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I have a friend who lives in some small town in the north of italy. He moved there because of his job. It took a while for him to get accumstomed and to like the way of life there, but now he is all obsessed with the beauty of the country and other things. One thing he seems particularly into is mountaineering.

Somehow we wound up talking about this during our last conversation: We want to do a high mountain hike. The mountain that sprang to my mind is of course Mont Blanc, but somehow it feels a bit like a beaten track, also it’s probably more expensive and more dangerous than the ALTERNATIVE: Monte Rosa. Monte Rosa is also closer to my friends place, from which we might start out.

Anyway. The first time I actually saw that mountain was when skiing in Saas Fee, which is a very well-known swiss ski-resort. The Monte Rosa Massive is located somewhere further south of there, bordering Italian territory. Monte Rosa is actually not one mountain with one summit, but a collection of summits, like, a dozen or so, all over 4000m high. The tallest peak is the some 4600 m tall Pointe Dufour, which from north looks like a small horn, pointing out of a huge white bull’s back, making Monte Rosa the number 2 in Europe after Mont Blanc.

So, the plan is, after some proper training to take the route up from the italian side. Possibly we have to book a guide, because both of us are not experts in glacier hikes. We will then head for the Capanna Margherita located at 4500something metres, drink a coffee and head down again. Sounds too easy? Objections? Feel free to leave a comment.

PS: I will be looking at crampons and ice picks today.

more info about how to get on the top of it on www.monterosa.com

An old man in the supermarket. Some brawling is going on at the till and the young woman working the checkout is completely at a loss of nerves because something does not work. When the old man reaches the till, he grabs her hand and holds it and says: “It’s going to be fine.”

This was a moment full of so much caress that I could barely believe seeing it happening.

Recently I became aware of a tricky research field called cybernetics. For an outsider like myself it might probably be the case that images of “Terminator” robots and cyborgs with biomechanic implants flash through one’s head. The advanced sci-fi reader might even think of William Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy, or other works by Asimov or Lem. But anyway, all of this doesn’t really explain about the research field of cybernetics which seems to be a mysterious philosophical discipline both anchored in humanities and science. So what is it really. I probably should shut up and go reading before writing any further, but as far as my impression goes it is in fact a field of modern functional art, in some certain way describing “inverse history” (the history of the future). Names like Von Däniken or Nikolai von Michalewsky spring to mind.

Prof. Mihaita from Bucharest University, probably Romania’s biggest guy in cybernetics, has contacted me the other day and sent me some documentation on something very puzzling. The Cybersyn Project. Cybersyn was a project run by the Chilean government in the early seventies under Salvador Allende, with the aim of implementing an ICT-based decision support system. The implementation was in fact put into practice, in the shape of a command center very much ressembling the bridge of a well-known starship. But this is no fiction. This was reality! And so very far ahead of time that it is hardly imaginable. Go to

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chile

and check out http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=0vmgylCPwrI for visual documentation.

So cold and dark Vienna might seem during autumn and winter, so sunny and friendly it appears in spring and summer. Go to www.weingutamreisenberg.at , which is one of the most beautiful Heurigen-locations in Vienna and see for yourself.

In my dreams, there seems to be one particular thing that persists throughout almost every dream i can remember. The ability to fly . It requires a lot of energy and skill. It’s not something you just do. You have to concentrate and find the right state of mind in order to be able to lift off. It takes most effort to get off the ground. At an altitude of half a metre or so, there seems to be some kind of critical point where it’s very unpredictable whether you will crash-land again or gain further altitude. It’s possible to fly up to 30 metres high, depending on the terrain below. There is the constant danger to loose concentration and fall down, therefore it’s unwise to exceed 10 metres. Getting off the ground can be made easier if you start on a slope where you can jump into the state of flying. Unfortunately there is never any guarantee that it works everytime. I like to fly at very low altitudes, like 1 or 2 metres high. I enjoy the curious looks of the other people and the combination between emotional tension and physical relaxation. I wonder if flying is actally healthy. Maybe it’s a new kind of medicine: “Fly like an angel, but stay alive.” Anyway it feels like something completely normal. Whenever I miss the bus to take me to school or work, I might just decide: “Well, let’s just take the straight way and fly it.”

Waking up being tied back to the ground again, feeling the discomfort of 1G pinning me down, it’s truly disappointing to discover that the convenient ability to fly is but an imagination.

In Vienna they are currently planning for the construction of a central train station. Pretty much like what was accomplished in recent times in Berlin. Right now, ressembling Paris, there is a couple of medium-sized stations circling the centre of town. Westbahnhof, Süd/Ostbahnhof (one complex), Franzjosefsbahnhof, Wien Nord,.. I think that’s about it. The station which is going to be reconstructed into Vienna Central, is going to be Südbahnhof.  Even now it seems to be the largest train station in Vienna, with its vast concourse, held in the chilling humongous ortogonality of 3rd Reich architecture.

