JoshuaScotton.com » Java

Teaching in Romania

Joshua Scotton — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 15:51:34 +0000

I’m currently in Romania. The main reason for me being out here is to carry out some research experiments regarding the adaptive e-learning software I’ve developed.

However to do e-learning experiments we need students and apparently there are plenty of students in Romania, which is why I’ve spent the last two weeks teaching a Web Application Development course in at Bucharest University.

I’m also here to (hopefully) confirm some hypotheses made by Craig Stewart in his PhD thesis on cultural based adaptation. The main thrust of Craig’s idea is that different cultural backgrounds can influence user preferences in relation to user interfaces. To confirm this we are splitting the students into two groups to undertake an online revision course on PHP and then giving group 1 the ‘Romanian’ interface and group 2 an opposite interface, in this case the ‘UK’ interface. We switch the interfaces round for the second course on Perl and as the students are taking pre/post tests we hope to see more improvement in students who use the ‘Romanian’ layout.

None of the cultural adaptation theory is my research. However the benefit to me is a perfect opportunity to test the layout adaptation research I’ve been working on and then writing up over christmas and January. Also we’ve been testing my system on it’s own using a MySQL revision course to see if student’s learn faster using my the adaptive learning environment that I’ve developed, called ADE.

As I’ve spent much blood, sweat and all the small hours in creating my lessons and example web application (QuizMaster!) to go with them, I thought I’d make them available to the world in general, so here they are:

Web Development Examples

Bear in mind that if you think Java is a nice cup of coffee these slides and examples will definitely not be for you!

ANTLR + LAG

Joshua Scotton — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:21:51 +0000

Spent this afternoon looking into parsing the LAG file format quickly in Java, the idea is to formally specify LAG grammar using ANTLR. I’ve got part of the grammar finished and it’s starting to output AST graphs like the one in this post so it’s looking hopeful and will save a lot of coding work later.

XML and Eclipse

Joshua Scotton — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:38:01 +0000

I’m working on a Java CAF + LAG viewer at the moment, and just getting back into programming in Java using Eclipse after a short break programming in python and visual basic.

I’ve finished writing the code to load the domain model concepts from an xml file and then will be working on loading the concept attributes and the goal model.

Assignments

Joshua Scotton — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:04:53 +0000

I decided earlier this week that I’d better start work on my next assignments which are due in early September.

As they are the last assignments for the two courses I am currently studying for (actually my last two in this degree) I’m not allowed any extension period so I had worked through the books faster than usual to give myself ample time for the assignments.

It’s a good job I did because three computer and laptops, four operating systems and seventy-two hours later I had only just managed to get the particular netbeans project I would be working on for the first (M362) assignment to run!

My head was ready to explode as I faced every obscure error in the book, NullPointer and ClassNotFound exceptions abounded as I tackled problems on both Ubuntu and Windows XP on my laptop, then it was Java Web Start and Glassfish problems on another. When I finally got worried that I was running out of computers to install Java SDK 1.6 + Netbeans 5.5.1 + Glassfish + Java DB it finally worked.

So much for a headstart, I’m just about ready to start the assignment now, half a week later!

Let’s just hope I don’t get problems with the second assignment…