Why I wouldn’t let Steve Jobs teach my class.

Posted: February 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , | 6 Comments

There is no doubt that Steve Jobs has had an incredible impact on the world in general – let alone the computing industry. Unfortunately, everything I’ve heard and read about the man has convinced me of one thing: he is probably the last person I’d want teaching people who are not exemplary. By construction, my classes contain a range of students and most of my job is working out how to educate all of them without boring the faster and killing the slower – Apple is not such an environment so it’s unsurprising that what worked for Steve would be anathema to my classroom.

Now, my apologies to Steve, whom I will now never meet, but his passion for doing things well and doing things ‘right’ appears to have come with an equally passionate lack of tolerance for failure, or not meeting his exacting standards in some way. And, like any educator, I don’t necessarily have that luxury. Yes, some standards are non-negotiable, but to nowhere near the same degree!

My class is full of passers. Scrapers. “Getters-by”. People who do dumb things and fail. I can’t yell at them for hours. I can’t get into a lift with 8 students and get out with 7, having un-enrolled and failed one between floors 4 and 5.

Now, before you think I’m having too much of a go here, I can understand places where the level of training and expertise is so high that my techniques are not valid. Education comes in many forms. I don’t have to worry about people wetting themselves and early primary educators don’t have to teach calculus – it all balances but it’s not all uniform.

But let’s talk about the places where things just have to be right. Airline pilots spring to mind. Years of training. Lots of mentoring.

Near enough is not good enough!

There is no ‘conceded pass’ or supplementary examination for landing a plane. It is either landed correctly or it is not, and you’re unlikely to get a second chance. I can see there being different standards of conduct and examination at this point because of the professional standards required.

What about my students? While they’re with me, we’re in the soft landing zone – the ‘try again’ zone. I can offer opportunities for redemption because nobody has died or was in danger.

But my students may control nuclear reactors, tank weaponry or aeroplane navigation systems. When they’re in the workforce, I can completely understand someone demanding their best, all the time, and to a given standard.

My point, hidden in all of this, is that I can see why Steve Jobs did what he did with his business, but I’m not sure that my students are ready for that yet. When they graduate? I hope they’d be up to the technical level required (I certainly will aim to do that) but I’m still not sure if they’d be all the way up to that level of perfection. Until that point? No way is he getting near my class – he would have killed them!

It’s an interesting thing to think about.

 

Give me a coffee, I’m about to teach something boring.

Posted: February 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

I think that you always know when you’ve delivered a good lecture. I mentioned fiero a while ago – that feeling of joyful success that makes you want to punch the air. When you get that from a lecture, because you nailed the explanations or everyone participated or a difficult demo came off, you feel good. You feel great.

After a bit of teaching, I came to know the feeling that I associated with a good lecture even in the preparatory stage – I would sometimes be nervous because I wanted the lecture to go well but I was never bored, or dreading the lecture, or grabbing a strong coffee to keep my edge. But I also came to know the opposite feeling. When I’d been dropped in to teach someone else’s material, which I didn’t know so well and that wasn’t in my style. When I hadn’t had a chance to tidy up my own notes from last year or this was the lecture that I’d always planned to rewrite.

That’s when I’d grab a coffee. Because it would keep me awake and stop me yawning while I managed to put myself to sleep. And not really want to be there. And try to get out as soon as possible.

Now, if I’m going to sleep, what is happening in every row behind the first three, where the keen and mature age students sit. Behind the wall of keen, it’s tumbleweed city. Wait long enough and someone will go sufficiently deeply to sleep that they’ll fall off their chair. How could they not? You’re boring yourself, or you don’t believe in it, so you’ve picked up some liquid edge to keep yourself going! The last thing you want to do is to give the caffeine-addicted, energy drink consuming student body even MORE of an excuse to drink caffeinated energy drink – one day, someone is going to explode.

My body was, of course, trying to tell me something important.

WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO DO IS GOING TO EITHER SUCK OR BE BORING. OR BOTH.

(My body speaks in capitals.)

After a while, I got to the level where I could think about a course and read my gut. I’d get that feeling early, that yawny, “I need a coffee” feeling to mask the fact that the content or delivery was boring me. That’s why I spend so much time fixing things up, because I’ve found it far easier to teach a good course that makes me feel good, than teaching a bad course that makes me feel bad. The time spent, which is often non-trivial, comes back to me in nights spent sleeping deeply, rewarding student engagement, and lack of terror. 🙂

We don’t always have the luxury of doing this – we don’t always have the access, time or resources. But, by seizing control when we can and leaving ourselves open to fiero and delight, instead of fear and dread, we do end up making our jobs easier, our teaching better, our students happier and our caffeine levels down.

