Summer of Tech (in general known as Summer of Code, but NZ expanded it to include more disciplines) is still almost half a year away for us. To shorten the time until then and to keep students and companies involved, the Summer of Tech team organized a Hackfest today.

They brought soon-to-be graduates and mentors from IT companies together to work on small programming projects in either PHP, Perl or Ruby on Rails for 5 hours and present the results at the end.

The e-learning team from Catalyst had dispatched François Marier and Jonathan Harker to mentor students in PHP programming. François supervised 2 students who worked on developing a block for Mahara that would display updates from Twitter and Identi.ca.

Jonathan had one student as another one had dropped out with short notice. His student created a search block for Moodle to read data from a library catalog that uses Koha.

The other teams developed a Twitter ticker, a system that would build your semester schedule according to previously defined rules, a spam protector, and a 3-player pong game to be played over a network.

The students worked closely with their mentors for the entire time. Occasionally, they had a brief break for drinks, food, Ubuntu stickers, PostgreSQL blue elephant pins, baseball caps, and shirt and bag prices.

Ruth McDavitt had the organizational hat on and made sure that everything was taken care of and that everybody was happy in general.

A group of enthusiasts of the OLPC project in New Zealand meet every Saturday at the Southern Cross Bar to play with the XO, test it, record tutorials, give newbies like me their first opportunity to see an XO live, and to have a good time.

After I had spent the previous two Saturdays in Wellington with shopping for stuff for my apartment, I finally found time to go to a meeting on 10 July 2010. It was a cold day, but I found my colleague Alastair, who is a member of the group, with a bunch of XO laptops sitting outside. I was thankful for the heaters outside because otherwise our fingers would have been frozen pretty quickly.

Alastair immediately set me up with two laptops and we started with something “geeky”: upgrading an older XO model to OS300. He basically told me the commands to type in and we watched the installation process. After that was done, a couple more people had joined in and Alastair had also installed Sugar, the Linux version that runs on the XO in my virtual machine so that I can also test it without actually having an XO.

The laptop is very sturdy and spill-proof with its plastic keyboard. The keys take a bit to get used to because they are so tiny, but I could type pretty well on them after I had gotten the hang of it.

OLPC = 2 per adult

The laptop is designed so that also very young children who may not yet be able to read can use it. Therefore, the default view lacks text and the favorites are aligned in a circle around the laptop symbol. Only when you hover over a symbol do you get the name of that activity. There is also the list view that offers more information, but nevertheless, everything is kept simple and without clutter.

The coolest thing we did, at least for me first-time user, was to set up a network among a couple of the XOs and write together in a text document. The so-called mesh network does not require internet access, and it can be activated within seconds by pushing a button on the keyboard and clicking on another user’s application that they want to share. And then you simply type away. Everybody receives their distinct color in the text document, and you see immediately what the other person is typing.

Application sharing à la XO

Our youngest XO tester that day was another colleague’s daughter who is approx. 6 months old. She happily clapped on the keyboard and was keen to test how sturdy the laptop material is by trying to bite into it.

Another regular at these Saturday meetings was Tim who recorded a couple of tutorials for upgrading to the latest version of XO and for revealing some of the hidden fun features.

Click here to view the embedded video.

He recorded a tutorial on my Nikon Coolpix S3000 and I was totally impressed by the quality of the video and the audio. As I am not into recording video, I have not had the need to use the video function of this camera which I have not yet had for very long. However, if I should need to record something, I know that I have a pretty good camera with me. And with a 4 GB SD card, I don’t have to worry to run out of memory too quickly.

If you want to know more about OLPC, here are a few links:

• OLPC in general
• OLPC in New Zealand
• OLPC wiki

I recommend to get your hands on one of these small laptops to test yourself what they are capable of and how powerful they are.

Accents and dialects: I either understand them or I don’t, but I am definitely not good at figuring out where people come from. Listening to a Kiwi on the phone, I pretty much detect the accent and love it. Meeting the same person face-to-face, s/he sounds differently and the accent is often not so strong.

