The Internet is Forever

Posted: June 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

I realise that, between this blog and my other blog, I have a lot of ‘Nick” out there and there is always a chance that this may come back to haunt me. Well, given that I’m blogging under my own name and I have a vague idea of how this whole Internet thing works, I was ready for this possibility. What always amazes me, however, is when people don’t realise that the Internet is neither memoryless nor able to be reformatted through fiat, no matter how much you want it to be so. Anything that goes out into the Internet is, for most reasonable definitions, going to be there forever. Trying to act against the Internet… ooh… look up the Streisand Effect (Wikipedia link), if you don’t know what that is.

You may have read about the 9-year old Scottish school girl, Martha Payne, who was a bit disappointed about the range and quantity of school lunches she was receiving so, with her dad’s help and with her teachers’ knowledge, started a blog about it. You can read the whole story here (Wired link), with lots of tasty links, but the upshot is this:

  1. Martha wasn’t happy with her lunches because she wanted a bit more salad, to go along with the fried food, pizza and croquettes that made up her lunch.
  2. Very politely, and without a huge axe to grind, she started putting up pictures of her lunch.
  3. Within two weeks, unlimited salads had been added for children at her school. (This is just one of the improvements that took place over time.)
  4. To make better use of the positive feedback and publicity, after about 20 posts, she asked people who liked and followed her blog to donate money to a group that fund school meals in Africa.
  5. People started following her in greater numbers. Other students started sending in pictures of their lunches.
  6. People started writing about her.
  7. Martha was pulled out of class to be told that she could no longer photograph her school meals because of something that showed up in a newspaper.

This was one of the first school lunches that Martha posted about (picture from her blog). Yes, that’s the lot. The rabid sausage looking thing is potato covered in stuff. That is also MAXIMUM ALLOWABLE CORN.

At this point, the people who were directing the school, the Argyll and Bute Council, went ever so slightly mad and forgot everything I just told you about the Internet. Firstly, because it was now obvious to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people that the A&B Council had censored a little girl from publishing pictures of her lunch. Secondly, because they posted an inaccurate and rather unpleasant statement about it, seeming to forget that everyone else could see what Martha had said and what the newspaper had said. This, of course, led to far more people knowing about the original blog than any other action that they could have taken. (I’m jealous, here, because Katrina had been following the blog before the shutdown!)

Thirdly, they forgot that the Internet is forever – that their statements, their actions to try and stop the tide from rolling, their questionable interpretation of events that might, if I were less generous, look both disingenuous and condescending (although I would never accuse the Argyll and Bute Council of such actions, obviously), these actions, and everyone’s reactions to them, are now out there. Archived. Indexed. Contextualised. Remembered.

Of course, the outcomes are unsurprising. After the Scottish Education Minister’s jaw was retrieved from the carpet, I can only imagine the speed with which the council was rung and asked exactly why they thought it a good idea to carry out their actions against a polite 9 year old girl. I note that the ban has now been lifted, the charity that Martha was working with now has so much money from donations that they can now build four kitchens to feed African school children, and some councillors have had a rather quick lesson in what globally instantaneous persistent communication means in the 21st century.

The issue here is that one girl looked at her plate, thought about it, spoke to some people and then,very politely, said “Please ;, may I have some more ;?” More salad then ensued! Food got healthier! The people at the school had responded sensibly. Children in Africa were getting more food! This was a giant win-win for the school and A&B Council – but somebody in the council couldn’t resist the urge to take a silly action in response to something that was no more Martha’a fault than the reporting of the Titanic caused the iceberg to drift into the sea lane.

Well done, Martha! Good luck with your continued photography of your increasingly pleasant, nutritious and delightful Scottish school lunches.

Time Banking II: We Are a Team

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

In between getting my camera ready copy together for ICER, and I’m still pumped that our paper got into ICER, I’ve been delving deep into the literature and the psychological and pedagogical background that I need to confirm before I go too much further with Time Banking. (I first mentioned this concept here. The term is already used in a general sense to talk about an exchange of services based on time as a currency. I use it here within the framework of student assignment submission.) I’m not just reading in CS Ed, of course, but across Ed, sociology, psychology and just about anywhere else where people have started to consider time as a manageable or tradable asset. I thought I’d take this post to outline some of the most important concepts behind it and provide some rationale for decisions that have already been made. I’ve already posted the guidelines for this, which can be distilled down to “not all events can be banked”, “additional load must be low”, “pragmatic limits apply”, “bad (cheating or gaming) behaviour is actively discouraged” and “it must integrate with our existing systems”.

