Wrapping up Grand Challenges

Posted: November 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

We had the final ‘farewell’ function for the end of my Grand Challenges course on Friday. While I would normally see most of these students again, as this is a first year course, one of them was a US exchange student who is flying home this morning to return to his own college system. I wanted to bring everyone together, in an informal setting, to say well done and farewell. It has been a remarkable semester. For me, now, digging through the student comments and feedback will drive a lot of my thinking for the next version of the course and the comments are very, very interesting. Students reflecting on the fact that they didn’t quite understand why they learned about the grand challenges in the first place, until we were knee deep in questionable ethics and the misapplication of Science, and then *bang* it all settled into place. Yes, this is what I intended but, frankly, it’s a little bit of a high risk strategy to construct scaffolding in that way and I had to carefully monitor the group dynamics, as well as making sure that the group had enough elements in it that we could achieve a good environment in which to reflect and develop. I, by myself, cannot be a full member of the group and I’m always going to be the outsider because, well, I have to be in order to function in the course coordinator and marker role.

Next year, we already have a lot of interest in the new course and this is very exciting. I’m not sure how many will roll up but I do know that I cannot handle a group larger than 8 with the current approach – hence, as I’ve said before, I now need to take all of the comments and work on scaling it up. Sitting around the table on Friday night, talking to all of the students, it really sank in that we (as a group) had achieved something pretty special. I couldn’t have done it without them and (I suspect) a lot of them weren’t quite ready to do it without me. What I saw around the table was passion, confidence, enthusiasm and curiosity. There was also some well-deserved pride when the final poster prints were handed out. I had their first projects professionally printed on Tyvek, a plastic material that is waterproof, hard to tear and really tough, so that their posters will go anywhere and hang up, without risking becoming sad and daggy old faded relics with tears and dog ears. The posters were the result of 6 weeks of work, hence some respect was due to their construction.

I’m not a very reserved person, which will come as no surprise to any of you, and people generally know what I’m feeling (with the usual caveat that I can appear delighted by the questionable musical practices of children and fascinated in meetings). My students will therefore know that I am pleased by what they have achieved and what, by their enthusiasm and willingness to go with a non-traditional structure, we have managed to achieve together. Was it perfect? No. I need to cater for students who are in transition more and remember that just because students can perform well academically, it does not magically grant them the associated maturity or ability to handle the unforeseen. It could certainly have been better organised and that was really down to the experimental nature of the course combined with my schedule. I was too busy, sometimes, to be as forward looking as I should have been (I was looking weeks out, rather than months). That will not happen next year. What’s really interesting is what my colleagues assume about these students. “Oh, they’re smart so they must have done all this maths or love maths or something.” No, they don’t. They come in with the usual range of courses you’d expect from students and have the usual range of likes and dislikes. They are, in a nutshell, students who happen to have worked out how to perform well under assessment. As it turns out, a GPA or ATAR (SAT) mark does not summarise a student, nor does achieving the same grade make you the same person. Shocking, I know.

But, snark aside, what a great experience and, from early indications, I am pretty confident that some of these students now have a completely different set of lenses through which to view the world. Now, of course, it is up to them. You might think that my posturing on an apolitical stance is just that, a posturing facade, but I am deadly serious about not imposing my political beliefs on my students. Yes, I firmly believe that there are a set of ethical standards that people in my discipline (Computer Science) and my calling (Education) should adhere to, but how you vote? None of my business. Next year, I hope to bring in more people from industry, more entrepreneurs, possibly even some more ‘challenging’ viewpoints. The world is complicated and the intellectual challenges are many. Me training students in dogma does nothing. Me training students in how they can think for themselves and then genuinely standing back to say “That was the toolkit, it’s up to you what you build” will truly test me and them.

Far too many times I’ve held forth on silly little points where I was wrong, or misinterpreting, and it didn’t help anything. I’ve always learned more from discussion than argument, and from informed disagreement rather than blind agreement. That’s the fine print on the PhD, as I read it, “be prepared to be wrong and then work out how to be right.”

If I were ever to work myself almost to collapse again, taking on too much, striving to develop an entirely new course for a new type of student that we haven’t really catered to before, while doing everything else – I would hope that at the end of the year, I could look back on something like Grand Challenges and nod, with satisfaction, because it worked. I’m looking forward to bouncing ideas off the course members over the next 6 months to get their feedback on the new direction, possibly using these students as mentors and tutors (good idea, MH) to help me run the course and to keep building the community. That’s what it was always about, after all. Yes, it was a course for students who could handle the academics but it was always about the biggest Grand Challenge of them all: getting people to work together to solve problems.

Turn on the news and you’ll see lot of problems at the moment. Running up to (yet another) end of the world, we are once again taking the crazy pills and, bluntly, it scares me. We have a lot of problems to solve and that will take people, working together, sharing, talking and using available resources to try and deal with things that could potentially destroy our species. If you have the opportunity to tun any kind of program that could assist with this – problem solving, community building, team formation, outreach to other schools, or whatever – please consider doing so. I’ll tell you, honestly, it’s one of the most rewarding things that I’ve ever done and I’ve been privileged to be able to do a lot of cool things.

Winding up 2012: Dear Students…

Posted: November 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dear Students,

After this week I will not see many of you until February of next year and, some of you, I may not see again because you’ll go on to do other things. This is the time of the year when I reflect upon what I have achieved in terms of contributing to the knowledge and skills of my students and how I can do it better. I have to start from the presumption that I can always improve upon what have I done but, even without that, accepting that every year will bring a different group, with different needs, forces me to think about the core of my teaching – as opposed to what actually came out in the teaching activities. What I always want to achieve is to help you develop yourselves. I can’t change you but I can help you change. If you know more, understand more or can do more at the end of the year, then I’m happy. If you go on to help other people, then I’m ecstatic!

Many people throughout your lives will tell you big, shiny success stories and expect you to take a certain path because there’s a big brass ring at the end. I have walked that path and have known success but, if we are being honest, success is not the same as happiness. Throughout the year we have discussed many things, scholarly and secular, but we have rarely had the time or the opportunity to talk about some of the most important things in life: the reasons why we do things and, ultimately, how it will make us feel. But you shouldn’t be listening to me because of who I am or how you think of me, I’m just another voice from our species and I have one of the many opinions. My friends will (I hope) tell you that I am mostly a good man, with some occasional moments of selfishness and stupidity. You should realise that almost everyone is like this. It would be impossible for us to live as we do, where we do, were this not so. The majority of people are good, most of the time, with occasional moments of stupidity. What that means, of course, is that we have a terrific amount of force to act against those who are always stupid or unpleasant – the silent majority is powerful.

Firstly, let me tell you how much I love our magnificent, terrible and bizarre species. We are terrible and beautiful. We are capable of acts of tremendous selflessness and kindness, yet sometimes we taint it with greed, selfishness and cruelty. We are driven by so many things and, the more I read, the more it becomes apparent that who we are, as individuals, is as much about the world around us, our families and friends, our education and our overall exposure to reality, as it is about ourselves. I can think of several points in my life where the intervention of other people has held me back from a terrible and destructive course, explicit examples of changing direction, but there are so many examples that speak of casual intervention: a smile on a day when I needed one, someone holding the door, being let into traffic after waiting forever.

To try and distill this species, into the “pull yourself up by your bootstrap” myths of Horatio Alger or to claim it is all emptiness and cynicism, is to sell us, and you, short. Fairy tales are conveniently small fictions, now separated from their original cautionary endings, that sell you a “happy ending” as a bill of goods, as if all you have to do is to kiss the frog, find the right name or have the right shoe size.

Nothing is that easy. If it is for you then, sadly, experience tells us that you will not really appreciate it that much. This is not a rationale for suffering but an observation of the bad behaviour that seems to come at certain levels of privilege. Be in no doubt, if you leave with a degree then you are privileged. This is not a matter of guilt or a burden, it’s just a fact. Some of you will never appreciate how lucky you were to go to University at a time of peace in a prosperous country because you do not quite realise how fortunate you were. You are no more or less entitled to be educated than the next person and it is pure accident that determines who enters school in a safe, highly educated, country, rather than trying to learn under gunfire in a cramped and broken classroom where you might be lucky to get to Year 6 before forced to go and work to keep your family alive. Some of you have made it through wars and fought your way to restart your education, surviving that and striving for more. Some of you represent minorities, first-in-family or face terrible ordeals that your peers will never quite understand. Many of you, facing no other impediment other than ignorance of a certain area, strive for more and to achieve a greater understanding. I salute all of you for your efforts, especially where you have reached out to help your peers. But why are you doing this?

We often fail to ask ourselves ‘why?’ “Why are you doing this degree?” “Why are you looking for this job?” “Why are you doing this?”

You will often be encouraged to believe that questions like “Am I happy?” or “Should I be doing this?” are somehow not appropriate questions – indicative of some sort of laziness when you should be seeking jobs and working harder, every single day. So, what are your plans? If your answer is “Get a job”, then which job are you looking for? If the answer to that is “a programming job”, then what kind of programming job? If you don’t know what you really want to do, then how will you know when you’ve found it? How can you search for something better? How will you say no to something that will make you miserable? What do you need to live and what do you need to make you happy? Can you combine them?  Many of you will have dependents and you will have to take the work that is offered, when it is offered. If you do have some freedom of movement now then I encourage you to make the best use of it so that, when people do depend upon you, you can support them with little or no resentment. Remember that rarely do the people we support ask for our help for any other reason than they need help. I always have to remember that when a student asks me a ‘silly’ question. It’s not about me – they just need my help and probably don’t yet realise what the question sounds like.

What makes you happy? Can you make it a job? Are you happy now? Do you actually want this degree? Why? Most students start University with no clear plan or understanding of why they’re doing it. Now, most students then end up finishing and having some idea of what they’re doing – and a Uni degree is a great thing to have when we teach it properly – but leaving after 3-5 years with a degree and no idea of direction means that finding something that you want to do is going to be a crap shoot. This must be tempered by the realities of your life because this is no fairytale.  You will give 5% of your time to some people and they will be so grateful in return that you will be embarrassed. You will try to give 200% to other people and they will only demand more. You will not necessarily know in advance which way this will go. Those of you have choice must remember that there are many, many more who don’t. Again, this is not about guilt but about perspective and valuing what you have, and what you can do.

