As many loose ends as knots

Concept Maps got me this link (http://www.dubberly.com/concept-maps) with such artwork as the following chart (link to PDF and more) makes me wish I had a reservoir of cash to throw at creative, productive people to train others and solve big problems. Just a thought.

Really though I'm stuck thinking through the endgame for the dissertation. It's dawned on me that I was heavily in brainstorm mode just a little too long. Now there's the content organization problem, or as many loose ends as knots. As the chart would suggest, there's a closed loop between make, observe, and reflect, rather than a simple chain that ends with "done".

Oddly reminds me of a weekend trip to Acapulco during a term abroad in Mexico while in college, when my classmates jumped at the chance of bargain rate Parasailing. I declined when I considered the number of knots in the tow ropes...  Occasional shark fin aside, all went well for those who participated.  Still, I took my chances on the ground.

At some point, it'll take printing out all the scraps of content I have, putting them in a line on the floor, and shuffling away just as I did with my Senior Thesis. I had hoped the tools since my college days in the MS-DOS era would have improved, but sadly not the case.  The tools I have at my disposal are proficient at "make" and less so at "observe" but sadly of little help in "reflect" beyond what I can shuffle in my limited human memory at the moment. The alternative is to make a tool to help in observing and reflecting, but that's just a little too meta to get into for the remaining timeframe.

Blackboard Feature Request

With grading done and final grades submitted nearly 36 hours ago, I'm somehow back to planning out next semester. This is really the best time to start, despite my urge to "chillax" in front of Netflix Online for the next 3 weeks. (That's really not true- I get bored after watching a single movie. There's that pesky dissertation that has to be wrapped up, though I still think it's a couple weeks away from being done.)

I've discussed some of my objections to Blackboard and reconsidered some of my objections.  Now that it's fresh in my mind about what good I'd like to see from a Learning Management System (i.e. the app space that Blackboard is monopolizing) I'll attempt a partial (unordered) list of features I'd like to see:

• The awareness that instructors may actually teach more than one section of the same course. This semester, I actually taught 4 sections each of two different classes, though all were partially or fully online. Even so, the classes do roll over to the next term. 
• See aforementioned- when classes roll over to the next term, why isn't there a decent way to update due dates? I go by Week 1, Week 2... to Week 16. Can't this awareness be made part of the course? I'm not alone in breaking the semester down into week numbers. Or, making the users do this manually is the result of weaksauce programmers...
• The ability to store/share a grading rubric as part of assignments. The way this would go down: Per assignment, I'd like the option to share the list of criteria I'd use to grade, and the points allocated to each. When I actually grade the thing, I'd like the option to show the student how many points per item I've given. Though instead of asking why they got the grade they did, they'd probably ask why they got the score they did for each grading point... let me think this one through a little more.
• The ability to store content more finely grained than a single file. I just don't get how a LMS doesn't store finely grained content (i.e. microcontent) for recall. I hate the orientation of punitive assessments- why not just make the browsing of content interactive, and take a real test at the end?  Yes there are ungraded tests, but no mechanism to halt progress until a satisfactory level of completion is achieved. Yes, it's probably the SCORM stuff, but I really don't want to invest the time to develop that without a clear indication that those features are actually supported.
• A grading mechanism that links to course content sections. 
• What I really want are decent course authoring tools, not a file input box to tell BB where to grab files to upload to the server. This goes hand-in-hand with breaking down assignments into blocks. Granted, the idea of "Content Object" that forms the second and third letter of the SCORM acronym is a bit controversial, but the entire concept isn't invalid, just the extremes that the fine people of the DOD like to push it.
• Instruction and education aren't start opposites- I think of education as a partial superset of instruction. Make part of Blackboard amenable to some form of rote learning. It really does have its place for the kind of courses that gravitate towards Blackboard. I never had a PhD class that actually bothered with Blackboard at all, but the undergrad courses live by it.

There's more, but that's enough for now I think. Feel free to use the comment section for feedback...

