Applying pedagogical skillz to FOSS projects: Plover case study


When I was in New York at the end of April, Mirabai and I sat down and hacked through a lot of pedagogy thinking for plover, an open source steno software project. We made a concept map to see how various skills were connected and a list of what, exactly, made certain skills difficult to learn.

I’m posting this with curiosity about two things:

  1. How understandable are these notes to someone who wasn’t part of the conversation (in the basement of a little tea shop with fantastic panini)?
  2. From what you can see here, would any of this sort of thinking/work/process be useful to other FOSS (or open content/hardware/Free Culture) projects with an educational component — whether that’s new developer outreach, “students” as a user group for the software product, a software product that’s specialized and/or difficult to learn, or anything else?

This is a concept map showing the connections between the topics (the things in boxes – skills and concepts) that make up the ability to do steno at a basic level. You can see strong (double-lines) and weak (single-lines) connections between topics. Clockwise from top, they are…

  1. EC – error correction (delete, backspace, arrow keys, etc)
  2. CUST – customizing your own dictionary
  3. CORE – using a basic “core” dictionary (the one that comes pre-loaded with Plover)
  4. EXCEPT – dealing with exceptions to phonetic rules
  5. PHON->CHORDS – mapping phonemes (auditory) to chords (on the keyboard)
  6. READ – reading steno shorthand (being able to look at a brief for a word, immediately chord that word on your own keyboard, and have a good guess as to what that word might be in English)
  7. THERE ARE PHONEMES! – breaking down words into phonemes instead of letters
  8. KeyBoarD LAYOUT – what keys on the qwerty (sidewinder) keyboard map to what letters on the steno keyboard; mostly building muscle memory.
  9. ALPHabet – the ability to type individual letters on the steno keyboard (vital at the start when you don’t know the briefs for many words).

The numbers by each box (for instance, 3/3/6 (9) right above the “EC” block) are totals for strong links, weak links, total links, and a weighted sum (2*strong + 1*weak) for each concept. This is to help us see which concepts are the most centrally connected, which is sometimes surprising – for instance, I didn’t expect “READing stenographic shorthand” to be almost half as “important” (by number of connections) than being able to use the delete key! (in “Error Correction”)

The orange highlights were things we tagged as “enduring understanding” — if you study steno and only remember three things, the most important ones to remember are…

  1. Dictionary construction – the connection between EXCEPT(ions to the phonetic system) and CUST(omizing your own dictionary)
  2. Transliteration – the connection between THERE ARE PHONEMES! and mapping PHONemes-to-CHORDS.
  3. KeyBoarD LAYOUT – skill as described above.

This is a description of “why these concepts are difficult to learn” — it uses the same topics as listed above, which you can probably figure out by reading the descriptions. For instance, the concept of phonemes is really easy to learn (I think most of us “get it” when we first figure out what stenography is). In contract, error correction is inert (you can learn the “delete” key, and then totally forget what the chord is when you’re in the middle of transcribing something) and tacit (one of those things you’re just expected to “pick up” somehow — it’s so natural to advanced practitioners that it’s easy to forget that beginners need to be taught about it!).Sometimes, knowing why something is difficult to learn can help you figure out how to practice it. For instance, learning the alphabet is hard because it relies on skill — the muscle memory of learning the letters — so drilling over and over is probably a good way to learn that. However, the same kind of drilling may not be the best way to learn how to read steno syntax.So… readers, what did you get out of this, and is there something we can do to help you understand this more, or apply it to your own projects?


May 13, 2012 – 5:31 pm | engineering edu, teaching open source | 2 Comments »

Extended update: Strattera, pita bread, German/stats swapping, Zachery, and Nunsense


So, Strattera! As it turns out, being able to focus more easily is nice, but I also like being able to sleep and eat, so… I am rapidly becoming not-a-fan (even I need more than 3 hours of sleep, and after 5 days the insomnia is wearing thin). We’ll see what ADHD meds I get next.

Had dinner with Jaqi’s family last week, and ended that evening building a rocket ship out of legos with her tiniest son (it was a very good evening). I was trading website-making lessons for cooking lessons, and now I can make homemade pita bread, which is the greatest thing since… okay, I know that sliced bread postdates pita bread in human history, but it predates it in my history, so the analogy still holds.