Time/Bank currency design by Lawrence Weiner. Photo by Julieta Aranda. (Question for Nick – do I need something like this for my students?)

Our goal, of course, is to get students to think about their time management in a more holistic fashion and to start thinking about their future activities sometime sooner the 24 hours before the due date. Rather than students being receivers and storers of deadline, can we allow them to construct their own timelines, within a set of limits? (Ben-Ari, 1998, “Constructivism in Computer Science Education”, SIGCSE,  although Ben-Ari referred to knowledge in this context and I’m adapting it to a knowledge of temporal requirements, which depends upon a mature assessment of the work involved and a sound knowledge of your own skill level.) The model that I am working with is effectively a team-based model, drawing on Dickinson and McIntyre’s 1997 work “Team Performance Assessment and Measurement: Theory, Methods and Applications.”, but where the team consists of a given student, my marking team and me. Ultimately our product is the submitted artefact and we are all trying to facilitate its timely production, but if I want students to be constructive and participative, rather than merely compliant and receptive, I have to involve them in the process. Dickinson and McIntyre identified seven roles in their model: orientation, leadership, monitoring, feedback, back-up (assisting/supporting), coordination and communication. Some of these roles are obviously mine, as the lecturer, such as orientation (establishing norms and keeping the group cohesive) and monitoring (observing performance and recognising correct contribution). However, a number of these can easily be shared between lecturer and student, although we must be clear as to who holds each role at a given time. In particular, if I hold onto deadlines and make them completely immutable then I have take the coordination role and handed over a very small fragment of that to the student. By holding onto that authority, whether it makes sense or not, I’m forcing the student into an authority-dependent mode.

(We could, of course, get into quite a discussion as to whether the benefit is primarily Piagiatien because we are connecting new experiences with established ideas, or Vygotskian because of the contact with the More Knowledgable Other and time spent in the Zone of Proximal Development. Let’s just say that either approach supports the importance of me working with a student in a more fluid and interactive manner than a more rigid and authoritarian relationship.)

Yes, I know, some deadlines are actually fixed and I accept that. I’m not saying that we abandon all deadlines or notion of immutability. What I am, however, saying is that we want our students to function in working teams, to collaborate, to produce good work, to know when to work harder earlier to make it easier for themselves later on. Rather than give them a tiny sandpit in which to play, I propose that we give them a larger space to work with. It’s still a space with edges, limits, defined acceptable behaviour – our monitoring and feedback roles are one of our most important contributions to our students after all – but it is a space in which a student can have more freedom of action and, for certain roles including coordination, start to construct their own successful framework for achievement.

Much as reading Vygotsky gives you useful information and theoretical background, without necessarily telling you how to teach, reading through all of these ideas doesn’t immediately give me a fully-formed implementation. This is why the guidelines were the first things I developed once I had some grip on the ideas, because I needed to place some pragmatic limits that would allow me to think about this within a teaching framework.  The goal is to get students to use the process to improve their time management and process awareness and we need to set limits on possible behaviour to make sure that they are meeting the goal. “Hacks” to their own production process, such as those that allow them to legitimately reduce their development time (such as starting the work early, or going through an early prototype design) are the point of the exercise. “Hacks” that allow them to artificially generate extra hours in the time bank are not the point at all. So this places a requirement on the design to be robust and not susceptible to gaming, and on the orientation, leadership and monitoring roles as practiced by me and my staff. But it also requires the participants to enter into the spirit of it or choose not to participate, rather than attempting to undermine it or act to spite it.

The spontaneous generation of hours was something that I really wanted to avoid. When I sketched out my first solution, I realised that I had made the system far too complex by granting time credits immediately, when a ‘qualifying’ submission was made, and that later submissions required retraction of the original grant, followed by a subsequent addition operation. In fact, I had set up a potential race condition that made it much more difficult to guarantee that a student was using genuine extension credit time. The current solution? Students don’t get credit added to their account until a fixed point has passed, beyond which no further submissions can take place. This was the first of the pragmatic limits – there does exist a ‘no more submissions’ point but we are relatively elastic to that point. (It also stops students trying to use obtained credit for assignment X to try and hand up an improved version of X after the due date. We’re not being picky here but this isn’t the behaviour we want – we want students to think more than a week in advance because that is the skill that, if practised correctly, will really improve their time management.)

