Here’s an interesting post by viral-learning about Learning Object reuse. One of the defining factor for Learning Objects ought to be reusability, you’d think. However, Downes once correctly pointed out to me that reusability is not really a defining factor… indeed, can you point out to a non-reusable learning object?

It remains an interesting topic. One of the pretensions of object-oriented programming is object reuse. You see it in textbooks. Supposedly, people would continuously reuse code because code is embedded in objets. In practice, it is a claim I haven’t seen come true. It hasn’t proven to be a powerful paradigm in my experience. Objects are useful modeling tool, but they are no magical bullet and they don’t clearly make reuse easier. Not in my experience.

What works? APIs. Coherence sets of function calls you can use in many of your projects.

What would be the equivalent in the Learning Object setting? The closest thing I could think of is a textbook. Are textbooks dead? I don’t think… they may simply no longer be printed in the near future…

Here’s a cool project: OpenTextBook. When I was at Acadia, we often wondered why students had to pay CAN$80 for a Calculus textbook when it was obvious that all such textbooks are the same, they have to be, and all of the content has been known for quite some time.

What are we paying publisher for, exactly? We could never quite figure out, but because, neither the university nor the professor ends up paying the bill, we keep asking students to buy expensive textbooks for no good reason.

To be fair, professors are not evil. Not all of them. Many wondered whether we could write a free calculus textbooks ourselves. I think there are some free textbooks but who would dare trusting them? I would trust a textbook that the community can peer review though. If people find mistakes, they can come in and correct the mistakes. It would not converge into a free, perfect textbooks, but it might end up producing an acceptable textbook, for sure.

I co-wrote this really cool document on Series. It is free! You can have the LaTeX source if you ask or are clever enough to navigate my hidden Web.

One day soon, I’ll co-wrote an open textbook. I should make a note of it.

Onde anda su? picked up on some of my recent commentaries and wrote a small post on them. I will assume it is in Portuguese, though my Spanish is so bad that it might as well be in Spanish… I can read it only because I speak French and latin languages are all fairly similar.

The interesting matter here is that I chose to write in English. There are people who choose to have a bilingual blog. People like Seb and I write in English. Yet, all these people live in French.

Is English the blog language? The answer, of course, is that you can write in whatever language you want. Nobody will care. Except that I doubt many people would read me in Brezil if I wrote in French. I’d have a slightly larger readership in Québec and in France, but I would lose out everywhere else.

It is not always the case that English is the best language on the Internet. For example, in my posting boards, I have some very active French posting boards. Because I setup these posting boards with the motivation that all these questions addressed to me could find a better home on a posting board, and because many of these questions where in French, it made sense to have French posting boards. These days, I write all my scientific papers in English. I’ve even heard that among UQAM faculty memebrs, it was frowned upon to write your papers in French. The pattern is somewhat clear: the higher level your work, the more beneficial it is to have in English. One should be careful though: my French home page has as many hits as my English home page. I also suspect that for e-Learning to fullfill its promise, we will need to accomodate a very wide range of cultures and languages.

So, why am I blogging in English? I guess maybe Seb would have the same intuition on this one: because blogging is part of my scientific research and that’s squarely in English, for convience.

Interesting post on Slashdot today: Are PDAs Simply Finished?? It appears that many vendors, including Sony, are moving out of the North American PDA market.

Those of you who know me since… since a year before I joined Acadia as a professor, will know that I love my PalmOS PDAs. I’ve owned many over the years, and my Palm m500 will hopefully be with me for many years to come.

To be fair, I did notice that most people don’t use PDAs. At NRC, every researcher could get a powerful iPAQ. The only person who used it a lot that I know is Scott Flinn. And Scott wasn’t exactly pleased (high failure rate, battery problems and so on) .

The North American market is kind of special: everyone (but me) drives to work. At work, you are sitting in front of your computer, so why use a PDA? When in transit, you have your cell phone anyhow, so why not build the PDA into the cell phone… Also, laptops are shrinking, so why not carry that instead?

I realized there was a problem when I bought my m500 two years ago. I think things are probably worse now. The m500 is a basic model. It does not play MP3s, it doesn’t run games (except my very own Sokoban implementation). The salesman didn’t want to sell a m500. What? No color? No MP3s? I insisted. Why? I needed 3 weeks of battery life and something inexpensive so I can break it and not cry… that’s right, you read me right. I don’t want to work for my PDA, have to think about my PDA. The PDA works for me. I drop it on the table for two weeks if I want and there it stays. I also do not want anything but project related stuff on my PDA. It is a work tool, not a game, not a social gadget. So I had to have my m500 special ordered and it took 5 weeks or so. When I got it, the salesman had a smirk, he was thinking “what an old geek”.

PDAs are right for me. I don’t want a cell phone. I owned one at NRC but it remained on my desk. I don’t want a very small laptop: it has to be no bigger than my wallet and a laptop of that size would be useless. It has to be a very long battery life because I’m not good at charging devices every day. I want the thing to remain in my pocket, not on some desktop.

The PDA must allow me to take notes at meeting, fill in addresses, enter meeting dates, and have some form of project management software. That’s all. My m500 is more than capable to serve all these tasks. A color screen or an integrated cell phone is just candy I don’t need.

So, are PDAs over? I hope not. I think they were always only good for a small fraction of the population. Those open enough to technology to come at a meeting with a PDA, but resisting technology enough to refuse wearing a cell phone. I think the PDA companies probably cornered their own product. By making them more and more powerful, they made them less useful to people who only want to take notes and jot down meetings.

