Staring In The SIGCSE Mirror

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

One of the great things about going to a top notch conference like SIGCSE is that you get a lot of exposure to great educators bringing their A game for their presentations and workshops. It’s a great event in many ways but it’s also highly educational. I wrote furiously during the time that I was there (and there are still some blog posts to come) because there was so much knowledge flowing, I felt that I had to get it all down.

It is also valuable because it is humbling. There are educators who are scraping together feather, burnt cork and a few pebbles and producing educational materials and content that would knock your socks off. Given that attending SIGCSE is a significant financial expenditure for an Australian, it’s a quiet reminder that my journey to SIGCSE had better have a valuable outcome now that I’m back. A lot of my colleagues are doing amazing things with far less – I have no excuse to not do at least as well. (And I’ve certainly been trying.)

It’s inspirational. Sometimes it feels like we’re all adrift in a giant cold sea, in little boats, in the dark. We do what we can in our own space but have no idea how many people are out there. Yet there are so many other people out there. Holding up our lights allows us to see all of the other boats around us – not a small fishing fleet but a vast, floating city of light. Better still, you’ll see how many are close enough to you that you can ask them for help – or offer them assistance. Sound, ethical education is one of the great activities of our species, but it’s not always as valued as it could be – it’s easier when you have some inspiration and a sea full of stars.

It’s levelling. It doesn’t matter whether you’re from the greatest or the smallest college – if your work was accepted to SIGCSE then other people will hear about it. Your talk will be full of people from all over the sphere who want to hear about your work.

It encourages people to try techniques so that they, in turn, may come back and present one day. It also reminds us that there is a place where CS Education is the primary, valued, topic of conversation and, in these days of the primacy of research value, that’s an important level of encouragement.

There are so many more things that I could say about the experience but I think that my volume of blogging speaks pretty much for itself on this event. How did it make me feel? It made me want to be better at what I did, a lot better, and it gave me ways to do that. It made me hungry for new challenges at the same time it gave me the materials and tools to bring a ladder to scale those challenges.

I’ve always said that I don’t pretend to be an expert – that this blog is reflective, not instructive or dogmatic – but that doesn’t mean that I don’t strive to master this area. Attending events like SIGCSE helps me to realise that, with work and application, one day I may even manage it.

 

Soft Power follow-up

Posted: March 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

The magazine “Monocle” has covered soft power in previous issues and, amusingly enough, about 24 hours after I put the previous post into the queue, they ran another article featuring a hard/soft comparison that was very similar to mine – I hadn’t seen it and, obviously, they neither saw nor cared about mine but the coincidence amused me. However, other discussions of soft power in the media include what will happen to the Cato Institute, which has had a significant cultural influence (whether for good or ill I leave to the reader) and now appears to be moving towards a less diverse controlling board. I’m not advocating for Cato (most certainly not) but this is a salient reminder that soft power is used by many different people to attempt to carry out non-military or confrontational change for whatever they consider to be the correct way to live or carry out activity x.

Putting Education into this sphere of “things that you should really think about” seems even more appropriate in this context. But, and it’s a big but (and I cannot lie), it is as easy to place material into the public eye that attacks teaching as it is to defend it. Regrettably, enough people are influenced by the first argument that they say which even vaguely aligns with their beliefs – it becomes a fact and attempts to argue against it just reinforce the fact. What this means to me is that positive, constructive examples should be seen everywhere.

Which comes back to us. I’m still a bit jet lagged but it’s right on top of my to do list. “Be educationally excellent – frequently.” 🙂

Education: Soft Power but Hard Sell

Posted: March 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

In 1990, Joseph Nye coined the term soft power to mean “the ability to obtain what one wants through co-option and attraction” (Wikipedia), in contrast to using payment and coercion, which is hard power. In the realm of nations, we can cast hard power as the military might and cash resources, but soft power is harder to pin down. There are many (conflicting) discussions about the accuracy of this separation and what falls into which category but what is generally agreed is that a nation’s culture is one of its most engaging forms of co-option and attraction.

And one of the most enduring contributors to a nation’s culture, and an indication of its future culture, is its education system.

While a country’s military might is generally directly linked to all of its other hard power indicators, its educational influence and culture are harder to pin down. I can count tanks, or dollars in the bank, but should I be measuring number of students, number of academics, world standing, literacy or some complex composite measure?

