James @ Edmonton Study Life: 10月 2010

2nd week(10/18-10/24) Temperature 4~-1℃

This week, I have my home in Canada (Home-Stay).

Why I want to find a Home-Stay? It is because I want to learn English and foreign culture. Most of home-stay family is Canadian. They speak in English, cook European-style or American-style foods and believe in God; those are different from my family in

Taiwan

. Besides, home-stay can provide me three meals a day and a bedroom for sleep.

Last week, Will taught me to use keyword “Edmonton Home Stay” to search on the Internet. I found a lot of websites provide home-stay information with the keyword. The home-stay websites I found have rich information about the home-stay, for examples, home-stay's location, family members, meals, and rents. At beginning, I found eight home-stays and sent emails to them for inquiry. However, four home-stays replied me with "the home-stay is no longer available," two home-stays replied me with "we don’t want to have a male tenant at home," and the others didn't reply me at all. So I still couldn’t find a home-stay after couple of days.

I told Will about the results of my searching for home-stays. He told me that his supervisor, Prof. Tan, had helped Jimmy, who is also under Prof. Tan’s supervision, to find a home-stay couple of months ago. Will suggested me to ask Prof. Tan's help. I thought it's a good idea, so I asked Will to arrange a meeting with Prof. Tan for me last Saturday. When I met Prof. Tan, I let him know my requirements to the home-stay and Prof. Tan told me “I will help you.”

On Tuesday morning, Prof. Tan told me good news, he found me a home-stay. In the afternoon, Prof. Tan took me to the home-stay, and let me check my bedroom and the house's living environment

This home-stay is good to me. First of all, it is a big independent house. The independent house has both front yard and back yard and is not close to neighbors. I won't hear noise from neighbors. Second, the rent is relatively cheap. The rent is 600 CAD per month, it's about 18,000 NTD. The rent includes three meals a day, internet connection, television, water, electricity and a bedroom. If I live in Taipei, I also probably need to spend 18,000 NTD a month with covering the utilities I have here. At last but not least is the house is close to a bus stop. I only need 10 minutes to go to ELC by bus and the bus stop is just 50 meters away from the home-stay. So I told the home-stay family (i.e. Antony and Julie) that I take it and will move in on Thursday.

On Thursday, Prof. Tan helped me move into the house, I was so grateful for what he did for me. From that moment, I started a new life here in Edmonton with strangers, i.e., the home-stay family. By the way, Antony and Julie have two children also live with them in this house.

Around 5:30 PM, I heard some noise coming from the kitchen. The time was closing to the supper, so I thought that probably the noise is caused by someone who is cooking. If my assumption is correct, than I should go to help. I went to the kitchen and saw Julie (home-mom) is cooking. I asked Julie "may I help you?" and Julie happily responded to me "sure!"

We finished cooking soon. During the supper, Julie and Antony introduced their house and family to me, and told me "James, you should take here as your home." When I heard that, I was so happy!

By the way, why I use "supper" instead of "dinner"? I discovered that this family is faithful Christians and found a painting near to the dinning table. The painting is "The Last Supper" as Figure 1 shows. So I think this family use the words on the painting.

Figure 1. The painting - "The Last Supper"

On Friday, I went to a workshop held at ELC. Many researchers showed their research results in the workshop. The workshop's subject is "Agents in 3D Virtual World."

The most important research among all researches presented in this workshop to me is Chris' research. He designs and develops multiple agents on smart phones in his research. In my research, I also need to build a multi-agent system on smart phones due to the limited resource that smart phones have. Multi-agent system can reduce the resource consuming because not all agents have to start at the very beginning. Chris' multi-agent system is implemented in Java. However, I have never used Java in developing systems before, so I need to improve my Java programming ability.

