Pandæmonium

Alan Cattier, Director of Academic Technologies and Carole Meyers, Senior Director, Facilities and IT at Emory College presented.

Space design is something they’ve been working on for seven years and they’d like to show us about what they’ve done for the campus and for departments.

Why talk about space and what makes it so challenging?  No one seems to have enough, maintenance is deferred in many spaces, non-traditional spaces are now becoming more valuable, and traditional ownership roles are at stake.

Between A/V, IT the Registrar and more, ownership is too complicated to say that any one office “owns” space on campus.

In a “World is Flat” world, there is a “Disappearance of an ‘Outside'”.  Students are home and away, work mixing with play, computers are complimented by other devices, there is wired and wireless access, and students are able to access resources on or off campus.

Financially, socially, and culturally everyone is looking for different things from space.  We also have to allow physical and virtual campuses to intersect.  Agility and adaptability are values to include in the design of campus spaces.

In 2002 Emory began a seven year program focusing on formal learning spaces (classrooms).  Five million dollars was allocated for investment in classrooms.  Cox was created to be a collaborative computing lab, something they did not have before.

Students are very savvy in how they exploit the space.  Quality matters: students were aware of the investment the institution had made.  61″ screens!  Maintenance really matters, and students take care of the place too because they see how much Emory cares.

When it works, space becomes place.  “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are”, Wendell Berry as cited by Wallace Stenger in “A Sense of Place.”

Carole spoke about moving on from Cox.  The challenge was to leverage the lessons from Cox across 600,000 square feet.  They decided to set up a series of incubator classrooms.  Different rooms had different approaches.  One room was done with bean bag chairs when the ones that were ordered didn’t show in time:

Some liked this room, but other classrooms experimented differently with space.  The trick was once these spaces were designed, how would they be operated and maintained.  Facilities has 3 staff dedicated to this, while IT has 13 on the College Facilities and IT Team.  Another team is the AAIT’s Classroom Technologies Team, which has 7 people and is responsible for operations of 90 registar classrooms + 100 other rooms..  A Classroom Planning Group brings in a larger group, and there is an annual budget of $300,000 – $500,000 for innovation and maintenance.  Design and operations is seen as a continuum.

A new project is their PSychology building.  If you have classroom standards, you can define the number of square feet per person that you want to have in a classroom.  New methods take more space per student and your architecht needs to know.  11% of the Psychology building is being preserved for common spaces – a direct lesson from Cox.

Acoustics, furniture, lighting and HVAC are all considerations.  Zone your buildings to preserve energy when possible. 

Facilities staff are usually interested but distant from academic practices and operations, as well as IT.  Put facilities staffs in your shoes – let them cart technology around so they can see the use of A/V closets.

If you do good work, the faculty and the students will get behind your efforts and demand that you do the same in their different spaces.  But you have to bring the facilities people along so they can see how people respond to changes in space.

Other points:

• Small investments can reap large rewards.  Setting up cheap, informal learning spaces (carpet, chairs, white board) makes a big difference.
• Web sites: Classrooms at Emory College, Centers for Educational Technology, more will be on the EDUCAUSE web site.

Technorati Tags: computing, EDUCAUSE2006, learning spaces, standards, technology

Robert Brown, the Dean of Continuing Learning and Nora Reynolds, Assistant Dean at the University of North Carolina – Greensboro presented.

Brown began by talking about his son’s passion for gaming.  Games are student-controlled, which is very different from your typical instructional experience.  About 72% of college students play games.  In a traditional Economics class, there’s lots of memorization and recitation (via exam) but no application of the principles.  We know that application produces better learning, and games allow students to apply what they’ve learned.

Gaming embeds the best features of education: interactivity, communication, assessment and more.

They played a movie introduction to the game.  Nice animation. 

Brown said there have been 35-40 people involved in the project, all internally funded.  Project management, coders, writers, videographers, content experts, etc.

