February 12, 2015 at 21:20

OSEDUCONF-2015, tenth conference “Free software in higher education” - videos and a brief overview

    A couple of weeks ago in Pereslavl-Zalessky was held the jubilee, tenth conference "Free software in higher education", briefly OSEDUCONF-2015.

    As the name of the conference, reports all revolve around open source Linux and education, sometimes with a bias in purely scientific and technical things, sometimes in clean software, sometimes in politics. There are incendiary reports, and frankly boring, deeply philosophical and mundane-realistic, specifically practical and academic reports with a title in three paragraphs, of which nothing is clear, complaints about life and success stories. Open-source developers and maintainers, rectors and university professors, industry practitioners, government officials from ministries, scientists of varying degrees of insanity, students gaining points for a diploma.

    Now the reports are looking for the audience - I recorded and edited them in quality (editing from several cameras, a screen and a voice recorder, animation technology ™, etc.), here, as an illustrative picture, the minute video-almost cube is well suited to instantly transmit and the general impression and quickly flip through all the reports - maybe someone, even without reading the reviews, annotations, the eye will immediately catch on interesting.


    And under the cutter there is a brief review and classification of reports from the last conference, as well as a retrospective classification for the last three years - do not be afraid to click, there is only compact text, and all videos with links.



    This year, probably the most interesting report for a wide audience was “ The UNIX way crisis and fundamental IT education ” .. Religious trend report on the crisis of faith. Beliefs in the UNIX-way - everything that was taught turned out to be wrong - and the Unix-rights system, and interprocess interactions, and text journaling, and the graphics system, and ... wherever you spit in Linux replace everything, review all architectures. Is there something invariably axiomatic in this crazy changing world that students can be taught for decades without regaining consciousness? It seems only to the generalized principles of good architecture, and it must be admitted that the "classical Unixway" often did not satisfy these principles. In a sense, the report continues the pessimistic line of the report on the open-source crisis , which we also recommend viewing. The report is expressive, and the speaker has the image of a mad professor from the comic book Blood Stain... it will not be boring to watch.
    STR for effective teaching

    Open source software in teaching IT disciplines
    • “ Building workshops on embedded systems programming ” supplementary materials is history, as they put the appropriate course for two Belarusian universities, with the desire to work on real ARM hardware, but still got a Kalashnikov assault rifle on core programming, passed through and all that on emulators. But still, good experience, all the materials on the github.
    • Several reports related to Kumir-PictoMir - an original, perhaps somewhat outstripping system of teaching children programming, moreover, its inventor actually spoke .
      • “ Algorithmics and programming for preschoolers and junior high school students - global trends and domestic experience ” additional materials - Experiments with PictoMir, i.e. "Pretext" programming systems for kindergarten. However, now probably everyone has already seen Blockly Games - and so, our own invented it a long time ago, only popularity is not enough ... And through official channels, with techniques and retraining of computer science teachers, with hundreds of page manuals, everything is not fast.
      • “ Five K. Yu. Polyakov workshops on programming with automated verification in the KuMir system. The results of retraining teachers of computer science " additional materials - This is just about the training of teachers, and there it is probably worse than with the training of a kindergarten. In general, as it turned out, not every computer science teacher will master independent training, although they have found a life hack - you can watch at what speed he solves a couple of problems in order to understand if he has a chance to study on his own or needs full-time training.
      • The " IDE for learning Python " is additional materials - you should not think that this whole Idol is some kind of "alternative special way", moreover, they are trying to create a solid training IDE for Python based on the IDE for Idol. There is a need - there are no good free IDEs, the project started even before the appearance of academic licenses for PyCharm, and in this case too, there are difficulties and fussing with asking for licenses and with the IDE overload. I immediately asked the author for the implementation of the REPL cycle in debug mode - a thing that wildly helps in learning, and at the same time that is only available in expensive paid IDEs. Whether it will take off or not, we'll see in the coming year. I wish it were.
    • “ About one experience of conducting a special Python course with automatic verification of homework ” additional materials - Distance report half from the screencast, about a half-distance training course at VMK-MSU, by live coding on a python with viewing screencasts, and tournament solving of problems on the ejudge olympiad system. "The higher the name in the standings under which you can log in, the higher your score ©." There are a lot of dubious decisions, like automatic grading by scored points, and risky advice to tame a difficult ejudge ... but the experience is interesting anyway.
    • “ Development of information systems using Open Source software NoSQL DBMS MongoDB ” additional materials - in fact, this is not about development, but about teaching development, so here people with experience are unlikely to find something new, on the contrary, they can pounce on a bunch of dubious statements ("NoSQL is transaction-free and not suitable for financial applications, etc."). But from the point of view of teaching, yes, it’s time to start teaching only the devices of the classic RDBMS, based on the "System R" theory and practice on phpmyadmin, it’s time to show the whole variety of the DBMS and learn how to make the right choice.
    • “ Learning about process management in free software ”, additional materials - “Business processes, managers with pathos, draw arrows in BPMN notations and then model the Corporation” - all this can be played on the domestic open source. And for free, and invented various puzzles, there are training materials and all that.

