Computers, creativity and learning

The way forward for CS Education in the UK

[cross posted from my CACM blog but the links are screwed up for some reason]

The last week has seen some interesting developments in Computer Science Education in the UK. Or at least, there has been some public hand-wringing about the poor state of computer science education, some sensible proposals for what could be done about it, and some government promises to dramatically overhaul the school ICT curriculum. This could be enormously beneficial for computer science, assuming the momentum is kept up. The hand-wringing is along the lines of “We used to do this so well. Look at Alan Turing” and “Think back to the glory days of the BBC Micro project in the ‘80s”. And then there is a public shaming of the geeks in the nation by the CEO of Google who rapped us on the knuckles, and admonished us for “throwing away” our “great computer heritage”. The Guardian newspaper has embarked on a Digital Literacy Campaign which has a comprehensive selection of articles from kids, politicians, teachers, parents, academics and business people all bemoaning the state of computing education in schools. All this does seem to have had an effect; the Secretary for Education (Michael Gove) announced last week that the current ICT curriculum would be scrapped, and more high quality qualifications in CS developed with freedom for schools to develop their own curricula. Fortunately, the Royal Society published a report on Fridaywhich brings reason, evidence and considered recommendations to the well intentioned but confused discussions. It clarifies the terminology, distinguishing between “Computing”, “ICT”, “Computer Science”, “Information Technology” and “Digital Literacy”. It recommends that school children in the UK should be educated in digital literacy; in the same way as they become fluent in reading and writing text, they should become fluent in using computers confidently. The existing ICT curriculum attempted to do this, albeit in a boring, simplistic and out of date way. A real contribution of the Royal Society report is to argue that children should also have the opportunity to study Computer Science as a rigorous academic discipline and that the curricula and qualifications should be restructured to reflect this. The report recommends that the shortage of specialist Computer Science teachers should be addressed (alarmingly, in England, 66% of teachers of ICT are not considered as qualified by the Department of Education), and that teachers should have greater access to continuing professional development, perhaps offered through industry sponsorship. Resources should also be improved in terms of increased access to software and hardware, and a loosening of network security restrictions which currently hamper access to online materials. Extra-curricular computing activities should also be encouraged. Less cumbersome assessment methods should be developed. So maybe - just maybe- the much lamented golden age of UK computing can return. If we follow these recommendations, our schools will be full of little Alan Turings and Ada Lovelaces all busy in their sand pits exploring the fundamental nature of computation.

Positive interdependence with opal fruits

It's been a while since I blogged about teaching, but for once I find myself with a little time so I shall use it to think about a class I taught today. I am teaching a fourth year/MSC course which requires a lot of group work which the students hate. Last year I had a weekly litany of studenty woes, with people weeping in my office regular as clockwork. People get frustrated about their group members for a variety of reasons, but it is a valuable skill for our graduates to have, so we can't just leave them to stew in their own isolated juices (what a curious metaphor). So how to help the students manage group interactions better?

I was reminded of the work on co-operative learning recently when I heard a teacher give a talk about it. If you plan co-operative learning carefully through structuring tasks in the right way you can promote positive interdependence. That is, the group sinks or swims together. If you make the task difficult or effortful enough the students realise they can't do it by themselves. They can only do it if everyone contributes, and so they have a vested interest in helping other group members succeed. There are various structured exercises around this (and a whole nice set of teaching patterns ). The one I used today was Formulate-Listen-Share-Create. I used it for an interface design task. The students individually formulated their own design ideas, then listened as group members presented them in turn and shared their ideas. Then they created a design as a group based on everyone's input. I insisted on the individual work first to ensure more equal participation in the subsequent discussion. During the discussion I gave each group member 5 opal fruits (sweets/candy for those without a sweet-toothed childhood in the UK). Every time a student took a turn to speak, they paid one of their opal fruits into the centre of the table. Once their 5 opal fruits ran out they were meant to remain silent until all the other group members had used their 5 sweets. At that point they could eat the sweets and talk as much or as little as they wanted.

I think this worked quite well for a group forming phase. It made them conscious of their input to the group but in a fun way (and they could laugh at me for coming up with such a stupid idea which is always good). I found it extremely useful because I could see at a glance how quickly people were exchanging ideas (sweets used up quickly), or if individuals talked too much (sweets used up quickly), or if some people were shy (5 sweets left when everyone else had finished). It's a good visual representation of group process for the instructor. The idea is that the other students encourage the people with sweets left to join in. This worked to some extent, although I was slightly concerned about the pressure it put on very shy people.At any rate, the groups did seem to work well together for the most part even although they had not all worked together before. Watch this space for further tales of(hopefully not pathalogical) group work later in the semester. 

