Via TechDirt I found this very cool video on how our “standard” notions of incentives don’t always work very well, especially when it comes to cognitive work. There’s a ton of cool ideas in the video (and more in the TechDirt piece, including some cool links).
The incentives in the talk are typically money, but I suspect that there are interesting things to be said about grades as an incentive in the academy. Does anyone know of work along those lines?
One really interesting story is about Atlassian, an Australian software company. (Their stuff is cool, and we’ve used some of it here at UMM in the past, but it’s gotten pricey and we’ve moved to other tools.) Apparently Atlassian gives their employees a 24 period every quarter to work on whatever they want, and then they have a party where people share what they’ve done. This apparently leads to a ton of cool ideas, bug fixes, and development. So, so cool.
How could we apply that here in the academy? What if we gave everyone in our Computer Science discipline a 24 hour period to work on whatever they wanted to and then had a big party where people shared what they did? Could we do it? Would it make sense if we did? What would it mean? We’d probably have to cancel at least our CSci classes that day, and probably make sure that no one was giving an exam the next day, etc., etc.
Because we would only control our discipline’s behavior, though, we wouldn’t give many of the students the freedom they’d need to really take advantage of the opportunity. It would presumably work a lot better if we did this across the entire campus – no classes, no exams, no papers due, and then some sort of event (or set of events distributed across campus) at the end for people to share their results.
My 17 month old son can start the iPad, unlock it, find (by navigating 3 screens) and run his favorite app: Dr. Seuss ABC.
When our wonderful son was about that age, he could turn on TVs at stranger’s houses; he’d figured out that it was the rightmost button (a pattern I’d never noticed).
The adaptability of young folks to what us oldies see as new and often confusing (or downright terrifying) circumstances may be the only thing that allows us to pull out of the many tailspins we’ve initiated. So when some politician babbles on about how “the children are our future”, see if their track record backs that up, and hold their feet to the fire if it doesn’t.
I took over 1,000 pictures at yesterday’s 2010 graduation ceremony at UMM, and will sometime be putting the least bad of them on my events account on Flickr, but at the moment I have a ton of deadlines looming (grades, etc.) so that’ll have to wait a bit.
The wind ensemble and choir both did an excellent job (as they always do); these are from before the ceremony started while people were filing in and taking their seats. I really loved the reflection in the euphoniums, especially the mirror sharp reflection of the Student Center, trees, and sky in the silver instrument.
I took quite a few pictures of that reflection, and struggled a bit with the final presentation. It’s not clear to me whether the emphasis provided by the desaturation above, or whether I’m better off leaving the color alone (below).
The top one makes a really nice desktop image, by the way :-).
Graduation is an occupational hazard for all teachers from pre-school and kindergarden on up. Here Spring rolls around and another crop of fine UMM students graduate, heading out into that nebulous “the world”. Today I watched another great group of people walk across that stage and shake hands with the assembled dignitaries, and I want to wish them all the best.
This year’s CSci graduates included students graduating with high distinction, students who’d published their research in major international conferences, done extensive volunteer work, travelled the world, pursued diverse interests, and won highly competitive national awards. Some are going into grad school, some to jobs, some to volunteer work, and some are still trying to figure out the next step. One of the great advantages of a small department is that I’d worked personally with almost all of them on special projects, and had the rest in at least a few classes, and I consider it an honor and a privilege to have gotten to know them.
And that’s just the CSci grads. Another advantage of a small campus is you get to know lots of students in lots of areas. People I knew from the radio station graduated today, along with committee members, musicians, artists, actors, historians, psychologists, biologists, and the lot. This included two Truman Scholars and, as we were reminded today, the only other schools that could boast two Truman Scholars at their graduation this year were Stanford and Wellesley. Not bad for a little school in the middle of nowhere that no one’s ever heard of, eh?
Talking about how great this or that group of students is always sounds dangerously like comparing children, but we just keep getting cool students to work with. This is really the “norm”, whatever that means when both the individuals and groups have such distinct personalities. These folks leave, taking with them a lot of experience and knowledge and enthusiasm, and there’s no doubt that we’ll miss them. There are, however, plenty of great students still on campus, and wonderful new admits that will be joining us in August.
So, best wishes to all this year’s graduates.