Well, no more than a few a day. I still like coffee, I prefer to have it as a choice, rather than as an anti-boredom device!

 

It’s okay to Karaoke (but why don’t you sing, instead?)

Posted: February 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , | 1 Comment

Today’s post focuses on the difference between memorising information and gaining knowledge. I don’t normally lead off with a descriptive sentence but I have to in this case because I’m going to talk about my previous life as a karaoke singer. I don’t want you to think I’ve accidentally posted on the wrong blog.

I quite enjoy singing and I have a reasonable karaoke voice – you’d never pay to hear me sing but you probably wouldn’t pay me to stop. When we used to sing in bars, when the machines first hit, you’d sing, people would listen, sometimes they’d clap and the assessment of the whole activity was based on how much you enjoyed it and, if you decided to compete, which of the dud t-shirts you won. For the record, my best placing was third place, a Yellow Cutty Sark t-shirt that made me look both jaundiced and leprous (a clever trick). I loved that t-shirt because, although third place was the best I ever achieved, but it was based on what the crowd felt and it was honestly earned. (I sang Prince’s Kiss in the style of Tom Jones, to complete this confession, so you may weigh the honesty for yourself.)

Of course, the fact that I can retrieve this fact, some 20 years down the track and well after the t-shirt was consigned to the rag pile, tells you a lot about the impression that this feedback had on me. However, the point of this anecdote is not that successful reinforcement is memorable (although that’s a good point) but that I wasn’t performing for points into a karaoke machine, I was using the technology to sing to subjective, analogue measuring devices – people, in other words. Now, the whole time I was singing, I had my own auditory feedback and (potentially) some crowd-based feedback but, being realistic, the only feedback I had was at the end if I won a t-shirt or if my friends either said ‘Yeah!’ or passed me a drink with a supportive expression. (Don’t judge me until you’ve attempted “Take On Me” by A-ha in a public space.)

Fast forward to today and you can have a karaoke machine in your home for the price of a PS2, PS3, X-Box or Wii. SingStar, Guitar Hero and Rock Band all provide you with the ability to play like a star and be adulated, and win awards, in the comfort of your own living room. Don’t like to rock out with pants on? Your lounge room – your rock and rules, baby! How, in this context, do we provide guidance that what you’re doing matches the song on screen? How do I award you a yellow Cutty Sark t-shirt?

In most cases, there is a ‘correct’ interpretation of the musical line – based on tone for singing and choice of input pad and timing for the other instruments in rock band. If you perform the right action (with varying degrees of tolerance) at the right time (again, with tolerance) you are recorded as having done the right thing. Based on this you get points, awards, more opportunities. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this – this is a valid feedback mechanism. The problem arises when you don’t regard the score as assessing the activity, but the activity as a means for maximising the score.

I was slightly surprised the first time I saw Rock Band being played by a group and the singer, instead of singing, mumbled the tones into the microphone, at a volume I could barely hear, in order to exactly match what was going across his screen without the risk of missing the note or stumbling by getting a word wrong. Sure enough, excellent score. I’ve seen people ace SingStar while singing out of tune because they completely repeated every phrasing, every tonal movement and every pause, but stayed within the tolerance, despite it being nearly painful to the human ear. Why were they still singing? Look at the score! I’m doing it right! I bet I can make a higher score if I sing the same song another 10,000 times!

At the same time, I’ve seen professional singers get canned by SingStar and given terrible scores, despite putting together a beautiful performance of the song. What’s going on?

Anyone who’s played any of these games probably knows why this is: SingStar (and RockBand to a great extent) reward memorisation and recall, not interpretation. It’s the degree to which you can recite the song that matters, not your knowledge of how the song is constructed and how it can be rearranged, while still being that song – or better.

Musically speaking, it takes a reasonable amount of experience and knowledge to be able to start interpreting songs in a way that sounds good. Anyone can hit vibrato and wave around the song like a 90s boy band on a roller-coaster – it takes talent to harmonise, built, manipulate cadence and involve the audience in something that makes them breathless. It takes even more talent to know that you don’t do that all the time but in the right place and at the right time. SingStar has no easy way to assess anything outside of the norm so it will reward you if you hit note X at time Y within tolerance Delta. If you decide to mess with the cadence or add some colour, which are both demonstrations of a sound knowledge of the underlying work and the techniques that are valid for manipulating it, you won’t do well. This makes sense from an electronic game designer’s perspective – you can’t encode all of musical theory into the game but you can easily check for conformity.

