Archive for November, 2006
Two project ideas floating around here, both of which are struggling to get from the idea realm to the reality one - any suggestions or comments on whether they’re worth pursuing or how one should go about best pursuing it would be awfully welcome.
Blue Sky The First: Engineering Project Notebooks That Don’t Suck
In the book “On becoming an innovative university teacher” by John Cowan, he suggests keeping a learning journal, a practice inspired by a book by Jenny Moon. The idea is that you keep a learning journal for every topic you study - like class notes, but with more emphasis on personal reflection - and then if you teach students in the subject later, you pass on your journals so they can read yours while they’re making theirs. Keeping a learning journal helps you keep track of your own educational goals, and serves as a record for the transformational thought processes you’ve gone through.
“Sweet,” I thought when I first read that. “I’ll do that!” A month later, I’d found that the learning journal concept works beautifully for art and writing, but not so great for engineering. Data on paper is beautiful but dead. You can’t type it, compile it, run it, or analyze it mathematically without a lot of rote cranking. I’ll be darned if I’m going to print out my code and neatly paste it inside one of those little lab notebooks just so I can point it out to my students years later.
Blogs are the closest things to learning journals I’ve found on computers, but if I go completely electronic , I lose the ability to quickly sketch diagrams or hash out math notes. Maybe other people can type LaTeX or LyX fast enough to keep up with a lecture - I definitely can’t, and besides, I do math with plenty of diagrams. Besides, if I type LaTeX into a blog (assuming I can even figure out how to make that display, whether it’s with MathML or something else) it still has no mathematical meaning; I have to re-code it all over again in Maple or Matlab to be able to maniuplate the numerical data.
Enter Matt Tesch, who provided a starting point - a proposal to combine handwriting recognition with LaTeX and a computational library. The idea is that if you have a tablet PC, and you scribble your math syntax in, it’ll be recognized as two things simultaneously: (1) LaTeX syntax, so your chicken-scratch suddenly turns into beautifully typeset math, and (2) computational entities, so that you can finish scribbling an equation, highlight it, click “evaluate,” and actually get an answer. Your handwriting will have both mathematical and typographical meaning, and it’d be a start in taking math notes this way, at least.
So the two of us are plugging away at that - Matt on the handwriting rec side (since it’s his independent study this semester anyhow) and myself on the typography and the numerical computation backend (since it’s a hobby of mine anyhow).
Ideas, suggestions, and things we’ve completely missed are very, very welcome. Is this idea completely useless? Are there things already out there that do what we’re trying to do? Do you know of any projects or papers we should look into in the process of figuring out how to make this happen? And the questions I’d really like to find the answer to - do you keep an engineering project notebook? Do you like it? How could we design a program that would entice you to keep your project notebook on your computer instead?
Blue Sky the Second: Peer Review (interface for simultaneous commentary on a paper)
Then there’s the problem of commenting on other people’s papers. Ben Salinas pointed out something to Matt Ritter and myself one afternoon: tools like Google Documents and Gobby do a great job of letting you edit simultaneously, but what happens if I have a paper draft and want to let a lot of people make comments on it? I can ask them to write comments on the paper as a whole, in which case their comments can’t be tagged to specific locations in the document.
This isn’t a big deal when you’re asking about a 1-paragraph email; it’s a problem when you’re writing a 300-page thesis. I can also ask them to use Track Changes and Notes in Microsoft Word, but let’s face it; that’s a less than perfect solution. Aside from the red lines swarming all over the place, it’s not really collaborative, and your poor commenters will end up with a dozen different versions in their inbox which they’ll have to merge.
The above image is a quick attempt at drafting an interface solution. It’s pretty simple - all it is is attaching comments to specific locations on a paper. In order to comment on (blue) or suggest a rewrite of (red) one area of a document, you just highlight that area (no matter how big or small it is) and type. Your comment will be “pinned” to that location, and the section of the document you just wrote about will be highlighted subtly in order to show that it’s been commented on. Each successive comment on the same section darkens the highlight. You end up with a commentary heatmap of sorts - heavy highlighting indicates the parts a lot of people are talking about. There are no “threaded discussions”; if you want to comment on someone else’s comment, highlight the same part as they did and post a reply.