We needn't be malevolent grumps in 2012

[cross posted from my CACM blog]

A few months back, Bertrand Meyer wrote about the nastiness problem in computer science, questioning whether we as reviewers are “malevolent grumps”. Judging by the user comments on the page, this hit a nerve with readers who were the victims of such grumpiness!  Jeanette Wing then followed up on this with some numbers from NSF grant rejections which did indeed indicate that computer scientists are hyper-critical. Much as I enjoy the colourful phrasing, I feel that a field full of malevolent grumps is not something we should simply accept. In fact, even if there are only a few grumps out there, it’s in all our interests to civilise them.

So what can computer scientists do to reduce the nastiness problem when reviewing? Reviewers, authors, programme committee members, conference chairs and journal editors can all do their bit by simply refusing to tolerate discourtesy. Let’s embrace the “no asshole” rule: we no longer ignore bad behaviour. As reviewers, we can aim to be polite (yet stringent) ourselves but also to point out to co-reviewers if we find their impoliteness unacceptable. As authors, we don’t have to accept a rude review and just lie down to lick our wounds. We can (politely!) raise the issue of rudeness with the programme chair or editor so it is less likely to occur in the future. As editors, chairs and programme committee members we can include the issue of courtesy in the reviewing guidelines and be firm about requesting reviewers to moderate their tone if we notice inappropriate remarks.

One of the first steps is to separate intellectual rigour from discourtesy. It is possible to be critical without being rude or dismissive.  We can maintain standards in the field without resorting to ill-natured comments. (Believe it or not, it is also possible to ask genuine questions at a conference without seeking to show off one’s own intellectual chops, but that is another matter). The purpose of reviewing, in my view, is to help an author improve their work, not to crush them under the weight of your own cleverness. It’s not the author’s fault that you had a bad day, or that some other reviewer just rejected your own paper. 

Of course, there are some pockets of good reviewing practice within the field which we can draw on. I am sure there are many, but I have chosen CHI because I have been writing for it recently. The CHI conference is one of the biggest well respected annual human computer interaction conferences. Last year there were 2000 attendees from 38 countries. This year there were 1577 paper submissions with a 23% acceptance rate.  This was the first year I submitted papers to it, and I have been impressed by the quality of the reviews in terms of their fairness, constructiveness and level of detail. They contained greater insight and intellectual oomph than the reviews I had from a high impact journal recently. For one of my CHI submissions, the reviewers did not agree with the paper on some points – it is on a controversial topic- but they still offered suggestions for how to resolve these issues rather than simply rejecting the paper. Was I just lucky in the reviewers I was allocated? Possibly, but the CHI reviewing process has some interesting features built in to maintain review quality*.

1. In the guidelines for reviewers, courtesy is explicitly mentioned: “please be polite to authors. Even if you rate a paper poorly, you can critique it in a positive voice. As part of polite reviewing practice, you should always state what is good about a paper first, followed by your criticisms. If possible, you should offer suggestions for improvement along with your criticism.” 

2. Authors can select both the sub-committee and the contribution type for a paper, which maximises the chance that the paper will end up with reviewers with appropriate expertise , and that the reviewers will use criteria appropriate to the paper when assessing its suitability (e.g. not insisting on empirical evidence for a theoretical contribution).
3.  The reviewing process is thorough and has several opportunities for unfairness or discourtesy to be weeded out. Each paper is blind reviewed by three or more experts, and then an associate chair writes a meta-review to summarise the assessment of the paper, and what action (if any) should be taken to improve it. In this way, individual grumpiness is moderated. A variant of this good practice from other conferences is when reviewers of the same paper can see each other’s reviews (once they have submitted their own), thus introducing peer pressure not to be awful.
4.  Authors have a right to reply by writing a rebuttal of the review. The rebuttal is taken into account along with a revised meta-review (and potentially revised individual reviews) at a two day committee meeting when final accept/reject decisions are made.
5. All submitting authors are surveyed about their opinions of the reviewing process – yet another chance to raise issues about unfairness or discourtesy which have not been addressed in a rebuttal.
6. This point is more about the nature of the conference itself, rather than the reviewing procedures. Because CHI is so interdisciplinary, participants have a wide range of backgrounds from art and design to hard core engineering. They are therefore exposed to – and may in fact seek out- different perspectives which may make them open to different paradigms as reviewers. Could colleagues from the arts and social sciences be having a civilising influence on the grumpy computer scientists?

