Friday, March 27, 2015

PhD Seminar - teaching, writing and oral presentation skills

Every month, here are Georgia Tech we are getting together to cover some of the things that PhD students should know / learn during their studies.  This month we gathered to cover various communication skills.  I have copied the points from today's seminar:

Teaching Advice
  • Strive for engagement
  • Trust your expertise
  • Conference Talk != Teaching
  • Get Students to Talk
Writing Advice
  • Write for a general audience occasionally
  • Read to find models of writing
  • Book Recs: Oxford Guide to Plain English / Bugs in Writing
  • It is a process
  • Find out what motivates you to write
  • Inside-Out style
  • Pay attention to copyediting and learn
Presentation Advice
  • Motivate them to want to read the paper
  • The audience doesn't know what you don't tell them
  • Toastmasters (or Techmasters at GT)
  • Slides as a reminder
  • Eye contact
  • Repeat the question (everyone has heard it and you know what is being asked)

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Book Review: Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty

A book of such promise is Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty, yet it fails.  The first third of this work followed the hopeful theme, intertwining the story of programming, its style, and the author's complex relationship with his Indian heritage, desire to be an artist (writer, etc), and his ability to make money programming.  An interesting twining that continued to encourage me to read, yet some worrisome signs developed.

The first worry was skipping a long section on how computers work.  This *is* my field of Computer Science, so I wasn't interested in reading the basics.  Yet worse was noticing some inaccuracies.  They established a certain level of understanding in Computer Science that was concerning, particularly in light of the author's non-technical background.  Livable, er readable, sure.

It was then the author's intent to show the great intellectual contributions made by Indians.  I have no dispute of this point, except that it wasn't actually fitting with the established theme of the work.  Finding that Sanskrit has a codified language of great antiquity enabled the author in this quest.  Alas, it was long pages that grew increasingly divorced with the first part of the title, "The Beauty of Code" and further focus on the later, "The Code of Beauty".  And this code deriving from Indian literary traditions.

In the end, the book concluded.  A crescendo of final claims that each read like next page would be the last, until such time as there was really no text left.  I learned something about Indian culture by reading this book, except that was not why I read it.  I did not gain in what I sought, so I cannot recommend reading it, nor care to provide a link to it.

Saturday, March 7, 2015

Conference Attendance SIGCSE 2015 - Day 2 / 3



I recognize that Day 1 afternoon went “missing”.  I presented my poster and that consumed the sum total of my time.  While I am happy with all that I achieved with my poster (writing IRB protocol, independent work, analyzing my teaching, et cetera), it was not considered as a finalist for the student research competition (SRC). Yet I received significant feedback and a number of follow-ons that I will have to try to evaluate the next time(s) I teach.  I have been doing an excellent job of networking and speaking with my colleagues.  And I have seen several exciting techniques to improve my teaching.

This was a small Bird of the Feather (BoF), but we discussed some approaches and things to know before attending your first conference, and not just for undergraduates.  However, in some cases, undergraduates are attending their local institution and may never have traveled any significant distance.  What do they really need to bring?



In traveling, take some time to prepare students.  Let them know what to expect.  For example, it is okay to miss some paper sessions, and even return to your room entirely.  It is okay to ask questions 1:1.  Find groups where people are being introduced and join in.  Student volunteering, while takes time, also gives an additional individuals that you will know.  Use the people you know to introduce you to others at the conference.

This is just what it sounds.  A Ruby based framework that enables writing simple unit tests that will then be applied to a full simulation of the assembly executed.

The presenter(s) were not at this poster, but it showed a high quality interface for seeing the scheduling of threads according to different scheduling policies.  The intent here was not to explore races and parallelism, but rather see how scheduling decisions are made in an OS.

I was not expecting this poster.  You are walking along and then see 4 Raspberry Pi's all networked together.  Raspberry Pis and HPC?!  A small setup, but it is an interesting development that takes advantage of the low cost Pi and still provide an HPC platform for students.

Plastic parts all worked together to form replicas of Pascal's mechanical calculator.  Interesting and student assembled.

