Mobile Computing's Marginalization of the Here and Now

I'm a fan of mobile computing generally. The convenience of SMS' unobtrusive pseudo-synchronousness is fantastic. Albeit slowly, I'm beginning to awaken to the potential of micro-blogging to connect and convey. Ambient findability is exciting. Our ability to connect and collaborate is undergoing incredible transformation right before us. All that, really.

And yet there is, of course, cause to be troubled. Cell phone fueled rudeness is only the most obvious (and least interesting) example. The notion that one's phone conversation is at least as pressing as the coffee purchasing transaction in which one is presently engaged is not just inconsiderate, it is incorrect in a profound but subtle way. Single-minded, willful awareness of and participation in one's present circumstances is central not only to civility, it just may be the secret to living well. Being glued to / distracted by one's computicator is a major impediment to such mindfulness, and that cost, no matter how easily ignored, is very real.

We might just as well be walking, shopping, and -- quelle horreur! -- drinking in our own little isolated virtual library carrels, walled off from one another, transparently isolated. Driving while on the phone is of course dangerous to the physical well being of those around you (and sorry but that's the case hands-free or not). Walking while texting/talking /browsing/blogging makes one not only annoyingly unaware of those with whom one shares the sidewalk, it frays, when done en masse, subtly but insidiously, civility's precondition: acknowledgment of one another's existence, to ourselves and to one another.

One often hears it said that many homeless, willfully ignored by most passersby as they are, want as much as anything to be acknowledged (I think I'd favor a warm safe place to sleep myself, but nevertheless). Just schlepping to work I sometime feel the same yearning. Casual, fleeting eye contact is some days impossible to come by. Sometimes I willfully fail to yield way to an oblivious text-er just so the collision will force our mutual acknowledgement, however surly, of one another's existence (does that make me weird?). I try to smile at any rare passerby who actually meets my gaze. It's a trifle by itself I guess but I do worry that civility is fragile and threatened. Online pseudo-anonymity gave us /b/ and its ilk (god help us); what harm will come of its real world analog (sic)?

When folks are immersed in their smartphone's 320x480 universe at the bar, computing truly has become horrifyingly ubiquitous. Here was a recent lineup: end of the bar; guy, head bent, texting obliviously; me; guy noodling his iPhone obliviously; woman talking loudly and angrily into cellphone re, from what I gather against my will, a recent breakup. Struck me as sad. Bowling Alone - the fact that in the US we're bowling in record numbers but that bowling together in organized leagues is all but a relic from a bygone era - troubled Robert Putnam, and it troubled me as well after I read that title in all its excruciatingly well researched glory, although I think Putnam underestimates technology's power to build social capital (after all, those folks sitting in the bar isolated by their iPhones are connecting all right, just not with those with whom they are colocated). Bowling alone (together) is small potatoes compared to drinking alone (together) for my money. "De-localization" is bad enough; de-localization at the watering hole seems a tragedy of sorts.

Awareness is what's at stake, and the well-being that comes with it. I am loathe to come across as all new age-y or anything like that (truly, a man less spiritual than I is tough to come by) but mindfulness in all its many layers and manefestations is vital. And it is especially fleeting in our heavily technology-mediated times.

Take a gander at Jon Kabat Zinn's talk at Google here if you don't already know what I'm driving at:

Reflections on My Experiences with Using Alice to Teaching Introductory Programming

I redeveloped and took ownership of BIS 112, Programming Concepts, over the summer of 2007, somewhat reluctantly given that the vision for the course and the work to redesign it had been started by a colleague who fell seriously ill and went out on leave. I thought that the idea to use Alice was sound and I endorsed it as the department chair, but at the outset I was not a true believer, so to speak. I came to love Alice, though, as well as the challenge of teaching introductory programming in an open enrollment context.

I taught my first section of the redeveloped, Alice-based class in September. I was struck at the outset by the potential of the Alice approach. A blank page and a blinking cursor can be intimidating, and it precludes the sort of exploratory messing around and “intelligent muddling” that can be so powerful, as a learning technique generally, but especially for learning software. (In fact, in a course on interface design and usability I hold out to the students that the extent to which a design supports intelligent muddling often works well as a sort of usability gauge for sufficiently complex software systems.)

From something as simple as one of the students, working on our first in-class lab asking “Ummm..what’s recursion?” because he’d inadvertently created a recursive function, it was evident that a direct manipulation interface affords serendipity in a way that an IDE just can’t, and having that conversation about recursion, even though it came too early in the course to be easy to address, and even though the class doesn’t really cover recursion in much depth at all, this sort of authentic inquiry can make a huge impact I think.

Better still was the student who, in the midst of an open-ended in-class assignment, called me over because he had a Halloween scene with a half dozen or so zombies and he was looking for a way to make them move one after the next; he was tiring of instructing them individually one after the next and suspected there was an easier way. Of course it was a wonderful opportunity to talk about lists and arrays. I’ve no confidence that he left that day with a particularly robust understanding of arrays, but eventually he did, and it’s great thing to see that genuine interest in accomplishing a task coupled with an earnest interest in doing it more efficiently. Having an authentic interest in accomplishing some particular task is a fantastic learning opportunity. They claim that a lazy programmer is a good programmer. The claim that a lazy programming student is a good programming student is pretty preposterous, I know, yet with authentic problems that students actually desire to work on, one can leverage that whole lazy = good business because students will seek easier ways to accomplish things and will learn them in the process. Yeah team! Without Alice that sort of “hey, here’s what I’d like to do and it’s taking a while is there an easier way to do it?” is much, much less likely on the first day of class, that’s for sure.

