Student Reflections – The End of Semester Process Report

Posted: June 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve mentioned before that I have two process awareness reports in one of my first-year courses. One comes just after the monster “Library” prac, and one is right at the end of the course. These encourage the students to reflect on their assignment work and think about their software development process. I’ve just finished marking the final one and, as last year, it’s a predominantly positive and rewarding experience.

When faced with 2-4 pages of text to produce, most of my students sit down and write several, fairly densely packed pages telling me about the things that they’ve discovered along the way: lessons learned, pit traps avoided and (interestingly) the holes that they did fall into. It’s rare that I get cynical replies and for this course, from over 100 responses, I think that I had about 5 disappointing ones.

The disappointing ones included ones that posted about how I had to give them marks for something that was rubbish (uh, no I didn’t, read the assignment spec and the forum carefully), ones that were scrawled together in about a minute and said nothing, and the ones that were the outpourings of someone who wasn’t really happy with where they were, rather than something I could easily fix. Let’s move on from these.

I want to talk about the ones who had crafted beautiful diagrams where they proudly displayed their software process. The ones who shared great ideas about how to help students in the next offering. The ones who shared the links that they found useful with me, in case other students would like them. The ones who were quietly proud of mastering their areas of difficulty and welcomed the opportunity to tell someone about it. The one who used this quote from Confucius:

“A man without distant care must have near sorrow”

(人无远虑 必有近忧)

To explain why you had to look into the future when you did software design – don’t leave your assignments to the last minute, he was saying, look ahead! (I am, obviously, going to use that for teaching next semester!)

The Confucian Symbol. Something else to put in my lecture slides for Semester 2, 2012.

Overall, I find these reports to be a resolutely uplifting experience. The vast majority of my students have learnt what I wanted them to learn and have improved their professional skills but, as well, a large number of them have realised that the assignments, together with the lectures, develop their knowledge. Here is one of my favourite student quotes about the assignments themselves, which tells me that we’re starting to get the design right:

The real payoff was towards the end of the assignment. Often it would be possible to “just type code” and earn at least half the marks fairly easily. However there was always a more complex final-­part to the assignment, one that I could not complete unless I approached it in a systematic, well thought out way. The assignments made it easy to see that a program of any real complexity would be nearly impossible to build without a well-­defined design.

But students were also thinking about how they were going to take more general lessons out of this. Here’s another quote I like:

Three improvements that I am aiming to take on board for future subjects are: putting together a study timetable early on in the game; taking the time to read and understand the problem I’ve been given; and put enough time aside to produce a concise design which includes testing strategies.

The exam for this course has just been held and we’re assembling the final marks for inspection on Friday, which will tell us how this new offering has gone. But, at this stage, I have an incredibly valuable resource of student feedback to draw on when I have to do any minor adjustments to make this course better for the next offering.

From a load perspective, yes, having two essays in an otherwise computationally based course does put load on the lecturer/marker but I am very happy to pay that price. It’s such a good way to find out what my students are thinking and, from a personal perspective, be a little more confident that my co-teaching staff and I are making a positive change in these students’ lives. Better still, by sharing comments from cohort to cohort, we provide an authenticity to the advice that I would be hard pressed to achieve.

I think that this course, the first one I’ve really designed from the ground up and I’m aware of how rare that opportunity is, is actually turning into something good. And that, unsurprisingly, makes me very happy.

Time Banking: Aiming for the 40 hour week.

Posted: June 24, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

I was reading an article on metafilter on the perception of future leisure from earlier last century and one of the commenters linked to a great article on “Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work: Six Lessons” via the International Game Designers Association. This article was partially in response to the quality of life discussions that ensued after ea_spouse outed the lifestyle (LiveJournal link) caused by her spouse’s ludicrous hours working for Electronic Arts, a game company. One of the key quotes from ea_spouse was this:

Now, it seems, is the “real” crunch, the one that the producers of this title so wisely prepared their team for by running them into the ground ahead of time. The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm — seven days a week — with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm). This averages out to an eighty-five hour work week. Complaints that these once more extended hours combined with the team’s existing fatigue would result in a greater number of mistakes made and an even greater amount of wasted energy were ignored.

The badge is fastened with two pins that go straight into your chest.

This is an incredible workload and, as Evan Robinson notes in the “Crunch Mode” article, this is not only incredible but it’s downright stupid because every serious investigation into the effect of working more than 40 hours a week, for extended periods, and for reducing sleep and accumulating sleep deficit has come to the same conclusion: hours worked after a certain point are not just worthless, they reduce worth from hours already worked.

