alex.polvi.net

woot, done with my formal 17 year education.

go beavs.

At the Civil war there was a snowmobile demo. They had pro-snowmobilers (yep, they have those) doing back-flips and other crazy stuff off of a huge pile of show. Well, this snow got moved into a giant pile in the Reser foyer. What happened? A group of students saw an opportunity, “Snow, a bench, why not?” one of them noted.

I love the innovation.

The best part (and funniest) is that they were “sponsored” by Domino’s. This sponsorship consisted of putting a domino’s banner on top of the pile of snow. It was awesome.

This weekend started last Thursday with a trip to Portland. Some of my long time friends (Lucas, Logan, and Aaron) had their first show since moving to the most sustainable city in the USA. Aleson Tap is made up of true musicians, which allows them to put on an awe inspiring show.

Lucas, making stuff up

Then, on Friday afternoon, I headed out with my new fishing buddy, John, to the McKenzie. We didn’t have any luck, but it was nice to get out on the water.

John on the McKenzie

Saturday was equally exciting. I got on the bus. Well, kind of. “Team Corvallis” of the Oregon Bus Project headed up to Washington County (somewhere in Beaverton). We met up with the rest of the 50ish volunteers there. I canvassed for Tobias Read, a democrat running for state representative. All said and done, I knocked on 52 doors. Canvassing was new to me, so it was a little intimidating talking to strangers about a candidate I had just met. It all worked out — nobody beat me up or sent their dog after me.

THEN, once we got home it was time to party it up with some friends. First, I went over to the lovely Andrea’s to carve pumpkins.

Firefox pumpkin!

After watching American Beauty (awesome movie) we headed over to Nelson’s for his birthday party. There, I got to catch up with a bunch of friends I had not seen in awhile.

Things did not slow down on Sunday. Team “pale hax0r” (Brandon, Stuart, and I), banded together to compete in the Beaver Fever Duathalon. The race consisted of a 5k run (me), 30k road race (Stuart), and another 5k run (Brandon). Brandon and I both PR’d (vs. our race last weekend). I even won a $25 gift certificate during the raffle!

I’m totally airborn!

Stuart dashing in to start Brandon off

And I thought the Rouge rafting trip two weekends ago was going to be hard to beat!

… ohh, and I’ve been working on the OSEL a lot. It is sort of the pinnacle of everything I have been working towards related to free software on campus. Check it out!

I guess now I just need to study for midterms. :\

Yup, we resolved 347226. See the full details and photos.

You might not know what it is… but you still should use this blog button. All great paths have their foot prints in snow.

5/25 @ 5:25

snow in the quad.

In this edition of “blog about an peer reviewed journal” we take a look at the latest Communications of the ACM. The “President’s Letter” by David A. Patterson regarding Computer Science educations, “Computer Science Education in the 21st Century” will be the focus. I am an Oregon State University (OSU) Computer Science (CS) major, in the 21st century, so this article was extremely relevant. As I read this paper in the Library, I could not keep myself from raising my arms and shouting. The essay touched on topics that have been advocating for years, theories that I have been discussing with my friends, and classes that I am actively considering purposing to my CS department. Even writing this post I am amazed by the pertinence of this paper.

The letter starts with the bold phrase, “To draw students to CS, we must first look to create a curriculum that reflects the exciting opportunities and challenges of IT today versus the 1970s. Future students and faculty would greatly benefit from an reinvigorating CS curriculum. (pg 1)” I could stop reading right there. Those two sentences sum up the problem with computer science in its entirety. To put it in my own words, CS is a field that changes so rapidly it would be foolish if the education did not shift with it. The first raised point in the article is that we should be using more current tools and software libraries. I could not agree more. The paper uses an example in which schools that use the Java programming language should use current development tools like Eclipse and JUnit. My computer science peer circle has been doing just this (even using those tools) and it has contributed directly to our success. We could go even further by encouraging OSU undergrads to use the contemporary languages to complete homework assignments or offer a “Trends in Computer Science” class highlighting current movements in our field. It would be so easy to supplement the piles of traditional CS curriculum with a few relevant hot topics.

