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

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

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

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

Two people running through an airport.

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

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

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

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

Moving Down the Road Trying to Lighten My Load: Performance Load (and taking it easy)

Posted: February 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

This is one of the posts of design that, I hope, will help to establish that good design is not just about images, Photoshop and Illustrator! I’m really enjoying the book that all of this is coming from (for those of you who are new to this blog, that’s Universal Principles of Design, Lidwell et al, Revised, 2010). I’ve not had the vocabulary to express a lot of what I’ve learned and that, of course, makes it very hard to communicate. This blogging process has really helped me to tie everything together – but this one is particularly important because it explains why we have to make the effort to manage the load that our students encounter in our courses.

Whenever you’re trying to achieve a goal, you’re going to have to expend effort – in terms of mental and physical activity. When the load gets high, the time it takes to get the job done increases but, regrettably, it’s not just the time it takes that increases – the possibility of error increases and the chances of success starts to drop away. If the load is manageable, then the time reduces, the possibility of error drops and you increase the chance of success. This is the performance load of a task and I suspect that this is one of the key problems in the preparation of a lot of teaching materials and support. There has been an attitude that some of what we teach can’t just be offered – that effort has to expended for the students to value it, or to show that they’re ready for the material. Without going in to too much commentary on this, because I think it’s an attitude that is often used as an excuse rather than a real philosophy, if this is the attitude, that there is an effort barrier, then this has to very carefully managed or the performance load is going to cause an unnecessarily high level of failure.

How easy was it to read that last sentence? What if I’d said “I’m not sure I agree with this, but if there is an effort barrier, we must manage it carefully. Performance load can increase to the point where failure may be inevitable.” Is that easier?

What does load look like for tasks? If it’s moving things around then our muscles come into play, our ability to physically interact with our environment. If it’s thinking then we have to use our cognitive abilities to identify and complete the task. Fundamentally, there are two type of load:

  1. Kinematic load is a measure of the physical activity involved – strength, number of steps, repetition of action, amount of force involved – to accomplish something. Not many teaching activities will have a strength-related load component (which is good, as it means fewer accessibility concerns) but any time that we introduce an activity that requires physical steps, we’ll reduce the kinematic load if we cut that number of steps down as far as possible. Allowing students to submit their assignments electronically reduces the requirement to print the work, staple it, and physically attend a submission place to submit it. Think about how many things could go wrong in that chain – everything from paper out in the printer, to a water leak destroying all of the paperwork once it’s submitted.
  2. Cognitive load is how much thinking we’re going to have to do to achieve our goal. How much are you expecting someone to remember? Most people can only hold a few things in their heads at one point – fighting this is pushing water uphill. Keeping your concepts clear and your explanations simple can really help with this. Keeping your presentations simple stops people having to filter out things that aren’t relevant – use consistency in your materials and, if you’re trying to keep everything accessible, consider producing separate sets of material so that information that is useful to one group isn’t considered ‘clutter’ to another. (If you want a good example, look at subtitled movies. One subtitle is okay, but I’ve seen movies subtitled in Chinese characters, English and Tamil simultaneously. It leaves about half the screen for the content and makes the film hard to watch!)

However you reduce performance load, you have to remember that there will be a minimum load – assuming that you don’t change the requirements of the task. This can be easy to get wrong. Abuse of load reduction can be prevalent in students. If you consider plagiarism, this used to much harder than it is now that we have networked computers and the Internet. The cognitive load reduction of copying was still quite high, but it required an equivalent amount of kinematic load because of the requirement to rewrite the work (or type it in again from a print-out). So, just being aware of load reduction is only part of the battle – how we reduce performance load has to be considered while still understanding that we can’t reduce the requirements of the task itself.

I think this is what people are always suspicious of when we talk about design – that somehow considering design will demean, cheapen or over-simplify the task. I agree that this is something we should think about, but I certainly don’t think that it’s inevitable.

Juggling the load – some free advice without the $4 words.

Posted: February 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

I have a list of things written on my wall, which I copied from “How to get things done” – one of my favourite ‘do something’ books. My favourite is:

Renegotiation: How can I achieve something AND make it awesome?

As I sit in my hotel room, at 10:48pm, after a fairly long day spent on planes and in talks, I have a chance to reflect on how I’m managing things. I’ve talked before about OmniFocus, mailboxes and to-do lists but, as always, there’s something else. Fortunately, I have no wish to get you to send me $1000 for the secret and I’m tired, so I’ll keep it short.

I realised that I’m handling things in a very ‘thought into action’ way. I have now assembled my tools, my iPad, my laptop and my phone, so that I can spring into action when I need to with the minimum of fuss. It doesn’t take me 15 minutes to locate something because it’s either in a paper folder or I can find it by searching electronically. This is not just liberating (because I am not bound to my office) but it allows for an immediacy of action. If I need it, I know where it is or I can find it easily. This reduces most problems down to read, think, decide, act, store. Once you take out ‘scrabble around on desk’ or ‘try to remember if you took this home’ or (worse) ‘become immobile because searching is now infeasible’, a lot of things start to look more possible.

