mamamusings: teaching

occupational benefits

One of the very best parts of being a university professor is being able to get free books from many publishers. It makes sense for them, because I’m unlikely to assign a book to my students if I haven’t had a chance to review it carefully. During the school year, however, I’m usually trying very hard to keep my head above water with the things I have to read, so I don’t take too much advantage of the benefit.

Summer is approaching, however. This is week 10/10 for classes, and next week I’ll be grading final projects and presentations. That means I’m only a week and a half away from being able to immerse myself in books that I’ve been wanting to read. So today I placed a bunch of orders—some using my faculty book allowance (some publishers, alas, don’t give freebies), and others taking advantage of generous faculty review copy policies. Here’s what’s on my reading list for June:

• Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader (edited by Hilde Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg)
• Ted Castronova’s Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality
• Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
• Mark Meadows’ I, Avatar: The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life
• Joshua Porter’s Designing for the Social Web
• Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery
• Gene Smith’s Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web
• Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It

And if I hadn’t already received a copy and started reading it, I’d add to that list

• Clay Shirky’s wonderful new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

teaching nightmare come to life

So, I’m sitting at home at 1:00 this afternoon, grading final projects, when my phone rings. It’s one of my students, and he asks me where I am. At home, I tell him…the exam’s not until 2:15pm.

No, he tells me, it’s at 12:30pm. The whole class is waiting at the classroom.

o.m.f.g.

Happily, I’m already showered and dressed. I toss on a coat, grab my computer, and fly out the door, arriving on campus 11 minutes later. They’re now taking the exam, which, thankfully, usually only takes students 45min to an hours to finish.

This is the kind of thing I have bad dreams about. (Though as one of my colleagues pointed out, it could have been worse if course evaluations weren’t already finished…)

things that can go wrong on your first day of teaching

• You can spill coffee all over yourself on your way to your first class of the day (luckily I was wearing a dress with a floral print that camouflaged it perfectly)
• You can forget to bring the stupid mac video dongle to connect to the projector (borrowed one from a colleague in the nick of time)
• You can have both projectors in your classroom go dead just as your second class is about to start (but they could bring up the syllabus on their lab computers)
• You can forget how utterly exhausting teaching is, and find yourself tired nearly to the point of tears just as you’re realizing that your kids start school tomorrow and they haven’t finished their summer reading packets (done now)
• You can foolishly upgrade the software powering your course blogs (they’re fixing the bugs I found as I speak, however)

On the plus side, my two freshmen classes this fall seem to be full of high energy students who will make teaching fun. Elouise and I aren’t on opposite schedules this fall, so we get to see each other lots. And the influx of gaming faculty into the department is changing the tone of our hallway in a very good way.

And in unrelated news, Lane’s full-arm plaster cast was removed from his right arm today and replaced with a waterproof forearm cast, so he can now shower! w00t!

interstices

I stopped by campus this morning to move a monitor from my office to Weez’s, and as I left the building I was struck by how empty the atrium was. The balloons were still attached to the ficus trees, the “congratulations” banner was still strung across the wall, but the building was close to deserted. Staff were working quietly inside their offices, but the bustle of students and faculty—which reaches near fever-pitch during the last weeks of the quarter—was absent.

It reminded me of how it used to feel when I was an undergraduate student in Ann Arbor, where I often chose to spend the summers working and playing with friends. There’s something almost magical about what happens in the spring when the swarm of students leaves for the summer. The strikingly quiet buildings and walkways invite you to slow down, to look around at how beautiful a campus can be, and to notice that while you were cloistered in classrooms and offices spring had arrived in all its glory.

For professors who are also parents, late May and June are particularly precious—because the kids are still in school, but we aren’t. So today I’m soaking up this brief, peaceful interlude between the just-finished chaos of exams and paper grading, and the impending excitement of heading to Seattle on Saturday.

the best part of teaching...

…is when, in the second week of the quarter, you realize that you have a lot of really talented students in your classes.

Yay!

cscw course syllabus

The break between fall and winter quarter this year was two weeks, which provided just enough time to relax a bit and then do a reasonable amount of course prep.

The break between winter and spring quarter, however, was only one week—and I didn’t have my grades done until Monday of break week. That means I’ve had basically no down time, because I’m teaching a brand new class next quarter that’s also a distance learning class—meaning that the material has to be much more organized than I might be able to get away with in a lecture format.

As a result, I’ve been cross as a bear for the past few days, as I struggled to get my mind around how to present the enormous topic of CSCW and Groupware in a mere ten weeks of instructional time. Blech.

On the plus side, there were a couple of people who had graciously put their syllabi for similar classes up on the web—most notably David McDonald at UW, and Joe Konstan and Loren Terveen at Minnesota. I drew on their work, as well as my own knowledge of the field, to come up with my syllabus. I know I’m taking on an awful lot of topics, but it’s really intended as an overview rather than an in-depth assessment of any one aspect of CSCW.

I’ll be filling in more details (particularly readings and lab assignments) over the next week, but at least the basic structure and the first week’s materials are available in time for the students to start work on them tomorrow.

that wasn't fun

help wanted: ta for rit web design class

I need an RIT student (graduate or upper-level undergraduate) to be a TA for my web design class next quarter. You have to have taken 4002-409 or 4004-737 (and gotten an A, natch), and you have to be enrolled as a student next quarter. My section meets M/W from 4-6pm.

