Screenshot: A Weblog

I know that a lot of schools are looking at outsourcing more and more services to save money - both physical services like facilities maintenance and technological services. I liked this student perspective in a recent Yale Daily News on Yale's plan to transition their email to Gmail. Besides enumerating some of the privacy and accessibility concerns that such plans have raised, the article argues for an open process when making such a significant change. It seems, from these students' perspective at least, there are questions they would like to have answered about the services Gmail will provide before a switch is made. I cannot comment on what types of opportunities for information and feedback Yale may have provided. But taking this article at face value, these types of open conversations can be time consuming, but particularly at a college or university I think there is so much value to helping students practice being part of complex decisions where multiple factors are being weighed, that the type of transparency being called for has a strong connection to the educational goals of these institutions.

Posted by Amanda at 8:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This article via Wired about whether geeky decorations turn women away from computer science has me conflicted. The article is definitely provocatively titled, "Star Trek Stops Women From Becoming Computer Scientists", but the underlying study being reported shows that sitting in a room with Star Trek decor correlates with women responding more negatively to a survey of attitudes about computer science, with men not showing the same effect.

As always with this type of study, there are things to poke at - would other strongly themed decors have the same result? What about a non-neutral room with lots of academic science posters and pictures? Or does a decor with any geeky content correlate with negative attitudes? Is the negative impact due to association with the geeky culture and the types of people the women think of as doing those jobs, so the issue is it being Star Trek, which triggers all sorts of stereotypes? Or is there a disinclination to associate so strongly with science that it defines one's whole life including the decor of one's space, and it doesn't matter what the nature of that geeky decor is?

I obviously have ulterior motives for wondering - I inevitably end up decorating my spaces. And I'm a bit of a geek. I might even have a *very* *tiny* Enterprise model in my office that someone gave me, as well as the obligatory Escher calendar, conference posters, etc. Is this subtly hostile to female students, and do the quilts and curtains that I've hung help counteract that? Should I take down the XKCD cartoons I've hung on my lab door? I don't want to - I like that students read them and will tell me "oh, now that I've taken your AI class I actually understand that!". But I can also see how that type of imagery projects the message that you are either in the group and get it, or outside the group and don't. I would be really curious if one gets the same effect with, say, physics or math.

So I'm thinking about it.... It adds to the oddness for me that I am the only female professor in my department, and I'm definitely the one with the strongest inclination towards geeky decor. Probably with the strongest inclination towards decor in general. I would have thought personalizing a space would show an appealing warmth and personality, which one might think would have a positive impact on attracting and retaining underrepresented minorities. But maybe I ought to think about bringing my Hermione wand home...

Posted by Amanda at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A Mathematician's Lament was Slashdotted weeks ago, but I finally sat down and read my way through the whole thing. Lockhart, a math professor who returned to elementary and high school math education, writes about the fundamental flaws he sees in how we approach teaching math, particularly at the youngest levels. He opens with two stories that describe in his view what music and art education would be like if they were taught in the same way math is taught:

I was surprised to find myself in a regular school classroom— no easels, no tubes of paint. “Oh we don’t actually apply paint until high school,” I was told by the students. “In seventh grade we mostly study colors and applicators.” They showed me a worksheet. On one side were swatches of color with blank spaces next to them. They were told to write in the names. “I like painting,” one of them remarked, “they tell me what to do and I do it. It’s easy!” After class I spoke with the teacher. “So your students don’t actually do any painting?” I asked. “Well, next year they take Pre-Paint-by-Numbers. That prepares them for the main Paint-by-Numbers sequence in high school. So they’ll get to use what they’ve learned here and apply it to real-life painting situations— dipping the brush into paint, wiping it off, stuff like that. Of course we track our students by ability. The really excellent painters— the ones who know their colors and brushes backwards and forwards— they get to the actual painting a little sooner, and some of them even take the Advanced Placement classes for college credit. But mostly we’re just trying to give these kids a good foundation in what painting is all about, so when they get out there in the real world and paint their kitchen they don’t make a total mess of it.”

