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, 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. 🙂

 

SIGCSE, Keynote #2, Hal Abelson, “The midwife doesn’t get to keep the baby.”

Posted: March 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Well, another fantastic keynote and, for the record, that’s not the real title. The title of the talk was From Computational Thinking to Computational Values. For those who don’t know who Hal Abelson is, he’s a Professor of EE/CS at MIT who has made staggering contributions to pedagogy and the teaching of Computer Science over the years. He’s been involved with the first implementations of Logo, changed the way we think about using computer languages, has been a cornerstone of the Free Software Movement (including the Foundation), led the charge of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) at MIT, published many things that other people would have been scared to publish and, basically, has spent a long time trying to make the world a better place.

It went without saying that, today, we were in for some inspiration and, no doubt, some sort of call to arms. We weren’t disappointed. What follows is as accurate a record as I could make, typing furiously. I took a vast quantity of notes over what was a really interesting talk and I’ll try to get the main points down here. Any mistakes are mine and I have tried to represent the talk without editorialising, although I have adjusted some of the phrasing slightly in places, so the words are, pretty much, Professor Abelsons’s.

Professor Abelson started from a basic introduction of Computational Thinking (CT) but quickly moved on to how he thought that we’d not quite captured it properly in modern practice: it’s how we look in this digital world and see it as a source of empowerment for everybody, as a life changing view. Not just CT, but computational values.

What do we mean? We’re not only talking about cool ideas but that these ideas should be empowering and people should be able to exercise great things and have an impact on the world.

He then went on to talk about Google’s Ngram viewer, which allows you to search all of the books that Google has scanned in and find patterns. You can use this to see how certain terms, ideas and names come and go over time. What’s interesting here is that (1) ascent to and descent from fame appears to be getting faster and (2) you can visualise all of this and get an idea of the half-life of fame (which was nearly the title of this post).

Abelson describes this as a generative platform, one which can be used for things that were not thought of it when it was built, one we can build upon ourselves and change over time. Generating new things for an unseen future. (Paper reference here was Nature, with a covering article from another magazine entitled “Researchers Aim to chart intellectual trends in Arxiv”)

Then the talk took a turn. Professor Abelson took us back, 8 years ago, when Duke’s “Give everyone an iPod” project had every student (eventually) with a free iPod and encouraged them to record, share and mix-up what they were working with.

Enter the Intellectual Property Lawyer. Do the students have permission to share the lecturer-created creative elements of the lectures?

Professor Abelson’s point is that we are booming more concerned with locking up our content into proprietary Content Management Systems (CMS) and this risks turning the academy into a marketplace for packaged ideas and content, rather than a place of open enquiry and academic freedom. This was the main theme of the talk and we’ve got a lot of ground left to cover here! This talk was for those who loved computational values, rather than property creation.

We visited the early, ham-fisted attempts to grant limited licences for simple activities like recording lectures and the immediately farcical notion that I could take notes of a lecture and be in breach of copyright if I then discussed it with a classmate who didn’t attend. Ngrams shows what happens when you have a system where you can do what you like with the data – what if the person holding that data for you, which you created, starts telling you what to do? Where does this leave our Universities?

Are we producing education or property? Professor Abelson sees this as a battle for the soul of the Universities. We should be generative.

We can take computational actions, actions that we will take to reinforce the sense that we have that people ought to be able to relish the power that they get from our computational thinking and computational ideas. This includes providing open courseware (like MIT’s OCW and Stanford’s AI) and open access to research, especially (but not only) when funded by the public purse.

As a teaser, at this point, Abelson introduced MITx, an online intensive learning system that opens up on MONDAY. No other real details – put it in your calendar to check out on Monday! MIT want their material and their content engines to be open source and generative – that word again! Put it into your own context or framework and do great things!

The companion visions to all of this are this:

  1. Great learning institutions provide universal access to course content. (OpenCourseWare)
  2. Great research institutions provide universal access to their collective intellectual resources.(DSpace)

What are the two reasons that we should all support these open initiatives? Why should we fill in the moat and open the drawbridge?

  1. Without initiatives to maintain them, we risk marginalising our academic values and stressing our university communities.
  2. To keep a seat at the table in decisions about the disposition of knowledge in the information age.

Abelson introduced an interesting report, “Who Owns Academic Work? Battling for Control of Intellectual Property”, which discusses the conflation of property and academic rights.

