Archive for February, 2012
Little thought experiment today (pedagogy class is really getting to my brain): if I were creating a new-hire process for employees being assigned to work on an open source project, what would it look like? Here’s a first pass; it’s randomly improvised and not particularly well-thought-out, but fun anyhow; it’s partially based on what I’ve (unconsciously) come to find myself doing each time I’ve launched into a new open source project over the past few years.
You spend your first week as a remotee, no matter who you are or where you’ll end up working. You have exactly the same access to the tools and processes that a community member would have; no internal mailing lists, no magical “you’re hired therefore you get the root password” shortcuts. If you want privs, you need to earn them the same way as any community member (or in some cases, when the hire is from the community, they’ll have earned them already). During this week…
- You have constant access to orientation staff — hopefully in-person, but at the very least via a remote medium you’re already comfortable in. This is important; they’re your culture/tools coaches, and their encouragement will help you buffer the inevitable frustration you’re going to hit (new hires will be told ahead of time that it’s going to be frustrating).
- You’ll get training in remote collaboration tools if you don’t already know them. Your project’s IRC channels, bugtracker, wiki, version control system, etc… you’re going to learn to use them. By the end of the week, you’ll be lurking on your project’s IRC channel(s), your blog will be feeding into Planet (and you’ll have posted on it), you’ll have introduced yourself on mailing lists, edited the wiki, triaged bugs… This is a lot like the material we teach in POSSE (actually, you could remix POSSE into this portion of such an orientation).
- Ditto the above to open source culture. Things like “release early, release often,” “default to open,” open source business models, “ask forgiveness not permission,” and so forth will be brought up by your coaches.
The main point is that you’re going to try to start doing your job without any sort of magical special “I’m an employee” powers (other than the fact that you’re paid to work on this, which is a privilege that shouldn’t be discounted). Inevitably, you’ll run into issues; outdated documentation, discussions you can’t overhear because they happened inside an office and someone forgot to send notes to a mailing list, information trapped inside the heads of your coworkers. Since you want to get stuff done, you’re going to start poking your teammates to get documentation out there, to talk on IRC, to better practice the open source way and enable you to work as a “community contributor” — and if they do, they’re not just enabling you, they’re enabling the entire community.
And that’s your deliverable for the first week. You’re going to try to get work done, and it’s great if you can, but you’re probably going to end up with a list of “things I can’t access from the community world and need in order to do my job.” Some of the things on this list may be legitimately internal; I’m willing to bet a bunch of them will be externalizable. It’s going to be frustrating, but again, that’s the point; you’re going to experience exactly the same pain community members face, so that you’ll know firsthand why it’s so important to open them up once you do get “inside.”
Oh. And you’ll get through the normal new-hire paperwork and training (finance/payroll, legal, company history/vision/mission, etc) because some of that is stuff companies are legally obligated to do (I think).
You’ll actually be allowed inside the office at the start of your second week, but only for 4 days a week. You can join internal mailing lists now, see private documents, that sort of thing. But you’re still considered to be in training. Here’s what that means.
- You’ll still get ongoing modules on the culture/tools/practices of the open source way. Maybe you’ll run an IRC meeting and get feedback on your meeting-running skills. Maybe you’ll shadow a “community-experienced” coworker to see how he/she handles certain kinds of interactions and tools. Maybe you read a little writeup on the feature selection process in your open source community and then blog about it.
- When you learn something, you’ll document it as a record of your learning. Publicly when possible, on a shared internal wiki (or something) when not.
- That one day a week you’re not allowed in the office? That’s your “community shift.” You spend that shift helping community members get their stuff done. That list of “stuff I needed access to during my first week that wasn’t out in the open”? Fix it. Hang out on IRC and answer questions. Review patches. Reply to mailing list posts. Triage bugs and thank reporters. Do some wiki gardening. Go to an open source event. Screencast a tutorial. You get to expense lunch, and you have to write a blog post (that will go to your project’s Planet) about what you (and your team) have been up to for the week — the stuff you can talk about publicly, that is.
Practicing the open source way is something that takes time and experience because it’s a paradigm shift; it’s about how you see the world, the subtleties of how you interact with it, and its effects are usually not immediately apparent. That’s what you’ll learn here — it’s easy to tell you, but in order to observe it, you need to live it.
You’ll learn that “but I have nothing to contribute!” isn’t true (remember, this is for all new hires, not just engineers). You’ll learn that your beginner’s mind is sometimes your most valuable asset. You’ll learn how your work with the community can bring a lot of subtle little long-term leverage to your employer (and some not-so-subtle, huge, short-term wins, if you’re lucky). You’ll learn what it’s like to welcome new people to the community in turn, and how quickly even a newcomer can become an even newer newcomer’s “old hand” and mentor. You’ll learn how much energy can be unlocked when you release a blocker and enable community folks to do stuff they’re already rarin’ to do.
This phase lasts for… some defined period of time. 3 months, 6 months, “until the release cycle you joined during is finished,” whatever makes sense for that project. But at that point, you get your first review…
Your performance review is based on your public record. If it ain’t public, it don’t count. The things you’ll bring before your boss are things like your git commits, meetbot IRC logs, wiki edits, list threads… your public portfolio of open source participation. If you don’t have enough of a public record (where “enough” is some standard we define somehow — I told you this was off the top of my head) then you remain in “trainee” mode for another round.
