Got up to find that I missed breakfast and the cool pastry shop nearby was closed on Sundays! :(

Went across the street down a ways to a cafe and had a Dutch pancake with apple and a coffee. Quite nice, actually.

Thought of these while eating/waiting for the check:

• The Netherlands will start to ban smoking in cafes and bars starting July 1… that’s like two days from now! I wonder what the people will do while waiting for their checks. It takes forever to get your check here. No more smoking… they’ll have to order more coffee…
• The Dutch probably have really well-conditioned butts since they sit on bicycle saddles all the time.
• The prostitutes and owners of the booths they rent could do a much better job at marketing their wares (whares?). For example, instead of plain tile, why not do some fancy mosaics in those booths? What about themed booths of some sort? Catholic school girl booth, nurse booth, etc. How about a free Dutch pancake with each trick?

See what you can come up with if you have lots of free time to let the mind wander while waiting for your bill?

Then went shopping in the museum plaza. Horrible photo above of the plaza. I’m trying to get copies of photos from others here who actually have their cameras with them and why there are so few photos of buildings so far.  Cool tulip vases at the Museum Shop.

It seemed odd to me that there was a lot of experimental or quantitative designs being presented. Or small comparison studies using quantitative measures to compare the two cases, I guess I mean. For example, one was comparing the use of computer mediated tools versus non-digital tools in a set of classrooms, studied using test scores as measures of success. Does that seem right to you? Not entirely to me.

(more on ICLS and photos of Utrecht/Amsterdam after the jump)

It’s a good first step, but I feel there’s so much more stuff going on in classrooms. What about long-term transfer? What about fostering a community of learners in a classroom so that they are more able to tackle future problems? And this is just stuff outside of the design of the experiment.

Confounding the experiment itself, what about the quality of the teacher in each classroom, the composition and dynamics of each classroom, etc. etc. Also, there was no description of the actual practice students engaged in with the different media tools. Are they more engaged, collaborative, talkative, on task, frustrated, etc. with the different tools? I mean, the findings don’t tell us anything about the actual goings-on in the classrooms and therefore fail to tell us what’s successful practice.

I was talking with Veronique after one session that included a presentation about distributed knowledge and collaboration. The presenter showed us research on the effect of using a tutorial and/or manual with a designed game-like activity that tested the successful sharing of knowledge. Findings generally showed that tutorials helped while manuals didn’t. But we question how useful this was on saying anything about distributed knowledge sharing in real-world contexts. In our research, the idea of sharing all info, which was possible in this game, is not possible with our participants, nor is it necessary for them to do what they do. For me, raiders in WoW don’t need to know what every other raider knows; they just have to be coordinated and trusting. For Vero, musicians also don’t need to know exactly what their band members know. I wonder if it is a difference between distributed knowledge, where knowledge is what is being measured, and distributed performance or activity, where people’s goal is doing stuff collaboratively rather than learning content knowledge.

In the late afternoon, I went back to the hotel to take nap. Then got up to meet Giovanna. We took about 30 min to find each other (there are so many churches in Utrecht with plazas right next to them). Then we met up with Therese, Alex, and Sheldon and had dinner at a great Greek place right next to The Dom, a huge-ass clock tower that rings for like 5 minutes every half hour or so and like 2 minutes every quarter hour (and makes it impossible to fall asleep from the hotel I was staying in).

While out we passed by some cool looking shops in Utrecht, right along the canal. Two or three comic book stores and two gaming stores. All closed.

The next day I met up with Giovanna and Sheldon and we went back to those shops, had brunch, and then to Amsterdam together.

We first went to my hotel, the Hotel Piet Hein, named after a privateer who captured a huge motherload of Spanish silver. The hotel is quite nice but damn, the wireless service isn’t working at the moment (writing this from a lobby laptop)! Then we walked around a bit.

Giovanna and I had been here twice already, so we basically walked around with Sheldon, checking out the main plaza, a novelty condom store called the Condomerie, the Bloemenmarkt, the Red Light District, and a Games Workshop store with some awesome minis on display!

One of the women pulled me aside and wouldn’t let go of my T-shirt. She promised a blowjob that would make me remember Amsterdam forever for just 50 euro. I decided I could remember Amsterdam just fine on my own. :)

We ended up eating dinner at a cafe near the lift bridges. After dinner they went back to Utrecht and I went to my hotel to sleep. Ah sleep.

Some people went off the Anne Frank house, some to the Van Gogh Museum, and others who had been to those places before checked out the Red Light District. Then we all met back at the central plaza at 6:30. Turns out the Anne Frank house was closed for some special reason that day, and the Van Gogh folk decided to shop instead since there was so little time before the museum closed (and since we found a cool shop called Hanazuki apparently run by an artists’ collective by the same name). :)

Then Giovanna and I stayed to try to find a cool shop we found on Tuesday and catch dinner in Amsterdam. The rest of them went back to Utrecht and got dinner over there.

The shop we found was open! Lots of cool little figurines and action figures designed by (street, urban, hip-hop, manga, skater culture) artists. Not sure how to describe it, but they’re pretty popular in magazines like Giant Robot.

Afterwards, Giovanna and I ate a hole-in-the-wall Chinese place, called Wing Kee, that was really quite good! [Edit: Looking it up on the web (now that I'm back in the States), one reviewer claims it's the best Chinese restaurant in Amsterdam!]