MishMash

Newcastle University Compromises on Excellence

High hopes for our new Vice Chancellor take something of a battering with this latest news:

Key themes of the discussions centred around how the pursuit of excellence should be balanced with relevance to student vocations, business and society in general.

Er ... pardon?

Looking forward to the next announcement:

After careful consideration, Newcastle University has decided that it can best provide relevance to student vocations, business and society in general by striving for unequalled mediocrity in all of its activities.

Howtoons

Howtoons are a viral form of engineering education and excitement. Each is a project in a cartoon for kids to build, play and learn with. Even better, they are fun adventures within themselves.

Howtoons are designed to encourage children to be active participants in their own fun, creativity, and invention and to rely less on consumable entertainment. They use the extremely photocopyable (and hence mass deployable) 8"x11" format with supporting URL's for more information on each.

Howtoons is a project of Saul Griffith and Joost Bonsen. [Howtoons]

I've got to make one of these.

This is the sort of training question …

… which leads to expertise in stripping away the crap to find the question:

Margaret is studying her math.

She encounters the following problem: If ice cream comes in five different flavors — pistachio, mint, vanilla, chocolate, and coffee — and the ice cream is sold in packages of two flavors per pack, randomly assigned, what is the chance that any given two-pack you buy contains mint?

Margaret’s answer: “Zero chance. I wouldn’t buy any at all, because only an idiot would buy ice cream in randomly-assigned two-flavor packages.” [AKMA]

Teaching is the art of the algorithmically testable?

Sébastien Paquet links in to a discussion Ed Felten and Henk Ellerman on using computers to mark students' work, and I can't let it pass. An idea which simply formalises

Teaching is the art of the testable.

and, further, narrows "testable" to mean "testable by algorithmic process".

Comments from Ari Jolma on my Open Source paper

My recent paper on the potential value of open source software in Hydroinformatics has stimulated another response (in addition, that is, to those published in the Journal from Profs. Mike Abbott and Jean Cunge). I will respond to Ari Jolma's comments here quoting, with permission, from his email.

I read with great interest your paper in J. Hydroinformatics. There surely is a need for free software and open and useful standards in Hydroinformatics.

The word "useful" in this sentence, apparently so innocuous, is critical, I think. I managed to resist all but the briefest comment on this subject in my thesis, because it was clearly off topic, but that brief comment I did feel compelled to make. Interoperability, Not Standards is Clay Shirky's mantra. Shirky was talking about premature standardisation in the context of Peer to Peer software. His conclusions seem valid for the hydroinformatics world too, however.

Teaching is the art of the testable

I've spent a few hours yesterday and today (and will add a couple more tomorrow morning) standing in the computer labs proving support for the students doing the Water Resources project [WARNING: PDF, 68Kb, the unit in question is on page 19; these things should be in HTML, natch]. As ever, an interesting experience. Working out what they get, and what they don't, trying to steer them to thinking about something without telling them, and so on. It's been a while since I've done any sort of teaching, and it's fun (but two half jobs and teaching doesn't work, before anyone in the department starts getting ideas :-).

When Dad was over in Bristol for the evening last week, one of the things we talked about was the way we (in the most general sense) teach kids (since this starts from a very early age) so effectively to answer exam questions. We've got ourselves stuck in this marvellous viscous cycle, where we try to dream up difficult questions, and the kids just get better at filtering out the crap. We ask,

Johnny has four apples, and he gives two to Mary. How many does he have left?

If Mary had three to begin with, how many does she end up with?

After being faced with a couple of these, our hypothetical child begins to see,

Easy exams

So, the annual flurry of discussion about the general and increasing uselessness of exam results as measures of [whatever it is we think we are measuring] continues. Too many people are getting A grades at A level, we need a better discriminator.

Well, far be it from me to excuse the general dropping of exam "hardness" (be quiet at the back, and don't try to tell those who sat a mixture of old and new exams (in Scotland) that standards aren't dropping), but it does seem that Universities and employers are managing to discriminate quite well, albeit to an inevitable chorus of complaint one way or another.

The BBC quotes Geoff Lucas, secretary of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, as saying,

Housing underclass

The BBC gets no prizes for insight in suggesting that absurd house prices are creating an underclass (it gets scorn for the phrase "house price inflation had fell", too).

RICS chief Louis Armstrong said: "A housing underclass is being created and its numbers are swelling to include people who traditionally would have been able to purchase their own home.

I'd never really thought about the interaction of student debt and the ability to buy a house. It's certainly having an impact on me, and predictions are now that with top up fees, students will be leaving University on average £30,000 in debt. I don't know the details of our esteemed government's plans for the repayment of this, but if it involves repaying as soon as one has a worth while job (whether through an additional education tax or through loan repayments) then it will cripple graduates right when the biggest difference can be made to their future situation.

Weinberger: The Tragedy of Coloring Books

David Weinberger:

And then you come to coloring books that train kids to see the world as edges to be filled in. Put down your crayons, kids. I have bad news: There are no outlines in the world, only swaths of color that are themselves fractally multi-hued.

The problem with describing knowledge using formal logic? Formal logic is based on well defined concepts, concepts with well defined edges. We define concepts by much more flexible means than if (properties x, y, z are true of object) then object is a whatever.

We're back to this problem which I previously commented was not quite "the symbol grounding problem". There we are, it's the colouring book problem.

Cambridge encourages ethnic minorities

Of course, if you host a week long "this is Cambridge" type thing for black and Asian school kids, their experience of Cambridge -- being surrounded by a large number of black and Asian school kids and Cambridge graduates -- is impressively divorced from the reality they will find if they later study there.

Elsewhere I see that the year's "Oxford/Cambridge/Bristol/whatever reject World's Best Student" stories have started already. This one has pledged to become the second woman in history to win the Nobel peace prize. No harm in having ambition, I suppose. Cambridge spokesrobot says:

"The University of Cambridge is committed to admitting students of the highest intellectual potential, irrespective of social, racial, religious and financial considerations.

"We can not comment on individual cases, but would like to wish Ms Clarke every success in her future."