My first and my most immediate concern was that students may adapt to this ‘last hand-in barrier’ but our collected data doesn’t support this hypothesis, although there are some concerning subgroups that we are currently tearing apart to see if we can get more evidence on the small group of students who do seem to go to a final marks barrier that occurs after the main submission date.

I hope to write more on this over the next few days, discussing in more detail my support for requiring a ‘no more submissions’ point at all. As always, discussion is very welcome!

Today, As I Was Crawling Across the Floor…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Shortest Distance Between Two Points Is The Internet

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

MY CHEESE!

I’ve been noticing a slight upwards trend in readership, as I’ve previously noted. On Friday, however, the readership exploded. 209 views on Friday, 259 views on Saturday. (Normally, I’m lucky to get a third of that.) One person, who obviously needs some help, viewed 99 things in one hour. (Even I’ve never done that.)

It was pretty obvious that something had happened but the other shoe didn’t drop until today, when a comment confirmation request came in. I’d been mentioned in a radio show and podcast for electronics enthusiasts and professionals – The Amp Hour!

Dave Jones had found my post on the bra ad that managed to combine sexism and insulting engineers and had, in his own words, been dismayed by it. His comment, and a link on the website, and suddenly I have some (quite possibly heavily confused) people reading my blog and wondering what they’d wandered into.

I saw the comment confirmation request, followed it back, commented, Dave responded, loop closed.

Except, of course, for how amazingly cool it is that something I wrote about an issue that bothered me found someone else, who it also bothered, who mentioned it, which sent people to me, which sent me to him, and then we basically met up in the corridor, nodded at each other and said “Hi”.

Of course, this would be far more impressive if Dave was in Antarctica, but he’s actually in Sydney. He went looking for stuff about the ad because he saw it and it bugged him – and he found my blog.

But this is still pretty cool. We’re a thousand kilometres apart (or so) and we’ve both agreed that the ad is rubbish. Twenty years ago, we would have had to have met or one of us would have had to write an article that got published on paper and distributed to me. I certainly wouldn’t know about Dave’s expertise in Internet Dating (seriously?) or passion for geocaching.

This is the world that that I have to prepare my students for. A world where their comments, good or bad, can travel for thousand of kilometres. A world where presence doesn’t have to mean physical presence. Of course, as educators, that applies to our classrooms and spaces as well. Our world does not have to be bricks and mortar, bench seats and blackboards.

We’re trying to make connections: knowledge, ideas, people, the future. We already appear to have the infrastructure to do it – do we have all of the right tools and the drive and vision to realise it?

I have no idea but I hope that we do. In the meantime, I’ll be over here, looking at the walls and thinking about the shortest distance between two points.

Eating Your Own Dog Food (How Can I Get Better at Words with Friends?)

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

I am currently being simultaneously beaten in four games of Words with Friends. This amuses me far more than it bugs me because it appears that, despite having a large vocabulary, a (I’m told) quick wit and being relatively skilled in the right word in the right place – I am rather bad at a game that should reward at least some of these skills.

One of the things that I dislike, and I know that my students dislike, is when someone stands up and says “To solve problem X, you need to take set of actions S.” Then, when you come to X, or you find that person’s version of a solution to X, it’s not actually S that is used. It’s “S-like” or “S-lite” or “Z, which looks like an S backwards and sounds like it if you’re an American with a lisp.”

There’s a term I love called “eating your own dog food” (Wikipedia link) that means that a company uses the products that it creates in order to solve the problems for which a customer would buy their products. It’s a fairly simple mantra: if you’re making the best thing to solve Problem X, then you should be using it yourself when you run across Problem X. Now,of course, a company can do this by banning or proscribing any other products but this misses the point. At it’s heart, dogfooding means that, in a situation where you are free to choose, you make a product so good that you would choose it anyway.

It speaks to authenticity when you talk about your product and it provides both goals and thinking framework. The same thing works for education – if I tell someone to take a certain approach to solve a problem, then it should be one that I would use as well.