Here’s the catch; these comments aren’t usually all displayed, because there might be thousands on a very long paper. In order to view the comments on a section, you highlight that section. In this image, some of the text has been highlighted (yellow) and the two comments applied to that area are displayed on the right. If you want to see all the comments, select the whole document. If you just want to see comments on one chapter or paragraph, highlight those. You could potentially sort & search comments on the right side by author/date/subject/tag/whatever, but plenty of interfaces for that have already been developed and it wouldn’t be a hard add-in, as far as I can tell.
Yeah. As I said, it’s a pretty lousy demo and a poorly done image, but hopefully some of the ideas squeak across despite my hackish graphics skills. Thoughts? Worth building, not worth building? More importantly, how the heck do you go about making something like this? I come from a programming background of mostly control/simulation software, and should probably pick up Ruby on Rails and Ajax and such at some point; I’m not sure what tools this kind of thing would typically be built in.
Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
Gui emailed me last night calling out a specific passage in the last blog entry. (Gui is very good at catalyzing long streams of random thought. It’s one of the things that makes him a joy to be around.)
Years later, the things that caused you the most cognitive friction are the ones you’re most likely to remember.
This reminded me of something Mark Penner and I once talked about several years back. I call it the Prodigy Point for lack of a better term. It’s the point at which something you were originally “naturally good at” turns very, very hard. For instance, I’ve reached such a point in my drawing; up ’till this semester I’d tinkered happily along and learned how to turn out pretty decent stuff with no formal training. I was “naturally good” at art. I didn’t need to think about it or work on it. It just happened to be that way.
Then this semester, BAM. Prof. Donis-Keller made me realize that what I’d really hit was a plateau of stagnation, and that to get any better I wouldn’t be able to rely on my old “it just comes naturally!” habit any longer - for the first time, I’d have to struggle and study like everyone else - perhaps even harder than everyone else, since I wasn’t used to struggling with drawing - and I was faced with the Prodigy Point (not that I was an art prodigy by any stretch of the imagination, but y’know). Do you keep zooming along on the plateau, or do you swallow your pride, set to work, and have a chance at becoming truly great at what you do, a greatness based on real skill and hard work, and not just talent and dumb luck?
I’ve hit that point with math, and have chosen to plateau on it for now (until winter break, when Rudin and I will meet again and I’ll wrestle through Analysis). I’ve hit that point with music, and have been in a plateau for… I’m ashamed to say it, but almost 7 years. It’s really cute when a toddler can pick out melodies on the keyboard by herself, but when the kid turns 20 and isn’t much better, it’s not cute any more. Man, it’s hard to break out of that plateau - especially when your first “this is easy!” plateau might be at a way higher level than most people will ever reach through years of struggling. It’s easy to rest on the laurels of arrogance. I definitely do it a lot.
You can hit the Prodigy Point with engineering, when you realize that messing with power tools in the school garage was awesome but you’re going to have to hit the books and learn DiffEq to build something on the next level. You can hit it with programming, when you realize you’ve been a clever little hacker but can’t wrap your mind around hardcore CS yet (learning Scheme was a major turning point for me in this). One of the things places like Olin and IMSA are good at is making a lot of folks - not all, but most - hit their Prodigy Points. Hard and repeatedly enough that you can’t ignore their existence.
Do you love what you do because you honestly love it, enough to sweat and cry over it? Or do you love it because it’s easy for you to be good at it and you enjoy coasting on the compliments? It’s a turning point where something that was formerly easy becomes hard, and the way you deal with the Prodigy Point tells you a lot about who you are and what’s really important to you.
Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Ran across a very interesting paper today that I’d like to discuss with people.
Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching by Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark
The abstract:
“Evidence for the superiority of guided instruction is explained in the context of our knowledge of human cognitive architecture, expert-novice differences, and cognitive load. While unguided or minimally-guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appealing, the point is made that these approaches ignore both the structures that constitute human cognitive architecture and evidence from empirical studies over the past half century that consistently indicate that minimally-guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than instructional approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning process. The advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide ‘internal’ guidance. Recent developments in instructional research and instructional design models that support guidance during instruction are briefly described.”
In short, this guy is saying that Olin’s “squirt-squirt”/”throw-’em-in-the-deep-end” method of education is not effective because it “does not fit human cognitive architecture.”
Among other things, it says novices “in the deep end” are unable to build a cognitive map of the information, so much of the learning is lost the first time around (”spiral learning”) which is often the /only/ time around. Worked examples or process sheets (which guide you step by step through solving the problem yourself) are more effective, according to the studies they cite. It also presents the problem of “lack of clarity about the difference between learning a discipline and research (or work) in the discipline,” which is the same as the gap between the engineering classroom and the engineering workplace we’ve been talking about at Olin.
It concludes with the question of why on earth are we using PBL if it’s not effective. I agree that before you can do PBL, you need to have knowledge of where to find knowledge (which is not the same thing as prior knowledge). I also agree that you tend to perform “directed” tasks more efficiently, which is not the same as deep learning of that particular subject. Years later, the things that caused you the most cognitive friction are the ones you are most likely to remember.
I’m not sure how to design a study to properly respond to this, or whether one has been done - it’s adding to my frustration at being essentially an illiterate in the educational field, and to my desire to fix this somehow (grad school?).
Update: Sam, Chris, and DJ all pointed out that the link to the paper was broken. It’s been fixed - thanks, guys!
Sunday, November 12th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
For those who don’t know, I’m in a band called License Server Hates You (usually abbreviated “License Server”). It consists of me (keyboard), Tesch (brass/guitar), Gallimore (percussion), Amanda (vocals), and DJ (bass/backup vocals), and we’re performing “Army” by Ben Folds for the coming ExpressO (our prior performance of Muse’s “Running Out Of Time” was well-recieved last year).
Anyhow, after a long practice we were walking out into the quiet, humid night, and we started talking. Even though it’s November, graduation’s rushing up on us. It’s like hurtling towards a void. And when we reach it in 6 months, this place isn’t not ours any more, and we’re not its students and we’re not each other’s (even though we’ll always be Oliners and have a strong connection). It’s making a lot of us cling more tightly to one another at the same time as we’re hungrily drifting apart. It’s a phenomena that gets repeated every year with every graduating class, but it still hits hard when it’s you in there.
I feel home, but I know it’s a home I can’t stay in much longer. It’s not something I’m going to dwell on overmuch; there’s plenty to do and a lot to appreciate while things lasts, and a lot of possibilities to move forward into. Still, it seems like you never really realize what you’ve got until you realize you’re going to lose it someday. And that moment is an odd one, when it comes.
Saturday, November 11th, 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
One of my greatest regrets from high school and the start of my Olin career is that I overloaded. I still do, but I’m much better, very conscious of it, and try hard to monitor it so that it works for me instead of against me.
I thought the point was to cram as much knowledge and experience into my tiny little brain as possible. Going outside and lounging with friends? Feh. Must stuff physics into brain. Enjoying a leisurely dinner with my aunt? No way. Coding was so much more productive. The more things I could do, the better off I’d be in terms of what I could contribute to society, and so forth.
Nope.
There’s a certain thin, clear sweetness to the rhythm of a grueling night of work. There is something to be said for singleminded devotion to a problem - or a host of problems - and a frantic period of activity, mad dashes, a mind bubbling with idea overload, knowing that you’re making sacrifices because the thing you’re working on is just that important. And you get a lot done, that’s for sure. It makes life worth living.
