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Making of my jewelry tree

Dec 29th, 2009
by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner.
6 comments

Knots, bends, entangled strands – it had to end.

That’s what I thought when I took a good look at my necklaces a couple of weeks ago. I remembered that something like a jewelry / necklace stand / tree existed and searched the web to find some answers. All commercial ones looked kind of unstable, did not have much space for the jewelry, were too short / small / tall, or were not to my taste. I also ran across a Swiss artist’s (Reto Baumann) interpretation of a jewelry tree.

That’s when I decided to make my own. I was going home for Christmas where I knew I would have a workshop, my dad still had tons of wood to choose from, and I would have all the tools I needed. I had called ahead to ask if he had any suggestions for the material of the “branches” as they needed to be made of some metal that could be bend easily but not too easily.

When I was at home, my dad and I looked for a nice piece of wood. We eventually found a piece of locust that would work perfectly. My dad used a big electric saw to shape it nicely. Then we sanded it lightly to bring out the texture.

We had a good collection of rods from 2 mm to 7 mm thick in my dad’s workshop. I chose brass rods of 3 mm that are used for welding because they were flexible enough to be bent without problems, but sturdy enough to keep from changing their shape if something was draped over them. The length of the individual rods we decided on was 0.5 m with one longer one of 0.6 m and a shorter one of only 0.4 m. Altogether I had 10 rods to bend. I used tongs for the bending process while keeping the rod immobilized in a bench vise. I also used some steel wool to put a shine on the rods.

After I finished the bending, I drilled 10 holes into my wooden base and varnished it twice. Twice because the “hair” of the wood would stand up after the first coat of varnish. Thus, I had to apply some strokes with the steel wool and could varnish a second time. The diameter of the holes was the same as the rods which allows me to avoid having to glue the rods into the wooden base unless necessary. Currently, only one rod moves around a bit. The others are pretty tight. Furthermore, having the rods a bit mobile, I can change their position. I already realized that I should have drilled the holes a bit closer to the white rim (I could only drill within the brown center) to set them further apart. When I put the rods in the wood for the first time, I had to re-bend a couple of them a bit, but that was also to their advantage. :-)

Here is my jewelry tree, my Xmas gift to myself:

Jewelry tree made out of locust wood and brass rods

Jewelry tree made out of locust wood and brass rods

And the tree in action:

My jewelry tree with my necklaces

My jewelry tree with most of my necklaces

Posted in: miscellaneous.
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TechLunch 2009 and 2010

Dec 19th, 2009
by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner.
No comments yet

On October 9, 2009, Bob Reuter and I held our first TechLunch on Campus Walferdange (Faculty of Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education – FLSHASE) of the University of Luxembourg. We had initiated this informal lunchtime session to give students, teachers, and researchers the opportunity to learn about digital technologies in a relaxed setting. Often, people at university do not have a lot of time to participate in workshops. Furthermore, 3- or 4-hour workshops are not always the right format to whet the appetite for a topic. To get people interested in something, we thought that a shorter session could be more beneficial. Participants would not have to invest much because they could eat their lunch at the same time. Thus, TechLunch war born.

We planned to hold it approximately twice a month also depending a bit on the internship schedule of the BScE (Bachelor in Educational Sciences) students who are a primary target group for us as we are both involved in that study program. However, we also welcome anybody else from the university, i.e. students, researchers, teachers, and staff from all 3 campuses, to join us. We have had 4 sessions up to now with 4 to 12 participants. All sessions are video recorded and uploaded to YouTube in case anybody who could not attend the sessions wanted to review them.

Although we are happy that anybody shows up, we would, of course, like to have a larger audience.

TechLunch survey

We set up a questionnaire to find out what further topics would be interesting to our potential audience now that they may have already heard about TechLunch or even attended one. Within the last 4 days we have received 23 responses. Now that everybody is in holiday mood and preparing for the festivities, I do not think that we will receive many more responses, but we will keep the questionnaire open.

