Teaching in Hong Kong, Day 6
Posted: July 14, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: AsiaBound, Central, CUHK, CUHK campus, education, Elephant, exams, exchange, higher education, Hong Kong, learning, Lee Woo Sing, Lee Woo Sing College, Maxims, Mongoose, MTR, networking, Run Run Shaw, teaching, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Vamos Argentina!, World Cup Leave a commentWell, this is the 6th day of teaching and the first day of the second week. (I’m not counting weekends.) Some of the students went to Shenzen over the weekend and discovered “an electronics mall the size of Adelaide” which was the big motivator for going. Sadly, I wasn’t able to join them at the World Cup this morning as my flight got in late and I still had marking and work to do, but here’s a picture that one of the students, Sarah, took of the crowd – and they were a very vocal crowd for 3 in the morning!
Let’s not talk about the result. © Sarah Belet, 2014
Today we finished off talking about the way that programmers work with the network when they write applications. When someone sends information too fast for a receiver, we need to control the flow of the information, but when there’s just too much information on the network (from possibly many sources) we have to deal with the congestion. Both of these (and the solutions we use) are really important reasons why the Internet works today! We had a lot of discussion, group-based work and I spent a lot of whiteboard time motivating how we could get information out of the network without having to do anything beyond what we already wanted to do, just to use it.
We had started later so students could get some downtime and it certainly paid off because participation was as good as it had been on other days and brains were only slightly slower than usual. It’s the great thing about having the freedom we have here, teaching only one course and leaving time for work and thinking time. I certainly prefer it as a teaching approach!
Feedback on the quiz and short exam are also positive although there is work to do on making the questions slightly less ambiguous because the terminology of networking often coincides with other uses and there isn’t the same amount of time to get students used to a new reference frame.
After a steamy few days, it seems cooler today and we’re seeing a large amount of blue sky. Here’s what the campus looks like from outside the building I’m teaching in!
Teaching in Hong Kong, Day 5
Posted: July 11, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: AsiaBound, Central, CUHK, CUHK campus, education, Elephant, exams, exchange, higher education, Hong Kong, learning, Lee Woo Sing, Lee Woo Sing College, Maxims, Mongoose, MTR, networking, Run Run Shaw, teaching, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Vamos Argentina!, World Cup 1 CommentWell, we had a normal session to start with, which consisted of discussion about the Transport layer (that bit of the network that makes it easier for the people who program your web browser to talk a web server) and some of it was good but some of it – ehhh, I think it got away from me. There are some really complicated diagrams and I’m still thinking about the best way to teach them. I suspect it’s something you go away and do, then discuss, then do again so that’s a note to self.
We broke for lunch and I (coincidentally) ended up at the same place as my students so I joined them. (There is no escaping the Nick.) They’re all doing the right thing and eating everywhere to see what’s good and basically getting into the whole experience. (They may all be addicted to duck’s web now. Sorry, that’s my fault.)
You can’t see Tom because he’s hiding off to the left, recovering from chilli overload.
After lunch, it was short quiz and short exam time – the students have weekly quizzes, marked automatically and worth 5% each, and then a short answer exam, which I mark manually and these are worth 10% each. Because of the compressed timescale, I’m trying to scaffold the revision process by requiring the knowledge earlier. From what I’ve seen so far, it appears to be working, although I’m not sure how appreciative the students are. Once I’ve marked everything, I’ll discuss it with them to see what their impressions are. I’m a great believer in working with students to try and build better courses and this is one of the best opportunities I’ll ever have.
I have to head back to Australia for the weekend but I’ll be back Sunday afternoon. Until then I’ve asked my students to work hard, play hard and be safe. I’ve delayed the class on Monday morning from 9am to 1pm, not because I’ll be jet lagged, but because CUHK is putting on a giant screen showing of the world cup with local commentators, starting from 3am. This is exactly the kind of serendipitous cultural moment that we want to capture in these sorts of exchanges so, not only am I shifting the class, I’m planning to go along myself.
