Links from Elsewhere

Open Innovation: A Bibliography

2012-04-30T14:56:52Z

"The Audrey Test": Or, What Should Every Techie Know About Education?

2012-04-29T08:33:42Z

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

2012-04-29T08:30:22Z

Graphing Calculator Story

2012-04-25T05:39:31Z

Tools for Modern Web Development

2012-04-23T19:49:08Z

GITLAB: Self Hosted Git Management Application

2012-04-21T22:38:23Z

Installing Gitorious on CentOS 6

2012-04-20T10:59:55Z

Installing Gitorious on CentOS 5.6 x64

2012-04-29T08:29:53Z

Unlocking Student Data Could Lead to 'App Economy' for Colleges - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

2012-04-16T11:42:06Z

Why Every Education Company Needs an API (& Why Educators Should Care When One Doesn't)

2012-04-14T06:12:02Z

Open Badges and ‘learning outcomes’

2012-04-12T22:21:42Z

Successful completion of an assignment results in the learner receiving a badge. In other words, rather than being a token representing course-level achievement, each badge is a token representing the achievement of a learning outcome.

via Why Universities Will Be the Biggest Awarder of Badges (and When) | iterating toward openness.

Badges effectively ‘open source’ learning outcomes, making them more visible, meaningful and their achievement more transparent. Handled well, badges will affect curriculum design and the relationship between tutor and student and their peers, because the badge will act as a point of negotiation about what has been taught and what has been learned. Rather than the learning outcomes being a largely bureaucratic exercise in quality assurance during the course design process, they would carry meaning throughout the running of the programme of teaching and learning. And of course, they also fit well with a modular form of study, where a student taking a single module, can demonstrate their full achievements before completing the full degree award.

The danger of badges being equated with learning outcomes is that it may tend to reduce the learning outcomes to a narrower number of badges. See section 3 in this course specification document for Journalism (pdf). How will badges affect the creation of these outcomes in the future? If a badge is awarded for every learning outcome, students will end their degree with a large number of badges. For the Online Journalism module I co-taught on this year, there are six learning outcomes listed in the handbook, which suggests that a student could be looking for about 100 over the course of their degree (6 outcomes x4 modules x3yrs). Does a student really want 100 badges? Badges are reputational currency, right? Lots of them circulating will devalue that currency. David writes about one badge per assessment, but an assessment doesn’t equate to one learning outcome, so perhaps badges don’t equate to a single learning outcome but rather a stage of learning (the stage of assessment) or a group of learning outcomes? I can see how badges fit the ‘challenges’ approach that David’s MOOC on openness in education has taken, but learning outcomes are not usually expressed as challenges.

If badges are going to be used in traditional educational settings, they won’t simply be equated with learning outcomes as they are currently expressed. If/when they take off, it will probably be led by student demand/expectation because they’ll require a whole re-evaluation of the way courses are designed and expressed in their formal descriptors. Student expectations are generally formed at school, prior to entering university, so it’ll be interesting to see if/how they are applied in that setting. I can see it happening in schools from an early age. They already hand out no end of badges and informal awards in primary schools. My daughter sticks them to the inside of her wardrobe.

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Benjamin Mako Hill

2012-04-12T08:43:22Z

Interesting profile of a hacker and the extent that his understanding of technology has influenced the tools he uses.

Dropbox tech blog » zxcvbn: realistic password strength estimation

2012-04-12T06:55:16Z

The battle to train a market

2012-04-10T10:29:37Z

Instagram users have been trained differently. Not only were they trained on a completely different technology – one where sharing a photo takes essentially the same amount of time as sharing text – but Instagram’s simple photo filters taught them that every photo they take, even on a smartphone, can be breathtaking.

Instagram convinced users that every image from their life – their stupid cat, the boring tree in their backyard, their hopelessly awkward teenage face – could be as visually stunning in reality as in their mind. It’s a positive feedback loop that would arguably work even as a single-player experience.

As a result, Instagram’s 30 million users started thinking about status updates as photos, not text. When they think of something really important that they want to tell their friends, they think about communicating that information as an image.

The battle to train a market: Instagram is what Facebook has been telling you guys to do for like a year, okay? – GeekWire.

Hackers solving problems

2012-04-08T07:53:28Z

via It’s About More Than Just Solving The Problem by ZURB.

“Data is the new oil”

2012-04-02T14:18:40Z

Want a job where the talent is scarce — and likely to remain that way for at least the next five years? Become a data scientist. That, at least, is the conclusion of a global survey of the number-crunching professionals by IT service company EMC.Some 63% of data scientists say the profession is going to be undermanned for the foreseeable future — and half of those see it as a serious shortage. In particular, the explosive growth of sensors — the so-called “physical Internet” — will provide organizations with an unprecedented wealth of data.But not all of them will have the capacity to turn that raw data into anything useful. Only 1/3 of respondents in the study were very confident in their company’s ability to make business decisions based on new data.“Data is the new oil,” says Andreas Weigend, Head of the Social Data Lab at Stanford and the former Chief Scientist at Amazon, in a statement. “Unfortunately, the technology has evolved faster than the workforce skills to make sense of it, and organizations across sectors must adapt to this new reality or perish.”Check out the rest of the survey data in the detailed inforgraphic below — and let us know in the comments if this is a career you’d like to pursue.

via Career of the Future: Data Scientist [INFOGRAPHIC].

