Last week was busy. I was home pretty much only to sleep and lived off train station junk food. Not the best life, but a lot of fun and cool things happened.

One of these was the Next Web conference, a great startup event where a lot of interesting people from the European and American startup scene were present. The conference was complicated for me slightly because Eelke and I volunteered to shoot a report of it for Frankwatching, one of the Netherlands’ leading Web 2.0 blogs.

The report is in Dutch but there are some choice bits of English interview in there, especially a Q&A with Robert Scoble which cuts pretty much to the essence of what he told us at The Next Web. It is up at Vimeo:

Frankwatching @ The Next Web 2008 from Eelke D. on Vimeo.

I’ve never done something like this before, but I’ve wanted to for a long time. This was a great opportunity. Suffice it to say that it was a lot of fun, very tiring and I learned a lot. I have a lot more respect for (video)journalists now.
I expect to do more with video in the future especially for travelblogging and ambient recording and I’m thinking of getting a Flip.

The Next Web was a great conference with a spectacular ambience fitting the growing European startup scene. I didn’t hear a lot of new stuff from many speakers. I like my speakers in depth, on the edge and interdisciplinary because I learn the most from those. But maybe that’s not everybody’s cup of tea.

A while back I was at BarCampLondon2 where I held my talk about Education 2.0. During this talk and the rest of the day I got to talk with people that were either involved or interested in education. I had a small idea with some people to setup EduCamp in London. Unfortunately there is already an Educamp planned in June in Dublin so this plan was quickly canceled.

One idea that I did want to pursue was the idea of doing some freelance podcasting for education. I already did some screencasts in the time that Reinier and I were still working for Education Made Easy so it wasn’t that much of a big step. After a couple of weeks thinking it through and setting stuff up I present you: teachr.tv.

I wanted to provide some content before I started spreading the word, so when you go to teachr.tv now you will see that there are already 3 episodes available. There are a few plans for the next episodes but I am very open to ideas and suggestions. You can mail me at info@teachr.tv or send me interesting stuff to del.icio.us/teachrtv.

I noticed that making high quality screencasts is still a lot of work but the workflow on a Mac is definitely more efficient than it ever was on Windows. As if I wasn’t happy enough with that, teachr.tv was recently even reviewed in the EdTechTalk-podcast (thank you Jeff!).

As far as I know, you pay a network a set amount of money per second to air a given commercial in a given timeslot.

That doesn’t strike me as economically optimal, though.

People zap away during commercials, but I doubt people zap away during a funny or catchy commercial that they haven’t seen before. If it’s funny enough, they won’t zap away at all.

A very annoying commercial, like this one (turn your speakers off - some screaming zombielike thing pops up midway - people with a weak heart should probably not watch it at all) will immediatly get people diving for the remote to turn the volume down. And once you’re holding the remote, zapping is that much easier.

On the other hand, anytime an ‘apeldoorn’ advertisement (like this one) comes along, I’ll keep watching, even if I’ve seen them before.

Thus I’d argue the cost to run an ad on a tv network should be not just a function of duration and timeslot, but also of how long its been running (how boring it has become, basically), and how ‘funny’ it is, though how you’d rate that I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

Even without the networks creating incentives for companies to make funny or intriguing advertisements, the internet’s always a help: interesting ads tend to see lots of free publicity once the youtube video gets posted.

For example, I thought this mini pie catapult was so funny, I just had to write an article about it. Talk about viral!

A long long time ago, I managed to find an IBM ViaVoice edition at a fleamarket, for one guilder. (It’s voice recognition software).

I was working on an assembler project back then, which has a very simple and small instruction set. I had a whacky plan to use the ViaVoice software to allow me to program by speaking, instead of typing. I honestly thought it would be able to program faster, it wasn’t some sort of noble goal to help programmers around the world suffering from RSI.

I guess my younger self wasn’t all that smart.

The project failed miserably, as customizing the dictionary wasn’t really possible, and you type something like MOV, or 0xFF a lot faster than you can say it.

Vista ships with a notorious and tempramental voice recognition module. Hmmmmm…. perhaps almost a decade of software improvement has brought programming-by-voice closer to reality?

Let’s check it out! (YouTube video)

“Funny” doesn’t cover the half of it. I practically fell off my chair.

NB: the sheer level of frustration reminds me of the Custom Super Mario level from Hell (swearing abounds, careful if you’re at work).

All kidding aside for a moment, the performance really isn’t that bad, and perl isn’t exactly the most natural language; it’s closer to cartoon swearing. If the software knows about the grammar and syntax of the programming language, this almost looks like it might work. The one time I ever got serious RSI indicators is when I tried to teach myself dvorak, but, certainly, the number of programmers suffering from RSI out there should be large enough that there just might be an interesting market for creating voice recognition software for programmers. I know, I know - there are far more ideas out there compared to entrepreneurs, but this particular idea should be just perfect for a Master’s thesis at my old alma mater, Media and Knowledge Engineering at the Delft University of Technology.

I already did a small review of the new Nokia N95 last week, but today I will be going into some more detail about what makes the N95 “tick”. The first day I had my N95, I played around trying to get Jaiku working over GPRS, and then I installed Fring to be able to use Skype over the Wifi. Obviously all this tinkering quickly drained the battery so here is a more detailed overview of “what computers have become”.

