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Tech Report kmi-98-14 Abstract


Has anyone seen this program? Synchronous and asynchronous help for novice programmers
Techreport ID: kmi-98-14
Date: 1998
Author(s): John Domingue and Paul Mulholland
Web Version

This paper describes recent developments in our approach to teaching computer programming in the context of a part-time Masters course taught at a distance. Within our course, students are sent a pack which contains integrated text, software and video course material, using a uniform graphical representation to tell a consistent story of how the programming language works. The students communicate with their tutors over the phone and email. The main problem with relying on the telephone and email for communication is that it is very difficult to establish the context for a discussion. The student wishes to talk about their program and it's behaviour. The tutor cannot see their program work. Secondly, tutors will often find themselves giving the same explanation to a number of students on the same day. Current facilities do not allow for the effective reuse of explanations. We hope to alleviate these problems through our Internet Software Visualization Laboratory (ISVL), which supports both synchronous and asynchronous communication. ISVL can be used as a synchronous communication medium whereby one of the users (generally the tutor) can provide an annotated demonstration of a program and its execution. Also, ISVL can be used to support asynchronous communication, helping students who work at unsociable hours by allowing the tutor to prepare short educational movies for them to view when convenient. The ISVL environment runs on a conventional web browser and is therefore platform independent, has modest hardware and bandwidth requirements, and is easy to distribute and maintain. Future work will consider how search agents and ontological classification can be used to support the student in accessing useful resources.
 
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Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities