Harnessing P2P Power in the Classroom Julita Vassileva Department of Computer Science University of Saskatchewan, Canada

Contents Problem: getting new materials in a class Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems The Comtella system Comtella in the “Ethics in IT” Course Evaluation Conclusions

Introduction The “Ethics and IT” class –4 th year undergraduate class –Topics: privacy, freedom of speech, intellectual property, computer crime and security, workplace issues and professionalism –Text: –Problem: New cases, laws, Canadian –Solution: students wind web-materials and post them on their websites.

P2P Filesharing Systems Napster, KaZaA, BitTorrent, BearShare Easy to develop, cheap to maintain (no server) Users are producers, maintainers and clients of materials Protocol allows easy search Ideal for our purpose!!

omtella A Client based on Gnutella 0.6 protocol Fully distributed Each client models the interests and relationships of its user (Vassileva, 2002) Used by graduate students to store and share academic papers found on the web –Where did I save that file?? Applied experimentally across the CS Dept for 3 months last fall. Problem: participation!

Ensure that the shared papers are available even if people aren’t online omtella in the Ethics Class

Comtella in the Ethics Class Share only URLs, not files

Search – by the topic of the week

Evaluation Compare two offerings of the class taught by the same instructor: one using personal web-sites and one using Comtella \ Class offering Parameters \ 2002/03 - first 6 weeks (using personal websites) 2003/04 - first 6 weeks (using Comtella) Number of students in class:2535 Total contributed links:51334 Average number of new links contributed per person (average from only those who contributed): Number of students who didn’t contribute at all: 14 or 56% of the class6 or 17% of the class Percentage of links contributed by the top five (5) students: 78% of all the contributed links 39% of all contributed links

Results: how much did students contribute Number of students Number of contributed links

Results: how regularly did students contribute? Number of students Contributed in:

Conclusions A way to support collaborative collection of a resource repository by P2P file-sharing –Finally, a legal application of P2P (hopefully)! –Success (confirmed by students in a questionnaire after the end of class) – Students suggested that the system is used widely in many CS and humanities classes P2P technically (on a protocol level) is not needed, but P2P in the general sense (users are both providers and consumers) is very useful.