Amplification of Thoughtlessness

Posted: November 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve been taught by, met, taught and am colleagues with a wide range of educators. The more people I meet, the more I realise how similar people are and the more I realise that one of the key differences in educators is how much they care. Caring more about your students is generally a good thing, as is caring about your commitment to scholarship and ethics, but caring is also a terrible amplifier of thoughtlessness and, regrettably, people can be truly thoughtless at times. When people are thoughtful, then being a caring educator is fantastic because you get that great feeling from finding out that people valued what you did, the effort that was expended and the final result that was achieved. I love it when students get back in touch with me, sometime down the track, or send me e-mail to let me know that something has really resonated with them. Sadly, the people who are thoughtless, or attempt to be unpleasant in some way, seem to stick in my mind a lot more than the success stories do.

In a way this makes sense because a successful student, or a successful course, doesn’t require any changes to be made. However, given that my job is to educate, anytime something goes wrong, it not only means that there is something to be fixed, it means that I didn’t do my job properly – or, at least, someone is perceiving that I have not done my job properly. You don’t have to care much to feel that fairly deeply. Caring about what you do is great because it makes you take work seriously and responsibly, but it also leaves you vulnerable. It saddens me that I have seen a handful of students who have gone out of their way to exploit that – but it saddens me more that they could have been through the educational experience that we still have to offer (it may not be perfect but it is still pretty impressive) and come out the end so determined to make somebody else unhappy or so utterly ignorant of the impact of their thoughtlessness.

I can clearly remember the first time years ago that a student’s relatively thoughtless act had a big impact on me, when I received a really nasty student evaluation for three students in a group of 140+. I had enforced some penalties for plagiarism and, mysteriously, a number of my students equal to the number of plagiarists had decided that I was awful, that I hated my students, I had acted unfairly and I was bigoted and discriminatory. It really shook my faith in my ability to teach. Overall, my figures were fine but I usually attribute the depth of passion to the extremity of the commitment and the fact that three people took the trouble to label me as a completely unacceptable teacher hit me hard.

When I first applied for Federal research funding, I received a reviewer’s comment that was so manifestly unpleasant, dismissive and vindictive that I went to the head of school pretty much assuming that I would have to resign and go and find other work. The reviewer all but told me to get out of academia or, maybe, in a decade’s time, I might not bring down another grant too badly. Those words, which I would laugh off in other arenas or at other times, came through a channel and at a time when I was going to place great import upon them.

There is a lot of difference in how you can say things and, the older I get, the more I realise that some things just don’t have to be said. There is no shortage of people who are happy to tell people things “for their own good” when, in reality, they are telling them for far less altruistic reasons. I have seen a lot of vindictiveness over the years dressed up as thoughtlessness, pretending to be an accidental overstatement. Of course, being human, I’ve sometimes made the mistake myself and I unreservedly apologise to anyone that I ever offended – if I haven’t already found you to apologise!

I sometimes wonder what some of my students want. If I didn’t care, if I showed up with the same slides from the last 20 years and rattled through them, never updating, handing all marking off to inexperienced TAs, failing people just because I’ve classified them as ‘dumb’, then I would be untouchable. I’d be untouchable because I would have divided the world into people who matter and people who don’t, slotting myself clearly into the ‘matter’ while leaving all of my students elsewhere. My students couldn’t matter to me and have me still teach them so badly. The problem arises when you do care about your students and some people, for whatever reason, decide that this is a weakness. Something to game for their own advantage or for their own amusement.

I suspect that I have taught less than 10 such people over my years in education, which is great in a way because it means that there aren’t that many of them, but it’s terrible to consider that such a small percentage of the students I’ve seen could still stick so much in my mind. However, these students, despite themselves, help to make me better at what I do. Yes, they get under my skin but I turn around and work out if any of what was said was valid. Could I improve? Could I help other people? This doesn’t defend unpleasantness- a positive outcome ascribed through moral accident is no validation of vindictiveness. But, by digging through the comments, sometimes I looked at myself and thought “Well, I’m not that bad but I could make some improvements here.”

Despite everything, we probably never will give up on these students. They may not understand that and they will probably never appreciate it, but the community of educators is one of the most inclusive, forgiving and amazing groups I’ve seen. Because we know what it’s like to learn and some things take longer than others, and sometimes people do dumb and thoughtless things. Fortunately, it turns out that caring can amplify thoughtfulness just as well as it amplifies thoughtlessness.

Ebb and Flow – Monitoring Systems Without Intrusion

Posted: November 23, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve been wishing a lot of people “Happy Thanksgiving” today because, despite being frightfully Antipodean, I have a lot of friends and family who are Thanksgiving observers in the US. However, I would know that something was up in the US anyway because I am missing about 40% of my standard viewers on my blog. Today is an honorary Sunday – hooray, sleep-ins all round! More seriously, this illustrates one of the most interesting things about measurement, which is measuring long enough to be able to determine when something out of the ordinary occurs. As I’ve already discussed, I can tell when I’ve been linked to a higher profile blog because my read count surges. I also can tell when I haven’t been using attractive pictures because the count drops by about 30%.

