Edubloggers
Online Educa 2009
Quite a while ago since my last post. In busy times it is my experience that blogging is one of the first things that gets lower on the priority list. This week I'm at Online Educa in Berlin. For me it's the third time. [...]
Why content is not king
I still see them around: e-Learning projects in which the main deliverable is one or more packages of content, deployed using a web based platform. It’s obvious that providing attractive, interactive content will engage [...]
RFI, RFC, RFP, RFX, RF...
The last 48 hours I have been working on a so-called RFC proposal for an extensive e-Learning solution. Together with a colleague, almost completely separated from the real world, we have struggled trough over 300 questi[...]
Bb World Europe 2009 - Day 3
The third and final day of the conference included some more interesting topics than the day before. I selected a couple of sessions in which collaboration, communication and use of (recorded) video were the main subject[...]
Bb World Europe 2009 - Day 2 (1/2)
Today was the first day with a full programme of (parallel) sessions. In general I found the presentations a little bit disappointing. Only traditional powerpoint-led lectures, some questions at the end, but no interacti[...]
Bb World Europe 2009 - Day 2 (2/2)
The second morning session was entitled "Making the grade with Bbv8: Practical measure", which was somewhat misleading because I was expecting some practical issues and/or experiences about the use of the Grade Center. B[...]
Bb World Europe 2009 - Day 1
After a long trip with quite some delays, today I arrived at Bb World Europe 2009 in Barcelona. In order to clear my head a little bit, I made a small afternoon walk in the immediate surroundings of the Fira Palace Hotel[...]
SAP into learning 2.0?
A few days ago I was able to attend a presentation by SAP Education on their SAP Enterprise Learning solution. As SAP indicates on their own website "SAP Enterprise Learning is the only enterprise solution that integrate[...]
Don't stop experimenting
Yesterday I attended the 10th Dutch e-Learning Conference held at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven. The closing keynote session was a virtual classroom by Elliott Masie, live from the US. After 10 years of e-Learning co[...]
Cloud computing
Yesterday I participated in the 19th ROC-i-partner conference in The Hague, which had the concept of een integrated application landscape as a central theme. I did a presentation together with Gertjan Sinke from ROC ID C[...]
Rush hour generation
Today I did a presentation together with my colleague Job Bilsen entitled 'e-Learning sustainable?' The presentation was held at the 'Nationaal Opleidingscongres' in Breukelen (NL). We were quite satisfied to have a rela[...]
Reflecting on OEB 2008
24 hours after coming home from Berlin it was time to reflect some highlights at Online Educa. Thursday was focused on having my own session on content repositories, together with co-presenters Koos Winnips (soon to be U[...]
Online Educa Berlin, day 1
Today was mainly for the pre-conferences. For me the day did not start too well, as there seemed to be a problem with my registration. That’s not even the worst thing, you only hear about it when you are first in line in[...]
On my way to Berlin
This morning I started travelling from 's-Hertogenbosch railwaystation. First I had to go to Deventer where I could catchcatch the ICE train from Amsterdam to Glowny (Poland). On arrival in Deventer I saw that most of th[...]
Restyling
After two years I decided that my blog was in need of a new look. So, I did a little bit of restyling. I am not done yet, but so far I am quite satisfied about the new look and feel. Today I'm making my final preparation[...]
Nationaal Onderwijscongres 2008
Yesterday I attended the annual Nationaal Onderwijscongres at the WTC in Rotterdam. Although the conference was also focused on higher education, it was a completely different type of audience compared to the SURF Onderw[...]
SURF Onderwijsdagen - 3
Another interesting presentation on day 1 was by Pieter van der Hijden. Although not very new, it was nice to see an organised overview of all steps that need to be taken during the implementation of a VLE. A crucial tur[...]
SURF Onderwijsdagen - 2
I promised to get back to you with some more impressions about the SURF Onderwijsdagen 2008. On day 1 I joined a very interesting presentation by Willem-Jan Renger from Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht. He had the disa[...]
SURF Onderwijsdagen 2008 - 1
Just two hours at home after joining the SURF Onderwijsdagen 2008. The closing keynote by Gordon Freedman (vice president educational strategy at Blackboard) was a little bit disappointing. The good thing was that he did[...]
