Steven D. Brewer's blog

The semester reached a crescendo today. I spent yesterday and this morning helping my students (and another class of students) finish making posters, went to the founder's day celebration during a windstorm, and learned that a tree had blown over in our yard. It was a little stressful. After it was over, I came home and had a drink. Or maybe two.

Each semester is different. I always worry a bit about the final research project in class writing class because sometimes it works great and sometimes it doesn't. Even when it isn't great, I always think it's better than if we hadn't done it. Research is always like that: you don't know for sure what the answer is going to be. And if you knew what the answer was, you wouldn't be doing it, would you. This semester, I offered to open up the BCRC on the last Sunday afternoon before the research project was due, expecting most of the class to use the chance to get the project finished. Only one student showed up. Yesterday -- when on the day before the project I still hadn't seen a single poster -- I began to sweat a bit. But the students pulled it together. Before I left for lunch, all but one group had their poster printed.

I don't usually do anything for lunch, but today was "Founder's Day". The University put on a giant catered lunch to celebrate. When I left the building, I was surprised how windy it was -- I hadn't heard that in the forecast. The celebration was near the library, which (being 26 stories) does weird things with the wind on a regular day. Today, the winds buffeted me as I walked to the celebration, making me stumble it was so strong.

The plan had been to meet Alisa at 12:30 (when I thought the lines might have gone down some). Alisa was late (big surprise), but the line was extremely long -- almost a quarter mile. I waited in line and hadn't even made it to the front of the line when Alisa joined me 20 minutes later. Then Lucy called.

Lucy said, "I heard a funny noise and checked and found that a big part of a tree has blown down in the yard." I asked, "Did it hit the house." She said, "I don't know." I said, "Well, can you check?" After a few moments she said, "I don't think it has." I said, "Do you need us to come home and check?" But she seemed pretty sure things were OK.

After another 25 minutes, we had our food and were sitting in a giant tent which did a remarkable job of keeping out the wind. It was a great lunch!

After lunch, I went back to the office and we had our final class meeting and poster session. Al Richmond stopped by and I invited him to see the students posters too. It went fine!

Still, the stress of the afternoon rather played on me and, by the time I got home -- after I had checked on the status of the tree -- I was glad to fix myself a cocktail and watch the evening news.

There's more to do: we'll need to find a tree service to deal with the tree (and maybe deal proactively with some of the other trees in the yard). And I want to make some adjustments in how the research project go: we just haven't had enough time for it in recent semesters, so I guess I need to cut one of the other assignments to make more time. But there will be time another for those things in the days that follow. For the moment, I can take pleasure in my students' fine work and the tree that didn't hit the house.

Among my varied accomplishments, I can now add that I am an award-winning author of Esperanto-language haiku. And I get a pound of free Raos Coffee!

I have been writing a lot of haiku lately and posting them to my twitter feed -- partly for napowrimo and partly just because. Twitter is perfect for haiku: the shortness and the empherality of the medium. (Although I am informed that the Library of Congress is going to archive all twitter posts.)

In any event, I was primed when I saw that Raos was having a contest and I submitted two haiku:

vintra dimanĉo...
paruoj manĝas semojn
mi trinkas kafon

a wintry Sunday...
chickadees eat their birdseed
I drink my coffee

and

unua kafo
kaj varma kaj vapora...
atendas ĵurnal'

today's first coffee
hot with the steam still rising...
the newspaper waits

They haven't said which one they liked better. I had also written this haiku years ago, thinking about Raos:

homoj kaj birdoj...
la frumatena
babilad'...
ĉe la kafejo

people and songbirds...
early morning conversations
at the coffeeshop

Philip is just a little jealous. :-)

When I first arrived in the Biology Department, the webserver was mostly the province of geeks: they were the only ones who know anything about it -- or cared, really. We have consistently been ahead of the curve in terms of engaging faculty and staff in building and maintaining web services, but over the past two years we've turned a corner. The conventional wisdom has finally shifted and what used to be considered an addendum to the Department's public image, the website is now the pre-eminent way in which the Department presents itself to the world.

One effect has been that I'm much less comfortable hacking on the live site to make changes to drupal, update modules, etc. Several months ago, I sent an email to the technical staff saying that we needed to construct a system for staging so that we could update our multi-site drupal installation and do testing, without affecting the production site, and then switch when we were ready. Over the past two or three days, we finally made it happen.

I spent a good time of time looking to see if there was a common way everyone did this, but it seems like each sysadmin rolls their own, so that's what we did.

