zachmusgrave.com

First off, I should note that I worked this past week with David A. Cohen to make this happen. It's really not a difficult install (once you know what you're doing) so I thought I'd write up a quick and dirty HOWTO for this week, so you can do it too!

This week has been one of deep thought for WSBF engineering. We are sexy.

A common problem WSBF experiences involves load placed on our Web server due to heavy listenership. The server at http://wsbf.net, beside running Windows Server 2003, also runs all of the following processes all the time.

This fall semester, I took an English course called The Future of the Book from Dr. David Blakesley. He runs his own academic publishing company, Parlor Press, and he has a lot of really cool ideas about how the book will evolve in future years.

One of the complaints brought up several times by my classmates was that e-book readers like Amazon's Kindle do not have page numbers. This makes them downright impossible to use for any sort of scholarly work; without page numbers, referencing citations is a tricky endeavor at best. Dr. Blakesley is correct, I think, when he says that digital editions are meant to be separate from their print brethren, and that the citation systems will evolve to complement them eventually. That will be great when it happens, but it doesn't help students now.

I decided to add page numbers to the open source EPUB format. By extending an open-source, JavaScript-based EPUB reader - found online at Google Code - I was able to insert the page numbers to a common paperback edition into the electronic edition of Charles Dickens' Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

In discussion-based seminars, this could be an invaluable resource for e-book-using students. "Okay class, turn to page 235 in the text..."

Check out my demo.
Press 'n' to scroll down and press 'p' to scroll up. Move your cursor over the icon to see the page number and edition information.

In the spring of 2009, I took Online Systems with Dr. Roy Pargas. The class was project-based, and our end goal was to create a Web application written in C# .NET that contained a pedagogical emphasis.

I decided to address a problem I had during my freshman year at Clemson: time management. The program, called Scheduletastic, builds students' class and study schedules for them... since they're not likely to do it themselves. Algorithmically, Scheduletastic takes a heuristic approach; it relies on a bunch of idiosyncrasies in Clemson's class blocks to effectively match students in the same class with one another in distributed study groups.

There is also some really disgusting screen scraping of Clemson's Web portal involved. SISweb is not valid HTML, so a DOM traversal simply does not work. There are no closing tags on any element in any of the pages.

I published the project with Dr. Pargas as a poster in the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and I traveled to Savannah, GA that February on a grant from Clemson's Calhoun Honors College to present the work.

Scheduletastic represents both my first conference experience and my first authorship. It was a blast.

CSCW 2010 two-page paper (PDF)

Abstract

Undergraduate students often have poor time management skills; this poster presents a time management approach specifically designed to meet their needs. Scheduletastic is a Web-based application that pre-populates students’ schedules by extracting data from their university’s Internet portal, including relevant class rosters and meeting times. The study times generated for each user are matched with those of peers in the same classes through the use of a best- case heuristic algorithm. This approach creates a product that encourages synergy and real-time collaboration, while requiring minimal resource investment by the user.

Welcome to my corner of the Web! I'm still moving in, but this site will soon contain my presence on the Internet.