Strange Aeons

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Simon Wells
Simon Wells

Simon Wells is an academic researching Argumentation Theory, Automated Reasoning, Intelligent Agents (IA) and MultiAgent Systems (MAS) all approached through a ludic lens.

He is particularly interested in how these tools can be usefully applied to critical literacy, security, gamification, and complex systems.

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2011 (12)
2010 (27)
2009 (3)
 

Scooby Doo as Critical Thinking Training for Children

Scoobydoo
Over at Comics Alliance there is a nice "Ask Chris" post that sets out to answer the Question, "On Scooby-Doo, do you prefer the monsters to be real or people in costumes?". What is nice about the answer "people in costumes" is that Chris goes further and claims that "there should never, ever be even a trace of the supernatural in the world of Scooby-Doo".

This is because Scooby-Doo is not about the supernatural, its not really a cartoon about kids fighting monsters but about kids looking for truth.

"the world is full of grown-ups who lie to kids, and that it's up to those kids to figure out what those lies are and call them on it, even if there are other adults who believe those lies with every fiber of their being. And the way that you win isn't through supernatural powers, or even through fighting. The way that you win is by doing the most dangerous thing that any person being lied to by someone in power can do: You think."


Seen through the lense of late sixties idealism, Scooby-Doo becomes a cartoon in which the viewer is trained to understand that whatever the mystery, you just have to observe, ask questions, and think to come up with rational explanations. The monsters don't really exist, just bad people who want to make you too scared to look, let alone ask questions or think, so that they can take advantage. Against this backdrop Scooby-Doo becomes a really nice way to educate children in the prerequisite skills of critical thinking: (1) observing, (2) questioning, and (3) thinking.

 

Addendum: There is also a nice discussion thread about this over at BoingBoing

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NYC Odyssey Day 2

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I spent this morning writing up ideas based upon yesterdays chats with Simon, having had the evening to let my brain digest everything I had seen and heard and start to come up with new directions and links between topics. Early afternoon I needed a change of scenery from my hotel room so I jumped on the subway and headed over to Coney Island. There was a tentative plan to meet Simon this afternoon so I was waiting on his call. So with the twin thoughts of lunch and a change from work I had a Nathan's Famous Hot Dog and fries (well I was on Coney Island, the home of the hotdog). I then visited the NY Aquarium and spent a couple of hours seeing the various water related animals before going to the Coney Island Sideshow where I had a beer whilst watching Donny Vomit do the human blockhead, Heather Holiday swallowing swords, and Black Scorpion with his super wonder hands. I think on Coney Island I found my spiritual home amongst the faded americana and old fashioned showmanship. Later this afternoon I got a call from Simon and met him at Brooklyn College before heading over to Manhattan for drinks, food, and chat with him and Betsy first in a small cafe called "Roots and Vines" then at one of those small quite bars that I mentioned yesterday. I got back to my hotel at a reasonable hour and basically flaked out, the heat of a NY summer, the excitement of somewhere completely different to home (and yet curiously familiar because of the influence of American TV, Films, and culture in general) have just left my knackered.
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NYC Odyssey Day 1

