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!

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.

The Entertainer Project (www.entertainer-project.com) is going to be releasing version 0.1 in two weeks time on the 14th June.

To test it prior to release (you’ll need bzr) get a console up and type in the following:

bzr branch lp:entertainer

Development website is over on launchpad (https://launchpad.net/entertainer/)

I’ve just joined the Entertainer Project  over on Launchpad.

From the website:

“Entertainer aims to be a simple and easy-to-use media center solution for Gnome and XFce desktop environments. Entertainer is written completely in Python using object-oriented programming paradigm. It uses GStreamer multimedia framework for multimedia playback. User Interface is implemented with Clutter UI-library, which allows sleek OpenGL animated user interfaces. Entertainer also uses other great projects like SQLite, pyIMDBb and iNotify.

The ultimate goal of the project is to create the best media center solution available for any platform. This means that Entertainer should be the best looking, most easy to use and most feature filled media center solution available. Not the easiest goal to achieve. It’s a long way, but we have a good start here!”

My first job is to add opml import capability to the rss feed reader and allow the option to sync with liferea. I’ll be checking out any bugs relating to this as well.