Goodbye 2010

After posting 243 grades for my 9 classes, the relief I normally feel this time of year has hardly set in.  But it's done and I've reverted to Intersession activities- another pot of chili in the slowcooker (vegetarian on request from my daughter), a 15-minute nap ended by the boy's saxophone practice, assorted little tasks around the house, and a start to plan out the next 3 weeks before classes resume for Spring. 

I've got a stack of books to browse through before classes start, not to mention a new semester schedule to input. And yes, a dissertation to finish. But this is a time to reconsider a few things before jumping full speed into tasks once the kids go back to school Monday. Like the dissertation to finish...

Let it snow

Looking outside with a foot of snow on the ground. Knowing I have my Dad's old 7 HP snowblower that hasn't started in 5 years and has probably rusted solid in the garage is strangely of little comfort. I'm in for a good 1-2 hours of shoveling by hand, based on my empirical estimates from prior years of an hour per 6 inches, plus 10 minutes of transition cost overhead- the effort of getting ready to go outside, and the subsequent removal of wet boots, snowpants, etc.

So I've had a couple cups of coffee, put on a batch of split pea soup in the crockpot, started a loaf of rosemary bread in the bread machine, put on a new pot of coffee with some instructions to my 10-year-old about getting it ready in about half an hour, and am about ready to roll. In maybe another 5 minutes or so.  It's still 18 degrees with a wind speed of about 20 MPH. #gonnabecold, as the kids on Twitter would say.

I'd make some tiresome comparison with my dissertation at this point, but instead am thinking about the really awesome snow fort the kids are going to be able to build. Maybe tomorrow when it warms up a bit. Today, they're still busy with Wii Lego Harry Potter.

Connecting them later

In the course of tracking down a little suspected plagiarism, I stumbled into this interesting blog:  http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/forgotten-art-of-programming  Some interesting thoughts here to digest after the semester is over. I also stumbled into some kind of indie music community site at http://www.thesixtyone.com/ largely in the course of checking something else from another (unrelated) student project. I've realized over the past year or so that I've given up my almost-daily writing habit, though I've decided I need to return to it in the course of figuring out other matters at hand.

There are a number of projects I'd like to work on, some in publishing, some in development- it's never been a shortage of ideas, but rather the match of time and resources available to the more promising projects. Some can be solved in parts, and some of these parts are common to each other. But all that is stuck in the queue behind my dissertation, that habitually feels like a never-ending journey, even though the end is really close at hand. But like driving in a blizzard, you're not there until you're there.  The exhaustion and disorientation take their toll. You're forced to rely on dead reckoning when the GPS you need for guidance the most is the most subject to failure in those conditions. 


I'm finding the indie bands on TheSixtyOne have really clear diction in singing what lyrics they have. It's like they're saying "hey, I write interesting lyrics" or something like that. As opposed to other bands that say, "Hey I'm famous, do the Zippo thing when I sing my unintelligible moody ballads despite how much it'll burn your fingers after 30 seconds." There's a pattern to the sequence, but that'll take time to figure out.

After all, with the programs written, run, and data collected with dozens of pages written up, it's just a clear head and potentially a couple weeks from completion. I remember such a trip back up to my hometown, from when I still lived in Jersey.  In the late night swirling snow, and approaching the highway exit, the 200-mile trip seemed near its end. It was when I crossed the city line I discovered my hometown had run out of money early and could no longer plow or salt the roads as much anymore. I discovered it while trying to stop on an inch of wet ice, narrowly missing a row of parked cars.  It was a long last couple of miles, though the morning was a little better after the sun rose again.

And no matter what or how cliched, the sun does rise every day, and the snow does melt eventually. By April, nobody knows how diligently you'd cleared the snow from your driveway or how well the roads were cleared. But it's time to move on to a different set of challenges, many of which are covered in next year's snow again. You don't know exactly when or how much, but you do need to be prepared and have a plan.

