Nice Suit! Why My Improved Taste In Clothes Helps Me Teach.

Posted: March 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

A picture of Barney from How I Met Your Mother

Graduation day can be one of the really big days for my students, as is the first day that they go off for job interviews, or placement interviews – the first day that they have some skills, a matching qualification and have put on the clothes and trappings of business. As Barney would say, “Suit up!”

I’m not intending to start a discussion here on the utility of the suit (because for anyone who has to do tech support, there is none), the assumption that the suit is practical wear in all climates (because in Australia in high summer it most certainly is not) but I do want to talk about the comfort of the suit.

Now, one of the weirdest things about suits is the number of people who wear uncomfortable or even dangerously constricting business attire. It would be hard to imagine a more consistently uncomfortable group of people than a large group of graduating students, sitting in a packed, hot hall, waiting to graduate, necks chafing if they’re wearing ties, sweating because of the layers, possibly risking ankle damage or a fall if they’re in unfamiliar heels and, overall, being ultimately miserable while waiting for the moment when we give them the big piece of paper and say “Go off and be legen…”

Wait for it.

“…dary”.

These days, I have very simple requirements of my clothes. Everything I wear has to be as comfortable as my long-distance running gear. When you run over 20 miles/ 32 km, you don’t have the ability to carry too much spare clothing. What you wear has to be comfortable, suitable and, above all, not chafe regardless of sun, wind and rain. This is clothing to achieve things in – and all of my clothing should do this!

People told me that suits meant business. But suits only mean business because business people wear suits. This kind of dogma is subtly and explicitly divisive – explicitly because if you can’t afford a suit, then you’re on the back foot; subtly because if you can’t afford a good suit, you’re sending a message of either impecunity or ignorance. Now, yes, for special presentations, funerals and where everyone else will be wearing a suit, I will still suit up. But, whenever possible, I wear a nice shirt and trousers – or good jeans. Or shorts, in summer. This is far more practical for what I do and allows me to still walk the 3 miles/5 km from home to work and get my thinking time in. There’s neat, there’s well-dressed and then there’s some of the nightmares passed off as business attire. There is a wealth of secret knowledge, affluence barriers, expectations and, above all, hidden pitfalls in this whole business attire thing that really makes me wonder whether we’re focusing on the right things. I can’t tell my students not to wear business clothing, because the reality is that some people just won’t hire them, but I should be able to help them to develop a mental framework where they can analyse what is being asked of them and then work out if they are happy to pay the price to achieve a goal.

I don’t pretend to be wise but I can now appreciate that I have done enough things, and failed at a sufficient number, that I’ve learned right and wrong ways to approach problems and find solutions. My students need me to share this with them because, although some of the lessons won’t sink in until they do it themselves, any proto-wisdom that I can pass on may save them time. If I tell them what dogma looks like, get them focused on the right things, then I help them to identify some of the things that they will hit once they leave us. I don’t feel more or less of a teacher if I wear shorts or a suit, but, in so many ways, the way that I expose my students to knowledge, discuss it with them and reinforce it will determine how their brain is dressed when they step out into the world. It will also strongly affect how will they improve upon what we’ve taught them and how they accumulate more information into the future. Basically, if I get across to my students the idea that we are giving them a foundation, which will be solid, and show them how to build – then sometime down the line, they’re on the way to something special and rewarding.

And being confident, skilled and competent at what you do, that’s probably the best thing that you can ever wear.

The Binary World of Steve Jobs

Posted: March 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve commented before on Steve Jobs but, having just finished Walter Isaacson’s fascinating biography, I’ve had some other thoughts that I wanted to talk about here.

I stand by my previous post, regardless of the success of Apple or Steve Jobs’ achievements, I still wouldn’t let him near my classes but there are still many things that they can learn from his ideas, his example, his life and, of course, his death. It’s just important to separate some of the innate Steveness from the ideas. His desire for the right solution, his attention to design, his drive for perfection are all things that I can use in my teaching. The amount of time spent trying to make every piece of something functional and beautiful – I couldn’t find better exemplars of the design principles I’ve been talking about and you can find them in most homes and in most people’s hands.