Do cool things.
And send us a postcard now and then.
P.S. I’ll try to get the pictures I took today up on Flickr sometime in the next few weeks, but with grading, the May Session course, and being in Ann Arbor the second half of the week, processing all those photos is going to have to wait a bit.
Since President Obama’s announcement of the Educate to Innovate program in November 2009, an encouraging number of technology and media companies, non-profit organizations and government agencies have been working in concert to strengthen the nation’s approach to science education. But the reality is that the lion’s share of transformation must come from within: from school systems, in the case of K-12 education, and from the academy, in the case of higher education.
A position paper recently issued by the Nature Publishing Group illustrates this point in the context of higher education. A significant majority, 77 percent, of the 450 faculty surveyed for the paper consider their educational responsibilities to be equally as important as research responsibilities. Only 6 percent consider research more important than education. Yet when asked to appoint a hypothetical candidate to an open tenure position in their department, the majority chose a star researcher with poor teaching skills over both a star teacher with little research background and a candidate equally skilled, though not notable, in both teaching and research.
The ripple effects of this mindset in the academy are damaging to the goals of universities.
The May, 2010, issue of the Communications of the ACM (CACM – the flagship magazine of the ACM) features a photograph of UMM CSci alum Tyler Hutchison presenting research work done with Andy Korth and Nic McPhee at MICS 2007. The article is “Student and Faculty Attitudes and Beliefs About Computer Science”. Andy and Tyler won the best student paper award at that year’s MICS for their paper “On the impact of geography and local mating in evolutionary computation”. The photo (taken by me during Tyler and Andy’s joint MICS presentation) features some of Tyler’s artwork illustrating the material.
The graphics folks at CACM found my photo on Flickr, and contacted me via Flickr offering to pay me a small fee if I’d be willing to let them use it. I happily said "Yes", and the rest is history.
As well as being a cool computer-science-type, Tyler is also a cool comic-art-type, and did the nifty drawings for the cover of our book "A field guide to genetic programming".
Happy, happy, happy.
But I’m easily amused :-).
In fairness, this could well be the one and only time I ever get published in CACM. I’m not all that likely to submit an article to them (in part because I don’t tend to write things they might want), so this could easily be the pinnacle of my career in terms of the number of people in my field seeing my work.
Some highlights from the “Purpose of the Position” section:
General priorities for the position include:
promoting a 21st century learning and teaching environment for an undergraduate focused residential campus;
supporting through technology and information resources the research endeavors of a highly qualified and active faculty; and
advancing the use of technology to engage a growing base of prospective students, donors, and alumni.
Specifically, the Director of Information Technology will:
Provide IT leadership to the Morris campus and in the broader University community.
Serve as a key member of the Morris campus and University of Minnesota technology leadership team, which formulates and implements local and institutional goals and initiatives.
Partner with the academic and administrative leadership across the Morris campus and university-wide to participate in the creation and implementation of strategic goals and IT initiatives.
I’m a member of the search committee, and I want to share this information here for two reasons.
First, if anyone reading this is interested, please consider applying!
Second, the search committee is gathering feedback from various stakeholders about what we want this person to be and do. Before we begin to look at applications, the committee would like to try to clarify as best we can what the campus wants and needs from someone in this position.
So, what do you think are the priorities for UMM’s Director of Information Technology? What do they need to do to support the teaching, research, and service missions of campus? Looking ahead 5 years, what issues do you feel that this person will need to address/get ahead of? On of my concerns in recent years has been that the campus has been far too reactive to technological change, and instead of being ahead of the ball we’re constantly scrambling to respond to events and put out fires. What skills and background does this person need to help us turn that around?
I’d be happy to discuss this at UMM CSci tea tomorrow afternoon (4-6ish in the lab), or hear from anyone by whatever other means work for you. If you have ideas or thoughts, however, please share promptly; we want to wrap up this fact finding process in the next two weeks (by the morning of Tuesday, 20 Apr).
Award ceremony at the 2010 Poetry Out Loud regional, Fergus Falls, MN. Thomas McPhee (on far right) took first.
