Archive for May, 2011
I went to the Bavarian Brathaus in Cary last night, drawn by reviews of their sausages. Yes, yes, there’s a voice in my head grumbling about how Bavaria is not representative of all of Germany, and I understand that not everyone has lederhosen hanging from their ceiling, but I also really, really love bratwurst, and these folks make theirs in-house.
And spaetzle. And sauerkraut. (I first had sauerkraut at Karsten’s farm salon last July and was terribly confused by the unadulterated sourness until Sebastian informed me that one was supposed to eat it warm, as an accompaniment to other foods, instead of chowing down on the jar straight out of the fridge as I was doing.) Anyhow, my dinner. Bowl of sauerkraut in the back, spaetzle in the plate on the right, and then from left to right, we have the regular, spinach, spicy, curry, cheese, and garlic bratwurst. I couldn’t decide which one to order, and asked some of my Red Hat teammates, and the unanimous decision was “all of them.”
In hindsight, it may not have been the brightest idea to eat 3 slices of pizza before heading out for brats, because I was ultimately unable to finish everything (which means I have a giant breakfast waiting for me now). But you can see that I do indeed like sauerkraut and spaetzle, and which sausages were my favorites (garlic, currywurst, and spicy).
The garlic bratwurst is fantastically garlickly, just redolent
with pungency, and I’m always a sucker for curry (especially after being
introduced to the Chancellor Plate in Hannover this January). The spicy sausage (despite large red text warning of “FIRE!!!”) had a nice mild heat, further confirming my theory that the German (or really, European – or really, Western) calibration for incredibly spicy! HOT! HOT! corresponds to the Chinese calibration for pleasant and faintly detectable spicy aftertaste. If I ain’t cryin’, it ain’t spicy.
For breakfast this morning, I’m finishing my favorite 3 brats and the remaining spaetzle and sauerkraut, then freezing the remaining sausage for use in pizza, stir-fry, or something of the sort later on. Omnom!
Friday, May 27th, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 4 Comments »
Read about the 70/20/10 model. Basically, learning time breaks down into an ideal of 10% training (formally learning what you’re supposed to do), 20% mentoring (observing and working with role models), and 70% practice.
Now, the average college class is supposed to take up 12 hours a week of a student’s time, both in and out of class. If we apply the 10% training, 20% mentoring, 70% practice ratios, we get…
- 1.2 hours training
- 2.4 hours mentoring
- 8.4 hours practice
A few questions from my end, mostly wondering out loud:
- Is class time training, mentoring, or some strange mix of both? Is lab time mentoring or practice?
- How does this compare to the way students are “supposed” to spend their time for a class according to the syllabi? (N hours in-class, Y hours homework, Z hours in the lab)
- How can initiatives like Fedora Classroom and POSSE Modules assist more deliberately and effectively with the “training” portion? What about the creation of well-designed learning materials for open source participation? If they are “training” content, should we be putting instructions on how to find “mentoring” time immediately afterwards. For instance, should a 1.2 hour module on IRC usage include instructions on how to find and join and lurk in channels for 2.4 hours of observation and question-asking, followed by 8.4 hours of actually working on IRC?
- Can open source communities take up some of the load for “mentoring,” particularly for large standard lecture classes whose focus is on training? I’m assuming the answer is “yes,” but how do we scaffold and structure this in a useful way so that we’re reassured students will have a good learning experience?
Nothing too rigorous here, but… musing. I’d love to read some good writing on this stuff so I can learn to think more rigorously about it — I feel my mental muscles getting all lax and lazy and want to whip them into better critical-thinking shape.
Thursday, May 26th, 2011 | teaching open source | No Comments »
Email to another young electrical engineer thinking about studying education in grad school. I figured “huh, maybe other people could use this info” so I figured I would post it. Note that I’m about to start grad school in the fall, so my experience is limited and I’m still awfully naive, so this letter should be taken for what is is – a near-peer writing about what she thought about on her own way to enrolling in a graduate program.
I’m also an electrical engineer who turned into an education geek and open source hacker… in terms of grad school and education, it depends on what you want to do with it and where you’d like to concentrate. Which…
- Age range – K12? High school? College? Post-college (adult learning)?
- Type of school you want to work with – public? charter? magnet? rural? community college? university? in Uruguay, or elsewhere?
