Q1ToddMytkowicz

Document Q1ToddMytkowicz

1. Your Name

Todd Mytkowicz

2. Your field of study?

Computer Science: Systems Research

3. In which semester of study are you?

Too hight to count

4. Why are you interested in taking this course?

I had an interesting internship at PARC where we discussed a lot of the issues regarding how to evaluate the effectiveness of web 2.0 technologies in aiding users to work in collaborative environments. I enjoy discussing the implications of measuring these types of systems. How do we define conflict in wikipedia, for instance? How effective are sites like the social bookmarking site del.icio.us in organizing our information? These issues are not discussed in the research literature and yet they are paramount to understanding how to make web 2.0 technologies more effective. I hope we spend some time in this course talking about these issues.

5. What courses / work activities / background knowledge do you have which might be relevant to this course?

I have a background of statistics and research methodologies (e.g. experimental design) and I am hoping to use these to help evaluate the effectiveness of design, learning or collaboration.

6. Indicate your own digital literacy / fluency:
6.1. Describe your programming experience (languages, projects)

I am a PhD student in CS and my research is in the area of computer systems. I write lots of code that interacts with the OS to understand the performance of a program on a micro-architecture. I have also worked for 2 years as a web developer (long time ago now!).

6.2. What applications are you familiar with (e.g. Photoshop, Canvas, Dreamweaver,...)?

Unix (e.g. emacs, C programming, etc), the statistical package R. I have really not used any of the listed tools.

7. Give a brief description of the most important book / article which you have read with respect to the topic of the course.

"Strong Regularities in World Wide Web Surfing" by Bernardo Huberman. This article was one of the first I read that showed how one could understand the mechanics of something that human's created. While CS may or not be a "science of the artificial", humans still have the ability to create/design a system that we have no idea how to fully understand. In short, the end result of the system is greater than the sum of its parts. This article was one of the first that I read that tries to formalize a means to understand how people use one of humanity's greatest creations, the web. If you do a search for huberman on google scholar, you will notice a lot more follow on articles that follow this general theme. His work is really interesting to me because of this and it is an approach I have taken in my own research. I basically try to understand the performance of computer systems. Just because we make them, does not mean we truly understand their dynamics. Part of my research is coming up with underlying "natural laws" for the systems we as engineer's build and using those laws to help build better systems or to use the ones we have more effectively.

8. What do you hope and expect to learn from this course?

I hope to understand how web 2.0 technologies can aid in design in collaboration. This, to me, entails coming up with "natural laws" of how we design and collaborate. For instance, a natural law could be how effective a large group of individuals are at designing a system as a function of the amount of interaction they are allowed to have with each other. This surely must influence design and it would be great if at the end of the class I have insight into how I would go about understanding this type of a problem.