Wii Fit, Cool and Brutally Honest ;)
Ever had a game console tell you you're overweight and unbalanced (physically I presume)? Mine just did, after I connected the Wii Fit. After a phone call yesterday from a local gaming shop that it just came in, and if I was still interested in buying one (Yes!), we went to pick it up today. Cool new gadget, that certainly appeals to me, even if it was brutally honest after I created a profile.
Elmine standing on the Wii Fit plate, and callibrating it.
The Wii Fit is a pressure sensitive plate that you stand on, and connects to the Wii gaming console. It senses changes in your posture by changes in the pressure your feet (or hands when doing push ups) give to the plate. For running excercises you do not use the plate, but put a Wiimote in your pocket. The sensors in it are used to determine your running rhythm and pace. What the Wii Fit and the software it includes do is bring back play into moving and excercizing. Just a it was when you were a little kid. You weren't running because you needed to run, you ran because you were playing.
In general I think these type of interfaces such as the Wii offers are a very interesting development, helping digital information to break out of the laptop screen and key board and become a more integral part of our physical surroundings. Other branches of the same tree in that respect are certain mobile applications, ambient devices, 'roomware' and internet 0 nodes as well as RFID applications. It makes me wonder what Johnny Chung Lee will do with this Wii Fit, having seen what uses he puts the Wiimote to.
0 Comments and 0 Trackbacks | PermalinkShort Visit To Copenhagen
Next weekend I will pay a short visit to Copenhagen. Elmine is coaching a youth fencing team at a tournament there, and I will tag along for the ride. A good opportunity to catch up with a few people in Copenhagen.
It will be different to visit the city without going there for Reboot (which will be in June again, and which Elmine and I will be certain to attend). We visited Copenhagen in 2003 for our summer vacation, and enjoyed the yearly Jazz Festival there. After that Copenhagen and Reboot have been synonymous for me. But not this week.
If I haven't been in touch with you through e-mail, but you would like to catch up on Saturday 29th or Sunday 30th in Copenhagen, let me know.
(The picture was taken in 2003, in the city center.)
1 Comments and 0 Trackbacks | PermalinkSome Thoughts On RSS Reading (BarCamp Amsterdam III)
During BarCamp Amsterdam, see previous posting, we talked about how I can use my tools to better suit my working needs. One of them being social filtering. In this posting I explore the thoughts on rearranging my feed reading habits this triggered for me. I'll describe how I filter information now first, before exploring how I can adapt those routines.
How I filter information
For my information gathering I have two lenses. Back in September 2005, I wrote about my filtering, and created this illustration, that is still valid:
The first lens is the outside-in lens, on the left of the funnel. The second one is my inside-out lens, and is directed by specific questions and tasks I have at a certain point in time. My RSS reading serves both lenses. The outside-in in real time (what is going on now), the inside-out mostly through searching in the archives or full text search in the current items. All my RSS feeds are people-based. I e.g. subscribe to your blog feed, delicious feed, Flickr pics, and other feeds that contain your personal on-line traces. I rename all those feeds to start with your name. From it I construct an overview of what is happening in the circles and communities I am part of.
Current feedreader organization
In my feedreader, I have grouped all feeds in to only a few sections. One for 'Dutch context', one for 'German context', one for ' Keeping track' which collects all internet traces I leave myself (self reflection as it were), one for clients, and one 'all' which contains the long list of people writing stuff I usually find worthwile. All in all I track maybe about 300-400 people, though it fluctuates over time.
My wiki may point the way
In the wiki I use on my laptop for personal note taking I also keep pages of people, where I write down some of the context we share. Where we met, the type of exchanges we've had in the past, and where they're from. I have about 240 people in my wiki, largely different from the ones in my feed reader. The way I categorize them is what is of interest here. I put the people pages in my wiki in circles based on social distance. These circles are roughly based on Dunbars number and 'natural' group sizes. As you can see in the screenshot below I have circles / categories for 1 (meaning <12), 12 (<50), 50 (<150), 150 (<1000), and 999 (>1000) where the number in the category name is sort of the minimal social distance I 'feel'. Remember: this is not exact science, it is just an approximation of my own intuitions. It means nothing more, but nothing less either.
If you were to draw these circles as a social networking graph, you would get what in SNA terms is called a network of spokes. Me in the centre with connections radiating out.
