The Third Bit

I just posted a note on the Software Carpentry site about Slide Drive, a new HTML5+audio slideshow tool from David Seifreid. Please check it out and let us know what you think.

Software Carpentry, Teaching

In a recent podcast, the always-interesting Audrey Watters talks about the tension between innovators who want to use technology to disrupt existing models of education built around top-down sales to school districts, rather than direct delivery to learners, and the big “educational” companies’ desire to subsume those technologies into their existing (very profitable) business models. Start in around 20:25 — there’s a lot to think about…

Teaching

Over the next few months, I want to experiment with at least four new learning formats for Software Carpentry. The baseline is what we have now: each topic is covered in 6-10 lessons, each of which has its own page. Most of those pages have a voice-over-slideshow video lasting 5 to 10 minutes and the slides themselves as PNG images in parallel with a transcript of the voiceover; the exceptions are the lessons on spreadsheets, databases, and debugging, which are actual screencasts of the appropriate tools in action. Only a handful of topics have exercises, and the only way to give feedback is to comment on the page.

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.

Software Carpentry, Teaching

Apple’s announcement, blah blah blah—I think Audrey Watters’ “Apple and the Digital Textbook Counter-revolution” sums it up best. So what should a “textbook” for a webified world look like? David Andrade’s description of what he does in his physics course, and Frank Noschese’s “Vision for a Physics iBook” are much better answers.

Teaching

The P2PU course I’m leading on teaching programming to free-range learners [1] officially kicked off this week. The first two challenges are up.  First, compare the way you teach (or the way you’ve been taught) to the research-based best practices in this IES report.  Second, describe who you’re trying to help. It’s already clear that participants are coming at these questions from many different angles—I’m looking forward to learning more.

[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”.

Teaching

I’ve spent some time in the last two weeks thinking about what I’ve learned from Software Carpentry, and how to move it forward. I think a lot of the ideas apply to online learning in general; I hope you find them useful.

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

Software Carpentry, Teaching

I just posted 1500 words plus footnotes on the Software Carpentry site summarizing what I’ve learned so far about online teaching. The takeaways are:

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…

Teaching

I’m looking for grassroots organizations that are trying to teach webcraft and programming to free-range (non-classroom) learners of all ages. So far, I know of:

• 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.

Teaching

I will be running a P2PU course starting in January on teaching free-range learners how to program and build stuff on the web. The blurb is below; anyone who wants to can sign up to follow along or take part (we expect it will require 3-4 hours/week from mid-January to some time in April). I’m not an expert on these subjects by any means, but I’ve learned a few things from running Software Carpentry that I think are worth sharing, and hope that this course will give me a chance to learn more.  (Note that I’m primarily interested in how to teach adults outside traditional classroom settings, so that will be the course’s initial focus, but its long-term direction will depend on the interests of participants.)

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?

Announcements, Teaching

I read Power and Gould-Morven’s paper “Head of Gold, Feet of Clay: The Online Learning Paradox” on the ride in this morning. In it, they summarize John Daniel’s Iron Triangle of education, which presents a trade-off between access, quality, and cost, then replace it with one of their own where the corners are cost-effectiveness, quality, and accessibility. That isn’t a big deal by itself, but it allows them to place stakeholders at the triangle’s corners: administrators seek to maximize cost-effectiveness, faculty to maximize quality, and students, accessibility.

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.

Teaching