The heart of the article is an argument for mathematics as an art, where creativity is central. Lockhart acknowledges that most people do not understand what mathematics really is - because they never get to really do mathematics in school. Math is taught as facts to be known rather than celebrating the ideas and insights that led to those facts being established. The drive to make math practical and relevant to our lives has taken out the part of math that is fun and interesting. I love the example that he gives of a good math question - one that asks you to think and have ideas:

Suppose I am given the sum and difference of two numbers. How can I figure out what the numbers are themselves?

As he notes, if you know algebra you can apply it to this problem, but even if you do not know algebra you can think about it and come up with an answer and test it out. It is a puzzle that encourages creative thinking instead of applications of formulas to problems that follow a predictable template. Ultimately Lockhart doesn't argue that we shouldn't teach students to learn arithmetic and algebra, but that those things should come out of real, interesting problems that the students are trying to solve.

For me, I think about how different my introductory programming class would be if math was taught this way. I watch students struggle with how to solve a problem based on the things they know how to do, and a number of them want to be told what process to follow to come up with an answer - what similar problem that they have solved before can they slightly adjust to come up with an answer to this problem. Exploring ideas, some of which will fail, seems to be an unfamiliar process for a lot of them. Which is sad, because that is part of what is so fun about programming - you can have an idea and then test it out right there and see what happens. The whole process hinges on having learned at some point to think "what if I do this" and see where it takes you. If math was taught in school the way Lockhart describes, the transition to programming would simply be one of adding a bit of syntax so the computer can understand your ideas.

If you are all at all curious about the article but daunted by its length (it is very long), read the first section with the "dreams" and then just skim through the dialogs - they are a nice Socratic summation of Lockhard's argument.

Posted by Amanda at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Thoughts on the approaching semester:

• Syllabi - There are two philosophies here, it seems. Go bare bones - who are you, what book is being used, and when are the exams. Or go all out - detailed policies on late homeworks, attendance, academic honesty, etc. and day-by-day breakdowns of every class meeting for the entire semester. I've been veering more and more towards the later, but that is really not my style. I'm thinking about how I can start to streamline. For now, I think it is going to vary by courses - low-level courses predominantly taken by freshman or sophomore students who have not had me in class before get the long-detailed version. Upper-level courses with students who have all taken at least one, if not two or three or four, courses with me get the fast and dirty version.
• Office Hours - I have held office hours at least three hours a week each semester for the past three years. The majority of the time, I am in my office alone during my office hours - sometimes having had to pass on attending a lecture or a meeting because I have office hours scheduled. The majority of the time that I meet with students is either by appointment or, more frequently, them catching me in my office and stopping in to ask questions. Sure, the theory is that you can get other work done during office hours if students are not there, but some tasks do not lend themselves well to the potential interruption, and I do not like having grading out or drafting assignments or exams if I know a student might wander in. So, I am going to experiment with not holding pre-scheduled office hours this semester and telling students to either schedule an appointment or just drop in if I am around. Really, this should give me more time to meet with students because I will not be starting with three potentially dead hours a week of "student time" before I see my first real live student.
• Administrivia - It is overwhelming the number of little things you forget about that have to be handled in the week or two before classes. Meeting times need to be set for various committees and the department, and the course schedule isn't in the room scheduler system yet, so it's a mystery which rooms are worth sending in requests to reserve - I'm starting a trial-and-error process of hunting down a room for one committee. Lab access has to be set up for students, which means making sure everybody is on the same page for the lab access policy. Making sure my student assistant is actually going to get paid. Sorting out where to drop off course packets to be copied. Making sure the software I need is on my lab's computers. I've probably sent a dozen emails today about minor things that need to happen.
• Courses - Oh, yeah... I'm actually going to be teaching soon. I've spent a lot of time earlier in the summer thinking about my classes and what I want to do, but the next week is going to be filled with the less interesting details of how instead of what. I am really looking forward to this semester though. I'll be teaching upper-level programming for the first time and I've got some really fun ideas of what I want to cover - both on the theory side and on the nitty-gritty tools side. I want to see my department's open houses continue and see if we can get a good mix of substantive discussion and social interaction going on at them. And I have two students I will be doing some type of research with, both working in really neat areas. At the very least, I am going to be busy.

Overall? This is either going to be a really great semester, or I will collapse into a little ball of stress by mid-October. Stay tuned to find out which!