Robinsons cites studies and practices coming from industrialists as Henry Ford, who reduced shift length to a 40-hour work week in 1926, attracting huge criticism, because 12 years of research had shown that the shorter work week meant more output, not less. These studies have been going on since the 18th century and well into the 60’s at least and they all show the same thing: working eight hours a day, five days a week gives you more productivity because you get fewer mistakes, you get less fatigue accumulation and you have workers that are producing during their optimal production times (first 4-6 hours of work) without sliding into their negatively productive zones.

As Robinson notes, the games industry doesn’t seem to have got the memo. The crunch is a common feature in many software production facilities and the ability to work such back-breaking and soul-destroying shifts is often seen as a badge of honour or mark of toughness. The fact that you can get fired for having the audacity to try and work otherwise also helps a great deal in motivating people to adopt the strategy.

Why spend so many hours in the office? Remember when I said that it’s sometimes hard for people to see what I’m doing because, when I’m thinking or planning, I can look like I’m sitting in the office doing nothing? Imagine what it looks like if, two weeks before a big deadline, someone walks into the office at 5:30pm and everyone’s gone home. What does this look like? Because of our conditioning, which I’ll talk about shortly, it looks like we’ve all decided to put our lives before the work – it looks like less than total commitment.

As a manager, if you can tell everyone above you that you have people at their desks 80+ hours a week and will have for the next three months, then you’re saying that “this work is important and we can’t do any more.” The fact that people were probably only useful for the first 6 hours of every day, and even then only for the first couple of months, doesn’t matter because it’s hard to see what someone is doing if all you focus on is the output. Those 80+ hour weeks are probably only now necessary because everyone is so tired, so overworked and so cognitively impaired, that they are taking 4 times as long to achieve anything.

Yes, that’s right. All the evidence says that more than 2 months of overtime and you would have been better off staying at 40 hours/week in terms of measurable output and quality of productivity.

Robinson lists six lessons, which I’ll summarise here because I want to talk about it terms of students and why forward planning for assignments is good practice for better smoothing of time management in the future. Here are the six lessons:

  1. Productivity varies over the course of the workday, with greatest productivity in the first 4-6 hours. After enough hours, you become unproductive and, eventually, destructive in terms of your output.
  2. Productivity is hard to quantify for knowledge workers.
  3. Five day weeks of eight house days maximise long-term output in every industry that has been studied in the past century.
  4. At 60 hours per week, the loss of productivity caused by working longer hours overwhelms the extra hours worked within a couple of months.
  5. Continuous work reduces cognitive function 25% for every 24 hours. Multiple consecutive overnighters have a severe cumulative effect.
  6. Error rates climb with hours worked and especially with loss of sleep.

My students have approximately 40 hours of assigned work a week, consisting of contact time and assignments, but many of them never really think about that. Most plan in other things around their ‘free time’ (they may need to work, they may play in a band, they may be looking after families or they may have an active social life) and they fit the assignment work and other study into the gaps that are left. Immediately, they will be over the 40 hour marker for work. If they have a part-time job, the three months of one of my semesters will, if not managed correctly, give them a lumpy time schedule alternating between some work and far too much work.

Many of my students don’t know how they are spending their time. They switch on the computer, look at the assignment, Skype, browse, try something, compile, walk away, grab a bite, web surf, try something else – wow, three hours of programming! This assignment is really hard! That’s not all of them but it’s enough of them that we spend time on process awareness: working out what you do so you know how to improve it.

Many of my students see sports drinks, energy drinks and caffeine as a licence to not sleep. It doesn’t work long term as most of us know, for exactly the reasons that long term overwork and sleeplessness don’t work. Stimulants can keep you awake but you will still be carrying most if not all of your cognitive impairment.

Finally, and most importantly, enough of my students don’t realise that everything I’ve said up until now means that they are trying to sit my course with half a brain after about the halfway point, if not sooner if they didn’t rest much between semesters.

I’ve talked about the theoretical basis for time banking and the pedagogical basis for time banking: this is the industrial basis for time banking. One day I hope that at least some of my students will be running parts of their industries and that we have taught them enough about sensible time management and work/life balance that, as people in control of a company, they look at real measures of productivity, they look at all of the masses of data supporting sensible ongoing work rates and that they champion and adopt these practices.

As Robinson says towards the end of the article:

Managers decide to crunch because they want to be able to tell their bosses “I did everything I could.” They crunch because they value the butts in the chairs more than the brains creating games. They crunch because they haven’t really thought about the job being done or the people doing it. They crunch because they have learned only the importance of appearing to do their best to instead of really of doing their best. And they crunch because, back when they were programmers or artists or testers or assistant producers or associate producers, that was the way they were taught to get things done. (Emphasis mine.)