I am, unashamedly, focused on actions taken for the good of us all: our community, our society and our home, which is far more than just a place for humans. I have spent time at a very low ebb over the years: depressed, deep in debt, terrible job or unemployed, living on almost no food for weeks, giving away my own books and CDs as gifts to not stand out at social gatherings, washing my clothes in the bathroom sinks at work to hide the fact that I couldn’t afford laundry powder or new clothes. I hope that none of this ever happens to you but you should be aware that this is happening, day after day, to people everywhere. Many of these people did not go to Uni, did not finish school, may not have basic literacy. How do you expect them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps when they have no boots and someone is standing on their toes (to quote Dr King).

I do not want to encourage you towards any movement, political, secular, religious or otherwise. It is none of my business what kind of “-ist” you become, if any, as long as you do so fairly, ethically and with respect and an appreciation of who you are and the people around you. I find myself constantly challenged to live up to my own beliefs and my ideals. Sometimes I do, sometimes I wish I had tried harder. That’s just how it is, for almost all of us.

My sincere wishes for a beautiful and happy future,

Nick.

A Late Post On Deadlines, Amusingly Enough

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

Currently still under a big cloud at the moment but I’m still teaching at Singapore on the weekend so I’m typing this at the airport. All of my careful plans to have items in the queue have been undermined by having a long enough protracted spell of illness (to be precise, I’m working at about half speed due to migraine or migraine-level painkillers). I have very good parts of the day where I teach and carry out all of the face-to-face things I need to do, but it drains me terribly and leaves me with no ‘extra’ time and it was the extra time I was using to do this. I’m confident that I will teach well over this weekend, I wouldn’t be going otherwise, but it will be a blur in the hotel room outside of those teaching hours.

This brings me back to the subject of deadlines. I’ve now been talking about my time banking and elastic time management ideas to a lot of people and I’ve got quite polished in my responses to the same set of questions. Let me distill them for you, as they have relevance to where I am at the moment:

  1. Not all deadlines can be made flexible.

    I completely agree. We have to grant degrees, finalise resource allocations and so on. Banking time is about teaching time management and the deadline is the obvious focal point, but some deadlines cannot be missed. This leads me to…

  2. We have deadlines in industry that are fixed! Immutable! Miss it and you miss out! Why should I grant students flexible deadlines?

    Because not all of your deadlines are immutable, in the same way that not all are flexible. The serious high-level government grants? The once in a lifetime opportunities to sell product X to company YYPL? Yes, they’re fixed. But to meet these fixed deadlines, we move those other deadlines that we can. We shift off other things. We work weekends. We stay up late. We delay reading something. When we learn how to manage our deadlines so that we can make time for those that are both important and immovable, we do so by managing our resources to shift other deadlines around.

    Elastic time management recognises that life is full of management decisions, not mindless compliance. Pretending that some tiny assignment of pre-packaged questions we’ve been using for 10 years is the most important thing in an 18 year old’s life is not really very honest. But we do know that the students will do things if they are important and we provide enough information that they realise this!

I have had to shift a lot of deadlines to make sure that I am ready to teach for this weekend. On top of that I’ve been writing a paper that is due on the 17th of November, as well as working on many other things. How did I manage this? I quickly looked across my existing resources (and remember I’m at half-speed, so I’ve had to schedule half my usual load) and broke things down into: things that had to happen before this teaching trip, and things that could happen after. I then looked at the first list and did some serious re-arrangement. Let’s look at some of these individually.

Blog posts, which are usually prepared 1-2 days in advance, are now written on the day. My commitment to my blog is important. I think it is valuable but, and this is key, no-one else depends upon it. The blog is now allocated after everything else, which is why I had my lunch before writing this. I will still meet my requirement to post every day but it may show up some hours after my usual slot.

I haven’t been sleeping enough, which is one of the reasons that I’m in such a bad way at the moment. All of my deadlines now have to work around me getting into bed by 10pm and not getting out before 6:15am. I cannot lose any more efficiency so I have to commit serious time to rest. I have also built in some sitting around time to make sure that I’m getting some mental relaxation.

I’ve cut down my meeting allocations to 30 minutes, where possible, and combined them where I can. I’ve said ‘no’ to some meetings to allow me time to do the important ones.

I’ve pushed off certain organisational problems by doing a small amount now and then handing them to someone to look after while I’m in Singapore. I’ve sketched out key plans that I need to look at and started discussions that will carry on over the next few days but show progress is being made.

I’ve printed out some key reading for plane trips, hotel sitting and the waiting time in airports.

Finally, I’ve allocated a lot of time to get ready for teaching and I have an entire day of focus, testing and preparation on top of all of the other preparation I’ve done.

What has happened to all of the deadlines in my life? Those that couldn’t be moved, or shouldn’t be moved, have stayed where they are and the rest have all been shifted around, with the active involvement of other participants, to allow me room to do this. That is what happens in the world. Very few people have a world that is all fixed deadline and, if they do, it’s often at the expense of the invisible deadlines in their family space and real life.

I did not learn how to do this by somebody insisting that everything was equally important and that all of their work requirements trumped my life. I am learning to manage my time maturely by thinking about my time as a whole, by thinking about all of my commitments and then working out how to do it all, and to do it well. I think it’s fair to say that I learned nothing about time management from the way that my assignments were given to me but I did learn a great deal from people who talked to me about their processes, how they managed it all and through an acceptance of this as a complex problem that can be dealt with, with practice and thought.

 

Stages of Acceptance

Posted: October 31, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Another short post while I get my head back from the migraine sequence I’ve been in.

