Expressiveness and Ambiguity: Learning to Program Can Be Unnecessarily Hard

Posted: January 23, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

One of the most important things to be able to do in any profession is to think as a professional. This is certainly true of Computer Science, because we have to spend so much time thinking as a Computer Scientist would think about how the machine will interpret our instructions. For those who don’t program, a brief quiz. What is the value of the next statement?

What is 3/4?

No doubt, you answered something like 0.75 or maybe 75% or possibly even “three quarters”? (And some of you would have said “but this statement has no intrinsic value” and my heartiest congratulations to you. Now go off and contemplate the Universe while the rest of us toil along on the material plane.) And, not being programmers, you would give me the same answer if I wrote:

What is 3.0/4.0?

Depending on the programming language we use, you can actually get two completely different answers to this apparently simple question. 3/4 is often interpreted by the computer to mean “What is the result if I carry out integer division, where I will only tell you how many times the denominator will go into the numerator as a whole number, for 3 and 4?” The answer will not be the expected 0.75, it will be 0, because 4 does not go into 3 – it’s too big. So, again depending on programming language, it is completely possible to ask the computer “is 3/4 equivalent to 3.0/4.0?” and get the answer ‘No’.

This is something that we have to highlight to students when we are teaching programming, because very few people use integer division when they divide one thing by another – they automatically start using decimal points. Now, in this case, the different behaviour of the ‘/’ is actually exceedingly well-defined and is not all ambiguous to the computer or to the seasoned programmer. It is, however, nowhere near as clear to the novice or casual observer.

I am currently reading Stephen Ramsay’s excellent “Reading Machines: Towards an Algorithmic Criticism” and it is taking me a very long time to read an 80 page book. Why? Because, to avoid ambiguity and to be as expressive and precise as possible, he has used a number of words and concepts with which I am unfamiliar or that I have not seen before. I am currently reading his book with a web browser and a dictionary because I do not have a background in literary criticism but, once I have the building blocks, I can understand his argument. In other words, I am having to learn a new language in order to read a book for that new language community. However, rather than being irked that “/” changes meaning depending on the company it keeps, I am happy to learn the new terms and concepts in the space that Ramsay describes, because it is adding to my ability to express key concepts, without introducing ambiguous shadings of language over things that I already know. Ramsay is not, for example, telling me that “book” no longer means “book” when you place it inside parentheses. (It is worth noting that Ramsay discusses the use of constraint as a creative enhancer, a la Oulipo, early on in the book and this is a theme for another post.)

The usual insult at this point is to trot out the accusation of jargon, which is as often a statement that “I can’t be bothered learning this” than it is a genuine complaint about impenetrable prose. In this case, the offender in my opinion is the person who decided to provide an invisible overloading of the “/” operator to mean both “division” and “integer division”, as they have required us to be aware of a change in meaning that is not accompanied by a change in syntax. While this isn’t usually a problem, spoken and written languages are full of these things after all, in the computing world it forces the programmer to remember that “/” doesn’t always mean “/” and then to get it the right way around. (A number of languages solve this problem by providing a distinct operator – this, however, then adds to linguistic complexity and rather than learning two meanings, you have to learn two ‘words’. Ah, no free lunch.) We have no tone or colour in mainstream programming languages, for a whole range of good computer grammar reasons, but the absence of the rising tone or rising eyebrow is sorely felt when we encounter something that means two different things. The net result is that we tend to use the same constructs to do the same thing because we have severe limitations upon our expressivity. That’s why there are boilerplate programmers, who can stitch together a solution from things they have already seen, and people who have learned how to be as expressive as possible, despite most of these restrictions. Regrettably, expressive and innovative code can often be unreadable by other people because of the gymnastics required to reach these heights of expressiveness, which is often at odds with what the language designers assumed someone might do.

We have spent a great deal of effort making computers better at handling abstract representations, things that stand in for other (real) things. I can use a name instead of a number and the computer will keep track of it for me. It’s important to note that writing int i=0; is infinitely preferable to typing “0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000” into the correct memory location and then keeping that (rather large number) address written on a scrap of paper. Abstraction is one of the fundamental tools of modern programming, yet we greatly limit expressiveness in sometimes artificial ways to reduce ambiguity when, really, the ambiguity does seem a little artificial.

One of the nastiest potential ambiguities that shows up a lot is “what do we mean by ‘equals'”. As above, we already know that many languages would not tell you that “3/4 equals 3.0/4.0” because both mathematical operations would be executed and 0 is not the same as 0.75. However, the equivalence operator is often used to ask so many different questions: “Do these two things contain the same thing?”, “Are these two things considered to be the same according to the programmer?” and “Are these two things actually the same thing and stored in the same place in memory?”

