Category: Education

Memes-ville: Five things you don’t know about me

Bristles and pages
This is arguably a poorly formed concept since its meaning can vary wildly depending on the referent of “you” but, hey, if Mr. Tozier is silly enough to tag me I’ll play along :-).

  1. I’ll start with something really random and meaningless: I have short pinkie fingers Actually, the fingers themselves are proportional to my other fingers, but there’s something a little off in the bones of the hand and both my pinkies start “too soon” and thus end about a joint short when compared to their neighbors. Its not exactly a big deal, as I didn’t even realize it until I was 13 or 14, when my piano teacher and I noticed it when I kept doing long reaches with my fourth finger insead my fifth. While I’m sharing trivial physical abnormalities, I also have a slightly curved spine, and smaller feet than expected for someone my height. My mother blames it all on smoking enthusiastically during both her pregnancies.
  2. I’ve only considered leaving UMM once since coming here in 1991. As a Reed (math) grad, I had always dreamed of helping found the computing department at Reed. They weren’t kind enough to set something up just as I was coming out of graduate school :-), but did advertise for their first computing faculty a few years after I came here and I couldn’t resist the opportunity. I didn’t even make the interview, but I have no regrets. I’ve been (and continue to be) really happy here at UMM.
  3. Like Bill, I read very slowly, although I think in different ways than Bill. I read slowly to begin with, and tend to do lots of daydreaming and thinking about what I’m reading on top of it. This is one of the reasons I’m a crap citizen of the blogsphere and related on-line worlds. There’s just way too much great stuff out there, and I’m way too slow a reader to stay on top of them. I suspect that’s one of the reasons I like Flickr; I can process a lot of images in the same time it would take me to read a fraction of PeeZed’s output.
  4. Dr. Seuss (and my son) helped me learned to sing. I’d always enjoyed music, but only started singing with any regularity when Sub-Evil Boy was born; it was nice singing to an (infant) audience that was so wonderfully non-judgemental. Reading lots of Dr. Seuss at the same time also taught me volumes about timing and rhythm. While I don’t miss diapers, I definitely miss reading to him every night.
  5. I have an Erdős number of 4. (Go to the Erdős Number Project for more info on how to compute your own Erdős Number.) The cool thing for me isn’t the number itself, but that it was lowered from 5 to 4 by a UMM alum (Nick Hopper) who I did research with when he was an undergraduate with. He went from here to CMU, where his advisor (and co-author) was Manuel Blum, who has an Erdős number of 1. Absolutely one of my highlights of my career at UMM, and I suspect this will be as low as my Erdős number ever goes. Rather remarkable it’s apparently the same as Bill Gates, but I suspect there are precious few other similarities between us.
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It’s hard for us old folks to get it (or teach it)

Four heads are better than one
John Naughton had a nice column in The Observer last month about the chronic problems with IT courses for kids. There had been a plan for a new required exam in information and communication technology (ICT) for 14 year olds in the UK, but enthusiasm for the requirement has waned and it looks like it ain’t gonna happen.

The requirement and the exam are sadly typical of so much K-12 tech education. As Naughton put it, these kinds of requirements (and courses) tend to be “An Old Person’s Guide to ICT”:

There’s a surreal quality to it, conjuring up images of kids trudging into ICT classes and being taught how to use a mouse and click on hyperlinks; receiving instructions in the creation of documents using Microsoft Word and of spreadsheets using Excel; being taught how to create a toy database using Access and a cod PowerPoint presentation; and generally being bored out of their minds.

Then the kids go home and log on to Bebo or MySpace to update their profiles, run half a dozen simultaneous instant messaging conversations, use Skype to make free phone calls, rip music from CDs they’ve borrowed from friends, twiddle their thumbs to send incomprehensible text messages, view silly videos on YouTube and use BitTorrent to download episodes of Lost. When you ask them what they did at school, they grimace and say: ‘We made a PowerPoint presentation, dad. Yuck!’

When I came to UMM in ’91 we had a computing requirement as part of our general education requirements. That was dropped in ’99 when we converted from quarters to semesters, largely based on an understanding that the state was going to be requiring some sort of computing course for all high school graduates. Unfortunately those high school courses are typically just the nightmare that Naughton describes, leaving the students with little real understanding of the underlying technologies or larger issues, and with a seriously bad taste in their mouth regarding these sorts of courses (a bad taste that carries over to college when we get here).

While I certainly think we need more science, math, and technology courses in K-12, it’s also clear that we need good classes and not misguided exercises in teaching outdated ideas that end up being a really annoying form of babysitting.

I tend to have mixed feelings about Morris dropping our computing requirement. The requirement was certainly good for our program. It brought lots of students through our courses, many of which would probably have not taken a computing course otherwise. Quite a few of those became majors, and those “walk ons” represented a very large proportion of our female and minorty computing majors. Now that the requirement is gone, our majors consistent almost entirely of students who come to college intending to be computing majors, and we get almost no “walk ons”. Consequently, our pool of majors (who I love dearly) is nearly 100% pasty white boys.

My experience with the students here is that they are often very familiar with Facebook and MySpace like Naughton suggests, but it’s by no means universal. I used blogs in my First Year Seminar course last semester, for example, and found considerable variation in the students’ experience with blogging. While many were very experienced, others were still very uncomfortable around the technologies.

Would a computing requirement here help? If so, how? What do our students need, and how do we serve them? And how do we avoid teaching just the sort of courses that Naughton so rightly skewers?

Tags: technology, Video

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