Archive for October, 2011
My dad’s birthday is on Halloween. There are a bunch of Chinese traditions around birthdays, but my family regularly follows two: (1) wear red and (2) eat noodles. Long noodles for long life.
Problem #1: I just got back from a trip and need to do laundry. All my red shirts are in the “should be washed” pile.
Problem #2: One of my reading groups is in the middle of a 2-week gluten-free challenge. Most noodles… have gluten. My larder… has rice.
Problem #3: By the time I realized #1 and #2, all the restaurants that might serve gluten-free noodles — pad thai or something of the sort — had closed.
And this is how I ended up running to the 24-hour Kroger’s down the street and consuming microwaved “pre-cooked rice noodles and sauce with vegetables and topping” from an instant-meal box while wearing (most of) my Halloween costume. Carmen Sandiego wishes you a happy birthday, Dad!
Monday, October 31st, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
I was just looking for Fedora materials suitable for an “Extreme IT Day” for high school and college students, and thought I’d share what I found. Some of these are oldies but goodies, and all of them are suitable for teens who may not have had prior exposure to free software.
Fedora Flyer by Max Spevack – (odt) (png-front) (png-back) (other languages)
Fedora Cheat Cube by Nushio – (png) (other languages)
The remainder are flyers from SXSW by Mo Duffy and the Design Team – the download links on that post are broken, so I tracked down the individual pdfs.
(Assets-flyer.pdf)
(Whatcanitdo-flyer.pdf)
(Interviews-flyer.pdf)
(Guesswho-flyer.pdf)
(Getinvolved-flyer.pdf)
Monday, October 31st, 2011 | fedora, teaching open source | No Comments »
It’s midway through my first semester of grad school, and I’ve finally started to feel like the next cycle of my academic identity has emerged as a thing that can be blended with the rest of my life (as opposed to “good lord what the hell is that?”) It feels like an alpha release of an early version; it’s nowhere near done, but it’s got some form to it now.
I’ve been looking for opportunities to blend it back into my (sorely neglected since school began) open source life. Writing pedagogical notes on OpenHatch mission design. Starting to wonder if I can do something more concrete with Plover (which probably starts with me finishing that opensource.com article for Mirabai — soooo much backlog…) because boy howdy if I want to do ethnographic research and narrative capture for my fieldwork in a year or two it would be awfully handy to know steno. Iterating on my research proposal, which is starting to shape a research question of “what sort of engineering learning goes on in open source communities?” (I need to write the next revision after a good conversation last week with Robin, my advisor; my self-imposed goal is November 1st, which means the rewrite happens tomorrow.)
My brain is changing and reshaping itself. It feels good. I’m trying to figure out how to convey the things I’m learning back to the open source world. Maybe informal literature reviews, because I keep running into articles and books and going holy crap that’s us, and then realizing that the paper looks like mumbo-jumbo to someone who hasn’t spent a couple months beating their heads against that kind of material full-time. (It looked like mumbo-jumbo to me in August.)
It’s a little frustrating, because I still feel mute — before school, I had such a limited grasp of the academic side that I could translate most of it into open-source-speak, but now that my grasp of the academic side of things has grown, my translation skills haven’t; I haven’t yet been able to voice this new knowledge to my old compatriots, which makes it feel (to many of them) that I haven’t actually learned anything yet. But I have. I just struggle to find ways to map them to my old world. Which means, in all probability, that I haven’t actually mastered any of this new stuff yet. But it will come, and I need to be patient.
I have gotten better at going in the other direction. Last week’s informal learning section on open source was excellent; there were some interesting reactions, including “I have always been curious about open source but thought it would be too hard and intimidating to tackle… but I’m glad you made us do it, because as I stepped through the readings, I started thinking wait, I can understand this… and then I realized, wait, is this how my beginning engineering students feel?” In a classroom full of future engineering professors, it became (to my surprise) an exercise in empathy as well as in the things I had expected (transparency, collaboration, awareness of academic culture, etc).
With spring semester registration upon me this week, I’ve been thinking (again) about what I want to get out of my grad school experience. I’ve decided to have some fun with my required competencies, so next weekend I’ll be up in Boston helping with Olin’s Board of Trustees meeting and getting it counted for grad school, which is epic win and an incredible opportunity that I am super, super, super grateful for. (Thanks to Christine Kelly for the inspiration, and to Rick Miller and Tom Krimmel for putting up with me.)