I will be making homemade pita bread on Tuesday night before I go to the Gerndt’s, because it is delicious. Jennifer is a doctoral student in German Linguistics whose dissertation focuses on teaching pronunciation, and whose datasets have grown to the point where it is difficult to manually analyze them. I am a deaf language learner with (consequently) big German pronunciation struggles who has a background teaching programming and math. We are therefore spending weekday evenings this Maymester in a glorious knowledge-swap (started last Wednesday) which I must write in more detail about in a separate post, because we are trying to log our adventures.

To make life even better, Jennifer and her husband Seb (yeah, it’s confusing – and both Sebastians are from Germany – but her husband goes by the nickname whereas my boyfriend refuses all abbreviations, so I’ll use that to distinguish) have two huge, friendly dogs that I adore completely. The last few weeknight evenings have been spent scratching a very contented dog’s belly while alternately playing with Python and listening to Jen and Seb speak German and attempting to isolate my tricky sounds, which is leading to the acquisition of an amusing vocabulary set: for instance, I must have said “Scheiße!” (“Shit!”) several dozen times while trying to figure out the “s” sound. (You have to admit that it is a good word for practicing the “s” sound.) Now there’s a double-bonus — I’ll practice hard sounds every time I curse in frustration (and trust me, learning how to say sounds you can’t hear is no walk in the park.) But anyhow, more notes on that later.

I love being in academia. Friday lunch was with Zachery Koppelmann, an English doctoral student who’s doing his dissertation on teaching composition to engineering undergraduates; the man clearly has more patience than I ever will. Pondering the same topic from two very different disciplinary perspectives (engineering and english) illuminated a lot of both perspectives for both of us — for instance, I’d taken Conway’s Law combined with the stated (but illusory) desire for meritocracy (and its consequence of topical expertise trumping titlular hierarchy) to be the way all meetings and organizations worked, but when I started illustrating meeting dynamics by drawing system block diagrams, Zachery assured me that was not the case in liberal arts. He (a military veteran) had not considered the impact of the GI bill on engineering education before our lunch — all of a sudden, a far more diverse group of people came into the field, at the same time as engineering professors began coming from research rather than industry backgrounds. Yeah, that might all have something to do with how engineers write. Deep geekery is fun, and if that’s a conversation between two grad students, how much better are these discussions going to get when we’re all professors decades and decades along in our field? Yesssss.

Watched Nunsense! peformed in ASL last night with my dad and my cousin Mark; my old interpreter Christine was the director, and it was fantastic to see her again for the first time in over a decade. The show was hilarious. I have no idea how they got deaf actresses to tap-dance (then again, I couldn’t hear if it was in unison — though Mark said the tap dancing was “pretty good.”) They cut some songs from the original script and reassigned others, but “Sister Julia, Child of God” never fails to crack me up, and the Reverend Mother unknowingly eating pot brownies and giggling all across the stage for the first act’s final number was… wow. The most interesting adaptation was to Sister Amnesia’s puppet show — in the original (non-ASL) production, the actress does ventriloquism with a hand puppet, which won’t work for an ASL version — not only can the puppet not sign, Sister Amnesia loses a signing hand. Instead, another actress dressed up as a puppet and signed the puppet’s part, leaving Sister Amnesia free to sign herself.

Breakfast with dad (perhaps) now, and then driving back to Indiana to do work. Mmm, work! First day of summer classes is tomorrow; I’m doing 6 credits (advanced qualitative research methods in education, plus modern dance 101 and an independent study teaching my blogging class) so I’d best get ready.


May 13, 2012 – 7:56 am | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »

It is not change that causes anxiety; it is the feeling that we are without defenses in the presence of what we see as danger.


I’m tired of people saying things like “oh, people are naturally resistant to change” or “everyone’s afraid of change” or “change is hard,” and treating those statements like Immovable Axioms that One Cannot Change Or Argue Against. They’re not entirely untrue; change is sometimes hard and scary. However, we’re not going to get anywhere if we use that as an excuse for not looking deeper.

