The Third Bit

If you want to know why we created The Architecture of Open Source Applications (now in two volumes), you need look no further than the descriptions of other books about software architecture on Amazon. Here’s part of the blurb of one that appeared last year:

Specifically, the book shows you

• What software architecture is about and why your role is vitally important to successful project delivery
• How to determine who is interested in your architecture (your stakeholders), understand what is important to them (their concerns), and design an architecture that reflects and balances their different needs
• How to communicate your architecture to your stakeholders in an understandable way that demonstrates that you have met their concerns (the architectural description)
• How to focus on what is architecturally significant, safely leaving other aspects of the design to your designers, without neglecting issues like performance, resilience, and location
• What important activities you most need to undertake as an architect, such as identifying and engaging stakeholders, using scenarios, creating models, and documenting and validating your architecture

Did you notice that “the architecture of 10 (or 20, or 50) actual systems” wasn’t on this list?  You won’t find that in this book, either, or this one, or this one. I haven’t read the upcoming third edition of this one yet, but I used to have the first and second on my shelves, and it didn’t “show the blueprints” either. If any ambitious grad student is reading this, and looking for a great thesis topic, comparing what software designers actually talk about to what’s in the standard textbooks on the subject would, I think, be very interesting…

Greg Wilson Architecture of Open Source Applications

Gary Stager isn’t the first person to point out that we’ve been dumbing down computing education for the last 30 years—that we’ve gone from teaching kids how to program to teaching them how to use Excel to teaching them how to use iPads.  (My five-year-old didn’t need to be taught…)  What people mostly aren’t asking is why this has happened, but I have a theory.  I think teachers are teaching the computing that they use themselves, because that’s the most economical thing for them to do: they use Word to make hand-outs, and Excel to manage grades, so they’ve already invested in proficiency, so they can put together lessons in less time.  They don’t use Logo (or Scratch, or Python, or whatever) in their own work, so teaching it requires more effort.

Which makes me wonder how successful current “programming for everyone” efforts are going to be. I doubt most teachers are going to want to hack their classes’ web sites (and even if they do, their schools may not allow them to).  I’m even more skeptical of the idea that teachers will program in their day-to-day work any time soon.

(“But wait,” you say. “Most Latin teachers don’t speak Latin at home. And there aren’t a lot of physics teachers building lasers in their dining rooms.” True, but those are recognized, accepted specialties within teaching right now: they aren’t trying to gain ground, just hold onto what they have.)

Now let’s shift focus a bit. My 14-year-old nephew is on the web, creating content, almost daily, but “on the web” isn’t quite accurate. He’s actually on Facebook: along with GMail, YouTube, and Minecraft, that’s pretty much what the web consists of for him (at least that he’ll admit to his uncle). We already know that if we want to teach kids, going to where they are works better than bringing them into an artificial environment and giving them artificial tasks. I therefore think that if we want the 95% who aren’t already keen on hacking to care enough to do it, we need to teach them how to hack the places they already are. Having everyone build their own Facebook plugin would (a) take far too long to pay off and (b) be unsafe (imagine you’re Facebook’s director of security and someone tells you that 100,000 high school kids are about to build plugins for your site).  But what if we made a generic plugin that allowed people to build and run WebScratch programs inside Facebook, with access to (some) FB content?  I know, I know, there’s no such thing (yet) as WebScratch, but you get the idea: if we could create, test, and deploy this that makes it easy for them to build that, what would “this” and “that” be?

(“But wait”, you say, “Facebook is a closed pseudo-monopoly. We shouldn’t be supporting them!” I agree, but (a) going into a slum in Rio de Janeiro to teach the kids who live there doesn’t mean you support the idea of slums, and (b) they won’t understand why “closed” is bad until they understand more about the web in general, and open in particular, and they won’t learn either unless they care enough to learn in the first place.)

So, question #1 is, “What can we teach about computing and/or the web that will appeal to teenagers, but will also be useful to classroom teachers?”  And question #2 is, “What plugins can we build that will allow learners to hack where they are?”

Greg Wilson Teaching

Greg Wilson Uncategorized

We are very pleased to announce that The Architecture of Open Source Applications: Volume 2 is now available from Lulu.  A PDF version will go on sale in the next few days, and e-book will become available as soon as we can produce it.  Many thanks to everyone who contributed, and to the indefatigable Amy Brown for pulling it all together.  As always, all royalties will go directly to Amnesty International, so if you buy a copy, you’ll be helping to make the world a better place.

Greg Wilson Architecture of Open Source Applications

I’m pleased to announce that Jeremy Banks has been accepted by Google Summer of Code 2012 to work on Slide Drive, a web-native presentation tool. You can follow Jeremy’s progress on his blog.