A fruit bat, in recovery, about to drink its special fruit smoothie. (Yes, this is shameless manipulation.)

This is because I know what the day-to-day operation of the blog looks like and I can spot anomalies. When I was a network admin, I could often tell when something was going wrong on the network just because of the way that certain network operations started to feel, and often well before these problems reached the level where they would trigger any sort of alarm. It’s the same for people who’ve lived by the same patch of sea for thirty years. They’ll look at what appears to be a flat sea on a calm day and tell you not to go out – because they can read a number of things from the system and those things mean ‘danger’.

One of the reasons that the network example is useful is because any time you send data through the network to see what happens, you’re actually using the network to do it. So network probes will actually consume network bandwidth and this may either mask or exacerbate your problems, depending on how unlucky you are. However, using the network for day-today operations, and sensing that something is off, then gives you a reason to run those probes or to check the counters on your networking gear to find out exactly why the hair on the back of your neck is going up.

I observe the behaviour of my students a lot and I try to gain as much information as I can from what they already give me. That’s one of the reasons that I’m so interested in assignment submissions, because students are going to submit assignments anyway and any extra information I can get from this is a giant bonus! I am running a follow-up Piazza activity on our remote campus and I’m fascinated to be able to watch the developing activity because it tells me who is participating and how they are participating. For those who haven’t heard about Piazza, it’s like a Wiki but instead of the Wiki model of “edit first, then argue into shape”, Piazza encourages a “discuss first and write after consensus” model. I put up the Piazza assignment for the class, with a mid-December deadline, and I’ve already had tens of registered discussions, some of which are leading to edits. Of course, not all groups are active yet and, come Monday, I’ll send out a reminder e-mail and chat to them privately. Instead of sending a blanket mail to everyone saying “HAVE YOU STARTED PIAZZA”, I can refine my contact based on passive observation.

The other thing about Piazza is that, once all of the assignment is over, I can still see all of their discussions, because that’s where I’ve told them to have the discussion! As a result, we can code their answers and track the development of their answers, classifying them in terms of their group role, their level of function and so on. For an open-ended team-based problem, this allows me a great deal of insight into how much understanding my students have of the area and allows me to fine-tune my teaching. Being me, I’m really looking for ways to improve self-regulation mechanisms, as well as uncovering any new threshold concepts, but this nonintrusive monitoring has more advantages than this. I can measure participation by briefly looking at my mailbox to see how many mail messages are foldered under a particular group’s ID, from anywhere, or I can go to Piazza and see it unfolding there. I can step in where I have to, but only when I have to, to get things back on track but I don’t have to prove or deconstruct a team-formed artefact to see what is going on.

In terms of ebb and flow, the Piazza groups are still unpredictable because I don’t have enough data to be able to tell you what the working pattern is for a successful group. I can tell you that no activity is undesirable but, even early on, I could tell you some interesting things about the people who post the most! (There are some upcoming publications that will deal with things along these lines and I will post more on these later.) We’ve been lucky enough to secure some Summer students and I’m hoping that at least some of their work will involve looking at dependencies in communication and ebb and flow across these systems.

As you may have guessed, I like simple. I like the idea of a single dashboard that has a green light (healthy course), an orange light (sick course) and a red light (time to go back to playing guitar on the street corner) although I know it will never be that easy. However, anything that brings me closer to that is doing me a huge favour, because the less time I have to spend actively probing in the course, the less of my students’ time I take up with probes and the less of my own time I spend not knowing what is going on!

Oh well, the good news is that I think that there are only three more papers to write before the Mayan Apocalypse occurs and at least one of them will be on this. I’ll see if I can sneak in a picture of a fruit bat. 🙂

Verbs and Nouns: Designing a Design

Posted: November 22, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

(Via the frequently delightful but often scatological Lolbrary.)

We have a very bad habit in Computing of ‘verbing the noun’, where we take a perfectly good noun and repurpose it as a verb. If, in the last few weeks, you’ve googled, face booked, photoshopped or IMed, then you know what I mean. (Coining new words like this, often genericised trademarks, is not new, as anyone who has hoovered the rug will tell you!) In some cases, we use the same word for the action (to design) as we do for the product (a design) and, especially in the case of design, this can cause trouble because it becomes very easy to ask someone for the product when what you want is the process.

Now, I realise that I do enjoy linguistic shenanigans (anyone who plays with which syllable to stress when saying interstices is spending too much time thinking about language) but this is not some syntactic mumbo jumbo, this is a genuine concern. If I ask a student to submit a design for their program, then I am usually assuming that the artefact submitted will be the product of the design process. However, I have to realise that a student must understand what the design process actually is in order for my instruction (give me a design) to be mapped into the correct action (undertake the design process). We’ve collected a lot of first-year student reflections on design and it is becoming increasingly apparent that there is not a clear link between the verb and noun forms of this very simple word. We can now start to understand why a student would feel frustrated if, when asked for a design, they submit what is effectively a re-writing of their final written program on a separate document with some arrows and we turn around and tell them that “this is not a design”. Well, what did we want? The student has given us a document with stuff on it and the word ‘design’ at the top – what did we expect?