Last night was the 2010 Lake Regional competition as part of the national Poetry Out Loud competition. Morris Area High School (MAHS) had two students in the field, Thomas McPhee and Tim Ostby, and Thomas took first place! He and Ellen Ferry (who took second) will be among the 18 students from around Minnesota at the state finals in the wonderful Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, starting at 9:30am, Monday, 8 March 2010.
Thomas qualified for the state finals last year (along with MAHS student Alex McIntosh), so we had the good fortune to attend last year’s event. The quality of the performances was really exquisite, and I highly recommend the event to any fans of poetry and literature in the area.
Tim Ostby (the other MAHS student this year) placed fifth at the regional. Congratulations to him and all the other students that performed last night! While there were fewer competitors at the regional than last year, the quality of the performances was considerably stronger, and the venue (A Center for the Arts in Fergus Falls) was vastly better than last year’s (a classroom at a regional community college).
Thomas McPhee, David Johnson, and Tim Ostby at the 2010 Lake Regional for Poetry Out Loud. Thomas took first, and Tim took fifth.
A huge thanks to David Johnson, drama coach and english teacher at MAHS. Dave’s been a huge influence and support for Thomas in both theatre and Poetry Out Loud. It’s greatly to Dave’s credit that MAHS has had a student in the state finals of Poetry Out Loud each of the last four years (which is every year MAHS could have competed), with two in last year’s finals. Further, every MAHS student that’s gone to state has placed in the top 6: Anika Kildegaard took 2nd in 2007, Mary Hu won the state competition in 2008 and went on to the National Finals, and Alex McIntosh placed 4th and Thomas McPhee 6th in 2009. In fact Morris is the only high school in the state to place four students in the top 6 from 2007-2009, with no other school has placing more than two. Not a bad track record for a small rural high school. Thanks a ton to Dave for all his support and assistance!
Last week I drove to a workshop in Madison, SD, with Kristin Lamberty (one of my Computer Science colleagues here at UMM). On the way, we went south on US 75, along the east side of the Buffalo Ridge wind farm, and there was a really gorgeous sunset behind them as we came into Lake Benton, MN.
KK was kind enough to let me stop and take some photos. This is one :-).
I haven’t actually messed with the colors here, except for deliberately underexposing the photo in the first place to saturate the colors. It really was a very cool sunset.
We don’t find a half-evolved cow or bee. None of the 1.4 million species on the Earth has half an eye.
Such deliberate cluelessness and misrepresentation – it’s unfortunate the U.S. News & World Report will publish nonsense generated by someone who’s clearly only using half a brain.
We're not quite ready to abandon classroom learning in favor of on-line education.
A recent study for the Department of Education (NY Times piece; full 93-page PDF report) performed a meta-analysis of 99 students over the past 12 years, and found that students in on-line courses did slightly, but statistically significantly, better than those in traditional classrooms.
It’s an interesting study, and likely to spur a whole new slew of interest in on-line courses, but it’s really not clear what it means. I’m sure there are a zillion ways I could pull together data showing an education advantage of X over Y, for a zillion Xs and Ys, but one would have to be very careful in the interpretation. I’m willing to bet that most of my colleagues here at UMM would teach better in English than Chinese, and most faculty in China would teach more effectively in Chinese than English, but that hardly means one is a better teaching language than the other. Context is everything, and it’s not clear (at least in the survey study) what the contexts are.
A few possible issues:
12 years is an eternity in the history of the web and web-based teaching. Are the studies from 12 years ago even talking about the same things as those now?
What are we actually comparing? Face-to-face courses have all kinds of variance, and their effectiveness changes with the instructor, the students in a particular running of the course, and external events. Presumably on-line courses will as well. Are we comparing the best to the best? The median to the median? I can easily imagine that an on-line course of a few dozen people can be a vastly better experience than a huge lecture hall of 800 students, even if the latter is still called “face-to-face” instruction. Similarly, one person struggling to manage 150 on-line students is not likely to look good compared to an energetic classroom discussion section of 12 people. The meta-survey doesn’t make it easy to see clearly what the comparisons are in the individual surveys, and I suspect that they probably vary widely, ranging from the pretty reasonable to apples-vs-kumquats.
How much of this is simply a function of novelty, both in faculty putting a lot of effort into a cool new thing, and students being impressed by the shiny new toy?
Etc., etc., etc.