Basically, scientific literature has become property. We, academia, produce it and then give away our rights to journal publishers, who give us limited rights in exchange on a personal level and then hold onto it forever. Neither our institution nor the public has any right to this material anymore. We looked at some examples of rights. Sign up to certain publishers and, from that point on, you can use only up to 250 words of any of the transferred publications in a new work. The number of publishers is shrinking and the cost of subscription is rising.

Professor Abelson asked how it is that, in this sphere alone, the midwife gets to keep the baby? We all have to publish if we act individually, as promotions and tenure depend upon publication in prominent journals – but that there was hope (and here he referred to the Mathematical boycott of the Elsevier publishing group). HR 3699 (the Research Works Act) could have challenged any federal law that mandated open access on federally funded research. Lobbied for by the journal publishing group, it lost support, firstly from Elsevier, and then from the two members of Congress who proposed it

Even those institutions that have instituted an open access policy are finding it hard – some publishers have made specific amendments to the clause that allows pre-print drafts to be display locally to say “except where someone has an institutionally mandated open access policy”.

BUT. HR3699 has gone away for now. Abelson’s message is that there is hope!

We have allowed a lot of walled gardens to spring up. Places where data is curated and applications made available, but only under the permission of the gardener. Despite our libraries paying up to hundreds of thousands of dollars for access to the on-line journal stores, we are severely limited in what we can do with them. Your library cannot search it, index it, scrape it, or many other things. You can, of course, buy a service that provides some of these possibilities from the publisher. A walled garden is not a generative environment.

Jonathan Zittrain, 2008, listed two important generative technologies: the internet and the PC, because you didn’t need anyone’s permission to link or to run software. In Technology Review, now, Zittrain thinks that the PC is dead because of the number of walled gardens that have sprung up.

In Professor Abelson’s words:

“Network Effects
lead to
Monopoly Positions
lead to 
Concentration of Channels
lead to
Decline of Generativity.“
 What about tomorrow? Will our students have the same tinkering possibilities that we had? Will any of our old open software still run?  Will mobile computing be tinkerable? Open source allows for small tinkering steps, and reduces our reliance on monolithic, approved, releases.
The talk then concluded with some more of Professor Abelson’s words, which I reproduce here because they are far better than mine.
“We have the spark of inspiration about how one should relate to their information environment and the belief that that kind of inspiration, power and generativity should be available to everybody.

These beliefs are powerful and have powerful enemies. Draw on your own inspiration and power to make sure that what inspired us is going to be available to our students.“

Fred Brooks: Building Student Projects That Work For Us, For Them and For Their Clients

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

In the Thursday keynote, Professor Brooks discussed a couple of project approaches that he thought were useful, based on his extensive experience. Once again, if you’re not in ICT, don’t switch off – I’m sure that there’s something that you can use if you want to put projects into your courses. Long-term group projects are very challenging and, while you find them everywhere, that’s no guarantee that they’re being managed properly. I’ll introduce Professor Brooks points and then finish with a brief discussion on the use of projects in the curriculum.

Firstly, Brooks described a course that you might find in a computer architecture course. The key aspect of this project is that modern computer architecture is very complex and, in many ways, fully realistic general purpose machines are well beyond the scope of time and ability that we have until very late undergraduate study. Brooks works with a special-purpose unit but this drives other requirements, as we’ll see. Fred’s guidelines for this kind of project are:

  1. Have milestones with early delivery.

    Application Description
    Students must provide a detailed application description which is the most precise statement that the students can manage. A precise guess is considered better here than a vague fact, because the explicit assumption can be questioned and corrected, where handwaving may leave holes in the specification that will need to be fixed later. Students should be aware of how sensitive the application is to each assumption – this allows people to invest effort accordingly. The special-purpose nature of the architecture that they’re constructing means that the application description has to be very, very accurate or you risk building the wrong machine.

    Programming Manual (End of the first month as a draft)
    Another early deliverable is a programming manual – for a piece of software that hasn’t been written yet. Students are encouraged to put something specific down because, even if it’s wrong, it encourages thought and an early precision of thought.

  2. Then the manual is intensely critiqued – students get the chance to re-do it.
  3. The actual project is then handed in well before the final days of semester.
  4. Once again the complete project goes through a very intense critique.
  5. Students get the chance to incorporate the changes from the critique. Students will pay attention to the critique because it is criticism on a live document where they can act to improve their performance.

