teaching
teaching, learning, and education
The "Build a Computer" class has begun to shift gears with the new semester. We finished building the computer last semester and are now trying to actually use it. In the first class meeting in January, we tried to use installers I had made on the mac in my office -- they didn't work. In the intervening week, I built new installers using a linux box and found that there was a step that the Mac directions don't include, where you install something in the bookblocks of the device. That was consistent with the failure mode we were seeing, where the device was visible in the BIOS but did not appear bootable. Unfortunately, there was a holiday and then the next class period was on the first day of the new semester and I felt like I needed to skip North Star to be in my office for people with first-day problems. But I sent the installers with Daniel so that he and the others could try them out. They called me a couple of times with questions, but succeeded in finishing the installation and named their new server "polaris".
This week, we built accounts for everyone on polaris. We updated the groups file and then tested to make sure that everyone could log in and could become root. Then we tried to set up networking.
My general plan has been that eventually the server could become the router and firewall, plugged directly into the cable modem. We're continuing with that possibility in mind. For the meantime, however, the server will reside behind the wireless basestation and so we wanted to set up wireless networking. It took some reading of man pages and a bit of googling, but eventually we got everything in /etc/network/interfaces, stopped and started networking, and we were able to ping out. We ran apt-get update and then were able to install tinymux.
My plan is to have them set up tinymux as their first service: something fun. And then move to other services. I'm looking forward to next week.
Eight years ago, I set up a text-based adventure game with my older son called "Muppyville". He was in fourth grade. We showed it to all the kids in his class for one class session and then he and a handful of his friends played it for months.
There was a little boy who was fascinated by the potential of Muppyville to exert power over the other children. He created places in the game that he could lead unwary people into where they would be trapped and he could taunt them and then leave them stuck there. He eventually figured out that he could change his "name" to "1imako", which looked a lot like the username name I used "limako" (the first character is a a one instead of an "L"). And then he would pretend to be me to other kids but then insult them and use obscenities -- among other things. I gave him a couple of chances to straighten up, but eventually I had to block his access and tell him he would have to have his parents contact me if he wanted access again. He was understandably reluctant to do that.
Fast forward to 2011: According to my son, this boy got an administrative password to "Powerschool" -- the database that the school uses to maintain records -- and subtly adjusted a few of his own test grades to change his grade from a B+ to an A. And he got caught! Reportedly, he was suspended and all of the colleges and universities he had applied to were notified of his academic dishonesty.
Some people just never learn...
Last spring, I spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of contribution I might make to the teaching at North Star. I suggested several possibilities and they chose to invite me to offer a course on building a computer. We met for an hour a week starting in September.
The first class attracted a lot of initial interest: more than 20 students came. I led a discussion where we started with what kinds of computers are there and it was great! Students started listing brands of computers (Apple, Dell, HP, etc) and, then we moved to form factors (laptops, desktops, towers, etc), and then purposes (workstations, servers, thin-clients, etc), and eventually came to architecture (RISC, CISC, and different processor families). We established our mission as trying to define the components, purchase, and assemble the components to build a server computer.
The next class, fewer students came, and even fewer came after that . In the end, there were only three who came every week. It may be that the others were imagining I would come in with boxes of parts and have everyone build their own. It was more work to try to figure out everything and buy it first. But we persevered.
We discussed the kinds of services we thought we might want. We agreed that it should be a file server and probably have a webserver. There we a lot of interest in having something that might be able to improve wireless performance in the building. And I suggested that we could also run a Minecraft server. And Daniel very much would like to run a MUX or MOO server as well. We talked about the other ubiquitous services like DHCP and DNS, that make the internet work.
We looked briefly at operating systems. We looked at and rejected Windows (which, if you try to buy the server version, is fantastically expensive). We considered Open Indiana and the various flavors of BSD, but settled on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS as probably the way to go.
By now, the fall was disappearing quickly. We identified some sources for components and began looking at the cheaper components, looking for something that would be most appropriate for a server (making sure there were drivers for linux) without breaking my wallet. We selected a processor/motherboard combo and picked out a DIMM. The first case we wanted was too expensive and didn't include a power supply, so we went with a cheaper case. When we first looked at hard-drives, they were quite cheap, but due to the flooding in Thailand, prices tripled, so we ended up getting a smaller hard-drive than we'd initially hoped. It took an extra day to find a wireless card that looked like it would support the HostAP stuff that (hopefully) will make it easy to build a captive portal.
