Archive for April, 2011
While reading “Training for Dummies” (for inspiration working on the POSSE curriculum), I stumbled across a comparison of pedagogy (“the art and science of teaching children”) and andragogy (same thing, but for adult learners).
My first instinct, after reading it, was why would any learner willingly choose pedagogy? I sure don’t want to be treated that way. Take a look (table from page 27 of “Training for Dummies” by Elaine Biech):
| Andragogy |
Pedagogy |
| Learners are called “participants” or “learners.” |
Learners are called “students.” |
| Independent learning style. |
Dependent learning style. |
| Objectives are flexible. |
Objectives are predetermined and inflexible. |
| It is assumed that the learners have experience to contribute. |
It is assumed that the learners are inexperienced and/or uninformed. |
| Active training methods are used. |
Passive training methods, such as lecture, are used. |
| Learners influence timing and pace in a learner-centered approach. |
Trainer controls timing and pace. |
| Participant involvement is vital to success. |
Participants contribute little to the experience. |
| Learning is real-life problem-centered. |
Learning is content-centered. |
| Participants are seen as primary resources for ideas and examples. |
Trainer is seen as the primary resource who provides ideas and examples. |
Well, duh. If I’m treated like an empty bucket dependent on benevolent sources of knowledge to swoop down and fill me and program me like a robot, of course I’m not going to come alive.
Perhaps the reason young people work like adults in open source communities is because that’s the way they’re treated. Nobody cares if you’re 15 or 51; if you’re willing to solve a problem they care about, and need to learn something from them in order to do it, they’ll teach you. It’s easier to be seen as a person and contributor rather than a collection of assorted demographics that say nothing about you as an individual case. Maturity as a self-directed learner is a pervasive expectation; you may initially need coaching to tackle projects fluently on your own, but it’s clear that that – not the arbitrary filling-out of grade checkboxes – is your goal.
If we want kids to become mature learners, we need to show them what mature learners look, act, think, and teach like – and expect them to be smart enough to drive their own process of figuring out how to get there, with the help of mentors and coaches along the way. Open source communities make andragogy accessible to anyone with access to a computer and the internet. No questions asked, no admissions applications to fill out – no need to prove you’ve got potential to learn before you’re actually allowed to try your hand at learning it. Don’t prove to us that you could learn it, we say. Go learn it, then come back and prove to us you did.
That… is my kind of school.
Friday, April 29th, 2011 | teaching open source | 1 Comment »
Just submitted this one to Ohio Linux Fest – even if I don’t get accepted, I think it’ll be a fun one to work on and then find a venue for.
Level-up with Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: turn your life into a data-driven video game with FOSS
Ever look around and think there must be something better than just going along with life, untracked and unaccounted for? I mean, where’s your scoreboard? Where’s your triumphant level-up sound after you complete a quest? Where the heck are those dang quests, anyway – and aren’t there supposed to be golden coins hanging in midair for you to jump into? Why isn’t your life as cool as a video game? When do you get your sword?
You recognize this. You want MOAR.
“Mel, if my life were like Angry Birds,” I hear you say, “my fitness level would skyrocket.” “Yes,” I nod. “Analyzing the differences between repeated attempts at various task setups with unpredictable results governed by defined rulesets would certainly get you in better shape – oh, and there’s a (FOSS) app for that.”
It’s not all about arcade games and pumping iron, either. How about RPGs like World of Warcraft – can quests, leveling-up, and building character attributes help you learn a foreign language? Or even Farmville – how can gifts, guests, and cute baby animals speed along your personal software development?
The answer is YES, good reader – and this quantifiedself-inspired talk will show you how you can do it all with FOSS, using everything from the arduino to identi.ca to the R programming language. Complete with live code demos and audience involvement in real-time quest completion, and possibly even a level-up in the middle of the talk.
Join us and take your first step into a MOAR EPIC, FOSS-driven life.
I also rewrote my usual bio for the occasion.
Mel Chua is a hacker – of hardware, software, and FOSS communities, at various points in time – who studiously avoided video game addition for over a decade. Instead, she spent her time as a member of Red Hat’s Community Leadership team teaching professors how to teach open source. These were happy, productive days… a simpler time, a simpler life.
Unfortunately, Mel started working on her PhD in Engineering Education at Purdue this year, trying to figure out what effect FOSS participation has on students. This started her on data-tracking and led her down the dark, dark path to doom once she realized that scoreboards were way more entertaining when sound effects (POW!) and elaborate titles (LEVEL 198 STORMBRINGER, GUARDIAN of VALID W3C XML and KEEPER of the SACRED PYTHON MODULE) were involved.
