bierfaristo blogs

When I was hired at UMass, I was largely given carte blanche to do whatever I thought needed to be done to improve how technology and education were implemented in the department. It was very uncomfortable for the first couple of years to be so unaccountable. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop: for someone to tell me I wasn't doing the right things. I did have a steering committee that I could go to for direction, but they ended up seeming more like a "pep squad" than something to be accountable to. My goal has always been to maximize the utility of technology for users: to reduce obstacles and make it easier for people to do what they need to do.

Unfortunately, over the last couple of years, the pressure has been to demonstrate accountability and reduce costs. So, for the past year, I've been putting in place infrastructure that makes the facilities harder to use: you can't just log in and print anymore. Now people have to jump through a series of hoops to see if they have an account and then more hoops every time they want to print. By implementing page quotas on printing and requiring an account to log in, we get much more information about who is using the facility -- and it does provide better service in the sense that we can exclude the freeloading non-biology students that didn't really belong there in the first place. There are fewer lines now and much less wasted printing: people don't print unless they're pretty sure they want it.

There are just two or three more technical hurdles to overcome and almost our whole infrastructure will be able to use the authentication system we've been building. I think it's going to make a huge difference in efficiency in setting up and providing services. But it's a big distraction from the kind of development that I'd really rather being doing.

Toward that end, I'm getting an iPod Touch to start thinking about building cool new educational apps. The Apple guy had me look at the "cool new educational apps" he liked, which were just the typical transmissionist bullshit: transmit some "facts" about a topic and give people a quiz to see if they "got it". Or watch a lecture on your iPod! Sigh... We've had this conversation enough times that he knows I don't like that kind of thing, but he doesn't really get why.

I think the first thing I'll build is my simplified take on the "knowledge broker" idea the physics guys had a couple of years ago. They wanted to be able to ask open-ended questions about reasoning in large classes and have some intelligent system to winnow down the answers into something manageable. I don't want an intelligent system -- I want the intelligence to be in people. I had the idea of letting people enter answers, but also to see a ranked list of answers submitted by other people and to vote for them. Most people would probably not enter anything, but would just vote. In a large class, you'd see enough answers to have an interesting sense of the diversity and the top 5 or 6 would probably capture the sense of the class. (Maybe only let people start voting after you have 5 answers?) Furthermore, you could leave the voting open while you discussed the question and, as various options got eliminated, you could eventually come to consensus on the best answer. I think I could build something like that based on Duck given a long weekend. But it would be coolest to have it on some portable device, like an iphone or ipod touch. Once I get the device, I'll start looking in to building it. It should be fun.