(To its credit, Rock Band does allow some room for free-styling on certain instruments and at certain times. However, I think it’s probably good that Keith Moon is dead or he would have personally picked up every kit and eaten it after his first encounter with that particular game.)

It should come as no surprise that I believe that we often fall into the trap of requiring memorisation and recitation, effectively in lieu of demonstration of knowledge. Recited answers are easy to mark, manually and automatically. Knowledge requires the marker to be knowledgeable – subtleties abound and there are fewer templates. Electronic systems often lean in this direction for exactly the same reason as SingStar. A simple script to check the output of something is far easier to write than a detailed analyser with all human knowledge in this area.

Knowledge has to be built upon a strong foundation of information – there have to be core facts to provide a basis for your learning (such as the multiplication tables or the names of human anatomy, as two obvious examples). But at the higher level, at the 2nd and 3rd year level of University, we shouldn’t be rewarding people purely for mumbling our own words back to us in the microphone. We’re after knowledge and the demonstration of knowledge and that means more than training parrots.

A bit of karaoke never hurt anyone, but we in higher ed should be training our students to interpret to the fullest, to learn everything and to be able to show us what they know in ways that surprise, delight and, yes, challenge us.

They should be singing.

The Tyranny of E-mail – Let’s go to the Piazza!

Posted: February 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

E-mail is probably the worst way to have an argument. Both sides tend to end up constructing long, winding and complex arguments that neither side really reads, rebutting the points that they feel they can and disregarding the rest. In truth, e-mail is the digital equivalent of “You said what?” when arguments start to fester.

It’s a shame, then, that we use such similar mechanisms in on-line fora. One student posts something, another student responds and addresses points, student one addresses some and ignores the rest and off we go. It’s a fundamentally competitive mechanism, because we do not provide an intrinsic mechanism to allow for modification of an existing statement in a way that doesn’t either appear to favour sycophancy or belligerence.

Tools like Piazza, where you can construct good answers and questions in collaboration with staff oversight, provide a completely different approach. You do not have to superimpose your answer or rebuttal over someone else, you can work with them to arrive at a new, joint answer. This is a completely different approach. It’s not even like Wikipedia where you are all sharing the same working space – in Piazza you have student space and staff space, you can provide a student refined answer and a staff refined answer. Students can work together to come up with a question and staff can work together to refine their follow-up question or teaching points.

Where all students have access to working on a common question or answer, no editing action (given that you’re reading and otherwise participating) can indicate agreement (or lack of significant dissent) but no giant bread crumb trail has to be followed. If things start heading a way that you don’t agree – join the editing process. (Falling back on staff oversight if the collaboration does happen to fall apart, but being able to constantly update and edit that staff oversight.)

Collaboration is built into Piazza as a base concept. It’s a fascinating tool and it could be handy if you find yourself having to act as the fight stopper in your on-line fora or student e-mail exchanges.

Pass me an oyster knife, I’m trying to bring a student out of their shell.

Posted: February 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment

Teaching across many cultures can be challenging. Usually, when we talk about cultures we’re talking about country, race, religion and upbringing – at least that’s what it seems to devolve to. It’s easy to point to a group of students from a given culture and say that they have behaviour X. Often, willingness to participate is listed amount these. Now, while certain cultures may have general tendencies, there are many students who just have difficulty in participating. Limiting it to one group is missing the point, in my opinion.

Let me, then, step back from my introductory statements about culture based on country or upbringing and split students into the only two cultures that matter for this post: students who will willingly participate in class and students who won’t.

It can be difficult in a large class to get to all of the students to participate in class-wide discussion or sharing of opinion. Students can choose to make it harder for me to do this in very simple ways. Sitting in a middle row, halfway in, makes it very hard for me to walk up to you and ask you what you’re doing. I prefer a more open class, which is smaller of course, as I can assign some work to the class during the lecture (something small) and then walk around and talk to people. Once I start people talking in a semi-private space, I may be able to get them talking to their neighbour, then their locale, then it’s a much smaller step to get them talking to everyone and participating. My experience in intensive teaching in Singapore shows that me leading people from individual discussion with me up to working in groups is very successful in opening people up. You can see more about that here.

In a large class in a big traditional lecture theatre, as I said, this is harder. However, just because I can’t get to a student doesn’t mean that nobody can. Students almost invariably have a student near them and this where, rather than me using my natural abilities to bring a student out, I can ask students to work in a group. This is far less intimidating because:

  1. Students are generally less scary than lecturers.
  2. Their views are in a far more controlled space and they aren’t having to talk to a very large group.
  3. A small enough group makes it a conversation rather than a presentation.