The same is, more subtly, true of the word program. After all the practise of programming is the production of programs (and the consumption and elimination of problems but that’s another post). Hence, when I ask a student for a program, or for a solution, I am often not explicitly placing the written instructions into a form that clearly elucidates the process and, as a result, I may miss important constructive steps that could assist the student in understanding and applying the process.

Let’s face it, if you don’t know what you’re doing, or don’t understand that there is a process to follow (the verb form), then any instructions I give you “Make sure you use diagrams”, “clearly label your variables”, “use UML” are going to be perceived in a way that is grounded in the final product, not the steps along the way. If I can use neo-Piagetian terminology briefly, then we’re looking at the magical thinking that we’d normally associate with the pre-operational stage. Not only is the knowledge not sinking in but we will engender a cargo-cult like inclusion of features that are found in the artefact but have no connection back to the process at all. We have potentially reached the unpleasant point where students now think that we are deliberately, or unfairly, ignoring the work that they provided in direct accordance with our instructions!

Anyone who has ever looked at a design with the steady sinking feeling that comes from reading poorly translated programming language, marked with superfluous arrows and dogged, yet unnecessary, underlining of the obvious, will probably be feeling a pang of empathy at the moment.

So what to do? How do we address this problem? The first step is to remember how fiendishly ambiguous language actually is (if English were easy, we wouldn’t need constrained and artificial programming languages to unambiguously assign meaning for computers) and be precise about the separation between the process and the product. The design process, which we provide guidance and steps for, will produce a design document. We are luckier in programming because while you can program and produce a program, you cannot produce a programming! In this case, the clarification is that you have assigned a programming task in order to produce a program. In our heads, we are always clear about what we mean but it is still amazing how often we can resort to asking for a product that is the final stage of a long and difficult process, which we are intending to teach, without realising that we are describing the desirable characteristics of the end point without considering the road that must be travelled!

On reviewing my own teaching, I’m intending to add more process-based instructions, on the grounds that encouraging a certain behaviour in the production process is more likely to lead to a successful product, than specifying an end product and hoping that the path taken is the ‘right’ one. This isn’t exactly rocket science, it’s well established in how we should be constructing these activities, but it does require the educator to keep a clear head on whether we are discussing the product or process.

When a student has established enough understanding, and hopefully all will by the end of the process, then I can ease back on these linguistic scaffolds and expect a little more “this means that” in their everyday activity, but at the start of the educational process, it is probably better if I always try consider how I specify these potentially ambiguous noun/verb pairs. After all, if a student could pick this up by osmosis or plain exposure to the final product (or even by neurolinguistic programming through the mere mention of the name of the artefact) then I would be thoroughly unnecessary as an educator!

I strive to reduce ambiguity and this requires me to think, very carefully, about how my words are read by students who are not even in the foothills of mastery. Reorienting my own thinking to clearly separate product from process, and labelling and treating each clearly and separately, is an important reminder to me of how easy it is to confuse students.

Learner Pull and Educator Push

Posted: November 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

We were discussing some of the strategic investments that might underpin my University’s progress for the next 5 years (all very hand wavy as we don’t yet have the confirmed strategy for the next 5 years) and we ended up discussing Learner Push and Educator Pull – in the context of MOOCs, unsurprisingly.

We know that if all we do is push content to people then we haven’t really undertaken any of the learning experience construction that we’re supposed to. If we expect students to mysteriously know what they need and then pull it all towards them, then we’re assuming that students are automatically self-educating and this is, fairly obviously, not universally true or there would have been no need for educational institutions for… hundreds of thousands of years.

What we actually have is a combination of push and pull from both sides, maintaining the right tension if you will, and it’s something that we have to think about the moment that we talk about any kind of information storage system. A library is full of information but you have to know what you’re looking for, where to find out and you have to want to find it! I’ve discussed on other blogs my concerns about the disconnected nature of MOOCs and the possibility of students “cherry picking” courses that are of interest to them but lead nowhere in terms of the construction of a professional level of knowledge.

Mark Guzdial recently responded to a comment of mine to remind me of the Gates Foundation initiative to set up eight foundation courses based on MOOCs but that’s a foundation level focus – how do we get from there to fourth year engineers or computer scientists? Part of the job of the educator is to construct an environment where the students not only want the knowledge but they want, and here’s the tricky bit, the right knowledge. So rather than forcing content down the student’s throat (the incorrect assumption of educator push, in my opinion) we are creating an environment that inspires, guides and excites – and pushing that.

I know that my students have vast amounts of passion and energy – the problem is getting it directed in the right way!

It’s great to be talking about some of these philosophical issues as we look forward over the next 5-10 years because, of course, by itself the IT won’t fix any of our problems unless we use it correctly. As an Associate Dean (IT) and a former systems administrator, I know that spending money on IT is easy but it’s always very easy to spend a lot of money and make no progress. Good, solid, principles help a lot and, while we have a lot of things to sort out, it’s going to be interesting to see how things develop, especially with the concept of the MOOC floating above us.

