Category: curriculum vitae

This is my Curriculum Vitae. If it will help you to understand what I have accomplished, it’s in this list.

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Teaching Scratch Training: Getting started with Block Programming

design hashtag
design hashtag

On Teaching Scratch Training

This afternoon, I taught some young, bright people how to get started with Scratch, MIT’s block programming application, at Princeton Public Library. Scratch training is a regular offering there. Block programming is a ‘lego-style’ approach to programming where you drag and drop functions from a predetermined set to develop a program. For example, you can have a character, called a sprite, dance back and forth on a canvas, jump when you hit a key on your keyboard, and flip when it touches another character.

Scratch Training (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Scratch Training (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Over a few weeks, I’m going to introduce the basics of Scratch, using their own great tutorial resources. My focus was their Scratch Cards, simple tutorials that allow beginners to quickly gain an understanding of things that you can do. http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Support/Scratch_Cards

Richard Stallman
Cover of Richard Stallma

I was particularly excited to share the easy way in which you can look at other Scratch projects that other scratchers have shared. You can visit those projects and play them as they were programmed, but you can also open them up in the editor, save a local copy to your own projects (called remixing) and begin making improvements of your own. I do this all the time in order to build upon the work of others, perhaps the key benefit of open source software, a key idea celebrated by Scratch. It makes sense that MIT manages this project, as Free Software and the idea of openness and transparency in software was born with MIT’s own Richard Stallman.

Next week, we’ll be coming back to share the projects that we came up with to explore how we can each use Scratch to scratch our own itch. Can’t wait!

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On gaining customer confidence and providing a high level of service.

brand is not a logo by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
brand is not a logo by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
283-366 Year4 Cracked Android
283-366 Year4 Cracked Android (Photo credit: johngarghan)

I was visiting a mall kiosk recently in the hopes of repairing my beloved Nexus 7 Android tablet. The kiosk advertises the repair of iOS based device screens, rooting, etc., but nowhere did I see Android repairs advertised. I figured I’d stop by and ask if they could do it and what it might cost, as the brand new Nexus 7 tablet is just over $200 and has some good improvements over the original. I could also go and get the bits myself and try the repair, but I figured I’d ask the professionals first. The conversation would decide whether I more likely make use of the old tablet, which I really love, or wipe and process it through a service like Gazelle.com.

Me: Hi, there, I was wondering if you guys do Android tablets too?
Him: (after finishing a bite of his breakfast and taking a drink out of his Dunkin Donuts ‘coffee’) Sure.
Me: Great, I have a Nexus 7 (I did not mention that this was the breakthrough device for Google into the tablet space, just about a year ago, made to compete directly with the iPad and the inspiration for the iPad mini, because I figured it would be rhetorical spittle) and I just cracked the screen enough to lose touch function.
Him: What’s the model number?
Me: (blank stare) It’s the Nexus 7.
Him: (almost rolls eyes) I can’t tell you anything without the model number.
Me: Okay, I’m just surprised. It’s the most popular Android tablet out there.
Him: (stares)
Me: Well, I can get that for you, can you give me some idea of the price of the repair?
Him: What size is it?
Me: The Nexus 7 is a seven-inch device. (smiles)
Him: Oh, I’m not sure, there’s a lot of those now.
Me: Can you give me some idea? Like $40, $60, $80?
Him: (looking away, clicks tongue) $85, prolly.
Me: Okay thanks.

This business works with mobile devices all day long. He did not know anything about the most popular, uncomplicated in terms of model, well branded devices in the Android space. He did not care to show that he knew. He did not hop on to his computer or the 6 tablets around him to look up the Nexus 7. He did not suggest that the $85 for the repair might be better used to buy a new device. He did not do much, and he did not hold my confidence.

No one knows everything, but everyone makes a choice about their attitude, the tools they have to solve problems and questions, and the level of service that they are willing to offer. I am going to visit Gazelle now, and tell all of my tablet wielding friends, if they get a crack in their screen, to avoid this one place in particular.

