The Third Bit

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.

Learning, Software Carpentry

Uncategorized

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?

Uncategorized

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.

Uncategorized

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.

Uncategorized

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…

Uncategorized

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.

Learning

I enjoyed the first three episodes of BBC’s Sherlock. I was disappointed by how episode 4 (the first of the newest trilogy) resolved episode 3′s hangover, but immediately forgave the writers as A Scandal in Belgravia unfolded. But then came episode 5, The Hounds of Baskerville, which was frankly awful.

So it all came down to episode 6, The Reichenbach Fall. Good opening, great development, tension steadily ratcheting up, and then bam, the final three minutes ruined it all. Completely. It was completely implausible, inconsistent with what we’d seen of the characters up to that point—frankly, it almost had me expecting Moriarty to reveal that he was Sherlock’s long-lost twin brother.

My ending is below the fold. Enjoy.

Read more…

Writing

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.

Uncategorized

Sylvia Jane Cotton (née Wilson), November 7, 1964 – January 21, 2012

I have sometimes dreamt that when the Day of Judgment dawns and great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”
— Virginia Woolf

Family