But there’s also a lovely part of life where you can go dancing, lie in the grass reading Milton, slowly sip some very hot, rich chicken broth, play music, hug people, and kind of… well, not do anything particular at all. It’s glorious. It’s productive in a different way. It makes life worth living in another way.
The first kind makes the second all the sweeter, and the second gives you space to do the first. It’s like being an athlete; you need to push yourself to perform, exceed your limits, occasionally collapse gasping on the floor because you’ve run too fast or tried to do too many push-ups, or you won’t get any better. But you need rest periods to rebuild and refresh. And I always love the feeling you get after a hard workout, after a long shower, when you finally lie down and almost glow with a light tiredness; it’s satisfying and makes the rest seem much more vivid.
By doing less, I give myself the freedom to do more. I’ve done more intense sprints, seen more moments of gloriously quiet beauty, gotten more done, been happier, and touched more lives - as far as I can tell - ever since I started saying no. I’m still bad at it, as anyone will tell you. But I’m slowly finding my balance.
Do I miss pulling allnighters? Yeah.
Do I like getting at least 4 hours of sleep a night? Oh yes. It feels so good. I haven’t fallen asleep mid-class since I stopped pulling allnighters; it makes a huge difference.
Do I wish I didn’t have to make the tradeoff? Heck yeah.
Is the choice I made (sleep is important) the better one? Well, yes. For now, at least. And I’m okay with it.
I remember going to Gill’s office sophomore year. This was when I was pushing 20 credits plus research and 2 jobs, committees, projects, FWOP, TAing, and pulling 1-2 allnighters a week. I was drained, bleary-eyed, dog-tired, desperate to overload even more, and agonizing about the things I’d have to turn down (”aw, Gill, if only these three classes weren’t scheduled simultaneously - I’d take them all!”)
Now, y’all know that Gill’s got the exact same problem of wanting to do everything. But he told me that life wasn’t about trying to do everything, it was making choices (one of those choices being the choice to try to do everything). And that if you had two options, and decided one was better, it didn’t mean the other one wasn’t good also. You make a choice, you go with that choice, and maybe you wish you could have done the second as well, but you know you made that first choice for a reason, and you accept that and enjoy the things you are doing instead of fretting about all the things you aren’t.
Easier said than done, especially now that my world of opportunities has exploded; when you spend the first umpteen years of your life butting up against a ceiling of possibility and desperately looking for people to talk to and things to do, and all of a sudden
that ceiling vanishes and possibilities appear, it takes a lot of self-control to not grab ‘em all at once; it’s like offering an everlasting buffet to a man who’s been living in famine for 15 years. But if you eat too much, you’ll get just as sick.
Making the most of abundance doesn’t mean you should overfill. Abundance means you have the freedom to choose what you want - not that you should grab as much as you can just because it’s there. It’s all about enjoying the food.
Slow down. It’ll help you run faster.
Friday, November 10th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Went to the NI Technical Symposium (excellent!) today and was enthralled with thin-clients, but I don’t want to talk about that. The thing that struck me most in the last 24 hours is from an article called “The future of transformational learning.” Original emphasis.
…the way to measure success in our public schools is not to reject academic standards, but to return to an evaluation system that measures quality by the school’s contribution to community development. Thus, we are changing the focus of public education to what should be its primary purpose - community development. The academic standards can be handled by third, sixth, and eighth-grade level passes if reading, math, science, history, and the arts are successfully completed through competency-based instruction. Yes, no grades!
Quality is not test scores on standardized tests. If you think so, read Deming’s “Out of Crisis.” Quality means students doing action research projects that improve the local, regional, or global community. Students learn how to learn when they choose to learn something that is important to them, but an added incentive is when it also meets a community need, a bioregional need, or a national need. An example is energy independence. Why not give high school, community college, and college students the opportunity to research a variety of energy options that would lessen the national dependence on fossil fuels?…
The question of how we evaluate our schools is really a question about what we think it means to be a good person. We say that schools are successful because they prepare children in certain ways, ostensibly in ways that will encourage them to have an impact, which is (we hope) the difference we’d like them to make.