Battery Life (+)

One complaint of some reviewers is the battery life of the N95, but both I and another N95 owner noticed that this is probably only an issue in the first week because this is when you are playing around with all the functions. Once you start using the phone as a phone, and only occasionally use the display/video/GPS/wifi capabilities, the battery life is actually very acceptable. For me, even when using a lot of wifi, the battery life ranges from 1 to 1.5 days .

GPS (+/-)

The built-in GPS receiver is what sets the N95 apart from the other Nokia N-series phones. Unfortunately the GPS receiver is of really bad quality, and the antenna is located in the keypad, so for reception you will have to slide open the screen. In the first days I couldn’t manage to get a fix, but I recently noticed that if you stand still under a blue sky, it is able to make a fix on your position within a minute or two. This isn’t quite quick enough to solve my GPS issue, but it is fun.

Amazingly though, once you do have a fix, it really manages to keep track of your position. Even in places (half inside a building for example) where you would not get an initial fix at all. I did notice some inaccuracy here and there but in the end it does it’s job. The software provided is pretty detailed and uses internet (wifi, GPRS, UMTS or other) to download your maps. I manually zoomed in to the London area once and that was enough to never again run out of cached maps. A nice addition is the built-in search engine for finding interesting places (hotels, restaurants, etc) in your current area.

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A while back I made a small tool for Alper to broadcast his thesis presentation live around the world to a small amount of people using flash on a macbook. So when I was listening to the This Week in Tech podcast I was amazed to hear the technical concept of ustream.tv. The concept is basically the same as my little tool: a flash component lets you stream your audio and video to their servers and you can then refer everyone to your own personal page. They even integrated chat (which I didn’t) but it’s a bit sad that this chat is implemented in Java. I think that with all the skills they have they could have done it all in Flash. I also regret the size of the video, but with a capacity of more than 2000 streams at 1 time I think they had to make some compromises somewhere.

Maybe this will open up the ability to others to share their thesis presentations live on the internet? Maybe Oliver or Eelke want to try it out?

I graduated from university recently and having spent some seven odd years at that venerable institution, I have collected some baggage which I need to express but which I also feel would help educators to improve themselves.

I think the word is catharsis.

Due to an administrative mixup and some human errors (both not completely my fault), I still have to follow one course: in4012tu Speech and Language Processing. This isn’t too much of a pain because languages are completely my thing and it gives me an excuses to pretend that I am a student for two more months.

One risk is that I stand the chance of being the gunner in this class. It is really easy to ignore the mantra: Learn, not teach.

Recording

One idea that I have concerns recording lectures. Our lectures have to be given in English if somebody in the hall requests it. This is very much to the chagrin of most our lecturers. Teachers at DUT have to lecture Masters courses in English but most of them hardly relish this opportunity to improve their language skills.

One of the overlooked advantages of lecturing in English is that it greatly increases your reach, not only to those one or two international students in the lecture hall, but to the entire world.

Seeing as all major conferences are already being recorded to be publicized after the fact, wouldn’t it be completely trivial for an university to do the same with lectures? And even if it wasn’t provided by university, I think anybody with a Macbook could easily tape themselves with the builtin iSight. Last weekend I did an impromptu video shoot and had it uploaded to YouTube within minutes.

The quality of the material, though not optimal, would be wholly acceptable for anybody interested in learning the stuff. With some extra effort the lecturer could also sync his slides to the video stream in a custom application (Slideshare + YouTube mashup anybody?) to provide a better viewing experience.

I can think of a great number of advantages but here’s one to start you off:
Giving a lecture is an important and time consuming activity and as such also should be worth recording for future reference. The value of creating a personal video archive of yourself telling interesting stuff should be directly evident to everybody. Publishing that video on a personal blog would further increase your value as a teacher/scholar. You could show the world that you are a valuable and interesting person and build a global following.
Just think what this would do for your next job interview or your chances of getting tenure.

Why would you not do this? One real reason could be the university’s intellectual property stance. Is a lecturer allowed to record his own lecture and do cool stuff with it? I have no clue but it seems worth a try.

Hyperspeed

Second point is the speed at which most lectures are given. This is not completely to my taste. I hope this isn’t representative of the speed at which university students absorb information because if so, then the innovation position of the Netherlands is in deep shit indeed.

Hyperspeed is a feature. After my graduation talk some people told me that not only had I started off too fast but that I also was accelerating during the course of my presentation. This was in part because I was nervous but mostly just because I had a lot to say and a limited amount of time in which to say it.

There are excellent speakers who have also learned to pace themselves very well and use rhythm and silence for maximum effect and information conveyance (see some at TED). This can work for expert communicators but in most cases going too slow is definitely a bug and runs the risk of putting me and the rest of your audience to sleep.

There are also speakers who go really fast and don’t effect less because of it. One of the best lectures I attended at university was given by Charl Botha and in my memory it stands out like a visual TGV ride.

I definitely think I can improve on my presenting and pacing but speed per se will probably not be one of the first things to be improved. Next time you see me present, just “Prepare for ludicrous speed”.

A suggested improvement to speedup lectures: have everybody watch all the slides in advance and make mental notes about stuff that isn’t clear. Have the lecturer go through the slides at high speed only stopping for questions. Use the rest of the time to do non-sleep inducing stuff.