So, if a student said to me “I am bad at this type of problem,” I’d start talking to them to find out exactly what they’re good and bad at, get them to analyse their own process, get them to identify some improvement strategies (with my guidance and suggestions) and then put something together to get it going. Then we’d follow up, discuss what happened, and (with some careful scaffolding) we’d iteratively improve this as far as we could. I’d also be open to the student working out whether the problem is actually one that they need to solve – although it’s a given that I’ll have a strong opinion if it’s something important.

So, let me eat my own dog food for this post, to help me get better at Words with Friends, to again expose my thinking processes but also to demonstrate the efficacy of doing this!

Step 1: What’s the problem?

So, I can get reasonable scores at Words with Friends but I don’t seem to be winning. Words with Friends is a game that rewards you for playing words with “high value” tiles on key positions that add score multipliers. The words QATS can be worth 13 or 99 depending on where it is placed. You have 7 randomly selected tiles with different letters, and a range of values for letters in a 1:1 association, but must follow strict placement and connection rules. In summary, a Words with Friends game is a connected set of tiles, where each set of tiles placed must form a valid word once set placement is complete, and points are calculated from the composition and placement of the tiles, but bonus spaces on the board only count once. The random allocation of letters means that you have to have a set of strategies to minimise the negative impact of a bad draw and to maximise the benefit of a good draw. So you need a way of determining the possible moves and then picking the best one.

Some simple guidelines that help you to choose words can be formed along the lines of the number of base points by letter (so words featuring Q, X or J will be worth more because these are high value letters), the values of words will tend to increase as the word length increases as there are more letters with values to count (although certain high value letters cannot be juxtaposed – QXJJXWY is not a word, sadly), but both of these metrics are overshadowed by the strategic placement of letters to either extend existing words (allowing you to recount existing tiles and extending point 2) or to access the bonus spaces. Given that QATS can be worth 99 points as a four-letter word if played in the right place, it might be worth ignoring QUEUES earlier if think you can reach that spot.

Step 2: So where is my problem?

After thinking about my game, I realised that I wasn’t playing Words with Friends properly, because I wasn’t giving enough thought to the adversarial nature of the occupancy of the bonus spaces. My original game was more along the lines of “look at letters, look at board, find a good word, play it.” As a result, any occupancy of the bonus spaces was a nice-to-have, rather than a must-have. I also didn’t target placement that allowed me to count tiles already on the board and, looking at other games, my game is a loose grid compared to the tight mesh that can earn very large points.

I’m also wasn’t thinking about the problem space correctly. There are a fixed number of tiles in the game, with known distribution. As tiles are played, I know how many tiles are left and that up to 14 of them are in my and my opponent’s hand. If I know how many tiles there are of each letter, I can play with a reasonable idea of the likelihood of my opponent’s best move. Early on, this is hard, but that’s ok, because we can both play in a way that doesn’t give a bonus tile advantage. Later on, it’s probably more useful.

Finally, I was trying to use words that I knew, rather than words that are legal in Words with Friends. I had no idea that the following were acceptable until (at least once out of desperation) I tried them. Here are some you might (nor might now) know: AA, QAT, ZEE, ZAS, SCARP, DYNE. The last one is interesting, because it’s a unit of force, but BRIX, a unit used to measure concentration (often of sugar) isn’t a legal word.

So, I had three problems, most of which relate to the fact that I’m more used to playing “Take 2” (a game played with Scrabble tiles but no bonus spaces) than “Scrabble” itself, where the bonus spaces are crucial.

Step 3: What are the strategies for improvements?

The first, and most obvious, strategy is to get used to playing in the adversarial space and pay much closer attention to which bonus spaces I leave open in my play and to increase my recounting of existing tiles. The second is to start keeping track of tiles that are out and play to the more likely outcome. Finally, I need to get a list of which words are legal in Words with Friends and, basically, learn them.

Step 4: Early outcomes

After getting thrashed in my first games, I started applying the first strategy. I have since achieved words worth over 100 points and, despite not winning, the gap is diminishing. So this appears to be working.

The second and the third… look, it’s going to sound funny but this seems like a lot of work for a game. I quite like playing the best word I can think of without having to constrain myself to play some word I’m never going to actually use (when we’re up to our elbows in aa, I will accept your criticism then) or sit there eliminating tiles one-by-one (or using an assistant to do it). Given that I’m not even sure that this is the way people actually play, I’m probably better off playing a lot of games and naturally picking up words that occur, rather than trying to learn them all in one go.

