May 27, 2004
56-129 Student Cluster Redesign
In addition to the redesign of the back room of the W20 student computing cluster, the cluster in 56-129 will be closing for renovations on June 9 and is scheduled to be reopened sometime in July. (See original article.)
Features of the 56-129 redesign include:
- an LTX Electronic White Board with web server
- modular and soft furniture
- wireless and Ethernet connections
View image
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| 56-129 before remodeling - June 2004 | 56-129 after remodeling - July 2004 |
Be part of this ongoing process of redesigns. Send feedback to cluster_improvements@mit.edu, or comment below!
May 17, 2004
About the Ed Tech Times
Vijay Kumar, Director, Academic Computing, Assistant Provost
Jean Foster, Editor, Ed Tech Times
We are happy to introduce the Ed Tech Times – an interactive, online vehicle for communication about academic computing and educational technology. The change in format and delivery from its predecessor, the Insider, is intended to address the current nature of educational technology activity at MIT – dynamic and diverse, with a high level of widespread engagement. Our hope is that through the active participation and contributions of faculty, staff, and students, this interactive site will become a rich and relevant resource for the community.
Sharing Strategies and Solutions
This is a period marked by important growth and transitions in the educational technology landscape of MIT. Significant initiatives such as TEAL, iLab, and OpenCourseWare (OCW) are looking to move into the next phase of implementation. New services and areas of activity such as High Performance Computing and Spatial Data have been launched, changes in the student computing environment are being planned, a sustainable software infrastructure for education is being built, and of course, there is a new organization, Information Services and Technology (IS&T), to help support this work. In light of these projects, more than ever there is great need to share strategy and solutions and to receive feedback to support good decisions and useful practice.
The primary purpose of the Ed Tech Times is to provide a forum for the MIT academic community to announce and discuss these developments as they occur. Posted content will include articles about new or updated educational technology services and research projects on campus, links to educational technology news from outside campus, as well as announcements of upcoming events or presentations about education technologies such as Crosstalk seminars or training opportunities.
Interactive Features
This newsletter has been designed to be interactive, allowing readers to post comments on article content. Comments will be subject to review before they are posted to ensure appropriateness for a world-readable site, but we want to hear your comments and welcome discussions about the material posted here.
Other features of the Ed Tech Times include the ability to subscribe to e-mail updates whenever a new article is posted, or to receive a regular bimonthly email synopsis of articles posted over the past two months. To receive automatic e-mail updates of new articles, write your e-mail address in the "Notify Me" fill-in box which is located in the lower left hand side of the Ed Tech Times web page, below the "Search" box. To receive bimonthly updates, send e-mail to edtech-times@mit.edu
Those who use RSS readers can also receive updates of new postings by linking to http://edtech.mit.edu/times/index.rdf from their RSS reader.
We welcome submissions of educational technology news from other organizations on campus. Articles may be submitted electronically via email, either in plain text or as attachments in MS Word (.doc) or Rich Text (.rtf) format. Submissions will go through an editorial review before being posted on the site.
We'd like to know what you think about this new format for educational technology news. Please add your comments below or send email to edtech-times@mit.edu.
May 14, 2004
A New VUE of Digital Content – The Virtual Understanding Environment
Phil Long
Teaching in a digital environment has brought the traditional hierarchical classroom structure to the on-line world, and a range of tools has emerged to help faculty transfer their course materials and their teaching structure onto the web. At MIT we have carved two domains, distinguished by audience, for tools that support online learning. For the internal audience, MIT students and faculty, the day-to-day give and take of teaching and learning is centered on the classroom and is supported by the Stellar learning management system. For the external audience, beyond the halls of MIT and extending around the world, MIT course content is seen through the window of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) publishing system. Both of these systems strive to recreate the familiar structured organization of traditional course materials, and both do it well.
