Strange Aeons

Commencing Countdown. Engines On.

It is rather late in the season for me to address this now but maybe by posting about it I will remind myself to try out some of these ideas next year (<ominous clouds/dark horizons>assuming there is a teaching next year for me</ominous clouds/dark horizons>). Over at casting out nines Robert has made a few points about how he begins the teaching year, for example, spending about ten minutes on course structure before diving straight into the material - something that I could afford to do more often- rather than spending most, if not all, of the first session telling the students what to expect. As one of the commenters points out, this approach has to be differentiated depending upon the level of the students, more support and gentle introductions for first and second years versus diving straight in for the third, fourth, and postgrads. Screen casts to illustrate aspects of course management are an interesting idea, something that I think I will definitely try out with Araucaria next year, as, year on year, students have complained about how unintuitive the interface is. With course management though I don't think that even first year computing students need a screencast to introduce them to using wordpress which is how I do all of my course management. What is most interesting, and something that I hadn't really considered, is the idea that many students form their lasting impressions of the module in the first few moments, and that these impressions stay with them throughout the semester. Managing those impressions, and hence the expectations and feelings of the students in the first few moments could, as a result, have a large effect on how smoothly the rest of the module runs. Finally, I like the idea of using a list of assignments to give the students a constant stream of activities and things to do. Mostly, outside of labs and lectures, I have the feeling that many students don't do anything related to their modules. With the advent of the new attendance registers in the school many more students are turning up regularly to their lectures but I am not sure of how much additional attention is being paid to course materials. I have always assumed that most students were at least as interested in the subject matter as me and that they would therefore be reading the required texts and doing their own background readings. In all likelihood, except for official assessments and exams at the end, I know that there is very little actual set work for my modules. I don't mark lab exercises I just expect them to be done as I know that they are essential to being able to both complete the courseworks and perform successfully in the exam. Maybe what I could do is start setting more work, more specific readings, and more exercises so that the students can engage in deliberate practise from an earlier point in the module rather than relying on trying to stay awake during lectures and cramming shortly before the exams.

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Deliberately Improving Teaching Ability

An article over at Study Hacks about the traits and practises of good teachers entitled "On Great Teachers and the Remarkable Life: A Deliberate Practise Case Study". Reporting on the Teach for America program and an associated article in the Atlantic called "What Makes a Great Teacher", there are a couple of things that I found interesting. Some of them were specific techniques such as:

getting students to write answers onto cards that are simultaneously held aloft so that no student is embarrassed if their answer is incorrect, but also the students who are struggling can be noted by the teacher and given extra support,
a variation on peer learning that splits the class into small groups to work on new material - with the role of team leader frequently rotating. The aim of this is to build upon the natural tendency of students to listen to their peers
passing an answer to a question to the teacher on the way out of the door so that there is another opportunity to see which students might need more support.

Just as important were the traits that are identified as most important for high-performing teachers. High performing teachers are those who:

set big goals for their students,
continuously look for ways to improve their effectiveness through evaluation & modification,
obsessively focus class time on student learning,
exhaustively & purposefully plan,
relentlessly work towards goals (no matter how hard it becomes),
keep students involved in the process.

It suggests to me that by cultivating these traits as instructors, by deliberately focussing on ourselves, our abilities, our methods, and the structure of our classes, we can't help but succeed.

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Scratch: Reducing Syntactic Complexity

I was looking for inspiration for a good way to do visually-based programming. I have a domain specific language which is fairly straightforward to use but because it contains some of the traditional selection constructs, like if-elseif-then blocks, it suffers from the same kind of complexity that makes most programming languages fairly inaccessible to non-programmers. Basically I wanted something that allowed users, especially non-programming users, to understand and naturally use the iteration and selection within the language, but without having to really learn anything from outside the domain of the language. One approach that I came across whilst skimming back issues of the Communications of the ACM was that used by Scratch, a visual programming language aimed at children and non-experts. Scratch takes the familiar, to programmers, language constructs for iteration and selection and uses well designed visual artifacts that are keyed to only fit together in particular ways. Essentially, Scratch ensures that the basic selection and iteration structures are well formed by treating them as a single visual artifact. Although having already heard of Scratch, the article where I actually started finding out how it worked was "Scratch: Programming for all" which tells the story of how teaching programming is difficult but that some of those difficulties can be avoided by putting play back into the act of programming. If the interface reduces the scope for syntactic errors then the user can put more effort into surprising and delighting themselves by getting their code to do what they want it to do. The most interesting part of the article though repeats the oft-stated aphorism about young people being digital natives but goes further and explains why, although true to a degree, they still need support in developing programming skills so that they can become producers as well as consumers (p. 62)

