Hans-Georg E�er Sci: My Research Blog

ULIX blog

I've created a separate ULIX blog to document my progress with the implementation of ULIX.

Dagstuhl 2011 (internal workshop) slides

Here are the slides of my talk at the Erlangen-i1 Dagstuhl seminar in July 2011. They describe my current approach which is to port ULIX to the Intel architecture.

Poster at ITiCSE 2011

I've presented my poster "Combining Memory Management and Filesystems in an Operating Systems Course" at ITiCSE 2011 (June 2011). A one page abstract will appear in the proceedings of the conference; an extended version of this text is available as tech report.

Reading in August 2010...

- Bruce Schneier: "Secrets & Lies"
- M. Howard, D. LeBlanc, J. Viega: "19 Deadly Sins of Software Security"

Reading in July 2010...

- Christian Mertens: "Wie lehrt man IT-Sicherheit am besten? Überblick, Klassifikation und Basismodule", Diplomarbeit, 2007
- Felix Freiling, Jan Goebel: "Forensische Informatik", Lecture Notes, 2010
- Alexander Geschonneck: "Computer-Forensik"

Dagstuhl 2010 (internal workshop) slides

Here are the slides of my talk at the PI1 Dagstuhl seminar in June 2010. They contain the results of my comparison of two Operating Systems lectures in the summer terms of 2008 and 2009.

Dagstuhl 2009 (internal workshop) slides

Here are the slides of my talk at the PI1 Dagstuhl seminar in June/July 2009.

Methods: Creating a Moodle course for Linux newbies

Since I cannot experiment too much with Moodle in my Operating Systems course, I am currently creating a Moodle course with text, audio and video elements for Linux newbies. It is planned as a step-by-step introduction to Linux, covering live systems, disk installation, and first steps with the desktop and some standard apps.

The course will be available online for free, but it's only in German. Here's the link: linux-einsteigerkurs.de (So far, there's only a framework; I've created mostly empty course topics in a Moodle course.)

The Moodle website has some information about certification (MCCC: Moodle Certified Course Creator), and I've considered learning all the bits necessary for this certification. (Full access to the cert information requires registration on moodle.org.)

Literature: Engaging Learning: Designing e-Learning Simulation Games (Clark N. Quinn)

While googling Instructional Design I came across an interesting book by Clark N. Quinn in which he proposes methods of teaching via simulation games. I cannot say yet whether this will be useful, but I bought the book, and when time permits, I'll go through it and give a short summary on this webpage.

Methods: 4C/ID: Combining Memory Management and Filesystems

As a first measure of implementing the 4C/ID method I am developping a new partial curriculum for the two topics Memory Management and Filesystems. Since there are many similarities in the concepts, I want to teach them in parallel. One of 4C/ID's suggestions is to change between different tasks while increasing complexity of the shown examples/concepts.

I start with writing a lecture notes chapter for the two topics; the latest version is available here.

At the end of this term's lectures I plan to hand out a questionnaire that will ask the students what they think about this combination of the two topics. I will also evaluate the final test's results and compare them with last year's results (only for questions concerning MM and Filesystems) when the course was taught in a classic way (MM and Filesystems as separate topics).

OS Courses: Operating Systems Course in Summer 2009: with 4C/ID and Moodle

Next summer I'll once more be teaching Operating Systems I at Munich Univ. of Applied Sciences (Hochschule M�nchen), and this time I'll try to implement the 4C/ID model in parts of the course (see posting below). I also plan to move some of the coursework into a Moodle course after having played with this e-learning platform in the current semester (in my "Introduction to Computer Science" course). Lectures will start in March 2009.

Methods: Evaluating the 4C/ID Model

I'm currently scanning literature which covers the 4C/ID (Four Components Instructional Design) model, in particular I am reading "Ten Steps to Complex Learning", by the inventor of the 4C/ID model, Prof. Jeroen J. G. van Merrienboer, see Amazon book entry.

4C/ID focuses on the definition of

"learning tasks", which shall be modelled as "whole" tasks that have real-world relevance,
"supportive information" (which is fundamental, background information needed throughout the whole learning process and thus provided before the task starts),
"just-in-time information" which is presented during e.g. the step-by-step explanation of a procedure that shall be learnt, and
"part-task practice" which helps students automatize sub-tasks that should in general not be treated as separate tasks.

For a short introduction, see http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/4C/ID.

I want to use this model to structure the elements of an Operating Systems curriculum and see what consequences this application will have for the order of presentation.

Literature: Unterrichten mit Moodle (Kay Hoeksema, Markus Kuhn)

Having planned to experiment with Moodle for quite some time, two things came together which made me finally get it going: One of my colleagues at the publishing house I work for put this book on my desk, and I started teaching a new course (on Computer Science Basics) that might profit from a course management system.

So I've read the book which is primarily targeted at school teachers (not University lecturers). Different from many technical books, this one doesn't start with the details of installing and infinitely configuring the last details of the software -- instead the authors show several standard situations that can occur in teaching and explain how using Moodle might help in these cases.

Even when things do get technical there's no need to start downloading and installing -- the publishers, Open Source Press, provide a guest account for a Moodle installation on their webserver which already contains several of the course elements discussed in the book.

This is not a technical book for the Moodle hacker, but it's a gentle introduction to Moodle's concepts, which does a lot to motivate readers to start moodling.

Kay Hoeksema, Markus Kuhn
Unterrichten mit Moodle
Open Source Press; 1. Auflage 2008, 229 pages
http://www.amazon.de/dp/3937514589/

Methods: Literate Programming -- Implementing a Round Robin Scheduler

Following a suggestion of my doctoral advisor Prof. Freiling, I have read some literature about Literate Programming (see e.g. http://www.literateprogramming.com/) and experimented with the source code of a Round Robin Scheduler that I wrote for my Operating Systems class in the summer term 2008. Here is the full documentation that I developed with noweb (http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/noweb/): sched-rr10.pdf

The noweb source file can be found here (sched-rr10.nw) as well as the bibtex references file lit.bib.

Literature: Learning to Teach in Higher Education (Paul Ramsden)

Last week I read a very interesting book about Teaching in Higher Education. The author Paul Ramsden focuses on approaches to learning and differentiates between "deep" and superficial approaches, where the former ones lead to a proper understanding of the topics of a course, while the latter ones only bring separate pieces of knowledge into (short term) memory and do not enable students to see the overall picture or apply those knowledge fragments to new problems in a meaningful way.

Examples in the book are drawn from several fields of academic teaching, including Physics, Statistics, Medicine and Animal Science. Ramsden supports his arguments with references to lots of research papers which have measured the results of using different teaching approaches. An interesting find was that the highest correlation was that of excellent grades and a full agreement with statements such as "The staff are highly concerned in making sure that we understand."

A summary of the book could be: Think what kind of abilities you want to see students develop, what kind of change in the student's understanding do you want to achieve? Then search for ways to help the student make this change. Good teaching is an enabling of good learning.

Paul Ramsden
Learning to Teach in Higher Education
Routledge Chapman & Hall; 2nd edition 2003, 288 pages
http://www.amazon.de/dp/0415303451/; http://www.amazon.com/dp/0415303451/

Dagstuhl 2008 (internal workshop) slides

Here are the slides of my talk at the PI1 Dagstuhl seminar in June/July 2008.

Status Report 04/2008

I've put my first status report 04/2008 online.