Generally, however, to all of these questions, we return a simple “True” or “False”, which in reality reflects neither the truth nor the falsity of the situation. What we are asking, respectively, is “Are the contents of these the same?” to which the answer is “Same” or “Different”. To the second, we are asking if the programmer considers them to be the same, in which case the answer is really “Yes” or “No” because they could actually be different, yet not so different that the programmer needs to make a big deal about it. Finally, when we are asking if two references to an object actually point to the same thing, we are asking if they are in the same location or not.

There are many languages that use truth values, some of them do it far better than others, but unless we are speaking and writing in logical terms, the apparent precision of the True/False dichotomy is inherently deceptive and, once again, it is only as precise as it has been programmed to be and then interpreted, based on the knowledge of programmer and reader. (The programming language Haskell has an intrinsic ability to say that things are “Undefined” and to then continue working on the problem, which is an obvious, and welcome, exception here, yet this is not a widespread approach.) It is an inherent limitation on our ability to express what is really happening in the system when we artificially constrain ourselves in order to (apparently) reduce ambiguity. It seems to me that we have reduced programmatic ambiguity, but we have not necessarily actually addressed the real or philosophical ambiguity inherent in many of these programs.

More holiday musings on the “Python way” and why this is actually an unreasonable demand, rather than a positive feature, shortly.

The Limits of Expressiveness: If Compilers Are Smart, Why Are We Doing the Work?

Posted: January 23, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I am currently on holiday, which is “Nick shorthand” for catching up on my reading, painting and cat time. Recently, my interests in my own discipline have widened and I am precariously close to that terrible state that academics sometimes reach when they suddenly start uttering words like “interdisciplinary” or “big tent approach”. Quite often, around this time, the professoriate will look at each other, nod, and send for the nice people with the butterfly nets. Before they arrive and cart me away, I thought I’d share some of the reading and thinking I’ve been doing lately.

My reading is a little eclectic, right now. Next to Hooky’s account of the band “Joy Division” sits Dennis Wheatley’s “They Used Dark Forces” and next to that are four other books, which are a little more academic. “Reading Machines: Towards an Algorithmic Criticism” by Stephen Ramsay; “Debates in the Digital Humanities” edited by Matthew Gold; “10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10” by Montfort et al; and “‘Pataphysics: A Useless Guide” by Andrew Hugill. All of these are fascinating books and, right now, I am thinking through all of these in order to place a new glass over some of my assumptions from within my own discipline.

“10 PRINT CHR$…” is an account of a simple line of code from the Commodore 64 Basic language, which draws diagonal mazes on the screen. In exploring this, the authors explore fundamental aspects of computing and, in particular, creative computing and how programs exist in culture. Everything in the line says something about programming back when the C-64 was popular, from the use of line numbers (required because you had to establish an execution order without necessarily being able to arrange elements in one document) to the use of the $ after CHR, which tells both the programmer and the machine that what results from this operation is a string, rather than a number. In many ways, this is a book about my own journey through Computer Science, growing up with BASIC programming and accepting its conventions as the norm, only to have new and strange conventions pop out at me once I started using other programming languages.

Rather than discuss the other books in detail, although I recommend all of them, I wanted to talk about specific aspects of expressiveness and comprehension, as if there is one thing I am thinking after all of this reading, it is “why aren’t we doing this better”? The line “10 PRINT CHR$…” is effectively incomprehensible to the casual reader, yet if I wrote something like this:

do this forever
pick one of “/” or “\” and display it on the screen

then anyone who spoke English (which used to be a larger number than those who could read programming languages but, honestly, today I’m not sure about that) could understand what was going to happen but, not only could they understand, they could create something themselves without having to work out how to make it happen. You can see language like this in languages such as Scratch, which is intended to teach programming by providing an easier bridge between standard language and programming using pre-constructed blocks and far more approachable terms. Why is it so important to create? One of the debates raging in Digital Humanities at the moment, at least according to my reading, is “who is in” and “who is out” – what does it take to make one a digital humanist? While this used to involve “being a programmer”, it is now considered reasonable to “create something”. For anyone who is notionally a programmer, the two are indivisible. Programs are how we create things and programming languages are the form that we use to communicate with the machines, to solve the problems that we need solved.

When we first started writing programs, we instructed the machines in simple arithmetic sequences that matched the bit patterns required to ensure that certain memory locations were processed in a certain way. We then provided human-readable shorthand, assembly language, where mnemonics replaced numbers, to make it easier for humans to write code without error. “20” became “JSR” in 6502 assembly code, for example, yet “JSR” is as impenetrably occulted as “20” unless you learn a language that is not actually a language but a compressed form of acronym. Roll on some more years and we have added pseudo-English over the top: GOSUB in Basic and the use of parentheses to indicate function calls in other languages.

