Tag: education

Breakfast with Indira

If you’re a student at the University of Alberta and you’ve been itching to share something with the woman in charge, you may be in luck! University of Alberta President Indira Samarasekera is inviting all students to a special breakfast event:

I’m writing you today with an invitation. I am planning a Breakfast Roundtable meeting just for students on Tuesday, April 18th from 7:30-8:30 a.m. in the Saskatchewan Room of the Faculty Club. Please come, if you are able. Over a continental breakfast, we can discuss some of the issues and challenges you face, and I can hear your bright and creative ideas for enriching the student experience.

Please RSVP by e-mail to jackie.wright@ualberta.ca or by phone at 492-1525.

I wonder how many students will actually end up attending this event. I am tempted to go simply to suggest that she not ever have a roundtable like this so early in the morning ever again! I mean, 7:30 AM? I might as well not go to sleep the night before if I am going to attend! On second thought, that’s probably why it is so early, so that there are fewer students willing to get up and go.

Read: UAlberta

Teaching Kids About Cyber Security

Post ImageFor all the fuss about hackers and spam and viruses and all the other malicious entities that exist in the digital world, there is very little done about education. It makes sense to teach kids about ethics and cyber security in an attempt to reduce viruses and exploits doesn’t it? I think it does! Looks like the United States is taking the lead:

A group of students at Rome Catholic School are learning how to become the future defenders of cyberspace through a pilot program that officials say is the first of its kind in the country. The program teaches students about data protection, computer network protocols and vulnerabilities, security, firewalls and forensics, data hiding, and infrastructure and wireless security.

Most importantly, officials said, teachers discuss ethical and legal considerations in cyber security.

I wish I could have taken a class like that in high school! Would have been much more interesting and relevant than some of the other stuff I had to take. Sure beats typing! And the content is useful on a day-to-day basis too, as our world becomes increasingly more digital. My only concern is that teachers won’t be qualified to teach such a course! Apparently they have a special training week for instructors.

Read: Wired News

U of A ExpressNews Podcast

Post ImageAs Dickson mentioned yesterday, the University of Alberta has decided to get more involved with podcasting, joining many other universities like Duke, Princeton, UBC, and the University of Western Ontario. The brand new ExpressNews podcast is a project of the UofA’s Office of Public Affairs:

Stories in the inaugural newscast include a fascinating interview with forestry researcher Dr. Mel Tyree, complete with the sound of trees drinking; a Parkland Institute report calling for a five-year moratorium on new oilsands projects, a reading by former U of A writer-in-residence David Adams Richards, and more.

The coming weeks will see a greater expansion of the podcast, with the development of a web page dedicated to audio and video files.

This podcast will probably become the U of A’s most well known, but it was not the first. Our ever-ahead-of-the-game Library has been experimenting with podcasting since September of 2005, and the Library site is full of links to other podcasts from around the world.

I’m really happy that my school has seen the light and will start podcasting. I only wish that Paramagnus could have helped them do it!

Read: U of A ExpressNews

President Samarasekera's Message

Post ImageOn Monday an email from University of Alberta President Indira Samarasekera made its way into my inbox. The email contained her Spring Break message to students. I have mirrored the PDF here. A few things stuck out for me from the message:

  • She definitely likes her quotes, using three in the message – one at the start, one in the middle, and one at the end.
  • The message sounds very big and forward-looking.
  • To my knowledge this is the first time she has communicated her “Dare to Discover” vision directly to students, though she didn’t get into any detail.

At the end of the message she invites students to get in touch with her at president@ualberta.ca and on the undergraduate page of her website. I’m going to have to read her vision and think about it for a while. Too bad she doesn’t have a blog – there, that’s my first bit of feedback, be one of the world’s first university presidents to keep a blog!

The Digital Family

Post ImageMy immediate family is very much what I would call a “digital family”. We each have at least one computer, cell phone, digital music player, etc. There’s lots of electronics in our houses, from TVs to networking equipment. Additionally, each one of us uses email, instant messaging, and the web on a daily basis. My extended family is much less a digital family, rarely using email and counting the TV as their most prominent digital device. When I went home for Christmas, it occurred to me that being a digital family is definitely the way to be. I compared my immediate family and my extended family in a very common setting – the living room – to reach my conclusion. I’m going to share my observations here using the living room as my lab, but rest assured, the same principles can be applied to any environment, which is why I refer to a “digital family” and not a “digital household”. The point is the digital family embraces technology.