I was speaking to someone from industry about some interesting ideas in networking and we had a great meeting because we were constantly agreeing on the resistance to new ideas. There’s a pretty standard set of responses, indicating the evolution of acceptance over time:

  1. It will never work.
  2. It may work but it won’t work here.
  3. Of course we should do that.

What we were discussing was currently in the stage 1/2 phase. Even where people could see its utility, they had a really good reason why it wouldn’t happen here. The first is straight out denial, of course. The second is special pleading, where a set of circumstances are identified as to why a general case (or accepted idea) does not apply here. The last is just plain old Human nature – I told you so.

We see so much separation between the different communities of practice across the disciplines and, regrettably, it’s possible for teaching practitioners to be (effectively) at stage 1 when the educational researchers and designers are at stage 3. Returning to Gladwell’s three requirements for the stickiness of idea, the environment in which the idea is presented and received makes a big difference: context is everything.

I suspect that next year will be one of building bridges for me, between one community and the next. Bridge building is essential if people will be able to walk from one state to another. The term Pontifex (bridge builder) is disputed in origin and is co-opted by churches now, but the existence of the term, whether it originally referred to roads or bridges, emphasises the importance of the role of the joiner, the people who brings things together.

Oh, good, another challenge. 🙂

Heading to SIGCSE!

Posted: October 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Snowed under – get it?

I’m pretty snowed under for the rest of the week and, while I dig myself out of a giant pile of papers on teaching first year programmers (apparently it’s harder than throwing Cay’s book at them and yelling “LEARN!”), I thought I’d talk about some of the things that are going on in our Computer Science Education Research Group. The first thing to mention is, of course, the group is still pretty new – it’s not quite “new car smell” territory but we are certainly still finding out exactly which direction we’re going to take and, while that’s exciting, it also makes for bitten fingernails at paper acceptance notification time.

We submitted a number of papers to SIGCSE and a special session on Contributing Student Pedagogy and collaboration, following up on our multi-year study on this and Computer Science Education paper. One of the papers and the special session have been accepted, which is fantastic news for the group. Two other papers weren’t accepted. While one was a slightly unfortunate near-miss (but very well done, lead author who shall remain nameless [LAWSRN]), the other was a crowd splitter. The feedback on both was excellent and it’s given me a lot to think about, as I was lead on the paper that really didn’t meet the bar. As always, it’s a juggling act to work out what to put into a paper in order to support the argument to someone outside the group and, in hindsight quite rightly, the reviewers thought that I’d missed the mark and needed to try a different tack. However, with one exception, the reviewers thought that there was something there worth pursuing and that is, really, such an important piece of knowledge that it justifies the price of admission.

Yes, I’d have preferred to have got it right first time but the argument is crucial here and I know that I’m proposing something that is a little unorthodox. The messenger has to be able to deliver the message. Marathons are not about messengers who run three steps and drop dead before they did anything useful!

The acceptances are great news for the group and will help to shape what we do for the next 12-18 months. We also now have some papers that, with some improvement, can be sent to another appropriate conference. I always tell my students that academic writing is almost never wasted because if it’s not used here, or published there, the least that you can learn is not to write like that or not about that topic. Usually, however, rewriting and reevaluation makes work stronger and more likely to find a place where you can share it with the world.

We’re already planning follow-up studies in November on some of the work that will be published at SIGCSE and the nature of our investigations are to try and turn our findings into practically applicable steps that any teacher can take to improve participation and knowledge transfer. These are just some of the useful ideas that we hope to have ready for March but we’ll see how much we get done. As always. We’re coming up to the busy end of semester with final marking, exams and all of that, as well as the descent into admin madness as we lose the excuse of “hey, I’d love to do that but I’m teaching.” I have to make sure that I wrestle enough research time into my calendar to pursue some of the exciting work that we have planned.

I look forward to seeing some of you in Colorado in March to talk about how it went!

Things to do in Denver when you’re Ed?

Making Time For Students

Posted: October 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I was reminded of my slightly overloaded calendar today as students came and went throughout the day, I raced in and out of project meetings and RV and I worked on some papers that we’re trying to get together for an upcoming submission date in the next few months. I wish I could talk about the research but, given that it will all have to go into peer review and some of the people reading this may end up being on those panels, it will all have to wait until we get accepted or it comes back on fire with a note written in blood saying “Don’t call us…”

For those following the Australian Research scene, you might know that the Australian Federal Government had put a hold on releasing information on key research funding schemes and that this has led to uncertainty for those people whose salaries are paid by research grants. Why is this important in a learning and teaching blog? Because the majority of Higher Education academics are involved in research, teaching and administration but it’s not too much of a generalisation to say that those who are the most successful have substantial help on the research front from well-established groups and staff who are paid to do research full-time.

Right now, as I write this, our postdoc (RV) is reviewing the terminology of certain aspects of the discipline to allow us to continue our research. RV is running citation analyses, digging through papers, peering at my scrawl on the whiteboard and providing a vital aspect to the project: uninterrupted dedication to the research question. I’m seeing students, holding meetings, dealing with technical problems, worrying about my own grants, preparing for a new course roll-out on Monday… and writing this. RV’s role is rapidly becoming critical to my ability to work.

There are thousands of dedicated researchers like RV across Australia and it is easy to quantify their contribution to research, but easy to overlook their implicit benefit in terms of learning and teaching. Every senior academic who is involved in research and teaching will most likely only still be teaching because they someone to carry on the research and maintain the focus and continuity that only comes from having one major area to work on.