The next project described is a classic Software Engineering project – team-based software production using strong SE principles. This is a typical project found in CS at the University level but is time-intensive to manage and easy to get wrong. Fred shared his ideas on how it could be done well, based on running it over 22 years since 1966. Here are his thoughts:

  1. You should have real projects for real clients.

    Advertise on the web for software that can be achieved by 3-5 people during a single semester, which would be useful BUT (and it’s an important BUT) you can live without. There must be the possibility that the students can fail, which means that clients have to be ready to get nothing, after having invested meeting time throughout the project.

  2. Teams should be 3-5, ideally 4.

    With 3 people you tend to get two against one. With five, things can get too diffuse in terms of role allocation. Four is, according to Fred, just right.

  3. There should be lots of project choices, to allow teams choice and they can provide a selection of those that they want.
  4.  Teams must be allowed to fail.

    Not every team will fail, or needs to fail, but students need to know that it’s possible.

  5. Roles should be separated.

    Get clear role separations and stick to them. One will look after the schedule, using the pitchfork of motivation, obtaining resources and handling management one level up. One will be chief designer of technical content. Other jobs will be split out but it should be considered a full-time job.

  6. Get the client requirements and get them right.

    The client generally doesn’t really know what they want. You need to talk to them and refine their requirements over time. Build a prototype because it allows someone to say “That’s not what I want!” Invest time early to get these requirements right!

  7. Meet the teams weekly.

    Weekly coaching is labour intensive and is mostly made up of listening, coaching and offering suggestions – but it takes time. Meeting each week makes something happen each week. When a student explains – they are going to have to think.

  8. Early deliverable to clients, with feedback.

    Deadlines make things happen.

  9.  Get something (anything) running early.

    The joy of getting anything running is a spur to further success. It boosts morale and increases effort. Whatever you build can be simple but it should have built-in stubs or points where the extension to complexity can easily occur . You don’t want to have to completely reengineer at every iteration!

  10. Make the students present publicly.

    Software Engineers have to be able to communicate what they are doing, what they have done and what they are planning to do – to their bosses, to their clients, to their staff. It’s a vital skill in the industry.

  11. Final grade is composed of a Team Grade (relatively easy to assess) AND an Individual Grade (harder)

    Don’t multiple one by the other! If effort has been expended, some sort of mark should result. The Team Grade can come from the documentation, the presentation and an assessment of functionality – time consuming but relatively easy. The Individual Grade has to be fair to everyone and either you or the group may give a false indication of a person’s value. Have an idea of how you think everyone is going and then compare that to the group’s impression – they’ll often be the same. Fred suggested giving everyone 10 points that they allocated to everyone ELSE in the group. In his experience, these tallies usually agreed with his impression – except on the rare occasion when he had been fooled by a “mighty fast talker”

This is a pretty demanding list. How do you do tasks for people at the risk of wasting their time for six months? If failure is possible, then failure is inevitable at some stage and it’s always going to hurt to some extent. A project is going to be a deep drilling exercise and, by its nature, cannot be the only thing that students do because they’ll miss out on essential breadth. But the above suggestions will help to make sure that, when the students do go drilling, they have a reasonable chance of striking oil.

SIGCSE Oh, oh, oh, it’s magic!

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

If you’re at SIGCSE, then you’re probably one of the 1,000,000 people who jammed into the pretty amazing Wednesday session, Demystifying Computing with Magic, with Dan Garcia and David Ginat. Dan and David coped very well with a room that seemed to hold more and more people – in keeping with a magic show, we were all apparently trapped in a magic box.

The key ideas behind this session was that Dan and David would show us five tricks that would teach or introduce important computing notions, such as discrete maths, problem representation, algorithmic patterns and, the catch-all, general notions. Drawing on Silver’s 1997 paper, Fostering Creativity Through Instruction Rich In Mathematical Problem Solving and Problem Posing (It’s better in German, trust me), they focused on the notions of fluence (diverse directions for exploration), flexibility (adaptation to the task at hand – synonymous with cognitive flexibility), originality (unfamiliar utilisation of familiar notation), and awareness (being aware of the possible fixations[?] – to be honest, I didn’t quite get this and am still looking at this concept).