I think the question isn’t, and can’t ever be, whether on-line is better than the classroom. In the end it’s about finding a way for a particular instructor and a particular student (or group of students) to work well together, and that’s going to depend on an awful lot of things and almost certainly change over time as teachers, students, and the world changes. On-line education and classroom education augmented with on-line components are clearly going to be an important (and probably increasing) part of that, but there will probably always be circumstances where a group of people are better served by some face time than by an on-line experience.
This study also looks at courses as isolated experiences. At a residential university like ours, the courses are crucial, but hardly the whole picture. Students learn a ton from simply living together, eating, doing laundry, volunteering, going to the movies, dating, being in clubs, and generally making all sorts of vital transitions as they move from 18 to 22 (give or take). Look at the important differences between someone’s who’s 16 and someone who’s 26, and an awful lot of that has nothing do to with courses. A good university experience can play a critical role both in and beyond the classroom, and a heck of a lot of that is tied up in physical presence.
‘Tis the season when students start returning, reinflating the nearly empty balloon that campus becomes over the summer. We are fortunate to have a really cool, engaged set of students that generally make you really glad to be a teacher. There are, however, moments that make you want to cry.
To whit: A few days ago, I was on campus just as the football team (who come to campus early) was leaving after breakfast. While most of the team headed towards the halls, a group of four were walking abreast towards us, occupying almost all of the one lane road.
And one was sporting a shirt sharing the assurrance
Don’t worry – I’ll pull out
Charmed.
I’m sure.
As Jess Larson has observed, university students are a bit like unfinished furniture. While some really just need some sanding and finish, others have major structural issues. I’m thinking that wandering campus displaying openly misogynist sentiments probably falls in the latter category.
Sigh.
I should make it clear that our students are generally very cool, & most of the guys are quite non-obnoxious. The unusual nature of this example of oafishness makes it all the more depressing & frustrating. I also don’t want to paint all our football players or student athletes with this brush; our athletes also tend to be very together peeps. Teams (& other groups) do need to be aware, however, that when they’re together in a context that identifies them as The Team, people are prone to overgeneralization. Know thyselves, folks; it’s in your own best interest.
Some deluded people believe that textbook orders for Fall Semester were due a month ago, but I’m never, ever close to on-time on these things, and am just now getting to it in a serious way. I’m teaching three courses in the fall:
Models of Computing Systems
Fuzzy logic and fuzzy sets
Refactoring
I’ve taught Refactoring several times and have a pretty good handle on that. Fuzzy Logic I’ve taught once before and am pretty comfortable with. The Systems course, however, is one I’ve never taught before and am still struggling with on a number of levels, including the textbook.
Any suggestions and ideas on any of these would most certainly be appreciated. I’ll say a little more about each course below the fold for those who want all the gory details.
Models of Computing Systems This is one of our three core courses (the others being Algorithms and Computability, and Software Design and Development), is a 5 credit course (4 hours of lecture and a 2 hour lab each week), and is intended to expose students to computing systems using a layer model that includes as major topics
Assembly language and a quickie overview of basic architecture
Operating systems basics, with an emphasis on processes, process management, and threading/concurrancey
Computer networks
System administration, including the installation, configuration, and management of common tools like web servers
I’m planning to use x86 assembly for the first item, and the sysadmin work will happen on Linux boxes. I’m planning (still in a vague way at the moment) to try to use computer security issues to motivate/illustrate a number of key concepts in this course. Things like file system and disk structure can be pretty abstract, for example, but I’m thinking that doing a lab where we see how those decisions lead to lots of “erased” data being recoverable might make it seem more “real” and significant.
I realize that no book is going to cover all these things, and on-line resources plus lecture can provide the necessary background for several of these. This course has typically using a “standard” OS book like Silberschatz, et al, but this is large and expensive and really only addresses one of the four topics. If anyone knows of a good book that would touch meaningfully on more than one of these areas, though, that would be really helpful.
Fuzzy logic This is a 2 credit elective course, and should provide a reasonable background in the theoretical definitions and concepts in fuzzy logic, as well as giving the students a chance to apply those ideas. (My current plan is to write robot race car drivers using fuzzy notions of concepts like fast, slow, near, and straight.)
