Archive for the 'education' Category

It’s good to be reminded again of the psychology courses i took back in Magdeburg: In this TED talk Dan Pink talks about motivation for tasks that particularly involve thinking and problem solving. He cites several scientific studies in psychology that show how creative tasks are sometimes even impeded by extrinsic motivators such as rewards and penalties. He makes a good case for running businesses on the basis of intrinsic motivators autonomy, mastery, and purpose:

Autonomy, the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery, the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose, the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses.

Sounds pretty exciting, if not revolutionary! However, Dan’s distinction between creative and mechanical tasks may sound a bit classist. He is focussing on a new operating system for the knowledge workers troubled by facebook and procrastination. The rest of the workforce, it seems, is still well-served with sticks and carrots:

That routine, rule-based, left brain work, certain kinds of accounting, certain kinds of financial analysis, certain kinds of computer programing, has become fairly easy to outsource, fairly easy to automate. Software can do it faster. Low-cost providers around the world can do it cheaper. So what really matters are the more right-brained creative, conceptual kinds of abilities.

I am not so sure if this is what really matters. Doesn’t everybody deserve autonomy, mastery and purpose? I wonder if balanced job complexes would be more suitable for this goal by having workers do both creative and mechanical tasks, using both sides of the brain, and having a diverse set of motivators for different types of tasks.

via swissmiss

Together with my supervisors Sheelagh Carpendale and Carey Williamson at the University of Calgary, i am conducting a Web-based study on information visualization and Web search. Participants of this study are asked to use a visual search prototype for as long as they wish and fill out short questionnaires before and after using the system. The purpose of this research is to better understand performance and usability issues of information visualization supporting search on the Web. The data collected during the study will be anonymised and the questionnaires will not ask for any personal information.

If you are interested in participating, please visit this Web page:

http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~mdoerk/view

If you have any questions, please contact me at mdoerk[at]ucalgary.ca for more information. In addition, if you have friends or colleagues who you believe might also be interested in participating in this research, we would be grateful if you were to talk to them about this research opportunity and/or forward them this information about our study.

For a seminar paper i will be looking closer at critical geography, and via the corresponding Wikipedia article i stumbled upon a freely available reader called Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings that spans over 150 years of discourse and 36 texts organized into four themes. Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro have compiled this compilation and made all readings available as PDFs.

This is another reading response for the course Urban Design Theory given by David Monteyne at the University of Calgary.

The major theme I got from this week’s texts is the social meaning of urban space and the collective construction (or deprivation) of place. Norberg-Schulz [1] gives a philosophical account of what the essence of a place might be. Relph [2] and Oldenburg [3] problematize the impoverishment of public space and place in North America. Massey [4] provides a more critical and global understanding of place, whereas Hayden [5] sees urban place as a space for public history. Along these readings, I will discuss in the following a) how place can be conceptualized and b) how place should be transformed for the better. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a reading response for the course Urban Design Theory given by David Monteyne at the University of Calgary.

Reading Hodge’s chapter [1] on the Modern history of Canadian city design, I wonder whether planning for a longer term is actually possible. Past planners couldn’t anticipate subsequent developments—like automobiles, urban expansions, and suburbanization—and I am not sure if we can approximate socio-economic and transportation developments over the next years. However, today’s planning decisions will have significant impact on how the cities of the future look, feel, and live like. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a reading response for the course Urban Desgin Theory given by David Monteyne at the University of Calgary.

The main theme throughout the readings for me was the significance and the divergent interpretation of open streets and squares as public spaces. It was particularly interesting to read how Baudelaire (as discussed by Berman [4]) sees Paris’ boulevards as a place where people of different classes would eventually come together again, whereas Engels understood Manchester’s thoroughfares as a “hypocritical plan” to hide the misery and poverty present in workers’ districts [1]. What troubled me reading this, is that his description of how Manchester is structured along class divisions, still applies to most cities of the world. People living in gated/suburban communities and those living in poorer neighbourhoods are not really bumping into each other on great common boulevards—instead, they probably stand bumper to bumper separated by steel, glass, fumes and noise. Read the rest of this entry »

Being rather busy these days with course readings and other stuff i tend to neglect this little blog of mine and indirectly you, dear readership. I’m sorry for that. But i have to tell you: the courses are really interesting. I am taking Social Contexts of Technology given by Patrick Feng and Urban Design Theory by David Monteyne. So to let you in on what the readings are about, i’m going to post some of my responses onto this blog. Thematically this fits in with what i was blogging about in the past and otherwise it is always nice to reuse material. So stay tuned.

Today i received again an email from ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) with the subject line “An Invitation to Join ACM”. Before this, i have received numerous of those as postal letters as well as emails. This is probably caused by attending an ACM conference last year. I managed to stop getting the paper versions, but it seems as if my plea for removing my email address from ACM’s database was unheard. I never ticked a checkbox somewhere asking for monthly “invitation” emails and letters. Why is there no easy way of stopping them?

This rather annoying member recruitment practice is only a small thing that makes me feel pity and at the same time slight disgust for the organization that represents so many computer science students and professionals. Academic values like advancing the field for the sake of humanity and sharing knowledge in an open fashion seem to be replaced by careerism and exclusive content — which is ironically only accessible via horrible interfaces such as the ACM digital library. Can you believe people being lured into becoming an ACM member with a flip-flop calculator? It just seems a bit surreal.

It’s not the yearly fee that keeps me from joining. It just doesn’t appeal to me becoming a member of a cheesy elite club, that has little to do with educational, egalitarian, or emancipatory values that i would rather see embraced in computer science and academia in general. ACM is a member-based organization and ultimately — if the members choose so — it can be transformed. I sure hope it does soon.

PS: while i pick here on ACM, the critique probably equally applies to the IEEE Computer Society and the many profit-driven publishers.

It was rather silent here the last weeks, mainly because i have finished my diploma thesis recently and defended (successfully) shortly thereafter. The title of the thesis is Towards a Better VIEW: Visual Information Exploration on the Web. The core idea is the combination of multiple interactive visualization widgets or VisGets that are used to explore web content, for example, from RSS feeds. If you want to know more about it check out the thesis page, where i have put abstract, thesis, and defense slides.

Somewhat in a similar vein as the last post: danah boyd calls for a boycott of closed (i.e., not open) access journals and venues to make academia a venue for free exchange of ideas and knowledge open to anybody. She seems kind of disgusted by publishers profitting from scientists’ work while locking down their contributions in repositories that are only accessible to those who have the privilege (i.e., money or position) to do so. Instead, scholars should turn to Open Access publishers that do away with those vomitous access restrictions while still providing the peer-reviewed process.

Peter Suber points to some more options for scholars beyond comepletely boycotting closed-access publishers. One of the major one is self-archiving online – which many publishers actually allow. Putting papers on one’s own personal or research group Website is usually accepted. There are also OA repositories that facilitate the self-archiving process. Through services like CiteSeer or Google Scholar it is then possible to make these contributions available in an OA fashion without actually submitting them to an OA venue. Good thinking. Take a look or two into Peter’s short and longer primers on Open Access to learn more around OA principles and practices.

By the way, i have ranted and chanted about Open Access before.