Sub Ubi

A colleague pointed me at this video by OK Go. I watched it through all the way, and have to admit: this is some amazing Rube Goldbergness.

Awesomeness.

I admit it, I picked up a funny domain name.

Allegheny College has a Freshman Seminar series where students engage in writing and speaking exercises that explore a subject in the context of the liberal arts. Darren Miller (Art faculty) and I linked our seminars (mine is titled Technology and Activism, his is Art and Activism) so that we would come together as a large group on a regular basis, while breaking apart into smaller sections for discussion and debate on related but different themes.

The role of openness plays a critical role in my course. Every text I required was Creative Commons licensed, and we will be talking about the Commons (as well as notions of openness in software) throughout the course. This is, in part, because contributing work to the Commons is a kind of activism. Further, we wanted to introduce our students to the tools that open communities use to communicate and enact change in the world. The first tool we introduced them to was the weblog.

I was surprised at how few students were familiar with weblogs. Clearly, an assumption on my part that all of my students today have at least five blogs and seventeen Twitter accounts. Who knew? So, there are now 40 new bloggers in the world. (They also learned what an RSS reader is.)

To do this, though, we didn’t use private blogs in Sakai. Instead, I set up a Wordpress-mu instance, and created accounts for them. The best part?

http://act.ivism.org/

OK, so it’s cheeze. But it’s some damn good cheeze.

I have aggregated all of their blogs at

http://act.ivism.org/planet.xml

which is managed through the magic of rawdog.

I’ll write more later, but I’m leave with the teaser that I’m very excited about our tie-in that we managed with Mel Chua, one of my POSSE wranglers last summer, now member of the RH Community Architecture team. She’ll be visiting later this term, and we’re going to do some Great Awesome with the students. At least, that’s our intent. Forty students will be introduced to the goodness of Fedora, but not in the way that you’d expect…

The concurrency.cc logo

I am excited to announce the release of Plumbing, software and documentation to support artists and makers in the programming of low-cost, open-hardware
platforms like the Arduino. The Plumbing libraries are a collection of parallel components written in occam-pi , a small language with a long history.

Last summer, we decided that it was time to bring six years of work regarding runtimes for parallel languages to the Arduino, a popular open platform for exploring the of art, electronics, and computing. In doing so, we decided that documentation would be critical in this effort. Documentation became a focus because we decided as a team that users matter. In designing and documenting Plumbing, we kept our focus on the students, artists, and makers who might do something amazing with our tools.

I think we’ve taken some substantial risks. Many people have contributed many thousands of hours of development time in our software (to say nothing of the years invested in occam-pi), and we will soon be releasing hardware as part of this effort as well. For me, the most substantial is the commitment to publishing our book, Plumbing for the Arduino, under a Creative Commons BY-SA license. That means that anyone can modify, distribute, and sell our work, as long as you give us credit.

Giving our book away is substantial because publishing is part of how academics are evaluated and keep their jobs. By giving away our book, we must now convince our respective institutions that publishing under the Creative Commons will force us to produce a better product (on an ongoing basis) than editorial review would, as well as reach more readers than if we found a publisher (who would then claim copyright over our creation). Or, we must find a publisher who is interested in helping develop and market our text while allowing it to continue to be available under a free and open license. (If you know one, please have them drop me a note to me at matt at concurrency dot cc.)

concurrency.cc and the materials made available from that site have been in development for years. I’m glad to finally see everything settling in place so people can easily download and explore the tools we have spent so many years working on. If you do, let me know how things go. (We’ll have mailing lists up soon, I promise… but for now my job as a professor calls, and it’s going to be a busy few days…)

Thanks to Dave Humphrey, GDK, and the rest of the POSSE crew. For months the encouragement to just release! has been kicking around my head. That message helped keep us on track as we reworked build systems, wrote text, built websites, and generally did all that stuff that no one thinks about when bringing a project together.

And we’ll get a Fedora RPM done as soon as we can. (In the meantime, you can build from source like the rest of us.)

I gave an introduction in Technology and Activism the other day to the Creative Commons. In that introduction, we (briefly) explored two thought problems:

[ music ] How long until you can own every song ever written? My first question had to do with music. If $60 buys a 500GB hard drive, you can put one year of non-repeating music on it. (I’m using the song Seasons of Love from the musical Rent to drive my calculation regarding the number of minutes in a year.) How long until hard drives can casually/affordably hold all music ever recorded? I put it to the students that they will likely see that day come within the next 10 years, at which point the way we consume music will certainly change.

The second though problem is much more interesting to me, however.

