Computers, creativity and learning

Double dividending

Double dividending is a cunning way of combining your activities to achieve multiple goals. Killing two birds with one stone, you know. It's a good way of being lazy*. My research, teaching and public engagement goals are so intertwined that I sometimes get away with triple dividending. The time I save I wisely spend eating bon-bons.

In the last few weeks I have reached new heights of double dividending in teaching. At one class recently I had three additional students sitting it for three quite different purposes: one because she was going to teach the same material (but simplified) to high school student, another because he wanted to revise and extend the lesson structure for a masterclass in software engineering, and the third because she needed to learn some of the practical skills for her PhD. The student who is working with high school students is going to help me plan a public engagement workshop for kids, with the help of a class member. The school she works with has taken part in various research studies of mine. I also have a group of 5th year students who have made the most fabulous news feed visualiser on the Kinect demoing their work for a UCAS applicant visit day. Another student who is helping on that day is doing it for part of the Computing in the Classroom module which I teach.

Lazy as it may be, you do have to be sharp during the teaching to make sure everyone is learning what they ought from the experience, and you also have to be careful to plan the logistics. But it has a high pay-off, and not just for me. The students learn a lot from each other. They learn about teaching from watching me teach, in a kind of apprenticeship model. So I can indirectly convince more people that they actually do want to learn computer science.

 

*I mean lazy in the same sense as Jim Smith http://www.lazyteacher.co.uk/

What staff can expect from students

I am working on set of guidelines of what lecturers and students can expect from each other, in an attempt to prevent communication problems and general huffiness! What do you think? Are these reasonable expectations? Have I missed anything? If you work at a different uni, can you point me to any similar documents? (If you work at my uni, you'll get consulted about this more officially too!)

What staff can expect from students

• Your commitment to your learning
• Politeness and respect
• A reply to email within 5 working days, particularly for mentors and project supervisors
• Attendance at classes
• Attention, courtesy and participation during classes
• If you can’t make a scheduled meeting with a staff member, please notify them in advance rather than just not turning up
• Your attention to the feedback we give you, and an attempt to improve your work based on that feedback

What you can expect from staff

• Commitment to helping you learn
• Politeness and respect
• A regular office hour slot where you can see them face to face
• Written feedback and a mark for coursework within 20 working days after the hand-in time.
• A reply to general email questions within 5 working days
• A response from your mentor within 2 working days
• If you would like to see your exam script to see where you went wrong, you can get it from the school office. You can make an appointment with the lecturer to get further advice on how to improve your work.

 

Better

I have been rereading Atul Gawadne's book "Better", mostly because I have been thinking about how we can improve teaching in my department since I became a course director. Here's an inspiring quote. Betterment is: "to live a life of responsibility. The question... is not whether one accepts the responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having accepted the responsbility, how does one do such work well?"p9. Gawadne suggests there are three aspects to making things better: diligence ("giving sufficient attention to detail to avoid error and prevail against obstacles"), doing right, and ingenuity (thinking anew). He also has some suggestions for how you can become a positive deviant (i.e. striving to make things better even if the people around you don't). 

1. Ask an unscripted question (when talking to people)

2. Don't complain

3. Count something (i.e. monitor something which interests you numerically)

4. Write something (to reflect on what you have counted)

5. Change

This is me doing number 4 - writing!

I find the quote above striking because even although it was written by a doctor about medical practice, it applies nicely to teaching. I believe that as lecturers, we have signed up to educate and that we can always do better. Even if you get great course feedback and high averages and win teaching awards, there will always be something which you can improve on. Having spent 6 months being a course director and talking to both staff and students about teaching, I am beginning to see that not everyone sees things that way. I think that maybe some staff see the pursuit of betterment only as a criticism, not something which is just built into the job.Maybe this is a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude. But my point of view is that you have to check whether it is broken regularly, and try to keep it in good working order! It's part of the cycle of reflective practice, planning, teaching, reflecting, then replanning. Trying new teaching methods or content from time to time will make things more interesting for you, and might well make things even better for the students.

