Cheryl Strayed

This has been a good year for me to listen to and meet authors! On 13 January, 2015 we went out to dinner at a Palo Alto restaurant before going to hear a lecture by Cheryl Strayed, author of "Wild". Cheryl was eating dinner in the same restaurant so we got a photo of her. Here is a photo of Strayed, myself and Aloe:

Walter Isaacson

I was lucky enough to be invited to a lecture by Walter Isaacson in the Foothill lecture series. He is the author of "Jobs" as well as other biographies of note. After the lecture we were able to meet and smooze with him in person. Here is Dean, Mr. Isaacson and myself on 26 March 2015 in the Green Room behind the Flint Center Theatre.

Google IO 2014

26 June 2014

One way to categorize the new technologies is between Chrome and Android. 

Chrome is Google's web browser and many of the new tools run in Chrome and other browsers such as FireFox. If you develop an application that runs in a browser, your app can run on a desktop, laptop or a mobile device.

Android is Google's mobile operating system. It runs on phones, tablets and wearables such as watches. Today Google started distributing a developer preview of the new Android operating system called "L".

You can watch the keynote, as well as most of the other talks, by going to:

g.co/io14videos

=> POLYMER

Polymer is a code library for developing web apps. Polymer was developed by part of Chrome team, so they were able to request improvements to the Chrome browser that would make Polymer work better. Polymer is based on web components and it runs on other browsers as well as on Chrome. Polymer is HTML elements, for example, core and paper. The DOM is its framework. Polymer is at the forefront of a web components revolution, joined there by Mozilla x-tags. The tool to help developers implementing Polymer web apps is called "polymer designer".

polymer-project.org

=> MATERIAL

Material is a set of UI design elements. These elements make up a new unified user interface. Material forms a bridge between web apps and Android.

eg: Polymer paper elements implement Material. You can find more information, including Google UI design guidelines at
http://www.google.com/design/

=> "How to make sense of data coming from online classrooms"

By Peter Norvig, Julia Wilkowski

In order to learn from classroom student data, you must have an analytical dashboard built into your Course Management System.

Google makes MOOCs with their CourseBuilder software, and they have Google Search instrumented too, that's how they have suggestions and auto-complete.

What if compilers had as many examples of misspellings as Google search does? A compiler could give us great suggestions instead of cryptic error messages.

We can learn a lot from MOOCs, student goals and whether they reached them or not.

Instead of asking "what do we want students to know?", ask "what do we want them to be able to do?"

=> Vtune is software that will profile your mobile application and tell you which methods and statements are talking up all the machine cycles.

=> The conference started with demonstrators outside Moscone West while we were lining up for entry. The demonstrators (who appeared to be anarchists) were blaming Google for the housing shortage in San Francisco, instead of asking their city government to make the city more welcoming to housing developers.

=> Our gift was an LG G Watch that pairs with an Android device and gives you lots of information without your having to pull out your phone. I am lending it to one interested high school student for the summer, and then to Foothill's Computer Science Club in the Fall.

Steve Wozniak

On 22 January, I was lucky enough to be invited to attend Foothill's Celebrity Forum when Steve Wozniak was the speaker. You may remember that Woz was the inventor of the first usable personal computer, the Apple II. For a "shy" guy, he was an excellent speaker (and an alumnus of De Anza, our sister college.)

After the lecture, we went to the green room for a reception given by Foothill College president, Judy Miner. Here is a photo of myself, my friend Amparo del Rio, Woz and his wife.

Future Faculty Seminar at Stanford

19 Nov, 2013

I was invited to sit on a panel called "Starting Now, Manage and Network your way to Tenure"
http://www.stanford.edu/class/inde231/schedule.html
The class participants are graduate students from many disciplines who are learning what it is like to be an academician. I touted the great life of a community college teacher, and promoted our new tenure track position that we are trying to fill in Foothill's CS department.

It was especially fun talking to the students at the reception after the class.

New Forms of College Access

21 May 2013

Public forum at Stanford School of Education, part of a seminar on "Education's Digital Future".

http://edf.stanford.edu/course/may-21-public-forum-new-forms-college-access

Interesting panel including Brian Murphy, President of De Anza. Chancellor Linda Thor was in attendance, and she said she wanted to meet with me about MOOCs.

MOOCs are seen as the new library; you may or may not read the book you check out.

Self credentialling with eportfolios.