The tricks themselves were all fun and had a strong basis in the classical conceit of the stage magician that everything is as it seems, while being underpinned by a rigorous computational framework that explained the trick but in a way that inspired the Gardernesque a-ha! One trick guaranteed that three people could, without knowing the colour of their own hats, be able to guess their own hat colour, based on observing the two other hats, and it would be guaranteed that at least one person would get it right. There were card tricks – showing the important of encoding and the importance of preparation – modular arithmetic, algorithms, correctness proofs and, amusingly, error handling.

Overall, a great session, as evidenced by the level of participation and the number of people stacked three-high by the door. I had so many people sitting near my feet I began to wonder if I’d started a cult.

The final trick, Fitch Cheney’s Five Card Trick was very well done and my only minor irritation is that we were planning to use it in our Puzzle Based Learning workshop on Saturday – but if it’s going to be done by someone else, then all you can ask is that they do it well and it was performed well and explained very clearly. It even had 8 A-Ha’s! That’s enough to produce 2.66 Norwegian pop bands! If you have a chance to see this session anywhere else, I strongly recommend it.

(A useful website, http://www.cs4fn.org/magic, was mentioned at the end, with lots of resources and explanation for those of you looking to insert a little mathemagic into your teaching.)

SIGCSE, Curriculum 2013 – the Strawman Cometh

Posted: March 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , | 4 Comments

It may come as a surprise to some, but the curriculum for Computer Science is regularly revised and, in recent times, we have see a new curriculum in 2001 and 2008. You can find all of this information at the CS2013 website. The 2013 revision has recently been published for the first time as a Strawman – something that you can attack and, traditionally, how we expose new things in CS to wider comment. Once everyone has hacked away at the Strawman, we examine the cuts and the weak points, patch it up, produce a new draft (the Ironman) and see how this stronger version fares against the slings and arrows of our peers.

This year, I had the chance to sit in on the steering committee panel from the ACM and IEEE-CS who had started the ball rolling. In order to produce a curriculum that is deemed (informally) to be a CS degree that meets the standards of the professional bodies, you have to have Core elements and a selection of Elective elements. Well, that was until now. Today’s big reveal, which was already known to anybody who read the earlier document released in February, was that Core was now Core Tier 1 and Core Tier 2. Instead of having 290 hours of ‘essential’ core material, we now had 163 hours of Tier 1 and up to 142 hours of Tier 2. On top of this, there’s a heap of ‘optional’ Elective elements.

So what makes up a CS degree? Well, if you use all of Tier 1 and at least 80% of Tier 2 and then fill in the cracks with Electives – that’s meeting the curriculum requirements and you have a CS degree. You’ll note however that the number of hours required for all of core has crept up by 15 hours since 2008 – this reflects the addition of new hours to reflect areas being introduced such as Information Assurance and Security, and Parallel and Distributed Computing. The curriculum does change over time but things tend to move rather than disappear. Adding things, however, requires more hours and this is always a problem – what do we take out? (A humorous suggestion was made that we ignore all other courses and ONLY teach CS. Not going to happen anytime soon.)

The depth of knowledge that is required is now described in a degenerate Bloom-derived taxonomy: knowledge (need to know what a concept means), application (can apply the concept) and evaluation (can compare/contrast/select appropriate method/strategy for different situations). My first thought, which needs review, is “Where is synthesis?” but I need to think about this – this would be the Creating step in Bloom’s revised taxonomy and it’s missing here. If it really bothers me, I’ll have to raise it as a consultative point.

We’re at an early stage of the process here, the Strawman consultation goes on for several months and then we get to attack Ironman. When I get back, I’m going to need to look across all my areas of curriculum responsibility and work out what to do – especially as my area “Net-Centric Computing” has now been changed in name and time, and split across two areas! Looks like it will be a busy few months.

Some audience members seemed to get caught up with how they could validate their curricula, which is missing the point in some respects. A country’s professional accreditation body, such as the ACS in Australia, will be a vital part of stating whether you have a CS degree or not. As one of the panelists said “To quote Pirates of the Caribbean, these are more along the lines of guidelines” and, thinking about this, it makes sense because it leaves the academic authority in the hands of the institutions while still allowing a discussion of internationally consistent framing for what it means to graduate in Computer Science.