I’m probably more interested in solid coverage of the theoretical material than the applications side. The students will benefit from a good introduction and reference on the mathematical material, and I can probably handle the motivation and application side in class pretty well.
Refactoring This is also a 2 credit elective course. I’ve taught this course several times, and I’m likely to again use a combination of Fowler’s Refactoring and Kerievsky’s Refactoring to Patterns. Fowler is the “standard” in the field; the first five chapters of his book are absolutely classic material on the realities of software development and should be read by pretty much anyone who aspires to write good software. Kerievsky’s book builds on Fowler and does a really nice job of demystifying design patterns, converting them from magical insights codified by geniuses into things you could discover on your own through careful refactoring. When I last taught it I think I had Kerievsky as the required text and Fowler as the optional book. Given that together they still add up to less than $100, I’m tempted to require them both. We have lots of copies of Fowler in the lab, though, so I might just require Kerievsky again. Ideas/thoughts on this would definitely be appreciated.
One of the problems we’ve run into in this course in the past has been attempting refactorings on code with limited automated testing. Without good tests you lose your courage to refactor mercilessly, or you have false courage and end up breaking things without realizing it until (sometimes much) later. With only 2 credits to work with, however, you don’t want to spend two weeks writing unit tests for a system before you can start refactoring it, especially when you don’t really understand what the units are and what they’re supposed to be doing. This time I’m planning to use BDD tools like Cucumber, RSpec, and JBehave this time to more cheaply write high level acceptance/functional tests that exercise the key parts of the system in meaningful ways without getting bogged down in a bunch of poorly understood unit tests. We’ll see how that goes.
Wrap-up
So, there they be. Any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, especially on the Models of Computing Systems course.
I’m completely exhausted. I had the pleasure today of explaining a little bit about computers and algorithms to some kindergarteners, and it just about wiped me out :-).
Timna Wyckoff (one of our biologists and mother of a kindergartener) arranged to have all the local kindergarten kids comes to the science building for 90 minutes to learn a little bit about science. They were divided up into groups of about twelve, and each group spent about 30 minutes at three of the six stations we’d set up.
I talked with them about their experience using computers at school (mostly “playing games”) and how the computer did things like draw pictures on the screen. (We determined that it wasn’t elves or fairies or tiny mice with little glasses and hats that took coffee breaks when you turned the computer off.) We then talked about how computers are machines, like their fridge or a car, and let them look inside a couple of old boxes destined for the scrap heap. This led to a bit on how computers are general purpose machines instead of single purpose machines (”Can you drive your fridge to the store?”), and how what the do is determined by the program they run. It turns out that computers are in fact machines specifically designed to follow lists of instructions, and programs are lists of instructions created by computer scientists that tell the computer how to do certain things (like draw dinosaurs on the screen). We then headed into a semi-tangential (but concrete for 5 and 6 year olds) discussion of recipes as a instructions, and people as machines for following those instructions. Finally, if and as time allowed (and it varied quite a bit across my three groups), they all got numbers, stood in a line, and pretended they were a computer running through the bubble sort algorithm. (Yeah, bubble sort. Don’t shoot me – it’s easy to run through with little kids.)
I spent a total of 90 minutes doing this three times, plus some setup at the beginning and tear down at the end, and I’m exhausted. If nothing else, this reinforced my belief that a good teacher of young kids is a real treasure. These are bright, enthusiastic kids, but they don’t always focus real well, and my short morning is enough to send me scurrying back to teaching adults. (To be honest, my students don’t always focus well, but they’re much less likely to distract everyone around them in the process.)
This was my first time doing this, and my little script was an amalgam of lots of ideas from KK, Timna, and WeatherGrrrl, and various students and alum responding to my request for ideas on Twitter. Many thanks to all of them for their ideas and feedback!
So Sub-Evil Boy found this via Pharyngula and was quite pleased that he could already (in the 6th grade) “pass” 8th grade math. Well, if he can pass, let’s hope his old man is up to the task…
And no, I’m not dead, just absolutely buried in work stuff. This is the price one pays for a week in Germany (slowly posting more photos on Flickr) and being chair of too many things.
I particularly like this shot of Riccardo and Alden working on the material that eventually became that amazing one week paper!