I think of it in terms of gearing. When I’m talking to other researchers, I use one set of mental gears. Inside my own group, I use another because we are all much more closely aligned. I use a completely different set when I talk to students and this set varies by year level, course and student! Making time for students is not just a case of having an hour in my calendar. Making time for students is a matter of making the mental space for a discussion that will be at the appropriate level. It’s having enough time to have a chat rather than a rapid-fire exchange. I don’t always succeed at this because far too many of my students apologise to me for taking up my time. Argh! My time is student time! It’s what I get a good 40% of my salary for! (Not that we’re counting. Like most academics, when asked what percentage of my time I spent on the three areas of research, teaching and admin, I say 50,50,40. 🙂 )

Now I am not, by any means, a senior academic and I am very early on in this process, so you can imagine how important those research staff are going to be in keeping projects going for senior staff who are having to make those gear changes at a very rapid speed across much larger domains. Knowledge workers need the time and headspace to think and switching context takes up valuable time, as well as tiring you out if you do it often enough.

On that basis, the recent news that the Government is unfreezing the medical research schemes and at least some of the major awards for everyone else is good news. My own grant in this area is highly unlikely to get up – my relief is not actually for myself, here – but we are already worried about an increased rate of departure for those researchers who are concerned about having a job next year and are, because of their skills and experience, highly mobile. The impact of these people leaving will not just be felt in terms of research output, which has a multi-year lag, but will be felt immediately wherever learning and teaching depended upon someone having the time and mental space to do it, because they had a member of the research staff supporting their other work. Universities are a complex ecosystem and there are very important connections between staff in different areas and areas of focus that are not immediately apparent when you make the simplistic distinction of staff (professional and academic) and, for academics, research/teaching/admin, research/admin, teaching/admin, pure research and pure teaching. The number of courses that I have to teach depends upon the number of staff available to teach, as well as the number of courses and students, and the number of staff (or their available hours) is directly affected by the number of people who help them.

It’s good news that the research funds are starting to unfreeze because it will say to the people who are depending upon grant money that an answer is coming soon. It’s also saying to the rest of us that we can start to think about planning and allocation for 2013 with more certainty, because the monies will be coming at some point.

This, in turn, stops me having to worry about things like contingency plans, who is going to be working with me, and how I will fund research assistants into 2014 because now I have a possibility of a grant, rather than a placeholder in a frozen scheme. This reduces my  current overheads (for a while) and frees up some headspace. With any luck, the next student who walks into my office will not realise exactly how busy I am – and that’s the way that I like it.

Thoughts on Overloading: I Still Appear to be Ignoring My Own Advice

Posted: October 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The delicate art of Highway Jenga(TM)

I was musing recently on the inherent issues with giving students more work to do, if they are already overloaded to a point where they start doing questionable things (like cheating). A friend of mine is also going through a contemplation of how he seems to be so busy that fitting in everything that he wants to do keeps him up until midnight. My answer to him, which includes some previous comments from other people, is revealing – not least because I am talking through my own lens, and I appear to still feel that I am doing too much.

Because I am a little too busy, I am going to repost (with some editing to remove personal detail and clarify) what I wrote to him, which distils a lot of my thoughts over the past few months on overloading. This was all in answer to the question: “How do people fit everything in?”

You have deliberately committed to a large number of things and you wish to perform all of them at a high standard. However, to do this requires that you spend a very large amount of time, including those things that you need to do for your work.

Most people do one of three things:

    1. they do not commit to as much,
    2. they do commit to as much but do it badly, or
    3. they lie about what they are doing because claiming to be a work powerhouse is a status symbol.

A very, very small group of people can buck the well documented long-term effects of overwork but these peopler are in the minority. I would like to tell you what generally happens to people who over-commit, while readily admitting that this might not apply to you. Most of this is based on research, informed by bitter personal experience.

The long-term effects of overwork (as a result of over-commitment) are sinister and self-defeating. As fatigue increases, errors increase. The introduction of errors requires you to spend more time to achieve tasks because you are now doing the original task AND fixing errors, whether the errors are being injected by you or they are actually just unforeseen events because your metacognitive skills (resource organisation) are being impaired by fatigue.

However, it’s worse than that because you start to lose situational awareness as well. You start to perform tasks because they are there to perform, without necessarily worrying about why or how you’re doing it. Suddenly, not only are you tired and risking the introduction of errors, you start to lose the ability to question whether you should be carrying out a certain action in the first place.

Then it gets worse again because not only do obstacles now appear to be thrown up with more regularity (because your error rates are going up, your frustration levels are high and you’re losing resource organisational ability) but even the completion of goals merely becomes something that facilitates more work. Having completed job X, because you’re over-committed, you must immediately commence job X+1. Goal completion, which should be a time for celebration and reflection, now becomes a way to open more gateways of burden. Goals delayed become a source of frustration. The likely outcome is diminished enjoyment and an encroaching sense of work, work, work. 

[I have removed a paragraph here that contained too much personal detail of my friend.]

So, the question is whether your work is too much, given everything else that you want to do, and only you can answer this question as to whether you are frustrated by it most of the time and whether you are enjoying achieving goals, or if they are merely opening more doors of work. I don’t expect you to reply on this one but it’s an important question – how do you feel when you open your eyes in the morning? How often are you angry at things? Is this something that you want to continue for the foreseeable future? 