Of course, there are problems with this as well:

  1. Students may feel more pressure because of the intimacy. This can be helped with prior exposure and training in tutorials or by the demonstration of positive exemplars in the classroom.
  2. Students may still not say anything. In this case, I try to make the discussion have a hand-in artefact associated with it – at some stage, they’ll have to talk to each other.
  3. This does put pressure on students. This is a hard one, as my discipline has group work built in as a fundamental requirement. Students have to work with other people, make presentations and generally get on with people as part of their process with us. So, while I respect that some people don’t want to participate, this will be a problem for them at some stage. I’m trying to provide a safe and comfortable environment for this, so I’m ok with this to an extent.
  4. Students may just talk and not do the work at all!

I don’t mind 3 much, as long as I can regain control. Students talking is better than students sleeping, in some ways, although my goal is still to get everyone working! What is everyone else’s experiences with this?

This is Five Minutes Work.

Posted: February 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , | 1 Comment

This post has a definite time limit imposed upon it. Having set up categories and tags, I gave myself five minutes to write down today’s post, including thinking about what I was going to say.

Obviously, today’s point is that having a limited time for an activity is going to shape the nature of the activity. But it’s not the only point. I’ve had to make a decision as to how much editing I will allow and basically, once a line is complete, I have to leave it alone. This makes this (usually at least semi-edited) blog into something that is much closer to an in-class exercise.

Now, I’m lucky in many ways because this task is not overly challenging. I have freedom of topic (so I probably have enough in my head to work out what I want to say), I have good tools to use (I can type quickly and get something legible) and I’m not actually being watched. If you’re reading this I thought the final result was interesting enough to post.

2.5 minutes.

In a classroom, if I give students an assignment to complete, I have to be aware of the fact that writing legibly takes longer than scrawling, that typing may not ever make it to me because the artefact is locked onto someone else’s machine and that the sheer thinking time involved for a student to be able to engage with my desired context could eat the entire five minutes.

So the next time that I think about setting a five minute in-class exercise, I’m going to have to consider the following:

  1. Have I provided enough context or guidance that the students can start almost immediately?
  2. Is there an easy first thing to write down?
  3. Am I only expecting less than 100 words (4:20 and this is about 295)
  4. Am I setting a task that is really too hard? Should it be a 30 minute exercise out of class.

Well, my time’s running out so I have to come to a close. I found this really interesting to do, and I hope that you found something useful from it as well. 4:59.

How Far Do I Allow You To Go, When You’re Heading the Wrong Way?

Posted: February 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Part of the assignment work that I’m overseeing on this teaching weekend is a set of programming assignments designed to let students show their understanding of the work by producing a small version of a big system. The first of these tasks, Assignment 0, is a dry run at using the big system and looks deceptively simple.

Assignment 0 is sufficiently complex that the students should write a design, should think about some key elements and should write an array of test code to see what happens. Assignment 0 is run with a 2-hour lab session, where I can watch the students work, talk to them and give them some guidance. More importantly, every 20 minutes or so I address the class and ask about a particular design feature – how will you deal with this, have you thought about it – and watch a lot of ‘oh’ faces appear as people start to realise that design is important, even for these simple assignments.

My students seem to learn a lot when they have an ‘aha’ moment. Most of these ‘aha’ moments occur when they have punched through some layers of ignorance to reach some real knowledge, and often when they have realised that they were wrong. It is worth me letting them wander slightly into the valley of the shadow of less-than-deft because of the benefits they get from seeing the mistake, avoiding or fixing it and moving on.

The question is ‘how far do I let them go’? This is a tricky call, especially over a large class. Thats why I like group discussion, peer consultation and guided pracs. If use a peer instead of me, then the ‘authority of wrongness’ is limited and I can step in and correct easily. If I use a group, then I tend to get good answers coming out from broad band Delphi effects – plus I can sit in on a smaller scale set of groups pretty easily.

In this ‘managed’ practical sessions, I can survey the class by staring at screens, expressions and electronic submissions. I can quickly see if people are heading down the wrong path and step in, individually or at the group level, when the ‘aha’ moment is ripe.

What I believe I should rarely do is to deliberately misinform the class, even if I correct myself shortly afterwards. There’s a big difference between accidentally getting something wrong and setting out to deceive the class. There’s a big difference between a ‘trick question’ and half an hour of rubbish.

Some of you may disagree and I welcome examples or discussions of experiences where you found that deceiving the class or letting them go a long way wrong was ultimately of positive benefit. Let me hear it!

