On Teaching

echin and myself had a great conversation about many things this evening. Started off somewhere around why tips are silly, and quickly moved on to other archaic customs we continue today. This reminded me of a link I have been meaning to post for a while about the Gutenberg method of teaching. I'll provide a brief summary to give you the idea.... but it is a really well written narrative, and worth the read just for that.
So why do we sit in large lecture theatres and copy down what the professor says [notes on the SFU system later]. Well, turns out books used to be expensive, not just $100 expensive, like 4 months work for a monk type of expensive. So how do you get students copies of all the relevant texts? Well one guy teacher stands at the front of a large room and reads out the text while all the scribes students copy it down. Yep, thats what you pay for with your tuition money, the opportunity to copy down a book. Now things have changed a little since then, printing press and all. So now you copy down your teacher's dictated text book in an incomplete and somewhat hap-hazard manner under the guise of "learning the material." They even encourage you to ask questions now, although no one does.
The Gutenberg method of teaching is basically exactly what you'd come up with as a teaching method if your weren't terribly biased by current customs... Get the students to read the text ahead of time and then answer their question and give them your intuition in class. Simple isn't it, now that you think of it. There are some other points that the article touches on, like, we have to write text books that are actually readable from front to back (note: this means not written as a reference on a subject) and this makes teachers jobs much harder (you know, they have to actually teach rather than just repeat material they are very familiar with).
Now, I have had the privilege of actually attending a university that half got this. Most courses provided copies of the overhead lecture notes in some digital format. This meant that we didn't have to play the roll of scribes most of the time. I found this hugely beneficial since it meant that I could actually pay attention to what the teacher said, not just on writing it down. However, the read the text before and have a discussion in class was missing. Now I'm sure this was partly my lack of initiative, but the university atmosphere wasn't really helping. There were many classes I got by on not even opening the text (probably more a fault of the text rather than the class). So SFU was part way there, but still has a good ways to go before bringing scribing learning out of the dark ages.
Anyway, a good read for anyone. Seriously, if you have read this far and haven't read the article, go read it now, it is worth it.



wow, I set out just to write something for the sake of writing and look what I ended up with. Real wind bag I am. Anyway, I really need to improve my writing skills, specifically my technical writing, so hopefully there will be more posts in the future. I should make a series of posts about the javascript app I'm writing, maybe next week.


Cheers for now.
Andy.

On Good Design

Good design is something that is desperately needed and extremely hard. We are abounded by examples of bad design so it is nice every now and then to see an example of an old problem being solved by an elegant design. The stairCase is just such an example. To get to the top of a tall book case, why not turn the bottom shelves into pull out stairs.

For more information on good design and its difficulties, I recommend reading The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman.

Liberals: please stop sucking

I really want to vote for you. Please give me a reason, any reason. Just say something!

So far the only person out and actually campaigning like they care is Harper. If it race is between a no show and Harper... well I may not vote.

I think the link is typical of how the liberal campaign has gone so far, a day late and a dollar short.

Gradumuation

So, Couple people we know went across the stage today:



I almost managed to text allen just as he walked across the stage, from the live feed, looks like I got him just before he handed his name to the guy reading names. I'll see if I can post a video of that sometime next week. Mike Schwartz was on the list for today but looks like he was a no show, that guy works too hard.
Anyway, congrats to all that graduated and I hope to join your ranks in about 4 months.

Cheers,
Andy.

Cognitive Surplus

The idea of putting the spare time of the masses to better use has come up a couple times over the last couple days and I think it is worth mentioning here. Boing Boing has a good article on just how much of this free time is available.

Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year [spent watching tv]. Put another way, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.

It is those hours not wasted on TV that produce projects like apache (which now out flanks Microsoft IIS 2:1) and wikipedia. It is harnessing the 5, 10 or 20 minutes of spare time thousands of people are willing to spare that allows these mammoth projects to be completed freely and openly and for the benefit of everyone. There was a great TED Talk on Open-Source economics that delves deeper into the social and economic ratifications of this model.

Pick your favorite project and donate your spare minutes... or for that matter pick a hobby... just turn the TV off and you'll be amazed at how much "cognitive surplus" you have.

8 years in 1.5 mintues

-- Original: The Adaption to my Generation via: The Vancouver Manifesto
The basic idea is, take a photo of yourself every day in roughly the same position. Then compile them together and make a video of yourself aging. The result is really quite awe inspiring, seeing someone age 8 years in only a minute and a half. I think this would be an awesome idea to do for a toddler, and then when they are old enough, let them decide if they want to keep going or not. Watching the first 20 years of someones life like that would be incredible.