Would you still do it, if you didn’t have to pay the rent and eat?

Regrettably, one of the biggest problems with over-commitment is not having time to adequately reflect. However, long term over-commitment is clearly demonstrated (through research) to be bad for manual labourers, soldiers, professionals, and knowledge workers. The loss of situational awareness and cognitive function are not good for anyone. 

My belief is that an approach based on listening to your body and working within sensible and sustainable limits is possible for all aspects of life but readily acknowledge that transition away from over-commitment to sustainable commitment can be very, very hard. I’m facing that challenge at the moment and know that it is anything but easy. I’m not trying to lecture you, I’m trying to share my own take on it, which may or may not apply. However, you should always feel free to drop by for a coffee to chat, if you like, and I hope that you have some easier and less committed times ahead.

Reading through this, I reminded of how much work I have left to do in order to reduce my overall commitments to sensible levels. It’s hard, sometimes, because there are so many things that I want to do but I can easily point to a couple of indicators that tell me that I still don’t quite have the balance right. For example, I’m managing my time at the moment, but that’s probably because being unable to run has given me roughly 8 hours  a week back to spend elsewhere. I am getting things done because I am using up almost all of that running time but working in it instead. And that, put simply, means I’m regularly working longer hours than I should.

Looking back at the advice, I am projecting my own problems with goals: completing something merely unlocks new burdens, and there is very little feeling of finalisation. I am very careful to try and give my students closure points, guidance and a knowledge of when to stop. Time to take a weekend and reflect on how I can get that back for myself – and still do everything cool that I want to do! 🙂

Workshop report: ALTC Workshop “Assessing student learning against the Engineering Accreditation Competency Standards: A practical approach. Part 2.

Posted: October 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Continuing on from yesterday’s post, I was discussing the workshop that I went to and what I’d learned from it. I finished on the point that assessment of learning occurs when Lecturers:

  • Use evidence of student learning
  • to make judgements on student achievement
  • against goals and standards

but we have so many other questions to ask at this stage. What were our initial learning objectives? What were we trying to achieve? The learning outcome is effectively a contract between educator and student so we plan to achieve them, but how they fit in the context of our accreditation and overall requirements? One of the things stressed in the workshop was that we need a range of assessment tasks to achieve our objectives:

  • We need a wide variety
  • These should be open-entry where students can begin the tasks from a range of previous learning levels and we cater for different learning preferences and interests
  • They should be open-ended, where we don’t railroad the students towards a looming and monolithic single right answer, and multiple pathways or products are possible
  • We should be building students’ capabilities by building on the standards
  • Finally, we should provide space for student ownership and decision making.

Effectively, we need to be able to get to the solution in a variety of ways. If we straitjacket students into a fixed solution we risk stifling their ability to actually learn and, as I’ve mentioned before, we risk enforcing compliance to a doctrine rather than developing knowledgeable self-regulated learners. If we design these activities properly then we should find the result reduces student complaints about fairness or incorrect assumptions about their preparation. However, these sorts of changes take time and, a point so important that I’ll give it its own line:

You can’t expect to change all of your assessment in one semester!

The advice from Wageeh and Jeff was to focus on an aspect, monitor it, make your change, assess it, reflect and then extend what you’ve learned to other aspects. I like this because, of course, it sounds a lot like a methodical scientific approach to me. Because it is. As to which assessment methods you should choose, the presenters recognised that working out how to make a positive change to your assessment can be hard so they suggested generating a set of alternative approaches and then picking one. They then introduced Prus and Johnson’s 1994 paper “A critical review of Student Assessment Options” which provide twelve different assessment methods and their drawbacks and advantages. One of the best things about this paper is that there is no ‘must’ or ‘right’, there is always ‘plus’ and ‘minus’.

Want to mine archival data to look at student performance? As I’ve discussed before, archival data gives you detailed knowledge but at a time when it’s too late to do anything for that student or a particular cohort in that class. Archival data analysis is, however, a fantastic tool for checking to see if your prerequisites are set correctly. Does their grade in this course correlate with grades in the prereqs? Jeff mentioned a student where the students should have depended upon Physics and Maths but, while their Physics mark correlated with their final Statics mark, Mathematics didn’t. (A study at Baldwin-Wallace presented at SIGCSE 2012 asked the more general question: what are the actual dependencies if we carry out a Bayesian Network Analysis. I’m still meaning to do this for our courses as well.)

Other approaches, such as Surveys, are quick and immediate but are all perceptual. Asking a student how they did on a quiz should never be used as their actual mark! The availability of time will change the methods you choose. If you have a really big group then you can statistically sample to get an indication but this starts to make your design and tolerance for possible error very important.

Jeff stressed that, in all of this assessment, it was essential to never give students an opportunity to gain marks in areas that are not the core focus. (Regular readers know that this is one of my design and operational mantras, as it encourages bad behaviour, by which I mean incorrect optimisation.)

There were so many other things covered in this workshop and, sadly, we only had three hours. I suggested that the next time it was run that they allow more time because I believe I could happily have spent a day going through this. And I would still have had questions.

We discussed the issue of subjectivity and objectivity and the distinction between setting and assessment. Any way that I set a multiple choice quiz is going to be subjective, because I will choose the questions based on my perception of the course and assessment requirements, but it is scored completely objectively.