It is not change that causes anxiety; it is the feeling that we are without defenses in the presence of what we see as danger… –Kegan & Lahey, Immunity to Change

I love the first part. Seriously, folks; I put on a new t-shirt every day, but that doesn’t cause me to go into paroxysms of fear as I stare at the closet in the morning. I’d be bored to tears if I had to eat the same thing for dinner every night, and think nothing of the sky going dark every evening. I look forward to starting new classes, getting new books, to the births of my new little nephews (welcome to the world, Oobs and Ewan!) We go through tons of changes that we’re not the least bit anxious about. (Okay, maybe my cousins were anxious about their babies being born, but I sure wasn’t.) Point being: not all change causes anxiety.

So what does? That’s the second part of the quote. There are two parts to it that I want to highlight.

It is the feeling that we are without defenses.

The feeling. Not the objective reality (if there is such a thing). If someone believes they are defenseless — if they don’t realize there’s a safety net, if they don’t think others will step in to protect them, if they don’t trust their own abilities to make everything okay — regardless of the situation, they will be afraid, and they will probably resist change.

In the presence of what we see as danger.

Again, subjectivity. If you don’t see something as a danger but someone else does, then of course they’re going to be more anxious than you. This works the other way around too; my parents and boyfriend are a lot more concerned about me walking around strange cities alone at night than I am.

And note that these two things together; if I’m without defenses but am confident that no danger will arrive, I’m not anxious — actually, I feel pretty safe. For instance, I feel fine walking around my apartment barefoot because I know there aren’t sharp things on the floor that could hurt me. And if you’re in the presence of something you think is dangerous, but you have defenses you feel are sufficient, you’re also going to be just fine; I know I would stand no chance against a full-grown tiger, but had no problem watching one pace behind thick glass the last time I went to the zoo.

Implication: to fix anxiety (whether it’s linked to change or not), make the fearful person either (1) feel like they’re well-protected, or (2) believe that what they’re seeing isn’t dangerous.

Sounds simpler than it is; this is still hard work. But it’s a heck of a lot better than going “well, people just don’t like change!” and throwing our hands up and walking away.


May 10, 2012 – 4:22 pm | olin | 1 Comment »

Well, I passed my classes.


Not only did I pass my classes, I pulled off an entirely respectable performance; 3 A’s, an A+, and a B. That was carrying 13 graduate credits (4 classes and an independent study) at a place where a full load is 3 classes (9 credits).

What. The. Hell.

Yes, I’m sure some of this is impostor syndrome speaking, but… but… I feel like I did that with luck, not skill or planning. Luck, and panic and last-minute scrambling and trying not to cry so I could see the papers I was writing at 3 in the morning. My apartment looks like a bomb filled with academic papers exploded in it, which is pretty close to the truth; the materials cited for all 4 of my term papers are sprawled everywhere — desks, tables, kitchen counter, floor, stacked on stools, across the sofa… I’m eating breakfast atop a drift of papers that’s 2 inches thick in some places.

I can perform at this level (so far), but I’m not turning out anywhere near the quality of work I could. I see it when I look at my writing; there are logical flaws I can fix now, holes in my research I know how to patch, places where my arguments are weak, though these are often obscured behind a plaster of fluent writing (the ability to bullshit is both a blessing and a curse). Therefore: ADHD coping strategies! And medication, now; I started with Strattera yesterday and am trying to get used to my brain having a different sort of inertia than I’m used to, though it’s also early and the effects haven’t kicked in fully yet.

One of the things that’s shifted this year is the way I see myself. I’m an engineer. I grew into becoming one, and now I am one, and ought to be confident in that; I don’t know everything, but can always learn what I need to know. And I’ll always be an engineer; I have that now. But right now, I am not doing engineering as a career. (Well, not much; there’s often a little something on the side, but it’s not my full-time focus like it used to be.)

Instead, I’m a researcher and a writer. It’s kind of odd to realize that. I’m actually a writer; this is now what I do professionally — if you think about what academics get evaluated on, it’s mostly stuff that’s formatted in text. I’m a writer that has domain-specific knowledge (in engineering and engineering education) that I need to have and hone and keep updated in order to write well — but at the end of the day, I am a writer now, and that’s pretty cool. (Katrina — it took me a decade to get here, but I’m here!)

