The Third Bit

A few weeks ago, a former student who’s now a friend asked me to teach him how to bullshit. At first I couldn’t decide whether I was flattered or offended, but then I decided I was more curious than anything. What did he mean by that? And why did he think I’d be a good teacher?

After a bit of back and forth, we agreed that he didn’t mean outright lying, or the indifference to truth that Frankfurter talks about in his book on the subject. What he wanted to learn was how to present things in a way that made the speaker’s preferred outcome seem like the only sensible or desirable choice—how to (in the words of one of my teachers) sacrifice truth for clarity, or (in the words of an ex-girlfriend) how to clarify things for people.

I’m still not sure why he thought I’d be able to teach this, but his request sent me wandering down memory lane. Back in 1989, when I was doing some work for a sociologist in Edinburgh, I occasionally sat in on his group’s seminars. At one, an American researcher talked about her studies of the impact of networked computers on workplace dynamics. (Remember, this was before the Internet: most PCs were still only connected to a printer, not to each other, and even on Unix systems, NFS needed a lot of love and care.) She claimed that networking was democratizing the workplace by allowing people to share information more freely.

She made a plausible case, but then one of the grad students challenged her with a thought experiment. Suppose we’d invented networked computers first, and that mainframes had only come later. Wouldn’t she be arguing that they were a democratizing force—that giving everyone access to the totality of the group’s computing resources was more empowering than allowing everyone a small, fixed fraction of those resources? In fact (he went on, warming to his theme), wouldn’t she be reading meaning into the term “time sharing” in the same way that she had actually emphasized “networking”?

This was where I first heard the term “appropriation” applied to explanations. Today, I see it happening a lot in and around education. Almost everyone claims that new technology will fundamentally disrupt the way we teach. As Audrey Watters pointed out in a recent podcast, though, the big education companies have an incentive to make sure that “disruption” isn’t, and the budgets and connections to neuter any change that might threaten their business models. Simlarly, as much as we might want kids to grow up to be better citizens, teaching them to program won’t automatically make this happen, any more than teaching them addition will automatically make them better at balancing budgets.

In his 2008 essay, “The Winning Ways of a Losing Strategy: Educationalizing Social Problems in the United States“, David Labaree showed how people have increasingly turned to schools to solve social problems, even though schools have repeatedly proven that they are ineffective at doing so. I think it’s equally true that reformers all too often ask technology to solve educational problems, even though it has shown time and time again that it can’t. (I speak as someone who lived through the VCR-in-the-classroom revolution, the PC-in-the-classroom revolution, and the first-generation-Internet revolution. Meet the new class, same as the old class…) Yes, new technologies might enable change, but they will not make that change happen. Only we can do that.

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“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
– Inigo Montoya

I recently sat in on an online discussion with Cathy Davidson, whose work focuses on technology, collaboration, cognition, and learning. She recently wrote a blog post titled “Why We Need a 4th R: Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, algoRithms“, in which she says:

…our world changed in April 1993 when the Mosaic 1.0 browser was released to the general public. We need new forms of education. We need to reform our learning institutions, concepts, and modes of assessment for our age… I have a basic literacy to add to the last century’s 3 R’s of “reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic.” Let’s add a 4th R: “algoRithm.”

I’m all in favor of that. But I’m not sure that Davidson and I mean the same thing when we say “algorithm”—in fact, I’m pretty sure we don’t. Based on the slide that appears on this page, and on comments she made in that online discussion, her definition includes:

procedural thinking webcraft/webmaking forking participation diversity future partisans for the open web

I’d definitely include the first; I’d say it was a prerequisite for the second, and plays into the third, but the rest feel like aspirational goals for society rather than anything algorithmic. Yes, the interweb is a powerful tool for implementing those goals (or their opposites), but “diversity” and “algorithm” have no more to do with each other than “justice” and “double-entry bookkeeping”.

What I mean by “algorithmic thinking” is, I think, closer to what Michelle Levesque is describing in this blog post (available here as a handy visual aid, complete with drop shadows). It’s what Jeannette Wing meant in her 2006 article that introduced the term “computational thinking”. Everyone immediately started using it to mean whatever they already wanted to push—office suite skills, parallel computing, how to search and filter—but Wing herself later defined it as:

Computational thinking is the thought processes involved in formulating problems and their solutions so that the solutions are represented in a form that can effectively be carried out by an information-processing agent.

