Knowledge Visualization of Wikipedia

One is the Master's students is doing some very interesting research into Knowledge Visualisation of Wikipedia articles. His website for this work is;

http://www.comp.dit.ie/dt217/jwang/jw.html

Here are some videos;

The Problem of Plagiarism (Reprise)

In a previous posting I mentioned the fact that I am Final Year Project Co-ordinator for one of the School of Computing's undergraduate degrees - DT228, BSc in Computer Science. And part of my duties is to ensure that no plagiarism is committed in the projects. Usually there is at least one one student who commits some form of plagiarism, but I am very, very pleased to say that this year there were no cases of plagiarism.

This is really excellent, particularly because one element of this role that I really hated was dealing with students who have copied. The Dublin Institute of Technology has a formal set of procedures that are undertaken when a student is suspected of unfair practice, which involves a panel of enquiry which can be incredible stressful and difficult for both the student involved and the staff.

This year during my weekly meetings with students I emphasised that the School has a "zero tolerance" policy on plagiarism, and gave them several presentations on what plagiarism is and what it is not. Additionally I created handouts for the students on plagiarism and we undertook creativity exercises on the topic. Finally, and I think this may have been the thing that most resonated with some students, I showed them part of an episode of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" entitled "The West Coast Delay" which concerns a live comedy show broadcast on the East Coast of America that inadvertently plagiarises another comedian's material during a sketch, which results in the production team scrambling to break into the taped West Coast feed to correct their error. The panic and problems that this causes is played out dramatically in the episode, which I think may have stuck in the students' minds.

Bottom Line: Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

Hackers and Hollywood: Best Presentation Award

As I mentioned in a previous posting, I had a paper at the 3rd International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions whose title is "Hackers and Hollywood: Considering Filmic Cyberthreats in Security Risk Analysis". It was well received by the international audience of Computer Security researchers, and was presented with the Best Presentation Award at the conference dinner yesterday. This was a totally unexpected surprise for me, I authored the paper to discuss a small issue in the process of undertaking risk analysis in computer security policies, and definitely didn't imagine it was going win an award.

I guess the fact that the paper was about movies helped in its appeal a lot, everyone in the audience had familiarity with some of the movies mentioned and the issues being discussed were relatively straightforward, that said, to have a group of lecturers present you with an award for giving the best lecture of the conference is a real honour and makes me think that I must be doing something right. The presentation (without video clips) is available below;
Hackers and Hollywood

Web 2.0: Tag Clouds

Just looking at tag clouds (or weighted lists) to see if they could be useful as a teaching tool. A tag cloud is set of related tags with the size of each tag corresponding to its frequency. Typical tag clouds have between 50-100 tags. Also, sometimes tag clouds can be interactive, the tags can be hyperlinks allowing the user to drill down on the data.

I am working on creating tag clouds from my lecture notes to see what the most commonly used words in my lectures are, and compare them to my idea of what I think I am emphasising in my lectures, to see if there is any kind of conceptual drift.

Some interesting examples of tag clouds include;

http://www.makecloud.com/
http://www.tagcloud-generator.com/
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Tag_Cloud.html
http://tagcloud.oclc.org/tagcloud/TagCloudDemo
http://www.artviper.net/texttagcloud/
http://wordle.net/

Oideachas 2.0

I attended EdTech 2008 which was on yesterday and today in Dundalk Institute of Technology. A former Masters student of mine, Ronan Carty, presented a paper based on his dissertation entitled "Oideachas 2.0" concerning the use of Web 2.0 by Irish computer science lecturers, and future directions of Web 2.0. Ronan researched a range of learning and teaching theories, and surveyed over 100 lecturers on their views and usage of Web 2.0. Following this he developed a prototype learning environment that incorporates Web 2.0 Tools.

Ronan's presentation was really splendid, he took the audience through his research, discussing in detail some of the responses that the lecturers had given, he did this with great insight, critial thinking, and humour. After that he showed them his prototype learning environment which clearly wowed them. His system is built in AJAX and allows both teachers and students to configure their learning environment dynamically, excellent stuff! His disseration can be found here;
http://www.comp.dit.ie/dgordon/Research/research8.html

There were other excellent papers presented at EdTech 2008, including; Crystal Fulton's paper on blogging as a facilitator in the learning process, Namgyal Damdul's paper on developing an eXtreme Programming (XP) game, and Seamus Fox's paper on the measurement of the quality and efficiency of online teaching.

Conferences are also an opportunity to catch up with old friends, it was my great pleasure to meet up with Tim Savage who is in the Department of Computer Science in Trinity. I knew Tim as a lecturer on Trinity's Masters in IT in Education which I also taught on for a while, plus we both worked on a report commissioned by the Information Society Commission entitled "Innovation in Learning in the Information Society: A Comparative International Study". Tim is doing some really interesting research into Blended learning, and his work on Immersive Virtual Worlds looks very great.

Hackers and Hollywood

I submitted a paper to the 3rd International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions and I'm pleased to say I just got word back that the paper has been excepted. The paper, whose title is "Hackers and Hollywood: Considering Filmic Cyberthreats in Security Risk Analysis", looks at the way computer hackers (really "crackers") are portrayed in movies to determine if that influnces the security policies of organisations.

Defining what exactly constitutes a hacker movie was the first step. To do this a large number of potential candidates movies were reviewed to determine whether or not they were truly hacker movies, and using Grounded Theory a series of guidelines were developed to explain why some movies were added and others rejected.

• GUIDELINE 1: A hacker movie must feature a hacker in it, it is insufficient to have an act of hacking in the movie, the hacker must appear in the movie as being either the main protagonist or antagonist, or at least be a well-developed character with their hacking being integral to the plot.
  
• GUIDELINE 2: Not all cyberpunk movies can automatically be considered as hacker movies.
  
• GUIDELINE 3: Only Science Fiction movies that feature recognisable hacker scenarios should be included.
  
• GUIDELINE 4: No animated movies will be considered.
  
• GUIDELINE 5: No movies will be considered whose sole focus is cryptography.
  
• GUIDELINE 6: No hacker documentaries will be considered, only movies.

Following this a list of 50 movies featuring a total of 60 hackers were compiled from the 1960s to the 2000s. And from here a general list of characteristics that hackers are most commonly portrayed with in movies was complied which was then compared with the reailty of hacking.

More detail here;
http://thetech.pbwiki.com/HackersandHollywood

The Search for Creativity

Creativity is something I am very interested in; What is it? How does it work? Is it different from Innovation? Can we teach it? Are some people better than others at it? How does it relate to programming and design?

I have been investigating concepts related to creativity and have been looking for sources of creativity. Part of this research has been working on projects with Edward de Bono to look at models of supporting creativity, e.g. The Six Thinking Hats, the CoRT techniques and Po. Some of the other models of creativity I have investigated, experimented and published research additionally with the following techniques; MindMaps, BrainStorming, Analogies, and Freewriting.

But models are not enough, to help identify sources of creativity I am looking at a range of people in a range of fields to determine if there is any commonality. I'm looking at inventors and their approaches. I'm looking at how literature is created, and how different authors have created their works. I am also looking at comics to see if their writing differs significantly from books. By looking at Television writing I am hoping to see if writing for a medium that is not only visually-based, but action-based, is significantly different. Finally I am looking at RPGs to see if they can aid creativity.

http://www.comp.dit.ie/dgordon/Research/research11.html