New Team Member: Hibiki Ishima

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The Digital Education Team grows: From 1.August 2020 Hibiki joined the team as a student assistant. She is currently studing at the University of Arts in the newmedia class and will work on the hardware of the Digital Primer. Some of her projects can be found here

Participation in the 9th Münster Workshop for School Informatics 2020

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The Digital Education Team presented the Digital Primer project at Münster School Informatics Workshop . This year's workshop topic "Mobile with informatics" was a perfect match for the contribution "Building instructions for a digital primer by and for your pupils" presented by the Digital Education Team. In the accompanying publication four characteristics of the Digital Primer are explained and a building instruction for a prototype is given. The publication in volume can be found here .

Presentation 'Make Your Pupil’s Embooked, Voluminous, Modular and Unique Digital Primer' is available here.

Digital Primer Code is now on Github

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At the URL https://github.com/hromi/Digital-Primer You will find some necessary software bricks which will allow You to create Your own variant of a digital Primer (DP). DP is a new kind of medium whose raison d'etre is to educate. Its ideal hardware embodiment looks like a book and hadigital primers multiple properties of a book. Instead of using screens, device uses e-ink displays (mostly using IT8951 controller) to present visual or textual content. Strong emphasis is to be put on speech technologies (automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis) and touchless human-machine interaction. Recommended platform: Raspberry Pi Zero running Raspbian OS.

New team Member: Paul Seidler

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Paul Seidler joined the Digital Education Team on the 1.April 2020. He studied at the University of Arts in the newmedia class and was working before in various research facilities, including the Design Research Lab and the Hybrid plattform .  His projects and papers have been presented at CTM, Transmediale, Dutch Design Week. His current focus is on Software design and development of the Digital Primers.

Prototype 1 of a digital Primer presented at ECDF's Industry Day

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First prototype of a novel kind of digital education medium, a so-called "Digital Primer" (DP) or a "digitale Fibel" was presented to public at the Industry Day of Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) on 21st January 2020. Design, realization and optimization of a digital Primer is the main research & design project of Daniel D. Hromada, digital education juniorprofessor affiliated to both ECDF as well as to Faculty of Design of Berlin University of the Arts.

Distinctive innovations brought about by the DP's prototype 1 include, but are not restricted to:

- three e-paper displays (two major ones to create a book-like experience, third used for cover)
- voice & e-ink text synchronisation
- interaction mainly by means of gestures and offline automatic speech recognition systems
- A5 format
- first lesson of Bildung Digitale curriculum and first instance od Berliner Digitale Leseprobe

OEB.global brings Steiner's, Montessoris and Freinet's ideals into the RaspberryPi age

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Talk "CO2-Neutrality and Digital School: can we align them ?" now on-line

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By clicking here, You will obtain access to the presentation just presented within the track "eCampus / Nachhaltigkeit in Verwaltung und Forschung" of the Hamburg conference Campus Innovation. Thanks to Visuelle Kommunikation student Niklas Apfel for playful illustrations.

Kastalia KMS presented at UdK Zukunftstag 2030

1572957235 / AE491105 , Berlin

Version v0.42 of the knowledge-management system (KMS) Kastalia has been presented as part of 2nd "Future day" organized by Berlin University of the Arts. Installation named "kastalia.medienhaus v0.42 :: 4 views" was a first public display of the system which is, since winter semester 2016 used as a singular tool for creation of collaborative presentations by study programs Kunst und Medien (KuM) and Visuelle Kommunikation (VK) of UdK's Faculty of Design.

As of 24th october 2019 kastalia's database contained 3846 "knots" ("Ding an sich") interconnected with "5226" bounds which can be displayed (as "Ding für uns") by > 79 different templates, thus generating at least 69 * 3846 = 265374 distinct and unique "views".  What was presented at UdK's Zukunfstag were four such views.

In short, Kastalia can be described as a collaborative swiss-knife of web-publishing, data-management and archivation. Asides being used as a collaborative presentation tool by all classes, workshops and labors of VK and KuM study programs,  kastalia also played a minor role in archiving the outputs of first edition of UdK2030, plays an instrumental role in creation of german-language corpus for the project of digital primer (digitale fibel) and is a backend for systems as diverse as Medienhaus cafeteria display, repetitio.digital.udk-berlin.de as well as the website You are reading in this very moment (e.g. bildung.digital.udk-berlin.de).

Invited talk about reduction of energy trace of UdK’s Medienhaus at Klasse Klima

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It has been a big pleasure to present a talk "Circadian and eutark reduction of energy trace of UdK’s Medienhaus" to students of UdK's Klima Klasse.

What was supposed to be a 20-min talk about circadian and eutark devices turned into a 90-min interactive talk spanning topics as diverse as Bildung Digitale, Lean ICT on one hand and photobioreactors, Wendelstein 7-X or carbon-sequestrating paints on the other.

@klasse.klima Instagram announcement is here and the on-line version of the presentation is available here.

Invited talk at Campus-Innovation conference

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As a follow-up to article about circadian and eutark artefacts, I have been invited to Campus-Innovation conference at Hamburg in order to hold a talk: "CO2-Neutrality and Digital School: can we align them?".

List of other conference participants here.

repetitio.digital.udk-berlin.de up & running

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A series of 23 "aphorisms" dealing with the topic of "Repetition" is being gradually added at https://repetitio.digital.udk-berlin.de.

The project has been initiated by request from authors of UdK Journal, the main printed medium of Berlin University of the Arts. Printed introduction to the art-work is "Ewige Wiederholung des Wiederholendes" can be found on a double-spread of pages 14 and 15 of 7th issue of the journal.

Asides being the first project combining the D3.js frontend with the kastalia.medienhaus backend, the repetition aphorisms can be considered to be first texts written by Daniel D. Hromada in german language.