In being positively deviant, I am also doing numbers 3. and 5. from Gawadne's list. The counting is to do with the dreaded national student survey results - logging students' attitudes towards their teaching and seeing if in the long term we can increase scores. I am not convinced this is an end in itself, but it is a benchmark for us to use to see whether our changes are actually making things better. Number 5 - change- is hard, it turns out. Universities tend to be conservative beurocracies which work on long time scales. It is hard to achieve anything within one academic year simply because of when meetings at which approval decisions can be taken are scheduled. Staff and students are both busy and busy people tend not to want to make changes which will cost them time. It is hard to coax people out of the habit of complaining and into the more positive frame of mind where they will make constructive suggestions.

But I am trying, and I will keep trying.

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. 

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

 

 

 

Reminder: must teach students

I spent some time hanging out with my colleagues yesterday talking about teaching, which is a rarer event than you might suppose for a lecturer.At least for a sociopath lecturer like myself. While marking some posters and watching the students reel around in hung-over misery, I talked to a couple of staff members about how the student projects generally lacked any sort of experimental design for the evaluation. Later at a seminar on peer marking, there was discussion about whether the quality of feedback generated by peers would be up to scratch or not. The odd thing about both of these conversations was that there was a general sense of blaming the students for not knowing stuff. Mmmm. Maybe we should teach them stuff. Maybe the students can learn how to do things if we show them how and give them practice. An astounding notion, I know. it is one which we often seem to forget. Maybe it is because we [lecturers] are not by and large born teachers. We tend to have teaching thurst upon us when there are no more post-doc positions available.

An interesting part of the discussion on peer feedback was that when the students receieve multiple grades from different class mates for the same bit of work, they begin to realise that there is some subjectivity in marking: there is no One True Mark. Which I know intellectually, but still find slightly surprising when I encounter the notion. I know many students do. One of my colleagues was asking whether this realisation makes students more prone to querying grades from lecturers (as you might expect). I liked the presenter's answer. He said that you can exhaust the students with so much peer reviewing that they get tired of thinking about grades. Har har.

High Priestess and learning zone updates

It's been a while since my last (somewhat psychotic) update on the student social area (aka crush area aka Learning Zone) and there have been some interesting developments. You might recall that the furniture was set up and that we were waiting for the screens to be installed and Goat Lady. Both are now here.

Goat Lady

Goat Lady is a reclining size 16 mannequin covered in goat hair and fibre optics. She lights up where you stroke her. She is an exhibit created by the artist Helen Storey and the real name of the exhibit is First, Last and Everything . She is currently on loan to us from our School of Textiles and Design. Originally she was designed to produce pheremones but we had to remove those as I was convinced the equipment for releasing them would be a fire hazard and we also though the pheremones had gone off after months in storage. Here is Goat Lady, with one the lecturers from Textiles and Design.

 
 When we started arranging the loan of Goat Lady, there was some disquiet about how she might offend female students. Or enflame the passions of the male students. In fact, the School of Textiles and Design refuse to display her for reasons of this kind. But you know what? It hasn't been a problem at all. In fact, people ignored her as best they could until recently. You'll see in the photo that I made a sign which says "stroke me" because people would never ever interact with her. At least not in public during the day. A few weeks back someone made another sign to put underneath mine which read "No, it's creepy". Which just about sums up how most people seem to feel about it. I personally am rather fond of Goat Lady. I like to stroke her because her fur reminds me of my big white cat. (Mr Bitey also likes to stroke her presumably because unlike the big white cat she doesn't run away.)

 In the last week events have taken an unexpected turn: people have started leaving offerings for Goat Lady! First there were coins left in front of her at night. Then origami birds. No-one knows why these offerings appeared but it is the subject of much spectulation! It has fascinated the staff in my department and is the main topic of conversation on the staff mailing list.  We hope it removes the need for tuition fees in this difficult economic climate. I have claimed the title of Goat Lady High Priestess, and it is now officially one of my admin duties in my boss's work load database.

