Been way to long… also, user test is finally live!

It’s been way too long since my last update on this blog. Stupid, since it’s something that forces me to write down what I’m doing. Let’s remedy that again.

User test

The last weeks I have spent too much time on programming a high-fidelity prototype for my concept. Still, the result is very nice and the early reactions from the student’s were great!

Questions about questions: another visit to iFontys

First of all, it’s been awhile since my last post. But as you can imagine, with the holidays and getting up and started again in the new year, blogs sometimes are the first thing to go.

So what has happened in the meantime? I made some big decisions for my graduation:

• A focus on asking questions and giving answers, to capitalize on the fact that those two are the biggest drive for collaboration.
• The tool will be designed with the facilitation of a Community of Practice in mind.
• I will focus my design specifically on the Fontys PABO Eindhoven students.

I will expand on the last two in other posts, but for now, I want to write about my last trip to Fontys students. But, it’s quite a read, so I’ll summarize what I learned for my design first.

• A lot of questions, the most important ones even, are about experiences. The questions and answers still stand, but this deserves some special attention later in my design.
• Content is still a very valuable resource to have in the design, especially when looking at the reading material students have. Being able to link this material to questions and answers might create some good discussion about it.
• The PABO is currently employing Learning Communities, which is very much related to the Communities of Practice that I want to encourage. Since the PABO LC appears to be largely built around meeting, I can fit my design around an online extension of this.

A lecture by Don Norman

Today I had the lucky chance of visiting a lecture of Donald Norman and it was a pleasure. The man is a great orator and he managed to get his point across very clearly, to the displeasure of a lot of the Industrial Design students and staff. But what was his point?

Concepts so far…

During the last few weeks, I created some concepts about collaboration in order to explore the possibilities, which I would like to share.

Devices in het onderwijs – Kennisnet Blog

I found a new blog about devices in education by Kennisnet. Amongst other experiences, it contains posts from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the RijksUniversiteit Groningen about the iPad in education. A nice read, but with predictable results.

Difference between spontaneous and group collaboration

While I was working on some ideas that I had as a result of my Fontys session, I came to a conclusion. All my currently new ideas were based around the idea of collaboration within project groups. While not a bad thing, I got back to thinking about my original goal, which was to use tablets as a means towards improving education through collaboration.

I have been blogged!

iFontys Magazine has blogged about my session with the Fontys iPad students last friday 🙂

Keiharde iPad neglect
Bruno Brainstorm

Can’t believe I missed those.

Blackboard and groups… crap?

One thing that always seems illogical to me is the collaboration and group functionality on Blackboard, a virtual learning environment (VLE). Every course in Blackboard comes with its own discussion forum, where students and teachers enrolled in that course can ask questions, give answers and discuss the lesson material. Blackboard also gives teachers the possibility of creating groups of students within a course. Each group gets his own group page with some functionality already embedded; ‘File Exchange’, ‘Group Discussion Board’, ‘Send Email’.

So far, so good, right? Blackboard, which is one of the market leaders in VLE’s worldwide offers collaboration possibilities.

Creative sessions in Fontys

Last friday I went to Fontys Eindhoven to have a creative session with two groups of students which are part of the Fontys iPad-project. They have been working with the iPad for around two months now and thus should have a pretty good idea on what its strengths and weaknesses are when using it for education. I visited the faculty of Communication and of the PABO.

The session consisted of a discussion about their current experiences with the tablet in their education and a brainstorm session for their associations about cooperation/collaboration and tablets.

The sessions themselves went great. I was rather worried that it would stagnate, especially during the brainstorms, but everyone kept the good ideas coming and seemed to have a good time. Thanks again to all the students and teachers that helped me.

Gaming principles in real life and education

A week ago, I was lucky enough to attend Game in the City 2010, a conference about game developing. While I’m not an active game developer myself, I am always interested in the latest news about it and in the inspiration that developers find for their newest games.