Tuesday 22 June 2010 at 20:46
I'm rethinking the design of my blog visually, organizationally, and in instrumentation. Well, I'm also rethinking my career. Hoping to focus my professional attention on computational education. Those of you reading via the feeds, there's likely to be some churn as I rearrange things a bit. I'll try to minimize the noise, but just in case I break something badly, you'll have had a little warning.
Tuesday 15 June 2010 at 22:42
Computational thinking and computational doing are powerful tools for teaching powerful ideas.
In Makers vs. Sponges Elizabeth Corcoran comments via O'Reilly Radar:
I keep wondering why we lump all "technology" into the same basket. By doing so, we ignore the most important distinction of all: whether we are sponges for absorbing other people's ideas, or whether we're making our own.
Some of the comments on that article turned into a small discussion about tools vs. content. I composed this first in reply to that discussion, but wanted to expand on the idea here.
The article Gary S. Stager wrote: A new paradigm for evaluating the learning potential of an ed tech activity emphasizes a need for education to introduce "powerful ideas". I'd like to expand on that thought with a few concrete examples.
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, long division was the subject of doctoral dissertations. Today long division is taught in elementary school.
What changed between those eras was the introduction of arabic numerals. Long division in roman numerals is profoundly difficult. The new technology of digits, and especially the humble number zero, completely changed long division into the relatively simple algorithm that we all learned in grade school.
The technological revolution that I want to see in education would make physics and calculus and linear algebra accessible to elementary aged kids, among other advanced subjects. But current student assessments are measuring for things like long division -- more advanced subjects would be missed completely. And schools of education are not preparing future teachers to teach more advanced material.
When I talk about teaching physics in elementary school many people look at me like I'm insane, or that I have no concept of "age appropriate". But the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.
In 1967 Seymore Papert was introducing elementary aged kids to LOGO. The turtle graphics in logo are differential geometry -- very advanced mathematics made completely accessible to young children. Some of Alan Kay's recent work includes fifth-graders recreating Galileo's experiments and then building computer models of gravity on the computer to compare with their experimental data. That's physics -- newtonian mechanics to be specific -- made accessible to grade schoolers.
Forty-three (seriously? 43?!) years later we don't see even LOGO among educational standards. I don't think there are enough adults who understand what a huge leap it is to teach differential geometry to kids through turtle graphics. In the late 1970s Apple II computers poured into many schools and LOGO became widely available in education. But those thirty plus years ago a bunch of adults saw some pretty pictures, shrugged, and ignored it as child's play instead of recognizing it for the little revolution it really could be. What else could we be teaching with these tools? If we could start elementary kids with an elementary understanding of newtonian mechanics, what could we be teaching them by the time they got to high school?
I really like Gary's comments about powerful ideas and can't agree forcefully enough that computational thinking and computational doing are powerful tools for teaching powerful ideas. It is about the tools, but not /only/ about the tools. Like the humble number zero, computing can completely transform the nature of the material we would like to teach our children.
Other posts about powerful technology and powerful ideas:
Alan Kay and computational thinking
Logo, Fractals, and Recursion; Programming, and Removing Repetition
Tuesday 09 February 2010 at 10:12
As I left the house this morning, my mind was racing over concepts of finance that I'd watched last night. Jon Udell interviewed Salman Khan about education and screencasting in his work on http://khanacademy.org. Their conversation began with thoughts about using a minimalist approach to produce tutorials on a vast array of subjects. They moved on to exciting conversations about education and technology. I spent some time watching a few of the videos... surprised to find that some among that collection were directly relevant to some of the work I do for bivio. My mind was buzzing about present value and his spreadsheet model for analyzing the question of buying a house vs. renting. I was daydreaming of other possibilities for the software he's created to quiz people on math concepts: http://khanexercises.appspot.com/. I was thinking about how I might do something similar around my work on perspective, or around the lessons I've learned about software development and software business from Rob. I was thinking a little about how I might simplify whatever it is I want to tell about Ralph Miller, Sarah's Grandfather.
Then I snapped out of my inner world and noticed the space I was in.
The sun was brilliant on the snow as I walked to work this morning. Each crunchy step along the sidewalk carried my eyes through shimmering veils, twinkling rays of sunlight reflecting off of the snow from every direction I turned. The sparkly blanket was striped with the startling visual quiet from the shadows of trees and shrubs.
The inner and outer landscapes were equally beautiful and exciting. I'm glad to have been lost in thought and equally glad to have been found in the moment. At least some people I know would disagree. If you have not been enchanted by mathematics and software, I'm sorry for the beauty you're missing. And regardless of that question, I hope that you see the beauty where ever you are right now as well as the beauty inside you.
Thursday 29 October 2009 at 11:55
What to do with 18 to 24 inches of snow in the yard? When I shovel our driveway, I always pile the snow up on the lawn, especially when it's good packing snow. This heavy wet storm... fantastic stuff. Last night, I decided to take one more pass at the driveway before the heavy wet snow froze overnight. Usually I'm thinking about getting some much needed water to our trees. Last night I was thinking about Halloween and Elliott's recent interest in mazes. Inspiration took hold of me and I spent an extra hour making a labyrinth with the Great Pile as the destination.