Do we know how to engage working class students online?

Some colleges aspire to produce networks of students, I like this idea.

If we think of co-presence as a treatment, how do we dose it? It is expensive, so what value does it bring?

So far we've shown that online courses can facilitate only mastery of content.
We need to provide access to valuable learning.

Exercise: Give a hard question and take vote, then do small group discussion and vote again; everyone gets closer to the right answer. This happens even when no one votes for the right answer the first time. This shows that small group discussion promotes learning.

Murphy emphasized that we want democratically engaged students who are empowered as participants in the economy.

Google I/O 2013

15, 16, 17 May 2013

I am always so excited to attend this event. I feel privileged to receive an early invitation when it is such a difficult ticket to get and people come from all over the world to attend. It's always fun to meet former students there and catch up on what they are doing now.

The gift this year is a Chromebook Pixel laptop that has:

-a touch screen,

-the highest pixel density of any laptop,

-Chrome browser only, no desktop computation (no Word, etc),

-two years of free Verizon cell service.

http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/chrome/devices/chromebook-pixel/

Google technologies that I learned about:

Cross platform single sign on (e.g. Sign on from your ipad and your laptop is automatically signed on too.)

Android Studio IDE built on IntelliJ

All access music service for $8 / month

Web GL on Chrome for graphics (they made maps with it.)

C++ to Javascript compiler via ASM.js

webP image format which is 30% smaller than jpg

Google play for education (developer.android.com/edu)

Hangouts app

Google search app for iphone – has "Google now" built in

Gamestorming: a great way to solve problems, especially in teams.

           bit.ly/gamestorming-cheatsheet

I need to review the following collaboration tools as alternatives to CCC Confer:

Scoot & Doodle

http://scootdoodle.com/

Google hangouts

https://plus.google.com/hangouts/

5-12 ideal number for a hangout

Students need to know: etiquette, agenda, silence OK, prompt arrival, experiment!

Finding: Students want to participate in, but not start, hangouts

User interface design was a popular topic here. I especially liked this session on "Cognitive Science and Design"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2exxj4COhU

Foothill Professional Development Day

10 May 2013

1) Flipping the Classroom with Morriss and Martinez

They are doing radical stuff in their math classes, including using qualitative assessment for final grades. But the students still need to sit alone and absorb content outside of any context (online, not in the classroom.) I believe that the real learning actually takes place when the students are in groups doing problem sets. I think that this learning would be deeper if it took place while solving a larger, real world problem.

New idea from Martinez: You need to assess groupwork or the students won't buy in.

2) Active Learning with Stefonik

"Creating Significant Learning Experiences" by L. Dee Fink

Conference for Computer Science Education

This month I attended the conference for SIGCSE, that is ACM's Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education in Denver. Thanks go to Jane Ostrander and NSF's "Destination: Problem Based Learning" project for supporting my trip – my first time at this conference. Most of the 1300 attendees are university professors, but there was plenty of talk about lower division courses.

1. MOOCs

I attended both a panel and a keynote on MOOCs. The panel had CS professors from different universities and the keynote was from John Etchemendy, provost at Stanford.

1.a. History

1200 AD: 4 universities in the world

1400 AD: 24 universities in the world

1450 AD: explosion of universites because of the printing press

In 2008 Stanford Engineering released CS 1, 2, 3 videos; they had a 5-10% completion rate.

Fall 2011 start of MOOCs when Stanford put up 3 CS courses

These online courses now follow the pattern where the instructor demos on video, and then provides an opportunity for the student to do it.

1.b. MOOC vs. F2F

MOOCs are bad at: motivation, coaching, help, discussion, evaluation.

MOOCs are good as interactive textbooks.

Face-to-face is the artisanal way to teach and learn.

Weaker learners do not do well online.

MOOC completers are advanced learners.

MOOCs provide info, they don't deliver education.

We should not replace face-to-face courses with MOOCs, because many students need the social structure of in order to do the work required to learn.

1.c. Economics

Cost of higher ed is rising because of faculty pay, legal and dental services have gone up with the cost of higher education also. This is because education hasn't seen an increase in productivity since 1450. We need to raise the student/faculty ratio but keep the same quality and level of assessment/feedback.

One way to be more productive is to not waste faculty time delivering the same lecture over and over again, when the students disengage when they are not active anyway. What if we could take our grading time and/or our lecture time and spend it with students, helping them solve problems?

