User:SWeiss

Revision as of 00:09, 9 May 2016

Stewart N. Weiss

Stewart N. Weiss is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science in Hunter College of the City University of New York, New York City's public university system. Hunter College has more than 23,000 students and 1800 full- and part-time faculty members. As of spring 2016, the Computer Science Department consisted of eleven full-time faculty members, with two more joining the Department in fall 2016. Prof. Weiss joined the Department in 1987 and has been teaching there ever since.

Prof. Weiss received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1987 from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University, under the mentor-ship of Dr. Elaine Weyuker. His research interest was in the area of software testing, concentrating on the testing of parallel and concurrent software, but also expanding to theoretical and experimental comparisons of various software testing methods and paradigms. Prof. Weiss's research later shifted to include the study of improved methods of computational quantum chemistry, specifically in approximation methods for computing molecular energy using ab initio methods.

More recently, Prof. Weiss has become interested in computer science education as a research topic in itself, with a particular interest in the teaching of software testing to computer science students.

Prof. Weiss was not always a computer scientist. He started out by earning a degree in architecture school from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, in 1973, and worked in that discipline, initially in architectural offices, and later with his own design and construction firm, through 1980, when he returned to school to obtain an undergraduate degree in mathematics. What architecture, mathematics, and computer science have in common is the creation of things, such as physical environments, models of abstractions or natural phenomena, or software. Consistent with this is that, in his spare time, Prof. Weiss loves cooking, indoor gardening, building and repairing furniture, and photography.

IRC Activity

1. How do people interact on IRC?
People write "comments" that are seen by all who are logged into the channel. Comments are typically short, no more than a single line, but sometimes they are longer. Some of the comments are commands to MeetBot. The MeetBot application defines the chairperson as the one who started the meeting.

2. What is the pattern of communication? Is it linear or branched? Formal or informal? One-to-many, one-to-one or a mix?
The pattern of communication is very much like the interaction that takes place in an informal group meeting. There are one-to-one and one-to-many conversations. One-to-one is sometimes implicit and sometimes made explicit by starting a comment with the person's name, e.g. "Stoney, ...". The conversation is mostly linear, but it also branches. This is largely dependent on the discipline of the meeting members. In the particular meeting about Mousetrap, the conversation is fairly disciplined, with almost no divergence from the purpose of the meeting. The meeting was discussing updates and so there were different threads relate dto different updates. The chair does not have to intervene at any point to control the discussion.

3. Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning?
There are various commands given to MeetBot, which have special meaning. They are identified by the leading character, #.

4. Can you make any other observations?
Unlike a face-to-face meeting in which people see each other, in an IRC meeting, there are no visual clues as to who has something to say at any moment. You cannot see who is about to "talk" next. The sequence of comments flows fairly well, but it can sometimes have different threads running through it. I suspect that this has much to do with the group dynamics and how well the people know each other.

5. Why didn't Heidi and Darci's actions get picked up by the meetbot?
Nicknames are case-sensitive, and the MeetBot can only assign an action item to a person if their nickname is used in the action item. The items not picked up had the wrong case.

6. Observations of an IRC channel
In general I did not find much conversation going on in the few project channels that I tried to monitor. I am guessing that a 24-hour window might be small because the amount of activity is a sparse function of time with bursts of activity that may be much further than 24 hours apart.

Sugar Labs Guided Tour

The first question is what roles in this project do I think would be most applicable for your students. Students have different skill sets in my classes, so there are a few different roles I foresee being possible. One is that of a content writer. Most students can handle writing either documentation, code, or guides of various forms and degrees of technicality. More likely is that the students will fit into the develop role, possibly with a bit of stretching. Some students like to code, some to debug, some to test, some to package things up, and so on. There is a task for all of my students as developers.