So I need to stop worrying about things like “but… but I don’t understand signal processing yet!” and actually focus on training in this craft, the craft of writing, the craft of being a scholar. This doesn’t mean I’m going to lose touch with making and doing (that would be… hard) but it does mean I will also be thinking of them as a means to better writing as well as a satisfying end in and of themselves.

And then maybe, this summer and this fall and into the next year, I can start producing writing that I’m proud of.


May 10, 2012 – 10:34 am | Didn't fit anywhere else | 5 Comments »

Mel’s first year in grad school, a retrospective


I’m writing this post for Robin, my advisor, who wanted an update on what I’ve done during my first year in grad school and where I want to go from here. I’ll do it in four sections:

  1. Classes I took (your first year at grad school, classes make up a huge portion of your life.)
  2. Projects I did
  3. Things I’ve learned about myself
  4. What’s happening next

Classes I took, what I learned from them, and what I made

  • Form Follows Data (Art) – I learned how to “think like an artist,” making artifacts for exhibition rather than functionality. My major piece was Absence Makes The Heart, a yarn graph of a long-distance relationship.
  • Inquiry (Engineering edu) – I learned how to do a lit review by making my first (terrible) lit review on open source and education. I can’t yet make good lit reviews but I know what direction I need to move in to get there.
  • Seminar (Engineering edu) – I learned who the professors in my department were and what they worked on research-wise. I didn’t make anything.
  • History & Philosophy of engineering edu – I learned that the transdisciplinary thinking that’s so familiar to me is really hard for other people, and filled my bibliographic coffers with artifacts (papers, etc) that help express these thoughts to others. I made graphic novels.
  • German for Reading Knowledge II – I confirmed my suspicions that I do amazingly well in language classes that don’t require me to hear, and translated an article on Sugar on a Stick. (I’m working on getting permission to post my translation online.)
  • Art and Design Research Methods (Art) – I was thrust into conversations with people (artists and designers) with a very different way of thinking, and had space to develop Radically Transparent Research.
  • Theories of engineering thinking and development (Engineering edu) – I learned how to use a bibliography manager (zotero) to remember a firehose of reading; I was already a fast reader, but had never needed to remember my material long-term before.I wrote an essay on cognitive apprenticeships in open communities, which I still feel is a half-baked first release — but a first release nonetheless.
  • Content, Assessment, and Pedagogy (Engineering edu) -  I learned how lucky I’ve been to have so many excellent teachers that I thought “good” course design (as explained in this class) was the only way courses could be. I learned how to reverse-engineer good classes in more detail (I’d started learning course design formally at an Olin summer workshop 2 summers ago, and this class at Purdue built atop that knowledge nicely). I created an academic blogging workshop that will run for the first time this summer.
  • Open Access (independent study with Amy Van Epps) – I learned that academic publishing and copyright don’t make sense, drafted Olin’s open access policy with Dee Magnoni, and presented it to Olin faculty; it’s currently being looked over by Olin’s legal counsel, at which point the faculty will formally vote on it.

Projects I did

  • I did some work with Eucalyptus around building their open source community; it’s great to be able to watch (and contribute to) their journey from an academic research project to a true open source company.
  • I started working on the Programmabilities project for UNICEF exploring how disabled youth can participate in open communities as part of their education; I’ll be finishing that paper for them this summer.
  • I left my job at Red Hat in December, but am still involved with Teaching Open Source (conferences and papers and panels, oh my!) and the POSSE workshop for professors interested in designing their courses to include open community participation. Sebastian Dziallas and I are doing a small study looking at the experiences of POSSE alumni to understand what teachers go through when transforming their teaching practices.
  • I started working on the Changemakers (former codename: Project Puppy) project with the Xroads research group and Linda Vanasupa from Cal Poly. My main contribution so far has been the evolving practice of radically transparent research.