I am currently taking, with the encouragement and support of two of my Purdue professors (yay Robin and Ruth!), a 6-week workshop called Foundations of Communities of Practice, which is boiling over with things I want to take back to the open source world but don’t have the words for… yet. This workshop is remote and features a weekly teleconference, so it’s also the first time I’ve really asked for disability assistance – my first CART experience will be tomorrow. Excited and a little nervous, because this is basically countering 2 decades of “but I can mainstream all by myself!” identity buildup.
My course selections for the spring semester will be pretty straightforward: finish the core introductory sequence for my program (pedagogy, policy, and epistemology courses, though I may swap the pedagogy class for “Social Computing and Education” depending on what Robin thinks). And a little side project of insanity, which I’ll probably write about later when the details are a bit more settled. This semester’s side project of insanity: learn about physical training and conditioning, which has changed my muscle tone from “nonexistent” to “acceptably poor” — back and shoulder strength helps reduce RSI, who knew? — and will continue to progress through the remainder of the school year. Mad props to my trainer Mark, who regularly pushes me to not wimp out on running and is working with me on the goal of pushup and pullup (yes, one of each, and even that’s a stretch – I told you I had no muscle tone).
Beyond that, things I’ve been thinking about… my engineering depth courses will either be computer engineering, software engineering, or computer science, and (if funding and time allow, it’s not clear I’ll be able to afford this) I’m considering tacking a couple more technical classes on and acquiring a MS, because really, I feel like I should know the academic side of the technical field I find myself most strongly grounding in.
My engineering education depth, on the other hand, can be in anything. And while I do plan on taking design cognition courses and other fun things, I think I may also look at economics and finance courses, management courses, and that sort of thing… because technical companies, technical projects, and learning institutions are institutions and I want to be a techie and an academic who can see and understand and shape the systems I’m working within. I had my painful “technical skill alone is not enough” moment of awakening at OLPC, I’ve watched Olin weather the economic downturn, I’ve listened to administrative conversations, and I’ve seen a difference between the people (in all of the overlapping circles of industry and academia and open source) who understand institutions from a business point of view and the ones who don’t. And if I’m thinking of becoming an ass-kicking, skateboard-riding college president someday, I’d better understand endowments; if I ever want to run an engineering team in industry, I need to know accounting; I don’t think “business” is ever likely to become my primary gig (I love the tech and teaching too much) but I think it’s a good language to be fluent in.
It’s past 3am. I should sleep. My sleep schedule is a little funky because I crashed hard this afternoon in an (unintentional) 7-hour nap, but I’m trying to use it as an opportunity to reset into an early riser once again.
Monday, October 31st, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: A Study of Engineering Education, written by Charles Riborg Mann in 1918. Wow, several hundred pages of text written in early 1900′s style. I wonder how I can make reading it more fun. I know! I’ll translate it into colloquial English shorthand, chuckling all the while about the gender assumptions (endless references to boys and boyish pursuits!) Mann is making about engineering undergrads.
Carnegie Foundation: Hey, we’re the Carnegie Foundation. Once in a while, we ask folks to write reports about the status of education for a certain field. However, since engineering education is (it’s 1918) pretty standardized across the various US universities, we don’t need to write about the “many different ways of teaching engineering” — there aren’t any! — so instead we’ve asked Prof. Charles Mann of the University of Chicago to look at whether the current teaching methods are effective. His take?
Drumroll…
Not really. Math is important, but by loading students with theory before they get to practice engineering, we’re graduating too many students who never find out if they can actually do practical engineering. We’re teaching engineering this way “because that’s how we’ve always taught,” which ironically means the way we teach this “applied science” is unscientific — so read on and Prof. Mann will tell you all about what we can do about it.
Professor Mann: Thank you for that excellent introduction, Coalition Of Important People.