Today, in class, we started building. George had teased me good-naturedly regarding whether I'd be able to let the students actually do the work, but I think my photographs provide testimony that I let them actually do almost everything. We got the motherboard installed and installed the CPU, CPU fan, and DIMM. Next week, we'll hopefully install the hard-drive and wireless card and hook up all the internal cables. Then we should be good to try to boot it up and install gnu/linux.
Next semester, we'll continue with sysadmin training and actually setting up all the services.
The parts have started to arrive for the North Star computer we're building. So far, we've only gotten the wireless card, but I expect the rest of the parts to arrive soon. The first thing the students want to work on is the connectivity in the building, so Step 1 will be to set up our own wireless access-point/NAT Gateway. So today we did an intro to networking.
We mainly looked at the output of ifconfig. We talked about packets and their structure (with a header containing address information and a payload) and about the differences between TCP and UDP and what an MTU is . We looked at hexidecimal digits and talked about translating between hex and base-10 and binary. We looked at the IP address, broadcast, and netmask and briefly discussed what they do. We talked about NAT and DHCP and why the 192.x.x.x address space is used inside and why you sometimes see 169.x.x.x addresses. We did some thought puzzles: why would adding one to the last octet still work and adding one to the first octet not work?
One bit I didn't think to talk about was to close the circle in terms of how processors load and manipulate data in registers and why netmasks work the way they do. That's not something I actually understand all that well myself -- just enough to wave my hand at it and say XOR or something. We can take that up next week, if we're not too busy actually putting parts together.
I got an email from one of technical staff in another department wanting to consult with me about setting up a streaming server. When we met, he explained that the faculty in his department were doing "class capture" and wanted to set up a server to provide access to the video files. We mostly talked about the technical issues involved, although I couldn't resist at least mentioning the pedagogical underpinnings.
So-called "Class Capture" is stupid. If you're teaching in such a way that a video recording of the screen is useful, then you're doing it wrong. The time the students and faculty are together is incredibly special and can be used much more effectively than as a memory dump by one person. In particular, you can have students discuss problems in small groups and report out to the larger group: class capture doesn't work for that. You can have students work on group projects. You can have students actually do things and not just sit there. If you do anything interesting with the class time, class capture doesn't work: it would be pointless. To do class capture in an environment like that, you'd need a team of camera-persons and sound persons. And an editor to provide a comprehensible stream of footage. Class capture only makes "sense" if you have someone lecturing. Sigh...
I pointed out that I understood that the poor tech couldn't make faculty choose different pedagogy and that he needed to just make something that would work for them. I showed him an approach that I thought would work. I pointed out that you really only need a "streaming server" if you want to provide live feeds and that for posting files, you could probably get away with just posting video files (probably .flv, transcoded using ffmpeg) and a player like flowplayer. I pointed out that you could put a pretty front-end on it with Drupal, but he said that people just needed to embed their videos in their course websites, so that probably wouldn't be necessary.
We also talked a bit about hardware and OS: he suggested getting a tiny Dell computer and using Windows. I pointed out that you probably wanted more reliable hardware than that, but he said that his department was notoriously cheap. It turned out the only reason he was talking to me was that they'd looked at purchasing some kind of video streaming solution that cost $5000. If money hadn't been an issue, they'd have just bought it, I guess. Sigh...
A system for badges for life-long learning, based on previously-established Department Learning Goals, driven by student applications, and implemented in Drupal, could encourage students to align their own learning with the Goals. In addition, it could provide a much-needed impetus for building improved assessment of learning.
The Biology Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has fostered revolutionary pedagogy and pioneered team-based learning approaches in lab and in lecture. With funding from Howard Hughes, we built innovative introductory and upper-level biology laboratory courses. With support from the Pew-funded Program in Course Redesign, we developed on-line resources to support in-class small-group problem solving. With funding from NSF, we've developed cutting-edge model-based problem solving activities for use with clickers.
About ten years ago, the Biology Department adopted a forward-looking set of Learning Goals that has been influential in the redesign of existing classes and the design of new ones. Acknowledging that, while the curriculum defines the depth and breadth of disciplinary knowledge, the Learning Goals can establish a vision for the skills and perspectives that every Biology course should foster and develop in students. The Learning Goals in many ways encapsulate scientific literacy and an appreciation for life-long learning from a biological perspective.