She went on to say:

Computational thinking enables you to bend computation to your needs…to:

• understand which aspects of a problem are amenable to computation,
• evaluate the match between computational tools and techniques and a problem,
• understand the limitations and power of computational tools and techniques,
• apply or adapt a computational tool or technique to a new use,
• recognize an opportunity to use computation in a new way, and
• apply computational strategies such divide and conquer in any domain.

That’s a much narrower definition, but I think it’s also more useful. CollaboRation or paRticipation would make a great “zero’th R”, but they’re very opposite of “algorithmic”. They are, fundamentally, about the exercise of judgment in situations where right answers can’t be calculated by following a formula—in short, about the things that still distinguish us from machines.

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I don’t know who Philip Guo is, but I think he’s amazing—at least, the software he creates is. Like several other tools, his Online Python Tutor lets you write and run code in the browser; unlike others, though, his allows users to step forward and backward through program execution, and displays simple, but effective, box-and-arrow visualizations of the program’s state as it evolves:

14 years after the publication of Stasko et al’s massive survey of software visualization, most IDEs still don’t do the latter. There are some good reasons (scalability and extensibility) and some bad ones (programmers can be surprisingly suspicious of anything new when it comes to their tools). My question is, will programming-for-everyone tools like Scratch allow people to create their own visualizations of their programs? I.e., will their be introspective hooks so that I can not only say, “Animate this picture,” but also, “And display the stack, my variables, and my definitions in the following way as you do so”? I wouldn’t expect the average eight-year-old to build new program visualizations, but (a) I’m frequently surprised by what non-average eight-year-olds can accomplish, and (b) who knows what those eight-year-olds might do when they’re sixteen or thirty-two if they’ve learned that tools are hackable too?

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Cam Macdonell teaches computer science at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton. Last September, he had to deliver a software engineering class for the first time. Instead of giving his students the kind of throwaway project such classes are usually built around, he put them to work on Ushahidi, a humanitarian open source project. As his end-of-course blog post shows, they can be proud both of what they did, and how well they did it. Like David Humphrey‘s course at Seneca College, or the UCOSP program that gives students from across Canada a chance to work together for course credit, this ought to be part of every undergraduate’s education.

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It’s amazing what you can learn when you don’t have cable TV:

• peaceful.com says “coming soon”.
• joyful.com is a one-man software shop. At least he’s Irish.
• disappointed.com tells you to get over it.
• angry.com and sad.com are both for sale.
• happy.com redirects to Walgreen’s pharmacy.

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Over on the Software Carpentry site, I’ve posted another set of musings on what a 21st Century learning content creation tool (i.e., a PowerPoint killer) would look like. Comments welcome…

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OK, so on the one hand we have online education growing by leaps and zounds, until anyone who really wants to do a quality university degree can do so from the comfort and security of their parents’ basement. On the other hand, we have the quite natural desire of 18-year-olds to get out of said basement and hang out with each other.  What can we do to help them?

Welcome to Gravenhurst, a small town in the heart of cottage country two hours north of Toronto.  (I could equally well say “welcome to Bracebridge” or to Parry Sound or to any of a dozen other places, but I’ll stick to Gravenhurst for now.) Every summer, Gravenhurst is filled with vacationing urbanites who either own, rent, or visit the lakeside cottages around it. They buy stuff at its stores, they drink in its pubs, they keep its summer theater alive—and then they go home, usually around Labor Day.

Would it be possible to create a centralized campus for decentralized learning in a place like Gravenhurst? I.e., could someone build a few dorms and labs and a gym to give students the social zing of living in a college town, and just skip all that stuff about professors and lectures and what-not? Students would take courses online from any provider (or mix of providers) they wanted, and get their degree from the course provider (which could be a big-name school like Stanford, Oxford, or whatever). When it came time to dissect a frog or write an exam, though, they’d pay a small fee to their campus provider for facilities, supervision, or invigilation [1].

I think it makes sense from the town’s point of view: students would be arriving just as tourists left, and leaving as tourists arrived, so it would even out the town merchants’ cash flow. It might not appeal to students who crave the bright lights of the big city, but I think there are plenty of others who’d leap at the chance to be a five minute walk from boating, canoeing, hiking, and the rest of the great outdoors. (And of course you could set up a physical campus for virtual courses in a big city, too, it would just cost more, and you’d have a harder time getting the host city to think you were really important.)