    Open source software and organizational process in universities
    • “ The educational process management system and the unified educational environment of MGIU ” additional materials - Students are taught Ruby / rails at MGIU, and therefore everything can be done from the ERP system for a university to the CMS portals and even the anti-plagiarism system. Of course, crossing Linux, GitHub, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, CAS, Ace, Pandoc, Markdown, LanguageTool, TeXLive, MathJax, jQuery, Reveal.js ... are all fashionable and tasty from the open source world. It’s sad that all this is in the spirit of the announcement “I’m not looking for anyone, just showing off ©”, i.e. the decision itself has not been published ...


    Open-source in scientific and pseudo-scientific research
    Yes, it’s not at all about education, rather, let's say, Original Scientific Research.

    Static code analysis

    reports with names of length above a reasonable (> 256): " The construction of an equivalent representation of the dependencies in the source program using a universal intermediate representation " dopmaterialy and " Experimental study of quantitative relationships in the analysis of the source code of open source software on equivalent representations " dopmaterialy - it's all about static analysis, with compiling code in different languages ​​in Abstract Syntax Tree(native parsers), and the translation of this AST into some even more abstract and generalized "SCP". Well, with the help of established frameworks we load a different open source code (where else to get a lot of code ...), and we consider some very strange metrics. I’ve got charts like “Dependence of the fraction of typed duck fields on the threshold” really carried out by the brain (“Agronomist, he got drunk like a fizteh ™”).

    Datamining and search

    • “ BigData analysis with Apache Spark and ontological engineering methods ” additional materials - By the way, here is an example that the conference is not strictly pro-Linux - and a speaker with mail in the “outlook.com” domain, and the very first phrase, “like here, in your Linux full display screen? " (by the way - F5). But good news - the simplest datamining (scrawling Wikipedia-indexing-counting something simple on a graph) is already taught on the latest - Apache Spark + Scala.
    • “ Improving the quality of search in large volumes of text documents using the genetic algorithm as a way to support scientific research ” dopmaterialy - uh ... one more attempt to create a Semantic Search Engine with Ontologies. In the world of fashion, this has already subsided, and good full-text engines have killed the mantra "search is impossible without semantics," but experiments continue. However, it does not matter, because the speaker is a beautiful girl.Everything is also on Apache Spark + Scala (“Scala is a fashionable language in our circles”). I really didn’t understand why a genetic algorithm is needed there, if it is used only for strange selection with fitness maximization according to randomly taken parameters ... (getting into ontology, weights of the terms found in different sections of the document ...) i.e. it seems that the main thing for genetic algorithms does not happen - the “crossing" of solutions.


    Chemistry

    • “ ROSA Desktop Fresh in the chemistry lab ” additional materials - alas, this is not about automation by the Breaking Bad open source, but rather some overview of analytical programs useful to the chemist. Directly the same devices (mass spectrometers, etc.) are still controlled by Windows with closed drivers. However, it is not so dense with near-chemical programs, if you throw out dozens of crafts, such as variants of the "periodic table". Alas, a good subject open-source software can only be born from a person with an understanding of the subject area, i.e. one must either wait until the chemist learns to program, or when he marries a programmer. Or vice versa, as in this case.


    Linguistics

    • " Practical Sanskrit morphoanalyzer - Morpheus " additional materials - the audience was filled with spells in dead languages ​​when the author showed his next plug-in to Firefox - while this is only the inverse task of morphoanalysis, the direct one is a wordform generator, in the near future. And of course, down with the hack, only javascript, only hardcore.
    “ What's new is expected in the Eighth Alt Linux platform ”, additional materials are probably a well-deserved sponsorship report, because ALT Linux is the permanent organizer of this conference . Well, and we, ROSA , regularly help with the technical part, video recording and publication.