Posted by Amanda at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In response to Harvard releasing its internal report on their educational objectives, Steven Pinker discusses some reservations, more with the high-level phrasing than the specific steps to be taken, it seems [via Arts & Letters Daily]. Of particular interest - even at Harvard the debates about requiring science, how much science, and of what types for what reason take place. Pinker laments that the current argument for science education seems to have a greater requirement that the applicability to social issues be made the focus than other fields find required of themselves. While it isn't a full argument, I thought his counterclaim for the relevancy of pure science education was nicely phrased:

Also, the picture of humanity’s place in nature that has emerged from scientific inquiry has profound consequences for people’s understanding of the human condition. The discoveries of science have cascading effects, many unforeseeable, on how we view ourselves and the world in which we live: for example, that our planet is an undistinguished speck in an inconceivably vast cosmos; that all the hope and ingenuity in the world can’t create energy or use it without loss; that our species has existed for a tiny fraction of the history of the earth; that humans are primates; that the mind is the activity of an organ that runs by physiological processes; that there are methods for ascertaining the truth that can force us to conclusions which violate common sense, sometimes radically so at scales very large and very small; that precious and widely held beliefs, when subjected to empirical tests, are often cruelly falsified.

I believe that a person for whom this understanding is not second-nature cannot be said to be educated. And I think that some acknowledgment of the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge should be a goal of the general education requirement and a stated value of a university.

Posted by Amanda at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was chatting with a friend about life, and the topic rolled around to issues of grading and busting cheaters. Which led me to speculate about how awesome it would be if that awful reality show "Cheaters" was about academic dishonesty. Which led me to write the following:

CHEATERS: ACADEMIA

Scene: at bucolic college campus, a professor calls up a PI.

Prof: "I think I have a case of cheating, but I need evidence."
PI: "Give me the details - I'll build up a dossier."

Night vision camera shots of the professor at the computer using Turn-it-in

PI: "These cases all start out the same. That small nagging voice of doubt in the back of the head. The normally sloppy student shows a new attention to grammar and turn of phrase. New words start appearing and the student gets vague when asked where they're from. Eventually, even the most naive instructor realizes something is going on. And then they come to me."

Cut to interview with professor, in a strained voice: "I don't want to believe it is true, but I just can't hide from the truth anymore. I need to know. I need to know if any of this was ever real." waves papers around

Scene: PI rolls up in a van outside an academic building to meet with the professor.

PI: "I have some things to show you - are you ready?"
Prof: "Yes - I need to know."
PI: "We've been monitoring your student's work for the past week. First, we look at this essay. At the end of the first paragraph, we see this complex sentence - it is similar to this passage on p. 67 of the text, but you'll notice that while there are no quote marks, the text is listed in the bibliography."
Prof, nods: "He always was forgetful about explicit citation - we used to laugh about that."
PI: "Later in the essay, we see him approach the question of the author's approach to the question, and you see him start this paragraph with a claim about postmodern existentialism....."
Prof, quiet: "He never saw that in any class with me...."
PI: "And then here, this entire paragraph is an exact match for this article found in the author's entry in Wikipedia."
Prof: "The bastard!!!!! Not with that whore!!!!!"

Scene: The PI and Professor roll up in the van to the campus computer center. They approach the student, working inside.

Student, looking up from computer, open to Ask.com: "What are you doing here?" hits Alt-Tab
Prof: "Shut up! I know what you did!"
Student: "What are you talking about?"
Prof: "Don't lie to me! I know what you're doing here! I know all about you and those websites. All that talk of background research, and using the web to familiarize yourself with the vocabulary - how long has this been going on?"
Student, defensive: "It was just that one time. I swear. I couldn't help it. I was just checking a date, and then I read it. I didn't mean to do it. I didn't even realize I was repeating what it said. It was an accident!"
Prof: "Accident! If it wasn't anything, why didn't you mention it? Why didn't you give me a citation? You knew it was wrong, and you didn't want me to find out."
Student: "What can I do? I'm sorry. Let me make it up. Let me write it again. I'll do anything. I don't want to lose this class."
Prof: "You've got to be kidding me. You had your chance with me. I want you out of my class now. You're not going to make a fool of me again."
Student: "This is all your fault. You were never there for me. I wanted to learn from you, but you were always in meetings. The web was there for me when you weren't. All of my friends say I deserve better. My mom is always telling me you don't understand me and my needs. I'm glad to finally be done with you."

