Daniel Staemmler » Technology

Is it time to change?

Daniel Staemmler — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 13:18:28 +0000

I haven’t been posting anything to this blog for over a year and three month. I think it is time for a change and get back on track and start blogging again what I am passionate about. Leaves the question, what is it that I am passionate about and want to blog about? Here is a list of things I want to post about in my blog:

eLearning (which ever version applies these days, I believe it is 2.0 right now)
cognitive psychology (cognitive and learning styles / types)
neuropsychology
educational technology
whatever else is of interest to me…

To manifest the state of change here at my blog I updated the theme today. I chose a clear and simple design since this is the way webdesign and its usability is heading towards in my opinion.

{democracy:2}

Thanks for the feedback and take a look around. Iy you like what to see subscripe to my RSS feed to stay up to date.

UPDATE: Apperently the first post had a little glitch. I couldn’t get rid of the letter ‘n’ in front of the poll I wanted to be displyed within the post using Democracy AJAX Poll verison 2.1. After trying for alomst 3 hours to find an answer to my problem. I canned the plugin and now I am happy to use WP-Polls verison 2.40 from Lester Chan. The downsite I haven’t figured out how to display a poll within a post. If you have an answer please leave a comment right here or send an email to webmaster@dstaemmler.info.

European E-Communications household survey

Daniel Staemmler — Fri, 18 May 2007 18:58:36 +0000

“The results of a special Eurobarometer survey conducted by TNS Opinion & Social between 17 November 2006 and 19 December 2006 to measure the attitude of European households and individuals towards fixed and mobile telephony, Internet access, TV broadcast services, bundled offers, 112 emergency call number, telephone directories, privacy and security. The survey covers the 27 EU Member States together with Candidate countries (Croatia and Turkey) and the Turkish Cypriot Community, with an average of 1.000 households interviewed per country.“

Some of the key findings for the European Union are (taken from the E-Communications Household Survey):

On average, most European households have both fixed and mobile telephone access (EU27: 58%, EU25: 60%).
The level of use of mobile phones remains fairly stable (81% in EU27) while at the same time more and more households give up their fixed line.
For many households, the reason for keeping their fixed line is still the internet connection (22%).
The majority of European households (54% in EU27) have a computer, primarily a desktop computer (36%). 34% of EU27 households with internet access at home have a wifi router.
Most households access internet via an ADSL line (EU27: 53% of households with broadband access, EU25: 54%).
Over a quarter of households with internet access have suffered from significant problems caused by spam, viruses and spy ware. The main consequence appears to be a lowering in the functioning of the computer (40%) or even a breakdown (27%).
The use of service packages has increased slightly (EU27/EU25: 20%, +3 points), the most common combination being fixed telephony and internet access. Respondents are particularly satisfied with the fact that two services are invoiced at once and that the combined price is cheaper than that of two separate services.

One question easily answered: What are you doing?

Daniel Staemmler — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 18:34:04 +0000

After a lot of things have been written about Twitter and it’s community that answers only one simple question: “What are you doing?” I checked this “… social networking and micro-blogging service“, that even has an entry at Wikipedia already, out. I have to admit that I have checked Twitter out a little while ago and was wondering what makes people interested in continuously post what they are doing right now. For example, are you interested who is having lunch right now. No problem. A visit at Twitterment, a Twitter search service, will reveal who is lunching right now (Source: Binaryplex.com ,Library Clips).Â Okay, now the question remains what are people doing right now and where geographically wise are they doing it? The answer is out there and Twittervision.com is a pretty neat mash-up application developed by David Troy that will show what is going on in real time at the Twitter community.
Alright, and for those of you who want to ban Twitter to their Apple Macintosh computer their is the free software application Twitterrific out there (Source: Twitter Blog). If you know of a similar application for Microsoft please add a comment to this post and let other readers know about it.

What makes Twitter so popular? I think it is very simple, we are always interested in what our friends are doing. A lot of times it is “… the first thing we ask when we call someone” (Source: Read/WriteWeb).Â A little snipped of text provides us with the real time information and a simple social need id fulfilled.

However, I have not decided yet for myself if I am going to use Twitter to keep my friends and readers up to date with my activities. If so you probably will see it on this blog in one of the sidebars.

Social Networking – What's next?

