Joseph J. Ekstrom

An enterprise-based grid resource management system

As the Internet began its exponential growth into a global information environment, software was often unreliable, slow and had difficulty in interoperating with other systems. Supercomputing node counts also continue to follow high growth trends. Supercomputer and grid resource management software must mature into a reliable computational platform in much the same way that web services matured for the Internet. DOGMA The Next Generation (DOGMA-NG) improves on current resource management approaches by using tested off-the-shelf enterprise technologies to build a robust, scalable, and extensible resource management platform. Distributed web service technologies constitute the core of DOGMA-NGs design and provide fault tolerance and scalability. DOGMA-NGs use of open standard web technologies and efficient management algorithms promises to reduce management time and accommodate the growing size of future supercomputers. The use of web technologies also provides the opportunity for anew parallel programming paradigm, enterprise web services parallel programming, that also gains benefit from the scalable, robust component architecture.

Academic IT and adjacent disciplines 2010

CC2005 used the bodies of knowledge (BOKs) of the five computing disciplines then officially recognized to position them relative to each other. Since that time several revisions of model curricula have been made, masters curricula have been adopted and other disciplines have emerged as an examples of what we could call cousins, if not a sister disciplines. In this paper we provide a brief description of the computing disciplines described in CC2005 as a baseline from which to describe the evolution of the computing family with related disciplines and discuss some implications for IT pedagogy and research in the future

Defining the IT Curriculum: The Results of the Past 3 Years

Introduction In the first week of December of 2001 representatives from 15 undergraduate information technology (IT) programs from colleges/universities across the country gathered together near Provo, Utah, to develop a community and begin to establish academic standards for this rapidly growing discipline. This first Conference on Information Technology Curriculum (CITC-1) was also attended by representatives from two professional societies, the Association for Computing Machine (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE), and also the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Inc. (ABET). This invitational conference was the culmination of an effort begun several months earlier by five of these universities who had formed a steering committee to organize a response from existing IT programs to several initiatives to define the academic discipline of IT. The steering committee wanted to ensure that the input of existing programs played a significant role in the definition of the field. A formal society and three main committees were formed by the attendees of CITC-1. The society was the Society for Information Technology Education (SITE); one of the committees formed was the executive board for SITE, composed of a president, vice-president, secretary, treasurer, regional representatives, and an activities chairperson. The other two committees formed were the IT Curriculum Committee, including subcommittees for 4-year and 2-year programs, and the IT Accreditation Committee, also including subcommittees for 4-year and 2-year programs. The development of IT as an academic discipline is similar to the process that computer science (CS) went through in the 70s and 80s. In fact, looking at the placement of CS programs in academic institutions around the U.S. illustrates the debate that swirled around the discipline as its core was being defined. Some CS programs are in departments of mathematics, others are in engineering schools, and many others have become mainstay programs within newly emerging colleges of computing. Information technology, as it is practiced at this moment in its evolution, reflects similar growing pains. IT programs exist in colleges of computing, in CS departments, in schools of technology, and in business schools. Professors of information technology possess degrees in information systems, electronics, communications, graphics arts, economics, mathematics, computer science, and other disciplines. Few to none of them have a degree in information technology. It should be acknowledged here that IT has two substantially different interpretations, and that these should be clarified. Information Technology (IT) in its broadest sense encompasses all aspects of computing technology. IT, as an academic discipline, focuses on meeting the needs of users within an organizational and societal context through the selection, creation, application, integration and administration of computing technologies. Procedure The participants of CITC-1 participated in a Delphi study. A Delphi study is characterized by questions being asked of experts, who then respond freely to them. Their responses to the questions are shared with other experts, who then may modify their previous responses as they feel necessary. This sharing repeats until the opinions of the experts appear to be converging. (Brown, 1968; Dalkey, 1967, 1969; Dalkey, & Helmer, 1951; Dalkey, Rourke, Lewis, & Snyder, 1972). The format of the Delphi study was chosen due to the fact that the relevant experts (the conference attendees) were all co-located. They were judged experts because all had worked in IT prior to teaching, and all were familiar with the closely related computing disciplines of Computer Science and Information Systems. Each participant was issued a pad of self-adhesive sticky notes and a blunt felt-tip marker. Then the entire group was given 20 minutes to generate as many topics as they could, one topic per sticky note. …

Experience with a cross-disciplinary aggregated glossary of technical terms

A glossary typically provides a binding of terminology to concepts specific to a particular document or specialty. What would an aggregation of these concept descriptions reveal about how specialists in various fields use terminology? In particular would it help students and educators understand how terminology is used by specialists with whom they need to communicate? This paper provides a status report on an effort to find out. Starting with ISO/IEC 24765: Systems and software engineering vocabulary which aggregated the glossaries from 120 standards, we have created a database of 131 glossaries gathered from various sources. Though only 4% of terms have 3 or more concept descriptions, some have 10 or more. Initial analysis indicates that such a glossary can provide useful insights into potential areas of miscommunication. Simple exposure to the diversity of concepts associated with a given term will help sensitize people to the issues.

