Rob Barton

Projects in Visual Basic

2012-01-06T23:30:00.003-07:00

Visual Basic is a fun little programming environment/language. It's good for creating quick prototypes or making a simple interface to perform repetitive tasks in a Windows environment. I'm sure you could do big, fancy stuff in VB, but generally you'd use a more powerful language for big projects that need to be optimized or run in cross-platform environments. Something that is neat about it is that it's the language used to write macros in MS Office. So if you have a great reason to use a macro, you'll want to know a little VB. Please don't use macros if you have anything less than a great reason.

Given the quick and dirty nature of it, it's no surprise that it's the language taught to business students who need to understand a bit of programming but don't need to be able to create their own compiler or operating system. One thing I liked about this course was that of all the programming courses I've taken, it was one of the few actually taught by faculty in my department. I worked in the Computer Science department for 5 years and don't have anything against CS faculty at all, but there's a greater connection having someone from your own department teaching a course.

As a case in point, look at this particular course. When I took it, it was the last semester that just one undergraduate version of the course was taught. The whole semester, the professor who taught it would bag on accounting students or other non-MIS business majors who didn't know anything about computers or programming. They were in the same section as the students with more technical majors, because there wasn't another option. All we heard about was how the professor wanted to move on to all these advanced concepts but couldn't because of the accounting students holding us back. This, of course, was the same thing I heard as an MIS student in CS classes, how we weren't real programmers like the CS students. So CS bags on MIS; MIS bags on accounting; maybe accounting bags on human resources or marketing? At least marketers have a handle on social media, so it's probably HR that's the bottom of the technology food chain.

However the pecking order goes, the next semester would see two versions of the course, for technical and non-technical business majors. I don't know how much they lightened the load in the non-technical version, since VB is already a junior version of programming.

For an example of a quick program I wrote in VB several years later, I created a small program to automate common tasks in the testing center I used to run. I created a map of the lab with a button for each computer and for common actions. You would select the computer and then click the button for the action you wanted to perform: view the screen, reboot it, shut it down, turn it on, or mark that it was being used to take a certain test. It even had an option to cancel the shut down command if you accidentally selected the wrong computer and realized it within 5 seconds. Students get freaked out for some reason when their computer shuts down on them in the middle of a test. The funnest options were to start up or shut down all the computers at the same time. It was like a race to see which computer would boot up first, and the silence when all the fans came to a stop was so peaceful.

The program was pretty simple and was very inelegantly written but saved a ton of time for those working the lab. An employee of mine sought to improve on my design and write a fancy version 2.0 with all kinds of customization options to work in other computer labs, but quick and dirty won the race. As long as he worked on it, he never got version 2.0 working.

Database Management

2011-12-23T23:30:00.004-07:00

I really enjoyed this course. It was a good foundation of database skills, which I have used in multiple jobs. It was also fundamentally well designed, building from basic terminology to practicing part tasks to a final project of our own choosing. I would throw out there the random made-up statistic that half the spreadsheets that exist in the world would be much simpler if created as a database instead. I wish everyone could take this class.

We started out learning the basics of databases. What's a table, row, query, DBMS, join, etc.? Unlike the class I had taken where I should have learned some of these introductory concepts, it was actually clear this time around how they would be used.

We progressed from basic concepts to writing simple queries to create tables, load data into them, and query their contents. From there we got into various types of joins and the dreaded subquery. We did some relatively complex things, but nothing too out of control. For our tests, we could bring a single page cheat sheet (that I still have a copy of) with whatever example SQL syntax we wanted to include. So like you might have reference material in a real world situation, we could have some to remind us of the basics, but you still had to be able to understand the examples well enough to modify them so they would do what you had to do quickly on the test. Of course, as Mike Seaver learned in the classic Growing Pains episode, you learn the material better by making the cheat sheet in the first place. (Just don't let your teacher see the bottom of your shoe if it's not allowed and that's where you wrote it.)

We had plenty of time in class to practice our new SQL skills on our own and in groups, learning from mistakes and celebrating successes. Ultimately the course built up to a culminating project. It had to have a database of some kind involved, obviously. Other than that, it was up to us to determine what we would implement based on the other technical skills we had. I don't remember what my project was other than I worked like crazy on it, and it ended up close but never functioned quite right. Thinking back on it, I doubt the professor spent much time actually using our final projects and checking in depth how well they worked, as long as our documentation was in order and it looked like we had done something big enough, but it was motivating to be able to choose our own project and figure out how to make it work.

Meta Blogging

2011-11-22T19:28:00.000-07:00

In September, I started a series of blog posts on college courses that I've taken. I wrote a post every day and got through about four or five semesters' worth, depending on how you count it (one year was quarters, plus some AP classes from high school). I haven't stopped but have slowed way down. Between not wanting so spam my (3) loyal readers and not having the time to keep up a post a day, I couldn't maintain that kind of production.

I don't know how the NaNoWriMo people do it. Well, I do know that of the hundreds of thousands of people who sign up, the average number of words written per person is just under 15,000. They're supposed to write 50,000. About one in five finish, which means about two in three write nothing.

I did write a post for every day that one month, which is something I wanted to try, and I have kept up my streak of at least one post a month for the past four years. Interestingly enough, I pulled in a little over 15,000 words in September, which means I beat a lot of NaNoWriMo people.

Something else I have let slip is my RSS reader. I had close to a thousand unread posts in there from all around the web. I unsubscribed from the feeds for a MOOC I stopped participating in, which dropped a few hundred unread posts off. I marked the posts from the You Are Not a Photographer blog, because everything is in there twice and they keep doing weird things with their feed that makes old stuff I've already read show up as unread again. I may end up just unsubscribing, since it looks like they stopped including the picture in their RSS feed, so you have to actually visit the site to make fun of how bad people are at photography. I've been considering unsubscribing from the Freakonomics blog for awhile now, but every once in awhile a post comes along that makes it all worth it.

I finally unsubscribed from Larry Ferlazzo's blog. I'm sorry, Larry. I tried to keep up. I really did. I subscribed when I found several interesting posts related to Bloom's Taxonomy, which I was reading about at the time. Seven posts a day is too much for me, especially if I get a couple days behind. To give you an idea of the volume here, he has well over 500 "most popular" posts. I have no idea how many unpopular posts he has. I was going to maybe suggest that he try Twitter, since his blog posts are mainly lists of interesting site related to teaching a given topic, and Twitter is great at sending out links to people. Of course, I should have known; he's got more than 30,000 tweets. That means that over 3 years on Twitter, he averages 27 tweets a day. Given an average of about 12 words per tweet, that's almost 10,000 words per month, so he's not much off the NaNoWriMo average and doing better than most would-be authors just on Twitter.

One thing I do need to do is go back and fix the pictures in my September posts. I didn't add a picture to every post, but for the ones that I did, I got lazy. I just randomly googled images and grabbed stuff wherever I found it. Normally I use photos licensed with Creative Commons on Flickr. When I use their photo, I will link back to their Flickr stream and leave a comment on the photo I used with my thanks for their sharing and a link to the post where I used it. The bus up there is just a random openly licensed photo I found that kind of popped out at me. Thanks for sharing but not sharing too much.

photo by didbygraham

Business Communication

2011-11-04T23:30:00.000-06:00

Business Communication was a great class. I enjoyed it and still use things I learned in it. One great thing about it was that it was a night class taught once a week. I like the extended time less often, because it seems that you can get into deeper conversations given the extra time. I like night classes a lot more than early a.m. classes, since I'd rather stay up late than get up early.

The content of the course was useful. We learned a ton of grammar, which I really appreciated. My spelling and grammar have always been pretty good anyway, but there were things I learned in this class that I had never grasped before. I do purposely break certain rules for various reasons, but it always is for a reason when I do. I do occasionally start a sentence with "And" but almost exclusively on my blog and only for added emphasis. The unfortunate thing about this class is that they have since removed the grammar component. Given my AP and ACT scores, I'd have qualified to skip the grammar pretest and never had to learn any of the rules that I actually appreciate having learned in this class.

A couple examples:

When using conjunctions such as and, because, but, and or, you only put a comma before the conjunction if what follows the conjunction could stand alone as a complete sentence. I raked the leaves and emptied all the garbage cans. No comma since "emptied all the garbage cans" is not a complete sentence. I had previously always used a comma before a conjunction.

You can tack two complete, related sentences together with a semicolon and no conjunction. I will pick up dinner at Pizza Pie Cafe on my way home; they are having a sweet sale right now.

Something I'll always remember about this class was the overhead slides. No, the weird part isn't that the professor used overhead slides instead of computer-based slides, although that was a little strange, too. This was and is one of my favorite professors of all time but for whatever reason had a strange method for displaying the overheads: lay slide on overhead, turn on overhead, talk about slide, turn off overhead, lay slide on overhead, turn on overhead, etc. The overhead projector was turned on and off for every single slide. I remember joking with my classmates that any electricity savings from the two seconds it was turned off while picking up the next transparency off the pile would surely be lost by having the replace the worn out power switch before its time.

I also recall that the final paper for this class had to be cancelled. It was supposed to be a research paper, which we'd write with all our new-found communication skills. The problem was that when you do research, you have to get IRB approval, even if it's a simple survey to ask people about their parking behaviors, which ours was. IRB approval usually takes months, and while there are provisions for blanket IRB approval for class-based research projects in certain situations, it was too late for that process as well. Being the go-getters that we were (and since I was writing a paper about the same topic in my English class the same semester), we already had our research collected by the time the sad news was delivered. We ended up writing and turning in our paper anyway for extra credit. The extra credit should have been reversed, since we threw a bunch of screen beans into it, and that flies in the face of any kind of professional communication which we had been learning about. It's too bad I couldn't have taken some of that extra credit and applied it to the grade in my English class, for which I was using some of the same content.

Microeconomics

2011-10-07T23:30:00.001-06:00

A strange turn in this class I took was that I had one professor for the first half of the semester and another for the second half of the semester. The first professor delivered a baby halfway through, so they assigned someone else to teach after her baby was born. C'est la vie.

While Macroeconomics is more about a top-down look at the economies of countries across the world, Microeconomics is about the choices of individual companies and people. They are highly related, since government tariffs and quotas obviously affect the motivation of individuals to produce or cut production of affected products.

For example, Haiti used to be a rice-exporting nation. It was their main product. Their people have always been poor due to the policies of foreign governments, corruption of their own government, and frequent natural disasters. But they always had rice. At a macroeconomic level, you could look at the amount of rice they sold to other countries and the policies of various governments that facilitated that. In the 1980s, cheap (or sometimes even free) rice from the U.S., AKA Miami rice, flooded our island neighbor to the point where it was no longer profitable to grow rice. Macroeconomic conditions led to the overabundance of Miami rice. Microeconomic principles led to individual farmers halting production of Haitian rice.

An interesting topic they talk about in Microeconomics is one of monopolies. A monopoly, of course, is a situation where one company controls the supply of a particular product or service to the point that they can engage in unfair practices. They are often highly regulated to avoid problems. Or even more drastic action may be taken as was the case when our phone system a few decades back was split up into several smaller regional carriers.

Interestingly enough, the way the phone systems have evolved over the years since, several of those Baby Bells combined back together, and with the market changes due to mobile phones, we actually find a small number of companies controlling the market. They compete, yes, but to some extent they collude to keep prices high. Take text messaging, for example, which is disturbingly expensive relative to the actual costs. It actually costs more to track and bill text message usage than it does to deliver the messages, so when you pay for texting, you're really paying for them to bill you for texting, not for the delivery of the actual messages. This type of situation is called an oligopoly. Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile can't make any huge moves to totally disrupt the market because of the market share of the other companies, but they don't want to either, because they're all sitting pretty if they can maintain the status quo. The potential buyout of T-Mobile by AT&T would actually serve to start tipping the monopoly scale if approved by regulators, so I don't think it's likely.

Business Spanish

2011-09-30T23:30:00.003-06:00

Business Spanish was different than any other Spanish class which I have taken in that there was a point to it. I say that kind of flippantly, of course. I have enjoyed the various classes I have taken over the years, but most of them lack a real context of learning a language for a specific reason.

I remember in one of the earlier classes I had taken having a discussion about why we were learning the words we were learning. What's the big deal about learning the words for family relationships, food, types of vehicles, and rooms in the house? We did come to the conclusion that it's probably because those are common things around us in everyday life. You don't go very far without encountering a door, needing to eat, or having to find a bathroom.

In learning a language for a business context, there were reasons for learning more advanced, nuanced words and phrases other than a laying-around-eating-apples-by-the-pool-in-your-cousin's-backyard context. One of the most useful skills would have to be writing an appropriate business letter, which is hard to do in any language.

This class would actually be followed up the next semester by a Business Communication course (in English), which was also very helpful in learning many rules of grammar and writing business correspondence. It's sort of interesting that it's the first course I've ever taken in another language before taking the same course in my native language.

Something more applicable to my college career generally is that this was the first, and only, course I've ever taken as Pass/Fail, if that wasn't the only option. I had learned about the Pass/Fail option long after it would have been really useful to me. I still don't understand why that isn't one of those things they train freshman on in university orientation.

I was enjoying this class. I thought I was learning a lot. The teacher was tough, but it was interesting. Then the midterm hit. It destroyed us. Everyone in the class just bombed it. The professor was not happy about it. Everyone was stressed out about it. I think a few people dropped. I looked into the option to change to Pass/Fail, and it looked like it might work. I talked to everyone I could find in the department to make sure they would still accept the course for my minor in Spanish if it was not graded.

Everyone agreed I could, so rather than fight with my grade in the class, I changed to Pass/Fail. The tricky thing is that it's technically P/D/F, not just Pass/Fail, so if you earned a D, you'd still get a D on your transcript. By this time, I had recovered from my freshman year and had a decent GPA going, so even a B would pull me down, and it seemed worth the switch. I was pretty certain I wasn't going to get a D, but above that I had no idea.

In the end, I totally don't know if it was worth it. I mean, it was, because it caused me a lot less stress, but I have no idea what grade I would have earned in the class. I have no idea what grade my fellow classmates earned. I don't know if she applied any type of curve or graded it straight. All I knew is that I got some peace of mind, and I got to try out the Pass/Fail option.

Legal and Ethical Environment of Business

2011-09-29T23:30:00.004-06:00

This course, also known as Business Law, was really a great class. It was hard, but not too hard. It was interesting, but not too interesting. Just kidding. It was just the right amount of interesting, though.

Here we learned the basics of the legal system. We talked about the differences between civil and criminal proceedings. In criminal proceedings, to be convicted, it has to be beyond reasonable doubt. The prosecution has to make the tough case. In civil litigation, however, it's a plaintiff rather than government prosecutor going after the defendant, and judgment is made on a preponderance of the evidence. Basically, throw the evidence in one of those Lady Justice scales, and whichever way it tips, no matter how slight, that's the side that wins.

We talked a lot about land and things like adverse possession, trespassing, and liens. Our professor told us about how he was able to get a piece of land for basically nothing by filing certain paperwork and paying the taxes on a piece of land for a certain number of years, and it became his for only the cost of the taxes. I'm not sure if that makes me want to be a lawyer or not want to be one. I think I'd enjoy doing stuff like that a little too much.

One of the things I liked most about the class was not related to the content (well, slightly related) but more to its administration. Specifically, the administration of tests. I generally subscribe to the belief that tests should be well written. Item analysis should be done to ensure questions are measuring what they purport to measure in a valid way. Garbage or joke answers should be avoided, because they don't add anything and throw off the answer statistics. The only point I can see to those obviously incorrect joke answers on a multiple choice test is that it may serve to reduce some test anxiety for some students.

So the questions on the tests for this class were terrible. But terrible in a good way. They were written by a random graduate assistant or something, not the professor. If they had actually be written by a lawyer that was worth anything, they would have been tight like I would expect them to be. Having such ridiculous questions actually served a purpose, though.

After taking the test, we would get our copy of the test back, and we could go back through everything that night and come back to class the next day prepared to fight for points. If there was a bad question, okay, when there was a bad question, you would be prepared to explain why the answer you chose was right or why none of the answers was correct or all of the answers were correct, or something else. With a page number and a quote from the book, you argued your case. If you had a preponderance of the evidence, you got the point back. Sound familiar? He gave us garbage so we would go through it, analyze every word on every line, become an expert on that item, and hold him accountable for the mistake in the way of compensatory points back.

I also had one of those real life versions of that nightmare that we've all had of showing up completely unprepared for a test. I don't know what was going on that I showed up to one of the midterms and wondered why so many people were there early sitting on the ground outside waiting for the previous class to finish up, until I saw everyone madly skimming through their textbooks. Oh, it's test day! Last minute cramming. I flipped my book open, and got in about 5 minutes' worth before the class started. Luckily, it was one of those classes where you could drop one test. Unluckily, that meant I'd have to take the comprehensive final, which I was looking forward to skipping and dropping the 0.

Principles of Business Information Systems

2011-09-28T23:30:00.003-06:00

While the Science Orientation course I took was technically my last orientation course, I'm not sure it's totally accurate to claim that. The Principles of Business Information Systems course I took was probably more accurately labeled a BIS (now MIS) Orientation course. Yes, it's meant for other business majors, too, so they can have a basic understanding of what the IS people do, but that still screams orientation to me, whether or not you're talking to students who will actually major in that field.

The part that was weird was that this was a 300-level course. It's something I never understood. Apparently other people didn't understand it either, because they have since changed it to a 200-level course.

I just never really got it and still don't. If they would change it to a 1 credit 100-level orientation course, I'd totally understand. What are some career options? What do IS professionals contribute to the business environment? Basic terminology related to hardware and software. Trends in the field. Professional organizations. I remember writing a two page paper about my brother in law's business, selling calculators and cables, since back in the 90s, this crazy new e-commerce thing was a pretty big deal.

They actually added some Excel and HTML/CSS to the course. Yes, when they dropped it down from a 300-level to a 200-level course they added more stuff to it. That may have been to keep them from having to drop it to a 100-level course.

Data Communication and Networking

2011-09-27T23:30:00.004-06:00

Something I really liked about the Data Communication and Networking course was that it was in the late afternoon one day a week. That was a far cry from my Chemistry class at 8:30 every morning my freshman year.

Something I still wonder about to this day was the deal with the McDonald's cup my instructor would be sipping on every class. It was one of those jumbo paper cups, not a mug, and they don't last that long, so I'm sure it was a new one every time. It made me wonder if he just ate out on days we had class or if he ate at McDonald's every day. Maybe he did just save that same cup and reuse it all the time.

On the first day of class, we took a pretest. We were promised that anyone who received higher than a certain score (maybe 70) could receive an automatic A in the class and wouldn't have to attend the rest of the semester. The test was basically a preview of the final exam, and it was hard. Nobody came anywhere close. It does make me wonder what he did with the test results. I don't know if he used the results to actually determine where we were knowledgeable and where we lacked in aggregate to guide his lectures. I've always thought it was a great idea but have never seen anyone else start off a class this way.

This class covered the basics of the OSI model and various network configurations and equipment. It was a pretty basic intro to get us familiar with all kinds of networking terminology but not to a point that we could actually do much with it, especially given that many of the technologies we talked about were old and not used much anymore, except in legacy environments. For what it was, it was a reasonable introduction to networking.

Survey of Accounting II

2011-09-26T23:30:00.000-06:00

The second accounting class I took was more interesting than the first class I took. We had gotten past the endless writing of debits and credits on T charts and started doing some interesting things. It covered topics such as cost accounting, budgeting, and standard cost variances.

Sure those topics sound boring, but this is where you start getting to a point where the accountant can actually help a business make important decisions. By breaking down fixed and variable costs to determine the true price of, let's say, an item you are manufacturing, you can determine the price you need to sell it at to cover all your costs. The accountant becomes a key member of the management team who helps everyone else understand where the money is coming from and where it is going. If I had to be an accountant, I would go into cost accounting.

Something I remember from this class was going to my professor's office to review my tests with him. I was always able to get a few points back by going in and talking to him. I would write notes all over my test paper, but the scantron only records if the bubble you selected is right or wrong. I would go look through the questions I missed, look at the notes I had written to see where I went wrong, and show him how I had maybe just flipped something right at the end, so I was really close to getting it. He gave me back partial credit on several questions like that.

It was in this class and the Microeconomics course I also took during my second semester as a business major that I would hone my craft of estimating my grade on a test. I take multiple choice tests relatively quickly. I'm pretty good at figuring out that type of question, generally. One testing technique I learned early on is that the longer you spend on a question, the more likely you are to miss it. Just answer it and move on. Your first guess will more often be right. If you get through quickly and have one of those professors who likes to lecture after the test instead of just letting you go, you sit around with nothing to do for several minutes while the over-analyzers are working hard at changing their correct answers to the incorrect answers, so you have to find something to do.

The technique I would use is this. Go through the test and count the answers that I just straight up felt confident about. I know it. One point. For questions that I didn't feel as confident about, I would count a percent for how sure I felt I had it right. If I totally guessed, 25%, assuming 4 potential answers. If I had ruled out 2 possible distractors (test item analysis lingo for wrong answers) and guessed between the remaining 2, I counted 50%. Add up the points and divide by the number of questions, and there you have it.

Advanced Spanish Grammar

2011-09-25T23:30:00.003-06:00

We would all do well to take an advanced grammar course, no matter the language. Before I get too far, though, I'm going to claim that any missteaks I make are here on purpose to point out the need for better grammar and spelling lest I am caught by the cardinal sin of improperly making fun of someone else's grammar.

That said, a blog post comes to mind, which came across Twitter earlier today. With the caveat that I understand that I'm not a perfect grammarian, and I've come a long ways in my learning not to look down on those with poor spelling and grammar skills, I really do like this post that I'm going to share, and I am not making fun of it at all. I have not yet watched the video she cites, but I plan to. The post is great, so if you get a pingback from this and come find my post, Chelsi, please don't feel bad.

I'm just going to say that it's a little funny to write a post talking about students' poor grammar skills and title it Is Texting and Instant Messaging Ruining the English Language? when it should have obviously started with the verb "Are" due to its compound subject. I totally get where she was going with it, thinking of texting and instant messaging (and later tweeting) as a singular phenomenon. Is Informal Electronic Messaging Ruining the English Language? I don't know what else I'd call it, and it doesn't matter. The title is fine, and the article is great. If anyone thinks I'm making fun, I'm not. I'll save the snark for responses on Yahoo! Answers. It's a blog post, which by definition is a less formal communication method. Being less formal, it is more important to get the point across than anything else, and we would all do well to cut each other a little slack. I often specifically choose to ignore certain grammar rules to reinforce a point or to make my writing more approachable. Yes, I am pointing out a grammar mistake in someone's post about poor grammar in order to make the point that she gets her point across well enough that it doesn't matter that she even made the mistake.

Okay, so what does this have to do with Spanish? Well, when you're learning a new language, you often learn many things about your own language that you wouldn't have otherwise. Also, when talking to someone who is a native or at least well-educated speaker, it is much different than talking to someone who speaks in halting sentences and a poor accent. We joke about some foreigners forgetting to use words like "the" or not conjugating nouns properly. It is those little things that make a huge difference in sounding educated or not. That is why this class is so important. It focuses on all the little things that take you beyond being able to find el baño and allow you to have a decent conversation with an intelligent person in the new language.

It goes into proper use of the common prepositions a, con, en, and de (to, with, in, and of). The ever-confusing verbs ser and estar (to be) are covered, as are the tricky pair of prepositions para and por (for). In addition to those words, advanced verb forms and tenses are reviewed, including such favorites as the past perfect and imperfect, reflexive verbs, and passive voice.

My favorite advanced grammar skill is piling on reflexive and direct object pronouns at the end of a verb. You can end up with a two word (Quisiera comprartelo.) sentence in Spanish with what would be eight words (I would like to buy that for you.) in English. Granted, they are the same number of syllables, so you're not saving much.

