I was interested to read Patrick Klaassen's posting on his weblog. He is lucky enough to be in San Diego to visit the Blackboard users conference...

I was especially pleased to hear that Blackboard is starting to change it's thinking and philosophy and is starting to direct there product less at a traditional learning.
They are building tools to support life long learning, like portfolio's for life. They appear to be adding the merits of social software. As you don't want to spend your life hidden in your Bb, there are rss feeds to keep you in touch with the latest news for your course.

They are also integrating tools from outside Blackboard. I am especially interested in the evaluation tool there are building as a building block. This seems to allow the comparison of surveys over various courses. This is a desire that has been around for a few years know. Als... more

My daughter was asked to deliver a talk on a subject of her choice in front of the class. Our trip to Bali had left quite an impression so she decided to give a talk on Bali. After some encouragement she discovered the merits of Google. She found a wonderful talk which had been written by a 17 year old. Fortunately that didn't bother her, she understood almost everything this girl had collected. So happily plaguerising she ripped large parts from this talk.

Of course I tried to convince her this was not quite the right idea, so she ended up copying the general gist. On the day itself she actually forgot her notes so she delivered her talk by heart. So I am very pleased to say it was not a complete rip off ;-)

To be fair I encouraged her to put her notes on the web so future students can use this as a basis for their talk. So here they are, surrounded by relevant Dutch search terms so Google will show up the information in the right ... more

In my work I am involved in implementing the use of anti-plagiarism software. Several faculties and universities I have spoken have decided to use different software for detecting plagiarism. They all claim to give you a good chance in spotting plagiarism so I thought I would give them a trial run. Please note: This is not a large scale test, this was just a once off test using a document I constructed myself.

The document contains public text, altered text, text on a restricted site and a translated text off a public website. The text is of course on Plagiarism.
» The original text

This is what three products provided as a response:
Urkund: no matches (even after removing the quotes)
Ephorus: two matches (match 1, match 2)
Safe As... more

Want to watch Peije play a game of Rugby?

» Follow this link.

This also gives you an idea about how television can be watched in the present day and age: Whenever you want. However, it can be lot of hassle trying to miss out all the adds... And even more of a hassle trying to find the original mediafile so you can cut out the right fragment using the Virtual editor....

We just had an excellent week skiiing in Raggal, Walser Tal, Vorarlberg, Austria. We stayed in a small apartment owned by a farming family outside the village. 'Der Franz' was the 70 year old father and also our patient and always good natured ski teacher. You will find him in one of the photographs included in the slide show.

One of the things that struck me most was the initiative in the village. The ski school had just been given a fresh start and everybody helped out. It is an important source of income for only a few weeks in the year. They are competing with the larger scale resorts further on in the valley. All the people in the village worked together and really showed enthousiasm for what they where doing. For many this meant long hours besides the several other jobs they had.

For us Raggal was a perfect village. Everything was on a small scale, everybody was very friendly and helpful and we felt at home directly (... more

Thanks to a posting on Patrick Klaassen's weblog, I found a site that offered a SAKAI testdrive... Of course, curious as ever I gave it a try. It was interesting to see SAKAI a year on. This site was showing off 2.1 (December 2005 release).

On the one hand hand it was reassuring to see how straightforward it has become. Buttons down the side which do exactly what you expect them to do. Everything is pretty obvious. They have not yet wandered into a wilderness of flexibility. It is also obviously been built by a few technical minds, with great attention placed on for example webdav and mailing lists.

On the other hand, it is a VLE. No more, no less. You can share the odd stuff, but it is still very teacher oriented. It does not (yet) contain the public facilities which allow students and staff to share knowledge and experiences. I know there are some initiatives along these lines and I am quite curious how se... more

'The PLE is a unique interface into the owners digital environment. It integrates their personal and professional interests (including their formal and informal learning), connecting these via a series of syndicated and distributed feeds. The PLE is also a portfolio system allowing the user to maintain their repository of content and selectively share that content as needed. It is also a profile system, exposing the users interests in a variety of ways allowing automated, but selective search of the individual and their digital contributions. Of course, the PLE is a social as well as an information environment, connecting the user to individuals and cooperative events and activities throughout the Net.'
(source: Terry Anderson's weblog, January 9th 2006 link.)

I think the PLE is an extremely valuable educational tool. On the other hand I wonder whether it will fully replace ... more

There are some wild ideas on creating a Community of Learning at Utrecht University. I think it is a very interested concept and certainly has some perspective. On the other hand I am worried that an all too straightforward application of the model of Communities of Practice will not work.

Fortunately Etienne Wenger (the guru of CoP's) came round and gave a very inspiring, enlightening and critical presentation. For all those interested in his idea's do visit his website.

I strongly believe in the value of Communities of Practice in which professionals at a comparable level of experience share their knowledge and experience. I am also sure that groups of students could set up Communities of Learning spontaneously. However: I am not sure you can stuff all students into a supervised group together with staff and alumni and a Community of learning will develop. I expect the difference in experience and knowledge to be too great. Also... more

Just had a great weekend caving. Suffering slightly from a cave-lag though... Caving itself isn't bad, but if you do it all night after a day of plastering and you end up drinking Belgian beers till the early hours does get to you slightly ;-)

But for all those interested: yes it was a small cave, interesting draft though, so we spent some time digging. It is the Blaireau project near Bomal. For all those interested visit the digging's team website.

On advice from one of my collegues I decided to try out Active Worlds. This is a virtual reality world which can really be useful in education.
Why? It offers students a very real world with some advantages you can't find in the real world. How easy is it to drag your students off to the pyramids of Cheops or along the Chinese wall?

However: from a constructivist point of view Active Worlds offers you a far more interesting opportunity. Let students build their own almost real world. They can do this together and could even share this with students from the other side of the globe. What about letting a classroom each construct their own living environment and giving students from the other side of the world a view of their world. This might foster a little more understanding...

So for everybody that is interested: check out the educational trial version at the Active Worlds site. Sadly using the real thing st... more