“Audio without image crosses a wire in my brain.”

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“Audio without image crosses a wire in my brain.”

via Utilizing My Aversion to Phones • Another Passion.

This is wonderful. And here I was thinking it was just me and my aunt. I have an aunt who doesn’t like using the phone either. It’s one of the many, many things I admire about her.

I suspect my husband thinks I’m just being silly – he keeps alternating between trying to force me to talk on the phone (as if some kind of phobia treatment will fix my ‘condition’), and talking over me like I have some kind of disability.

It’s neither – I’m not actually afraid of the phone, and some days I end up talking on the phone with 15 or more different people. I have no problem talking on the phone to people who are looking for information, and I have no problem phoning to ask for information on something, but if there are any feelings involved or there might be nuances in the conversation that require interpretation, I hate using the phone. Really HATE it.

To me, the phone is quite simply inadequate for that kind of communication – in many ways it’s worse than email because there is no ability to review what you are about to say. I almost ALWAYS re-read my emails several times before sending them – and I almost always end up editing something. Communication is important to me, and the phone just isn’t up to the task.

There’s also the interruption factor: “Hey, let’s CHAT.” Never mind the fact that I might have been deeply engrossed in some work that will require at least 10-15 minutes after the call is over before I’m back up to speed again. Asking if I “have a minute” is a waste of time – I’ve ALREADY been interrupted. It’s already going to take me considerable time and effort to back into what I was doing, so I might as well finish the phone thing so I don’t have to get interrupted another time for the same thing. Don’t expect me to be all chatty though.

For me, there simply is not enough information in a voice if I can’t also see the face. It’s like not being able to see every fifth word.

 

Radio drama isn’t the same thing at all (it’s one way) so don’t even go there. I like radio drama as well as audio books. Different thing entirely.

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Student evaluations of teaching don’t correlate with learning gains « Computing Education Blog

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Student evaluations of teaching don’t correlate with learning gains « Computing Education Blog.

Mark Guzdial comments on a post made on (LISTSERV 16.0 – AERA-L Archives.) by Richard Hake, who disagrees with the popular (especially among administrators) notion that student evaluations of teaching are valid form of evidence to measure teaching. I agree with him too. They’re not.

They are measures of a teacher’s popularity and have little if anything to do with how much they have learned. He also mentions something I have found to be true again and again in my 30+ years of teaching: student evaluations often go down when students learn more by working harder.

 

Teaching awards do NOT imply that someone is a good teacher. They imply that someone is a good politician, who knows how to get people to like her (or him).

 

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I’m the only one left who remembers my childhood.

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So, the other shoe has dropped so to speak.

I don’t usually write personal things, but this one is important.

This isn’t going to be a long post but I wanted to get this out there before too much more time went by. I imagine I will have more to say on this later.

My brother was diagnosed with Leiomyosarcoma in March 2010. They were sure they got it all when they removed the tumour along with one adrenal gland, one kidney, and about 1/3 of his pancreas.

My mom was diagnosed with stage-IV breast cancer in July. Her treatment was palliative. She seemed to be doing OK – was even starting to try and eat better.

In September, it was discovered that my brother’s cancer was not gone and that it had grown rather aggressively.

In November they stopped treatment.

He died on January 17.

I feared my mom wouldn’t be able to recover from that one. Her condition had been pronounced stable in March 2011, yet when she went in for a blood transfusion on April 28, they booked her into the hospital and told her she was dying.

She died May 10.

My dad died when I was a kid so now there is no one left who remembers my childhood. Not really. There’s no-one left who can tell me where the paintings on my mom’s wall came from, or who gave her that ring she’s had for as long as I can remember.

It feels like the end of the longest, hardest, and darkest winter of my life. I really hope it’s the end of the winter.

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Frankencode and Other Writing

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Students, Reading and Writing – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A former student of mine once coined a phrase that he used to describe the phenomenon whereby students take bits of code from various other programs and stitch it together in the hopes of ending up with something they can submit for an assignment. He called it “Frankencode”. (many thanks to Jared Hopf)

While I’m pretty sure Jared deserves credit for coining the term, the phenomenon is not new. The article above mentions it too only he calls it patchwriting. Maybe this could also be called Frankenwriting.

His hypotheses on why students seem to be able to write passably in writing courses but not in other courses are important.

  • In many courses that are not focused on writing skills, instructors might not provide detailed enough instructions on their writing assignments to convey to the student what the instructors’ expectations are, and
  • A different issue is whether or not the student understands the course material: a badly written essay may be the result of the student author not understanding the subject rather than not being a capable writer.

