Sub Ubi

Joe sums up a list of obstacles to the use of weblogs for communication and collaborations in the educational arena.

From Brooklyn BloggEd:

As much as we may have our heads in the clouds at times about weblogs in education, it’s good to know Pat is on the other coast with his feet in an urban school system. It’s all about context. The obstacles are real. Human obstacles, bureaucratic obstacles, mindset obstacles, and, yes, technological obstacles. Just because it’s good practice and technologically feasible doesn’t mean it’s going to become pervasive in schools. You pick and choose your battles and these technological ones (infrastructure and access) aren’t ones that most are willing to take on. (If they did, there would be lots of other important battles left unfought.) It bears repeating that many administrators and teachers don’t see the value of putting their work on the web. Some people just don’t want to share their work with anyone outside the classroom. Some people don’t want to learn anything new.

Any one of these might account for why my last round of potential participants in the CS-ED.org experiment are yet to post. Time, however, is a factor that Joe doesn’t mention; more importantly, the perception on the part of a non-blogger of how much time it takes to maintain a weblog is important. I had a potential blogger drop their slot simply because they thought they’d never get around to it, and would never have enough time to keep at it. How do you know how much time it’s going to take if you’ve never done it?

Is it possible that blogging simply isn’t for everyone? Or, is it going to someday be like email: you can’t hope it’s going to go away, and you’ll be forced to keep a blog to be part of the game?

Joel is a good college friend, currently… well, currently living life in India. It’s hard to keep up with exactly what he is doing, but his notes simply make me smile. If you know Joel, you can easily picture him riding through the jungles of Nepal on top of a bus. If you know Lost in Gambier, imagine Brian M. on top of the bus with Joel: you can almost hear him saying “I don’t think this is very safe…”, clutching, white-knuckled, to anything that looks like it might not move (too much), and Joel, grinning like a madman, saying “What?! Look at this! Isn’t this amazing! Come on, guys, I’m going to stand up… take my picture! Ooops! Watch out for that branch!”

This post is just a reminder that to everyone that when they say you can do anything in life, they really mean it. Even if you live in Nowheresville, and think your life is so far from the exotic that even your housecat has seen more of the world than you, go taste something new today. Do something different. Challenge expectations, surprise yourself, enjoy the gifts you have.

Another guest article from Joel Lee.

It’s a cozy place where I live, a guava tree with ripening guavas outside my window, no need for a mosquito net, the fragrance of freshly processed chewing tobacco occasionally wafting from N.K.’s “home industry” tobacco cannery in the basement next door.  The hostel caretaker is a veryfriendly Sikh man and renowned poet, whose name appears on the advertisements for Urdu poetry sessions in Bombay, Calcutta and Hussein Tekri.  The screen door fell out of the doorway, frame and all, about the third time I opened it when I first moved in.  But there’s hardly a need for it, since, as I mentioned, there are unbelievably few mosquitoes here considering the warm, lush, monsoon climate and the fact that we live across the street from Lucknow’s Gomti River.

Urdu studies are coming along swimmingly, but language learning is above all time consuming, so I’ve had to abandon “free time” for the duration of the program.  I’m skipping out on a field trip today in order to write this and catch up with a few personal things.  Please do keep writing and know that I appreciate every little typed line of affection I get from you all.

I get around Lucknow, capital of Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India (a friend recently pointed out that Lucknow itself has the same population as all of Ireland), on a 1984 Enfield Bullet, the Shah of Indian motorcycles.  It’s old and funky, fun to drive, and belongs to a college friend.

