Trevis Rothwell | Writing on software engineering, music production, photography, and stuff

May 15, 2013

Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men

I just finished reading Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men, the story of a Virginia writer and shepherd who explores Scotland in search of adopting a border collie suitable for helping him work his sheep farm back home.

One of the things that impressed me the most in reading this book was the vivid description of life as a shepherd. I had never imagined shepherding as being a very mentally demanding occupation, but here we learn of a shepherd who by the age of twelve could recognize each of the family farm’s one thousand sheep individually, and recall their attributes such as medical history and grazing preferences.

While the accounts of shepherds was fascinating, this is mainly a book about border collies, and their stories are at least as fascinating: a border collie who successfully rounded up a flock of frightened sheep in the darkness of night; a border collie who could gracefully drive sheep down from precarious mountain peaks; a border collie so determined to obey his master’s commands that after being told to “stay”, to the horror of his master who neglected to signal otherwise, he stayed put without taking a step while being trampled to death by a herd of cattle.

We also gain insight into the close relationship that can develop between shepherds and their border collies: an expert sheep dog who, after being sold to another shepherd after several years with his first, refused to herd sheep in any sensible way for his new master; the shepherd’s complete inability to tend to the sheep without his dog; a shepherd who, upon learning that his beloved border collie is about to pass on, spends the night with it, outside, in the snow, wrapping the dog in his own coat until morning.

This book paints border collies as absolutely magnificent creatures; if not the most beautiful, then surely the most faithful of all dogs. But the book concludes with a warning that border collies can be difficult to deal with as pets. If you already have a border collie, reading this book will give you a greater appreciation for your companion; if not, it would be inadvisable to run out and adopt a border collie just because of the stories in the book, as taking care of a border collie can be more intense than many other breeds of dog.

(Thankfully, I had already adopted a border collie before reading the book!)

There are a few photographs, but the book is mostly straight text, and would be perfectly readable on a Kindle or an iPad, if the publisher sold an electronic edition, which they don’t. You can buy a printed copy at Amazon.

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May 14, 2013

Learning Creative Learning finale

The MIT Media Lab course on Learning Creative Learning for Spring 2013 has come to an end. While the course boasted twenty or so in-person students who received academic credit, I was one of over 10,000 online students who signed up just for fun. Statistics show that less than 10% of students registered in such online classes actually participate meaningfully, with recent anecdotes suggesting that the number may be closer to 4%. I would estimate that around 150 people (1-2%) appeared to be engaged with Learning Creative Learning.

I’ve written elsewhere about some specific things that we explored in this course, but the major takeaway for me was simply reinforcement of the value of creative learning: don’t just read or listen to a lecture, but do something with what you are learning. Reading the popular news over the past couple of years, a lot of people seem thrilled with the free online classes offered by such great institutions as Harvard or Stanford. Big name lectures broadcast on the web is indeed interesting, but if we think we are amazing students just because we listen to amazing lectures, we are fooling ourselves. Write about what you are studying. Build something with the knowledge you’ve gained. Contribute. Create.

The final LCL session was an opportunity for students to offer ideas to the teaching staff on ways to improve the course. The biggest problem cited over and over was that, while there was plenty of interaction amongst the class participants overall, dividing the class into small groups for deeper discussion really didn’t work. If you have a small group of ten people, and only 10% of them participate in the discussion, then you don’t get a very lively discussion!

Despite such shortcomings, many aspects of the course were great. Interesting lectures and guest speakers, plenty (but not too much) good reading, and much emphasis on doing something rather than just consuming facts. I look forward to seeing how this course and related efforts develop in the future.

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April 20, 2013

Mindstorms – Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

I just finished reading Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms, the first couple of chapters of which were assigned readings for the MIT Media Lab course on creative learning, but I found so enjoyable that I kept going.

The central topic of the book is about the Papert’s LOGO/Turtle programming environment, which I had used myself in elementary school. I saw Turtle programming then as an introduction to computer programming in general: writing scripts to make the “turtle” on the screen move around and draw pictures. Papert’s intentions were in fact much deeper than that; he developed the Turtle programming environment for the purpose of creating situations in which children could learn about basic concepts of Newtonian physics (how objects move) and differential geometry (how shapes can be constructed).

While much of the book uses the Turtle programming environment as an example, the main thesis of the book is that people learn best when they are engrossed in an environment in which to make use of what they are learning, rather than learning abstractly, disconnected from application of the ideas. Papert brings up the challenge of learning a foreign language: would you learn French better by sitting in a classroom memorizing books, or by living in France for a month, communicating with native speakers? The goal of the Turtle system, then, was to provide an artificial place for children to go to engage in ideas of physics and geometry, where those were not just abstract concepts but things to play with and to create with.

But Papert’s grand vision was not to create Turtle and be done with it. He hoped that it would serve as an example for others, to continue to use computers to create environments in which people could engage with ideas for better learning of any imaginable subject. Years after writing the book, he mused that, unfortunately, what most readers got out of the book was a study of the Turtle system itself, rather than the ideas behind it.

A very good read for those interested in education, and the intersection of education with technology. Oddly enough, the book does not appear to be available in digital format yet, but you can buy a printed copy at Amazon.

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April 12, 2013

MOOCs, Universities, and Motivation to Learn

This month’s Communications of the ACM includes an article expressing concern that the free MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) will effectively undercut paid university courses. Why would anyone pay to attend a course on differential calculus when you could learn it online for free?

MOOCs do a great job of packaging up and distributing lectures to a lot of people in the form of videos. If all we needed to learn was lecture content, then libraries full of books would have put universities out of business years ago. Listening to a lecture (or reading a book) can be enlightening, but a lot of learning takes place as we use what we have heard or read. As computer scientist Alan Perlis remarked:

You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.

Listening to a lecture exposes us to ideas, presents us with facts and opinions, and generally points us in a particular direction for understanding. When we write about what we heard in the lecture, we force ourselves to explore gaps in our knowledge and to make stronger connections in our minds. When we teach someone else what we have heard and written about, we face even more potential gaps in our understanding that we have to fill in: someone else might see things differently than we do and ask questions that we didn’t think of. (And for computer scientists, expressing knowledge as precisely as required by a computer program can be an ultimate test of understanding!)

Just listening to a lecture doesn’t force us to write or to teach, but MOOCs do provide us with more than lectures. They also offer us opportunity to test our knowledge through online quizzes, and to discuss our knowledge through online forums. But since MOOCs are free, you don’t lose much if you don’t discuss in the forums. You don’t lose much if you ignore the quizzes. For that matter, you don’t lose much if you skip watching the lectures. And in fact, the vast majority of people who sign up for MOOCs do not complete them in any meaningful way.

Paid in-person courses, on the other hand, go further to foster an environment that makes learning easier: you can ask questions of the professor if some spot of the lecture was unclear; you can work on assignments with classmates in a group environment which can help you stay focused easier than collaborating via the web; you can get opportunities to help others learn through tutoring and teaching assistant roles. And likewise, not learning becomes harder: it would be embarrassing if you are clueless when it comes time for group discussion; it would be embarrassing if you get F’s on your exams; it would be an utter waste if you don’t even show up to class and just mindlessly hand over tuition payments to the university.

While I think MOOCs are great as far as they go, and can be a wonderful resource in the hands of self-motivated learners, they make it too easy to be a slacker while deluding yourself into thinking you are learning. Just like how procrastinating can sometimes feel like working, you can superficially participate in a MOOC, learning little, but still feel like you are “taking a course”.

Even if universities do offer a superior educational experience, I too am concerned that MOOCs might be their downfall. Not because they are free, but because they demand so little in exchange for just enough.