Things I’ve learned about myself

  • Coming to get my PhD was the right decision. Academia is a rich and wonderful environment that works well for me, and I’ll rapidly grow in skill and facility in this new sort of universe — but I will also never quite be content within it, or within any particular discipline within it. It will become one of my homes, but never my only one.
  • My reading skills need upgrading. I read fast, but I don’t retain well, so I’m working on using tools and note-taking/finding processes to shore me up with a cyborg memory (seriously, I’m going to think of these things as the cyborg portion of my brain). I’m still a weak hunter in the jungle of scholarly information, and need to build my lit-review muscles.
  • I am a writer now, and need to develop my process for writing long things. My strategy of “write it all in a long marathon immediately before the deadline” is no longer a viable option. Planning, note-taking, outlining, revising… the more I develop the discipline to stick to a long-term process for writing, the better my writing (and thinking) will be.
  • I need to have at least one part of my life where I am making things with people. I can do individual reading and writing, but I can’t subsist only on that; I need to build things in community, or something in me goes adrift.
  • My coping strategies for deafness and ADHD need to evolve. I’ve never really needed help with coping with my “disabilities” before, but now I’m doing harder and harder things, and they’re showing up as limiting factors. I’m glad for this – one of my hopes in coming to grad school was to hit a place where people wouldn’t let me get away with things like covering up bullshit with enthusiasm, and the fact that I’m slamming against a wall right now means that I’m winning. I found my weak spots; they’re desperately exposed right now, and it hurts like hell, so I will be forced to evolve.

What’s happening next

  • I’m doing my 6 summer credits as follows: advanced qualitative research methods (3 cr), modern dance 101 (2 cr), and teaching my blogging workshop (1 cr) while writing a paper for UNICEF and learning German (since I’ll be getting hearing aids and might actually be able to hear people speaking it now). I’m doing this all during Maymester, effectively frontloading on “things that’ll pay the bills,” then going off to do awesome research project things for the rest of summer. Oh, and hiking across England without luggage; that’s going to be my vacation. It will be fun!
  • I plan on taking my readiness assessment (the equivalent of quals) in the late fall. Consequently, my fall courseload will be the lightest it can be, 9 credits. I’m taking a statistics class on the R programming language (3 cr) and a course on hearing aids as one of my “engineering” requirements (2 cr), which leaves 4 credits unspoken for at the moment. I’m on track to finish my required classes by spring 2013, assuming I passed everything this term.
  • I have a fellowship for this coming school year (2012-2013), but need to look for funding after that – so that’s a big item on my to-do list.
  • I’m experimenting with hearing aids and ADHD medication this summer to see if I can come up with better ways of incorporating them into my life.
  • And right now, I’m going home to take a nap.

May 4, 2012 – 12:49 pm | engineering edu | 2 Comments »

A cool idea that failed: you can’t reverse-engineer a paper for open access


One of the things I tried out as part of my independent study on open access this semester was the idea of reverse-engineering a publication. This isn’t about hacking code; it’s about hacking copyright. And as it turns out, it doesn’t work.

Here’s the setup: imagine you’re a researcher and you’ve written a great paper that’s published in a prestigious journal. You beam with pride! Life is fantastic. And then you find out about the open access citation advantage, realize your publisher allows archiving of preprints, and think that life is about to get even better.

There’s just one problem. You can’t find your preprint version (the final edited version you send to the publisher, usually a plain Word or LaTeX document). You only have the final copy PDF with all the branding and pretty-print formatting on it – the version that got published in the journal. Somehow, in the frenzy of hard drive clean-up that accompanied your “I am done with this paper forever!” project completion celebration, you… you lost the file.

But wait… the final print version is identical to the text you sent in, right? All the publisher did was add formatting. So if you could just grab the text from the final print version and throw it back into a Word document, that would be identical to the preprint, and you could post that. A preprint is just the end publisher content there without the end publisher formatting. Right?

Wrong. The problem here isn’t technical, it’s legal. I actually took a print pdf and “reverse engineered” it into a LibreOffice document, and it looked fantastic — I did the process by hand, but it would be easily automatable, so the software portion of the problem is trivial. I talked with Donna Ferullo, Purdue’s copyright librarian, and the copyright portion of the problem is, unfortunately, a blocker bug. The crux of it the matter is that we don’t know what value the publisher added before printing. Okay, this probably is “not much other than formatting,” but still… it’s legal grey. So we hit a hard wall on that, but at least we learned something.