Contact me at my my RIT email (ell at the standard mail dot rit dot edu) if you’re interested.

things i'm doing instead of blogging

• responding to the slew of last-minute messages from students panicked about exams and projects* grading final exams and projects
• restarting the afghan for Lila Rose, because I didn’t like the yarn I was using and the way it wouldn’t lie flat
• dealing with the chaos of kids home all day because of February break
• reading and reviewing grant proposals for a meeting later this week
• catching up on Battlestar Galactica episodes that were on the verge of being deleted from our list of recordings
• leveling my troll priest in WoW—I expect she’ll be 70 by the end of this week

I don’t expect blogging to resume with any regularity until grading, proposal reviewing, and leveling are all finished.

collaborative exam creation

I tried an experiment this quarter in my Human Factors class. I set up a SocialText wiki, extended invitations to all of my students, and told them that 10% of their midterm grade would be the quality of their submissions to the wiki. Everyone was expected to submit a minimum of 10 points worth of questions to the wiki, and I promised that once the submission deadline had passed, only questions on the wiki would appear on the exam.

Overall, the quality of the questions provided by the students wasn’t great. Many were poorly worded, and they didn’t cover the full range of topics we’d covered in class. However, I was able to extract a sufficient number of questions (some with wording changes to clarify them) to create a full exam, which they took today. Here’s what the grades looked like:

That’s just about a perfect textbook (I didn’t mean to imply that as a teacher I want my students to not all do consistently great work…) curve from a pedagogical standpoint. And the grades matched my expectations, for the most part, in terms of how individual students would perform. So I’d call this experiment a success.

I will modify the process for the final exam. First of all, I’ll provide a little more structure to the page before they start adding questions. I’ll create specific topic headings associated with lectures and readings, so that they can see which areas need to have questions developed. I’ll provide a few questions to “seed” the page, so they can see examples of well worded questions. And I’ll moderate the page a bit more, marking questions that I’m likely to use in some way. I may even add a few questions of my own to supplement theirs. The key thing is that I don’t want them wasting time studying for questions that are poorly worded, since that’s not a good use of their time.

I’ll report back after the final exam in February.

(Update: I’ve made the wiki publicly readable, though only students can edit it.)

grading as a text adventure

Oh, this is so wonderful!!!

From eye of a cat’s LiveJournal:

>look at stack
It's not getting any smaller.

>pick up essay
You lift one essay off the pile.

>read essay
With trepidation, you lift aside the cover sheet. Suddenly, 
the world around you  seems to melt away...

Hell
You are in a maze of twisty little paragraphs, all alike. 
The path ahead of you is littered with sentence 
fragments, left broken and twitching at your feet as 
their pathetic spaniel eyes implore you to put them 
out of their misery. Dangling modifiers loop happily 
through the branches overhead. In the distance, that 
sound of undergraduate feet has turned into a heavy, 
erratic thwump - swoop - THWUMP you recognise 
immediately - it's a badly-indented long quotation, 
and it's coming  closer.

Go there. Read it. What a treasure!

(Thanks, Steve!)

happy dance

midquarter blues

It’s the halfway point in our quarter (RIT is on an eleven-week quarter system).

Sandra Boynton’s wonderful drawing sums up how I’m feeling at this point:

(The image is scanned from a notepad I bought years ago. Yes, it’s probably a copyright violation to post it. But so far as I know, it’s out of print—otherwise I’d point you to a licensed version. If you have kids, however, and don’t already own most of her board books and audio recordings, you must must must go to her site and acquire as many as you can afford. These books were a staple of my kids’ childhood, and they still make me happy. And the music…well, go listen for yourself. It’s fantabulicious. And while you can’t actually listen to cuts from Grunt*, you should buy it anyways. Trust me. )

—
*I just noticed this great line on Sandra Boynton’s bio page: “I like to think of Grunt as the culmination of a lifetime of joyfully squandering an expensive education on producing works of no apparent usefulness.”

whew

Turns out I didn’t forget how to teach. Or how to enjoy it.

online professor rating systems

I see from the wiki for BarCampRochester that someone has proposed a session to talk about the online professor rating system. I wish I could go. I’d love to ask some hard questions about these systems generally.

For example, would the people who champion these systems be just as enthusiastic about a publicly accessible “student rating system” that let professors share their opinions about students?

I’m really torn about these rating systems. I understand the desire and the need for them. I remember using a print version of them when I was an undergrad at Michigan. But too often the systems I’ve seen on the web turn into the worst example of online character assassination. I may not be the best professor there is, but how helpful is it to have a system that lets people write (as I found on one site several years ago) “She should be chasing chickens on a farm, not teaching information technology.” Yes, I can laugh at the absurdity of it. But I’ve seen some that were far worse and more damaging than that. Comments about people’s sexual preferences, their physical appearance, and more.

As soon as you allow anonymous free-text commenting, you get the worst of what people have to offer. And unlike in-class evaluations, where you get a full sample of student views—good, bad, and indifferent—on these opt-in systems you tend to get comments only from people with the strongest of opinions, skewing the accuracy.

If these professor rating systems are inevitable, what checks and balances can be put in place to keep them from being overrun with personal attacks? Is it realistic to have content editors? To limit to a preset list of comments? It’s not reasonable, I think, to put the burden on the professor to police his or her own evaluations.

