Bytes & Bites: e-Portfolios

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Yesterday I gave a talk for McMaster’s Bytes & Bites – e-learning cafe about e-Portfolios: Helping students represent themselves (PDF of Powerpoint). Our way of teaching students to do portfolios is different than how e-portfolios are usually structured as we can expect of Multimedia students that they create a web site from scratch on a server off-campus (where they can update it over time as their career matures.) There seem to me to be two challenges to the use of e-portfolios in learning:

  • Faculty Consensus is hard to secure. E-Portfolios work best if there are meaningful assignments throughout a program where students are asked to put their work in the system. This means your colleagues have to understand and agree to use the system and to encourage the self-reflection portfolios support. But consensus among faculty, especially when half your courses are taught by sessionals, is hard to get.
  • Privacy and Publication. One of the incentives for students to post their work to a portfolio is the opportunity to publish the portfolio when they graduate, but that also raises privacy issues. What rights do students have to not keep stuff they aren’t proud of. We have to make sure they get to choose what to publish and that they have the ability to remove stuff. Further, and this is where our simple go-get-your-own-domain-and-ISP model works well, a structured portfolio system on campus will always constrain the way students can publish their material.

Intute: Researching videogames with Intute

Intute has a nice summary page about serious games, Researching videogames with Intute. The page is just the right length and builds on records in Intute. I note that they don’t mention the Serious Games Institute that I blogged recently.

This is the first time I’ve noticed that Intute is publishing longer guides. They call them Limelights and describe them thus:

Limelight, from Intute: Arts and Humanities, is a monthly feature showcasing individual artists, topical subjects, new and noteworthy websites, or forthcoming events, exhibitions or festivals. Each feature gives information, links to related sites in the Intute: Arts and Humanities database and suggestions for possible searches.

Digital Humanities And High Performance Computing

This Monday and Tuesday we had a workshop on Digital Humanities And High Performance Computing here at McMaster. The workshop that was sponsored by SHARCNET was organized to identify challenges, opportunities and concrete steps that can be taken to support humanists interested in HPC techniques. Materials for the workshop are now on my wiki philosophi.ca, but will soon migrate to SHARCNET’s.

The intersection of the humanities and HPC is heating up. We aren’t the only people developing encounters. The NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) has a Humanities High Performance Computing Resource Page that describes grant programs for humanists. One program with the DOE gives humanists support and cycles on machines at the NERSC. The support will be crucial – one thing that came out in our workshop is that humanists need training and support to imagine HPC projects. In particular we need support to clean up our data to the point where it is tractable to HPC methods.

The workshop brought digital humanists, HPC folk, and grant council representatives from across Southern Ontario. Pictures are coming!

Update: Materials about this workshop are now on the SHARCNET DH-HPC wiki.

Serious Games Institute

SGI Logo

I just stumbled upon the Serious Games Institute (SGI) at Coventry University. Their aim is, “to become an international centre of excellence for serious games and a model of best practice for regional development through technology innovation.” (About Us) They seem to be focused on developing games to teach business, and the games seem to be fairly sophisticated. (See their Showcase.) It is interesting how serious gaming is being used to revitalize a region. nGen (Niagara Interactive Media Generator), recently announced by Brock, is a similar initiative that is connecting with Silicon Knights to kickstart game development as a way of generating new industry.

The Serious Games Institute seems to use Second Life a lot where they have an island.

Clemens: Virtual Wiiality Redux

Photo of me with Wiiality on

One of our students Joel Clemens gave a demonstration of his impressive fourth year project, Virtual Wiiality Redux. He used common consumer components like the Sony SIXAXIS controller, which has motion sensing, to create an virtual reality system. In the picture above you see me with the helmet (with the SIXAXIS velcroed above) experiencing the 3D space (a version of our lab with a gaping chasm below my feet.) The strange broom thing was Joel’s solution to tracking where I am in the space. It has a small bowling ball with rollers to capture movement. The broom “floor mouse” didn’t work as well as the head tracking set, which was very responsive. With hackers like Joel and cheap motion tracking controllers, DIY VR may be a real “wiiality”. Check out his extensive web site.

Game Physics – Half-Life: Havoc

Graphic from web site

Two of my students have been getting attention for an original senior thesis they did for Multimedia. Calen Henry and Jacob Karsmeyer created a mod for Half-Life 2 to explore game physics. You can get the mod and read their essay on the history of game physics on the web site the created, Half-Life: Havoc. As of today, Sunday, April 13th they are ranked 5th on Mod DB. Kotaku has also blogged their project which seemed to have started a long thread about whether one can trust downloads not to have viruses (and some comments about the writing.)

Brooks: The Mythical Man-Month

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. (Brooks Law, p. 25)
The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. was first published in 1975, but it still reads easily and wisely. At its heart is an understanding of how programming is a human task which takes communication to do in teams. As Brooks puts it, “Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.” (p. 16) For this reason you can’t just throw more people at a project to get it finished faster. Some other quotes:

The bearing of a child takes nine months, no mater how many women are assigned. Many software tasks have this characteristic because of the sequential nature of debugging. (p. 17)

Even at this late date, many programming projects are still operated like machine shops so far as tools are concerned. Each master mechanic has his own personal set, collected over a lifetime and carefully locked and guarded – the visible evidence of personal skills. Just so, the programmer keeps little editors, sorts, binary dumps, disk space utilities, etc., stashed away in his file.

Such an approach, however, is foolish for the programming project. (p. 128)

A computer program is a message from a man to a machine. The rigidly marshaled syntax and the scrupulous definitions all exist to make intention clear to the dumb engine.

But a written program has another face, that which tells its story to the human user. (p. 164)

building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet. (p. 182)

The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence. (p. 183)

In the chapter “The Surgical Team” he proposes that programming be done in a small team like a surgical team around an experienced programmer. The team would have a Chief Programmer, Copilot, Administrator, Editor, Secretaries, Program Clerk, Toolsmith, Tester and Language Lawyer. The Editor would help document code. The Copilot would work closely with the programmer discussing design with her – which sounds like extreme programming. The Toolsmith makes sure the computers are running right. The Language Lawyer would be the resource for the programming language.

VersionBeta3 < Main < WikiTADA

Screen Shot of BigC GUI

We have a new version of the Big See collocation centroid. Version Beta 3 now has a graphical user interface where you can control settings before running the animation and once the animation is run. As before we show the process of developing the 3D model as an animation. Once run you can manipulate the 3D model. If you turn on stereo you can see the text model as a 3D object if you have the right glasses on (it supports different types including red/green.)

I’m still trying to articulate the goals of the project. Like any humanities computing project the problem and solutions are emerging as we develop and debate. I now think of it as an attempt to develop a visual model of a text that can be scaled out to very high resolution displays, 3D displays, and high performance computing. The visual models we have in the humanities are primitive – the scrolling page and the distribution graph. TextArc introduced a model, the weighted centroid, that is rich and rewards exploration. I’m trying to extend that into three dimensions while weaving in the distribution graph. Think of the Big See is a barrel of distributions.