I promised to write something up about this since I don’t think the reverse-engineering idea has been broached before, and it’s at least good for others to know that it’s a dead-end — so here it is.


May 3, 2012 – 8:42 pm | engineering edu, fedora, olin, teaching open source | 4 Comments »

ADHD coping strategies so far, pre-intervention


Here are the things I’ve already figured out for my ADHD. These are the strategies that let me survive this long without getting help (and for a long time without being diagnosed, too). It will be interesting to see how this list changes once I start getting help.
Do homework on the day it’s assigned. Finish up the things for a trip before you leave that location. Basically, don’t ever leave hanging threads.

Travel a lot, which breaks the day into (useful) chunks and gets physical motion in; do work as a “secondary” thing between the bouts of travel, so you don’t feel guilty for not doing it (it’s travel!) but an amazing amount gets done (there are an awful lot of little breaks in there).

Teach — the regularity of a classroom and the requirement for immersive engagement motivates you.

When you study, try to have it be 1:1 as possible, and ride off the momentum from meeting your teacher as soon as you get it, for as long as it exists.

If you can’t get 1:1, your memory is likely to wander during instruction you don’t need to intelligently respond to. Prepare for this. Get things transcribed in realtime. Your memory will wander, but you can zip back and scroll up every once in a while — you can bring yourself back. If you can’t get realtime transcripts, use supplementary materials (textbooks on the same subject, etc) to give you the thing you can get information from when you “come back.”

Set reminders for your future-self to give you motivation-kicks down the road. Automatically scheduled emails help, especially if other people (who need to be involved) are copied on them.

Catalyze groups. They’re usually full of folks who can sustain things when you’re spotty, and they see you as an energy-injector coming at just the right time. You do well when you’re responding to the work of others coming in at real-time.

Work while eating. Read while eating. Reading keeps your mind on one topic’s track; it keeps you from being distracted to other tasks while eating or whatever else you’re doing.

Script out repetitive tasks and set aside time to do them. Expense reports on Fridays just marching through a detailed list of instructions. Reward yourself afterwards.


May 3, 2012 – 6:10 pm | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »

You can achieve anything, but not everything + ADHD


This is one of the things I wanted to write about.

Aaagh.

I thought about what I tell my overly ambitious students when they take on too many extracurricular activities and their grades falter: “You can achieve anything, but not everything. If you try to do everything there is no doubt you will do everything badly. But if you choose, then you will succeed in whatever you do.” Yet at that moment, I couldn’t stop the voice that kept screaming in my head: I cannot choose! I cannot choose! I must do both and I must succeed! –Anjalee Deshpanda Nadkarni, in “Two Boards and a Passion”

I know. I know I know I know.

So, another thing I’ve been struggling with this semester is ADHD. One of the natures of the beast is that it doesn’t rear its head until you cross a certain threshold of doing difficult unstructured things, so the effect on your life goes from “sunshine! puppies! daisies!” to “HOLY SHIT LIVING HELL” in a heartbeat, leaving you wondering how you’ve suddenly become an idiot as the world crumbles around you. I nearly dropped out of undergrad because of it.

But the reverse is also true. Cross back over that threshold of difficult-unstructuredness, and poof – the butterflies and ponies reappear. It looks like you’ve learned how to deal with it, but you’re actually just in environments that don’t bring out the monster — and the unstructured, improvisational nature of open source communities are great for letting you pretend it isn’t there. Similarly, they’re great for letting me ignore the fact that I can’t hear, but we’re already seeing the beginning of my pushing back against that – I want to go everywhere, not just the places where I can slack off on coping with deafness and ADHD.

If any place is into difficult-unstructuredness, grad school… is it. I have been beating off the monster since March; it’s gotten particularly bad in the past few weeks. For folks who’ve seen me recently and may be thinking “but… but Mel, you looked like you were really kicking ass!” — yes, I was. There. Then. With other people. Getting out there into the world where I look (and feel) confident helps a lot, because when I’m by myself with it at night, my other-people scaffolding falls down and sometimes I end up crying (which is pretty epic; I’m not a bawler).