Science Code Manifesto

2012-03-31T15:25:01Z

Software is a cornerstone of science. Without software, twenty-first century science would be impossible. Without better software, science cannot progress.

But the culture and institutions of science have not yet adjusted to this reality. We need to reform them to address this challenge, by adopting these five principles:

Code

All source code written specifically to process data for a published paper must be available to the reviewers and readers of the paper.

Copyright

The copyright ownership and license of any released source code must be clearly stated.

Citation

Researchers who use or adapt science source code in their research must credit the code’s creators in resulting publications.

Credit

Software contributions must be included in systems of scientific assessment, credit, and recognition.

Curation

Source code must remain available, linked to related materials, for the useful lifetime of the publication.

via Science Code Manifesto.

A “campus” is always equated with innovation

2012-03-30T07:28:35Z

The UK will become the “technology centre of Europe”, Chancellor George Osborne has vowed.

He was speaking at the opening of Google Campus, a new centre offering desk space and mentoring for technology companies.

Mr Osborne said Campus was part of a wider effort to “create the next generation of British technologies”.

However, some UK start-ups outside of the capital have accused the government of being too London-centric.

Google’s Eze Vidra described the opening as a “transformational moment for the UK start-up community”.

Campus is situated in the Old Street area of east London, an area dubbed the Silicon Roundabout.

The new building incorporates existing co-working space TechHub, which has now moved out of its original premises.

On the building’s sixth floor is SeedCamp, an early stage investment programme which puts cash into about 20 fledgling technology companies a year.

via BBC News – Google Campus opened by Chancellor George Osborne.

Reverse engineering video for the CM9 Samsung Galaxy S2

2012-03-30T07:25:12Z

It’s great when you see something like this. The community driven open source CyanogenMod operating system for the Samsung Galaxy S2 was missing working video. It’s been the only major issue on the device for some time now. In the post below, the problem is fixed after a couple of people reverse engineered parts of it and brought their work together. It’s worth reading the thread to see how these things develop.

Originally Posted by Zlodo

Yep, it does mean the bit isn’t set

I’ve gone much further now. Investigating some more, I pinpointed the codec specific data missing issue to the interface between the kernel MFC driver and the OMX codec implementation: it is defined by a data structure in a file called mfc_interface.h. Both the kernel driver and the omx codecs in samsung/hardware use their own copy of that file, and it turns out the structures are mismatched.

In hardware/samsung/exynos4/multimedia/codecs/sec_codecs/video/exynos4/mfc/include/mfc_interface.h, line 132, there is a field called in_output_mode that doesn’t exist in the kernel driver.

I’ve commented it as well as the three places where something was written to it (comments mention this isn’t a supported feature of the driver anyway), and things fell into place to the point that the “missing codec specific data” error doesn’t happen anymore.

It still doesn’t work but had an effect on the end result: the camera now records a video consisting of solid green, instead of black.

[edit]

There are a lot of other discrepancies between the mfc kernel module and the code that interfaces with it in the omx codecs. It may very well explain why it still doesn’t work. It’s like the user side and the kernel side of that interface aren’t exactly the same version.

Ok..

So your fix (http://review.cyanogenmod.com/#change,14174) together with http://review.cyanogenmod.com/#change,14108 will make video work.

Thank you for your fantastic work, Zlodo.

__________________

AOSP and CM9 fan

Using GT-I9100 with CM9/AOSP deviants.

Samsung User? Sign this Petition: http://www.change.org/petitions/sams…chased-devices

via [ROM][GT-I9100][4.0.4] CyanogenMod 9 nightly builds | DEVELOPMENT THREAD – Page 294 – xda-developers.

Startups: a hidden lifestyle at MIT

2012-03-29T12:12:27Z

MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS) is one of MIT’s best kept secrets. The program, launched in 2000, matches MIT students, alumni, faculty, and staff with mentors who help them with all aspects of their startups. The service is completely free, and does not ask for an equity stake in any of the companies. Rustagi said that his company benefitted tremendously from VMS. “There were tons of mentors to help us, and they really helped us showcase our startup.”

In the end, startups at MIT are intense, time consuming, and extremely rewarding. Vinnie Ramesh ’12, a senior in Course 6-3 who co-founded Wellframe, a health data science startup, says he likes the startup environment because “you get to move extremely quickly, and you get more responsibility at a startup.” Wellframe’s product helps users estimate their risk of diabetes and other diseases based on information like age, weight and other biometric data. Last year, the startup became a semi-finalist in the Data Design Diabetes competition, and received $20,000 in funding.

“I really enjoy the opportunity to work on hard problems that I’m interested in, and I get to play a lot of different roles, like technical, marketing, sales, etc.” “Mostly you sacrifice sleep,” he added. “But I think that’s normal — at MIT, if you have to stay up all night to get something done or learn something new, you will. … MIT is good training for working hard.”

Ramesh is undaunted by the lack of guarantees inherent in working on a startup. “If I fail, I’m probably going to try again and start another company,” he laughs. “But I think if you have an idea, and it solves a problem, that’s really valuable. And if it doesn’t work, you’ve still learned a lot, and you’ll come out a stronger person.”

via Startups: a hidden lifestyle at MIT – The Tech.