- What area of education you want to learn about or work within – curriculum development? being an actual classroom teacher? research on the effectiveness of programs? school governance? policy?
- If there’s any particular topic you’re fascinated with – CS education? math teaching? kids with learning disabilities? the arts in education? cognitive science?
For me, I decided I wanted to work with college students in technical fields who were interested in making educational technology – so I could teach others to make useful (open source) tools for learning in addition to making tools myself – and that I wanted to be able to (1) teach and do good design for learning, meaning that I have to study cognitive science and curriculum design, and (2) rigorously see whether the things we’re making are effective, meaning I have to learn how to do research. So I’m headed to Purdue University’s PhD program in Engineering Education in the fall to do exactly that.
Other things I considered:
- Harvard graduate school of education masters with a concentration in cognitive science (nice if you want to go into theory/research/policy)
- MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group (they do Scratch, etc – nice if you want to be the one making experimental toys)
- Taking up an engineering masters or PhD and doing edu stuff as electives and extracurriculars (if I wanted to hone my technical skills even more)
There are also other engineering education programs in the US and I can point you towards them if that’s what you’re specifically interested in (the teaching of engineering in a variety of places and grade levels). I don’t know very much about programs outside the US but I’d love to swap notes with you on that if you decide to look in Uruguay or other countries (I’m hoping to study or research abroad at some point during my PhD work).
You can also go into CS education, or any other field’s education and use your tech skills – for instance, if you’re interested in music education, you can study music education and be “the geek in the music ed program who makes software,” or physical education and be “the geek in the phys ed program who wired the gym with sensors and heart rate monitors,” and so on.
One consideration: if you’re thinking about becoming a faculty member later on, you’ll usually be expected to do research in the field of your PhD, and research outside that field will often not “count” – so if you want to do, say, CS education research, you may want to do your studies in education (and be the educator who knows a lot of CS) rather than CS (and then struggle to be allowed to work on studying how to teach intor programming when your department chair really wants you to write more papers on compiler theory).
I think for grad school one approach is to have a project you want to work on in mind – one you currently can’t do with the skills you have – and then go to the program and advisor that will teach you what you need to do in order to do that project, and give you credit for it. Worked for me. I have some other friends from college who were into education also, and they optimized for some other things…
- who would give them funding (important! I got lucky and got funding at my first choice)
- the best-ranked, best-known name (imo not important, but useful if you’re going to go around talking with lots of people outside the field who might not understand what you’re doing but will automatically respect that you went to Harvard or whatever).
Hope this helps – basically, this is a braindump of “what I wish I’d known a year ago before I started applying to schools.”
Friday, May 13th, 2011 | olin, teaching open source | No Comments »
Playing with wordpress themes, mostly minimalist ones – I’ve enjoyed fifty-fifth street and manifest and would love to take them apart and see how they work.
Came across a delightful quote from jwz.
…you can’t take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of “open source,” and have everything magically work out.
The full essay is
worth reading – and keep in mind this was 1999. Many of the same things
still apply, but it’s also nice to look and see how far we’ve come (and
how far we haven’t).
The essay “Bad Education” (comparing higher education to a bubble similar to the sub-prime lending crisis) is provocative and I wish it were better cited – it’s got some pretty big claims there and I’d love to see where they’re drawing the conclusions from.
I need to force myself to watch my full POSSCON talk video. It’s painful to critique yourself as a speaker, but that’s how we learn. (I know that presentation isn’t my best because of the large number of significant last-minute changes that went on, so I dread this a little.)
Wednesday, May 11th, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Spent several hours tonight talking with my cousin Melanie, who turns 16 next month. One of the things we talked about was generations; our batch is growing up, with nearly everyone in high school or college or recently through it. We’re next in line; within the next decade, our parents will be the elder generation, and some of us will probably be parents. Adulthood will fall on us slowly, over time. And we are gradually starting to circle the wagons – now that our round of children is “complete,” with Audrey (17 years younger than me, the eldest) the last one of the bunch – we’re beginning to talk and self-organize as a unit, as a generation – because it’s likely that within a decade, we will not be “the children” any more.
This is all natural. It feels natural, although it also feels like a slowly awakening consciousness. In a way, our parents (our mothers, mostly) planned this; I remember being small, elementary-school small, and listening to my mother talk about my responsibilities as the eldest in our batch. How she hoped that my cousins and I would be close and supportive of each other, just as we could see her and her 7 sisters doing. And we did see that – it was far more than lip service and duty that kept my mother and her sisters in close touch, caused us cousins to spend an inordinate amount of time together as children considering we lived in different cities, countries, continents – had us watch this remarkable circle of women support each other through life.