Etchemendy doesn't think a MOOC will ever substitute for an undergraduate education nor a PhD program. But it could deliver the education required in the middle professional level.

2. Tools and assignments for CS 1

processing.org

zyante.com

problets.org

introcomputing.org

nifty.stanford.edu
http://www.learnstreet.com

3. Ideas for MPICT

EMC Academic Alliance – they are dying to train us!

GitHub - http://teach.github.com/classnotes/2013-03-06-sigcse-2013.html

SLOs for all ICT students: capspace.org

Distinguished Speakers Program from ACM

Summer Institute 2013:

"Facilitating Change that Sticks: Becoming an Effective Educational Change Agent"

June 5-7, Needham, MA

http://i2e2.olin.edu/summer/personal_change.html

4. Inverted Classroom

Paper talk by Kate Lockwood, CSU Monterey Bay

Research shows students flatline in lectures

don't waste faculty time in lectures

easy, comprehension questions after watching video

online interactive workbooks

give credit for completing things

monitor student time spent with CMS

Use bamboo tablets to draw on while creating videos

cs unplugged is a good resource for classroom activities

pair programming in classroom

5. Security Mindset in CS 1A

Paper talk by Vahab Pournaghshband, UCLA

Create ROBUST software that performs as expected

Use a login program as the first few assignments

to learn branches, loops, int, String

My experience taking a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)

Course name: "Designing a New Learning Environment", Fall 2012

Instructor: Paul Kim, Assistant Dean for Information Technology and CTO, Stanford University School of Education.

Course website: http://venture-lab.org/education

This was a 9-week course, recommended by Dean Peter Murray. 18,054 students from all over the world registered for it. Over halfway through the course only 730 students were still working on it. I ended up spending every Sunday afternoon or evening during the rainy October and November months working on the class. I am not aware of a certificate or any other proof that I could get showing that I completed it.

A. Content that I Found Valuable

1) World inequality database:

http://www.education-inequalities.org/

2) Non-cognitive skills like willpower and the ability to set and reach goals are critical but not taught explicitly in school.

3) E-portfolios are becoming more important. Once the technology is in place for people to share their work, it will become much more important for job candidates to show what they have made as opposed  to showing a transcript that proves they took a particular course.

4) In one assignment we had to describe an educational challenge, and then after the due date we were to try to solve a challenge that another student described. When I went looking for a challenge to solve, I found that another student had described the elimination of courses by Foothill's CS department! This shows that the searching ability of the course website was good enough for me to find what I was interested in.

5) Another local student set up a study group meeting weekly at Stanford. I was only able to attend once, but I found it fun to interact face-to-face with real people in such a huge, global, online course.

B. Team Project

The assignment was to "Design a New Learning Model." We organized ourselves into teams based on our interest, again using the excellent searching capabilities of the site. I looked for a team organized around project-based learning but found none. So I joined a team whose goal was to design a professional development workshop for teachers who want to "flip" their classrooms. In a flipped classroom, students watch lecture at home and do homework assignments with the teacher in the classroom.

I was very lucky that only one person from the team dropped out (she was the provost of a college in Costa Rica, and the one who chose the topic in the first place!) The other students were very compatible, not wanting to work more than 5 hours per week but able to meet via Skype and very motivated on the subject.

The six of us worked well together, mostly on Skype. Since Skype is free, we could just work independently while hanging on the phone to ask questions or discuss when necessary. The other team members came from Uruguay, Spain, France, Nebraska and Missouri; they were a mixture of teachers and administrators. We had fun together!

Our team was incredibly lucky to have a self described "technologist" and instructional support coordinator in Ryan Sullivan from Missouri. Ryan created a Wordpress website into which we could all deposit our work. Right now, only two days after our due date, 5 people (our fellow participants in the MOOC) have already reviewed our work and given us an average of 90%!

Link to our final team project:

http://learningflipped.wordpress.com/

C. Links to Learn More About MOOCs

1) Good video on The Future of Learning:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quYDkuD4dMU

2) What 100 experts think about the future of learning:

http://www.teachthought.com/trends/what-100-experts-think-about-the-future-of-learning/

3) Directories of other MOOCs:

Coursera:

https://www.coursera.org/

Udacity:

http://www.udacity.com/

Stanford Online:

http://online.stanford.edu/courses/index.html