American engineering started when the colonists needed to find ingenious ways around the building of a new country without the help of European tech and expertise. We have been slow to actually acquire schools of engineering (until the Morrill Act funding opened the floodgates), but today (1918) we have 126 engineering schools, and they all believe that “The ultimate aim of engineering education has always been and still is more intelligent industrial production.” (p. 336)
Similarities end there. What proportion should be spent in lecture, shop, and lab? How many credit-hours should students spend on different subjects (math, chemistry, humanities, etc)? As industry and tech have exploded, we’ve crammed more credit-hour requirements on these poor kids; “it is obviously absurd to require from the student more hours of intense mental labor than would be permitted him by law at the simplest manual labor.” (p.257) And because of the way school governance is set up, a good chunk of these required classes are in departments siloed off from engineering, with each department thinking their topic is most important, so the English profs will cram them with their material, the Chemistry profs with theirs, the Physics profs with theirs… and you end up with an overloaded and scattered head.
Dropout rates are ridiculous now — at least 60% — but they’re better than before (91%). Most students drop out before 2nd semester sophomore year, when they haven’t even started engineering classes yet (they’re mostly taking math, chemistry, physics, English, drawing, and shop). Why should failing English or German mean you’re not going to be good at engineering? We compared company work records with grades for some GE engineers and found that college grades didn’t correlate with satisfactory job performance. (And how can we expect them to get good grades when we’re requiring them to take so many classes at once?) And there’s no reason to require theory as a prerequisite to practice. Alas, “…teachers generally believe that the students are incapable of working intelligently at practical engineering projects until they have been well drilled in theoretical principles and mathematical processes, in spite of the astonishing manner in which boys of high school age learn without assistance to man age wireless telegraphy or gas engines.” (p. 326)
Let’s talk about admissions. We took a big leap forward when we started standardizing acceptance criteria — instead of individual departments making wildly varying decisions, the College Entrance Examination Board gave us a stable metric to gauge against. It still misses a lot, though — for instance, why not take into account engineering-style hobbies? Selection of professors is also important; in contrast to law and medicine, which came from apprentice-style teaching by active practitioners (medical professors have treated patients themselves), engineering is taught by academics who have usually not worked in industry. Fortunately, some schools are experimenting with different ways of teaching engineering; I’ll list a bunch of cool things folks are trying like the University of Cincinnati’s introduction of a co-op program. Others have been looking at grading; is there a way we can make a system students won’t want to game, a system that also recognizes and encourages things like creativity?
Anyhow. Concrete recommendations. Here’s what I think would work:
- For heavens’ sake, give these students a reasonable workload. Don’t require more than 18 credit-hours (4-5 classes) of them at one time, so they can actually learn the material.
- Get “real” engineering experience into the first two years “to make the boy feel that he has actually left high school and entered upon a professional career.” (p. 316)
- Make sure engineers have broad training that includes the humanities, rather than narrow specialization — otherwise they can’t change the world they’ll go out into. But they don’t need foreign languages (in 1918) — our graduates say they never use them.
We’ll need to do quite a bit of work on our institutions and curricula to get here, since we can’t just swap components in and out — it all needs to be coordinated.
Hop to it, people.
And nearly 100 years later, we’re… still trying to hop to much of the same stuff.
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011 | engineering edu, olin | No Comments »
I don’t do this often, but there’s been a collection of interesting readings lately…
- Lack of Confidence as Professionals Spurs Women to Leave Engineering, Study Finds – “…women [studying and recently graduated from engineering] lack [not competence, but] “professional role confidence,” a term that describes,
loosely, a person’s sense that he or she belongs in a certain field. The
term encompasses more than mastery of core intellectual skills. It also
touches on a person’s confidence that he or she has the right expertise
for a given profession, and that the corresponding career path meshes
with his or her interests and values.” Courtesy of Olin professor Zhenya Zastavker to the learningaboutlearning mailing list, and separately Purdue professor Karl Smith to the Purdue ENE list. Memes!
- A Hearing Aid That Cuts Out All the Clatter, forwarded by Kevin Mark – the awkward necklace-and-a-wired-box FM unit (with matching “I have a deaf student!” teacher microphone-and-a-wired-box) I had to wear in elementary school now has a grown-up equivalent that actually sounds pretty awesome; wire loops around the perimeter of a given room (theatre, hall, classroom, etc) that transmit audio directly from existing microphone/speaker setups into most modern hearing aids. Trouble is, I don’t really have “modern” hearing aids, but… still. Incentive. Technology makes progress!