Goal! Goal! Goal! (Or possibly Penalty! Penalty! Penalty!)
Sorry to my German readers but I have to support Argentina or my friend Guadalupe will kill me. Vamos Argentina! Have a great weekend and I’ll fill you in on Monday in a few days.
Teaching in Hong Kong, Day 4
Posted: July 10, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: AsiaBound, Central, CUHK, CUHK campus, education, Elephant, exchange, higher education, Hong Kong, learning, Lee Woo Sing, Lee Woo Sing College, Maxims, Mongoose, MTR, networking, Run Run Shaw, teaching, the Chinese University of Hong Kong Leave a commentWe were back in the classroom today and the overall plan was to talk about some teaching materials that I’d put on-line already on programming network-based applications. (A lot of work has gone into making it easier for people to write programs that talk across the network and it’s really useful to write these programs for practice because it exposes students to all of the problems that occur when an application spans more than one machine.)
Rather than just walk the students through some slides, I made it pre-reading and then asked them to produce a very small example that sent communication from one machine to another. We had some really interesting results – everyone had been working on it and had something to show, although a couple of people had discovered that trying to add features just before a demo can make a the demo a little less ‘demonstrative’ than it might otherwise have been. The demo code showed a lot of humour and also a high level of the understanding of the problems.
This led into discussion of why certain protocols work the way that they do and, in many cases, it’s because people wrote things that would work for the network of the ’70s and ’80s. These days, with the Web, video streaming and on-line gaming, we have different requirements in many senses and now that the students have written some code and tried some things, they’re ready to start thinking about the “whys” and the “hows” and, most importantly, the “what nexts” of the network.
It wasn’t a long day as the amount of work that had gone into the programs reduced the amount of time I had to spend explaining concepts (funny, that). After a quick design workshop on what the next assignment should look like, where everyone took part in forming ideas as to how we would build it, we broke early to give people more time to work on what they wanted to do.
Goodness – work done early leads to extra time for tasks later? Who thought that would ever work!
I’ve been trying to get a good picture of the Run Run Shaw Science Building, which is far more striking than it ever is in my photos, so here’s one I found on Wikimedia. It gives you some idea of the striking nature of CUHK – buildings nestled among the trees on the hillside.
The glorious colours of the Run Run Shaw Science Building. It dominates the CUHK vista from the MTR station.
Teaching in Hong Kong, Day 3 (Expeditions and Yum Cha!)
Posted: July 9, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: AsiaBound, Cats, Central, CUHK, CUHK campus, education, Elephant, exchange, higher education, Hong Kong, learning, Lee Woo Sing, Lee Woo Sing College, Maxims, Mongoose, MTR, teaching, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Harbour, Tsim Sha Tsui, yum cha 2 CommentsWe’ve built this course so that, while the students work reasonably hard, there are still days off and time to explore the new country – why on Earth would you take students to a different city that they then don’t get to see? Today’s expedition was MTR down to Tsim Sha Tsui and on to the Star Ferry to take the classic trip across the Hong Kong Harbour. It was a gorgeous day and we sat up the front to get good breeze and view – here they are!
Taking in the (warm) sea air.
There’s always something happening in Hong Kong and, on the walk across the land fill towards City Hall, we ran across a movie being shot. We watched it until we chased away for “getting in the way” which I think is movie-making speak for “eh, go away”. After some questionable navigation due to the many changes in the area (sorry, everyone) we made it to Maxim’s and got a seat straight away. Fortinately, one of the students speaks Hokkien and some Mandarin which, combined with some pointing, got us an amazing feast of yum cha. Here’s the view from my seat:
The Panoramic Yum Cha Experience at Maxim’s!
It was great to relax and just hang out as we talked about all sorts of things and just enjoyed spending some time in a new place. The course starts again in earnest tomorrow at 9am, and the students have some work to do, but I left them to wander in Central – I think most of them were heading for the Peak as it was a most delightful day! Here’s a picture of what it looked like as we walked around:
Buildings are big in Hong Kong.
Nick Falkner 