Tags or folders to add contexts
To be able to not only look at my social network (as an information filter) from the above perspective, i.e. me at the heart of several circles, I need to be able to add contexts. Single facet contexts like 'my old fraternity', 'people working at client x', 'living in or around Berlin', as well as multi-faceted contexts like 'coders in Amsterdam', 'Drupal community members in Germany', 'coders in Ruby on Rails', 'start-ups around mobile applications', ' stakeholders around client system x'. The former would form community 'blobs' on my circles above. The latter would add spider-networks to it.
Social distances with community and multi-faceted contexts plotted on them
Adding the single faceted contexts could be easily done by splitting feeds into folders, or rather allowing the same feed to be in multiple folders. The multi-faceted contexts can not be done with folders I'd say, but need some sort of tagging, where you can filter on combinations of tags to get the context you need. Like drupal+Germany, to give me people working on Drupal, based in Germany. Tags can of course also replace any folder structure completely.
Inside-out and Outside-in
As I said, all the usual feedreading is for outside-in information-filtering. To get a feeling what is happening in the world of people that mean something to me in one context or another. For finding answers to my own current questions, information pertaining to current tasks, or refinding links to things I want to point to in what I share on-line myself, I like to use an archive on my laptop. Insdie-out information filtering then amounts to full-text searches on that archive. Also because I spend a lot of my reading and writing time off-line e.g. in the train, I like my feedreader to store stuff off-line. Therefore on-line feedreaders are not a workable option for me.
Finding the right RSS reader
Now I can start out with arranging my feeds in my feedreader (currently using Vienna) according to the circles of social distance shown above, but tags and one feed being able to live in multiple folders is a different thing. Do you know about an off-line feedreading client that provides these functionalities (one feed in multiple folders and tagging, or at least tagging)?
BarCamp Amsterdam III: Tools I need, But Don't Have Yet
Last week saw the third edition of BarCamp in Amsterdam. Located, just as the first one (and second BarCamp ever), at Mediamatic offices near Amsterdam Central Station, a small group of people gathered to discuss their projects. I am not a coder, but do like to talk about the wishes and dreams I have about my tools. As before this was the still evolving story I brought to the programme.
Listening to Robert on Roomware.
The full title of my topic was "The tools I need/want but that don't exist yet, or I am unaware of."
I started with a sketch of the three major quantitative changes I see.
First an increase in connections between people (induced by new global infrastructure like mobile telephony and internet).
Second, an increase in speed and dynamics (when you build roads, you create traffic)
Third an increase in information until the level of abundance.
As our previous strategies to deal with connections, speed and information don't scale into a networked globalized world, we see qualitative answers emerging.
Those qualitative answers are along the lines of:
First a more pro-active attitude, making your own sense of the world.
Second different priorities in existing and new information skills.
Third, new tools and work forms that cater to a pro-active attitude, and different information skills.
The shift I see, also in working with clients, away from the Web 2.0 avant garde, is to a higher level of cooperation: networked co-creation. Here I quoted Ivan Labra from his talk at BarCamp Brussels, where he distinguishes three maturity levels (sharing information, coordinating tasks, co-creation).
When I look at what this requires to build effective working routines, I see things like:
Pattern recognition, and taking those patterns as input signals.
Being human on-line: more subtle and granular negotiation of trust levels and intimacy in information exchanges.
Visualisation: what is the quality of my social network as a filter, where are the white-spots, echo-chambers, dark zones.
True co-creation: simultaneous editing, re-arranging and adding, in real-time.
What resulted was a good conversation, in which others gave some tips and pointers to tools that might provide buidling blocks (though most were familiar). Yahoo Pipes, Megite, Quartz, APML and Open Search were among those mentioned.
I also noted in this conversation how deeply ingrained a notion it is that we look at information piece-meal. Where my point is, that I don't look at individual information pieces when I want to get a feeling for what is happening in my communities. I look at what they are talking about, not what they are saying immediately. When I have a specific question to answer, then I do read individual items/entries that look to provide parts of the answer.
My main take-away however was the realization, in line with the needed pro-active attitude mentioned above, that I need to dig into this deeper myself. Have a dive into sources on data-mining and into the pointers given.
It also triggered me to think about redesigning the way I gather and combine my RSS feeds. That is the topic for the next posting.
More pics of BarCamp Amsterdam can be found in my Flickr stream, and some video's I life-streamed with my phone are at my Qik account.
1 Comments and 0 Trackbacks | PermalinkPhun, or Learning Physics the Fun Way
In the VR Lab at Umea University (Sweden) they have created a beautiful teaching help called Phun, where in a game like environment you get to experiment with all kinds aspects of Physics.
When I talk to teachers they sometimes think that making learning fun means making it simpler, dumbed down. Once I heard one say learning had to 'hurt a lot' for it to stick.