SIGCSE, Keynote #1, Fred Brooks. (Yes, THAT Fred Brooks.)

Posted: March 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr is a pretty well-know figure in Computer Science. Even if you only vaguely heard of one of his most famous books “The Mythical Man Month“, you’ll know that his impact on how we think about projects, and software engineering projects in general, is significant and he’s been having this impact for several decades. He’s spent a lot of time trying to get student Software Engineering projects into a useful and effective teaching form – but don’t turn off because you think this is only about ICT. There’s a lot for everyone in what follows.

His keynote on Thursday morning was on “The Teacher’s Job is to Design Learning Experiences; not Primarily to Impart Information” and he covered a range of topics, including some general principles and a lot of exemplars. He raised the old question: why do we still lecture? He started from a discussion of teaching before printing, following the development of the printed word and into the modern big availability, teleprocessed world of today.

His main thesis is that it’s up to the teacher to design a learning experience, not just deliver information – and as this is one my maxims, I’m not going to disagree with him here!

Professor Brooks things that we should consider:

  1. Learning not teaching
  2. The student not the teacher
  3. Experience not just the written word
  4. developing skills in preference to inserting or providing information
  5. designing a learning experience, rather than just delivering a lecture

His follow-up to this, which I wish I’d thought of, is that Computer Science professionals all have to be designers, at least to a degree, so linking this with an educational design pathway is a good fit. CS people should be good at designing good CS education materials!

He argues that CS Educational content falls into four basic categories: the background information (like number systems), theory (like complexity mathematics), description of practice (How people HAVE done it) and skills for practice (how YOU WILL do it). In CS we develop a number of these skills through critiqued practice – do it, it gets critiqued and then we do it again.

He then spent some time discussing exemplars, including innovative assignments, the flipped classroom, projects and a large number of examples, which I hope to commit to another post.

Looking at this critically, it’s hard to disagree with any of the points presented except that we stayed at a fairly abstract level and, as the man himself said, he’s a radical over-simplifier. But there was a lot of very useful information that would encourage good behaviour in CS education – it’s more than just picking up a book and it’s also more than just handing out a programming assignment. Often, when people disagree with ‘ivory tower’ approaches, they don’t design the alternative any better. A poorly-designed industry-focused, project-heavy course is just as bad as a boring death0by-lecture theoretical course.

Bad design is bad design. “No design” is almost guaranteed to be bad design.

I’ll post a follow-up going in to more detail over what he said about projects some time soon because I think it’s pretty interesting.

It was a great pleasure to hear such an influential figure and, as always, it wasn’t surprising to see why he’s had so much impact – he can express himself well and, overall, it’s a good message.

Another month, another milestone!

Posted: March 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

That’s another month of blogging down. At some stage, I plan to measure what my output has been and try to come up with some indication of how I can improve my content. I’ll probably try to make things tighter, add some picture, but have separate longer essays occasionally.

Only 10 more months of 1 post / day to keep to my original goal!

Thanks for reading – if you’re new, you can start at Jan 1 and work forward, if you’re a long-time reader, thanks for sticking around.

I wanted to put a picture of success or winning here but, frankly, there are only so many pictures of grumpy babies and Charlie Sheen that anybody needs. So enjoy the rapturous and simplistic text. I’ll see you tomorrow.

Familiarity: Breeding Contempt or Just Contextually Sensitive?

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

One of the strangest homilies I know is “Familiarity breeds contempt”. Supposedly, in one reading, the more we know someone, the easier it is to find fault. In another, very English, reading of it, allowing someone to be too familiar with you reduces the barriers between you and allows for contempt. (It’s worth noting that being over-familiar with someone and using their first name or a diminutive ahead of an often unstated social timeframe was a major gaffe in society. Please, call me Nick. 🙂 )

What a strange thought that is – that we must maintain an artificial distance lest we be found to be human. There’s a world of behaviour between maintaining professionalism and being stand-offish – one allows you to maintain integrity and do things like provide an objective mark, the other drives a wedge between you and your students. This is a very hard line to handle when you’re teaching K-12, because the winnowing hasn’t occurred yet. In the Higher Ed sector, as I’ve noted before, everyone who couldn’t concentrate or acted up is probably already gone. I have the polite ones, the ones who passed, the ones who didn’t sit there and cut pieces off people’s hair or be generally anti-social.