While the Learning Goals have been influential, both in terms of curriculum and course design, the Department has not established assessments to monitor and evaluate student progress toward the goals in any centrally-reportable way. That's not to say that the assessments don't happen at all: they're simply embedded in courses with no mechanism for sharing them or their results. Finding ways to share the outcomes of assessments would help the department substantially, both by providing information about the Department's mission to help guide further efforts, but also to enable the department to communicate our mission to outside constituencies. It has been difficult, however, to build the necessary consensus among the faculty to accomplish the work. I believe a system based on badges could solve this dilemma.
I propose a slightly subversive mechanism to turn the problem on its head by enabling students to request badges through submission of an artifact from a course or experience (a project, paper, photograph, video, examination, etc) and writing a brief statement that explains why it merits receipt of the badge. By creating a student-driven system, the incentives for faculty could be inverted: the student requests will drive the system and provide the information about where the learning goals are already being assessed.
Badges will be aligned with the major learning goals and perspectives with four levels that students could potentially achieve for each badge (one for each year of study). Ideally, the instructor of the course and another faculty member would be required to certify that the work submitted represented progress above and beyond the level the student had previously achieved. In very large courses (some Department courses have more than a thousand students), this could be unrealistic, however, and course TAs might be needed to manage the requests.
By encouraging students to achieve the Leaning Goals directly, they will develop increased familiarity with the Goals and begin looking at their assignments and activities with an eye for how they could potentially meet Goal and earn badges. This will undoubtedly give students greater appreciation for how the Learning Goals articulate with class goals and with the Goals the faculty have for students in the major.
There are several places where the student badges could be used to confer privileges and opportunities to students. The website itself will offer a feed where new student badges are posted (at the discretion of the student). Another place where the badges could be leveraged is the Biology Undergraduate Research Apprenticeships application program where students already apply online and their badges could appear when their application is viewed. Changes to the Honors College will also necessitate the Department managing an admissions process for Honors students and the badges could appear when this determination is made.
Minimally, this system would provide a wealth of information to the Department regarding where the Learning Goals are being practiced and implemented effectively. One potential outcome of this system would be that faculty might begin redesigning their courses and assessments to facilitate student badge applications: faculty might feel some pressure to redesign their assessments if their classes yield few or no applications for badges.
I believe this can all be built with tools already available and in use in the Biology Department: We have extensive experience using Drupal and we've already started using the user_badges Drupal module (for Science Scouts badges). This module does not currently support the Mozilla Open Badges initiative, but I have already begun trying to organize a group to put in a subsequent proposal to extend the user_badges module to support it and it seems like a good platform to start with. Students would submit the material on-line and, via the workflow module, the faculty members would be notified to evaluate the submission, and assign the badge.
If other departments or entities on campus were interested in pursuing similar badges, it would be easy to replicate or centralize the infrastructure for the badge system. The General Education group and the new Integrative Experience program have similar kinds of learning goals that badges could be developed for.
For nearly ten years, I've been trying to convince the Biology Department to embark on a process to assess the Learning Goals we developed and adopted without success. If a system of badges could get students to start identifying where we're already doing these assessments and provide the mechanism for sharing the information centrally, it would be a transformative step in moving the department forward. But the biggest winners would be students taking greater control of aligning their education with the Department Goals.
Submitted as a proposal to the Digital Media Learning Badges for Life-long Learning Competition with Tom Hoogendyk & Coherent Bytes listed as a collaborator.
One thing I realized early on in teaching science was that it is misguided -- stupid even -- to invest a lot of energy trying to "teach" students things that they don't see any point in. Oh, you might be able to get them to remember stuff to pass a test -- if you structured the incentives that way and held a big stick over them. As a trick, you might get them to do it once, if by the end of the lesson they realized how wise you were in leading them down the path. Otherwise it's pointless: they'll forget it all as soon as they can, because there's rarely any point in merely knowing all that crap in the first place. You have to actually understand it, if it's going to be useful. And that requires real intention on the part of the students.
The idea of teaching people particular things has several bases, but none of them are valid any longer -- if they ever were. Modern public education was organized along the model of the assembly line, where students in cohorts move along a conveyer from one station to another having "information" added systematically along the way. It conceives of learning as laying courses of bricks and is grounded upon the assumption that students can't do anything interesting until they've assembled a critical mass of information to work with. Teaching has become a sterile activity where teachers use tricks to keep students "on task" doing drudgery that they generally see as pointless. These are all false, discredited models for how learning should be organized -- or should ever have been organized. And the testing paradigm, which is predicated on the notion that everyone must be taught the same things at the same time, has made this all much worse.