Unearthing the Community: A Surprisingly Rapid Result

Posted: November 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I am thinking of a number between 1 and 100…

Next Monday I am co-hosting the first Adelaide Computing Education Conventicle, an offshoot of the very successful program in the Eastern states which encourages the presentation of work that has gone to conferences, or is about to go, and to provide a forum for conversations and panel discussions on Computing Education. The term ‘conventicle’ refers to “A secret or unlawful religious meeting, typically of people with nonconformist views” and stems from the initial discussions in Melbourne and Sydney, back when Computing Education was not perhaps as accepted as it is now. The name is retained for gentle amusement and a linkage to previous events. To quote my own web page on this:

The Conventicle is a one-day conference about all aspects of teaching computing in higher education, in its practical and theoretical aspects, which includes computer science, information systems, information technology, and branches of both mathematics and statistics. The Conventicle is free and open to all who wish to attend. The format will consist of presentations, discussion forums and opportunities to network over lunch, and morning and afternoon tea.

The Conventicles have a long history in other states, allowing a discussion forum for how we teach, why we teach, what we can do better and provide us with an opportunity to share our knowledge at a local level without having to travel to conferences or subscribe to an every growing set of journals.

One of my ALTA colleagues set his goal as restarting the conventicles where they had stopped and starting them where they had never been and, combining this with my goal of spreading the word on CSE, we decided to work together and host the informal one-day event. The Australian gravity well is deep and powerful: few of my colleagues get to go to the larger educational conferences and being able to re-present some key papers, especially when the original presenters can be there, is fantastic. We’re very lucky to have two interstate visitors. Simon, my ALTA colleague, is presenting some of his most recent work, and Raymond Lister, from UTS, is presenting a very interesting paper that I saw him present at ICER. When he mentioned that he might be able to come, I didn’t wast much time trying to encourage him… and ask him if he’d mind presenting a paper. It appears that I’m learning how to run a conference.

The other good news is that we have a full program! It turns out that many people are itching to talk about their latest projects, their successes, recent papers and about the things that challenge so many of us. I still have space for a lot more people to attend and, with any luck, by this time tomorrow I’ll have the program nailed down. If you’re in the neighbourhood, please check out the web page and let me know if you can come.

I hope to see at least some of the following come out of the First Adelaide Computing Education Conventicle:

  1. Raised awareness of Computing Education across my faculty and University.
  2. Raised awareness of how many people are already doing research in this!
  3. An opportunity for the local community to get together and make connections.
  4. Some good discussion with no actual blows being landed. 🙂

In the longer term, I’d love to see joint papers, grant applications and all those good things that help us to tick our various boxes. Of course, being me, I also want to learn more, to help other people to learn more (even if it’s just by hosting) and get some benefit for all of our students.

There’s enough time to get it all organised, which is great, but I’ll have a busy Monday next week!

 

What Do You Mean… “Like”?

Posted: November 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

I was alerted to a strange game the other day. Go to Mitt Romney’s Facebook page, note the number of ‘likes’ and then come back later to see if the number had gone up or down. As it turns out, the number of Facebookers who ‘like’ the former Presidential Candidate’s Facebook page is dropping at a noticeable but steady rate. My estimates are, if this drop is maintained and it is linear, it will be about 1666 days until there are zero people liking the page. (Estimates vary, but the current rate of loss is somewhere around 11 likes a minute. You can watch it here in real time.) I mention this not to add to Mr Romney’s woes, because he is already understandably not happy that he lost the election, although you may disagree with the reasoning in the linked article. I mention this because it identifies how nebulous our association is with the term and the concept of ‘like’.

If this is your closest friend, you might need to catch up on this thing that we call ‘Facebook’.

For those who have recently returned from 7 years of bonding with a volleyball in the Pacific, Facebook does not allow you to ‘dislike’ things, it only allows you to comment or hit the ‘like’ button (or hide the comment or post but that’s a separate thought). What does it mean then to not click the ‘like’ button or to comment? Thank you, Facebook, for presenting us with yet another false dichotomy and for giving us such a large example on Mr Romney’s page. Before the election, millions of people liked Mr Romney’s page which, one can only imaging, meant that they were showing him support and saying “Go, Mitt!” Now that, in a completely different way, the message “Go, Mitt” has been communicated, it appears that, at a time when an unsuccessful candidate would need the most support, the followers are leaving. Now, this is important because, as I understand it, to stop liking something you have to take the active step of clicking on something – it doesn’t just expire in a short timeframe. People are actively choosing to remove their liking of Mr Romney’s page.

Why?

