Computers, creativity and learning

Which would you rather be: terror of the class, or inkblot?

I was a bit miffed yesterday because one of my students told me I was terrifying. This is not an image I really aim for, fun as it may be to pretend from time to time.I asked him why, and he said "We all[him and other project students]  make sure we prepare for meetings in case we disappoint you." I don't ever remember getting angry with a student for not bringing work to a meeting. I said that to someone else once and he said "but you'll be disappointed and that's worse". I also don't recall looking disappointed. Perhaps they see me looking sadly into the distance and mistake my longing for the box of biscuits on the shelf behind them as disappointment in them. :-) I reckon I am a big old blob of rorschach ink for the students' consciences.

Anyhow, it did provoke me to think a little bit about teaching personas. Sometimes my colleagues and I have debates about whether giving the students a bollocking for things like not showing up to classes will help or not. I think not. I feel that I am partly vindicated by this study which shows that "shows that project managers can get much better performance from their team when they treat team members with honesty, kindness and respect". I know we're not exactly in the role of project managers, but there is some sense in which we are managing or leading their learning, and we're certainly helping them to develop as good managers should.

I was quite struck once to hear a head teacher give a talk where she spoke about "unconditional positive regard" for learners. I think this is possibly why I am a bit uncomfortable by the idea of these terrified students worrying about me being disappointed. Don't worry students! I still like you when the dog eats your homework.

Hooray!

I just got an EPSRC dissemination grant! Hooray!  The word "hooray" does not sum up the immense relief that I feel at this point. :-)  This is a resubmission of the grant which was rejected last time. Previously it was ranked 12th, and they funded the first 11. This time it was ranked 3rd out of 22. The moral of the story? If at first you don't succeed, try again. (Or "use the knee and then the heid", as my dad would say). Now I feel like a respectable citizen of my department and can (possibly) stop writing so many grant proposals.

The funding is to carry on my previous EPSRC funded Adventure Author project but this time to do a lot of teacher training. The idea is to train teachers how to help their pupils make their own computer games. My good friend Cathrin will be working on the project with me because she knows all abou training teachers. Briefly, our argument was as follows:  we think little children should learn how to make computer games because it is fun and it will make them want to learn computer science.( And everyone knows that the world needs more computer scientists. Because if it doesn't get them the ICT infrastructure of the world will stagnate and collapse. Then you'll be sorry you called us nerds and stole our dinner money.) The way to get kids making games is to get teachers involved because teachers can keep teaching classes long after individual bits of funding run out, thus ensuring a steady stream of happy baby computer scientists. A cunning argument, yes? Well it worked for the EPSRC reviewers...

We will train 32 teachers over 18 months (starting May 1st), and also train a bunch of computer science students to give them hands on help in the classroom. Thus ensuring that the almost grown up computer scientists inspire the baby ones.If you're a teacher within a 100 mile radius of Heriot-Watt, or a student who might want to be paid to work on such a project, let me know.

Wheeeeee!

EPSRC read blogs, it turns out

Ye Gods and Little Fishes. I was staggered to get a phone call from a nice man in EPSRC this morning, wanting to quote my post about the changes to EPSRC funding regulations in a presentation about academics' reactions to the changes. It would appear EPSRC having been reading academics' blogs about it. I bet they have google alerts set up looking for such stories. Anyway, I was factually wrong, because I mistook an "and" for an "or". (I know, as a computer scientist I should know better). The regulation is
"From 1 June 2009, we will exclude repeatedly unsuccessful applicants from submitting proposals to EPSRC for 12 months and ask them to take part in a mentoring programme.

This will apply to applicants (listed as the principal investigator on a proposal) who have:

• Three or more proposals within a two-year period ranked in the bottom half of a funding prioritisation list or rejected before panel; and [my italics]
  
• An overall personal success rate of less than 25%."

So maybe it isn't as bad as I thought. I was worried that EPSRC might take my inaccuracy amiss, and come and poison my tea*. But it turns out they wanted to use this quote from my post because it summed up what they were aiming for: " [it] means that university departments will have to stop their relentless pressure on us to keep applying for lots of grants. Fewer applications but higher quality will have to be the name of the game."

My guess is they are doing a damage limitation exercise now because lots of academics misunderstood them and having been moaning loudly. It is what we do, after all.
A final thought: this is an interesting demonstration of the power of bloggers to influence government and vice versa. One of the things I was interested in at a seminar of public engagement with science was that scientists, the public and government could all work with each other about what and how science should be done in this country. Here is an example in practice (although it is at a meta level of how science is funded), and interestingly was not mediated by broadcast media. This is one reason I think that social networking has a great part to play in public interest in science. But that topic is for another day.

