I'm back from my visit to the Center for Computational Biology at U.C. Merced. I enjoyed meeting the faculty there, and I was given the opportunity to provide two workshops introducing Connexions and our authoring system.

Getting there

It didn't go as planned, but it ended up being better that way. Bad weather in San Francisco delayed our departure from Houston for 2 1/2 hours, so I missed my connecting flight to Modesto, where I was supposed to pick up a rental car to drive to Merced. I was able (I think) to get a refund on the Modesto portion of the trip and change my car arrangements to drive from (and to) San Francisco. While I didn't enjoy the drive to Merced that much (heavy traffic and rain), the drive back was great. If you are travelling to Merced, I suggest that you consider driving from SF instead of trying to fly Modesto or Fresno and then driving to Merced. Even the 3-hour drive from SF with weather and traffic is likely to get you to Merced quicker than the layover and connecting flight to Modesto with the 45-minute drive to Merced. Under favorable conditions, the SF to Merced drive is about 2 hrs 10 min. I had favorable conditions on the way back, and it was a pleasant drive with a chance to see the Central Valley transitioning into the coast.

I can recommend the Hooper House Bear Creek Inn B&B, where I stayed. It's a beautiful house and the wireless internet connection worked very well.

The Center

In its own words, the CCB "sponsors multidisciplinary scientific projects in which biological understanding is guided by computational modeling. The center also facilitates the development and dissemination of undergraduate and graduate course materials based on the latest research in computational biology." The faculty & researchers working under the CCB's aegis are indeed a multi-disciplinary bunch: mathematicians, physicists, computational chemists, genomicists, evoluationary biologists, cell biologists, computational biologists, neuroscientists, and probably more. Though I'm a layman with little familiarity with the kinds of research conducted there, I found it exciting to learn about the work going on in the Center.

What's cool for us is that the CCB is committed to outreach to high schools and community colleges, in part to develop students who will one day study and research computational biology at UCM. They see Connexions as a way to share instructional material with these "feeder" institutions and their students to that end. They also plan to offer workshops to instructors at these institutions. This effort is being funded in part at least by a grant from the Hewlett Foundation to UCM to support outreach to potential transfer students from the Central Valley. The CCB is already sharing instructional materials as PDF files and Word docs.

Friday

Friday morning I met with Quoclinh Nguyen, the programmer at the CCB who will provide technical support for Connexions use at UC Merced. We had a chance to work together and to discuss several aspects of the Connexions authoring system.

Right before lunch I got to meet for 1/2 hour with Jeff Yoshimi, an assistant professor at UC Merced who works both in neural networks and in philosophy of mind. He is interested in using Connexions not only for publishing his own instructional content, but also for interaction between students in developing class projects. I am looking forward to helping Jeff work out ways to use Connexions for this purpose.

I had lunch with Mike Colvin (the director of the CCB), Masa Watanabe (the academic coordinator of the CCB, who visited us in July), and Quoclinh Nguyen (CCB programmer). We ate at a local restaurant featuring Cajun and Southern food. Excellent hushpuppies! It was great to meet Mike, and to talk with him about what's going on at UC Merced. For one thing, they are using Sakai as their course management system, which was cool to learn since we are interested in providing hooks for Connexions (Rhaptos)/Sakai interoperability. Faculty at Merced are required to enter course grades into Sakai, even if they don't make use of its other course management functions.

After lunch I gave my Connexions presentation/workshop to Mike, Masa, Quoc, a professor from engineering, and a graduate student in biosciences. It was great to have the chance to go through my presentation with a small audience to get feedback on how to tailor it to the larger CCB audience at the meeting on Saturday.

Saturday

Saturday was occupied with the Merced-Centric CCB Workshop. This meeting was a chance for the faculty and researchers to familiarize one another with their research and to discuss strategies for furthering the goals of the Center. In this context I had the opportunity to give a substantial demonstration of Connexions's authoring and publishing system, in particular the MS Word importer and the Edit-in-Place interface. I think we were able to show that our progress in making the Connexions authoring process simpler.

Saturday evening, Mike Colvin very kindly invited me to dinner at his house with his family. It was a delightful evening, and we talked about everything from the issues connected with founding a new university campus to classical languages to James Joyce. (Mike is teaching an undergrad course on Joyce this semester as a service class.) Mike & Phung have been involved in book collecting fine press printing, and I got to see some wonderful books from their collection.

I am grateful to Masa and Mike for their hospitality during my visit, and I look forward to working further with Quoc. I am also interested in following the progress of Jeff's use of Connexions in his teaching.

Other points of interest

Mike was interested to learn if Connexions has plans to develop a distributed repository architecture. I wasn't able to say much except that we are aware of the need for such an architecture, but also that there isn't any existing software that would enable us to implement a distributed architecture with Connexions--such a thing would need to be developed.

Another point: the biosciences curriculum includes the use of the JMOL applet for molecular visualization (see e.g. the BIS 1 assignment 1 page). We will need to figure out how to integrate this applet with its features into Connexions modules. My suspicion is that this will entail further development of the XSLT that handles the media and param elements.