Retroid Raving

And after that previous pathetic neo-classical outpouring from a Retroid Komponent more in touch with his/her touchy-feely artistic side, we have an altogether more classy piece for you this am:

 And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning

Thank you, messrs Gilmour, Wright, Mason and...the other guy.

[Hey, I didn't think "Shining City" was that bad!]  (Yes, well you probably liked Kahlil Gibran and The Carpenters too)  {Children, children...degustibus non disputandum est, but that piece was seriously off} [And so Led Zeppelin is the height of good taste??]  {Damn, is that thing on....??  And were we speaking out lou....}

Behold!  I see a shining city upon a hill
All girt about with cloud - yet bathed in golden light
As if from heav'n above
What wondrous sight is this, on a winter's dawn!

Yes, the old alma mater can look pretty good when the sun shines on it.  Until you get close up, that is...B-)

"The machine of a dream
Such a clean machine
With the processor a pumpin'
And the screen all agleam...."

Apologies to Queen

OK, it's not a car - although I like that quite a lot too. No, it is - and I would have cut my throat rather than say this two years ago - a product of Apple Inc.  Specifically, the big phone that isn't: I speak of the iPad, naturally.

<Drool mode ON>Consider its lines: simple and clean; no clutter of controls...just understated side buttons, and a rim of surround around - The Screen, where everything happens.<Drool mode partially OFF>

Seriously, now - what's not to love??  Light as a leather folder that one might normally tote around; battery power to die for; endless games plenty of serious business applications, like...like...ah yes, Pages, Keynote, Numbers, the Nature reader - and, if you go out and buy them, adapters to allow VGA, HDMI and DVI output to projectors or big screens.

Yes, it's a seriously nice toy - but mine has faithfully bonged 15 minutes before every meeting for two months now, after effortlessly syncing with my Google Calendar, and then allowed me to type notes in meeting after meeting with a virtual keyboard.  Which I can then email around, or save as PDFs, DOC or Pages format.  I go to journal clubs with the paper in electronic format; I can pull documents out of the cloud via Dropbox to show people in meetings....

You can also play downloaded movies, and do Ginger Bakeresque drum solos on Finger Drums, and I am learning how to do soulful lead guitar breaks on the hard rock guitar option in Garage Band - and even to do the opening bit from "Whiter Shade of Pale" on a church organ.

But my point is - this is a seriously good management tool: it beats PDAs into a cocked hat; it is FAR more convenient to drag around than any net- or notebook; it combines calendar and diary and notetaking and presentation tools with a slimline tablet that is big enough to read things on - and does them well enough for you to want to.  Oh, and you can share someone's Kindle account and download a ton of novels for your overseas trip as well.  Overseas institutions are looking at not only giving senior management one each, but in some cases (eg: University of Adelaide) are giving their entire first year Science curriculum intake iPads - as long as they stay enrolled.  Retention figures are up!

So resistance is futile, comrades - the revolution is here.  I have been assimilated...B-)

Subscribing as I do to The Scientist - seriously good journal, even if one Robert P Grant seems to write half of it - I found this audio snippet the other day, which was of more than passing interest.

You see, I seem to have got myself invoved in a scheme aimed at revolutionising UCT researcher access to the WWWorld, of which a very important part is going to be Open Access publication, and Open Resources, Educational and otherwise- and this is right up that street.

Access the podcast here.

Pretty much all of the article follows:

In this five minute clip, Cameron wonders how to stop talking about open science, and how to actually do something that will showcase its benefits. His idea is to leverage funders’ requirements, by not simply capturing ‘outputs’ from the science they fund, but thinking about how to measure how they are used—be they papers, data, materiel or patents. The ultimate aim is to demonstrate benefits of reuse, and thereby encourage scientists to make their research output open. 

Amen, brother Cameron!  We could do a lot at UCT to further this aim - like having an easy-to-use repository for theses and reports that otherwise moulder away on shelves; like displaying all Open Access papers published from UCT - and there are a lot, every year - and putting all (or nearly all) of our teaching material up on the Web. 

Like I do, he says, modestly.