I think both apply to forms of writing beyond essays – like code. Actually, I’d go so far as to say they even apply to communication generally, so we also see the same problems and hear the same complaints when students do presentations. AND, while I’m on the subject, this may go some way to explaining why so many presentations made by professionals, and even professors lack, to put it mildly, luster.

I taught introductory programming at university for 25 years. It took me many (MANY) years before I was truly comfortable enough with the material to play around with it while I was teaching. That’s not to say I didn’t know how to program – I did (and do) and I was pretty good at it. However knowing a subject and knowing enough to be able to teach it require entirely different levels of knowledge. The better you understand your material, the better you can be at presenting it. Of course there are always those who have no problem pretending to know things – they, like consummate actors, can present on almost anything and make it look like they know what they’re talking about (except of course, to those who actually DO know what they are talking about). But, I digress.

Mr. Williams goes on to outline four methods by which people incorporate research into their writing. Let me expand that to the incorporation of outside sources generally. Here the list:

Writers have four means by which they can incorporate source content into their text: they can quote, summarize, paraphrase, or patchwrite that content. Contemporary educational and media discourse has been focused on whether writers acknowledge their sources when they incorporate material from them. A more profound question is how writers incorporate source material; quotation, summary, paraphrase, and patchwriting are separate discursive moves representing different levels of intellectual engagement with the source. Quotation requires only the ability to copy. Paraphrase requires comprehension of and engagement with a small bit of text, such as a sentence. Summary requires engagement with an extended passage, even the entire text. Patchwriting stands between quotation and paraphrase; it is neither an exact copying nor a complete restatement.

We definitely need to pay more attention to helping people learn HOW to incorporate outside sources and a little less obsessing about plagiarism. Let’s face it, most of the work we do is repackaging the work of others anyways. That’s also what the bulk of what is done by those we graduate once they get out into the real world.

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Trading off between Education and Fun??? SRSLY?

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The Wall Must Come Down | Learning From Hollywood.

Some years ago I did a survey with public school teachers to see if they were using games in school, and if not, why not. Some of the obvious and significant barriers were highlighted: lack of admin support, lack of resources, lack of time to learn, etc.

The comment that still sticks with me today is this one:

As a parent I object to having my child “play” on the computer when he has completed some piece of work. I want my kids working at school. I can use computer games at home for there entertainment. I also think that “edutainment” as a name is attempting to give computer games some degree of educational value. My students come to school to learn not to be entertained. Would you want your university profs. entertaining you?

I do understand the pressure on teachers to not “waste” time, but the sentiment voiced by this teacher still lingers in the heads of many educators. As soon as we start to have too much fun, educators become suspicious that there is not enough learning happening.

I’ve even had EdTech professors tell me, quite matter of factly, that “fun” and “education” are at opposite ends of a continuum. How sad. And, might I add, WRONG. A continuum implies a 2-dimensional perspective which in turn implies that education and fun are somehow at odds – one comes at the expense of the other.

That goes a long way to explaining some of what is wrong with our formal educational system (the propensity to see things in only 2 dimensions is also a problem).

By the way, the ONLY correct answer to the teacher’s last question is YES!!! Yes I DO expect professors to entertain their students. Now, if that were ALL they did, the students would be justified in feeling cheated.

Emotion is essential to learning – we can not learn without feeling something, be it anger, fear, or joy. It’s probably unethical, in most cases to scare our students, so, make them feel happy!

But none of that pseudoteaching either. REAL learning, with REAL fun.

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Comment on: Data-Oriented Design – A “New” Idea

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Gamasutra – Features – Sponsored Feature: Data-Oriented Design – Now And In The Future.

I know I probably shouldn’t care, but it really irks me when people attach a schnazzy new name to an old idea a claim the idea was theirs.

Data Oriented Design? Are you kidding me? This is NOT a new idea. It’s been around since the 60’s and 70’s, only then it was called Data Driven. Try looking up JSD or Data Flow Diagram.

Perhaps part of the reason software design has progressed so little over the years is that people keep “inventing” old ideas without ever learning from the past.

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Academic Travesties – Open Access Publishing

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I got ANOTHER invitation to publish an article the other day – this time it was a call for book chapters. I get quite a few of these, as I’m sure others do too.

Personalized invitations are always flattering, but of course, with the advance of automated mailers and data mining, there is no real reason to believe that an actual human had anything to do with my invitation at all. The invitation mentioned one of my papers, but they had obviously not read the paper. The paper they mentioned talks about a technique I developed for analysing educational approaches in video games using reverse engineering and while the book for which I got the chapter invitation is about reverse engineering, it is very definitely aimed at engineers and computer scientists, while my work is informed BY these fields, not FOR them.

