Education

The final exam today was a proud day for this AI professor: while waiting for me to hand out the exams, we heard someone smashing their computer on the quad outside the classroom and one student yelled out “Yeah – your AI is WEAK!” I’ll be missing this class….

I really don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before this, but having read this story about a student posting their test on-line for profit, I’ll be adding a copyright notice to all of my course materials, homeworks and exams on Monday. I understand that students at my school will hold on to and swap old assignments and exams, but creating on-line databanks, and in particular profiting off of my creatve work, is unacceptable. The article says it well in this quote: Dane Ciolino, who teaches copyright law at Loyola University in New Orleans, said Narva took “an age-old … Continue reading Copywriting Course Materials

It’s always fun to start the morning with an object lesson in not trusting internet sources, particularly followed up with a side dish of a plagiarist getting slammed. The writer of the above site shares a series of chat sessions in which he was solicited to write a college student’s essay over IM, which he proceeded to do as poorly and factually inaccurately as possible, and then reported her to her school as well as posting the story (and her full name) on his website. Particularly interesting is the long thread of comments, enough to spill over onto the next … Continue reading On the Internet, Everybody Knows You’re a Cheat

I think the college prerequisites system needs to be rethought. Today in class, I was discussing various types of behavior that are classified as exhibiting human intelligence, and after suggesting “guessing”, mentioned the relevant scene at the end of Star Trek IV: The One With The Whales. There wasn’t a single student in the room who had seen it. I commented to them that a more useful pre-req for my class than Psych. 101 might be Amanda’s Pop Culture 101 – a common lexicon of science fiction movies and television would be a good base for class discussion.

Here’s another article about the drop in computer science program enrollment at the undergrad level, attributing the drop to offshoring of programming jobs. On the one hand, a 23 percent decrease in new majors over the past year is stunning, and clearly too large to be a fluke. But I think the recent focus on offshoring as the core of the problem is too limited. When I graduated from college about a decade ago, computer science programs were still relatively new and the boom was just starting. You could leave college (and a liberal arts college at that!) with a … Continue reading Why Fewer CS Students?

An ACM committee has constructed a Model Curriculum for K-12 computer science education – not a programming curriculm and not just at the high school level (the report is a pdf available off that page). The “Grade-Level Breakdowns” section summarizing the skills to learn at each level is the most interesting to me – there’s a strong and early focus on using technology, with education about computer science as a problem-solving field being secondary to my eye. The only items listed for K-2 that seem like computer science, instead of computer proficiency, are the last two out of twelve – … Continue reading CS, K-12

It’s moved on from overdone to a yearly academic tradition: the Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2007 is out. There are always a couple of items on the list which surprise me and illuminate small changes that I never noticed happening. This year, those items include: 8. An automatic is a weapon, not a transmission. 12. Gas has always been unleaded. 32. They have always had a pin number. 33. Banana Republic has always been a store, not a puppet government in Latin America.

In a topic close to my own heart, and getting front-page coverage around here, the NY Regents board comes face-to-face with the ambiguity inherent in trying to express mathematics through English. There’s a reason we have mathematical symbols, on top of which people very rarely intersperse computation symbols and language in practice, making it an even more falsely constructed problem.

This is a really nice story from a elementary school teacher reminding people of how off the notion of “age-suitable” material can be, through an anecdote of teaching second graders vocabulary words “beyond their ability”. Says she: The names of four great classical artists rolled off the tongue of a boy who couldn’t keep his shoes tied. When you grow up, as I did, with kids who learn from cartoons to discuss the possibilities of cellular mutation before they can read … well, you just don’t accept that certain words are too hard for children to understand. Classrooms obviously need … Continue reading I always loved Donatello….

Here’s an example of where students today have some great resources that just weren’t available when I was in school. Darthmouth College has put together a site on the hows and whys of citations. It’s not the Chicago Manual of Style, but it’s easy to use and covers the most common cases, including citation rules for electronic formats. I particularly like that they give examples of correct citations following different style guides across the humanities and science. A must-bookmark for the high school or junior-high kid in your life!