Shift Happens

I stumbled upon the latest version of the provocative Did You Know? video this weekend. This presentation was first created a few years ago, but went through a nice revamp in late 2008. Watch the most recent version below and leave your thoughts in the comments section.

My main question for you:
What skills does the university need to provide to our students so that they will be able to thrive in this new era?



...and here are some of the more interesting figures they withheld from the current version:

2006 College Graduates:

• United States: 1.3 million


• India: 3.1 million


• China: 3.3 million

Other figures:

• 100% of 2006 college grads in India speak English


• More than 50% of 21-year-olds in the United States have created content on the web.


• More that 70% of 4-year-olds in the United States have used a computer

Tricky puzzle or learning tool?

Fantastic Contraption is part puzzle part learning experience. You are given a limited set of materials (Tinkertoy wheels and connectors) and the simple goal of move one block across the screen. By the end of the series of puzzles, the solver has developed an intuitive feel for torque and elasticity as well as invented many of the common structures known to engineering.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/inXile_Ent/fantastic-contraption

Even if you decide not to play, you may want to scan youtube to see the wide range of machines and solutions that other players used.

The History of the Internet

I came across this video which gives a brief (7 minute) history of the Internet. Visually appealing and entertaining, it's quite simple and straight forward. It's not comprehensive of course, but the video does a good job of getting at some of the big ideas. The complete accuracy is questionable in places, but even so I think it's a good overview, especially for those who know little on the topic.

Enjoy!



History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

NJ High Performance Computing Event

NJEdge is having its cyberinfrastructure and high performance computing conference today, Friday. The goal of this conference is to promote and facilitate an understanding of advanced computing technologies to share high performance computing successes from NJ institutions. Whether your interest lies in the physical sciences, life sciences, social sciences or the arts as an educator, researcher or simply have a professional development goal, HPC is likely to play an increasingly prominent role in academic life. Join us to learn more.


Cost: Free
When: Friday 3/20/2009

Agenda:
8:30 AM To 9:00 AM Registration
9:00 AM To 9:05 AM Introduction - Kevin Rego, Sun Microsystems
9:05 AM To 9:45 AM Keynote: HPC Cloud Computing - Glenn Brunette, Sun
9:45 AM To 10:05 AM Research Computing at NJIT - Kevin Walsh
10:05 AM To 10:25 AM Sun's HPC Success - Dave Teszler
10:25 AM To 10:35 AM Break
10:35 AM To 12:10 PM Sun's HPC Solutions and Future Direction - John Fragalla
12:10 PM To 12:30 PM Lunch
12:30 PM To 12:50 PM Demanding computational problems in life sciences - UMDNJ - Angelo R. Rossi
12:50 PM To 1:10 PM HPC at Rutgers University - Eric Marshall
1:10 PM To 1:30 PM The Value of HPC within Healthcare Delivery - Vincent Grasso
1:30 PM To 1:40 PM Q & A and Closing remarks - Matt McGrath

Where:
Sun Microsystems Somerset, NJ office, Sun Conference Room
400 Atrium Drive
Somerset, NJ 08873
Google Map: http://maps.google.com/maps?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=400+Atrium+Drive+Somerset,+NJ&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&split=0&gl=us&ei=hAHDSbDAMcT8nQfNhemdCQ&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&resnum=1&ct=title

Register Online: https://www.suneventreg.com/cgi-bin/register.pl?EventID=2672

Order in the Court: Hand Over Your Wireless Device

There is an increasing amount of attention being drawn to cases where jurors have used wireless devices in the courtroom. In recent events, court proceedings have suffered due to accessing information that otherwise would not be permitted (or have been thought of as permissible) by the judge into the case.

As the linked article explains, just last week a juror assigned to a Florida drug trial admitted to the judge that he had been researching the case on the Internet from his handheld device. This went against the presiding judge's instructions and against what we know to be appropriate conduct in the courtroom, careful to avoid introducing bias toward either direction. If it had stopped there, the judge could have just thrown him off the case. Eventually, it was found that eight others had done the same thing and so the judge was forced to declare a mistrial.

In a similar scenario in Arkansas, a defense lawyer is asking the judge to rule a mistrial due to a juror's tweets in the courtroom. The twitter(er?) says that the verdict was already spoken before he relayed any information through Twitter.

Has our technological landscape changed so much that we need need to accommodate other realms that are affected by it? Or should it be 'business as usual' regardless of what kind of advances take place? On one side it seems appropriate to bar the uses of these kinds of devices, but the opposing argument would be that they introduce information that could turnout as key evidence in the case. Where is the line drawn?