* Probably should make students taste my tea for a bit to be on the safe side.

Got a paper accepted for AIED 2009

Yay! I got a paper about creativity in game authoring accepted for the conference Artificial Intelligence in Education 2009. I am pleased for two reasons: a) It took me ages to learn how to do the stats for it and b) it's hard to get papers accepted there (30% success rate this year). Sadly, the venue is Brighton, UK. Last time I went it was in Sydney, but you can't have everything.

Words of the week: testiculation, crabbitness and academic legacy

It has been a week of depressing university politics, wrangling, budget worries, stressed project students and testiculation. Have you ever noticed that academics in seminars can't resist just talking for the sake of talking*? I went to one this week which really tested my patience and made me all crabbit. It was 2 hours and 45 minutes long, the result of blokes butting in with their tuppence worth so the official speakers didn't have a chance to say their piece.  And they were mostly blokes, before anyone gets their hackles up. Sometimes most of my working life seems full of blokes testiculating - the inevitable consequence of being at a science and engineering university. To add financial insult to woffling injuries, did you know that women computer science academics earn 81% of men's salaries for equivalent posts?** See? It makes me crabbit!

Want some more depressing news? Consider EPSRC's new policy. If you are not familiar with academic funders, EPSRC is a UK government research council which funds science and engineering. Academics apply to them for funding for research projects. (This is where my Adventure Author was funded from). Your career progression relies in bringing in this funding. University departments sink or swim, depending on how much grant funding comes in. EPSRC have now changed the regulations so that researchers with a less than 25% rate on their applications get banned for applying for more funding for a year. They say it is to reduce the load on their reviewers. It's likely to be extremely effective given that at the last round of decisions about funding, the panel which considers my field awarded funds to only 27% of the projects!  Hah! Almost everyone would be blacklisted, no? It's most certainly a "rich get richer" types scheme. My only consolation is that is means that university departments will have to stop their relentless pressure on us to keep applying for lots of grants. Fewer applications but higher quality will have to be the name of the game.

Having depressed you, I feel obliged to cheer you up again. I leave you with a quote from David Patterson *** from an article about supervising students. "What I learned from the book was that people were happy with their careers if they designed or built objects that lasted ... or if they shaped people's lives such as patients or parishioners. Thus I went into the job of assistant professor with the hypothesis that my long lasting impact was not the papers but the people. Thirty-two years later I can confirm that hypothesis: your main academic legacy is the dozens of students you mentor, not the hundreds of papers you publish. My advice to advisors is to get your students off to a good start, create stimulating research environments, help them acquire research taste, be a good role model, bolster student confidence, teach them to speak well publicly and help them up if they stumble, for students are the real coins of the academic realm."

*and some, like me, blog for the sake of blogging.

** Klawe, M., Whitney, T., and Simard, C. 2009. Women in computing---take 2. Commun. ACM 52, 2 (Feb. 2009), 68-76. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1461928.1461947

*** Patterson, D. A. 2009. Viewpoint
Your students are your legacy. Commun. ACM 52, 3 (Mar. 2009), 30-33. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1467247.1467259 : 33

Experiential learning talk - teach your students in mongolian tents

I went to a good talk at lunchtime today about experiential learning, by a chap called Colin Beard.  You can see a similar talk of his at the HEA academy site: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/videoandaudio/2008_keynote_3

I am too tired to blog it all (the only reason I am writing at this time on Fri evening is I am waiting for hubby to collect me from work) but here are some bits I liked:

• "Let the learners do the work in class, and let them enjoy it" (i.e. don't waste your time making handouts for them. Get them to do it)

• "Ontology trumps epistimology" (i.e. it's more important for the students to devleop as people than to worry about individual bits of knowledge)

• Coffee and papers: Turn your students loose to do some reading with a cup of coffee in comfy seats. Then bring them back to discuss what they read. (good news for Starbucks, I guess)

• Teach your students in a mongolian tent. (Should I add this to my list along with the goldfish?)

Study on podcasts vs lectures

 

Thanks to Hywel for sending me this: http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/02/study-listening-to-podcasts-better-than-going-to-lectures.ars . Bottom line: students who went to the lecture, then downloaded podcasts, took notes on them and re-listened to the podcasts did better in a test than those who simply attended the lecture and looked at powerpoint slides. Hmm - students do better if they review material and make notes on it? Surely not!  Actually, that's not entirely fair because the findings suggest that reviewing the original material in audio form might be better than a written summary.

I usually use podcasts to cover material I am not covering in class but in this case too, students making notes on the content is key. Good to see people are doing studies on this for reputable journals (Computers in Education in this case).