Screens

Some of the wonderful PhD students and postdocs took on the task of finding things to display on the screens. Stefano wrote some code to visualise incoming tweets from a twitter aggregator in a pretty way.

 
Pawel is working on a slideshow app which enables users to identify inappropriate content using QR codes. The thing we are now realising about a public display is that it needs a lot of content because it's switched on for such a long time and the material cycles very quickly. We found that the screens were mysteriously being switched off - we think because people were fed up of looking at the same content. Which (predictably) irritates me. There's a message on the screens which clearly explains how to add more content. So in my view if the lack of content annoys you, you should either do everyone a favour and add more, or put up with it, but not passively agressively switch the whole display off. I spoke to some students about it and they seem annoyed by the screens and their lack of content as if their inalienable right to be entertained had been violated. So now they find themselves working on a project to produce content for the crush area. Hehe. I have another group of students working on producing an interactive application using Kinects for user input so we will see what that produces. Maybe some kind of app for GL to keep track of her devotees?

Lab classes - missed opportunities

You know what's weird? Lab classes are. In computer science, in Scotland, that is. Maybe they are less odd in other places. Or, for I know, all lab classes in the sciences are deranged. Here's what might go on in a typical lab.

Lab classes don't really start at an appointed time. Students are often working in the labs prior to the class, so they might already be working when the lecturer or teaching assistant arrives. This also means you get random students from other year groups in the room during your lab classes, which is dreadfully confusing. Judging from the students' aggrieved expressions when I chuck them out, it is not common for other  lecturers to mind. When other students start to drift in, they typically collect the lab worksheets from a table on the way in and start to work on the exercises. Or maybe just look at Facebook. Students will continue to wander in throughout the class whether it is their lab slot or not. Throughout the class, students might put up their hands for help and a staff member will scurry over to their computer and talk to them quietly. They also put up their hands when they want an exercise checked off for marks. Sometimes they seem surprised if I ask them to explain how their program works. Why don't I want them simply to copy code from their friends, they might wonder to themselves? Students also tend to drift out of classes when it suits them to "finish work at home" which could well mean "discussing it in the pub with friends". This is the way it is, it is the way I was when I was a CS student and perhaps, in some quarters, the way it always will be. So why am I remarking on it?

Consider, if you will, the sort of helpful learning and teaching behaviour you might expect to see in other settings. A teacher might:

• welcome the class, and explain the purpose of the class as well as the activities which the students should perform. (OK, this is not altogether unusual but it is not universal in my dept.)
• spend time with each student to discuss their general progress and help them to plan work as well as solve current problems. (I particularly like doing this as only lab classes are small enough to do this).
• draw everyone's attention to a commonly occurring problem and discuss strategies for solving it
• get a student to show off a good piece of work
• mention when someone figures out a new way to approach a problem
• relate learning which is occurring in the lab to concepts from the textbook or lectures

and crucially

• hold a short plenary session at the end of the class to recap on what the students learned and give them pointers for what to focus on next time. Discuss with them what they feel were important points.

This last point is something which my teaching guru Cathrin Howells has impressed on me over the years as we work with groups of kids. She has a mantra which is "don't crash the bell" i.e. don't let a lesson finish in a rush when the bell goes (or in university settings when the timetable slot ends) and everyone is in the middle of a task. Finish the hands-on part of the lesson in plenty of time for a plenary so everyone had time to reflect on what they learned and discuss it.

This is hardly exotic stuff. But it is pretty rare in my experience as a lecturer or a student. Why is culture so hard to change in computer science? It seems that there are a myriad of lost learning opportunities, particularly chances to strengthen a sense of community between learners, because of these strange traditions. And the saddest thing is that because I am coming into this semester 2/3 of the way through, I don't think I am going to be able to tackle it properly until I get a new, fresh, pliable class to work with. It is very hard to change the pattern of classes once expectations of what is considered to be acceptable behaviour have been established.