Conceptually, it's simple: we duplicated the webtree and called one "htdocs-yin" and the other "htdocs-yang". We similarly duplicated all of the drupal databases into yin/yang versions. The script looks to see which way htdocs is pointed (yin or yang) and replicates everything from one to the other -- this builds the development mirror -- and rewrites the drupal settings files to use the new copy of the database. The second script just switches which way the symlinks point.

With development space, I could finally update the department website: I updated drupal from 6.14 to 6.16, updated about 12 modules, installed a new module, and made some scary changes to some views that are prominent features of the site. Everything seemed OK, so we pulled the switch and we're now using the updated version of the site.

If there had been a serious problem after we switched, I could have just run the switch again and it would swap them back again. Next week, I can start working on doing some significant development for the department site and not have to worry that my changes will break the production site. A very satisfactory accomplishment.

A short post to document a fix that might help others. After I installed Noscript, I was able to watch Youtube videos for a while but, at some point, it quit working. I spent some little time trying to figure out why it wouldn't let me watch them anymore. Eventually I realized that Youtube must have quit working at the same time I disabled Flashblock. I had thought that since Noscript blocks Flash, I didn't need Flashblock anymore. I'm not sure exactly why, but when I turned Flashblock back on, Youtube works again. Go figure.

On Friday, Nolan Bushnell gave a talk at UMass and participated in an extended discussion with people from the Information Technology program. He's an interesting guy. His current project is to create a model to replace public schools with for-profit high schools using a strongly behaviorist model of programmed instruction. Unfortunately, he doesn't really know anything about pedagogy or behaviorism. I found it rather sickening to watch someone with more money than sense set about ignoring history for the sake of repeating it. What's worse is that with the current measures being used for education, a behaviorist model might actually get you farther: like an amputation weight-loss program.

He began with a critique of existing public education, which was entirely reasonable. He talked about the competing demands for children's interest and how children find schoolwork unworthy of their attention. But then he sailed off into crazy land, laying out the framework for a reductive, behaviorist cubefarm, with children isolated and slaved to computers.

One of his most absurd ideas is a "mind inventory". Instead of just "testing" a subset of knowledge that children are supposed to know, he wants to create a full list of everything that people know. Then, he argues, you can tell exactly what children have learned and what they haven't. Anyone who's read much knows that this is a failed philosophical endeavor: people have tried to do this since Aristotle and have run into what a tangled web human knowledge is.

Underlying the entire structure is a set of rewards and punishments for children and a network of surveillance to monitor student behavior truly Orwellian in scope. Children that play along will receive "zetas" that they can use to buy treats from vending machines or receive other privileges in the school. If you wonder whether he recognizes the punitive nature of this regime, one such treat would be temporary freedom from surveillance.

His solution for curriculum is to create an "app store" for teaching modules that could be assessed to see how well students "learn". His goal is to create a market where curriculum developers would compete to sell teaching software modules.

He has no theory of learning, beyond accretion of facts, no theory of teaching beyond communication of facts, and no model of student behavior beyond rewards and punishments.

Unfortunately, most of his listeners were unable to see his program for what it would be. They heard and agreed with the critique and then uncritically accepted his flimflam as a serious educational program.

I tried to think of questions I could ask that wouldn't be mere insults regarding the entire enterprise. I asked if he saw learning as anything beyond accumulation of facts. Well, maybe, but you still had to learn all those facts first. I asked how he hoped to foster any kind of creativity with a curriculum based on canned questions. He said there would be other parts of the curriculum that weren't canned. I finally lost it and asked if wives and subordinates should also be subject to the same kind of Orwellian surveillance he pictured for children.

He is willing to admit that he's wrong about half of the things he thinks. I think he's wrong about way more than half. Regardless, he still thinks he can make a lot of money doing this, which he defends as a good thing. During his talk, I realized that I mostly don't agree with making money: I think that the primary way that people make money is dishonest: it comes about when someone recognizes that people are ignorant about the relative value of something. Someone who was honest would help people learn what the value actually was, rather than exploiting their ignorance to make a lot of money.

For years, I've been fascinated by onychophorans -- a kind of evolutionary oddity somewhere between annelids and insects (sort of like tardigrades). They're found pretty much exclusively in the southern hemisphere and look something like caterpillars. I first learned about them in graduate school and wrote a paper about them. For years, I've been trying to find a source to get some to study -- partly thinking that they might be a replacement for the rat-tailed maggots I've used as a first prompt in the writing class. But I had been stymied. You can find some web pages in the UK offering them for sale as pets, but nothing in the US -- even from biological supply companies. Lo and Behold a few weeks ago, it turns out that a local invertebrate enthusiast gave some Peripatus to Al -- our resident herpetologist. He mentioned that they might be parthenogenic and that appears to be true: where there was one, there are now five. So Al gave me one of my own so that I can start trying to raise a brood of my own! My own little Peripatus! I'm so excited!

