Strange Aeons

Commencing Countdown. Engines On.

It is rather late in the season for me to address this now but maybe by posting about it I will remind myself to try out some of these ideas next year (<ominous clouds/dark horizons>assuming there is a teaching next year for me</ominous clouds/dark horizons>). Over at casting out nines Robert has made a few points about how he begins the teaching year, for example, spending about ten minutes on course structure before diving straight into the material - something that I could afford to do more often- rather than spending most, if not all, of the first session telling the students what to expect. As one of the commenters points out, this approach has to be differentiated depending upon the level of the students, more support and gentle introductions for first and second years versus diving straight in for the third, fourth, and postgrads. Screen casts to illustrate aspects of course management are an interesting idea, something that I think I will definitely try out with Araucaria next year, as, year on year, students have complained about how unintuitive the interface is. With course management though I don't think that even first year computing students need a screencast to introduce them to using wordpress which is how I do all of my course management. What is most interesting, and something that I hadn't really considered, is the idea that many students form their lasting impressions of the module in the first few moments, and that these impressions stay with them throughout the semester. Managing those impressions, and hence the expectations and feelings of the students in the first few moments could, as a result, have a large effect on how smoothly the rest of the module runs. Finally, I like the idea of using a list of assignments to give the students a constant stream of activities and things to do. Mostly, outside of labs and lectures, I have the feeling that many students don't do anything related to their modules. With the advent of the new attendance registers in the school many more students are turning up regularly to their lectures but I am not sure of how much additional attention is being paid to course materials. I have always assumed that most students were at least as interested in the subject matter as me and that they would therefore be reading the required texts and doing their own background readings. In all likelihood, except for official assessments and exams at the end, I know that there is very little actual set work for my modules. I don't mark lab exercises I just expect them to be done as I know that they are essential to being able to both complete the courseworks and perform successfully in the exam. Maybe what I could do is start setting more work, more specific readings, and more exercises so that the students can engage in deliberate practise from an earlier point in the module rather than relying on trying to stay awake during lectures and cramming shortly before the exams.

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Informal Logic Overview

I just found this interesting post introducing the subject of informal logic, a more formal way of describing what we call argumentation theory, or "the stuff what we do in this module". It is a useful but very light overview of how everyday argumentation relates to formal logical reasoning. What is interesting though is that the company whose blog this post is on develops argumentation visualisation software for use in online opinion research and public consultation. It is not as advanced as Araucaria, and delib appears to be taking a different approach to ours in the development of MAgtALO. Nevertheless it looks nice, and that is usually half the battle when getting user uptake, engagement and participation. An example of the kind of argumentation visualisation that the amap software provides:

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Argument Reconstruction on the Web

Floris sent me a link to this advert for a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam’s Leibniz Center for Law. The advert relates to a new FP7 project called IMPACT (not to be confused with Chris’ IMM-PACT EPSRC funded project) which aims to do the following:

IMPACT is an international project, partially funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework programme. It will conduct original research to develop and integrate formal, computational models of policy and arguments about policy, to facilitate deliberations about policy at a conceptual, language-independent level. To support the analysis of policy proposals in an inclusive way which respects the interests of all stakeholders, research on tools for reconstructing arguments from data resources distributed throughout the Internet will be conducted. The key problem is translation from these sources in natural language to formal argumentation structures, which will be input for automatic reasoning.

What is of particular interest to me is the idea of building new tools for reconstructing arguments from data resources on the web – very similar to the argument blogging approach to online argumentation that I have been working on recently. The main difference here though is that the prospective IMPACT tools appear to be aimed at working with the web as a static resource whereas argument blogging is meant to be an active, user-centered activity, although one extension that I am looking at is to integrate active, “no I disagree because…” type arguments with “and here is a resource to prove it…” type arguments, which I see as being a mixture of both active and static argumentation. Also similar is Mark’s OVA software, an online argument analysis tool similar to Araucaria, although currently this can only be used to analyse a single web resource not collate and resuse arguments across multiple sources.

Interestingly this project will use the LKIF, understandable given the domain in which the project is to be executed, but it makes me wonder about the possibility of tools to translate between AIF & LKIF so that resources from one domain can be accessed by tools from the other and vice versa.

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Araucaria on OS X

There appears to be something wrong with the script included in the Araucaria install images which means that the classpath is not set properly to run Araucaria. This means that although all of the software is included, the JVM cannot find all of the extra jars or other items that the software relies upon to function correctly.To get Araucaria running on OS X, use the following procedure:

Assuming that you have Java 1.5 installed on your Mac (this is the default on recent versions, if you don't have it installed then download and install it), download the Araucaria3_1.dmg file.
Create an Araucaria folder in which you will keep your Araucaria software. This can be located anywhere you like but on the desktop will be fine for now. You can subsequently move it once everything is working.
Open the dmg file, select all of its contents and copy them into your new Araucaria folder.
Create a new text file called araucaria.sh and save it into your new Araucaria folder.

Edit araucaria.sh to contain the following script:

#!/bin/bash
java -Xmx96m -cp ./jars/mm.mysql-2.0.4-bin.jar:./jars/jai_codec.jar:./jars/Araucaria3_1.jar Araucaria

Make araucaria.sh executable:
$ chmod 700 araucaria.sh
Run araucaria.sh
$ ./araucaria.sh
You should now see something similar to the following

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Commencing Countdown. Engines On.

Informal Logic Overview

Argument Reconstruction on the Web

Araucaria on OS X