Here’s what I want instead:

Superficially, it isn’t much different from what we have The “Slideshow” area shows the current diagram, code snippet, or whatever. The “Continuous Controls” (the usual forward, pause, and rewind) control the synchronized slideshow and audio track, while the “Stepping Controls” allow users to move forward and back a slide at a time, and the “Pointmarks” show where slide transitions take place. Finally, the “Transcript” is, as its name suggests, a transcript of the audio that accompanies the current slide.

The big difference doesn’t show up in this diagram. In this version, the slides are not PNG images, an MP4 video, or any other paint-by-pixel format. Instead, they are SVGs stored right in the body of the web page, so that their content is visible to search engines, and can be copied and pasted in sensible ways. This means that if the current “slide” is showing some code, the user can pause the show, select that text, and paste it into her own editor. She can do similar things with the diagrams, i.e., select a cloud, shift-select the caption, and paste them both into her favorite image tool, rather than having to select a rectangular block of anti-aliased pixels that happen to look like lines and letters to a human eye.

I haven’t built this yet, but I think it should be fairly straightforward: each “slide” is a div with a unique ID containing an image and a block of text. The audio is linked from the page; a data-* attribute in each slide div has its start time, and a bit of Javascript shows the right slide at the right time. Marking start times will be a bit tedious—I think it’ll have to be done by hand, at least for now—but it should be easy to allow people to add and view comments and questions in place, instead of tacking them all onto the bottom of the page. And displaying an all-in-one view of the slides with appropriate bits of transcript for printing (or for people who just want to browse) will be easy.

This is just a start, of course. I haven’t said anything about (self-)assessment, which is crucial to real learning, or about accessibility (although I think that having all the code and captions in the page as first-class text will help a lot). I also haven’t thought yet about whether I can build this in just one week, which is about as much time as I have, because there’s one question I should ask first:

If so, I’d be very grateful for a pointer.

[1] “Free-range” meaning “anything other than a conventional classroom format”. I like the term because it allows us to call people sitting in lecture halls listening to someone talk at the front of the room as “battery-farmed learners”.

1. What I’ve Learned So Far
2. Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning
3. What Success Looks Like Five Years Out
4. Fork, Merge, and Share
5. Some Responses to Some Comments
6. The Fire Last Time
7. Settings Our Sights a Little Bit Lower

1. Online teaching isn’t as effective as in-person teaching.
2. Today’s tools suck.
3. If content is king, then community is queen, pope, emperor, and president-for-life.
4. If you don’t know how to tell if you succeeded, you’re going to fail.
5. If you don’t take the time to explore what other people have done, you deserve to fail.

I’d welcome comments…

• Black Girls Code
• CodeNow
• Girl Develp IT
• Hackasaurus
• Ladies Learning Code
• Boston Python Workshop
• PyLadies
• PyStar
• RailsBridge
• School of Webcraft
• Web Start Women

I’d be grateful for pointers (and introductions) to others.

How to Teach Webcraft and Programming to Free-Range Students

What do we know about how novices learn webcraft and programming, why do we believe it, and how can we apply that knowledge to free-range learners?

Right now, people all over the world are learning how to write programs and create web sites, but or every one who is doing it in a classroom there are a dozen free-range learners. This group will focus on how we, as mentors, can best help them. Topics will include:

• What does research tell us about how people learn?
• Why are the demographics of programming so unbalanced?
• What best practices in instructional design are relevant to free-range learners?
• What skills do people need in order to bake their own web?
• How are grassroots groups trying to teach these things now?
• What’s working and what isn’t?

All of this is warmup to claims that their BOLD (Blended Online Learning Design) instructional design methodology satisfies all three groups at once. I don’t have any way to evaluate that claim (and they only present arguments, not data), but their one-to-one match-up of stakeholders with corners seems forced to me. In my experience, these three groups have more complex priorities:

1. Administrators actually do seek to minimize cost, rather than maximize cost-effectiveness. Partly, this is because they have no way to measure the latter, but another reason is that people don’t really care about how much students learn at university; they care about GPA × the school’s reputation.
2. Faculty care about the quality of their research, as judged by their peers. Most care much less about the quality of their teaching: for proof, look at how few actually invest time in learning how to teach well. They also care about cost, but for them, the currency is time rather than money, since the former affects them directly, while the latter (mostly) falls on their school.
3. Students… Well, that’s a hard one. The good ones care about quality, though that may be a circular definition, since I pretty much define a good student as one who cares about learning [1]. Accessibility? That’s certainly important for free-range students [2]. But I think it’s more useful to think about time cost and financial cost. The former is what matters to students who are fitting their lessons in around the rest of their lives; full-time students have, by definition, decided to devote all their time to studies, so what we see them thinking about secondarily is financial cost.

I therefore think that the triangle in education is financial cost vs. time cost. vs. quality. Administrators care mostly about the first; most university faculty care primarily about the second; and different kinds of students balance the other three in different ways. It isn’t as tidy as Power and Gould-Morven’s breakdown, but it’s a more accurate starting point for discussions about what’s worth doing, what’s likely to succeed, and why those aren’t always the same.

[1] Given a choice between an apathetic genius or someone working as hard as they can to maintain a C, I’ll take the latter.

[2] I really don’t like calling these people “non-traditional students”, since almost all learning throughout our lives has always taken place outside a formal classroom. Plus, it allows me to refer to students sitting row on row in a lecture theater as “battery-farmed”, which I like.

OK, now imagine that you’ve just enrolled in a school where students are expected to do most of their learning online via videos and exercises. There is a teacher, but she’s there to help when you can’t figure things out for yourself.  Oh, and she has 19 other students [3]. Why would you think that was going to go any better? Learning is the creative, thinking-intensive job; if most experienced managers can only handle half a dozen grown-ups before they start dropping balls, why should we believe that teachers will be able to handle more than half-a-dozen children before doing the same?

[1] Though many believe, wrongly, that they’re able to handle more.

[2] Larger teams always break down into sub-units: forwards and backs in rugby, infield and outfield in baseball, etc.

[3] I’m being optimistic here: many classrooms have more than 20 students, and since many school boards’ real motivation for moving education online is to save money, it’s very like that student-teacher ratios will increase.