Sunday, December 11, 2011

CSL Pecha Kucha Presentations

Here are some of the presentations from our last day of class. I will add the presentations that CSLers send my way!

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Final Send Off

Thank you so much everyone for coming today to our final class.

Thank to you the CSL students who bravely gave wonderful presentations (using Prezzie!) about their placements. They all taught us a lot about not-for-profits organizations and what goes on at the University and in the local area.

Thank you also to the three students, Kelsey, Annalise and Julianna, who created a visual and musical wrap-up of the term using social media! Amazing work!


Lecture 35: Final Day of Classes

Hi everyone!

And here we are, on the very last day of ALES204 - I know you'll miss it! :)

REMINDER: Your E-portfolio is due today by 17:00. Please send the link to your blog to your TA. And, don't forget to include the links to your FIVE comments in your final blog post.


I'd like to thank you all for coming to class and participating both in class and through the class blog, your blogs and twitter. I'd also like to wish you all a lovely festive season. On that note, here is a video from 16 year old Winnipeg student Sean Quigley, who harnessed social media (youtube) and is now famous: a Canadian wintery rendition of The Little Drummer Boy.





On our last day, as mentioned, we will have the exciting Pecha Kucha presentations for the CSL students. They are going to share with us a little bit about what they've been working on this term. Perhaps you'll be so interested, you'll want to enroll in CSL in another term.

After the Pecha Kucha presentations I would like you all to take about 10 minutes to answer a survey I've created. I'm very interested to hear your thoughts on the course, what you learnt and perhaps what you would still like to learn. I'll use this information in my next course design! I appreciate your input and your participation.

You can fill in the form right here (scroll down a bit) or access the google doc (but of course!) here. Note, feel free to work with a partner.

And finally, we'll conclude our class with a special send-off from three of your classmates, Kelsey MacDonald, Julianna Damer and Annalise Young.

Monday, December 5, 2011

Lecture 34: Futurecasting

Wow, it is that time of year already - two classes left in the entire term and today will be the final lecture!







As you know, Wed. we have some fun lined up for us consisting of the sure-to-be informative pecha kucha presentations from our CSL students and a special sum-up from Kelsey MacDonald, Julianna Damer and Annalise Young.


 Here is my own little summary of this term's Ales204 class. I used storify (mentioned in the lecture) to curate some photos, tweets, audioboos and more that were published on the web with our course tag: #ALES204. Enjoy and feel free to comment on the stories themselves (a new feature storify recently added).


Take a look at this prediction for the Future of Science from the Institute for the Future:


A Multiverse of Exploration: The Future of Science 2021
 CNN features map in "A look at 'the future of science' 2021"
Future of Science map - click to view large image

Invisibility cloaks. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence. A Facebook for genes. These were just a few of the startling topics IFTF explored at our recent Technology Horizons Program conference on the "Future of Science." More than a dozen scientists from UC Berkeley, Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, Scripps Research Institute, SETI, and private industry shared their edgiest research driving transformations in science. MythBusters' Adam Savage weighed in on the future of science education. All of their presentations were signals supporting IFTF's new "Future of Science" forecast, laid out in a new map titled "A Multiverse of Exploration: The Future of Science 2021." The map focuses on six big stories of science that will play out over the next decade: Decrypting the Brain, Hacking Space, Massively Multiplayer Data, Sea the Future, Strange Matter, and Engineered Evolution. Those stories are emerging from a new ecology of science shifting toward openness, collaboration, reuse, and increased citizen engagement in
scientific research.
We are delighted to share the map with you, under a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. We hope you enjoy it and find it provocative. Think of "A Multiverse of Exploration: The Future of Science 2021" as a star chart of possibility, pointing the way toward opportunities for wonder, knowledge, and insight. Use it to raise questions about how your life and work may change in light of the startling transformations that science may bring about in the next ten years. Indeed, every forecast could be rephrased as a "what if" question. What if you could record your dreams? What if you could design a life form? What if you could launch a company in orbit? Your answers to those questions can help inform decisions in the present. Inside this map, you'll find plenty of space to think.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Ales204 Blog and Analytics


Miarcel Salanthe created Webpages As Graphs, a visualizer applet that will turn any weblink into a graphic form. You can view the graph being plotted in real-time as little colored nodes branch out into snowflake-like patterns. Each color dot represents a certain aspect of the web structure, such as blue if for links, red is for tables, violet for images and so on.
Webpages As Graphs uses Processing, Traer Physics and HTMLParser. Salathe has also provided instructions on how to print out the graph into poster-size.


via PSFK.