- Happy Open Access Week!
- The rules of effortless parenting, which sounds an awful lot like the style I’d use if I ever had kids. (I mean, not that I will.) It’s a very “world-proof-the-baby” attitude – heck, don’t just world-proof the baby, get the baby out there messing with the world.
- Envisioning Disney Characters in “Real Life” – photomanipulation plus some deft digital painting skillz gives a look of what some Disney princesses might look like if they were actual physical women. Not absolutely perfect, but… impressive. Mulan is (as always) my favorite. Via my cousin Megan’s message to our friend Randy, who’s a big Disney geek.
- Coaching Yourself, which has stories of the systematic sort of feedback I’m trying to set up for myself as well. Trouble is, I sort of want to master everything, but you can’t set this sort of feedback up for everything… can you?
- Bogleheads, which has the sort of personal finance and investment discussions I want to be able to participate in. I can mostly understand them, but have not jumped as far in as I ought to, mostly because of lack of time and fear. On the one hand, I’m doing what seems to be a pretty decent job; when Randy and I went to the Financial Planning Day event in Chicago, the financial planner I got my free 15-minute coaching session with looked at me after I’d laid out my situation (maxing out standard retirement accounts, emergency savings, what about a 529 as a tax vehicle..) and said “I usually don’t get 25-year-olds like this.” But I haven’t rebalanced my portfolio… pretty much… ever. And my credit report? Never checked it. And I have no medium-term savings goals, basically – it’s all either “retire!” or “pay rent next month,” as if there were no big milestones popping up in the next decade of my life (graduation and subsequent relocation? buying a house? round-the-world trip?) So I could sure as hell use help with this, and am grateful Randy’s also trying to get through it so we can be personal-finance-learning buddies. (Anyone else interested? Let me know!)
- The Secret To Lying is a young-adult novel by a fellow IMSA alum (before my time), and is basically set in “IMSA” (the same way Yellow Lights was set in “Olin”). IMSA life doesn’t usually have that much drama, and my experience was in most ways dissimilar to the protagonists’; I really don’t remember that much relationship drama everywhere at the high school, but then again I was pretty oblivious to that sort of thing at that age. However, there was a lot of familiarity to the setting; I found myself mentally walking through the campus during the book scenes. I’ve studied in those hallways, walked around that pond, been a Club Pseudo geek (yes, they mention our improv/variety-show club by name) and done creative things with awful cafeteria food. A little haunting, the knowing of the place that comes through in the writing. And there is a little I can sympathize with.
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Massachusetts caught me in the fall.
It was October, and I was 16. My dad and I were in Boston for college visits, the second time I’d ever been — the first time being when I was perhaps 6 or 7, and my little brother 4, and the video documentation of our family trip shows me raging impatiently at the dinosaur museum when my brother took too long to puzzle out the signs in his hesitant small-child-beginning-to-read-out-loud voice.
But I was older now, and this was the college tour trip — MIT and Harvard, said my father, because we know they’re Very Good Schools. Olin, I said, because it’s on the way, we might as well. Besides, I’d never get into any of these places; they were for Smart People. But I’d like to see them.
We saw MIT and Harvard; I think this is when I spent the night at MIT’s Fenway House, curled in a basement room with garish red/white/yellow/black murals painted by teenagers, cats and encyclopedias, random trips to the video arcade without asking our parents for permission! and late-night conversations, scruffy sneakers and sweaters and statistics tangled on the couch studying, adrenaline. It was the first time I had walked a city’s streets at night without a parent and a tight agenda, and — what a buzz! There was traffic. There were buildings. There was… everything, it seemed — the city screamed of informality and freedom and sprawl, mental and physical. Harvard Square was red brick, bookstores, history — a depth of stately knowledge lacking (or so my high-school self thought) in the extruded plastic subdivisions I’d grown up in.