Josh talked about the technology.  The movies were created with Maya, with 3D Studio Max too.  THey rendered out the scenes and used other programs to put the final movies together (Motion, Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack, music was done in house).  Adobe After Effects for some compositing.  After Final Cut put the movie together, it was all put together with Flash, which was the primary game engine.  FLV files instead of SWF files.  Audio syncing is better in FLV.  FLVs stream better, and presentations can be longer.

THe back end was done with a MySQL database to record actions of the game players and their game states.  PHP server scripting and XML to talk to Flash.  Synchronous chat is enabled so you can ask advice or go over lessons in game.  Also professors can participate to “provoke conversation throughout the game.”  Audio is mostly MP3, pulled in dynamically.

Putting a movie together is a non-sequential process – this doesn’t lend itself to sequential learning in class.  Reynolds spoke about where everyone is with the story.  A spaceship has crashed on a post-apocalyptic earth.  There were fatalities but some have survived.  You come from a planet that had no scarcity, but here everything is scarce.  You are identified immediately as the leader because your commander has died.  You have an ethical dilemma – you don’t have enough medical supplies to save everyone so you have to decide who lives.  You have a robot (‘bot’) that malfunctions but can access earth archives to help you (and be your guide).  Next you have a survival problem: not enough water or food.  In the process of developing survival techniques you will learn how to create a labor force.  Eventually you can create a surplus and you can then go out to find other pods that have crashed. 

After climbing a mountain you learn another tribe exists on a shore and there is a possibility for trade (fish and rabbits).  A human city (and its diseases) is found, and another crisis occurs.  The other pod (Pod 51) will most likely be wiped out by a hurricane.  Do you help?  You get some advice and you choose whether you’re going to be a democratic leader, soliciting input on the costs and benefits.  Each research option costs at least one hour of time, and the hurricane is coming.

The quest is interdisciplinary.  The giving of foreign aid isn’t always altruistic, and the advisors present different perspectives on the economic consequences for the giver.  The videos of the advisors are from historical footage from earth (a video of Zaire and Rwanda).

Students then do meet with the other advisors after the choice is made to hear their perspectives on what to do.  You are then faced with a refugee issue. Instructors can use Illiuminate, podcasting, etc. to communicate.

In Economics courses, there are typically two exams, a mid-term and a final.  With the game, there is constant assessment that opens new opportunities for faculty to communicate with students who have problems at different points in the game.

What happens if they’re not getting it?  We can see how much time they spend in the game.  Students are prodded, encourged, etc., but if there is a part that students really don’t get it, the production team meets with students to work out new content that could be dropped into the game (in the game metaphor) to help students understand these issues better.

At the end of every level there is a leadership rating which is essentially your grade for that level.  Average your level scores and you know your grade.  You also get feedback at the end of each quest. 

They spent 18 months working on it, about twice the time they thought it would take.  It also ended up being very expensive.  They needed more programmers in certain areas of the game, which created a project bottleneck.  Brown and Reynolds didn’t have a good idea of how long the technical aspects of the game would take to produce.

In the game, you have dreams where you are in earth game shows (Hollywood Squares) where you are tested within game. 

The final confrontation is where you have to unlock a series of gates by answering questions (random questions).

They played a promotional video for the class.  Here’s a shot from that (think Stayin’ Alive):

Questions came up about cost (this was deflected).  They are also thinking about other gaming engines.  Every decision students make goes into their grades.

How do you prevent cheaters, just as there are in other games?  A huge bank of questions is one defense.  The game is not compliant with section 508.

My take is that this was very well done, but very expensive to do.  I’ve always thought that semester-long games are possibly more work than what you get from them.  I don’t know how long the game will be playable (as technology continues to progress), and how extensible the game really is as the overall effort is finished and the large team disbands.

That said, I’d love to play the game, and I’ll be visiting the UNC-G web site to see how the game is received.  They begin the first full round of game play tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: EDUCAUSE2006, flash, gaming

Edward Ayers, the Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia and Will Thomas, the John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities, in the Department of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln presented.

The presenters were interested in presenting the past more effectively through digital means.  Using the paradigm of weather maps, Ayers suggested we develop something similar to show the “historical weather”.