Anyway sometimes when I get there, there is this train to Moscow waiting at the platform. It appears to be going directly to Moscow, all those many hundreds of miles.  It waits there, lurking, with it’s dark blue carriages, some machinery whispering in their humming tune, and staff in their different uniforms bustling to load the train with food and equipment. It takes 30 hours to get to Moscow.

Thinking about it, I picture myself getting on that train, in my briefcase I have the golden ticket for the ride to Moscow, with some kyrillic words of mistery on it. Heading north-east through unknown territory, passing vast patches of barren isolation and dense forests. Sitting in the restaurant car, dining in the crammed yet pittoresque atmosphere of the long tradition of traveling by train. The crystal glass of port, swaying in the yellow light of electric candelabras.

Then finally Moscow, the suburbs made from darkness and hulking slab buildings,  getting closer to the centre, peering out of the window and getting dazzled by the lights of this HUGE city.

There is a subway network, one of the most dangerous places on the planet. Especially the Y line, that goes in a circle around the centre of town, is known to be dangerous.

Of course it’s the first ride I take, other passengers shaking their head at me while rushing for the taxi stand. Then emptiness of the subway platform, the train approaching, and then solitude, screaming danger, the noise of metal on metal, and dark phantoms outside the windows. Watching my own reflection pale white and dripping with cold sweat, pupils widened in terror, pulse thumping in raging fear.

But nothing happens - it’s just a quite normal subway ride in a large town.

I should go and try it out myself. Yes, I expect to be on my own. If not, contact me.

OK now I am in Nuremberg. I got up too early, had to kill some time, so I started writing and writing… Ramble Productions presents their latest big hit: A TEL article-something!

As it happens, I seem to get more and more involved in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). Formerly the field was called “e-Learning”, but at some point that term got out of fashion and it changed to TEL. Definition-wise TEL seems to be somewhat of a more general term than “e-Learning” because “technology” could actually also be non-electronic technology like old-school typesetting and the like. But this is probably a rather meticulous observation. The real message is in the “E” of the TEL acronym: learning should be enhanced.

Personally I must say that there was a long time when I was not too concerned with the whole fuss about e-Learning. During my studies I usually just skipped lectures, borrowed books from the library, got bored during the first few pages, got more books, (repeat) until I finally found a cool or interesting book which I actually read voluntarily. Exams then forced me to huddle also through less interesting books at last. I never was bothering about electronic media so much. I followed some kind of survival instinct, and that instinct told me to go read real books.

But of course in doing so, I had made use of the electronic library catalogue to find out about book availability, browsed lecture slides on-line in order to find out what book to read, downloaded lecture recordings (for hamstering purpose rather than viewing, occasionally fastforwarding through them to check), communicated via email and ICQ with other students or university staff to get recommendations and hints. And so on. So I had used TEL all along without even consciously noticing. Getting to the point, learning was not only enhanced by electronic media, it was made possible in the first place.

Howsoever, the term “e-Learning” was, in those times, reserved for the university’s e-learning-system (or Learning Management System, aka LMS) which had the following main features:

• if you searched in the LMS for course material or course information, you would hardly ever find anything,
• if you still found some course in the system, there was no way to access learning materials other than first “booking” or “registering” in some certain way,
• learning materials were mostly incomplete because instructors had fallen out of love with the LMS along the way, or something else had distracted them,
• for an instructor the e-learning system was even more annyoing because it was far more long-winded to provide materials that way (and finding them again, for that matter) than just uploading them on a web site.

The term “e-Learning” had become synonym with “big annoyance” to both teachers and students. And now, after some years have passed, working as a university teacher myself, this impression persists in many ways, because the fumbling with an LMS is a very consciously perceived part of the “e” learning process: An LMS screams the word “e-Learning” into your face while you struggle with it to get (it) where you want.

But TEL also comprises the rather unconscious and hidden parts of the learning process in which technology comes into play (or might come into play in the future, in some respects yet to be developed).

For example the process of taking the decision what to learn before you actually start learning. This can be supported by recommender systems that draw conclusions from a person’s background, preferences, behaviour, actions etc. in an automatized way. Other than taking random chances without any base for decision, a learner can be pointed into the right direction.  Or can they? How to make sure the system interprets the information about the learner the right way? The easy answer would be: “Well, let’s just collect as much data as possible about this puny transparent bastard!” If you know everything about the user, you know the user. But this would essentially require a 1984 scenario of Stasi-like spying and zero-privacy. And that’s where the problems start. What if some political changes occur and the force in power starts to seize and voluntarily (ab)use that data? To suggest the least, the dream of equality of opportunities would not only fall apart, but turn into the opposite.

That’s why it is important to give people control about what is going on with their data, and why adaptable and decentralized systems are in that respect more desirable than centralized adaptive systems.