Not sure how long the thing will last under the attention of an energetic four-and-a-half-year-old on a snow day. But at least I have some pictures to show for it.
Thursday 15 October 2009 at 10:41
Only of interest for perl programmers, and from 2003 so there's some chance you've seen this before. This node at perlmonks is beautiful, even if it does illustrate the rampant re-invention of wheels that mostly defines perl culture:
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=296978
We have our own style of objects in bOP. At their core they're all blessed array refs, but it's not quite as simple as that.
Saturday 19 September 2009 at 22:49
Back in the early eighties, one of my best friends introduced me to a bunch of music I really wasn't ready for at the time: Dead Kennedy's, Suicidal Tendencies "before they sold out", Butthole Surfers, and a bunch of others who's names I can't remember now. Shannon had run away from home. He was squatting in an abandoned house in Denver with some other punk rockers and skin heads. I seem to remember that he had some respect for Metallica at the time, but I didn't know that band for probably another decade. He also left some vinyl records with me including The Who's Next and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.
One especially memorable night I was hanging out with him and his friends. Now understand... there was absolutely no way I could ever have been allowed in this punker home without Shannon's introduction. I was a total preppy at the time, collar up and everything. I was listening to pop music of the time like Howard Jones, Flock of Seagulls, Duran Duran, Brian Adams, Loverboy, or some older seventies stuff like Styx, Boston, Eagles, ELO ... do you have the picture? Could not have been a less likely crowd for me to hang with for even a few hours.
Fast forward a few years to 1989. I transferred to CU in the spring. My brother and I were on our way out to a fancy dinner with my mom and uncle -- we were dressed in ties and maybe coats too (which will be important for the story later). We ran by my dorm to drop off my stuff. I think I spent that weekend at Mom's house and came back to the dorm a day or two later. When I arrived one wall of the room had been newly decorated with a sheet painted with all sorts of punk rock images and slogans. I recognized the DK and punk snot dead and Sex Pistols. Black Flag's logo seemed familiar from somewhere (tho' didn't know at the time it belonged to Black Flag). I wasn't sure what to make of the "Die Frat Boy Scum." Could have been a band name, or just something keeping with the theme.
I thought to myself, "Cool. My roommate must be a punker." It was really a beautiful bit of punker graffiti art.
It was another day or more before I actually got to meet my roommate, his friend across the hall, and a woman they hung out with often. All were in jeans, t-shirts, and painted leather jackets. The friend across the hall wore his hair in a short mohawk, the woman was shaved on one half and long purple and black on the other half. My roommate was just starting to learn guitar. We had a long and pretty interesting conversation about a lot of things, but mostly music and where we were from. At some point my roommate asked "Are you an ATO?"
"I don't know. Can you be one without knowing it?" I replied. It seams one of the guys down the hall saw Greg and I when we moved my stuff in and assumed by our dress that I was in a fraternity and really gave Steve a scare -- thought he'd seen an ATO pin on one of our lapels. That more or less explained the "die frat boy scum" thing, anyway. Whenever I think about this it makes me laugh out loud at the tragic horror that must have filled that dorm room as my roommate and his friends decorated that sheet, laying down the anti-establishment ground rules from the outset. I also can't miss the irony of just how well I would have fit the part of frat life, if I'd known anything about it at the time. It must have been a huge relief that I mostly knew who Jello Biafra and Sid Vicious were. It was cool hanging out with punkers. I went been to some local shows and played in the mosh pit on at least several occasions.
Another few years on, my own tastes had migrated to big hair bands. I had lived with another musician, Scott, who was a guitarist in a local heavy metal band. Greg had also introduced me to Metallica and Queensryche and Megadeath and I pretty much became a head banger -- hair down to the middle of my back and everything. I think it was around this time that I caught up with Shannon once again and got to tell him about my short life living with punkers.
I think it was at that time that Shannon described a poetic jacket he'd seen some years before. It was clearly very beaten up and had obviously once been thoroughly painted. Only one glyph was left on the sleeve. The faded words "punk snot dead" around which was a more freshly painted tombstone embossed with R.I.P. I've never been able to get that image out of my head and so tonight decided to see if I could recreate something like it. Kind of a present to Shannon for having been the first to broaden my musical horizons beyond pop radio and a thank you note to anarchists everywhere.
There's a little more to tell in this story too. When I was living in Las Vegas in the mid 1990's, I went to see The Offspring in concert with a specific interest in seeing what punk rock looked like back from the grave. It was a huge and pretty fun show. I think there were three different mosh pits going at one point. I'm pretty sure that's the last time I moshed. Except for those pits, it seemed an awful lot like a big hair band arena sized concert.
And to add just a little more contrast to my musical influences... I also learned some ballroom dance and especially the Lindy Hop with the UNLV Ballroom Dance team. When I moved back to Boulder, I was quite active in the Denver Lindy Hop scene. Mom couldn't believe I was dancing my socks off to the music her father loved!