Once you “graduate” from new-hire training, you’re no longer mandated to do “the open source way” training modules (or at least not constantly), and you’ll be allowed in the office anytime. Maybe your “community shift” will shorten (half a day instead of a full day every week?) or maybe, depending on your role, it might vanish (although I would love to see, for instance, the new lawyer or accountant continue to lurk in IRC, comment on mailing lists, and so forth). Maybe on-site workers will still be required to take one “remotee week” a year in order to remind them; remotees are already typically expected to make trips to headquarters to meet folks in person at least that often, so why not reverse it?
Again, raw thoughtdump. Plenty of holes, I’m sure. I’m curious what people think – especially people who have careers in open source, or want them. Is this an orientation you’d sign up for? Is this an orientation you’d like your coworkers to have?
Friday, February 24th, 2012 | eucalyptus, fedora, teaching open source | 9 Comments »
On Wednesday, I finally got to start geeking out about hearing aids with an audiologist and a hearing aid researcher in the way I’ve been dreaming about for decades. (Literally. I remember getting in trouble at age 6 for disassembling my first pair.) Thanks to everyone for the thoughts and recommendations — and yes, there were a ton of questions asked.
Background reading: “Frequency-Lowering Devices for Managing High-Frequency Hearing Loss: A Review” by Andrea Simpson, published in Volume 3 Number 2 of “Trends in Amplification” in 2009. Let me try to give a summary of the options, which all involve taking high frequencies (which I can’t hear) and moving or smooshing them into low frequencies (which I can).
- Vocoding – I’ll let Wikipedia explain it. Makes people sound like robots (or Daft Punk).
- Slow playback – What it sounds like. Makes everyone sound like goofy baritone cartoon characters. Also takes longer to play back than the actual speech sound, so you end up lagging more and more as the conversation goes on.
- Transposition – take the high frequency spectrum, shift it down, and copy-paste it on top of the low-frequency spectrum. This is the equivalent of playing piano while shifting your right hand two octaves down so it literally overlaps the left hand. Like the piano analogy, the trouble here is that your “high frequency info” ends up slamming over the low-frequency one.
- Nonlinear frequency compression – take the normal speech spectrum and squeeeeeeze it into the lower portion I can hear – nothing overlaps, the musical notes just get closer together. The “nonlinear” part comes from squeezing the high frequencies more than the low ones so the low frequencies get less distorted. Problem: can you imagine how awful music sounds like this?
- Frequency shifting – just move everything down. Makes everyone sound like Darth Vader.
These are all extreme oversimplifications, of course. The other bit I noticed is that there wasn’t much aural rehabilitation done in the experiments covered by the meta-study. Most people simply aren’t willing to put up with the cognitive discomfort and time needed to significantly retrain their brains to hear; they want to understand speech now because they’re having difficulty and falling behind.
But I’m an odd case. I understand speech and have coping mechanisms sufficient to let me keep up with what I need to keep up with, unamplified. I have a long time horizon; I want to understand speech better 5 years from now, and am willing to pass through extreme amounts of masochism between now and then. I have a high tolerance for cognitive discomfort and like stretching my brain into unfamiliar shapes (see: graduate school, foreign languages, etc).
So I am completely fine with the idea that my amplified speech comprehension might drop for years before my brain retrains enough to climb back up — it’s the equivalent of learning dvorak (or steno) for typing when you already know qwerty. Yes, you’re slower at first… but theoretically, once you climb the learning curve, you can blow past your prior performance. I want to see if the same might happen here.
So they said all right, maybe we might want to look at this spectral IQ technology – let’s contact the manfuacturer, find out more details. From what I gather, this thing…
- is constantly working in the background to detect high-frequency speech sounds for instance, an “sh”
- when, and only when, it detects those sounds, it plays a lower-frequency sound that is not a transposition — so not a low-frequency version of “sh” that occludes speech sounds within my hearing range, but rather a made-up sound that interferes less with the speech sounds I can hear. I would then train my brain to associate that made-up sound with “sh.”
- aside from this, the original sound signal remains largely untouched; there’s far, far less narrowing of bandwidth than with other techniques.
The concern here, I think, is that my hearing loss remains severe enough at low enough frequencies that this technology might not work. We’ll check in again in two weeks and see where we stand, if we’ve heard back from the manufacturer yet, and so forth.
Friday, February 24th, 2012 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
James Huff and I ran the second half of our “Developmental Theories and Engineering Thinking” class this afternoon. The topic: behaviorism and social learning. Being the pedagogically adventurous type, we decided to place the following restrictions upon ourselves:
- no powerpoint slides, no reading handouts
- no small group discussions and presentations
- all active learning, ALL THE TIME
This blog post chronicles our lesson plan for future reference. We split the class into two: Mel’s team (Farrah, Tosin, Canek, Les, Justin, Francesca, and John) and James’s team (Joi, Ruth, Dana, Nick, Farshid, Tasha, and Kelsey).
Part 1: behavorial conditioning with cards
James’s team goes off to another activity in a separate room – which we’ll reveal later. We’re left with Mel’s team in the classroom with several decks of cards, a buzzer, and a meditation bell kindly lent to us by Ruth Streveler. Mel’s team is given no verbal instruction; the buzzer and bell serve as feedback whether their actions are correct – but eventually they figure out they’re playing a game with hidden rules, namely Bartok (chosen for its similarity to the familiar game Uno as well as for its mechanism for adding new rules during gameplay).
Once they figure that out, Mel stops them and explains their challenge: they are to think of several new rules (the rule-adding phase of Bartok) and then try to teach the game – including the new rules – to James’s team when they return, without speaking to them or directly instructing them, implying that they need to show them the “correct” actions through example. The group is given some time to come up with the new rules and play a few rounds in order to get used to them; Mel gives the bell and buzzer to another member of the group, and play proceeds.
