Its been a while since I last worked on my weblog, so I have some catching up to do...
I had a great weekend in Thaxted, Essex visiting one of THE annual ring meetings. It was my first visit to Thaxted and I was very impressed. It is quite an experience to spend a weekend with so many Morris men, some from so far as Australia. I was also very impressed by the Abbot's Bromley Horn Dance, a dance which is reported to go back as far as the 13th century. We (the Utrecht Morris Men) were very honored to carry the horns up to church in the processional on the sunday. It is certainly a good way to get even the least believing into church ;-)

It finally took place: My wife defended her PhD thesis. I must say, she did a great job. For me the whole process was an interesting way to learn all about the difference between social capital and social cohesion, gemeinschaft und gesellschaft, government and governance and especially: when to keep your mouth shut about theoretical models ;-).

For all those interested: The thesis is titled: Governance as Glue (although to be precise, it is the cohesion that should be the glue, Governance is considered a tool in improving social cohesion). And the subtitle explains it all: Urban Governance and Social Cohesion in post WWII neighbourhoods in the Netherlands.

View the full pdf in the repository of the university library

For all those interested in creating Screencasts, but not able to afford Camtasia: I have heard some good stories regarding Wink. This is a freeware package that allows you to create screencasts and publish them as flash files.
» Go to the website
» View a number of screencasts created using Wink

Seeing as my wife will be throwing a party on the 1st of June and she wasn't quite sure which songs she wanted the DJ to play, we decided on a technological solution to this dilemma. You can now view the records to be played and suggest new ones... You will need a username and password for the latter. Please let me know if you require one

» Go to the WIKI

Harriet Truscott from Cambridge was kind enough to give me a guest account in one of the SAKAI courses at Cambridge. I was very impressed, the WIKI used was a clear and attractive way to present information. The great added feature was the automatic linking the Wiki offered to terms in titles in other pages. If you build up a Glossary of terms (each with its own page) you will of course have links everywhere.

The one thing that sprung to mind was how about letting students do the work? They can build up webbased hyperlinked knowledge bases which can be left ready for the next year students to extend. This is something I must see if I can find a teacher interested in giving it a go...

My collegue (I couldn't make it, I must admit) visited an Apple seminar on the solution they have on offer for creating podcasts from lectures. He was very enthousiastic and I can easily understand why. What they have on offer is an integrated solution. Using a Mac Mini and a video camera a teacher can start his recording. On completion it is automatically transferred to the media server and converted into a number of formats automatically. When complete you can offer it as streaming video, but also in a podcast of MP3 or of course video...

It is a basic solution, but offers plenty of facilities to connect extra devices and facilities.

Out of curiousity I just tried out what would happen if I password protected my podcast. This was no problem for iTunes, it simply asked for the username/password and started the downloading. This means teachers do not have to worry about having their podcasts open for everybody to see.

The coming week I will be joining in with an online discussion on the possible uses of ict in education. You can follow the discussion at: http://blogit.helsinki.fi/teachwithweb/. I am very intrigued with what will be discussed. The goal is stated as:
'The main goal is to share good ideas and experiences of web-based teaching with blogs, wikis or e-Learning Environments.'
Extremely broad, I wonder where it will end up...

Hasse chose to celebrate her birthday on a real working dairy farm. All the girls (and Peije) had a great time. They had to get used to all the large farm animals, but really enoyed sitting on a real full size horse.

It was very interesting to see how a farm has chosen to offer the facility of organising children's party's. It has been such a success, they have decided to redirect their interest more to this field of income.

For anybody interested: We had a great day, the weather was lovely, but I must say the farmer's wife really organised it very well.
» Visit their website

We spent a long weekend bouldering in Fontainebleau. It was great to be back. We stuck to the easy routes, although the kids are starting to bore of the white routes and are trying out the yellow ones. We left the blue routes to Anke.

For all those that are interested visit: www.bleau.info. Although most of the work described there is way out of our league...

After the Google website ranking we now have friend rankings on Hyves and MySpace. If anybody is interested do become my friend at http://www.myspace.com/kgrussell. My ranking will surely rise.
The music is the one thing that makes this site an interesting option, different to the others. Following the analogy through, the best band is the band with the most friends.

But seriously: what does this mean for teaching and education? In an article on the Dutch ICT in higher ed website the claim is set that every student should be encouraged to move on from understanding other people idea's and should be creating their own. I wonder if this is such a new idea. Is this not what a good academic should be capable of?

But with the NET2 generation entering the classroom what is a better place to show off these idea's than online? Rather than letting them write articles w... more