However, new projects are attempting to look beyond traditional ways of presenting and viewing online educational materials. The critical thinking and creative knowledge building required to support educational goals requires a flexibility and responsiveness that may differ by discipline and pedagogy. For instance, at MIT the MetaMedia project provides a mechanism for students and faculty to select, arrange, annotate, and present multi-media objects to convey a new narrative approach to scholarly argument. A different approach is being pursued at Tufts University in the Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) project, which is a desktop software application developed with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The VUE project explores the use of concept mapping not only to graphically represent ideas, processes, and their interconnection, but also to manipulate the content of the information being mapped.
View imageFigure 1. A concept map of concept maps. (1)
Concept Maps for Education
In educational settings concept maps are used to
- organize instructional materials for individual courses or entire curricula,
- serve as navigational aids for hypermedia,
- scaffold understanding,
- consolidate educational experiences,
- improve affective conditions for learning,
- aid or provide an alternative to traditional writing,
- teach critical thinking.
Tufts University’s VUE uses a highly flexible, visual interface for mapping, structuring and semantically connecting electronic content drawn from local file systems, the WWW or FEDORA-based digital library systems. Unlike the concept mapping tools described above, VUE goes beyond creating flat representations of information and becomes an interactive interface to manipulating the data itself. VUE is not, however, a replacement for course management systems but an application designed to address the activity of structuring and presenting digital materials and the ideas that they contain during learning and instructional processes. The maps created with VUE could become another resource within a course management system or digital repository, literally offering students and instructors an alternative view of a set of curricular materials. VUE leverages the open and extensible development platform of the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) and the FEDORA digital repository to develop a visual environment for structuring.
View imageFigure 2: Dimensions and consequences of biotechnology. Each node on this map represents a category and is linked to a relevant local or remote digital resource.
VUE will provide students with a flexible utility for structuring and restructuring resource-based curricular maps, as well as a tool to help them justify their arguments, explanations, and conceptions by linking to digital sources. These concept/content maps can then be shared with instructors and peers for further review and discussion. The explicit act of organizing, annotating, and connecting educational resources via a concept map is a powerful educational exercise. Concept maps engage students as active participants in the structuring of information into knowledge and meaning. Through establishing personal connections between materials and/or by adding additional resources to an existing instructional concept map, students begin to relate new information to preexisting knowledge.
Concept maps are used at the Tufts University School of Medicine by teams of students within the Problem-Based Learning curriculum to demonstrate their understanding (and gaps in understanding) of clinical conditions and solutions. These maps traditionally have been done on white boards during class sessions and have been found to be a pedagogically effective tool. Maps created by students early in the class can alert faculty to pre-existing misconceptions or incompleteness of a student’s understanding. Post-instruction program maps can help instructors assess changes in student understandings, providing a means of assessing learning.
As valuable as concept maps have been they are relatively static, representing interrelationships among ideas that, even when created using typical software applications can at best include URLs to link ideas to web resources. When concept maps and the ideas they represent are connected to digital resources themselves rather than just their links concept maps also become content maps and this is what VUE does.
VUE extends the power derived from graphical representation of knowledge into a tool for mapping against, and drawing from, persistent collections of content contained within digital libraries. VUE is also an integrated digital library application. Using OKI’s Digital Repository Open Source Interface Definition (OSID), among others, VUE allows users to search, browse, retrieve content from digital repositories and upload resources into these systems. The FEDORA digital repository was used in the initial implementation of VUE. However, VUE can be used along with other digital repositories such as DSpace, ArtSTOR, JSTOR or any repository that implements and expose an OKI interface.
Tools like Inspiration allow one to visually drag a node on top of another, but the effect is only visual. Complex, nested hierarchies of topic elements and materials are not fully supported. Maps in VUE are represented as XML structures that can be parsed by external applications and rendered with alternate style sheets or graphic programs. This enables maps, with all of their semantic connections, to be rendered in several different ways – textual or outline mode, 3D, etc. Version 1.0 of VUE provides an outline view of the base maps.