I flew into JFK on Monday evening. After remembering how the subway works, what card I needed, and understanding the map I then did a combination of subway (Airtrain, A, G, F, and Q lines) and walking to get to my hotel. By the time I got there it was dark and I had yomped my bag for a good mile or so on foot in evening temperatures that were quite a bit warmer than those I left in Dundee. So my first full day here was Tuesday. I headed up to Brooklyn College and spent some time seeing the first day of the Bridges to Computer Summer School where the kids get a taste of computer science through fun and interesting topics such as Cryptography, Graphics, Web Design, Robotics, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). I managed to get a good idea of what the scheme is about then managed to grab some time to chat with Simon Parsons about researchy stuff. They are doing some interesting work here involving agents, argumentation, and education which parallels and dovetails quite nicely with some of the topics that I have been looking at recently. I spent a bit of time explaining some of the research and teaching that I have been involved in, such as argumentation teaching, MAgtALO, DGDL, strategic argumentation, argument blogging, online visualisation of argument (OVA). I then talked about the ideas that are beginning to form for how some of these could be recombined and deployed as teaching tools in a learning support context. The main thrust is that agents and argumentation systems, both individually and separately, offer useful teaching and learning support tools that could be used in university level classes, particularly teaching introductory computer science, problem solving, and critical thinking. I also have an idea for an argumentative dialogue based online application that fits into the GoogleWave distributed collaboration mode and that uses a novel interface. Lunch was two slices of pizza and a can of juice with the kids and instructors -- I helped with serving up the food to everyone and getting it shifted to the right place at the right time. Afterwards Simon and Betsy were pretty tired from the running around organising stuff so I headed back to my hotel before heading out to get a T-Bone steak which tasted pretty bloody good. All in all a good day  was had . It was quite productive with the beginnings of a number of ideas for collaborative research. I wasn't sure how much I would like Brooklyn but I have warmed to it greatly. My last visit here was confined to Manhattan and I found that the Greenwich area was really quite nice. For evenings out I like the small quiet bars that are dotted around everywhere where the music isn't too loud, the bartenders are friendly and talkative, and there is rarely any waiting for a fresh drink. I haven't yet found a decent bar in the Sheepshead bay area that is like that -- mostly it seems to be restaurants and tourists, though I am probably wrong. Then again I have a decent shop a minutes walk from my hotel which has a fine selection of bottled beers in the chiller, at least as good a range as Tesco has back home, so I think that I can manage.
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Working on my CMNA Presentation

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This Dilbert cartoon seemed apropo given that I am still working on my CMNA9 presentation of the Argument Blogging Project work. I managed to record a short film of Colin talking about his project at the School of Computing 09 degree show held in the Queen Mother Building at Dundee University. I am not a videographer but I think that I managed to capture the essence of Colin's implementation work on the project (or rather Colin managed to make a good presentation and I managed to hold the camera reasonably steadily and zoom in/out and focus on the relevant bits almost at the right times).

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CMNA 9, IJCAI'09, & Travelling

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I will be at CMNA 9 on the 13th of July and given the nice mixture of theory and application at previous CMNA workshops, I thought that this XKCD strip would fit nciely. This year's CMNA will be held during IJCAI in Pasadena, California which means that I have some intercontinental travel coming up. First though I will be spending a week at Brooklyn College in N.Y. visiting Simon Parsons and finding out about their argumentation, intelligent agent, and  C.S. Education research. Luckily this will coincide with the Bridges to Computing summer school which should give me some food for thought on how other institutions attract and retain C.S. students. Hopegully this will be a busy, exciting, and productive east coast stopover on the way to California.
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Dundee Students @ Yahoo! HackDay

We (meaning Andy) have run a successful Yahoo! HackDay at Dundee for the last couple of years. This year some of our students went down to the Yahoo! OpenHack event in Londidium to present their own hack: IntelliSearch, for which they won Best Mozilla Hack. Anyhow, two of the three students who developed IntelliSearch, Laurence & Chris, have been working in their spare time, on a multiplayer online game called Zandrok. Anyhow, yesterday I met with Chris to discuss his fourth year project which will use software agents in relation to Zandrok. More information will be forthcoming once we iron out what exactly we plan to achieve, but it should be an exciting project. In the meantime, here is the IntelliSeach presentation:

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Mixing Things Up

An interesting post over at Study Hacks that suggests that changing study patterns can help you to study better. I think that changing your work patterns can also make you better at what you do regardless of whether you are a student or not. Asking yourself  "is this the best way to achieve my goal?" or "is there a better way to do this?" or otherwise just realising that "this is stale I want to try something different and let serendipity help me along" can help you to break out of those patterns that you just fall into. Taking into account the results of this kind of reflection can lead to an improvement in your work habits. Sometimes though we do need to take a step back, tear down the set of habits and work patterns that we have constructed, and start to build something new and ideally more effective. Some of the benefits of this approach are listed in the Study Hacks article, e.g.
  1. It frees you from the grasp of particularly devastating hidden assumptions.
  2. It acknowledges the fact that you learn more about studying as you progress through your career.
  3. It introduces novelty.
I have edited benefit 2 however because I don't think that this is a good technique only for students, as an academic at the start of my career I am still trying to refine effective work habits that will lead to a sustained output of high quality research. Partly this is of course just down to putting in time and hard work, just like in everything else, but I can improve my chances by improving my work habits.
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A Craftsman's Tools...