Consider France. The French Alliance Française has been one of the most important ways of spreading French language and culture in the period following the decline of French as the dominant language of diplomacy. It’s an educational approach that spreads a very distinct cultural message – French is sophisticated, fun and something desirable. Do we measure its success by number of French tourist, French speakers or number of Alliance Française offices?

We are all aware that many governments are trying to quantify the efforts of educators, using standardised tests and other performance measures, but this is generally more linked to funding measures and notional ranking structures. What if we could quantify our educational contribution to culture then we can immediately provide a lever for a government in terms of dollars or cultural impact.

Imagine that we could say that investing $10,000,000 in education was equivalent to the impact of a strong positive leadership decision. Or that it would bring in 5,000 more students, who would then take our education culture back out to the world.

If we could get soft power and hard power on to the same table, could we ever say that an centrally-funded teacher post-graduate study program was equal to an aircraft carrier in terms of regional stabilisation. Soft power needs hard currency, which means that the funding agencies and the government have to be willing to put money into it. And the first step is making sure that the decision makers understand how important soft power, cultural impact and education are. The second is making sure that it’s the kind of importance that gets funded, rather than recognised and left without money.

Obviously, this is a difficult problem to solve – but the first problem is reminding people that education makes our culture and our culture has a strong influence on the world’s view of us. Regrettably, soft power is easy to talk about but, ultimately, it’s a very hard sell.

 

Laziness or Procrastination? I Have the What But I Need the Why!

Posted: March 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , | 3 Comments

I’ve referred, several times, to the fact that my students have managed to make it through all those years of school before they meet the pre-requisites, get a sufficiently high score and then select the Uni I work at. If people had really bad study habits before they hit Uni, they probably wouldn’t hit Uni. (This ignores all the issues as to WHERE those bad habits come from – I’m not saying that the students are responsible for everything but that an inability to study, for whatever reason, will be a likely bar to academic progression.) This means that the bad study behaviours that we see in early years of Uni are most likely to be transition issues on going from school to Uni – the change in structure, the different requirements and, most obviously, the fact that only a subset of the people who were in school have made it to Uni and, based on this, the educational requirements have now been tailored to these people. But, yes, some poor academic behaviour may be brought in – which immediately raises the question as to how the students with this behaviour have made it this far?

When people talk about lazy students, I always wonder how someone could have been lazy up until this point and still get through. The answer, generally, is that students at the top end of the academic spectrum have often been able to get through with less effort than other students. In certain circumstances, for particularly gifted students, they may never really had to extend themselves at all. When they get to University, we do try to challenge and extend everyone, but these students may never have formed a mental model that required them to read work when it was handed out and allocate enough time to it – and their just-in-time, ‘when I think of it’ model starts to fall apart. So this is one situation in which a (to date) lazy student could hit our system.

What if the vast number of students who are late in handing in, or just-in-time/just-too-late, are procrastinators, rather than lazy? It’s a lack of awareness of the amount of work involved, which is often related to a lack of subject understanding and structure, that can lead to them working late. You can see this in the data that says that roughly a third of out students start handing in work for assignment on the last day, or that the vast majority of electronic support material is accessed in the 48 hours before the exam. Rather than not committing to the work, based on previous success with a lazy approach, we see a lack of understanding of what is involved and the time commitment doesn’t match what is required.

We have a lot of quantitative data on student hand-in and assessment behaviours, but I don’t have the “Why?” of the data. This is where surveys and student interviews can give us a ‘Why’ for our ‘What’ which, we hope, will tell us ‘How’ we can get more students to take accurate control of their time management.

Dealing with the Rudent – the Rude Student

Posted: March 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment

One of the most frustrating parts of any educator’s job is dealing with people who have decided that they can be rude to you. No, scratch that, that’s the most frustrating part of any job! With students, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether you’re dealing with social dysfunction, frustration, lack of respect, feigned lack of respect or any of the other forms of mis-directed aggression that masquerade as rudeness.

In some cases, students genuinely don’t realise how they sound – a simple nudge in the right direction can help them. However, the tone that you take in response is always going to be important here. The escalation of rudeness is easy to fuel and hard to stop. That’s one of the reasons that we have what amounts to be a ‘generous tone and interpretation’ policy on our electronic forums. We expect our students to be polite to each other, to think about what they’re writing and to try and interpret another person’s comments in a positive light.