Then we drove into the suburbs towards Olin. As we curved through Wellesley and Newton, northeastern sunlight filtered through the trees, which were saturated with yellow and red with splotches of green. Brown, purple. Mottled shapes, different textures; bright bars thrown across the roadway, slow confetti flutters cartwheeling across the street as we sailed past. One curve in the road is blurred into my memory; I saw the light, I saw the leaves, and I thought yes, I would surround myself with this beauty of a city for four years, see what it transforms when it soaks in. Even now I see flashes of that moment every time I drive to Olin in the fall.
Now I am in Lafayette, a far cry from Boston. We’re in the cornfields; roads are straight and flat. But autumn still comes, and I am still arrested by rain-varnished mosaics of fallen leaves on the sidewalks as I walk to campus. Now I walk by houses on the way. Some are obviously occupied by students; beer pong tables and cheap plastic furniture on dilapidated porches, uneven spurts of decorating (a Purdue-carved pumpkin, a state flag). Some are what I imagine a professor’s house to look like, a sort of worn-in comfort; cozy-looking gates and windows, an absently roaming garden jammed with flowers, grasses, and a plethora of charmingly mismatched lawn doohickeys.
Inside, I imagine a fireplace, a lounging couch with laptop power cords winding towards it, shelves and shelves and shelves stuffed full with books, desks stacked happily with papers and coffee stains. Everything in a sort of happy flow, absentminded of the cooling mulled cider because of an intense, expansive mental presence in a problem space, dogs and cats and spouse and kids tumbling in and out of a researcher’s field of vision.
The night grows crisp, and the tea kettle runs out and is rinsed with hot water and placed upended on a towel to dry. Lights fade. And I am still caught in a timeless fall, with teenagers and leaves tumbling across college campuses. And glimpses of myself — my past, my present, and maybe my future — in the flashing flights of color that float down.
Tuesday, October 25th, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Blast from the past came up in #teachingopensource today, the Personal Learning Environments page on Wikiversity. Cormac Lawler, you have been one of my grad school heroes since we first met in Taipei in summer of ’07, and I continue to search for a dissertation project Just As Cool for my own studies. I salute you, sir.
Also, this quote still holds true.
“…the exact technologies that are in use at any particular point in
time don’t matter as much as the fact that it is people being connected
through them. Tools come and go constantly, and the only constant is
that the people are the important part of the equation.” –D’Arcy Norman
Tuesday, October 25th, 2011 | olin, teaching open source | No Comments »
I’ve admired Richard Felder’s work on learning styles of engineering students for years, so when I got him as a reading assignment (to summarize for the rest of my class) I was psyched. The essays are short and fun to read, so I do recommend looking at the links — but for the time-pressed, here’s a one-page summary of learning styles Felder covers. Always good to have more insights into the way you learn. For the record, I’m a strong Intuitor, almost entirely Global, and (as any of my more project-management-minded friends will tell you — I’m sorry, Nikki and Sebastian) ridiculously in the realm of a Perceiver.
Stan and Nathan – Sensor/Intuiter
Stan is practical; he fixes cars, does perfectly in lab classes, but struggles with others, doing homework problems by trying to copy the steps of a book example in order to solve a new homework problem. He is a Sensor, favoring information from his senses. Sensors are attentive to details and don’t like abstract concepts, frequently complaining that something “doesn’t apply to the real world.” Sensors like well-defined problems that can be solved by standard methods.
Nathan is scholarly and a bit spacy. He’s a voracious reader who can’t change a lightbulb, and does well in classes except for labs, where his results are always inconsistent. Nathan is an Intuiter and favors internally-generated information (memory, conjecture, interpretation) while being bored by details. Intuitors prefer problems that call for innovation.
Susan and Glenda – Sequential/Global
Susan gets straight B’s. She is a Sequential learner and gains understanding in a linear fashion, with each new piece of information building logically from previous pieces. School’s structure works for her.
Glenda gets a mix of A’s and C’s. She is a Global learner who absorbs information almost randomly, in no apparent logical sequence. At the start of classes, she flounders — but sometimes everything “clicks” and thereafter she can do problems intuitively (which is where the A’s come from). Although these folks are often
global systems thinkers and potentially super-creative, the structure of school poses difficulties for them and they frequently drop out.