And just going outside and shoveling isn't the most efficient plan, either. I've got a lot of the same things written more than a couple of times.  Having a clear plan, a clear path is the best bet, even when you can't do it all at the same time or in the same path. Clearing out the parts you can and connecting them later is often the only choice you have. My hometown did manage to keep the roads clear, it was just a patchwork community effort that year, not that you can tell today.

Parallel Play

Still deep into grading final papers and projects, I'm struck with how Facebook has ceased to be the central topic, but a peripheral one.  In the many papers that hint at Facebook and other social networks (like Twitter) I think about the style of interaction: you post comments and pictures to no one in particular, and whoever is interested can respond. And as always, it reminds me of the "parallel play" style of toddlers- they play and if someone wants to join in, great, and if not, the toys are just fine anyway. 

Young children don't even close the door to the bathroom, often preferring to talk as they go about their business. Are our social network applications much better than that? Clearly children have little understanding or value of privacy. I used to wonder about an age of post-literacy, in which technology would make literacy obsolete for the general population.

But now I wonder if the real issue is adulthood. Perhaps we're entering an age of post-adulthood, when technology assumes the responsibility of managing our ongoing lives, and we've abdicated a sense of boundaries and privacy in the pursuit of our own little worlds of parallel play.

Newsfeed for life

In the course of wrapping up my semester grades juggling between Blackboard, email, and my spreadsheet, I consider RSS and the recently-patented Newsfeed and what they could bring to the table.  It would be nice to be able to set up a feed from my email client, so that whenever one of a list of people (i.e. students) sends an email containing a key word (e.g. Blackboard, BB, online, final, exam, crashed, doesn't, reset) it goes into local feed, which could be RSS. Blackboard similarly could generate a feed of recent changes. And the help desk could create an RSS or other feed that could be restrung as RSS.  Then a plain-vanilla aggregator would create a context-specific news feed for things like system outages, student activity, etc. in the context of these many parallel channels of communication that the modern world has created for us.

Disaggregation, stove-piping, or whatever you want to call it, sucks. Make it a well-documented API or standard feed so that usable tools can be employed to turn it into something that humans capable of getting a date can make some use of.  Yahoo! had something called "Pipes" that looked interesting, but I never got around to looking into it, or checking Mashable to see if they're even still in business.

But when all is said and done, and similar cliches have been otherwise exhausted, a way for something to funnel all the varying ways we can collect information and communicate with others is essential. Pipelining essential information into our brains in a way that makes the cost/benefit of our scarce investments of time is needed to actually improve the quality of life.  It doesn't feel quite like we're close yet. But there are plenty of Apps and other widgets out there, regardless.

Blackboard revisited

Thanks to the recently discovered Blogger Stats, I discovered that my most popular post of all time was my 3-year old rant, "Blackboard Sucks" at some 300+ pageviews, while the vast majority of my posts have nary a page hit in sight. And a leading search expression that found it was "Can Blackboard tell if you cut and paste?".  Well, going through a stack of last assignments and term papers, I can safely say that Blackboard in and of itself can't tell, though a related product, TurnItIn seem to be so capable of detecting plagiarized works, though only against stored works. 

(One important tool in detecting plagiarism is the grader's intuition. An uncharacteristically well-composed paragraph not quite relevant to the assignment topic, and/or in a different font and color from the surrounding text can be a giveaway. And after a couple of semesters teaching, the writing style of Wikipedia is jarringly different from most student writing to be suspect.  And as I remind students continually, Google works both ways, no matter how obscure the content source would seem to the typical 18-year-old.)

Where I suspect these products fall short is in a couple of places: an adequate understanding of citations and microcontent, and student copying.  First, the understanding that a document is made up of sentences and paragraphs would help the determination of what portions of the document may have been attributed or plagiarized. This has a good starter discussion of Web 2.0 in this context.  By deconstructing the document into its associated parts, even at the sentence or clause level, sequencing it, and a little link analysis could yield some interesting insights about the depth of research in addition to mere cut and pasting off Google search results.