History takes place in time and space, but the discipline hasn’t come up with traditions of telling this information beyond “heavy textbooks” and atlases.  He looked at what happened after emancipation – people disbursed and the record vanished.  Using a topographical model, Ayers showed us what looked to be creeks feeding into rivers.  These were preachers and ministers who promoted freedom.  He also showed a QuickTime movie that showed the migration patterns of African Americans through US history.  It was fascinating to see how everyone spread out after emancipation.

Ayers’ point is how can the humanities ignore the tools that are becoming available.

Thomas talked about developing a 4-dimensional atlas, and what that would mean.  Thomas wanted to use the hypertextual network to understand the change that railroads brought.  They changed time and space, and conceptions of time and space.  It was thought that railroads had annihilated space and time.

ACRLS has said that humanists and social scientists have to develop their own means to do research and interpretation – others won’t do it for them. Thomas is working to do just that.

The Arora project (History in Four Dimensions) is an attempt to create not silos of archives but a larger digital archive of history, with many views into that information.

Thomas presented an interactive map of Nebraska that allows you to drag along a timeline to see how the “weather” of history changed the state, with population changes as the railroad developed.

Thomas says that we need more collaborations with historians, IT specialists and librarians to build these kinds of resources.  He described Token X which can find the frequency of words in XML documents, and showed an example analyzing slave labor in the creation of railroads.  The words displayed on a map or picture that can be connected to documents that tell individual experiences.

They’ve looked at passenger rates, using internet maps to show how rates worked in 1880, with links to accounts of travel over that particular railroad line.

Thomas says that the web is thought of in terms of space, but not time (with the exception of the Internet Archive).  If we can proceed with some humility and a dash of boldness, we will know that the tools we have are imperfect, but they are better than what we’ve ever had.  They can allow historians, students, and the general public to see history in a different way.

Questions:

How are students involved?  Ayers thought there was so much energy that’s wasted, so they build everything first so the students could just jump in.  Get the students into the library, into the special collections.  Students had to create brief narratives for 10 stories.    Students created 10 Word documents that were then cut and pasted into the database, along with keywords.  2/3 of the way through the semester they had a good amount of work, and for their final project they used each other’s work.  2500 cases now.  The front end can be a map that you click to access specific data.  “Imagine you’re writing history for your cell phones.”

What kind of changes are you seeing in students’ ability to analyze data?  Students come so processed by Advanced Placement.  By the end of the semester they are much more creative in the way they talk about what they are finding and how.  Start with a torn piece of paper, put it in a database, and then analyze.  The students say it creates lots of anxiety, but it’s a worthwhile experience.

is there a public URL?  There are two sites, both will be attached to the presentation page on the EDUCAUSE site.

(I couldn’t hear the questions, but there were two): Much of what they’re doing looks more like social science than history, but it is grounded in the literary resources.  History has always been an uncomfortable fit because it is so grounded in text.  Thomas spoke about making it extensible – this will be their greatest challenge.  Bringing other historians into this project will be difficult.  History is a monographic culture, experimentation at this level is unprecedented.  Using a digital object in a class is one thing, but making a scholarly mark as a professor is difficult.  They have to say something analytically different about the past, not just promote the tools.

History departments typically don’t have technology budgets.  How do you fund things like this?  Thomas said this was the stone soup model, where getting buy in from the head librarian was crucial for this kind of experimentation.  Getting IT support was also vital (equipment).  A one time, one shot deal with IT. NIH is interested in funding – everyone is waiting for scholars to step up with ideas.

Technorati Tags: EDUCAUSE2006, humanities, history

Brian Hawkins started the conference by telling us that more than 7000 people are attending this year.

Vinton G. Cerf was our keynote speaker.  Cerf is currently the Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, but he’s had a long history with innovation and the internet.  He was wearing the graduation garb from the University of the Balearic Islands.

He briefly mentioned Google Apps for Education – they have 2500 institutions using these applications today.