So. I have been taking advantage of the ADHD tendency to attack new shiny stimuli with great enthusiasm, frontloading on reading ADHD books, trying out new strategies, etc — trying to get ahead as far as I can before falling off the wagon. I’ve seen multiple types of counselors at Purdue in the past few days. Tomorrow morning I’m going to go in and see about medications (which I have incredibly mixed feelings on, but I should try it at least once). I’m sitting in a school support group writing this blog post right now.

One important decision I’ve made is to not reduce my workload while trying to handle all this. I’m going to try to build in more failsafes so that the consequences of my failures will be less severe (taking things pass/fail or auditing them, and so forth), but since my ADHD only rears its ugly head above a certain threshold, I need to stay on the “hard” side of that threshold to see if any of the strategies/medications/etc are taking effect. (There’s no sense in treating stuff if you’re in the land of happy butterflies anyway.)

I have a second post coming with coping mechanisms I’ve already developed. More in a moment.


May 3, 2012 – 6:09 pm | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »

Project Puppy is… not human subjects research? and: the true nature of Project Puppy begins to be revealed.


For folks who’ve been following the radically transparent research adventures of project puppy (and the similarly transparent project kitten), we have… unexpected news.

Project Puppy is, apparently, not human subjects research. We don’t need to go through IRB.

Which is fantastic news (we don’t need to go back to our participants with yet more paperwork), but also somewhat confusing news; it feels like playing Minefield and clicking on a square and having the computer tell you “yay, you didn’t die!” But that only tells you about the square you’re on. Fog is all around you, so you’re not sure whether you can move in any direction without dying; there might be a cliff two feet to the right that you can’t see.

So I asked Robin to send back the following reply, and we’ll see what we get.

Thanks for your decision — this is great news that will help our research group move forward with our work. Since we plan on doing more projects with the radically transparent research technique in the future, would you mind helping us understand why our project is not human subjects research, and whether we are close to the boundaries of any actions that would make it human subjects research? We were told during initial office hour consultations that it ought to be submitted for HSR approval, so we’d like to make sure we understand the rationale so we can make sure we submit future “radically transparent research” projects for review appropriately in the future.

The short term effects of this, however, is that now we can talk openly about Project Puppy. Actually, we can call it by its real name, and show people its data, and explain the research, and… oh, this feels good. So, without further ado: I’m going to stop calling it Project Puppy, and start using the project’s proper name. Changemakers. (That’s what we call it, anyway.)

The short (overly-academic-sounding) version is that we’re doing “preliminary work on change knowledge through a study that investigates what exemplar changemakers understand about how transformation occurs.”

What this actually means is that Linda did long interviews with 8 people who’ve caused substantial changes in engineering education through the course of their careers, asking them to talk about how the heck they did that, and we’re trying to figure out, okay, how do they think? What makes someone able to affect that sort of change? Can we learn how to do it too? And stuff like that.

Now to put Project Kitten through the IRB process (armed with the Changemakers decision) so we can open that up to the world properly as well!


May 3, 2012 – 4:30 pm | engineering edu, olin, teaching open source | 1 Comment »

My first film festival: Tribeca (with reviews and spoilers)


Sebastian took me to my first film festival last weekend – TriBeCa, in New York. It’s a trip we’ve planned since last year, so it was fantastic to finally get to go. We only watched two films because frantic amounts of homework were being done by all, but it was definitely a pause in the chaos that I needed and am grateful for now. Train re-routings meant we spent an afternoon getting lost instead of eating macarons at the Laduree location that recently opened near Central Park, but we did find a great little Italian hole-in-the-wall on the edge of Harlem (of all places!) and ended up with macarons from a Japanese bakery instead. And let me tell you, folks, if you’ve not had a cherry blossom macaron, you’re missing out. (Passionfruit was also excellent.)

The films we watched were Trishna and High Tech, Low Life. The first one was an adaptation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles to modern-day India, and I have mixed feelings about it, largely because I know the story in the original book. The second is a documentary on citizen bloggers in China, and I liked it better. Sebastian thought High Tech, Low Life was good but too long and with less dramatic dialogue, and that Trishna had more well-crafted script moments (actually, he used some other film-review-ish term I’ve forgotten). I pointed out that Trishna had, y’know, a script.  SPOILERS FOLLOW.