However, what I can make out are words and phrases commonly used in New Zealand. My collection up to date is not so large as I have been in the country only for 3 weeks and do not constantly engage in conversations with Kiwis but people from around the world. What I already picked up are the following:

mate

“Hey mate, how are you doing?” “Come on in mate.”
–> used as a generic for men and also women. Also in “my mates came…” as in “my friends came…”

sweet

A: “I got this to work.” B: “Sweet.”
A: “Where do you live?” B: “Close to the CBD [Central Business District].” A: “Sweet.”
–> used as affirmative and to express a positive opinion on the topic, e.g. “That’s cool.” “That’s great.” “Good.”
The sales guy of my phone provider answered almost every single sentence of mine with “sweet”.

no worries

A: “Thanks a lot for your help.” B: “No worries.”
–> used in the sense of “you are welcome” or “don’t mention it”

3 in 1

And the best is that you could use all three expressions in one conversation turn:
A: “Thanks to your information, I found the correct information.”
B: “Sweet. No worries, mate.”

You can come up with unique Kiwi terms doing a simple Google search. Even back in the day before Google, I created a Kiwi English dictionary for a friend by doing some online searches. However, as my internet connection has not yet been established at home, I can’t check if I could find a site with background information on these three expressions and can thus just voice my observations.

P.S.

Today I learnt a new word: chur (for pronunciation check out this video). It’s an all-purpose word and can also be used for “hello, goodbye” among others.

My first cultural shock with New Zealand culture did already occur before I even stepped foot on this beautiful island country. Once I had received my visa, I set out to find an apartment and was optimistic to line up a few acceptable viewings for the first few days to get the apartment search out of the way.*

So I got on TradeMe, the New Zealand equivalent of ebay, where many people and real estate firms  advertise their properties that are for rent or even sale. After reading through a few ads, I figured out that the number of rooms of an apartment are given in terms of bedrooms just as in the US and Luxembourg thus making a 1-bedroom apartment an apartment with 1 bedroom, a living room and a separate kitchen unless specified that you have “open plan living” which makes the kitchen a part of the living room.

Compared to that, in Germany you usually provide the amount of rooms no matter whether bedrooms or living room plus kitchen and bathroom. Thus the standard abbreviation “ZKB” (Zimmer, Küche, Bad [room, kitchen, bathroom]) as in 1 ZKB or 5 ZKB.

That was the easy thing to figure out. Easy was also to learn what whiteware is. If whiteware is included, you do not have to worry about buying a fridge and a washing machine. Often, a drier is part of the deal, too, as can be a dish washer.

However, nowhere did I find mentioning of the actual size of the apartments in square meters. I would have even taken square feet. Really, nowhere. Sometimes advertizers put “spacious” in their ads. That was the only indication that this apartment might be a tad bigger than the rest, but you can’t really go by that. Therefore, you do have to look at each apartment and can’t decide from the start that one may be too small from the start.

Annoyingly, no landlord and realtor that I encountered actually knew the size of the apartments they were trying to rent. You just have to look at the apartment and decide whether you like the size or not, no matter how big it is. Of course, you could always estimate it on sight.

Even though I do not want to buy the property, I still want to know the price per square meter to have a point of comparison to other apartments. One landlady said the size is usually only provided for houses and of course for land, but not  for apartments in general. Thus, when I asked how big the apartments were, everybody looked at me as if I was the first person to ever ask that question (which I probably was) and they always said something like “Well, as I am the landlord / realtor, I should probably know, but  frankly, I  don’t” and that was it and we moved on to another question.

I saw some hotly advertized apartments that had no view whatsoever, but had the same asking price as others where you could see the sky. In the city you do not really want to have your only window facing a warehouse or parking garage just 2 or 3 meters away from your window because you will never see the light of the day. Rooms with no window at all are also not recommendable except for bats and people with night vision.

A good thing about my apartment hunt is that I got to know a number of streets in Wellington.

But the cultural difference to renting in Germany or Luxembourg does not stop here. Rent is not calculated in months but in weeks. That makes it a bit of a hassle to convert it to a monthly rent all the time, but is better for the renter because the bond is also calculated in weeks and usually is between 3 and 4 weeks whereas in Germany and Luxembourg the bond is around 2.5 or 3 monthly rents. Therefore, you do not need to come up with so much money up front in New Zealand. Furthermore, you often only pay 1 or 2 weeks rent in advance and not the entire month. And if you do not have a fixed rental term, the contract can be cancelled within 3 weeks at best compared to 3 months back home.

A big bummer with the majority of apartments is that there is no storage space in a cellar. That is similar to the US where my apartments also did not have that luxury. In Germany and Luxembourg you expect that to be there and cellars, even in bigger apartment complexes are common, but not here. I guess, that will force me not to store many things. Units (bigger houses chopped up in smaller apartments) that are found in the suburbs or in older houses may have a garage that you could use as storage space, but not every house comes with a garage.

