However to do e-learning experiments we need students and apparently there are plenty of students in Romania, which is why I’ve spent the last two weeks teaching a Web Application Development course in at Bucharest University.

I’m also here to (hopefully) confirm some hypotheses made by Craig Stewart in his PhD thesis on cultural based adaptation. The main thrust of Craig’s idea is that different cultural backgrounds can influence user preferences in relation to user interfaces. To confirm this we are splitting the students into two groups to undertake an online revision course on PHP and then giving group 1 the ‘Romanian’ interface and group 2 an opposite interface, in this case the ‘UK’ interface. We switch the interfaces round for the second course on Perl and as the students are taking pre/post tests we hope to see more improvement in students who use the ‘Romanian’ layout.

None of the cultural adaptation theory is my research. However the benefit to me is a perfect opportunity to test the layout adaptation research I’ve been working on and then writing up over christmas and January. Also we’ve been testing my system on it’s own using a MySQL revision course to see if student’s learn faster using my the adaptive learning environment that I’ve developed, called ADE.

As I’ve spent much blood, sweat and all the small hours in creating my lessons and example web application (QuizMaster!) to go with them, I thought I’d make them available to the world in general, so here they are:

Java MVC

Session Handling

Data Web Access

Persistent Storage

Web Development Examples

Bear in mind that if you think Java is a nice cup of coffee these slides and examples will definitely not be for you!

It’s called OSOLCaptcha and is a captcha plugin for the user registration, login, reset password, contact us and remind username forms. You only need to install and then publish the plugin for it to work and you can download it for free from here.

The default theme is fine for my needs and since installing it and doing the initial configuration I haven’t needed to touch it for months. The plugin page is here but you can also click on ‘Add New’ from the Dashboard Plugins menu and install it from there. I’d highly recommend using it if your blog is on WordPress.

I’m now looking into a similar plugin which works with Joomla for some other websites I’m currently working on. It’s called Mobile Joomla and looks pretty good as well.

Here’s my first app, it’s fairly simple and uses the TinyDB and the OrientationSensor objects which were fun to play with.

Ever had an argument about which direction North is? You haven’t? Just me? Well, if you had, you could have solved it on the spot with “Where’s North?!?”. Two players try to point the phone North. The closest player wins…

You can’t upload AppInventor apps to the market yet so you’ll need to download here or scan the barcode below. Make sure you have Settings->Applications->Unknown Sources ticked otherwise you won’t be able to install it.

I’m presenting a talk on “Reusing Adaptation Strategies in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems” later this morning and the slides are available from here.

The first events of the year that I organised for Notts/Derby BCS group went well and I’m hoping that this continues with the events over the next couple of months.

They are all held at the Long Eaton Novotel and are free to non-BCS members. If you want to come along please register first on our website so we have an idea of numbers. The next few meetings are:

• 15th March: Safe Disposal of IT equipment
• 19th April: Speed Networking!
• 17th May: Game-based learning
• 21st June: The Art of Productive Laziness

All meetings start at 18:30 and are at: Novotel, Bostock Lane, Long Eaton, NOTTINGHAM NG10 4EP (map)