SURF Onderwijsdagen 2008
Today and tomorrow I will be joining the "SURF Onderwijsdagen 2008" in Utrecht. I am curious about the keynote for today, which has the title of "11-11-2020". Tomorrow I will have my own presentation, together with Oscar[...]
Election time!
I am probably not the only person on the planet to address the American elections today ;-). Looking at the results of different polls and surveys in the Netherlands there seems to be an overwhelming support for Barrack [...]
Capturing the Captcha
A CAPTCHA or Captcha (IPA: /ˈkæptʃə/) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer (Source: Wikipedia). During my search for new, interesting techno[...]
Reflecting on the financial crisis
I just submitted my conference presentation for NOC 2008, so I thought I take a moment to reflect on some remarkable issues in the financial crisis. Although I don't experience any personal damage yet, it all looks quite[...]
Microsoft as a virus distributor?
Reading today's newspaper I noticed a small article about Chinese computer users who are angry with Microsoft. What's new you might think? Well the case is that Microsoft has developed a Windows Genuine Advantage applica[...]
Sakai re-visited
My career at the University of Twente is now exactly 10 days behind me - it was a nice "say goodbye" reception by the way - and I shifted to 6th gear in working for Stoas Learning. The past few days I contributed to a pr[...]
FireFTP
One of the things I do in my spare time is the maintenance of a few websites such as www.tsdekker.nl. In a technical sense it's a rather straightforward site, basically some .css, .js and a bunch of .html files, that can[...]
Making the next step
As mentioned in one of my previous posts my career is moving ahead to the next step: senior consultant e-learning at Stoas Learning in Wageningen (NL). September will be a sort of transfer period in which I start working[...]
World Mind Map
A few days ago I was invited by a friend to contribute to a new thing he developed together with a colleague. It's called World Mind Map (www.womima.com). The idea is relatively simple. I think most of you know the conce[...]
Give way to math education
After a long period of writing a coherent development programme, together with the department of applied mathematics, we finally received a 'go' on a series of four projects in the field of math education. The past years[...]
Back in blog-business
It has been quite a while since my last post. A number of reasons - which I will not bother you with - caused that I simply didn't have the time to maintain my blog. Hopefully this will change from now on. This week two [...]
Do open source learning solutions really stand a chance?
This evening I was reading the blog of Andreas Wittke who brings up an interesting and the same time somewhat worrying perspective. I think he is quite right in his analysis that higher education institutes have a sort o[...]
Another fine for Microsoft
Yesterday EC commissioner Kroes anounced yet another fine for Microsoft, this time for an amount of € 899 million. This is the highest fine so far and sums up to a total of € 1.7 billion. The reasons for this third fine [...]
Preliminary conclusions
Earlier this week we held our information session on the Quickscan Sharepoint project, which is running towards it's end. Sir Bakx (Information manager at the University of Twente) was invited to give a brief opening ses[...]
2008
First of all I'd like to start with wishing you a very happy and succesfull 2008. From an ICT in education perspective I truly hope the new year will bring some solutions we have been waiting for so long. In the 3TU cons[...]
Getting used to it
The project we are currently running on MOSS2007 is about halfway. Part of the project is to work with MOSS2007 ourselves, the other part is to gather information from site visits in the context of Dutch Higher Education[...]
Using Archimate modelling techniques
Last Friday (Oct. 19th) I attended an information session at Surf Foundation, focused on modelling your information architecture by using the Archimate language. (see http://www.archimate.org/). We are dealing with Archi[...]
Beyond the VLE
Last week I visited the third SURF conference titled 'Beyond the VLE'. Some of the issues brought up were a follow up of the the Personal Learning Environment as presented by Scott Wilson at the second edition of this co[...]
The speed of innovation
In 1997 Philips introduced the first flatscreen plasma television set, Sharp introduced GPS car navigation and Sony showed the first designs of mp3-like players, www was still an acronym for wait-wait-wait. Ten years lat[...]
Wikipedia censured?
This morning there was a lot of fuzz on the news because it is assumed that Princess Mabel of Orange-Nassau and/or her husband Prince Friso of Orange Nassau have made changes to a page on Wikipedia. But isn't that the ba[...]
The students have arrived!
Today is the start of the introduction weeks for our new bachelor students. The main campus road (Drienerlolaan) is blocked with a sort of market with all kinds of activities, music and of course most student societies t[...]