To me adapting teaching to our networked information-abundant world means making it fun, challenging, and relevant to me instantly. I've never equated fun with easy. Fun just means the learning process is more engaging, easier to stick to, not that the content is of less quality or less challenging. The work done in Umea is a case in point.
(found via the HumLab blog)
0 Comments and 0 Trackbacks | PermalinkMoo Cards: Tangible Change
I received my Moo mini cards today. Not a newsworthy event as such, especially not to most of you who are familiar with them anyway.
But the bigger point behind these Moo Cards is that
1) they build on my own production (my Flickr pics), making it more personal and meaningful
2) they turn my photos into tangible/physical products thus taking digital stuff into the physical realm
3) they create unique items (100 different cards) for a very reasonable amount (15 euros), where we've become accustomed to equating unique with pricy.
I am excited about getting my Moo Cards because it will help engage clients, colleagues and others less aware of what kind of changes Web2.0 is an expression of. I will use them as my business cards. Each unique cards has a story attached to the picture it shows, a personal story. Something you never have with other cards. The card is smaller than usual, but they will remember it better. I bet.
(these are the 100 pics the cards have been printed from)
1 Comments and 0 Trackbacks | PermalinkQik: Live Streaming Video From My Phone (alpha)
In the past days I've been playing with an alpha application for my Nokia N95 phone that really impresses me.
It's called Qik and it live streams video from your phone to the web. After you're done streaming, it keeps the video stored. You can leave your videos up on Qik, and also have them automatically put into your Seesmic account, and share a link to the footage in Twitter, via the options part of your profile.
My Qik profile page
Registering: your phone put in the centre
Registering for Qik was easy: leave your phone number on the site. I soon got an SMS inviting me to download and install Qik on my phone. Downloading didn't start however. Some real time e-mail exchanges with the dev support people (Qik is California based) helped sort that out, by them adapting the download procedure right there and then. Once downloaded installing was easy, and ended with asking me to create a short video there and then. After making the video I received another SMS with the login info to the site.
I thought that was clever, as it makes sure only people who have installed the application as well as used it at least once, in the end have an active account. Certainly in an alpha testing phase that makes sense.
First user experiences
Streaming video works ok, primarily if you use a wifi connection on your phone. GPRS won't cut it in terms of bandwith, but faster internet connections on your phone do work. Although it delays the streaming a lot at this point. (Taking several minutes to stream a 50 second item). Streaming via wifi is indeed live streaming (with only seconds delay) and works the best by far.
Videos can be embedded of course (as a channel too), linked to directly and also downloaded:
Like I said, the videos get piped into Seesmic as well, if you wish
Other products in the same field
Qik of course is not the only one looking into live streaming video from your phone. There are more.
For instance there is Livecastr (described here on TechCrunch) which is Amsterdam based (and hence generated my interest). Their site however feels all wrong to me (no community, no interaction, just promotion, it looks fake), and the number of questions I needed to answer to register for a beta were a fatal put-off. Especially unanswerable (in some meaningful way at least) questions like "Which community site are you member?" (even ignoring the english) and "How do you plan to use LiveCastr" (emphasis mine) which to me shows a complete lack of understanding in how people acquire and explore the use of a new tool they never saw before. Especially if asked before even seeing anything of the tool. Ask me after having tested something for a while, not at a point where it only serves as a barrier to entry.
And there is Sweden based Bambuser.com, which looks a whole lot better on their site than LiveCastr. Haven't got an invitation to test yet, though. Looking forward to have a closer look at them soon.
0 Comments and 0 Trackbacks | PermalinkBarCamp Amsterdam III: March 1st and March 2nd
On March 1st and March 2nd, the third BarCamp Amsterdam will take place. Initiated by Ralph, again Mediamatic in the Post CS building will be hosts to it. Boris Mann suggested (or more like told me) I attend. So guess what? I think I will. See Upcoming and the BarCamp wiki for more.
Kitchen session at the first Amsterdam BarCamp (and the 2nd BarCamp ever) (more pics)
What is on the menu at this third Amsterdam BarCamp?
First of all there will be a follow-up session of the Federating Social Networks session held last December. That will spill over in a full-blown BarCamp where the agenda of course is set by those attending.
I think I will do something on how web2.0 tools may be more useful in making sense of the world around you. Part of that is the way I'd like federating social network sites to work (taking me, not the networking site as the crucial element). Another part is how I actually build a socially filtered learning environment (aka connectivism) from my Web2.0 tools and what that means for the design and development of those tools. A continuation of my contributions at Barcamps in Brussels and Vienna really.