What if it were turned around? What if professors could warn each other about problem students—the ones who regularly fall asleep in class, the ones who consistently cause discord in group projects, the ones whose grandmothers have died at least six times since their freshman year? And what if these systems were as publicly available as the professor rating systems? Is that somehow worse? If so, why? (I can think of some reasons, but I think it’s a valuable exercise to discuss this.)

graduate cscw class this fall at rit

This fall I’m going to be teaching a graduate class on CSCW—computer-supported collaborative work. In many ways, CSCW is the academic field of social computing, although social computing goes well beyond collaborative work.

As a result, I’ll be covering not just the more traditional forms of CSCW (groupware, email, etc), but also the newer forms of social computing that are becoming increasingly influential in business contexts—blogs, wikis, social networking tools, social bookmarking, and more.

Right now, the course only has three students enrolled (in part because it’s seldom offered, and people don’t really know what’s covered in it), and I need ten in order for it to run in the fall. So if you’re an RIT graduate student (or advanced undergraduate, or even a colleague) interested in a distance-learning class on social technologies, please consider enrolling in 4002.892.90!

Later this week I’ll work on putting up a tentative course outline, and I’ll post an update when that’s available. (I need to get my MT courseware updated first.)

graduations aren't always goodbyes

I was too tired last night to write everything I was thinking about graduation—and I knew I was going to have to get up at 4:30am to catch my 6:45am flight home. But the airport is nearly deserted this morning, and I flew through security, leaving me with free time (and free airport wifi, one of the many nice things about Rochester) to follow up on my last post.

During my first few years at RIT, I thought of graduations as goodbyes. I’d had students for a class or two, taught them what I could, and then they were gone. But over the years, I’ve realized that with the best students that’s not the case. There are many students whose graduation has marked the passage from student to colleague, and whose friendships I treasure. They’re the ones who don’t think twice about calling me Liz instead of Professor Lawley, who still send me email updates about their newest job, who show up in my IM buddy list, who add me as a friend in Facebook, who post comments to my blog, and who even have my cell phone number.

Students like Jared Campbell and Jon Dunn, Eric Willis and Brendyn Alexander, Chris Blessing and Jay Bibby. (And yes, I know those are all men’s names. That’s the result of teaching in a department that averages fewer than 5% women in its freshman class. There have been women who made a difference in my life as teacher as well, though. Pooja Kapoor, Beth Levine, Katie Giebel, Sayali Sakhardande, Sara Berg, Tara Parekh, just to name a few.) Not all of them were straight-A students (though many were). But every one of them is someone I’d recommend without hesitation for a job, because of their creativity and initiative, their integrity and intelligence.

It was Jared who taught me that my students can be as aware of my personal ups and downs as I can be of theirs—I’ll always remember the evening that he stopped by my office to see if I was okay. I was surprised by his question, and wondered aloud why he was asking. “I read your blog,” he replied, “and just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

It was Erhardt who made me aware of just how much an astute observer can learn about a person from their bookmarks, when he stopped by my office nearly two years ago to ask with concern whether I was leaving RIT. I couldn’t imagine what had made him ask that—until he mentioned that he’d seen the bookmarks I’d listed for “homeschooling” and “Seattle” on del.icio.us. (I’ve been a bit more careful about what I do and don’t put on social bookmarking sites since then!)

Brendyn helped remind me of just how much raw talent and enthusiasm can accomplish, and how much of an impact we as professors can have on shaping that. He bounded into my life (and Elouise’s) at an advisory board dinner his freshmen year, as full of energy and curiosity and affection as an overgrown labrador puppy. It’s been a gift to watch him grow over the past four years, from ‘sycophant’ (not really, but that’s a long-standing joke) to self-assured young man with a Microsoft job offer in his pocket. I learned a lot about courage from both Brendyn and Jon, both of whom had to face some challenging situations during the time that I knew them.

Eric showed me how gracefully someone can make the transition from student to employee to colleague. In what felt like the blink of an eye he went from being a cocky student in my web design class to being the best student grader I ever had to teaching as an adjunct in our department while running (and growing) the software development team for a local business. I spent an hour over dinner on Thursday evening trying to recruit him onto my team to develop a new social application, and I’ll consider myself lucky if he can find a few hours of free time in his schedule to work with me.

Chris Blessing was a lesson to me, early in my teaching career, that some of those students with a hefty dose of attitude have it for good reason. At a time when the web was still relatively new, and most of my students wouldn’t have known an HTML entity if it bit them in the ass, Chris coded (and designed) circles around not just the others in the class but me as well. I didn’t admit it at the time, of course (those Jedi mind tricks are important for surviving as a teacher), but he taught me some humility. (Yes, Eric, you did too. But Chris did it first.)

Jay reminded me that my students could take the seeds of an idea I’d given them and grow it well beyond anything I could have done. He started his first blog in my class, but then went on to create one of the most widely-read blog sites on casual games, Jay Is Games, which probably gets more hits in a day than any my sites gets in a week.

A few weeks ago, I got an email out of the blue from a student who’d taken a class from me years ago. We hadn’t stayed in touch, but he was writing to let me know how much of what he’d learned he still used every day—and to ask if I had any talented students I wanted to send his way to hire. And few weeks before that, an article on web design popped up in my del.icio.us links with a title that looked familiar…it turned out to be written by one of my former students, and it was clear evidence that what he learned in that class had stuck with him. A good reminder that influence in the classroom can extend well beyond it.

