User:MNakazawa

Mario Nakazawa

Mario Nakazawa is Associate Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Program at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. Berea College is an undergraduate only liberal arts college with 1600 students, who all have 4 year tuition scholarships and must demonstrate financial need to be admitted. As a work study college, all students have a primary labour position at the college, ranging from being teaching associates to grounds-keeping. The computer science program has 4 faculty members and more than 100 majors.

Dr. Nakazawa's primary teaching interests are varied, ranging from courses such as parallel and distributed computing, computational intelligence, database systems, theory of computation, and others. He teaches at the introductory and senior level courses.

As Computer Science Chair, he is responsible for administrative duties such as scheduling, assessment, and mentoring fellow faculty members. He also runs the local ACM programming contest qualifiers and arranges for teams of students to attend the ACM programming contest every year.

When not teaching computer science, Dr. Nakazawa enjoys teaching ballroom dance, hiking and spending time with his family.

IRC Questions and Answers:

• How do people interact? They communicate in incomplete phrases to ensure that the participants know that someone is present and in the middle of trying to communicate. The format is relatively freeform, without a specific agenda or anything.

• What is the pattern of communication? Is it linear or branched? Formal or informal? One-to-many, one-to-one or a mix? I honestly to not understand the question, but I will try to answer them. The participants are discussing issues and problems, and every now and then specific people who offer ideas and suggestions. The moderator would issue commands to the meetbot whenever s/he sees that some resolution to an issue or suggestion has been made. There are multiple conversations going on at the same time, and they are interleaved, which makes sense due to the asynchronous nature. It kind of reminds of the "write" command on Unix.

• Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning? Apart from the jargon, all the commands issued to the meetbot serve as "meta commentary".

• Can you make any other observations? Other than people are moving in and out without any announcement? There are times when the user's name is at the start of a line in the conversation with a colon, but it does not match the nickname. In this case, it was "John:" for "john_", unlike "heidi" and "amber", which are the same as the nickname.

• Bonus question: Why didn't Heidi and Darci's actions get picked up by the meetbot? I do not understand the question, the actions "Heidi look into the status ..." and "Darci will find John ..." ARE recorded in the meetbot output.