[ textbooks ] How much do you spend per semester on books? A quick poll of the class showed that the majority of the students spend between $250 and $300 per semester. Lets look at this picture:

A publisher gives me a book for free. I like it. I assign it to all of my students. They then buy it, sometimes paying $120 or more for a single text (Physics, Math, Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science… we all have runaway textbook prices that are crushing our students.) They send $300 every semester to the publishers. It is simple to see why publishers want DRM: they don’t want kill the cow that lays geese that lay golden eggs.

At a college of 2000 students, that means students are spending

$1,200,000

per semester on books. The college has no direct control over this cost, and there is no incentive for faculty to keep costs low for the students. I managed to offer both of my courses this semester using only Creative Commons licensed texts… but there aren’t a lot of those I can choose from.

The thought game became this: why haven’t small colleges come together and established a free press? They could hire an editor or two, some typesetters and indexers, and then commission books and short monographs and release them into the Creative Commons. Authors taking part could be rewarded better than any publisher could ever pay for this kind of material, and the impact on the educational world would be huge.

the ipad arrives

The iPad isn’t a revolutionary game-changer, but no doubt Apple did some things right with its design. It does web and video well, and it is possible to pay on a month-by-month basis for connectivity to 3G networks. (Nice if you’re going on a trip and just want roaming wireless for a month.) And while $500 sounds expensive, think about it this way:

$500 is $50/semester for device and insurance.

If an institution commits to ebooks—meaning, all the faculty agree that they will commit to finding electronic texts to teach their subjects—we can slash student book fees drastically. We raise the floor, meaning they have a mandatory $50/semester technology fee. However, we then have 2000 students with a wireless slate that can display video, play audio, surf the web (campus WiFi), display PDF, Google Docs, read email… the list goes on and on. To me, it seems like a very compelling vision.

In terms of the device, I don’t really care if it is the Apple iPad or not. If Steve wants to send me one to use and evaluate, he’s welcome to. I’m a Mac owner, have a Touch, and think this could be an excellent device. But I also know that Mary Lou Jensen has developed some incredible technology at Pixel Qi, and an Android- or Linux-based device could do everything I’m suggesting just as well. So, put simply, it is currently an exciting time for devices that are bridging the gap from laptop to slate.

Peter Klein over at Organizations and Markets wonders aloud:

It’s easy to come up with examples of organizations run by jerks that failed, but do we have systematic empirical evidence that nice-guy firms finish first? Do the marginal costs of costs of placing rude, self-centered people in management positions outweigh the marginal benefits?

It is likely that Peter is already familiar with Robert Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule. If he isn’t, either 1. he’s forgotten what it is like to be a hazed and harassed junior member of the faculty, or 2. he hasn’t read it. In my experience, “assholes” (a technical term from Sutton’s text, which generally means what you think it means) are capable of slowing down a department or organization (by blocking forward progress on all manner of issues) and are happy to use their position to abuse or otherwise demean anyone who they view as less than themselves.

There is no value in an institution to people like this. His example of a “self-described Law school asshole,” drawn from Mendelsohn’s own reflection (PDF link) does not match Sutton’s definition:

University of Pennsylvania 3L Steve Mendelsohn (writing in 1990) tells his fellow students: “You know who we are. We’re the ones who always have our hands up in class volunteering to answer the professor’s questions, or ready to ask one of our own at seemingly any and every opportunity. Everytime you hear one of our names called, you groan and turn to the person next to you and slowly shake your head from side to side.”

This is not an asshole. This is an engaged student. Being passionate and engaged in ones subject of study is exactly what I want my students to do. I don’t want passive consumers of information in my classroom—which, it sounds like, is what the culture of law schools encourages. I want critical questions, I want debate, I want a room full of critical thinkers who use the time we have together in the classroom for more than consuming information that I pass on to them. When I want to do that, I create a video and point my students at it. It’s far more effective than giving lectures over and over.

People who are driven, who know there is a better way, and who work hard to achieve that even when it means shaking up the status quo—those people are not assholes. They’re innovators. Catalysts. Activists. They’re the people who make things happen in this world. The problem is, for someone who is passive, and just wants to leave well enough alone, the innovator is an asshole.

In short, I respectfully disagree with Klein’s terminology. Only in an industrial-age classroom, where the fount of all knowledge lives at the front, dictating from yellowing notes written before the beard was greying… only there can an engaged and passionate student be labeled an “asshole.”

Update, slightly later: Peter’s question is about organizations, not classrooms. I got distracted by his example. I doubt that “productivity,” “creativity,” or any other way of measuring the value of an employee necessarily correlates with whether they treat their colleagues poorly. (Highly productive people want to see others be the same; only assholes want to make sure that they are recognized as the local expert/value proposition within an organization.) I would be interested in seeing any research that demonstrates that middle managers or those throughout an organization who abuse their power, and therefore their colleagues (passively or actively), add substantial value to the workplace.