Your Screwdriver Is a Hammer

Posted: February 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

There’s always a temptation to start teaching tools rather than techniques, and that’s certainly true in my discipline, Computer Science. My school doesn’t teach inside a ‘standard’ Integrated Development Environment (IDE) [If you’re a non-tech person, that’s a friendly, graphical framework for writing programs]. This isn’t because we have some sort of “real programmers don’t use IDEs” nonsense going on but it’s because we want to teach techniques for designing, writing, testing and improving computer code that can be used anywhere and everywhere.

Not everyone runs the same computer hardware, operating system and applications package set-up. Almost every workspace is different. (Whether they should be or not? That’s another post.)

It’s a little like that “give a man fish…” sentiment, except that tools are notoriously short-lived and mercurial in the computing world. Today’s killer environment is tomorrow’s bad example. One group may have a semi-religious objection to the tools of another group – and both can be wrong. It’s more like “give a man a fire, he’ll be warm for one night, set him on fire, he’ll be warm for the rest of his life” and makes about as much sense, once you remove the humour.

Ultimately, if I teach someone a tool-based approach, there’s always the risk that they will think that this is the only way to solve it. To drag out another platitude, when all you have is a hammer, opening beer becomes very messy. This is why we try not to only teach one programming language, one programming paradigm (that’s an overall approach to programming) and certainly not one platform – especially if it’s an expensive or proprietary platform.

I recently purchased one of the Adobe Creative Suite full-version packages, for work, at a cost of thousands of dollars. Is it useful? Yes! Has it broadened my horizons in terms of teaching design? Yes. Would I teach with it? Oh, heck no. If what I’m teaching is programming, like the scripts in Adobe, I can do that with free products and the knowledge transfers, with a small warm-up time if you get to use this product. If what I’m teaching is graphics, then there are existing products out there that are free and in the same ball park. Yes, students can buy student licences, but at roughly the same cost as a textbook – given a choice, I’d probably rather that they bought a useful book than a heavily specialised tool. I’d be slightly terrified if someone though that all problems could be solved with CreativeSuite.

It’s a bit like using Microsoft Excel for scientific data analysis: great tool, wrong purpose, costs real money, makes bad science.

Yes, I accept that I may disadvantage a student who takes their general Bachelor of Computer Science and goes to a place that demands 6 months experience with Adobe. But I’m not part of tech training for tool use (not saying that this is bad, it’s just not what I do) so I have to focus on techniques so that, whichever package or system or language my students find themselves involved with, they can look at it through the tool and apply the techniques.

Even a well-crafted screwdriver can blind you to the other options out there and, in the worst case, have you stand there sadly banging the screws in. With an understanding of technique, well, I’d love to say we’d eliminate this, but let’s settle on we’ll probably reduce the possibility of this happening.

 

Why am I here?

Posted: February 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment

I’m currently in Singapore, teaching an intensive course as 3 hours Friday night, 6 hours Saturday and 7 hours Sunday. Obviously a course like this poses challenges for both staff and students, given the intensive nature, so I try to make it very interactive, full of peer activity and very little ‘just listening to Nick speak’. (Sometimes I succeed better than others.)

On Friday night, I wrote two lines up on the board:

“Why are you here?”

“Why am I here?”

My first discussion with the class, at 7pm on a Friday night after they’d been at work all day, was on these questions. As always, initial participation was guarded. Most students are in classes to meet requirements, pass exams and get pieces of paper – asking questions about this can cause some soul searching. So I switched to a discussion about why I was there.

Pause. Then a cautious suggestion.

“Money?” (Class laughter)

This gave me a more relaxed class to talk to and the chance to talk about all the reasons I could be there. After a minute or two’s (guided) discussion, I heard:

“You’re here to share your knowledge?”

Which then guided us to the next stage of the intro discussion – the important bit. The fact that if they know the work then passing the exam will be relatively easy. The fact that I care about what they know and that, when they leave, they should be able to practise their art with confidence.

The whole activity took about 5 minutes and set the tone for highly engaged discussion in and around 28 people, late on a Friday night, that happened to include a lot of information on Distributed Systems. It’s an ice breaker, a warm-up and it also tells the students what I need them to know: that I need them to know.

It’s Saturday, it must be Singapore

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

The next few messages have the theme of Intensive Teaching, as that’s what I’m doing this weekend, at our Singapore campus. I have 28 students, half a semester of content and 16 hours over three days. These students almost all have responsible full-time jobs and, in Singapore, that means 5.5 days a week.

My challenge is to present the material of Distributed Systems in an interesting, engaging and informative way to 28 people who, by Sunday, will be at risk of narcolepsy. Fortunately, the students are keen, the material is quite interesting by itself and I’ve done this before.

I hope that some of the posts that follow give you some interesting insights into a type of teaching that we don’t do all that often in higher ed – the ultra-intensive. I look forward to your comments.

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