The second is whether students grab paragraphs or even entire papers from others.  By comparing papers in pairs with other students within the class (or even across course sections), a richer understanding of student integrity can be realized.  Copying entire papers is easy enough to detect, but grabbing a paragraph here or there is a little harder to sift through, especially in a product like Blackboard that forces you to grade with blinders on.  In short, it's a socially-networked version of plagiarism that is as old as term papers and yet out of the grasp of the products I've heard about. Computationally difficult, but not impossible in smaller scales. Though if I thought it through, it might prove easier than at first glance...

But what Blackboard could use is this ability to compare projects side-by-side more readily. And by treating multiple sections of the same class as distinct courses entirely, the ability to coordinate across classes is significantly reduced. A Learning Management System (LMS) misses some real opportunities here in helping users actually compose materials, and collaborate with students using a microcontent manager that tracks authorship of individual bits of content.  Group project assessment would be far less of a nightmare as well...

Ramble On...

The frantic pace of the closing semester continues, while the non-teaching students I know are just about winding down, and the non-teaching non-students around me seem to be continuing on like it's just another week between holidays. Somewhere is that dissertation I need to pick at once in a while to remind myself that it's not over until it's over. But the simulation is written, the data collected, initial analysis completed. All that remains is a pocket of continuous time and coherency sufficient to fully reload the dissertation into my brain.

It's just not enough to skim pages here and there to find things to add, it's a matter of reloading the varying issues of text written, recapturing the vision of the original research project that seemed so clear a year ago and yet is so elusive today. But as grading season winds down, there's a few weeks left between semesters that will be essential to gather the various loose ends and tie them together. Metaphors involving quilts and tapestries come to mind, cliche as it sounds. But there are enough pieces, but assembling them into a coherent whole is a task unto itself, and one that is urgent now.

At its core, the research is really about travel, and how we spend our time. I do have my hopes about what the research will turn into someday, and have some short term plans about how to implement something that could potentially change some lives in constructive ways. It's isolating work, the dissertation, and something that has taken a heavy toll on all those around me. At least I have Led Zeppelin to keep me company through the hours remaining, though the task of undoing the damage of this PhD program on those who depend on me will only be starting. But this journey is nearing its end, just as the next one is about to start.

Constraints

There are hard physical limits to what can be done, what can be experienced, and what can be accomplished. Currently, I'm trying to write up the simulation results from my dissertation. Yet I'm struggling with the hard limits of what I can endure these days, with no end in sight. Currently I'm flailing in my progress- finding what I write has already been written months ago, losing sight of what I saw more clearly in better days.

I watch my little simulated people hit their limits, some failing and dropping out, and feel for them and the hardships as this plays out into real life. No matter what tools they have, how good their information is, they will simply be overwhelmed by the demands of their lives and the resources at their disposal.

As I discussed this issue with a professor at a retirement party I attended last week, he asserted that this may be my greatest contribution in this project: helping people understand what their resources were compared to the demands placed on them would drive better choices. You cannot see into the future, but certainly there are some intelligent guesses that can be made when you have a clearer assessments about the full impacts on life.

Going to the end of the line.

Somehow the Traveling Wilburys album speaks to me today.

A difficult year has ended in a heart-wrenching month. But with help from family, I can have faith that things will ultimately work for the best. As some research has demonstrated, man has a propensity to walk in circles without a landmark, a guide star, to show the way out. Whether that guide star leads to safe ground is another matter entirely.

But every day is another step closer to the end of the dissertation. Working on TiddlyWiki is good, but a useful feature for a microcontent manager would be a feature that pulls up the content that sounds like something I'm writing now. You know, to avoid things like writing the same explanation several times... And trackbacks would be nice, a listing of where the current bit of content has already been linked.

This morning I was surprised, after reopening this blog to the public, to get some questions about a post from 3 years ago about shortcomings of the LMS Blackboard. So it turns out this blog is read after all... :)