The PI and his burly henchmen separate the two - fade to post-interviews

Student: "Whatever. I already had a transfer to another college. I was just hanging around for the transfer credits. I've already moved on."

Prof, sadly: "I just don't know anymore. I really thought this one was special. I just don't know when I'm going to trust again. Maybe they'll take some time to think about what happened and come back. I think we might still be able to make it work...."

Posted by Amanda at 9:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

If I could afford to add any more books to my to-read list, I would pick up a copy of Clark's Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, reviewed here by The New Yorker [via Arts & Letters Daily] Tracing the history of modern academia and its traditions forward from their roots in 18th century Germany (including the ancient roots of faculty balking at oversight and bureaucratic instrusion, such as early requirements that faculty publically list what courses they are taking in a course catalog), Clark uses the idea of charisma to talk about the sources of authority and tradition in the classroom:

The organizations that became the first Western universities, schools that sprang up in Paris and Bologna, were in part an outgrowth of ecclesiastical institutions, and their teachers asserted their authority by sitting, like bishops, in thrones—which is why we still refer to professorships as chairs—and speaking in a prescribed way, about approved texts. “The lecture, like the sermon, had a liturgical cast and aura,” Clark writes. “One must be authorized to perform the rite, and must do it in an authorized manner. Only then does the chair convey genuine charisma to the lecturer.”

I think we all know how religion has played a role in granting academics authority - you don't have to go back to the German Middle Ages but can look at the history of America's oldest colleges as well. I find it intriguing to look at the specific impact this has had on how modern education works, though. For example, the review mentions an old alternative to the lecture - the disputation, "in which a respondent affirmed the thesis under discussion and an opponent attempted to refute it". As the review notes, this is now seen in dissertation and thesis defenses. As a student, I think it would be interesting to understand the roots of this seemingly adversarial structure; in the course of the many reports and defenses I have given, I've never seen a faculty member verbalize that the antagonist role they adopt is part of a different type of pedagogical tool. I, in fact, hope that students do read this book. It sounds like it could do them as well as faculty some good in thinking about why we do things the way we do.

Clarke's main thesis is about how the shift towards researched-focused universities occured, and he seems in the end to have come up with a fairly insipring description of academic revolution. At the very least read the review - and make sure you get far enough through to encounter some of the great anecdotes about how academia used to be and probably my favorite quote from the whole review:

In an even more radical break with the past, professors began to be appointed on the basis of merit.

Posted by Amanda at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

David Brin laments the lack of simple built-in programming environments on personal comptuters [via Slashdot]. I too remember learning to program on my Apple IIe - if you turned on the computer without a programmed disk in the drive, you fell into BASIC, and I copied many listigs out of magaziines or books and played around with their functionality. Brin is entirely right - this type of built-in, no-fuss programming environment got a lot of us started.

Now, there are still command-line options. My programming students download Java off the Sun website and compile and run from the DOS prompt, and they could use Notepad to write their code, though I think a more supportive editor is desirable. But, Java isn't accessible in the same was BASIC was. And installing and running it this way requires some wrangling with your PATH environment variable - particularly if you have Quicktime installed.

And Brin points out that even if you can fairly quickly get a Java environment (or C++, or.....) going on your computer, these alternatives do not match the advantages of BASIC. I'm not going to head down the path of arguing comparative programming languages, though I think there are other programming languages that can be interesting tools for early exposure (okay, I'll just mention LISP and its functional ilk.....) but will agree that our modern robust languages don't lend themselves to back-of-the-book, type-it-in experimentation.

The whole article is a really good read, but Brin's bottom line point is that without this ease of experimentation, today's children will grow up with the computer being a perevasive tool but no more understanding of how it really works than most of my generation has of the workings of our car (especially compared to the knowledge of our grandparents). Says Brin:

The parallel technology of the '70s generation was IT. Not every boomer soldered an Altair from a kit, or mastered the arcana of DBASE. But enough of them did so that we got the Internet and Web. We got Moore's Law and other marvels. We got a chance to ride another great technological wave.