I'm interested by concepts that are present in one language but not another, such as clusivity. A word I really like in Spanish is aquel. It has a few different forms based on gender and number, plus it can be either a pronoun or an adjective, but on top of that, the concept of aquel is one we lack in English, unless you include "them thar hills". Grouped together, there are éstos, ésos, and aquéllos, meaning these, those, and those way over there, respectively. Aquel refers to not just those things, but those far away things. I think if we had such a construct, McCain may have referred to Obama not just as That One but as Aquél.

Psychology

2011-09-24T23:30:00.002-06:00

The Psychology course I took as part of general education was a bit strange grading-wise. The content of the course was great. We learned a lot of things about how the brain works, about memorization, careers in psychology, historical figures, and various other theoretical foundations of the field. I remember talking about Bernie Goetz, the Subway Vigilante, as I recall as an example of things people will do under extremely stressful circumstances.

One of the best parts of the course was watching The Mask. Part of the point was observing Ben Stein's role as a clinical psychologist analyzing Stanley's problems that the mask represented.

Where the course went a little weird, like I mentioned, was in the grading. As we would study each day's material, he would give us a couple related multiple choice questions (but not the answers). By the time of the midterm, we had a bank of questions (but not the answers) that he had given us, from which he wrote the test. In the study session before the midterm, we could ask questions about anything we wanted, so if there were multiple choice questions he had given us that were a little tricky, you could ask some questions about it and know pretty much what the right answer was. Basically, everyone aced the test.

His plan was to follow the same process for the final, and he did, but he let us know that a few people complained that the test was too easy, since he had given us all the possible questions. It was way more questions than would be on the test, and we did have to figure out the answers ourselves, but we had them nonetheless. Some people were apparently frustrated with the fact that you could just look up and memorize all the questions and answers and were worried that other students would pass without really learning anything about psychology. His response was that psychology is largely about the brain and memorization is a big part of that, so there was more psychology in how he gave us the questions than we might have thought. That was the flippant response anyway. The more serious response was that if anyone thought the process was too easy for them, they could get with him to write a paper on an approved topic related to the course content.

I don't know if anyone took him up on the offer. I didn't. I still wonder who was so uptight about a Psych 101 course being too easy. At work we've actually been working on a similar online course, and it's funny because some of the recommendations I made for the course would have turned it into something much more difficult (and I still maintain more rewarding). Thinking back on it, I should perhaps recommend students watch and write a paper on The Mask instead. I wonder how that will go over.

Order

2011-09-24T07:40:00.002-06:00

I had mentioned that my daughter has to memorize the Gettysburg Address. What I didn't mention is that she is also memorizing the Pledge of Allegiance, Star Spangled Banner, Preamble to the Constitution, all the states and their capitals, and all the US presidents.

She has until the end of the school year and already has the three short ones down.

I thought I'd be helpful and suggest an entertaining resource to help her memorize the states and their capitals:

It's a great song from a great TV show. The only issue is that the states are not in any particular order other than what makes sense for the song. So Louisiana and Indiana are near each other, as are Alaska and Nebraska and some stretches like Hawaii is a joy and Illinois. It becomes a dealbreaker only for the project they're doing, since the rule is that they have to recite the states and capitals in alphabetical order by state, which is a totally arbitrary measure. (You heard about the patient who came home and announced to his wife the shrink's diagnosis that he had CDO? She asked what that was and he replied that it's OCD but with the letters in alphabetical order, like they're supposed to be.)

I wrote a couple years ago about a book I had read, Everything is Miscellaneous where the author David Weinberger draws attention to the fact that unnatural ordering systems can actually be detrimental. For example, what if every time the federal budget was being decided, money was allocated to states in alphabetical order? Alabama and Alaska might really like that, because they might get more with full coffers at that point. Chances are, by the time we get to lowly Wyoming, there's not much cash left to go around so every year they would get hosed.

The list of presidents to memorize is in an order that makes sense, the order they served as president, which happens to match the order the Animaniacs' presidents song is in (not to mention learning a few additional things like Ulysses S. Grant's supposed drinking problem):

It seems that there might be another order that would make more sense to list the states in, though. The order they joined the union would give them a general sense of history that could be helpful. Population might make sense, although physical size would be less prone to change. Location might work, but could be a little confusing as you try to figure out how to snake across the country, so simply filling in a blank map rather than reciting might be a useful workaround. The point is that there are state orders that are more natural and provide meaningful context so that you gain something additional with the same amount of work as memorizing in alphabetical order.

Billiards

2011-09-23T23:30:00.003-06:00

Billiards was the last PE class I would take in my undergrad program. It was a good class, and I did learn a lot in it, but I didn't have much space in my schedule from there on out for any extracurricular kind of courses.

One of the most important billiards tips I learned was how and when to use chalk. The short answer to when to use chalk is every time you hit the ball. Chalk adds friction to the tip of the cue and makes it stick to the cue ball. If you've ever lined up the perfect shot, all the angles measured perfectly, made connection with the cue ball, and had the cue fly off to one side while the cue ball flies off to the other, it's because you didn't chalk up.

With a well chalked tip, even if you don't hit perfectly in the center of the cue ball, it will grip and not skip off to the side. This is especially necessary if you want to do things like add English or spin to the ball. If you hit the cue ball just above center, the cue ball will follow the object ball. If you want the cue ball to stop as soon as it contacts the object ball, hit it at or just slightly below center. If you want it to actually roll back towards you after it hits the object ball, you hit it even further below center but not so low that you lose control of it. Doing this allows you to make sure after you've hit the object ball into the appropriate pocket, the cue ball will roll to where it should be to line up your next shot. Playing billiards can be like chess where you have to think multiple moves ahead rather than just play the shot, see where the ball lies, and then figure out your next shot. At a minimum, you can make sure the cue ball doesn't follow an object ball that's close to a pocket right down the hole by having it roll back towards you a little.

You can also add right or left English by hitting the cue ball slightly to the right or left of center. If there is an object ball frozen to the right rail (touching the bumper), you have to get that ball to spin clockwise (left English) so it rides the rail all the way to the corner pocket. To get it to spin clockwise, you would actually spin the cue ball counterclockwise (right English) by hitting the cue ball slightly to the right of center. You want the cue ball to hit the object ball on the exact opposite side from where the pocket is, and the opposite English on the cue ball will turn the object ball like a gear in the appropriate direction and hug the bumper all the way down.

In the class, we played a little bit of the standard 8-ball, which everyone seems to know how to play. Whoever gets a ball in first picks stripes or solids, get all yours in, and then go for the 8 ball. Just don't hit the 8 ball in too soon or you lose.

The big game we learned and spent most of our time on was 9-ball. It is a little different, and I think is actually my preferred game. You rack up the balls 1-9 in a diamond shape like the above picture, although the only positions that matter to the non-OCD among us are that the 1 ball is closest to you and the 9 ball is in the middle. Instead of each person hitting in a distinct set of balls, everyone is going for the same set. If you get any ball to drop, you keep playing. The basic rule is that you have to hit the lowest numbered ball first with the cue ball. If you don't or if the cue ball goes into a pocket, it's a scratch, and you've probably given away the game, since your opponent can place the cue ball wherever they like, which will probably be at an angle where they can knock the lowest numbered ball into the 9 ball, sending the 9 ball into a pocket. That's the big difference, though, is that nobody really cares about knocking in balls 1-8. You're always trying to get the 9 in. If you can hit the 1 ball into the 9 ball, pocketing the 9 ball, you've just won the game even if every other ball is still on the table. If you don't have a shot to make on the 9 ball, you just knock in the lowest numbered ball and then aim for the next lowest, trying to get into a position as soon as you can to sink the 9.

Another game we learned, which was the bane of my existence was 3-ball. In this game, you line up any 3 balls in a straight line parallel with the length of the table. The goal is simple: sink all three balls in the fewest shots possible. If you're lucky, one will go in on the break, and you will be able to drop the other two in 2 additional shots. Only one player plays the table at a time. Once they hit 6 or 8 points or whatever the maximum is that was decided upon or sinks all the balls, the next person plays a freshly racked 3 balls. A certain number of rounds is played by each player, and whoever has the lowest score wins. Like golf, it can be addicting, because while you can and do play against others, in the end you're really just competing against yourself.

Macroeconomics

2011-09-22T23:30:00.001-06:00

Economics should be required for all majors, if it isn't already. I know that as a general education and business course, it is required for all business majors, but I think it should be impossible to get out of school without it. It is that important.

Economics is important to understanding how markets work but also to just understanding human behavior and decision making. Ideally, individuals act rationally and in their own self interest. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations points out, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest." While I have been known to occasionally make a loaf of bread for the pure joy of it, bakers bake bread because they know we will buy it from them, not because they're doing us some big favor.

When irrationality abounds (Tickle Me Elmo) people make bad decisions that are not in their own best interest. Occasionally order has to be restored by some outside force, such as government regulatory action, but generally speaking, the invisible hand of the market helps things stabilize on their own. When rare children's toys are selling for $1500 on the black market, it is not sustainable. The company will either start producing more or people will realize that is too much to spend on a doll or something else will give.

Opportunity cost is an important economic principle we would all do well to understand. The principle is that the cost of something is not only the monetary price we pay or the time we spend but also what we could have spent our money or time on instead. When I was in high school, I worked at Dairy Queen and would occasionally not get all my homework done, because I was working late. Once I had brought my book to work to read on my break or while washing dishes but didn't ever get to it. Then I forgot my book at work so was unable to read it when I got home or during my first period class and was thus unprepared for that day's quiz. The opportunity cost or what I gave up in order to work was points towards a grade in a class. Some might say that the money I earned was more important than the grade, as long as I passed the class, since it probably didn't change my GPA much if at all. Others might say that I was a fool and could have lost thousands in scholarship money by getting poorer grades. In the end it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. It only matters what I think. And it matters that I have the information I need to make a decision. By understanding the trade-offs involved, I can truly make a decision. I actually did drastically cut back my hours and then eventually quit not too long after that, because I decided that the money I was earning was not worth the things I was giving up in terms of my classes and my social life.

Other important concepts to understand are that of comparative advantage (everyone wins when the person with the lowest relative opportunity cost creates that thing and then trades with others), price elasticity (the extent to which consumers still buy a product when the price goes up; gasoline is inelastic in the short term, because when the price goes up, you're stuck buying it anyway, but in the long term it is elastic, because people will eventually start changing their behaviors and buy more efficient cars if the price gets too high), and the benefits and drawbacks of tariffs and quotas when importing or exporting goods.

Spreadsheets and Databases

2011-09-21T23:30:00.003-06:00

Spreadsheets and databases was a good course. It had the potential to be a great course. It didn't quite make it to greatness, but looking back on it, I can see the possibilities. I know it has potential to be a terrible course as well, because I know several people for whom that was the case. Some of that depends on the person taking the course, as databases just don't make sense to some people, but I think most of it has to do with the person teaching.

We had a seating chart, where we had to sit in the same seats every time. We got to pick where but once we picked, it was set, so that the professor could use his map of names and where people sat. I thought it was nice that he was using some type of system to learn our names. I was lucky to have a professor who was actually savvy in the way of databases. Others I know had someone who didn't understand databases at all teaching the course, so instead of spending 50% of the time each on Excel and Access they would spend 12 weeks on Excel and maybe 3 weeks on Access.

I did learn a lot about Excel. I don't know that I ever really "understood" databases from this class, but I learned a lot of the basics. I could perform the various required tasks but didn't have a solid grasp of why you would actually do what we were doing. A roommate of mine sat next to me. I remember him asking one day for the professor to explain how we might use this in real life. It was just too abstract for him, as it was for me and probably most everyone else in the class. Nobody else had the guts to actually ask why we were learning this stuff. I don't remember his answer other than it wasn't a good one.

This makes me think of one of the key principles of andragogy or adult education, which is that adults will do better if they understand why they are learning something. I contend that children and young adults, for whom a pedagogical or teacher-centered approach is traditionally used, would also do better if they understood the why. The difference is in the power relationship we have when teaching younger students. They still want to know and sometimes are even willing to ask how what they are learning will be useful to them. Because of the imbalance of power, we blow them off instead of taking them seriously. Adults simply hold their ground and require you to come up with a good answer while young students who hold their ground are disciplined.

Survey of Accounting I

2011-09-20T23:30:00.003-06:00

Once I found myself in my new information systems major in the business college, I jumped right into the business core classes like accounting and economics. My accounting teacher sounded and acted like Kermit the Frog. He looked kind of like him, too, at least until he started growing a beard. I think that's why he did it. He was also way into snowmobiling. Like way into it. Like calm down, it's just driving around on the snow, not bringing about world peace.

We spent a lot of time in the class filling out T-charts. In double entry accounting, you record every transaction in two places. You either debit or credit the asset or liability columns. When you're done, debits will equal credits. For example, if you buy a car, you would reduce the amount of cash you have (credit) and increase your vehicle/equipment account (debit) by the same amount. If you don't have the cash on hand, then instead of reducing your assets you would increase (credit) your liability account to show that you had to borrow the money to buy the car.

It's kind of weird, because it's more natural to think that if you take money away, you're debiting, and if you're adding money, you're crediting. But remember that if you're decreasing an asset account or increasing a liability account, it's a credit. Your credit card is named that, because it's a liability account. The bigger the credit line the more you can borrow (and probably the less cash you have on hand).

Science Orientation and a Change in Major

2011-09-19T23:30:00.002-06:00

After three quarters in a row with some type of orientation course, Science Orientation would be my last one. It was held in the business building, for reasons unbeknownst to me. The College of Science is spread all across campus, so with no central science-specific meeting place, I guess a business auditorium is as good as any. They have since built a very nice science building, one in which I worked for 5 years, and it is one of the nicest buildings on campus.

While I can't tell you anything about the course besides where we met, I can tell you the reason I took it. It was becoming clear at this point of my college career that engineering was not going to work out well for me. At that time I still enjoyed programming somewhat and thought that was the direction I would be headed. Rather than change my major immediately, though, I thought I'd take the orientation course to see if it shed any light on whether I would like switching to computer science.

During this same quarter, I ended up dropping the next CS course in the series I had been taking, since I found myself understanding less and less what the CS professor was talking about and not caring that I didn't. You see, after my calculus experience, I had learned something, that it was better to get out of a class you're totally lost in than score a useless D. While the orientation course didn't answer the question about whether the new major was for me, the CS course I dropped kind of did.

When it would come time to register for classes again, my mom would somehow find a major requirements sheet for Business Information Systems, the major of my then-former roommate who liked computers but not programming. She wasn't really sure where she got it from or why, so call it divine intervention or what you will, but that is the major I would set and stick with for my undergraduate degree, making the Dean's List six straight semesters until graduation.

It turns out I could have completely skipped my freshman year and graduated in six semesters. With all the history, English, math, and science AP credit I came in with, that was the equivalent of a good, solid freshman year. I didn't need the credit hours, and other than the Spanish counting towards my minor (which was totally optional), nothing "counted" for anything. That said, I learned a lot and feel like I made it through that first year relatively unscathed.

Fundamentals of Acting

2011-09-18T23:30:00.003-06:00

I took an acting class my sophomore year of high school and really enjoyed it. There were no desks, just a random collection of chairs and couches with a small stage and props strewn about. The teacher appeared in random commercials and low budget movies, including the following public service announcement:

We learned to do monologues, mime, acting for both live and video audiences, lip sync (we chose the song Tequila, and yes I think it actually worked rather well), movie scenes, TV commercials, stage slapping (I'm still sorry about that, Lawrence), and more. It was great.

When I got to college and saw the option to do an acting class, I thought it would be more of the same fun, laid back atmosphere. It wasn't. Almost everything in college is bigger and more intense than high school, and acting was no different. About half the class was going into some type of theater-related major, and the other half of us seemed to be there because we thought it would be fun. It was fun but in a serious kind of way. It was a small class, well under 20 students, one of the smallest classes I've taken at the university. I stuck it out even though we were warned that the class was the third in a three class series that had been going all school year, but the computer didn't enforce the prerequisite, so you could register without having the other two classes first.

We learned all kinds of things from how to project your voice to standing up straighter (those actually went together well) to memorizing lines. I remember getting my wisdom teeth taken out over spring break and after returning having the TA for the class try to get me to open my mouth wider during some of the vocal drills we were doing. Sorry, man, not gonna happen.

There are many memorization techniques out there. For the particular one we happened to learn in that class, you used a partner. The partner had the script and would read the first word. The person memorizing would repeat it. The partner would then read two words, and the person memorizing would repeat both words. This would go on like a kind of non-electronic game of Simon. If you messed up, the partner would stop you and back you up to the last phrase you could repeat without mistakes. I found it to be quite an effective technique, at least for relatively short passages. I may use it to help my daughter memorize the Gettysburg Address, which she has to do for school.

One memorable event was when a girl doing a monologue accidentally lit for real the prop cigarette she was just supposed to pretend light. Between the Clean Air Act and the fire marshal, lit cigarettes inside the building are a no-no. But she was in character doing her act, and she handled it quite well. She didn't really react to it but just sort of flippantly waved it around a little like her character might have done and crushed the burning corner in the ashtray without missing a step. It was one of those things where you knew what she was doing, but if you didn't know, you would have never known.

Naturally, the final in the class was a scene. It was supposed to be more polished and a little longer than anything we had done yet up to that point in the class. Somehow I ended up doing a The Chalky White Substance, a short two-person one-act play, one of the last written by Tennessee Williams who would have turned 100 earlier this year. Other well-known works of his include A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I played a young boy watched over by an abusive older protector in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where water and women were scarce. My character lets slip the secret that there was an underground stream running under his house providing unlimited access to water, a precious enough commodity that I got to do a dramatic death scene. Sebastian Shaw would have been proud.

Volleyball

2011-09-17T23:30:00.002-06:00

Anytime I have a chance to play volleyball, it's a good thing. It comes as no surprise then that another of the best classes I ever took was volleyball. Priority registration was ultra helpful in getting me into this ever popular class.

As I think about this class, I'm reminded of a comment made by someone several months ago on an online story about Western Governors University, my current employer. At the time, they were working to launch WGU Washington, so the news was covering the discussion. In supporting the establishment of WGU Washington, this commenter pointed out that he didn't think it was his responsibility as a taxpayer to subsidize young adults' self discovery. That is a whole discussion in and of itself and one of which I could argue either side (possibly three different sides).

As an institution of adult education, WGU focuses on getting down to business and providing students with what will really help them advance their careers. These are generally older, more mature students who don't need personal enrichment as much as they need advanced skills and credentials. Institutions serving traditional college-aged students have some responsibility, I believe, to help them be well-rounded members of society. Part of that would be encouraging physical activity that will reduce their physical well-roundedness.

Yes, I am now pondering how we could create a physical education program at an online school. I can see a log of hours spent practicing at the local gym, video of running through certain drills, and submission of results from a tournament the student participates in for a culminating experience.

An important part of the class I took was dedicated time for drilling and skill development. Just running out there and playing any sport is not an effective way of doing things (not to say it can't be fun). By taking the time to practice specific skills, when it comes times to use those skills in a game situation, you'll perform properly without having to think about it and with less likelihood of hurting yourself.

The middle of a game is not the best time to try something you've never done before. In low pressure environments like pick-up games with friends, it's a safe place to fail and try new things, and may in fact be encouraged by the group, but it's still not an effective way of perfecting a skill. Of course, outside of sports that's good advice for professional activities like giving presentations or using software to analyze data. Having an environment where it is safe to fail within your team but where everyone is well prepared and polished when working with outside stakeholders provides opportunities both to learn and to successfully perform at a high level. Yes, I'm still trying to justify the online volleyball course.

So let's have it. What are some other ideas for awesome online courses in subjects that don't initially seem like they would fit an online model?

Sign Language

2011-09-16T23:30:00.005-06:00

I'm not totally sure why I decided to take a Sign Language class my freshman year. I remember there was a football player in the class, wanting to be able to communicate better with a deaf teammate. I don't think he lasted very long in the class. I stayed in the class the whole time but didn't do very well, like anyone learning a brand new language, and having not used it since, I've forgotten most of it. I do know that playing the telephone game in American Sign Language (ASL) gets you about the same results as the whispering version, where you end up with a totally different message by the time you make it around the circle.

Something interesting about ASL that may seem obvious to some and not so much to others is that it is distinct from English. There is Manually Coded English (MCE) which is basically a word for word translation from English, generally following its grammar rules, but that's not what two people signing to each other are likely to use. ASL has its own grammar rules, not to mention some extra features. Obviously body language and facial expressions are important in spoken conversations, but they are even more important when signing.

I find the spatial nature of the language fascinating. Think of the way you might write a paragraph talking about a person. The first time you mention him or her, you would say the name, and generally from then on you would use the pronoun he or she, at least until it starts getting confusing if other hes or shes are involved. You can actually do a similar thing when signing, where instead of assigning a person, place, or thing to a pronoun, you assign them to spaces. So if you're talking about your boss and a coworker, you might sign your boss's name over toward your right side and your coworker's name toward your left side. If the boss gave something to the coworker, you would make the sign for give and move it from the boss' space to the coworker's space. Maybe it was a birthday gift and when your coworker regifts it to you for your birthday, you would then make the give sign and move it from the coworker's space toward yourself while making a kind of disgusted face.

Speaking of signing names, if someone is not Deaf (capital D, meaning they're part of the Deaf culture), they would just have an English name that is finger-spelled. You don't give yourself a name. A Deaf person gives you a namesign. It's kind of like the mountain men. You get a mountain man name from a mountain man as part of being accepted into the mountain man culture. Like mountain man names, namesigns are generally descriptive of a physical characteristic of the person or something he or she does. It may or may not be related to the given English name.

Something I learned not really related to the content of the class but that would be helpful in understanding the workings of college in general is that if you're taking a random elective and not receiving an awesome grade (think C), changing the class to Pass/Fail is a great option to not pull down your GPA. Of course, I learned this after I finished the class, not during it when it could have helped me. That's just another one of those things that an advisor could have told me during orientation instead of all the useless stuff they told us.

Intermediate Spanish

2011-09-15T23:30:00.002-06:00

I actually took two in a series of Intermediate Spanish courses in back to back quarters, but I'm going to throw it out there that I don't remember the difference between the two. It seems that they were taught in the same classroom. I have no recollection of who taught the classes, but I do remember that some advanced Spanish students would come in to talk to us so we could practice speaking.

After learning a bit in junior high and high school and dropping my ridiculous AP Spanish class, over two years would go by before I would take another Spanish class. I picked it right back up again, though, and would actually do really well in both classes. These were probably the most important Spanish classes I would take, as they were beyond the basic level of high school Spanish and really prepared me by helping me solidify my grasp of the language.

I would talk sometimes with a girl in my apartment building who spoke Italian, and it was amazing how well we could understand each other. She wasn't Italian, just an American who spoke Italian, so with us both talking to each other in Romance languages and our American accents, it wasn't too hard to figure out what we were saying.

I still wonder what it is that makes so many Americans almost proud of the fact that they can only speak English. Learning another language helps you know your first language better by understanding how the various parts of speech work together. Having to consciously think about how all the parts work together helps you know why you're saying what you're saying instead of just saying what you hear, or think you hear, others say (like 'could of' where it should be 'could have' but who could of known which is right, since they sound the same when you talk fast?).

If you learn a language with a lot of the same Latin and/or Germanic roots as English, it can help you know what some of the more obscure English words mean, because they're similar to a common word in another language (like edifice and edificio, meaning building).

Racquetball

2011-09-14T23:30:00.002-06:00

Racquetball was one of the bright spots of my freshman year. It's the only class I've taken with someone I was related to, my sister Christie. I had received a racquet for Christmas and bought some sweet new gym shoes while on vacation with the family in Florida.

I remember an odd couple my sister and I would pair up against in doubles occasionally. There was a younger, student-aged kid who played with an older guy who wore khaki pants and loafers. While playing. I know. I still can't figure that out. I remember that they would sometimes stand right up on the receiving line (the dotted line you stand behind while waiting for the serve) and try to take us off guard by hitting the ball really quickly instead of letting it bounce around off the back wall. Just that you're only surprised after they do it once or twice and then it simply becomes annoying. So you just softly lob it over their heads.

