undesigned

Recently our National Library of Virtual Manipulatives team (Bob Heal, Larry Cannon, Jim Dorward, and myself) was awarded the Utah Governor’s Medal for Science and Technology.

Here is some press that covered the award:

• Utah State Today – USU Researchers Awarded Governor’s Medals for Science and Technology
• USU College of Science – Three USU Scientists Receive Governor’s Science Medal
• Salt Lake Tribune – Herbert to honor recipients for contributions to science
• UtahPolicy.com – State Advisory Council For Science And Technology Announces Governor’s Science Medals For 2009

Here are some previous articles about the team as well:

• USU – Developed Virtual Math Tutor Aiding Students Worldwide
• USU – Winter Insights 2006

Posted on January 28th, 2010 by joel
Filed under: interactive online math, nlvm | 1 Comment »

My daughter’s friends got a hold of my droid and thought it would be fun to try to guess the password pattern. After enough times, it locked up my droid and asked me to login with my gmail account credentials. Problem is, that didn’t work. It is a known bug. After a few minutes of Googling, I found:

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4784 (comment 35)

1) create a new gmail account on the computer.
2) call your cell phone with a different phone.
3) answer your cell phone then hit the back button and it will take you to the home
screen.
4) turn on wifi so it can do data and voice at the same time (remember that the phone
is still connected)
5) go to Settings -> Location & Security and disable lock pattern (you’ll need to
enter to correct pattern previously set)
6) go to Settings -> Accounts & Sync and click “Add Account” and add your newly
created Gmail account.
7) hang up the phone.
turn the phone back on, at the lockout screen, enter your new Gmail account info
and it should let you back in
9) once the phone is unlocked, you can go in setting and remove the newly added Gmail
account and keep the old one.

Google giveth, and Google taketh away, and then Google giveth again.

Posted on January 28th, 2010 by joel
Filed under: family, mobile | 2 Comments »

We’re in the process of building out personal recommendations for folksemantic.com. The basis for the recommendations is user attention metadata. The data we use includes:

• Identity feeds – RSS feeds that users register that represent their interests. For example, their blog or their delicious account.
• Clicks – The articles that the user clicks on.
• Shares – The articles that the user shares to others.
• Comments – Articles that the user comments on.
• Time on page – Amount of time that a user spends on an article before moving on.
• Searches – Searches the user executes.

Recommendation Assumptions

Some of our assumptions are:

• Semantic relatedness – The more semantically similar an article is to articles that a user has paid attention to, the more interesting to the user.
• Attention types – Different types of attention should be given different weights. For example, following a link to an article should not give it as much weight as writing the article.
• Attention details – The particulars of a given type of attention might make it more important than another attention of the same type. For example, if a person shares an article with 100 people, it might be reasonable to infer that it is more important than an article that they share with one person.
• Entry recency – The more recently an article has been added to the system, the more interesting to the user (they probably haven’t seen it before).
• Attention recency – The more recently a user has showed attention to an article, the more weight that should be given to it.
• Attention frequency – The more frequently a user has showed attention to an article, the more weight that should be given to it.

Stating these assumptions reminds me of the difference between relevance and certainty. So while an item that a user clicks on may be more relevant than an blog article they have written, it is harder to be certain of that. Our approach is to give the click less weight than the article.

Recommendation Score

Right now, we score articles using the formula:

(relevance)(attention type)(attention details)(attention recency)(article recency)

For all articles that a user has paid attention to, we score the 20 “related articles” using this algorithm; rank the scores and cache the top 20 (that the user hasn’t already clicked on) to recommend to the user. There are obvious weaknesses to this approach, but we are going to start there and see where to go next.

Possible Extensions / Improvements

We are considering:

• Collaborative Filtering, Bipartite Graph, and Discriminative Weight Algorithms – Putting into production, the algorithm that combines discriminative weights with a novel sparse matrix clustering method we conducted research on.
• Modeling user interests separately – Modeling users interests using multiple term vectors (one for each interest) by extracting vectors from closely related (clustered documents) that users have paid attention to.