I thtink Brin is a bit too dismissive of the value of "information consumption devices" when engineering and used properly. But given that there is no technological reason why such devices can't also allow easy access to minimal programming environments, I think he is right to question whether we are advancing ourselves beyond a point that invites the energy and enthusiasm of novices and hobbyists.

Posted by Amanda at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

There are so many interesting things about the lesson plan marketplace site described in this article. Absolutely, teachers getting tips from other teachers instead of textbook publishers and other major corporations is a smart idea. At the college level, the mailing lists I am on for computing education often field requests for class activities of a certain style or around a certain topic, and they have some associated web repositories. But there are some things that strike me as odd about the auction model.

First, I'm just surprised that there isn't already a free website doing this - whether ad supported or maintained by a teacher's organization. Discussion boards have been around forever, and would allow interactive development as well as outright sharing.

Now, a discussion board model wouldn't have teachers getting paid for the lesson plans they offered. But it seems that, given the sign-up fee and the very low prices teachiers are offering their plans for, most people will just make back their sign-up fee. In a weird way, offering these plans for one or two dollars seems to actually devalue the teacher's work. If it is something clever enough that someone else would want to buy it, I'm sure it took some time to create and write up. Suppose the idea sold for $1 only took an hour to create - even if we figure the teacher has used the plan themselves so doesn't expect to be paid for the full value of their time in development, they are also saving the other teachier an hour of their time (at least, since presumably they are looking for a plan because they are having trouble coming up with something on their own for that particular topic). Either way you look at it, you get a radical devaluing of the time and effort to develop a lesson. The article quotes one teacher as projecting he may make enough to eat out an extra time each month - if so, that may be enough money to be worth while. But there's a value at which I think there is gerater value in having the support of a community where one can share freely and borrow freely - the gap between giving the plan away and charging $1 for it isn't that large, but freely sharing doesn't place any market value on the item being shared.

I'm also curious, and really don't know the answer to this - do schools consider the lesson plans a teacher develoips while working for them to be their property, or does the teacher really maintain absolute control over them, as suggested by this new site? Because I would have thought that schools might have intellectual property rights on work produced for use at a school while in that school's employ. I would certainly imagine that schools would decline to pursue those rights for the small amounts of money being exchanged here, but wonder if that is another force in keeping the prices down - having them low enough that schools don't feel it is worthwhile to get involved.

Posted by Amanda at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A mathematics instructor makes an attempt to explain why 0.999... = 1 in their blog, and tackles some of the classic explanations as well as many arguments in the comments [via Clicked]. What interested me most was that the writer was frustrated that people can't accept the arguments, buit buries the real proof of this fact at the end. Instead of laying out from the start the question of what does it mean to say that a repeating decimal is equal to an integer, point out that it has to do with computing a limit, and going from there, the explanation starts with multiplying x=0.9... by 10 to get 10x = 9.9... and subtracting the one equation from the other to find that x=1.

This approach feel vaguely like the kind of argument that actually leads people not to believe the fact is true - it feels like a "trick". And there is a catch-22 in play. On the one hand, we have the desire to educate people with an innacurate mathematical intuition. However, if we show them the proof involving a limit, there is the real risk that they will zone out, feeling that they don't "get" math and limits are hard and so on. So, one falls back on an "intuitive" argument, or in fact here a number of different intuitive arguments. And I suspect the average person feels that sure, these magical calculations show that 0.9...=1, but probably some other magical calculations show that they aren't the same, and there is no real convincing happening, in addition to people becoming even more cynical about "numbers lying".

Which, I guess my point is that I kind of like the Ask Dr. Math approach (linked in the comments of the original post) which just tackles the limit proof head on, in fairly clear terms I think. It would be nice if it said more about a repeating decimal equaling the limit than just it "is understood to mean", because that is the crux of the problem - first understand what it means for the equation to be true or false,and then the truth or falseness falls into place fairly quickly.