Michelle, Rob, and Art – Meaning/Reproducing/Achieving
Art (studying for an exam): “Look at this question—he’s used it for three years in a row.” Art has an Achieving Orientation; his goal is to get good grades, which means finding out what the teacher wants and delivering it. If he needs to dig deep, he will; if he can get away with staying shallow, he will.
Rob: “Just tell me what formula I plug into, okay?” Rob has a Reproducing orientation. He’s just memorizing, and tends to be extrinsically motivated.
Michelle: “I was trying to think why you would want to know the entrance length, and it seems to me that if you’re designing a piping system that has a lot of short pipe segments it would be important to know how well your pressure drop formulas will work…blood flow again, in capillaries, or maybe lubricating oil in a car engine, or…” Michelle has a Meaning orientation, and wants to know how things she’s learning are related and how they matter to her experience. Teachers wish they had more students like her.
Jill and Perry – Judging/Perceiving
Jill: “It’s 4:30 and we haven’t started yet…let’s see…maybe if we study for about 45 minutes now, then I’ll work on the report and we can get a pizza delivered, and that way we can leave at 7 to get to the movie…” Jill is a Judger, who plans ahead and budgets her time. However, they tend to jump to conclusions, make decisions prematurely, and doggedly adhere to agendas that may no longer be appropriate.
Perry: “Why don’t we just get started and see where we are at 7 and decide then what to do, we can always skip the movie or go and study some more when we get back if we need to.” Perry is a Perciever, who does as little planning as possible, preferring to remain flexible in case something better comes up. They tend to work in fits and starts, alternating between periods of unfocused activity and frantic races to meet deadlines. Their flexibility and tolerance of ambiguity will make some of them superb researchers.
Tuesday, October 18th, 2011 | engineering edu, olin, teaching open source | 2 Comments »
Composing a Life by Mary Catherine Bateson is the book I read through the past week of travel, first relaxing (difficult work, relaxing!) in Scottsdale, Arizona, then shyly trying to maintain and deepen that sense of breathing through an engineering education conference in Rapids City, South Dakota. Languid deserts, palm trees and cacti dotting rust-red soil; sun-warmed pools and winding conversations over massive burgers and differential equations, passing platters of chicken wings and following friends through a Halloween store, spontaneous plane tickets, fractured rock in the Black Hills.
My long-wished-for “proper” tea, with finger sandwiches and scones with clotted cream and lemon curd, the structure of the meal a revelation as each small component fit into a larger orchestration. The discovery that more slow layers of familiarity have emerged; seeing the conference with the eyes of someone with a month of immersion into the scholarly tradition of the engineering education discipline, instead of none. Meeting my old physics professor — now Sebastian’s professor — and her new research group; watching my Purdue colleagues and faculty thread through the convention center, a duck confit and window-shopping with Steve, a long drive with Greg and Heidi. Small things that restock my soul. Debating pedagogy, looking over at the rustle of the New York Times, and wondering how did I get to be so lucky? And also why am I so tired, and how do I listen for discernment?
Anxiety and a perpetual knot in my stomach, occasionally dissolved with long, slow hugs; a lovely lazy morning of sleeping in. Frustrating paper sessions that made my eyes glaze and my fists clench; a flood of broken language as I try to situate my research ideas within grant-proposal format — excitement, trying to grasp a dialogue I’m unfamiliar with speaking. Quiet reading on the plane; sketching the canyons, excited cell-phone filming of the airport.
It has been life. And Bateson’s book, picked up during occasional moments, has framed that life this week, with its themes of following the constructed and improvised lives of five brilliant, multifacted, evolving, and very human women. I scribbled notes.
On page 71: “Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.”
Particularly relevant during a large academic conference on engineering education, which has long had issues with diversity, privilege, inclusion, and self-knowledge. It’s a quote I wanted to remember, so I reread and recopied it until I felt like it had a hope of emerging unexpectedly in later thought and adding its tone to the self-awareness of that unknown future moment.
On 82: “There is a special dynamic in hard creative work alongside someone you are in love with.”
There is. I think we found that work dynamic long before realizing that there was something beyond a friendship taking hold — in fact, I want to say I started recognizing feelings through the way work felt, because that was the lens my life was focused on, almost in entirety, before the first time we went through the awkwardness of shuffling, defining, and renegotiation that accompanies the start of a relationship (or this one, at least). The quote continues. “The idea flow differently, and there is a common vividness… women are often stimulated to more ambitious and creative work when they see that work supporting someone they love.” And yes, I think that’s true.