Educational testing is driven by the premise that finding questions that experts will answer differently than novices, and using those as an indicator of student performance, will allow measurement of student ability and teaching efficacy. This model is false for several reasons, but principally because expert performance is mainly due to how their knowledge is organized, rather than its quantity. Test questions rarely can address how knowledge is organized unless you can understand why someone selected the answer they did. This kind of testing, though possible, isn't cheap -- it generally requires trained people and individualized assessment.
The broad application of the testing paradigm has deprofessionalized K-12 teaching and shifted emphasis from what's important to what can be easily assessed. Teachers are becoming merely jailers who implement an instructional regime, created by bureaucrats, that's driven by assessments and bean counting. Students are rewarded for compliance, not for critical thought or challenging the establishment goals. Teachers are rewarded for avoiding schools with non-complying students. And Higher Education is now in the sights of the testing industry.
In higher education, I still have some freedom to try to deprogram the students that come into my classroom. I spend a great deal of effort trying to build in mechanisms for student activity to be driven by what makes sense to them. In different classes, I use different schedules for extracting myself from students' teacher-centered expectations about learning and seek ways to engage them with their own learning. Generally, I'm quite directive in the first few days (which is what college students depressingly expect) and then, little-by-little, I wean students off from seeking my approval to trying to satisfy themselves.
I am sometimes successful: in end-of-term reflective essays students often describe to me how they had experienced an epiphany at some point -- and its effect is evident in the subsequent work the student performed during the semester. What brings about the epiphany varies from student to student: sometimes it's seeing what peers are doing, sometimes it's something I say, and sometimes it just happens out of the blue.
I occasionally meet tremendous resistance from students. One student, after the first day, dropped my course saying that he could see that in the course students would have to think "outside-the-box". "I don't want to do that," he said. In another course, I had used the analogy of taking the students out to the middle of the ocean and asking them to pick a direction and swim. "I guarantee you'll get someplace interesting," I said. "But you have to pick a direction and swim. I'll try to make sure you don't sink and help you navigate the reefs and currents that you run into. But you have to swim." Some students just crossed their arms and refused: they were convinced that if they waited long enough, I would turn the assignment into a meaningless set of steps they can perform without choosing. In a chat-session with the students, one woman kept re-iterating reasons why she couldn't start her project until she received assurances that it was the right way to go until another student finally said, "Swim, Cynthia! Swim!"
It would be much better if students didn't need to wait until college to discover that learning works best when it's driven by self-interest and self-motivation -- and is self-directed. The internet, more than any one other single thing, now makes that possible. Not inevitable -- but possible in a way that has never been possible before.
The internet hasn't changed how students learn, but it has the potential to be an incredible source of student empowerment. Every student with a computing device and a network connection now has access to a greater library and source of information than any human being on earth has ever had. Much, much greater. Students don't really need textbooks. They don't really need teachers. What they need are reasons to delve into that stuff and take advantage of it. School -- most of our current formal educational structure -- is not good at providing those reasons. In fact, schools (and government) are generally afraid to let students have unfiltered access to the full world of information on the internet. Students that buy into the formal schooling program become rule-followers and get comparatively little real benefit from the "learning". What students need are engaging, authentic tasks that require learning -- and the freedom to pursue them.
Once students are liberated from the drudgery of menial schoolwork, they suddenly discover that the world is a fascinating place -- and there are whole communities of people who have been equally fascinated by it and have been trying to figure it out for ages. Instead of trying to drag students along by the nose, the teacher is liberated to help students accomplish their goals: they can become a genuine guide and mentor -- and not just a supervisor trying to trick students into learning stuff they have no interest in.
School -- and much of higher education -- as currently instantiated is a poor substitute for self-motivated learning. Most would get a lot farther fostering and pursuing their own interests. The tools for students and teachers to liberate themselves are there just waiting.
Today, I spent a few hours and got things ready for the start of the semester. On Friday, I was so busy -- and got interrupted so many times -- that I just couldn't get things finished. There was no-one in the ISB today, so I finished the image for the Molecular Evolution course (they needed a handful of command-line programs installed) and, while that was updating, I got my writing course website mostly set up. I still have to set up the intro labs, but labs don't start until next week, so I still have a few days.
I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the "theme" for this semester's writing class. I've generally tried to look for something to drive a data collection exercise. Last semester, we did a "calling frog" survey. Another semester, we mapped the location of garlic mustard plants in Amherst. The problem is that, in the fall, the conditions are not favorable for doing field studies -- and I don't have a laboratory for the course. (In point of fact, next semester, I'm planning to try to schedule my course in the ISB, so I'll have a lab. But this semester, I'm still on the hook...) One year, I had my students study cockroaches: I thought that was perfect. We could find cockroaches in the building and study them. I thought the students would be ecstatic to be studying animals. But, for some reason, the students didn't enjoy studying cockroaches. Go figure.
