April 5, 2006

Awwww! Someone found OnTutoring useful!

From http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/a/o/aog103/Tutor%20Manual/feedback2_mxplan.html :

This set of instructions for the tutor to take into account when
tutoring is very helpful and lets the tutor know that it is not all
about lecturing the student in the session. The student should speak
more and the tutor should let the tutee set the agenda, this is how
the tutee will really learn the subject matter. Also the tutor must
keep a positive attitude so that the tutee stays positive about the
subject and does not just give up. I chose this list because it is
more descriptive than the first list, and it is more of an agenda
helper while the last list was overall ideas that should come natural
to the tutor.

I can use this list because it entails that the tutor will carry out
these tasks so that the tutee is comfortable working with me. I think
it is important for every new tutor to know that this is very
important. You want to make the student feel welcome in the tutoring
center, and you want to feel comfortable and personal in a session.

I would remove the parts that mention reading/writing because I am a
math tutor, but overall this is a great list that every tutor can use.

On Technorati: teaching, education

Random Japanese sentence: Ａ ｓｐｏｔ ｏｆ ｓｈｕｔ−ｅｙｅ は、また猫のいねむりともいわれている。猫は１度に２〜３分しか寝ない癖があるからだ。 “A spot of shut-eye” is also called a cat nap because a cat is in the habit of sleeping only a few minutes at a time.

Dr. Brenda Laurel presents The Human Face of Research

Ontario College of Art & Design
100 McCaul Street (Yahoo! Maps, Google Maps)
Toronto, Ontario M5T1W

Thursday, April 6, 2006 (6:30 PM – 8:30 PM)

An investigation into new approaches to design research, with an
emphasis on human-centred design research, set within the context of
emerging needs, technologies and forms of the 21st century.

Brenda Laurel is an acclaimed designer, researcher and writer, with a
25-year career in human-computer interaction (HCI) and expertise in
interactive narrative and cultural aspects of technology. One of the
founders of Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto, California,
Laurel conducted research into gender and technology, co-produced and
directed the Placeholder Virtual Reality project, and co-founded
Purple Moon a subsidiary acquired by Mattel in 1999. She serves
currently as Chair and faculty member of the graduate Media Design
program at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California,
and concurrently works as Senior Director and Distinguished Engineer
at Sun Microsystems Labs in Menlo Park, California. Laurel has
published extensively on interactive fiction, computer games,
autonomous agents, virtual relation and political artistic issues in
interactive media. She is editor of The Art of Human-Computer
Interface Design [Addison-Wesley 1990] and author of Computers as
Theatre [Addison-Wesley 1991].

Both presentations take place at OCAD’s Auditorium (Room 190), Nora
E. Vaughan Wing, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto. All are welcome to
attend, and admission is free. For information, visit www.ocad.ca or
call 416-977-6000.

Argh, argh, argh! I’ve already committed to going to the Toronto
Coranto dance practice…

E-Mail from David Crow

Random Japanese sentence: 夫が有名な科学者である婦人が向こうからやってくる。 He kept a white cat, who often played with a ball.

It’s exceedingly slow, but it works. Hooray, hooray! Kudos to
http://individual.utoronto.ca/bonert/wireless.html for good
instructions.

On Technorati: wireless, linux

Random Japanese sentence: 私は猫を家の外に出した。 I let the cat out of the house. Watashi wa neko o ie no soto ni dashita.

Boundary studies are nice for figuring out where something doesn’t
work and why it doesn’t work. I’ve been thinking about where tagging
and folksonomies break down for my FIS paper. Some of the cases I’ve
been looking at involve web services where you tag people.

Tagalag is a no-frills system for tagging
people. It doesn’t really offer anything in the way of immediate
personal incentive. In fact, the only thing you can do with it aside
from tagging people (e-mail address required) is put your XML feeds
together in an OPML list for easy aggregation. Very bare, and very few
users.

43people allows users to track whom
they’ve met and whom they want to meet. Popular tags include
occupation, gender, nationality, and location. Tags are also used to
describe characteristics such as “funny”, “glasses”, and “brilliant”.
This shows tagging as a clear faceted classification. “Find people
also tagged with…” makes it easier for people to search for
interesting combinations, and you can narrow the search to the current
city. Usual problems with keywords: “smart” vs “intelligent”, etc.
Particular problem: funny vs hilarious, relativity.

Consumating is the weirdest. It’s a
dating site with a much broader audience than the other two sites, and
you can tell that from the tags. The most popular tags follow the tag
profile of 43people, but the recent tags look like one-off tags used
for communication. That said, Consumating makes good use of tags in
conjunction with polls, prompting people to keep refining their
profile every week.

So: tagging other people is still a bit weird, but shows a bit of the
folksonomic piles-of-leaves flattened faceted classification. Tagging
one’s self, on the other hand, is more of self-expression, ad guiding
it with questions is pretty effective.

On Technorati: tagging, folksonomy, web2.0, research

Random Japanese sentence: すると、少し先に、またもう一匹、ふわふわした灰色のねこがめにつきました。そしてこれも前の二匹と全く同じくらいかわいいのです。 But then he saw a fuzzy gray cat over here which was every bit as pretty as the others, so he took it too.

Ah, I see! People could be using tags for messaging in order to get
around Consumating’s message limits. Or maybe it’s spam. Argh.

On Technorati: tagging, folksonomy