And they are a remarkable circle of women. Remarkable, especially coming from a culture and a time that emphasizes male inheritance – a group of 8 sisters, all who went to college, all of whom had careers (at least before marriage and children, though many still do). Somehow, they’ve managed to instill in us a sense of this is your family and you will perpetuate it just as much – if not more, in some cases – than on our father’s side, which is what is “supposed” to happen. We carry our common middle names [0] with just as much pride as we do our patchwork of last names. It used to be a joke that men married into the Lim family rather than the other way around, that boys first decided they wanted to be part of that circle and then would go about figuring out which of the sisters to court. (I don’t think it ever actually happened that way, but I do have uncles who were originally thought of by third parties as potential matches for a sister different than the one they ended up with.)
These women raised us as a group, and to some extent we grew up as a group – wildly different lives, interests, groups of friends – but definitely a generation. Not a generation of women as our mothers are – my brother Jason and a younger boy named Neil make up 2 of our 14 – but certainly a generation that recognizes the power of women and the power of the ties of women. Maybe our fathers wear the pants and run the house and have the final say, but our mothers hold to each other. And they make the tough decisions for the Lim clan (how much of this is caused by the absence of sons to do so, I do not know), and they take care of things.
And they took care of us, and I really mean it as a they; I spent my first 14 years in my mother’s house, but most of the past 7 in her 5th sister’s. My mother’s 8th sister has 2 daughters in college near where my parents live; my mother watches out for them. Kids swap around. Your mom’s always your mom, but you always have multiple houses to go to, and your cousins are like siblings, and the blood ties run thick and deep. I would not hesitate to open my home to a cousin or a child of my cousin, anytime they needed it, for as long as they needed it, even if I had last seen them years or decades ago. That’s just… what you do. You grow up together and you take care of each other.
And you take care of the elders when they’re elders. We watch our parents talk, we watch our mothers gather, we watch them subtly weave a web of gentle watchfulness and respect to make sure that our grandmother, our mother’s-mother, our Guama, is okay. Who will host her, who will fly with her from house to house, who will pick her up from her apartment; she is woven into our lives instead of set aside apart from them. I want my parents to be the same way when they are older – people who walk among and alongside my children (if I ever have any), not just people who come to visit them. And that does not depend on frequency of visits, nor does it depend on distance; it’s a sense you have of where they are and how they are and who they are with you.
Someday, our parents will get older. Our circle of 8 aunts will age. They will take care of themselves and each other, but someday we’ll also take care of them. This is many, many years from now – decades, multiple decades. But we’re starting to circle our own wagons, talk with each other about these things, now that most of us are in our teens and twenties. The next time there’s a family reunion, Melanie said, we should call the cousins together, and just talk. Catch up. Even the littlest ones will be 9 or 10 – old enough to know and listen and remember, to speak and understand. Start recognizing the roles we have been growing into and will continue to grow into; not just elder/younger, not so much “leader” in the sense of “boss” – but rather peacemaker, clown, detail-verifier; storyteller, tool-bringer, the comforter, the rational one, and so forth.
It’s fascinating, watching the forming of an “us.” Our mothers did their work well. I hope we will do honor to that legacy. I guess we’ll find out in a century or so.
[0] The (usual) middle name of a Filipino or an unmarried Filipina is his/her mother’s maiden name. When a woman marries, last and middle names get pushed down the queue, with her former last name becoming her middle name; thus Zenith Maya Yu Lim (daughter of Mr. Lim and a Ms. Yu who became Mrs. Yu Lim) marries Kenneth Su Chua (son of Mr. Chua and a Ms. Su who became Mrs. Su Chua) and becomes Zenith Maya Lim Chua. I was born Mallory Lim Chua; under this scheme my married name would be Mallory Chua <last-name-of-husband> – except that I’m a westernized academic who wants to keep her citations easily searchable and will thus be breaking the thread and staying “Mel Chua” forever regardless of life status. Also, I was utterly perplexed when I encountered other middle-name schemes – around middle school graduation, when I heard my classmates’ full names for the first time in most cases. (“Your name is Meredith Jennifer Smith? Your… mom’s maiden name was Jennifer?”)