This semester, I'm thinking I'll have the students construct computer models and study those. It would free us from having to go outside in the snow. And it would make it easy to get lots of cool data. The question is now, what to model. But we've got a whole semester to figure that out.
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.
Yesterday in class, I gave pairs of students a data set and asked them to see if the data enabled them to draw and conclusions. The data set showed results for around 50 people, showing gender, GPA, hours studied per week, and hours slept per week. I had, in a fairly simplistic way, salted each dataset to show a unique trend. I had also added some outliers to the data. I had thought this would be a fairly straightforward activity for the students to construct summary tables showing comparisons of mean and/or median values, bar or pie charts, and scatter plots with regression lines. They found the activity to be more difficult than I had expected.
Now, today, I have to read all the rough drafts from their papers and make comments. It's going to be a long day.
Today was the last class of the semester. We ran our poster session and the students presented their finished projects. We were all exhausted. They worked really hard.
We really needed another week. The semester was a week short this year: we only had 13 weeks of class. We really needed one more week to pull everything together. Or maybe I should just drop one of the projects. It's hard to imagine doing that because I somehow need to provide all of the pieces.
When I first taught the class, I didn't have an "observation" project at the beginning, but I found that without it, students were unprepared to do the methods project. But without the methods project, they can't write a proposal. And without a proposal, its hard to choose a Research Project. It's hard to know what to cut.
A student asked me if we were going to do teaching evaluations. I've had students ask me once or twice *if* we're going to do teaching evaluations. I guess there are some people who don't, but the question always makes me feel a bit weird. Of course we're going to do teaching evaluations. I always do teaching evaluations. I used the opportunity to recruit that student to do the teaching evaluations for me and to drop them off at the Chairman's office.
I remember talking to Pop years ago about teaching evaluations. He pointed out that he mostly didn't pay any attention to them because he knew what the students were going to say. He'd arranged the course as well as he could and some of the things they didn't like were intentional and some were just side effects of who he was. I understand his point better now.
I've been enjoying doing more photography with my new little camera. I'm trying to carry it everywhere and to take pictures of everyday things. It's incredible when I download the pictures and find that they don't need any retouching: I look at them and can't find anything to fix. My Pentax can take great pictures, but they nearly always require tweaking. Maybe I could set it so it would be closer to what I want at first pass. But the canon is already like that. It's wonderful for snapshots.
At the MEES conference, I took some Eristalis larvae for people to observe. I've done this plenty of time with students and -- at least with Biology students -- it generally works really well as an observation exercise. I've used lots of stuff that can work really well -- almost anything can. I've used green onions and walnuts before. But Eristalis larvae are about the best, because they're so unusual.
After the presentation Kathy Davis asked if she could have the larvae to use with her pre-service teachers. I said, "Sure!". Today, she send me email to explain how they worked out. She thanked me for my presentation and then said:
my students in my Thurs class were not all that excited about the maggots...they seemed to have some biases floating around about what animals are acceptable and which are not...can you imagine that? WE had a bit of a conversation about garbage, etc. which led to boa costrictors and other animals usually marginalized from the in-crowd of critters. Anyway, they did look at them as long as the lids were on the little containers.
Here's my reply:
Thanks for your kind words about my presentation -- I had a good time.
Regarding what animals are acceptable, I had a similar experience with biology students. Each year, I identify a theme for the projects that were going to study -- I've tried leaving it open and constraining it and have found that constraints usually generate a better project in the end. So I usually pick some organism or theme for the class to study. Usually I've picked a plant -- or some plant themed project (like trees, garlic mustard or lichens) -- because plants are safe. You can find them reliably year round and you don't need to fill out 50 pages of paperwork to study them. But students say they hate plants -- they want to study animals. So last year, I decided we could study an animal you can find reliably in the Morrill Science Center: the cockroach! I thought it was a brilliant idea. Students could study an animal and I wouldn't have to fill out a mountain of paperwork. Unfortunately, even biology students don't seem to believe cockroaches are animals. Or they want to study animals, but will make a special exception for cockroaches. So last semester, I took some Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches to my first class for students to handle, but then suggested maybe we could study tardigrades instead. Only a few students complained about studying tardigrades after that.
