offers exist. The impressive part is that you can get these machines to do your bidding by feeding it things as simple as PDF files. You create your model or drawing and then basically hit the print button, select 'laser cutter' instead of your regular ink jet printer, and watch the machine get to work.
We played with the 3D full colour printer, which is very impressive.
In the 5 minute video below I documented the whole process. From the example object, to making 7 smaller copies of it. 3D printing is time consuming, but you can do amazing things with it.
Siert and I created a card board casing for Arduino boards to prevent it from short-circuiting because of the surface it is lying on. For the first version I simply drew a first sketch in Neooffice (the Mac version of Open Office), in a text document. I then imported that text document as PDF into Corel Draw on one of the PCs in the FabLab and hit the print button. The lasercutter cut a piece of card board according to my sketch, which assembled resulted in the first version of our Arduino holder.
Version 1.0 of Arduino board holder
Then Sierts education as an engineer kicked in and he adapted the design into version 2.0. Again hitting Print resulted in a handful of pieces of cardboard coming out of the lasercutter that fitted snugly together. Who would have guessed I could be so pleased with a few bits of card board?
Version 2.0 of the Arduino holder
The video below shows another run with the laser cutter for a different item (part of a 3D game board)
Last week as well as today I made a point of showing the other participants how easy it is to share pictures and video of what you are doing while you are doing it. To help lower the threshold for them to start sharing their FabLab work as well.
Technorati Tags: protospace, fablab, utrecht, lasercutter, 3dprinting, learningbyplaying 0 Comments and 0 Trackbacks | Permalink
Giving a Key-note at Online Educa in Berlin
I am honoured to be invited to give a key-note at Online Educa in Berlin early December. This is the 14th international conference on Technology Supported Learning and Training.
It promises to be an interesting event, that will feature much more than just presentations. Bloggers have been invited to cover the event, and there are a number of fully interactive sessions as well. Michael Wesch of Kansas State University, the anthropologist that created the 'Machine is Us' and other videos with his students will be presenting as well, and I am very much looking forward to hearing him speak.
My own presentation, as well as my contribution in the panel discussion that will follow it, has the title "Networked life, networked work, networked learning. Or the consequences of accidentally reconfiguring my life." It will be a combination of the story of what my fully networked and connected day looks like, and the more fundamental shifts in underlying cultural categories that go with it. The changes I made these past 6 years in the way I live work and learn have not been preplanned, but happened in response to a changed environment. Once I noticed those responses I turned them into more conscious strategy.
When we look at how children respond to the technology available as well as to the societal changes that already caused, it is much the same process. We need to adapt our teaching, because the world these children grow up in and respond to has already changed due to the new affordances that mobile communication and internet give us. Our teaching needs to empower children to consciously shape their strategies using the tools and environment they already adapted to without noticing.
In preparation of the conference the organizers published a short interview with me, and there is a short article featuring some quotes on TrainingZone.
Am looking forward to visit Berlin again. It's been a long time since I last was there.
Technorati Tags: onlineeduca, berlin, conference, keynote, tonzijlstra
3 Comments and 0 Trackbacks | PermalinkRecipe for Arduino Projects
When I attended the Spimes workshop at SHiFT08, we used a recipe to brainstorm spime applications.
This was the 5 point recipe:
1) Choose the spime's sensors for its interaction (electromagnetic, mechanical, chemical, social sensors etc.)
2) Choose the level of spime data aggregation for your application (loca, global, non-geographic)
3) Choose a point in the timeline of technological development (now, at some specific point in the future)
4) Design machine to machine interaction (reliability, redundancy, systems needed etc.)
5) Design machine to human interaction (what is 'friending', information display, social objects)
Thinking this weekend on how to brainstorm interesting projects for my Arduino prototyping kit or my Lego Mindstorms kit, I decided to extend the recipe by a 6th point: choosing your actuators. Or perhaps it can replace the 3rd point, as in experimenting with Arduino and the like, you are using available technology by definition.
So my Arduino recipe becomes:
1) Choose the project's sensors for its interaction (electromagnetic, mechanical, chemical, social sensors etc.)
2) Choose the level of data aggregation for your application (loca, global, non-geographic)
3) Choose the project's actuators for its interaction (servo's, switches, displays, sounds, lights etc.)
4) Design machine to machine interaction (reliability, redundancy, systems needed etc.)