Part 2: enter social learning, stage left
James and his team return. They are told to pick a person on the other team to “shadow” and to see what they can learn. Mel’s team models the desired gameplay behavior for several minutes, then each person hands their cards to their “shadow” from James’s team and gameplay continues, with Mel’s team providing feedback (via the bell and buzzer) as to whether James’s team is getting the rules “right. After a period of gameplay by James’s team, the class gets back into one large circle for discussion of the card game — the rules are revealed, the strategies discussed, behaviorism debated.
Unknown to Mel’s group, James and his team have been spending their time outside the classroom talking about Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, and they have their own game to bring in… but they’re not telling anyone. Each person has adopted an Erikson stage and is analyzing the behaviorism discussion in light of that specific stage; they are starting all their comments in the person of someone in their chosen Erikson stage, and their goal is to get their partner from Mel’s team to do the same. This is obviously a much more subtle and difficult task than playing a card game.
Again, we leave this open-ended; bell and buzzer may be used, verbal feedback (“no, that’s not right, you mean… <rephrase>”) may be given so long as explicit instructions aren’t revealed, James may indicate allowed and not-allowed responses and facilitate the modeling by following each comment from Mel’s group with a “correct” rephrasing from someone from his group, and so forth. The discussion will probably get a little stilted and sound odd, because… well, Erikson doesn’t exactly make for the most natural flow of conversation! How long will it take Mel’s group to figure out that something is going on?
Part 3: all is revealed
Finally, after everyone is thoroughly confused and/or frustrated (or amused), we’ll reveal everything we just wrote about, and see how the class responds. Some questions:
- What was going on during the solo phase of the card game? Behaviorism, obviously… but what sort of conditioning? How was it effective or ineffective? How would it have compared to direct instruction?
- How was social learning exhibited by both groups? How did the teams plan their social learning strategies? Did the social learning group (James’s) learn the card game’s rules faster than the behavioral conditioning ones? What did it feel like to be on the receiving end?
- James’s team knew they were supposed to pick up something via social learning (the card game); Mel’s group did not. Did this make a difference?
Readings
The class had to read several hundred pages of (already-assigned-by-the-professor) work on the topics; student presenters are usually expected to expand on this material. Our original readings from Dr. Evangelou:
- Crain, W. (2005). Theories of development: Concepts and Applications, NJ: Pearson. Chs. 8, 9, 12
- Jarvis, P. (2006). Towards a comprehensive theory of human learning. London: Routledge Ch. 8
- Bandura, A. (1969). Social learning theory of identificatory processes. In Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research. D.A. Goslin Ed. Ch. 3, p. 216-262.
- Bandura, A. (1989). Human agency in social cognitive theory. American Psychologict, 44(9), p. 1175-1184.
- Kelman, H.C. (2006). Interests, relationships, identities: Three central issues for individuals and groups in negotiating their social environment. Annual Review of Psychology, 57, p. 1-26.
In lieu of powerpoint slides and such for the background/expansion, we figured “hey, why reinvent the wheel?” and decided to contribute to the Wikipedia pages on our topics so they included all the information we wanted to give the class. Therefore, our “readings for further reference” follow. Note that these articles also have good links in them (to related topics, researchers, techniques, specific studies, etc) but we centered around these as the “core.”
Tuesday, February 21st, 2012 | engineering edu | 1 Comment »
We’re a bit over a week away from the Teaching Open Source symposium (unconference!) at SIGCSE, which is the largest CS education conference in the world. This year it’s in Raleigh, NC, home of Red Hat (and formerly myself as well – so I’m looking forward to revisiting some old haunts while in town. I miss the BBQ!)
First: I know we have a lot more people coming than the attendee list indicates — if you’re registering, either edit the page to add your name, or email me and I’ll add it for you.
Second: the event is going to be unconference-style — don’t worry, we’ll explain this at the start the event itself (it’s much easier to explain in person). If you want a preview of what you’ll be in for, see the links at the bottom of the event page. The general idea is that in most conferences, the “hallway track” has way more interesting conversations than the “sage on the stage” presentations do — so why not try to facilitate a lot of hallway-track style interactions?
What this means in practice is that people come in with questions, thoughts, projects, materials, etc, and then we go around the room doing a rapid-fire pitch of our ideas at the start of the day, then take some time to group common interests into session slots (so 3 people interested in sharing various “FOSS for the humanities” ideas might share a session, and 2 people presenting on capstone classes may share a session — and that is how the schedule’s built). Think of a jazz jam session translated into conference format and you’ll mostly have it. (FOSS community members: it’s interesting to see how different academic conference culture is from what we’re used to. Useful culture-bridging moment, to be sure.)
Third: Because it is unconference style, it’s good to start thinking about session topics you’d like to see now. Check out the current ideas and then add your own. FOSS community members — what would you like to see CS faculty discuss? Here’s your chance!
Questions? Holler here. I’ve also posted this to the TOS mailing list.
Monday, February 20th, 2012 | teaching open source | No Comments »
I’ve gotten some feedback on my post on fielding common questions at your Eucalyptus talk since it came out nearly 2 weeks ago, and have updated the text accordingly — check it out if you’re curious. I was actually urged (by EuCa employees) to put pricing information there – a level of transparency that surprised even me.