Interested in learning at and contributing to (which are essentially sides of the same coin) BarCamp Amsterdam? Make yourself known (here or here) and see you there! (Or find out about an upcoming BarCamp near you)
3 Comments and 0 Trackbacks | PermalinkKLM Checking Schiphol Brand Fall-Out
Last week a reporter of a Dutch tv station reported how easy it was to get onto Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, and even place a fake bomb in the cargo hold of a passenger plane. The conclusion was, that even though checks on passengers were relatively strict, checks on ground personnel were a joke.
Apparantly some people at Schiphol Airport, airline KLM's home base, are worried/curious about the fall-out of this report.
In my serverlogs this morning:
a) visit from a KLM server.
b) via a Google search on Schiphol Security
c) finding a blogpost of mine as the 3rd hit
d) talking about how they overlooked a screw driver in my carry-on bag in 2006
Funny.
0 Comments and 0 Trackbacks | PermalinkConnectivism Workshop At Rotterdam University
Last Friday Elmine Wijnia and I gave a day long workshop at Rotterdam University (Hogeschool Rotterdam) on networked learning.
The group of 15 participants are alle involved in realigning the teaching at their institute to the digital reality their students are living in.
We created the workshop, starting from the notion that in order to be able to change their teaching, the teachers need to feel what networked learning can be for themselves. If you can feel it for yourself, you will be better able to transfer that knowledge to colleagues and engage students.
Changing Behaviour of Youth
We started with a short theoretical introduction, repeating the to the participant familiar notions of Wim Veen's Homo Zappiens, and 'Generation Einstein'. Both describe how the lives of young people have changed, under the influence of digital networked technology.
What young people are doing is intuitively responding to their given surroundings. So what is their behaviour an answer to?
I see three quantitative shifts, that trigger a change in behaviour.
Those three, mutually connected, quantitative shifts are
1) increase in connections between people (due to network infrastructure like internet and mobile telephony)
2) increase in speed and speed of change (where there are more roads, there will be more traffic. Where there are more connections, there will be more exchanges. We built highways and cities for exactly the same purpose)
3) increase in volume of information (extra connections, create extra exchanges, along multiple paths and channels)
Quantative Shifts Lead to Qualitative Answers
The point is that above a certain point, quantitative changes cannot be answered with the same existing strategies. At some point conventional strategies stop scaling. The quantitative shifts reach a qualitative tipping point.
Three qualitative answers to these quantitative are:
1) A more pro-active personal role (as sense maker, as producer and consumer, as pattern-hunter, active sharing)
2) A different set of information skills (pattern recognition, social filtering, validation/authentication and evaluation skills)
3) A different set of tools (web2.0, social software) and work forms (open space, communities of practice, networked organisations)
Our youth have stumbled upon aspects of these qualitative answers, using the tools they find available. It is important to note here that this does not necessarily mean a technological or digital answer. The same effects are visible off-line, in other aspects of our lives.
Being pro-active, using network skills, and networked tools, also changes the way we learn and handle knowledge. This is where George Siemens's Connectivism comes in. He positions knowledge as being connected, and learning as building new networks of meaning, adding connections.
This has a systemic impact on education, turning it into optimizing the value of those networks of meaning.
After this more theoretical framework, it was time to take a look at how an average working day looks for me, and how being continuously networked is having an effect on how I make sense of the world, work and learn.
This makes the theoretical framework more tangible, and also introduces the use of social software / web2.0 tools.
Building Your Own Socially Filtered Learning Environment
The rest of the day (actually most of it) were spend first at familiarizing the participants with a number of tools and second at building a starting point for a personal networked, socially filtered, information environment. We listed 8 steps for this:
1 Connecting within tools (participants adding eachother to their buddy lists in different tools, this time primarily delicious.)
2 Creating a dashboard (in this case Netvibes or iGoogle)
3 Adding theme based feeds to your dashboard
4 Adding your buddies from the tools in Step 1 to your dashboard
5 Finding and adding people through themes
6 Finding and adding people through people
7 Actively sharing what you find
8 Actively sharing your own opinions, annotating your finds
Key point here is that sharing is a prerequisite to be visible to your network peers. If you don't share you don't exist.
It was a good and intensive day. We did not succeed in completing the entire programme we had planned, but I think we did get the main points across. We hope that the participants will be able to use the workshop as a starting point for building their personal learning network.
The sheets we used during the workshop (in Dutch but with lots of images):
Weblog by 