5) Design machine to human interaction (what is 'friending', information display, social objects)
Playing with my Arduino kit
Arduino Workshop, Finally
Transient Technology
For about 18 months now I've been looking into transient technologies. Digital applications are breaking the boundaries of our laptop screens, and the internet of things, as well as internet connected peripheral devices, both sensors and actuators, are moving into our physical surroundings. This means that it is now no longer enough for me to have a sense of what is happening in software development circles to see what kind of new apps are coming, and that I also feel the need to look into hardware more. Open source hardware like Arduino, sensor based space and time aware applications (Spimes), RFID tech, Chumby and Nabaztag etc. That is why I proposed an Arduino workshop to Reboot last June, even though I did not know much about it myself. Alexandra and Nick of Tinker.it in London stepped up and made it happen, but in the end I did not get to attend my 'own' workshop (except for opening it and closing it), because I was speaking at the same time in the hall next door. 
Workshop at ProtoSpace
But today I finally attended an Arduino workshop. It's been a long time since I tinkered with electronics. About 18 years I guess, but I assume I still have a soldering iron in the attic. The workshop was organized by ProtoSpace, one of the FabLabs in the Netherlands. My brother in law is the lab manager there, and he attended the Arduino workshop at Reboot I mentioned. He is now spreading that knowledge again.
In the morning of the day we covered a basic introduction about FabLab and ProtoSpace, and talked about Phidgets (physical widgets) and Lego Mindstorms, before getting to Arduino. The entire afternoon was then spend on playing with Arduino.
Play
I have been used to playing with software tools for so long I really rediscovered the fun of playing with tangible stuff again. A lot of old knowledge of electronics resurfaced. The physics of it hasn't changed of course, but the threshold to make programmable stuff has been seriously lowered, as has the cost of acquiring sensors and actuators that enable you to do interesting stuff.
Playing with Lego Mindstorms:
The trajectory the Mindstorms robot has to follow
Designing the trajectory before programming
Programming the robot via USB
Video of the finished experiment
Experimenting with Arduino open source hardware:
FabLab
Next week Friday I will return to ProtoSpace for a workshop on how to use the different machines that make up the FabLab there: a lasercutter, a milling machine, a vinyl cutter, and a full color 3D printer. All programmable of course. Already looking forward to it.
Lasercutting an apple during lunch:
3D printing examples lying around:
Technorati Tags: fablab, protospace, arduino, utrecht, legomindstorms, reboot10, shift08 1 Comments and 0 Trackbacks | Permalink
Shifting Cultural Categories: General Kick-off
This is the kick off of what might become a series of postings. At Reboot 10 last June in Copenhagen, I talked about how to reflect on the impact of mobile communications and internet as new infrastructures on our societies. In my presentation (video available, embedded above), I talked about how infrastructures in the past 2 centuries had wide and deep impact on a lot of aspects of our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Which turns into the question how the two newest infrastructures we built will impact us.
Especially as these two new infrastructures are qualitatively very different from previous infrastructures: they not just reduce distance in time and distance, they make it zero. And on top of that, the end point is not geographically defined. Instead you yourself are the end point of it, or rather, you carry the end point around in your pocket. I used to need to know where you were to be able to call you, my mail was sent to a geographic address. Now you are your own address and I usually have no clue where my call or e-mail will reach you, nor do I really care.
What will this mean for our understanding of the world? Any lasting impact of the introduction of technology means that the definition of our cultural categories will change (there are three other typical answers to technology that I regard as temporary. See Monster theory). Our notion of what constitutes work, freedom, transparancy, privacy, mobility, friendship etc. will be shaped, and will shift, in response to the affordances, effects and changes induced by new technology.
A classic example would be how railroads changed our perception of time. Because of railroads and train schedules standardized times and timezones became a necessity, where before each town defined its own time and rhythm of the day. (The town I grew up in was about 20 mins ahead of the capital 150km away before being connected to the railroad. A national standard time was adopted in 1909, before that only towns connected to the railroad and dilligence network used synchronized time).
Last week at SHiFT08 I used the time slot in the programme allotted to me to have a conversation with the participants of the changes in their own lives mobile communications and internet already had caused, and how their understanding of themselves and their world had changed. Where my talk at Reboot 10 was more asking questions on a theoretical level, this session was about the implications at the practical and personal level. We talked about things like being always reachable by your manager, work - life distinction, regarding colleagues half a world away as 'close', being able to work as self-employed or not, and the number of clients you can help out at the same time. (If you read Portuguese see e.g. this blogposting 'Help I'm shifting' by Jose da Silva who participated in the conversation)
In coming blogpostings I intend to reflect on different cultural categories and how they may have changed in my own perception, and what kind of examples of change I see happening around me.
