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The Third BitThe harder you work, the richer you die. |
| Sep 27, 2016 | Terrified Sheep |
| In a recent article in Aeon, the historian Alice Dreger says, “Without tenure, professors become terrified sheep.” She goes on to say: Why should professors who receive tenure get a special kind of lifetime job security? …[Because] tenure, in fact, does something very important: it frees up researchers and adult educators to try out new, unprofitable, and challenging ideas. …universities in which the majority of the faculty feel unsafe in terms of job security become places where no one feels safe to do anything that might risk upsetting someone… And that’s a recipe for generally useless research as well as... | |
| Sep 21, 2016 | What I Wish I'd Read |
| I would have called myself a research software engineer from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, and if I could send email back in time and tell my younger self what to learn, only some of it would be about programming. The rest would be about how to talk to clients and colleagues about what they wanted, how to keep a project on track (or tell if it’s gone off the rails), how to run a productive meeting, and how to manage my own time. I’d also tell me to learn how to teach, since it turns out RSEs spend... | |
| Sep 12, 2016 | Collaborative Choral Software Exegesis |
| I’ve been thinking a lot about Mike Caulfield’s idea of choral explanations, the way we use Etherpad for collaborative note-taking in Software Carpentry workshops, and the idea of having learners work with an instructor in a single shared Jupyter Notebook during a live-coding session. I don’t think that having a bunch of novices edit the same piece of source code together is going to work well, but what about having them edit the comments? Critical editions of Biblical texts, Shakespeare, and legal documents are sometimes laid out in two columns: one contains the source, while the second contains comments on... | |
| Sep 10, 2016 | Slides for Two Talks Online |
| I've posted HTML slides for two upcoming talks, one on lessons learned from Software Carpentry, the other on what's missing in computing and what it can tell us about our field. I'll be giving one or both at York University, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin this fall – hope to see you there. | |
| Aug 26, 2016 | What I Didn't Learn in a CS Degree |
| I recently stumbled across The Imposter's Handbook, which describes itself this way: For the longest time I would remain silent when discussions with my peers would veer toward theoretical topics like P vs. NP, Lambda Calculus or bubble sort vs. merge sort... I decided to change all of this a year ago. I sat down and looked up all of the topics that a typical CS degree covers and then I dove in. Half way through, I decided to write a book about what I was learning. It's an interesting project, but it got me thinking about all the things... | |
| Aug 26, 2016 | Markers |
| Contents include: a copy of The Portable Curmudgeon a joke book from Australia from the late 1940s or early 1950s a toy fish a piece of broccoli a coffee mug my father's ashes Goodbye, Dad. | |
| Aug 14, 2016 | Holtzmann |
| Aug 8, 2016 | Smooch |
| Aug 4, 2016 | Not Much of a Conversation |
| I've been reading articles on The Conversation for a while, and with a couple of trips coming up, I thought I might try to write something for them. I clicked on their "Become an author" link, and got this: My first reaction was disappointment. My second was that it's not much of a conversation if only one side gets to talk. Depending on how you count, only 2% to 18% of people doing doctorates become professors. The rest of us don't actually have our brains wiped when we leave, and acting as if we did doesn't exactly encourage us to... | |
| Aug 4, 2016 | Etsy for Teaching |
| I've been wondering for years why people don't collaborate on lessons in the same open, ad hoc way they write Wikipedia and build open source software. Turns out I may have been using the wrong analogy. Teachers Pay Teachers is "... the first and largest open marketplace where teachers share, sell, and buy original educational resources", i.e., it's Etsy for teaching rather than Wikipedia. Their site says they have earned $200 million for their teacher-authors since their founding, and have two million "resources" available, ranging from lesson plans and interactive notebooks to games and classroom decor. Thanks to Sumana Harihareswara... | |
| Jul 17, 2016 | Commonization |
| I just finished a pair of books that were each very good in their own right, but were even better back to back: Think Like a Commoner is a brief introduction to the notion of a commons: something managed jointly by a community according to rules they themselves have evolved and adopted. As Bollier repeatedly emphasizes, all three parts of that equation are essential: a commons isn't just a thing, like a shared pasture, but is necessarily also comprised of a community who share it and the rules they use to do so. Building Powerful Community Organizations is longer and... | |
| Jul 12, 2016 | 500 Lines |