He is interested in computer science faculty taking up a challenge that has been largely unmet.  Mobile users vastly outnumber computer users around the world.  The largest fraction of internet users are in Asia today, with over 380 million users.

Cerf challenges the idea that computer science is a science.  Normally in science you develop a theory, you predict results, you make measurements, compare with predictions, publish and iterate until predictions and measurements coincide.  But computer science doesn’t work in this way.

Programming efficiency has not kept up with hardware efficiency.  What can we predict?  We cantalk about memory, computing requirements and time, network modeling, language grammar analysis, decidability and optimization.

But we can’t predict how long it will take to complete a program, how long it will take to find the bugs in a program, or how many we will find.  We can’t predict if the program will do what it is supposed to do.  We can’t even tell if a program is a worm or a virus, or even tell if a message is spam.  Spam filtering is fairly effective, but the algorithms we use to detect spam aren’t very sophisticated.

Security is another challenge.  Are there holes in the operating system?  Does this router have vulnerabilities?  Can the network be used to attack itself (auto-immune distributed, reflective denial of service)?  Is the internet a bad configuration?

Cerf says we didn’t put enough authentication into the internet, and we should fix that.  Public-key-cryptography was only published when the internet was getting started, so it wasn’t really available.  We need to know that the information we are receiving is valid, not faked.

Digital signatures have the possibility, along with public-key-cryptography to fix the authentication issue on the internet.  Cerf says we should see something soon along these lines.

But problems often come because of erroneous configurations on any of the pieces that make up the network.  We need to find better ways to find configuration problems.  Until we do we will have an unstable environment.

Information Management is another area ready for improvement.  We need more tagging and we need automated tools for doing this.  We don’t have good tools for searching video and audio (“find me a picture that looks like this one…”).  We’ve made heavy use of location, and can index content according to where it is.  Geolocation is coming along, but time (time of day, etc.) should also be included, along with location.

We need to preserve operating systems and software.  This helps us discover old material.  Without this, more and more information will become undiscoverable.

There are new user-oriented paradigms to consider.  Amazon, Tivo, IM, GPS navigators, image and video sharing are all part of the self-service paradigm that makes collaboration more important.  Real estate searches aren’t done in cars anymore; they’re online.

Cerf is very concerned about declining computer science enrollments.  Children are natural scientists, though, so what is causing the failure?  What can we do?  Sputnik was a real surprise back in October 1957.  In January of 1958 the US had created the NSF Science/Technology enrichment program.  ARPA, NASA and a national focus on science, technology and engineering all helped the US – including Cerf himself – to dedicate themselves to science and technology.

Cerf suggests global warming is the new Sputnik.  If we treat this as a national challenge, improved science and technology programs in K-12, designed fossil fuel efficient cards and power generation.  France uses nuclear power to reduce their oil consumption.

This would require massive computing and new algorithms to model.  Tele-working, tele-cooperation, tele-operation, tele-medicine are all possible ways to reduce our dependency on oil.  What else?

Cerf then gave us an update on the Mars rovers and how they’re doing.  It’s a good thing the dust devils blow the dust off the solar panels on the rovers.  He also mentioned how redundant radios have kept the rovers communicating with earth (the first radios died out, but the new ones can communicate with the orbiters).  Cerf sees the internet extending into space, with an interplanetary backbone being created over decades.

Questions were asked.

What about net neutrality?  Google couldn’t have gotten started if the net weren’t freely available.  Cerf hopes this gets addressed better next year.

Someone expressed their concerns about software losing backward compatibility and the loss of information created using that software.  Cerf suggested that software makers be approached about putting their software into escrow when they create it.

What about privacy?  Cerf says there isn’t much.  Americans in particular are willing to give up privacy in exchange for convenience.  The Myspace or iPod generation in particular seems to think it’s cool to share information about themselves.  People need to be trained to think twice about what they are putting up on the internet.  Identity theft is a 200-billion dollar a year problem.  Our definition about what’s personal is going to have to change.

Technorati Tags: computing, EDUCAUSE2006