The gestation period of a learning space

Which do you think is easier? Gestating and giving birth to an 8lb boy, or arranging for a student coffee area to be revamped? I gotta tell you, both made me sick, both were more painful than you would imagine, both were messy, one took 4 months longer while the other resulted in something infinitely cuter. 

I bring you my first pictures of what has always been known as the crush area due to some pretentious theatre allusion. Normal people would call it the student coffee area. Behold! It is properly lit. It no longer looks like an 80s airport lounge. You could argue it now looks like an early 21st centre airport lounge, but maybe we can still fix that.

 Leaving aside my in-poor-taste comparison with the beautiful experiences that people tell you pregnancy and birth are, let me explain what it took to get to this point. It started with a workshop I went to for computer science recruitment where one of the speakers Ed Quincey mentioned they got their students to go round the physical building of their CS department and take photos of the manky bits. I wrote post back in March 2009 about the findings from our own version of doing this (http://judyrobertson.typepad.com/judy_robertson/2009/03/somebody-buy-me-some-goldfish.html). 

So when we finally got some money which could be spent on refurbishing the department, I decided to be involved and ended up leading the project from the CS dept end. This involved user centred design work with the students and other users of the building from cleaners to engineers.(see spec at http://judyrobertson.typepad.com/files/crushbrief.pdf). It meant spending Wednesday afternoons standing around in the crush area talking to students about how things could be better. It meant endless meetings and budget wrangles with Estates. It meant soothing egos. Massaging them. Pedicuring them! Sheesh! It meant meeting furniture and carpet people to talk through mood boards and designs and find out our plans couldn't work because of accessibility constraints. It meant listening to people's concerns and complaints and endless conservative pessimism. 

And then we got some money which could be spent on refurbishing other areas of the building so I had to do another whole round of consultation which started with me skulking around in the boys' toilets with an architect and ended with an air conditioned computer lab. It basically took any spare moment I had between September and March when I finally staggered off on maternity leave. 

It could break your heart, this type of project in a university. It starts with a vision, with imagination, with creativity. And then one by one your favourite ideas fall to budget constraints, to beurocracy, to institutional inertia and to the blinkered banality of university policy. And all the while the users ask you in disappointment or mockery: what happened to the sky lights? Where are the bright colours we wanted? Why are there fewer seats than before? And you feel like Frodo being pulled into the dead marshes with the ghostly pallor of your dead ideas all around you, screaming "the budget!" and no one, not even Gollum can save you. 

It is almost finished apart from the large display screens, a few bits of furniture, some wall decals and the goat lady (Yes, goat lady). The students will be back in a few weeks and we shall see what they make of it. Will they spot that the carpet tiles are arranged in patterns from Conway's Life? Will they recognise that the furniture layout meets their requests for group working space? That the colourful furniture was the best we could do to brighten the place given the Estate departepment's strange dislike of coloured paint? Who knows. In a way, I am glad I will still be off and will miss the returning students' reactions. 

Was it worth it, I ask myself? I wish I could say so. It cost me two semesters worth of time I could have spent on publishing. I don't think it will benefit my career. I think if I hadn't done it, life in the department would have rubbed along as it always did before in its ordinary shabby way. I wish I could say the students had been my allies, that they had entered into the spirit of it. But, apart from a few loyal souls, they didn't. They don't care. They think they are entitled to perfection by virtue of the fees they pay and resent (in some cases) having to contribute their energy to make the place better. I wish it had given me enthusiasm for such projects. But for now, all it has left me with is a profound sense of cynicism and an understanding of why other people have stopped trying to make things bette