However, all I actually wanted to do was to make the same thing happen again, maybe with some minor changes to what it was working on. Think of a sub-routine (method, procedure or function, if we’re being relaxed in our terminology) and you may as well think of a washing machine. It takes in something and combines it with a determined process, a machine setting, powders and liquids to give you the result you wanted, in this case taking in dirty clothes and giving back clean ones. The execution of a sub-routine is identical to this but can you see the predictable familiarity of the washing machine in JSR FE FF?

If you are familiar with ‘Pataphysics, or even “Ubu Roi” the most well-known of Jarry’s work, you may be aware of the pataphysician’s fascination with the spiral – le Grand Gidouille. The spiral, once drawn, defines not only itself but another spiral in the negative space that it contains. The spiral is also a natural way to think about programming because a very well-used programming language construct, the for loop, often either counts up to a value or counts down. It is not uncommon for this kind of counting loop to allow us to advance from one character to the next in a text of some sort. When we define a loop as a spiral, we clearly state what it is and what it is not – it is not retreading old ground, although it may always spiral out towards infinity.

However, for maximum confusion, the for loop may iterate a fixed number of times but never use the changing value that is driving it – it is no longer a spiral in terms of its effect on its contents. We can even write a for loop that goes around in a circle indefinitely, executing the code within it until it is interrupted. Yet, we use the same keyword for all of these.

In English, the word “get” is incredibly overused. There are very few situations when another verb couldn’t add more meaning, even in terms of shade, to the situation. Using “get” forces us, quite frequently, to do more hard work to achieve comprehension. Using the same words for many different types of loop pushes load back on to us.

What happens is that when we write our loop, we are required to do the thinking as to how we want this loop to work – although Scratch provides a forever, very few other languages provide anything like that. To loop endlessly in C, we would use while (true) or for (;;), but to tell the difference between a loop that is functioning as a spiral, and one that is merely counting, we have to read the body of the loop to see what is going on. If you aren’t a programmer, does for(;;) give you any inkling at all as to what is going on? Some might think “Aha, but programming is for programmers” and I would respond with “Aha, yes, but becoming a programmer requires a great deal of learning and why don’t we make it simpler?” To which the obvious riposte is “But we have special languages which will do all that!” and I then strike back with “Well, if that is such a good feature, why isn’t it in all languages, given how good modern language compilers are?” (A compiler is a program that turns programming languages into something that computers can execute – English words to byte patterns effectively.)

In thinking about language origins, and what we are capable of with modern compilers, we have to accept that a lot of the heavy lifting in programming is already being done by modern, optimising, compilers. Years ago, the compiler would just turn your instructions into a form that machines could execute – with no improvement. These days, put something daft in (like a loop that does nothing for a million iterations), and the compiler will quietly edit it out. The compiler will worry about optimising your storage of information and, sometimes, even help you to reduce wasted use of memory (no, Java, I’m most definitely not looking at you.)

So why is it that C++ doesn’t have a forever, a do 10 times, or a spiral to 10 equivalent in there? The answer is complex but is, most likely, a combination of standards issues (changing a language standard is relatively difficult and requires a lot of effort), the fact that other languages do already do things like this, the burden of increasing compiler complexity to handle synonyms like this (although this need not be too arduous) and, most likely, the fact that I doubt that many people would see a need for it.

In reading all of these books, and I’ll write more on this shortly, I am becoming increasingly aware that I tolerate a great deal of limitation in my ability to solve problems using programming languages. I put up with having my expressiveness reduced, with taking care of some unnecessary heavy lifting in making things clear to the compiler, and I occasionally even allow the programming language to dictate how I write the words on the page itself – not just syntax and semantics (which are at least understandably, socially and technically) but the use of blank lines, white space and end of lines.

How are we expected to be truly creative if conformity and constraint are the underpinnings of programming? Tomorrow, I shall write on the use of constraint as a means of encouraging creativity and why I feel that what we see in programming is actually limitation, rather than a useful constraint.

Doo de doo dooooo, doo de doo doo dooooo.

Posted: January 1, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
"What did you do in the 80s, Daddy?""I don't want to talk about it."

“What did you do in the 80s, Daddy?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Some of you will recognise the title of this post as the opening ‘music’ of the Europe song, “The Final Countdown”. I wasn’t sure what to call this post because it was the final component of a year long cycle that begin with some sketchy diagrams and a sketchier plan and has seen several different types of development over time. It is not, however, the final post on this blog as I intend to keep blogging but, from this post forwards, I will no longer require myself to provide at least one new post for every day.