I has an OLPC project - join in!

Good news! I have just started an open source software project for the One Laptop Per Child program. It's going to be for student projects here at the uni, but anyone else who wants to can join in. The development laptop is being shipped now and should arrive within a few weeks. The project is abuout storytelling software for young learners.

If you can program and want to volunteer time to write some educational software to help children all over the world, leave a comment on this post to say you are interested. Equally, if you're a teacher who wants to contribute educational expertise let me know. Or indeed, if you are a writer or a storyteller, we'd love it if you could donate some stories.

See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects/Storybox - It's empty just now but once students start to sign up, we can fill it in. Here is my proposal which was accepted:

A treasure box of stories

The plan is to develop an application to support children to share

and express their stories with others across the world. It would provide

 brainstorming, planning, composition and review features as well as

some example writing exercises. It would also enable children to

 browse for stories written by other learners, and eventually would

 create a rich archive of stories; a window onto the cultures of the

world. It would draw on aspects previous academic research systems,

 including StoryStation which is an intelligent tutoring system I

 developed a few years back. An interesting feature is that it would  be

based on a model of the creative process of writing, which would

 enable to software to give intelligent prompts to help students with

 the writing process. In future versions there would also be a

 facility to record oral stories (for those who find written language

 difficult, or for cultures where oral transmission is particularly valued). A

 future extension would be to include a comic authoring tool to give

children an opportunity to develop skills in new media literacy.

Somebody buy me some goldfish

One of my students passed on a "command" from his friend that I should blog more regularly, so here I go. Sometimes I wonder if I am getting something backward - I ended up feeding my project students tea today even while seeing through their transparent ploy to prevent me noticing they hadn't finished their work. I am flotsam on the tide of student whims, apparently.

In fact, I have been deliberately seeking out student whims recently. Me and my partner in crime, Sandy, are talking to students to find out what in the department they would like to improve. This all came about because I went to talk at an HEA event about student recruitment where I heard about a project that they did at Keele University to improve their computer science department. They used user centred design methods to discover from their current students what school pupils would look for in an excellent CS department, and whether their department currently measured up. What was interesting was that the students mostly talked about physical stuff in the building. An excellent department has lots of impressive computing equipment and the building looks up to date, in their view. Syllabus? Teaching? Nope, not a mention. Which just goes to show we needn't have bothered revising our degree structure...

We asked our students the same thing. And got much the same results.The fabric of the building is important for making a good impression for prospective students. Further, our poor old current students would appreciate a clean, well maintained, up to date and cheerful building to work in. We turned our student society loose in the building with some cameras last week and asked them to take pictures of good and bad things they saw. They brought their pictures back to us and we discussed their priorities for making things better. Interestingly, a lot of what they suggested is little or no cost. All it will take is an academic with enough energy and patience to see it through. I don't want to discuss the specific problems in our department for all the world to see on my blog, but let's take as an example the issue of brightening up the communal area outside the lecture theatres. I bet loads of departments have an area like that. Currently ours has a out of date crumpled posters and not much else. Again,  I bet we are not the only place with the same problem. Our students suggested:

• Asking students and staff to give their photos of the local area to be framed and put on the walls;
• Asking students to donate good bits of work to be displayed on the walls
• Asking more academic staff to put up research posters in teaching areas
• Making information posters for labs about how to do common unix tasks

To add to that, I thought we could:

• Give each year group the job of keeping a corridor area of lab wall up to date with pictures;
• invite a local school to give us an exhibition of their art work (computers of the future?) in exchange for our students helping out with a computer club;
• Invite a local artist to work with the students on a sculpture or mosaic to display in the central area;
• Get a local company to sponsor a fish tank or plant display (both initial set up cost and ongoing maintenance)

This is pretty much low cost stuff, apart from the fish tank. People laugh at me about that one, but I am serious. If you listen to the students talk about the building, you realise they want something less clinical, somewhere more homey and welcoming, something with living things around. I noticed this seemed important for the girls, particularly. I feel a special responsibility to help improve things for the girls, because- believe me - I remember the general depressingness of feeling like you don't belong in a geeky grubby man's world. Also, building a community through exhibitions and displays is not hard. It's  a solved problem- walk into any primary school and you will see what I mean. It's just that unis don't tend to do it. Maybe it's because people assume adult learners don't need a nice environment. If you listen to our students, it turns out that they do. In fact, most people care about the environment they work in. 

So, if you are one of our students, look out for the suggestions box and put in some of your ideas. Or leave a suggestion on the comments page of this blog. If you are a company (or a rich former student) give us a fish tank. Please? We would name the fish after your CEO.