The story continues…
Tuesday, April 26th, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Don Davis sent me this nice paper he wrote up with some colleagues – it’s a tutorial introduction to the statistics language R that includes a study on legitimate peripheral participation in the GNU/Linux community that uses the software and methodology. Basically, the study is the example they use in the tutorial, or they wrote a tutorial on how they did their study… whichever way you read it, it’s pretty cool.
Here’s the study, and here’s the R tutorial.
R has some nice data manipulation and graphing capabilities – it’s something I would love to look into more for tracking class results for TOS professors, as well as the overall TOS and Fedora statistics efforts. If and when I decide to pick it up, you can bet I’ll be using Don’s tutorial to do so. I wish my statistics class in college had been taught this way!
Monday, April 25th, 2011 | fedora, teaching open source | 1 Comment »
While looking for language-learning tips I stumbled across the brilliant idea of learning conversational connectors. I should copy that list and get translations for it into the languages I want to learn. Brilliant, when your goal is to start having conversations as soon as possible and you don’t have enough of a vocabulary to do much…
Other phrases I need to learn proper ASL for: Help, anyone? I can stammer these out but I know I’m using awful grammar:
- Nice to meet you! (Okay, I’m lazy, this should be easy to find – I’ll go look for it.)
- I’m (deaf/hard-of-hearing) but mainstreamed, so I’m really just starting to learn about deaf culture and ASL now.
- How did you learn to sign? (Is this just “ASL-learn-you-how?” That’s my best guess at grammar.)
- Do you have any tips on how to learn or practice ASL? OR: what was the most helpful thing for you when you were starting?
- I’m an engineer and work on open source software. What do you do [for work]? (Also, it would be helpful to have a one or two sentence explanation for what open source is in ASL, but I don’t even know where I would start with this one.)
- I’m also trying to learn some spoken languages – the listening and speaking are hard. I can’t hear, so I need to learn how to lipread the other language, but most materials and classes and teachers don’t understand that since they’re used to students who can hear. For speaking, I need to sit down with someone who can help me get the lip/tongue/throat movements into muscle memory because I can’t give myself auditory feedback – but sometimes I don’t know where to find these sorts of people. Do you have any ideas? (I can say “writing and reading are easy” but don’t know how to talk about lipreading, and don’t know if there are particular words or phrases one can use to describe the process by which completely deaf people learn how to speak English – you learn sounds by the feeling of the tension of muscles in your throat, by the way your mouth feels when it’s vibrating “correctly” because your lips are placed in the precise positions that they need to be in – this is how I learned to speak Mandarin, with my tutor listening to me say “zh/ch/sh/r” etc. over and over again and telling me whether I’d got it right or not, until I could consistently nail it. It’s a weird thing for hearing people to think about, apparently.
- Thank you for being so patient with me [and my bad signing]!
If I can get some help in translating this list, I’ll make a video of myself signing each phrase so other people can have it for future reference as well. I’ll also try them out at the next local ASL meetup I can make it out to and come back with the results of asking these questions. There must be more deaf polyglots of spoken languages out there.
Monday, April 25th, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
While reading The Thinking Body by Mabel Todd today, I came across the statement, cribbed from Human Anatomy by Geroge Arthur Piersol, that “a given quantity of matter is much stronger, both lengthwise and crosswise, when disposed in a hollow cylinder than as a solid one of equal size and length.”
Well, this seemed like a fuzzy statement of the setup to me. As they said in The Giver: precision of language, people! Precision of language! There are three different cases here, all slightly different.
- Given the same amount of stuff – imagine two identical lumps of clay – and having to support, say, the same book at the same height with each lump. Between building a solid cylinder to hold up the book, and forming the clay into a hollow (and therefore larger-diameter, because it’s the same amount of clay) cylinder to hold up the book, you’ll get stronger results from the hollow cylinder in general. They’ll be identically strong in compression (book-pressing-straight-down-on-column) but the cylinder will have a broader base, which is going to make it more stable. The cylinder will also be stronger bending-wise because the moment of inertia will be bigger.