I would play off and on over the next who knows how many years but only really started playing consistently the last few years. It's been interesting as every time I kind of hit a plateau where I have felt like I've learned all I could, I'll start playing with someone new and learn all kinds of new things to try. That's a good metaphor for life. You can always learn something new from everyone you meet.

Multivariable Calculus

2011-09-13T23:30:00.000-06:00

In Multivariable Calculus I earned the lowest grade I have ever received in any class in my entire life both up to that date and since (it's the one that isn't really failing but isn't really passing either). It was the nail in the coffin for my budding engineering career.

I still remember sitting there in the middle of the back row in the most uncomfortable wooden desk/chair combos in the H-shaped technology building. It was horrible. The only thing I learned was that I shouldn't go any further with math. The only other math courses I would take the rest of my college career would be statistics, which I would learn to love, but I no longer had any use for calculus.

Honors Orientation

2011-09-12T23:30:00.001-06:00

The Honors program never made sense to me. Take harder classes and write extra papers in order to get a note on your transcript and diploma that you graduated with honors. Or you could just take the regular classes, not write extra papers, pull a decent GPA, and graduate cum laude. Yes, "cum laude" means "with honors".

I joined, because I thought it would be useful to get priority registration. At the time anyone could join their freshman year, no matter how well they did in high school, just by taking the orientation course. In addition to the priority registration, I also got a discounted ticket to the Chinese terra cotta warriors exhibit, which was pretty neat.

By the time I finished my freshman year, I was technically a junior with all my AP credits and other courses I had completed. The priority registration wasn't as useful, so it wasn't much of a blow when I got kicked out of the Honors program due to my calculus-laden GPA.

Whatever they talked about in this course (study skills, how to fill out your priority registration form, where the big bowl of candy was located in the honors lounge, etc.) it wasn't enough to make me try to get back in. Oh, I could have. Making the Dean's List every semester after my freshman year was over, I had that part down, but I was starting to improve my understanding about the differences between things that are useful and things that just make you feel like you worked really hard.

With that, I leave you with an essay question from the application to the current Honors program:

You return to your room in the residence hall next fall, and on the floor just outside the door you find a hard hat, a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, and one additional object. In addition to revealing the identity of the third object, explain how the hard hat, the book, and the third object got there and their significance.

Leave your response in the comments, and you could be awarded Blog Reader with Honors.

Computer Science II

2011-09-11T23:30:00.001-06:00

I remember the room this CS course was in, one that I would later teach computer literacy courses in. We were continuing on in C++, which is what I had primarily worked with in the other programming classes I had taken up to this point.

I remember that we talked about multidimensional arrays, which made sense to me, and pointers, which didn't make sense to me. Which still don't make sense to me, beyond a superficial level anyway. I remember doing a lot more with inputting from and outputting to files rather than just prompts on the screen.

The programming was starting to get harder, and I was dealing with more of the frustration/joy cycle working out bugs in the programs I was writing. I still thought I wanted to be a programmer, and I started to think about changing from Electrical and Computer Engineering to Computer Science. I remember a roommate and I introducing ourselves at some get to know you thing. He went just before me, telling his name and that he was majoring in Business Information Systems, since he liked computers but didn't like programming. I went right after him, telling my name and that I was going into Computer Science, because I did like to program. Yeah, we'll see how long that would last.

July 2, 1986

2011-09-11T06:45:00.002-06:00

A photo from 25 years ago, remembering the sad events of 10 years ago.

Calculus II

2011-09-10T23:30:00.002-06:00

Having scored a 5 on AP Calculus, I was eligible to jump right into more advanced Calculus when I officially enrolled at the university. No one told me this would be a bad idea on many levels. I guess it's one of those things that advisors could tell you but don't, because they believe deep down that you'll learn better by figuring it out on your own than if they just told you everything up front.

Perhaps if I had been destined for engineering greatness, advanced Calculus would have been more natural for me. Perhaps if I'd worked harder, I would have done better than barely pass.

My professor was actually really good. He was engaging and knew his stuff. Whenever he talked about planes, you know the math kinds, he would switch over to this funny accent and start saying "de plane, boss, de plane!" I don't know if anyone else in the class knew what he was talking about, but I never did.

Until I just looked it up on YouTube and Wikipedia, I had a totally different picture of what he might be talking about. I pictured a deserted island with Tattoo as a humpback, and they were trying to be rescued. It turns out it's a fancy island with nice amenities and guests fly in, paying $50,000 to have their fantasies come true, and Tattoo is a midget. Who knew?

Engineering Orientation

2011-09-09T23:30:00.002-06:00

After my awesome Physics class and doing well in Calculus, I was excited to declare as an Engineering major. I attended the summer general college orientation and dutifully signed up for all the courses my new advisor told me to take.

One of the courses new Engineering students take is Engineering Orientation. I don't remember much from it, other than it being in the engineering classroom building which is no longer standing, since it was replaced a few years ago by a new building. I also remember there was a computer lab we had to go to in order to run some special engineering software for some of our homework. It was largely about helping us determine the specific emphasis we would choose based on the types of jobs we were interested in and learning the resources available through the department.

Whenever I think of that now-demolished auditorium, I think back not first to the orientation class I had in it but an engineering test I took in that room during high school. From what I recall, students in certain math and science courses were invited go up to USU to take an engineering test that could potentially lead to a scholarship. I signed up for it, although I didn't know many other people from my high school who did.

The test was over the Thanksgiving break. My sisters were both attending USU at the time, so I stayed at their apartment. The timing was fortunate enough that I was able to participate in a Thanksgiving dinner they were holding for a few roommates, friends, and neighbors. It just so happened that one of my sisters' roommates had a brother who was also in town to take the engineering test. We nervously walked all the way across an empty campus together, found the right location, partook of the cheap glazed donuts that were provided, took the grueling test, for which I have no idea how I scored, and returned back to participate in the festivities.

What makes this so memorable was an ironic event during dinner preparations. The fastest and thus best way to cook a ton of potatoes for that well-loved side dish mashed potatoes is to use a pressure cooker. Maybe you know where I'm going with this already. Older pressure cookers didn't always have safety latches and valves that prevented you from opening a pressurized pot like they do now. As college students, assuredly they owned the oldest cookware you could find, including an unsafe pressure cooker.

As dinner time was fast approaching, the windows of the fishbowl, as their apartment was aptly nicknamed due to the large windows in the front room, were beginning to fog up, excitement was in the air, and the finishing touches of the meal were being, well, finished. My sister's roommate's brother was asked to see how the potatoes were doing. So he opened the pot to check, of course.

Well, he didn't exactly open the pot. It more opened itself, once he loosed the sealing mechanism without first releasing the pressure valve or running under cold water to lower the temperature. The immense pressure inside threw the lid off the pot in a grand explosion of hot water, steam, and potatoes. All eyes were on the budding engineer who had just finished taking a test to demonstrate his engineering knowledge, some questions of which undoubtedly covered such foundational concepts as the relationship between the pressure and temperature of liquids and gasses, possibly while keeping the volume constant.

A quick check and everyone was okay, with no major burns to report, and everyone's hearing quickly returned to normal. They were still finding potatoes in the kitchen for months afterwards. They were delicious.

Computer Science I

2011-09-08T23:30:00.002-06:00

For my Computer Science I course, I was in the same large auditorium that I had my Chemistry class in, which meant I spent a lot of time in that room. Just as I can't remember a lot of specific things from my American History class, having had so many classes in it, I've taken a lot of programming classes, so it's hard to remember where one ended and the next began.

I do remember a lot of late nights in computer lab down in the basement of the library trying to get my programs to work. I felt the pain and frustration of repeated failures, followed by the rejoicing that would inevitably come when the program finally worked properly.

I remember being amazed by the video our professor showed in class about the making of Toy Story. Here was this fully animated feature film that paved the way for the movies we see today (although if you trace backwards, you'll find Tron paving the way for Toy Story).

I remember taking tests by writing code on a piece of paper to be hand graded by a grad student, an experience many fellow students and I would repeat throughout several other CS courses, until I led my programming team to develop a system for facilitating computer-based testing and grading of student code-writing abilities in a proctored testing center I managed when I worked in the CS department.

One of the coolest things our professor let us do is see what our grade was without taking the final and decide if we wanted to attempt it or not. If we chose not to, there was no penalty. If we chose to take it, you could possibly have your grade go up or down depending on how you did on it. Gambling for grades. I chose not to take it.

Principles of Chemistry

2011-09-07T23:30:00.002-06:00

After my AP classes in high school, the first real college course I took was Chemistry. One of the most important things I learned in this class was not to sign up for early morning classes. I guess if you go to bed at a reasonable time, it's okay, but what freshman living in the dorms goes to bed before 1 a.m.? I actually did go to bed early one night, only to find my roommates sneaking into my room with a bowl of warm water. They didn't succeed with their prank, since I hadn't fallen asleep yet, but I had learned the lesson. Stay up late, even if it means you sleep through your early morning classes.

My professor was Scottish, and his TA who taught one day a week was Asian. I had a hard time understanding both of them. The class was in a huge auditorium, which got less and less full every week as people dropped or stopped attending.

Welcome to college.

Spanish and Computer Science

2011-09-06T23:30:00.002-06:00

To wrap up the AP classes that I took, I have to touch on the AP tests I didn't take. I passed all the ones I attempted, but I didn't attempt the test for all the classes I had taken.

I mentioned the Physics Electricity and Magnetism tests which I declined to take. I simply didn't feel prepared enough and figured that having already passed the regular Physics test, that would probably get me as far as I needed to go for general education purposes.

I actually dropped Spanish. In New Jersey I had signed up for an optional early morning Spanish class in junior high, which gave us a jump on the language, since you normally started studying foreign languages in high school. My Spanish teacher my freshman year of high school had an advanced degree from a university in Spain.

After moving to Utah, my teacher's experience included going on a 2 week vacation to Mexico once. Having had three years of Spanish classes, I was excited for AP Spanish to begin, until the first day of class when she started teaching us the alphabet. I thought it was ridiculous that she would do that, since there were prerequisites for the course. I was even more stunned to find that the alphabet refresher was actually needed, because there were people in the class that didn't know it. Between the alphabet experience and finding out that maybe two people from our school had passed that test in the last decade, I figured I'd be better off not wasting my time. Two years would pass before I took another Spanish class, and I picked right up where I had left off (unlike Calculus).

Computer Science was a great class. I learned a lot about the logic of computer programming, building a solid basis for several other programming classes I would take in college. I just didn't feel prepared to take the AP test, so I didn't.

Calculus

2011-09-05T23:30:00.004-06:00

Calculus is one of those things that takes awhile to wrap your head around, but if you put in the work, it starts to open the world for you. The problem is that the second you stop maintaining your advanced math skills, it all goes away, and you realize you wasted a lot of time learning something you'd forget quicker than it took you to learn it.

I'm sure there's some change in the brain that remains long after you've forgotten everything you once knew about calculus, which makes it all worth it. I just can't prove it and have no desire to. I subscribe to the movement that statistics is more useful to more people, thus should be taught in place of calculus, even though many people are as scared of stats as they are of calculus. Engineers and others requiring advanced math can study calculus if they need it. We would all do well to know a little stats.

But this is about calculus, so I'll save the stats rant for later. My AP Calculus course was taught by a guy who had been teaching at the same high school since my dad became part of the first class when the school was formed 30 years previously. He was old school. Our administration declared that unlike some of our rival schools who banned hats, they would only follow when it was shown that hats prevent learning. Well, except if your calculus teacher bans hats from his own classroom. There were a lot of hat heads in there.

We had to learn to juggle. It was required. I don't remember if there was a penalty for not doing it, but it was required, even if you had to juggle pieces of tissue paper. I got decent at it as my friends and I practiced. Juggling was always a good diversion from a particularly hard problem, and it was okay, since it was a required part of the class. At the end of the year when it came time to show off our talents, our teacher brought home the object lesson that you can do hard things if you just work hard at it. Then he proceeded to tell us that he couldn't juggle himself. Oh.

A couple classmates had written an awesome program on the TI-85s that we used in class, and which we were allowed to use on the AP test, that automated almost everything you needed to do. I actually had my own graphing calculator that I used, a Sharp, I believe. I was used to mine, so I used that primarily on the test, but they allowed me to bring one of the loaded TI-85s as well, so I actually used two graphing calculators during the test. It worked out, and I got a 5 on the test, the highest of any of the AP tests I had taken.

English Literature

2011-09-04T23:30:00.001-06:00

Near the end of my freshman year in high school, my English teacher asked me if I wanted to be in Honors English the next year. I didn't know or care what that was, so I said no. I didn't realize the alternative was Druggie English.

After a disastrous waste of sophomore English, where I received credit for reading Frog and Toad are Friends onto a tape as my friends discussed the scholarly classics A Tale of Two Cities and Wuthering Heights (neither of which I have read to this day), I accepted the challenge of Honors and then AP English the next two years.

In preparing for the AP test, we read classics such as 1984, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, and Heart of Darkness. The teacher had a policy that one could skip her final (yes, she still had a final, in spite of also having to take the AP test), if you got something published or won an award of some kind for your writing. I placed in the Utah State Poetry Society contest with a sonnet I wrote named Simple Things.

More interesting than my prize-winning sonnet was another poem I wrote about our teacher, which I now present to you:

The Demon Queen

The light of the new day breaks slowly over the horizon.
As alarm clocks are hit over and over all over the valley,
For just ten more minutes of sleep,
One Demon-Fiend arises ready for the new day to begin.

Teeth gnash one with another, and the jungle hair
Of the beast is pulled from the eyes
To reveal a sinister gleam, a glare, a terrifying gaze.
The Demon-Fiend is ready to capture her victims.

As she travels to the place of hunting,
The evil beast plans the first trap.
Hah, laughed the creature, No one can escape me!
I shall destroy all those who come near my path!

The cruel plan is so fiendishly clever in its intricacies.
I shall lure my soon-to-be victims into thinking
That I am their friend. I shall make them work for me,
But still think that I am working for them.

When they are fully enveloped in my power,
I will move in for the kill. I will destroy their hope.
I will shatter all their trust in others, but
They will still work to gain my favour.

When those hopeless wrecks of human beings are laid to rest,
The fiend will pretend to mourn,
But only to pull others within her grasp.
It is a never-ending cycle of target, capture, destroy, move on.

As the Demon retires for the night from a hard day of hunting,
She is constantly planning new devices of beguilement.
To weaken them, I shall have my fellow demon-creatures
All attack them at once, when they least expect it.

In their time of feast celebration, when all should be joyful,
I shall gather together my legions, and surround my victims.
When they are covered on all sides, they will be forced
To turn to me. I shall use them for my gain, and discard them.

The night slowly falls upon all the land.
A precious few are still awake, trying to thwart the plans of
The Evil One. There must be a way, they reason, but
There is no hope. A faint cry echoes, Nona Eleison.

Our teacher was pretty intense, and we were reading some pretty intense content (although I lucked out not having to read Beowulf that year), so I wonder if she had a large collection of anonymously written works about her slid under her door like the above poem was. I wonder if she knew I wrote it. I wonder if she knew what it meant. There is reference to the large paper due right after Christmas break and the fact that her large papers were often due right when big projects in other classes were due. Then there was the jungle hair. I don't know how to describe it, but there was always a claw in it. This is not the traditional Utah/Idaho claw (if you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about), but it was a claw nonetheless.

Physics

2011-09-03T23:30:00.003-06:00

What can I say about Mr. Jackson and Physics? Wow, there may be enough to write a whole book. I don't even know where to start with him. For someone who didn't know him, I might explain the phenomenon that was Mr. Jackson as similar to the Kinetic King on the current season of America's Got Talent. Take ultra nerdy and mix in stuff blowing up, and you have an exciting show. Unlike the Kinetic King, who is probably the nicest man in the world, Mr. Jackson mixed in a dose of mean, but I think we all knew deep inside he was mean because he loved us and wanted us to succeed. Very deep down. And well disguised.

The AP class actually required an introductory physics class as a prerequisite, but to get around that, they taught both the introductory and advanced class simultaneously. My school had an A/B block schedule, where you'd alternate attending your A classes (periods 1-4) and B classes (periods 5-6) every other day for twice as long as a normal class. It could get tedious, because you were in the same class for an hour and a half or so at a time, but it could be nice, since you were always guaranteed at least two days to do your homework. Not with physics, though, since that was held every day.

The classroom was filled with Van de Graaff generators, magnets, hydrogen and oxygen tanks, batteries, and machines to move balloons around en route to being blown up. We sent an electrical charge from a generator through the whole class, holding hands, to the last two class members who held their fingers over a Bunsen burner and lit it with the spark that jumped between their fingertips. We blew up countless hydrogen balloons by calculating where the balloon would be at the exact moment a flaming ball would be catapulted across the room. To add excitement, Mr. Jackson would put on these old Sousa march records so they'd blow up to Stars and Stripes Forever and other great songs.

Each year the physics assembly was one of the most popular events. There was lip syncing behind huge Fresnel lenses, freezing all sorts of things in liquid nitrogen, and many more fun demonstrations, capped off by blowing up hundreds of hydrogen balloons in the dark to John Philip Sousa.

We made shirts with Mr. Jackson's face on the front and his wacky sayings on the back and wore them to the Physics Day competition at Lagoon, the local amusement park. We would send 20 teams to compete and gather around the single team of the most nerdy students the other schools could find, wearing our matching shirts and cheering each other on.

I took the Electricity and Magnetism class the next year, because I loved physics so much, but it was hard enough that I decided not to take the E&M AP tests, in spite of easily passing the regular AP Physics test the previous year. He inspired me to be an engineering major in college; that only lasted my freshman year before I moved into business, but the impression he left was lasting.

American History

2011-09-02T23:30:00.002-06:00

My junior year of high school, I followed up my success of passing the European History AP test by taking the American History course. I have to say the teacher was not quite as dynamic or interesting as my first AP teacher, other than the fact that she looked like Alice Cooper. I say that in a loving way now, although it may have been less loving when we said it at the time.

She actually did know her stuff and did a lot to help us prepare, including several after school study sessions to prepare for the big test. She had essay questions from old versions of the test she would have us practice answering and grade us according to a similar rubric.

To tell you the truth, I don't remember a ton about the content of the course, probably because being American History, it blends in more with the history I've learned all my life, where the European History class covered material that was quite different than what I'd learned anywhere else.

The way the test is set up is that you get a multiple choice section and three essays. If I remember right, one essay was required, and for the other two essays, you could pick among three different questions for both. One of the questions I answered had been almost exactly the same as one our teacher had just barely covered with us in a practice test session, so we were all excited to see that question.

The one I still wonder about to this day is the third essay. I didn't write it, yet I still passed the test. I didn't know anything about any of the three possible questions. I wrote not more than about 5 or 6 words, not even in a complete sentence, as tangential topics or themes related to one of the questions. Maybe the third essay counts less, since they figure you might run out of time when you're working on it. Maybe I did so great on the question our teacher had just covered. Maybe I aced the multiple choice questions. Maybe...it was a miracle. I don't know.

European History

2011-09-01T23:30:00.000-06:00

As I finished PhD coursework awhile ago and am working toward my dissertation, thinking back on some of the classes I've taken over my illustrious college career, two thoughts come to mind. First is the quote from Tommy Boy, "You know a lot of people go to college for seven years", followed by Richard's retort, "I know; they're called doctors". I'll soon enough be a doctor, but the kind that doesn't help people. Second, I wondered if I could remember my teacher, something I learned, or anything at all about every college class I had.

That seems like a tall order, since I've taken close to 90 classes over the last who knows how many years. So I thought it would be interesting to blog something about every college class I've taken. To start off, I took several AP classes in high school, and since those show up on the college transcript, I'm counting them.

The first college class I ever had was European History, my sophomore year in high school. I wondered what I was getting myself into when receiving an assignment to write a paper about the book Ivanhoe over the summer. I like to read, so that much wasn't a huge problem, but analyzing the development of chivalry was probably a bit beyond most of us at the time. I doubt there's any way to find the paper I wrote. It was probably as good as anything the average freshman might hand in, that is to say, not very good, but a good way as a teacher to quickly get a feel for the students in your class.

It was a difficult class, yet entertaining. It provided a lot of background for many parts of my life. I have to wonder if they still cover as much religious content in the class as they did when I took it, but I would think they would have to. So many major events going back several hundred years to a thousand years ago were so highly influenced by the church, that it is impossible to recount the history without including it.

We learned about everything from the Great Schism, to protestant reformers such as Martin Luther and his 95 Theses, to the dysfunctional royal families of England (okay, most countries, not just England), to the contrasting doctrines of transubstantiation and consubstantiation.

Various political terminology was covered in the class, with the naming of conservative and liberal political groups being based on the French National Assembly, where the differing parties sat in the right and left wings of the chamber, respectively. Related to this legislative body, not to go into all the details, would be the storming of the Bastille, which happened on my birthday in 1789, and the beginnings of the process to dismantle the system of nobility and create a constitution.

Most memorable, for better or worse, may have been watching Month Python and the Holy Grail after the AP test was over. Hey, once the test is done, it's a party until the end of the school year, right? I made some great friends in that class that would last throughout high school and beyond.

Bubble Guppy Analytics

2011-08-24T20:26:00.002-06:00

I haven't watched much Nickelodeon since the days of Double Dare and You Can't Do That On Television. I'm slightly intrigued by a cartoon that is in its first season on the well know kids' channel. I actually don't know anything about the show, but Google somehow thinks, or at least one day thought, that my blog is somehow related to Bubble Guppies.

I was just looking around in my analytics and found that a couple weeks ago, someone from Ontario visited my site after googling Bubble Guppies. They were sent to my main blog page, not to a specific post. I have no idea what could have been the draw, other than perhaps a recent post that mentioned swimming in a couple triathlons. I wouldn't think that the mere mention of swimming would be enough to pull in a search for information about preschool-aged cartoon mer-people.

By writing about it now, I am, of course, taking the risk of forever linking my blog to the cartoon like I did with the website Surf the Channel in a post a few years ago that still gets me hundreds of hits every month for no good reason. So to the potentially hundreds of you that may visit in the future, if you actually read all three paragraphs of this post, leave me a comment and let me know what you were looking for when you found this and perhaps an interesting fact about yourself. Don't be afraid that you'll be revealing too much, as I already know quite a bit about you just by your visiting (for example, my unknown visitor from Ontario was using Google Chrome on a 22 inch widescreen monitor over Rogers Cable). And yes, every other website on the internet knows at least that much, if not more, about you when you visit them, especially if they integrate Facebook plugins to their site.

Expectations of Quality

2011-08-22T07:55:00.001-06:00

Behold the smartness of Logan City road crews:

zoom in if you don't see it
We all make mistakes, and some like the one above are more easily corrected than others.

It makes me wonder what kind of expectations of quality the road crews have of themselves. We would all do well to think about the expectations we have of our employees, coworkers, and bosses, not to mention the expectations they have of us. If everyone does not set the bar at the same level, the tension can build quickly. Having a work environment where it's safe to fail, balanced with high expectations of each other, will lead to learning experiences. Ultimately the learning experiences will lead to higher quality outcomes if the team can stay in sync. Set the bar too low or get out of sync of the expectations of others, and you end up with the stereotypical "government job" and results like the above.

Three Sides to Every Story

2011-07-31T23:45:00.000-06:00

On Friday, President Obama announced new fuel economy standards that will be worked towards over the next 15 years.

Shortly thereafter, the obviously politically neutral folks at impeachobamacampaign.com posted about how these new fuel economy standards will result in death. Simply put, cars must be lighter in order to attain higher fuel economy, but people in light cars are more likely to die when they collide with heavy vehicles.

Just two days earlier, the even more politically neutral folks at freakonomics.com posted a similar story, but unless they had some White House connections (which is possible) was unprovoked by Obama's announcement of higher standards. Their line is that heavier cars cause more deaths.