Ts This is a fairly heavy weight process, but if conference organisers adopted even just one more of the practices from points 1-5, or if journal editors added a courtesy clause to their review instructions the world would be a slightly better place. Make it your New Year's resolution to stop tolerating malevolvent grumps in 2012!

 

*Thanks to Tom Erickson – the person who runs the CHI author survey – for kindly raising some of these points.

 

To my nemesis

Oh reviewer, did you realise that you wrote 13 pages of review without raising any substantive issues? Your enthusiasm is not matched by your insight.

Reviewer, I am on p11 of your review comments and my patience is wearing thin. Your attention to detail is alarming

Swings: STFC grant rejected. Roundabouts: CHI paper accepted

Celebrate Open Access Week with ACM’s Author-Izer tool

[cross posted from my ACM blog]

Happy Open Access Week! If you would like your work to reach the widest possible audience, Open Access week encourages you to take steps to make this happen. Think of all those unfortunate readers out there who would just love to read your latest article but can’t because it is hidden behind a pay wall. Luckily, the nice people at the ACM have developed a new tool called Author-Izer which can help you reach these readers by allowing them to download your ACM published articles for free via a link from your own web page.

This is a great step forward from the ACM in the support of the democratisation of academic knowledge. I’ve been following the arguments for open access publishing for a while. The arguments go like this: academics invest their time in research and in writing up their findings for conference and journal articles. Conferences and journals do not pay these authors for their contributions. Reviewers and editors volunteer their time to ensure the high quality of the publications. Publishers then charge readers a small fortune for the articles which they got for free, either through institutional library subscriptions or individual charges per article online. This means that potential readers of articles can be barred from accessing the articles they need, for example because they belong to a small institution which does not subscribe to a particular journal, or because they are not professional researchers and so don’t have access to institutional resources of this sort. Yet, for science to progress, researchers need access to the latest findings. And if science is to take the rest of the world with it, members of the public should also have access to articles which relate to the issues in their lives.

A lot of academics attempt to get round the problem by publishing early versions of their articles on their personal web pages for readers to download. The problem with that is that the final version which appears in the published journal may contain important corrections which your readers will miss. Further, if a reader downloads articles from your web page, this download is not included in bibliometric download data which the publisher collects so your true brilliance is not quantified for those who care about such things! Author-Izer takes care of both of these issues. Here’s how to set it up. First, get your free ACM web account, and then go the ACM digital library. From there you can edit your author profile page. Once you get an email notification that the author profile has been updated you will find that the ACM Digital Library shows an Author-Izer option under every article by you which was published by the ACM. When you click on it, you can authorise the article to appear the url of your personal publication web page. It evens generates the code for you to cut and paste into your webpage so it appears with the smart little ACM logo and – glory of glory- the bibliometric information about how many times it has been downloaded and cited. That last touch appealed to my academic vanity no end. There you are – next time a reader visits your web page, they will be redirected for free to an ACM archive of your article.  They will be humbly pleased to read your great work, and their click will be added to your download statistics. And the cause of science will have advanced, one article view at a time.

UK Students turned into goldfish by social media

[cross posted from my CACM blog]

Apparently UK students get distracted by social networking at least once an hour, goldfish that they are. This rare talent for multi-tasking (or astonishing rate of dim-wittedness depending on your point of view) is unparalleled worldwide. They're also the second most connected student body in the world after Chinese students, as uncovered in a cutting edge survey commissioned by Cisco (who couldn't possibly have brought an agenda to the research). The CEO of CISCO in the UK, Phil Smith, claims that this means that employers need to consider young people's working habits, with more options for working at home and so on. Presumably working at home is advantageous for these hyper-connected young things because their bosses can't see they are using Facebook all the time. The problem with being distracted does not lie with the young people, in Mr Smith's view. Rather “if people are getting distracted from their jobs, it's often down to bad management.” By extension, if students are being distracted by social networking in my classes, this is clearly my fault for not being entertaining enough. However, I believe I can accommodate my learners' needs by having a 2 minute social networking break every 15 minutes, as suggested for films in the recent Orange cinema advert. That should enable them to catch up on any of the really important issues they're missing by being cooped up in a lecture theatre for a whole 50 minutes at a time.