Well, there’s a lot of speculation about this, including the notion that some of the initial surge of followers came from buying friends by bringing in other accounts that are used by non-people but this still doesn’t explain where the unlikes are coming from because, after all, a Justin Bieber Slashfic Spambot is nothing if not loyal in its mechanically allocated trust. What is probably happening here is that the social media front ends were being used explicitly as part of a campaign to see Mr Romney elected President and, understandably, the accounts are now seeing much less use and, fickle as the real Internet is, you’re only as good as your last post or as hot as your posting frequency. The staffer or group of staffers that were paid to do this have now lost their jobs and the account is heading towards the account graveyard. (The saddest thing about any competition like this is that someone, somewhere, who has been doing a good job may still lose their job because the public didn’t support their candidate. I try to remember that before I overly celebrate either victory or defeat, although I don’t always succeed.)

What concerns me are the people who liked this Facebook page, legitimately and as real people, and have now turned around and deliked it, because this can easily be seen as a punitive action. It has no real impact on Mr Romney in any sense but it does make him look increasingly unpopular and, really, it achieves absolutely nothing. What does ‘like’ mean in this context? I support you until you fail me? I support you because you might be President and I have some strange mental model that your Secretary of State will be picked randomly from your Facebook followers?

To me, honestly, a lot of this looks like spite. After all, what does it hurt to remain a liker of a dead page? It doesn’t, unless your aim is to send a message. However, I think that Mr Romney probably already knows that he didn’t get elected to the highest office his country can offer – but I’m sure that when he becomes aware of all of the people fleeing his page, it will really neatly reinforce how he could have improved his campaign.

Oh, wait, that’s my point! The vocabulary of like/delike (recall that there is no dislike option) is fundamentally useless because of its confused binary nature. Does no ‘like’ mean ‘dislike’,’meh’,’sort of like’,’maybe in a dark room’ or ‘I missed this’? Does ‘like’ mean ‘yay!’, ‘hugs!’, ‘i want to smell your hair’ or ‘*gritted teeth at your good fortune*’? Or does it just mean ‘like’? We have no idea unless someone comments and, given that we have the easy out of ‘like’, many people won’t comment because they have the deceptively communicative nature of the flawed channel of ‘like’!

Like most Universities, we have a survey that we run on students at the end of courses to find out how they felt about the course, what their experience was. Regrettably, a lot of the time, what you end up measuring was how much a student liked you. It’s on a 7 point Likert scale but, and many students don’t realise this, the middle point is not ‘non-committed to like/dislike’, it counts as ‘not like’. Hence if you get 7/7 from everyone for something and get one 4/7, you no longer have 100% broad agreement regarding that point. Because there is confusion about what this means (and there is a not applicable that is separate to the scale), students who don’t care about anything tend to write down the middle and end up counting as a vote against. Is this fair? Well, is that the question? Let me ask a different one – was it what the student intended? Maybe/maybe not. As it stands, the numbers themselves are not very much use as they tell you what people feel but not what they’re thinking. The comments that also come on the same form are far more informative than the numbers. Much as with Facebook, there is confusion over like/dislike, but the comments are always far more useful in making improvements and finding out what people really think.

I feel (to my own surprise) some empathy for Mr Romney at the moment because there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people a day sending him a message that is utterly and totally confusing, as well as being fundamentally hypocritical. Ok, yes, he might not care to know what every American thought he got wrong, the Internet can be challenging that way, but ‘deliking’ him is not actually achieving anything except covering your tracks.

What did any of these people, who have now left, actually mean by ‘like’?

Ethics and Opinion: Please Stop Confusing My Students

Posted: November 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

One of the sadly rather expected side benefits of the recent re-election of President Obama has been the predictable outpouring of racist sentiment. Of course, to listen to the people uttering racial slurs and unpleasant requests, they are not actually racists, they are just expressing their opinion. You know?

They’re just sayin’.

A woman is currently being investigated by the Secret Service for Tweeting a heavily charged racial epithet against the President, wrapped up in a paraphrased death threat, and appears puzzled about all of the fuss. After all, it’s just what she thinks and she’s not a racist. Australian former cricketer Greg Ritchie recently uttered some serious racial slurs that are highly inflammatory towards South Africans and can’t see what the big deal is either. He also managed to get in a joke about Muslims. When asked, however, Ritchie had this to say:

“If they take offence that’s their choice.”

His joke, involving Muslims, is in his own words “just a little humourous joke to indicate that they’re not my favourite people of my choice.” Hey, Greg, guess what, when you’re trying to defend yourself against charges of discrimination, perhaps it’s best to do so in a way that is not actually discriminatory? Of course, we’ve been tolerating Ritchie’s antics for years, so it’s not surprising that he is now confused that we don’t find him funny. He, in blackface as pseudo-Indian Mahatma Coate, was a regular on the Australian Rules Football sports variety show “The Footy Show” for years. And, thus we crawl, inexorably, towards my point.

