Say Hello to Our Seventh Cohort

Oct 11, 2013 • Greg Wilson

Group 7 met for the first time yesterday; 41 people attended, and three sent apologies, so it’s shaping up to be the largest cohort we’ve ever had. Notes are below (along with a warning about upcoming disruptions in the time-space continuum); the first exercise is to create some concept maps, and we’ll meet again in two weeks if Greg’s teaching schedule permits it.

Notes:

  • Welcome
  • Four things you need to know:
    • A lot of smart people have spent decades studying learning and education, and we’ll be better teachers if we base our practices on what they’ve discovered
    • Learning isn’t just about knowing more, it’s about thinking differently
      • changing how people see the problem, “change behaviour”
      • good/strong/varied connections between information
      • learning how to learn
    • Teaching is a performance art
      • “Never hesitate to sacrifice truth for clarity”
      • Make them want to care about what they are learning, and how they can use it
      • personal motivation is of paramount importance for students’ learning — how to encourage that motivation?
      • Software Carpentry focuses on what’s instantly usable by students.Two days isn’t much time to change behaviours.
      • These curriculum items aren’t what might be most important in computing in a general sense.
      • addendum: “It’s what the students are doing that counts” — E. Prather.
    • Greg is still learning this stuff himself
      • Feel free (and encouraged) to make corrections/additions to the material!
  • Goals of the course
    • Get you ready to improvise (because you’re going to have to)
      • Every audience is different, therefore we need to be able to adapt to the audience and conditions
      • diverse audience = variety of needs and backgrounds, need to adapt your materials to your audience, adapt to questions
    • Familiarize you with what Software Carpentry teaches, how, and why
    • Build bonds with your fellow instructors
      • pair/group activities
      • observing each other, giving each other feedback: peer reviewing leads to better product and speeds things up
      • interesting stat: In the US, teachers get 2/3 hours per year peer review. In Finland, 2/3 hours per week.
      • Includes commenting on the work of others (constructively) on the blog
      • teaching with others allows for critique, and ultimately improvement …
      • “Great musicians will thank those who tear them to pieces” — taking & giving criticism are themselves hard skills
      • Criticism must be constructive — tearing them to pieces gives the wrong message!
  • Learning is about building connections
    • The real story is complicated (see Patricia Benner’s work on nursing), but for our purposes, there are three levels:
      • Novice: “I don’t know what I don’t know”
        • Frequently level of scientists who come to SWC workshops
        • copy-paste/repeat exactly instructions…frequently those attending SCW
      • Competent: “I can apply the right rules correctly under normal circumstances”
      • Expert: “I know when to break the rules” — see the world differently
        • Experts tend to be able to debug better than competents, because they can reason backwards
        • But you forgot sohow to understand the thing (and explain simply): expert blind-spot
        • Experts aren’t thinking faster, but are considering only the alternatives that are relevant
        • getting to the point where your brain just recognises solutions, we are not aiming to create experts…we can get people from novices to competent (they can do normal things normally…).
      • Two interesting experiments with chess novices and experts
        • memorizing pieces position for setup coming from real games or from random placements -> experts outperformed by novices in the random case
      • Want to get people from novice to competent (producing experts is not SWC’s goal)
        • Takes less time
        • They can get to expert themselves if needed
        • The Tolstoy theory of learning: “people who understand, understand the same way; people who misunderstand misunderstand in original ways”. backed by research
        • Easy to figure out student misconception if 1-on-1, but impossible for 40 or 400, this is where peer instuction can help (scales well!)
        • Clear up their misconceptions, so they have the right framework to work from, and do more stuff
      • Peer Instruction (best scalable instruction technique we have up to date)
        • put a multiple choice question on the board — eg which option fixes this buggy code?
        • ask people to vote for answers
        • have people explain/discuss the answers in small groups (3-4)
        • then vote again (another round of discussion and you get to talk to the people again: most of the learning takes place in the 2nd round of discussion)
        • Could be a good combination of expert (teacher) and competent (peers) teaching
      • Applying this to coding practices??
      • MOOC don’t work very well for novices, but work well as review for concepts
        • broadcast lecturing of any type (MOOC or sage on the stage) doesn’t work well for clearing up misconceptions.
      • Difference (btw novice, competent, and expert) is partly volume of knowledge…
      • …but strength and density of connections are actually more important
      • the better you understand the topic the more connections between the facts…so fewer hops
        • We partly will give the facts, but also the connections, facts+connections=improved retention
        • The more pointers to a fact in the brain, the more likely is is to be remembered (if no pointers, then purged) ; think about garbage collection
  • Teaching is about making new facts and connections digestible
    • How the brain learns under-constraints instructional design
    • 7 plus or minus 2 (number of facts short-term memory can hold at one time — Don’t overload!)
    • 45-90 minutes (brain gets tired at this point, murble murble murble)
      • But really 5-10 minutes blocks of information we absorb
      • The recovery period is about 5 minutes, get air/oxygen, need to move (Twitter doesn’t count as a reset activity)
    • Underrepresented groups more likely to go into an activity if they go into it with at least a few other people that they identify as being like them
    • group sign ups might bring up more interactivity and ease than individuals that never meet each other in the room…unless it’s a technique they have used before…
    • scientists not use to peer review in teaching…give and accept correction…
    • organization target bootcamps: share interest, even better if in the same disciplines, more material and higher retention: focus more narrower on what that particular crowd needs…
    • follow-up after bootcamp: bring many people from a lab to a scw will translate in easier implementation of what they learned vs a single individual…
    • And many other factors that we’ll discuss later
    • People talk to each other more if they know each other.
  • Round 1
    • Read the first two chapters of How Learning Works and Mark Guzdial’s paper
      • If you’re going to read one blog for this course, subscribe to http://teaching.software-carpentry.org
      • But if you’re going to read a second, read Mark’s: http://computinged.wordpress.com/
    • Pick a small topic related to what we teach here (something you think you could teach in 5 minutes) something a scientist with few computing skills would be interested in learning
    • Create a concept map for it (“bubbles and arrows”)!
      • Half a dozen bubbles and a dozen arcs — does not commit us to an order which a bullet list would. But we don’t think in order…we think in connections.
      • Lists are linear, vs a concept map where you can put things down, link them, and then think about the order to put them in (for sketching out writing papers)
    • A picture of the ideas and how they connect, not of the thing you’re teaching
      • can be given to students before they’re being taught
      • have students write them — as a feedback mechanism
    • Low fidelity!
      • no fancy software tools, draw it freehand and quickly (Post a picture)
      • makes people be more honest, if you use a low fidelity drawing you will get more honest feedback…cause the reviewer see this can be done faster and therefore hurt less the feelings of the sketcher…prototypes: make them quickly, get honest feedback. Concept map: visual hook for those learnin about what they are learning: reinforces too (making the connections explicitly).
    • Invert concept maps: ask the learners draw them about what they learned (quick concept map on a post-it) …you’ll be able to see if they got it or not. Not scalable though (numbers), use end of the day/just before lunch.
    • See examples from past participants
    • Post it by Thursday Oct 17 in the categories “Round 7.1″ and “Concept Map”
      • We use categories rather than tags
    • Comment on at least two other people’s concept maps
      • Does it make sense?
      • What’s missing?
      • What’s there that shouldn’t be?
      • Is it too large/too small?
    • We’ll meet again on Thursday Oct 24th (if Greg’s teaching schedule permits)
  • Q&A
    • Coursera is good only if you’re already good at the subject (very bad for newcomers)
    • 70-90% of successful “completers” have a background in the area

