Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

UBC Student Services launched a virtual campus tour this month. The virtual tour is created using Adobe Flash. It highlights the students life on UBC campus. The presentation was well put together and delivers an interesting perspective about UBC. It covers topics like the beautiful UBC campus, student spaces, the city Vancouver, places to learn, life on campus, student residences, Athletics and much more. Check it out if you care to learn more about the university I am working for...

The computer graphic card producer NVIDIA released information on the Personal Supercomputer named "Tesla Personal Supercomputer". This computer is calculated to be 250 times faster than standard PCs today.

Weeks long calculations can be shortened to just a few hours with Tesla PSC (Personal SuperComputer:)) Thans to the GPUs used in the Tesla system is 3 or 4 Tesla C1060 computing processors with 4GB of dedicated memory per GPU. It offers the performance of a cluster in a desktop system, delivering close to 4 teraflops of performance.

Pretty much anything that you do on your PC that takes a lot of time can be accelerated with this. These supercomputers can improve the time it takes to process info by 1,000 times. If you imagine it takes a week to get a result (from running an experiment), you can only do it 52 times a year. If it takes you minutes, you can do it constantly, and learn just as much in a day. (Chief Scientist of NVIDIA - David Kirk)

Some of the comparisons and ideas on Tesla are remarkable:

Synchronize a movie to an iPod normally takes up to 6 hours now can be done by Tesla within 20 minutes

New computer applications/games can be written to optimize the multi-tasking graphic ability of Tesla so that motion graphics can be presented at much higher quality than the best computer graphics today.

Tesla would allow doctors who will be able to process results for brain and body scans within hours instead of the days taken on a regular PC.

With it's high computing speed, Tesla will also help scientists to run hundreds of thousands of simulations in order to shortlist drugs that may likely be a cure to diseases such as cancer and malaria.

The biggest question on this computer would be affordability. Unfortunately, it's still priced at the much higher end, well , it is a Super Computer after all. It's suggested marking price is at US$6,000 today. But this price will be lowered dramatically in no time just as all the other hardware on the market.

At first Tesla will be sold to the scientific and research institutes and organizations. Then Dell will later bring it to the consumer market.

There seems to be some debates around if this personal supercomputer is breaking the famous Moore's law in the technology world. A more thorough discussion on Tesla's computing power and technical specifications can be found here.

A friend of mine created a web site to promote Chinese language learning. She uses lots of multimedia components to make the learning experience more pleasant and straight forward. There are currently 21 free lessons where learners can learn the language at their own pace. There seems to be a total of 37 free lessons that covers many daily living subjects such as, "greetings in Chinese", "Chinese names", "shopping in Chinese", "rent an apartment in Chinese" etc... According to the owner of the web site, the remainder lessons will be completed by the beginning of 2009. Then a synchronized learning platform will be introduced so multiple learners can "meet" in a virtual classroom and learn directly from the content creator on each of these lessons. I am looking forward to see what they will come up with in the new year. In the meanwhile, I am recommending this site to my co-workers and friends whom have been bugging me on wanting to learn Chinese on their own...

Simple-chinese.com, Learn some Chinese online for free!

Starting this term (Winter term 1 2008-2009), all students evaluations at the end of the semester are being moved online here at UBC. Essentially a user based survey platform is being created and hosted centrally. Individual faculties, departments and faculty members are allowed to shape the evaluations to fit their need. The result will be reviewed by the Dean and Department Heads to inform decisions concerning reappointment, tenure, promotion and merit. What I am curious about is whether this move encourage more participation from the students compare to the paper based process. I will post the result here once I find it out.