So: is anyone already doing this? If so, I’d welcome pointers…

[1] I actually think that invigilation—i.e., exam supervision—is the key to this whole plan. Once online learning really matters, we’re going to see cheat-for-hire services appear (“Give me $50 and your login ID, I’ll write the calculus exam for you.”). Learning providers who want to maintain the value of their degrees or badges will need ways to prevent fraud, so there’ll be a need for people like notary publics (notaries public?) to provide such assurances.

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I was passionate about politics when I was in my twenties, mostly because I was desperate for something to be passionate about. (I had friends who felt as strongly about Hibs and jazz as I did about apartheid and nuclear weapons, for much the same reason.) And while I’d never actually been in any “direct action”, and would have been absolutely useless in a riot, I often quoted Malcolm X’s phrase, “By any means necessary.” I even used the whole thing as a mail signature for a while:

We declare our right on this earth…to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.

I didn’t really mean it, though. There were things I simply wouldn’t do, and right at the top of that list was “compromise”. Like most angry young men, I’d rather fail than find common ground, because after all, the point wasn’t actually to change the world—the point was to be trying to, to be preaching at the indifferent, and above all, to be angry.

But here I am, almost 49, and I’ve come to realize that compromise isn’t just the only way to make progress—it’s the right way too. Science and democracy both depend on the most difficult of virtues: humility. Both only work if people regularly say, “I might be wrong,” and actually believe it, rather than just saying it to clear their throats before adding, “But…” I think I know how best to teach certain things, but I might be wrong, and people who believe others ways are better might be right. I think I know what basic ideas people need to grasp in order to make the web their own, but I might be wrong about that too. Sticking to my guns might give me a crusading adrenaline rush, but if I really want to change the world, I need to accept that people I disagree with—people I think are part of the problem—are (mostly) sincere and intelligent, that their opinions are based on experiences I haven’t had, and that they almost certainly have insights and ideas that would complement or improve on mine.

This is why I find myself off in a corner in many of the discussions about teaching programming to the masses. Like many of the people who are trying to do this outside traditional classroom settings, I believe that:

1. knowing how the web works is as important today as knowing how contracts or electoral democracy work;
2. our educational system, and the models of learning it assumes, are all badly broken; and
3. if properly used, the web can help us fix or replace them.

However, I think these things are independent of one another. More specifically, I think that we can and should try to work with—not just co-opt, but work with and learn from—teachers who are inside today’s system, even though we think that system is part of the problem. They have the hands-on experience that most of us don’t; if we’re willing to listen, they can tell us which of our seemingly-plausible ideas are going to fail when transferred to the 85% of learners who aren’t ultra-curious hard-working self-starters.

This is why I’ve asked participants in the P2PU course on teaching webcraft and programming to free-range learners to think through the IES report on organizing instruction and study to improve student learning. This is why I think that we should be going to every relevant conference we can find, rather than setting up our own events. Yes, it’s fun and invigorating to hang out with fellow revolutionaries, but remember Frank’s Law:

If you care deeply about a cause and you are then engaged on behalf of that cause in an activity that makes you feel very good and very brave and you’re really in solidarity with all your friends, and you’re enjoying it, you’re probably not advancing the cause very much, because you’re spending all your time with people you agree with cheering each other on and not engaging.

And this is why I’m trying to hear what people like Larry Cuban, Scott Gray, Mark Guzdial, and Audrey Watters are saying, and to go and meet them on their home ground (physically as well as virtually). Humility doesn’t come naturally to me—just ask my parents or my former students—but if we really want to change the world, it’s as necessary as courage.

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I’m glad you asked:

• Today was my last day at Side Effects; thanks to a grant from the Sloan Foundation, I start work on Software Carpentry again on Monday.
• I’m running an open course on how to teach programming to free-range learners over at P2PU, which also starts on Monday.
• Volume 2 of The Architecture of Open Source Applications is coming along nicely—Amy Brown is doing her usual great job of organizing, editing, and managing reviews, and we hope to have it on the shelves (and the web, and your tablet) in April.
• Ellen Hsiang and I collected some great feedback on And Then… just before Christmas, and we’re going to try to find time to make some revisions in the next couple of months. I haven’t written any fiction since last February, but Sadie has threatened to get me a desk in a shared workspace two mornings a week as a birthday present to shame me into putting my head down and actually finishing one of the novels I’ve got on the go.

It’s going to be a busy few months…

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