In Trishna, “Tess” from the original book is renamed into the title character, a rural girl forced to look for work when her father falls asleep at the wheel of their rented truck while it’s carrying vegetables to market — a nice transplant of the original story, which has the family’s horse-drawn wagon getting in an road accident that ends up killing the horse. The characters of Angel (“the good guy”) and Alec (“the bad guy”) in the original novel are rolled into one character in the movie: Jay, who runs several businesses of his family’s empire, including the hotel where Trishna goes to work. The acting is good, the cinematography well done (Sebastian may disagree, but I love disorientingly rapid cuts during montage scenes), and the story unfolds well in the beginning; Trishna works at the hotel Jay runs, they find themselves drawn to each other, and end up making love one night after a party (consensually, instead of the rape scene between Alec and Tess in the original book). Trishna is overwhelmed and runs away back home shortly thereafter, only to realize she’s pregnant; her family forces her to get an abortion, then sends her to a factory in the city, where she labors until Jay shows up again; he’s been looking for her ever since she ran away. So far, so good; the merger of Angel and Alec into the character of Jay is done in a way that makes sense.

Jay asks Trishna to move to Mumbai with him; she accepts, and they live together in the city, very much in love. (I think.) Jay is clearly channeling the character of Angel from the original book; he’s a good guy, genuinely seems to care for her, and so forth. Cute and funny moments abound in montage scenes here! He even promises Trishna he’ll tell his family about her – which prompts her to confess the pregnancy and subsequent abortion right before Jay leaves for home. The revelation shocks Jay; when he returns, he’s turned into a ticking timebomb of an asshole — effectively metamorphing from “Angel” to “Alec.” The metamorphosis is unconvincing and awkward now, and (in my opinion) ruins the movie; as Sebastian put it, “the film goes downhill along with their relationship.” The script attempts to justify the deteriorating romance by reassigning Jay and Trishna to yet another of his family’s hotels: he as the manager, she as a worker. Presumably, once they stop living together, the differences in their social strata cause strain (which I buy) and this strain turns Jay from a caring, sensitive guy into a cruel, abusive jerk within a few months (which I don’t buy) Finally, desperate to end the movie, Trishna stabs him, then herself (her suicide scene intercut with her cute little brother and sister dramatically reciting the Our Father in school as TENSE MUSIC BUILDS!) But it was quite good up ’till the “honey, I got an abortion — you can turn into an asshole now!” part.

I liked High Tech, Low Life better; it’s a documentary on citizen journalism in China, following two bloggers over four years as they skirt the edge of Chinese law to get news past the censorship blockades. The main characters are a study in contrast. One is “Tiger Temple,” an older man with a quiet steadiness and a heart that aches for the people whose stories he covers — a young woman murdered in broad daylight, a farm village devastated by toxic waste dumped into their water supply — once he starts interviewing the local homeless population, he’s motivated to raise money to buy a place for them to live. Then there’s “Zola,” a young man who bristles with overconfidence the same way his pockets bristle with gadgets and emergency supplies. He’s a vegetable seller, but wants to become famous — so he sets off to get attention on the internet by covering news that would otherwise be covered-up, always featuring a picture of himself grinning by the location. He does become famous, of course; he’s invited to speak at a blogging conference overseas, only to have the government block his exit from China. At times, his excitement at the increased notoriety this “injustice” is bringing him seems to overshadow his disappointment at the injustice itself.

Perhaps the reason I thought the documentary was a better film was because it stirred up all sorts of aches inside me as I watched, conflict and guilt and hope and rage, simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity… all these feelings from a whole different universe that I deliberately ignore and place halfway across the world. My family history includes (1) China and (2) participation in journalism that got us in big trouble in the past; Sebastian’s doesn’t, so maybe the film was less immediate to him — not sure. But it was good, to step into the stories of other people for a short, defined while — they’re on a screen, they start, they run an hour or two, they stop, you walk away and think and talk and eat falafel sandwiches and ginger ale. And then you go back to school and work and work and work again.

Film festival braindump done! Now to close out this semester, so that I can… work on the backlog of non-academic work that’s built up in the meantime.


May 3, 2012 – 9:19 am | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »

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