But one thing that was thrown into sharp relief for me throughout the biography was the strictly dichotomous nature of his world view. A dichotomy is the splitting of something into two, non-overlapping parts. An often heard dichotomy is “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.” (This is usually a false dichotomy, implying that there are only two choices when there are probably more. If you’re curious, the “Saw” movie franchise exercises the false dichotomy for most of its running – pretending that the protagonists only have two options and that the choice that they make inside that morally and physically restrictive space is somehow a reflection of their ethics.)

Steve Jobs’ world was full of dichotomies. Things were either excellent or they were terrible. Sometimes this switched, very rapidly, depending on the day or who was being spoken to. People were heroes or… well, let’s say villains because I’m trying to keep this clean. There is no doubt that this contributed to the pursuit of excellence in many ways, but my reading of the biography rather obliquely suggests that it was the sheer brilliance and excellence of the people around in Apple that made this happen, to some extent despite this stark view.

A diagram of the hate/like dichotomy

This is pretty much what Isaacson reports as Steve Jobs’ world view and, while it’s quite clear and clean in many regards, it’s simplicity is undermined by the fact that the things in either set could cross that yellow line in unpredictable ways. Now, once again, yes, Apple are hugely successful and there is no doubt that this binary approach had a lot to do with a great deal of its success – but this is not a view that naturally generates discussion. Once again, this is an important part of my job: I need to get students talking.

It would be trivial for me to walk out, ask a question, mock people who give me a weak or incorrect answer, write ‘idiot’ on their assignments and never give them strong guidance as to how to fix it other than “It’s not right”, but it’s not what I’m getting paid for. I will happily talk to my students about purity of vision, strong design principles, try to give them feedback that they recognise as feedback to reinforce this (trickier than it looks) but, at the end of the day, me lecturing at people doesn’t get as much information across as me getting them involved in a broader discussion of issues and principles. It’s very easy to say “this sucks”. It’s much harder to say why this sucks and in discussing why we naturally start to head towards how we can fix it, because we can see the reasons that it’s terrible.

Now, I’m going to move away from Steve’s heroes/villains, great/terrible dichotomies to some of those I see from students while I teach. I have to be able to handle a far less dichotomous view of the world and I have to draw the students away from this as well. Hardware and OS dichotomies abound: PCs don’t suck, Macs don’t rule. Macs aren’t for grandmas and noobs, PCs aren’t the only true programming platform. There’s the regrettable and seemingly entrenched gender dichotomy in STEM – men and women are far more individually distinctive than any mindless and echolalic gender stereotypes that try to give a falsely dichotomous split. (And, of course, this doesn’t even begin to address the discussion on the number of gender identities being greater than two!)

I don’t have a fundamental problem with people being able to identify things that they like or don’t like, I just need to exercise this as a matter of degree in my teaching and I have to pass on to my students that even if they want to draw a line in the sand to separate their world, having only two categories imposes a very hard structure on a much more complicated world. I also need to be able to explain why a categorisation has been made or all I’m going to pass on is dogma – something indisputable that has to be specifically learned in order to be known, versus something that is a matter for discussion. I teach Computer Science – a discipline based heavily on mathematics, usually implemented in artificially-created, short-term universes with arbitrary physical rules inside the system. I’m not sure that I have enough hard ground to stand on to be dogmatic!

At the end of all this, there’s no doubt I would have found Steve Jobs charismatic, fascinating and terrifying, probably in equal parts, and I suspect that he would have had little time for my somewhat wooly, generous and contemplative approach. I certainly could never have achieved what he achieved and I don’t seek to criticise him for what he did because, frankly, I don’t really know enough about him and who am I to judge? But I can look at this example and think about it, in order to work out how I can improve the way that my students think, work and interact with other people. And, bottom line, I don’t think false dichotomies are the way to go forward.

I Am Thinking, HE/SHE Is Procrastinating, THEY Are Daydreaming

Posted: March 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

This is a follow-up thought to my recent post on laziness. I spend a lot of time thinking and, sometimes, it would be easy to look at me and think “Wow, he’s not doing anything.” Sometimes, in my office, I stare at a wall, doodle, pace the corridor, sketch on the whiteboard or, if I’m really stuck, go for a walk down by the river. All of this helps me to clear and organise my thoughts. I use tools to manage what I have to do and to get it done in time but the cognitive work of thinking things through sometimes takes time. The less I sleep, the longer it takes. That’s why, while I’m jet lagged, I will do mostly catch-up and organisational work rather than thinking. Right now I can barely do a crossword, which is an excellent indicator that my brain is fried for anything much more complex than blogging. Given that I last slept in a bed over 30 hours ago, this isn’t surprising.

