open – Data Science, Data Analytics and Machine Learning Consulting in Koblenz Germany

What happened to Vensenya's "Changing mindset" project?

Rene — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 12:27:12 +0000

Two and a half years ago I posted about Simons project which at that time was just starting and to me still very fuzzy. Still I donated 150 Euro and asked others to do the same. It was the trust I had in him that it would be working out great even though it was still not clear how.
Today I have received an email, that the project has become much more focused and will be finally going public in September 2015. The will produce a tv series that will be published on youtube. Have a look at their trailer in German language.

Together with youngsters they produce a series about the live and problems and challenges of youngsters. They try to focus on a growing mind set approach that comes from “I can never do this” and focuses on “I will be able to do this.” The best thing is the authenticity of the project. It is done with non professional actors, cameramen, cutters. Also the equipment is borrowed. It seems that the project will get a really high quality but is kind of low budget – right in the sense of: “Of course we can do this if we really want to and we don’t need much money.”
In that spirit they have a second crowd founding campaign (which I guess is much more about publicity than really attracting money) which I warmly recommend to support:
https://socialimpactfinance.startnext.com/kaempfergeist
I will certainly keep you up to date as soon as the result will be published! But first I will send an email to Simon and ask him if it will be possible to use an open license for the material. I guess they want to earn money by licensing but still for a social and crowd founded project I think an open license would be appropriate.

Creating an award winning video doesn’t need much technology or technical know how.

Rene — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 15:18:18 +0000

After I won the community award in the Wikipedia Video contest in the category documentation and interview with my pointer in C video I would like to share some experiences on creating educational videos. This is mainly to encourage anyone to do the same as I did.
Have a look at the winning video again if you don’t remember it

In my opinion it doesn’t take much more than a real interest in education. So the video that won the award was used for me in a real teaching scenario. I only had one dry run before recording my one and only and published version of it (which still with more iterations could be a little bit shorter, more focused and slicker). Most time (about 3 hours) for the process was in planning how to present the learning content – something everyone teaching something should do anyway. The entire time it took me was less than 5 hours including planning, dryrun, recording, uploading and sharing with students.
The impact: From originally 16 Students that where participents in my class the video has been watched about 10 thousand times by now. Especially it was included in the wikipedia article on pointers and thus is hopefully a helpful resource for people interested in that topic.
Most important I did not need expensive technology. As you can see from the attached picture I did not even have a proper way of fixing my digital camera. The microphone was the internal one from that very digital camera. I used a couple of books together with a ruler to bring the camera to the correct position in order to be able to have a nice shot of the whiteboard that I was using. Other than that I used two lamps for proper light and lowered the outside courtains of the window.

What I am basically saying: Everyone who owns a camera (which most people nowadays do) can take a video and explain something. You can contribute your explaining video to the growing knowledge base on wikimedia commons. You can contribute to the ongoing discussion weather wikipedia articles should be enhanced with videos or not. Most important if you do everything like me on the whiteboard you will most certainly not run into any of the copyright problems that I ran before.
So what are you waiting for? I am sure you are an expert on something. Go and give it a shot and share your video here in the comments but also via wikimedia commons and maybe include it even within some wikipedia article that is fitting well.

Please Google make an open system of the self driving car

Rene — Thu, 29 May 2014 14:22:59 +0000

This is a copy of an answer I left on Larry Page’s Google Plus profile after another announcement about the progress of the self driving car:
How come you have a patent for the self driving taxi company in the USA? I always thought of you as a creative role model who wanted to change the world towards a better place.
Why not leaving the competition open? I really loved Jonathan Rosenberg’s blog entry in which you ask for openness. This inspired me in my PhD program a lot to make everything open.
I was so keen when you announced the self driving car as it was my childhood dream to have self driving cars in the world. (Visiting the United states in 2001 I learnt programming in high school and in my book I drafted my own first class Schema for a self driving car.)
After you announced the self driving car I was keen to build up the taxi company. Contributing to the progress in transportation and logistics and helping the process of automation.
There is much criticism against Google but after your recent TED talk I thought “Larry is really the guy who doesn’t care for money but wants to make progress to the world!” Before I often wondered why you didn’t take part in Bill Gates giving pledge. But I realized that you needed your capital for building stuff like the car or glasses. I thought that this is also an amazing way to change the world towards a better place.