Of course, if a student said something along the last lines to me, then they’re saying that they don’t mind not succeeding. In this case, it’s perfectly true. I enjoy playing and, right now, I don’t need to win to enjoy the game.

Just as well really, I think I’m about to lose four games within a minute of each other. That’s four in a row – pity, if there were three of them I could do a syzygy joke.

Step 5: Discussion and Iteration

So, here’s the discussion and my chance to think about whether my strategies need modification to achieve my original goal. Now, if I keep that goal at winning, then I do need to keep iterating but I have noticed that with a simple change of aiming more a the bonuses, I get a good “Yeah” from a high points word that probably won’t be matched by winning a game.

To wrap up, having looked at the problem, thought through it and make some constructive suggestions regarding improvement, I’ve not only improved my game but I’ve improved my understanding and enjoyment of the activity. I feel far more in control of my hideous performance and can now talk to more people about other ways to improve that maintain that enjoyment.

Now, of course, I imagine that a million WwF players are going to jump in and say “nooooo! here’s how you do it.” Please do so! Right now I’m talking to myself but I’d love some guidance for iterative improvement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Proscription and Prescription: Bitter Medicine for Teachers

Posted: May 24, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Australia is a big country. A very big country. Despite being the size of the continental USA, it has only 22,000,000 people, scattered across the country and concentrated in large cities. This allows for a great deal of regional variation in terms of local culture, accents (yes, there is more than one Australian accent) and local industry requirements. Because of this, despite having national educational standards and shared ideas of what constitutes acceptable entry levels for University, there are understandable regional differences in the primary, secondary and tertiary studies.

Maintaining standards is hard, especially when you start to consider regional issues – whose standards are you maintaining. How do you set these standards? Are they prescriptions (a list of things that you must do) or proscriptions (a list of things that you mustn’t do)? There’s a big difference in course and program definition depending upon how you do this. If you prescribe a set textbook then everyone has to use it to teach with but can bring in other materials. If you proscribe unauthorised textbooks then you have suddenly reduced the amount of initiative and independence that can be displayed by your staff.

Excuse me, Doctor, you appear to be writing in invisible ink…

As always, I’m going to draw an analogue with our students to think about how we guide them. Do we tell them what we want and identify those aspects that we want them to use, or do we tell them what not to do, limit their options and then look surprised when they don’t explore the space and hand in something that conforms in a dull and lifeless manner?

I’m a big fan of combining prescription, in terms of desirable characteristics, and proscription, in terms of pitfalls and traps, but in an oversight model that presents the desirable aspects first and monitors the situation to see if behaviour is straying towards the proscribed. Having said that, the frequent flyers of the proscription world, plagiarism and cheating, always get mentioned up front – but as the weak twin of the appropriate techniques of independent research, thoughtful summarisation, correct attribution and doing your own work. Rather than just saying “DO NOT CHEAT”, I try to frame it in terms of what the correct behaviour is and how we classify it if someone goes off that path.

However, any compulsory inclusions or unarguable exclusions must be justified for the situation at hand – and should be both defensible and absolutely necessary. When we start looking at a higher level, above the individual school to the district, to the region, to the state, to the country, any complex set of prescriptions and proscriptions is very likely to start causing regional problems. Why? Because not all regions are the same. Because not all districts have the money to meet your prescriptions. Because not all cultures may agree with your proscriptions.

This post was triggered by a post from a great teacher I know, to whom I am also related, who talked about having to take everything unofficial out of her class. Her frustration with this, the way it made her feel, the way it would restrict her – an award winning teacher – made me realise how privileged I am to work in a place where nobody really ever tells me what to do or how to teach. While it’s good for me to remember that I am privileged in this regard, perhaps it’s also good to think about the constant clash between state, bureaucracy and education that exist in some other places.

Students and the New Content Models – What Would We Have Done?

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

I’m heading over to Cupertino this week to talk at Apple’s Education branch about institutional support for iPads used in teaching. As it turns out, there are some good ways and not-so-good ways to get a large rollout of tablet devices into a University and we’ve, well the Faculty of Sciences, have managed to have a very successful roll-out. To support this, they now have an all-electronic textbook model so that students no longer have to lug 30kg (66lbs) of textbooks around with them.

This is bad for physiotherapists but great for the students. Well, for those who buy the books.