Laptops in the classroom: useful or a distraction?

On March 16, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article entitled, "Students stop surfing after being shown how in-class laptop use lowers test scores." In the article, an associate professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder found that the students surfing the Net during class scored 11% worse, on average, than their peers.

A June 13, 2008 article, found quite the opposite. A survey of 29,000 students at 85 law schools found that Web access can enrich classroom discussion.

I've found that when I set boundaries for laptop use, and channel the use toward topics relevant for a given class session, both the students with laptops and the students without laptops benefit from a richer class discussion.

What do you think? What have your experiences been?

The art of explanation and the credit crisis

"Explainers" are important these days. That statement alone needs a solid explanation (hence the hyperlink).

Unfortunately in our information age, people are left behind when it comes to understanding complex ideas. This is why it is important (as the article to which I've linked above explains) to sometimes shift your focus from information to explanation. This is part of my job everyday: to translate "geekinese" to English, and explain the complexities that inherently come packaged with most technologies.

Our current credit crisis is very difficult to understand if you're not big into financial lingo. I've seen many different videos that attempted to explain our current credit crisis, but often came away more confused as to how home owners, lenders, bankers, brokers, and investors all fit together into this complex puzzle.

I stumbled upon a video (below) that does an outstanding job of explaining it in plain English. The creator, Jonathan Jarvis, completed this visualization as part of his thesis work in the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.



The video is a little over ten minutes long, but does an outstanding job of keeping the viewer engaged by scaffolding their understanding throughout.

OIRT is looking for a few outstanding undgergraduate researchers

Late last semester, OIRT and the Aresty Research Center started a video series called The Undergraduate Research Spotlight. The goal of the series is to recognize the contributions of those students who are at the heart of this university's strong research tradition. We asked faculty to nominate their outstanding undergraduate researchers, and we got an amazing response: 34 faculty nominated 87 students from 50 departments!

Check out some of the videos by clicking the links below (Quicktime required to view):
Aradia Herbst-Gervasoni - Pituitary cancer and its relationship to ethanol and estrogen
Preeti Khanolkar - Video gaming through the eyes of its practitioners

We're still buried in the editing process for all of these interviews, but we're looking for more undergraduate researchers to come in and talk to us about their research.

Nominees should be current or former undergraduate researchers here at the university. Nominees should also be comfortable (and excited to be) talking about their research in front of a camera!

If you'd like to nominate someone, please send an e-mail to podcasting@rutgers.edu with the student's name, e-mail address, and a bit about the nature of their research. You can even self-nominate, if you like!

The videos are being uploaded into the Rutgers iTunes U media repository as they are being completed. Check out the rest of the videos, and other great Rutgers content, by going to http://itunes.rutgers.edu and clicking the big red button (download iTunes).

Diagram in a gliffy

Don't have five hundred extra dollars to spare for diagramming software? I don't blame you. Gliffy is an online application that provides the tools necessary to create various types of diagrams, share and collaborate with others, and publish the finished product quickly and easily. It's like Google Docs meets Microsoft Visio.

The service boasts a comprehensive shape library with the ability to import your own images, revision control feature so all users are working on the same version, and enhanced multi-user management (for premium accounts).

Whether you are working on a SWOT analysis for your management class or drawing up technical layouts for engineering, this tool goes the distance. Watch the Demo here.

Mobile technologies-or How to get students to use their cell phones for learning

Mobile learning is one of the new buzzwords circulating among teachers these days. It involves using cell phones, iPods, and portable gaming platforms, devices that most students already have, to encourage anywhere, anytime learning.

The Sesame Workshop recently published a report about using mobile technologies in learning. I think that it contains some really interesting examples of what can be done with these technologies.

I hope to try using some cell phone apps later this semester and during the fall. One tool, gFlash, will let me create flash cards that my students can use on their cell phones. I hope that it works . . .

Schools considered harmful to creativity? Sir Ken Robinson weighs in

In a very engaging (and, dare I say, funny) presentation, Sir Ken Robinson takes a swipe at the education system of today. His case is focused on the idea of a wider vision of intelligence and the supporting idea that passion is critical to success. If nothing else, his 'stand-up' comedic bit about being Shakespeare's elementary school teacher made me laugh out loud.

Ken Robinson was knighted in 2003 for his work in the UK regarding education, creativity and the economy.

Using a Creative Commons license for dissertations

This is a really interesting summary of how a Berkeley grad student, Danah Boyd, was able to license her dissertation under Creative Commons. One of her reasons for doing this is to encourage more grad students to make their dissertations publicly available, to encourage free use and expand scholarship.