I read this extremely discouraging article about How to Build a Better Teacher today and was struck, again, by what seems like a commonsense difference between what education reform is trying to do and what we actually need. The focus is on teaching tips about who can make kids perform better on measures rather than looking systemically at why kids think school learning isn't worth doing. The failure of education is about kids being unpersuaded that work in school is worth doing. Someone who can fix *that* will actually transform a kid's outlook about learning for the rest of their life. Someone who uses teaching tips and tricks to get kids to pay attention to the teacher or pass a test has not done anyone any favors. We need students to become self-motivated learners and to develop their own self-regulatory strategies. Nothing in this article shows that anyone is thinking about that at all.

I saw a funny report this morning in about students worrying about becoming one of those iPhone people. I don't worry about that, but my iPod Touch has been helping me understand it. I probably spend too much time looking at computer screens already but, with the iPhone, you can be looking at a computer screen without being at a computer. It's terribly easy to keep up with mail, look stuff up, and keep current with social media -- you don't have to be at a computer anymore.

Speaking of social media, while I reading Inside Higher Ed, I saw this cautionary tale about faculty being surprised when their posts were more public than they had expected. I've been trying to tell everyone who would listen for years that you shouldn't expect privacy if you post stuff electronically. I forwarded the link to the Biology faculty with my admonition: I think the take-home lesson should "you should act as though everything you post online can be read by anybody". I think the wrong message is to tell people to carefully configure their privacy settings to make sure their posts remain private.

One other bright spot recently was reading that Diane Ravitch, one of the architects of the failed so-called "standards based educational reform effort", has woken up to how much damage we're doing to kids with those policies. Better late than never. I've tried to tell people: if you set policy based only on what's easy to measure, you leave out most of what's really important in education.

First post with my new Macbook. I used the Migration Assistant and nearly everything came over perfectly. In point of fact, the new Macbook is nearly the same as my old Macbook -- the processor is marginally newer -- but it has the same amount of RAM, the hard-drive is not really any bigger, the display is about the same, it has the same version of the OS, etc. What it *does* have, is a brighter display, the keyboard actually works, the battery works, the wireless card works. And it has that fresh, new, computer smell. :-)

This morning, I have some extra time to play with my new laptop because the University is operating on a two-hour delay due to a snow storm. In fact, the storm is ongoing and may yet close the University -- the public schools are all closed. I'm hoping we can get our BCRC steering committee meeting in, which has been postponed and rescheduled about 4 times now due to various circumstances.

Today, Karen Searcy and I finished work on a new website: Botanical Collections of William S. Clark and David P. Penhallow. Karen and Lita D'Acunto (a former student of mine) scanned in herbarium cards that William Clark made when he visited Japan in the late 1870s. We built a site in Drupal that let's the public browse thumbnail images and download very, very high resolution images of the herbarium cards. Tom Hoogendyk helped with the theme and a bunch of other folks contributed historical images and checked the identifications. It was a cool and interesting project that has been in the works for a long, long time.

My new Macbook arrived today. I have named it "polpo" so that it sort of goes with the ipod touch (which is named "palpilo"). I'm currently using the migration assistant to move over all my data from my previous laptop (which was named "mopso"). I'm looking forward to having a laptop with a working keyboard, battery, and airport card.

I've been frustrated with not being able to find any instant messaging software for the iPod touch that supports OTR. That seems like a huge gap -- people have been complaining about it for years. Every one of the programs seems to have a thread in their support forum with people pleading for them to add support for OTR.

I'm kind of surprised at how difficult it is to compare apps at the App Store -- all you can get is a big swarm of icons that you then have to look at one at a time. There is very limited tagging, so you can see "Social Networking" apps, but you can't sort easily by price or by ratings or last updated or by any measure of viability. Using iTunes as the interface for the iPod Touch is also quite cumbersome. It feels clunky and not-well-thought-out.

Using the iPod Touch at a meeting yesterday, I was surprised how easy it was to use it unobtrusively for research. Having a laptop open really changes the dynamic with other people. But the iPod Touch doesn't create such a barrier with other people. It felt like a bigger difference than I would have predicted.