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.

 

Impact and Legacy. A Memoriam For a Man I Never Met.

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

Paul Haines is dead. I never met him. Part of his legacy, however, is that you can read what I’m writing now.

Paul was a writer, and a very good one, who I got to know, to an extent, through LiveJournal. Regrettably, it was after he was diagnosed with the cancer that went on to kill him, on March 5th, 2012, but his account of his striving to survive and his continuing desire to write and be a father and a family man had a great effect upon me. Sadly, it didn’t remove my love of subordinate clauses but my own fiction is now a far more Australian fiction – a more authentic expression of myself. I told him that it was an embarrassment that it took a New Zealander to show me how to be Australian. I’m happy in that I was able to tell him this while he was still alive and awake, before he slipped deeper down and went. I’m sad in that we agreed to share a beer one day, me hoping that it would come to pass and him knowing that it was a ghost’s promise. I’m sad that he leaves behind a wife and young daughter. And I’m angry at cancer but, then, I’m always angry at cancer.

I have always considered my legacy to be my students and my friends. I have no children of my own and cats don’t last forever. The extent to which I now feel the loss of a man I never met reminds me, not that I should need it, that honest writing, regular writing, naked writing is a legacy of its own. Part of Paul’s legacy is here, on this page as you read it, as well as in his books and on-line writing.

If you’re reading this, then you know I write – but do you? What do you want to say to the world? They say that “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.” I wonder how many people we can get to write? Paul’s struggle, his account of his life, his works and his untimely death, foreshadowed as it was for so long, touched me and led me to write. To finally start putting things out there. Not because I have anything that amazing to say but because I have anything to say at all.

You don’t know when and you don’t know where. Do you have something to write? Do you have anything to say? Share it with us all, please. We may hate it, it may scare us – or it might inspire another person. More impact. A legacy.

Tomorrow I will fly home. As I approach New Zealand, Paul’s birthplace, and as I leave it and head towards his adopted home, I’ll raise a glass for that beer we never had and toast his memory. And when I land, I look forward to reading your writings.

RIP: Paul Richard Haines 8 June 1970 – 5 March 2012

The Pipeline and How to Swing it

Posted: January 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment

Getting everything done would be easy if we had very little to do or unlimited time in which to do it. Sadly, by the time you stack up what your students need you to be, your school or faculty needs you to do, the parts of you required for your colleagues and your family, it gets hard to get things done. That’s where good pipeline management gives you a bit of help in encouraging you to prioritise in a way that lets you maximise your use of your own time.

Some things cannot be handled in advance. You can’t mark an assignment until the students have returned it, you can’t publish the exam results until all of the marking and any adjustments have been taken into account. Some things have to be dealt with by you being there and dealing with the events as they happen. To be good at learning and teaching requires a lot of your time, there’s no disputing it, but trying to do it all at the same time will crush you. Some of things that we need to do can be reorganised in terms of their importance, amount of preparation time and deadline, and this is where your pipeline comes from. If you currently have a to-do list, but you don’t do any real longer-term forecasting, then this post is probably for you.

If you’re not good at breaking things into manageable tasks, like me, then go and grab one of the many good books that can help you. I have had a lot of great use of a book called “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. You may want to start by looking at a website called 43 Folders. If that appeals then you might want to replace your existing paper to-do list (or e-mail notes, or sticky notes) with some task management software. I use OmniFocus on iPad and Mac for task tracking and Merlin for project management. Whatever you use isn’t important but what you need to be able to do is to work out:

  1. What you want to do
  2. How it breaks into components (and you should know the order of these) – you must be able to identify the FIRST STEP. This will lead to the second.
  3. When it is due (set this wherever you need to in order to finish on time)
  4. How long each component will take
  5. Who else is involved
  6. What other resources you have

Then, armed with a list of all of the projects that you have to achieve, and a list of the first steps in each one, you can work out which has to be be tackled first. Something not due for a month? How long will it take? A month? Start now! A week? Get it to pop up in two weeks time. Maybe you can handle it early and go on to something else.