I’d also like to give a shout-out to Dr. Karl Wurst, who some of you have seen around the Eucalyptus IRC channels recently. Karl chairs the CS department at Worcester State University and is a long-time member of the Teaching Open Source community who’s been getting his students involved in open source projects since 2010. He’s taking his junior/senior Software Development class into Eucalyptus as their spring term project, and they have taken on the challenge of testing eutester against the new 3.0 release – no small feat, considering that they’re testing new test software against newly-released software with no prior experience with the platform.
I predict the readability of Eucalyptus getting-started documentation will dramatically improve over the coming weeks as they progress – which is incredibly important if we want new folks to pick up on the project. Most people fail silently; if they can’t get something to work, they’ll quietly give up and go away, and you’ll never be the wiser. By committing to fail publicly and loudly, Karl’s class is taking a vital role (and one that requires no small amount of bravery). They speak for the people who won’t. And as newcomers, they’ll be able to write better explanations for other newcomers than all the old-timers out there. Fresh eyes are an asset; if you have them, use them.
His students are blogging as they go along, and it’s interesting to see their take on the project from a newcomer’s perspective. If you see them on IRC or the mailing lists, say hello and introduce them to whatever you’re working on – and if you see something interesting on their blogs, drop by and leave a comment. Those sorts of small contacts with the “real world” are ordinary everyday things to those of us who are used to the open source world (or heck, industry in general), but trust me; they’re absolutely magical the first time you start getting them as a student. (I still remember being awed as an undergrad that people were emailing me about things that weren’t homework.)
So welcome, Worcester State! Welcome to the wild and wooly wide, wide world of Eucalyptus. Glad you’re here.
Monday, February 20th, 2012 | eucalyptus, teaching open source | No Comments »
One of the best things about blogging over multiple years is that sometimes, you really do end up writing for your future self. Case in point: around my senior year of college, I had an epiphany that I should study “Engineering:Education” that came while I was…
…posting a two-page dense ramble of engineering education resources in response to Nikki’s innocent query to the metaf07 list for thoughts on ways to do a 2-credit independent study on pedagogy at Olin. “Mel, you covered 10x more material than any 2-credit independent study could cover in a semester,” said Marco. (April 30, 2007)
Flash forward almost 4 years, and I’m in the first year of my PhD in engineering education, hunting for good books to read deeply. I’ve been flat-out sick this weekend and have a next-revision of my lit review due today. So I go dig up that email, curious about what my younger self found so fascinating, and…
Warning: this email shows the tip of the iceberg of my obsession with engineering education. I can go on about this stuff for hours.
I think Andy’s suggestion is great. Your list looks awesome. One thing I’d make sure to do is look at what other schools are doing, as well as getting some outside readings on pedagogy/educational theory, since it’s helpful to have various frameworks for looking at these kinds of things. (imo, that’s one of the great things about Meta; you learn how to apply rigorous frameworks from different disciplines to a subject you’re interested in – in this case, Olin).
So get some readings on, for instance, different schools’ grading philosophies (Chris Morse has some readings on grading and evaluation – I’ve cc’d him here, hi Chris! and one book that totally spun my head around was “Punished By Reward” by Alfie Kohn, which Gill gave me Junior year.) Zhenya, Stolk, Somerville, Allen, Lynn, Raymond, Debbie, and Rob have thought a ton about this stuff over the years too. Talk to them! Our faculty came here because they’re really into the whole “teaching” thing as well as the whole “engineering” (or math or science or whatever) thing. They are your best resources EVER.
The IEEE Education Society and the ASEE (American Society of Engineering Education, which Sherra Kerns used to be president of) have some good journals and resources, as does the NSF (although you’ll have to dig a little harder for the NSF stuff, which is mostly “oh noes, students becoming less interested in technology, must find out WHY!”)
Another helpful thing may be to learn about research methods in the humanities and social sciences (esp. education) because their “way of thinking” and how they run their studies, form their theories/ideas, analyze data, what’s important to them, the terminology, etc. is very different from the way engineers talk. Arthur Applebee’s “Curriculum as Conversation” may help clarify some of this a little, but also read at least one research paper written by an Education PhD (maybe a thesis from the Harvard Grad School of Education? Nick Tatar’s predecessor in OSL, Zach First, attends HGSE now; ask Nick or Rod if they can get you in touch with him) and compare it – and its research methods – to an article in, say, the ASEE or IEEE pubs written by an engineer on education.
Caryn Park (Mark Chang’s wife) is doing her PhD dissertation in Education and has some fascinating stuff on multicultural education (mm, discussions on diversity in college admissions!) and also some very important stuff on imperialism that y’all should read (imperialism = “dude, we Know Better so we’re going to go Help Out all these Poor Unenlightened People and make them Happier.”)
OSL [student life] people – Rod and Nick et. al – can give you a completely different view of higher education – the bird’s eye view of why we have Trustees, the history of colleges (did you know we stole the idea of grad school from Germany, or the idea of a residential college – as in, dormitories – from England? Or that the first US colleges were made exclusively to train priests? Did you know that the lecture method of teaching comes from pre-Gutenberg days when monks copied down Bibles by listening to another monk read the Bible from a lectern? Replace “Bible” with “lecture notes” and you’ll get the idea.) They also have some very interesting perspectives on education in higher education… notice how NOBODY at Olin except for some folks in OSL actually have education degrees. Typically, faculty and administration at schools past the secondary level have received no training in education whatsoever! This has some very, very interesting consequences.