Article "After smartphone : Towards a new digital education artefact" published in Revue Enfance

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Article "After smartphone : Towards a new digital education artefact" published in Revue Enfance

Paris; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3917/enf2.193.0345

Article "After smartphone : Towards a new digital education artefact" is now made available by Revue Enfance, one of the most oldest (est. 1948) continental scientific journals in the field of developmental psychology and published by renowned publishing house "Presses Universitaires de France".

The article is a part of an issue 3/2019 dedicated to "Cognitive technologies for childhood" edited by Jacqueline Nadel & Charles Tijus. Its abstract being as follows:

"Non-moderate smartphone usage may induce diverse pathological states and behaviors which may potentially result in an array of syndromes and illnesses. Digital devices built for education rather than consumption and entertainment should not neglect intricacies of human physiology, ergonomy and cognition. For this reason, we present first four properties of an idealized “digital primer” artefact which could maximize the human and cultural potential of a normal elementary school pupil by means of holistic, semi-supervised interaction. Properties addressed and defined in this article are: “speech-based”, “narrative”, “circa-temporal” and “habit-disrupting”."

In its appendix, the article is also a 1st scientific publication contains a list of 23 characteristics of a digital primer, as proposed since 2016 on fibel.digital.

Fulltext is available here for a 5 € fee.

Make Your Own Device (MYOD) to be introduced at oeb.global

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Happy to announce that presentation ""Make Your Own Device": When Digital Education Marries Reform Pedagogy" shall be presented on 29th November to attendees of the oeb.global conference as part of the Teaching Skills and Competences for Tech-enabled Futures Starts at School: the New Digital Literacy Curriculum panel. Full program of oeb.global conference is available here.

Podcast about Digital Primer broadcasted @ SWR2 Radio

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Brief description of the digital Primer ("digitale Fibel") project in its earliest stage + some other remarks concerning the usage of AIs in education + an excerpt from a RaspberryPi TTS-synthetized variant of an old Slovak fairy-tale, all this and some more was part of the program "Lerning in the robotic era" broadcast by SWR2. You can download the podcast variant which You can download here. Article summarizing the Podcast is available here.

Thanks the SWR2 journalist Ms. Silvia Plahl for an agreeable interview.

First batch of digital artefacts presented at UdK's Rundgang

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Less then one year after introduction of Digital education at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), we have already managed to present some working artefacts to wider audience during UdK's event of the year, a so-called Rundgang.

Main exhibits included: Avatar0 (created in collaboration with Christian Schmidts) communicating with visual installation In Praise of Void by Akif Sari; PappeFibel0 (the core prototype of the fibel.digital project); touchless musik instruments Schale (physical setup by Kohei Kimura), Ukulele (Nik Kapanadze, Anna Petzer); drumming plants Cyberplant0 and Cyberplant1 and binaural headphones sonic by Nik Kapanadze.

Consistently with the "Make Your Own Device" (MYOD) philosophy, majority of artefacts hereby introduced is based on Raspberry PI hardware, GNU/Linux operating system and tend to include at least one upcycled component.

First participation at Berlin's Long Night of the Sciences 2019

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Artefacts PappeFibel0 and Cyberplant0 were presented during the event "Long Night of the Sciences" at Einstein Center Digital Future (sometimes also known as "House of digitalization"). A more elaborate report about the event is available here.

Article "Circadian and eutark reduction of energy trace of a digital school" accepted for publication

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Article thematizing two properties (circadian and eutark*) of digital yet sustainable digital education devices has been just accepted for publication in 7th volume of "Fachmagazin für Digitalisierung in der Lehr Synergie". Publication date is 22 May 2019 (AE490522). 

*word "eutark" is not a typo but a neologism meaning "energy-autark", i.e. "able to produce energy necessary for own operation"

Prolegomena students organize 0th edition of "The futurological congress AE100

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Faculty of Design of Berlin University of the Arts

The zeroth edition of the course "Digital Culture :: Prolegomena to Educatio Digitale :: Historical Context" finished by a "congress" organized by students and for students. Congress interventions included: presentation of a string&pulley-based logical gates (NOT, AND, NAND, XOR, OR, buffer); Digi-Comp2 paper-based replica; video about a somewhat unhappy cyborg; unveiling of the Pygmallion tableau and referats about Ada Lovelace and digital sounds in everyday life.

Prolegomena students meet prof. Zuse

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Vivisection of digital infrastructure of UdK's Medienhaus

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Symposium Digitalisierung UdK Berlin /// Eine Anatomie, UdK, Berlin

Presentation of the talk "Vivisection of digital infrastructure of UdK's Medienhaus, as executed by an ex-IT-Admin" is now available in the Kastalia Knowledge Management System und is accessible here.

To BYOD or not to BYOD in an elementary school ?

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Hybrid Platform TU / UdK, Berlin

Should elementary school pupils bring their own devices into school or not ? Some pro- and contra- arguments, as well as an answer to this highly actual question have been presented at the 33rd Hybrid Talk dedicated to "Learning". An impress.js presentation is available here.

Core of Fibel's speech recognition engine compiled on an embedded-system

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Faculty of Design of Berlin University of the Arts

Happy to announce that the state-of-the-art Kaldi Automatic Speech Recognition system has been just successfully compiled on an embedded Rock64 platform.

First evaluations of the Prolegomena series

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Prolegomena to Educatio Digitale initiated

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UdK Wintersemester 2018/2019 courses

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Presentation @ ECDF 2018 Industry Forum

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Einstein Center Digital Future, Berlins
A short presentation "Digital Primer :: Speech-technologic fostering of literacy in dyslectic children" presented at ECDF's 1st Industry Forum is available here.