Ent2002 Assignment 4

What you need to do to please your supervisor

The worst thing you can imagine, so you think, has happened. Your supervisor (me) has been "looking around" to see if things could be improved.

He ran into the website The Roller Weblogger and the article Building an Open Source J2EE Weblogger about it.

He did not read very far until he said "Ahaa!". I've got all these slaves (that's you) available, and we should be able to create from all of this a framework that I (your supervisor) can use to simplify my life, and maybe the life of the slaves.

So that (should you choose to accept it - or not:--) is the assignment.

What concerns your supervisor

I am trying to "accomodate all comers" in my classes. Believe me, I don't get extra pay for doing so, but no complaint, so far I have not been starving to death, and as senior faculty will be the last to go if tuition dries up:-

I think the topics which I loosely call "distributed computing" are VERY important, developing at an explosive rate, usually non-trivial, and therefore lots of fun.

Trying to learn to teach about it, in the form more of "principles" than of "practices" (but always remembering that principle is worthless if it does not affect practice in a favorable way) is fascinating, fun, and frustrating.

Trying to communicate with my partners in learning (AKA students) is a never-ending learning experience as well. I have some very strong views about some aspects of the job, as expressed in the classic Compulsory MisEducation by Paul Goodman. To sum up for me, the point of giving you work to do "is a means of structuring, and also of finding out what is blank or wrong and what is assimilated and can be taken for granted. Review ... is a means of bringing together the fragments ...".

So it seems to me some type of "log"-based approach, with real problems, might help.

I do not like to turn students away who want to learn things that I may be able to help them learn, on the other hand, it is just not possible for me to go through what they have done in detail, while at the same time keeping up with what we should all be learning.

Furthermore many students learn parts better than I will know them, and discover interesting tips, ideas, documents that could help their classmates, and many times a student is stuck on a topic that a classmate has already sorted out, or knew in advance. So I would like to try to learn how to use "the web" to improve our sharing of learning experiences.

So I am wondering if we could not use this "roller" technology to set up a system for communicating learning experiences.

I am thinking of it operating like "news" much of the time. If I suddenly realize there is something that might help everyone else I can just post it when I think of it. This almost always would come as a reaction to a communication from a student to me about a problem, and I realize that everyone else might be having the same problem.

On the other hand when I post a "suggestion" some of you may already have "been there" and can offer an improved suggestion, or information that my original suggestion was not a very good one (can you imagine!).

Also when I see that someone has really sorted out a particular topic, for example has a very nice "ant build" file for their project, it would be nice to "instantly" just point to this for everyone else to see.

What might please your supervisor

So here are some problems I see, or things I would like to do, that you can help accomplish. This is really "pre-pilot", so I would like you to go through what is available, examine it in relation to my concerns or those that you have as participants in this shared enterprise of learning, and see if "the roller", or a similar beast, could help. If so explain in a little more depth how it could help, perhaps with a mini-prototype or an example found elsewhere: if not, explain why not, and either offer an alternative suggestion or explain why my concern is ill-founded.

What you can produce for me is a 'reasoned discussion' of what you found. I am a slow learner, so simple examples will be much appreciated!

How you can present it to me, is, as just about always (perhaps until this project is done:-), a nice web page, or set of web pages, posted on your part of the class site as Assignment4.html.

Could you please me another way?

As always, I am primarily trying to give you some problem to "cut your teeth" (without chipping them:-) on, so if you think you would learn more by doing something else, please go ahead and do that, and document it, instead.