Read “Teaching Engineering” and “The Torch And The Firehose,” two classics on how engineering classrooms can be/should be/are run. (Rebecca may have interesting stories on “The Torch And The Firehose.”) It’s sort of like a manual for new engr profs. Also read “Understanding By Design” which is THE classic on curriculum design, and compare it to some of the classes you’ve been through.
Read a few of Piaget’s papers (he was the one who started the line of thought that, y’know, what students do is kind of important to their learning – previously everyone was operating under the assumption that kids were blank slates and that education was moving memorized facts from the prof’s brain to the students)’. I also like Papert’s stuff (he was the first person to propose that kids could learn about computers from — gasp! — playing with computers). Then again, theory might not be your cup of tea; that’s totally cool, the rest of the readings are definitely “more fun” than the ones in this paragraph. (note: I’m the kind of person who gets a kick out building up the notion of multiplication through through agonizingly painstakingly slow moves through abstract mathematics, this stuff is the education equivalent, you have been warned.)
Do an IEEE search for papers written on Olin by Olin (and non-Olin!) faculty – there is some interesting stuff on how the original curriculum was designed, a paper on competencies from when competencies were started, about Olin’s CS curriculum, etc. There’s also a book “Educating the engineer of 2020″ which has an entire section on Olin. In terms of the history of engineering education, try to find some stuff on MIT, which is where the idea of “engineering science” (teaching engineering as a science and a discovery process) got started. It’s also where the academic field of electrical engineering got started (after WWII, the government gave MIT’s research labs 6 months after their research ended to write down everything they’ve learned; the newly displaced researchers then proceeded to take these ready-made lecture notes to colleges across the country and set up EE programs there).
Also look at past Olin material – the ABET binders we’ve collected in the conference room by Ozgur’s [design professor Ozgur Eris] office are a good start. [now-retired director of institutional research] Ann Schaffner can point you towards all sorts of statistics. (Look at ABET’s accreditation criteria, btw; everyone goes on about how they’re “restricting us” but they’re like 18 pages long – ~2 pages on general engineering programs, and a half-page each for each degree, so only ~3 pages are actually relevant to Olin.) Look at ABET reviewer comments and external Expo evaluator comments if you can get them; look at exit surveys from the classes of ’06 (and soon ’07 – I feel old now) on how well they think their Olin education has prepared them.
Other good “general public” education books: “In Schools We Trust” by Deborah Meier, anything on multiple intelligences by Howard Gardner (“Frames of Mind” or “Multiple Intelligences” seem to be the classics – he was the one who came up with the ideas of
kinesthetic/visual/mathematical/etc. intelligence instead of just one measure of IQ; “Disciplined Mind” is also good), check out the TLL (Teaching & Learning Laboratory) at MIT [now in 2012, former TLL-er Sanjoy Mahajan is on the Olin faculty] and the HGSE (Harvard Grad School of Education), and look at the Futurepaths study [by Susan Silbey at MIT] (which is looking at Olin, among other places). For an interesting view on gender in engineering education, check out Smith (and talk to Zhenya). Also talk to Gill & Brian about the engineering certificate program at Wellesley.
On teaching: “What The Best College Teachers Do” is good, “Stuff You Don’t Learn In Engineering School” is a little hokey so don’t actually read past the table of contents but it’s fascinating to see what they include (ironically, their chapter titles match up reasonably well with stuff we cover in our competencies), and “Thinking Like An Engineer” is long and dense (so pick one chapter of it, if anything) but has some cool stuff on how one can think about ethics in engineering (and teaching students about such), and also on the Philosophy of Engineering (yes, it’s actually a field [which, in 2011, I learned drives me nuts to read]) which is the tacit stuff we absorb but don’t usually think about – for instance, why are we supposed to dislike bureaucracy and like action and hacking? Why do we value idiosyncratic individuals instead of folks who “fit in”? (the “great man” theory of science and technology) How are these values passed on, consciously and unconsciously, to students as they go through engineering school?
Also on Competencies, try to get the Big Conversations video featuring Woodie Flowers’ talk, and then after your minds have been sufficiently blown by his speech, go hunt down the research study he mentions in his talk. (And let me know if you find it. I’m still looking.)
If you want to get into the more new/subversive/radical educational philosophies check out Neil Postman (esp. “Teaching as a subversive activity”), “The Saber-Tooth Curriculum” (hilarious parody of the modern education system), “The Teenage Liberation Handbook” (on unschooling), anything by John Holt or John Taylor Gatto (also on unschooling – Holt is the founder of the movement, but Gardner has a semi-relevant book also called “The Unschooled Mind”).
Look for material on the Open Courseware movement and on the rising trend of adult education (University of Phoenix, etc.) because much of the “let’s involve the learner!” trends have been pushed forward by adult students who, after years of working as professionals, wanted to have control over their own educations. Chomsky (who is pretty much provocative no matter what he’s saying) has written a book called “Chomsky on MISeducation” but it’s not the most readable thing in the world. I’d do a chapter at most.
Also, look at how other fields educate their students – one thing I’ve heard over and over again from engineering faculty is how teaching is like acting, so I’m trying to learn how drama students learn theatre in college. How do musicians learn? Historians? English majors? Dancers, studio artists, athletes, skateboarders?
Phew. I’m undoubtedly missing stuff here, but that should give you a starting point… and again, I’m totally happy to talk to people about this stuff anytime. Aaaaanytime.
I am now terribly intimidated by my 20-year-old self. And… I think I have a few more books to put atop that lit review of mine now. Yes.