There are a lot of layers between “is this a good school?” and “what do we want the future of the world to grow up to be?” but the connection is there.
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Just got back from the President’s Council dinner. It’s a landmark evening in many ways. We’ve just finished our ABET visit and the NEASC decision is coming soon (both major accreditation agencies), we’re going through our first curriculum revision where we don’t have to reinvent future course years from scratch, and Larry Milas, the man behind the founding of the “whole damn college,”* is stepping down as Chairman of the Board of Trustees tomorrow.
Strangely enough, almost 9 years (minus about a week) tomorrow, Olin College was a piece of paper, a few people, and a dream. We’ve only been around as a blue sky idea for about that long. 9 years ago they had that piece of paper, and most of us students and alumni were kids in elementary or middle school, playing ball at recess, riding bikes, (or in my case) discovering math in our bedroom closets in the middle of the night.
The dinner tonight was filled with visitors from industry and academia. Presidents and past presidents of colleges, CEOs, CIOs, board members of major companies, VPs and chairs. One question I heard multiple times from multiple people is “what is entrepreneurship?” and “are you an entrepreneur?” Everyone there said that entrepreneurship was about making things happen, not making money (a common misconception). There seems to be plenty of call for integrating that more deeply into the curriculum.
The biggest thing that struck me tonight was how open they were for change, how enthusiastic, how encouraging. As DJ put it, “it’s very heartening that people that high up in the administrative chain are having thoughts that radical.” The other thing that struck me was how open and friendly these folks were. They’re amazing friends and teachers to our instutition, but they’re also here to learn from us - I hope I’ll be able to maintain that kind of humility when I’m older.
Even if we can’t do many (or any - although I hope we’ll do some) of the crazy things being proposed, just to know that they’re under consideration warms my heart. (Although as Amanda so wisely brought up, we’ve got to be careful not to innovate wantonly for the sake of just doing something different. ‘Tho this be madness, there’s method in ‘t.”)
And then I got back to the dorms and Mark brings in some homemade bread and blackberry jam. It’s been a good night.
Lots of things to think about. But I’ve got a lot to do and an early wake-up call for the meeting tomorrow, so I’ll have to swing out for the evening.
* The original quote is “why don’t you build your own damn college?” from Margie Milas.
Sunday, November 5th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Ana and Nikki pointed out at dinner today that we give lots of feedback, but it’s mostly negative (since that’s when we pay attention). When things are going well, the usual response is blank silence. She also pointed out that “the staff and faculty are just as insecure as we are” - not that we’re inherently neurotic people, but that it’s often hard to tell when you’re doing things right, so you worry too much that you’re doing things wrong.
So a group of students convened in the lounges tonight to write thank-you letters to every single staff and faculty member on campus (Nikki went through the student handbook and labeled envelopes for everyone, and Tim pulled them into some semblance of alphabetical order by the fireplace). They’re still sitting in the 1st floor lounge of West Hall, and will be out until Tuesday, when people will start picking them up and delivering them by whatever means they think best.
If you’re around, drop by and fill an envelope; most of the letters are a couple lines long on a strip of torn paper, but we all know from experience that a small note is all it takes to brighten someone’s day. If you aren’t around, do it to the folks you are around. Or send emails and letters back to the folks here who touched your life. It only takes a minute to type a short thank-you.
The best part about teaching, someone once told me, is the students who come back. Doesn’t matter how well you did in their class, whether you turned in your papers or not - just coming back and saying “hey, you made a difference in my life” is what teachers live for.
Saturday, November 4th, 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Found this from an old email thread about respecting different viewpoints. The issue in question was same-sex unions, but the thing I was trying to say here (however awkwardly) is applicable to a lot of issues (the curriculum revision comes to mind).