It has become commonplace to refer to young people as "digital natives" due to their apparent fluency with digital technologies. Indeed, many young people are very comfortable sending text messages, playing online games, and browsing the web. But does that really make them fluent with new technologies? Though they interact with digital media all the time, few are able to create their own games, animations, or simulations. It's as if they can "read" but not "write".

This, I think, exactly captures the issue. People need to become betters writers in the digital landscape rather than just readers. This realisation doesn't alter the situation but it does put it very succinctly, and I am left in the position I was in at the beginning, needing a good visual method to "hide the syntax" and allow the user to play with the language, but having looked at Scratch, I think that I have a handle on how to do it now...

Mitchel Resnick, John Maloney, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Natalie Rusk, Evelyn Eastmond, Karen Brennan, Amon Millner, Eric Rosenbaum, Jay Silver, Brian Silverman, & Yasmin Kafai (2009). Scratch: Programming for All Communications of the ACM, 52 (11), 60-67

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NYC Odyssey Day 2

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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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.

It frees you from the grasp of particularly devastating hidden assumptions.

It acknowledges the fact that you learn more about studying as you progress through your career.

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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Brainstorming a MetaLab

We have an empty lab in the SoC that is currently used by students who bring in laptops. It used to be populated with standard desktop machines but as we already have two other labs full of similar machines, actually four labs if you consider the honours and MSc labs, it was felt that the space could be used for something more exciting. The current thinking is to develop a techzone although I have taken to calling it the MetaLab. The idea is that we use the budget which would otherwise buy a lap full of regular machines, and spend it on more interesting gear that could be used in teaching and research projects by staff and students, although primarily aimed at student use. With that in mind, and because I am on the initial brain-storming committee, I have started putting together some ideas on my research wiki.

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Teaching Time Again

It is nearly that time again when I have to start teaching. All of my teaching duties are confined to the second semester which means that I am really busy but gives me a large chunk of time in the summer and first semester to get on with some research. This year I have decided to try something a little different with my online teaching presence. More polemic and opinion oriented posts on educational and learning topics will still be posted here but anything relevant to particular modules that I am involved in will be posted on the blogs for those individual modules. Thats right, this year I have split the learning materials away from my personal site and have posted them (or at least am in the process of so doing) to their own individual blogs set up especially.

I also plan to give editorial accounts to other academics involved in delivering material on these modules so that we can share responsibility for keeping learning materials up to date and publicly available. I also have the outlines of a plan to possibly let students have contributor accounts (registered using their @dundee.ac.uk email addresses) for the blog part so that they can contribute relevant resources that they find. Hopefully this will lead to increased interaction with the students during the module and will provide a useful point of presence for coordinating the modules and ensuring that there is a point of contact outside of normal timetabled contact. Obviously this is as opposed to using blackboard and virtual learning environment offered by the university. I think that this is fine for people who aren't running their own servers, or who don't have the skills to create and maintain this kind of resource but it doesn't work for me. Partly this is because I don't want to be beholden to others for the tools that I use to improve the experience of my own students. I care about the tools that I use and will use the best and most appropriate tools available for my purposes and I definitely don't like being told which tools to use. I also feel that my time is better spent deploying the tools I already know rather than learning to use a new tool which can do most of the same things that I already do. One thing that I particularly like about running my own teaching resources is that they are completely open and can be accessed by anyone, whether they are enrolled on my module, or not, whether they are students at Dundee, or not. This is because I have received complimentary emails from people in the past who have solved problems using the knowledge gained from my lecture slides and materials. That is quite gratifying and I can't think of a good reason why any of the lecture materials that I have put together should be o restricted access. It has also been the case that on occasion I have wanted to investigate a topic that I am not familiar with and have found the lecture materials all locked up in blackboard. Yes I could easily email the module coordinator and get access to the materials by logging in but I think that that is too much of a rigmarole considering there is no good reason to hide the materials away in the first place. So, one week and counting, and I still have to get most of the module materials onto their respective new sites.