Finally, I found an apartment last night that is acceptable, especially in terms of rent. Now I have to send in my tenant application with two references and hope to be able to move in early next week.

—

* All observations and comparisons I make are based on my limited experience and that of friends etc. They do not necessarily reflect every aspect in any of the countries mentioned.

Thursday, 27 May 2010, also brought another good news along besides my visa having been issued. I am officially a PRINCE2 Practitioner (the certificate still takes a bit to be issued).

During my search for a new job, I had come across the PRINCE2 certification, a project management method, a couple of times in UK postings. I had already done project management at the University of Munich for the EU-funded project “imMEDIAte TEACHing” (and I should find out basically ever since), but had learned everything “on the job” and not methodically. Thus, I thought it would be a good thing to prepare for my new job by refreshing my PM knowledge and do so by using a specific method.

PRINCE2 (Projects in Controlled Environments) is a PM method developed by the UK government, but is recognized around the world. As it is generic, it can be applied to any project in any field no matter how small or big the project is.

The certification for PRINCE2 is split up into two exams: Foundation and Practitioner.

The Foundation exam is for everybody involved in a project. Thus, it can be made sure that everybody understands the terminology, the basic themes and processes of PRINCE2 and knows the responsibilities of the individual roles. This exam tests definitions, the relations between processes etc. It is a multiple-choice exam with questions that are not related to each other.

The Practitioner exam is a further step for the project managers themselves. In this multiple-choice exam, the testee receives a project scenario and all questions relate to it. In this exam, PRINCE2 needs to be applied to the scenario.

The preparation for these exams can be done individually by reading the 327-page manual “Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2″ and answering exam prep questions in books that can be bought. However, many training companies also offer preparation courses either face-to-face or online. As the exams are rather expensive (£585 for both), I decided to take a course.

After some shopping around, I opted for the ILX Group’s PRINCE2 Gold Pack which includes (taken from the web site):

• The interactive PRINCE2 CD-ROM course
• Exercises at Foundation and Practitioner Level
• Simulated Foundation Exam
• Cost of PRINCE2 Foundation Exam
• Cost of PRINCE2 Practitioner Exam
• Managing Successful Projects in PRINCE2 (The Official PRINCE2 manual)
• Laminated A3 PRINCE2 Process Model
• Access to a PRINCE2 Trainer via email or phone
• 2 Day UK Based Classroom Revision Workshop (cost of overnight stay is not included)

This blended learning course consisting of the self-study preparation and a classroom workshop as preparation for the Practitioner exam suited me well. The e-learning content on the CD (is the same as online) is very well organized and guides the learner step-by-step through the method. The exercises and the exam simulators that are included give an impression of what to expect in the exams though it seemed that the actual exam questions were more difficult despite the fact that original questions were included in the training pack.

The process model designed by the ILX Group is even better than the model found in the official manual. It makes things very clear and gives an excellent overview of all the processes in a PRINCE2 project.

The admin staff of the ILX Group were very supportive in the preparation of getting the materials to me and scheduling a workshop. Due to the ash cloud of the eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull and thus delays in mail services, my training material took a while to make it over from the UK and I did not have much time for the preparation. Thankfully, I could study throughout the day and did not have to do that besides work. Thus, the time frame of 1.5 weeks turned out to be fine. I was happy to learn that I could also take a workshop in Amsterdam instead of travelling to London thus cutting down a bit on the travel expenses.

My workshop took place in Amsterdam from 10-12 May 2010. We were a small group of 6 people taking this prep course and that was a fantastic size. 4 out of 6 lived in the Netherlands, but only one was Dutch. We were an international group of one each: American, British, Chinese, Dutch, German from Luxembourg, and Turkish from Germany. Our trainer was British with a very extensive PM background and could talk like a waterfall. If he hadn’t done so, we would have needed an additional day.

Our course schedule looked like that:

• Monday: 1-hour Foundation exam and organizational issues
• Tuesday and Wednesday morning and a bit of the afternoon: revision of the PRINCE2 themes and processes with time for questions, elaborations and going through another prep exam
• Wednesday afternoon: 2.5-hour Practitioner exam

Lots of paper on the tables during the workshop

cc licensed flickr photo shared by 4nitsirk

PRINCE2 and universities

Although I had not worked in a company and had been involved in university projects only, I could relate to the topics that are covered by PRINCE2 very well. That is also supposed to be that way because PRINCE2 is not designed to be industry specific but universal. Of course, the company metaphor is in the foreground, but it can be applied to a university background or any other one as well.