Dr. Patterson goes on to talk about “Course I would Love to Take #1, Join the Open Source Movement“. At this point my exclamation in the library was audible enough to turn heads. I have a reason to be excited, the President of the ACM is advocating the exact cause I have been talking about for the past two years. This shows that I am not completely off the rocker. He elaborates on the example of using open source software to help learn large systems. The pitch to incoming undergrads would be that you could work on something relevant. Why do I love open source software? I can contribute to something relevant. With relevance comes practicality, and we are put in a situation where students are learning their discipline by doing. This is a feature of Computer Science. A civil engineer is going to have a hard time building a bridge in class, but a CS major can write a patch and contribute to a real system, even while they are learning.

The Oregon State Computer Science program is in a unique position to adopt open source software into education and successfully become leaders. This paper is further evidence that this is a practice worth pursuing.

Find the full letter here.

One of the best things that has happened to me this term is my writing 214 class encouraging me to read peer reviewed journals. My only prior experience with such journals is seeing them outside a professors door waiting for office hours. The topic were always very specific, technical, and over my head. For those reasons I have never really had any interest in reading them.

“The communications of the ACM” has been my journal of choice. It turns out that all my prior journal stereotypes were wrong. Sure, there may be some overly convoluted titles, but the articles are very relevant to my life and career. With that, I give you the moral of the blog post: Read your peer reviewed journals.

Browsing the latest Communications of the ACM I came across an article called “Inside risks: Software and higher education“, by John C. Knight and Nancy G. Leveson. The column argues that many contemporary computer science educations fall short providing adequate training for the real world. I would hope that this does not apply to my program, but seeing as my school is merely dreaming of having a top 25 program, I am left a bit worried.

The column goes on to talk about the many common “deficiencies” in computer science education. As I read the issues, I applied it to my current education and shuddered. Not because we heavily violated the authors concerns, but because as a student there is no way to tell how the program is doing.

One of the most troubling issues is the lack of accountability. As an undergrad I have no idea how qualified my instructors are to teach their respective subjects. I have to walk into class and blindly trust that what I am being told is accurate and relevant. Furthermore, I pay for this with no consumer data backing up my decision. Would I spend tens of thousands on a new car with out doing any research beforehand? No. Or maybe education is not a manufacturing industry, and instead it is a service industry. Still, no matter how much money I throw at it I will never get a service level agreement. And I am not alone. There are roughly 20,000 of us at OSU for some reason agree to pay for a service that offers no accountability or guarantee. Have we been fooled?

What happens if my school did not adequately prepare me? Who is accountable? I asked and paid for a computer science education, in turn they took my money and educated me. If I am under-prepared it is clearly arguable that it is the programs fault, not mine. However, can I ask for my money back? Unlikely.

The next natural question is, how do you determine ones preparedness for the work-force? Is it the ability to get a job? If that is the case I will definitely not give my classroom education credit. The Open Source Lab is where I had preparation for that. They even paid me!

Now it sounds like I am really down on my education, but that is not the case. If I pay a lot of money for something I want to know that I got something valuable in return. Right now I cannot see it. I honestly hope this is one of those “young and ignorant” moments and I just cannot see the importance of it because I am right in the middle of it. Can someone assure me that is the case?

The results of the funding round of 2006 for the technology resource fee are now public.

In case you did not know, every term there is a $100 fee assessed to all students — to help fund technology related endeavors.

2006 proposals and results

A recent assignment for technical writing used collaborative writing. The plan was to get in groups of 3-4 and write an essay analysing various forms of visual literacy. As soon as I heard the word collaboration in my writing class, I went to wikipedia. Sure enough, the visual literacy page was a stub.

It took a little bit of convincing, but once the other guys had a chance to play with it, they seemed to like the idea. We could all work on the document, track who did what, and publish our material (this is what intimidated one member the most). As an extra bonus, we did not have to email around a word document.

It worked! Still pretty rough, and not done, but… I present you…. the wikipedia page on Visual literacy.