All boats rise with the tide. If my colleague is excellent, it makes my workplace better and my institution more successful, and I have a better chance of demonstrating my own excellence as well. Only those insecure in their person need to put others down or hold them back in order to define who they are.

I’m eager to see anyone release a full-sized (US Letter / A4) ebook reader. The Sprint Skiff is promising, and may appear shortly. It looks like an 11.5″ diagonal with roughly 3GB of internal storage available, and expansion through SD cards.

Along with the large screen, it looks far lighter and portable than any laptop I could purchase today. No doubt, it will either cost too much, or be tethered to a cellular service that I don’t want.

I’m not sure where my upper bound is in terms of cost, but I desperately want to be able to carry around all of my documents, email, and calendars using a device with this form factor. If one comes out at CES, and I can afford it, then this will likely become my summer project:

A DIY book scanner. Once I have a full-size ebook reader, I’m then going to be interested in having my entire library (not just every research article related to my ongoing research) available to me at all times.

In the preface to The Art of Computer Programming (1969), Knuth wrote the following:

I would posit that the vast majority of students who complete an introduction to Computer Science (often heavily focused on introducing the practice of programming) would not say that they felt they had been exposed to “an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.“

This next term, I hope to work on developing a new course at Allegheny titled (tentatively) Digital Creativity. This course could serve as a pre-intro to the major, or introduce non-majors to the beauty of programming and computing, providing a collaborative, cross-disciplinary, and creative grounding in computational thinking using tangible, physical artifacts that students can relate to directly.

Greg Wilson recently posted about student learning, specifically with respect to studying from their own lecture notes. He received some advice from Brock MacDonald at the Writing Centre at Woodsworth College. Brock gave Greg some very bad advice about qualitative research, based on what Greg passed on in his blog (emphasis mine). Here’s some of Brock’s advice:

Empirical evidence for the value of students writing their own assignment specs is harder to come by, because it’s less amenable to direct testing (like most aspects of teaching writing)–the support is more qualitative than quantitative, hence more open to question.

…

both Elbow and Bean refer to quite a bit of supporting research, though as I said it’s mainly qualitative.

Let me set the record straight here: qualitative methods are excellent research tools. They can be applied correctly or incorrectly in any given situation, and the analysis of a qualitative study can be carried out poorly or it can be performed with skill. Qualitative methods give us access to the why of social settings things in a way that statistical methods are hard pressed to do with any rigor whatsoever. Put simply, qualitative and quantitative methods both have a place in research, and we should no more dismiss one than the other.

For Brock to say that a piece of research is “open to question” simply because of the methodology used demonstrates a lack of understanding of the methods involved. We do not evaluate research simply based on the methods used, unless the method employed is inappropriate to the question being asked. We do not consider either qualitative or quantitative research to be flawed unless the method was inappropriately applied or analyzed. And that is not what Brock said in his note to Greg. He just implied (strongly) that the research was questionable simply because it employed qualitative methods.

Peer reviewed qualitative research is not “open to question” as a general rule. (Or, it is always to be challenged… but that is ideally a challenge issued by experts through another research study.) Qualitative research has rigor, and clearly addresses the questions asked in the context they were asked. Unless you’re going to develop expertise enough to evaluate the research in question, accept it as having been executed by people with expertise, undergone peer review by experts, and see for yourself what the research says to you about your specific educational context.

Natural Parenting

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Yeah, that’s roughly how it works.

To be clear, #2 is not on the way. That is not what I’m saying.

But frames one, two, and three roughly capture our parenting experience so far.

Omer passed on this picture:

That is a concurrency.cc Arduino-compatible board fired up and ready to go. As you can see, the vias aren’t really lined up that well, which may account for some intermittent USB-to-serial weirdness that he is chasing down at the moment.

Awesome job, Omer! If all goes well, I think we’ll have around 40 to 50 students at Allegheny building their own computers next semester in courses I’m teaching or co-teaching, another handful at Kent, and who knows… perhaps I’ll find another place to bring these into my students’ experience next term.

I remain hopeful that our final boards will be purple, and that the ability to expressly direct parallel code for an affordable embedded platform like the Arduino will be of use to many. One step at a time, though: we need to get revisions done on our existing book chapters, write the next five we have outlined, get Windows and Linux distributions done… it seems like a lot, but we’ll get there.

I’ll have to write a longer reflection at some point, but the long and short is that I’m very excited to see our project coming together on multiple fronts for distribution: robust software, source-to-binary builds, hardware that showcases our tools, and a text that provides structure and guidance for non-programmers to get into hardware exploration one small step at a time. When you start a project like this, you want all of these things from the start… but sometimes, it takes lots of small steps, side explorations, and unsure starts to get you to where you want to go.