Friday, May 6th, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 4 Comments »
I gave a talk to my high school’s CS class today (ah, the powers of teleconferencing). It was an okay talk and Q&A – not terrible, but not one of my great ones. It’s the first talk I’ve ever given remotely, and wow, I miss the live feedback from the audience – being able to scan and gauge a room. On the up side, it’s nice to have a text backchannel where questions can queue up; I think it’s just a different way of talking that I’ll have to get used to.
Inevitably, I was asked the question what do you think of girls in CS?
I get asked this a lot. If you’re a woman in technology, you probably do too. What do you think of women in engineering? Females in open source? <Minority you belong to> in <field that features predominantly people in other demographics>? And I do believe in the answer I gave – I said something like “…well, what about girls in CS? What about guys in CS? What about redheads in CS? I care about people in computing, and I care that people who want to do computing go into computing. The computer doesn’t care what kind of person you are. If you’re interested in tech, then do tech! If you’re not interested in tech, do something that you’re interested in!”
And yes, I know this answer ignores lots of social factors for why women may be subtly dissuaded from exhibiting interest in technology careers – it’s not like it’s a level playing field and that girls are minorities in CS solely because lacking a Y chromosome makes you automatically less interested in computers. In hindsight, I think what I was trying to say was gender shouldn’t be a big deal in computing; it’s an important aspect of who most people are and we should embrace that richness, but gender-in-CS shouldn’t make anyone gasp. I know that’s not the world we live in right now, but I believe these things should all be qualities, not stigma.
What I wish I’d asked first was: would you be asking the same question if I was a guy?
I know this class is going to have a few other speakers. I think I’ll email the teacher and suggest that they ask the same question to the next male speaker that comes along. After all, being a woman doesn’t qualify me to speak about all women – and being a man doesn’t disqualify you either. If you want to learn about gender in technology, you should be learning about and asking people of all genders, not just one.
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 | teaching open source | 4 Comments »
Laundry-folding, for me, largely consists of making neat cloth parcels emblazoned with the logo of a project (often FOSS, these days) and shuffling them into my drawer. I have shirts from Fedora, Sugar Labs, Red Hat, OLPC… amusing shirts given to me by friends, in-joke shirts from college, even one with a typical junior-year schedule week printed on it. In a drawer in my parents’ house are older ones; high school plays, middle school ASL lunch group. (And before that I was still-growing enough that no shirts from that era would fit me now.)
And as I fold them up, still slightly warm from the dryer, something hits me: Projects go. People stay.
But that’s not really how I spend my time, is it?
I spend most of my waking hours being functional on projects. All the things I sink so much time, sweat, work, tears, and soul into… they’re things. 6 months later, I’m working on other things. I squint at the class schedule printed on my shirt and go oh yeah, I did that, and the memory is foggy and distant. But the friends I’ve made are still there, and we hang out and chat about things completely unrelated to the newspaper we used to write for, the labs we pulled allnighters on together, the marathon drives to strange cities for unconferences we’d heard about. These relationships are the real things I gain from all my projects, all my work. These people keep me going.
And yet I need the work to make and keep the friendships. I’m shy. Cool people intimidate me, because… why would they want to talk with me? (I know my brain isn’t always rational.) I make my friends through school, through work, though projects. Work gives me a reason to be there, a reason (functional!) to talk with those around me, a purpose for existing that I know isn’t wasting anyone’s time. (I constantly feel like I need to make up, in some way, for my presence – as if tolerating me imposed a burden onto others.) It’s how I reconnect, instinctively – hey, want to work on something? Even if the “something” is cooking a dinner together, shared making is the way I most comfortably connect with people. It’s only after many, many months of shared labor that I can get together and sit down just for the purpose of having a quiet conversation. And by that time, we’ve shared many quiet conversations in the pauses between spurts of work, so I know what to talk about, what to expect.
And so I spend my time on work, so that I can have these connections. And I know the connections have higher priority. Still, I struggle to clear time to actually prioritize my friends and family, to be proactive about writing letters, making phone calls, taking the onus of getting in touch with them without any events, emergencies, or asking on their part. I’m still a reactive friend. I’ve been trying to change that lately. If you’re reading this and we haven’t chatted for a while, drop me a ping and we’ll figure something out.