In the talk you mentioned shared economy and too many cars in LA. I thought “Great, this is exactly where the Taxi company comes in.” and I was happy to realize that you already seem to have the same ideas. I even expected Google to create a taxi company.
Anyway please give the self driving car to the world and don’t own all the applications of it. Please build open systems and give people the chance to contribute to the ecosystem around the self driving car.
Closed systems will slow down the progress as you say yourself in the above mentioned blog article.

Teaching Web Science (web architecture and Web ethics) to students

Rene — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:52:51 +0000

In July 2012 we taught a course for the German National Summer School for high school students. The course consisted of 50 hours over 14 days. Due to some specific settings of the Summer School we had to make a few adjustments to the format of our curriculum and lectures. Still we gathered some good experiences for future teaching. The main lesson learnt was that knowledge of the Internet protocol suite contributes to a better understanding of the decentralized and open aspects of the web. This leads to a better comprehension of the ethical aspects of the web like net neutrality, copyright, relevance paradox, censorship and others. We propose that any curriculum about Web Science should include a fair part of lectures on Web Architecture and the Internet protocol Stack.

Course context (level, students, discipline, etc.)

The course was designed for 16 highly gifted high school students (11th and 12th grade). The level was supposed to be manageable for a second year undergraduate student. Since our students came from different grades and schools we were forced to sacrifice some course time to teach some basic programming skills. Thus we could not cover all the aspects of Web Science. Instead we focused on three main course objectives:

Course objectives and targeted competencies

By the end of the course our students should…

understand the current web architecture in particular the decentralized and open aspects.
gain the ability to form and defend a solid opinion on currently ongoing ethical discussions related to the Web.
realize that the study of the Web needs much broader skill set than knowledge about Computer Science.

Course content (Structure, sections, topics, references)

All students were asked to prepare a talk and read the book ”Weaving the Web” by Sir Tim Berners-Lee before the summer school started. Ten of the talks included the technical foundations starting with binary numbers going all the way to the application layer and all the necessary protocols. This included the theoretical study of IP, TCP and HTTP as well as routing algorithms (BGP ) and DNS. To ensure a better understanding the students had to form groups and implement a simple Web Server and a Web Client that were able to process HTTP1.0 GET requests during course time. This was done using the Java Programming Language and the socket classes from the Java API. These topics have been covered in the first week of the course. In the second half we focused on the ethics of the web. After each talk on an ethical topic which was supposed to give an overview for about 20 minutes we entered a 2 hour group discussion. For example for the discussion on net neutrality we knew the following groups of interests from the overview talk: Large internet providers, big web companies, small web companies, politicians, consumers. Students were randomly assigned to one of these groups. Within 10 minutes they had to prepare a list of arguments that would reflect the interests of their particular group as well as arguments they would expect from other groups. While discussing the issue on a round table they had to find a good solution respecting the technical nature of the web and the interests of their group.

Evaluation methods (Tests, projects, papers,etc.)

Even though the Summer School is very competitive participation is voluntary so there can’t be an exam or something similar in the end. Also all work had to be completed during the 50 hours course time without any home work assignments. We had three evaluation methods to ensure the comprehension of the course content.
1. Hacking Project: As already mentioned students implemented a Web Server and Web Client during the first half of the course. Being in groups of 2 or 3 students and being new to programming we teachers helped students out which gave us a nice feedback whether or not students understood the content.
2. Oral presentation: After the middle of the course students had to prepare and give a presentation to be consumed by an interdisciplinary audience i.e the students from other courses of the summer school, which are all not covering any IT topics. We asked the students to create a theatre role-play of what happens if someone types www.wikipedia.org into a web browser and hits the enter key. All students placed routing tables on the seats for the audience, created TCP / IP packets (filled with candy that represented the time to live) and routed DNS requests as well as HTTP requests together with the TCP handshake around the audience in the class room demonstrating that the basic decentralized web architecture was understood by everyone in the course.
3. Paper Writing: During the last days of the course the students were expected to collectively prepare a 25 pages documentation with scientific standards of what they have learned during the summer school. The process of creating this documentation is not only guided by us teachers but gives also a nice feedback loop to see if the goals of the course have been achieved.
Overall we can say that the concept of the course worked really well. Especially putting such a high focus on the Web Architecture and actually letting students implement protocols helped to gain a deeper understanding.