Posted by Amanda at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you aren't familiar with the process by which a textbook is created, I highly recommend this "Confessions of a Textbook Editor" article from a couple of years ago. It's a short snapshot of the considerations that come into play, and the degree to which content is selected in order to avoid controversy from anyone. If you are interested in the topic, I recommend What Johnny Shouldn't Read: Textbook Censorship in America by Joan Delfattore which I reviewed back in 2002, the book itself being even older than that. It seems the textbook industry has been pretty consistent over the past decade.

Posted by Amanda at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Moebius Stripper asks an interesting question, in discussing a social-justice mathematics text:

No, what bothers is this: is anyone familiar with a movement among social studies educators in secondary schools to use math in their courses, or does the movement toward interdisciplinary studies of social justice only go in the other direction?

Coming from the math-and-science side of the spectrum myself (not to mention the post-secondary world), I can't speak directly to what is happening in social science classrooms, but it is definitely the case that students are not graduating from high school with sufficient awareness of the connections between the subjects they study. I have gotten surprise in the classroom both on the side that algebra would be expected, and that well-organized, grammatical written arguments would be expected. Not hostility - just not an assumption that, in a course about technology, either of those topics would come into play.

But there does seem to be a problematic assumption, if the generality suggested is accurate, that knowing mathematics is sufficient to equip one to speak intelligently about social science issues whereas knowing social science is not sufficient to equip one to speak intelligently about mathematics. And that should upset both the mathematicians and the social scientists.

Posted by Amanda at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It's not often that I turn on the television to see breaking news banners nowadays and am actually happy about what they are announcing, but yesterday's ruling in PA that Intelligent Design cannot be taught as a science, even if only in the Dover school district, was heartening. The judge's accusation that efforts by the defendants to claim that intelligent design and creationism are entirely separate things were flat lies was also entertaining.

It occured to me today, as I was thinking about this ruling, that I could imagine, in an alternate reality where schools actually decided that these computer things weren't just a fad and computer science was worth teaching at a pre-college level, that artificial intelligence could see itself coming up against similar problems. After all, as a field, we're asking questions about what it is to be intelligent, and generally rejecting the "having a soul, as bestowed by God" definition of the term.

Continue reading "Intelligent Design bad for CS too" »

Posted by Amanda at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Moebius Stripper, always able to supply a nice rant about how integrated calculators in math classes are producing students unprepared for college math, supplies a good set of links to articles about the connections between Texas Instruments and the math textbook industry.

For some reason, these articles got me thinking about a related question - how much computer usage in school is a good thing, and how much distracts from real learning? That's a huge can of worms, so how about just the question of the correct balance of computer usage in my department's classes?

Continue reading "Less TI, More Math" »

Posted by Amanda at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The NY Times has an interesting article about the trend away from Friday courses on college campuses, and efforts to bring back the serious five-day week. As far as it goes it is interesting, but I think that it misses two points. One, there is a strong implication that it is primarily student pressure to avoid Friday classes - there is only one brief mention that faculty are expected to do much more than teach and having a work day with fewer teaching obligations helps keep on top of research and community obligations.

Second, even with Friday classes being common, Thursday will remain a party night. On a Monday-Wedneday, you have a full day of classes, and then have to finish any work due the next day and work on anything due later in the week as well. On Thursdays, you can just make sure you've finished up everything due the next day but can easily put off working on items due the following week because you have the entire weekend ahead of you. I even experience this on the faculty side - I try to stay a few steps ahead in lecture prep, grading, etc. but if it is Thursday and I have everything set to go for Friday, I take the night off because by that point in the week I'm usually exhaustsed. For the students, taking the night off just tends to take the form of partying.

Posted by Amanda at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

I'd never heard of the "Carnival" concept in weblogging before, but it is apparently an arrangement among a number of webloggers to post articles around a central theme during a month and then one weblogger maintains a list of all of these posts, organized into subthemes. I found out about it after seeing a link to Teaching Carnival II - a Carnival about secondary education teaching.

It's a very cool idea for pulling together posts on a particular topic, and I found the Teaching Carnivals (I also went back to check the previous one) really great - people are posting some wonderful advice and assignment/activity suggestions. Definitely worth checking out if you teach, or even if you're taught.

