Google Labs Similar Images

I saw a tweet yesterday from Lisa Thumann at the Center for Mathematics, Science and Computer Education. She's got her finger on the pulse of the educational technology world and she mentioned a new technology from Google Labs called Similar Images.

In my short play-test, I found it to be extremely successful. Here is quick walkthrough of how it works:

1. Visit the site and search for an image of something, I chose fencing and got this screen full of images:



2. Click 'Similar Images' beneath an image for which you'd like to see others like it, I clicked the fifth image and got this:



While they're all sketches, they're not all fencing images.

I went back and clicked the first image in the list (a shot of American Jon Tiomkin versus Renal Ganeev of Russia in the Athens Olympics in 2004) and got this:



Which are all images of two Olympic or world cup fencers on a very dark background. Pretty nice work for a computer!

Honoring Our Fallen Soldiers Using a Google Earth Layer

During Memorial Day weekend, it is easy to get caught up in barbecues and summer rituals and forget the original purpose of the observance of this holiday. I happened across this blog post that I felt would be appropriate to share during this time of remembering those who lost their lives defending our country.

Sean Askay, an engineer for Google, unveiled on his blog a Google Earth layer he created to acknowledge those who died fighting in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Using information found from a number of sources, Askay mapped out the locations of the soldiers' hometowns and approximations of where they were killed, as well as other detailed information about each individual.



If you have Google Earth you can download the layer file here.

Not knowing anyone personally who has died in the recent wars abroad, it's easy to become numb to the news stories of continuous casualties. Using this tool put everything into a new perspective for me. Just the opening image of the U.S. map covered with seemingly endless symbols representing these men and women who died is shocking and humbling in itself. Taking a closer look at my neighborhood revealed an even more moving experience as I saw the faces and learned the names, ages, and hometowns of my own neighbors who gave their lives protecting mine. While I had never met these individuals, I am grateful to those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

data.gov is live!

For those of you interested in government datasets and an invitation to play and shape the future of publicly available government data, your day has arrived!

From the main page of data.gov:

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often. With your help, Data.gov will continue to grow and change in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

This is huge! The fact that the data is machine readable is even better! I'm really excited to see the kinds of data visualizations that come out of this, as well as the new data sets that citizens request.

Looking ahead to the new Sakai... (Part 3)

Tomorrow's the big day! Here are the last of the changes we will be making:

Site Info

There have been some improvements to the "Import from Site" action in the Site Info tool. You can now choose whether the material you are importing should replace your current site material or be added to what is already there. You can also now import participants from another site, adding them to the participants already in your site (this only works with participants added individually, not with participants attached via roster).

Polls

You can now sort the poll results by their headers. This lets you display the poll options in order of most to least popular, for instance.

Discussion & Private Messages

You can now grade posts, either topic by topic or for an entire forum. With this enabled, an extra grading button will appear on your message board where you can enter numerical grades and textual comments for each student. You can also link these grades to the Gradebook tool.



Email Archive

In addition to general performance improvements for sites with many archived messages, you can now specify what appears in the "Reply to" field of messages. Previously, replies would be sent to the original sender only. Now, you can instead choose to have replies go to the email archive itself, allowing everyone in the site to see replies.

Schedule

You can now manually select which sites you would like to be included in your My Workspace Schedule tool, instead of always seeing scheduled activities for all sites to which you belong. You can also now subscribe to iCal calendars within the Schedule tool.

Dropbox

Similar to Assignments, there is a new option in Dropbox to download all content of the tool. This will give you a .zip containing a folder for each student along with any files that have been uploaded.

Assignments

This is another tool with a lot of changes...

Improved Grading Navigation

When you are grading assignments, there is now a previous, next, and return button to make it easier to grade lots of assignments in one sitting.

Improved Drafts Sharing

You can share drafts of assignments between instructors and TAs, instead of them being private only to their creator.

Custom Fields

When setting up an assignment, you can create some custom fields for various purposes:

• model answer/solution - This will be displayed to students when they view the assignment. You can specify when you want students to see this (as they work on the assignment or after it is graded, for instance).
• private note - This will be displayed on the instructor side during grading. You can decide whether you want to share it with other instructors or keep it private to yourself.
• all purpose item - This is additional information that doesn't fit into the other two categories. You can choose who you want to see it (students, instructors, etc), and when you want them to see it.
  

Improved Integration with other tools

Assignments that are posted in the Schedule and Announcements tools now have links from the post in the tools back to the assignment.

Find Missing Submissions Feature

This was actually available before, but was not linked anywhere. Sometimes students attach a file to an assignment, but don't realize they have to complete the second step of actually submitting the assignment and so the instructor does not receive a submission. In Sakai, when students attach files to assignments, they are saved even if the assignment is not submitted. There is now a "Find Missing Submissions" button when you are grading assignments, allowing you to see all attached files, whether or not the student actually submitted it.


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That's everything! All of these changes will be available after we complete the upgrade, which should be sometime late tomorrow (Wed) night.