There are others, of course. Far more than I’ve listed here. Each fall when I walk into the lab for my freshman multimedia class, the new students lined up behind the computers, full of promise and potential. But the friendly ghosts of their predecessors live in those labs, as well, reminding me that when I see these freshmen file past me years later, they’re not necessarily walking past me and out of my life. Graduation doesn’t have to mean goodbye.

choosing to give

A lot of people have asked me recently if I’m planning on going back to RIT at the end of my sabbatical—or if, having tasted the sweet nectar of well-funded industry research, I might be tempted to stay in Seattle. I decided a few weeks ago that I was going to return to Rochester, but I had some lingering doubts and fears in my mind about whether I was making the right choice.

This weekend I flew back to Rochester for a few days, primarily to attend RIT’s commencement ceremonies. For the first day or two, I did have some second thoughts about my decision. Departmental politics were running rampant, colleagues were stressed with last-minute grading, and the overcast skies were more oppressive than I remembered.

Last night, though, I heard two wonderful addresses at the university-wide convocation ceremony. The first was by Dean Kamen, which I really hope will be posted in its entirety on the RIT web site (as they’ve done with past speakers). Elouise covered some high points, but you had to be there to appreciate the warmth, wit, and charm of Kamen’s delivery. It was lovely. (And yes, he did in fact ride a Segway up to and back from the platform, wearing his academic robes.) The second was by Erhardt Graeff, a student whom I first had in freshman seminar, and whose progress I’ve watched closely over the past four years. Erhardt’s a wonderful young man—intellectually curious, adventurous, articulate, creative, and genuinely goodhearted. He was selected as our college’s delegate for the university-wide ceremony, and then chosen as the one delegate to give the student address for all of RIT—and he did a spectacular job. Both of the speakers (without knowing the other’s theme) chose to speak about graduation as a passage not from learning to doing, but rather as one from taking to giving…something that hit a resonant note for me.

This morning I woke up at 6:15am so that I could be at RIT by 7:15, and in my robes ready to line up for our college’s commencement ceremonies at 7:30. Even after nearly ten years of doing this, I still love marching into the field house with pomp and circumstance playing, watching the parents and grandparents and spouses and partners and children craning their necks for a view of the processional, snapping photographs and clapping. And my favorite part of the school year is when our undergraduate students walk across the stage as their name is called. As they come down the steps, there are always a group of faculty waiting to shake their hands, and I’m always part of that group. I love watching the faces of these young men and women, many of whom I taught during their first quarter of freshman year, as they grapple with the realization that they’re really, truly, graduating. More than one of them gets a hug from me rather than a handshake.

After the ceremony, our department hosts a brunch for the students and their families. It’s hard to explain how much it means to me when a student pulls his or her parents over to meet me, telling them “This is Professor Lawley! Remember me telling you about her?” When I met Erhardt’s mother today, however, I got something new…she told me she reads my blog. (Hi, Mrs. Graeff!)

I nearly cried a couple of times today. One of those times was meeting the family of Katie Giebel, a delightful young woman who took my introductory web/multimedia class the fall of her first year at RIT. She came close to leaving IT, but stayed after I (and others) convinced her that it was only a short term rough spot she’d run into. When she was invited into the RIT honors program, she told me she was worried she couldn’t handle that and her ROTC responsibilities, and wanted to decline. I helped convince her to give it a shot, and she didn’t just survive—she thrived. Katie graduated with honors today, and the Navy is sending her to Monterey to pursue a master’s degree. (I’m wiping away a little tear right now, just typing all that.)

This year at MSR I’ve gotten an enormous amount from the amazing people around me, and I’m beyond grateful for that. But I don’t have the opportunity to change lives that being a professor provides to me, to give what I can of myself to my students. I left the reception today 100% sure that coming back to RIT was the right choice. And as I pulled into the driveway of my mother’s house, the sun finally came out…as if to welcome me home.

yet another thing i owe to my blog...

I’m always a little bit amused by people who still wonder aloud how and why I find the time to blog. I find time the same way most people find time to watch their favorite television shows, or go to movies (neither of which I do very often at all). And I do it because I’ve had extraordinarily personal and professional rewards accrue to me as a direct result of the effort I put into blogging—not the least of which is the visiting researcher position I currently hold here at Microsoft.

But today’s mail brought an unexpected bonus from my blogging, in the form of five copies of the second edition of Edward Tufte’s wonderful essay on Powerpoint. It’s new enough that it doesn’t even seem to be advertised on his site yet. Since the only time I met Dr. Tufte was as a student in one of his workshops more than ten years ago, I can only assume that the “with the compliments of Edward Tufte” card attached to the essays was entirely a result of the posts I’ve made here about Powerpoint, many of which reference the original essay.

A nice bright spot in an otherwise gray day. And a good reminder of the blessings this blog has brought.

microsoft research talk: robin hunicke

(Stupid Ecto for Windows is ignoring my request that this be a draft entry ‘til I’m done, so expect frequent updates over the next hour or so…)

This afternoon I’m at another MSR talk, this one by Robin Hunicke, who’s a really interesting woman. Her talk is on increasing diversity and creativity in CS. Here’s the formal description:

ABSTRACT: Decreased enrollment in Computer Science has led many universities, businesses and government institutions to take a closer look at the field and how it is perceived. As computers become increasingly essential for education and commerce, how can we shape their image within the popular culture? Is it possible to re-invent CS, and to attract new students with diverse backgrounds, goals and talents?