Hi. My name is Mel, and I like eating chicken feet.
Some people think chicken feet are absolutely disgusting. All right, they probably shouldn’t be able to prevent me from having my tasty snack. However, do I have the right to say that they can’t disagree with the goodness of me eating chicken feet? It’s not very nice of them to plaster the dining hall with “CHICKEN FEET EATERS ARE EVIL” and nag me about how my chicken-eating habits will damn me to eternal high cholesterol.
As a considerate and respectful person, it would also not be very mature or nice of me to flaunt eating chicken feet in front of them and call them names (”Chicken feet haters! You’re so prejudiced against chicken feet!”). I know it bothers them, and I can’t force them to change the fact that they’re bothered about it. They know I like chicken feet, and they can’t force me to change the fact that I like chicken feet. Well, we can try, but it’s frustrating and counterproductive effort to drill your beliefs into someone else’s head. If I want them to respect my views on chicken feet, I must show respect for theirs. And not just their right not to eat chicken feet - I need to respect their right to not like that I eat chicken feet. Subtle yet crucial difference.
Thoughts?
Saturday, November 4th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Raymond Yim rocks my world. His class (Analog and Digital Communications) and the way he teaches it is quick becoming my model for how courses can accomodate both traditional (lecture and problem set) and nontraditional (…well, myself for one) learners. I’ve always wished for someone to do for me what I try to do for most of the folks that I tutor, and - wow. Go Raymond. He’s really going above and beyond.
He called me in because I’m struggling in the class, big-time. And he sat down and explained that he didn’t care about the grades and the important thing was that I learn what I wanted to learn, and together we went through and designed a Mel-friendly communications class that involves me skipping lectures, reading lots of books and original articles (oh the books and articles!), and designing my own final exam (which is a project on information theory, by the way). Starting after Thanksgiving break, it’ll be my job to come into his office and try (probably badly, but I’ll do my best) to “teach” him the concepts I’m trying to learn.
I want to grow up to be like my professors. Mchang’s wit, initiative, and computer wizardry, Somerville’s hardcore physics majesty and deep-rooted curricular rethinking, Raymond’s flexibility and continuous learning and crazy math intuition, Diana’s giant meld of music and science and her patient counselling on how to bring the million things you want to do together in your life, Brad’s component ninja-fu and quiet upheaval of the entire POE experience, Gill as an extension of the engineering philosophy into everything else in life, and as a teacher of teachers…
And then there are non-ECE profs. Lynn, Rob, Allen, Caitrin, Steve, Prof. Donis-Keller, I’m - oh, what the… here we go.
We are so lucky to be here and learning from these people. They’re who I want to grow up to be. When you have good teachers, you incur - not a debt, but a responsibility - that you can only fulfill by passing the same experience on to the people you teach yourself, later in life.
I want to say this now for when I read this blog entry in a few decades: Mel-of-the-future, you wouldn’t be where you are now without the things that happened and the people that helped you at Olin. You’re a very different person now at 20 than you were the first time you came here (remember? that painfully shy and awkward 16-year-old cowering behind a textbook and an inability to accept failure well enough to take real risks?) and you’re a different person yet when you read this in however many years it may be because of the experiences between me, as I write this in 2006, and you, whenever you may be.
And then there are the teachers at IMSA. And the ones in Glenview, and the ones that weren’t technically your classroom teachers but helped you tremendously anyway; the folks you’ve met, the ones who have emailed you, taken the time to talk with you, taken slices of their lives to share with you so your own life can grow. And your parents and your family. They teach you as well.
This is a reminder to my future self to give back, and a reminder of how much has been given to me, and a reminder of why I am a teacher, and a reminder of how much I owe to those who have taught me. I have not stood on the shoulders of giants; I have been carried by them.
Heavy on the melodrama, this post is. I’ll stop reflecting in a moment and get back to doing. But one of the “doings” is going to be a lot of thank-yous. They’re long overdue.
Saturday, November 4th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