I predict that PDAs will still be around for a long time, but they won’t sell in great numbers in North America. I already had to special order mine 2 years ago, I expect that it will become quite a niche in 2 years: you’ll have to special order yours directly from Europe or Japan. That’s ok.

I reported earlier on my installation of Gentoo Linux at the office. There are many things that are appealing about Gentoo Linux: it is managed from a non-profit corporation, it leverages the power of free software by being source-based, it has a cool package management called Portage written in my favorite language, Python, and finally, it is constantly updatable: you may never need to install an OS again on your machine because there is no version number, a Gentoo machine is always up-to-date (just type emerge sync; emerge -u world; env-update once in a while). It is not GUI-driven like Mandrake, Suse, or RedHat. So, you actually need to learn a lot of things before you can install it properly. Some say it is a bad thing. I disagree. I actually almost gave up on it when I found out that you needed to actually follow instructions and type the commands by hand: I’m glad I didn’t. I must say that the compile time is long.

Setting it up at the office was rather painless. After all, the toughest part was getting samba to get me on the network, and that was mostly some reverse-engineering of the network topology: just make sure you jot down everything you possibly can about the network before formatting the drive for good.

At home, it was more of a challenge. For one thing, I wanted to try the new 2.6 kernel and it is sweet: very low latency for highly responsive GUIs. Second of all, I wanted the sound to work: at the office I don’t have speakers yet, so I couldn’t care less. And finally, I have a lot of scripts on my machine which do many magical things for me: I have lots of clever scripts everywhere including on this web site, I love scripts. But scripts have dependencies and you need to install specialized software.

The one true lesson I learned about Gentoo is: forget Google. Go straight at Gentoo Bug’s database. For me, almost all my problems were solved by reading the bug reports and the comments related to them. The only thing that I had to figure out on my own was that the new 2.6 kernel includes alsa, so you don’t need to compile it separately. (Alsa is the sound library used under Linux these days.) Well, there is one other thing is that if you have a PDA, you want to include pda in your USE flag. Everything else, I learned through the bug database and the excellent installation guide provided by Gentoo.

This reminds me of some complains Stephen had about Linux: I recall that I told him to go see the Mozilla bug database and sure enough, there were bugs related, some of them with my name on it. Now, I’d probably claim that Stephen would have less problem in the long run with Linux if he went with Gentoo instead of Mandrake. Mandrake might be user-friendly, but it appears like a very monolithic project to me: if the Mandrake developers are not working on your problem, you can’t easily help fix the distro.

Still stuck in a Microsoft-only world? There is hope. Be daring. Install Linux now.

Update: Marcel Ball, of OO JDrew fame, correctly points out that he is the one who got me to have a lot at Gentoo. Marcel is probably one of the top 5 undergraduate student I ever met. I might very well be the best, but then, because he has no web site to call his own, I can’t give him too much credit.

I like Tim Bray. He gave us so many great things and I’m sure he will help Sun. I’ve learned through OLDaily that Sun’s employees can now blog without asking permission. This is quite clear: if you want to comment on today’s technology or on your daily work, go right ahead. You don’t need to ask your boss first as to whether you can say that or this. I would imagine that company secrets have to remain off the blogs, but such “secrets” are usually quite boring anyway and not what employees would want to write about, and a large company like Sun cannot hold secrets very well anyhow.

To be fair, many Microsoft employees have done this too, and with support from Microsoft. Again, these companies encourage open communication and thus, creativity. They cannot lose.

Interesting post on slashdot on Google’s Ph.D. Advantage. It would appear that:

Google’s willingness to let every employee spend 20% of his or her time on an independent project is a compelling motivator and that they estimate that Google has as many Ph.D.’s working for it as Microsoft, which is 30 times larger.

What’s interesting to me is that Google has a distinctive culture and everyone has felt it. It is hard to describe really, but the minute people tried to use Google, they discovered that it wasn’t just another search engine driven by business people who focused on the business case. And you know what? It has only gotten better over time. Some say that the dot-bust and generally depressing state of the industrial R&D won’t be with us for very long, that we will rebound. I think that despite everything we can think, Information Technology will still be a very good place to be just because this is what most people have trouble with: managing information and knowledge. If you work in any kind of organisation, I’m sure your days are filled with questions such as “where can I find this, who knows about this?”. I know my days are like that. That’s why I use email so much. That’s why I have a wiki, a cvs server, and a blog… and that’s why I keep on exploring new ways to manage data… because all of these techniques extend the reach of my brain and, to put it bluntly, they do make me smarter.

There aren’t too many job offers where a Ph.D. is considered a plus and unless you want a job in academia or are willing to start a company, if you want to remain in Canada, your Ph.D. might not give you a strong edge (though I don’t know for sure). A search on monster.ca reveals that there are 19 job offers in Canada with Ph.D. in the description. Not all of those are for Ph.D. holders though. For example Google is looking for a sales coordinator (Toronto) but they only mention that the founders had Ph.D.s. I’d say it is more like 10ish job offers in all of Canada.

Call me an optimist, but I think the days when business turns back to innovation for growth have to come back really soon. Google shows that an innovation-driven business can work. It can compete with the largest beasts like Microsoft, at least for a time. I want to believe in the rise of the creative class: wealth is mostly provided by creativity and creativity comes from creative people. My only worry is whether this will happen in Canada and in Montréal in particular. I just don’t know. Some people tell me that industry is really vibrant in Montréal right now. I haven’t been back long enough to know. I need to go downtown a bit more. I need to find out where the creative people are in this city.