If my students can see all of their requirements ahead of time, know what is expected, have been given enough process awareness, and have the will and the skill to undertake the activities, then we can potentially teach them a better way to get things done if we focus on time management in a self-regulated framework, rather than imposed deadlines in a rigid authority-based framework. Of course, I still have a lot of work to to demonstrate that this will work but, from industrial experience, we have yet another very good reason to try.

Time Banking: Foundations

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

Short post today because I’ve spent so much time looking at research and fixing papers and catching up on things that I haven’t left myself much time to blog. Sorry about that! Today’s post is talking about one of the most vital aspects of time banking and one that I’ve been working on slightly under the radar – the theoretical underpinnings based on work in education, psychology and economics.

Foundations: More complex than they first appear.

Today we’ve been looking at key papers in educational psychology on motivation – but the one that stood out today was Zimmerman (90), “Self-regulated learning and academic achievement: An overview.” in Educational Psychologist, 25.  I want my students to become their own time managers but that’s really just a facet of self-regulation. It’s important to place all of this “let’s get rubber with time” into context and build on the good science that has gone before. I want my students to have the will to learn and practice, and the skill to do so competently – one without the other is no good to me.

This is, of course, just one of the aspects that we have to look at. Do I even know how I’m planning to address the students? Within an operant framework of punishment and reward or a phenomenological framework of self-esteem? How am I expecting them to think? These seem like rather theoretical matters but I need to know how existing timeliness issues are being perceived. If students think that they’re working in a reward/punishment framework then my solution has to take that into account. Of course, this takes us well into the world of surveying and qualitative analysis, but to design this survey we need sound theory and good hypotheses so that we can start in the ballpark of the right answer and iteratively improve.

We’re looking at motivation as the key driver here. Yes, we’re interested in student resilience and performance, but it’s the motivation to move to self-regulation that is what we’re trying to maximise. Today’s readings and sketching will be just one day out of many more to come as we further refine our search from the current broader fan to a more concentrated beam.

What of the economic factors? There is no doubt that the time bank forms a primitive economy out of ‘hours’ of a student’s time but it’s one where the budget doesn’t have to balance across the class, just across an individual student. This makes things easier to an extent as I don’t have to consider a multi-agent market beyond two people: the student and me. However, the student still has private information from me, the quality, progress and provenance of their work, and I have private information from them, in terms of the final mark. Can I make the system strategy proof, where students have no incentive to lie about how much work they’ve done or don’t try to present their private information in a way that is inherently non-truthful? Can I also produce a system where I don’t overly manipulate the system through the construction of the oracle or my support mechanisms? There’s a lot of great work out there on markets and economies so I have a great deal of reading to do here as well.

So, short post – but a long and fascinating day.

The Many Types of Failure: What Does Zero Mean When Nothing Is Handed Up?

Posted: June 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

You may have read about the Edmonton, Canada, teacher who expected to be sacked for handing out zeros. It’s been linked to sites as diverse as Metafilter, where a long and interesting debate ensued, and Cracked, where it was labelled one of the ongoing ‘pussifications’ of schools. (Seriously? I know you’re a humour site but was there some other way you could have put that? Very disappointed.)

Basically, the Edmonton Public School Board decided that, rather than just give a zero for a missed assignment, this would be used as a cue for follow-up work and additional classes at school or home. Their argument – you can’t mark work that hasn’t been submitted, let’s use this as a trigger to try and get submission, in case the source is external or behavioural. This, of course, puts the onus on the school to track the students, get the additional work completed, and then mark out of sequence. Lynden Dorval, the high school teacher who is at the centre of this, believe that there is too much manpower involved in doing this and that giving the student a zero forces them to come to you instead.

Some of you may never have seen one of these before. This is a zero, which is the lowest mark you can be awarded for any activity. (I hope!)

Now, of course, this has split people into two fairly neat camps – those who believe that Dorval is the “hero of zero” and those who can see the benefit of the approach, including taking into account that students still can fail if they don’t do enough work. (Where do I stand? I’d like to know a lot more than one news story before I ‘pick a side’.) I would note that a lot of tired argument and pejorative terminology has also come to the fore – you can read most of the buzzwords used against ‘progressives’ in this article, if you really want to. (I can probably summarise it for you but I wouldn’t do it objectively. This is just one example of those who are feting Dorval.)

Of course, rather than get into a heated debate where I really don’t have enough information to contribute, I’d rather talk about the basic concept – what exactly does a zero mean? If you hand something in and it meets none of my requirements, then a zero is the correct and obvious mark. But what happens if you don’t hand anything in?