| After a lot of hard work by Mike Dibernardo and Amy Brown, the latest book in the AOSA Series is now out. It's called 500 Lines or Less, and in it, developers walk readers through small but realistic implementations of databases, web servers, game engines, and many other kinds of applications. I think it's wonderful—congratulations to Amy, Mike, and all the contributors. | |
| Jun 21, 2016 | In That Dawn |
| "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive..." — Wordsworth Jerome Ravetz's recent article How should we treat science's growing pains? made me realize something about open science. He writes: [Science]'s present problems can be explained partly by the transformation from the 'little science' of the past to the 'big science' or 'industrialised science' of the present... There are two familiar qualitative aspects of the steady quantitative growth of the scientific enterprise. The first is the loss of 'Gemeinschaft', where all communities...have become so large that personal acquaintance no longer dominates in the professional relationships. The old informal systems... | |
| Jun 10, 2016 | The Superbug in Education |
| Roy Pea coined the term "superbug" in 1986 to describe the belief many novices have that computers can understand our intentions in the same way that people do. There's a similar superbug in education: the belief that if someone knows how to do something, they also know how to how to teach it. It's really hard to convince people that it just ain't so. Pointing them at evidence doesn't work; if anyone can suggest strategies that do, I'd be grateful. | |
| Jun 4, 2016 | Knitting |
| Sometimes programming feels like trying to fix a leaky pipe, one that's rusted half-way through and just barely accessible in an awkward corner behind some moldy water-damaged drywall. And sometimes it's like one of those conversations where time just goes away as you and the other person finish each other's thoughts and get a glimpse, just a glimpse, of what it would be like to see the world from space. But sometimes it's like knitting. Sometimes when I'm programming I feel the way I imagine my mother felt, sitting on the couch in the evening as she turned yarn into... | |
| May 19, 2016 | Get Better But Not Change |
| The tragedy of the Hapsburgs was that they wanted things to get better, but couldn't bear the thought that anything might actually change. — Frederic Morton George Orwell said something similar in his landmark essay on Dickens. Poverty, filth, hopelessness: Dickens raged against them all, but in every one of his books, the plucky hero is saved by a bequest from a long-lost uncle or some other deus ex machine. Dickens could see that his world was broken; what he wouldn't allow himself to see was that the problem was structural, and that the only way to fix it for... | |
| May 10, 2016 | Accident or Malice |
| I'm involved in several hybrid online and in-person communities, and two of them have had unpleasant incidents in the last couple of weeks. In one, a poorly-phrased but probably sincere question provoked a harsher-than-necessary response, which in turn provoked foul language, which in turn—but you can probably guess what happened next. In the other, a poor choice of words by someone whose intentions were clearly good provoked an unforgiving backlash, which in turn resulted in the speaker quitting the community. I believe everyone involved was acting sincerely (i.e., not trolling). What separates the two cases in my mind is the... | |
| Apr 29, 2016 | Why Teachers Don't Collaborate on Lesson Development |
| Later: Christina Koch wrote a rejoinder to this article that says a lot of insightful things better than I ever have. For the last three years, I've been asking people why teachers don't collaborate at scale on lesson development in the way that programmers collaborate on open source software and pretty much everybody collaborates on Wikipedia. I put this question to a room full of people who know more about education than I do back in January, and got some new answers. I've summarized them below, along with my rejoinders. The most important thing about a lesson isn't having it:... | |
| Apr 9, 2016 | For Some Value of 'Just' |
| One of the cardinal rules of Software Carpentry is never say 'just', because it signals the listener that the speaker thinks their problem is trivial. I've been reminded of this recently when hearing people say things like, "It doesn't matter what language you choose: just pick one and master it," or, "It doesn't matter what you build when you're first learning to program: just dive in and build something." Each time, I remember being at my first high school dance: "Just get out there and bop around" might have sounded like sensible advice to my exasperated friends, but they were... | |
| Apr 8, 2016 | Trying to Find a Form |
| I have been thinking (again) about what to teach in a full-length course on Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry, which has led me, meta begetting meta, to thinking about how to represent the curriculum for such a course to the people who might teach it and take it. What I've come up with is a four-part division into: the big questions learners ask; our answers to those questions; the lessons that teach people how to implement those answers; and the topics within those lessons. My current rough draft of the above lives in this CSV file (taken from this GitHub... | |
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