Wrap up of BarCampMelbourne 2013

With huge thanks to Pomke and the team at Small World for lending us their fabulous Causeway House Boardroom venue, BarCampMelbourne 2013 got off to a great start.

Pomke on Angular JS

The talks I got to see where many and varied. First up, Pomke spoke to us about Angular JS and using node.js on the backend – moving processes to the client. This is becoming less of an issue with powerful browsers.

Steve on programmable logic controllers

Steve spoke to us about process control systems – and how they present a number of security risks. PLC – programmable logic controllers – drive inputs and outputs on machinery – essentially replacing buttons and switches and dials. They are programmed in ladder logic, and the PLC scans through the logic continuously – evaluating and acting on logical conditions. PLCs are low end devices in terms of capacity and communications – and could still run on 9600 baud RS232. SCADA systems are generally proprietary and generally only run on Microsoft Windows. There are risks here – such as the Stuxnet virus which was exploited before USB keys. These systems were born in the days before security was an issue, and this means that there are ways to interface remotely with many of these devices – as you have to be able to get into them to diagnose them and repair them if required. Another issue they found was that the equipment was only capable of running at 10mbps – which made it vulnerable to TCP broadcast storms.

Marc Cheong on teaching with engagement

Marc told us the story of how he became an accidental teacher – having started his PhD, falling into a tutoring role, he discovered the knack of engaging students. In his role, he found that students weren’t engaged – they wouldn’t learn anything. When exploring the underpinning causes he found that there is a paradigm shift involved in adult learning – it is self-directed, not spoon-fed. Students felt like a cog in a huge machine, and lecturers weren’t paying them very much individual attention. To remedy this problem he chose to ‘engage with empathy’ – learning everyone’s first name, ensuring icebreakers to reduce the feelings of isolation and building bonds between the class and the teacher.

He explained that the theory chained low motivation with low engagement to result in low marks – so the key to better marks is engagement and motivation – making the learning process fun and making people proud of their work.

Alec Clews on the ICT education crisis

Alec spoke about the challenges of ICT education in Victoria – there is a skills shortage, but the skills people are leaving the education system with are not great. Much of the proposed ICT curriculum should be in other parts of the curriculum and not in ICT education. For instance ethics and being safe online really belows in citizenship, while data interpretation and modelling really belongs in humanities. We need more of a focus on programming – and there was a strong sentitment in the room that visual programming is a copout. We also need more co-ordination between subjects – such as writing databases for humanities. We need to bring hacker skills into woodwork through 3D printing etc – using low cost accessible devices such as the Raspberry Pi. These devices will be a huge enabler for education.

computingatschool.org.au

Trystan on robot design choices

Trystan spoke about robot design choices, and what sort of need or objective your robot was serving and what sort of senses your robot should have. This allows you to make key design decisions so that you can build a robot to your desired budget. Once your robot has sensors, it needs some form of brain to blue all the pieces together. Microcontrollers are one way to make this happen – and you might have to design your own controller using a field programmable array (FPGA).

Lars Yencken on the quantified self

This was one of my favourite presentations of BarCamp, around the quantified self. Lars explained that everytime we use someone’s website to record something they are tracking what we are doing – but it is harder for us to capture this information about ourselves. The ideal situation would be that we have an agent measuring what we do, and providing useful advice such as ‘don’t drink that coffee because it will interrupt your sleep patterns’ based on the gathered data. Lars explained how the key areas he was trying to quantify were food and weight, but one of the challenges he had was balancing the need for bookkeeping with getting value out of doing it.

The key takeaway from me was that the mere act of measuring can serve to change behaviour – such as getting more exercise or eating fewer calories.

He also went into details about some of the glitches experienced in quantifying the self – such as battery life, GPS glitches and difficulties exporting data captured over long time periods.

One tool he mentioned that looks interesting is Huginn – which helps to measure changes in behaviour.

 

A huge shout out to to sponsors No ISP for helping make the day happen – their business model for an ISP co-operative is interesting indeed.