is it just me

At this week’s SSE 2010 workshop, Prof. Bernd Brügge from TUM gave the keynote entitled “Opportunities for Social Software in Large-Scale Project Courses”. The talk was really inspiring and introduced the DOLLI project to us. This project was a cooperation between TUM and the airport Munich during which more than 50 students worked on a real-life problem for the airport. Not only the engaging topic but also they way they did project management (starting with RUP and switching to XP after that) and used video during the whole project is worth the viewing.

Also check out the website of the DOLLI project.

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Jana Herwig hat sich in den voestalpine digitalks in der dritten Ausgabe mit Microblogging, Video und Weak ties beschäftigt. Das sehr interessante Video findet sich auf YouTube, die Folien auf Slideshare und ein ausführlicher Beitrag in Jana’s Blog. Enjoy.

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Today I came across a real awesome video presented by Critical Commons.

Critical Commons is a non-profit advocacy coalition that supports the use of media for teaching, learning and creativity, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students, educators and creators. Critical Commons provides information about current copyright law and its alternatives in order to facilitate the writing and dissemination of best practices and fair use guidelines for scholarly and creative communities. Critical Commons also functions as a showcase for innovative forms of electronic scholarship and creative production that are transformative, culturally enriching and both legally and ethically defensible. At the heart of Critical Commons is an online tool for viewing, tagging, sharing, annotating and curating media within the guidelines established by a given community. Our goal is to build open, informed communities around media-based teaching, learning and creativity, both inside and outside of formal educational environments.

The video discusses informal learning through blogs and creative thinking in the context of online/offline learning networks in a rather … extraordinary way. On of the best parts is

Don’t worry Anna. We will always have our informal learning networks.

But see yourself:

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I came across Sikuli today, a MIT User Interface Design Group project that is just awesome and allows to automate or script your computer based on screenshots.

Sikuli is a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots). The first release of Sikuli contains Sikuli Script, a visual scripting API for Jython, and Sikuli IDE, an integrated development environment for writing visual scripts with screenshots easily. Sikuli Script automates anything you see on the screen without internal API’s support. You can programmatically control a web page, a desktop application running on Windows/Linux/Mac OS X, or even an iphone application running in an emulator.

What you do ist basically tell the program which region on the GUI it should click or move or rotate bei making screenshots of the region. Sikuli even let’s you automate the fill in of forms (e.g. IP adresses in the network preferences dialog).

See the demo video they put online for a detailed inspection and give the tool a try. This is really cool…

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One of my grad students (Frederik) is developing a great tool for scientific writing in the context of his masters thesis. Today the first screencast of the early alpha version has gone online. Maybe you want to check it out and to subscribe for updates on the tool named SciFlow…

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This morning I had a quick look on the statistics from ALT-C 2009 last week that I gained with our tool twitterVisBT and was impressed: we analysed more than 3800 tweets from more than 680 users. Since some of the attendees asked for more statistics, here is a short screencast of what we analysed…

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Together with my colleague Tobias Nelkner I wrote a white paper on our work in progress on self-descriptive widget and the design of an interaction language for widgets. This Widget Self-Description and Interaction Language (WSDIL) will allow the easy orchestration of widgets (for example in a PLE or PLME) and the data exchange between widgets. We tend to let users create their own “pipeline” of interactive widgets that auto-update their content depending on events and actions in other widgets.

This video presents how the drag and drop and data exchange between widgets can work. In the example we show a tag cloud widget, a widget that incorporates the Google search and a widget that represents a chat. If we attach widgets to each other they change their content/representation based on the content of attached widgets.

The next steps will include the realization of filters and selectors to let users choose what kind of data is exchanged between widgets.

The presented work is part of the EU funded project MATURE.

Here you find the white paper on WSDIL. Just tell us what you think (remember it is work/research in progress). Maybe you can point us to similar approaches or ask questions that let us explain our proposition more deply.

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The video shows extracted terms from the communication of the scientific community on Twitter using the hashtag #edmedia from 2009-06-18 until 2009-06-30. This timeframe contains communication before the ED-MEDIA conference, the conference itself and after the ED-MEDIA conference.

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Andreas pointed me on xtranormal today. Their slogan is text-to-movie. Basically it’s a great tool, to generate quick flash animations with avatars that talk. You can set the camera perspective, change the moods and faces as well as sounds and angles. In a nutshell: you have to try this cool tool.

Here is my first movie made with xtranormal. It called You cannot store knowledge and is dedicated to my students of #wekm09 at the University of Paderborn.

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