First, let’s describe the living room. You might think it’s silly to suggest that an entire family can spend some time together in their living room given that everyone these days is so busy. And normally I’d agree, but the holidays afford a little more time, so I was able to make some observations. What happens in a living room (or family room if that’s more to your liking)? Usually there’s TV, maybe you chat amongst yourselves, there might be some food, and in the digital family at least, there’s at least one computer. In the case of my family this past holiday, there was usually three and sometimes four computers – my parents each have a laptop, I had my tablet, and my brother occasionally brought his laptop upstairs. Also important is that the computers are all connected to the Internet wirelessly.

So let’s describe a typical scenario:

The family is sitting down watching television together. Doesn’t really matter what program is on, just that they are all watching. A familiar face comes on the screen, and someone in the living room wonders who it is. The other family members don’t know, but maybe they recognize the face too.

What happens in a non-digital family? The family all agrees that they recognize the face, but with no way to find out who it is, nothing further is said. The face remains nameless. What about in the digital family? Someone picks up the laptop, heads to IMDB and looks up the show the family is watching. A few seconds later, the family is able to put a name to the familiar face.

If you think that’s a silly example, think again. I was watching TV with my grandparents one time in their living room when just this scenario happened. My grandfather recognized the face, but with no way to find out who it was, the conversation just stopped. Over the holidays the same thing happened with my digital family – my Dad recognized someone. This time we were able to look up the show using one of our laptops, and my Dad realized that the person he recognized was Robin Tunney from the popular show Prison Break. Later that night we decided to watch Vertical Limit, a movie from 2000 that Ms. Tunney co-starred in.

Think about that for a minute, think about how powerful that is! There’s lots of research to suggest that actually going through the process of doing something helps you learn it – my Dad probably won’t forget her name again. We already owned Vertical Limit on DVD, but imagine we hadn’t? We might have decided to purchase it right then and there. The possibilities are endless.

The digital family immediately impacts the world.

Here’s another example. My brother received March of the Penguins on DVD for Christmas, so one night we decided to watch it. The movie was very well done, and very interesting, but the most fascinating part to me was what happened after we watched it. The movie focuses on Emperor Penguins, so we discussed what other penguins also made the march, and how long they lived, and various other questions. We decided to watch another movie though, so nobody picked up the laptop. The next morning my Mom had been searching the Internet and found the answers to all of our questions. What might normally have been unanswered or forgotton questions became information we all learned.

The digital family actively learns together.

These are just two examples of the power of the digital family, and there are many more. I haven’t lived with my parents for almost eight years now, and yet I talk to them every day using instant messaging. Where many families might drift apart, we’ve used the technology available to remain close and up-to-date on each other’s lives (true the phone would work, but that is disruptive and very expensive by comparison). Many people cite our society’s growing reliance on digital devices as a negative thing, but I feel it’s entirely the opposite, and I think the digital family is a great way to illustrate why. Certainly if one person is completely digital but the rest of the family is not, there might be difficulties, but when the entire family is a digital family, there’s lots of benefits.

So here’s my theory in an nutshell:

The digital family embraces technology in all its forms and utilizes it to the fullest extent. As a result, the digital family is stronger, better educated, and has a greater impact on the world around them.

I’m probably not the first person to come up with such a concept, but I think it’s pretty powerful nonetheless. You might have heard of something called the “digital lifestyle”, but very often I find it focuses on the individual instead of the family. Bill Gates’ recent keynote at CES 2006 definitely mentioned some family aspects, but mostly it focused on the individual. And even more often I find that for the individual to follow the digital lifestyle, their entire family needs to be a digital family. So often there are demonstrations of keeping an eye on your kids, or handling your family’s medical information, but those things all require a digital family, not a digital individual, which is why I think the digital family concept is potentially more powerful.

I’m glad my family is a digital family – imagine if every family was!

Podcasting at the University of Regina

Post ImageThis is just too cool for words! Via Tod Maffin’s wonderful blog I came across what might become the world’s first university course on podcasting! It seems that Michael Bell from the University of Regina’s School of Journalism really likes podcasting and wants to take such a course:

When I first made the decision to come to j-school, I was excited about the possibility of combining my interest in practicing podcasting with my studies of journalism. Especially enticing was the impression I got from j-school instructors that it would indeed be possible to podcast within the j-school’s program of study. But it has to start somewhere, right?

Via this proposal, I hope to outline a way to continue to study journalism and combine my study with the practice of podcasting.

Michael is a full time student, not a teacher, so the idea uses something called “directed study”, which he explains is a way for a student to gain credit for learning something of interest. There is an instructor to suggest readings, assignments, etc. His entire proposal is pretty interesting and worth a read.

I think a course on podcasting (and blogging for that matter) would be a really unique offering at my own school. I admire Michael for taking the initiative to get something started. I’m definitely going to have to look into this “directed study” thing – I wonder if we have something similar at the UofA?

Read: Podcaster Canadiense

JavaSchools are not the problem

Post ImageJoel Spolsky is one of the most famous and respected software development commentators, so when he writes an article, it is usually a good idea to take notice. His latest article, The Perils of JavaSchools, was published today and is definitely worth reading. I think Joel makes some good points, but I don’t agree with his entire argument. I don’t think JavaSchools, as Joel describes them, are the problem.

First, Joel mentions that in the old days programmers chose C as their language of choice whereas now they choose Java. His first claim is that Java “is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers.” He goes on to say that pointers and recursion, two of the most difficult concepts to understand, are no longer taught in so called “weed out” courses.

The lucky kids of JavaSchools are never going to get weird segfaults trying to implement pointer-based hash tables. They’re never going to go stark, raving mad trying to pack things into bits. They’ll never have to get their head around how, in a purely functional program, the value of a variable never changes, and yet, it changes all the time! A paradox!

The first problem with this argument is that pointers are rarely required anymore, and functional programming just isn’t used much. Joel himself identifies both of these facts. He also mentions that to work on an operating system, you pretty much have to understand pointers. That’s the second problem – while that may be the case today, it probably will not always be the case!

I don’t think that a programmer has to learn a really hard language with really hard concepts to be a great programmer. I don’t think it matters much if someone is an expert at recursion and pointers, or if they are an expert at object oriented programming instead.

How is anyone supposed to learn anything if the curriculum has been carefully designed to make everything easier than it already is?

I don’t think that you need to learn the hard way in order to learn anything.

The fact is, things are getting easier than Joel makes them out to be. Managed code is quite a bit easier to write than traditional unmanaged code, but that doesn’t mean it is limited. There is already a research project at Microsoft to build an operating system using managed code (almost entirely). And we’re inching closer and closer to a time when efficient programming is more important than figuring out all of the different ways to solve a problem and then finding the fastest one, or the one that uses the least amount of memory, or separating them on some other heuristic. We’re going to need rapid application development to get things done quickly.

Consider manufacturing. Do you have to know how all of the little pieces work together in a widget in order to make a useful contribution to the team building that widget? What if the widget has wheels, do you need to completely understand the wheel? All of the angles, the way it works, the problems it may encounter? I would argue that the best way to make a useful contribution is to specialize in a particular part of that widget, or even better, the process of building part of the widget. We’d be able to build far more widgets, far more efficiently, if everyone specialized in something than having to understand everything.

Medicine works the same way. All doctors have to learn the same basic stuff, but then they specialize in a particular field. The difference with computing sciences is that we don’t yet know what that “same basic stuff” should be. Is it object oriented programming, or something else? Certainly the conventional wisdom is that you should learn OOP, and thus we teach Java. The “same basic stuff” has become Java, and I have no doubt it will change again in the future.

Second, Joel seems to suggest that the only good programmers are ones with lots and lots of education.

But what about the CS mission of CS departments? They’re not vocational schools! It shouldn’t be their job to train people to work in industry. That’s for community colleges and government retraining programs for displaced workers, they will tell you. They’re supposed to be giving students the fundamental tools to live their lives, not preparing them for their first weeks on the job. Right? Still.

I can’t understand why the professors on the curriculum committees at CS schools have allowed their programs to be dumbed down to the point where not only can’t they produce working programmers, they can’t even produce CS grad students who might get PhDs and compete for their jobs.

I agree that CS students really should learn to do some actual programming rather than just theorizing about it. I don’t agree though, that a good programmer should be defined by their level of education! I think what needs to happen is a separation of what we currently call “computing scientists.” Those with the PhD’s, and those who like to do the research and try and wrap their heads around weird concepts should be the computer scientists. Those who are trained as good programmers, able to solve problems and actually implement solutions should be computer engineers.