This is, perhaps, just as well, because I am already looking over 2013 and realising that my ‘free project’ space is now completely occupied until July. Despite my intentions to travel less, I am in the US twice before the middle of March and have several domestic trips planned as well. And this is a reminder of everything that I’ve been trying to come to terms with in writing this blog and talking about my students, myself, and our community: I can talk about things and deal with them rationally in my head, but that doesn’t mean that I always act on them.

In retrospect, it has been a successful year and I have been able to produce more positive change in 2012 then probably in the sum of my working contributions up until that point. However, I am not in as good a shape as I was at the start of the year, for a variety of reasons, so when I say that my ‘free project’ space is full, I mean that I have fewer additional things to do but I am deliberately allocating less of my personal time to do them. In 2013, family and friends come first, then my projects, then my required work. Why? Because I will always find a way to do the work that I’m supposed to do, but if I start with that I can use all of my time to do that, whereas if I invert it, I have to be more efficient and I’m pretty confident that I can still get it done. After all, next year I’ll have at least an extra hour or two a day from not blogging.

Let’s not forget that this blogging project has consumed somewhere in the region of 350-400 hours of my time over the year, and that’s probably an underestimate. 400 hours is ten working weeks or just under 17 days of contiguous hours. Was my blog any better for being daily? Probably not. Could I be far more flexible and agile with my time if I removed the daily posting requirement? Of course – and so, away it goes. (So it goes, Mr Vonnegut.) The value to me of this activity has been immense – it has changed the way that I think about things and I have a far greater basis of knowledge from which I can discuss important aspects of learning and teaching. I have also discovered how little I know about some things but at least I know that they exist now! The value to other people is more debatable but given that I know that at least some people have found use in it, then it’s non-zero and I can live with that. Recalling Kurt Vonnegut again, and his book “Timequake”, I always saw this blog as a place where people could think “Oh, me too!” as I stumble my way through complicated ideas and try to comprehend the developed notions of clever people.

“Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'” (Vonnegut, Timequake, 1997)

I never really thought much about the quality of this blog, but I was always concerned about the qualities of it. I wanted it to be inclusive, reliable, honest, humble, knowledgable, useful and welcoming. Looking back, I achieved some of that some of the time and, at other times, well, I’m a human. Some days I was angrier than others but I like to think it was about important things. Sexism makes me angry. Racism makes me angry. The corruption of science for political ends makes me angry. Deliberate ignorance makes me angry. Inequity and elitism make me angry. I hope, however, the anger was a fuel for something better, burning to lift something up that carried a message that wasn’t just pure anger. If, at any stage, all I did was combine oxygen and kerosene on the launch pad and burn the rocket, then I apologise, because I always wanted to be more useful than that.

This is not the end of the blog, but it’s the end of one cycle. It’s like a long day at the beach. You leap out of bed as the sun is coming up, grab some fruit and run down to the water, still warm from the late summer currents and the hot wind that blows across it, diving in to swim out and look back at the sand as it lights up. Maybe you grab your fishing rod and spend an hour or two watching the float bob along the surface, more concerned with talking to your friend or drinking a beer than actually catching a fish, because it’s just such a nice day to be with people. Lunch is sandy sandwiches, eaten between laughs in the gusty breeze that lifts up the beach and tries to jam a big handful of grains into every bite, so you juggle it and the tomato slides out, landing on your lap. That’s ok, because all you have to do is to dive back into the water and you’re clean again. The afternoon is beach cricket, squinting even through sunglasses as some enthusiastic adult hits the ball for a massive 6 that requires everyone to search for it for about 15 minutes, then it’s some cold water and ice creams. Heading back that night, and it’s a long day in an Australian summer, you’re exhausted, you’re spent. You couldn’t swim another stroke, eat another chip or run for another ball if you tried. You’ll eat something for dinner and everyone will mumble about staying up but the day is over and, in an hour or so, everyone will be asleep. You might try and stay up because there’s so much to do but the new day starts tomorrow. Or, worst case, next summer. It’s not the end of the beach. It’s just the end of one day.

Firstly, of course, I want to thank my wife who has helped me to find the time I needed to actually do this and who has provided a very patient ear when I am moaning about that most first world of problems: what is my blog theme for today. The blog has been a part of our lives every day for 1-2 hours for an entire year and that requires everyone in the household to put in the effort – so, my most sincere gratitude to the amazing Dr K. There’s way I could have done any of this without you.