Thus, I wish I had known about PRINCE2 earlier in my career because then I could have avoided some pitfalls in my project management and sometimes done things in a more structured way. Although I must also say that we already did many things “correctly” in “imMEDIAte TEACHing” because PRINCE2 was not developed out of the air, but from real-world examples. Hence, common sense, previous project experience, and obligations from the funding body lead you to a number of the same conclusions that can be found in the method.

However, I think that learning about a project management method should be high on the agenda of professional development for anybody at universities involved in projects. And here I do not just mean big national or EU projects, but also small ones. Everything that is not “business as usual” is a project. During my exam preparations I realized that I had participated in a number of projects over the last 2.5 years at the University of Luxembourg though they had not been labeled as such. Had a PM method been applied, some aspects of the work could have been improved.

At universities, researchers are increasingly involved in projects, but they do not always get appropriate support or know about project management. Learning about a PM method can boost their confidence and make the management part of the projects easier so that they can focus more on the content delivery as that is the main objective of their project work.

As an aside: We also learned that strawberries can make it onto bread in the Netherlands. We have not yet found out whether that is a specialty of Amsterdam or not, but Sia Vogel, one of my former #CCK08 contacts, knows about it.

Sia Vogel about strawberry bread on Twitter

cc licensed flickr photo shared by 4nitsirk

Click here to view the embedded video.

May 27, 2010, 5:02 p.m., has turned into a milestone for me. The embassy employee responsible for visas at the New Zealand embassy in Brussels left a message on my answering machine letting me know that my work visa  for New Zealand had just been granted and was ready for pick-up.

My temporary work visa was issued very quickly for which I am very grateful because having to wait for the news of whether I got it or not for already 4 weeks was the most excruciating time in my life so far. I would have surely gone insane had it taken longer. Going for the temporary work visa (valid for three years, and it can be extended) was the quickest way. Other visa options would have taken much longer. However, I will apply for residency to avoid having to go through the temporary visa process repeatedly.

Before I can finally start my new job as e-learning specialist with an IT company in Wellington on 15 June 2010, I have lots of things to organize, wrap up, etc. It will be a hectic 2 last weeks in Luxembourg for me before I go on the 19,025 km journey to Wellington via Singapore and Sydney.

Everything will be new for me: the job, the country, and the hemisphere. But what about the continent? I had wondered if New Zealand belongs to a continent, but it is already too far away from Australia. Geo-politically, it is grouped under Oceania, but does not belong to the continent of Australia. It is just a group of islands. Thus, no continent for me.

I am very excited to embark on this new adventure. Thanks to the internet, staying in touch won’t be a big problem though I will miss face-to-face encounters.

Let the adventure begin.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In Wikipedia, the definition for take-out (takeaway) is “food purchased at a restaurant for the purpose of being eaten elsewhere. The restaurant may or may not provide table service.” So what would that make a Takeaway University?

Is it a university where the education is purchased for the purpose of being consumed somewhere else, but maybe also on university grounds?

Lots of takeaway food is fast food: cheap and with a questionable health aspect. Does that mean that you get a cheap education at the Takeaway University, but one that is also of inferior quality?

At the Takeaway University you should be able to order anything that’s on the menu in any order and also multiple times.

Are there different Takeaway Universities specializing in certain menus, i.e. study programs?

Is the Takeaway University a university on demand?

Does the Takeaway University deliver content in bite-sized servings for quick consumption during a short break?

Takeaway University

Some weeks ago I decided to purchase Aperture 3 after a long time of non-decision due to bad reviews of Aperture crashing, eating photos and databases etc. Lucky for me, I had no problems importing my Aperture 2 database and photos and everything went smoothly.

I updated to Aperture 3 not necessarily to be up-to-date with the latest software, but to take advantage of some of its features. The ones very high on my list were:

• geotagging
• face recognition
• Flickr uploader

Geotagging

Up until this update, I have hardly ever geotagged my photos as the process was a bit cumbersome with an external software. It did work well, but was just not easy for the workflow. Now with “Places”, a browser view in Aperture that shows where your photos are on a map, geotagging became easy as pie. Of course, having the GPS coordinates committed to the metadata immediately upon taking the photograph would be even better, but I do not have that luxury. Thus, I go for the second best option: tagging manually.

Places works very well and you can easily see which photos you have already geotagged as they have a little red pin in the Places view.