In this talk I will present a post-mortem of my (non-standard, but incredibly fulfilling) education in CS, AI and video games. I will describe my experiences with art and computer science education, standardized and self-guided curriculums (undergraduate and graduate alike). I will discuss my dissertation research and explain how working closely with the game development community has inspired my research and informed my practice as a student and educator.

Finally, I will explore my work with the IGDA’s Education Committee, and show how games are transforming CS programs across the globe. By describing this work in the context of my own experiences, I hope to shed some light on the issues raised above. In particular, how games and CS can work together today, to attract the designers, programmers and leaders of tomorrow.

BIO:
Robin Hunicke is finishing her PhD in Computer Science at Northwestern University; her dissertation work is on AI for Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in video games. In addition to her studies, Robin works with the International Game Developer Association (focusing on Education and Diversity efforts), participates annually in the Indie Game Jam, the Experimental Gameplay Workshop, and the Game Design Workshop at the annual Game Developers Conference. Through these efforts, she strives to build bridges between academics and developers, to promote independent, student and women developers, and to evangelize concrete, directed analysis of games and game design. For more information, see her web site.

She wants to “make another me”—she thinks it’s mostly because people don’t realize that there are opportunities in this space. So, what has to happen to “make another me”?

So, how do we reposition CS? CS is more than a discipline, it’s a way of thinking about things in a procedural way.

Starting with “The Wonder Years”—what were her first experiences with technology? Her father was a nuclear engineer, her mother was a historian and artisan. As a child, she wanted to be a tinkerer and an explorer. There aren’t a lot of female role models for those activities, but she could do a lot of those activities through games (Atari, NES/SNES, M.U.L.E.). BUT…these were not her machines. These were her brother’s machines. She was branded as “gifted” and given a lot of opportunities. But the opportunities wiere in a creative and expressive context, not in the context of procedural learning. Never tied to programming or math or problem-solving.

She felt a tension between science (in school, owned by others), and art (outside of school, personal ownership).

So, 7-12 grade she had a positive focus on humanies and extracurriculars, but her aptitude for math and science wasn’t encouraged. Her overall enthusiasm for school waned.

When she got the U of C, she was able to take a class on programming as a liberal art (Bill Sterner & Don Crabb). Aristote and Turing, Turkle and Tversky. Discussions of history and architecture and oral history, but in the context of computing. She began spending hours in the ocmputer lab making things. Again, an internal split—but she was now starting to try to merge these components.

She built her own interdisciplinary program: film, fine art, oral/historical narrative, women’s studies, and computer programming. Her focus was on storytelling and memory. Because there was no CS major, she could take classes in an ad hoc way, seek mentors as needed, and experiment. Only later did she realize that this was not typical.

In considering grad school, she got the strong impression from successful women she talked with that she had to love math to be a computer scientist. But she did it anyways. :)

At Northwestern, she’s really had an opportunity to do interdisciplinary work, to include things like narrative intelligence, game studies, and game AI in the context of CS graduate study. She discovered a new community, people who could explore with her, learn form each other, share ideas and enthusiasm.

Out of this, came events like the Indie Game Jam, Experimmental Gameplay Workshop, the Game Design Workshop, etc.

There are familiar challenges. There are no famous female game developers, for example. Her experience in CS has bled out into the industry, which has caused her to want to find ways in academia to correct the problems that can in turn bleed out to industry.

There’s a “night and day” problem is how we approach all of this, similar to the split she felt as a teenager. How can we correct this?

Suddenly schools are approaching her to develop games-centered curricula.

Why CS? Why should anyone major in it? Is it accessible? Expressive? Useful? Enjoyable? Profitable?

We need to change the identity of CS—it needs to become a core competency and a tool. We need to evangelize ourselves as programmers as well as our other skills.

CS is a tool, not just a discipline or profession! Kids need to learn how to do procedural thinking. We need to expand how kids think about machines, about procedural thinking.

How can we make CS projects more about expression and about choice?? This is the critical, fundamental problem. Your work says something about you. If you choose work over family (I’m not sure why she frames it this way), you really want it to be a positive expression of you.

If you can program, you can help people in a variety of fields to accomplish tasks. CS doesn’t just mean being a professional programmer sitting in a room writing code, It’s increasingly a component of all kinds of professions and jobs. You’re a better finance analyst if you know how to program database queries and spreadsheet macros, or write your own analysis tools.

How can we use interest in other areas as levers into CS. Her cousin is an environmental scientist who would benefit from being able to write a simple Python program to analyze data she’s collected.

Trailblazing is nice, but bridges may be better. We need better journals, conferences, web sites, amlinl lists, student groups, travel, and internship programs.

Her advisor is using a “Bauhaus model” for education, using a scheme-based tool for projects. He’s demystifying procedural thinking, pointing out that it’s got creative components, not just mathematical and scientific components. He points out how people can use these tools to integrate into their interests.

The next generation of computer scientists won’t be identifiable by current stereotypes. And this will inspire more women and underrepresented minorities to take CS classes and learn computing skills. New contributors lead to cross-pollination, long-term relationships, and groundbreaking work in the field.

(I’m amazed to hear her say she’s never given this talk before—she’s funny and passionate and knowledgable and convincing. She needs to be getting this message out all over the place!)