Just as in real software engineering, however, there are accidental and essential complexities in teaching programming too, and Alice was no panacea (no silver bullet, if you will) of course. I had heartache soon enough that no programming environment could redress when, on our second meeting, it came time to perform some resoundingly basic arithmetic manipulations. My request of the students in class was to make a world that asked the user how old he or she was in years and to tell them how old they will be in days at their next birthday. Having temporary trouble is reasonable enough but the stark difficulty several of the students had with flat out basic arithmetic took me aback. I asked one student - OK, do we need to make the number the user gives us bigger or smaller? He was uncertain. Abstraction of any sort can be tough: I asked him how old in days someone who was 10 years would be and he answered immediately and correctly. I’ve still not quite come to terms with the consequences of open enrollment, nor have my teaching approaches evolved as much as they need to. Such a wide preparedness disparity is an inordinate teaching challenge, and one with which I continue to struggle.

Essential complexity is irreducible. That which is genuinely challenging will remain genuinely challenging. Nevertheless my initial experiences are that Alice is a real time on task enhancer, and that is no small thing. The final projects in the class *way* outstripped the minimum requirements I had assigned for them. Students made way bigger, more involved and more creative projects than they needed to. This doesn’t mean that they learned programming any better necessarily, but it surely doesn’t hurt. I’m greatly encouraged.

Favored Quadrants

...Just don't be *too* deviant.

Plagiarism & the Culture of Customer Service

Every case of plagiarism is devastating. I'm crushed by the squandered opportunity of it all, the betrayal, the death of the sense of working together to a common end. And in many cases -- the one that moved me to write today included -- my intelligence is insulted, 'How could you possibly think this would fool me' style.

This term one of my students, and a fairly good one to that point to boot, turned in as his own one of the example programs that comes with the Alice programming environment / IDE. Not only did this example program have nothing to do with the requirements specified for the final project, it was wildly more elaborate than the final project needed to be (not to mention the fact that I recognized the moment I saw it as one among the sample programs provided with Alice).

This is an online class (did I mention how spectacularly difficult i find teaching programming online?) and I returned the assignment electronically with a note calling the bluff and emphasizing how disappointed I was. About 12 hours afterwards I get the following terse little single-sentence email from the student at issue:

Please call me at [phone number].

I know, I know - at least he said please, right? Didn't address me at all, didn't sign, didn't express an interest in straightening out a terrible misunderstanding, just "call me." Ach du liebe!

It's troubling not only for the extent to which the approach is so profoundly misguided but also for the disrespect of it all. Haranguing about the commercialization of higher education is tired and boring, I know. Nevertheless, if we didn't operate in a culture that encourages students at every turn to think of themselves as customers, I'm doubtful such an email would ever have graced my inbox. And if we didn't operate in a culture that encourages students to think of themselves as customers we'd have fewer cases of plagiarism in the first place.

Now comes the claim that there must have been some sort of technical error, that he never uploaded any such file, that, while no easy explanation for how what happened came to transpire avails, this was all just, y'know, a glitch. Such clotted nonsense. In for a penny, in for a pound - I suppose it's human nature.

Normally this job is great, inspiring fun. Other times, alas, it is not.

Opting-Out of the "Rewind Revolution": legitimizing the transmission model with automatic classroom capture

I received the following notice from Drexel, where I am an adjunct:

All on-campus classes starting this upcoming winter term that are able to be captured using Apresso/Echo 360 will be, and materials will be made available to students via a Blackboard course shell. Please include in your syllabus the following sentence - “Lectures may be recorded and/or streamed and rebroadcast for educational purposes only.” If you do not want your course made available to students using this technology, you need to request an exemption by 12/22/08.

I've no immediate personal interest. (Indeed - I should be so lucky as to get a classroom sufficiently functional as to have Echo 360 in it! I'd be happy for a !#@%ing data projector and a median room temperature under 85.) Still I'm troubled.

I've no doubt that there are some introductory, knowledge-driven, lecture-centric classes where these recordings will undoubtedly be very convenient for students and may even enhance learning. Nevertheless, I'm troubled. This default recording and rebroadcasting of class time marks the apotheosis of the transmission model of learning. Class is not a learning experience brought into existence by the active participation of all, it's an artifact facilitating the transmission of knowledge from one head to the next. You can consume the class live as it transpires if the mood strikes, or you can do at your leisure. Whichever suits you.

This is of course a horrific mindset and one I have struggled over the years to resist. Students don't consume the learning, they create the learning and they do so in the moment. Save 40 or so minutes out of 150, my classes would be largely pointless to watch after the fact, I'm proud to say. What happens there is not a performance; it is not intended to be consumed ex post facto (or at all, for that matter).

Fortunately, an instructor may seek to opt-out of the auto-recording if it "does not advance the educational goals of the course". Call me judgmental, but my inclination is to say shame on you if you fancy it does advance the educational goals of your course.

The opt-out nature of this arrangement gives me the creeps. Isn't it de facto surveillance? Perhaps the professors can opt out, but can the students? No, it would seem, and once again I find that troubling. Apparently the single sentence we were instructed to add to our syllabi -- "Lectures may be recorded and/or streamed and rebroadcast for educational purposes only." is supposed to take care of that, which strikes me as grossly inadequate.

The chilling effect of such recording not only on the spontaneity of the learning environment but on the free exchange of ideas worries me too. Will an instructor be less inclined to take up controversial or difficult issues and follow boldly wherever they might lead knowing that the proceedings will be going down on the permanent record? I fear I might be.

IP questions abound as well, although it would seem Drexel's policy to my non-lawerly eyes seems to make no ownership claim to classroom materials.

Lecture capture technology does not really excite me that much. There are authentic uses and ones I'm interested in myself (providing online classes with a window into classroom-based analogues running in parallel could be very useful, although I'd favor doing it is real time with Connect or WebEx). Whatever other controversies remain, it's exceptionally difficult to argue that classroom capture should be opt-out.