Recently I had a student start posting and it was hard to tell if he was forming sentences clumsily or actually being rude. I gave him the benefit of the doubt for a couple of posts and then, when he started going further, I stepped in and suggested that he looked at his tone as he was heading towards the problem area. What’s interesting is that his messages were directed at me and I would have stepped in sooner if it had been anyone else.

I don’t have much to add to the vast body of educational psychology and people management that covers all of this, except to give my handling mechanisms for public student communication spaces as a simple list.

  1. Be explicit about your politeness policy – don’t depend on implicit rules. I announce these at the start.
  2. Be as consistent as you can about this – respect should be omnidirectional. I try to be welcoming, friendly and polite. Any serious disciplinary admonishment is NEVER in the public eye.
  3. If a message, post or comment makes you even vaguely angry – step away and don’t respond until you’re calm (if you can).
  4. Re-read all messages before sending them to check your tone and, if in doubt, ask someone else to look at it. If you can, add something positive to the message to redirect the discussion back to the main point. Remember to encourage positive discussion!
  5. Always send messages and communicate at the level of politeness and respect that you want back.
  6. Never read the forums or e-mail when you’re already in a bad mood – it’s a dark lens.
  7. Be direct. Give your message and move on. Most students aren’t that bad and will be fine after the occasional flare-up. Let it go.
  8. If someone keeps being rude, move it up the chain and seek disciplinary intervention, even if it’s a personal chat from the Head of School. We’re serious about politeness, so stick to your guns.
  9. If you ever make a serious gaffe on any of these, suck it up, apologise and move on. Learn from it.
  10. Always apply the same rules of protection to yourself – you are not a punching bag.

SIGCSE, Why Can’t I Implement Everything?

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

I was going to blog about Mike Richards’ excellent paper on ubicomp, but Katrina did a much better job so I recommend that you go and look over there.

My observation on this session are more feeling based, in that I’ve seen many things at this conference and almost every time, I’ve wanted to tell more people about it, or adopt the mechanism. As Katrina said to me, when we were discussing it over lunch, you can’t do everything because we only have so many people and not every idea has to be implemented at every University.

But it’s such a shame! I want small home-rolled mobile computing platforms and fascinating programming environments! Everything good I saw, I want to bring home and share with people. However, the hard part is that I want them to be as fascinated and as excited as I am – and they’re getting it from me second-hand.

The other things that I have to remember is that whatever we do, we have to commit to and do well, we can’t just bring stuff in, try it and throw it away in case there’s a possibility of our ad-hoc approach hurting our students. We have to work out what we want to improve, measure it, try the change and then measure it again to see what has changed.

You’ll see a few more SIGCSE posts, because there’s still some very interesting things to report and comment on, but an apparent movement away from the content here isn’t a sign that I’ve stopped thinking about – it’s a sign that I’m thinking about which bits I can implement and which bits I have to put into the ‘long term’ box to bring up at a strategy level down the track.

I’ve met a lot of great people and heard many wonderful things – thanks to everyone at SIGCSE!

SIGCSE Wrap-up 2012

Posted: March 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

And SIGCSE is over! Raja and I presented the infamous puzzle-based learning (PBL) workshop. It took three years to get into a form where it was accepted – but it was worth it. ALl of the participants seemed to have a good time but, more importantly, seemed to get something useful. The workshop about 12 hours of information jammed into 3 hours but it’s a start.

Today’s lunch was pretty good but, despite the keynote being two really interesting people (Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, from Google’s Big Picture visualisation in Cambridge, MA) and the content being interesting – there wasn’t much room for us to take it further beyond contributing our datasets to the Many Eyes project and letting it go to the world. I suspect that, if this talk had preceded Hal’s yesterday, it would have been much better but, after the walled garden talk, the discussion of what a small group of very clever people had done was both interesting and inspirational – but where was the generative content as a general principle?

I’m probably being too harsh – it’s not as if Fernanda and Martin didn’t give us a great and interesting talk. I suspect that Hal’s talk may just have made me a lot more aware of the many extended fingers in the data pies that I work with on a regular basis.

So let me step back and say that the current focus on presenting data in easily understood ways is important and exciting. It would be fantastic if all of the platforms available were open, extensible and generative. There we go – a nice positive message. Fernanda and Martin are doing great stuff and I’d love to see all of it in the public domain sometime. 🙂

Following the lunch, Raja and I had to set-up for our workshop, and that meant that our audience was going to be the last SIGCSE people we’d see as everyone else was leaving or heading off to another workshop. We think it went well but I guess we’ll see. I’ll try to put a PBL post in the queue before I start jumping on planes again.