Now it’s easy to accept that I stumble around, somewhat absent-mindedly, because I’m an academic and you can all understand that my job requires me to do a lot of thinking…

But so many jobs require a lot of thinking to be done well – or , at least, the component tasks that go to make up modern jobs.

It’s a shame then that it’s activity that most people focus on rather than quality. If I were to sit in my office and type furiously but randomly, answer mails curtly, and never leave for coffee or cake, have to schedule meetings three weeks in advance – what a powerhouse I would appear! Except, of course, that I wouldn’t really appear to be that to people who knew what I was supposed to do. I don’t do the kind of job where I can move from task to task without, in most cases, detailed research including a search for new material, construction, creation, design, analysis, building, testing and executing. As always, this doesn’t make my job better or worse than anyone else’s, but I don’t carry out the same action repeatedly, an action that can be reduced in cognitive load with familiarity, I tend to do something at least slightly different each time. Boiler plate repetition is more likely to indicate that I am not doing my job correctly, given the roles that I hold.

So, if there are no points in a week where I sit there with books or papers or doodles or sketches of ideas and I think about them – then I’m really running the risk of not doing my job. I need to produce work of high quality and, because there’s a lot of new content creation, there’s creation/editing/testing… load throughout. Some of which, to an external viewer, looks like sitting around throwing paper into the bin while I hunt for solutions.

I think about this a lot for my students. I expect them, in a lecture, to not sit and think so much that they don’t communicate. I will try and bring them back from mental flights of fancy rather than let them fly off because I’ve only got an hour or two with them and need to try to get certain concepts across. And then what? Sometime in 4th year, or PhD, I expect them to flip a switch and realise that the apparent inactivity of quiet, contemplative thought is one of the most productive activities? That a day where you write eight pages, and on review only salvage half of one page, could be the most important and useful day in your PhD?

This is why I tend not to give out marks for ‘just anything’ – two pages of nonsense gets zero, there are no marks for effort because I am rewarding the wrong activity, especially where we haven’t achieved quality. Similarly, I don’t give out marks for attendance but for the collaboration – if you are after an activity, getting the students to do something, I think it’s always best to reward them for doing the activity, not just attending the framing session! But this, of course, comes hand-in hand with the requirement to give them enough timely feedback that they can improve their mark – by improving the quality of what they produce.

Electronic learning systems could be really handy here. Self-paced learning, with controlled remote assessment mechanisms, allows this thinking time and the ability to sit, privately, and mull over the problems. Without anyone harassing them.

Years ago, when I was still in the Army Reserve, we were on exercise for a couple of weeks and my soldiers were getting pretty tired because we’d been running 4 hour shifts to staff the radios. You sat on the radios for 4 hours, you were off for 4. Every so often you might get 6 hours off but it was unlikely. This meant that my soldiers were often sleeping in the middle of the day, desperately trying to make up lost sleep as well as periodically showering, shaving and eating. 4 hours goes really quickly when you’re not on duty. People in our base area who WEREN’T doing these shifts thought that my soldiers were lazy and, on at least two occasions, tried to wake them up to use them on work parties – digging holes, carrying things, doing soldier stuff. My soldiers needed their sleep and I was their commander so I told the other people, politely, to leave them alone. My operators had a job to do and maintained the quality of their work by following a very prescribed activity pattern – but the people around them could only see inactivity because of their perspective.

Maybe it’s time to look at my students again, look at what I’m asking them to do and make sure that what I’m asking and that the environment I’m giving them is the right one. I don’t think we’re doing too badly, because of previous reviews, but it’s probably never too soon to check things out again.

Staring In The SIGCSE Mirror

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Education: Soft Power but Hard Sell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dealing with the Rudent – the Rude Student

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIGCSE Wrap-up 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the questions that students asked started to change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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