(UPDATE:)
Postings in this series thusfar
Shifting Empathy
Shifting Mobility
Shifting Workplace
Technorati Tags: reboot10, shift08, culture, infrastructure, monstertheory
0 Comments and 0 Trackbacks | PermalinkSHiFT08: Spimes Workshop with David Orban
On the first day of SHiFT08 in Lisbon last week I participated in the workshop on SPIMEs by David Orban. SPIMEs are transient applications that are aware of SPace and tIME, hence SPIMEs and can interact with their surroundings through sensors and an internetconnection. Those spimes are the core of the internet of things.
In the workshop we split up in groups to come up with different spime applications. To be able to do this and have a reasonable change of coming up with something, David gave us a recipe to follow:
1) Choose the spime's sensors for its interaction (electromagnetic, mechanical, chemical, social sensors etc.)
2) Choose the level of spime data aggregation for your application (loca, global, non-geographic)
3) Choose a point in the timeline of technological development (now, at some specific point in the future)
4) Design machine to machine interaction (reliability, redundancy, systems needed etc.)
5) Design machine to human interaction (what is 'friending', information display, social objects)
With that recipe our little group (as shown in the picture above) went to work. We ended up with a spime application that is based on detecting people falling.
The final presentation on our spime application, dubbed 'All Fall Down', that I gave on behalf of our little group has been taped and uploaded to YouTube by David:
On the sidelines of the workshop I had a little chat with David as he was preparing some slides for the other groups in the workshop:
One of the groups had drawn their slides on paper, which David then photographed. The pictures he edited and cropped into Keynote slides, after which the group gave their presentation. The interesting bit is perhaps not so much in the process of this, but very much in the last remark David makes in the video above: it means you can bring in the laptop as a tool at the very end. I totally like that. Because the laptop is not a social object in group work, but pen and paper is. During this workshop Jose (the guy on the left in the pic) and I both worked on our laptop, which helped to keep our notes and work organized, but which was a barrier in the conversations. Pen and paper on the other hand serve as just as good a means for note taking, but at the same time enhance the conversation. (As seen here, e.g. during Elmine's Birthday Unconference)
An enjoyable workshop, the concepts and take-aways of which were reinforced the next day as I attended David Orban's presentation on the same subject, and during the conversations we had during the conference, amongst other over a seafood lunch.
Tags:shift08,elmine2008,lisbon,conference,spimes,davidorban
SHiFT08: Knowledge Cafe Slides, Pictures and Video
I had great fun at the SHiFT08 conference in Lisbon in the past days. Inspiring stories both on and off stage, lots of familiar and new faces, great conversations, and great sea food.
Meanwhile I have added all SHiFT08 pictures to Flickr. Feel free to tag them if you want (which following up on Stephanie's advice is now possible for everyone). I am in the process of uploading video to Youtube, a few of which are already online.
The slides I used as introduction to the Knowledge Cafe I gave at SHiFT08 are up on my Slideshare account of course:
Tags:shift08,knowledgecafe,boundaries,worklifebalance,futureworkspaces,lisbon,conference
SHiFT 2008: Knowledge Cafe on Shifting Cultural Categories
I am currently in Lisbon for the SHiFT conference. This three day event saw a day of workshops yesterday, and today is the start of the conference proper, with about 50 presentations until tomorrow evening.
Feira Internacional de Lisboa: SHiFT venue
My contribution will be a 80 minute Knowledge Cafe on the cultural categories and concepts that need/are shifting because of the impact mobile communications and internet have as infrastructures on our lives and routines. Digital nomads have seen their perception of work-life balance, value, transparancy, privacy, information strategies, organisations, jobs, structures etc, change in the past decade. This means we are learning new boundaries, barriers and attractors to balance our lives, and are creating new meaning and language to express that. I think there is a real need for that type of redefining cultural concepts and creating new language. Simply because it is virtually impossible to express the new exclusively in the language of the old. By doing a Knowledge Cafe (apart from not having time to create the content for a presentation last week because I was ill) I hope to bring the discussion down from the abstract level into the individual context of the participants, where they are most likely to feel well equipped to reflect and exchange experiences and stories.
Hanging out with Henriette, Mark and Brian during the workshop day
Tags: shift08, knowledgecafe, boundaries, worklifebalance, futureworkspaces, lisbon, conference
0 Comments and 0 Trackbacks | PermalinkElmines Birthday Unconference: The Video
Announcement of Elmines Birthday Unconference at the venue
Elmine edited the video statements she took from everybody at the Unconference on her birthday a month ago, and turned them into a 7 minute video document.
My major take-aways from the event are all around boundaries and balances, as I blogged a few days ago. (And I am still working on that.)