I’m teaching our Software Design and Development course again this semester after what I think is the longest hiatus I’ve ever had from the class (1.5 years!). This break is giving me a nice (and somewhat frightening) chance to see some things afresh and ask some questions about how some things have been handled historically.
One of the key ideas here is to do frequent small releases that are broken up into even shorter iterations. Historically I’ve usually done 3 releases, each composed of 3 (or sometimes 2) one week iterations. Re-reading the Bob Martin’s excellent Agile software development and thinking about how that’s gone in the past, I’m wondering if it might make more sense to two 2 releases, each composed of 2 two week iterations. The problem is that a 1 week iteration doesn’t give you very much time for planning and tracking, especially since everyone is “part time”. Martin’s text, for example, suggests two week iterations (for full time employees!) with a planning/tracking meeting half-way. (With one week iterations we try to have something like that mid-week, which gives them feedback sooner, but we tend not to do it every week because it would just take up too much time, etc., etc. So maybe two week iterations are just more honest?)
I see two possible downsides to this. One is that a two week iteration is a long time, giving groups more time to delude themselves that everything’s OK and they’ll pull it all out in the end. The mid-point planning/tracking meeting/report will help mitigate that, but it won’t make it go away.
The other is that we only get two releases which cuts down on several opportunities for pedagogical fun. One thing I’ve often done, for example, is have groups swap code bases after the first release and see how much fun it is to deal with someone else’s code in the second release. We then get the third release to pull everything back together and reduce the amount of chaos.
If I thought that was really important to do this kind of swapping I could make them swap in the middle of the first release, so everyone does a single two week iteration on Project A, and then switches to Project B for the second iteration. Then they’re also stuck with that group’s planning and estimates, which could be fun (or a complete mess!).
Anyone out (including the several of you that have actually been through this course) there have anything thoughts?
We’ve got to spread that message among students from a rainbow of backgrounds, or risk becoming a technological backwater.
That “rainbow of backgrounds” is where the liberal arts enter the picture:
computing-related jobs are no longer an isolated component of American industries; IT underpins every function of the business community—market research, product design, finance, strategic planning, environmental issues—every aspect of doing and leading. That means these jobs are not only vital but fun. They require people who have strong technical knowledge but who also can work and contribute in a much broader realm. A recent New York Times article dubbed this kind of IT professional “the renaissance geek.” The leaders of Microsoft, Google and other companies have made their point clear: Give us more well-trained, well-rounded computer scientists!
Yeah - “renaissance geek”… Gotta love that!
The article goes on to provide several suggestions for how the business and academic worlds can work to encourage and develop this next generation of Renaissance Geeks. These include thinks like making a computing course a requirement for more undergraduates (and make sure they enjoy it), make connections to other departments/disciplines, and hire more female faculty.
UMM used to require all our students to take a computing course, but this requirement was dropped 6 years ago in the belief that the high schools were getting up to speed and providing our incoming students with the backgrounds they needed. I think there’s a growing sense on campus that they may not have worked out as well as we’d hoped, and I know our experience in Computer Science and UMM is that we’ve seen a much more homogenous group of students (white males with a strong leaning to the more stereotypical geek) than we did before the requirements changed. Making a change to the general education requirements like restoring this requirement wouldn’t an easy thing, though, and we run the obvious risk of entering into an unpleasant “Why is your field more important than my field?” sort of debate since (obviously) every discipline at UMM is crucial to being a well rounded citizen in the 21st century.
We’re doing a pretty good job on the business of making connections to other disciplines, in part in an effort to broaden our appeal in the wake of the aforementioned change of requirements. We’ve got interdisciplinary programs in media comutation (with Studio Art and Speech/Communications) and bioinformatics (with Biology and Chemistry), and a new faculty in Philosophy has started a conversation on a possible program in Cognition that will likely include us in some form. There’s more than can be done here, but I think the wheels are turning in a useful way.
And, finally, we’re rocking pretty hard on the gender diversity in our faculty as we currently have 3 of 5 being women, which puts us well ahead of most other programs.
I’ll wrap with this final quote:
At all levels, schools need to make computing attractive to ambitious students who have a fondness for technology but also want to fold in other skills and interests. These are the students who are going to be leaders and make a difference in the world, and they include women and minorities and the full cross-section of society.