It’s much like I imagine zen archery. The arrow is plucked from where the arrow must be, the arrow is set, the bow is drawn, the arrow is released and it flies through the air, inevitably striking the target. If there is another target, I already have my next arrow waiting. One motion, no hesitation.

Fluid. Efficient.

It has taken me weeks… possibly months… to get to a point where things are working smoothly but it has been worth it. A year ago I would have crumbled under this, especially with the teaching about to start again. Currently, things are working.

If I’m being perfectly honest, and I try to asymptotically (*ding* $4) approach this, sometimes I still miss the odd thing but it’s most likely to be a conscious choice. I can see it coming and I have to work out if I can do it or if I have to push that load off somewhere else. There’s still room for improvement, which is always good.

Looking back at what started this post, I’m now achieving things and, with luck, I can increase the overall level of awesomeness as well.

Awesome! 🙂

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.

Ready to roll (or teach)

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

Yesterday I mentioned CS Unplugged. Today I’m helping out, somewhat last minute, at a CS Unplugged event that I didn’t even know about yesterday! Perhaps I should write a post about “Nick gets lots of free money given to him” and keep my fingers crossed?

This does actually segue into something semi-useful and blogworthy in that my general principle in my career is “always be ready to seize a new opportunity”. I stick my hand up for a lot of things but I never stick my hand up if I don’t think that I would do a good job. The price to pay here is that you must always know what you can do, what you have time to do and, harder, have a good enough vision of the future to have the right skills.

I don’t pretend to be an expert here but I have a short list of things that I do that help me to do this:

  1. I prepare myself for the idea that opportunities could come along and think about how and why I should accept them.
  2. I talk to lots of people. I attend events, talk shop, listen, contribute, write several blogs, read just about everything I get sent, send a lot of things on and, generally, try and stay as connected as possible. Why? Because then I know what is happening in my own discipline, in my own Uni and in my own country. Very few announcements are surprises to me because the (much more informed) people I’ve been speaking to have seen it in the wind and suggested it as a possibility. Other people think that I may be able to help them, which means that they may get in touch with me later.
  3. I write down my ideas and what it would take to make them happen. When I have a good idea, I generally discuss it or write it up as a possible funding opportunity – or just sketch out a plan for it. If you came to me tomorrow and said “Nick, I have 10K/30K/100K/1M for a project” I can have an outline to you in about 10 minutes. Wow, that seems a bit… creepy. Why are you planning for money you don’t have? Aha, it’s because…
  4. I have a long term focus. Research this year turns into papers next year turns into grant applications the year after that. Teaching plans for next year have to start now. I don’t naturally have a long term focus! I like to work day-to-day like normal people but I kept finding that I ran out of time because I never really knew what to do next. I referred before to the joys of the pipeline and admitted that I’m naturally not good at this. But that leads me to point 4.
  5. Not being good at something isn’t an excuse. It’s not an excuse for our students (there’s a lot of difference between ‘not enough practice’ and ‘zero aptitude’) so it’s not an excuse for us. This is especially true if it’s part of the job. It’s a hard job. It’s a great job. It’s being responsible for the provision of knowledge to the next generation of scientists, teachers, educators, people, parents, children – it’s the whole human race that we’re working with here. Not being good at something is an opportunity to get better.
  6. I work out when I should say no. I am a hopeless overcommitter but I have now reached a level where I can’t fit any more in so I say ‘No’ more often. I have no kids and my wife is another academic so she has the same time pressures – I have a great deal of time flexibility at home. But I still need to hang out, relax, eat and sleep or I will go mad.  But some things are time critical. While I was writing this a mail came in asking if I could have something (that didn’t have a solid deadline) ready in a week. I thought about it and decided to say ‘Yes’. If I work on this tonight, I can do it. It’s definitely worth it to do this and I want to do this project so I can spend a couple of hours in front of the computer instead of watching Doctor Who re-runs. It’s a delicate balancing act but some of the best opportunities have no initial load or money associated with them – they are overtime eaters until they pay off. If they pay off…
  7. Not everything pays off but take enough opportunities and one probably will. This is the big one so I’ll finish with it. The more things you try (which you have any chance at success with) the more likely you are to succeed. This is often demoralising, time consuming and, until something does pay off, it often makes you feel that you’re wasting your time. Look at this blog. It’s eating at least half an hour a day and for what? This has no pay off associated with it!

    Or does it?

    Well, it does. It forces me to focus for at least one part of a day that could be filled with admin and research on my teaching! On thinking about how I teach, how I learn, how I think my students learn and what I want to share with the world on this. Every post I write makes me a better writer. Gives me more ideas. Focuses me on teaching as I lead back in to first semester. No-one’s going to give me any cash for this, or load relief, and none of my jobs require this – but working here helps me think about how to manage other opportunities. Something here may one day head off into a seed grant idea. Some of your feedback may make me think about things in a different way.

    Working on this blog prepares me for other opportunities and makes me open to share and receive new knowledge. It’s like a workout for my opportunity muscle.

What do you think? What are the best ways to prepare for an opportunity?

 

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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