I’m nearly done with my courses (they call them “modules”) at Liverpool’s Master’s of IT. The second and final part of getting this degree is writing a dissertation. That’s supposed to be a 40-50 page “full, scholarly, and critical exposition of your project, presented in a conventional academic format, as a series of chapters”. There is a template and all sorts of guidelines I have to review, but I’ve spent some of the last two months fishing for a project – which hopefully will be the meat of the work and the thing that will keep me going.
Greg Wilson has been very helpful, offering much advice and several project ideas. There are two that stuck in my mind, and I am considering both:
Cowichan Problems
This is a set of relatively simple but computationally complex algorithms that are connected via IPC and implemented in several languages – the purpose being to evaluate a language’s or library’s utility in parallel programming.
My rough understanding of the potential project’s purpose is to implement the problems in several languages, and compare how easy it is to do. This would give clues as to whether any of today’s tools actually help with parallel programming, or whether it’s all syntactic sugar with no substance.
The original paper is here. The previous work is stored in svn here: http://cowichan.googlecode.com/svn
The project is interesting because I would learn new languages, and I would learn parallel programming, which I have nearly no experience with. The fundamental question is also something I feel is worth answering.
Clickers
This project is to use some existing technologies (e.g. smartphones, wifi) to enable professors to ask questions from students. The idea is similar to how “clickers” work, but would not require extra hardware (clickers aren’t free).
Here’s my first list of questions I had about this project:
- Mike sent me this link which may be telling me that the client software has already been written.
- My Master’s is in IT and I am required to write /some/ code, so this may turn out to be a concern (depending on how good the existing implementations are).
- More generally, what would be the scholarly value in this project?
- I am wondering how much of an issue the requirement for WiFi connectivity is.
- If the client-side app is in a web browser, is typing in the URL a major pain for the users?
- Can the server be the presenter’s laptop? Can that laptop be already connected to a wireless network or does it need its own? Are networking rules/filters in organisations a concern?
- What’s the best way to integrate this with other presentation technologies like powerpoint?
- Are there applications outside a presentation room?
- How difficult will it be to do test runs with real students, depending on the questions my thesis is trying to answer?
- Is my thinking too narrow, what possibilities am I missing?
After a chat with Greg and Karen Reid I got some answers:
- If the software has already been implemented, that may actually make the project easier, I would still write code (and thus satisfy the Liverpool requirements) but for backend/tools/analysis rather than the application.
- The real goal of this project is to encourage classroom particilation, but not at the expense of extra effort from the professor, who doesn’t normally have the time to play with neat new gadgets. This has to save time, not be a burden.
- Networks in many schools are so poor or so restricted that using them may be a serious pain. And from what I remember cellphones don’t work very well in all classrooms at Seneca, which may be true in other schools too.
- If the user (student) is given a choice – participate using this software on a private network or be connected to the internet and read Slashdot – it’s not clear they would choose to participate, but that may be an interesting question to answer.
- Smartphones have better capabilities than generic clickers. One idea is to have the users point at something in an image.
- Outside the classroom is out of scope.
I’m still not quite clear on the academic value of this project, and that the client software already exists makes it less sexy for me (i would love to learn some mobile development).
- Mike sent me this link: http://www.turningtechnologies.com/audienceresponseproducts/responseoptions/responseware/ which may be telling me that the client software has already been written. My Master's is in IT and I am required to write /some/ code, so this may turn out to be a concern (depending on how good the existing implementations are). - More generally, what would be the scholarly value in this project? - I am wondering how much of an issue the requirement for WiFi connectivity is. - If the client-side app is in a web browser, is typing in the URL a major pain for the users? - Can the server be the presenter's laptop? Can that laptop be already connected to a wireless network or does it need its own? Are networking rules/filters in organisations a concern? - What's the best way to integrate this with other presentation technologies like powerpoint? - Are there applications outside a presentation room? - How difficult will it be to do test runs with real students, depending on the questions my thesis is trying to answer? - Is my thinking too narrow, what possibilities am I missing?