Top 10 Disappointing Technologies

Sometimes, technology isn't all it's cracked up to be. More often than we'd like, some new technology that is expected to change the face of IT simply....doesn't. PC Authority gives a review of some such technologies in the recent article, Top 10 Disappointing Technologies. Their ranking:

Honorable Mentions:

• Biometrics
• Ubuntu

Top 10:

10. Virtual Reality
9. Alternative Search Engines
8. Voice Recognition
7. Apple Lisa
6. 10GB Ethernet
5. FireWire
4. Bluetooth
3. Itanium
2. Zune
1. Windows Vista

Some of this surprises me a bit. As much as I hate to admit it, VR is ranked lower than I expected. I want VR to work, I really do, but sadly, it's simply not there yet. There's a lot of hype, but for the most part, it doesn't really follow through. On the other side, I was not expecting Bluetooth on that list, especially at number 4. Sure, my Bluetooth headset for my phone doesn't work as well as I'd like, but I've never had a problem with file transfers and, overall, I find it a handy tool to have.

What are your thoughts? Does any of this surprise you? Is there anything that you think should have made the list, but didn't?

(A draft of) the next step in search engines is here!

Wolfram|Alpha opened its doors to users this weekend. It is being touted as a step beyond conventional search engines. Its creator is Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame), who calls it a computational knowledge engine. Briefly, this means that this engine can take specially prepared data sets and attempt to help you compute and create knowledge. The idea is that you can ask it questions like you would ask questions of a person, and it would be able to help you understand the answers. See this post from Gina at Lifehacker for a pretty good testing of Wolfram|Alpha, and to get some insight on how to use it.

For those who just want to play with a computational knowledge engine, click here to play with Wolfram|Alpha. Click the 'Examples by topic' link on the right menu to get situated. For those who want to better understand what they're about to play with, read on:

Google is a great way to find information and data on the web, there is no doubt about that. But how good is Google at helping us discover and analyze knowledge? First, some definitions to get things moving:

Information: facts provided or learned about something or someone

Knowledge: information or skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject

...so a very rudimentary definition of knowledge is information having been applied or analyzed.

So why are we still just searching on information instead of knowledge? The short answer is that computers can't very easily parse much of the information on the web and make meaning out of it. This is because most of the information is written in a way that is easy for humans to understand.

Could you imagine a world where we slept through the night as our computers chugged hard to create knowledge out of all of our data? This is part of the idea of a semantic web!

As much as Web 2.0 gave rise to a sharper focus on the use of semantic markup on the web, it never quite reached the goal of a fully semantic web. The rise of the semantic web is one piece of Web 3.0.

In my short (several hour) play-test of the engine, I found it to be helpful when I asked questions about the things that the engine was prepared to answer. I found comprehensive answers when using its suggested queries, but I was often left unhappy with the answers it gave to questions that were shot from the hip. For example, the suggested query of 'microsoft vs. apple' yielded considerable results, but the query 'mac vs. pc' yielded no results. This is acceptable to me because I understand that this is an emerging draft, and it can only call upon pre-selected silos of properly scrubbed data.

My thought is that projects like Wolfram|Alpha (and Google Squared, which is dropping later this month) are showcases as to how the semantic web may someday behave. I look forward to the evolution of this kind of software, and to the emergence of a semantic web.

Looking ahead to the new Sakai... (Part 2)

Here is the promised Part 2. I'm going to start listing 2.6 changes based on tools from this point on.

Announcements
You can provide an RSS feed for people to subscribe to your announcements in a site. Only the announcements set to "public" will appear in this feed. All other announcements will only be viewable by members of the site.

Chat Room
Multiple chat rooms were available in 2.5, but now you can link directly to the different chat rooms in the left tool menu. This saves people from having to manually move from the default chat room to the one they want. Simply add a second Chat Room tool (Site Info --> Edit Tools) and then set the second Chat Room tool to default to another specific room.

Gradebook
Similar to how you can upload multiple Resources in one shot, you can now add multiple Gradebook items at the same time. While you're adding Gradebook items, you can click "Add Another Gradebook Item" to bring up the option. How many can you add at once? I'm not actually sure. I got bored and quit when I reached adding 30 items at once.

Tests & Quizzes

This tool has received the most attention in the 2.6 upgrade. It is very complex, which gives it a lot of room to grow. There are a lot of new features here, so I'm giving it its own category.

Assessments can now be released to specific groups within a site
If you use the "Manage Groups" option in the Site Info tool to split your Sakai site up into smaller groups of students, you can release assessments in the Tests & Quizzes tool to only students within certain groups. If you have used this in the past with the Assignments tool (for example), this new feature works the same way.

Changes to question with multiple answers
Multiple choice questions can have more than one answer. There are now two ways to do this:

1. Single selection - A or B is correct, students choose one answer and receive full points if they choose either
2. Multiple selection - A and B are correct, students choose many answers and receive partial points for each correct selection while losing points for incorrect selections

Before, only option 2 was available.