Posted by Amanda at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Moebius Stripper has a good post, and good comments, over in her weblog about shortcomings of traditional testing, particularly within mathematics. Given an entirely blank slate to work from, I think everyone would agree that testing should, in fact, be a trigger as to whether one is ready to move on to the next set of content. But with multiple students, limited time per week, and a set-length semester, simply changing the testing scheme only tackles part of the problem. When the entire end evaluation of a student is a single letter, there is an awful lot of meaning to be crammed into a single dimension. Two students might get a C, one by doing very well in the first half of the course and then not understanding any of the second half, and another by maintaining a minimal level of understanding across the entire course. Which one is more equipped to move on to the next course in the series? (Answer: it probably depends on the content of the course and its follow-up....)

Posted by Amanda at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Can I get a big eye roll over the mandate, recently getting press, that all schools and colleges receiving any federal funding must recognize September 17th as Constitution Day and offer an educational program on the constitution on that day? The Department of Education's notice on the topic does make it clear they're flexible about the form of such a program, but it's still being required. Woo hoo - I know I feel better with Congress setting curricular requirements without any pedagogical justification for such an approach to educating students on the topic. I doubt that there are school boards out there saying that high school students don't have to learn about the constitution. And I don't deny that there are still students who come out of school without an appreciation for what the constitution really says and means. But setting aside a Constitution Day doesn't seem like the solution - my recollection of such events is that they were basically vacation days from classes and homework. I'm sure they can be effective in reaching some students, but it's not the only and probably not the most effective way. Better to encourage teachers to think about ways to relate the constitution and its principles to their content throughout the year. Discussing with students whether they really have a "right" to privacy, to information, or to the many other things they believe they have a right to, and what it means, in the context of the Constitution to actually have a "right" is a more teachable moment, in my mind, than another federally mandated hoop to jump through.

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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....

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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 tradition of keeping test banks and posting it online, and that makes new issues arise."

"It's not as simple as he says ... because by posting it online he's in effect making many, many more copies," Ciolino said, adding that Narva can't claim fair use if he's selling access to the tests.

The author or copyright owner may wish to place a copyright notice on any unpublished copies or phonorecords that leave his or her control.


Example: Unpublished work (c) 2002 Jane Doe

Such a notice protects not only from sale but also from copying and free distribution to a magnitude that the commercial value of the original is decreased. Certainly, as a professor, one of the values that I offer my college and my students is the extensive time I spend crafting course materials. Many professors, after teaching a class, will use their materials as the basis for textbooks they write - if all of my materials are freely available elsewhere, it significantly decreases the value of any text that I might write. A school's reputation is to a large extend built on the reputation of its faculty, and if the faculty's course materials are not protected, the value of the education offered by the college, comparative to other schools, is also decreased.

This has nothing to do with a desire to reuse old tests or assignments (I'm not that naive to think I could get away with that even without the internet); it has to do with protecting the value of my creative works.

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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 entry, discussing whether what he did was "fair" or not. While I can understand the people who feel putting her name online might be going a step to far, as she will now never escape this action, I think it's a lesson in not asking strangers to help you participate in immoral acts via a recordable conversation. There is no way in which a zero on that paper wouldn't have been preferable for this woman. In fact, you can see exactly how badly it all turned out by clicking forward through the blog entries for the next few days to find out the whole story. [via Bitch. Ph.D.]

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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.

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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 six-figure starting salary and lots of benefits (I had a friend whose new employer sent a moving company to pack up and relocate his dorm room - the English majors living next door loved that). If you were on the fence about computer science, and you saw the seniors being treated that way, it was a huge incentive to pursue the major. In other areas, you'd probably have to put in graduate work, or many years of experience, to reach the point that computer science students were starting at. The question for computer science students was whether you put in the whole four years, or let yourself be lured away at the two- or three-year point.

Slowly enough students took this path that companies could get their choice of programmers while waiting for people to graduate. The one-year masters program tacked on to the end of your degree became huge, with some schools letting you merge it into the undergrad program if you took extra courses and worked in a project. Now, companies can get a decent supply of good programmers with masters degrees, who come in with more training (and a bit more maturity). And a computer science degree is no longer a ridiculously accelerated track to a high paying job.