Bye, SIGCSE, it’s been fun. See you… next year?

SIGCSE: Scratching Alice – What Do Students Learn About Programming From Game, Music Video, And Storytelling Projects?

Posted: March 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I went to a fascinating talk that drew data from 11-14 year olds at a programming camp. Students used a 3D programming language called Alice or a visual programming language called Scratch, to tell stories, produce music videos and write games. The faculty running the program noticed that there appeared to be a difference in the style of programming that students mastered depending on whether they used Alice or Scratch. At first glance, these languages both provide graphical programming environments and can be very similarly used. They both offer loops, the ability to display text, can produce graphics and you can assign values to locations in memory – not surprising, given that these are what we would hope to find in any modern high-level programming language. For many years, students produced programs in Alice, with a strong storytelling focus, but from 2008, the camp switched to Scratch, and a game-writing and music-video focus.

And the questions that students asked started to change.

Students started to ask questions about selection statements and conditional expressions – choosing which piece of code to run at a given point and calculating true and false conditions. This was a large departure from the storytelling time when students, apparently, didn’t need this knowledge.

The paper is called “What Do Students Learn About Programming From Game, Music Video, And Storytelling Projects?“, Adams and Webster, and they show a large number of interesting figures determined by data mining the code produced from all of the years of the camp. Unsurprisingly, the game programming required students to do a lot more of what we would generally recognise as programming – choosing between different pathways in the code, determining if a condition has been met – and this turns out to be statistically significant for this study. Yes, Scratch games use more if statements and conditionals than Alice storytelling activities and this is a clear change in the nature and level of the concepts that the students have been exposed to.

Students tended to write longer programs as they got older, regardless of language, games were longer than other programs, IF statements were used 100 times more often in games than stories and LOOPS were used 100 times more often in games and videos than stories.

Some other, interesting, results include data on gender differences in the data:

  • Boys put, on average, 3.2 animations of fire into all of their games, compared to the girl’s rather dull 0.8. Come on, girls, why isn’t everything on fire?
  • Boys use infinite loops far more frequently than girls. (I’d love to see if there’s an age-adjusted pattern to this as well.)
  • Girls appear to construct more conditional statements. This would usually indicate a higher level of utility with the concepts.

We generally have two things that we try to do when we carry out outreach – amuse/engage the audience and educate the audience. There’s not doubt that the choice of language and the exercise are important and this paper highlights it. They’re not saying that Alice is better or worse than Scratch but that, depending on what you want, your choice of activity is going to make students think in a certain way. If all you’re after is engagement then you don’t need students practising these higher-level programming skills – but if you’re trying to start out proto-programmers, maybe a storytelling approach isn’t what you’re after.

SIGCSE, Birds of a Feather (BOF) Session “eTextbooks”

Posted: March 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

My blogging of these events is getting later and later but another BOF session from Thursday night, hosted by Professor Cliff Schaffer from Virginia Tech. As always, my words may not quite match those of noted speakers.

Overall, a really thought-provoking panel – we all want to write but we ant to get all of the new features, without necessarily really knowing what the features available are or what the cost will be. The fear of wasting time is a constant spectre over the eBooks market. If I make it, I want it to be useful and feature-rich for some time.

What does the term eText even mean? Is it a type of text, the platform, the concept – some intersection? The virtues are obvious: portability, additional features like hypertext and search – but is this it? What are the educational benefits?

Cliff’s main idea was that, for our educational purposes, eBooks support interactivity and, hence assessment. There are projects like OpenDSA, a data structures and algorithms course in the creative commons. They’ve got content, texts, visualisations and assessment. Once a student has finished, they appear to be confident that they have understood the material.

Looking at Khan Academy it’s easy to focus on the videos, when the assessment exercises and awards system is an equally important part. But this is for Maths which is (notionally) easier to generate problem variations for and assess the result, to allow exercise in variations.

When students interact correctly with this progress determination activities, they answer the question, get told of their mark and given feedback and can then go again. Why do we mean by interactivity? (NF note, I’ll blog on this some more, later.)

There are a lot of solutions in this space, including algorithm simulation environment – how can we go beyond the textbook? Do we need to abandon the idea of the textbook as a closed container – does it make any sense any more?