As I’ve been out of touch with almost all of you, I’ll mention that before coming to Lucknow and after the Dalit Human Rights survey work, I went to Udaipur in Rajasthan for a wedding, passed through Delhi several times to pick up the bike and play Dictionary and watch films like Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible Part I” - which I’ve wanted to see for years - with Delhi University friends, and then spent a few days in Nepal in order to fulfill Indian visa requirements.  I wanted to write you all from Nepal, but in the face of the silent, terrifying, impossible enormity of the Annapurna massif of the Himalayas, mundane things like writing email or, well, being indoors at all, seemed ridiculous.  One highlight of the sojourn in Nepal was the 9 hour bus ride from the Indian border to Pokhara, most of which I spent with 27 other men and eight pigs in burlap sacks on top of the bus, and god only knows how many people crammed into the bus interior (we came upon another bus that had broken down on those remote mountain roads, so we had all their passengers as well as our own), enjoying truly fresh air and a 360 degree view of the bursting green jungle-covered mountains of central Nepal, from a road that drops off on one side about 500 feet to the boulders and crashing milky waters of the Kali Gandaki River.  On the other side the mountains continue their dizzy, racing ascent into the ungaugeable heights of the monsoon clouds above.  Bus-top is the way to travel.  I cannot recommend it enough.

5:17 PM, Mt. Vernon, OH

Given that my country of residence for the next few years is England, I found this story about a real politician with a real weblog (via Scripting News, via Lance Knobel on the BloggerCon 2003 weblog) rather interesting.

It turns out Tom Watson, Labour MP, has had a weblog for a while–since mid 2001, actually. Now, I haven’t read through it in any extensive way, but it seems like A) he actually maintains it (and not a poliflunky), and B) you could actually, directly or indirectly, infer a lot about him as a politician from his weblog.

It’s coming up on time for dinner, so like too many of my posts, too much of my reflection will have to wait for later. However, I wonder what we (educational/research webloggers) can learn from weblogging in the political sphere, and visa versa? Each clearly exists for different purposes at some levels, but on others their purposes are the same: to communicate information.

I’m looking forward to seeing more politicians taking this jump, and particularly interested in UK politicos. Politicians in the US have, for so long, been pandered to by the media, I suspect they will not feel driven to the WWW as a place to get their message out. That, coupled with the fact that so many Americans get their information through Murdoch’s FOX Evening News^TM, the value in investing in the format will be… hm. I don’t know. I can see a weblog format as being much more personal in nature, implying a “fireside chat” of sorts that can soften even the most disgusting and eggregious of NEWS RELEASE regarding the next civil liberty being knocked over by a member of the House or Senate… that, and your typical Senator has at least one liberal arts graduate who can reshape all their releases into an MT weblog…

Call me a pessimist… I only see propaganda coming via daily posts on US politico weblogs. US politics and their interaction with the media just turns my stomach of late. The whole point was to point out a relatively interesting, positive weblog from a politician who has been doing it before it was “fashionable.”

Right. Dinner. I’m always irritable right before dinner.

12:26 AM, Mt. Vernon, OH

I think I may have played the game Creatures once. It had a very cool premise: teach, grow, evolve a bunch of little… well, Creatures. Here’s a random review found via Google that gives a little more detail.

Chris pointed to the game originator’s … history of the game, for lack of a better set of words to describe the page. This is a very cool skim; mostly, I want to come back to look through it later.

I wonder if it was ever released for the Mac… hmm…

Must keep reading articles!

Update, 20031013 I found a thorough review of this paper at RPI.

11:37 AM, HomeHome

This post represents the first of an experiment. While travelling in the US, I’m working at getting through a number of papers from the Empirical Studies of Programmers conferences. As this weblog partially represents a continuing experiment in the use of a weblog as part of my Ph.D. work, I’m going to post comments and notes regarding these papers here as I work through them. Caveat researchor applies to all of these posts, as they represent my working notes as I develop a proper review of the literature.

Spohrer, J., and Soloway, E. Analyzing the high-frequency bugs in novice programs . In Empirical Studies of Programmers, E. Soloway and S. Iyengar, Eds. Ablex, New York, 1986.

Overview
The researchers classified “bugs” in student programs (semantic, not syntactic errors) by examining the first syntactically correct version of programs generated for a sequence of homework assignments in a (typical?) CS1 course at Yale.

Discussion

The role of folklore in CS education and the role of context in CS-ED research both struck me as important as I read this paper. What follows then are some additional thoughts and comments.

