The Third Bit

The web, like all network technologies before it from the mobile phone to writing itself, has the potential to enable a qualitative change in our capacity as people, organizations and societies. We are starting to see the first glimmerings of how our research capacity might change with projects like Galaxy Zoo and Polymath but these remain isolated examples. What will it take to exploit the network capacity that the web brings us to enable a step change in the efficiency and effectiveness of our research?

This seminar will be the first in a series highlighting new opportunities to network knowledge through application of knowledge media design values and methodologies.

Announcements

Releng 2013 is a one day workshop (co-located with ICSE) to bring together release engineers and researchers to discuss the challenges in release engineering and develop areas for further research. Areas of discussion include research and practice of all activities in between regular development and actual usage of a software product by the end user, i.e., integration, build, test execution, packaging and delivery of software. The conference is May 20 in San Francisco and deadline for submission of talks in February 7th. For more information see http://releng.polymtl.ca.

Announcements

For the past few years, Jon Udell has been working on a project called ElmCity. Its ostensible aim is to do for calendars what the RSS ecosystem has done for news: allow everyone to be an author, but also make it easy to aggregate, filter, and share information from a wide variety of sources. Its deeper aim, though, is to teach people by example that this is what the web is for—that it’s a way to re-mix information to meet your needs, when and how you want.

After several false starts, ElmCity now has an aggregated calendar for the city of Toronto that combines data in real time from a bunch of sources. If you want your own events to show up, you don’t send Jon entries for its database, because it doesn’t have one. Instead, you give him the URL for your event feed, so that whenever you add something new, it’ll show up automatically. That’s how to think like the web, and if we’re going to teach kids anything about computing in grade school, that ought to be part of it.

Note: if you’d like to help ElmCity grow, please contact Jon: he’s always looking for new curators.

Announcements, Government 2.0

PPIG Workshop 2012, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK 5th-th-7th September.

Deadlines

Full Papers 10th July
Short Papers/Work in progress 8 August
Doctorial Consortium 31st July

The Psychology of Programming Group (PPIG) invites abstracts for the 2012 meeting, to be held at Newcastle University, UK.

PPIG wants papers on the psychological aspects of every area of software development: education, language design, software engineering, programmer team working etc. Papers can adopt a strictly theoretical approach, be entirely empirical, or feature a mix of both—whatever is appropriate. The list of possible themes has grown over the years and currently looks like this :

• Empirical studies of programming
• Programming education and skills acquisition
• Human centred design and evaluation of programming languages, tools and infrastructure
• Programming and human cognition
• Human Computer Interaction issues in programming
• Team/co-operative work in programming
• End user programming
• Distributed programming, globalisation, work in large teams
• Free/libre open source software development
• Software engineering methods, planning, estimation, agility etc.
• Gender, age, culture and programming
• New paradigms in programming
• Code quality, readability and re-use
• Mistakes, bugs, and error handling
• Working with notation
• Specialist and domain centred programming tools and languages
• Unconventional interactions and quasi-programming

However, we are open to any new ideas and topics.

SUBMISSION

Full papers should be 12 pages or less; Short Papers and Work in Progress reports are also welcome. To format your paper, please use the PPIG Word Template or the LaTeX template, which will be available from the website which will be online shortly. The programme committee will review all submitted papers and, based on their reviews, each accepted paper will be classified as a “Full Technical Paper” or a “Work in Progress Report”. All papers accepted for presentation at PPIG 2012 will appear in the workshop proceedings and be archived on the PPIG website.

Authors may also submit a Short Paper or a Work in Progress Report, clearly marked as such, to describe conjectural, late-breaking or tentative results. The refereeing process will be suitably lighter. Papers for the workshop should be submitted to Lindsay.marshall@ncl.ac.uk with a subject line reading “PPIG2012 Paper Submission: [Title of Paper]” and have a PDF version of the paper paper as an attachment.

Doctoral Consortium

The PPIG Workshop will again hold a doctoral consortium. The event is for research students at all stages of doctoral study. The event will include brief introductions by each of the students (about 10 minutes, plus time for questions, depending on the numbers involved) and sessions on the process and practice of Ph.D. research. Experienced researcher will take part as ‘discussants’ to give other perspectives and to provide feedback on individual research programs.

Submission: applications must provide an overview of your research (max 5 pages) and be submitied by email to M.Kutar@salford.ac.uk with the subject ‘PPIG2011 doctoral consortium submission’. The submission should be in PDF format.

Dates

• 10 July: submission of draft papers
• 10 August: authors will be notified
• 22 August: final camera-ready copy to be received

Announcements

I’m pleased to announce that Jeremy Banks has been accepted by Google Summer of Code 2012 to work on Slide Drive, a web-native presentation tool. You can follow Jeremy’s progress on his blog.

Announcements

I’m very pleased to announce that the Sloan Foundation has generously agreed to fund six months of work by Software Carpentry and the Mozilla Foundation. You can read more on the Software Carpentry blog; it’s going to be a lot of work, but I’m looking forward to it.

Announcements, Software Carpentry

I will be running a P2PU course starting in January on teaching free-range learners how to program and build stuff on the web. The blurb is below; anyone who wants to can sign up to follow along or take part (we expect it will require 3-4 hours/week from mid-January to some time in April). I’m not an expert on these subjects by any means, but I’ve learned a few things from running Software Carpentry that I think are worth sharing, and hope that this course will give me a chance to learn more.  (Note that I’m primarily interested in how to teach adults outside traditional classroom settings, so that will be the course’s initial focus, but its long-term direction will depend on the interests of participants.)

How to Teach Webcraft and Programming to Free-Range Students

What do we know about how novices learn webcraft and programming, why do we believe it, and how can we apply that knowledge to free-range learners?

Right now, people all over the world are learning how to write programs and create web sites, but or every one who is doing it in a classroom there are a dozen free-range learners. This group will focus on how we, as mentors, can best help them. Topics will include:

• What does research tell us about how people learn?
• Why are the demographics of programming so unbalanced?
• What best practices in instructional design are relevant to free-range learners?
• What skills do people need in order to bake their own web?
• How are grassroots groups trying to teach these things now?
• What’s working and what isn’t?

Announcements, Learning

I just signed the “Research Without Walls” pledge: effective today,I will assist in the peer review process (as a reviewer, board/committee member, chair, editor, etc.) only for conferences, journals, and other publication venues that make all accepted publications available to the public for free via the web. If you believe that sharing ideas is the heart and soul of science, please sign up as well.

Announcements

Brian Kernighan, whose books on C, Unix, and programming design shaped the thinking of an entire generation of software developers, has a new book out called D Is For Digital: What a well-informed person should know about computers and communications. I’ve spent 20 years trying to write like him; very excited to get my copy. Equally excited that he has gone with a print-on-demand publisher rather than one of the big players: it’s a sign of the times…

Announcements

Announcing Workshop #2: HTML & CSS for Absolute Beginners – Brought to you by Ladies Learning Code and the Yorkville Media Centre

On September 24th, join us for our second Ladies Learning Code workshop as we tackle HTML & CSS with help from the Yorkville Media Centre. Mark and Liane will be leading us, and in total, you’ll enjoy the company of 20 developers dedicated to helping you learn some awesome new skills.

Register now!

Announcements