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
Laundry’s in the wash, sun is pouring through my bedroom window, and noodle soup with fish balls is being heated in my microwave. It’s a good morning; I woke an hour ago from a crazy rambling dream that had me back on move-in day as a student in a mix of people and places from the past 10 years. So I slung a backpack on and walked out of IMSA’s dorms – I bunked with my high school roommate and two middle-school friends, in this dream – and down a set of steps lifted straight from Olin’s campus, where I caught up with a bunch of current Oliners and some FOSS colleagues.
Everyone was the age they are now, doing what they’re doing now; I talked with my high school roommate about her upcoming wedding, asked my middle school buddies about law school and what it’s like to be a linguistics grad student – but it was also full of the same puppy-like chaos I loved about move-in day; doors slamming, people upending boxes onto mattresses, the earnest discussions about how to shuffle limited furniture around a limited space, catching up with friends in brief, intense conversations; running out while your desk is still littered with crates of office materials to help a friend carry his suitcase in, happy voices, music spilling into hallways, standing in a doorway and chatting while your friends pin posters to their walls.
School’s an immersive experience for me. It’s a place of learning that you live in. That everyone around you lives in. Learning is your purpose for being, your object in doing, not something to be compartmentalized off into N-hours-a-week on the side. Move-in day, for me, feels like coming home – and it’s something you do with other people. It will be odd to move into an Indiana apartment instead of a dorm, just the two of us, the timing more about when my car pulls into town than when a calendar allows students on campus. I guess I need to change my expectations of what school means, what a school can be. Or maybe that’s why academia sometimes feels like it’s calling me home, though I feel an equal compulsion to step out of it, so I can scout and bring things to and from the world of schools and learning.
Went blues dancing on Friday for the first time in a while, and mmm, it
sure felt good. I’m getting bolder with my dancing – that night, I tried to get myself to look at my partners instead of gazing shyly at my feet, the wall, anything. It worked. It was uncomfortable, but it was the sound of my shyness crackling away, inhibitions that shouldn’t be there flaking off. Leads are starting to repeatedly ask me out onto the floor, and I’m doing dips and lifts – deep, throw-your-head-back dips, both-feet-off-the-ground dips, lifts… each time it happens, it surprises me, because I was always the one looking at the girls who could do those things, follow those things, and wishing I could move like that but not being able to imagine my awkward, inhibited body move that way. But… now I can. And now I do. Wow.
Last night, on a whim, I followed a food truck’s tweets to a lawn concert on the edge of Raleigh, a funk band playing on a makeshift stage in front of a loft apartment. After consuming the burger I’d gone there to get, I saw a few people standing near the stage, dancing a little – maybe 5 out of the 200 or so people on the grass watching and listening. Now, funk is very danceable. You can totally blues to it. But nobody up there looked like they knew blues, and I didn’t know anyone…
Come on, Mel, I told myself. You’re trying to learn how to take risks and not be timid and be more like all those bold, brave people you admire. I figured, okay, logic: if you did know someone here, then you could dance with them – or they’d know that you did dance and they’d cheer you on, at least. And if you don’t know anybody here, either they’ll see you again or they won’t; if they see you again, don’t you want them to think whoa, it’s that girl who danced totally fearlessly at that concert! and if they don’t see you again, what do you care what they think of you? Your feet are itching, your body wants to move; go dance.
And I did. I put my soda can down and went right to the edge of the flashing lights and moved. Most of the time, I was at least somewhat self-conscious. But there were moments where I wasn’t, and those… felt wonderful. I only lasted half an hour before my shyness recapitulated and I grabbed my soda and strode out of the light, out of the concert while I could do it without timidity, and the magic faded as the music sank further away, and I slumped into my car seat, misted with sweat, heart chugging at a steady clip slightly higher than usual, feeling good, a little proud, a little lonely. It sure takes a lot of energy to build a life somewhere, but I’m doing better these days.
Today is full of meetings, teaching, orientation, lessons, awesomesauce. It’s been a while since I had a busy day – a meaningfully busy day, filled with things that make a difference and push my limits, not just things-to-do for the sake of doing-things. I expect this will be a most satisfying day, and that when it’s all over I’ll want to relax and unwind with some Limonata (okay, okay, San Pellegrino is awesome) and some long and lazy conversations. Mmmm.
Monday, May 2nd, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »