Towards a Mobile Learning Software Ecosystem
Right before the vacations I successfully defended my licentiate thesis “Towards a Mobile Learning Software Ecosystem”. Since I needed to figure out the different copyrights for all the papers and so forth this post took a bit longer than I anticipated. With all the administration cleared I can now finally publish a copyright-edited version my thesis here for download.
Download the thesis Towards a Mobile Learning Software Ecosystem
Thank you all who attended the defense and the party afterwards, also a big thanks to David Johansson for the picture.
MAMP trouble
I decided to spend some time on some of my neglected side projects this week as weather in Sweden haven’t exactly been “summer-like”. As they have been in hibernation for some time due to thesis writing, I needed to set up my development environment again. Since I’m a bit old fashioned in some senses I still stick with MAMP for testing purposes, mostly since it has never let me down, until now. After fresh installation on OS X 10.6.8 the MAMP MySQL simple refused to start and after a little digging in the logs I found the somewhat cryptic message:
[error] /applications/mamp/library/bin/mysqld: unknown option ‘–skip-locking’
After some searching I found a post complaining about MAMP not ignoring setting files in OS X. This is a problem as OS X comes with Apache, MySQL and PHP already installed and thus have conflicting configuration files. The simple solution is to rename the built-in MySQL configuration file located in /etc/ called my.cnf. This is only an option if you are not using the built in server! A quick fix is running the command below in the terminal, as always with sudo you need to be careful.
sudo mv /etc/my.cnf /etc/my.cnf.bak
At least this solved all the problems for me, but please feel free to correct any inaccuracies in the comments.
Licentiate Thesis
It’s time to present my licentiate thesis! It is an open defense so just drop by if you are around.
Slides for tomorrows workshop
I am giving a brief introduction to application development for mobile learning at tomorrows leaf workshop. The introduction will cover a little bit about general development as well as a brief overview of three of the projects from CeLeKT which illustrates some of the possible paths available to developers in this domain. The presentation will be mostly oral but I made a few slides just in case I forget anything, by themselves they are not very informative however.
Virtual Workshop on SE & TEL
During the middle of May me and Mamdouh Eljueidi from NTNU will host a virtual workshop for the Nordic LEAF Network. Virtual in this sense means that it will be hosted on Adobe Connect. This workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers to discuss issues related to software engineering and TEL.
Topics of interest for this workshop includes
- Tools for rapid application development / prototyping
- Commercial of-the-shelf (COTS) applications
- Tools developed internally
- SE approaches for TEL
- End-user programming, e.g. Scratch, Android Inventor
- Content reuse (Learning Object, Learning Design etc.) from a software perspective
- What is on the horizon for the next few years (Cloud computing, The internet of things, Frameworks, Hardware etc.)
This workshop is open for people associated with the LEAF network but in case this sounds interesting please contact me or Mamdouh.
Making Mendeley Library Access work with Linnaeus University
Mendeley released a nice feature a while back that allows you to find the article you are currently browsing in full text via your library. Autodetection doesn’t work but by adding the proxy version of our openurl directory, you can access this feature from anywhere. Just manually add a new external library in Mendeley options using the URL below.
http://link.libris.kb.se.proxy.lnu.se/sfxlnu
Note that you need to log in with your LNU username and password.
Credits to Simon at infontology for bringing this feature to my attention
Tiny update
I am currently in the “refinement” phase of my licentiate thesis (which is something we do in Sweden, writing a thesis is so much fun that we do it twice). This basically have been the focus of most of my attention for the better part of 4 months now and quite frankly its been exhausting. Challenging, mind-opening and fun, but oh so exhausting. A decent analogy would be liking your intellect to a tube of “Kalles Kaviar” and your thesis is a very (very) big sandwich that your making.
Procrastination is a powerful foe.
This post is nothing but procrastination so I’ll make it short and sweet but I found some nice winter photographs in my phone that cheered me up in this “fake spring”-state that Sweden is currently in. They are raw from the phone so try to keep the funmaking to a minimum 
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The unfortunate case of the troublesome laptop
Everyone who knows me have probably heard me rant about the lack of quality in the Macbook Pro that I currently have assigned to me at work. It started with bright spots on the screen, which is not really a big deal for me as I’m usually head deep into a IDE and thus not all that visible. Then I had two chargers anything but explode on me, the first one after two months and the replacement I got about one month after that. (The third one have been running fine for over two years now tho). Problems continued and after 7 months I was down to a solid 5 minutes of battery life which effectively rendered the “laptop” a very pretty desktop computer.
Those things where minor compared to the graphics card defect that plagued my version of the MBP (as well as many other laptops from that year). Apple did handle this flawlessly however and replaced it free of charge (I do suppose they charged Nvidia for it ). The CD drive has not been working for a few years, but since I have used it perhaps twice in these 3.5isch years that I got the computer, I can’t say that it have affected me negatively. The icing on the cake of fail however was the (apparently rather common) loss of keyboard and trackpad functionality half a year ago.
This post is not about Apple flaming however, even tho I have no battery, a spotty screen, no CD drive, no keyboard and no trackpad, it is still very much a useable computer for work (although it is a bit slow due to its age and only 2gb of RAM). This post is actually about me fixing the keyboard/trackpad using the guide from Gigaom.
What this guide changed for me was the advice to use HardwareGrowler to see whether or not the USB was working. It also provided a very good overview of the problem and I found it immensely helpful. Although the problem is not “fixed” it might bring a few more months out of a MBP for someone. So if you are plagued by the loss of trackpad/keyboard in your MBP, try the guide 
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Vederslöv part 1
Before Christmas, we ran a small project in a school outside of Växjö. The project was not as technically advanced as some of the other things we are working on but as we all know, the amount of advanced technology used in a learning project have little (or in the worst case scenario, a negative) impact on how well an activity is perceived and performed.
What we mainly wanted to try with this activity was the notion of spatial orientation. What we wanted to try is how well student could orient themselves in relation to two points on a field. So an application was constructed to allow this. Using Android phones with a GPS module, the student where challenged to find an array of different points on the field.
One of the main lessons learned is that if you are planning to run an activity in a field with deep snow, make sure you have clothes for it.
Even thought the activity had no technical failures, despite the freezing cold and not optimal weather conditions, still some problems where encountered. These where mainly due to the problem of students not dressing for the occasion. This lead to students having shoes full of snow after 10 minutes which made students loose both concentration and interest. Luckily, some replacement clothing could be found and the activity completed but the importance of making sure students are dressed for the activity is a very important point that simply can not be stressed enough.
Publications are pending but will be linked to from here when available.
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