Teams of 4 students, approach is evaluated on courses from three years of major (sophomore on up).  Teams are formed with CATME (particularly using dissimilar GPAs in a group), as well as partner selection (when possible).  Students provide peer evaluations after each stage of the project.  Significant data collection looking particularly at what students prefer for to be the evaluation policy (between 100% of grade for the group’s work to 100% of the grade for the individual’s contribution).  This question was taken repeatedly throughout the semester, which leads to whether student preferences change?  More senior students prefer more weight being attributed to group.  The predictor for what grade split is at what point in the course is this surveyed, and effectively as soon as the teams are formed the students prefer to be graded primarily as a group.  Follow on study is looking at experience with team projects, trust in the ability to evaluate individual contribution, and other questions.  This is a hopeful data point.

How do faculty become aware and why do they try out teaching practices?  66 participants in CS, including chairs, tenure-track faculty, teaching faculty, and Ph.D. student instructors across 36 institutions.  First, the mental model of what an instructor does can differ significantly from what the instructor is actually doing.  Second, faculty can find out about practices through a variety of approaches, such as self-identifying that there is possible improvement in their teaching.  Faculty often trust other faculty like them (researchers to researches, lecturers to lecturers).  Third, when adopting a practice, faculty need to evaluate the effectiveness (see also my poster, student feedback, etc).  -- My efforts in this have been having different faculty (my recommendation letter writers) view my lectures / teaching, and thereby giving them demonstrations of different practices.
"We lost the war on cheating"  Instead, we have to meet with students such that they are demonstrating their understanding of the code.  The requirements of submissions: attribute your sources and understand your submission.  Enables students to work together, use all sources, develop interview skills.  Enables reuse of assignments.  Grading is now 40% correctness / 60% code interview.  Rubric for each interview.  Students should arrive early and have their laptop ready to present / explain.  Students were better able to learn and complete the assignments, as well as feedback for improvement.  Students also felt better able to learn the material by being able to collaborate and not constrained by a collaboration policy.  There are some stressors, such as TAs having to meet with hundreds of students, as well as their inconsistencies.  -- This was perhaps the most exciting new technique that I saw / heard about.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Conference Attendance SIGCSE 2015 - Day 1 Morning

It is colder here in Kansas City.  Fortunately, I will only be outside briefly.  Most often I will be networking and continuing my efforts to both become a better teacher, as well as finding an academic job teaching.

This morning, I am focusing on the "Curriculum" track.  I am excited by the three papers in this track, the first looks at research, the second is on systems courses, and the last on parallel computing courses.  Alas, I was in the hallway track and missed the first work.  Perhaps I can find the authors later.

Backward Design: An Integrated Approach to a Systems Curriculum
The goal of systems is "higher level software creation".  Computer Science courses are split into Core Tier 1 and Tier 2 (a term from the ACM 2013 curriculum), where the former are taken by all CS majors and the later are only taken by most or some.  One issue in the old curriculum was that OS also taught C.  In crafting a new curriculum, first establish a vision statement, which can be used in conflict resolution (and also revised).  Establish SMART objectives to prepare and build the assessments.  The results can be found on github.

A Module-based Approach to Adopting the 2013 ACM Curricular Recommendations on Parallel Computing
Parallel computing is important and important for CS graduates to know.  The 2013 ACM Curriculum increased the number of hours that students should take in parallel computing.  Part of the recommendations are to place parallel computing into the curriculum and not just as a course.  Thus parallelism modules are placed throughout the curriculum (perhaps as early as CS1 or CS2).  Find the level of abstraction for a concept and introduce it appropriately.  For example, Amdahl's Law in CS1 versus cache coherence in senior-level class.  5 modules of parallelism were established, which have equivalences with the ACM.  Each course in the curriculum may have 1 or more modules, which then teaches and reinforces the topics.  Even after adding these modules, there has continued to be incremental development and revisions, which have improved student outcomes.  The key take away is that it is possible to introduce these recommendations without completely rewriting the curriculum.

In the afternoon, I will be standing with my poster -  Using Active Learning Techniques in Mixed Undergraduate / Graduate Courses.  Later I will post updates from my afternoon.