With the marking approach that I practice and advertise, which uses time-based mark penalties for late submission, students are awarded marks for what they get right, rather than have marks deducted for what they do wrong. Under this scheme, “no submission” gives me nothing to mark, which means that I cannot give you any marks legitimately – so is this a straight-forward zero situation? The time penalties are in place as part of the professional skill requirements and are clearly advertised, and consistently policed. I note that I am still happy to give students the same level of feedback on late work, including their final mark without penalty, which meets all of the pedagogical requirements, but the time management issues can cost a student some, most or all of their marks. (Obviously, I’m actively working on improving engagement with time management through mechanisms that are not penalty based but that’s for other posts.)

As an aside, we have three distinct fail grades for courses at my University:

  • Withdraw Fail (WF), where a student has dropped the course but after the census date. They pay the money, it stays on their record, but as a WF.
  • Fail (F), student did something but not enough to pass.
  • Fail No Submission (FNS), student submitted no work for assessment throughout the course.

Interestingly, for my Uni, FNS has a numerical grade of 0, although this is not shown on the transcript. Zero, in the course sense, means that you did absolutely nothing. In many senses, this represents the nadir of student engagement, given that many courses have somewhere from 1-5, maybe even 10%, of marks available for very simple activities that require very little effort.

My biggest problem with late work, or no submission, is that one of the strongest messages I have from that enormous data corpus of student submission that I keep talking about is that starting a pattern of late or no submission is an excellent indicator of reduced overall performance and, with recent analysis, a sharply decreased likelihood of making it to third year (final year) in your college studies. So I really want students to hand something in – which brings me to the crux of the way that we deal with poor submission patterns.

Whichever approach I take should be the one that is most likely to bring students back into a regular submission pattern. 

If the Public School Board’s approach is increasing completion rates and this has a knock-on effect which increases completion rates in the future? Maybe it’s time to look at that resourcing profile and put the required money into this project. If it’s a transient peak that falls off because we’re just passing people who should be failing? Fuhgeddaboutit.

To quote Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle, naturally): 

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. (A Scandal in Bohemia)

“Data! Data! Data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without clay.” (The Adventure of the Copper Beeches)

It is very easy to take a side on this and it is very easy to see how both sides could have merit. The issue, however, is what each of these approaches actually does to encourage students to submit their assignment work in a more timely fashion. Experiments, experimental design, surveys, longitudinal analysis, data, data, data!

If I may end by waxing lyrical for a moment (and you will see why I stick to technical writing):

If zeroes make Heroes, then zeroes they must have! If nulls make for dulls, then we must seek other ways!

Time Banking IV: The Role of the Oracle

Posted: June 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I’ve never really gone into much detail on how I would make a system like Time Banking work. If a student can meet my requirements and submit their work early then, obviously, I have to provide some sort of mechanism that allows the students to know that my requirements have been met. The first option is that I mark everything as it comes in and then give the student their mark, allowing them to resubmit until they get 100%.

That’s not going to work, unfortunately, as, like so many people, I don’t have the time to mark every student’s assignment over and over again. I wait until all assignments have been submitted, review them as a group, mark them as a group and get the best use out of staying in the same contextual framework and working on the same assignments. If I took a piecemeal approach to marking, it would take me longer and, especially if the student still had some work to do, I could end up marking the same assignment 3,4, however many times and multiplying my load in an unsupportable way.

Now, of course I can come up with simple measures that the students can check for themselves. Of course, the problem we have here is setting something that a student can mis-measure as easily as they measure. If I say  “You must have at least three pages for an essay” I risk getting three pages of rubbish or triple spaced 18 point print. It’s the same for any measure of quantity (number of words, number of citations, length of comments and so on) instead of quality. The problem is, once again, that if the students were capable of determining the quality of their own work and determining the effort and quality required to pass, they wouldn’t need time banking because their processes are already mature!

So I’m looking for an indicator of quality that a student can use to check their work and that costs me only (at most) a small amount of effort. In Computer Science, I can ask the students to test their work against a set of known inputs and then running their program to see what outputs we get. There is then the immediate problem of students hacking their code and just throwing it against the testing suite to see if they can fluke their way to a solution. So, even when I have an idea of how my oracle, my measure of meeting requirements, is going to work, there are still many implementation details to sort out.

Fortunately, to help me, I have over five years worth of student data through our automated assignment submission gateway where some assignments have an oracle, some have a detailed oracle, some have a limited oracle and some just say “Thanks for your submission.” The next stage in the design of the oracle is to go back and to see what impact the indications of progress and completeness had on the students. Most importantly, for me, is the indication of how many marks a student had to get in order to stop trying to make fresh submissions. If before the due date, did they always strive for 100%? If late, did they tend to stop at more than 50% of achieved marks, or more than 40% in the case of trying to avoid receiving a failing grade based on low assignment submission?