Folklore
The authors were looking to probe two pieces of “folk wisdom” in programming education at the time:

1. Just a few types bugs are made by many students, and
   
2. Most bugs come from misunderstandings of language constructs.
   

The second piece of folklore comes from the linguistic debates of the time (”LISP vs.” of one form or another), most of which were syntactic at some level, and semantic on others. Today, the debates are cast in new language (we speak of language paradigms instead of debating syntactic issues, but let’s be honest… it’s the same thing.)

We are religious about our languages. Period. Rarely are people truly open-minded about the programming languages they use and teach. Our pedagogy is infused with folklore and religion that stems from linguistic differences.

Cast in that light, my thesis challenges a popular piece of folklore:

STUDENTS WHO COMPILE EARLY AND OFTEN ARE NOT THINKING ABOUT THE PROBLEM.

Test-driven methodologies (as endorsed/implied/imposed by eXtreme Programming, for example) challenge this notion. However, my suspicion is that top-down thinking and design is an idea that runs swift and deep in the mind of many computer science faculty, whether they know it or not.

Context in CS-ED research
The students were programming in Pascal on a VAX 750. This implies (I believe) a text terminal in a controlled environment. Students today can program anywhere on their laptops, in their dorm room on a machine often more powerful than anything the school can offer (with music, TV, hallmates interrupting), or in public computing labs with anywhere from 5-50 machines stuffed in a room.

The text editor used (’ED’, I would guess) would need to be exited to compile and run the program. I think. Really, I don’t know. I don’t know which Pascal compiler was used. I don’t know how the compiler would be invoked, I don’t know how long the programs took to compile, and I don’t know how much time students spent on their programs (workgin on paper, I would assume) before sitting down in front of the terminal. In short, there is a huge amount of context regarding student programmers at Yale in the mid-1980’s that I simply don’t have access to from this paper.

Before any (fair/educated/informed) comparison or evaluation of the research presented can be made, a more thorough investication of the paper’s context is necessary.

Additional comments

Limitations of target population
The study examines the first syntactically correct program generated by students for a sequence of assignments over the course of a semester. The authors argue that these programs contain the most semantic (logical) errors (”bugs”), and are therefore the most interesting.

As a result of this premise, 1/8th of all programs were thrown out of the study “because the students had not tried to solve enough of the problem in their first attempt”. Therefore, this analysis seems to exclude the kind of programmer I’m (implicitly) most interested in: the programmer who compiles early and often. However, considering my lack of understanding regarding the context these students were working in, it may be that compile early/often programming behavior was “incorrect” (that is, there was neither the time nor resources available for students to program in an exploratory manner). If it was possible to be an eXtreme Programmer in Pascal on the VAX 750, then the Spohrer/Soloway study ignores one of my (potentially) most interesting populations entirely based on the assumption that early and incomplete compiles are incorrect and/or uninteresting.

Theory and bias, food for thought
Their analysis is not atheoretic; this is not a problem as such, but is a clear source of potential bias in the research. Soloway et. al. (large number of self-citations in the paper) were devloping a “theory of the knowledge that programmers use in generating and interpreting programs.” These involved programming goals and programming plans; from the paper, “goals are what must be accomplished to solve a problem, and plans are how the goals can be achieved.” This, again, implies a top-down programming methodology; I might argue that if you go looking for one, you’ll find one. Their analysis (roughly) involved doing a decomposition (based on their theory of goals and plans in programming) of the instructor’s solution, and then comparing that to the student solutions. While the authors acknowledge there are many solutions to any one problem, the analysis implies a fundamentally top-down approach to programming. This, again, may be contextual.

The implication Spohrer/Soloway claim their research supports:

“Educators can most effectively improve their students’ performance by changing instruction to address and to eliminate the high-frequency bugs.”

does not address a very wide variety of issues regarding programming instruction. This thesis implies a focus on “bugs” like “division by zero,” and bad boundary conditions. Does the data support the hypothesis? I would even begin by asking what Spohrer and Soloway mean by “performance” in this context. Giving them the benefit of the doubt on either of these questions, and acknowledging that multi-million dollar mistakes have been made (in recent memory) on these bugs, will focusing on them improve students as programmers?