For everyone who is not my wife, thank you for reading and being part of what has been a fascinating journey. Thank you for all of your comments, your patience, your kindness and your willingness to listen. I hope that you have a very happy and prosperous New Year. Remember what Vonnegut said; that people need to know, sometimes, that they are not alone.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

And this is the real me! Yes, it was me ALL ALONG! Happy New Year!

And this is the real me! Yes, it was me ALL ALONG!
Happy New Year!

WordPress Still Don’t Quite Get It

Posted: December 31, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Some time ago, I logged a report to WordPress that one of their ‘incentive’ messages for completing and posting a blog post was a highly dismissive Capote quote about Kerouac’s writing of “On the Road” – “That’s not writing, that’s typing”. I felt that this was not the kind of thing that you said to someone as an incentive and, nicely, the people who handled my comment appeared to agree and I haven’t seen it since.

Today they sent me their “Your Year in Review” link which gave me a prettied-up, but not overly informative, set of aggregated statistics for 2012. This one stuck out:

“In 2012, there were 438 new posts, not bad for the first year!”

Not bad? I posted every 20 hours on average across the year and that’s not bad???

23137877

I know what they’re trying to say but, seriously, their automated encouragement software needs some work. Of course, the scary question is: what does WordPress consider to be good in terms of posting count? Every 10 hours? Every 5 hours?

Seriously, WordPress people, please start thinking about the throwaway language that you are using to pretend that you know what we’re doing. We are all happily using your site – don’t let bad scripting and automated pseudo-encouragement undo all of the cool things that we can do here!

Thanks for the exam – now I can’t help you.

Posted: December 31, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I have just finished marking a pile of examinations from a course that I co-taught recently. I haven’t finalised the marks but, overall, I’m not unhappy with the majority of the results. Interestingly, and not overly surprisingly, one of the best answered sections of the exam was based on a challenging essay question I set as an assignment. The question spans many aspects of the course and requires the student to think about their answer and link the knowledge – which most did very well. As I said, not a surprise but a good reinforcement that you don’t have to drill students in what to say in the exam, but covering the requisite knowledge and practising the right skills is often helpful.

However, I don’t much like marking exams and it doesn’t come down to the time involved, the generally dull nature of the task or the repetitive strain injury from wielding a red pen in anger, it comes down to the fact that, most of the time, I am marking the student’s work at a time when I can no longer help him or her. Like most exams at my Uni, this was the terminal examination for the course, worth a substantial amount of the final marks, and was taken some weeks after teaching finished. So what this means is that any areas I identify for a given student cannot now be corrected, unless the student chooses to read my notes in the exam paper or come to see me. (Given that this campus is international, that’s trickier but not impossible thanks to the Wonders of Skypenology.) It took me a long time to work out exactly why I didn’t like marking, but when I did, the answer was obvious.

I was frustrated that I couldn’t actually do my job at one of the most important points: when lack of comprehension is clearly identified. If I ask someone a question in the classroom, on-line or wherever, and they give me an answer that’s not quite right, or right off base, then we can talk about it and I can correct the misunderstanding. My job, after all, is not actually passing or failing students – it’s about knowledge, the conveyance, construction and quality management thereof. My frustration during exam marking increases with every incomplete or incorrect answer I read, which illustrates that there is a section of the course that someone didn’t get. I get up in the morning with the clear intention of being helpful towards students and, when it really matters, all I can do is mark up bits of paper in red ink.

Quickly, Jones! Construct a valid knowledge framework! You're in a group environment! Vygotsky, man, Vygotsky!

Quickly, Jones! Construct a valid knowledge framework! You’re in a group environment! Vygotsky, man, Vygotsky!

A student who, despite my sweeping, and seeping, liquid red ink of doom, manages to get a 50 Passing grade will not do the course again – yet this mark pretty clearly indicates that roughly half of the comprehension or participation required was not carried out to the required standard. Miraculously, it doesn’t matter which half of the course the student ‘gets’, they are still deemed to have attained the knowledge. (An interesting point to ponder, especially when you consider that my colleagues in Medicine define a Pass at a much higher level and in far more complicated ways than a numerical 50%, to my eternal peace of mind when I visit a doctor!) Yet their exam will still probably have caused me at least some gnashing of teeth because of points missed, pointless misstatement of the question text, obscure song lyrics, apologies for lack of preparation and the occasional actual fact that has peregrinated from the place where it could have attained marks to a place where it will be left out in the desert to die, bereft of the life-giving context that would save it from such an awful fate.