What's interesting is that the two stories are saying both the same thing yet opposite things at the same time. One claims that lighter cars result in more deaths, while the other claims that heavier cars result in more deaths. The difference is in which car they're talking about. If car A is heavier and collides with car B, car B's occupants are more likely to die. If car B is lighter and collides with car A, car B's occupants are more likely to die. What I take from this is that it's the difference between the two that counts. The relatively lighter car will always fare worse.

So if over the next couple decades, most cars get smaller, there would not likely be a large increase in deaths, because everything would get smaller at about the same rate. Some of the behemoths currently on the road will still be out there, true, but you're not going to last long driving a 20 year old SUV pulling in 12 mpg when everyone else is getting 50+ mpg.

So there's two sides to the same statistical story, but what's the third side? My side is the third side. I question whether we'll even be thinking in mpg in 15-20 years. Between CNG, electricity, Mr Fusion, methane, solar, hydrogen, etc. there are so many alternative energy sources poised to take the place of the archaic gasoline that you'd have to hope something else will have matured enough by then to take its place. At the very least, we'll see more hybrid or bi-fuel vehicles that either automatically or manually switch between gasoline and the alternative power source.

Then what if there's an alternative power source that is so cheap and powerful it allows for heavy vehicles? Add to that computers and sensors that detect imminent crashes and stop you before they happen, and it won't matter the size of your vehicle, since we won't crash into each other anyway. Perhaps cars will be driven by Google so we can just rest in our sleep pods while Google optimizes our travel for us.

Maybe 2025 is too soon to expect an accident-free, emissions-free future. After all, I'm pretty sure Back to the Future's vision of hovercars and home energy reactors won't be reality by 2015 even though they've had 30 years to work on them. But we can dream. Maybe we'll see Obama channel JFK's speech from almost 50 years ago about going to the moon and rally the country around a monumental transportation goal, ironically just after he dismantles NASA.

We'll see where the big dreams take us, but with all the fantastic possibilities my mind can dream up, 50 mpg doesn't seem like that big of a deal, even if it requires a little extra technology to keep us from crashing into each other so much.

Triathlons

2011-07-29T21:04:00.003-06:00

I don't like to run.

I do like to do things to get/keep myself in shape. If I'm not doing something fun or working towards a goal, working out doesn't happen. Over the past couple years (although not the past few months) I've been playing racquetball regularly, because it's fun (oh and good exercise, too). Last year, my wife and I had been meeting with a personal trainer twice a week for several months, so since I had something scheduled and two other people depending on me to be there, I was on top of it. I've done a few fitness challenges with family and coworkers, where you eat well, exercise, etc. and get points for doing good stuff (and for one challenge, you got dinged for eating bad stuff); I've won something in every challenge I've done, because I'm motivated by the challenge.

This is where triathlons attract me. I can prepare for and do something hard that's only partly running. For a lot of triathletes, the swim is what scares them most, because many of them start out as runners and move into triathlons as a way to add some low-impact cross training, which both swimming and biking are. So I'm a little backwards where I like swimming a lot better than running. Little known fact is that many of those skin and bones runner-converts you see are wearing wetsuits not as much for the cold water as for the extra buoyancy so they don't sink like rocks. I don't have that problem. Yet.

My first triathlon was one I didn't even race in. About 6 years ago, I worked on the race staff, helping set up the transition area the night before and helping with whatever they needed on race day, including sweeping up a bunch of gravel out of the road that had just barely been chip sealed and was causing problems for the bikers in the middle of the race. I actually lost 5 pounds in about a 12 hour period. Being around the race piqued my interest but not enough to do anything about it until 2009 when some family members decided to do a race here in Logan.

I had been doing some things to get in shape but didn't decide to do the race until maybe 2 months before it, which wasn't a ton of time to prepare. The swim was in a pool and the bike and run both very flat, so it was a good one to start with. I was able to swim fairly regularly at the pool on campus at lunchtime, and in the evenings, I'd pull one or two of the kids in the bike trailer up the hills above my house. Then on race day, I had a tuned up road bike, instead of my heavy, rusted mountain bike, so that made a big difference.

The distances were 500m swim, 20k (12.5 mile) bike, and 5k (3.1 mile) run. My three goals were to finish, not finish last, and finish under 90 minutes in that order.

They started us off generally in order of estimated swim time, so you just kind of found your place in the line around people who swam about the same speed as you. They started a swimmer every 15 seconds. You go down and back the length of the pool and then under the rope to the next lane and repeat until the last lane. It was hard, but the water was warm and the lanes made it easy to know where to swim even if it was a bit crowded. Then it was off to the bike. It was pretty straight forward, out and back on a straight, flat road. Until you experience the bike to run rubber legs, though, it's difficult to imagine.

By the time I got to the run, it was just hot. It was middle of July, the race had started around 9 or 9:30, but with the line for the pool, I probably didn't start until around 10, which made it about 11 by the time I got to the run. I grabbed two cups of water at the aid station, one to drink and one to dump on my head. I planned on alternating running for a minute and walking for a minute. I ended up running for 30 seconds and walking for 30 seconds. My lungs were in good shape; it was pain in my calves that knocked me out.

They give you 5 split times, for the three legs of the race and the 2 transition periods: swim, T1, bike, T2, run. They were 12:48.1 03:58.4 42:07.2 01:23.4 34:30.9 for a total of 1:34:48.0. I finished 23/24 in my age group and 96/105 out of all the men. So I finished. I didn't finish last in any of the splits or my age group, although I was very close. Ignoring my transition times, I finished the three legs in under 90 minutes, but the transitions are part of the race that some people actually spend a bit of time practicing, so I pulled in just under 95 minutes, and I was happy with that.

Last year, I planned on doing a couple races and thought I'd be in great shape since I was working regularly with my personal trainer. Then the summer came, trainer left, I overate for a week at a family reunion, overate and didn't exercise at a big work conference my first week at a new job, and had a hard time picking which race to do so my schedule didn't really get set until kind of late. On top of that, this would be an open water race with slightly longer legs (750m swim, 13.4 mile bike, and 5k run), although still a sprint, and some hills to deal with.

With everything going on, not having seen the course before race day, and not having ever swum in a wetsuit, I didn't even set a time goal.

The water was cold, and I was glad to have my wetsuit, although it still took my breath away when I put my face in the water. Next time, I'll dunk my head under the water to get over the cold shock before the race starts. Not being able to breathe as I'd gotten used to in the warm pool, I flipped over and went backstroke for a bit. I had a hard time going straight whether doing backstroke or even when I switched back to freestyle without those lines painted on the floor. They make a big difference.

The bike was hard. I'd still been training on the hills above my house on my heavy, rusty mountain bike and again had a light road bike for the race. The hill was brutal, though. It was pretty much a couple percent grade uphill for the entire first half of the bike. Once you get to the top and start coming down, it's easier, except then you get to a very steep downhill section on the way back. I didn't bring my bike computer this time, so I didn't know how fast I got up to. I can say I was going as fast as I felt comfortable going and still had a few people zoom by me.

By the time I got to the run, I just had so little left. I didn't get on a good pace, where I'd alternate running and walking for certain set times, but rather would run and walk randomly, which means I'd probably run for not as long as I should have and then walk for too long before switching back. Of course I was walking when the photographer caught me; he should have had a whistle to blow so I'd know to make it look like I was running like the wind.

About the start of mile 2, I came up on a guy in my age group (you write your age on the back of your leg), and I ran with him for a bit. I didn't know where we were compared to anyone else in our age group, so I did figure that if I beat him, I for sure wouldn't be last. We ran up and down one hill, and then on the start of mile 3, we grabbed some water at the aid station and started up another hill. At that point, I started running, and I don't know what happened to the other guy except that I was 90% sure I was in front of him. I did a little better keeping it going that last mile, knowing I was almost done, knowing that other guy wasn't too far behind me, hoping to catch up to him on the 10% chance that he did pass me at the aid station, and having had my legs recover somewhat from the bike.

My split times ended up being 21:14.773 03:35.833 53:19.650 01:58.506 36:23.496 for a total of 1:56:32.2. I ended up coming in 29/32 in my age group and 138/158 out of all the men. It was a bigger race, and while I was slower than my first race, I did beat more people than the first one.

After just talking about who I beat, keeping in mind a lot more people beat me, an interesting cultural thing I noticed about the bike and the run in both races (not much talking going on during the swim) is that if someone passes you, they give you some words of encouragement. Keep it up. You're doing great. Then if you pass someone, they give you some words of congratulations. Keep it up. You're doing great. It really is uplifting.

Of course, I had to do some comparisons between my times on the two races. Here are the split times side by side for my 2009 and 2010 races:

  12:48.1   21:14.8 (14:09.9)
  03:58.4   03:35.8
  42:07.2   53:19.6 (45:09.2)
  01:12.4   01:58.5
  34:30.9   36:23.5
1:34:48.0 1:56:32.2 (1:41:16.9)

You can see I calculated an adjusted time in parentheses for the legs that were longer in the second race, as if they had been the same distance as the first one. If I'd have only gone 500m instead of 750m, I'd have still taken a little over 1 minute longer on the swim. I actually got through T1 faster the second time. The bike was quite a bit slower as well, but at that pace if I had one less mile to go, I was down to only 3 minutes slower. Given the massive hill, I thought I did well. The run was the same distance. Given my inconsistent running pattern and the hills, I was quite surprised to be less than 2 minutes slower than the first year's run. Did I mention the huge hill on the run?

While I actually finished over 20 minutes longer than the first race, adjusting for a shorter course, I'd have come in just over 6 minutes longer. It was night and day difference between the two courses in terms of difficulty, so it's hard to really compare them. The best way to compare would obviously be to run both those races again this summer. Which is why I'm naturally running a different race this year.

Who's in?

Undergraduate Research

2011-07-20T21:58:00.001-06:00

Is anyone surprised by a study showing first year college students can't research?

They don't select good sources, don't engage with their sources, and largely copy and paste without showing real understanding of the content. Of course they don't. This really isn't a surprise, right? First year students are still unlearning high school habits. Any research they might be doing their freshman year is not going to be realistic, since they don't have deep content knowledge. Instruction in introductory writing courses is of the assembly line variety with large classes trying to meet general education requirements.

Is it a problem? I don't think so. If seniors and grad students are still writing papers like this, that's a problem. The real solution is to teach research and in-depth writing in the context of major courses. Introductory writing courses would be better off focusing on mechanics and grammar as a foundation for in-depth writing later. One step at a time.

Acacemia

2011-07-18T22:33:00.001-06:00

IMing with a coworker recently, I mentioned the upcoming academic meetings, where twice a year faculty from all over the country fly in for a conference. Only instead of calling it the academic meetings, I called it the acacemic meetings. While I see the spelling and grammar missteaks I make in IM, I generally don't fix them or call attention to them based on the informal, conversational nature of IM, unless it made what I wrote illegible. This Freudian slip, however, was too much to leave on the table.

acacemic = cross between academic and glycemic

During the first such conference, I gained five pounds that week. With as much food as was floating around, I'm surprised I limited my increase to that. During the last one we did, I was able to break even by watching my eating closer and exercising more. The only soda I remember drinking was near the end of the week. I was having the hardest time staying awake so grabbed a Coke, only to find myself in the living-healthy-when-you-work-at-home-for-an-online-school session.

We went on to analyze various high-and-crash situations. Any time you get excited about some new idea, the reality of trying to implement it always seems to put you back into your place. This is all over in academia from starting a new class or degree program to graduating and trying to find a job. It doesn't slow down for professors either as they try to get tenure, wrangle for grant money, and work to save their departments from budget cuts.

Thinking about traditional schools, food (often high in sugar) is commonly used to keep the excitement going between the figurative highs and lows. What traditional college student (or assistant professor) isn't always on the lookout for free donuts, pizza, candy, coffee, soda, ice cream, etc.? Among stress, alcohol, buffet meal plans, abnormal sleeping habits, and simply lack of experience living on one's own, the Freshman 15 attacks many, holding on for a 6 year ride.

That is why WGU provides mentors for their online students, to make regular contact and ensure students can bounce out of the lows that life throws their way. I'm imagining now a deal with a nationwide pizza chain where online students can get a free pizza delivered to them, let's say 6 times per year, included in the cost of tuition. Feeling low? Click here for an instant pick-me-up.

I was exposed to yoga at the last academic meetings and have kept up with it semi-regularly. There's nothing like meeting people in person to improve the quality of virtual meetings. Setting regular goals and regularly checking them off your list is a great motivator for many.

So what are some other healthy ways of keeping the high going or at least leveling out the lows? I was going to offer a chocolate bar to the best answer, but Phillip ate it at the beginning of the post.

Benefits of Online Learning

2011-07-15T19:58:00.001-06:00

Through the twitterverse came the question of how the list of ten benefits of online learning as presented by students at the Open High School of Utah is different.

Their list:

1. I can work ahead if I'm able to
2. I get nearly instant responses from my teachers
3. I get personalized support when I need it
4. My teachers are just as excited about online learning as I am
5. I can do all my math for the week on one day if I want to
6. I know how I'm doing, my grades are right on the screen
7. My parents can see my work and grades
8. My courses are more challenging
9. I can keep up with my work when my family travels
10. I can work around a busy schedule

Of course, being Twitter, there wasn't much more to the question, specifically how is this different from what? I have to assume it's asking how online schools are different from traditional schools, since good teachers would be doing the stuff in the list anyway. The difference comes in where at a student-centered school, the culture of the entire organization is focused on helping the individual students, where traditional schools are centered on the faculty member so whoever is teaching a class decides whether or not students can work ahead and how challenging the homework is.

There's a big difference between a single teacher running a student-centered classroom and having an entire school be student-centered.

Dual Monitors

2011-07-12T23:27:00.001-06:00

Are dual monitors the answer to increased office productivity? I don't know if they're such a thing as the answer, but they're certainly an answer.

They're one of those things that you don't realize how much you need dual monitors until you have tried it out. I'd tell anyone that once you go dual, you'll never go back. Some high resolution wide screen monitors where you can more easily put two windows next to each other on the same screen are close, but there's nothing like two full monitors to allow you to compare documents, using what's on one screen to write something on the other screen, or just good old multitasking (there's only so fast you can alt-tab among active windows).

I first made the jump about 7 or 8 years ago when I took an old CRT that was going to be sent to the surplus sale and hooked it up to my video card that happened to support dual monitors. It was a little awkward how the two monitors were different sizes and resolutions, but it was more productive nonetheless.

No one in the office at the time used the computers to their full ability. It was fun to watch people become interested and slowly the phenomenon spread throughout the office, until a couple years later the standard was that everyone would automatically get matching dual screens. Of course, I was in the IT department and encouraged people to order and use them. The IT department at my current job doesn't give people who work from home a second monitor and even for those in the office, according to the IT dude I talked to, IT has to approve whether or not you're worthy to receive one. It's those IT attitudes that ruin it for the IT professionals that actually care about providing technology that makes people more productive.

Maybe the answer is teaching the IT department to care. But you may have better luck just buying your own second monitor.

Facebook as an LMS

2011-07-09T16:18:00.001-06:00

In a recent discussion on a friend's wall in Facebook, the debate was whether Facebook could be used as an LMS. The arguments from one particular professor didn't quite cut it for me. One issue he raised is that requiring students to use a particular platform, whether Facebook, Gmail, or any other social media service is problematic and naive.

Given that the state of Utah is adopting Instructure Canvas to replace Blackboard, and one of its features is the ability to coordinate information with outside services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, etc., it seems that supporting the use of these third party tools is the direction we're going, not one of continuing to lock up our courses.

Regarding requiring students to sign up for a service they may not have been using already, it begs the question what percent of college students are already on Facebook. My understanding is that it's up in the 80-90% range, if not higher. They're in there anyway. This is just bringing the class to where the students are. You can set up a private instance of elgg, but if students don't get in there, it's no better than Blackboard, Moodle, or any other LMS, even if it's slightly more social.

I talked to one class I was teaching about the idea. While the initial thought was that it might be creepy having their instructor be their friend on Facebook, they agreed it was not so creepy and they may in fact think about class more often since they're in Facebook all day, if we were in a group together and didn't necessarily have to be friends. That was a couple years ago, though, and now everyone's grandma is on Facebook, so students may be more used to authority figures in their lives connecting with them on Facebook.

The big related question that was brought up was one of security and FERPA. Supposedly this professor has seen threats to sue because the professor openly discussed a student's performance in a classroom, and the student understood the critique to be a breach of their privacy. He pointed out that misunderstandings of intent are more likely to happen in online environments where context and body language are lacking than they are in face to face classrooms.

Regarding lawyers getting involved, it seems that of anyone, a PR professor (who was the one doing the complaining) ought to be able to figure out how to take a misunderstanding and turn it into a learning experience. At least in an online environment, you have a more permanent record of discussions, so you don't have to rely on the "he said, she said" of face to face meetings. Of course, it is ironic that the example he gave of misunderstanding was in a face to face classroom, not an online environment. I tend to agree with Dave Merrill, who suggests that writing for public publishing of work on a blog or eportfolio that others can see will make the quality much better than if the student is just writing a paper that no one but the professor will ever see.

Given the content area, I would suggest that if you're taking a PR course and there's not a FB (or Twitter) component, you should consider dropping. Some other majors may be able to get away with not using these tools, but from what I understand of a field like PR, if a student is not given practice in using social media tools in a professional context, they will be at a disadvantage. Yes, they know how to use Facebook in a social context, but holding a class in Facebook gives them the invaluable experience of an organized, professional use of the platform. Yes, it is fast becoming a platform, not just a standalone site.

Campfire Cooking

2011-07-09T11:54:00.004-06:00

I have other places I usually write about cooking and recipes, but these are too good to not spread the news.

Campfire cooking is great, whether on a stick, in a Dutch oven, foil dinners, or whatever. Following up the main course with s'mores over the dying embers is as much of a tradition as camping itself.

If you're willing to try a new tradition in campfire cooking, cook up a biscuit cup with a dough boy stick, and fill with either dinner or dessert (or both, although preferably not at the same time).

A nutella and raspberry filled dough boy topped with whipped cream will make you forget the last s'more you had. Or if you don't want to break tradition too much, insert the chocolate bar and roasted marshmallow into the dough boy shell instead of using a graham cracker.

For full disclosure, while I know the people behind the dough boy magic, I have not been given free products by them. I am very open to the possibility, though. Very deliciously open.

Play Games

2011-07-07T20:32:00.000-06:00

Here's a couple similar articles on how parents playing video games with their daughters can have positive impacts on their daughters and that both boys and girls can learn life skills from their parents while gaming.

The second article more directly points out that kids directly benefit from the game playing, while in the first it's less clear whether there is causation or simply correlation. It's like the Freakonomics guys pointing out that kids who grow up in a home with a lot of books do better in school, but it's not the presence of books that necessarily causes them to do better as much as it is that having books around the home is a signal that the parents are the kind of people who care about what their kids are learning.

Part of why I like Scouting so much is that I like playing the games; it's a way of never having to grow up. On a recent trip, one person we visited talked about not knowing much about the games their kids were playing after asking the kids to pause or turn off their game to do some chores; I pointed out that there was only about 30 seconds left of that level, so maybe the kid should just finish. I knew it, because it's a game I play. With my kids. And my kids play it with each other. Even the ones who don't normally get along that well. Whether it's canoe races, Mario Kart, or Scrabble, it's spending time together to build memories and common bonds that is important.

Negative Space

2011-06-17T14:50:00.007-06:00

In art, negative space is an important yet occasionally overlooked concept. There are a couple different types of negative space. If you google the term, the results are mostly all types of silhouettes, where an object doesn't actually appear in the image at all. What is missing is what you're supposed to actually see. An example of this is the arrow in the FedEx logo. What arrow, you ask? Well, go look real quick, and then come back. ... Pretty cool, eh? The silhouette walking across the street here is another more obvious example.

The other type of negative space is a type of balance or contrast to the focus of the piece, also apparent in the photo of the sign pictured above (which iboy_daniel was so gracious to share with an open license). The same picture taken head on would simply not be as interesting. Negative space used this way adds a level of depth that is missing otherwise. The divine proportion and rule of thirds are related to the concept of negative space.

In images with a lot going on, photographers will often use a large aperture, resulting in a shallow depth of field, meaning that only a small range of the picture is in focus. This artistic blurring of the foreground and background is negative space that makes the pieces that are in focus almost pop out at the viewer. The out of focus elements are important because of the context they provide to the in focus elements.

In a recent conversation with a former employee of mine, we got to talking about the importance of negative space in the workplace, although we didn't call it that at the time. It's the idea that time spent sitting around talking, grabbing a cup of coffee, running to the break room to play ping pong, going to lunch together, or otherwise spending time together not immediately engaged in "work" is an important aspect of the workplace.

An article in the paper about a team running the Ragnar Wasatch Back Relay, which happens to have started today, points out this same concept. A business sponsored a team a few years ago for the 200 mile 12 person relay race through the mountains and found clear benefits in the way of increased collaboration and connections among employees back at the office long after the race ended, so they've continued doing it.

Being able to step away momentarily from the task at hand to do something that doesn't really matter helps increase focus on important issues upon returning to work. These important issues are often lost if taken on too directly with nowhere to allow the eyes or mind to rest. Of course unrealistic deadlines, high travel costs, juggling multiple projects, and other factors can make such downtime seemingly difficult to fit in. It doesn't have to be huge, though, and probably shouldn't be. Care does need to be taken to ensure the focus isn't moved off what is important and onto elements that should be in the background.

In virtual teams, instant messaging can provide some of the same downtime to a limited extent, but getting together in the same physical location occasionally can do wonders to reinvigorate a project or team that is suffering from lack of contact. Whether or not the in-person time is "productive", it can help remind everyone of the importance of their piece in relation to the big goal and that there are real people receiving their submissions on the other end of the line.

I often practice a negative space technique when working on a paper or presentation. A month or two out I'll review the requirements and read some related articles or books but not write anything. A week or two goes by, and I'll put together a basic outline of what I'm going to write or talk about. I'll sit on it for another week, while in the back of my mind I'm thinking of stories, articles, events, theories, videos, and all sorts of related issues. This cycle progresses until it's relatively close to the time of submission/presentation, depending on its size and importance. When I do sit down to knock it out, the whole thing flows from my fingertips in a way that was not possible the month or two prior, because of the downtime I'd had to process it.

I always did like it at the moving company I used to work for when the person over our crew on any given day was a smoker; it meant we would get a 10 minute break every hour instead of one 15 minute break every four hours. The focus there was always on when the next break was coming. Everyone filed out of the warehouse like kids following an ice cream truck when the snack truck would pull into the parking lot every morning and save us all if he was ever late. At a physically demanding job, that negative space is closely guarded and for good reason, but at white collar jobs it can be easy to forget or to spend your downtime alone.

So be positive. But don't forget about the negative.

16 Free Tools to Create Media in eLearning

2011-06-17T13:26:00.005-06:00

From a presentation at eLearning DevCon 2011 by Jeff Batt, a trainer with Rapid Intake.

Video
- JayCut - Online video editor
- Video Spin - Desktop video editor
Video Converter
- Any Video Converter - Desktop video converter (batch convert, resize, etc.)
Audio
- Audacity - Desktop audio editor (don't forget the LAME mp3 encoder so you can export to mp3)
- Aviary Myna - Online audio editor
- Aviary Roc - Online music creator
Images
- GIMP - Desktop image editor
- Aviary Phoenix - Online image editor
- Sumo Paint - Online image editor (my addition, which actually bumps the list up to 17)
Image Capture
- Jing - Desktop image/video capture
- Aviary Talon - Online image capture
Animation
- Vectorian - Desktop animation (Flash) editor
Vector Images
- Inkscape - Desktop vector image editor
- Aviary Raven - Online vector image editor
Color Schemes
- Kuler - Online or desktop color theme picker
- Aviary Toucan - Online color theme picker
Course Analytics
- enspark enfuse - Web analytics tool

I can vouch for Audacity, GIMP, Kuler (my new blog colors are from the Retro Package color scheme), and obviously Sumo Paint.