Put simply, (as CS educators) are we trying to improve the programming process our students engage in, or the end product they produce? Spohrer and Soloway examined the end product, and claim that we can improve the end product by focusing on where the most mistakes were found in that product. My thesis involves examining the process, and ideally being able to support, inform, and guide students engaged in the process of programming.

11:29 AM, Tacoma, WA

The Bootstrapping CS Education workshop ended yesterday.

I am completely, totally exhausted.

The last two weeks were the hardest I can recall in recent memory. The weeks proceeding last year’s departure from Indiana were hard, but there was a pressure here that I placed on myself that was of an entirely different nature.I drove myself well past my limits, and ended up loosing my voice, coming down with a cold, and picking up conjunctivitis (or “pink eye”) as I degraded my body’s defenses with long hours and completely inadequate amounts of sleep over the last two weeks. The 60-70 hour weeks I was pulling leading up to this workshop probably didn’t help.

It was, however, worth every minute.

The Bootstrappers compiled a 40 page paper regarding their work (which will be subject to some revision over the coming weeks), and I am honored to be counted amongst the co-authors for my efforts in supporting the data mining and analysis of their research. I ended up developing a good deal of code in real-time to support their continued explorations, and was glad I had chosen Scheme for the implementation language; as most of their queries involved working with sets of subjects, I was able to make use of the natural structures of Scheme (as well as it’s powerful macro facilities) to provide processed data quickly and (in most cases) reliably on the spot. This was guerrilla coding at its best, and I had the right tools for the job.

Would I do it again? Yes. But I certainly would do some things differently, having learned a great deal about supporting researchers in exploring their data under extreme time constraints. That, however, is for another time, after I’ve had adequate time for reflection. For now, I’ll be joining Heather, Peter, and Duncan for a few days in Portland, and then am off to my ancestral home in Ohio.

Part of the reason I’ve been head-in-the-sand the past few weeks is that I’m the data analysis support guy for the Bootstrapping Research in Computer Science Education project. It’s been fun, actually. In the process of wrangling the data, I’ve

• Mangled Excel spreadsheets in Perl,
  
• Learned a good deal about the SSAX XML parser for Scheme (including an exploration of SXPath),
  
• Gone head-to-head with NP-complete problems (the market-basket problem, in particular) and come out, well, as well as could be hoped for given the time available,
  
• Become a PostgreSQL master (adding yet another O’Reilly text to the bookshelf), as well as
  
• Written a small s-expression based language that compiles to SQL (guaranteeing syntactically correct SQL, and it’s better than composing strings!), and
  
• Once again have rediscovered the value of test-cases and good design. (That is, I came closer to doing this one right than previous hack-jobs I’ve done.),
  

all while visiting the beautiful (Carrie | country of Wales)! (Actually, I’ve been at this for a few weeks, but made some nice jumps last week while away.) I head for the States on Thursday, and will probably end up hacking in new functionality/visualizations of the data in “real time” while at the conference to support queries developed by the researchers involved in the project.

No, it’s not my thesis, but it covered travel, and it’s been good experience and will probably make for some good connections with some of the Bootstrappers.

Well, mostly it’s that technical stuff really makes me nervous when I’m under time pressure.

I use my Linux desktop as a remote server; I plugged the monitor into my Powerbook a long time ago, because, well, it’s like having a Powerbook, but with two monitors! (Actually, it isn’t like having a Powerbook with two monitors, it is, but I digress horribly.) I remote everything from the Linux machine, and typically do when I want Brute Power; it’s a nice, 2.4 GHz machine with 512 MB of RAM. It Does Good.

Or… It Used To Do Good. I don’t know what it will Do next…

I just issued an apt-get upgrade -o APT::Force-LoopBreak-1 after changing the word stable to unstable everywhere in /etc/apt/sources.list. I hope this wasn’t Bad. Somehow, I thought this was a good way to Save Time in configuring a bunch of things I needed to install by simply getting All The Latest And Greatest.

No doubt, it will crash at some point, and be unrecoverable.

Some days, it doesn’t pay to not think.