If you want to know what all the talk in the video is about, also have a look at the pictures of the flip over sheets, and the event itself that Elmine and I posted in Flickr.
Tags: elmine2008, unconference, enschede
0 Comments and 0 Trackbacks | PermalinkCall for Papers: Personal KM Workshop, Switzerland, March 2009
I have been asked to be part of the Programme Committee for the '1st International Workshop on Personal Knoweldge Management' (PKM2009), that will be part of the 5th international conference on KM, called WM2009, in Solothurn, Switzerland next spring.
PKM has been an interest of mine for a long time. In 2004 and 2005 I organized some sessions about it, amongst others with Lilia Efimova and Piers Young on KM Europe in Amsterdam, as well as BlogWalk sessions.
Since then I have come to see the topic more in terms of personal information-strategies, networking strategies, networked learning, and boundaries and balances in work and other more private activities. All in all a rich subject. (One that I will be addressing on several conferences this fall, like Shift next month in Lisbon, and Online Educa in Berlin in December)
Perhaps this Call for Papers is of interest to you, and is it connected to your work or research.
Here is the (long!) Call for Papers for the PKM2009 Workshop:
###################
###########
#######
##### CALL FOR PAPERS
###
## FIRST INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON
#
# PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (PKM2009)
http://personalknowledge.org
March 25, 2009 - March 27, 2009
Solothurn, Switzerland
Part of the Conference on Professional Knowledge Management (WM 2009)
http://www.km-conference2009.org
=== Dates ===
* October 31, 2008: Submission of workshop papers
* December 15, 2008: Notification of authors about acceptance/rejection
* January 10, 2009: Submission of camera-ready papers
=== Introduction ===
Knowledge Management (KM) deals with creating and exchanging knowledge
within groups of persons in organisational contexts. The potentials and
needs of the individual is often not in the focus of KM efforts, although
no-one would deny that the individual as knowledge bearer, -user and
-creator is naturally the most essential part of knowledge management. The
main goal of PKM is make the individual more productive - and thereby the
organisation as a whole.
The term Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) has two main dimensions:
* Personal Knowledge - Ultimately, all knowledge is personal knowledge.
Following the tradition of Nonaka & Takeuchi's spiral model (and later Ba
model) knowledge resides partially in the minds of people and can
partially be codified as external artefacts. PKM investigates the use of
methods and tools to amplify the abilities of the individual to work
better with knowledge. E.g. recall previously learned knowledge faster (or
at all) when it is required model personal knowledge and beliefs with
external modelling tools to derive new insights (MS Excel is often used
for this today) strategies for filing ideas to retrieve them when needed
* Personal Management - Management is a systematic approach to define goals,
measure, define and execute actions and repeat this control loop until the
goal is reached. Different from traditional management, in personal
management one has to manage oneself. This involves the problem of
fulfilling two roles (executing and managing) and learning when and how to
switch between them. Typical management problems in PKM are e.g. time and
task management matching work habits with personal productivity level
variations investing time into personal learning and PKM improvements
work-life balance
=== Audience ===
We invite practitioners and academic researchers alike to collaborate on
the interdisciplinary topic of PKM. Academic researchers might come from
KM-related disciplines such as economics, computer science, education
science, business informatics, or information sciences but to explore the
individual aspects also contributions from fields such as cognitive
psychology, brain science and HCI are invited. Practitioners might work as
consultants, tool vendors, or user in knowledge-intensive industries. We
invite especially pragmatic early adopters and interested students. No
submission to the workshop is required in order to participate. We will
run a lighting talk round to collect the positions of all participants.
=== Research questions ===
How can an individual effectively and efficiently use external tools to
amplify his abilities to handle knowledge in large quantities and /or with
high complexity? How can the individual support, structure and improve his
personal knowledge management and individual knowledge
creation,-modelling, -usage and -development? How can the conflict between
personal goals (e.g. motivation) and the goals of an organisation (e.g.
efficient knowledge sharing, productivity) be tackled or even resolved?
Foundational questions such as
* theoretical foundations of PKM (e.g. from cognitive psychology, cognitive
ergonomics, etc.),
* extension of established KM-methods with PKM-specific aspects,
* results from work sciences about characteristics of and potential for
support of individual knowledge work,
* legal questions (e.g. which knowledge must be shared or may not be shared,
privacy issues arising from user observation by tools)
* relations of PKM to related topics (e. g. ePortfolio and competence/skill
management and development),
* methods for self-management and PKM key competencies (e.g. time
management, task management, stress management, social networking).