- Given a hollow cylinder and a solid one of equal size and length – imagine two identical solid metal cylinders, and drilling a hole straight through one of them so it becomes a tube – the solid cylinder will be stronger both in compression (more “stuff” to bear the load”) and bending-wise (again, more “stuff” you have to bend). However:
- Mass-to-strength ratio-wise, hollow cylinders win hands-down. You can do the calculations if you like (I do not particularly feel like calculus at the moment, but could do it if I had to). If you take a cylinder of stuff and drill out 50% of the material from its inside, so that it’s a hollow tube, you’ve lost half the weight, but only something like 10% of the strength. I think it’s because one of them depends on the square of the drilled-out radius, and the other on the cube, or somesuch.
Yes, I know that last sentence will be unsatisfyingly fuzzy for some. There’s a nice discussion here
with more formulas for those who like their physics with more rigor, and on another day I might have gone down that path myself, but I’m satisfied enough with this to keep on reading about the
structural properties of the human skeleton – the “hollowness” of bones -
which are filled with marrow, they’re not actually hollow – was what
prompted that sentence in the first place. Now I can move on with life and move on to learn about
how tendons and ligaments restrict the range of motion of a joint.
Woohoo!
Monday, April 25th, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
There’s a bit of dialogue in this scene from the X-Men 2 movie that jumped into my memory today. The teenage mutant Pyro, who (as his name indicates) has the ability to telekinetically control fire, is wary at being questioned by Magneto, an older mutant he’s heard of but is meeting for the first time.
Magneto: What’s your name?
Pyro: John.
Magneto (holding Pyro’s lit cigarette lighter) : What’s your real name, John?
Pyro (summons the flame to his hand, gazing at it for a moment before he speaks) : Pyro.
Magneto: Quite a talent you have there, Pyro.
Pyro: I can only manipulate the fire. (He closes his hand and the flame vanishes.) I can’t create it.
X-Men 3 Pyro sketch by cklum – unlike the rest of this post, this image isn’t open-licensed.
It’s the last part that struck me. I can only manipulate the fire. I can’t create it.
I’m far better at taking something someone else has started and building momentum around it than I am at being the person who starts the thing, keeps leading it, keeps an eye on the wood to feed the steady burn, kindles the deep glowing of embers that last. I’m lighter fluid. I do fireworks, bonfires, things that bring more people in – because perhaps a few of them will be deeper burners, folks that can have the kind of steadiness I don’t, make the things I care about last, because I know I’m inconsistent.
In the absence of those folks, in the absence of those who start the fire, my talent to grow it, swirl it, throw it – my talent means nothing. And when I let loose, I hope to god someone is thinking of the safety net, ready to shout if ropes are fraying or the fuel is running out. Because I don’t. And I shouldn’t, in the middle of it all – I’ll check those things beforehand, I’ll look at them afterwards – but when I’m blazing, I am blind – have to be blind to all that. And I know it.
And it’s okay. The world needs sprinters just as much as it needs marathoners; it needs catalysts, but we need something to catalyze. I’m at my best when I dive into chaos and make something from them – chaos is my raw material. I cannot conjure nothing up from silence. but I cannot conjure something up from silence.
So I’m going to go and find some noise.
Sunday, April 24th, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 2 Comments »
Some bits and snippets that have been going around in my head today, all language-related.
First, I went to the ASL meetup in Durham this morning, and was surprised and pleased to find myself able to function in a room of just signing – I looked at conversations and I understood them! It was sometimes a struggle – I had to ask for many words to be explained, and dropped back to fingerspelling at least once every other sentence because I didn’t know a word – but I did far, far better than I thought I would – no talking, no sound, very little lipreading to help me. And I’m not stuck with baby sentences – I can, with difficulty, get across most thoughts I want to convey, even complicated abstract things like “lipreading multiple languages being a challenge because phoneme sets differ across languages and people are only really trained for auditory and visual (lipreading) discrimination of their native language at first.” (Okay, so that one took a while for me to stammer out and explain.) Also, discussions about action movies are extremely entertaining in ASL.
I’m awkward, halting, lack vocabulary, have atrocious grammar (I don’t even know what I’m doing wrong – I started imitating the sentence structures of the folks around me), and generally scream hello! I was mainstreamed! but I can hold conversations and I can learn more sign through the act of signing, and this feels so good. I could get thrown into a deaf world and make it all right, and that’s wonderful to know. And for once in my life, I wasn’t straining to hear conversations – any communication difficulties came from my inexperience with the language – very fixable – rather than not being able to hear, which is… less fixable. It felt weird and wonderful to be on that sort of level playing field.
Second, this snippet from an email I wrote George Jemmott the other night. George and I were SCOPE teammates at Olin.