Should we move the exams earlier and then use this to guide the focus areas for assessment in order to determine the most improvement and develop knowledge in the areas in most need? Should we abandon exams entirely and move to a continuous-assessment competency based system, where there are skills and knowledge that must be demonstrated correctly and are practised until this is achieved? We are suffering, as so many people have observed before, from overloading the requirement to grade and classify our students into neatly discretised performance boxes onto a system that ultimately seeks to identify whether these students have achieved the knowledge levels necessary to be deemed to have achieved the course objectives. Should we separate competency and performance completely? I have sketchy ideas as to how this might work but none that survive under the blow-torches of GPA requirements and resource constraints.

Obviously, continuous assessment (practicals, reports, quizzes and so on) throughout the semester provide a very valuable way to identify problems but this requires good, and thorough, course design and an awareness that this is your intent. Are we premature in treating the exam as a closing-off line on the course? Do we work on that the same way that we do any assignment? You get feedback, a mark and then more work to follow-up? If we threw resourcing to the wind, could we have a 1-2 week intensive pre-semester program that specifically addressed those issues that students failed to grasp on their first pass? Congratulations, you got 80%, but that means that there’s 20% of the course that we need to clarify? (Those who got 100% I’ll pay to come back and tutor, because I like to keep cohorts together and I doubt I’ll need to do that very often.)

There are no easy answers here and shooting down these situations is very much in the fish/barrel plane, I realise, but it is a very deeply felt form of frustration that I am seeing the most work that any student is likely to put in but I cannot now fix the problems that I see. All I can do is mark it in red ink with an annotation that the vast majority will never see (unless they receive the grade of 44, 49, 64, 74 or 84, which are all threshold-1 markers for us).

Ah well, I hope to have more time in 2013 so maybe I can mull on this some more and come up with something that is better but still workable.

Thinking about teaching spaces: if you’re a lecturer, shouldn’t you be lecturing?

Posted: December 30, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I was reading a comment on a philosophical post the other day and someone wrote this rather snarky line:

He’s is a philosopher in the same way that (celebrity historian) is a historian – he’s somehow got the job description and uses it to repeat the prejudices of his paymasters, flattering them into thinking that what they believe isn’t, somehow, ludicrous. (Grangousier, Metafilter article 123174)

Rather harsh words in many respects and it’s my alteration of the (celebrity historian)’s name, not his, as I feel that his comments are mildy unfair. However, the point is interesting, as a reflection upon the importance of job title in our society, especially when it comes to the weighted authority of your words. From January the 1st, I will be a senior lecturer at an Australian University and that is perceived differently where I am. If I am in the US, I reinterpret this title into their system, namely as a tenured Associate Professor, because that’s the equivalent of what I am – the term ‘lecturer’ doesn’t clearly translate without causing problems, not even dealing with the fact that more lecturers in Australia have PhDs, where many lecturers in the US do not. But this post isn’t about how people necessarily see our job descriptions, it’s very much about how we use them.

In many respects, the title ‘lecturer’ is rather confusing because it appears, like builder, nurse or pilot, to contain the verb of one’s practice. One of the big changes in education has been the steady acceptance of constructivism, where the learners have an active role in the construction of knowledge and we are facilitating learning, in many ways, to a greater extent than we are teaching. This does not mean that teachers shouldn’t teach, because this is far more generic than the binding of lecturers to lecturing, but it does challenge the mental image that pops up when we think about teaching.

If I asked you to visualise a classroom situation, what would you think of? What facilities are there? Where are the students? Where is the teacher? What resources are around the room, on the desks, on the walls? How big is it?

Take a minute to do just this and make some brief notes as to what was in there. Then come back here.

It’s okay, I’ll still be here!

Read the rest of this entry »

Three more – for various definitions of three.

Posted: December 29, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I have three more posts to make to complete my ‘year of daily posts’ – and this one doesn’t count, you’ll either be pleased or saddened to hear. I’m still torn as to when and how these will be written. I prefer the spontaneity of making the post on the day but I am very tempted by the thought of sitting around tomorrow morning to put the remaining two (by then) in the bag.

I’ll be very interested to see how much I will post after this is over. I may take Gas station without pump’s approach and publish a similar or greater number of words in a less scheduled way or I may fall completely silent. Right now I have no idea at all, which is fun and a bit scary at the same time, like almost all interesting things.

I’ve seen my fair share of abandoned blogs – you know the ones “Here is where I will detail my travels through my PhD” and the last post was back in 2006, it was only the third post and it amounted to “my brain, it hurts”. But life gets in the way and these blogs are the same as the diaries, started on January 1st, that start with “Wow, here’s my yearly diary! Every day I’m going to write something positive!” and wind up, a week later, as drink coasters or propping up the wonky sofa in the study. Life gets in the way.

Death gets in the way, too. I was reading someone’s LiveJournal years ago when they were diagnosed with cancer and the journal continues until their (far too early) death, with the final reflections of that person’s life taking place in other LJs, visible as a permanent artefact. I reread that LiveJournal, from first to last, earlier this year, to remind myself of a person who I had only known through this mechanism and, even knowing what the ending was going to be, the post where she announces that the test results had come back, and that it was cancer, shocked and upset me, almost to the point of throwing up. This vibrant, excited person, deeply in love with someone and working through all of the bits and pieces that happens when you and the person you love are in different countries, no longer updates their LiveJournal but it is still there. I have too many of these dormant LiveJournals on my list now. Death gets in the way, too.

This whole year, the good, the bad, the thoughtful, the preachy, the plain dumb and ill-informed, will stay here until this data corpus fries or the company gets sold to someone who wants to charge money for access or some such, but while it does that, it will reach more people than any other form of small-scale self-publishing has every achieved up until now. And while I have made some mistakes, it’s wrong to remove them just because I was wrong, as long as I’ve corrected them or noted where they should be corrected to be right.

This has been a part of my life. I wonder what role it will have from January 1st, 2013?

False Dichotomy: If I don’t understand it, then either I am worthless or it is!

Posted: December 29, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve been reading an interesting post on Metafilter about the “Minima Moralia: Reflections from the Damaged Life“, by Theodor Adorno. While the book itself is very interesting, two of the comments on the article caught my eye. An earlier commenter had mentioned that they neither understood nor appreciated this kind of thing, and made the usual throwaway remark about postmodernism being “a scam to funnel money from the productive classes to the parasitical academy” (dydecker). Further down, another commenter, Frowner, gently took this statement to task, starting by noting that Adorno would have been appalled by being labelled a post-modernist, and then discussing why dydecker might have felt the need to attack things in this way. It’s very much worth reading Frowner’s comments on this post, but I shall distil the first one here:

  1. Just because a text is difficult to obscure does not mean that it is postmodern. Also post-modernist is not actually an insult and this may be a politically motivated stance to attacks  group of people who are also likely to identify as status quo critical or (gasp) Marxist.

  2. Not all texts need to be accessible to all audiences, not is something worthless, fake or elitist if it requires pre-readings or some effort to get into. Advanced physics texts can be very difficult to comprehend for the layperson. This does not make Quantum Field Theory wrong or a leftist conspiracy.
  3. You don’t need to read books that you don’t want to read.
  4. You don’t need to be angry at difficult books for being difficult. To exactly quote Frowner,

    Difficult books only threaten us if we decide to feel guilty and ashamed for not reading them.

    If you’re actually studying an area, and read the books that the work relies upon, difficult books can become much clearer, illustrating that it was perhaps not the book that was causing the difficulty.

  5. Sometimes you won’t like something and this has nothing to do with its quality or worth – you just don’t like it.
  6. Don’t picture a perfect reader in your head who understands everything and hold yourself to that standard. If you’re reading a hard book then keep plugging away and accept your humanity.

Frowner then goes on to beautifully summarise all of this in a later comment, where he notes that we seem to learn to be angry at, or uncomfortable with, difficult texts, because we are under pressure to be capable of understanding everything of worth. This is an argument of legitimacy: if the work is legitimate and I don’t understand it, then I am stupid, however if I can argue that the work is illegitimate, then this is a terrible con job, I am not stupid for not understanding this and we should attack this work! Frowner wonders about how we are prepared for the world and believes that we are encouraged to see ourselves as inadequate if we do not understand everything for ourselves, hence the forced separation of work into legitimate and illegitimate, with am immediate, and often vicious, attack on those things we define as illegitimate in order to protect our image of ourselves.

I spend a reasonable amount of time in art galleries and I wish I had a dollar for everyone who stood in front of a piece of modern art (anything from the neo-impressionists on, basically) and felt the need to loudly state that they “didn’t get it” or that they could “have painted it themselves.” (I like Rothko, Mondrian and Klee, among others, so I am often in that part of the gallery.) It is quite strange when you come to think about it – why on earth are people actually vocalising this? Looking more closely, it is (less surprisingly) people in groups of two or more who seem to do this: I don’t understand this so, before you ask me about, I will declare it to be without worth. I didn’t get it, therefore this art has failed me. We go back to Frowner’s list and look at point 2: Not all art (in this case) is for everyone and that’s ok. I can admire Grant Wood’s skill and his painting “American Gothic” but the painting doesn’t appeal as much to me as does the work of Schiele, for example. That’s ok, that doesn’t make Schiele better than Wood in some Universal Absolute Fantasy League of Painters (although the Schiele/Klimt tag team wrestling duo, with their infamous Golden Coat Move, would be fun to watch) – it’s a matter of preference. I regularly look at things that I don’t quite understand but I don’t regard it as a challenge or an indication that it or I are at fault, although I do see things that I understand completely and can quite happily identify reasons that I don’t like it!

