I submitted an abstract for our annual departmental Postgraduate Colloquium event titled “Viewing and Delivering Adaptive Educational Hypermedia” last week. It’s about the program I’m currently writing at Warwick and is currently going through the review process. Providing the abstract is accepted the talk would be given on 3rd July.

Here’s the abstract in full:
Adaptive Educational Hypermedia offers a more intelligent and customised approach to the field of e-learning then the traditional linear methods. In an Adaptive Educational Hypermedia course a student’s learning experiences can be personalised using a user model which could include such information as the student’s knowledge level or learning style.
Adaptive strategies are sets of adaptive rules and once the learning material to be used in a course has been created, adaptive strategies can be applied to allow the personalisation of the course to students. This talk will describe the initial development of a software platform which imports learning content and adaptive strategies and then can display the resulting Adaptive Educational Hypermedia course to students. The software platform, called an adaptation engine, will be able to implement different types of adaptive strategies and test their suitability.

The incredible Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge search engine has gone live today to the public. It has answers to pretty much anything you can think of, and although it may not be able to explain the meaning of life or what you ate this morning it can still tell you that the temperature in Antartica when Kennedy died was -38F. Make sure you visit as it is amazing!

Elsewhere on the internet I came across (via everyjoe.com) a webpage with a few really impressive images comparing the earth to the sun, the sun to some bigger star and then the bigger star to the REALLY bigger stars. Makes you feel small but it definitely worth a look. The world we live in is truely amazing!

Of course you can get some interesting facts on these things from Wolfram Alpha here…

You can get the latest issue of the free Blender magazine, BlenderArt #21, from their website here. This issue’s topic is “Look What I Can Do!”

I’ve written a couple of instrumental pieces this year and here are the results. I wrote ‘Spring’ in March and was playing around over the weekend and came up with a piece I’m calling ‘Eternal Hope’.

Let me know what you think…

As usual both tracks are available from my last.fm page:

• Spring
• Eternal Hope