Out of these 23 people, 5 had already attended a TechLunch. We also already have a couple of regulars who have come to 2 and 1 already to 3 TechLunches.

TechLunch time

One concern of ours is the time to offer TechLunch. With students not having classes every day, researchers and teachers also being on campus often irregularly, it is very difficult to come up with a time that would suit most. We had opted for Friday 12:00-12:45 p.m., but wanted to see if other times might be more convenient.

Friday does not seem to be too bad, but our preferred time was not among the ones chosen most (only 3 people agreed with that time).

  • 6 participants preferred Friday, 1:00-1:45 p.m.
  • 5 participants opted for Wednesday, 12:30-1:15 p.m.
  • 4 participants each voted for Monday, 1:30-2:15 p.m., and Thursday 1:30-2:15 p.m.

One person suggested to offer a date with several time slots before each TechLunch and see which one is the most popular. In theory that might be a good idea, but bringing in a sign-up process would complicate everything. We had asked people to sign up for the first TechLunch (Zotero for Beginners) because we knew the topic was a favorite for our students, but it generated more emails than people actually came to the session because some could not come in the end and apologized or asked if they could come late etc. Having the sign-up process also feels as if it is something formal whereas we want to keep TechLunch open and just as a gathering to exchange ideas and opinions about using digital technologies for learning, studying, teaching, and researching.

TechLunch topics

Before planning the coming “summer” semester (it starts in mid-February ;-) ), we wanted to get an idea if the topics that Bob and I would offer would also be of interest. We proposed 13 topics:

  • Bookmarking: synchronization and sharing with others
  • Electronic notetaking
  • Advanced features of Zotero
  • Facebook and Twitter
  • Alternatives to PowerPoint
  • Setting up a personalized start page in a browser
  • Mahara [this eportfolio system doubles as social network and is in use in the BScE] as social network
  • Creating cartoons online
  • Open Educational Resources: What’s that?
  • How do I find photos online that I can use?
  • Why should I have a blog?
  • How can I subscribe to online content and view it easily?
  • Password management

Only “Creating cartoons online” got less than 5 votes. Maybe we should have added “… for learning purposes / with kids in the classroom” or something like that. ;-)

The top 3 topics with 14+ votes are:

  • Alternatives to PowerPoint (17)
  • Open Educational Resources (15)
  • Using online images legally (14)
Interest in proposed TechLunch topics

Interest in proposed TechLunch topics

Some people also provided their own suggestions for future TechLunch topics:

  • Troubleshooting common error messages on a Mac (I guess, also Windows computer owners could find some); unfortunately, no examples were provided and also no email address to contact the commenter
  • Chrome OS
  • Cloud Computing
  • Privacy Issues
  • Image, audio and video editing
  • Using Word optimally
  • Google Wave (that was already on our list, but we did not put it forth because it is not out yet for everybody)
  • iTunes U
  • Zotero for beginners (two times)
  • OpenOffice (two times)
  • R as alternative to SPSS
  • SPSS
  • Creating online surveys with tools other than Grafstat
  • Tools for creating handouts (which tools are there? compatibility PC-Mac, preferably free)

We also asked if anybody would be interested in leading a TechLunch. Although up until now we have led all 4 TechLunches that doesn’t mean that that needs to stay that way. We welcome others who want to share their experiences and use of software or online services. Two people were interested in doing just that. Yeah. :-)

Comments in the survey

In the general comment text field we received encouraging comments to keep up with TechLunch. However, we need to make it clear that the language in which TechLunch will be offered will depend partly on the audience. The first posters were in German thus discouraging some people to attend. However, the last two sessions were conducted in English as we had some non-German speakers in them. Thus, we can be flexible, but it must be clear to our audience. Initially, we used German to encourage the BScE students to attend. The language issue is a bit complicated because the University of Luxembourg has three official languages: English, French, and German.