There’s an extended section on caretaking and the many forms it can take, and about self-care as a form of caretaking. There’s another pointing out the patchwork lives of women — and of men — as directly contradicting the assumption that work, energy, and care are finite and zero-sum, that one can only serve one master at a time; there are tales of interweaving multiple lives in ways that enrich both. There was familiar wonderment and pain and loneliness, as in the line on page 180:
“Sometimes I felt as if a whole living planet were turning in my mind, with no one around me willing to share my vision.”
There were others. Page 193: “…constructing an educational system on observation rather than authority,” and on page 210 “The need to live in an imperfect world… [simultaneous with] the need to maintain a vision of a better one.” There was a new vocabulary word, wandervogel, used to describe the itinerant-traveling-scholar life of a famed researcher when he was in his unformed, rapidly-learning youth: my dictionary tells me that this translates into “bird of passage.” There was Arabic poetry, discussions on female college presidency, on gender role assumptions, on sacrifice, on an embrace of ambiguity and messiness, a meditation on how war brings black-and-white clarity to things and can come as mental relief.
It feels wonderfully reassuring to listen to other voices speak about these things, write them, describe tapestries of lives that in some small ways do reflect my own experiences, because I feel so frequently like a kindly accepted other. And the stories of these women give me a space in which I can be not a you but a thou, a soul with kindred of some sort, someone who enters a space already deeply understood. Thank you, Professor Bateson.
My plane is landing, so it’s time to close my laptop and reflect and think. Plenty to do once I land — give Nick a ride back to school, call the casting producer, get groceries, work on my lit review, figure out how desperately behind I am on homework… I’m learning once again to find and marvel in the oasis for a moment, be refreshed, and then move on.
Sunday, October 16th, 2011 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
I’m currently sitting in the Frontiers in Education (FIE) conference., but my brain’s too jumbled to give an actual event update, so you’ll get the non-event stuff instead.
First, just-the-fun-stuff: Red Hatter and former Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields is teaching an after-school activity for his kids’ elementary school, a Python workshop for 5th graders. He’s using a custom thumbdrive-bootable pulled Fedora Remix to provide a consistent computing environment across the school’s computer lab and will be putting his curriculum online — something to watch! Read more at Paul’s blog post.
I’ve been working on a research proposal with the goal of settling on one project idea by Halloween. It has to do with “engineering education and open source practices,” but beyond that I hesitate to call anything stabilized. The current version is incoherent, rambly, impossible to execute, raises questions about ethics… but “release early, release often” tells me that the quicker I get it out there, the quicker it’ll improve. I managed to get 3 feedback rounds in before the end of FIE (2 incorporated, 1 which I still need to factor in) and have promises of 4 more very soon, and some pointers to resources I need to spend time tracking down. Fail faster!
Finally, our SIGCSE 2012 workshop got accepted. It’s called “Welcome to Makerland: a first cultural immersion into open source communities,” and here’s the abstract.
Participating in free and open source (FOSS) software communities provides students with authentic learning while supplying instructors with a wide variety of educational opportunities including coding, testing, documentation, professionalism and more. However, instructors may be unfamiliar with how FOSS communities work and therefore may be reluctant to involve students in such communities. This workshop is a subset of material used in Red Hat’s Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience workshop, now in its third year of successfully providing a ramp to FOSS projects for instructors. These instructors have demonstrated success in involving their students in FOSS
communities where students have contributed code, interface design, and more.
Intended audience: Computing educators at the college or high school level interested in involving students in open source software projects in any capacity (testing, coding, documentation, design, project management, observational shadowing of a large-scale project, etc). The workshop may also be of interest to pre-high school computing educators and members of the open source community. No experience with open source communities or contribution is necessary.
If you’re interested in attending, helping, contributing materials, getting copies of materials (they’ll be open-content and posted online, of course) or want to get involved in any way, drop me a line and we’ll figure out the best way for you to participate.
Saturday, October 15th, 2011 | teaching open source | No Comments »