So there has been talk of standardising the ways that materials are made available to students. Dundee University has a web based system called MyDundee that is supposed to be the standard virtual learning environment for the university. I haven't gotten around to using this yet. I have logged in several times but I find the entire system to be quite impenetrable and contrary to the user interaction experience that we teach about in the School of Computing. There are a number of problems that I have with the system, apart from the useability, one is that I am essentially being dictated to as to which tools I should use to engage with my students, as opposed to allowing me the academic judgement to select the best tools for the job. I am not convinced that a one size fits all approach is an appropriate way to deliver academic materials across all of the subject domains taught at Dundee. More seriously, is the fact that the minimum requirements for the MyDundee system don't match the teaching environment for my second year module. The students are required to learn and use Linux during this module, but Linux is unsupported in the published technical specifications, so I run the risk of having teaching materials for a module locked away in a system that isn't guaranteed to be accessible from the systems that the module is teaching which is a little Kafkaesque. Additionally, having bitten the bullet and logged into the system, I find that right now I am not even able to access any of the modules that I actually teach! The current system I use is a wordpress blog for each taught subject. This requires only that students have access to a relatively modern web browser if they want to get access to all of the materials for the module. Additionally the materials aren't locked away behind an access wall so anybody who is interested can access them. This has two benefits, firstly lecturers at other universities around the world have occasionally found interesting and useful ideas in my lecture materials, which is quite gratifying to me, and secondly it means that I am backing up the argument that studying at Dundee is about more than just the material covered but is about the experience of actually coming here and interacting with, at least in the case of the School of Computing, a fairly excellent group of highly motivated individuals. If open access to learning materials is good enough for MIT, Berkeley, Notre Dame, Yale, Tufts, and Stanford, then surely it is good enough for us?
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Remove the nonreferential this to improve clarity

Over at Phillip Wadler's blog there is a post pointing out an article in the latest CACM which, in a sidebar at the bottom of page 36, suggests that it is a good idea to chase instances of the nonreferential this from student's written work.
While it sounds pedantic at first, you get a huge increase in clarity by chasing the "nonreferential this" from students' writing. Many students (and others) use "this" to refer to a whole concept rather than a noun. For example: "If you turn the sproggle left, it will jam, and the glorp will not be able to move. This is why we foo the bar." Now the writer of this prose fully understands about sproggles and glorps, so they know whether we foo the bar because glorps do not move, or because the sproggle jammed. It is important for students to put themselves in the place of their readers, who may be a little shaky on how sproggles and glorps work, and need a more carefully written paragraph. Today, it is not that hard to find a "this" that is nonreferential. Almost all begin sentences, so grepping for 'This' will find them.
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Academic Earth

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Academic Earth is a relatively new site where scholars post video lectures from their academic courses. Whilst MIT has been doing something similar for ages with their Open Courseware project and Berkeley has had the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) lecture videos available for ages, I like that this has a really nice online interface that presents all of the available videos from many different sources in a fairly uniform fashion. Anyhow, I have had a good look through the Computer Science lectures and found a number that are of interest to me including the aforementioned SICP which I should finally try to watch and understand, as well as Operating Systems and System Programming and Machine Structures which are both relevant to my AC2B module, and Circuits and Electronics which isn't relevant to anything I teach or actively research but looks just darn interesting from a personal perspective. Particularly nice is that lectures can be downloaded, as MP4, shared or embedded in lots of web 2.0 type ways. As revision materials I think that they could be very useful from an academic perspective.
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