Are there significant and measurable differences between assignments with an oracle and those that have none (or a ‘stub’, so to speak)? I know what many people expect to find in the data, but now I have the data and I can go and interrogate that!

Every time that I have questions like this about the implementation, I have a large advantage in that I already have a large control body of data, before any attempts were made to introduce time banking. I can look at this to see what student behaviour is like and try to extract these elements and use them to assist students in smoothing out their application of effort and develop more mature time management approaches.

Now to see what the data actually says – I hope to post more on this particular aspect in the next week or so.

Today, As I Was Crawling Across the Floor…

Posted: June 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

As I believe I’ve already mentioned, I play a number of board games but, before you think “Oh no, not Monopoly!”, these are along the lines of the German-style board games, games that place some emphasis on strategy, don’t depend too heavily on luck, may have collaborative elements (or an entirely collaborative theme), tend not to be straight war games and manage to keep all the players in the game until the end. Notably, German-style board games don’t have to be German! While some of the ones that I enjoy (Settlers of Cataan, Ticket to Ride and Shadows Over Camelot) are European, a number are not (Arkham Horror, Battlestar Galactica and Lords of Waterdeep). A number of these require cooperative and collaborative play to succeed – some have a traitor within.

I have discussed these games with students on a number of occasions as many students have no idea that such games exist. The idea of players working together against a common enemy (Arkham Horror) appeals to a lot of people, especially as it allows you to share success. One of the best things about games that are well-designed to reward player action and keep everyone in the game is that the tension builds to a point a final victory gives everyone fiero – that powerful surge of joy.

Now, while there are many games out there, I decided to go through the full game design process to get my head around the components required to achieve a playable game. I’ve designed some games before and, after a brief time spent playing them, I’ve left most of them back on the shelf. Why? Poor game design, generally. As a writer, I have a tendency to think of stories and to run narrative in my head – in game terms, this is only one possible passage through the game. One of the strengths of computer games such as Deus Ex is the ability to play multiple times and get something new out: to shake up the events and run it in your order, forming a new narrative. (In DE, technically, you were on rails the whole time, the strength of the game is in the illusion of free will.)

Why is it important for me to try and design a good game? Because it requires a sound assessment of what is required, reflection upon how I can model a situation in a game, good design, solid prototyping, testing, feedback, revision, modification, re-testing, thought, evaluation and then more and more refinement. From a methodological point of view, my question to myself is “Can I build a game that is worth playing based on a general sketch of the problem, a few good ideas and then a solid process to allow me to build game features in the way that I would build code features?”

Right now I’m in the requirements gathering phase and this is proving to be very interesting. I’m working on a Zombie game (oh no, not another one) but I want to have a three-stage game where the options available to players, resources and freedom of action, change dramatically during each stage. I want it to be based in London. I want to allow for players to develop their characters as they play through a given game. I want player actions to have a lasting impact in the game, for decisions to matter. I want the game to generate a different board and base scenario set every time, to prevent players learning a default strategy. I want the whole thing to run, as a board game, in the German style. I want the instructions to fit onto 8 A4 pages – with pictures.

(I should note that I’ve been playing games for a long time and made a lot of notes about rules and mechanics that I like, so this has all formed part of my requirements gathering, but I’m not trying to put a new skin on an old game – I’m trying to create something interesting that is also not a blatant rip-off. Also, yes, I know that there are already a lot of zombie games out there. That isn’t the point.)

I’ve been crawling the web for pictures of London, layouts, property values, building types and other things to get London into my head. Because the board has to change every time, and I can’t use computer generation, I need a modular board structure. That, of course, requires that the modules make sense and feel like London, and that the composition of these modules also makes sense. I need the size of the board to make the players work for their victories and not make victory too easy or too hard to attain. (So, I’m building bounds into the modularity and composition that I can tune based on what happens in play testing.)

I knew this but my research nailed it as a requirement: London is about as far away from being a grid layout as you can get, with a river snaking through it. Because of this, and my randomisation and modularity requirements, I had to think about a system that allowed me to put the elements together but that didn’t make London look like New York.  Instead, I’ve opted for a tiled layout based on hexagons. They tesselate nicely, you can’t run in straight lines, and you can’t see further than the side of one hex, which reflects the problems of working in London without having to force someone to copy out a section of the London map with all of its terrible twists and turns.