The Open University in the UK has split their material between paper and electronic – electronic because of all the features and paper because students feel ripped off without a paper copy! The electronic materials have three levels of response to assessment-based interaction: firstly mark and just note where errors occurred, on the second pass, mark and suggest materials, on the third pass, if still under performing, direct student to read the material again. This is a bespoke system, producing Flash, but they hope to move to HTML5 at some stage.

Other tools mentioned included CTAT (Cognitive Tutoring Authoring Tools), AlgoViz and the amazing interactive textbook system written in Python, thinkcspy.appspot.com. If we’re going to have systems like Khan Academy, we need them to decomposable and re-usable but it would be nice if their grading system (badges) could work with us.

On the thinkcspy.appspot.com site, Brad and David’s book (Luther college), customised by Christine Alvarado, contains mid-term grades, log files and then end of term survey. CodeLens, visualisation was most correlated with results. However, outside of class time, students did not use most of interactive elements. The night before a test they flipped through the book. To learn this content, they have to change behaviour. Had assessment items already built in to drive knowledge boundary forward but students chose not to engage with the book.

Mark mentioned a new NSF project in October – building CS books for HS students to allow them to learn CS. Can’t use apprenticeship model because HS students don’t have time to mentor or be mentored because of an already full curriculum. The curse of outreach is that we have to take the time to produce and try to jam this into a heavily prescribed and full curriculum, to interest students in something – we need a mechanism that people will consult outside but it’s obvious that people won’t (according to the above).

How do we change the behaviour? All content seems to get used the most 48 hours before the mid-term! (No real surprises) There are many open questions about how students feel about reading in general and about whether we should be changing the way we write books to reflect a chunk repository, rather than a linear narrative.
Finally, a big issue was which format we should use – we need a solid, survivable format that works with publishers, authors and readers alike. HTML5 could be a start, but MathJAX is a good solid format for equations. Cay Horstmann suggests that any XML format will work.
Basically, despite these materials having been around for many years now, there are still a lot of unanswered questions. Fora like this are a start but it’s very telling that so many people had to show up to a physical venue to have a discussion about an electronic system…

SIGCSE, Birds of a Feather (BOF) Session “CS Unplugged”

Posted: March 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Poor Tim Bell. He must think I’m stalking him. I attended the BOF session for CS Unplugged, which quickly turned into the BOF on ‘Energising your Outreach to Schools” (my words). Once again Lynn Lambert and Tim shared their experiences with CS Unplugged to help us frame what was wrong with our outreach (or the problems that we had) in order to try and fix them.

The main issues were:

  1. How do we get into the curriculum?
  2. Bad/old equipment.
  3. Creating a meaningful activity in a very short time.
  4. Persistence – how we do we stay in their minds or their environment?
  5. Priming – how we prepare them for our visit?
  6. Time – how do we fit it all in and, more importantly, how does the teacher?
CS Unplugged is a good way to address quite a few of these problems – it provides a curricular framework (1), doesn’t need equipment (2), is meaningful in a short time (3) and doesn’t take much time to carry out (6). But what about persistence and priming? The group discussed this for a while but the main message was “Train the trainer” – we need to keep investing time in teacher training to make these activities a go-to for any part of the day and a desirable activity for busy and over-worked teaching staff.
Along the way, we had a fascinating discussion of what it is that we actually do – how do we tell kids what it is that we do? As one participant says “A doctor walks in and says ‘I save lives’. We walk in and say ‘We process data.'” That’s a hard comparison but it’s a fair one.
We liked the idea that “We solve other people’s problems” and we also discussed the notion of regionalising what it is that we did, so picking out a CS focus for a given area, where the kids would see people doing it every day, or see people appreciating it every day.
Some other general notes from the session:
  • Pick the right time to come in and interact with students, when teachers are happy to have you. Teachers don’t get a reward for dealing with students at elementary level.
  • CS BIts and Bytes is a good newsletter
  • cs4fn got another mention as a good website
  • One amusing quote from a parent, after finding out what we did, was “I had no idea that CS had any application.” To our credit, nobody cried when this was told to the group.
  • Involve people in discussing useful, relevant problems and how CS is used to help: suggestions included global warming and genomic sequencing.

Overall, another fun discussion with a lot of actively concerned people trying to make things better. Please leap in for corrections if I missed something important or got something wrong. I’m also happy to edit to add credits if required. 🙂

 

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