Methods and tools such as
* those for personal knowledge articulation (e.g. knowledge mapping,
editable visualisations, step-wise formalisation),
* personal wikis, semantics desktop, personal storage and search solutions,
* extending PIM tools and methods for PKM, creativity tools and personal
idea management,
* innovative use of new technologies (e.g. mobile devices, speech
recognition, ePaper),
* the link from personal to shared knowledge models,
* tools for computer-supported personal work (CSPW) in contrast to and
combination with CSCW.
Applications and case studies such as
* long-term studies,
* lab experiments,
* products and best practices,
* evaluation of personal knowledge work and supporting tools
=== Goals ===
The PKM 2009 workshop marks the begin of a workshop series aiming to
provide a forum to discuss in an interdisciplinary fashion all aspects of
PKM in theory and practice. By reflecting critically and building on
existing practitioner (consultants, tool vendors, early adaptors)
experiences and research results we aim to establish PKM as a sub-field of
KM.
=== Submissions ===
We invite submissions
* up to 8-10 pages
* LNI style (http://www.gi-ev.de/service/publikationen/lni/)
* in German or English,
* dealing with any of the above mentioned topics.
To stimulate a rich, interdisciplinary discussion we expect explicitly not
only formal scientific papers but also position papers, overview articles,
tool descriptions, case studies, etc. The type of work and current status
has to be clearly indicated, e.g. in a chapter "future work", "status of
implementation" or "limitations".
We can accept only submissions in PDF-Format via the WM conference
management system (http://www.km-conference2009.org/submissions.php).
For each accepted paper at least one author has to register at the
conference and present the paper in the workshop. Participation in the
workshop without a submitted or accepted paper is invited, too. Each
workshop participant must be registered at the WM conference.
Every submission is reviewed by at least two Program Committee members.
The reviews are mostly intended as a quality control and -improvement and
less as a selection procedure. Each presenter in the workshop is expected
to read another submission critically (and constructive!) to ask in-depth
questions at the workshop and to provide a counter position to launch
lively discussions.
All papers will be published as CEUR proceedings. A selected subset (based
on reviewers comments) will be published additionally as printed LNI
proceedings.
=== Workshop Format ===
We hope to get enough high-quality submissions to run a full-day workshop
- investigating a new interdisciplinary topic requires a larger proportion
of discussion than in established fields. Submissions will be presented as
long talks, short talks and lightning talks (position statements of
participants without papers). Each presenter gets assigned beforehand a
"challenger" to stimulate a critical and constructive discussion.
Some time of the workshop is reserved for group discussion to clarify and
consolidate terms, topics and goals of participants.
=== Program Committee ===
* Prof. Marco Bettoni-de Vries, Fernfachhochschule Schweiz (CH)
* Dr. Ernst Biesalski, EnBW AG, Karlsruhe (D)
* Magdalena Böttger, netvibes.com, München (D)
* Lilia Efimova, Telematica Instituut, Enschede (NL)
* Ludger van Elst, DFKI GmbH Kaiserslautern (D)
* Anja Flicker, Reinisch GmbH Karlsruhe, (D)
* Prof. Dr. Stefan Güldenberg, WU Wien (A) confirmation pending
* Dr. Siegfried Handschuh, DERI Galway (IE)
* Prof. Dr. Martin Eppler, Universität Lugano (CH)
* Dr. Claudia Müller, Universität Potsdam (D)
* Dr. Eyal Oren, VU Amsterdam (NL) confirmation pending
* Dr. Uwe Riss, SAP Research, CEC Karlsruhe (D)
* Martin Roell, Dresden (D)
* Leo Sauermann, DFKI GmbH, Kaiserslautern (D)
* Swaran Sandhu, Universität Luzern (CH) confirmation pending
* Dr. Sigmar-Olaf Tergan, ex Institut für Wissensmedien, Tübingen (D)
* Denny Vrandecic, Institut AIFB, Universität Karlsruhe (D)
* Dr. Reinhard Willfort, innovation (AT)
* Ton Zijlstra, independent consultant, Enschede (NL)
=== Contact & Organisation ===
Max Völkel, Heiko Haller, Andreas Abecker
Mail Abt. Wissensmanagement
FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik
at Karlsruhe Institue of Technology
Haid-und-Neu-Str. 10-14
D-76131 Karlsruhe
Tel +49 721 9654 854
Fax +49 721 9654 855
Mail voelkel AT fzi.de
URL http://www.fzi.de/ipe
Tags: pkm, wm2009, pkm2009, solothurn, conference, personal knowledge management
2 Comments and 0 Trackbacks | Permalink
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