A to-do list is a great start but it’s only as good as the bigger list of projects that feeds it new to-do items. A good to-do item can be achieved in 15 minutes, maybe an hour. Why so short? Because then you can tick it off and move on to the next task. If you spend a day working and you tick nothing off your list, how much will you feel like you’ve achieved? If your to-do items, for writing an exam say, were “review last year’s exams”,”copy LaTeX template to repository and check security and backups”,”Write question 1 on underwater knitting” you can look at your work at the end of the day and, if you’ve got to Question 2, you can tick off three things. Doing things this way also gives you some checkpointing and rollback if you get interrupted, or distracted, or come down with a cold. Short tasks are also easier to interleave and it may help if you set up your pipeline so that short high-reward jobs get bumped up the queue occasionally to give you some needed endorphins for the longer haul projects such as grant writing or course re-design.

I wrote a 36 lecture course late last year and the pleasure in ticking off 36 individual ‘complete lecture x’ items was much greater than waiting two months to tick off ‘write lectures’. Apart from anything else, a good, concise task description will remind you what you were thinking and get you back into work more quickly – your ability to context switch will improve.

How you refill your list is up to you but, given how busy we all are now, it’s better to have the list showing you what you’ve achieved but listing what you could do next than to let you think that there’s nothing you have to do. If you want to take a breather, schedule it into your calendar or your list and stick to it. Got 15 minutes paper review time? Print the paper, leave your office, sit down somewhere else and read, if you can. One very good suggestion is that you take a break every hour to rest your aching back, get your eyes away from the computer and refresh. That’s harder sometimes than others but always be open to taking a brief , refreshing pause that will let you finish your work, get home, enjoy dinner and sleep.

And, if you actually know all of your deadlines, and what has to happen and when, you will worry less about what you’re missing and, with any luck, the sleep you have will be deeper and better. Sometimes, yes, it’s going to be a mad rush to completion but doing that all the time will burn you out. Use some of the excellent references and technology to do what you have to do and what you want to do in a timeframe that makes everyone happy and keeps you sane.

Happy pipelining!

Surviving and thriving on collaboration.

Posted: January 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Juggling all of the things that you’re supposed to do as a University academic can be tricky. The traditional academic is supposed to conduct large amounts of valuable, cited and grant-rewarded research, be an exemplary and inspirational teacher, and also find time to sit on lots of committees, fill out forms and not get in the way, too much, of the central administration process. As a junior academic, you’ll sit on fewer committees but you may, instead, get admin jobs like ‘collecting the software requirements’ or ‘looking after the casual teaching budget’, so there’s always something to do.

The biggest mistake a lot of people make is trying to do it all themselves. Yes, you must be involved with these tasks, you will be responsible for their successful completion, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t consult other people to help, or involve them for collaboration, or bring other people in when the scale of what you’re trying to do might crush you.

The quick summary of this post is that if you get good at collaborating with other people, and you can set up a relationship that is on a roughly equal footing, then everyone benefits. However, you need to work out what each person is bringing and who is the right person to involve.

You can read a lot of self-help books that, effectively, boil down to “making it appear as if there is more than one of you”. When you can set things up so that you put in some vital, required, element, but then the heavy lifting or continued presence is handled elsewhere, then you’ve achieved this because you can then devote yourself elsewhere. Some things require you to be there the whole time: your own wedding, any event where you are supposed to be the speaker (which includes lecturing) and a lot of meetings. Some other things on our long to-do list require us to be involved, but not necessarily to be the sole operator. Let’s start by looking at research.

Research, in terms of finding ideas, pursuing ideas, getting results, writing them up and publishing them, is a time-intensive activity that requires reasonably long stretches of uninterrupted time to get the best results. Unless you have a research-only position, or you’re on sabbatical, that’s very hard to achieve. However, this doesn’t mean that we can’t do it and we don’t necessarily have to sacrifice all of our weekends to do it. (Seriously, though, you’re going to lose some leisure time here and there. Academia is not a 9-5 job.)

One of the big advantages of having research collaborators is that your research and its publication, hence visibility and possible grant success, is always moving forward. These collaborators might be colleagues in a research group, research fellows, post docs, research assistants and PhD students (in later stages) and most of these, especially people who are paid to research, can keep the flow going when you’re tied up having to be in another place.

All these staff sound fine but this assumes that you’ve had the success required to employ all of these people! So how do we start down this track?