Daniel Staemmler — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 07:22:01 +0000

Social networking has taken over and everybody is talking about it. The big players are MySpace, Facebook and on the professional networking end LinkedIn and Xing (former OpenBC), to only mention a few. Are you part of one, two or even more of these social networking? I am! Signing up is easy and mostly done in a few steps but creating your profile takes most of the time a little longer than only a mouse click here and there. However, help is on the way: OpenID. “OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.” Further information is also available at Wikipedia. However, a recent article in the New York Times discusses the idea of a standardized OpenID which is pushed by several companies. But why? Well, the question is pretty simple, there will be more and more social networks out there. My guess is, that not only classes, universities, schools, and professional networks will be the center of interest. More so private social networks like extended circle of friends, communities, neighborhoods, and families. So who wants to enter all the personal information over and over again? I do not and therefor pledge for an OpenID that will help me to sign up for those social networks I would like to be part of and those I have been invited to.

Interested in creating your own social network that you are in control off? Here is one of my earlier entries that describes one option on how to do so.

As a side note, this somehow reminds me a little bit of the idea and discussion about global ID and how Google is or can be a part of it. John Lanchester wrote a pretty comprehensive and interesting article about it that I enjoyed reading.

TEDTalks – Hans Rosling

Daniel Staemmler — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 00:56:39 +0000

Did you ever wonder how to visualize your data that people understand and grasp the information easily? One man who really understands how to do that in the field of international health is professor Hans Rosling from the Swedish Karolinska Institute, who also is the “… founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life“. He gave a presentation in February 2006 at Monterey, California at TEDTalks and gave a quiet stunning example of his outstanding work and how to visualize data . To see a recording of his presentation click here. I highly recommend visit the Gapminder tool at the Google website since it “… makes it possible to search deep into Gapminder’s moving graphs visualizing world development“.

The question remains is there any tool or WebApp out there that helps you to visualize, display, share and discuss your data. Actually there is and it is called Many Eyes. I only briefly explored this tool which seems to be pretty comprehensive but easy to use. Any kind of feedback is greatly appreciated.

Last but not least there are a couple of books out there on how to visualize data. A name to mentioned in this regard is the one of Edward Tufte. Here is a list of his books at Amazon. I once went to a seminar here in San Francisco he gave and wasn’t impressed and left after lunch. However, is books are definitely worth to have a look at.

Current Issue of Human Technology

Daniel Staemmler — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 17:41:27 +0000

The new issue of the on-line journal Human Technology: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Humans in ICT Environments just has been published. This special issue is titled “Culture, Creativity and Technology“.

TEDTalks – Jeff Han

Daniel Staemmler — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 19:02:03 +0000

TEDTalks are presentations about Technology Entertainment Design. One of these presentations about an “intuitive, interface-free, touch-driven computer screen” I cam across via Jochen Robes Weiterbildungsblog (German for continuing education blog). I encourage you to go and check out this 10 minute video presentation that has been recorded on February of 2006. It really is amazing to see what might be the interface we will use to interact with computers in the future.

“Jeff Han is a research scientist for New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Here, he demonstratesâ€”for the first time publiclyâ€”his intuitive, “interface-free,” touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure.“

More Trends and Predictions

Daniel Staemmler — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 18:50:15 +0000

I know, I know, there are a lot of trends and predictions being published and released right now. After all it is this time of the year to reflect on what happened and to predict what might be.

However, I just received the wwwtools for education newsletter with a nice assembly of “Trends from 2006, Projections for 2007… and Beyond“. Graeme Daniel put a nice list of notes and trends in education together. He split these different areas up into the following categories:

Highlights: Technology in education, 2006,
Technology 2006,
Forecast for Technology, 2007,
At the hardware trade shows,
The iPhone – Rising Star of Macworld?
More mobile and wireless trends,
Converging technologies: Computers, TV, Video and Net,
A mixed bag (e.g. Web 2.0, Nanotechnology),
Just for fun, and
Books.

Enjoy once again the trends of 2006 and predictions for 2007. If you want to sign up for the wwwtools for education newsletter you can do so by clicking here.

Missuse of Youtube

Daniel Staemmler — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 22:57:16 +0000

When I went to school cell phones and other electronic devices didn’t exist in the classroom. Well, maybe a TV was mounted on the wall to watch some educational programing.
Today things look quiet different, especially when it comes to the way of using new technology to let everybody else know what is going on inside the classroom. The New York Times published a story (registration required; free) about two teenage students who willingly aggravated one of their teachers. The incidence has been recorded and the footage went online at Youtube. The 33 year old teacher is on voluntary sick leave who taught students with a learning disabilities.
The video has been removed from Youtube upon request from the Portages-de-lâ€™Outaouais school board and the two students have been suspended from the school.