Monday, February 20th, 2012 | engineering edu, olin | 2 Comments »
I’m at the airport on the way back from a lovely visit to Penn State’s Schuylkill campus (many thanks to Elinor and Tom Madigan for being such gracious hosts, with thought-provoking conversation and amazing food!) and gleefully eyeing the (gigantic!) moon pies sitting beside me.
One of the folks I met last night at dinner was David Beahm, who left a comment that I started responding to… and the response grew long enough that I decided “okay, it’s a post now.” So here goes.
You are also forcing me to rethink my approach to educational videos, which have been strictly screencasts with voice-over. How do you deal with those when you encounter them?
I turn the volume up really, really loud.
I’m halfway serious about that. I can hear some (bass), so I certainly watch and enjoy videos (especially music), but usually can’t understand words in them — I’d compare it to your experience watching an unsubtitled film in a language you don’t know. You get some things, sure — but you can’t assume you’ll actually extract and learn content from them, since you simply don’t know what you’re missing.
I’ve been blessed with some extremely good and patient friends, including a wonderful boyfriend, who are in my field. The “in my field” bit is important, since I’m an engineer and most people can’t grok the technical terminology even if they can hear. As I’ve gotten into more and more advanced material, it’s harder and harder to get support, so you can imagine the nightmares I’m having of my PhD defense in a few years.
Anyway, these wonderfully gracious people occasionally transcribe short videos for me (insanely time-consuming), or sit next to me and repeat the words back while the video is playing (so I can switch between lipreading them and seeing the video), or… similarly awkward arrangements — but they’re the best we can do, and it’s better than nothing. I am incredibly grateful for this — and it obviously doesn’t scale, nor is it a system I ought to rely upon. Because it’s so labor-intensive, this happens for perhaps one video every few months. Now, compare that to the frequency you probably watch web videos at… there are people who watch more web videos in a day than I’ve had made fully accessible to me in my entire lifetime.
Anyhow, returning to the original point: as far as educational videos go, I assume by default that I can’t use them. I find a book or website or something else on the same subject (guessing from the video title). There are platforms (such as dotsub and opencaptions) that let people transcribe web videos so folks like me can understand them, but the vast majority of videos are untranscribed. To get an idea of what the video world looks like for me, mute your computer audio, go to YouTube, and start trying to watch the clips you’d normally find interesting. Suddenly, the world looks much, much smaller.
This isn’t just a problem for people with hearing loss or auditory processing issues. Students with attention deficit, students who aren’t 100% fluent in English… captioning and transcribing has been shown to help them considerably as well. On a more pragmatic, publisher-facing note, no transcripts means the video is harder to find (because search engines don’t pick up keywords in the text).
Now, I think educational videos can be excellent and I’m not saying people shouldn’t do them — they are accessible to most, and if you can make more immersive, interactive multimedia — why not? (Heck, I make these videos myself sometimes.) Some people learn visually, some auditorily… the main thing, though, is to make sure that each student can get to the content in a format that’s accessible to them.
Let me repeat that, because it’s important. We need to make sure that each student can get to the content in a format that’s accessible to them. I’m used to having to ask for this myself, and wait for it (getting the content on a delay compared to my classmates in many cases), so when someone anticipates and accommodates me ahead of time, it’s glorious. (And sometimes students struggle silently and don’t ask. Sometimes I do this, too. I’m a very proud person…)
The easy solution for video is to post the voiceover script alongside it. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing. If you want to consider visually impaired users as well, things like “selecting colors with high contrast for color-blind people” and “provide a text description of the visuals so screenreaders can read that out loud” become important. I totally realize that not everyone has time to do that all the time for every little video, which is why I’m also a fan of releasing your work under a Creative Commons license so that it’s possible for others to remix it into a more accessible format (translate into different languages, subtitle, remaster, etc).
That’s probably more than you wanted to know. I’ve dealt with this all my life, and can talk about it… pretty much forever.
Saturday, February 18th, 2012 | engineering edu, teaching open source | 5 Comments »
All right, folks – it’s studyin’ time.
As many of you know, I’m deaf. Or more specifically, I’ve had a bilateral high-frequency severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss since age 2. Hearing aids have historically been awful at helping out with this sort of loss, so I had them as a child but never wore them (because they didn’t, y’know, help). I speak, lipread, and have mainstreamed my whole life because that’s how my (highly geeky) young life happened to turn out, but have tremendous respect for Deaf culture and would never impose technology or coping mechanisms on others that they didn’t want. I’m also an open source hacker, electrical and computer engineer, and all-around gigantic geek, and when I found out (very) recent technology developments in the hearing-aid department have been aimed directly at my type of loss, I immediately asked where I could sign up as a guinea pig.
And so next week I’m meeting with an audiologist and a hearing aids specialist who are also researchers at Purdue, and we are going to have a big geek-fest conversation about technology options, where they’re at, how they work, the state of the field, etc etc… and what might work best for me.
I want to preload my brain with as much useful information before this conversation as possible. As readers of this blog may have noticed, I’m trying my best to keep a record of what this sort of journey looks like as a patient and a curious hacker — it may be a useful story to have out there later on.
So. What should I know? What should I be familiar with? What questions should I ask? (What are you curious about?) Go!
A few things to keep in mind:
- I’m at a large research university with an excellent audiology department, live in the library and love librarians, and can probably get my hands on any papers and books (and websites, but that goes without saying) you point me to.
- I’m an engineer. Technical things don’t scare me – I love them. Advanced math, signal processing, geekery about chips and parallel processing and embedded packaging – yes. Throw them at me.