The other thing I really wanted to know was “How fast do zombies move?” and, rather than just look it up, I’ve spent a bit of this afternoon shambling around the house and timing myself to see what the traditional “slow” zombie does. Standard walking and running are easy (I have a good feel for those figures) but then I thought about that stalwart of zombie movies – the legless crawler. So, in the interests of research, I measured off a 10m course and dragged myself across the floor only using my arms. Then I added a fudge factor to account for the smoothness of the floor and, voila, a range of speeds that tell me how long zombies will take to move across my maps.

Why do I need to do this? Because I’ve never done it before. From now on, if someone asks me what the estimated speed of a legless zombie is on a level surface, I can say “Oh, about 0.25m/s” and really stop the conversation at the Vice Chancellor’s cocktail party.

Requirements gathering, around a problem specification, is a vital activity because if it’s done properly then you gain more and more understanding of the problem and, even though initially the questions seem to explode, you can move to a point that you have answered most of the important questions. By the time I’ve finished this stage, I should have refined my problem statement into a form that allows me to write the proper design and then build the first prototype without too many further questions. I should have the base rules down in a form that I can give to somebody and see what they do.

By doing this, I’m practising my own Software Engineering skills in a very different way, which makes me think about them outside of the comfortable framework of a programming language. Students often head off to start writing code because it’s easier to sit and write code that might work, instead of spending the time doing the far more difficulty activities of problem specification, requirements gathering, specification refinement and full design. I don’t get much of a chance to work on commercial software these days, so a zombie game on the weekends is an unusual, if rewarding, way to practice these skills.

Sliding across the floor is murder on the knees, though…

What are the Fiction and Non-Fiction Equivalents of Computer Science?

Posted: June 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I commented yesterday that I wanted to talk about something covered in Mark’s blog, namely if it was possible to create an analogy between Common Core standards in different disciplines with English Language Arts and CS as the two exemplars. In particular, Mark pondered, and I quote him verbatim:

”Students should read as much nonfiction as fiction.”  What does that mean in terms of the notations of computing? Students should read as many program proofs as programs?  Students should read as much code as comments?

This a great question and I’m not sure that I have much of an answer but I’ve been enjoying thinking about it. We bandy the terms syntax and semantics around in Computer Science a lot: the legal structures of the programs we write and the meanings of the components and the programs. Is it even meaningful to talk about fiction and non-fiction in these terms and where do these fit? I’ve gone in a slightly different direction from Mark but I hope to bring it back to his suggestions later on.

I’m not an English specialist, so please forgive me or provide constructive guidance as you need to, but both fiction and non-fiction rely upon the same syntactic elements and the same semantic elements in linguistic terms – so the fact that we must have legal programs with well-defined syntax and semantics pose no obstacle to a fictional/non-fictional interpretation.

Forgive me as I go to Wikipedia for definitions for fiction and non-fiction for a moment:

“Non-fiction (or nonfiction) is the form of any narrative, account, or other communicative work whose assertions and descriptions are understood to be factual.” (Warning, embedded Wikipedia links)

“Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author” (Again, beware Wikipedia).

Now here we can start to see something that we can get our teeth into. Many computer programs model reality and are computerised representation of concrete systems, while others may have no physical analogue at all or model a system that has never or may never exist. Are our simulations and emulations of large-scale system non-fiction? If so, is a virtual reality fictional because it has never existed or non-fictional because we are simulating realistic gravity? (But, of course, fiction is often written in a real world setting but with imaginary elements.)

From a software engineering perspective, I can see an advantage to making statements regarding abstract representations and concrete analogues, much as I can see a separation in graphics and game design between narrative/event engine construction and the physics engine underneath.

Is this enough of a separation? Mark’s comments on proof versus program is an interesting one: if we had an idea (an author’s creation) then it is a fiction until we can determine that it exists, but proof or implementation provides this proof of existence. In my mind, a proof and a program are both non-fiction in terms of their reification, but the idea that they span may still be fictional. Comments versus code is also very interesting – comments do not change the behaviour of code but explain, from the author’s mind, what has happened. (Given some student code and comment combinations, I can happily see a code as non-fiction, comment as fiction modality – or even comment as magical reality!)

Of course, this is all an enjoyable mental exercise, but what can I take from this and use in my teaching. Is there a particular set of code or comments that students should read for maximum benefit and can we make a separation that, even if not partitioned so neatly across two sets, gives us the idea of what constitutes a balanced diet of the products of our discipline?

I’d love to see some discussion on this but, if nothing here, then I’m happy to buy the first round of drinks at HERDSA or ICER to start a really good conversation going!

What’s the Big Idea?