We also discussed data collection as well because there are so many options here. When will we collect the data? If we collect continuously, can we analyse and react continuously? What changes are we making in response? This is another important point:

If you collect data in order to determine which changes are to be made, tie your changes to your data driven reasons!

There’s little point in saying “We collected all student submission data for three years and then we went to multiple choice questions” unless you can provide a reason from the data, which will both validate your effort in collection and give you a better basis for change. When do I need data to see if someone is clearing the bar? If they’re not, what needs to be fixed? What do I, as a lecturer, need to collect during the process to see what needs to be fixed, rather than the data we collect at the end to determine if they’ve met the bar.

How do I, as a student, determine if I’m making progress along the way? Can I put all of the summative data onto one point? Can I evaluate everything on a two-hour final exam?

WHILE I’m teaching the course, are the students making progress, do they need something else, how do I (and should I) collect data throughout the course. A lot of what we actually collect is driven by the mechanisms that we already have. We need to work out what we actually require and this means that we may need to work beyond the systems that we have.

Again, a very enjoyable workshop! It’s always nice to be able to talk to people and get some really useful suggestions for improvement.

Brief Stats Update: I appear to have written two more books

Posted: October 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

On May 6th, I congratulated Mark Guzdial on his 1000th post and I noted that I had written 102,136 words, an average of 676 words per post, with 151 posts over 126 days. I commented that, at that rate, I could expect to produce about 180,000 more words by the end of the year, for a total of about 280,000. So, to summarise, my average posting level was at rate of 1.2 posts per day, and 676 words per post.

Today, I reanalysed the blog to see how I was going. This post will be published on Tuesday the 9th, my time, and the analysis here does not include itself. So, up until all activity on Monday the 8th, Central Australian Daylight Saving Time, here are the stats.

Total word count: 273,639. Total number of posts: 343. Number of words per post: 798. Number of posts per day: 1.23. I will reach my end of year projected word count in about 9 days.

I knew that I had been writing longer posts, you may remember that I’ve deliberately tried to keep the posts to around 1,000 where possible, but it’s obvious that I’m just not that capable of writing a short post! In the long term, I’d expect this to approach 1,000 words/post because of my goal to limit myself to that, with the occasional overshoot. I’m surprised by the consistency in number of posts per day. The previous average was a smidgen under 1.2 but I wanted to clarify that there has been a minor increase. Given that my goal was not to necessarily hit exactly 1/day but to set aside time to think about learning and teaching every day, I’m happy with that.

The word count, however, is terrifying. One of the reasons that I wanted to talk about this is to identify how much work something like this is, not to either over inflate myself or to put you off, but to help anyone out there who is considering such a venture. Let me explain some things first.

  1. I have been typing in one form or another since 1977. I was exposed to computers early on and, while I’ve never been trained to touch type, I have that nasty hybrid version where I don’t use all of my fingers but still don’t have to look at the keyboard.
  2. I can sustain a typing speed of about 2,500 words/hour for fiction for quite a long time. That includes the aspects of creativity required, not dictation or transcription. It is very tiring, however, and too much of it makes me amusingly incoherent.
  3. I do not have any problems with repetitive strain injury and I have a couple of excellent working spaces with fast computers and big screens.
  4. I love to write.

So, I’m starting from a good basis and, let me stress, I love to write. Now let me tell you about the problems that this project has revealed.

  1. I produce two kinds of posts: research focused and the more anecdotal. Anecdotal posts can be written up quickly but the moment any research, pre-reading or reformulation is required, it will take me about an hour or two to get a post together. So that cute high speed production drops to about 500-1000 words/hour.
  2. Research posts are the result of hours of reading and quite a lot of associated thought. My best posts start from a set of papers that I read, I then mull on it for a few days and finally it all comes together. I often ask someone else to look at the work to see how it sits in the queue.
  3. I’m always better when I don’t have to produce something for tomorrow. When the post queue is dry, I don’t have the time to read in detail or mull so I have to either pull a previous draft from the queue and see if I can fix it (and I’ve pretty much run out of those) or I have to come up with an idea now and write it now. All too often, these end up being relatively empty opinion pieces.
  4. If you are already tired, writing can be very tiring and you lose a lot of the fiero and inspiration from writing a good post.

I have probably spent, by all of these figures and time estimates, somewhere around 274 hours on this project. That’s just under 7 working weeks at 40 hours/week. No wonder I feel tired sometimes!

I am already, as you know, looking to change the posting frequency next year because I wish to focus on the quality of my work rather than the volume of my output. I still plan to have that hour or so put aside every day to contemplate and carry out research on learning and teaching but it will no longer be tied to an associated posting deadline. My original plan had an output requirement to force me to carry out the work. Unsurprisingly, oh brave new world that has such extrinsic motivating factors in it, I have become focused on the post, rather than the underlying research. My word count indicates that I am writing but, once this year is over, the review that I carry out will be to make sure that every word written from that point on is both valuable and necessary. My satisfaction in the contribution and utility of those posts I do make will replace any other quantitative measures of output.

My experience in this can be summarised quite simply. Setting a posting schedule that is too restrictive risks you putting the emphasis on the wrong component, where setting aside a regular time to study and contemplate the issues that lead to a good post is a far wiser investment. If you want to write this much, then it cannot be too much of a chore and, honestly, loving writing is almost essential, I feel. Fortunately, I have more than enough to keep the post queue going to the end of the year, as I’m working on a number of papers and ideas that will naturally end up here but I feel that I have, very much, achieved what I originally set to to do. I now deeply value the scholarship of learning and teaching and have learned enough to know that I have a great deal more to learn.