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affiliations consulting insights professional activities research interests technology

Technology and the Arts: Open source hardware and technology based creativity

open by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
open by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

This is the 2013 series premiere of Technology and the Arts, a webcast exploring the connections between technology and art. Co-hosts Brian Kelley and John LeMasney discuss Arduino, Raspberry Pi and a study on how technology can be used to teach young people about creating art. For more information, visit http://technologyandthearts.com.

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An introduction to Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and open source hardware.

At 7 pm, on Monday August 5th, 2013, I’ll be at Princeton Public Library, I’m going to be giving an introductory overview of open source hardware, the Make movement, and the ideology of openness. In particular, I’ll be talking about Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and related hardware projects.

(post event note: Thanks to everyone who came out, and here is the link to the presentation)

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyp...
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. In other words you can build all kinds of cool shit with it. And yes, you can program it with Python 🙂 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Arduino is an electronics learning platform. The instructions for how to make one from scratch are freely available, which is why it is considered open source hardware, though many people find it far easier and supportive to the platform to just buy one. You can get them at your local Radio Shack. Once you have it connected to a computer, you can begin to program it or run programs that others have made for it, called sketches. The key idea with Arduino is that you program it to accept input from sensors or scripts, and to produce output in the form of light, sound, and other signals. With this basic idea, you can use the Arduino to solve little problems like knowing when the Dryer has stopped, feeding your animals reasonably while you are away, or making sophisticated environment based games.

Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi (Photo credit: tkramm)

The Raspberry Pi is perhaps a simpler idea for the uninitiated: a computer capable of doing most anything your laptop, desktop, tablet or phone can do (given the monitor, keyboard and mouse) available for $25-$35 dollars, depending on model. Because of the incredibly low price but relatively strong computing power, you can use the Pi to do all kinds of interesting things that you would not consider doing with your desktop or laptop machine. Running home automation, media servers, dedicated graphics workstations, an email terminal, a streaming media interface for your TV, and much more.

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Google Analytics and targeted campaigns.

open_waveform by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
open_waveform by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

Hi, all! This week, I have some interesting projects going on, and I wanted to share them with you and invite you to join me.

On Monday, July 22nd (and 29th), 2013, I’ll be starting a two part class on Google Analytics at Princeton Public Library. This is my first opportunity to talk publicly about the power of GA, and I’m really excited. This series will be focused on getting started for beginners, but if you are like me you know that even seasoned experts learn something new in a beginner’s class, so please come out and join us from 7-8:30 in the Tech Center at PPL.

Google Analytics v2.0
Google Analytics v2.0 (Photo credit: vrypan)

Google Analytics is an insight engine. By adding a little bit of javascript to each of your pages in your site, you tell Google to track activity on your site that can lead to insights about your content. Because you can learn where your audience is viewing your content from, you can tell if you need to focus more on local content or remote content. Because you can tell what your most popular content is, you can focus on the issues that matter to your audience most. Because you can track which pages are being visited specifically, you can learn how effective a particular link or advertisement is or not. These are just a few of the things that you can do with Analytics, but over the next two weeks we will learn many more.

I’m using Analytics in work with a client right now in order to tell if a particular ad campaign is effective or not so that they can focus their money and energy in the most productive way.  If we are using two different methods or advertising channels to get people to take the same action, let’s say to click a link or watch a video, we can tell easily after a week of clicks which method was more effective and by how much. We could also look at visits in two comparative time periods to see if one method was more or less effective than another during a particular month or season. Outdoor advertising might not work as well as other methods during a very cold winter month, for example. With Analytics, we don’t have to guess or assume that to be true, we could deduct that from the data.

If this is interesting to you, please consider yourself invited! If you’d like to see what other classes and content I like to teach, or if you’d like to have me come to your organization to speak or consult, please visit the Presentations and Topics page.

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Tonight at PPL: Food Blogging, or sharing your passion for rations.

David making pancakes (lemasney)
David making pancakes (lemasney)
David making pancakes (lemasney)
David making pancakes (lemasney)

Hi, everyone! Tonight at 7pm at Princeton Public Library, I’ll be explaining the who, what, when, why, where, and how of food blogging. I’ll be talking about best practices, tools, reasoning, methods, and more. Please join us in the chilly technology center at PPL!

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