Tipping point

While on maternity leave, I have been taking the opportunity to catch
up on the sort of book which was fashionable a few years back but I
never got round to reading. I finished "The Tipping Point"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point published in 2000)
since Ian was born and it occurred to me that there might be some
useful ideas in there in terms of improving university teaching. The
book is about social epidemics and the conditions which cause them to
gain momentum to the point where change happens rapidly and radically.
It gives some examples of successful marketing, education and public
health interventions which worked by leveraging ideas from how
epidemics spread and putting them to a positive purpose. It also
suggests why some public health campaigns such as anti-smoking
campaigns for teenagers just don't work and how they could be fixed.
This isn't my academic area, so I am not sure whether it is all
codswallop or not. At any rate, it suggests a way of looking at the
problem of improving teaching which I hadn't thought of before and
that can be useful. Imagine if there was an unstoppable epidemic of
teachers hell bent on improving their practice! Imagine if there was a
sudden shift away from traditional boring lectures towards classes
designed to match the subject and learners.

Gladwell describes three rules of epidemics.
1. The Law of the Few
Change can be brought about by a small number of highly socially
influential people. Not necessarily people in positions of official
power, but people who have a large impact on their social networks.
There are three subtypes of people: connectors, mavens and
salespeople. Connectors are people with a large number of weak social
ties who are very socially gifted, interested in people, and have a
knack of making new friends and acquaintances. News travels fast when
spread by connectors. Within a university you need a teaching
evangelist who knows a lot of people across the university, but also
in other universities so they can spread whatever new teaching methods
are current. Mavens are information hounds who are extremely
knowledgeable and keen to pass on their expertise in a helpful way.
For example, the kind of person who always tries out new technology in
the hope it might be useful for teaching could be a maven if he also
tells lots of people about it. Salespeople are highly persuasive
charismatic individuals who can benignly convince people of their
point of view. An excellent visiting speaker can often inspire staff
to try a new teaching method by enthusiastically describing a teaching
case study. In rarer cases, you might get one person who fills all
three roles and if you're very lucky, they might work in your academic
practice unit at your university. At the very least, a university
would need a connector in the kind of post which aims to teach
lecturing staff about new teaching approaches, and that connector
would need to work with mavens and salespeople inside and outwith the
organisation. (Like flexible learning pal, faithful reader of this blog!) In this view it is
down to the people rather than the university policy which will make
educational change happen.  It doesn't come from a management
hierarchy but from flat social networks (in the old fashioned sense). In my opinion, though, some support would be required from senior management or at least they would have to get out of the way to enable change to happen.

2. The Stickiness Factor
This refers to how memorable the message to be spread is.I suspect this is the key to a lot of the success of social epidemics. Apparently Sesame Street was very carefully devised in a user centred, iterative way to test which aspects of the show work well for young children and this is largely what made it so massively successful. Although the educational content was presumably the same even if it was presented in a way to make it "stickier". Am I suggesting that academics should have inservice training with Big Bird? No. But having CPD sessions on topics requested by academics with their feedback incorporated into sessions might work well. Academics typically hate being lectured at and having to attend classes so I take my hat off to the people who do this well (again like Flexible Learning Pal).

3. The Power of Context

The environment (including time and place) will make a difference to how quickly change is achieved. The example from the book is the Zero Tolerance campaign for crime in New York. By seriously combatting low level crime like vandalism and fair dodging on the subway, NYC drime rates dropped dramatically in a few years. (Or so the author claims). The idea is that small things in the environment can make a big difference towards individuals' willingness to change their own behaviour. In the context of university teaching, this might be getting rid of the small everyday irritants which trip you up every time you try to do something different. Such as timetablers not giving you 2 hour slots, or rooms not being big enough for group work. Unfortunately these seemingly small changes take a huge effort to change in slow organisations like the university and actually do require the management hierarchy to be involved.

It seems to me that a social epidemic of good teaching practice could be achieved in my uni particularly because the academic enhancement people are good connectors, mavens and salespeople. Time has shown that it can't be done without resources, which is why it is good that there is now top managment support for teaching at my uni. Hopefully this will get round the stumbling blocks in the environment and help speed change along.