Half baked but crispy

Here is the recording I made of the VLE is Dead Symposium at ALT-C 2009.

 

Thanks to everyone who turned up and joined in.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 9:09 am and is filed under altc2009, graham attwell, josie fraser, nick sharratt, steve wheeler, vle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I happened across an attempt to live stream this panel discussion from the ALT-C 2009 conference in Manchester (I was stuck in Swansea at the time). Unfortunately, the live stream (provided by uStream lost sound after about 20 minutes) so I'm really glad that James Clay of the e-Learning Stuff blog and podcast. Lots of food for thought for all my colleagues at the Learning Lab, SALT, TrinityTEL and SWEPP.

Try doing this with a computer!

T-Mobile UK this morning announced the Pulse, the first pay-as-you-go Android 1.5 smartphone and the third coming from the network operator for £180 and to-be-determined tariff fees.

The Harwell computer was still in use in 1973

Britain's oldest original computer, the Harwell, is being sent to the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley where it is to be restored to working order.

Provide your posterous blog with an RSS feed from Feedburner and widen your reach. I also added Google analytics at the same time.

I teach computer science at San Jose State University. My department just ended up on Slashdot. One of my colleagues, Dr. Beeson—who, to his great credit, makes beginning students write lots of little homework programs until they get them right—got into a tussle with Kyle Brady, an eager student who insisted on publishing his answers on the internet. I don't want to get into the personalities here. Beeson can be irascible and a bit overbearing, and the student's claim that he is doing this to increase his chances for employment rings a bit hollow. When is the last time you hired someone because of their TicTacToe program? Even if I did, I'd be wary about candidates who write if (foundEmpty == false) instead of if (!foundEmpty)...

Sure, instructors should vary their problems from one semester to the next, but there are only so many ways in which you can vary the basics. Consider TicTacToe. There are maybe ten ways of changing it. Of course, there is no intrinsic merit to TicTacToe. It's just a vehicle to test nested loops over a 2D array. We like it because doesn't require a long backstory—students are familiar with it. But let's ditch TicTacToe if all variations are on Google. What else is there? Magic squares. Row and column totals. Counting zeroes. Making shapes with ASCII art: squares, diamonds, spirals. Floodfill. Escaping from a maze. The game of life. But all of these are on the internet too.

So, what does it mean for teaching and learning programming when the solution to every beginner problem is available on the internet?

I am all for more code reading by students. Too many students just write code, and if googling an answer makes them read more code, that's great.

When I learn new stuff, I set myself little tasks to solve. I don't just google for the answer since that would defeat the purpose of learning. Are our students like that? Kyle Brady probably is. But I have met a few who just want to get a good grade, get their degree, and start making money. Others are willing to do the right thing but lack the self-discipline. Quite a few work a job or two to put themselves through college, and limited time and financial necessity makes them go to Google when they shouldn't.

That brings me to the issue of “certification”. When you hire someone, you want to see that college transcript because you expect some correlation with ability. So, we as instructors need to give grades, and to give grades, we give homeworks and exams. All of whose solutions are available on Google. So, how can we certify that students know what they are supposed to?

Strategy #1. Shut off the internet. Herd everyone in a room with lead walls and make them do their work there. Or (gasp) go back to paper and pencil. Personally, I hate doing that. I give bring-your-laptop, open-book, open-notes exams because I want my students to build up skills that they can use later.

Strategy #2. Starve them for time. That's what TopCoder and betterprogrammer do. Sure, you could google for hints, but then you would not be able to finish in time. My students will argue that I use that approach as well, and they do not like it.

Strategy #3. Interview each student personally and ask questions about the code. Unfortunately, this is incredibly time-consuming and impractical on a large scale. (After all, if this was easy, we wouldn't have the SCPJ.)