But us old folk shouldn't mock. We shouldn't laugh at the younger generation who evidently find social networking crucial to their existence. One in three students and young professional surveyed by Cisco considers the internet to be as important as air, food and shelter. If you look at it that way it seems harsh of me to give lectures which last so long. After all, I wouldn't expect anyone to go without air for 50 minutes. It wouldn't be humane.

 

Gender discrimination in the UK Research Excellence Framework

[cross posted from my CACM blog]

All over the UK, academics are frantically writing papers. Yes, I know academics everywhere are frantically writing papers – there are after all over a million papers published per year. But UK academics are writing now to publish in high impact journals in time for the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF), the result of which determines how government block funding for research is allocated. We are meant to publish 4 world beating Turing-award level papers between 2008 and 2014 to bring in the maximum funding for our cash strapped departments. However, this is not a post about the problems of channelling researchers’ efforts into stalking their own bibliometrics on Publish or Perish instead of doing something productive. This is a post about how the REF discriminates against female researchers. It's an issue which could prevent the recruitment of more female computer science academics (or encourage existing ones to leave) at a time when as a discipline we should be trying to address the gender imbalance.

You might expect that female researchers who have been on maternity leave during the REF period would be expected to produce a number of papers proportional to their time spent at work in that period. No. Instead, the draft REF guidelines indicate that women will be expected to produce one paper fewer only if they have taken more than 14 months off for maternity during the REF period. Because of the way statutory maternity leave works in the UK, it is common to take between 6 months and a year off. So to qualify to produce one less journal paper output, you’d probably need to produce more than two human outputs (babies!) over 5 years  (See http://www.swipuk.org/notices/02-09-11/ for a good summary).  An alternative proposal is to reduce the REF output by one paper for each child. I do find it bizarre - almost comical- to equate the effort of carrying, delivering and raising a child to researching and writing a paper but at least this proposal acknowledges that children have an impact on their carers’ careers.

This proposal, if carried out, would further divide academia along gender lines. It’s already a fairly bleak situation. In Europe, only 18% of professors are female, only 9% of universities have a female head , and there is a pay gap of 20% in the US.  An interesting article in the Times Higher from last year cites studies which show that women’s publication output falls after childbirth, although it does bounce back later. Further, in countries which invest in high quality childcare, female researchers are more productive. So it is not inevitable that women who have had children must be less effective researchers in the long run. It is however probable that their productivity will drop in the period when they take maternity leave.  It would be strange indeed if being off work for 6 months to a year didn't affect one's output.

What about computer science in particular? A report from the main research council which funds computer science in the UK (EPSRC) shows that only 13% of grants are awarded to female researchers. Of course, the prospects in the computing industry outside academia are not good either. In the US, an NCWIT report states that there is a gender pay gap in CS jobs  starting at 7% and increasing to 11% for workers with more than 15 years experience. Also worrying is the trend reported in the same source that two years after graduation from CS degrees, only one third of women remain in science and technology jobs. 

The odds are stacked against women succeeding in academia, and in computer science  as it is. The discrimination built into the REF would penalise women who have had children, increasing their stress at work and reducing their chances of promotion. The good news is that the REF document is still under consultation. There is a chance to change the way the REF is conducted by writing comments here before October 5^th. Please do this for your sister computer scientists!

 

New students' hopes and fears

Today I inducted 66 new students into our department for Computer Science and Information Systems degrees, having the previous day been part of the exam board which graduated a seemingly endless stream of MSc students. Such is the cycle of university life. 

I like to get the students to write down their hopes and fears for starting uni so we can discuss a few of them with staff from the student advice centre. I actually find it quite touching. There is something so evocative about seeing a scribbled note on a bit of paper: "Will people like me?" Bless you, who ever wrote that. Of course they will.

Here is a selection of representative comments.

Looking forward to:

Learning from experts in their subject

More knowledge on computer science and using it in real life

I am looking forward to study great and interesting things

Learning new programming languages and meeting like minded people

Using all 6 cores!

Find out at what I’m really good

I look forward to graduating with high marks and living and working in Scotland

Meeting new people

Worried about:

I am worried about money (loads of people said this!)

Debt at the end of the course

Will people like me?

Being away from family and friends

Cooking/ looking after myself

Not making many new friends

Leaving home and having only myself to blame for what I do (See Nick, people were listening!)

Not being able to keep up with the class

Failing

High work load

Exams

Full time job + full time university

English language