VUE Technical Design - Application Architecture
The VUE client is built in an object-oriented, modular fashion to preserve the logical separation between the application’s core subsystems and user-generated data. This architecture provides building blocks on which future functionality will be built. VUE 1.0 consists of the following high-level components:
A VUE map is, in essence, a complex node containing a collection of topic, content, and relationship nodes along with their descriptive metadata. It is represented as an XML data file separate from its presentation characteristics. This allows user generated semantic structures to be parsed by applications outside of VUE. These separate files are managed by the application file subsystem. In addition, a map contains references to style sheets used for data visualization. As the map grows in complexity with thousands of nodes and relationships, a very robust XML schema is necessary to efficiently capture the structure and semantics of the information. The physical properties of the VUE map is represented using the Scalable Vector Graphics XML standard while the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) is used to capture the administrative and descriptive metadata for the all nodes. The METS schema is a standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding digital objects.
The learning template module allows instructors to customize and/or constrain what types of nodes and links a student may create. This feature is extremely useful for concept mapping exercises designed to scaffold critical thinking and problem solving. Rather than constructing a map freely, a student may be required to first generate a hypothesis, then gather supporting evidence and post a final solution. Two templates are provided in VUE 1.0. A default, unlimited template will enable all of the application’s core functionality and a pathways template will allow users to create sequenced pathways through resources contained on VUE maps. VUE 1.0 also supports two types of visualization: a two-dimensional map containing primitive shapes and links, and a hierarchical list. However, the visualization subsystem supports the future integration of additional rendering engines. For example, a 3-D viewer might permit a user to “fly” through a map containing a large set of nodes.
Digital Repository Management
The repository management subsystem is the heart of VUE, as it provides interaction with persistent collections of digital materials, whether they are found on local or remote file systems. As with Authentication and Authorization, this subsystem was built from OKI OSIDs. VUE implements the File and Digital Repository OKI OSIDs to support communication between the VUE, file systems and digital repositories.
Basing VUE on a judicious selection of established and emerging open specifications allows other institutions to incorporate VUE into their environments more easily and provides a broader user base that can inform future versions of the application.
View imageFigure 3. Welcome to VUE – the introductory page with documentation and getting started assistance.
View imageFigure 4. The MIT’s Computationally Intensive Computing Community of Practice website represented as a concept map, but with the actual contents of the site included.
For comparison, go to the actual site. In Figure 4, note that the left pane provides a range of search capabilities across an expandable set of OKI exposed digital repositories. In this case these range from a set of learning object repositories in Canada, OCW web pages, Tufts Fedora Digital Repository, the local iTunes and iPhoto repositories on the OS X G4 on which the software is installed, and local file system of the hard drive. Moving content into the Concept map is a drag and drop process.
The Future VUE
VUE will be piloted in several Tufts’ classes in Fall 2004. There is also interest in integrating VUE with the SAKAI Project tools. SAKAI is a grant-funded, collaborative development project between MIT, Stanford, University of Michigan, Indiana University, the uPortal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI), to create a set of open source, web-based, modular, learning management tools. Tufts is a member of SAKAI’s Educational Partner Program (SEPP) and is naturally interested in having VUE work with the other SAKAI tools. To download a copy of VUE to try out, go to http://vue.tccs.tufts.edu/References:
1. J. W. Coffey, M. J. Carnot, P. J. Feltovich, J. Feltovich, R. R. Hoffman, A. J. Cañas, J. D. Novak (2003). Summary of Literature Pertaining to the Use of Concept mapping Techniques and Technologies for Education and Performance Support, Technical Report submitted to the Chief of Naval Education and Training, Pensacola, FL.(PDF)
2. Jonassen, D. (2000). Computer as Mindtools for Schools: Engaging Critical Thinking. New York: Prentice Hall.
3. Novak, J. D., & Gowin, D. B. (1984). Learning How to Learn. New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
4. Novak, J. D., & Musonda, D. (1991). A twelve-year longitudinal study of science concept learning, American Educational Research Journal, 28(1), 117-153.