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

I was reading Mark Guzdial’s blog just before sitting down to write tonight and came across this post. Mark was musing about the parallels between the Common Core standards of English Language arts and those of Computing Literacy. He also mentioned the CS:Principles program – an AP course designed to give an understanding of fundamental principles, the breadth of application and the way that computing can change the world.

I want to talk more about the parallels that Mark mentioned but I’ll do that in another post because I read through the CS:Principles Big Ideas and wanted to share them with you. There are seven big ideas:

  1. Creativity, recognising the innately creative nature of computing;
  2. Abstraction, where we rise above detail to allow us to focus on the right things;
  3. Data, where data is the foundation of the creation of knowledge;
  4. Algorithms, to develop solutions to computational problems;
  5. Programming, the enabler of our dreams of solutions and the way that we turn algorithms into solution – the basis of our expression;
  6. Internet, the ties that bind all modern computing together; and
  7. Impact, the fact that Computing can, and regularly does, change the world.

I think that I’m going to refer to these with the NSF Grand Challenges as part of my new Grand Challenges course, because there is a lot of similarity. I’ve nearly got the design finished so it’s not too late to incorporate new material. (I don’t like trying to rearrange courses too late into the process because I use a lot of linked assessment and scaffolding, it gets very tricky and easy to make mistakes if I try and insert a late design change.)

For me, the first and the last ideas are among the most important. Yes, you may be able to plod your way through simple work in computing but really good solutions require skill, practice, and creativity. When you get a really good solution or approach to a problem, you are going to change things – possibly even the world. It looks like someone took the fundamentals of computing and jammed together between two pieces of amazing stuff, framing the discipline inside the right context for a change. Instead of putting computing in a nerd sandwich, it’s in an awesome sandwich. I like that a lot.

It turns out that there are a lot of images when you search for “Awesome Sandwich”.

Allowing yourself to be creative, understanding abstraction, knowing how to put data together, working out to move the data around in the right ways and then coding it correctly, using all of the resources that you have to hand and that you can reach out and touch through the Internet – that’s how to change the world.

 

Learning from other people – Academic Summer Camp (except in winter???)

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

I’ve just signed up for the Digital Humanities Winter Institute course on “Large-scale text analysis with R”. K read about it on ProfHacker and passed it on to me thinking I’d be interested. Of course, I was, but it goes well beyond learning R itself. R is a statistically focused programming package that is available for free for most platforms. It’s the statistical (and free, did I mention that?) cousin to the mathematically inclined Matlab.

I’ve spoken about R before and I’ve done a bit of work in it but, and here’s why I’m going, I’ve done all of it from within a heavily quantitative Computer Science framework. What excites me about this course is that I will be working with people from a completely different spectrum and with a set of text analyses with which I’m not very familiar at all. Let me post the text of the course here (from this website) [my bold]:

Large-Scale Text Analysis with R
Instructor: Matt Jockers, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities, Department of English, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Text collections such as the HathiTrust Digital Library and Google Books have provided scholars in many fields with convenient access to their materials in digital form, but text analysis at the scale of millions or billions of words still requires the use of tools and methods that may initially seem complex or esoteric to researchers in the humanities. Large-Scale Text Analysis with R will provide a practical introduction to a range of text analysis tools and methods. The course will include units on data extraction, stylistic analysis, authorship attribution, genre detection, gender detection, unsupervised clustering, supervised classification, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis. The main computing environment for the course will be R, “the open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics.” While no programming experience is required, students should have basic computer skills and be familiar with their computer’s file system and comfortable with the command line. The course will cover best practices in data gathering and preparation, as well as addressing some of the theoretical questions that arise when employing a quantitative methodology for the study of literature. Participants will be given a “sample corpus” to use in class exercises, but some class time will be available for independent work and participants are encouraged to bring their own text corpora and research questions so they may apply their newly learned skills to projects of their own.

There are two things I like about this: firstly that I will be exposed to such a different type and approach to analysis that is going to be immediately useful in the corpus analyses that we’re planning to carry out on our own corpora, but, secondly, because I will have an intensive dedicated block of time in which to pursue it. January is often a time to take leave (as it’s Summer in Australia) – instead, I’ll be rugged up in the Maryland chill, sitting with like-minded people and indulging myself in data analysis and learning, learning, learning, to bring knowledge home for my own students and my research group.

So, this is my Summer Camp. My time to really indulge myself in my coding and just hack away at analyses and see what happens.

I’ve also signed up to a group who are going to work on the “Million Syllabi Project Hack-a-thon“, where “we explore new ways of using the million syllabi dataset gathered by Dan Cohen’s Syllabus Finder Tool” (from the web site). 10 years worth of syllabi to explore, at a time when my school is looking for ways to be able to teach into more areas, to meet more needs, to create a clear and attractive identity for our discipline? A community of hackers looking at ways of recomposing, reinterpreting and understanding what is in this corpus?