Take my school, for example. We have Computing Sciences and we have Computer Engineering – but the two do not match up to the two types of people I just described. Currently, Computing Sciences encompasses both computer scientists and computer engineers. That needs to change. There should be different curriculum for each.

Joel says:

I’m going back to ones and zeros.

That’s too bad, because Joel is a very smart guy and could probably make a difference in how we move forward. The problem is not with JavaSchools. The problem is that the same school is trying to teach two totally different types of people.

Read: Joel on Software

School Libraries in Canada Weblog

Post ImageAs some of you know, I have been the Technical Editor of SLIC for a couple years now. SLIC, or School Libraries in Canada, is the Canadian Association for School Libraries‘ journal for teachers and teacher-librarians and has been an online journal since I joined. I haven’t said much about it on my blog, but I thought our most recent issue was rather interesting!

The latest issue is titled Teacher/Teacher-Librarian Collaboration, and in addition to a collection of articles written by teachers, teacher-librarians, and other contributors, we have for the first time published a weblog! Aside from the fact that we probably won’t be making any new posts, it is a real blog, complete with web feeds, comments, and all of that other good blog stuff. Definitely a good way to talk about collaboration! Here’s the description for the new issue:

This issue of School Libraries in Canada examines the importance of that most elusive of ideals, the equal partnership of classroom teachers and teacher-librarians. The articles present the research findings on the effectiveness of collaborative teaching practice, discuss strategies, offer suggestions, and tell tales of passion and sorrow, frustration and success. At the heart of it all is a way of teaching that requires and models mutual respect, trust, cooperation and the power of shared vision. From the dry data to the practical experience, our writers share the importance of our work to the success of our colleagues, our students and ultimately our schools. This issue also includes SLIC’s first weblog – a venue for the community of teacher-librarians to discuss the challenges and rewards of collaborative teaching practice. We hope you will take advantage of this opportunity to explore the issues surrounding collaborative teaching practice with teacher-librarians across Canada and around the world.

This is just another example of blogging becoming more and more commonplace. Indeed I think educational institutions have been quick to warm up to blogging as it’s a really versatile medium – it’s perfect for class projects, teacher updates, school news, or even teacher and teacher-librarian collaboration!

Read: SLIC Online

Gates on High School Education

Post ImageMany of my friends are in, or have graduated from, the Faculty of Education. I guess that means that whether or not they become teachers, they have some interest in education, and indeed a vested interest in seeing education move forward. Yet I have often said that I don’t think the way we do things is right. I have wondered aloud to these friends that perhaps a move back to the old “master and apprentice” way of learning would be more appropriate! Today I came across these remarks from Bill Gates made back in February:

When we looked at the millions of students that our high schools are not preparing for higher education – and we looked at the damaging impact that has on their lives – we came to a painful conclusion:

America’s high schools are obsolete.

By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points.

By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.

I’d say that’s a fair assessment. Almost since day one of my University career, I have thought there must be a better way to do this. After the first two years of University, Grade 11 and Grade 12 largely seemed like a waste of time. Or maybe not a waste of time, but an inefficient use of time. Maybe I’m just cynical, I don’t know. I know there are teachers who care, but there’s often not enough resources. And some of the things that students need, they don’t have the opportunity to obtain.

I don’t really have a suggestion for alternatives though either – I simply haven’t given it enough thought. I do know however, that I want my kids to have the best education possible. There’s so much that we could be doing in high schools that we aren’t.

Read: Bill & Melinda Gates

Great Idea: NAIT's OokSTICK

Post ImageUSB Memory Sticks are incredibly inexpensive now, and as a result, it seems that everyone has them. The great thing about a memory stick though, is that you can never have too many! That’s why I think NAIT’s OokSTICK is an amazing idea:

Full-time students who are registering for courses this fall at NAIT [Northern Alberta Institute of Technology] are getting off to a great start with a memory stick and virtual magazine.

The 256MB USB stick not only contains plenty of storage space for student assignments, it also features OokMAG – the NAIT Student Virtual Magazine, a 40-page electronic publication loaded with information about life at NAIT.

Wonderful! This is something all post secondary institutions should be doing. It’s a great way to share information with students, and an even better way to show students that you’re willing to do something for them once in a while. I think tuition would be easier to swallow if I got a USB memory stick as part of the deal (not easy to swallow, just easier).

Read: NAIT OokSTICK