The July meeting is cancelled in favour of the Faculty lunch tomorrow.

Regards, Charles

The next Information Research Group meeting will be in Lewis Lecture Theatre (http://www.une.edu.au/maps/une/#C28 ), from 1 to 2pm on Friday, 28th May 2010. The topic will be “The Moodle Implementation” with a presentation from Myles Carrick our newly recruited Project Manager who will answer questions on the project plan, technical aspects of implementation, overall design features, and the migration plan from Blackboard and Sakai to Moodle. The slide presentaion can be found at: http://www.slideshare.net/mylescarrick/the-une-vle-implementation-an-initial-overview

Everyone is welcome

The next Information Research Group meeting will be in Lewis Lecture Theatre (http://www.une.edu.au/maps/une/#C28 ), from 1 to 2pm on Friday, 30th April 2010. The topic will be “VLE@UNE: Designed by Students for Academics”. This is a shift from the traditional view of academics being the producers of knowledge and students the consumers.  UNE is developing a new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for next year. It is based on Moodle with Equella as the content management system and Mahara for e-Portfolios. We are also forming an “ICT Users Group” to consider issues such as availability, reliability, security, resources, training, and support.

Everyone is welcome.

Further information can be found at: http://blog.une.edu.au/informationresearchgroup/.

Means et.al. (2009) demonstrated the advantage of online learning over face-to-face study since the advent of web2.0 technologies. Key findings include:

    •    Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.

    •    Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction.

    •    Studies in which learners in the online condition spent more time on task than students in the face-to-face condition found a greater benefit for online learning.

    •    Blended and purely online learning conditions implemented within a single study generally result in similar student learning outcomes.

    •    Elements such as video or online quizzes do not appear to influence the amount that students learn in online classes.

    •    Online learning can be enhanced by giving learners control of their interactions with media and prompting learner reflection.

    •    Providing guidance for learning for groups of students appears less successful than does using such mechanisms with individual learners.

Reference

Means, B., Toyama,Y., Murphy. R., Bakia, M., and Jones, K. (2009). Evaluation of Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-analysis and Review of Online-learning Studies. http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf

The next Information Research Group Meeting will be in Lewis Lecture Theatre (http://www.une.edu.au/maps/une/#C28 ), from 1 to 2pm on Friday, 26th March 2010.

The topic will be ”The Reformation of Information Technology Directorate”. Following the recent review of ITD by external consultants Price Waterhouse Coopers (part of the eUniversity Project) Sam Austrin-Miner will present ITD’s response and strategy for change and transformation of IT functions within the university. Sam will provide a presentation which was tabled at the most recent Vice Chancellor’s Committee on what needs to be transformed within ITD and the steps forward for implementation.

Everyone is welcome.

The presentation slides can be found at http://mcs.une.edu.au/~cwatson7/I/ITD_Strategy_010310_v1.1_BRIAN.pdf

The PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) ITD Architecture Review Report of Dec 2009 is available for UNE staff at:
http://www.une.edu.au/faculties/arts-sciences/staff-only/PwC_Report.pdf

Approximately 2900 premises in west Armidale encompassing the University of New England campus are included in the NBN Co. fibre-to-the-premises first release. See: http://www.nbnco.com.au/firstreleasesites/first-release-areas-details.aspx . This semester UNE is extending the trial WiFi network to 300 access points across all UNE campuses. The improvement of the network core speed, Voice over IP, IPv6 and multicasting will support many new web based applications such as video on demand and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) such as World of Warcraft.

But how do we connect isolated rural and regional areas? Satellite communication is expensive and ADSL is 40% more expensive here than Korea. What new technologies are emerging to fill the gap? WiMAX (http://ieee802.org/16/ ) is a broadband wireless protocol covering hundreds of square kilometres. In Perth yesterday TV Channel Seven Network’s wireless broadband subsidiary Vividwireless launched its $50 million WiMax network. See: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/m-stokes-wimax-network-to-take-on-fixed-operators/story-e6frgakx-1225843996944

Advantages of WiMax include:

a.       International 4G Standard established in most countries

b.      Perfectly suited for regional and rural areas

c.       Excellent spectral efficiency

d.      Purchase and installation of WiMAX technology is faster, simpler and cheaper than other solutions

e.      Non-line-of-sight (NLoS) capability provides coverage despite the challenges of geography and the limited footprint of wireline.

f.        Australia’s late adoption provides UNE with an opportunity to show leadership in the bush by piggybacking on overseas development

g.       Intel Centrino 2 chip set is now available

h.      Provides cost effective “last mile” connectivity to fibre node backbone

i.         Unlicenced spectrum is owned by local council avoiding Telstra/Optus carrier costs

j.        In Africa, WiMAX provides Internet and VOIP services faster and more affordably than wireline

k.       Wide coverage – 50Km

l.         Range can be enhanced in a rural setting by increasing EIRP (effective isotropic radiated power) to 25W

m.    Ideal for remote isolated regions with no existing coverage

n.      WiMAX supplies data bandwidth only, increasing the bandwidth without compromising voice service quality.

Can we pilot a 4G wireless network to reach the “last mile” of the NBN FTTN and demonstrate the efficacy of this technology for regional and rural communities?