Klee's "The Goldfish". Some will see this as art, others will say "my kids could do that". Unless you are Hans Wilhelm Klee, no, probably not.

Klee’s “The Goldfish”. Some will see this as art, others will say “my kids could do that”. Unless you are Hans Wilhelm Klee, no, probably not.

I am, however, very lucky, because I have a job and lifestyle where my ability to think about things is a core component: falsely dichotomous thinking is not actually what I’m paid to do. However, I do have influence over students and I need to be very careful in how I present information to them. In my last course, I deliberately referred to Wikipedia among other documents because it is designed to be understood and is usually shaped by many hands until it reaches an acceptable standard of readability. I could have pointed my students at ethics texts but these texts often require more preparation and a different course structure, which may have put students off actually reading and understanding them. If my students go into ethics, or whatever other area they deem interesting, then point 4 becomes valid and their interest, and contextual framing, can turn what would have been a difficult book into a useful book.

I agree with this (effectively) anonymous poster and his or her summary of an ongoing issue: we make it hard for people to admit that they are learning, that they haven’t quite worked something out yet, because we make “not getting something immediately” a sign of slowness (informally) and often with negative outcomes (in assessment or course and career progression). We do not have to be experts at everything, nor should we pretend to be. We risk not actually learning some important and beautiful things because we feel obliged to reject it before it rejects us – and some things, of great worth that will be long appreciated, take longer to ‘get’ then just the minute or two that we feel we can allocate.

Typo Apology

Posted: December 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Apologies for the spate of small errors in recent posts, I’m working on much smaller devices with touchscreens at the moment and reviewing is more difficult. Should be back to normal shortly.

Your definition of normal may vary. 🙂

What Brings Us Back?

Posted: December 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

There’s a Thai restaurant and bar that I go to whenever I’m in Melbourne and, for those who don’t know Melbourne, there is no shortage of good restaurants and bars so what is it that keeps me bringing it back to this one place? I’m asking this question because I always like to provide a good educational experience for my students – one that they keep coming back to – so lets start our exploration by looking at something that I keep coming back to.

  1. The food is excellent. The core role of a restaurant is to provide good food and the Thai is fresh, tasty, authentic and reliable. I’ve never had a bad meal here. So it’s consistently what it should be. But lots of Melbourne restaurants are like this so that’s not my only choice.
  2. It’s always busy but it’s never so crowded that it’s overcrowded.it’s a popular place and, sometimes, you might have to wait for a short while but the space is set up so that it’s well compartmentalised and offers a range of dining/drinking experiences. Now there are many spaces that meet this requirement so that’s not unique either.
  3. The waiting staff are helpful and friendly and can either get you what you want or can help you to work out what you should have ordered, had you known.

    4. This is an interesting point. I know the food menu well enough that I’m happy to self-navigate but the beer and wine menu changes, with the “on tap” items changing very frequently. If I put myself in their hands then I get good recommendations and advice.

  4. I don’t feel like a stranger. the first time I went there, I felt I was getting the same excellent experience as everyone else. People I have sent there remark on this. Without resorting to false camaraderie or obsequiousness, you feel at home very quickly.

Let’s distill this: reliable quality, good use of space, good advice and open staff, and a feeling of belonging. It’s no surprise that I keep going back, is it, and if I offered this kind of experience in my classes, it wouldn’t surprise you if the students kept turning up. Obviously I’m not running a Thai restaurant, more’s the pity, so how can I do this educationally?

Well, firstly, I need to know my stuff and prepare for every activity. The only way to deal with the ups and downs of life is to prep well and be ready for the unforeseen especially in terms of time consumption. Next I need to provide an experience that will make the best use of my student’s time and space: rather than talking at the during a lecture, we can use that time to take advantage of the fact that they are all sitting next to each other for an hour, with me hanging around. Of course, to address the next point, I need to get to know my students to work out how to advise them so that I always give them good advice and I need to be available to actually answer questions and give them advice. Finally, they need to feel like they belong at the Uni, in my class, and that they can explore, learn and ask questions – which is all about paying attention, encouragement and working out how notice when students need me to ask them how they’re doing.

That’s a lot of stuff to do but if I want my students to seek out and stay in my classes, the way I’m guaranteed to spend at least one meal in Melbourne at this restaurant, I can learn from some of the things that I like and try to emulate that to get the same results.

Food, no pun intended, for thought.

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