Originally, we intended TechLunch for students, researchers, and teachers. However, administrative staff can also benefit from some of the sessions. Therefore, TechLunch really is for anybody at the university.

Where to go from here?

So how will we continue? Well, the last session for winter semester 2009/10 will be held on January 15 (time to be announced) and we will look into using polls in the classroom and for research. The online service PollEverywhere will be introduced. Then there will be a brief semester break and TechLunch will be back in summer semester 2010. We will come up with a schedule and take all the topic suggestions as well as preferred times into account to allow more people to join us.

Posted in: edtech, university.
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Distraction-free writing with OmmWriter

Dec 10th, 2009
by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner.
No comments yet

My first impressions of OmmWriter in video. You should watch the HD version in order to see the text.

YouTube Preview Image

Here is the text that I typed in the video with a few added links:

Via a Twitter message by D’Arcy Norman, my attention was drawn to OmmWriter.

Having installed it, I must say that I like this slick software because it just offers you to type text. No thrills, no bells and whistles. Simply text.

As keystrokes and background music are not my thing, I can turn them off. I can also change the frosty winter landscape to a simple white to see even less on the screen.

OmmWriter forces me to separate content from layout because there are no layout options. Usually, I play with headings, bullet point and pictures. It will be interesting to see if I get jumpy from not being able to do all that or if there are also instances when I don’t need to layout.

You can actually also use OmmWriter to create audio text art when you use the music and / or the pitches of the keystrokes to convey meaning.

Posted in: technology.
Tagged: · ·

How to improve a product effectively

Dec 2nd, 2009
by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner.
No comments yet

Clayton M. Christensen brings product improvement down to a simple statement in his presentation at the ECS National Forum on Education Policy: “Understanding the job rather than understanding the customer is the critical insight” (at about 8:30 min in the video).

His example is the buying of milk shakes. Collecting data on who buys milk shakes is not enough. A company also needs to understand why the people buy milk shakes at that particular time. In his example, people buy milk shakes before starting their long commute to have something to do while driving. Thus, the company would do good to bring the shake dispenser to the counter and equip it with a pre-paid swipe card system so that customers – who are in a hurry in the morning – can get their milk shake without having to wait in line. Customers who buy milk shakes in the afternoon will most likely have very different needs and thus the company needs to think about a different strategy to get them to buy more milk shakes.

via @ctscho

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.

Posted in: technology.
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Participants’ participation in an online conference

Nov 19th, 2009
by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner.
4 comments

George Siemens presented today at LearnTrends 2009 on “Finding New Points of Balance”. In his presentation, which was attended by 120 participants on average, he employed a very nice online presenter technique. He offered (almost) empty slides encouraging participants to drop their ideas on them and thus engaging in the presentation more than just through the backchannel.

I had already seen that others had done this before. Recently, Dave Cormier wrote a good post on this method that he also tried for one of his presentations with great success entitled “Presenting with live slides“.

This technique is great to interact more with participants and to bring in their voice. Of course, one could use the backchannel or the audio chat. However, by putting everything on a slide, the contributions become part of the presentation visuals, and the presenter can use the ideas more easily than if he had to sift through the chat log which can move rather quickly with a large group.

The slides that George provided were filled quickly because he had approx. 120 other minds chiming in and bringing ideas forth.

In a way, this session showed that online conference sessions can be more engaging than f2f conference sessions because everybody can participate at any time by using the backchannel without interrupting the speaker. By offering a white slide for putting down ideas, people will do so actively and I had the feeling more willingly than in an auditorium where we would have had to raise our hands and shout our ideas to the podium where the speaker may not even have heard them. It was also suggested that the nature of the writing on the whiteboard assisted the involvement as it was anonymous.

One slide from Georges slide deck on which we participants put down our ideas on the continuum of using online tools for learning.

One slide from George's slide deck on which we participants put down our ideas on the continuum of using online tools for learning.

Posted in: CCK09, conference.
Tagged: ·

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