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Thursday, July 12, 2007
It's another slow day. Most of my projects are kind of stalled right now. Even though I've been wading through php for the past few days, I'm still not entirely certain where in the server code the minimization of slides is happening. I've emailed James, another undergrad who's been working on UP since last school year and who knows the server much, much better than I do, but I haven't heard back yet. The GUI issues are C# issues, and I can't figure out what's causing them. Hopefully, someone who knows C# will be able to look at it sometime soon. It's not a huge priority, since there is a working GUI already, but it would be nice to finish. The redraw issues I've been sort of incidentally experimenting with; apparently they don't appear until there are a certain number of instructor slides and note slides in a deck. Unfortunately, this number seems to be about five. This is a little more info on this particular issue than I had before, though, so it may be helpful later.
I have an idea for what I want to do for my larger summer project. It will definitely involve implementing static comments, so that there can be discussion about lecture slides even after the lecture, and possibly a different slide view, a 2D grid instead of a slide strip and the current slide, making it easier to view the entire lecture at once. Ideally, I'd like to make it possible for students to take notes that keep track of ink iterations like CP does, so that students can have them for their own reference, and to make their own classrooms if they're dealing with an instructor who doesn't use UP. I haven't talked details over with Beth yet, though, so I'm not sure what's in the scope of this summer. I think the research-y part will end up being education research on the impact that some of these changes have on learning. We'll see.
Last night, I went to see the new Harry Potter movie with a bunch of people. There was a loosely linked group of about 15 or 20 people, most but not all of whom know Liz. I have to say, I liked the movie better than the book, but part of that I think is that I didn't much care for the book. It was a fun group of people to see the movie with -- pretty much everyone had read the books, and was happily anticipating book 7.
Now I'm off to see Krista's class (I guess?) on AI that she's teaching for COSMOS. Should be cool.