- I am studying education, and while I’m not an expert on developmental psychology or cognition or neuroscience or any of that stuff, I’ve had more exposure to it than your average layperson, and am actively pursuing learning more. I am fully aware that part of using hearing augmentation tech includes reprogramming your brain to make sense of the new inputs it’s getting (“aural rehabilitation” is the term) and want to learn about that too.
- However, my biology/physiology/medical-literature/audiology background is not as great; I took a single intro-to-Bio class as an undergrad, and my knowledge of the way the auditory system operates is exactly equivalent to the contents of Wikipedia articles on it. I am a researcher, so medical research papers don’t look wholly unfamiliar – but they are very much not in my domain (engineering education).
- This is an intense side interest. My graduate studies and work take up the bulk of my days; I love tackling tough things with intensity, but I am time-and-resource limited in what I can do with this. So “read this entire journal series, start attending all these conferences, buy this $50,000 development kit, and prepare to do research in this field for the next 50 years” is unrealistic, but I am happy to plunge into specific difficult papers, talk with individuals, experiment with technical platforms that don’t require a lot of time or money (grad student, remember!) startup cost, and so forth.
Thank you!
Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 | engineering edu, fedora, olin, teaching open source | 7 Comments »
Jason Priem from UNC Chapel Hill’s library/info department gave a talk on altmetrics, total impact, and decoupled journals this morning at Purdue. Actually, he’s giving it as I type this — welcome to the talk liveblog.
One common theme throughout the presentation is that scholarly communication has always been limited by the best-available technology. Writing individual letters by hand made sense when we didn’t have the printing press – at least it let us get our ideas out to others. Printing centralized journals made sense when we didn’t have the internet – we could reach far more people this way, and that was worth the constraints of large-scale centralization and all its accompanying restrictions of limited print space and needing to wait many months or even years to hear about scientific progress. But now that we do have the internet, we no longer need industrial-scale replication in order to reach a wide audience – and so the next publishing revolution will promote a diversity of outputs.
Research has several different types (or stages) of output; the web changes them all.
- Data – raw output. Logs. Pictures. Probe data. Satellite dumps.
- Analysis – what you do to the data. As computerized tools make their way deeper into the research world, it becomes easier to track the actions you took – the commands you told your statistics package to add, the codes you assigned to this portion of the interview – and suddenly it becomes possible, even easy (technologically, if not legally/culturally) to release this to the world as well.
- Stories – once we’ve analyzed the data and learned something from it, we tell the tales of our journeys in knowledge, often via journal articles.
- Conversations – how we talk with colleagues about them. The web has been transforming how we have conversations – witness the proliferation of reference managers (zotero, mendeley), blogs (wordpress, blogger), social bookmarking, and social networking software. Some of these conversations are, and could be – gasp – scholarly.
Jason discussed the example of using Twitter for research. He no longer reads the table of contents of many journals – he simply follows a hundred or so other researchers and reads the papers they tweet about. More and more researchers are beginning to use Twitter as a scholarly tool — and cooler yet, there’s no significant differences in adoption or usage between disciplines or stage of career. (See “Prevalence and use of Twitter among scholars” here.) This means English grad students and tenured chemistry faculty were equally likely to use Twitter intensively for research. I can’t help but wonder if this sort of thing might lead to interdisciplinary conversations that may not previously have taken hold.
(A better version of the graph can be viewed here.)
There are several different types of scholarly tweets. “Primary” tweet-citations (“citwations”) link directly to a scholarly paper, but far more common are secondary citations — tweets referring to blog posts that in turn refer to scholarly papers. This is due in part to questions of access; researchers are hesitant to link to papers behind a paywall their colleagues (and followers) may not have access to, but they know that everyone can read a blog post.
This isn’t an entirely new idea — it’s just that we’ve recently acquired the tools to actually do it well. The Science Citation Index was created by Garfield in 1961. The big idea was to use crowdsourcing (remember, this was 1961, long before “crowdsourcing” was a buzzword) to fill the role formerly held by individual expert judges. Instead of asking one person how “good” an article was, why not just see what researchers use — what data do they mine and cite? The more folks use it, the better it’s likely to be. In other words, Garfield invented Google PageRank decades before the internet took hold.
So why does Google PageRank make a lot more sense to us than “scholarly citation indexes?” Well, a citation index has limitations. It only deals with academic people using scholarly articles as resources for a single use – writing other scholarly articles. And of course, there are a lot more people than researchers. And even researchers do a lot more with articles than write other articles about them. There’s this entire universe of usage we aren’t capturing or counting.
For instance, I’m an engineering education researcher(-in-training); my work is designed to be read by – and impact the work of – people who do not publish scholarly articles. Engineers. Hackers. As a grad student who hasn’t yet been primary author on a peer-reviewed journal paper, my citation impact is zero – but my impact is arguably nonzero. My work on teaching open source has reached dozens of faculty, touched hundreds of students, been read by thousands of hackers, been blogged, tweeted and dented, found its way into classes being taught, textbooks being written, conference talks…
When I stand up several years from now and present my portfolio and defend my dissertation, I want this work to count. When I look for a faculty position (if I do), I want to go to a school that values the sort of impact I care about — and I want a way to show them what that is and how they can evaluate me on it. That’s the idea behind Altmetrics, and I’m sold. I think I’ll pitch Shannon on letting me do my end-of-term project on publicly instrumenting my scholarly life to gather and display altmetrics and getting all my old research open-access, so I’ll be clear to “do it right” going forward.