So, if you're the student deciding between rival majors, computer science has lost an edge. Yes, I suspect the decline is exacerbated by the supply also being supplemented with offshoring. But solutions have to be looked at that consider the larger context, and I am dubious that the peak enrollment numbers can be recreated (nor is it agreed across departments that it should be). It doesn't do CS departments looking to regroup any favors to view the issue one-dimensionally, as a problem of offshoring. I don't think the numbers will go back up by trying to lure back the same set of students who would have entered the field three years ago. And frankly, I think that most academic departments understand this - I think it's the media who has honed in on offshoring as a simple scapegoat for a more complicated issue.

Hmmm - if only there were a large population who hasn't traditionally pursued computer science and might be open to novel recruitment efforts that illuminated computer science as a problem solving field with connections to real-world problems.

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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 - understanding binary and sorting information as in a telephone book. There's lots of mention of graphics, multimedia, and web programming throughout - great tools for getting students interested and providing examples, but computer science education should go beyond that. The games/activities in the appendix get a little closer to what I think of as elementary computer science education, but the tone of the report as a whole surprises me. The fact that "proficiency using the keyboard with correct fingering" is even listed as the first Grades 3-5 skill seems off. I think that even at a very young age you can start to introduce the concepts of algorithms and logic. A further advantage is that teaching those concepts requires significantly less sophisiticated equipment (if any). On the positive side, I was very happy to see instruction in computer ethics, responsible usage, selection of appropriate technology, and social impact topics included.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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Schools certainly have to choose books with an awareness of not offending or traumatizing students, particularly when dealing with young children. Banning Shakespeare, or requiring permission slips from parents, particularly when talking about high school seniors is absurd. Almost as absurd as calling TwelfthvNight "alternative lifestyle instruction".

MACBETH
We will proceed no further in this business:
He hath honour'd me of late; and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people,
Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,
Not cast aside so soon.

LADY MACBETH
Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time

Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'
Like the poor cat i' the adage?

MACBETH
Prithee, peace:
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.

LADY MACBETH
What beast was't, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.

MACBETH
If we should fail?

LADY MACBETH
We fail!
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we'll not fail.

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More Cornell grad student unionization news: Cornell has signed an agreement recognizing the rights of grad students to unionize, and that they will recognize any union the students vote into place. I'm not surprised - too many other peer institutions have been forced to ultimately capitulate. Of course, the announcement of the agreement, despite admiting that Cornell was the first school to act so openly towards a unionization effort, makes sure to shade Cornell as the hostile oppressor against which a union is the only solution for meeting grad student needs. On the plus side, the agreement makes it very clear that the union will only bargain on "wages, hours, and conditions of student employment" and spells out clearly the academic issues on which the union will not bargain.

The election is scheduled for October 23/24. I've yet to see a wide, public debate on the issues surrounding unionization. I've certainly see no information from the unionization effort about how our particular union would be organized, what precisely it would be focusing on, what distribution of representation across the university there might be. I don't understand how anyone could vote for a union without knowing how that union would be run and how they would be represented.

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When sensitivity goes overboard: this is an extreme degree of sanitizing of literary passages in the NY Regents exams [NYTimes
registration required]. There is a line between choosing not to use offensive texts and butchering texts, without the authors permission, and without indication that the passages were edited. In many of the cases described, the meaning of the passage is lost. The types of changes being made go beyond abridgement, which may be a necessary evil on a timed exam. Mentions of race, religion, sex, and alcohol are cut, and in one case the word "fat" was replaced with "heavy", to be more sensitive. The people who are pushing these types of changes are taking what started decades ago as a push to prevent openly racist, hostile texts from being used in standardized tests and are trying to banish any slightly uncomfortable ideas.

Beyond the ridiculousness of the edits being made, the edited versions would seem to work against those students who had actually read the texts in question and have to choose between answering based on what the actual book says, and what the passage they are given says. If the literature in question is really unacceptable for "children" (as these high-school seniors are being labelled), then use passages that are acceptable. If existing literature is going to be torn apart in this way, then use the editing time to create original passages, which would have the tangential advantage of being equally novel to all of the students being tested.

Finally, to be an idealist for a moment, manipulating an author's work in this way isn't intellectually honest, and with plagiarism running rampant through schools and colleges, wouldn't it be a good idea to make sure that the educational system is setting the right example? [via Arts & Letters Daily]

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