Now start creating!

The Enlightened Eye

2011-06-14T18:47:00.001-06:00

I just wanted to jot a few notes down from Elliott Eisner's 1991 book The Enlightened Eye: Qualitative Inquiry and the Enhancement of Educational Practice.

Eisner discusses 6 features of qualitative study:

qualitative studies are field focused; that is, anything that is important for education is potential subject matter, from observing teachers in the classroom to how children play to the design of the trophy case in the school
the researcher as instrument; we all make judgments as to what is or isn't important, and calling out one's own biases is as important as identifying those of others
a qualitative study is interpretive; thick description, motivation, underlying attitudes, and nuanced differences are essential
expressive language and presence of voice; this goes along with the researcher as instrument in that it is false to assert a neutrality that does not exist
attention to particulars; rather than run details through a statistics engine to arrive at a general statement, the analysis of outliers and unique details of an individual situation, individual, event, or object provides a flavor that is often lost
triangulation; qualitative researchers look for multiple sources to validate findings, not a sterile statistical test of significance.

I'm reminded of the story of a quantitative and a qualitative researcher observing a man mowing his lawn. The quantitative researcher measures the length of the grass before and after it is cut, in addition to the average and standard deviations of the length of the grass of his neighbors, and explains that he was cutting his grass in order to keep it within a certain threshold acceptable for that street. The qualitative researcher asks the man why he is cutting his lawn, to which he replies he is doing it early in the morning to get back at the neighbors who were up late loudly partying the night before.

Of course, both quantitative and qualitative are important, and you can't really have one without the other. Straight quantitative research loses touch with reality fairly quickly, and qualitative research simply isn't scalable. Problems can be identified by either method or a combination of the two. Heavy quantitative analysis is often used to develop and validate interventions that work for the majority, but then qualitative work is necessary to really understand whether the desired effects are taking hold and to work with those who don't fit in the majority mold.

Course Design Rubric

2011-06-03T17:33:00.000-06:00

As a follow-up to my last post presenting the idea of a design rubric, here is the first real draft of the course design rubric.

I haven't worried yet about putting the rubric items in any specific order or weighting them in importance at all. That will come later. I will probably group them together somehow so related rubric items are next to each other. They will also be fleshed out with better descriptions of what it takes to get a certain score. There's only so much space in each little box.

The way a rubric like this works is that the rater starts at 0 and moves towards 3, stopping whenever criteria are no longer being met. So you can't meet the criteria for a 3 if the criteria for a 2 were not met. In working to validate the rubric, I'll look at an overall score out of 21 by adding up the 7 individual scores, the correlations between individual rubric items and external criteria, and the correlations/dependencies among rubric items.

There were a few times that I debated which items would score higher on a given criterion when one was not naturally subsumed by the other. For example, what if the recommended learning path does build effectively but is not flexible? Or what if learning activities provide new experiences as a foundation for the content to be presented but do not build at all on student experiences prior to the course? Those are obvious holes that will need to be patched before this is production ready.

As I hinted I might do in my last post, I did decide to combine the Measurable and Clarity items into Clear and Measurable Objectives. That was a more interesting decision to make than it seems. As I wrote last time, the goal was to write a rubric that allowed for rating the design of a course before it was developed. What I've been leaning more towards, however, is a rating of a developed course. Most of the items could still be used in a design-only situation (and really should be if you're not shooting from the hip and developing without designing first), but combining those two items related to writing good objectives in effect serves to weight that portion less than some of the other items that apply more naturally to a developed course.

Of course, the real power of using a rubric is not so much that you can use it to come up with a grade but rather that it can be used during the creation process to improve the quality of the end product.

So what's missing? What's redundant? What's out of order? What can't be measured?

Instructional Design Rubric

2011-05-19T23:22:00.003-06:00

In looking around for research opportunities, I made an indirect connection between the research a friend of mine was doing and something I had been thinking about at work. I helped with the research on a pilot study. It was using a rubric (Boote & Beile) to measure the quality of dissertation literature reviews. It turns out literature reviews aren't taught consistently, and (no surprise here) are not consistently performed properly either. I'll just say that after reading a stack of dissertations, my confidence in my own ability to do academic research increased dramatically.

The conversation has been had several times about how strange it was for my friend doing a literature review on doing literature reviews, just as last summer I was working on designing instruction about designing instruction. My thoughts turned to whether it would be possible to do something at a level that could improve more of the higher education world, of which PhD studies are a fairly small part. One interesting idea I came up with deals with an analysis of the gap between expected outcomes from current students in higher education and recognized outcomes from graduates of higher education, with cross sections based on type of institution, level of degree, subject area, etc. My guess is that we'd find that students aren't fully realizing the benefits they expect to receive; that is, there is a misalignment somewhere. Think about what you were asked to do in your first job out of college and whether you used anything that was listed as an objective for any of the courses you took. While I still think that is an interesting topic to pursue at some future date, it's not quite dissertation material at this point.

At work, we follow a fairly well structured design process to come up with what we call the competencies and learning objectives for our courses. Competencies are roughly equivalent to educational objectives in Bloom's Taxonomy, and the more focused learning objectives match up with Bloom's instructional objectives. Going with a more wide angle, we also couch everything for a degree program within a conceptual framework, which Bloom would probably call global objectives.

While there is research on Bloom's Taxonomy, much of what I've seen has to do with validating the order, leading to a recent swap in the last two levels since researchers had identified that evaluation is less cognitively demanding than creation. There are other taxonomies out there, which overlap quite a bit, but I have yet to come across any good research that really supports the most famous of educational taxonomies. I believe it, because it makes sense, but who is to say if something is missing or if all the current components are really necessary? One article talked about how the iconic triangle should be flipped on its point so it opens up as you reach higher cognitive levels. Whatever. I don't care about the job aid. I want to know if the taxonomy is right. So the proposed research is to rate the quality of a course designed using Bloom's Taxonomy and compare that to some measure of the actual quality of the finished course developed according to that design.

I haven't pulled this together as a formal literature review yet (but I will be pulling out my Boote & Beile rubric when I do). Just a quick compilation of features from several models out there, and I come up with an unpolished rubric that I hope may be useful in rating the quality of a course design, with design being the first D in ADDIE, not the kind where you're choosing background colors.

While I have not yet found anything substantive related to measuring the quality of the initial design of a course, Merrill does have his 5 Star and e³ rating forms based on his First Principles of Instruction along with some other theories, which are intended to rate a developed course. At that point, however, it's a little late. The course is already created and perhaps already taught. It would be more helpful to rate the design of a course before it's developed. Fix the problems before developing the instruction on a flawed design.

Again, this is not complete or valid in any way. The models I considered, based on our practice at work and general research I'm familiar with in the area, in no particular order, are as follows:

Wiggins & McTighe - Backwards Design Model
Merrill - First Principles of Instruction
Gagne - Nine Events of Instruction
Anderson & Krathwohl - Revised Bloom's Taxonomy
Mager - Preparing Instructional Objectives
Knowles - Principles of Andragogy

The principles or characteristics of effective design that align with the above theories, and that serve as a first draft of rubric principles are:

Problem-based or realistic (publishing work, problem solving, creation)
Alignment between assessment and content (teach what you test and test what you teach)
Appropriate path to complete objectives (flexibility for diverse learners, no orphans, properly scaffolded)
Measurable behavior (specific, discrete, observable)
Level of performance (alignment with content and audience)
Clarity (one verb, understandable, meaningful, maybe combine with measurable)
Metacognition
Bridging prior knowledge and future practice
Any other suggestions as to what's missing?

I'm picturing a four point scale, 0-3 for each item. The 0 is obvious; it simply doesn't meet the requirements. A score of 1 would indicate minimal coverage. A score of 2 would indicate significant alignment but missing higher level components or perhaps most objectives are written correctly and a few incorrectly. The goal is to score a 3, meaning all principles and characteristics are present and appropriately applied.

The rubric itself would take the form of a table, which I'll put together later, but the principles or characteristics would be listed down the left and the points across the top, with a description of what is needed to receive that score in the intersecting boxes.

A graduate-level course, for example, with all multiple choice tests would likely score poorly on problem solving and realism but could score okay on the alignment if you're planning on teaching at the scantron level. One could argue whether completing a multiple choice test is measurable behavior; I'd maybe put that in the 1-2 range, since while the correctness of the student's answers can be easily measured, it's debatable whether it can be considered behavior. The level of performance is obviously wrong if we're talking about giving grad students multiple choice tests, so we're talking maybe a 1 here if the questions get past a superficial level. There's not going to be much metacognition going on.

For an undergraduate-level course, on the other hand, while some of the principles may still be rated low in terms of realism and metacognition, the level of performance may be appropriate. It may even be possible to score decently on bridging prior knowledge and future practice if the scantron content is considered foundational knowledge that will support more in-depth performance in later classes.

Good, bad, too much, not enough? Other principles, theories, or methods that should be included? Has anyone actually done something like this for instructional design? What measures other than inter-rater reliability could be used to validate the score from this type of rubric?

Metered Internet

2011-04-30T20:22:00.001-06:00

In the early days of the Internet, some 10-15 years ago, there was a different landscape than we view before us today. Consumers and content providers faced a strange problem. Many consumers used slow but cheap dial-up connections to access the Internet. They couldn't justify the outrageous costs of high speed Internet, which probably wasn't even available where they lived. Maybe if there was actually any good content beyond plain text and some banded gifs, it would be worth paying the higher price, and I'm not just talking about those Flash splash pages that were popular back in 1999. I mean real multimedia content.

Content producers didn't want to invest in putting heavy content online, however, because nobody could see it. It would take too long to download over a 56K connection; there really wasn't an audience with the necessary bandwidth, other than perhaps faculty and students at universities.

We talked about it, though. Some day in the future, we would all have broadband access, and we would be able to watch videos whenever we wanted. We would make video calls, share music, and play games. As the content grew little by little, so would the numbers of broadband subscribers until there was a critical mass.

High speed Internet is practically considered a public good now, and its pervasiveness is taken for granted. Interactive multimedia content abounds, broadband access is available in most homes, as well as on mobile devices, and many consumers produce large amounts of their own content.

So of course we are now taking the obvious step of reducing our broadband use through throttling and overage charges.

In Canada, there have been some crazy expensive overage plans that look like they are being scaled back due to their ridiculosity. I can't find the link right now, but one blogger calculated that between speed limits and overage charges, it was both faster and cheaper to buy a new terabyte hard drive, fill it up, and overnight it across the country than it would be to transfer the data over the internet.

These data caps are advertised as necessary due to the strain from multimedia content, especially video sites like youtube, hulu, netflix, and the rest of their ilk. That sounds reasonable until you look at the way service providers are bundling internet-based phones and TV along with their internet service. So yes, that's right, the service providers are piling more types of traffic onto the very same network that they claim is not big enough for current usage.

The method of measuring by amount of data transferred over a month is flawed anyway. Data transfer should only really be measured by available speed. If you want to stream voice and video, you need a higher speed than if you just tweet and check emails with little real regard to volume.

Mobile is following the footsteps of traditional ISPs. Many mobile carriers are touting new cheaper wireless data plans, which actually make a ton of sense for those people who buy a smartphone with no intent of actually getting online with it. And there are a lot of people for whom that is the case. The early adopters of smartphones were IT guys who used the data like crazy. Now that the common folk carry smartphones, they don't use them to their full potential. It's still seen as odd when someone looks up information on the internet using their phone whether during a class or an informal conversation. Oh, who's Mr. Smart Pants, showing off his fancy phone? Well, you could have looked it up on your phone, too, but you apparently don't know how.

So there are some heavy users and some light users of mobile internet, so it makes sense to let the light users pay less, right? Have we learned nothing? Notice how more phones are coming with videoconferencing hardware and applications? Notice how everyone has downloadable apps for everything? Notice how more and more devices will act as a GPS with turn by turn directions? Notice how more content providers are advertising that their content is being optimized for these mobile devices? Does this sound familiar? There is more and better multimedia content coming available for smartphones, not to mention tablets which have finally started to take hold. These applications and content are user friendly enough that the non-techie masses will start using them more. The social stigma of actually using your device in a way that approaches its potential will decrease.

Let me put it more directly. Unlimited data plans on mobile devices served well to stimulate the generation of more multimedia mobile content. Now that there is plenty of content, service providers are dropping the unlimited data plans before everyone starts using the data fully, telling them that it is for their own good, but knowing full well that very soon everyone will be using more data and start slamming up against massive overage charges. Just like traditional landline high speed internet only a short time ago.

No More Books

2011-03-23T21:55:00.000-06:00

It's interesting how an initiative touted by one group as being a revolutionary improvement will often be seen as counterproductive or ineffective by another group.

At a recent faculty meeting, where discussion of a new writing center was taking place, I was witness to such an example. One faculty member pointed out that as important as it is to help students improve their writing, which the writing center is intended to do, there is unfortunately something else that has the potential to hurt our students even more.

What's the insidious plague about to be unleashed on our students' writing skills? It is an initiative aimed at reducing the amount they have to read. If we require them to read less, it will have direct impact on their ability to write. Well, of course, the matchup between reading and writing seems pretty obvious, but why would anyone propose to dramatically reduce student reading?

It turns out the faculty member misunderstood the initiative. The proposal is to create integrated learning environments where students can access multimedia, direct themselves to activities based on formative quizzes, oh yeah, and read. His understanding was that the multimedia and pretty websites were going to replace books.

While it's true that the goal is to move away from traditional printed textbooks, the same text from the publishers is going to be integrated in an electronic form with the bells and whistles that improve student engagement and track progress in ways that a plain old book could never do. I know a lot of publishers create companion websites where students can access some bonus materials, but they're not integrated with the text. Bringing them together in one place reduces the extraneous cognitive load associated with having the text and bonus features in completely separate mediums, giving them more time and mental capacity to devote to their reading.

Trolling

2011-03-02T19:53:00.001-07:00

Sitting in on some meetings with faculty members from several different departments, the discussion turned at one point to staying on top of student opinions, experiences, and problems they might be having.

photo by sue_elias
Various methods of keeping tabs on the student experience were discussed. One in particular was worthy of note. A faculty member shared her habit of trolling the course message boards and encouraged others to do the same. (Just to be clear, these are message boards open to anyone working on a given course, not locked down to just one section of a course inside an LMS.)

I alternated between staring in disbelief and suppressing laughter as I pictured a seemingly polite and professional faculty member taunting students in the official university message boards. I could understand if she wanted to do it under a pseudonym on a third party site. I mean, who doesn't do that, right? Right?

Obviously the behavior she engages in is lurking, not trolling. As nefarious as it sounds to be a lurker, it's really no big deal. It's just someone who sits by and watches the conversation but doesn't contribute. The real life equivalent of lurking is somewhat awkward; just sitting around watching people and listening in on their conversations is not considered polite. In the online world, however, lurking is often recommended, primarily as a way to get acquainted with a community before actively contributing in order to get a handle on the norms of that particular group and to get to know who the trolls are.

That brings us to trolling. It really doesn't have anything to do with trolls, as nasty as they are. Rather, it comes from a fishing term describing a method of dragging a lure behind a boat. The lures are often designed to mimic dying or injured fish. The idea is the troll tosses the bait out there and drags it around looking for easy prey. The victim thinks they're attacking a helpless victim, but they thus become the victim as they take the bait and are unwittingly dragged into an argument. Getting into an argument with a troll means you have lost. You are the victim. There is no way to win. The argument is what the troll is looking for. The flame war is the desired end result. Even the most glaring hole in a troll's argument cannot be addressed, because it is often simply more bait designed to keep the "conversation" going.

Chaos is only avoided by ignoring the troll or calling him or her out directly as a troll and then proceeding to ignore. I recently watched a video of a dude hitting himself in the face with a racquetball. In the comments, a troll starts an argument by claiming that the sport they were playing was squash, not racquetball. It's clearly racquetball. No logic prevails, as any evidence is simply countered by "it's squash". At one point, the troll even directly admits to being a troll and then immediately parrots back the line again, "it's squash" and the argument continues.

What's the point? Why would someone do that? It doesn't matter. Analyzing why someone would do such a thing is beside the point. The only thing that really matters is recognizing it and disengaging immediately.

Now imagine with me again the kind-hearted faculty member leaving our discussion on how to best engage with and assist our students, pulling up her laptop in some dark corner of the hallway, and leaving provoking comments on the student message boards.

A Whole New World

2011-02-17T22:30:00.001-07:00

Last month, I mentioned how sometimes people will fight against something and by so doing cause what they were trying to avoid in the first place. Here is a similar example, this time of people arguing against something and thus making the point they were arguing against.

At East High School in Salt Lake City (yes, THE East High School), they are putting on a bilingual production of Aladdin. I think it's a great idea. Basically, half the school is Caucasian, one quarter Hispanic, and the rest other minorities. The problem is that only the white kids try out for the theater, until now.

They are coming together. They are all happy to have met people they didn't know before. They're helping each other with their languages. What a great story, too. Aladdin is all about not trying to be something you're not but loving others for what they are. Maybe next year they'll do a bilingual Romeo and Juliet.

The point I made in the first paragraph comes from the comments on the story. The more people complain about this production, the more their own xenophobia is apparent, thus reinforcing the need for such a production. Most of the first comments were people saying this was a bad thing, though it is balancing out with supporting comments as the day goes on. Some commenters claim this is a ploy to encourage acceptance of illegal aliens. One asks that we stop catering to minorities and accept each other without bringing race and culture into the conversation. Another asserts that a bilingual production won't help the Hispanic kids learn English, which is the global language of business and science. Two commenters unfold the logical fallacy that if we do things in Spanish, we'll have to start doing things in many other languages as well.

First, who knows if the Hispanic kids are illegal or not? Second, who cares? They may very well have been born here, and whether they were or were not, they likely have little choice but to live where their parents are. These are children we're talking about. How messed up is the request that we accept each other without talking about our races and cultures? If the acceptance only goes one way, from minority to majority, that is actually a request that minorities reject their own race and culture with an out where the majority doesn't have to accept anyone that's different.

When it comes to learning languages, I don't think we need to worry about whether or not the Hispanic kids are learning English. They've grown up here; they know the language. They weren't ignoring the theater because they don't know the language but because there was simply a cultural barrier that needed to be broken. It has now been broken.

It's the white kids who are less likely to know another language, like the joke (not actually a joke) that if you know two languages you're bilingual, three languages you're trilingual, and one language you're American. Learning a second (or third) language helps one understand his or own language better. And talk about the language of science being English, except that many of the terms we use come from Latin, upon which Spanish is based. A firm grasp of a Romance language makes Latin a lot easier.

I think it would be great if the slippery slope argument came true when it was put forward that if we allow Spanish, we'd have to do things in countless other languages. Okay, let's do it then. Let's mix in Arabic, Hindi, Mandarin, and Russian. We're still arguing about Spanish, when there are all these other languages that millions (even billions) of other people are speaking. We're not at risk of having the issues that China and India have with hundreds of languages swirled all over the place causing communication issues. English is already common, in spite of how poor of a language it is; we just need to add on a few more to spice things up.

The bigger question is one of culture, not language. Language happens to often be the piece that starts someone off into a better understanding of other cultures. Is there a better way to build cultural understanding than our children sharing language and song in a production about not trying to change yourself to impress others?

Improving Teaching by Understanding How People Learn

2011-02-16T22:17:00.001-07:00

A colleague recommended a book he's been reading, “How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School” by the National Research Council.

In the introductory chapter, they give some important concepts for teaching based on an understanding of how people learn. The main points:

student initial knowledge and conceptions provide a foundation for further learning

frequent formative assessment encourages metacognition and leads to deeper learning

need to teach education students to help their students recognize and replace incorrect preconceptions

in-depth coverage of fewer topics is better than superficial coverage in many topics

to be an effective teacher, you need to have done in-depth study yourself

assessment must test at the level teaching occurs, that is deep testing for deep teaching (students will do poorly on superficial testing if they've been taught for deep understanding)

metacognition needs to be planned into the curriculum

The whole book is graciously provided online for free. See the complete table of contents.

Student Government or Start a School?

2011-02-14T15:19:00.003-07:00

Someone has to plan parties. Otherwise they either wouldn't happen or would be very poorly organized. So there is a place for student government in college, but it should be renamed to reflect that limitation.

High school is all about being popular, so it makes sense that student government there would be structured around popular kids maintaining their popularity monopoly. It just doesn't translate to the college level.

College is a great equalizer. It's a time to regress to the mean. Ultra popular kids will find they really aren't that much more special than everyone else (big fish in little pond becomes little fish in big pond). Shy kids will break out of their shell. All that is really needed at this point is someone to throw a few big university-wide parties and several small department-sized parties to bring everyone together.

A recent article in the paper at USU regarding approval ratings of various facets of student government there focuses mainly on the fact that approval ratings are up, because they put on some great concerts this year. That's as it should be.

Just a couple months ago, there was another article about how student government was restructuring compensation for their officers, since as of halfway through the school year, they had put themselves $80,000 in the hole. I'm okay with someone who's bad at math putting on a big party, because the worst they're likely to do is go over budget by a few thousand dollars or run out of ice cream halfway through the party. The problem is when they start stepping out of their party zone to push for new buildings or try to influence academic programs, both of which they've also been doing over the past couple years. Major capital investments and toying with academics are just something they shouldn't be allowed to play with.

I'm not saying that there are no students that could contribute in a meaningful way to the university community or even do awesome things around the world. There are many who can and do. The people who will do these amazing things, however, are not likely to run for office, since they recognize its party-planner role. My dad was Business Senator about 40 years ago, so no offense, Padre, if you're reading this; maybe leave a comment if things were much different back then than they are now. From my own experience about 10 years ago as VP of one of the chapters of ACM on campus, we did get decent turnout to some great educational sessions on a variety of topics, but the billiards and pizza party at the end of the year got a lot bigger turnout than the demos on Flash or ASP.

To drive the point home, check out this video by current president Tyler Tolson, encouraging students to run for office. His point is basically that you get paid to eat dinner with university administrators and students follow you around campus (unless their shoe comes off like the dude on the far left at 1:01).

Compare that to Casey Allred, also an undergraduate student, who has created a non-profit organization, Effect International, and built a school in India with more on the way.

What do you do in your spare time? Throw a party? Rid the world of illiteracy? Choose what works for you, but be honest about it.

Problems in Student Teaching

2011-02-10T22:22:00.003-07:00

This week is WGU's semi-annual academic meetings. We're almost getting too big for the conference center we've been meeting at, with about 700 people attending.

Today one of the presenters talked about a particularly difficult problem facing the teacher education programs. An important component of licensure is student teaching, and true to form, WGU has a different term for it: demonstration teaching. Regardless of what you call it, placing students in schools is becoming more difficult, and I imagine it's the same for schools across the country.

With the economy down, people are out of work, so they go back to school to either be better positioned to find a job now or to at least find a better job when the big recovery happens, so enrollments are up. Budgets in the states are down, so teachers are laid off, meaning there are fewer classrooms in which the increased number of teacher candidates can be placed.

Add in the pressures of NCLB, and a whole new challenge appears. In schools that are struggling to maintain AYP, teachers may decline to take on a student teacher because of the extra burden it imposes and the chance it could cause problems for their students' scores. For failing schools, well, it's not really an option to student teach at a failing school.

Unfortunately, I don't know what the solutions are. A change to NCLB seems like a good place to start.

Know Your Bill of Rights

2011-02-08T22:16:00.003-07:00

While it is rare these days to have to assert one's rights as guaranteed by the Third Amendment, it's probably important to know what's in it. This is mainly to reduce the extent to which you look like a fool when you mix it up with one of the more commonly cited amendments.

Sending Mixed Signals?

2011-02-01T16:29:00.000-07:00

We're heading up to go skiing at Beaver Mountain with the family tonight, which is always fun. Starting to get ready reminded me of the mixed signals Utah State sends when it comes to winter activities on campus. I love sledding on Old Main Hill, and ice blocking in the summer is also fun.