I didn’t think much about it. I was going to politely decline, but I’ve been quite busy lately and it slipped my mind. This morning I got another invitation from the same group about the same book. SO, I checked it out. Something in the email caught my eye that I had previously missed – this is an OPEN ACCESS publication.

The punchline? It will cost me 590 EUR to have my chapter published.

In the 21st century, if you have money, you can publish. It won’t matter if your work, or even your writing for that matter is any good, just so long as you have money. Commercial publishing doesn’t even do this. I am currently writing a book for a major publisher (Wiley). They pay me. They pay me an advance, which is effectively their gamble that the book is worthy. When it hits the shelves, I get royalties. If my book isn’t any good, or if it isn’t something people are interested in, I don’t get paid. That’s how capitalistic publishing is supposed to work. Academic publishing is supposed to be based on MERIT. Period. It should not be based on money, nor should it be based on what’s popular.

Some say they don’t see open access publishing as a big deal. I know plenty of well-known researchers who have had big grants for so long they probably don’t even remember what it’s like to have to think about what things cost, if in fact they ever did. Often all you need to get that next big grant is to have had a big grant before (but that’s for another rant). I spent most of my academic career as an instructor – I was ineligible for grants. At least that is what the people who had to sign off on my applications told me when they laughed at me for asking. (That’s another rant too – that people up the ladder can poison or even outright block your attempts to get funding. Many of these people are administrators because they aren’t much good at anything else so they see you as a threat if you are better than them.)

Now, the original idea of open access, namely that readers will get to access the publications for free, is a worthy and laudable one. It also fits in nicely with what education should be – accessible. However, the Academy and capitalism do not mesh well (ever) and what we have ended up with is a system whereby academics (I’m starting to hesitate to even call them that) PAY to have their stuff published. Here are just a few of the reasons why this is so very wrong:

  1. Publications get accepted on the basis of ability to pay (i.e. selecting for the wealthy and/or well-funded) rather than on merit (i.e. what the Academy is SUPPOSED to stand for). Researchers with money have an advantage.
  2. An individual with no money can not get published, REGARDLESS OF HOW GOOD OR IMPORTANT their work is. Researchers with unpopular ideas (politically or institutionally) are discriminated against.
  3. Publishers, no matter what they claim, will accept low-quality work to fill their publications as they have realized that it is actually pretty easy to fill a publication this way. Often those with the least to say push their stuff the hardest.
  4. Scholarship becomes about doing what will pay rather than doing something that might advance human knowledge or help the world.

This really is despicable and any academic who supports or publishes in such a venue should be ashamed of themselves. Yes I know the old adage, “Publish or Perish”. I also know that this is the reality for the most part. But here’s the kicker: universities are run by academics. SO, ultimately, THEY are the ones who encourage this kind of perversion.

As far as I’m concerned, a publication in an open access venue has questionable merit -right up there with someone who never publishes alone (and someone who ONLY publishes alone). The academy doesn’t seem to care, but every self-respecting academic should.

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On Peter Lawrence’s Article, The Heart of Research is Sick

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Boy does he have it right on the nose.

lawrence-the-heart-of-research-is-sick-2011.pdf (application/pdf Object).

I know people who insist on putting their names on things their grad students did. There are others who do it more subtly. They are just as despicable.

I am proud to say that I had significant input on everything ever published with my name on it. I’ve had one or two co-authors who have said they felt bad because they didn’t feel they pulled their weight. In those cases, I was the one who insisted their name stay on the paper – they did have significant input, even if they didn’t do the actual writing. I’ve also had a few that were supposed to be joint efforts but the other author ended up contributing virtually nothing. Those STILL leave a bad taste in my mouth – AND make me forever wonder how much they actually contributed to any of their other co-authored efforts.

The basic rule is that credit always flows upwards. If you’re a student, your supervisor will get the credit. If you’re a group leader, your department head might get credit, for example, in the research assessment  exercise for rating UK universities. You don’t get rewarded for having discovered something
yourself. I think that has a poisonous effect. It encourages too many scientists to steal credit, to annex the discoveries of the young. To keep on top of the young people working for them, so that they can claim to have been involved and garner the credit for it. It’s become so built-in that people think that if somebody does something on their own, there’s something slightly suspicious about it.

The single, simplest thing that the granting agencies could do is to look backwards, when possible, rather than forwards. The system we have now is counter- productive, wasteful of time and energy. We get people to write a piece of fiction about what they’re planning to do. It’s a kind of intellectual  exercise – sometimes it relates to what they actually do, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s a sort of game we have to play to get a grant.

“The idea that politically correct people have, that all professions will one day have equal numbers
of men and women is not only wrong, it’s silly.”

 

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