Keep IT Simple!

Bob Reuter's Web

I simply don’t get it?!? The new MS ad with Jerry S.

They must be on some serious drugs at MS??!!!???

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz6amk3P-hY

Is MS really paying so much money for an ad that makes you wanna run and buy shoes (and get your stupid clown card with a “i-once-was-an-ugly-teenager” photo) instead of an operating system???
come on! the world must be upside down…
best regards and a wonderful september friday to you all!
bob

P.S. well maybe they just want a lot of people, like me now, to send such messages of disbelieve and have everybody talk about windows again…

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2 July 2009 at 07:51 - Comments

Tracking the way between P&R Beggen and the Campus Walferdange

It took me less then 3 minutes by car to get from the P&R Beggen to the parking in front of the Sandkaul on Campus Walferdange of the Université du Luxembourg. The distance was more or less 1.5km. I’ve checked this track using Google Maps, because they now offer the option to get directions for walking (still a beta version)… and well… walking would take you about 16 minutes. That’s feasible, no?

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2 July 2009 at 07:50 - Comments

From my archives: uni.lu @ feierkrop

I’m trying to free up some space on my internal hard-drive and find a lot of funny stuff from the past, that I think is somewhat worth sharing with my readers… Today, we have very short article, with a screenshot from a web site. It was published 28th January 2005 in the FEIERKROP, the only somewhat satirical journal in Luxembourg, and it refers to the former webpage of the campus Walferdange of our beloved university… The “staff-page” then stated that the staff was “not available”… Gilbert, you know why this was the case 🙂 too funny…

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2 July 2009 at 07:50 - Comments

Auertest?

It has become a real tradition with our bachelor in educational sciences students to make the famous “auertest” on our eLearning plateforme, moodle.

Since they have to choose their optional seminars online and this activity opens at a certain time (defined by the server’s clock), it’s very important to know whether the server’s time is in phase with the current time or not… So student post an “auertest” message in a forum to check the time…

I think the Luxembourgish Railway Company (CFL.LU) should hire one of our students!!!

Last week I was taking the 8:01 train to Walferdange, but it was announced to leave @ 7:01…

Had time been standing still for an hour? Had I gone through some time machine? or was this just a plain error in their scheduling system… after all, it wouldn’t be the first error… 🙂

I’m curious what I will discover next week…

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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2 July 2009 at 07:49 - Comments

Merci Michelle!

I’ve been attending a seminar on “portfolio as a tool for professional development” on friday, that was organized by Michelle Brendel, one of my colleagues in the Bachelor in Educational Sciences @ uni.lu.

And I’ve learned something (amongst other things, I guess) about how to use colored post-its to find out what topics or questions are most relevant to the interests or interrogations of my classes… It’s so simple, yet so efficient, that I simply that to post it here in my own online digital portfolio, so that I will be able to return here if I should ever forget this technique…

To me, it perfectly reflects one step of the pedagogical concept of auto-socio-constructivism: « on apprend pour soi-même, par soi-même, mais pas tout seul » (GLEN, http://www.glen.lu/page27/1/charte.html)

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2 July 2009 at 07:49 - Comments

Create a bibliographic alert

Within the BNU portal it’s possible to create an automated
bibliographic search and get email notifications if new references are
published. Very nice. I’ll have to try that.

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2 July 2009 at 07:49 - Comments

Material Metaphors

Sometimes physical objects can act as support for material metaphors… 
Below is a picture of a newly installed gate on Campus Walferdange. 
To me, it just looks like it’s trying to tell us a nice monday-morning-hangover-blues story 🙂

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2 July 2009 at 07:48 - Comments

Using old technology & new technology for learning & teaching

Last night I attended a conference, organized by the Luxembourgish Green Party, given Mr Reinhard Kahl on “Schulen: Treibhäuser der Zukunft”… and since had no sheet of paper on me, but a pen (the 70% bio pen distributed by the Greens for promotion purposes…) and since I really wanted not to forget an interesting motto presented by Mr Kahl, I had to use the pen and my very own hand to write down two words to be able to remember this “famous” beautiful motto… BUT, and every child knows that for having tried it out, pen color fades away rather quickly, because you sweat or have to wash your hands… So, I thought I had to find a solution to “capture the moment” and took a picture of the writings on my hand… with my digital camera (which I also have with me since the beginning of the winter semester 2008, in order to be able to document what ever seems interesting for my seminars @ uni.lu)… and well, the result is quite nice… and it has produced a rather abstract and compact representations of Mr Kahl’s sentence, which was something like: “Kinder sind keine Fässer, die gefüllt, sondern Flammen, die entfacht werden wollen.“ Kahl actually quotes the famous French poet François Rabelais.

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2 July 2009 at 07:48 - Comments

Live from my behaviorism seminar

With a classroom configuration like back in the last century… 😉
very appropriate to illustrate the presented theory of learning…

Bob Reuter

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2 July 2009 at 07:48 - Comments

Keep it simple!

Sometimes long speeches are necessary to convince people of some not-yet-clear truths. Sometimes very simple words can do the same.

I think that Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers, Inc. got the whole thing right with this very short paragraph:

"But my teacher got a Sunnyvale [computer] company to let me come in and program. I just read a programming manual and wrote whatever programs came to my mind — I didn’t program just what some teacher said to. " ( http://woz.org/education/index.html)

He wanted to CREATE things, programs in his case, and he did not wait for some adult to tell him what to REPRODUCE something they had thought of. If he had gone the standard, traditional way that so man schools around the world still want their pupils and students to go, then he would not have gone very far, and we still would not have (or maybe somebody else would have had to start the computer revolution instead of Woz and Jobs) all the beautiful digital tools that allow us to be creative producers of meaning and also self-publishers of it (like I do with this blog…).

I highly recommend Woz’s auto-biography iWoz (http://www.signedbywoz.com/) to every pre-service and in-service teacher, because he very beautifully shares his passion for learning, creating & inventing, his own way of being an auto-didact and all the help and support that adults and peers provided him with.

Because, after all, we are all auto-didacts, we all have to learn what we learn by ourselves, ideally also for ourselves, and with the help and assistance of other humans around us (and not "malgré nos professeurs ").

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2 July 2009 at 07:48 - Comments
bob at 07:59 on 2 July 2009
And when I think about the fact that Logo, Turtle Graphics, is still experienced by some many students (and probably…