Attendees (morning):

  • Greg Wilson (Mozilla, Toronto)
  • Vijai Kumar (Tamilnadu, India)
  • Aaron Garoutte (East Lansing, MI) (Hello, Aaron :))
  • Sarah Sirin (Cambridge, MA)
  • David Worth (STFC, UK)
  • Fan Yang (Ames, IA, US) (hi Fan!)
  • Erik Schnetter (Waterloo, ON, Canada)
  • Richard Barnes (Minneapolis, MN)
  • Luis Pedro Coelho (EMBL, Germany)
  • Sam Thomson (Edinburgh, UK)
  • Robert Flight (Lexington, KY, US)
  • Joshua Adelman (Pittsburgh, PA, US) (Hi Josh — LPC)
  • Don Brown (Indianapolis, IN, US)
  • Pauline Barmby (London, ON, Canada)
  • Melissa Santos (Portland, OR)
  • Brian Brennan (Mozilla, Brooklyn, NY)
  • Chris Greenough (STFC, UK)
  • Christina Magkoufopoulou (TGAC, UK)
  • Rémi Emonet (University of Saint Étienne, FR)
  • Daniel Hocking (Durham, NH, USA)
  • Ofer Bartal (Rehovot, Israel)
  • David Kua (Toronto, ON, Canada)
  • Asela Wijeratne (Wooster, OH, USA)

Attendees (evening):

  • Greg Wilson (Mozilla Toronto)
  • Naupaka Zimmerman (Woodside, CA, USA)
  • Bill Mills (TRIUMF, Vancouver)
  • Daniel Braithwaite (Chicago, IL, USA)
  • Dave Jones (State College, PA, USA)
  • Chris Waigl (Fairbanks, AK, USA)
  • Alex Demarsh (Montreal, QC, Canada)
  • David Rio (West Lafayette, IN, USA)
  • Trevor Bekolay (Waterloo, ON, Canada)
  • Ryan Williams (Ames, IA, USA)
  • John Corless (Dallas, TX USA)
  • Margaret Leibovic (San Francisco, CA, USA)
  • Raymond Yee (Berkeley, CA USA)
  • Shirley Sanchez(Boston, MA USA)
  • Scott Chamberlain (San Francisco, CA, USA)
  • Vicky Schneider-Gricar (TGAC, Norwich, UK)
  • Denis Haine (Montreal, QC, Canada
  • Michelle Hall (Cambridge, MA, USA)
  • Sharon Benjamin (Falmouth, MA, USA)