In response to a question she talks about the panic going on in universities about declining enrollments. (Can’t replicate her very funny version of what the dialogs sound like in departments…) She says, and she’s right, that we need to be thinking about the customer — but that it’s hard to have these conversations when you’re panicked about your own existence (I would really love to have her come give this talk to our faculty and administration at RIT…)

“I think we should teach computer science like we teach spelling.” Why can’t we teach 10-year-olds to program? If they can memorize baseball statistics (and Pokemon characters), they can learn to write code, too. (My 11-year-old has been teaching himself how to program in Javascript for the last year—he’s a great example of exactly what she’s talking about.)

She blasts (appropriately) the advertising for the recent Microsoft DirectX Meltdown, which showed women as g-string-wearing sideline characters next to powerful male superheroes.

There are all kinds of computer scientists, and we need to learn from each other. We can’t generalize form our own experience. None of us knows instinctively what “women” want in games, for example, We need to learn from each other.

We need to acknowledge that there are sometimes advantages to being the only woman, the center of attention—and it can be hard to give up that center stage. But we have to work harder to reach out to other women, welcome them, include them.

it's all over but the bubbling (and the kvetching...)

Done, done, and done. With grading, that is. Final essay exams, weblog posts, homework questions, chat participation. I’ve made my list, and I’ve checked it twice. I had a number of students who did really good work this quarter. And, unfortunately, several who ignored a large part of the course requirements and are likely to be extremely displeased with their grades. Tomorrow morning I’ll electronically “bubble in” their grades, and then brace myself for the onslaught of “how could I get a…” that will result. By waiting until tomorrow to formally submit the grades to student records, I delay the grade announcement emails until tomorrow night, after commencement (though the students can see their final average via the courseware gradebook function if they look). By then I may have recovered sufficiently from grading-induced sleep deprivation to manage the barrage gracefully.

Part of why I haven’t been posting recently is that I’ve been busy—end-of-quarter work, faculty meetings, 72 hour trips to the west coast, taking care of a sick husband, etc. But part of it has also been that overall, life is good, and that isn’t really fodder for interesting blog posts. Christine Lavin, one of my favorite singer/songwriters ever, has a song called “Please Don’t Make Me Too Happy,” with these lyrics:

Please don’t make me too happy
Because if you do
My songwriting will suffer
From the bliss you’ll put me through
Nothing’s quite as boring
As two people this in love
We’ll be so blinded by the stars in our eyes
We won’t see the stars above

There’s something to that, really. Angst is a great source of creativity, and I’ve been awfully short on angst lately.

The LA trip was lovely…had lunch with Allan Karl, and dinner with with someone I’ve known since kindergarten, but had fallen out of touch with. I also met with folks from USC’s Annenberg Center about a potential collaborative grant project, and then got to go to the pre-SSAW party before heading back home.

I think I’m still in denial about the upcoming move, despite the fact that it’s less than a month away. That’s going to have to change, soon.

We’re mulling over car purchase/leasing options, as well as house refinancing options, as well as necessary home repairs before we leave. Ack. While next year we’ll be in good shape financially, the dual salary won’t start ‘til July, and there are going to be a lot of expenses before then. We’ve got some juggling to do over the next few weeks to make it all fall into place.

small successes

During the ten days I spent in Seattle, I was surrounded mostly by people who qualify for the label “technical elite.” And too many of them, I fear, are beginning to forget that their worldview is not exactly representative.

This was particularly obvious when someone (Rael Dornfest?) asked the teen panel at the Social Computing Symposium whether they ever listened to podcasts. Their response? “Huh?” That didn’t surprise me at all, because it’s been clear to me for a while that podcasting has a pretty narrow band of followers and enthusiasts (almost all of whom, so far as I can tell, have lengthy commutes).

But what would probably surprise this group even more is how many people still don’t see blogs as anything more than a fringe phenomenon. I teach in an IT department at a technical university, and most of my students still don’t recognize the potential professional value of blogs.

This quarter I’m trying to change all that by really teaching about blogs and their uses in technical contexts. And based on the midterms I’m finishing grading today (yes, very very very late), I’m making some progress. Take this excerpt, for example, which I found particularly gratifying:

As I mentioned earlier, I am seeing the importance of blogs in the work place. A co-worker and I want to start a blog to make others in our group aware of available upgrades for the software tools we commonly use or any new functions or ideas that one of us may be working on. We may also use it to keep our common procedures in one place. A good example of how this would be of benefit is by providing annotated instructions on how to install or upgrade a piece of software. And, as of [this Monday], a blog will prove especially important for our group; our pointy-haired boss will be splitting us up along application lines (our web apps, client/server apps and mainframe apps) as opposed to what function we provide as a group. So we’ll be working for different mangers, depending on which applications we’re working on. (I will continue to refer to us as a ‘group’ in this paper.)

A weblog will then be a great way for us to communicate because of its interactive nature. It will also be a great tool to “advertise” what our group does. Others will surely want to check out our blog simply from a curiosity standpoint. Then perhaps other groups will have blogs of their own and the proliferation of information flowing between groups will be mind-numbing (right!).

