New Year’s Resolution
Happy New Year!
It is that time of year again to declare my New Year’s Resolution. I actually have a couple this year. The first and foremost is to finish my PhD, which is something that I’ve been doing for the last three years. The second is to use my blog more often.
I’ve changed the tagline from “My life in bytes” to “Erudition of software engineering, e-portfolios, and life”. I’ve spent the last three years of my PhD working on software and e-portfolios, so I figured I should be writing more frequently about these topics, especially in what should be my final year of my postgraduate studies.
I also promise to further my work on dotFOLIO this year. I have been taking some time out on it for another software development project called Curriculum Central, which is a workflow based application for managing course outlines and logistics for Higher Education. The application is available from the OpenACS CVS repository as curriculum-central.
Curriculum Central and dotFOLIO are separate projects, but will be linked. I intend to allow students to import completed course information into students’ e-portfolios. Therefore they will be able to progressively understand their learning development, as well as gain a clearer picture of where they are heading with their studies. There will be more to come on these concepts.
Another related project I’ve been associated with is Beagle, which is a plagiarism detection web service. We successfully trialled this software with over 2000 blog postings from a first year unit of study in 2005, and discovered all cases of plagiarism. With information accumulated by dotfolio, we were able to determine who copied whom. The results were very surprising, and when Juan Jose and I get round to publishing our findings, the results should be a wake up call to all tertiary institutions, especially those that facilitate online learning activities.
Finally, the last thing that I will aim to do this year is work out what to do with myself once I finish my PhD. I’ve thought about working for a company, and I’ve also thought about starting a company. I would actually prefer the latter, and in all likelihood I will probably start a consulting group with a bunch of friends that I can sell the vision to. In fact, I’ve already roped my good friend Bennett into it, as he too will be winding up his PhD in Medical Research this year. I also registered a domain name today for the prospective consulting group. However I can’t see us getting together to work on a business plan until 2007 and beyond. So like all good things in life, this one will take time.