Altmetrics impact is mostly orthogonal to traditional citation impact, so if you care about it, it’s important to make sure you gather it because it’ll be invisible in your portfolio otherwise. There’s a great slide showing the correlation of one type of citation to the other (the image below, grabbed from Jason’s slides). You can see that html and pdf downloads correlate with everything, that social media has its own cluster of correlation in the lower right, and that traditional scholarly citations have their cluster in the upper left. But the picture is clear; relying on scholarly citations alone misses a giant portion of the real impact that your work is having.
You can also look at large bundles of altmetrics data and see the different “types” of articles — there are, of course, a few (3%) that become popular with all walks of people, scholarly and nonscholarly, as well as many articles (a bit over 50%) that aren’t popular with anyone at all. But there are articles that do well with traditional citation metrics but aren’t “popular” on the internet – canonical papers, methods papers, things researchers cite as foundational work. And there are articles people share on scholarly networks like Mendeley but don’t cite in their own papers – what do we make of those? (There are more of these than we may think. 80% of the articles in PLoS are in at least one researcher’s Mendeley library.) How about articles with a high Mendeley ranking but no Facebook posts — are those the ones of interest to a specialized population but nobody else?
As for gaming the system — yes, every system can be gamed, including our existing citation system. But the more data you have, the easier it is to spot gaming by eye or by automation — it’s a classic instance of “more eyeballs make bugs shallow,” – the eyeballs need sufficient data on the “bugs” to make them “shallow.”
All right. We’ve talked about a different sort of citation and impact tracking system, but we’re still applying those trackers to conventional outputs – papers in scholarly journals. What if we applied web tools to those as well, and started publishing with the best tools the 21st century had to offer, instead of the best tools the 17th century had?
Let’s talk feature set. Anything that tries to supplement or replace journals will have to have feature parity on four fronts: certification (“yes, this research is high-quality”), dissemination (getting research out there), archiving (keeping it findable in perpetuity), and registration (are you who you say you are?).
Of these four, existing simple web tools do a far better job of everything except certification. (Heck, mailing lists do a better job.) Certification is still vital, though; it’s why we have peer review. We want high-quality research, and high-quality anything requires careful scrutiny, feedback, and filtering.
Jason’s point was that this filtering doesn’t need to be done in a centralized place by a single group of people. And he launched into a description that looked surprisingly similar to the discussions on content stamping we were having at OLPC some years back.
And it’s already being done. “My twitter feed is like a private journal,” Jason said. “The people who care about my work – the… you know, four people who care about my work – they follow me on twitter, and they’ll read everything I write, and that’s peer review.” More large-scale examples are F1000 and ArXiV, and there are others.
Like any good hacker, Jason had a call-to-action in his talk. Want to try things out for yourself? Check out Total-impact, a web tool that lets people put in collections of (scholarly or nonscholarly) materials and get a wide range of citation stats on them. I wonder how well the opensource.com/education articles play in the semi-scholarly spaces… probably not that well (since that’s not the intended audience), but we could be surprised.
Tuesday, February 14th, 2012 | engineering edu, olin, teaching open source | 2 Comments »
Getting radical realtime transparency in a project can be slow and frustrating, especially in the beginning. Most folks don’t know this, but in order to have public conversations, leaders need to send out a ridiculous number of private messages to get things rolling. In fact, looking at my own inbox history for the past half-decade, I’ve sent anywhere between 2-20 private messages – on average (not maximum, average) – to get a single public message during the early stages of a project’s “open” life.
You really need to keep poking people in private asking them to put their messages public. It’s thankless and invisible work. It takes a while to build a new cultural habit, and for a while it’s going to seem like you’ll be doing this forever… but trust me, it will come. It’s going to take longer than you want it to, it’s going to take an unexpected route, but keep the faith – it will come.
There are three strategies it’s useful to have up your sleeve for times like this.
Start the conversation in private, then say something like “hey, this is really good, could you resend it to the public list and I’ll reply there?” This is good for starters if folks are new to the “default to open” concept and are reacting with great nervousness. This nervousness stems from wariness that they may not want to go public with some hypothetical future thing – in effect, worrying about a problem that hasn’t happened yet. Going this route allows beginners in radical transparency to look at something they’ve already written and assess the risk for only that specific situation – no unknowns here, no future commitments. After a few times of going “oh, I guess that retroactive transparency was okay!” it’s much easier to ask people to give “open by default” a chance.
Publicly announce that you’ll only respond to things sent to the public list. Reply to private emails with a reminder of this. This only works only if the people you’re trying to persuade are unable to route around you. It’s also a bit of a strongarm tactic, not appropriate for all situations and best used in moderation if at all. But if you’re a project manager, or an instructor, or a senior engineer, or something of the sort, you might be able to get away with it – and boy, folks learn fast this way.
Get others to help you with the nudges-to-public. Those 20 private emails to get a single public email? No reason why you’ve got to be the only one doing it. Train others to become Agents of Transparency as soon as you can, especially if they were once on the other side of the conversation. To begin with, ask them to work specific mailing lists, specific people, or specific conversation threads into the public eye – coach them from behind if needed. After a little while, they’ll be able to do it on their own – then just ask them to keep an eye out in general, and hey presto!
The key thing to keep in mind is that this is an investment. You’re putting resources into something that may not see returns for a little while. But the returns will come, and they’ll be worth it – when a project tips over into living, breathing, and practicing true realtime transparency, the results of the culture shift can be stunningly refreshing.
Keep going.
Saturday, February 11th, 2012 | eucalyptus, fedora, olin, sugar, teaching open source | 3 Comments »