Other researches are also interesting. Researchers develop agents and use multiple agents to provide different services in 3D virtual world. One research shows that users can interact with the agents by using natural language in the chat of Second Life. The agents in the research are psychologists and can do consultations for users. Another research is talking about using an agent to automatically and randomly generate questions for players in Wonderland. Players can answer any question at anytime by typing the question and corresponding answer. Once the players sent out their answers, the agent will check if the answers are correct. If a question has been answered correctly by a player, the agent will not generate the question again.

Every Tuesday we have a Context-Aware and Location-Based Ubiquitous Learning Service (CALBULS) meeting at ELC. Dr. Chang asks me to read a paper related to my research project every two weeks before New Year. After paper reading, I need to prepare slides for presenting the research which the paper talks about to all of us (Chris, me and Dr. Chang).

During the weekend, I read a paper and prepared for a presentation on next Tuesday meeting. The research designs a "knowledge construction formative assessment" for mobile ecology learning. The assessment system provides students e-library and online feedback for the worksheet questions they have done in three field trips. The worksheet has three kinds of questions: (1) multiple-choice questions (2) short-answer questions and (3) structured concept maps. They can be used to clarify and to scaffold students' mangrove species knowledge. This research shows that researchers use students' learning results to test the assessment system's effectiveness.

The reason that I chose this paper is because "the worksheet." My research is also regarding worksheets. I need to make smart phones have ability to automatically generate personalized worksheets for students. Students can do worksheet learning activities during their field trip. I have to know how teachers design worksheets and what learning activities a worksheet may have, so I need to do in-deep survey on worksheet relevant research first.

1st week(10/12-10/17) Temperature 16~0℃

On October 12, 2010, I departed from Taiwan for pursuing master degree in Canada. It is my first time to leave Taiwan for such long, because the next time I plan to come back would be six months later, and I can not see my family, friends, and girl-friend in the following six months. In this morning, Dad and Mom took me to Kaohsiung International Airport. On the way to the airport, they kept talking to me things that I need to remember for living in Canada, even they had talked thousands of times. I knew that is because they worry about me so much and love me very much. We waited for Chris in the airport, because he was also going to Canada on that day. I was so lucky that I was not alone in this trip.

Due to I am living at Taichung, the itinerary to Canada for me is complicate. I need to go to Kaohsiung first, then fly to Hong-Kong, continue heading to Vancouver from there, and finally get on a national flight to Edmonton where is I supposed to live for the next fourteen months. The total time I am going to spend for ground transportaion is 3 hours, in the air is 16 hours, and on the ground for the transit is 4 hours. After 23 hours not sleep and eat well, I finally have arrived Edmonton.

I planed to stay at Chris' place for couple of days until I found a home-stay family. There are three people currently live in Chris' one-bedroom apartment, they are Ting, Will, and of course, Chris, himself. Ting is a PhD student and he is doing a research project in Athabasca University; Will and Chris are Master students of Athabasca University, we are classmates in Taiwan, but they came here one year earlier than me.

Ting came to the airport in order to pick us up and Will was preparing surprised welcome party for me at home. Will shared his room with me and it is really a nice place, so I had a good dream at that night.

On Wednesday, Chris and Ting took me to a lot of places (e.g. Costco, Save On Foods, Dollarama, and Future Shop). The most important thing to me is that Chris took me to CIBC (i.e. a bank) to open student banking account. Having a banking account allows my family to transfer money to me.

On Thursday, I and Chris had a meeting with Dr. Chang. Chris took me to the Edmonton Learning Centre (ELC), Athabasca University (AU). The learning centre locates inside a building and has three floors for staffs working and researchers doing research. Dr. Chang taught me a lot of skills about presentation in the meeting and that’s very useful to me. He also told me the research plan that I am going to do for graduating from AU, which let me know what I should do in the following two months before I start my first semester next January.

On the weekend, Juliette invited me to go to watch a show. Juliette is a Dutch, has been here for long time. I met her on the Vancouver-to-Edmonton airplane. The show's name is "improv night." It is improvised performance, the performance is very funny and the laughs started from the beginning and couldn't stop until the end of the show. I had never seen any performance like this one before, it is interesting and unforgettable.