If you’re opinion is actually racism, then it’s a racist opinion. I can completely understand why people don’t want to be labelled as racists because we all know that’s bad but, and here’s the tricky thing, racists are people who believe and say racist things or act in a manner than discriminates against people based on their race. Calling someone a racial epithet because of the race that they belong to counts here and, before we get all ‘classification theory’ about this, there is a world of difference between any classifications of ethnicity that are scientific in nature and slurs. There is also a great deal of difference in how we use this information. The moment that you start saying things like “they’re not my favourite people of choice”, you are saying that you don’t like an entire group that is defined by a given characteristic and, wow, it’s not hard to see where that leads. (Now, no doubt, there is someone who is itching to leap and tell me that ‘aha – Muslims are not a race’. Spare me the sophistry, especially where the Muslims that appear to catch the most problems here are (surprise!) not Caucasian.)

Whenever anyone leaps in and says “statement – I’m just sayin'” or “statement that challenges movements that are egalitarian – playing devil’s advocate” then I really must wonder ‘why?’ I have heard a number of people trying to sneak in sexist comments based on poor evidence or by playing the “Devil’s Advocate” card. “Wow, but what if women aren’t as good at X as men, playing Devil’s advocate/just sayin’/just askin’.” You know, that’s a good question. But it’s not the one that you’re asking. The question that I’m hearing (and I apologise because I have weird ears) is “How can I make a sexist statement with plausible deniability because I am not yet convinced that women are equal?”

This is about fundamental human rights, not an opinion on whether Picard or Kirk would win in a jello-wrestling competition. The questions that we ask, however they are framed, reveal what it is that we believe to be true. And right. And, by extension, what we consider false or wrong.

My real problem with all of this is that my students are like big mobile sponges. They hear a whole heap of stuff before they come to me and, if most of it is opinionated nonsense that magically escapes classification, they will learn that this is how the world works and come to me with a head full of garbage. They’ll recite rubbish at me that they’ve picked up from the world, politics, media, television and their own families that has no place in a University environment. I don’t give a hoot how entitled you feel to have a racist, sexist or discriminatory opinion, it’s going to get called as one and you can argue until you’re blue in the face that saying discriminatory things doesn’t make you discriminatory but, important point, you are almost never as ironically funny as you think you are. (And, yes, we all have to be aware of that. To my shame, I have occasionally gone too far in trying to mock discrimination and I apologetically confess that I have on occasion been less than funny and just plain dumb.) The important thing to ask is why are you trying to set up the situation in the first place?

My students have to think about these things all the time. They cannot guess how people will react to their dumb jokes and supposed ‘irony’. Worse, as people who have had the benefits of more education, other people will look to them (explicitly or not) as thought leaders and the best of my students will have a very wide-ranging impact. I can’t stop people saying silly and hurtful things, but let’s stop the pretence that there are special “get out of jail free” textual containers that allow people to utter the phrasings of discrimination and, yet, mysteriously escape being labelled as such.

(And, for the record, the Internet indicates that Picard would most likely take the match, given that he has mud wrestling experience.)

The Limits of Time

Posted: November 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’m writing this on Monday (and Thursday night), after being on the road for teaching, and I’ve been picking up the pieces of a hard drive replacement (under warranty) compounded by the subsequent discovery that at least one of my backups is corrupted. This has taken what should have been a catch-up day and turned it into a “juggle recovery/repair disk/work on secondary machine” day but, hey, I’m not complaining too much – at least I have two machines and took the trouble to keep them synchronised with each other. The worst outcome of today’s little backup issue is that I have a relatively long reinstallation process ahead of me, because I haven’t actually lost anything yet except the convenient arrangement of all of my stuff.

It does, however, reinforce one of the lessons that it took me years to learn. If you have an hour, you can do an hour’s worth of work. I know, that sounds a little ‘aw shucks’ but some things just take time to do and you have to have the time to do them. My machine recovery was scheduled to take about four hours. When it had gone for five, I clicked on it to discover that it had stopped on detecting the bad backup. I couldn’t have done that at the 30 minute mark. Maybe I could have tried to wake it up at the 2 hour mark, and maybe I would have hit the error earlier, but, in reality that wasn’t going to happen because I was doing other work.

Why is this important? Because I am going to get 1, maybe 2, attempts per day to restore this machine until it finally works. It takes hours to do it and there’s nothing I can do to make it faster. (You’ll see down the bottom that this particular prediction came true because the backup restoration has now turned out to have some fundamental problems).

When students first learn about computers, they don’t really have an idea about how long things take and how important it is to make their programs work quickly. Computational complexity describes how we expect programs to behave when we change the amount of data that they’re working on, either in terms of how much space they take up or how long they take to compute. The choice of approach can lead to massive differences in performance. Something that takes 60 seconds on one approach can take an hour on another. Scale up the size of data you’re looking at and the difference is between ‘will complete this week’ and ‘I am not going to live that long’.

When you look at a computing problem, and the resources that you have, a back of an envelope calculation will very rapidly tell you how long it will take (with a bit of testing and trial and error in some cases). If you don’t allow this much time for the solution, you probably won’t get it. Worse case is that you start something running and then you stop it, thinking it’s not going to finish, but you actually stopped it just before it was going to finish. Time estimation is important. A lot of students won’t really learn this, however, until it comes back and bites them when they overshoot. With any luck, and let’s devote some effort so it’s not just luck, they learn what to look for when they’re estimating how long things actually take.

