- Innovative Learning Week 2012 (Stuart)
- Programming in first and second year (Stuart)
- Stuart has spoken to Ewan
- Possibly using Python in first year
- Action: James to find out what first years think
- Diagnostic testing on programming (Stuart)
- Students do diagnostic tests before starting here
- If test doesn't go well, they take current OOP course instead of FP
- More advanced Java course during second semester of first year
- Reflective questionnaires (Stuart)
- mi3/4
- As long as Geometry exam isn't too difficult, not much more that can be done about the current maths course
- New courses to start from September
- Action: Stuart to speak to Maths
- Inf1 drop-in labs (James Wheatley)
- CLW is sometimes being closed during drop-in labs, leaving little space for other students
- Action: Stuart to speak to demonstrators about taking computer availability into account and only closing part of the lab
- Skype and Dropbox on DICE (James Wheatley)
- Skype has a strange protocol that makes the network unstable with lots of users
- Action: Neil to raise ticket about installing Dropbox
- UPDATE: See below for update from Computing Support
- Informatics Online Store (James Wheatley)
- Store is now empty
- Informatics no longer doing hoodies
- University decided not to offer Informatics hoodies themselves
- Action: Neil to look into getting all links to the store removed
- Placements and Careers (Stuart)
- ScotlandIS want to start a placements scheme where all Informatics students would be offered a placement
- Need to work out what students want in terms of placements
- Need to consider what could be done to make students (particularly first and second year) be doing more to make themselves employable
- Possibility of a cascaded employability scheme
The Official Line on Dropbox
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px}
Response 1:
Frankly we'd rather not, there are a number of issues with appearing to
sanction it's use:
1. Anything placed in the Dropbox directory is copied onto a server or
servers in the US, this exposes our users to US laws which may
criminalise things which are not in the UK. Equally when you place files
in the Dropbox directory you are in effect exporting the files outside
of the EU and depending on the contents there are DPA issues as
DropBox
is not certified as a safe harbour.
2. From a technical point of view there are issues with the install, the
software that is installed doesn't actually do the file synchronisation,
instead it provides hooks into the gnome file browser and then downloads
a proprietry daemon to do the file copying. Whilst we run proprietary,
closed source software I'm a little queasy about the way that dropbox
does this.
Finally,I'm also not convinced just how well it works, this is on my PC
at home:
bash-4.1$ dropbox help
Dropbox command-line interface
commands:
Note: use dropbox help <command> to view usage for a specific command.
status get current status of the dropboxd
help provide help
puburl get public url of a file in your dropbox
stop stop dropboxd
running return whether dropbox is running
start start dropboxd
filestatus get current sync status of one or more files
ls list directory contents with current sync status
autostart automatically start dropbox at login
exclude ignores/excludes a directory from syncing
bash-4.1$ dropbox status
Dropbox isn't running!
bash-4.1$ ps auxww|grep dropbox
iainr 19473 0.0 1.3 155384 27360 ? Ssl 03:31 0:08
/afs/zathras.org/home/iainr/.dropbox-dist/dropbox
iainr 21266 0.0 0.0 4468 728 pts/7 S+ 10:25 0:00 grep
dropbox
bash-4.1$ dropbox start
Dropbox isn't running!
Dropbox is already running!
bash-4.1$ dropbox stop
Dropbox isn't running!
bash-4.1$ ps auxww|grep dropbox
iainr 19473 0.0 1.3 155384 27360 ? Ssl 03:31 0:08
/afs/zathras.org/home/iainr/.dropbox-dist/dropbox
iainr 21273 0.0 0.0 4468 728 pts/7 S+ 10:25 0:00 grep
dropbox
bash-4.1$ kill 19473
bash-4.1$ ps auxww|grep dropbox
iainr 21308 0.0 0.0 4468 728 pts/7 S+ 10:28 0:00 grep
dropbox
bash-4.1$ dropbox start
Starting Dropbox...Dropbox isn't running!
Done!
bash-4.1$ dropbox status
Dropbox isn't running!
What facilities does it provide that we're not providing at the moment?
Response 2:
Each student has a home directory on AFS, which allows them not only to
share files at will with fellow students (by granting access by specific
users or groups of users to specific folders) but also allows them to
access their files from any computer connected to the internet, (subject
to installation of the
OpenAFS client for Linux, Windows or
MacOS ).
This covers all of the
DropBox functionality I'm aware of, and has all
the advantages of an Informatics manged service (and of course therefore
lacks the caveats of an externally-hosted one).
I suspect that we (the computing staff) have not succeeded in educating
our students as to the advantages of our globally-accessible filesystem,
but perhaps now would be a good time for us to do so.
-- Main.s0915100 - 24 Jan 2011