Or this one:

This class for example has exposed me to the opinions and insights of a community of learners, where we all take turns at being lectures and listeners, all from the comfort of my home. Even as I search the web for the answers to the weekly questions I find that many times the freshest perspectives on the subject matter to be in weblogs. Unfortunately it seems like I spend more time sifting through the weblog to find the gem I was looking for. Since working full time and raising a family, it has been difficult for me to travel to campus at least three times a week taking traditional classes. The weblog has been an excellent way for me to learn, while at the same time putting a little extra time back in my day for my family. I was a bit apprehensive about taking a distance-learning course, but I find that I have learned as much from the format of this class as I have from the content on the on-line chats and reading assignments. This class has exposed me to a new method of study I would have never considered.

Maybe they’re just trying to tell me what I want to hear—or maybe I’m actually making some progress. I prefer to believe it’s the latter.

teaching a workshop for awc

Tonight I’m teaching a workshop for members of the upstate NY chapter of the Association for Women in Computing. (Jetlag and all…)

The information for this workshop can be found here; I’ll stick a creative commons license on it tomorrow after I get some sleep. :)

the joys (yes, you read that right) of grading

(No, this is not an April Fool’s post, despite the title.)

I mentioned in an earlier post that this quarter my students in the grad class “Current Themes in Information Technology” are maintaining blogs, in which I’ve got them posting their responses to the readings, and answer to homework questions I pose each week.

Because reading and grading written work by IT students is not always the most enjoyable task, I’ve been putting that off this week. But today I’m holed up in Panera Bread, trying to get through the blog entries.

And it turns out, much to my delight, that some of my students are not only competent writers—they’re downright thoughtful and even entertaining writers. Take, for example, Alexander Pita’s response to one of last week’s readings, a research paper from Bell Labs entitled “Architecture as Metaphor”:

Whoa.

I like to think that I’m a pretty well rounded guy, which a decent appreciation of the arts, humanities, etc…, but I think the authors of “Architecture as Metaphor” need to take a deep breath and read “How to Deconstruct Almost Anything”, by Chip Morningstar [1]. “Grounded theory is based on asking questions about the phenomenon in question.” As opposed to what? Not asking questions about the phenomenon in question? Asking questions about some other totally unrelated phenomenon? “Each concept was captured on a card and thrown on the floor. In grounded theory, this is called open coding.” In English, this is called “taking notes, messily”. Talk about peacock feathers.

It made me literally laugh out loud (which required me then to remove my earbuds and explain to Weez, who’s working across from me, why I was laughing when I was supposed to be suffering the miseries of grading).

And now, back to work…

current themes in it seminar

This quarter I’m teaching a graduate course entitled “Current Themes in Information Technology,” a seminar class in which the topics du jour are redefined each quarter by the professor teaching it.

It’s a distance learning class, so I’ve decided to teach it using blogs for student work and comments, IRC for weekly class discussions, and IM for office hours.

If you’re interested in seeing how my students are approaching the material in the class, you’re welcome to stop by their weblogs. I’ve collected the feeds for their class blogs in Bloglines. (I just added the feeds, and Bloglines takes up to two hours to retrieve posts the first time, so you might want to wait a few hours before checking them out…)

In an attempt to keep spam under control, I’ve limited commenting to those with TypeKey identities, so if you want to comment on their blogs you’ll need to log in with a TypeKey ID. Sorry about that, but it’s a necessary evil until better spam-protection measures can be implemented.

why do academics blog?

I keep getting asked this question by colleagues here at RIT and elsewhere, and I find myself sending them the same links over and over again. So here’s what I give people who ask me this, in an attempt to clarify the value of blogging to those of us in academia. It’s not all about personal confessionals. Really.

My Posts
you may ask yourself “how did i get here?”
blogging risks and benefits

Anders Jacobsen
Why I blog

Crooked Timber
The Academic Contributions of Blogging?
Academics and Blogging (see the comments)
Academic Blogging and Literary Studies
Lit Studies Blogging, Part II: Better breathing through blogging

Seb Paquet
Personal Knowledge Publishing and Its Uses in Research

Jill Walker and Torill Mortensen
Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool (PDF)

Collin Brooke
Blogging @ MEA (Collin’s notes from the panel that I did with Seb Paquet, Alex Halavais, Clay Shirky and Jill Walker)

Also…

University of Minnesota’s edited collection of essays, “Into the Blogosphere”

Feel free to add other favorite links to the wiki page I’ve set up.

great site-building advice from 43 folders

Today’s post on 43 Folders is targeted at sites for bands and musicians, but the advice is useful for a far wider range of sites. Given that this quarter I’m teaching a web design class to students who are likely to want to use Flash for everything, this snippet from the post is particularly relevant:

Use Flash like you would cilantro—sparingly and for a single high-impact effect. Nobody wants to eat a whole bowl of cilantro, and nobody wants an animated death march when they have a “passionate task” to complete. Also, build your pages to make it super-easy to link to anything. Use sub-page anchors, and clearly identify why they’re there.

teaching my class about trackbacks

Today in class I’m showing my students how to use trackbacks to the class web site…

the other side of the classroom

I’m sitting in on a colleague’s class on digital video this quarter. Not just any colleague, though—it’s Weez. It’s fun to be on the other side of the room for a change, listening to someone else talk. We’ve got very different styles, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things that I can learn from watching her teach.

She’s already made me laugh with some of her slide titles. The one we’re looking at right now, for example, is on bandwidth and other technical topics. The title of the slide is “The hard stuff: Size matters”. The students didn’t even crack a smile when it appeared, alas. First day of class, they haven’t yet gotten a sense of what the classroom protocols are, and most of them probably don’t know Weez well enough to know that the humor was intentional.