…I’m required to have some sort of engineering concentration for my engineering education PhD… and the current thoughts I have for focus have been around embedded signal processing for speech sounds – otherwise known as “hearing aids suck, what do I need to learn in order to deal with being deaf and wanting better ways to learn foreign languages?” And [a phonics course like the one you took our senior year] would be a lovely addition to the mix, as it’d help me understand the actual nature of the signals I’m trying to interpret (cognitively), possibly with the help of a bunch of processing tools.
I’m also interested in language learning in general for travel and such, and also fascinated by language learning methodologies as ways of teaching, because I think there’s plenty of off-the-wall creative stuff for teaching, say, Spanish, that boring-as-hell engineering topics could benefit from. People want to learn French in their car, in their spare time, as a hobby… how many people would buy “Pimsleur’s Partial Differential Equations”?
Finally, a sci-fi story that is lovely, sweet, sad… not quite any of those things but close enough that they’re the best words I can come up with at the moment – accidentally discovered while reading about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It’s called Story of Your Life, by Ted Chiang, and… sometimes the thinking patterns written into it sound familiar and wake up faint and distant echoes in my mind. Reminds me of the sort of story Sumana would post about.
Saturday, April 23rd, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
This is an academia-to-English translation of a paper given to me by Erin Dowd – although to be honest, it’s more a summary than anything else, since this paper is refreshingly well-written, at least compared to all the technical papers I’ve been reading lately – linguistics researchers appear to have better writing skills, on average, than engineering researchers. Taking notes here because I think the fact that people study these things is incredibly cool.
The Source of Enhanced Cognitive Control in Bilinguals: Evidence From Bimodal Bilinguals. Karen Emmorey, Gigi Luk, Jennie E. Pyers and Ellen Bialystok. Psychological Science 2008 19: 1201
If you speak two different languages (you’re bilingual), older studies have shown you’re probably better at making certain kinds of decisions – specifically, “executive control” problems where you have to pick one of multiple options. The guess is that bilingual folks need to choose between their two languages constantly, whenever they open their mouth, so they’re used to that sort of mental switching.
But what if you know two different languages, but only one is spoken – so you don’t have to choose what comes out when you open your mouth, because the other language uses your hands? That’s what this study was about – there are folks like my friends Kevin Cole, Mackenzie “Maco” Morgan, and Steve Jacobs who both a spoken and signed language (ASL), so they’re also bilingual. They can “simcomm,” or sign-while-talking – two different modes of communication, so we call them “bimodal bilingual.”
Contrast that someone who knows, say, Portuguese and English – obviously you can only speak one of those at a time, because you only have one mouth. Since bimodal bilinguals don’t actually have to choose between their two languages while communicating – they can sign and speak simultaneously – do they also get the decision-enhancing benefits of being bilingual?
Nope. On the types of control tasks measured, everyone had about the same accuracy, but bimodal bilingual (signs-and-speaks) and monolingual (only-speaks-one-language) people took about the same amount of time to answer, whereas unimodal bilingual (knows-two-spoken-languages) people could do it faster. You’ve actually got to speak two different languages to reap these benefits.
Here end the actual notes on the paper. I’m personally curious what would happen if they studied (1) someone who knew two sign languages – say, Japanese Sign Language and ASL – you can’t use two sign systems at the same time, so these folks would also be unimodal bilingual – and (2) someone who knew sign language and two different spoken languages (or perhaps if the simcomming folks were taught a second spoken language and then re-measured). These would arguably be difficult to find subjects for, and expensive to do (in the case of offering a language course to simcommers), but they make interesting thought experiments – my guess is that both of those kinds of subjects would get the “bilingual benefit,” but we won’t know unless someone actually tries it out.
Science! It’s wonderful.
Saturday, April 23rd, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
No sooner had I posted a long mope about not making anything cool than I realized that wait, I have. I just haven’t been sharing it. D’oh.
This is how I used to take notes in math, physics, and engineering classes in high school and college. I’ve lost most of those notes, unfortunately – I didn’t think much of them at the time and chucked them with the rest of my school stuff when the class was over, but when Sebastian started up at Olin I began to hear grumblings about long-forgotten topics. Partial derivatives. Eigenvectors. And then, several evenings in a row, double and triple integrals, and how the textbook was extremely non-helpful at explaining them.