Have a look at our own "snowflake"

Image created here

Friday, December 2, 2011

Lecture 33: Online Class


Online class! By the end of class (9:50) please complete the following exercise:
As the new editor–in–chief of a significant journal published by Reed Elsevier you would like to modernize the academic publishing process. You are eager to implement “open peer review” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_peer_review even after Nature’s experiment with this form of peer review failed (see http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/nature05535.html). However, a more recent experiment by Noah Wardrip-Fruin on the Grand Text Auto blog was more successful (see http://grandtextauto.org/2009/05/12/blog-based-peer-review-four-surprises/).  Do you try to convince your colleagues to try open peer review or are you daunted by examples such as Nature’s?
Upload your 3-5-paragraph response to Google docs. Make sure you share your document so it is visible to anyone and add a link to the document as a comment on the Lecture 33 post. Be sure to e-mail the link to your TA and I as well. 

Friday, November 25, 2011

Lecture 30: Interview Analysis

Today's lecture is going to be in two parts. Those of you who have been following along on Twitter, would have seen that we'll have fellow student, Ian McNeill tall us about some software development he's made using what he's learnt in #ALES204. Exciting!

 This is what Ian says about his presentation:


LMS stands for "Learning Management System" and is used in one form or another by practically every company today.  LMS software has a large variety of different purposes, but they all follow the same structural format (Information presentation followed by Testing and online).  Over the last year and a half I have been making my own LMS software and you will notice much of what we learned in ALES 204 has been incorporated into the presentations!

For the second half of the class (if time permits), we'll practise analysing an interview. You will have the opportunity to find an interview related to your interest or field, and then you can analyse it using a google doc which can be found here.

Note: PLEASE make sure you *save a copy* of the google doc rather than simply writing in it! more like a workshop where you'll have most of the class to practise what we've been covering all week.




Thursday, November 24, 2011

Using Google for Research

During the lectures I often noted how useful google can be to find academic research. We talked about using google scholar and the advanced search function. With that in mind, I'm sure you'll appreciate this infographic from Jenica Rhee.


Get more out of Google
Created by: HackCollege
Here is Xiaoming's and Arisha's post from Audioboo! Great work ladies!

http://audioboo.fm/xjia3

Courtney

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

CSL Lab's Audioboo's

Hello folks!

Here is my CSL lab's audioboo recordings. They did an excellent job (I am so impressed by these ladies!). Their interview was a journalistic style, since this made most sense based on aligning this work with what they are doing in CSL for their placements.

They interviewed each other and in small groups, sicne we have such a small class and this was great practice for them. What I have suggested, since they have done the itnerviews about their placements (the key pieces of info on their placements) is that they could perhaps offer these recordings to their placement coordinators to be used as a promo or info pweice for their actual placements.

Linking all their work in labs, and what they've learned from class, to the course assignments and their placements has been critical to them, and has offered them added value in practicing relevant tasks from learned skills so that they can use these in 'real life', in their placements.

Thanks folks!
Courtney Hughes

Kalin, Cassandra and Jamie on SustainSU
http://boos.audioboo.fm/attachments/1829913/sustain-su.mp3?audio_clip_id=557327

Tania and Angele on Writer's Guild
http://audioboo.fm/boos/557282-tania-boyko-s-interview

Wagma and Jiayue on U of A's Infolink
http://audioboo.fm/boos/557295-infolink-interview?utm_campaign=detailpage&utm_content=retweet&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

Arisha (Voices for Choices) and Xiaoming's (Alberta CareGivers Association) are TBA - I will post it once they get it done :)