Cloud computing describes a new model for IT services providing dynamically scalable and virtualized resources over the Internet. Gartner says Cloud Computing will be as influential as E-business. See: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=707508

Last month, Edith Cowan University announced signing with the live@edu offering, which includes 10GB of online storage. It will be used by 36,000 students. The WA institution joins Sydney University (46,000 students), University of NSW (30,000 students), Curtin University (192,000 students and staff), Queensland University of Technology (40,000 students) and University of Queensland (38,000 students). See:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/microsoft-extends-its-lead-in-university-email-and-online-services/story-e6frgakx-1225810380108 

About 14 Australian universities have already outsourced their student email to Gmail or Microsoft’s Live@edu service, but this month Macquarie became the first to migrate staff to the so-called cloud in a deal with Gmail.  See: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/uni-staff-migrate-to-the-cloud/story-e6frgcjx-1225818578173 and http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/macquarie-university-to-save-millions-with-gmail-deal/story-e6frgakx-1225818206662. Griffith university is also “going Google”. See: http://app.griffith.edu.au/03/lib-blog/?p=436

UNE is planning trials involving academics, students and administrative staff for e-mail and collaborative educational apps. Outsourcing these services will significantly reduce infrastructure and support costs.

There will be no meeting tomorrow. Have a Merry Christmas.

The next Information Research Group Meeting will be in C28 – Lewis Lecture Theatre from 1 to 2pm on Friday, 29th January 2010.

Future Meetings will be in C28 – Lewis Lecture Theatre from 1pm to 2pm on the following days:
Friday, 26th February 2010
Friday, 26th March 2010
Friday, 30th April 2010
Friday, 28th May 2010
Friday, 25th June 2010
Friday, 30th July 2010
Friday, 27th August 2010
Friday, 24th September 2010
Friday, 29th October 2010
Friday, 26th November 2010

Venue: http://www.une.edu.au/maps/une/#C28

Dear Colleagues,

The Information Research Group meeting will be in Arts Lecture Theatre 3 (E11_A3)  from 1 to 2pm today, Friday, 27th November 2009.

Everyone is welcome.

Regards, Charles

NVIDIA’s October GPU Computing Webinars now open for registration.
These webinars cover many topics including an introduction to C for CUDA, the OpenCL™ API, and performance optimization techniques, presented by NVIDIA DevTech Engineers with additional staff online to answer questions.

These webinars will help you get ready for the next CUDA SuperHero Challenge which will start on November 23rd, the CUDA practice servers are up and running:
http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=Static&d1=sponsors&d2=NVIDIAOverview

Please follow the links to register for each webinar you would like to attend. Advance registration is required. Please note all times are in Pacific Time (UTC-7 hrs, British Summer time -8hrs).

Full Schedule and short abstracts can be viewed at:
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/gpu_computing_online.html?refCode=nvinvite

An Introduction to GPU Computing and The CUDA Architecture, 1.5 Hours
Monday, 10/19/09, 9pm: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/214702074

Introducing a new Multi-GPU Frameframe
This is an extended, technical presentation about a new framework for developing code for Multi-GPU environments.
Wednesday 10/28/09, 9am: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/628549827

Memory Optimization and Performance Considerations for CUDA, 1.5 hours
Wednesday, 10/21/09, 9am: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/723693579
Wednesday, 10/21/09, 9pm: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/731145515

Further CUDA Optimization Techniques, 1.5 hours
Monday, 10/26/09, 9am: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/406661946
Monday, 10/26/09, 9pm: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/953597875

An Introduction to GPU Computing and OpenCL, 1.5 hours
Thursday, 10/22/09, 9am: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/409536002
Thursday, 10/22/09, 9pm: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/580290250

Best Practices for OpenCL programming, 1.5 hours
Friday, 10/23/09, 9am: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/352716234
Thursday, 10/29/09, 9am: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/422319282
Thursday, 10/29/09, 9pm: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/719309611

The next Information Research Group meeting will be in E11_A3 – Arts Lecture Theatre 3 from 1 to 2pm on Friday, 30th October 2009. The focus will be on programming Graphics Processing Units for High Performance Computing.

The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a recent computer hardware development providing high performance graphics rendering. These highly parallel processors are now being applied to computationally intensive problems. The GPU architecture is well suited to parallel computing with minimal inter-process communication. Tasks are divided into multiple threads that run independently on single processing elements in the same way that regions of an image are rendered.

Now that GPUs have evolved into fully programmable devices they have become an ideal resource for acceleration of many arithmetic and memory bandwidth intensive scientific applications. GPUs are typically composed of groups of single-instruction multiple-thread processing units. Parallel machines in the past failed to achieve their full performance potential due to memory access conflicts and divergence of execution paths for conditional execution operations. GPU design ameliorates these problems by using hardware multithreading, clusters of small processing units and virtualized processors.

The CUDA development environment makes programming GPUs accessible to a wide group of users. Thread allocation and memory management is simplified, code can be read from arbitrary addresses in memory and fast shared memory used as a user-managed cache, enabling higher bandwidth. The CUDA programming model is based on the decomposition of work into grids and thread blocks. Grids decompose a large problem into thread blocks which are concurrently executed by the pool of available multiprocessors. Each thread block contains from 64 to 512 threads, which are concurrently executed by the processors within a single multiprocessor. Each thread block is computed by running a group of threads, known as a warp, in lockstep on the multiprocessor.

At the meeting we will look at coding practical algorithms for high performance implementation and identify problems that will be developed further at the UNE Summer CUDA Code Camp.