With the exception of me, the students are sitting behind computer screens but not using them—they’re focused on her, because they care about what she’s telling them. (This is not to say that I don’t care…simply that I’m distracted by having to prep for my 12:00 class, which follows hers in this same classroom.

rit-it election night party

Yes, we’re having a party!

On Tuesday night, Elouise Oyzon and I are hosting a party in the IT conference room (70-2400). We’ll have two projectors going—one with an IRC chat so that people can participate from the comfort of their own homes, and one with either streaming video from the web or broadcast TV (we’re waiting to find out if there’s a live coax jack in there).

We’d love to have you there—while you’re welcome to yell and scream at the screens, however, we do ask that you refrain from abusing attendees who might not share your political leanings.

So don’t sit home alone, watching the results trickle in all by yourself. Come join us—preferably in real-time, but at the very least in irc.

(Planned channel is irc://irc.freenode.net/#ritparty ; you can use a dedicated IRC client to connect, or you can use Mozilla—just type the URL into Mozilla and it will launch the appropriate software and connect you.)

As for refreshments, we’ll collect $ for pizza and drinks, or you can bring your own food if you’re broke. But given the glass walls of the room, it might be best not to bring any alcoholic beverages. :)

nifty powerpoint feature

On the rare occasions that I use Powerpoint in the classroom, I generally have my computer set to mirror the display on the projection unit—so I see the same thing on my laptop as the students do on the wall screens.

Today, however, I was previewing some slides while my computer was hooked up to an external monitor, and I discovered an awesome feature of the current version of Powerpoint for the Mac. On my external monitor, I got the expected slide display. But on my laptop monitor, I got this nifty screen:

Very, very cool. I get a timer in the top left corner, the surrounding slides on the left so I can see where I am in the presentation, any notes associated with the slide at the bottom, an “up next” version of the slide so I’ll know what happens if/when I click, and clearly visible arrows to click to move forward or backwards through the presentation. Color me impressed.

mt as content management software

In the comments of my evangelism post on Friday, a discussion on the merits of Movable Type as a CMS for general purpose (non-blog-like) sites has begun. It got me thinking that it would be nice to have a list of sites using MT (or other weblog software) for more traditional CMS purposes.

So here’s my start, with the stuff I know about. Feel free to add links in the comments, and when I finally get my wiki running, I’ll shift it (and the edublogging resources page) over there. (Full disclosure: I’ve shamelessly stolen some of the examples from the Tutorials and References listed below…)

Examples

• My courseware (example: Intro to Multimedia)
• Andy Phelps’ personal web site and Muppets research site
• Boxes and Arrows, an information architecture magazine/resource site
• Stanford Center for Internet And Society
• The Morning News, a daily online magazine.
• Adaptive Path’s company site
• Every content site in About.com
• Hunterdon Central Regional High School (uses Manila rather than MT, but could easily have been an MT implementation…)
• Into the Blogosphere, a peer-reviewed essay collection on “discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs.”
• SeattleParent.org
• MuniWireless.com
• Main website and cyberportfolios at the Institut St. Joseph in Quebec

Tutorials/Discussions

• Doing your whole site with MT (Brad Choate)
• Beyond the Blog (Matt Haughey)
• Description of the Adaptive Path redesign (Jay Allen)
• Rebuilding a Portfolio (Doug Bowman)
• A Movable Type Intranet (Keith Robinson)

evangelism

I spent an hour this afternoon trying to convince decision-makers at RIT to invest a relatively small (by site license standards) amount in a campus license for Movable Type. It was wonderful being able to merge my social software interests with my home institution, since typically the two haven’t been closely connected. And with luck, it will turn into something that benefits many of my colleagues and the students here at RIT.

The idea would be to set up something similar to what Minnesota has at UThink, but also to start looking at MT as a platform for content management on departmental sites, class sites, etc. We would also be looking at ways to integrate other pedagogical tools (like testing and gradebook software) into MT templates so that students could have something like my MT courseware, but with RIT-specific private components embedded and/or linked. Fun stuff.

In preparation for the talk, I created a list of educational blogging resources and examples (cribbed from another list on a private server that danah boyd and I have been working on for a workshop). It occurred to me that the list could be useful to others trying to convince their institutions to implement wide-scale blogging initiatives, so feel free to steal from it, point to it, add to it, etc. (Yes, I know, it should be on a wiki. I’m working on installing one that I like, but haven’t had time for it recently…) In the meantime, if you leave comments here with things you think should be included, I’ll consider them for the list.

alex halavais' most excellent grading faq

Thank you, Alex, for saying so clearly and eloquently what I find myself having to explain every year to almost every class.

Things that particularly hit home:

It speaks volumes of our own program that having writing as the major evaluative component makes it a “writing course.”

and

This is up there with “Did I miss anything important on the first day?” as one of the dumbest questions ever. What am I supposed to say? “No, I consider myself a ‘soft’ grader; perhaps even lackadaisical”?

Read the whole thing. I’m going to post it on my door, and make it required reading for all of my students.

educause on educational social software

The September/October issue of Educause Review is devoted to “New Tools for Back-to-School: Blogs, Swarms, Wikis, and Games.” The articles are well worth taking a look at.