The student association lists sledding down the hill as an important campus tradition.

Then there's this video put out by the university highlighting the winter recreation close by campus. The whole video is great. Jump to 2:38 for video of people sledding on Old Main, and at 3:01, it blows me away what the dude does while skiing down the hill.

Just don't tell the risk management office what you're doing or you'll be severely warned about how dangerous it is.

I just wonder which way they want it. Is it a dangerous activity that the university should warn us to avoid or an advertisement to attract students to USU? I, for one, am receiving mixed signals.

Academic Advantage Scam ...or not

2011-01-17T13:35:00.006-07:00

It's funny how sometimes in an attempt to prevent something from happening, people will actually cause the very thing they were trying to prevent in the first place.

It seems to happen more often on the Internet, but I have seen it in real life, too.

The most recent Internet story is of the tutoring company Academic Advantage who sent a takedown notice to BoingBoing, because the words 'academic', 'advantage', and 'scam' were all on the same page, not necessarily next to each other, and talking about a completely unrelated story to whether or not the tutoring company is a scam. I don't even care if they are or not. If they had read the original story, they'd probably know that it's not talking about them. Even if it was talking about them, if they knew anything about BoingBoing and its readers, they'd know to leave it alone and let it die away quietly instead of bringing more attention to themselves.

The real life example that comes to mind is a few years ago right here in Logan, when a planned PETA protest at the KFC actually ended in a counterprotest. News of PETA's plans attracted one of the largest lunch crowds that store had ever seen. I had considered going down there for lunch that day myself, but couldn't make it because of something else going on. Of course that was before Oprah's free meal fiasco when I ate there so many times over a month or so that I don't think I can step foot in a KFC again.

Breaking News

2011-01-12T21:53:00.002-07:00

This just posted on the Salt Lake Tribune website:

The Salt Lake Tribune wants to remind readers that The Tribune’s articles, photographs and other content are protected by the federal Copyright Act, and legally cannot be reproduced elsewhere without written permission from The Tribune.

All content in The Salt Lake Tribune’s print editions and on The Tribune ’s websites, including sltrib.com, is copyright protected.

See the original story for more information. Yes, it's actually a story.

I'm pretty sure if I include the following quotes from the story, it will still be just a little less than half, so will not be considered most of the story and will thus be okay.

The law allows people to quote a small amount of a copyrighted story so as to be able to comment on it, and even criticize it. ... But copyright law does not allow anyone to copy and display most or all of a story, photograph or graphic. To do so is a violation of our copyright and we will use all legal remedies available to address such infringements.

I'm pretty easy to find, Tim, so give me a call if you have any problems.

Snow law like a snow law

2010-12-28T17:59:00.001-07:00

It's interesting that within a few weeks of each other, two cities within a few miles of each other both discussed making it "unlawful for any person to push, plow, or otherwise deposit snow from private property into the public street."

Smithfield passed it, whereas North Logan rejected it.

It makes one wonder if somebody is going around pushing all the city councils to adopt the same ordinance. I don't know if Smithfield and North Logan use their own crews or contract out with Logan or the county, but I'd guess the same group takes care of plowing if they both discussed this issue at the same time.

Logan City, where I live, has their own snow removal crews and already has an ordinance that prohibits leaving water, wood, rocks, snow, ice, vehicles, etc. in the road in such a way that they block travel or endanger people. Logan's ordinance is worded in a way that mostly makes sense, although it does make me wonder if the puddle my sprinklers leave in the gutter would be considered a stagnant pool and leave me technically in violation.

photo by mvhargan
I'd be interested to see the wording of the proposed ordinances, but the stories linked above were a little sparse on the details. The main detail that seems clear is that they don't want residents pushing snow into the street and leaving tracks that freeze into bumps that can cause the snowplows to bounce around when they hit them; you know, a miniature version of the wall of snow the plows push into the end of your driveway right after you finish shoveling? So why don't they just make an ordinance saying that? "Don't create snow or ice piles that interfere with snowplows."

On a side note, you'd think someone could invent a snowplow with some type of guard on the right side that could be enabled by the driver passing a driveway or intersection, which would temporarily stop the snow from flowing freely off to the side and when disengaged would release any accumulated snow. It wouldn't have to hold much for very long. But I digress.

From the discussion in the articles, if it just prohibits pushing snow from private property into a public street, then what happens if you push that big pile from the snowplow back into the street? If it's technically snow from the public street, not from your private property, is there a repercussion? North Logan did the right thing and rejected it, since they agreed that it would simply be unenforceable.

Friend Lists

2010-12-26T10:01:00.002-07:00

Is anyone out there using friend lists on FB? Are they being used "correctly"? I haven't set any up yet, since I have yet to see a point. I just don't trust that FB can get it right and that something I post for one group of people I know won't end up being displayed to the wrong people.

I generally like most Google products, although they admittedly have had some failures. That is great, though, because it means they're not afraid to try new things and pull the plug on what doesn't work. Their failure with Google Wave may end up working out well for the few people who actually used it, since they open sourced the project, and the Apache group has picked it up.

Google has yet to really hit it big in the social media market, other than perhaps their acquisition of Blogger several years ago. I don't include Gmail or Google Talk as social media, because email and IM are private communication tools, not social media. Android is great, but it's an operating system.

I don't care if Google's Orkut hits it big here in the states. I'm fine if FB keeps its stranglehold on the market. I do hope that Orkut can be used to push FB to innovate in a direction that's useful to users. Several months ago, a new version of Orkut was launched, which has something FB really needs: real separation of friend networks.

We see the friend list arrive on FB, presumably because of the new Orkut feature. The problem is that they need a whole FAQ page to explain how to use it, because it's hidden several clicks into a submenu where few venture. So like most privacy settings in FB, it's hard to find if you even know it's there. Given their history, what happens when FB decides to change their privacy settings and everything you posted for one group of friends suddenly becomes public to all (either accidentally or on purpose)?

We can do this the easy way or the hard way

2010-12-23T19:04:00.000-07:00

There's an obscure change that was made in Office 2007, which I only noticed because of a chance experience. They changed the terminology from labeling the X and Y axes of a chart to labeling the horizontal and vertical axes. What's the difference, you might ask? The horizontal axis is the X axis, so who cares?

I'll get to that, but first how I even became aware of this issue. I happened to be helping a student who wanted help getting ready for a retake of a test on Excel. She missed part of the chart, because she mixed up the X and Y axis labels. As we were looking at what she had done, it was very obvious that the labels did not match. I don't remember the exact topic, but it would have been analogous to having a label that said "States" next to the axis with a range of numbers and a label that said "Population" next to the axis with the names of several states. You look at it and have to wonder if something is messed up, but then again, I have written before about how students will consciously choose to answer a question incorrectly with the idea in their heads that our tests were constructed by idiots and therefore the wrong answer will likely be scored as correct.

I showed her how the labels obviously didn't match, and I opened her spreadsheet file, and showed her how the box labeled X-axis had the text she was supposed to put in the Y-axis box and vice versa. The problem? I have to admit there was some logic to her decision to switch them, albeit based on a possible problem in our educational system, which is where I'm headed with this.

Among the various chart types in Excel are the bar chart and the column chart. I don't want to get into the difference between the types of charts, where you'd use a histogram vs a bar chart vs a line chart, etc. Perhaps another post. Suffice it to say that Excel doesn't really do a histogram without a lot of work on your part, and it's beyond the scope of this post.

So a column chart and a bar chart in Excel are actually both bar charts, with Excel's bar chart rotated 90 degrees. What ends up as the vertical axis, since it is rotated, is actually the X-axis. The reason it is the X-axis is because it is the independent variable. The dependent variable is the Y. I still remember in middle school missing a quiz question, because I hadn't read the chapter for that day and had to guess whether it was the X or Y that was vertical and horizontal. It turns out, that while convention does generally put the X horizontally, it doesn't have to be that way. There is a greater law. Unfortunately, we are taught the simplistic version of the law. If we were to take the advice of some and teach more statistics rather than calculus in school, perhaps there would be some importance of knowing the difference between a dependent and independent variable and thus we might be taught the greater law.

So, what the girl had done based on this "fact" that had been so ingrained in her throughout years of math classes was specifically decide to put the labels in the wrong boxes just so the X label would be on the horizontal axis, even if that meant having the X label in the properties box labeled Y and next to data that didn't make sense. After mistakes like this and others by a multitude of students, I started putting notes like "if something looks wrong, it probably is" on most test versions that I would write.

Apparently, Microsoft must have gotten some feedback from other people getting confused, and so rather than leave it as technically correct but difficult to understand, they punted. They just changed the labels to be called the horizontal and vertical axis labels in Office 2007. Now there is no question. And the three people per year that had a problem with this now don't learn anything, because it never comes up. In case you're wondering, OpenOffice still labels the vertical axis on the bar chart as the X-axis, because that's what it is.

So at what point do we switch from teaching the easy rule to teaching the more complicated but correct rule? Is there ever a reason to teach the easy rule? Wouldn't we perhaps see fewer line charts that should actually be histograms, etc. if we taught people assuming they were capable of understanding an advanced concept? Is this an advanced concept?

TMI

2010-12-08T14:59:00.003-07:00

The acronym TMI is often used as a way of expressing that someone just shared too much information with you, generally something embarrassing or private or that they just don't care about. I believe some of this comes because of an overload of information always flowing around us through computers and mobile devices, so we lose the ability to filter out extraneous or private information from that which should be communicated.

Given the large amounts of information that is put out there, since people do seem to just braindump it all onto various social media sites (or vetted news sites) in a way that's easily accessible by others, those who learn to actually mine the vast data fields will do very well for themselves in our information-based society.

While some people see these vast data fields as a wasteland, like the Abominable Snowman in Monsters, Inc., I would say, "I think you mean wonderland!" We should be able to take the plethora of information created by others and turn it into something useful. There should be no such thing as TMI, because the more data out there, the better we can harness it for the good of ourselves or others.

I'm occasionally made fun of for looking up information on my phone or a computer. Someone asks a question or wants a clarification about a statement made by someone else, and everyone just sits there thinking, yeah, someone should find that out. Then the conversation goes a different direction and everyone forgets there was something they wanted to know. So I look it up before forgetting what the question was. And I get strange looks for providing the answer. I'm the smarty pants because I googled it, when half the room could have also pulled out their iPhone or Droid and looked it up themselves. They're using their phones to text, so it's not like they're put away to be polite to the present company.

Isn't that why we have smartphones? I mean, it's cool that you can use your iPhone as a digital rattle to keep your kids occupied, but isn't access to Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo Answers, Twitter, etc. the best reason to have a smartphone? Nielsen claims that 25% of smartphone users don't even access any data on their phones and that 6% of users consume over half the mobile phone data. The rest of us are on that logarithmic continuum somewhere.

What other information is out there that we aren't using? If you have a blog (or any website for that matter), do you use Google Analytics to see who is coming to your site, from where, and for what? How long do they stay, what do they do while visiting, and do they actually find what they were looking for? Is that just another type of TMI that you don't care about?

Over the past 2-3 years, my two most consistently popular posts are on Pedagogy vs Andragogy and Surf the Channel. Coming in a distant third place is a post related to Cognitive Load Theory.

It's interesting, since I spent a lot more time writing the cognitive load post than I did the other two. Maybe the third place post was too long or too academic or too focused on the specific situation in which I was using it. Something I have been able to figure out, though, is that if you can find something that is an interesting or upcoming topic that not many people are blogging about, you'll get a lot of hits. That may seem obvious, but I only figured it out because I had data that told me. If you think I should have known that already, guess which of your blog posts are the most popular and then turn on Google Analytics and tell me how close you were after a month or two of collecting data.

I've been thinking for awhile now that I need to write another post on Andragogy, because I'm afraid that the one that several hundred people a month find just wasn't all that well written or informative. It was just a quick recap of an experience I had and a few comments on some of the basics of that area. I know a lot more about the topic now and knowing people are looking for that information and having a hard time finding it, I feel it my duty to help others make some sense of it.

They could find academic articles on it or take a class on the subject. They could go to conferences and talk to people using techniques based on these principles. But they don't. At least they're googling it, which many don't even have the motivation to do like I already talked about. So if that many people come asking the question, how many more are out there who don't even ask, because they can't be bothered? There's probably not much I can do to reach out to them, since I can't force my blog down everyone's throats. I should at least try to answer the question people who do find my site are asking.

So what does Google Analytics tell you? And what are you going to do about it?

TSA

2010-11-27T23:04:00.003-07:00

I don't have quite the audience or flare of Ron Paul, but I had a thought regarding the recent complaints over enhanced search techniques by the TSA. My last flights were right before the new regulations went live, so I haven't been through any of this myself. I did have one packet each of mayo and mustard make it through four security screenings in October without being caught. I also had a TSA agent tell me to throw out my toothpaste, even though it was only 3 ounces and fit fine in my ziploc bag. I told her about three times that it was under the size limit before she finally made the connection, let it through, and said something about how it was nice having passengers that know the rules.

The basic problem I see, besides the inconsistent training, is that the TSA wants to live on both sides of the government/private enterprise line. As a government entity, their employees are shielded from prosecution for actions in the line of duty. A wave of their hand and they can call a cop over to arrest you for the most minor thing, yet however egregious their offenses, they have a shield that protects them.

This is where it gets muddy, though. They can search you with or without cause. They can hold you for as long as they feel like with no explanation. A cop can't do either of those things. A TSA agent can provoke you until you crack and then have a cop cart you off. That's entrapment in the legal world, but they want to be treated like a private enterprise all of a sudden and not be subject to the constitutional protections against government abuses. They require you to stand where they tell you and for how long and have you arrested if you give up and decide you no longer want to be their customer after entering the secure area.

Oh, well the airlines are a private enterprise, and there's no constitutional right to fly, so if you don't like it, you don't have to fly. Of course. If I don't like the color shirt the local grocery store makes its baggers wear, I don't have to shop there. If I believe soft drink companies are poisoning us, I don't have to consume their products. If I don't want to be mugged, I avoid certain streets in certain cities. Many stores have signs saying they can refuse service to anyone or that customers must wear shoes and a shirt to be served. Those are all simple enough and deal with private enterprise. There are varying levels of governmental involvement in all of the above situations, but when it comes down to it, I generally have pretty decent alternatives. If I need to get from one side of the country to the other reasonably quickly and safely, I have not as many choices. The airlines, while they are private, are highly regulated and propped up by government subsidies, since it is a national security issue in many ways.

So which is it? Is the TSA a government agency that is subject to constitutional protection against illegal searches or are they acting on behalf of their clients, the airlines, in a civil/private matter like security guards in a sports arena? Is the TSA a private organization that can make a customer wait hours while providing lousy customer service or are they a law enforcement agency that can only detain you for cause?

There is a tension here that cannot last. Perhaps we can get the Tea Partiers to take up this issue and do something useful with their powerful masses.

More Hiring Fun

2010-11-27T21:20:00.001-07:00

I haven't blogged a whole lot about my change of employment that happened this summer. I'm sure at some point I'll let loose about it, but for now I'm still drinking it all in. However, I do have some fun stuff left over from working at USU related to job applications. I've written about other strange interviews and bad resumes before, and while I hesitate to talk about hiring issues a ton, since an offhand comment about someone you didn't hire can become a major lawsuit issue, I've also heard from a reader or two that those kinds of stories are some of their favorites. So I'll try to balance things as well as I can.

The first is from an interview within the past year. It was going reasonably well until I talked about what is expected while working in the computer lab, making a half-question-half-statement about not being on Facebook all the time while working. It turned into a kind of awkward moment when she pretty much told me she probably would be on Facebook a lot. Kudos for honesty? Or recommendation for a psychologist to help with your addiction? Or just end the interview as soon as possible, because we're not hiring you?

Just as I was leaving, while they were in the middle of hiring my replacement, we also had quite a bit of staffing to take care of, since several people had graduated or had other personal things come up that they weren't coming back in the Fall. I was hoping my replacement would do all the hiring, but when the timeline got tight, I had to review the resumes we had received.

I had received about 250 emails about student jobs in the lab. In 2 hours, I made my way through all 250 emails, whittling the list down to 20 potential hires which I passed along to my just barely hired replacement to make the final decision. Whew, that was fun! I did have the sense to copy out a few gems from the cover letters and resumes I received. Some of the best:

Lagoon (Seasonal) Managed a group of 6-8 employees, keeping them in line and on task

I knew it was important to keep customers in lines, but I didn't realize they had lines for employees, too.

I'm interest in working in the CIL Lab. What is required for?

English proficiency, maybe for?

Working knowledge of all Windows and Apple based software.

All?

Child Care, Many repeat requests

So you babysat your neighbor's kids every weekend?

I would be willing to work before, after or when I have breaks in between classes.

Being a campus job, I can't require students work during classes, but yes, before, between, or after classes are pretty much the times I make everyone work.

Rapport Leadership International

This is one I was pretty sure I didn't want to even touch. Just from the name of it, you can guess what kind of place it is. I did take a minute to google it, and yes, it's one of those training courses where they humiliate you and rip you down to nothing before building you up into a machine that rips down your friends and loved ones, for only thousands of dollars a month. I don't know or care the details of RLI, Impact, or the other similar programs; I just know enough to know I don't want anything to do with them. If you want real leadership training, ask me about Wood Badge.

Proficient in Word, Excel, Power Point, The Internet and Dental Software

Ooh, proficient in both the internet AND dental software?

Sandwich Artist

Look, I know that's the title Subway gives the people who work there, but you're not an artist, and what you're making barely resembles a sandwich.

2.81 gpa

Just leave it off if it's under 3.0. If I ask for GPA, you're hosed, but if I happen to not ask for it, you might be able to slip in unnoticed. I have had people with bad GPAs be good employees and vice versa, but with the sheer numbers, any bad info you give me will be used against you. Of course, the question may arise whether 2.81 is a bad GPA. It's basically a B- average, so perhaps not all that bad. Consider, however, that to get a GPA in that range, you have to balance out every A you receive with a D in another class. Grade inflation itself is an entirely different conversation, but within the current system, more than a handful of Ds (or worse) means there's something wrong. On the other hand, the perennial 4.0 student can be suspect as well. I just added that, because I want to make sure I offend everyone equally. There's a lot more I could say, but I'm going to save it for another post.

I really would like a job.

Oh, well, yeah, that makes sense. Just come on in.

Roller Coaster Aficionado

Actually, I was intrigued by this one, but not enough to keep him or her, given the tight timeline.

That's all the quotes. There were a few other items that helped me in my filtering. One person submitted a 2 MB attachment; if it was a whole artistic portfolio, I'd understand, but we're talking a resume and cover letter that should come in under a couple hundred K. I received one resume in MS Works format. I could have converted it somehow and figured out a way to read it...but I didn't. Another interesting one was a duplicate resume that I recognize having received several months earlier; the thing that made it stand out so much was the same mistakes that made me toss it the first time still weren't corrected. As always, I received several resumes with a completely blank page appended to the end, since they didn't double check to delete the extra whitespace.

I did have a girl earlier this year apply; if I recall correctly, she was referred by someone else who had been working for me. Her resume was actually bad enough that I emailed her back with some tips to help her improve the resume before submitting elsewhere. I didn't have the time to send back constructive criticism on all these beauties, though.

More On TwHistory and Social Networking

2010-11-12T12:54:00.001-07:00

I recently posted about the top 10 things I'd learned from TwHistory, a project I've been helping with to teach history using social media. I was at a conference recently where one of the papers presented was about how social networking doesn't create learning communities or communities of practice. I'm going to do a more full analysis of it at some point, but for now, I'd like to point out that TwHistory has shown to some extent that the supposition of the paper is false or at least not completely true. I don't know if I even want to touch on their premise that you need more control than social media tools allow to facilitate a constructivist learning environment.

Social media/networking tools are just that, tools. A classroom is a tool in a manner of speaking. Blackboard, let's see if I can say this with a straight face, is a tool. (Blackboard's "designers" are tools also, if you know what I mean.)

Of course just using Twitter won't magically build a community, just as throwing a prominent researcher into a classroom won't make him or her an effective teacher and dropping a class into Blackboard won't stimulate discussion.

A couple guys who had worked together on some previous software projects to create tools for building communities around openly licensed educational materials came up with the idea. I was involved in the first reenactment on TwHistory because of something one of them posted on Facebook. An awesome high school history teacher has enhanced her method of teaching history because of that Twitter reenactment. A grant from Talis funded a sweet new twhistory.org website that will allow anyone to build and share their own reenactments because it was shown that it could be useful in the classroom. People are starting to use the new site on their own now.

A community is being built using various online tools. A common reaction from many people who hear about this community is that they are now interested in using some of these social media tools that they were never interested in before, because they see it can be useful for something more than just wasting time. They want to join in, because there is a community pulling them in.

There's more to come on this topic, but that's enough for now. If you've made it this far, here's a bonus 5 more things I've learned from TwHistory.

To reduce the amount of complaining you have to listen to, appoint a murmurer for the group - if anyone wants to murmur, they have to get his or her permission first.
Expect to be "taught a lesson" if you fall sleep while on guard.
Assign a few select hunters, because if everyone in camp goes, you'll scare off all the game.
If your ramrod gets stuck in the barrel right in the middle of battle, just shoot it out at someone and pick up someone else's gun.
You can tell the tribe an indian is from by the shape of the moccasin print.

Travel Dichotomy

2010-10-20T22:47:00.009-06:00

I traveled to a conference in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago. It was interesting to reflect on the atmosphere in my hometown vs. that of the conference venue. Isn't it great how even though it's annoying to stand in security lines at the airport, modern technology lets us go to such extremes as these within the course of one day:

Leaving in this morning, this was the view.

This was the view mid-afternoon.

And then that evening.

This guy was pretty good with the spray paint.

Above Fremont Street, just outside the hotel I was staying at, they have a TV that spans four blocks, with music videos and other stuff playing throughout the night. (Fast forward to 1:40 for Break on Through.)

Top 10 Things I Learned from TwHistory

2010-10-14T10:42:00.004-06:00

I've had the opportunity to work on the TwHistory project over the past year and a half. It's been really fun and interesting. I've never been much of a history connoisseur myself, but it's turned me around.

I've surely learned more than 10 things from TwHistory research, but these are a few that come to mind:

There was a girl who really would stand at the bow of the Titanic after her nightly escapades.
Fort Bridger was just a couple small log cabins.
No one really won the Battle of Gettysburg.
Never leave the percussion cap on the hammer of your rifle.
If you don't burn towns as you march through them, the ladies treat you nicely.
Don't tie up the prophet's horse within rope's distance of a sinkhole.
If you're considering deserting the army, be prepared to dig your own grave and then be shot in it.
Only 3 of the 4 smokestacks on the Titanic were real; the last one was decoration.
The best time to raid the enemy's camp is just when they're sitting down to dinner.
History can be fun and interesting.

The First Cut is the Deepest

2010-09-15T22:13:00.003-06:00

I grew up generally interested in sports, although I never played on an organized team. My brother played baseball for several years, and a major portion of my inlaws' lives as they grew up revolved around organized sports (some of them still do). I collected baseball cards, played a little baseball in the backyard with my brother, played basketball fairly regularly at Scouts (but never enjoyed it that much), and went to a few Yankees games, even though I was a Mets fan. The Yankees fan in the family was a lot more vocal than I was. I still remember the day I became a Mets fan. It was pretty anticlimactic. Sitting in Mrs. Sullivan's fourth grade class, probably working on our latch hook pillows, Ralph Aiello asked me who my favorite team was. I told him the Mets and the Yankees, since living in North Jersey, those were the teams you heard most about. He told me I couldn't like both of them. So I picked the Mets. That was it.

Over the next few years, I didn't think much about playing organized sports until shop class at Eisenhower Middle School. We would be working on our pointless projects (no, really, even more pointless than most junior high shop classes; my brother at least got to make a grappling hook) and the guys would be talking about their football and baseball teams they played on. It kind of hit me. I thought, hey, I'd like to play something. I realized, though, by that point, I knew little enough about most of the sports that I'd probably make a fool of myself if I actually tried out for anything, since I hadn't been playing since I was 5 like they all had.