I wasn’t expecting to have my main machine back up in time to do any work on it today, because I’ve done this dance before, but I was hoping to have it ready for tomorrow. Now, I have to plan around not having it for tomorrow either (and, as it turns out, it won’t be back before the weekend). Worst case is that I will have to put enough time aside to do a complete rebuild. However, to rebuild it will take some serious time. There’s no point setting aside the rebuild as something that I devote my time or weekend to, because it doesn’t require that much attention and I can happily work around the major copies in hour-long blocks to get useful work done.

When you know how long something takes and you plan around that, even those long boring blocks of time become something that can be done in parallel, around the work that also must happen. I see a lot of students who sit around doing something that’s not actually work while they wait for computation or big software builds to finish. Hey, if you’ve got nothing else to do then feel free to do nothing or surf the web. The only problem is that very few of us ever have nothing else to do but, by realising that something that takes a long time will take a long time, we can use filler tasks to drag down the number of things that we still have left to do.

This is being challenged at the moment because the restoration is resolutely failing and, regrettably, I am now having to get actively involved because the ‘fix the backup’ regime requires me to try things, and then try other things, in order to get it working. The good news is I still have large blocks of time – the bad news is that I’m doing all of this on a secondary machine that doesn’t have the same screen real estate. (What a first world problem!)

What a fantastic opportunity to eat my own dog food. 🙂 Tonight, I’m sitting down to plan out how I can recover from this and be back up to date on Monday, with at least one fully working system and access to all of my files. I still need to allow for the occasional ‘try this on the backup’ and then wait several hours, but I need to make sure that this becomes a low priority tasks that I schedule, rather than one that interrupts me and becomes a primary focus. We’ll see how well that goes.

Being a Hypnoweasel and Why That’s a Bad Idea.

Posted: November 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I greatly enjoy the television shows and, as it turns out, the writing of Derren Brown. Mr Brown is a successful conjurer, hypnotist and showman who performs stage magic and a range of deceits and experiments, including trying to turn a random member of the public into an assassin or convincing people that they committed a murder.

This is Derren hypnotising you into believing that this is the best post ever.

His combination of trickery, showmanship, claimed psychology/neurolinguistic programming and hypnotism makes for an interesting show – he has been guilty of over claiming in earlier shows and, these days, focusses on the art of misdirection, with a healthy dose of human influence to tell interesting stories. I am reading his book “Tricks of the Mind” at the moment and the simple tricks he discusses are well informed by the anecdotes that accompany them. However, some of his Experiments and discussions of the human aspects of wilful ignorance of probability and statistics are very interesting indeed and I use these as part of my teaching.

In “The System”, Derren shares his “100% successful horse race prediction system” with a member of the public. He also shows how, by force of will alone, he can flip a coin 10 times and have it come up heads – with no camera trickery. I first saw this on a rather dull plane flight and watched with interest as he did a number of things that, characteristically, showed you exactly what he was doing but cleverly indicated that he was doing something else – or let you believe that he was doing something else. “The System” is a great thing to show students because they have to consider what is and what isn’t possible at each stage and then decide how he did it, or how he could have done it. By combining his own skill at sleight of hand, his rather detailed knowledge of how people work and his excellent preparation, “The System” will leave a number of people wondering about the detail, like all good magic should.

The real reason that I am reading Derren at the moment, as well as watching him carefully, is that I am well aware how easy it is to influence people and, in teaching, I would rather not be using influence and stagecraft to manipulate my students’ memories of a teaching experience, even if I’m doing it unconsciously. Derren is, like all good magicians, very, very good at forcing cards onto people or creating situations where they think that they have carried out an act of their own free will, when really it is nothing of the kind. Derren’s production and writings on creating false memory, where a combination of preparation, language and technique leads to outcomes where participants will swear blind that a certain event occurred when it most certainly did not. This is the flashy cousin of the respectable work on cognition and load thresholds, monkey business illusion anyone?, but I find it a great way to step back critically and ask myself if I have been using any of these techniques in the showman-like manipulation of my students to make them think that knowledge has been transferred when, really, what they have is the memory of a good lecture experience?

This may seem both overly self-critical and not overly humble but I am quite a good showman and I am aware that my presentation can sometimes overcome the content. There is, after all, a great deal of difference between genuinely being able to manipulate time and space to move cards in a deck, and merely giving the illusion that one can. One of these is a miracle and the other is practise. Looking through the good work on cognitive load and transfer between memory systems, I can shape my learning and teaching design so that the content is covered thoroughly, linked properly and staged well. Reading and watching Derren, however, reminds me how much I could undo all of the good work by not thinking about how easy it is for humans to accept a strange personally skewed perspective of what has really happened. I could convince my students that they are learning, when in reality they are confused and need more clarification. The good news is that, looking back, I’m pretty sure that I do prepare and construct in a way that I can build upon something good, which is what I want to do, rather than provide an empty but convincing facade over the top of something that is not all that solid. Watching Derren, however, lets me think about the core difference between an enjoyable and valuable learning experience and misdirection.