Strategy #4. Forget about coding and evaluate students on their ability to be creative, express themselves, resolve conflicts in a non-confrontational way, etc. etc. These are all wonderful traits, of course. But I am reminded of a faculty summit at, of all places, Google, where eager professors from reputable institutions shared the latest thinking in computer science education. At the closing session, one of the Google managers said that this was all good and well, as long as the graduates can code.

So, as you read those Slashdot comments, have some pity for the poor CS instructors. Not for having to come up with a neverending stream of practice problems—that's part of the job. But for having to teach students to be ever more disciplined. In the past, we could rely on a reward system for homework assignments. Do a good job, get an A. Thanks to Google, it has become too expensive to give a fair reward for the kind of routine practice homeworks that one really needs to build up skills. Now we must train students to do their homework without resorting to Google, show them nicely what happens when they don't, and then tighten the screws by the end of the semester, all without demotivating those students whom we want to attract to the major. This is not an easy task.

What you don't hear in Slashdot is that Dr. Beeson is actually doing a good job. He built a system where students can submit their problems until they get the right answer, and for a lot of students that is pretty motivational in itself. Obviously motivational enough to get Kyle Brady to come up with answers that he is proud to share with the world.

A cautionary tale that asks some interesting questions about teaching programming in the Google age. How do you get students to learn something when all they want is the grade by the easiest way possible?

For me, FriendFeed has been a new answer to an old question — namely, how to collaborate in a loosely-coupled way with people who are using, and helping to develop, an online service. The elmcity project’s FriendFeed room has been an incredibly simple and effective way to interleave curated calendar feeds, blog postings describing the evolving service that aggregates those feeds, and discussion among a growing number of curators.

In his analysis of Where FriendFeed Went Wrong Dare Obasanjo describes the value of a handful of services (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in terms that would make sense to non-geeks like his wife. Here’s the elevator pitch for FriendFeed:

Republish all of the content from the different social networking media websites you use onto this site. Also one place to stay connected to what people are saying on multiple social media sites instead of friending them on multiple sites.

As usual, I’m an outlying data point. I’m using FriendFeed as a lightweight, flexible aggregator of feeds from my blog and from Delicious, and as a discussion forum. These feeds report key events in the life of the project: I added a new feature to the aggregator, the curator for Sasktatoon found and added a new calendar. The discussion revolves around strategies for finding or creating calendar feeds, features that curators would like me to add to the service, and problems they’re having with the service.

I doubt there’s a mainstream business model here. It’s valuable to me because I’ve created a project environment in which key events in the life of the project are already flowing through feeds that are available to be aggregated and discussed. Anyone could arrange things that way, but few people will.

It’s hugely helpful to me, though. And while I don’t know for sure that FriendFeed’s acquisition by FaceBook will end my ability to use FriendFeed in this way, I do need to start thinking about how I’d replace the service.

I don’t need a lot of what FriendFeed offers. Many of the services it can aggregate — Flickr, YouTube, SlideShare — aren’t relevant. And we don’t need realtime notification. So it really boils down to a lightweight feed aggregator married to a discussion forum.

One feature that FriendFeed’s API doesn’t offer, by the way, but that I would find useful, is programmatic control of the aggregator’s registry. When a new curator shows up, I have to manually add the associated Delicious feed to the FriendFeed room. It’d be nice to automate that.

Ideally FriendFeed will coast along in a way that lets me keep using it as I currently am. If not, it wouldn’t be too hard to recreate something that provides just the subset of FriendFeed’s services that I need. But ideally, of course, I’d repurpose an existing service rather than build a new one. If you’re using something that could work, let me know.

This is pretty much how I use FriendFeed, that is as an aggregator for my stuff. I have also set up a group within FriendFeed for capturing postings on a project that I have. We'll see how it works out.

Another significant milestone in this year that has already celebrated the birth of the world-wide web, the start of world war two and UNIX. Some of my students may recall the "world of Zuul" an look back on BlueJ with fondness. Congratualtions to Mike, the team at UKC! BlueJ, or at least the pedagogic principles that underlay it (because Java gets bad press these days), deserves to be more widely known and appreciated!