How can I not go? I hope to see some of you there! I’ll be the one who sounds Australian and shivers a lot.

Codes of Conduct: Being a Grown-Up.

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

I always hope that my students are functioning at a higher level, heading towards functional adulthood, to some extent. After all, if they need to go to the bathroom, they can usually manage that in a clean and tidy manner. They dress themselves. They can answer questions. So why do some of them act like children when it comes to good/bad behaviour?

I searched for “adult child” and found this. I think Craig Ferguson should sue.

I was reading Darlena’s blog post about one of Rafe Esquith’s books and she referred to Rafe’s referral to Kohlberg’s Six Levels of Moral Development, which I ‘quote-quote’ here:

  1. I do not want to get into trouble.
  2. I want a reward.
  3. I want to please someone.
  4. I always follow the rules.
  5. I am considerate of other people.
  6. I have a personal code of behaviour.

I’ve been talking around these points for a while, in terms of the Perry classifications of duality, multiplicity and commitment. What disappoints me the most is when I have to deal with students who are either trying not to get into trouble or only work for reward – and these are their prime motivations. There’s a world of difference between having students who do things because they have worked through everything we’ve talked about and decided to commit to that approach (step 6 in this scale) and those who only do it because they feel that they will get punished if they don’t.

I always say that I expect a lot of my students and, fairly early on, I do expect them to have formed a personal code of conduct. Yes, I expect them to be timely in their submissions, but because they understand that assignment placement is deliberate and assists them in knowledge formation. Yes, I expect them to not plagiarise or cheat, but because to do so deprives them of learning opportunities. I expect them not to talk in class because they don’t want to deprive other people of learning opportunities (which is a bit of points 5 and 6).

I press this point a lot. I say that I reward what they know, as long as it’s relevant, rather than punishing them for getting things wrong. I encourage them to participate, to be aware of other people, to interact and work with me to make the knowledge transfer more effective – to allow them to construct the mental frameworks required to produce the knowledge for themselves.

I really don’t think it’s good enough to say “Well, students always do X and what can you do?” I have a number of people in my classes who have discovered, to their mounting amazement, that I basically won’t accept behaviour that doesn’t meet reasonable standards. I mean what I say when I say things and I don’t change my mind just because someone asks me. I’m tough on plagiarism and cheating. I don’t let people bully me or other people. And, amazingly, I don’t see many of these behaviours in my class.

I encourage a constructive and positive approach for all of my students – but the basis of this is that they have to establish a personal code of conduct that I can work with. If they go down this path, then everything else tends to follow and we can go a fantastic educational journey together. If they’re still stuck, doing the minimum they can get away with, because they don’t want to get yelled at, then my first (and far more difficult) task is to reach them, try and get them to think beyond using this as their only motivator.

Now, of course, the golden rule is that if you want a student to do something, then giving marks for it is the best way to go – and that’s a technique I use, and I’ve discussed it before. But it’s never JUST the marks. There’s always  reward in terms of scaffolding, or personal satisfaction, or insight. I want fiero! I also don’t want the students to do things just because I ask them to, because they want to please me. I have a middling amount of lecturing charisma but I’m always aware that I have to be content first/showmanship second. If I do that, then students are less likely to fall into the trap of trying to do things just because I ask them to.

I’m really not the kind of teacher who needs an apple on the desk. (I already have two iMacs and a MacBook Air. Ba-dum-*ting*)

Number 4 is one that I really want to steer people away from. Yes, rules should be followed – except where they shouldn’t. You may not know this but it is completely legitimate for a solider in the Australian Army to refuse to follow an illegal order. (Yes, it will probably not go very well but it’s still an option.) If a soldier, who is normally bound by the chain of command to follow orders, believes the order to be illegal (“No prisoners” being one of them) they don’t have to follow it. Australian soldiers are encouraged to exercise discretion and thought because that makes them better soldiers – they can fill in the blanks when the situation changes and potentially improve things. The price, of course, is that a thinker thinks.

Same for students. I want students who change the world, who make things better, who may occasionally walk on the grass to get to that bright new future even when the signs say ‘stay off the grass’. However, without a personal code of conduct, which rules you can bend or break are going to be fairly arbitrarily selected and are far more likely to have a selfish focus. We want rule bending in the face of sound ethics, not rationalisation.

As I said, it’s a lot to ask of students but, as I’ve always said, if I don’t ask for it, and tell people what I want, I can’t expect it and I certainly can’t build on it.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →