I’ve gotten a barrage of emails with URLs for your websites the last several days. I have to say, I am very happy with most of the results. Some of you really did a great job organizing and communicating “your story” … I know my expectations seemed big for this little project, but most of you rose to the occasion and produced dynamite results.

As far as grades go, let me say that I will be looking at them all very critically in the next week or so. I don’t want any of you stressing over points here or there. I want you to be focused on finishing your problem solution and getting prepared for the final. I know who’s done what, who has been contributing, and what you have put into this class … grades are a means to an end … I am concerned with the things you take away from the class. I am hopeful that you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have and that you have a new found respect for the power of technology as a driving factor in your world … I am also hopeful that you get the whole process orientation we’ve been working on since day one … my favorite professor in college used to talk to us about the “Five P’s of Success: Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance…” I know, a little corny, but he is so right. Click the link to listen to a little audio feedback from me–>

Quick post this morning … saw this at wired.com and thought you’d all be interested. Looks at the growth in file sharing … they are essentially debunking what the RIAA has been saying — that file sharing is decreasing. Interesting stuff … what do you think?

A week away from Thanksgiving … the time is flying by. I have to say up until recently, the activity at the Course Blog has been great. Maybe my posts haven’t been as interesting? At any rate, please keep those posts coming … the Discussion Activity for this week is a little late, so you have until Sunday at 5 PM to finish it. I really struggled with this one … in years past, I’ve gotten some decent responses, but I’ve just never really liked the idea behind this one. The Solutions Institute builds software — some of it we even sell to people … most of it however is used in educational settings to support IST. I understand the whole designing and developing IT applications and it is a critical piece of knowledge to have if you are going to be a part of any development effort. With that said, some of the things that are going on in industry do disturb me … I don’t want to give away too much, so I’ll just give you the question.

Discussion Activity

More and more, software giants are selling beta versions of their software to end-users. Beta testing has traditionally cost companies a lot of money to perform properly. However, they receive very valuable feedback from the beta testers. With this new trend, they are receiving both feedback and a revenue stream. Is this appropriate? Should end users pay for incomplete, unstable software and provide mission-critical feedback?

Ok, so I went to a good talk on Friday to listen a guy from one of IBM’s research labs … he talked about eLearning and focused a lot of attention on how to provide quick, customized content to learners. Now, he was coming at it from a training perspective, so it’s a little skewed relative to what we do, but there are some really good ideas to port over. As I was listening, I felt like most of it was sort of ho-hum, but it did get me really thinking about how I could start to make our courseware (like the 110 topics you all are reading) a little better … it also made me want to ask you all what you think. Here are a couple of quick questions for you:

Right now if you click into a Topic you get the opportunity to select any lesson and then from there, navigate through a series of pages … back when we started the Online IST project we felt it was critical to “chunk” the content so it could be easily read … over time, I have gotten less and less impressed with that approach … for one thing, it makes printing really tough. The other thing it does is make it tougher to move around whole lessons at a time to let faculty and students build new topics quickly and easily – in other words, it screws with the concept of modularity a bit. Here’s the question … how would you all feel if each lesson was really one long html page instead of the 6-15 screens they are now? Let me know, I am ready to make a change.

How important would it be for you all to have quick search capabilities from within the syllabus or a given topic? I know it would be cool during a lecture if a point came up I could quickly find the information I was looking for with a simple, google like search. Why don’t we have search now you ask? Well, we got huge push back from faculty because they felt that would allow cheating during “open browser” exams … I am at the point where I care less about them and more about what you guys think … so, what do you think?

I doubt many of you are taking advantage of rss feeds for news or podcasts, but I do … I also think you’ll all be using it within a couple of years as the whole Internet experience moves towards an end user centric approach. RSS allows you to select what feeds you like and the content is delivered to you automatically … in other words, if you read Wired.com five times a day, with an rss feed, you’d never have to point your browser at it — the content would be downloaded to you in the background as it changed. What I am thinking about is how we could add rss capability to the syllabus so you could subscribe to all sorts of news — IST stuff, other blogs, news sites, sports, whatever and it would show up for you … what do you think?

The syllabus now gives you some basic communication capabilities — direct links to individual emails, team emails, and IM status. I have gotten good feedback on the whole IM status thing, but I’d like to take that further … I am looking for ideas. You see, I came up with the whole IM status thing from two experiences … the first was at a big meeting at Apple that showed me IM is not a toy, but the other was by asking (and watching) students what they want the most — they said IM! So the SI team put it in. I use it all the time to get to you guys. The question is, what the hell do you think would increase the social connectedness of out of class communication?

You guys have been a great group and I think you are starting to get the whole teaching with technology thing, so I would really value your ideas. Leave some comments and help us make Edison Services 3.0 kick ass … what do you think?

I can’t believe we are in the double digits discussion activities! This semester is blowing by … its been fun so far. Anyway, you ought to spend a little time reading Topic 10 … it will give you some good insight into the types of systems you’ll need to plan for when solving the 110 Challenge. Ok, here we go …

Discussion Activity

Computers that can evolve to improve themselves have been fantasized in science fiction books for years, but something similar has occurred at the University of Sussex in England. Adrian Thompson (Center for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics) works with computer chips that can manage their own logic gates by testing new designs and choosing the best configurations for a particular task. Two technologies make this possible: evolutionary algorithms are computer programs that can rapidly generate variations in their own code to evaluate and select the most efficient code; and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), which use transistors that appear as an array of logic cells to change their value and connect to any other logic cells as they are programmed. When these two technologies are brought together (shazam!), circuits can become more effective than similar circuits designed by humans using known principles. There is one problem — Adrian doesn’t know how it works.

So if a management system, which is a critical system, has been built using a working technology such as evolutionary algorithms and FPGAs, but we don’t know how it works, should we implement this technology? Is this technology reliable? Explain the possible advantages and disadvantages, potential for success and potential risk in your opinion.