Posted on November 23rd, 2009 by joel
Filed under: recommender | No Comments »

Rachel Bower – Internet Scout Wisconson Madison, ATE Central, AMSER. Advanced Technological Education is a sister program to NSDL. Designed to connect NSDL with community and technical college faculty. Instead of focusing on a content area, they chose to focus on an audience and to cover all of applied math and science. AMSER is being created by a team of folks led by InternetScout. ATE, AAC, AMATYC, NISOD, MERLOT, NSDL. Scout not only connects higher ed with resources but also best practices. Mellon funded the development of Scout Portal Toolkit, which became CWIS – DL in a box. I was made aware of Internet Scout when they featured the NLVM in 2002.

ATE Central is an example of how a project in NSDL can influence other NSF programs. It brings all of the ATE resources in to one searchable portal. It builds the ATE brand and helps disseminate the projects. ATE is different than NSDL in that they focus on content development, industry connections, and the improvement of training and teaching for workforce development. ATE offers smaller grants and larger center grants. Example national, regional, and resource centers of excellence are geoTech, CARCAM, AgrowKnow. ATE Central has been funded for 1 year. They focus more on events than in other portals. This is partially because ATE focuses a lot on workshops including virtual. They create resource areas on ATE Central for each projects and centers. This has been a big deal to their projects to help them collaborate. ATE has a center that is funded just for evaluation. They send out a monthly update and are creating success stories. She showed videos of people that have found success of students that have benefited from ATE.

Linea Fletcher and Rachel is interested in the life of NSDL projects that continue beyond funding (are sustainable). They want to capture and share these stories. Another focus is on how to capture of evidence of impact across projects. They currently track 320 projects and aggregate and share it in interesting ways.

Posted on November 18th, 2009 by joel
Filed under: conferences | No Comments »

Bruce Mason – Open Source Physics. Modern Physics is done with computation no matter whether you are a theoretical or experimental. Our current classroom practice doesn’t allow with this well. A tri-partrate learning platform. Their project combines Open Source Physics, Easy Java Simulation, and the Compadre Library.

Modeling is important because it is what scientists do. It is also a valuable way to interest and help students learn. You can do problems that are too hard or impossible to visualize, that you just don’t see if you don’t have the computational resources. “The difference between physics and math is that I have fun demos. In physics as opposed to math. We do have answer. It is what I measured”. The Falling Slinky Model: What happens to the bottom when it begins to fall? Physically, it is hard to see. The bottom doesn’t know it has dropped until it gets a message from the top of the slinky. Colliding Galaxy model. There is no way for someone to do this on paper.

Adoptable, adaptable, and understandable. They have to be modular, adaptable, visual, interactive, internationalization, quality control, easy to get to, vetted by other teachers, descriptions of how it has been used. Francisco Esquembre – creator of Easy Java Simulations. He says the most important characteristics are adoptable, adaptable, and understandable. This gives power to the people. This was my theory and excitement in my dissertation study. Give the teachers the tools, and they will create. My findings can be summarized by the 90-9-1 rule. 1% of teachers have the time, interest, and skills to create. Of course more powerful tools make it more possible for people to participate.

He showed an Inferior Ptolemaic Model of what it would be like if the earth was the center of the earth and Venus went around the earth. How could you tell which model is right? People can conjecture and explore.

He showed the Falling Loop Model. A loop that is falling through a magnetic field. Faraday’s law. It creates a current that opposes the falling. Other physicists can open (download) the model and modify it with minimal programming. His students can do this as well. This is similar (but more advanced) to my work in the eNLVM that allows users to configure and serialize applets. They connect EJS to the library to make it easy for people to find, discuss, and share their models. Their library allows users to rate, collect, relate, comment, sort, annotate, and share. Again, the themes of our Mellon work and the ODLMS shows its head. One of the contributors to Open Source Physics has written a text book for which their File Cabinet contains the resources aligned with the sections of the text book. They have build into EJS the ability to browse repositories of EJS models. There is a professor in Taiwan who has over EJS 150 models. Doug Brown, Wolfgang, and Lyle Barbato are some of the key people. A project called Tracker that generates video from EJS simulations. They have also done a Data Tool.

Their stats (Open Source Physics?) are 350 resources, 1700 users per week, 31,000 downloads per month. By comparison, the NLVM has about 110 applets and gets 40,000 users per day.

Posted on November 18th, 2009 by joel
Filed under: conferences | No Comments »