Greg Wilson Announcements

My sister-in-law, Sarah Harrison, wrote a “Lives Lived” about my sister Sylvia which appeared in today’s Globe and Mail. I wish Sylv was here to read it…

Greg Wilson Family

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
— H.L. Mencken

Over at The Atlantic, Philip Howard is trying to convince us that America’s education problem has a simple cause and a simple solution:

America’s schools are being crushed under decades of legislative and union mandates. They can never succeed until we cast off the bureaucracy and unleash individual inspiration and willpower… Successful teaching and good school cultures don’t have a formula, but they have a necessary condition: teachers and principals must feel free to act on their best instincts.

Mm. Jim Keegstra was acting on his best instincts—does Mr. Howard think he should have been free to continue doing so? Or what about teachers who ignore bullying: should they be free of bureaucratic “interference”? How about teachers who are themselves the victims of bullying or worse by school administrators: shouldn’t they have somewhere to turn? Yes, a lot of bureaucracy is pure empire-building, but a lot of it has been created after someone was badly hurt in order to prevent a recurrence.

I complained a lot about the pettifogging backside-covering red tape at U of T when I was there—in fact, it’s one of the main reasons I left.  I used to complain about having to wear safety goggles in the chem lab, too, until I met a guy who lost an eye when a beaker blew up. I agree that 90% of the time, 90% of the regulations are unnecessary. The problem is, we don’t know in advance which 90%. If Mr. Howard can convince me that he does, and that clearing away all that bureaucracy won’t make life easier for slackers, predators, bigots, and bullies, I will personally operate the shredder on his behalf.

Greg Wilson Teaching

I’ve been reading Beneath Ceaseless Skies, an online SF&fantasy magazine, for about a year now. Most of the stories are pretty good, but there’s a sameness to their style that’s starting to weary me: they all feel as if they were written on a drizzly Sunday afternoon by someone who would really rather be penning paeans to J.D.Salinger for the New Yorker. Meanwhile, Michael Chabon (a one-time darling of that set) is now writing the kind of kapow! adventure story that was, for many decades, the mainstay of SF&fantasy.

Just sayin’…

Greg Wilson Uncategorized

On April 1, 1942, George Orwell wrote:

Connolly wanted yesterday to quote a passage from Homage to Catalonia in his broadcast. I opened the book and came on these sentences:

“One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting…It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.”

Here I am…less than 5 years after writing that. I suppose sooner or later we all write our own epitaphs.

Greg Wilson Uncategorized

I have a lot of respect for Heather Payne (founder of Ladies Learning Code): she’s working hard to get women into technology, and has been more creative about doing it in 12 months than I’ve been in 14 years. I’m therefore reluctant to disagree with her publicly, but her most recent post said this:

I find it pretty interesting to note that most of our Lead Instructors and Mentors are in a teaching role for the first time ever when they join us at a Ladies Learning Code workshop. And no one on the Ladies Learning Code team has a background in education. The funny thing about that is that it might be why what we’re doing works.

Respectfully, no. What LLC is doing works as well as it does because:

1. It has attracted a really talented bunch of inventive, open-minded, hard-working people.
2. It’s one day or one week, not four years.
3. Everyone in the room really wants to be there.

The first explains itself, so let’s look at the other two. A night out or a weekend away is very different from being married; similarly, one jam-packed day of new, new, new is a whole ‘nother thing than a four-year university program that’s trying to cover all the bases, including the ones learners don’t think need to be covered. (They’re often right, but not as often as they think.) The kind of energy and engagement I see in workshops (of all kinds, for all ages and backgrounds) simply doesn’t last for months or years.

Second, I believe that about a quarter of the students in any university program would rather be elsewhere (if not more). They’re in class because their parents told them they had to go to university, or because they’re worried about being unemployable if they don’t have a degree, or because whatever they’re doing seemed exciting two years ago when they picked their major, and they think that if they switch tracks now, those years will have been wasted. That, combined with peer pressure in high school teaching most teenagers never to appear keen about anything a grown-up is telling them (unless said grown-up is disreputable), sets the tone for the student side of most university classrooms.

The faculty side—well, as Eleni Stroulia said, we’re here to do research, they pay us to teach, we spend our time on administration. Most grade school teachers, and many university professors, are passionate about teaching—just look at the 60-hour weeks they put in. But many others have burned out, have discovered that they don’t like it as much as they thought they would, or (at university) have always regarded teaching as a tax they have to pay in order to do the research they love. And while I can’t speak for K-12 from first-hand experience, promotion in most universities really depends primarily on your research, no matter what’s in your employment contract about “teaching” and “service”.

So, do things like LLC work as well as they do (and they do work very well) because the people leading don’t have a background in education? I don’t think so. Would they work better if their organizers and instructors could ace the Audrey Test? I don’t know; I don’t think it would hurt, but I wonder if what formally-trained educators are taught is more relevant to the cross-country trekking their learners are expected to do than to workshop participants’ sprinting. What I do know is that we’d all benefit from more thoughtful analysis of what works and what doesn’t at various scales and for various learners.

Greg Wilson Teaching