I have to walk a careful line on this one when I teach in Singapore, because it is a more formal society. Business cards are presented formally, business relationships have more structure and my students prefer to call me Sir or Dr Nick (Hi, everybody!). Now, I’m happy for them to call me Nick but, here’s the tricky thing, not if that means that they have moved me into the box of people that they don’t respect. That’s a cultural thing and, by being aware of it, I manage the relationship better. Down in Australia, I expect my students to call me Nick, because we don’t have as heavily formalised a society and I feel that I can manage my objectivity and relationships without the strictures of being Dr Falkner. But I have a lot of international students and sometimes it just makes them happier to call me Dr Falkner or Sir.

Ultimately, as part of this juggling act, it’s not my view of what is and what is not formal that matters – it’s how the student wants to address me that they feel that I am their teacher, and that they are getting the right kind of education. This then allows us both to work together, happily. If someone calling me Nick is going to put fingernails down the blackboard of their soul, then me insisting upon informality is inappropriate.

When I’m in the US, I take the trouble to explain that I have a PhD and am a tenured Assistant Professor in US parlance, a Lecturer Level B in Australian jargon, because it helps people to put me into the right mental box. This is the other trick of familiarity – you have to make sure that your level of being familiar is contextually correct. It bugs me slightly that I have given talks where people’s attitudes towards me and my material change when they find out I’m tenured and a Doctor, but it’s always my job to work out how to communicate with my audience. If I presume that every audience is the same then I risk being over and under-familiar – and, because I haven’t done my research as to how to deliver my message to that audience , that’s when I risk breeding contempt.

Another Airport Land Speed Record: Can My Students Make Their Connections?

Posted: February 29, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

As I was running through San Francisco Airport last week, I was thinking many things. Among them were:

  1. Why am I running through yet another airport?
  2. How long will it be before my bad knee gives out? (Surgery last November)
  3. Is my wife still behind me?
  4. Do I ever do this to my students?

Two people running through an airport.

The reason that I was, once again, running through an airport was that delightfully evil concept – the legal connection. This is the minimum connection time estimated for your incoming and outgoing flights, through a given airport. When your travel organiser goes to make flights, they plug all of your destinations and restrictions into their computer, add some seriously manual machinations, and then receive a set of results that all meet the legal connection limits. These are connections that the airlines say are legitimate and, if you miss a flight, they will assist you in making another one. There’s only one problem with the so-called legal connection. Any variances to the schedules, caused by weather, delay in customs, late arrival of other planes, maintenance or unexpected construction in the airport, can make it hard to impossible to make your (so-called) legal connection. Hence, I run a lot in airports. I very rarely miss planes but I run past a lot of people who do – people who don’t know that there’s only one bus every 40 minutes between the international and domestic terminals. People who don’t know where the bus is or that it’s more reliable to catch a cab. People who don’t know which way to go and there isn’t enough signage to assist – Frankfurt Airport, with your sign that says ‘Terminal X this way” and a sign that points in both directions, I’m looking at you.

On this occasion, my knee held out and my wife WAS behind me, which is just as well as the hotel is booked in her name. But it really made me think about the layout and structure of STEM curricula. We set up pathways through our courses that are designed to develop knowledge and produce a graduate with the right combination of skill and knowledge. But what else do we assume? If we have provided bridging to bypass a pre-requisite, are we secretly assuming that the student will have aced the bridging or just passed the bridging? Do we introduce Boolean algebra in second year because “almost every student will have enrolled in Logic I” even though it’s not formally part of our course progression?

We can look at our programs as being legal connections, but with that comes all of the darker aspects that this entails. We’ve recently redesigned our curriculum, just in time for curriculum 2013, and part of this was removing some of the implicit assumptions and making them explicit. Providing pathways for the less-experienced. Matching expectations so that a Pass in a pre-req was sufficient for the next course – you didn’t need 60. We build giant pyramids of knowledge throughout our courses but, of course, a pyramid only works one way up and is far less stable if we don’t have all of the supports. If too many of these building blocks are assumed, and not explicit, then our legal connection is next to impossible to make. And we all know what the cost of that is.

I don’t want to run through anymore airports, and I strongly suspect that when we ask our students to do so, we lose a fair few of them on wrong turns or leave them stranded somewhere along the way, without ever making their destination.

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