Another animal I've thought we might be able to find in Morrill: Psocoptera (aka "book lice"). I'm not sure students would like them any better. I've thought it would be interesting to examine faculty member's books for psocopterans to see which faculty members have the most and the most diverse populations of psocopterans: you could think up all kinds of factors that might contribute to diversity in the population.
Anyway, sorry your ingrate students didn't much like the maggots. :-)
Tomorrow, I'm presenting at the Massachusetts Environmental Education Society conference at Holy Cross in Worcester. I've spent a good bit of time over the past few days putting together a presentation that includes two hands-on activities and an overview of the projects I used for the BIOL597B class. I should probably add one more slide to talk about Free Software.
I'm not sure quite how long it will take me to get through the presentation. I have an hour and fifteen minutes. My goal is for the introduction to last 5-10 minutes, the first activity 15 minutes, the overview for 20-25 minutes, and the second activity roughly 15 minutes. That should give me 10-15 minutes for questions plus a little slop. I could easily spend an hour on any of the parts.
It was fun to go back and look at all the work my students did last semester. They posted more than 1300 images. And great stuff! Some of them I had missed when they went by the first time. The on-line format has some advantages -- some students might otherwise not be able to participate -- but I'm always struck by how unsatisfying I feel afterward about the relationship I had with the students. I don't feel like I really get to know people, like I can in a face-to-face class.
I taught my last class yesterday. We did a poster session on the tardigrade research project the class had taken up. I always worry a bit when we do these big projects -- they're always a bit risky and don't always work out perfectly. Last semester, several of the groups had crashed-and-burned, in spite of (what I thought) were herculean efforts on my part to support and sustain students' efforts. This semester, things went relatively smoothly. One group insisted on using Powerpoint for their poster and, sure enough, it wouldn't print properly. We struggled with it and eventually -- at the very last minute -- we were able to get something to print. Overall, however, the posters were fantastic. The students had worked very hard to collect tardigrades, mount them in slides, identify them, and collect beautiful imagery. The posters were attractive, well-organized, and most had carefully constructed figures.
It was fun talking to the students about their projects. Several had reported how hard it was to find any tardigrades at first, but how, once you trained your eyes what to look for, you began to see them everywhere. Several talked about how cute and engaging the tardigrades are -- not everyone liked them so much, but I think everyone liked them more than the cockroaches I had students study the previous fall. (Maybe next fall, I can do something else warm and cuddly, like leeches. The cuddle up real close and are quite warm, especially as they finish their blood meal.)
I made a request at the beginning of class that, if anyone had any extra time, I would appreciate some help cleaning up the lab, since it had gotten messy while they were finishing their projects. I went down later in the afternoon to start cleaning and it was already done! A couple of enterprising students had taken it upon themselves to really make it shine. I was really touched and, in spite of the gathering gloom, it made the day seem brighter.
Some of the students have contributed their slides to the departments Natural History Collections too -- it will be useful to have them in the teaching collection so that future students will be able to see what a tardigrade looks like. (Although they're really easy enough to just go find when you need some.) A very successful semester in writing.
Andrew Leonard recently posted about shopping with no human contact. I remember seeing a promotional video for self-service checkout systems that explained that, the systems wouldn't necessarily just eliminate jobs, but it would allow the stores to repurpose their staff from menial jobs to more customer-oriented jobs. Bullshit.
Technology is increasingly being used to replace human interactions. It certainly is the direction we've been going -- at least for the lower and middle class. In fact, I think most people prefer that. People are a PITA to deal with.
It was a shock to me when I visited Spain in the 1980's that few stores in Madrid even allowed you to browse. Most stores had their products inside glass display cases and you were not expected to look to see what they had, but rather to tell the shopkeeper what you needed and then to have him show you what products might meet your needs. The idea of "just looking" was utterly alien to them.
It used to be that sales people could offer useful insights to the customer. Recently Circuit City fired all of their most experienced salespeople. There was the perception that experience salespeople add more value because they presumably know the products and can more effectively answer questions. With the rise of the internet, I'm not so sure that's true anymore. Most people I know, compare features pretty carefully using the internet first and visit the store only to see and touch the products, to get a sense of the fit and polish. I tend to be skeptical of what salespeople have to say -- especially when you know they're being compelled to try to sell you "extended warranties" and other crap you don't need.
If you're really wealthy, of course, you can hire great people to pick out great stuff for you or harass people you don't like or whatever you want. And some stores, that cater to the wealthy, will continue to have highly-paid staff. But most people, seemingly, would really prefer to buy stuff at Voldemart and save a dollar or two.
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