When I was 15, I worked a summer at the baseball fields. I was ahead of my time and unwittingly broke a gender barrier; apparently boys are supposed to work as umpires, and girls work in the snack bar. I got a job at the snack bar...with 11 girls. I'd figured out something all the umpires hadn't: girls, shade, and candy were better than angry parents, hot sun, and no candy.

In high school, my friends and I started playing volleyball regularly, slowly figuring out the rules and techniques (which was a lot harder in the pre-internet days). We played a lot, and once or twice we even challenged random people at the big volleyball pits in West Bountiful, but still nothing organized. My sisters got me into racquetball when I started college, and in my time at USU, I took classes in racquetball, volleyball, billiards, and golf. Over the next decade or so, I played each of those sports sporadically. I had a pretty regular volleyball schedule going a couple years ago, but it fizzled out. I've also been picking up the Triathlon bug as well, but that's another post.

So about a year and a half ago, I taught a couple guys that worked for me to play racquetball. We started playing a couple days a week when we needed to get away from the office for a little bit. In a completely unrelated move, I had joined Facebook a few months before, and was kind of figuring it out, not sure how much I liked it or not. (I'm still not sure.) Like a good Seinfeld episode, but less funny, the two stories came together when Tom Caswell, a fellow PhD student, posted something on Facebook about how the best part of his PhD program was playing racquetball. I followed up, started playing with him and a group of other guys, and over a year later, generally playing 2 or 3 mornings a week, here I am pretty decent at racquetball.

So a couple nights ago, the racquetball team, officially a campus club, held tryouts. I was pretty sure I didn't have the time to actually join the team, but curiosity got the best of me. Could I compete? Could I make the team?

I showed up 5 minutes early, and it was a pretty packed house. I was by far the oldest person there. I figured I'd get toasted and head home, coming away with a good story about how woefully inadequate I am, while maybe learning a move or two to show the guys the next morning.

We started late, and there were way too many guys there for the number of courts they had available, especially since for some reason the team president thought it was important to play singles, not doubles or cutthroat, which left a handful of us standing around talking about how nice it would be to get to play. Someone finally convinced el presidente to let us play cutthroat and/or doubles and we were all in. They watched from up above, occasionally asking questions like our names and how many years of school we had left. I did pretty well, serving quite a few aces and some very wicked kill shots from all the way in the back court. I was on fire and started thinking, hey, maybe I can do this. After about half an hour of playing (and half an hour of not playing), they called us all together to make the first cut. I didn't make it.

They called around 8 to 10 names and asked those guys to come outside to talk about what was next, since they would be having another round of cuts at some point. I biked home, shrugging off what might have been, knowing I probably wasn't going to have even joined the team had I made it.

Just as I got home, I got a phone call from the team president. Apparently he'd written my name down but accidentally called someone else's name instead of mine. He wanted me to come back. So I drove back to the gym to find out the details on when they would be having us come back for the final round of cuts.

Oh. They were doing it right then. I hadn't brought my stuff back, since I didn't think we were playing anymore that night. I didn't have my glove, racquet, goggles, or headband. I borrowed a racquet that I wasn't used to playing with, sweat running unimpeded down my face, and afraid of getting hit in the eye. Still, I played well. I destroyed a couple guys when I know they were watching from above. I also was destroyed by one guy that was pretty awesome. It was humbling to be in the same court as one so great. I was pretty evenly matched with a couple other guys. So you do the math: if they're going to take 5 or 6 guys, and there was only one guy who could really slaughter me, I had to be in. Maybe I will be on the team. Maybe I will get to go to all these cool tournaments. Maybe I'll go to nationals.

And I was cut. For the first time in my life I didn't make the team (except the other time about an hour before, when I was accidentally cut but then reinstated).

And just like that, I'm back in dissertation land.

Addicted or just that busy?

2010-08-17T13:08:00.005-06:00

How busy or addicted to your mobile device do you have to be that you can't set your phone down for five minutes while you take pictures for your business card?

Here's more info if you're extra excited about having someone this busy as your realtor. And yes, there is a picture of him talking on a different phone.

What is Instructional Design?

2010-07-31T23:14:00.003-06:00

I'm working on a project designing an M.Ed. program. There is one course in Instructional Design. It's kind of interesting having taken many courses and done quite a bit of research on this topic, it's hard to nail things down to what you'd cover in just one class.

If you're looking for core principles for this field, it seems to me that there are three general levels of abstraction. At least, this is what I came up with.

The first layer is what I'll call the Process layer. This is ADDIE, the Dick & Carey Model, or Rapid Prototyping, meaning the overall process of determining stakeholder needs, implementing something to meet those needs, and evaluating how well needs were met. These models are generally ongoing cycles.

The second layer is what I'll call the Architectural layer. This is Merrill's First Principles of Instruction or Gagné's 9 Events of Instruction. In order to get to this layer, you have to be (or should be) going through a design process, and you decide the types of problems students will have to solve and the ways in which students will be motivated to learn. This is the core of designing how the course will function, how and when learning materials will be accessed by students, and making sure on a macro level that the course will be effective.

The third layer is what I'll call the Turbidity layer. This is Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory or Clark & Mayer's Multimedia Principles. Once the first two layers are set and the overall framework has been laid out, the outline is filled in with details. These specifics can either add to or detract from the planning in the first two phases. Maybe you've got awesome videos with no pause buttons. Maybe course materials are scattered around on half a dozen websites, each with their own username and password to access. Given two great textbooks, which do you choose? Every choice you make, no matter how small, can make your instruction more or less clear. On a micro level, ensure your course materials are effective.

How many of these layers can you integrate into one instructional design course and in what order?

Energy Independency

2010-06-20T10:03:00.003-06:00

We are an unstoppable oil dependency breaking machine. Unfortunately the machine runs on oil.

Thank you Jon Stewart.

Blogging Class

2010-06-14T11:35:00.001-06:00

This week I'm teaching a fun blogging class to students from the Summer Citizens program at Utah State. It should be a lot of fun helping them learn this technology.

786,432 points of light

2010-05-28T13:19:00.003-06:00

A great video from a couple years ago that points out some of the disconnect between teachers and students:

See further discussion of the video by the professor involved in its creation.

I wonder how some of these statistics have changed since the original video was made. The point is just as valid.

Twitter: Lame or Misunderstood?

2010-04-30T22:24:00.004-06:00

Last month, I mentioned an idea to use Twitter to let students communicate with the teacher and others live in a classroom. It turns out there is a professor in Texas doing this in her history class. Students tweet during class as well as when they're not in the classroom. Students can text in their tweets, use their laptops, or write a note and hand it to the TA to tweet for them. Interesting.

The question, though, is whether this will really connect to younger students. According to a few studies I've seen, younger students aren't interested in Twitter. They do text a lot, and they use Facebook. You'd think that anyone who liked texting would like Twitter, but apparently that's not the case. You could use Facebook to facilitate this same in-class communication just as well as Twitter. In the end, the tool itself probably doesn't matter that much, so long as you find something to open up the lines of communication with your students.

It would be nice if people would learn the various tools, the etiquette to using each, and the strengths and weaknesses of each, before making a judgment as to how lame or like totally awesome a given technology is.

We recently had an earthquake a few hundred miles away from our town, and one guy I talked to said the first place he thought to look was Facebook, to figure out what happened. The first place I thought to look was Twitter. On Twitter, I was instantly connected to hundreds of other people who I don't know discussing the earthquake. On Facebook, there were less than half a dozen people that I know who mentioned something about it. I really didn't gain any information from Facebook.

There are problems with Twitter. There are problems with Facebook. Both have benefits. Choose to participate or not in either or both. However you do or don't participate, there are conversations happening. Will you be part of those conversations? Will you start a conversation?

Cell Phones in the Classroom

2010-03-18T09:57:00.002-06:00

I spent a little time yesterday reading about using cell phones in the classroom. I'll do a more thorough write-up of this later, but I think one of the most interesting potential applications is using cell phones as an iClicker replacement. Sure there is an extra layer of complexity there in getting SMS responses in quickly especially if you're in the basement of a building with low signal strength and the question of how to deal with the less than 1% of students who don't have cell phones, but at the same time, you have a pervasive technology that students already use on a daily basis.

To loosen it up from the more formal polling of just certain questions, what about live tweeting in a classroom? You can use twitter from your cell phone or from a laptop. There are many conferences that provide a hash tag for that conference so everyone can follow what everyone else at the conference is tweeting about. So how about the professor set up a hash tag for their class and run a live feed either just to their monitor to see what students are or aren't understanding, or if they're feeling really adventurous, run the feed to the projector so the whole class can see. You could minimize purposefully distracting tweets by having students register their twitter account beforehand, so if someone puts something dumb up on the screen, you'd know who it was.

Of course, the type of professor who would kick someone out of class for participating in a discussion would retire before allowing something like this in their classroom, but they're not really the market for something like this anyway. It needs to be professors who actually want feedback from their students.

Internet Explorer has stopped working

2010-03-08T12:18:00.002-07:00

Yes, thank you, Windows Vista, for that great error message. I think I already know what made it stop working, though. It probably has something to do with the fact that I clicked the red X thingy in the corner to close it.

Food Revolution

2010-02-17T18:44:00.003-07:00

Awhile back, I mentioned a McDonald's commercial where a team loses the soccer championship, and we find out it's because they eat Happy Meals after their games. Here's the video that hadn't been posted at the time:

With the Olympics going on currently, we're inundated with more McDonald's commercials telling us how much the athletes eat it all the time. I suppose it is possible that it's not all a big lie and that these commercials are not outright fraud. Yes, these athletes work hard to fine tune their bodies to do amazing things, and it seems that fast food wouldn't fit in there. However, it is plausible that McDonald's is an integral part of these athletes' diets. Considering that Michael Phelps eats 12,000 calories a day to keep up with his training demands, it is possible he loads up on a few Mighty Kids Meals at 800 calories and 1400 mg of sodium per meal as an efficient way of piling on the raw energy his body needs. That doesn't mean it's good for the rest of us. Exercise like Phelps and you can eat whatever you want.

So do we add a sin tax to bad food or threaten kids with cancer or diabetes to fix the problem?

Jamie Oliver may have it right with his goal to educate people about food so they have the tools to make good choices for themselves. He says:

I wish for everyone to help create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.

Hopefully his Food Revolution works. Is there anything else that can?

One Way Street

2010-02-06T17:11:00.004-07:00

I'm often impressed by some of the things Seth Godin has to say, and I've linked to a few of his blog posts here in the past. One of the things I'm less than impressed with is the fact that there's not a way to post comments on his blog.

I've had both Scott Adams and Mark Cuban respond to things I've written in the comments on their blogs. If that doesn't show off the power of the Internet, I don't know what does. The great equalizer of the Internet puts us all on the same level.

It doesn't work that way for Seth, though. He recently posted about an app he'd like to have. He called for someone to develop a non-linear presentation application that would run on the iPad, although it would work as well on any PC.

The funny thing is, what he's looking for pretty much exists already in Prezi. Now, Prezi doesn't exactly match what he describes, as he's still thinking in terms of slides and Prezi has gone to a slideless presentation design. Well, they claim it's slideless, although, you could possibly call it a one huge slide with everything on it presentation design, but it's nonlinear, nonetheless.

Maybe Seth has seen Prezi. Maybe he hasn't. With any other person that throws out an idea like this, I'd just make a comment on the blog post and point them to this existing product that closely matches what is being called for. Seth could then comment back that he's seen it, but it doesn't work for him. Or he might exclaim that he's going to go buy a bunch of stock in Prezi. Instead, he locks himself off from feedback, in spite of his persistent call to listen to one's customers.

To take it a step further, in his call to develop this killer app that he wants to buy, he set up a wiki for people to go collaborate and work out the design for the app. That's cool, until you see that he set up the wiki, and right at the top explains that he just set it up for everyone else to use to collaborate on, but he's not going to come back and check on the process or participate at all. He just wants to buy it when it hits the iTunes store.

Welcome to 1995, Seth.

Wireless Electricity

2010-02-01T21:03:00.001-07:00

How soon will this be available for my Wii remotes?

Big Issues

2010-01-28T01:09:00.002-07:00

After last year's successful legislative session, Utah lawmakers are ready to debate another set of very important issues. Bills to watch include:

banning endangered wolves from entering the state
getting rid of 12th grade

I'm all for tossing around interesting ideas, but these ideas should have been presented in some unknown committee or sitting around the dinner table at home and then never made public to anyone, let alone actually debating them on the hill while the per diem clock is ticking.

The budget is always a big deal. Hopefully they keep the reduced tax on groceries steady and make cuts elsewhere. I bought some ice cream last week for $2.06. Imagine the mobs who would form to protest if that same ice cream suddenly cost $2.13. Sure it was full of both fudge ribbons and E.L. Fudge cookies, but come on, we're talking over 3% here.

english bad

2010-01-04T21:32:00.003-07:00

How did the arguably greatest country in the world end up with one of the arguably worst languages in the world? And how did that terrible language end up as the de facto language of international business?

Why does English have so many silent letters? Why are there so many ways to pronounce every letter? The rules in Spanish are more complicated than some languages, but definitely more intelligible than English. You can always tell how to say a word based on how it is spelled. The imperfection with Spanish comes into play where there are multiple ways of spelling a word based on how it is pronounced.

Even if we could get pronunciation down, English is still missing more advanced features of other languages. What happened to the second person (as if that were advanced)? Why are we stuck with forming new words like y'all to reduce the confusion of having no difference between singular and plural you (as if that were advanced)?

If you really want advanced, take a look at Guaraní, the native language of Paraguay, which enjoys co-official language status along with Spanish. It is enjoying a resurgence and is actually taught in schools again after the efforts of some to hide their native tongue. Even this little-known language has something most languages don't: clusivity. A language like Guaraní with clusivity gives the speaker an 'inclusive we' and an 'exclusive we' so the listener knows whether or not he or she is included.

Jim: We're going to the store.
Tom: Great, I'll get my coat.
Jim: No, I mean Amber and I are going to the store. You're not invited, Tom.

Awkward, I know. Not in Guaraní. If Jim had said ñandé instead of we, Tom would know he was invited to go with Jim and Amber. In the above case, however, Jim would have used oré to signal to Tom up front that 'Amber and I' are going to the store.

Perhaps the language reform question will become moot as texting and Twitter have their way with us, but in the mean time, there ought to be something we can do to fix our language. I'm not suggesting we go as far as the nooalf guy, but the first reform I have adopted has to do with quotation marks. If a sentence ends with a word or words in quotation marks, I put the final punctuation outside the quotation marks. I just like it better that way, even though it's "wrong". It's at least a place for ñandé to start.

Be Weird

2009-12-21T18:36:00.005-07:00

HP's recent problem with facial recognition software failing to recognize the face of a black man underscores the importance of good quality assurance (QA) testing. Regardless of whether it was just an issue of too much backlight or something else with the algorithm, there is a problem here that should have been caught.

Recognition of different races is something that should have been pretty obvious to test. Recognition in poor lighting situations is another obvious one. HP likely did test both of these items.

It is just as important for QA teams to test things that aren't quite so obvious, such as the combination of race and poor lighting. What if you throw glasses, a hat, and headphones into the mix? What about glittery makeup? Facial hair? Vibration from using a laptop with the camera while riding as a passenger in a car or bus?

How far do you take it? Where are the reasonable limits?

For a good QA team, that's a trick question. There are no limits.

I remember finding some pretty obscure stuff when I did QA testing on videoconferencing units for Sorenson Technologies. The main product I worked on was sold as the D-Link i2eye. We stuck them in the refrigerator and under hot pads to test extreme temperatures. We'd leave a call going for 48 hours straight. We affectionately referred to one bug I found as the Kevin Bacon bug, referring to his movie Hollow Man, wherein his character turned invisible. I figured out how to send video from a third party unit to a unit that was in a call with someone else. The unit received video from both sources and mixed them together, so you'd get something that looked kind of like a semi-transparent shape moving around on the background of the other video.

What did they do about the bug I found? Nothing. They determined it was not likely enough to actually happen to warrant setting up the unit to filter where it received video from. It didn't matter to me. My job wasn't to determine what the programmers were to work on. It was to do weird stuff and report the results. Now that I manage programmers and QA testers, it is my job to prioritize what gets worked on and to remind the QA testers to stay weird.

Tax Deductible

2009-12-02T22:01:00.004-07:00

As much as I like Seth Godin, he's recently given people some bad tax advice or at least inferred it. He's offering 3,000 free review copies of his upcoming book Linchpin to people who donate at least $30 to Acumen, an organization dedicated to eliminating poverty.

They're well on their way to meeting their goal of raising $100,000, which is great.

The problem is his unclear statement that you get a tax deduction for the donation. Tax laws state that if you make a donation in exchange for a gift, the portion of that gift that coincides with the value of the gift is not deductible. If the gift is a surprise to the donor, the full amount is deductible. In this case, the donations are specifically being made in order to obtain a copy of the book. That means you're buying the book.

I suppose a portion of the $30 would likely be deductible but not all of it. The book is currently listed on Amazon for $17, so you would probably get a tax deduction of $13. At the same time, the $30 minimum must be met in order to qualify for the 'free' book, which may in fact mean the entire thing is not deductible even though it's more than the value of the book. But don't take my word for it. Or Seth's. Talk to your accountant. Pony up for charity and get yourself a copy of the book either way, but be careful about actually claiming it on your taxes.

Match

2009-11-16T19:45:00.002-07:00

Seth Godin recently talked about people who begrudgingly agree to work together or perform a business transaction, spending an inordinate amount of time explaining how it's a special case that isn't going to happen again.

I have to agree with his point that it makes no sense to go half in.

Just recently I had my racquet restrung, since I've been playing quite a bit in the mornings before work. I went to a local retailer, who is often more expensive than chains, but whom I generally trust. I had been looking at their website and found some string for a good price. When I got to the store, they did not have the same string as what was listed on their website. The string in the store was all $20, whereas the online string was $7. I asked if they had the less expensive string I'd seen on their website. The guy helping me said they didn't, but that they price match anyone, as long as it is the same item.

I paid $20 for the string and left my racquet to be restrung. After I got home, I got to thinking about the price match policy I had been told about. I looked online and quickly found the same string I had just purchased for $4, plus $5 shipping. I called the store, confirmed they would match the $9 price, drove back to the store, and waited while everyone in the store complained about how the price was too good, how it was probably below their cost, and tried to figure out a way to not give me half my money back. They relented and gave me $11 in store credit, which I told them I'd use to buy a racquetball glove another day, since the store was just about to close.

After several days of calling to see if it was ready, I talked to someone who said they didn't want to string it for me. I would have been fine if they had told me up front the price match didn't apply, since the in-store purchase included the stringing service. In effect, it's really not the same product, which is why I specifically asked about that issue on the phone before I drove back in. Since they did initially agree to string it without charging any extra when I talked to them the first night, I finally convinced them to actually string my racquet.

My issue now is that I don't want to go back there again. I'll go use my store credit, which at their prices won't buy me much. I was planning on buying $100-150 worth of bike parts from them to fix up my bike or perhaps even buy a new bike. Now because of the big deal they made out of $11, I'll probably go somewhere else. They've made me feel guilty like I was trying to get away with something, and I feel like every cashier knows who I am and talks about me as soon as I leave.

What is an Educated Person?

2009-10-31T23:03:00.003-06:00

Yesterday was the third time I've attended the Utah System of Higher Education's annual conference on general education. Last year's conference was pretty interesting, especially the discussion of e-portfolios for students. It sounds like a great idea to provide a system that allows students to upload their work into their e-portfolio and show potential employers or grad schools some of the projects and papers they completed, along with feedback from professors and classmates.

There was a follow-up to e-portfolios this year, but for some reason they scheduled the Computer and Information Literacy breakout session at the same time as the e-portfolio report. While I was sad to have missed it, we did have some interesting discussions in the CIL breakout.

I'm still processing it all, but it is interesting to note that although all the schools in the state have implemented CIL quite differently, the challenges we face at our various institutions are quite similar. Although we don't do much if any coordination, whenever one school has a seemingly innocuous discussion related to the topic, somehow the word gets out and everyone else starts getting fired up that someone may be changing something.

My fear is that one school will do something rash in their budgeting process and that everyone else will follow like lemmings off a cliff.

As the keynote speaker Jamie Merisotis told us, "Quality in higher education should be calculated based on measurable student learning outcomes, not institutional inputs." When he made the point, he was referring to the fact that prestigious schools with billion dollar endowments are considered to be superior because of the large amounts of money they throw around. However, we can flip this around to the poor end of the scale, and the maxim should still apply. The importance of a program or a general education requirement is not diminished just because the institutional inputs are lacking. CIL skills are just as important as they ever have been, if not more so. Everyone's budget is struggling. So let's get together and gather some data, determine the importance of what we're doing independent of the budget issues we face, and then see what economies of scale we can harness to help us run more efficiently.

Free Software

2009-09-30T23:31:00.005-06:00

I followed an interesting discussion this past week. It started as a discussion of some security vulnerabilities that were released by a security researcher. "Abe" got all worked up, saying that this researcher should be prosecuted for releasing the details of the security hole so anyone would be able to take advantage of it.

The importance of openness in security was brought up, specifically how big software companies will generally try to hide vulnerabilities to protect the illusion of security, as opposed to the way open source projects just acknowledge and fix the security holes.

The conversation somehow turned into Abe accusing someone else of participating in an underground economy and personally benefiting from using free software at the expense of taxpayers, who are paying his salary (which is so false it doesn't even merit a reply). He continued on pointing out that free software isn't actually free, since there are all kinds of costs associated with it.

Of course there are costs associated with any software. The "free" doesn't mean that there are no acquisition costs but that once you have acquired it, you are free to do with it what you want. Proprietary software generally costs up front to purchase it, and then you are at the mercy of the software developers to make changes to the software if that is desired or needed. If you need a new feature and they don't want to implement it, you'll never get it. With free software, you may or may not pay up front to purchase it, but you are of course likely to invest in training, hardware, and other costs to actually implement it. The nice thing is that once you've implemented it, if you need a new feature, you can just add it or pay someone else to add it. If the original developer won't do it for you, it doesn't matter. You're free to change it if you want as long as you're willing to share your changes with others.

It was pretty obvious to everyone else that Abe didn't know what he was talking about, since he kept referring to money instead of freedom, so someone finally called him a troll. It didn't end there as he made a joke about trolls that showed he didn't know what a troll was. Someone else referred him to Wikipedia's article on trolls, after which Abe backed off and claimed he was just acting as devil's advocate and pointed out that the debate could just go back and forth all day so wasn't worth continuing.

I'm pretty sure he didn't understand all the arguments against his position or else he was the dumbest devil's advocate ever. Either way, he realized he was outmanned. The biggest piece that he was missing was not whether there are costs associated with implementing free software but that there are very real costs associated with not being permitted to maintain proprietary software yourself after implementing it. Can you really afford the lack of control over whatever platform you deploy if you use something other than free software?

Accidentally on Purpose

2009-08-22T17:26:00.004-06:00

Utah legislators were trying to make some small changes to gift disclosure laws last year. You know, the kind of changes that make it look like they're doing something meaningful but that don't come anywhere close to the changes that their constituents want?

Well, they accidentally made a big change on the scale that ethics reform advocates have been asking for.

For some reason, rounds of golf and tickets to sporting events and concerts didn't used to be considered gifts. I don't know what they were before if they weren't gifts, but that's another conversation. I mean, I'm cool with a meal being treated differently than a gift, but free courtside seats to an NBA game is a gift.

So gifts over $50 had previously been banned. The accident came when the legislators writing the bill were attempting to just require that the names of legislators accepting gifts over $10 be disclosed. The "problem" was that in that process, they accidentally included event tickets and golf in the gift category, making it illegal to accept them if worth more than $50.