Evaluation of a computer networking class in information technology

Information Technology (IT) is a rapidly-developing discipline. IT instructors often design new courses to meet changing needs. There is also a need to evaluate courses once they have been designed and implemented. Evaluation of courses leads to improvements in the learning experiences for students and better understanding of the educational process and outcomes for course designers and instructors. Evaluation and improvement of quality is a requirement for programs accredited under ABET (and other accrediting bodies). A networking class in IT was selected for evaluation. Networking was selected because it is one of the core required topics in the IT curriculum. The course was compared to national standards for curriculum in the networking area. A single class was evaluated but methods were developed which can be applied to other courses in the IT discipline. The evaluation study included evaluation of the course content and the course structure. Student input was obtained through a survey instrument and the validity of the input was considered. Several questions were identified for this evaluation: Did the networking class meet student needs and expectations in terms of content and teaching approach; What are the students preferred learning styles; What coursework should a networking class include compared to what was actually taught; Did success in the earlier foundation class lead to success in the networking class; How well did students perform in this class relative to their performance in the IT major as a whole? Pursuing these questions involved data gathering from students as well as researching student records. Appropriate mechanisms were developed to protect student privacy. The evaluation of this class led to a number of useful insights and recommendations into technical class content, teaching and learning styles, and into the evaluation process. The methods of the study can be used for other courses and for other IT programs.

Collecting IT scholarship: the IT-thesis project

In 2006 it was proposed that one significant factor defining an IT research agenda was the scholarly work published in theses and dissertations from universities with IT graduate programs. It was concluded that a repository of IT research was necessary both to facilitate access to this body of work and to make it possible to do a bottom-up analysis of existing work. This paper reports on the status of our efforts to implement the repository that was proposed. A repository for theses and dissertations has been implemented and about 100 thesis abstracts of interest to scholars in IT have been made available. Many provide links to the text of the electronic source documents. The current repository is small, but useful for students and other researchers as a window on current student research efforts. Here we discuss the design and implementation of the repository along with the issues we have encountered in early efforts to populate it. We also discuss the issues discovered while developing analysis techniques for the repository and proposed improvements. We solicit involvement of the IT community in locating and entering relevant documents into the repository located at http://it-thesis.appspot.com

An infrastructure for the evaluation and comparison of information retrieval systems

Even though information retrieval systems have been successfully deployed for over 45 years, the field continues to evolve in performance, functionality, and accuracy. There are hundreds of different products available with different indexing and retrieval characteristics. How does one choose the appropriate system for a given application? The first step in that choice is the creation of a framework for comparison of IR products and an infrastructure that supports automated execution and analysis of testing results. The next step is providing an environment for subjective measurement using human evaluators. In this paper we briefly introduce the concepts used in IR system evaluation and report on our initial implementation of a framework for evaluating indexing performance. We also report a test case, which provides a comparative analysis of the indexing characteristics for three IR system implementations using a common collection of documents.

The IT thesis project: a slow beginning

In 2009 a repository was created to hold the body of masters theses and dissertations for IT degrees across the country. Before this, there was no central location where researchers could easily access these documents. Analysis of this repository has helped propose a research agenda for the IT discipline. The themes of IT research themselves were not surprising, but gathering the research to populate the repository did yield some surprising results. Much of the work done by IT graduate students simply is not readily accessible to the rest of the world. This makes it appear as though there are less IT graduate students than we thought, and the repository is currently only populated with just over 100 theses and dissertations. The presentation of the repository at SIGITE 2009 yielded good community support. There have been enhancements and upgrades for the repository in the last year, but we have as yet seen little community participation in the actual submission of IT research.

Measuring conceptual understanding: a case study

IT Educators are challenged with the task of providing learning experiences that helps learners build abstract mental models of IT concepts to help solve the complex, ill-defined problems they will face. But of the many instructional strategies discussed in the literature how can we tell which methods are better for the different types of IT knowledge presented. Can we assess how well different instructional strategies affect students conceptual understanding of IT concepts? This descriptive study examined one possible way of measuring conceptual understanding of a specific learning activity called Model Eliciting Activates (MEAs).

Hiring the IT Graduate: What’s in the Box?

An effort has recently concluded for developing recommended information technology (IT) curricula and accreditation standards. This paper addresses what industry can expect from graduates of programs utilizing these guidelines. It addresses the knowledge, skills and abilities, as well as the philosophy, of graduates of IT bachelor degree programs. It also provides industry with methods by which they can participate. In the educational process and provide feedback to help IT curricula evolve to meet the ever changing IT needs of industry