After several nights of this (“read the textbook!” “It doesn’t help!“), I finally dragged out all the calculus textbooks I had (yes, I collect textbooks – stop laughing at me!) and sure enough, he was right; all of the explanations were excruciatingly boring. Heck, I understood double and triple integrals, and reading the textbook chapter on them made me want to smash a window with my water bottle – they all spent 5 pages or more obfuscating a perfectly simple thing. So I whipped out some paper and a ballpoint pen and wrote: we’re going to explain what double and triple integral are, what they’re good for, and how to solve them. WITH PENGUINS! And then I kept on drawing.
There actually are penguins in that document – just not in the section I used for the screenshot. You’ll have to read the full thing to meet Fritz, the Homework Penguin. Little Fritz sketches used to adorn all the assignments I turned in for math and physics classes when I was a freshman.
If you want fritznotes on something you’re wondering about, feel free to ask – if I’ve got time, I might make them. All fritznotes are licensed under CC-BY-SA.
A few rules:
- They have to be fairly small topics – no fair asking me to explain all of Calculus in 2 pages! Think “textbook chapter subsection” – so not even “sort algorithms,” but something as specific as “quicksort.” I’m most familiar with math, physics, and computing – but I love challenges, so if you ask questions about, say, Gaelic grammar, I’ll do my best (but it may take… longer).
- Any level is okay – I’ll explain anything from 3rd-grade multiplication all the way up through Gauss-Jacobi sums (though I’ll need help refreshing on the latter – it’s been years since I did anything more complex than introductory abstract algebra).
- In addition to the topic, give me something you know and like, and I’ll try to work that into the notes too. For instance, Newton’s Second Law of Motion and skateboarding (easy), or isolation amplifiers and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (…less easy – I’m not sure how I’d do this one yet, honestly, but I’d figure it out).
- I don’t have to know the thing in order to create fritznotes for it, but it’d help if you sent me some pointers on resources I could learn from – wikipedia pages, articles, book titles, etc. I have, in the past, translated semiconductor journal papers, anthropology books, etc. into more entertaining forms of English – so that’s another option, “fritznote summaries.”) Alternatively, if there’s a topic you understand and want to teach to other people, and want fritznotes to hand out about it, spend a little time teaching me and I’ll draw up a fritznotes on it for you. Ok?
Okay. Go for it.
Friday, April 22nd, 2011 | olin, teaching open source | 1 Comment »
I’ve been thinking about the different languages and cultures of geekhood, and why it’s sometimes hard for me to… well, engage with other people. It’s not because I’m smarter (I’m not) or because I hate people (I don’t) or even because I’m shy (I am shy, but that’s not the whole reason).
This comic analysis sums it up pretty well. It refers to this section in the comic strip (the full version is at the link – note that unlike the other stuff on my site, this image snippet isn’t creative-commons licensed):
The comment that grabbed me:
Because some people speak geek and some don’t, there is a huge communication gap. Geeks understand the “reason” that it works is because x = y. But their language is algebra, which lots of geeks don’t understand. So geeks end up saying things like, “Now that you’ve seen the proof, you know fully why it works.” Yeah, some people do, and some don’t. What geeks don’t understand, though, is that algebra is more or less just a language. It is not the reason, really, it’s just the language they use to explain the reason. Plain english can explain the reason as well, it just takes longer. Algebra is pretty much just shorthand. Because geeks “get” this shorthand, they’ve forgotten that other people don’t, and they don’t see the reason to expend the effort to rethink it so they can explain it in plain english… What geeks don’t get is that if someone doesn’t “speak” algebra, they can’t understand the description, so it doesn’t explain anything to them. It’s like when Robinson Crusoe tries to communicate to Friday in English, and Friday doesn’t get it. So what does Crusoe do? He speaks louder. That’s what geeks more or less do. How smart can they really be, then?
Right. I think this is why I teach well when I teach well – the best TAing I’ve ever done involved translating whatever I was teaching (electronics, math, physics, or computing, usually) into the primary “language” of the student I was working with. A bio major couldn’t understand positive and negative feedback in circuits until I said “okay, explain these cell biology processes to me,” and then went bam, that’s positive and negative feedback right there, the chemical signaling you just explained – and she went “oh!” and went on to write a brilliant lab paper. PID control made no sense in Matlab to a couple of my mechanical engineering friends until I had them talk about cruise control on their car. Voltage and current, to an art major, were the thickness and darkness of a line depending on how hard or fast or far she pushed the charcoal stick against the paper – that made it click.
Teaching is translating.
And I think the thing I’ve been lacking lately might be people to talk with. I should go out and ask people about their awesome projects – talking with inspired people is contagious.
Friday, April 22nd, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »