http://www.joelduffin.com/blog life is a rum go guv’nor, and that’s the truth Thu, 30 Sep 2010 07:08:21 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm presenting OER Recommender at RecSysTEL today http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/09/30/oer-recommender-at-recsystel/ I've had a Mac for years but used it mostly for testing. I always laughed at the religiously zealous mac users. Last October I switched my day to day computer work from Windows to Mac.  My only regret is that I waited so long to switch. I turn on my ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/09/23/everytime-i-boot-into-windows-i-have-to-install-a-critical-security-update/ Tonight I will be leading a discussion about the NLVM, eNLVM, and a new site called Models for Math. Models for Math is partnering with providers of interactive open content for math, including the GeoGebra community, to provide free hosting of websites where they can author and deliver online lessons. ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/09/08/introducing-models-for-math/ After playing with Hadoop a bit in the past, I'm now trying out some things on Amazon's Elastic MapReduce. I signed up for a new AWS account and ran their sample LogAnalyzer Job Flow using the AWS console. That was easy enough. Next I attempted to run the same sample from ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/09/08/getting-started-with-hadoop-on-amazons-elastic-mapreduce/ In Folksemantic, we run into the following problems: Duplicate entries. Search and recommendation results that list multiple entries for the same resource. Catalog pages. Search and recommendation results that link to catalog pages for resources (people would rather go directly to the resource, but the metadata providers want people to go to ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/09/02/hadoop-based-aggregation-and-recommendation/ Default Tomcat installations run on port 8080 so you get urls like: http://mydomain.com:8080/lms/index.jsp Some firewalls block port 8080 so I wanted my site to be available on port 80 so that it uses urls like: http://mydomain.com/lms/index.jsp. One option was to modify the Tomcat configuration to listen on port 80. However, I already have Apache ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/08/16/configuring-apache-and-tomcat-to-serve-my-java-web-application-through-port-80/ I'm presenting at the First GeoGebra North America Conference this morning http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/07/27/geogebra-na-2010/ Today I am presenting Using Technology Effectively to Teach Mathematics at the Utah Association of Math Teacher Educators annual meeting being held at Utah State University. http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/03/06/using-technology-to-teach-mathematics/ I was excited to see yesterday that images from the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) are being made public. Amazing images. Here is my new computer desktop image that I stare at in wonder. For more info and cool images check out the WISE project website. Some of Technology for WISE ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/02/19/wide-field-infrared-survey-explorer-wise/ 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 ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/01/28/nlvm-team-receives-utah-governors-medal-for-science-and-technology/ Justin and I submitted proposals to the Digital Media and Learning Competition. I was amazed to see the breadth of the 100 pages of submissions. There are a lot of good ideas there. Not being sure that the submissions will always be kept public, I wanted to archive them for ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/01/28/web-crawling-on-a-budget/ 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. ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2010/01/28/how-to-unlock-your-droid-when-your-kids-try-to-guess-the-pattern-too-many-times/ Generating personal recommendations is one thing, presenting them to the user in a way that they find them useful is something else. Here are our plans for folksemantic.com: Personal recommendations page - For each user, provide a personal recommendations page. Visually separate recommendations that they have already clicked on. Personal recommendations tool ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/23/presenting-personal-recommendations/ 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 ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/23/a-personal-recommendation-algorithm/ I had the chance to talk with David Yaron again about how to generate more and better assessments that get at deeper levels of knowledge than what typical assessments do. I didn't realize this but, Turadg, whose presentation I attended is one of David's students. I shared my reaction to ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/19/encouraging-the-creation-of-assessments-to-measure-deep-understanding/ 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 ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/18/ate-a-sister-program-to-nsf/ Lyle Barbato, the comPADRE lead developer talked about conference services as a model for sustainability. Each collection in comPADRE is focused around supporting existing community or a particular course. Teachers, Courses, Specific Students, Specific faculty. They offer workshops etc to those communities. The Physics Education Research community has existed since ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/18/per-central-conference-services-as-a-sustainability-model/ 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 ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/18/open-source-physics-adoptable-adaptable-and-understandable-power-to-the-people/ Dan Garcia is charged with motivating users to participate. 90-9-1 principle. 90% of users are audience, 9% of users are editors, 1% of users are creators. Creators are not representative of who the community is. Cites alertbox/participation_ Nielson research about 90% of postings come from 1% of the users. We ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/18/90-9-1-principle-getting-people-to-contribute/ Lois Delcambre is talking about the new ensemble portal and the CS1 project being motivated by the CSTA. There is an intellectual debate about what you should use to introduce people to computer science. Their community site is intended to promote discussion. The site uses drupal as a platform. They ... http://www.joelduffin.com/blog/2009/11/18/remixing-web-content/