This whole conflict of different interweaved TEL models can be summarized as follows (especially to those who like dots at the left end of a paragraph):

• Adaptive systems adapt to the users needs, but they conflict with adaptability and privacy
• Centralized systems create a controlled environment which is important to gather and interpret user data, as well as creating an environment for assessment of learning outcomes. But the user has to rely on the system’s credability with respect to privacy.
• Decentralized systems give the user (almost) all power over their data, but usability can be a problem because technical understanding and the ability to manage their own data is required. The users have to protect themselves from attackers and have to build their own network of trust.
• Adaptable systems are typically decentralized systems, but also centralized systems can be made adaptable. The question is, how big is the usability barrier of a system that has to be adapted. There is no real way to just use them out of the box. The dichotomy between adaptability and adaptivity is a complex problem, especially in multi-lateral social learning environments. On the other hand, an adaptive system that adapts the the wrong way might not be usable at all.

Another aspect is the paradigm of Open Content or Open Courseware. TEL methods have the potential to help disseminating free content to the everyone in the right way, making use of recent technical developments of the world wide web. In a world where “equal opportunities” are but wishful thinking, it is important to come up with some wishful doing, and granting open access to (to some certain degree personalized) educational resources is the right track into that direction.

Vienna has this strange appeal to it. It would be a perfect city. It’s got clean air, excellent public transport (known to have the most dense coverage of a town in Europe), and an almost absurd abundance of cultural things like museums, artists, historical sites, and the like..

Someone told me, although he has been living in Vienna for a number of years, he doesn’t even know his way around, because he is a “wormhole traveller”, referring to going by subway for whichever destination.  I think this is probably happening to a lot of people, and admittedly to me as well (although i have been living in Vienna only for 1 year so far).

Yesterday I was in the 12-Apostel-Keller. A very nice so-called “Stadtheurigen”, a type of bar-style restaurant with typical Austrian cuisine. It’s located in a large cavernish cellar, looking very ancient, possibly even actually dating back from roman times. The drinks are fresh and the food is tasty. What is a bit odd is the unfriendlyness of the waiters. A waiter there in fact seems to be somebody you really have to wait for.  When they arrive to take your ordes, though, they can get quite impatient. Make sure you know exactly what you want, they might not come back for quite a while, extending the wait. The unfriendlyness actually is hard to describe. It’s something about showing some certain attitude, like reluctancy, disgust, and rolling eyes. It seems like nothing special, the diligent consumer probably has seen that in other places quite many times.

But in this case it’s that spectacular that it’s actually worth experiencing. Get good food and good wine and enjoy evil wait(er)ing times

Today we went to Chamonix, a small town located right at the foot of Mt. Blanc, Europe’s highest peak. We wanted to take the tour from atop the “Aiguille de Midi” through the “Vallee Blanche” back down to Chamonix, but unfortunately weather conditions were foggy above 3000m sea level, so we had to change plans and went to the “normal” ski resort of Chamonix which “only” goes up to 3300 meters. The ski resort calls itself “Grands Montets” and has very steep yet long slopes. Difficulty is very high in this resort. It is non-recommendable for beginners, and takes its toll of exhaustion even from the well trained. But it was a great experience to go skiing right within the Mt. Blanc Massive.

My impression of the Mont Blanc is that of a ferocious, incredibly steep-walled, dizzyingly high mountain towering way aloft. All around its lofty summit glistening in brilliant white like a perfectly round shaped cloud, there are claws of rock domes piercing the sky in 4000m height, seemingly guarding the soft giant from unauthorized access.

One thing that’s most impressive is the fact that this mountain is much higher than any other in its vicinity. When approaching from Annecy, the first view is overwhelming. Even from quite a distance it occupies almost the whole sky.

Yesterday I went to Alt-Erlaa. It’s an area in the 23rd district of Vienna, in the southern part of the city. The day before I had noticed a couple of very large buildings in that area, so i decided to go there and explore. It was already late and the light of the day had turned into a hazy purple when the subway emerged from the underground to continue its journey south. Up ahead there were the buildings I had eyballed the day before.  Massive and hulking. I got off the subway swiftly, pretending to know exactly where I was headed, which was easy because the looming building landmarked the way. When I drew closer, however, the sight was roofed away by some kind of a deserted shopping centre. I still walked as though I were completely sure where to go, but I caught myself taking turns and walking into the opposite direction, yet still with a firm stride. At some point I had arrived out in the garden, with one of the building monsters towering directly over me. I felt struck, mesmerized and dizzy. The buildings were not only tall but so BIG.  I tried to take some pictures but even in wide angle I would only be able to capture a small part.

I tried to get inside one building. The doors were locked from outside, so I waited. An old woman opened the door to get outside, but when I tried to grab the open door and sneak through, she blocked me and told me to ring the bell of whoever I was going to visit. Well. Since I wasn’t visiting anyone, I decided to try another time. Also I was beginning to feel hungry at that point. So I headed back to the subway station and went home to my normal, old house flat in the centre of Vienna.

This is a link to a nice description of the Wohnpark Alt-Erlaa, including interesting photography.