ladamic's blog research on information networks and non-researchy random musings

2009/07/27

academic advising

Filed under: CourseWare — ladamic @ 15:08

Twice a year, and a few times in between, I’m expected to advise students on the courses that they should take. At first my excuse for not feeling very qualified was that I hadn’t been a faculty member for that long. By year 2, I was requesting course enrollment data from the registrar, and mapping network diagrams of “people who took X also took Y”. That way I could at least make plausible recommendations. For the first year I was at SI, there was also a site, “rankSI”, where students could rate and comment on courses and professors. Though it was at times painful to look at the harsh criticism, it did provide useful insights. Then it became flooded with spam and went away (btw, I think having CourseRank, a Stanford project that Hector Garcia-Molina is involved in, here at UofM would be great).
It all boils down to a feeling that it’s the students, and not we the faculty who have the inside scoop on courses. Ages ago, while getting my PhD at Stanford, I took pretty awesome courses in CS, stats, EESOR and physics, thanks to recommendations from other students. And I would be able to recommend those courses, because I spent many hours toiling through them.
But now I take no courses. I may know that a colleague is a good researcher or a good speaker, but do I know things about their courses past what is listed on the syllabus (if that)? Sometimes, a bit, if an instructor boasts about an activity, or an advisee mentions their experience with a course. An even bigger challenge comes when students from other departments ask me about courses similar to mine, but in their department. Or students from my school asking about courses elsewhere… I then try and remember what other advisees had told me, or sneak a peek at my not-overly-useful network diagrams. But mostly I tell them “ahem… have you thought about talking to other students?”.

2009/07/23

There’s nothing you can know t…

Filed under: Uncategorized — ladamic @ 12:55

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.
Nothing you can see that isn’t shown… on Flickr.

2009/07/22

sadness. talked to elderly man…

Filed under: Uncategorized — ladamic @ 15:55

sadness. talked to elderly man staying at hotel close to hospital. His wife had checked in. 25 years ago he worked with Intel 286 processors

SI 508 (networks) is now part of OER

Filed under: CourseWare — ladamic @ 15:17

Thanks to the OER folks and quite a bit of work (more than I expected in any case) on my end, the masters-level version of my networks course, SI 508 is now part of Michigan’s Open Educational Resources.
In theory all the content has been cleared for copyright and now has a creative commons license, meaning that anyone can use and adapt it for their own purpose. It has slides, labs, datasets, demos, student projects, everything.
I talked about it briefly earlier this week at the SocialNets in Education Project workshop @ Duke. I also found out that there was interest in my DRAT course materials (SI601), but it will be another while yet before I undertake another OER conversion :p.

2009/07/21

agree with Castle. Serial kill…

Filed under: Uncategorized — ladamic @ 20:12

agree with Castle. Serial killers less interesting to read about than murderers with real motive. Hope you watched, Mankel and Larsson.

2009/07/08

Second Life study in the press and to be presented at EC

Filed under: conferences/workshops,NetSI,papers — ladamic @ 16:34

Eytan will be presenting our work on Social Influence and the Diffusion of User-Created Content in Second Life this Friday. In the meantime, the study has been getting a bit of geeky press :).

2009/07/07

In the long run, the long run …

Filed under: Uncategorized — ladamic @ 20:50

In the long run, the long run wins.

2009/07/03

Network textbooks are here!

Filed under: CourseWare — ladamic @ 12:52

Over the past 4 years, as I’ve taught a course on social and information networks, I’ve had to rely on a mix of research and review articles for the reading. It’s true that some books had appeared that covered the developments of the late 1990s to the present, especially from the physicist camp, but they either didn’t quite start from the beginning (that is, they were aimed toward the advanced graduate student), and typically they were very much focused on “scale-free” networks.
Just last year, I started using Matt Jackson’s text, “Social and Economic Networks” in the PhD-level networks course I teach. As the title suggests, it is heavily econ flavored, which puts a nice emphasis on game theoretic models of network formation, and games on networks. But it also includes excellent treatments of other topics, such as diffusion and search. And the problems at the end of the chapters have had both me and the students scratching our heads and more importantly tinkering in Mathematica.
Two news books are about to appear.
The one I’ve been reading of late is by Kleinberg and Easley on “Networks and Strategic Behavior”, and it is 1/2 about networks, 1/2 about game theory, info markets, and other neat topics. Aimed at undergraduates, it explains the subject matter so clearly, so eloquently, so seductively, that it brings tears to one’s eyes (tears of joy, but also of envy that someone is able to write like this). It should be available by this fall.
Mark Newman’s long awaited textbook is also supposed to hit the shelves sometime soon. I don’t know when exactly (some people don’t like being asked how their book is coming along), but he will be using it or a preprint version when he teaches CSCS 535 again this fall. It will likely be aimed at physics graduate students or advanced physics undergraduates (or students with a similarly strong mathematical background). I expect it will become the definitive volume on the topic.

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