We’ve seen the purchasing of textbooks drop dramatically over recent time. There are a lot of factors at play here: changing demography so that more students have to work and have to decide what to spend their money on, a return to charging students for study (even as part of a long-term loan scheme), the fact that books have a limited resale value because new editions (and associated electronic resources) are released annually for most texts… There’s a lot going on. The fact that books are heavy and hard to lug around is just one more part of it.

Now the whole secondhand market brings me to an interesting point. Students appear, small scale and informal survey here so this is bordering on anecdata, to favour buying the physical text and the electronic version. That way they get something large and clunky to read at home, the satisfaction of the physical book that never needs charging, while having the convenience of a searchable reference that is always available as long as they have their gadget with them.

But students aren’t silly about these things. They will ask you, up front, which textbook they actually need, which is a fair question. We have reduced our own dependency on textbooks quite a lot because (a) many students won’t buy it anyway and (b) we can put a few into the library and they will function quite well in reference mode instead. However, it goes beyond a “what do I buy”, it also comes down to a “what can I use that will meet my requirements”?

A real book is an amazing thing but, ultimately, if someone hasn’t indexed it properly, you’ll quickly find that you have to dangle page markers out the side, start annotating, and read the whole thing cover to cover.

You can only do this with an eBook (on whatever format) if someone has given you the ability to do so. There are a number of electronic books that my students won’t buy because they have restricted search abilities, or constrain the way you can label pages.

Worse, there are a number of textbooks that students won’t touch with a bargepole because they have limited licence lifespans or have been shown to be unreliable in their availability. All it takes is a hiccup in an on-line verification server and suddenly a book that you paid $50 for is now inaccessible. Of course, this also quite explicitly gives you no resale or secondhand value as well, if the authentication is locked to your identity or the ID of your device.

It is no surprise that a model that has been creeping into gaming is now seeping into textbooks. You buy the legitimate copy and then download the pirate version because the pirate version either doesn’t have the irritating levels of Digital Rights Management (DRM) that reduces your usage or it provides an additional set of features by removing arbitrary restrictions. Of course, I cannot condone this in any sense – because it supports piracy and the number of people who would use the pirate copy without buying a licence will, most likely, outstrip the number of people who buy a licence and then have a second copy. Seriously, I’ve never done it, don’t think that it’s ethically defensible but, more importantly, it reduces the need to solve the actual problem. Rather than try and get some change going that will move us to a point where we don’t have to do this, you reduce the incentive to change because you just work around it. Don’t like Apple’s Walled Garden? Then don’t use an iPhone or start advocating for change – but don’t jailbreak your phone because you’re not addressing the root cause. Vote with your wallet, advocate, try to support good models and encourage positive change.

This is why I strongly support models like O’Reilly and Associates, where you can buy physical + digital, or just digital, and it arrives in a multiplicity of formats, DRM free and yours to pass on, as long as only one copy is in existence and use at any time. Immediately, this reduces the need to go to the pirate feeds. This brings back secondhand value. This reduces the impact of device loss or identity crash. Yes, someone can put their copy on a pirate feed, of course, but there are always going to be thieves and receivers of stolen goods. Rather than dealing with the minority who will do it anyway, I support O’Reilly because they make it easier for the majority who wish to make legitimate purchases.

When it comes to book piracy (even with a legitimate licence purchase in parallel), it is easy to say “Well, students shouldn’t be doing that” and, of course, I wish that they weren’t, and I completely agree that they shouldn’t be doing it. But can I understand why they’re doing it when the products that are strongly limited and restricted actually provide a less attractive option than the physical book, especially when the book can be snatched out of your hands through a software error! I also understand, and completely agree, that rights holders should be rewarded for their efforts and want to find a mechanism that allows people to use items that they have purchased as they wish, while still allowing the rights handling and money issues to proceed in a way that has, as its primary affordance, a legitimate and rewarding experience for all participants. I think that O’Reilly (and the other providers who are following them) have set up the right way of doing it – set your price correctly, place your product into that slot in an attractive way and the vast majority of your interactions will be positive.

