Lecturing – Student method

How difficult is it to prepare a pure technical lecture ? Practically we choose to use marker/chalk on the board to explain concepts. What if we need to put them on a PC and explain. Say it’s a virtual classroom atmosphere where participants are connected someway via web.

For example, lets take and example of presenting stack frames. Say we have 2 things on agenda.

1. Stack Frame Diagram

2. Sample program covering various memory segments

Presenter method

I call it the presenter method because the presenter thinks that the knowledge is transformed from him to the listener/student.

Lets see how he/she goes about presenting.

1. Agenda

Announcing the overall coverage

2. Stack frame pictorial

The student is able to get a pictorial idea

3. Code example

The student gets a feel of the code and directly maps it with the picture seen before

4. Summary

Summarizes the important point

5. Questions

The student gets a chance to ask questions or just take an excuse of time.

Student method

I introduce the student method. What if a question is asked for which we find answers in the form of a knowledge exchange/transfer. You call it presentation or what ever it is. To put it in simple terms, question originates from the Student and the Presenter prepare his/her material.

This sentence above might look quite strange, stupid, Out of mind, Un-realistic. But the Question -> to -> Answer looks quite politically/theoretically correct

Ok, let us take it step by step.

Helping the topics

Make a notice on the board / bulletin saying (Keep the presentation prepared)

Topic: “Programming Stack frames”

Time: 1 Hour (Next week: xx/xx/xxxx date)

What does it solve: A program’s Runtime memory representation.

Pre-requisite: Need to download the presentation from the link http://x.x.com/lecture1101 and give a reading. Add the topics which you feel might be missing or not clear or needs improvement. Justification is mandatory.

Extra Credits: Given to students who fixes maximum number of the mis-understanding sthe presentation gives for the reader (with proper justification)

What are we trying to achieve here

Guess we are nearing the point of discussion. Why should a material be corrected by the unknown ? How can a mind which doesnt have any idea come up with correction or say the best presentation.

But keep in mind, the lecturer has a vital role to play here. He originated the thought provoking process.

Best case: The lecturer may get lot of thought provoking questions or lot of stupid questions

Worst case: The lecturer may not get any questions at all

Average case: The lecturer may get few good points and few wrong points

But with all these 3 cases, we understand what has to be taught and how.

The exercise  works best when the lecturer intention is the deliver the best and understands that he is getting the questions and not the complaints.

This change would require radical re-thinking of the process of teaching. Takes quite a brave/mighty heart.

micro blogging and macro narration

Twitter everywhere. I am really a fan of twitter. It’s a remarkable way to bring bloggers *together and am surprised to see it everywhere. I could also see media companies promoting twitter apps in their set top box.

But i don’t know why but for some reason i am not able to tweet much even though i like the way it takes the message to the people. I remember myself and Joseph were discussing about one such idea exactly a year before(when we never heard of twitter, or say it was not so popular) and we even kept a name for it, life blog. The word life is because, the whole intension of the platform is to narrate the life

So when did this micro blogging idea came into picture ? Is it an easy way to bring in mobile users to blog ? I feel mobile web would bring in lot of changes to the way blogs are read or say conceived. Narration !! Interesting who knows, we may even have a twitter feed running in our personal blog site sometime, Soon !

Another interesting analysis about twitter. It has enormous content nerrated by souls in this world and at times it becomes less manageable. So does it gets shaped up like how a macro blog (or blog) gets shaped? The word *shape has a deeper meaning in the world of expression, esp. in the world of blogs. I believe the regular blogs gives the author a tool to shape up information than it is with the micro blog. Tweets are some sort of expressions carried out in a *timeline. Small time !! I call it small time because it’s the very old nature of west to live every moment and gauging every second. I do not find anything wrong in this conception of “every second” living unless you carry a long size mini notes with you to remember.

It’s really nice to see what people narrate in the little time slots. Mostly it’s like communicating in pieces. Exactly like a asynchronous telephone conversation. Say telegram sort. It’s a gram basically. This little concept drags many people towards it. Say for example, how you felt when you saw you exam result, how you learnt cooking you favourite dish etc.., These things may not shape up to something big, but it has it’s own beauty and essence.

west drags web 2.0

Times of recession and it’s about business  survival. Stories of cost cutting, layoffs, no funding for research, frozen development etc…, are closely related to corporates and governance. Ok enough of those boring lines of corporate lecture. Do we see web 2.0 getting affected by these uncertainties of the business world. As a close observer of the web, i could see some sort of dizziness in the world of web development.

I don’t want to talk big players like Google and Micorosoft as they already established some sort of revenue model out of web, but i am worried about the startups. Since most of them being funded by west, aspiring startups might go for a halt for some time. I should say post 2006, the world of web saw many new ideas like Flikr, Facebook , Youtube etc.., Do they evolve as a model ?

So, how long do we wait. Wheres are those budding mobile VAS providers. Can this ecosystem sustain the tides of economic crisis ?

Another important question is: will web 2.0 take a turn someway or take a temporary halt ?

Ubuntu lappy

Wow. I really liked ubuntu. It may not be for geeks(but a contrasting info later) but it is definitely for a desktop user. And more importantly it has the heritage of the ever powerful Debian. I would definitely call this as GNU/Linux ubuntu. It pretty nicely differentiates between proprietary and non-proprietary software. I loved that part when ubuntu pop up at the first startup saying, do you want to continue with this x properitory driver software be enabled. It would be a less common work for m$ windows user though.

And the gnome desktop with Advanced Display technology shines. The laptop battery indicator is a very nice hack. It looks cool and yet very simple. I would definitely recommend it to friends who eat, drink and live redhat / suse / debian for desktop.

I thought ubuntu might not suit building / hacking gnome applications. But i should say it was in ease for me. I just tried a relatively new java-gnome build. It initially threw some dependency heck. But thanks to apt-get. It was way too cool. I was able to resolve dependencies and install. Wow. What more to ask if you are a hacker. Anyway the complete gnome build would be interesting. But still this is pretty cool.

Liferay portals

Liferay Portal

Wow. What an experience working with a beast of a portal server. It’s around 85 MB in size and does lot of stuffs when it comes to managing portals. No nasty configuration steps and easily deployable with tomcat/jboss bundled. I am waiting to see more application servers integration support. It also supports pretty good extended environment to compile our applications adding portlets.

I must say open source community is now into a new and different channel of thought. And this one is pretty big. It’s a java portal but still it should be disturbing all the perl and python developers.

I must say web developing and content management are pretty big and frequent words used these days. I had the oppurtunity to work in liferay (and still continuing) and i learnt the core idea.

I believe it will serve as a pretty good enterprise platform for content management and applications. Since lightweight java services like Springs, Struts etc creating significant market, liferay is set to get mature with them. Even though i could not work much on configuring liferay i was able to get a feel of it. Especially the themes configuration are made so simple. And not to forget user and portlet permission management. It can be just done in ease.

Once place where one as a liferay administrator can get stuck is with the versions. And it’s generally not so administrator friendly when it comes to debugging errors (apart from those typical java application errors). He/she needs a pretty decent hands on experience and must be able to master the liferay specific portlet configurations.

The portlet based application development are getting fame slowly but i believe one day they would definitely gain more space with more better standards flowing.

Issues regarding liferay and setup are pretty interesting topics to read on. I would like to devote some time in future writing them here. Happy reading.