The answer is collaboration: finding people who are doing similar things so that you have more than one of you working on research, papers and grant applications. Look around inside your own school, or faculty, and work out if you have something that you’ve done that, combined with someone else’s work or input, can give you both some benefit if you work together. Ideally, the effort expended by each of you is approximately 50-70% of the effort required individually but still achieves the outcome. The more you work together, the more synergy that you’re likely to achieve because you start to have small copies of each other in your heads.

The same is true for learning and teaching based research and development. Can you find someone who also wants to do what you’re doing and can you work together so that you achieve the same result with less individual effort? Can you find someone to bounce those early ideas off to get better ideas forming?

We all know that your students learn more when they’re excited and engaged and discussing things with their peers. Research success can be achieved on the same basis. If your research is rewarding and you have someone to bounce it off, someone who can enthuse you or bring it back on track, you will do more and you will achieve more.

Forming a collaboration should be rewarding and all parties should benefit from it. Some collaborations stop after one effort, because one side or the other feels that they have been exploited. Yes, sometimes this happens, but you’ll quickly work out who you can and can’t work with. Forming successful collaborations early on, before you have the money to employ your own continuity providers, makes your job more manageable and allows you to bring more of yourself to other places, including your home life.

Here’s my (not exhaustive) list of things to think about when setting up a collaboration:

  1. What are you going to do? You should know what the task or project is, including every subtask you can think of, so there are no surprises later on.
  2. Who is involved? Work out who you are working with and have them involved from the start.
  3. What is everyone doing? Who is responsible for what?
  4. How much is everyone bringing to the arrangement? Resources, time, people or goodwill – cards on the table up front to avoid disappointment.
  5. When is everything due? Know your internal and external deadlines.
  6. How often will you meet? Will you be minuting things, e-mailing, using wikis or just having chats to keep track?
  7. How will credit be allocated? If it’s a paper, what does the author list look like? How could it change? If it’s a grant, what’s the money division?
  8. Do you have to worry about IP or commercialisation? If so, this gets tricky fast and makes 4 and 7 more complex. Sort this out BEFORE someone runs off with the IP and founds MicroGoogleII.
  9. Evaluation. How will we know that this worked for us and if we should continue? Sounds premature but if you have a rough idea of what you think denotes a successful collaboration, and you discuss it early on, then everyone knows the rough behaviour that’s expected.

Finally, here’s my list of 5 things to look out for as possible warning signs that your collaboration is not as solid as it could be.

  1. The other party has a lot of equipment resources and makes them available to you but does no actual research or writing, they just expect credit. Credit as an acknowledgement on a paper or grant app is one thing, expecting lead authorship or a slice of the funding is another. This isn’t always invalid but it’s almost always cleaner to pay cash money for resources, or resource access, and remove any doubt about credit. (A senior person who demands lead authorship regardless of involvement is much harder to manage here. That’s a political problem I leave to you although I might try and comment on it later.)
  2. Your collaborators have lots of ideas but never seem to produce anything. However, after five meetings, when you present the final work, they will still expect full credit for their ideas, regardless of the quality or usefulness. If you’re a non-producing ideas person, then other people will be just as grumpy with you. There are ideas and then there are ideas.
  3. Your collaborators rewrite everything that you submit, or redo the design, or experimentation, because it’s not up to ‘their standards’ or they just feel like it. I’m not saying that they or you are wrong – but your expectations aren’t aligned and one of you is going to get frustrated quickly.
  4. Deadlines slip or you end up in a deadline-chasing model that doesn’t work for you. Some people like to work in a panic close to the deadline, some don’t. If working up until the minute before hand-in is your thing, but gives your collaborator heartburn, don’t expect the relationship to survive. If you and your group can’t agree upon whether deadlines are really important or not, the stress risks breaking the relationship.
  5. You walk away from most of the meetings wondering why you bothered. If either of you is thinking that, you have to either address it up-front or finish what you’re doing, tie it up and find someone else to work with. Discussing it might be able to save the relationship (some people just don’t realise what they’re doing) but always be ready to close off your project neatly and start again elsewhere.

Collaboration is a fantastic way to get more results for less effort by recognising that people can work well together and, carefully controlled, it is the ultimate tool for junior academics to make it to being more senior (and tenured) academics. Just go into it with open eyes and be frank in your early discussions and it will work for you, rather than becoming a cautionary tale for the future.

Happy collaboration!

 

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