I was fortunate enough to see the time before photocopying became cheap and widespread and, as a result, I was able to see how book use changed. Initially, almost all of us bought textbooks for our courses, if we could afford to. We had to, because photocopying wasn’t that cheap and the library copies always ran out. Without PowerPoint slides and photocopies of slides, you depended upon your handwritten notes and the textbook. Demographically, almost none of us worked and most were supported by their parents, who also bought the books. Then PowerPoint crept in, along with photocopied notes. Reliance on the textbook started to slip. Then photocopiers became faster, more reliable and cheaper. Suddenly people were carrying entire photocopies of the book, because the cost and time involved had become manageable. The second-hand book market, once a valuable commodity, started to slip as the photocopy price/time/availability started to move – but also because improvements in desktop publishing and electronic production meant that new versions could come out annually rather than ever 2-4 years. Suddenly, rather than finding a recent edition or current edition, you could be looking at something that was 4 generations old. This was compounded by the inclusion of “free access” to supporting web sites or code testing environments – which had a fixed lifespan and didn’t transfer with the book.

I left traditional study in 2001 (returning in 2004 for a PhD but that’s a different textbook relationship) and bandwidth was increasing, download limits were increasing and the time/cost metric for finding and downloading books was starting to reach the attractive point. And that’s where we are today – a new mechanism for grabbing stuff has reached the cheap enough point. It’s a new content mode but it’s the same old problem. We can talk about what we want students to do and not to do but, historically, they’ve always done the maths. It’s good to see that O’Reilly and people like that are also doing the maths and making it easier for people to act legitimately and do the right thing by the rights holders, without forcing them to bend over backwards to pay for things the right way and get what they actually wanted in the first place.

Once again, XKCD says it all – “Share Your Knowledge With Joy”

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

In a recent XKCD post, Randall Munroe asks us why we criticise people when they don’t know something, rather than taking it as an opportunity to inform and delight them. After all, what is the actual benefit of belittling someone if they haven’t happened to have been exposed to the same information as you.

Well, that’s an excellent question. And, if you’re an educator, it’s the essential question.

We know that out students come to us without the information that they need. Because of this, they are regularly going to not know things and, sometimes, that’s going to be frustrating, but that’s what we’d expect.

I’ve run across it a few times myself when I’ve been surprised that people haven’t known basic (and to me common) terms in other languages like French or German. Why should they? I was raised in England, intermittently around French speakers, and have been exposed to European languages in one form or another for 40 years. I studied French at school and have German-speaking friends and colleagues, who I’ve visited. When someone doesn’t know what bon mot,  or soupçon means, that’s not actually an indicator of anything, except that they don’t know it yet. Ok, hand up in shame, I have, in the past, been obviously  surprised when someone didn’t know something but, over the last few years, I’ve worked really hard to curb it and try to be positive and informative, rather than being a schmuck.

After all, when I was a wine making student, a Microbiology PhD student sneered at me, quite effectively, because I didn’t know how to prepare a certain type of sample. The fact that I had never been shown, it hadn’t been a pre-requisite, and that it was actually his job to show me apparently eluded him on the day. Net result? 10 years later I remember being made to feel small but I still don’t remember how to prepare that sample.

I know what it’s like when someone decides to feel superior through exclusivity, rather than get a kick out of sharing the knowledge. Even if it wasn’t my job, even if knowledge sharing wasn’t something I enjoyed, even if it wasn’t the only ethically defensible choice – I should still be doing the right thing because I know what it’s like to be on the other side.

Thanks again, Randall, for a potted summary, in fun cartoon form, to remind us what it means to not be a schmuck.

Deadlines and Decisions – an Introduction to Time Banking

Posted: May 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

I’m working on a new project, as part of my educational research, to change the way that students think about deadlines and time estimation. The concept’s called Time Banking and it’s pretty simple. Some schools already give students some ‘slack time’, free extension time that the students manage to allow them to manage their own deadlines. Stanford offers 2 days up front so, at any time in the course, you can claim some extra time and give yourself an extension.

The idea behind Time Banking is that you get extra hours if you hand up your work (to a certain standard) early. These hours can be used later as free extensions for assignment, up to some maximum number of days. This makes deadlines flexible and personalised per student.

Now I know that some of you already have your “Time is Money, Jones!” hats on and may even be waggling a finger. Here’s a picture of what that looks like, if you’re not a-waggling.

“Deadlines are fixed for a reason!”

“We use deadlines to teach professional conduct!”

“This is going to make marking impossible.”

“That’s not the right way to tie a bow tie!”