I almost felt sorry for John Valentine, a Republican from Orem, when I heard his story about how he had to turn down tickets to an Atlanta Braves game. I'm not sure how going to the see the Braves play has anything to do with the state of Utah, though.

The real question is what the legislature is going to do about it. It's frustrating but understandable when legislators don't vote to enact legislation that restricts giving to themselves. It makes sense that they would talk a lot about how important it is and then slowly each year make little tiny changes until their constituents stop complaining. But now that a major restriction has been put into place, can they remove it without a huge backlash? Any vote now to remove the restriction, even if it was accidentally put into place, will be very difficult to sell. Who wants to be the sponsor of a bill that says "please give us more gifts"?

Maybe Chris Buttars will do it. He doesn't care what anyone thinks of him, and the voters in South Jordan keep voting him back in, in spite of his idiocy. It probably wouldn't pass, though, since I think at least a simple majority of the legislature would be smart enough not to side with Buttars on anything this high up on the media's watch list. That may be giving legislators too much credit, though, especially considering the only reason they did the right thing on the gift ban bill to begin with was because everybody accidentally forgot to actually read the bill and think about the consequences of voting for it. Like they do with most everything else they vote on.

And you want to be my latex salesman...

2009-08-20T08:38:00.006-06:00

My last post was about a weird interview. I didn't even have a job posted at the time. He just showed up. I actually do have a job posted now, and it's not getting much better.

I've received at least two, maybe three, resumes via email that have a blank page number 2 included in their resume. That's not a great sign for someone who will be teaching people how to create professional-looking documents in a word processor, if they don't know how to delete the blank spaces from the end of the document. It actually helps to use the print preview even if you're not going to print, because someone else might.

One girl included her responsibilities at a former custodian job as: clocking in and out, getting to work on time, and cleaning the facilities. In that order. My assumption then is that she would only actually clean the facilities if she was able to successfully do the first two items. She didn't say how often she was able to perform all three tasks.

I also received a resume from a person who was just caught cheating on a test in our lab about a month ago. And now you want to work for me. How interesting...

The part that gets me wondering the most is the people who email me to ask me what they need to do to apply or who stop by my office and drop off their resume in person, even though the job posting says to email me a resume and class schedule. Invariably, their resume will list attention to detail as one of their strengths. Yes, I can see that.

Don't even get me started on the weird email addresses some people list on their resumes.

Is any impression a good impression?

2009-07-13T18:17:00.005-06:00

I've been debating writing about an incident that happened last week. I worry about writing something negative about someone who could potentially read what I wrote about them. In this case, I'll just have to hope that either the guy doesn't find my blog or that if he does, he finds some constructive criticism that can help him out. His honesty is refreshing but also a dealbreaker.

Like anyone, I try to hire good people. It's hard to do, though. Some hires don't turn out as well as their resume and interview indicated. Other times, I'm sure I've passed on people who would have been amazing employees because of a typo in their resume.

In this case, I pretty sure I'm doing the right thing by not hiring the guy I talked to last week, in spite of how memorable he was. I really don't see many resumes that are very memorable, like resumes on t-shirts or CDs or with an ice cream coupon attached. There is one guy I remember, because he gave me his resume in a manila folder with his name on the tab. There was nothing special about him or his resume, but I use that folder to hold all the other resumes I get.

So the guy that came in last week (I'll call him Charles), came into my office unannounced when I didn't have any jobs posted and greeted me in Spanish. I returned the greeting, since I speak Spanish. He made a little joke in Spanish and introduced himself. He sounded very fluent, although I could tell it wasn't his native language. He then proceeded to tell me in Spanish that he wanted to switch the conversation to English, and I obliged. I mean, he was the one who started in another language, not me.

Charles then began to tell me about himself. He told me that he was working in another office on campus but that they didn't have money to pay him. He had supposedly created some new invention but couldn't afford to have it patented. So he's looking for a new job to get him through his last year of school. I asked if he wanted to work doing teaching and customer service in our testing center or if he wanted to work as a programmer. He said he'd like to be a programmer but that he didn't know Java, which is what we use in our office.

I told Charles that we had plenty of programmers at the moment but that we might be hiring in the testing center. I asked if he had passed the CIL tests. He hadn't. He claimed he didn't need to, since he had done his general education at another school but that he had taken a few of the tests anyway. He told me that he noticed a bunch of mistakes in our tests, and I wasn't surprised in the least when I checked after he left and found that he'd failed the tests he had taken. It always seems that it's the students who complain the most about how bad the tests are that most often fail them.

Charles proceeded to tell me how he could work in the lab but that it wasn't really something he wanted to do. He was willing to do something that wasn't related to his career goals, just to pay the bills until he's done with school. He's just not motivated to do anything for his other job since they can't pay him, so he just sits in his office and doesn't do anything. Oh, well this is getting better and better. I'm not sure, however, if it's worse than the time one of my former employees told me she was torn between an internship that was directly related to her major and continuing to work for me. It would be good experience at the other job, but she really liked that she didn't have to do anything at her current job. I strongly encouraged her to take the other job.

I decided that I'd probably heard enough, so I asked Charles to email me a copy of his resume and gave him some "we're done here" body language. He continued to lay there, flopped back on the little couch in my office, except to lean forward momentarily and hand me a copy of his resume that he had brought with him. Well, actually, he gave me two copies. One was in Russian and the other in English. I think he was trying to flaunt his language skills, in that he could make a Russian resume, in addition to knowing some Spanish greetings. The two resumes didn't look at all alike but I was worried more about getting Charles out of my office than I was about critiquing his resumes.

I started leaning back and turning to look at my computer like I had something else to do and told him that I'd look over his paperwork and email him if we had something open up. He continued to lean back on the couch and tell me again how he needed something to pay the bills. He then started talking about how he had all these ideas and that he was going to hire all these Indian programmers to implement his ideas and start a bunch of businesses. This went on a little until he finally started to lean forward a little and I quickly stood up and offered him a handshake and a "good to meet you; thanks for stopping by".

After he left, I called a former employee of mine who knows Russian and asked him to stop by for a second on his way home. My OCD about the two resumes looking completely different was on the mark, and we were able to deduce that his Russian resume hadn't been updated for two years. Sure, I don't know what it says, but I know that you gave me a two year old resume. It's not looking good.

I looked over Charles' English resume a little and was aghast at what I saw. He had mismatched fonts, underlined hyperlinks (as if I could click on the piece of paper he gave me), a particular item that he listed under both work experience and volunteer service, and it went three lines onto the second page. As I looked it over, thinking how I would have adjusted the spacing slightly to get everything to fit on one page, it all came together. The most recent job was the part in the different font, so I could tell that it probably used to fit on one page. When he inserted a few lines for his current employment (that didn't pay him anything), that knocked things down a little onto the second page. That all doesn't bode well for someone who, if hired, would be teaching people how to use Microsoft Word.

Charles, if you're reading this, you'll probably make a great cell phone salesman, but don't be surprised when I don't hire you.

Photo by SOCIALisBETTER

Twitter

2009-06-11T18:47:00.004-06:00

I recently mentioned in a post about Facebook that I rarely see the benefit of certain Web 2.0 technologies until I actually get in and use them. I've experienced the same thing with Twitter to a certain degree.

I haven't really started following a ton of people. I only have a small handful that I follow and a small handful who follow me. I have created several accounts. One is for work to send updates to our department website. Another one is a personal account, which updates my Facebook status. You'll also see a few of my latest tweets on my blog. It's really no big deal. Except...

The coolest thing that I've been involved with when it comes to Twitter is twhistory.com. The current project is following several people who were involved in the Civil War, leading up to the Battle of Gettysburg in real time over several months' time. I've been tweeting two Confederate soldiers and a Yankee newspaper.

Louis Leon is hilarious. I seriously laugh all the time reading his journal. You can find his journal online or take a look at his Twitter posts. He carries the flag for his regiment and provides such interesting daily insights as to how the soldiers really lived. I find myself pulling for him and his regiment to beat the Yankees, even though I know that's the final result of the war. I hope that's not a spoiler for anyone.

Future potential projects include the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK Assasination, and really anything else that people are interested in. The main thing that will really facilitate this project exploding is software, which we've got someone working on, to allow volunteers to put together the tweets for people and load them into a database so the system can automatically post everything at the appropriate times. I have a hard time keeping up with just three accounts. I don't know how Marion Jensen, the mastermind of the whole thing keeps up with the dozen accounts he's tweeting.

There are two main points that make Twitter such a great platform: the power of the masses and the API. Of course, that's the same for any Web 2.0 application, so it's not a huge surprise. But some of Twitter's detractors are still talking about how much of a time waster it is without paying attention to the power that Twitter holds. Hopefully the team that runs Twitter will be able to figure out how to make Twitter sustainable, since they're running on venture capital now. When they accomplish that, some of the limits they have had to put on the number of API calls that can be made for performance reasons should go away.

Assuming the API issues will go away and the timed tweet application ends up being as sweet as I hope it will be, piles of twhistory volunteers will really be able to put together some awesome projects.

As cool as this project is turning out to be, hopefully others in the Twitter community can come up with even more applications of the Twitter platform.

Facebook

2009-05-28T22:47:00.003-06:00

I gave in and joined Facebook a few months ago. As with most other social networking tools, I had been avoiding it. It seems that with most new technologies, once I get in and learn how it works, I wonder how I ever lived without it (blogging being the prime example of this). I am glad I never joined MySpace, but while I appreciate some things about Facebook and generally support it, I do have a few issues with it. I don't know if I could say that it's something I couldn't live without.

To start off my experiment, when I joined, I decided I wouldn't invite anyone to be my friend. Now, I actually did invite two people, but these were people who had previously invited me before I joined, so in effect I was just accepting their previous invitations. I'm not 100% sure how the friend recommender works, but I may have also invited someone to be my friend after an existing friend recommended them to me. What I've ended up with, after little or no inviting of my own, is a mass of family members, employees, former coworkers, former roommates, high school friends, a high school barely acquaintance, PhD classmates, professors, old neighbors, junior high friends, people I've served in Scouting with, and people that go to the same church as I do.

There are people from almost every phase of my life all lumped together, and that's where it starts getting strange. I've ignored a few people whose updates I don't care to see. I've deleted a comment or two of people who don't think before they post on something I've shared. But for the most part, all these people who have never met each other and have no connection other than at some point they met me, are having this mass, public, unfettered conversation with me and showing each other pictures they have of me from a long time ago. I don't necessarily have anything to hide, but in real life I'm not going to invite a couple of my employees over to my house to hang out with me and a couple people I knew when I lived in New Jersey 20 years ago, yet that's what's virtually happening. I'd like to see some of my friends from New Jersey again. I'd have nothing against having a barbecue for my employees at my house (we'll see if any of them are reading this and take me up on it). I just wouldn't do them both at the same time. There's something strange about it.

A possible way to work around this would be to allow the user to put their friends in different groups so only people within the same group can see each other's conversations. I don't know, but there has to be a better way.

The thing I do like about Facebook is the open platform that it is. It can be extended to be anything you want it to be. The groups are obvious, as a way to communicate with large numbers of people quickly without having to be their friends. The applications are where it really gets good. Well, the potential is there anyway. I don't feel a need to fill out every 'what X are you?' quiz out there, and Mafia Wars appears to be a colossal waste of time (not as much as World of Warcraft of course). It's just this limitless platform that anyone can write a program for and throw it out to the world to share. We've obviously had that open platform for awhile called the internet, but now the social component is automated.

I asked some students in one of the classes I teach what they would think of having a Facebook group for our class. At first they thought it would be kind of weird but then admitted they would keep up on what was happening in the class better, since they would be in there all the time. However, when I asked some of the non-traditional students (read older, less tech-savvy) in another class of mine, they basically replied that there would be no way they would set up a Facebook account, even if that was where we were 'holding' class. CourseFeed is one app that has potential in this area. I need to set it up and try it out.

So I have mixed feelings when it comes to Facebook. It makes sense. I can see the good in it. Like anything else in life, there's waste in it. I look forward to seeing if some killer app shows up for it. Perhaps the next UI redesign will be much more successful than the last one and it will actually become easier for more people to use instead of more difficult so they can reach a new audience. Right now, I'm just watching and waiting.

KFC

2009-05-07T23:20:00.004-06:00

KFC management apparently has worse powers of prediction than Jim Cramer.

Let's look at this for a moment. They offered coupons for free meals over a two week period with their new product, grilled chicken. Anyone ought to be able to see where this is going to end up. It gets picked up by Oprah and thousands of bloggers and twitterers, who slam their website so hard that it can't keep up with all the traffic.

The funniest part of the whole thing, I thought, was the website where the coupons were posted. It was unthinkfc.com. What happens if you split that out? You get Unthin KFC. Ooh, not exactly the point they were trying to get across by touting grilled chicken instead of fried. I should mention that unthinkkfc.com also worked, but the link from Oprah's page was to the unthin URL.

I assume they figured that by limiting the coupon to print four times on a computer, that people would only print a small number of coupons. I'm sure not everyone has access to a computer lab with 35 computers in it like I do (you do the math to figure out how many coupons my employees printed), but most people have access to a computer at home, one at work, plus a laptop, and maybe grandma's house. It adds up quickly.

So we go last night and get several free meals for our family and take it to a great U8 soccer game. Overall, it was a good experience. The wait was terrible, though. There was a line snaking through the whole restaurant, and when you got to the front you realized why. Even if the people scooping up the mashed potatoes were fast (which they were not), they had a hard time keeping the chicken stocked. One of my employees was a few people behind us in line. He and his wife got two meals inside and two through the drive-through. They ran out of grilled chicken and offered to let them take Original Recipe chicken instead. Really? Is that a good idea? People show up to try your new grilled chicken and you give them the fried stuff instead? So much for the whole point of the promotion, which was to try the new product.

I did actually get grilled chicken last night, but when we went for lunch today, they were out again, and they gave me Original Recipe. As good as the grilled chicken was, the fried chicken was still better. The biggest problem with the grilled chicken, I think, is that they leave the skin on. Why not cut it off and save that many more calories?

The other problem was one of sides. I don't know if other stores did the same thing, but where we went, they only allowed you to get mashed potatoes and cole slaw, even though the coupon infers that you can get any two sides you want. I suppose it's more efficient and probably cheaper to give everyone the same thing, but really, I heard a lot of people ask for something other than cole slaw only to be turned down. I guarantee a lot of cole slaw and the styrofoam bowls it comes in ended up just being tossed in the garbage. Part of the problem likely comes from the manager of the store not finding out about the coupons until just a couple days before the great giveaway was to start and being able to have enough of everything on hand to handle the increased traffic.

So today, three days into the two week giveaway, KFC announced that they will temporarily stop honoring the coupons, since they have been inundated with people taking them up on their offer. Are you that surprised, KFC? Did you really not see that coming? So now, customers have to take their coupons into the store, get an extra form from the manager, which they mail in to KFC, who will mail back rain checks with staggered dates they can be used, in order to spread out the demand a bit. At least to make up for the extra effort, they are throwing in a drink with the rain check.

So thumbs up for going with the free offer that really is actually free, but thumbs down to whoever didn't predict this would be this huge. Seriously, how can they be surprised?

On a side note, what's with the fake "Buttery Spread" and "Honey Sauce" for the biscuits? We're supposed to unthink what we thought about KFC when you give out sauce that is 89% corn syrup and 11% honey instead of just pure honey?

Collaborative Filtering and Web 2.0 Technologies

2009-04-30T20:42:00.003-06:00

Filtering Methods

Collaborative filtering systems connect a person's needs with content based on ratings by others with similar interests and needs. Depending on the system, filtering may be based on human or machine analysis of content or a hybrid approach (Herlocker, Konstan, & Riedl, 2000). An example of the hybrid approach is Google Images, which uses a machine analysis of file names and text content in the page around images in combination with its Image Labeler. The Image Labeler is a game of sorts where users accumulate points for matching key words with a randomly selected partner, with more points awarded for providing more specific terms. The two sets of data are combined and then used in searching (Google, 2009).

Doctorow (2001) claims that observational metadata by a machine is more reliable than that created by humans, listing several obstacles to dependable human-created metadata including people's inability to fully report their own behavior and the ambiguities and non-neutral nature of many measurement and reporting techniques. Avery & Zeckhauser (1997) suggest that some incentive to evaluate content is necessary to avoid issues where the majority of users wait for others to evaluate content for them.

Some of the problems with the lack of human-created metadata may be due to the types of tools available to catalog resources. As I've mentioned before, the complex metadata standards like LOM were designed by engineers and just take too much time to implement; however, with the advent of many Web 2.0 tools there is an abundance of tagged resources and RSS feeds that easily work together. However, an abundance of tags does not necessarily solve problems without causing new ones. Tagging with a common or ambiguous word may cause unrelated content to be displayed together, and spammers may mark their garbage such that it displays alongside legitimate content (Walker, 2005). A closed community might help keep these ambiguities under control, but restrictions would likely lead to lower participation.

Communities

Communities use social interaction to combine existing knowledge with new knowledge to meet their needs. One piece of content may mean different things, based on the context in which it is used (Burnett, Dickey, Kazmer, & Chudoba, 2003). The question is how to make open tools like Del.icio.us, Twitter, and Flickr work to facilitate individual communities without blending them all together or limiting access. It may be ideal to build or expand collaborative filtering capabilities that work in conjunction with manual tagging and machine analysis of content. In order to be successful, such a collaborative filter should filter out irrelevant information and provide a means for community members to access relevant information at the appropriate time, based on the behavior of others in the community (Walker, 2002).

De Souza & Preece (2004) point out two components by which an online community can be assessed: sociability and usability. The sociability component applies to any community, whether online or offline and includes the people, purposes, and policies involved. The usability component focuses on the technical and HCI issues of the software used. In their framework, these two components have to be aligned to produce success. Web 2.0 tools do well in terms of usability, based on the large numbers of people blogging, tagging, editing wikis, and otherwise collaborating. In terms of sociability, there is still work to do. It is easy to set up whitelists of content producers or tags once you know about them, but finding that content to begin with is difficult to do.

Web 2.0 Technologies

Walker (2005) lists Flickr tags that are related to the tag "bush" including: protest, election, politics, kerry, president, graffiti, snow, war, vote, iraq, tree, winter, cameraphone, cheney, and antibush. These associations among terms are then described as "sheep paths in the mountains" that have just formed over time, with no systematic approach. Over the past few years, clusters and pools of related content have made it a little easier to find what one is looking for. Now when searching for that same term, instead of just listing a few related tags, Flickr will prompt the user to see the clusters of related tags such as bush/green/nature/tree or bush/protest/war/iraq. These clusters help bring the sociability level of Flickr up towards its usability level which has been high for awhile now, however they are still based on manual tagging of content.

So one tool has begun to work on becoming a little bit more community-friendly, but how are the rest doing? Digg does well at quickly floating news stories in and out of the spotlight, based on their popularity within certain categories, but it is done by manual voting and categorization. Youtube videos can be associated with channels, contests, groups, categories, and tags, in addition to being rated by viewers. Videos can also be prioritized based on the number of overall views, but not by views of those similar to the user, which would be ideal. Wikipedia allows users to collaborate on documents and hold behind-the-page discussions before doing so, but in order to find a page that might be interesting to the user, a text-based search engine is used. Wordpress and Blogspot seem to follow the same pattern as these other popular tools, using RSS and tagging and linking, but not following a truly dynamic model that builds rules based on behavior and interests rather than cataloging by humans. Much of the human-generated data is good data, but it is simply not enough to narrow down the results by removing false positives. Combining with observational data and machine-generated contextual data will help triangulate the most accurate results for each individual user. Twitter and third party tools built on its API may be the closest to success with its ability to bring together both spontaneous and organized groups of people in real time for any given event.

Good Examples

For an example of non Web 2.0 collaborative filtering, we can look to TiVo (Ali & van Stam, 2004). TiVo still depends on users give shows they watch a thumbs up or thumbs down rating, but it has a few additional features most current Web 2.0 tools do not. It recommends shows the user might like, based on other shows they have watched and rated using correlated pairs of shows. It can also predict a "thumbs level" for unrated shows based on other characteristics.

For another example, Google tracks the searches and site visits of users that are logged into Google while they surf. Users can view statistics on their surfing habits and receive recommendations from Google for searches, web pages, videos, and gadgets the user might like based on the user's searches.

What's Next?

So if Google and TiVo can utilize a combination of factors to pinpoint content that would be appropriate for a user's general searching or entertainment needs, how do we harness those algorithms to extend the widely available Web 2.0 tools so they are more effective in the classroom or in business environments? Setting up a closed system is an option, but as mentioned above, a more open system should encourage more participation. With several of the tools such as wikis and blogs designed for teamwork and collaboration, it seems that the most useful collaborative filters would be those that perform well with newly created, unrated content that is identified by RSS feeds and then quickly react to the actions of users.

I'm not really sure how all these pieces ultimately fit together, but I am interested in further study on the topic. As I have been reading about virtual communities and open content lately and using several of these Web 2.0 tools for various projects, I am drawn to the power that is given to the masses to create content and influence politics, education, and many more aspects of our lives that were not open before. Traditional newspapers have new competition. There are free alternatives to the content traditionally provided by textbook publishers.

With my background in business, I believe that a reasonable amount of competition can be a very good thing. Enabling teams to more efficiently communicate with each other prevents duplication of effort and miscommunications within the group, as well as allowing the group to meet synchronously or asynchronously as schedules allow. Collaborative filtering seems to be an important next step in enabling virtual communities to better utilize the resources currently available to them. The tools for generating new content within a well-known context seem to be well developed, but an essential component of successful teamwork is better organization and dissemination of content and culture that already exist in order to maintain order when certain dynamics of the group change.

REFERENCES

Ali, K., & van Stam, W. (2004) TiVo: Making show recommendations using a distributed collaborative filtering architecture. Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data mining.

Avery, C. & Zeckhauser, R. (1997). Recommender systems for evaluating computer messages. Communications of the ACM, 40(3).

Burnett, G., Dickey, M.H., Kazmer, M.M. & Chudoba, K.M. (2003) Inscription and interpretation of text: A cultural hermeneutic examination of virtual community. Information Research, 9(4).

de Souza, C. S., & Preece, J. (2004). A framework for analyzing and understanding online communities. Interacting with Computers, 16(3), 579-610.

Doctorow, C. (2001) Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia. Retrieved from http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm.

Google (2009). Google Image Labeler. Retrieved from http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/.

Herlocker, J., Konstan, J., & Riedl, J. (2000). Explaining collaborative filtering recommendations. Proceedings of the 2000 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Walker, A. (2002). An educational recommender system: New territory for collaborative filtering (Doctoral Dissertation, Utah State University).

Walker, J. (2005). Feral hypertext: When hypertext literature escapes control. Proceedings of the 2005 ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, 46-53.

Wilt Thou Pass or Flunk?

2009-04-27T10:24:00.001-06:00

And it came to pass, early in the morning of the last day of the semester, there arose a multitude smiting their books and wailing. And there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth, for the day of judgment was at hand and they were sore afraid. For they had left undone those things which they ought to have done, and there was no help for them.

And there were many abiding in their rooms, who had kept watch over their books all night, but it naught availeth. But some there were who arose peacefully, for they had prepared for themselves the way, and made straight the path of knowledge. And those wise ones were known to some as the burners of the midnight oil, but by others they were called curve-spoilers.

And the multitudes arose, and ate a hearty breakfast, and they came to the appointed place, and their hearts were heavy within them. And they had come to pass, though not all would.

And some of them repented of their riotous living and bemoaned their fate, but they had not a prayer. And as the final hour approached there came among them one known as the professor, he of the diabolical smile, and passed paper among them, and went upon his way.

And many and varied were the answers which were given, for some of his teachings had fallen among the fallows. Many who had not a prayer in their hearts had nothing but BS to offer up in hopes of pacifying this professor.

And when they had finished, they gathered up their belongings, and went away quietly, each in his own direction, vowing to themselves in this manner, "I shall not pass this way again. It is a long road that has no turning."