Questions can be set to negative point values on an incorrect answer
If you want to dissuade guessing on a quiz, you can make students lose points if they answer a question incorrectly.

Question pools can be shared with other site members
In the past, question pools were user-specific. Now, you can share your question pools with someone else, allowing instructors to collaborate on quiz questions within a Sakai site.

Assessments display a "last modified by" date
From the instructor's side, if an assessment is modified, the date, time, and modifier will appear next the assessment name. For students, if an assessment is modified after they have already submitted it, a warning note will appear: "This assessment has been modified since you submitted it. Please consult your instructor if you find any discrepancies."

"Quick create" feature for creating assessments
When creating a new assessment, you have the option to use "quick create". This will allow you to do a mass input of questions in a specific format, instead of entering questions individually using the normal Sakai interface. The format is pretty standard to what quizzes look like if they are formatted in, say, Word (questions listed, then answers, with an asterisk in front of the correct answer).

Once you add the questions, you can continue on to create the assessment. Sakai will take what you entered, create questions out of it, and give you the option to make any changes necessary. Then all that is left is to go through your settings (delivery dates, feedback options, etc), and you're ready to publish.

Assessments will be submitted at deadline
As of last semester, timed assessments would auto-submit when the time limit was reached. Now, regular assessments will also auto-submit when the deadline for the assessment is reached. If students begin an assessment, save for later, and don't come back to submit it (or simply forget to hit the final "Submit" button), the assessment will automatically go through at the due date.


There are also a few smaller improvements/changes to Tests & Quizzes which may not be noticed by the casual observer. Those are all the major ones, though!

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I still have some more updates to go over. Part 3 will come out early next week with the rest of the changes in Sakai 2.6.

Looking ahead to the new Sakai... (Part 1)

As you probably know, Sakai will be down on commencement day, May 20. This is to perform some major upgrades to Sakai as we update from Sakai 2.5 (the current version) to Sakai 2.6.

We at OIRT have been hard at work the last few weeks, doing final testing on our test servers. We are catching bugs, getting acquainted with the new system and any quirks it has, and customizing the "generic" Sakai system to look and feel like the Rutgers Sakai you have all grown accustomed to. The result, we hope, will be a smooth transition to Sakai 2.6, with few glitches, informed Sakai support staff ready to answer questions, and as little noticeable change in basic functions from the user perspective as possible.

So, what's happening? In my next few blog posts, I'll be writing about some of the changes and new features you can expect to see once Sakai 2.6 goes live. If you have any questions about any changes, feel free to leave them in the comments of the posts and I'll check back to answer.

General Changes

There are a number of changes happening behind the scenes, which users should not really notice (or in many cases even care about). I will instead focus my posts on interface changes, new features, etc. One thing I would like to mention though is that we are upgrading to the latest version of java. This should result in a faster Sakai. Some of the issues we encountered lately with Sakai being slow or unresponsive should be fixed with this upgrade.

Overall, the look of Sakai should not change too much. One difference is the button you press to get back to the home page of a tool.


Right now, this appears as a house icon:



In Sakai 2.6, we've changed this image to look more like the "refresh" button in your browser:



A big feature that has been added is the ability to view a site as a student/access user. This lets instructors see things exactly how a student in the class would see the site. No more worrying about whether or not the Announcement actually got posted, or what parts of the Gradebook and site participant list students can see! Also, for those of you who used to add yourselves to your sites as students, this should take away some of the need for that.

Another excellent feature is the ability to specify how many tabs you see across the top of your screen. If you're anything like me, over half of your screen may be wasted white space instead of convenient tabs. No longer! You can add and remove tabs just as easily as you can change the order in which they appear.

A handy feature (though rather a nuisance to test...) is a timeout warning before Sakai logs you off due to inactivity. Users will normally be logged off after 2 hours, but now Sakai will pop up a warning 5 minutes prior to logging you off, giving you the ability to remain active.

These features alone make me excited to see Sakai 2.6 go live. But that's far from all we're implementing. Improvements have been made to many tools, including Assignments, Chat, and Tests & Quizzes, to name a few.

But I'll save those for future posts.

Exam questions that address cheating: primer or ethics reminder

Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University and visiting professor at MIT's Media Laboratory. I found an interesting and timely post that he wrote on his blog the other day, which is short enough to share in full:

Here are the first two question of the exam I just gave:

1) My parents and grandparents would be most proud of me if:
a. I did not cheat on this exam and got the score I deserve
b. I cheated on this exam and got a score higher than the score I deserve

2) While taking this exam, I intend to:
a. cheat (e.g., by looking at other people’s answers, or showing my answers to others)
b. not cheat


I think it was effective...

Do you think this is a primer for students to cheat, or a gentle reminder to do the ethical thing? I'm inclined to believe that for most students, it is the latter (at least I hope so).

What are your thoughts?