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Public Speaking Tips

One of my colleagues sent around the following tips on improving your public speaking:

Don’t apologise
Don’t plunge straight in
Structure your talk
Use notes
Speak up, slow down
Don’t fidget
Use eye contact
Keep to time
Check the equipment beforehand

Although aimed at the undergrads with little experience of speaking in front of a group I think that for the most part they are a decent set of guidelines. Although I would personally add the following:

Enjoy Yourself!

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Clash of Cultures?

Probably not but I was reminded recently of a conversation with a lecturer from IMD a while back which exposed the different expectations made of, art students on the one hand, and science students on the other. I was looking for an undergrad student to work on a project which had a highly visual element and required creativity. The idea was to explore different ways to present analysed argument and dialogue data to users alongside the source from which that argument was extracted. I naturally thought that a design student working in interactive media might be an ideal candidate and asked whether there might be a suitable student available. The way that things generally work in the School of Computing, at least for applied computing students, is that a list of available projects is circulated and any student who has their imagination fired can volunteer to take that project. Occasionally students develop their own ideas and then search for an academic with a relevant background to supervise it. The upshot of the conversation though was that most students from IMD had projects of their own devising and that any students who didn't have a project might not be worth taking on for the project that I had in mind. I wonder whether this is in part due to the nature of the art versus science debate? In art having ideas is a prime motivator whereas in science we tend to require that you learn what others have done first before putting forward your own new ideas. Now I realise that these are very general, almost stereotypical, descriptions of educational approaches in these domains, and that there are some overlaps in approaches and relaxation of assumptions in certain areas, but as a rule of thumb, if you are creative, in an artistic capacity then you might consider pursuing some form of artistic qualification. Along the way you learn techniques, and other knowledge that support the expression of your initial ideas, and possibly develop new ideas. I personally doubt that many people pursue art without having some initial ideas of their own that they wish to express (although how well that expression is achieved is subject to much discussion) and this state of affairs seems to me to be perfectly reasonable. Conversely many people pursue a scientific education without possessing any initial ideas of their won beyond some inkling of the area of science that they find interesting. This seems quite acceptable because without knowing what has been done before you risk wasting your own time re-covering old ground. In learning about what others have done you quite often discover a fascinating unanswered question and decide to pursue it, thus a new research career is born. Rarely however is a science student's lack of insight into what is worth pursuing from a research perspective taken as a measure of their worth, rather it is to be expected. This is why the majority of computing students pursue projects that are suggested by academics rather than developing their own project. Like so many areas the interesting aspect is in the overlaps, the boundaries between disciplines, and the interplay of the edges that define them. So as more designers become interested in computing as a medium, and as more software developers become interested in the design of their software artifacts from aesthetic rather than purely functional perspectives, then there are going to be more of these strange interactions and realisations. In my case I felt that an arts student, rather than a computing student, might be more likely to exhibit the aesthetic sensibilities that I was after for my project. In addition my project might have provided a new direction for the student that they had never previously considered. What I had not expected was that the lack of ideas on the part of the arts student might be construed as evidence against them. As we increasingly pursue collaborative, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary research, it is worth bearing in mind the differences in how we evaluate the worth, for want of a better term, of our students.

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Commencing Countdown. Engines On.

Deliberately Improving Teaching Ability

Scratch: Reducing Syntactic Complexity

NYC Odyssey Day 2

NYC Odyssey Day 1

Mixing Things Up

Brainstorming a MetaLab

Teaching Time Again

Public Speaking Tips

Clash of Cultures?