Aperture 3: Places mode

Face recognition

At first I thought I would be finished with tagging the faces in my pictures very quickly as I hardly ever take photos with people in them (how wrong could I be?). Once I fired up the Faces browser mode, Aperture told me that it found over 10,000 (!) faces in my photos. First, I thought: Yeah, right. But then, when I saw some of the faces, it dawned on me that I indeed had a lot of photos with people in them. I just did not upload them onto Flickr. As I tend to document events like special seminars or conferences that we had organized, by default, these pictures featured mostly people.

So it took me a long while to sift through all my faces and label those that I wanted to have in my Faces browser and reject all others. As I rejected the majority of faces, Aperture was not so good in “learning faces”, but that was fine by me.

Faces is actually nothing more than a special tag for a photo with the name of the person’s face. I could have achieved something similar by tagging the photo with the name in the keyword field. However, then the name would show up as regular tag everywhere. In photos with a number of people in them, I would still not know who was who. The Faces tagging resolves that problem. In addition, I can quickly see how many photos I have of a certain person, and I only see their face in a close-up and not the entire photo. This is especially great for photos of small children. You can see their development in seconds by flipping through these close-ups.

Flickr uploader

I had hoped that the Flickr uploader that was incorporated would be FlickrExport 3 for Aperture or something similar. However, I got disappointed. The Flickr uploader merely takes photos that you have selected and creates a new album on Flickr for them. That is nice for people who start out with Flickr after purchasing Aperture, but not for all others who already have Flickr albums. The Flickr option in Aperture does not allow you to view your already existing Flickr albums and add photos to them. I learned that the hard way as I tried to upload a photo to one of my albums and another one with the same name was created in Aperture AND Flickr. In the heat of the moment, I moved the image to the already existing album and deleted the newly created one on Flickr. But alas, the album still existed in Aperture. And I can’t delete the album there. That is the only time when Aperture actually freezes me out.

Aperture still needs to do quite a bit of work on this Flickr uploader. Meanwhile, I use FlickrExport which works like a charm and does not give me headaches.

Since Camtasia for Mac came out last year, I have been using it to create screencasts. I had used different screencasting tools before buying Camtasia (Jing and IShowU), but they did not allow me to edit the screencast.

Camtasia is very easy to learn and you get the hang of editing a video quickly. I only wish that it were possible to copy shapes from one project to another. That would save time when I need the same items in multiple projects. Furthermore, the properties pane is a bit clumsy.

Nevertheless, it is a great tool to record the screen and then be able to zoom in and out to the details that are necessary to show, to add shapes and text and even have multiple video sources in one final video.

I knew that I could also record myself using my iSight camera. However, I had never tried to record both the screen and the camera at the same time always assuming that this would not be possible.

But, there is always a first time. Yesterday, we held our 6th TechLunch session. Prior to it we had decided to do away with the big DV camera for recording and instead do a screenrecording and use my colleague’s Flip camera to record me speaking to use that for the in-screen. Despite this plan, we did not have the Flip available yesterday and thus thought we would only do the screenrecording.

A few days ago I had downloaded the update for Camtasia for Mac. As my colleague, Bob Reuter, did not know the software, I showed it to him. Then he just asked: Can you also record the iSight at the same time as the screen? We just pushed the camera button and I was damned: We could record both. That of course, saved our day because now we did not need any additional camera anymore, but could record the screen and the talking head at the same time with one computer. And of course, the quality of the recording is much better than filming the video projector image. Much crisper.

I don’t know if Camtasia for Mac could already record the iSight image in version 1, but it can certainly do so in version 1.1. The editing of the recording was thus also reduced by many hours because we did not have to use Final Cut anymore to transfer the DV video to the computer and then wait endless hours for the export.

The ability to record the screen and the talking head at the same time of course makes Camtasia for Mac well-suited for recording lectures or other demonstrations where one wants to have the speaker video as well. Even if the speaker walks around, the computer could be pointed in his direction to capture him but still always also have a very clear recording of everything that goes on on the computer screen.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Alec Couros, one fantastic educational technologist, who recently also got his tenure at University of Regina, finally went viral officially on YouTube with his medley “Alec Goes Viral“.

Curious as I am, I watched it, but could only decipher two of the videos / songs that he imitated.

The first one was really easy as it was “Numa Numa“, a YouTube classic.

The second segment in his short video is a musical drive-thru order. The one original that I know best is RhettandLink’s “Fast Food Folk Song“. They have been doing some pretty funny songs including commercials for local businesses.

The third video in Alec’s medley is still a mystery to me. Any hints?

Click here to view the embedded video.