Summer Term - Software Development in C++Posted by Christian Safran in
Lectures
During the summer term I am occupied with the lecture "Softwaredevelopment Practical Excercises", in order to teach the first year students OOP in C++. This year's first practical example is tightly coupled with the last example of the C lecture in winter term. The students are required to develop a rudimentary commandline environment to enter geometrical objects. These objects are subsequently presented as an svg-file.
A Geospatial Wiki for m-LearningPosted by Christian Safran in
Publications
In subjects, where a major part of the education is based on visual information, like geosciences, architecture or civil engineering, this information is often tied to a specific location. Field studies and excursions are thus an essential part of the education in such subjects. This paper describes an application designed to bring the advantages of collaborative, technology enhanced learning into these environments. The development is based on the idea of a Wiki specially designed for collaboratively compiling location-bound information. Other key features are the inclusion geographic coordinates to all Wiki articles, the integration of external map material and providinga mobile interface for the use ldquoin the fieldrdquo. The result of this development process is a geoWiki application tailored for the needs of m-Learning. With a user interface based on widely known applications, TUGeoWiki offers learners and teachers alike the possibility to collaborate on geospatial information.
The paper was accepted at the International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE) '08 conference in Wuhan, China, and is published by IEEE. Reference: BibTex EndNoteACM Ref DOI Set Hibernate Mode on MacBook (Pro)Posted by Christian Safran in
Mac
I have been wondering quite some time why my MBP knows only one hibernate mode (suspend to RAM). While most of the time the fast wake-up is very useful, sometimes I leave it off longer - and this drains my battery level. So I began to search for a solution and found it at http://www.macworld.com/article/53471/2006/10/sleepmode.html. Btw, the hibernate mode can also be set to skip the "safe" part of "safe sleep" (not writing of the RAM to the HDD).
Blogging in higher education programming lectures: an empirical studyPosted by Christian Safran in
Publications
This paper describes a case study at the Graz University of Technology on the use of weblogs in a higher education programming course for Computer Science students. Weblogs, as a tool for knowledge sharing, have received plenty of attention in recent years. Due to the support of constructivist learning models they have also been credited importance in supporting students' learning performance. Several case studies have been conducted showing positive influence on student's success. However, those case studies are based on the fact of introducing weblogs as an obligatory part of coursework for the students. The research presented sought to determine the influence of maintaining a weblog as a personal learning log and ePortfolio would positively influence the students' performance in a large programming course with the explicit precondition that blogging was voluntary and no necessary part of coursework.
The paper was presented at the Mindtrek '08 conference in Tampere, Finland, and is published by ACM. Reference: BibTex EndNote ACM Ref DOI ... back againWord 2007 citation featurePosted by Christian Safran in
Publications
Believe it or not, I finally tried Word 2007. And actually, as I am getting used to it, I am starting to like it.
In fact, on einteresting feature is the integration of a citation tool. Well, of course there have been a lot of such tools around and bibtex is far more powerful if latex is an option, but actually it comes quite handy. Well, would come quite handy, as in fact, it supports only a small number of citation styles and none of those which are important in computer science (for me ACM / IEEE citations or, as far as the German speaking area is concerned, the DIN standard). Well, the tool is based on XSL transformations, so why not edit the stylesheets and create your own style. I do know a bit about XML and XSLT :), but a stylesheet of more than 9000 lines is not easily adapted. Moreover, searching the Web also did not reveal too much of a hope that somebody else had done the work. Admittedly there is ond DIN 1505 stylesheet, but I seriously doubt that it is close to the standard, at least as fas as I know it. So I started to work myself on the stylesheet and, as a first try, finally have an ieee.XSLIEEE citation style which should be close enough. I continue to work on an adaption of the DIN style, but this turned out to be more work. Interview made at the E-Learn 2007AndroidPosted by Christian Safran in
Development
I recently stumbled across Google's Android platform. Sounds like a promising tool for me (espacially as, I am sure, quite a lot of people are going to face the challenge and try to win the competition. Personally I am interested in the SDK due to the fact that I would require some mobile tools for one of my research projects. Maybe I will start to development for Android rather than Symbian (which I first intended), or maybe better both.
One important question in this context is, of course, when the first mobile will be available which runs Android and how expensive it will be. End of LecturesPosted by Christian Safran in
Lectures
Last week was the last lecture for "Introduction into Structured Programming" for this term. By the beginning of this week I've finished the preparation of the last lecture recordings. All six recordings and the podcast are now available at the IICM website:
> www.iicm.edu/esp/vo/podcasts > blog.iicm.tugraz.at/esp/esp_podcast.xml ELearn 2007 - Photos and Travel TipsPosted by Christian Safran in
Conferences
Pictures from my trip to Quebéc City are now available online at picasa. My hotel (www.hotelmanoirdelatour.com) was a very affordable alternative to the official confreence hotels with roughly $90 a night. It is rather small, not very new (Victorian house), but clean, nice people and best of all in easy walking distance to the Quebec City Convention Centre and the old town.
SACS 2007Posted by Christian Safran in
Conferences
I am currently attending the "Significant Advances in Computer Science" congress in the Graz cityhall, which marks the celebration of 30 years of computer science at the Graz University of Technology.
Talks which I appreciated up to now: Ian Witten's talk about modern dragons  Bart Preneel's talk about Cryptography Thomas Ottmann's talk about AOF / Lecturnity, yet another lecture recording system (and his experiences with lecture recording) Lecture PodcastsPosted by Christian Safran in
Lectures
Like in the previous year we are recording the lectures of Introduction to Structured Programming with Camtasia and the TeleTeachingTool (although we are experienceing some smaller troubles with the latter). This time we decided to make these recordings also available as a podcast
 suitable for viewing on the iPod.This accompanies one of our research projects, which deals with the development of a streaming server to automatically resize the video for various media and add some other goodies (like time based tagging). Updating to LeopardPosted by Christian Safran in
Mac
Having experienced Tiger (MacOS X 10.4) only for a few weeks I have just updated to the copy of Leopard (10.5) I have just received. Thank's goodness I had no troubles, unlike some other guys reported in blogs. Anyway, the new OS is a bit slower. I will have a closer look at the features to see if it's worth the change.
Anyway, one of the features I did not like from the beginning is the glowing blue dot indicating the active applications. Luckily I have found a blog entry describing a way to deal with the problem. E-Learn 2007Posted by Christian Safran in
Conferences
I'm attending the E-Learn 2007 conference in Québec / Kanada. Today I had the chance to present a survey I have conducted with Denis Helic and Christian Gütl about Web 2.0 usage at the Graz Unversity of Technology.
I have had the first talk of the first day, which I pretty much appreciate. So I can use the rest of my time here to listen to other talks and no longer have to await my own. |
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aktualisiert: 21.09.2007