“It’s the end of civilisation as we know it!” (Sorry, that’s a little hyperbolic)

Of course, some deadlines are fixed. However, looking back over my own activities during the past quarter, I have far more negotiable and mutable deadlines than I do fixed ones. Knowing how to assess my own use of time in the face of a combination of fixed and mutable deadlines is a skill that I refine every year.

If I had up late, telling me to hand up on time or start earlier doesn’t really involve me in the process that’s required: making a decision as to how I’m going to manage all of my commitments over time, rather than panicking when I run into a deadline.

I can’t help thinking that forcing students to treat every assignment deadline as fixed, whether it needs to be or not, doesn’t deal with the student in the way that we try to in every other sphere. It makes them depend upon the deadline from an authority, rather than forcing them to look at their assignment work across a whole semester and plan inside that larger context. How can we produce students who are able to work at the multiplicity or commitment level, sorry, Perry again, if we force them to be authority-dependent dualists in their time management?

Now, before you think I’ve gone mad, there are some guidelines for all of this, as well as the requirement to have a good basis in evidence.

  1. We must be addressing an existing behavioural problem. (More on this later.)
  2. Some deadlines are immutable. This includes weekly dependencies, assignments where the solutions are revealed post submission, and ‘end of semester’ close-off dates.
  3. The assessment of ‘early and satisfactory’ must be low effort for the teacher. We don’t want to encourage handing up empty assignments a week ahead. We want to encourage meeting a certain standard, preferably automatically assessed, to bring student activity forward.
  4. We have limits on the amount you can bank or spend, to keep assessment of the submitted materials inside the realm of possibility and, again, to reduce unnecessary load on the staff,
  5. We don’t tolerate bad behaviour. Cheating or system fiddling immediately removes the system from the scheme.
  6. We provide up-front hours to give all students a base line of extension.
  7. We integrate this with our existing ‘system problem’ and ‘medical/compassionate problem’ extension systems.

Now, if students don’t have a problem, there’s nothing to fix. If our existing fixed deadline system encouraged students to start their work at the right time and finish in a timely fashion, then by final year, we wouldn’t need anything like this. However, my data from our web submission system clearly indicates the existence of ‘persistently’ late students and, in fact, rather than getting better, we actually start to see some students getting later in second, third and honours years. So, while this isn’t concrete, we’re not seeing the “Nope, no problem here” behaviour that we’d like. So that’s point 1 dealt with – it looks like we have a problem.

Most of the points are technical issues or components of an economic model, but 6 and 7 address a more important issue: equity. Right now, if your on-line submission systems crash the day before the assignment is due, what happens? Everyone who handed in their work has done the right thing but, because you have to grant a one day extension, they actually prioritised their work too early. Not a huge deal in many ways, because students who get their work in early probably march to a different drum anyway, but it makes a mockery of the whole fixed deadline thing. Either the deadline is fixed or it isn’t – by allowing extension on a broad scale for any reason, you’re admitting that your deadline was arbitrary.

We’re trying to make them think harder than that.

How about, instead, you hand out 24 hours of time in the bank. Now the students who handed up early have 24 hours to spend later on and the students who didn’t get it in before the crash have a fair chance to get their work in on time. Student gets sick, your medical extensions are now just managed as time in the bank, reflecting the fact that knock on effects can be far greater than just getting an extension for a single assignment.

But we don’t go crazy. My current thoughts are that we’d limit the students to only starting to count early about 2 days before the assignment is due, and allow a maximum of 3 days extension (greater for medical or compassionate). This keeps it in our marking boundary and also, assuming that you’ve placed your assignments in the context of the appropriate knowledge delivery, keeps the assignments roughly in the same location as the work – not doing the assignment at the beginning of the term and then forgetting the knowledge.

So, cards on the table, I’m writing a paper on this, identifying exactly what I need to look at in order to demonstrate if this is a problem, the literature that supports my approach, the objections to it and the obstacles. I also have to spec the technical system that would support it and , yes, identify the range of assignments for which it would work. It won’t work for everything/everyone or every course. But I suspect it might work very well for some areas.

Could we allow team banking? Course banking? Social sharing? Community involvement (donation to charity for so many hours in the bank at the end of the course)? What could we do by involving students in the elastic management of their own time?

There’s a lot more but I’d love to hear some thoughts on it. I look forward to the discussion!

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