There are many ways to fool people and these make for good television but I want my students to be the kind of people who see through such enjoyable games and can quickly apply their properly developed knowledge and understanding of how things really work to determine what is actually happening. There’s an old saying “Set a thief to catch a thief” and, in this case, it takes a convincing showman/hypnotist to clarify the pitfalls possible when you get a little too convincing in your delivery.

Deception is not the basis for good learning and teaching, no matter how noble an educator’s intent.

Planning Spontaneity

Posted: November 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Whenever I teach an intensive mode class, as I’ve just finished doing, I have to face the fact that I just don’t have the same level of ‘slack’ time between classes that I’m used to. In a traditional model of 2-3 lectures a week, I usually get a break of up to 5 or so days between each teaching activity to make changes based on student feedback, to rehearse and to plan. When you’re teaching 3 hours on Friday, 6 hours on Saturday and 7 hours on Sunday, and adding a good hour of extra time per session on for student questions, you have no slack.

I like to able to take the class in a wide range of directions, where student questions and comments allow the exploration of the knowledge in a way that recognises how the students appear to be engaging with it. I still get all of the same content across (and it’s in the notes and probably podcasts as well) but we may meander a fair bit on our path through it. I learned, very early on, that being able to be spontaneous like this and still cover everyone was not something that I could achieve without planning.

The New Caledonian Crow can spontaneously solve problems without planning. I’m guessing that this doesn’t include teaching Computer Networks to humans.

If I don’t ask students any questions, or they don’t ask me any, then I can predict how the lecture will roll out. I can also predict that most students will end up asleep and that they will learn very little. Not a good solution. I like to be able to try different things, other activities, focus on issues of direct concern to the students but, given that I have almost no reaction time in a tight teaching mode like this, how can I do it? Here are five things that I’ve found are useful. There are more but these are my top five and I hope that they’re helpful – there’s nothing really earth-shattering here but there’s a tweak here and there.

  1. Get any early indications you can of what students are interested in. Use this to identify areas that might get explored more.

    Have you set an assignment on ‘subject X’? Students will be interested in subject X. Has something been in the news? Is there something on the student’s mind? In the previous post, I used a question board to find out what each student was really curious about. A quick scan of that every now and then gave me an idea of what the students would talk about, ask questions about and care about. It also allowed me to do some quick looking up to confirm areas that weren’t on the traditional course that could add more interest.

  2. Review the course and know what can be dropped. Plan not to but have it as a safety valve.

    Ok, this is Teaching 101, but it’s essential in an intensive course. Once it’s over, you’ve missed the chance to add new content and you only have 2.5 days to get it across. I know which areas I can reduce depth on if we’ve gone deep elsewhere but, sometimes, I’m in a section where nothing can be dropped. Therefore I use that knowledge to say “I can’t drop anything” so I have to use a different strategy like…

  3. Have a really good idea of how long everything will take. Be prepared to hold to time if you have to.

    If you run 10 minutes over in a traditional lecture, the next lecturer will grumble, the students will grumble, but the end of the day resets the problem. Do that in intensive mode and you lose an hour for every six lectures. On the course I just did, you’d lose nearly three lectures (worst case). Yes, yes, we’re all rehearsing our content and re-reading it before we present, but intensive mode students have different demands, and may keep asking you questions because they know this is one of their few chances to talk to you face-to-face, which brings me to…

  4. Understand your students.

    My intensive students have full-time jobs when they’re not in my classroom. They’re so dedicated to their studies that they work 5 days, spend Friday night with me, work Saturday morning, and then spend Saturday and Sunday afternoon with me. What does this mean? It means that I can’t just run over on Friday night because I feel like it. I need to respect the demands on their time. Some of them might be late because of public transport or work running over and things like that – because we’re all jamming stuff in. I don’t condone students not caring about things but I do try to understand my students and respect the amount of effort they’re putting in. What else does this mean? I have to be very interesting and very clear in my explanations on Sunday, preferably with lots of interactive activities of one form or another, because everyone is really, really tired by then.

  5. Understand yourself.

    The whole reason I plan really carefully for these activities is that, by Sunday, I’m pretty tired myself. University courses do not usually run at this pace and this is not my usual approach. I’m rounding out a 10 day week at a pace that’s faster than usual. While I will still be quite happily able to teach, interact and work with my students, there’s no way that I’m going to be very creative. If I want to support interesting activities on Sunday, I need to plan them early and identify their feasibility on Friday and Saturday. However, I plan with the assumption that it will go ahead.

This Sunday I ran a collaborative activity that I had planned earlier, foreshadowed to the students and used as a driver for thinking about certain parts of the course. It ran, and ran well, but there’s no way that I could have carried it out ‘off the cuff’ and everything good that happened on Sunday had been planned at least a few days in advance, with some of it planned weeks before.

I love being spontaneous in the classroom but it has taken me years to realise that the best opportunities for the kind of spontaneity that builds useful knowledge are almost always very carefully planned.

 

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