    By the way, this is still a beta version of the video, they contain "debugging information" - for example, red time markers of true time. So if you suddenly find some critical bug in the video (the sound has disappeared, you need to make the screen larger to read something, or vice versa, remove the screen to see the laser pointer) - write to me, or by comments on the video, or drugs, in general, as you like - indicating this same time range and problem - for now (a couple of weeks), you can still fix it.

    Yes, there was another report, even with a very cool result (something like “P = NP !! 111”, but I don’t even understand right away), but actually both the speaker and the rector of that university decided to maintain secrecy and not to write it down (speech went about some patents and other games in priority). Of course, this would not stop me from recording, but then the “Homeostatic Universe SO ©" really happened, the snowfall, I was stupidly late on a non-powered machine ... but even having managed to get to the beginning, it died out 20 meters before the venue (generator → the battery → I was driving without headlights → and stalled at the last bend) and was transported just before the end of this report, which was coming first. So it goes.

    Well, since you read it here, we offer you under the spoiler a close-packed review-classification of the conference for the last three years, with links to videos and other materials, because even pompous names and bloated annotations can be difficult, here everything is as brief as possible, in a twitter-style.

    OSEDUCONF Conference Review Over Three Years

    Education - Philosophical and Political Issues

    Open-source and organizational process in universities

    Education and Industry

    Specialized Distributions for Education

    STR for effective teaching


    Open source software in separate disciplines
    Programming and IT





    Robots, mainly based on LegoNXT



    We play "drawing business processes" almost the theme of one author in development →



    Open-source in the scientific and pseudo-scientific research of the


    Laboratory

    Further, Original Scientific Research, therefore, you probably need to be more careful with perception - if the audience gathered in the reports on education does not allow to tell complete nonsense, then in narrow areas there may be dragons. Therefore, your feedback is especially important in this part - write comments, point out errors, suggest ideas, I will try to bring them to the authors.

    Static code analysis Yes, again, the topic of one author is about parsing the code in the AST and then into some of its Universal Representations, and then trying to make something useful out of it. The author of a life hack (two reports at one conference) solved the problem of limiting the time of one report and scored a whole series →



    Datamining and Search Technology



    Hydrodynamics



    Parallel computing


    Linguistics Also the reports of one author, a fan of developing on JS / node.js, and his favorite morphoanalysis plugin for Firefox “Morpheus”:
    There was also something completely incomprehensible to me: “ Search for minimal essential closed classes in Pk ”, additional materials .



    Free software (almost no connection with education)

    Follow the links - there will be annotations, abstracts, and detailed slide infographics, thematic classification and information about the authors. By the way, often this was the most difficult moment in the publication - to understand who spoke: for some reason, the speakers did not introduce themselves, a dozen co-authors were declared in the program of the report according to Soviet habit, it is unclear which of them acted, and, according to stupid tradition, the program only names with initials, stupid names, according to which not only figs that you google, but even the gender of the author can not be understood. I had to spend hours searching for sane information about the authors. Speakers, I urge once again - read my memo to the speaker , you will make the world a better place.

    In general, it is clear that the speakers are repeated from year to year, but I would like both fresh faces and audience growth. Therefore, I am campaigning to come and speak next year - to create a more serious competition, so that there are no reports accepted from hopelessness. The conference takes place on the last weekend of January, somewhere around the New Year it is necessary to begin to follow the announcements (put yourself on the calendar now).

    But if there are no reports, I’m still campaigning to come. Reports are not the main thing:
    • This can be considered recreational educational tourism:
      • The conference in the center of Pereslavl-Zalessky , a city that abandoned the railway in the 19th century and ... let's say, has remained unchanged ... At least the center.
      • There is good authentic Russian cuisine.
      • The weather is excellent for winter at this time - light frost, snow.
      • You can get there (from Moscow - in a couple of hours by car, though the aforementioned snow can be a problem if you are driving in a non-powered car, as I once managed to do), or on the organizers' bus, or just the bus .
      • And all this - business tourism - they will note a business trip, get a couple of days off at work for the holidays.
    • Communication is a “party” of intelligent adults, with some opportunities and a certain power - here are the leadership of universities, employees of Linux distribution companies - you can catch and complain, suggest ideas ... it’s quite possible to make the world a better place, or at least find out why not .
    In the end, here are my photos , not very artistic, but giving some idea of ​​the situation, people and the atmosphere of the conference itself.
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