Projects
I am involved in a number of interesting projects right now, mostly relating to the use of information technology in education.
COVCELL
Through my company, ODG, I am involved in a project named COVCELL, it stands for Cohort-Oriented Virtual Campus for Effective Language Learning. To get right down to it, the basics are mostly to make some interesting modifications to the Moodle VLE (or CMS as they like to call it), most of them centering around increasing possibilities for user interactions. The nature of this project naturally sparked my interest in the social aspects of learning, and I am highly interested in how social interaction possibilities affect learning performance. Naturally these types of social interactions are necessary for social constructivism approaches in education to apply — Moodle is of course a highly constructivist system, while the social aspect may be slightly lacking.
iCamp
The iCamp project is much harder to specify in my own terms than COVCELL, so I’ll borrow a passage from the iCamp site; The project aims at creating an infrastructure for collaboration and networking across systems, countries, and disciplines in Higher Education. Pedagogically it is based on constructivist learning theories that puts more emphasis on self-organised learning, social networking, and the changing roles of educators. This may sound slightly vague, but what I am doing so far has been building tools for interconnectability between learning systems (repositories, learning management systems, etc), and my main project till 2008 should be to build a powerful community site to facilitate collaboration between learning institutions, to teach facilitators how to use the iCamp tools and methodology, and to provide a place for the iCamp community to network, and discuss their research. I am employed by the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration to work on the iCamp project.
Beyond these projects I also have some pet projects of mine, including this blog site, where I try to share my limited wisdom with the world, as well as a couple of music related projects.
Andrými
Andrými is the small record label I’m launching together with friend and collaborator Varði. The idea was born really when I was helping him build a website and planning to build a webstore for him to independently sell his music online. It came to mind whether we should start our own little label for releasing music online. Of course, the world probably doesn’t need yet another label, but we felt our vision was quite different from most — we want to distribute high quality mp3’s for free. So the idea is, download and enjoy most (if not all of our music), and if you really like it, maybe you’ll by the CD for your collection.