From a personal perspective, I believe that all of the words written have been valuable to me but, from next year, I have to make sure that the words I write are equally valuable to other people.

I’ll finish with something amusing. Someone asked me the other day how many words I’d written and, off the top of my head, I said “about 140,000” and thought that I was possibly over-claiming. The fact that I was under claiming by almost a factor of two never would have occurred to me, nor the fact that I had written more words than can be found in Order of the Phoenix. While I may wish to reclaim my reading time once this is over, for any fiction publishers reading this, I will have some free time next year! 🙂

October Reflection: Planning for 2013

Posted: October 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

When I was younger, I used to play a science fiction role-playing game that was based in a near-ish future, where humans had widely adopted the use of electronic implants and computers were everywhere in a corporate-dominated world. The game was called “Cyberpunk 2013” and was heavily influenced by the work of William Gibson (“Neuromancer” and many other works), Bruce Sterling (“Mirrorshades” anthology and far too many to list), Walter Jon Williams (“Hardwired” among others) and many others who had written of a grim, depressing, and above all stylish near future. It was a product of the 80s and, much like other fashion crime of the time, some of the ideas that emerged were conceits rather than concepts, styles rather than structures. But, of course, back in the 1980s, setting it in 2013 made it far away and yet close enough. This was not a far future setting like Star Trek but it was just around the corner.

The game had some serious issues but was a great deal of fun. Don’t start me talking about it or we’ll be here all night.

And now it is here. My plans for the near future, the imminent and the inevitable, now include planning calendars for a year that was once a science fiction dream. In that dark dream, 2013 was a world of human/machine synthesis, of unfeeling and mercenary corporate control, of mindless pleasure and stylish control of a population that seeks to float as lotus eaters rather than continue to exist in the dirty and poor reality of their actual world.

Well, we haven’t yet got the cybernetics working… and, joking aside, the future is not perfect but it is far less gloomy and dramatic in the main that the authors envisioned. Yes, there are lots of places to fix but the majority of our culture is still working to the extent that it can be developed and bettered. The catastrophic failures and disasters of the world of 2013 has not yet occurred. We can’t relax, of course, and some things are looking bleak, but this is not the world of Night City.

In the middle of all of this musing on having caught up to the future that I envisioned as a boy, I am now faced with the mundane questions such as:

  • What do I want to be doing in 2020 (the next Cyberpunk release was set in this year, incidentally)
  • Therefore, what do I want to be doing in 2013 that will lead me towards 2020?
  • What is the place of this blog in 2013?

I won’t bore you with the details of my career musings (if my boss is reading this, I’m planning to stay at work, okay?) but I had always planned that the beginning of October would be a good time to muse about the blog and work out what would happen once 2012 ended. I committed to writing the blog every day, focussed on learning and teaching to some extent, but it was always going to be for one year and then see what happened.

I encourage my students to reflect on what they’ve done but not in a ‘nostalgic’ manner (ah, what a great assignment) but in a way that the can identify what worked, what didn’t work and how they could improve. So let me once again trot out the dog food and the can opener and give it a try.

What has worked

I think my blog has been most successful when I’ve had a single point to make, I’ve covered it in depth and then I’ve ducked out. Presenting it with humour, humility, and an accurate assessment of the time that people have to read makes it better. I think some of my best blogs present information and then let people make up their own minds. The goal was always to present my thought processes, not harangue people.

What hasn’t worked

I’m very prone to being opinionated and, sometimes, I think I’ve blogged too much opinion and too little fact. I also think that there are tangents I’ve taken when I’ve become more editorial and I’m not sure that this is the blog for that. Any blog over about 1,100 words is probably too long for people to read and that’s why I strive to keep the blog at or under 1,000 words.

Having to blog every day has also been a real challenge. While it keeps a flow of information going, the requirement to come up with something every, single, day regardless of how I’m feeling or what is going on is always going to have an impact on quality. For example, I recently had a medical condition that required my doctor to prescribe some serious anti-inflammatory drugs and painkillers for weeks and this had a severe impact on me. I have spent the last 10 days shaking off the effects of these drugs that, among other effects, make me about half as fast at writing and reduce my ability to concentrate. The load of the blog on top of this has been pretty severe and I’m open about some of the mistakes that I’ve made during this time. Today is the first day that I feel pretty reasonable and, by my own standards, fit for fair, complex marking of large student submissions (which is my true gauge of my mental agility).

How to improve

Wow, good question. This is where the thinking process starts, not stops, after such an inventory. The assessment above indicates that I am mostly happy with what came out (and my readership/like figures indicate this as well) but that I really want to focus on quality over quantity and to give myself the ability to take a day off if I need to. But I should also be focused on solid, single issue, posts that address something useful and important in learning and teaching – and this requires more in-depth reading and work than I can often muster on a day-to-day basis.

In short, I’m looking to change my blog style for next year to a shorter and punchier version that gives more important depth, maintains an overall high standard, but allows me to get sick or put my feet up occasionally. What is the advice that I would give a student? Make a plan that includes space for the real world and that still allows you to do your best work. Content matters more than frequency, as long as you meet your real deadline. So, early notice for 2013, expect a little less regularity but a much more consistent output.

It’s a work in progress. More as I think of it.

 

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