5. Schau, C. & Mattern, N. (1997). Use of map techniques in teaching statistics courses. The American Statistician, 51 (2): 171-175.
May 13, 2004
Make Way for the Future - Redesigns of Student Clusters
Phil Long
In several formal and informal surveys taken over the past year, students have consistently expressed a need for computing spaces where they can work together, in addition to spaces where they can work individually. Cooperation and teamwork are an essential part of many MIT classes. Since the traditional Athena cluster model does not readily adapt to collaborative work, students have developed their own ad hoc solutions, not all of which harmonize with the Athena Rules of Use.
There are also new changes in the student computing landscape that need to be considered and reflected in student work spaces. Incoming freshmen are now advised that they should consider making a laptop their primary computing device. MIT continues to expand its wireless network, which is one important piece of supporting laptops, but more can be done to create a computing space that is truly laptop-friendly and more nearly matches student expectations of how laptops will be accommodated (e.g., power outlets, network drops, tabletop space).
Over the summer, Information Services and Technology's (IS&T) Academic Computing group is planning several pilot redesigns of existing Athena cluster spaces to make them better suited to support mobile computing. The first space is a small corner room off one of the largest clusters in the Student Center's W20-575D. The cluster will be closing in mid-May and is slated to re-open by the end of June.
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| W20-575D before remodeling - May 2004 | W20-575D after remodeling - June 2004 |
Based on the information gathered in the student surveys and interviews, features of the new space will include:
- wireless access
- two 42-inch LCD monitors
- a white board with an electronic capturing device
- modular and soft furniture
We'd like to know what you think about these experiments in new learning spaces. Please comment below or send email to cluster_improvements@mit.edu!
Upcoming Matlab Training Courses
Announcement
The MathWorks will be conducting training courses for beginner, intermediate and advanced users of MATLAB, Statistics and Optimization in Boston, MA this June and July.
The following courses will be offered:
ML01: MATLAB Fundamentals and Programming Techniques -- June 28-29
Provides a comprehensive understanding of MATLAB as a programming language. This course is intended for beginner and intermediate users. No prior knowledge of MATLAB is required. This course covers working with matrices, data manipulation, graphical visualization, and programming. Additional topics include file I/O, advanced data types, Handle Graphics, and graphical user interface design.
ST01: Statistical Methods in MATLAB -- June 30
Introduces statistical tools in MATLAB and the Statistics Toolbox. Covers performing data file input and output, handling of large and incommensurate data sets, computing descriptive statistics, performing statistical plotting and visualization, and fitting distributions to data. Explains using random number generators, simulation, and basic inferential methods. Examples and exercises come from a cross-section of application areas in science, engineering, and finance.
OP01: MATLAB-Based Optimization Techniques -- July 1
Provides an introduction to optimization in the MATLAB environment, focusing on the functions in the Optimization Toolbox. Discusses a variety of basic problem types and their corresponding optimization functions. Emphasis is on problem identification, accurate formulation, and use of appropriate methods. Discusses algorithms at a level consistent with understanding input/output behavior and performing necessary diagnostics. Covers general techniques for producing usable output in numerical and graphical form. The course includes many hands-on examples from a cross-section of application areas.
ML05: Building Graphical User Interfaces with MATLAB -- July 2
Demonstrates how to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in MATLAB. Explains how to build GUIs in MATLAB from the command line by using MATLAB's graphical user interface development environment (GUIDE). Introduces concepts for designing and laying out GUIs. Demonstrates how actions defined by code can be linked to a user interface object, such as a push button. Explains how to create custom menus for GUIs.
For more details on course content and to register online visit http://www.mathworks.com/training. To register by phone call 508-647-7000 and select option 3