Because it really does help improve the visibility and the reputation of this University.  The next couple of years look like they may just be fun...B-)

Ed Rybicki

And a Happy New Year to all of you ardent followers; prosperous too, hopefully!!  If the Academics Union does its job, of course....

And because he has had reason to wonder along similar lines in a UCT context recently, the Retroidal Komponent of the VftN noted this news snippet from the Tuesday Monday Paper of the 14th December with great interest:

"UK universities stand accused of hypocrisy over their claims to value teaching, after a major study of promotions policy and practice found that many are still failing to reward academics for leadership in pedagogy. Research by the Higher Education Academy and the University of Leicester's "Genie" Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning examines the promotion policies of 104 UK universities. In the research-intensive Russell Group and 1994 Group universities, only 58% and 35% cent, respectively, feature criteria on teaching and learning in their policies."

...and do we have any reason to consider that UCT is any better??  Aside from Retroid's particular bugbear, the "research-led teaching" concept, the Kollektiv is unaware of any concrete examples enshrined in writing in UCT policy documents that allows for teaching excellence to be weighted equally with research excellence in the assessment of the promotional prospects of any given academic.

Not, Retroid hastens to add, that he believes that he has been unfairly treated in any way, and would in fact rather that the retroidal u/g teaching component be reduced to zero because of research commitments...but this is another argument.

Really and truly, in this day and age in The New SA where we need so badly to help the badly-educated young escape from their academic straitjackets, should we not lead the way in establishing genuinely parallel teaching- and research-track career streams for academics?

 My Leicester connection - an excellent virological researcher who decided to become a "teacher track" academic - may have an opinion here; however, I think it is high time UCT got off the fence, and embraced teaching excellence - even in the absence of high-level research activity - as a legitimate criterion for promotion.

Long live, committed teachers, long live...!

The retroidal father is basking in the warm, reflected glow of the retroidal son's achievement today. 

The loinal fruit has, with his partner,  made an animated interactive computer model of an adjustable electrical circuit, and then tested the effect of the use of this in Physics lessons in various classes at their high school.  And there is a measurable difference in achievement level for those exposed to the demo, compared to those who were not, when all were tested on the identical material.  All of this, for a Grade 11 science project!  I remember making a pin-hole camera....

So why isn't everything scientific or technical taught this way?  Speaking for myself - and, I suspect, many others -I find that visual material and especially animated and/or interactive material is SO much more informative than chalk-and-talk, or even OH projector and talk, that I wonder why anyone serious about education ever tolerates the old ways.

But then, I note that the wonderful offspring had, in order to be able to do this, learned (a) Linux, (b) the use of a sophisticated rendering package, (c) mastered an unbelievably complicated-looking animation package...and how many people out there can do all of this AND know enough about the subjects at hand, to be able to produce useful material?

 Precious few, I am sure.

 And therein lies the problem.  So viva! all of you who work to such ends, viva!  You should be paid far, far more than you are.

Folks in both the academic teaching and library / archiving spheres: is anyone aware of any concerted effort to put the theses published at UCT on the Web, or to otherwise publish them electronically?

I ask this because (a) our very own Gray Area has just put up a post which relates to this, (b) I have commented on it saying I think it is a great idea, (c) I am frequently asked by outsiders for information from theses written by my students which they otherwise could have got via a UCT resource server.

I have a personal collection of MSc and PhD theses which I would very much like to see being accessible from the outside - for that matter, I have a treasure trove of Honours project write-ups which presently either only gather dust, or are read only by other Honours students as templates for their dissertations.  I have been thinking of putting them all up as PDFs accessible via my home page - however, if there is an official initiative, I am sure it would be a better idea to have them centrally epublished.

And yes thank you, the Rybicki family is safely back from a family wedding in Scotland, where it rained.  Then it rained some more.  When that had finished, sure enough, it began raining again.  When you thought "This MUST clear sometime, surely?", so it did - only to rain again.  I have photographs of Edinburgh in the rain.  I have photos of Stirling after one bout of rain, and just before another.  Summer??  Don't make me laugh....

Ed Rybicki

Retroid is nothing if not persistent in the search for new things to amuse, and possibly even to educate...but not having time to go on workshops and the like can make it difficult when the learning curve is steep.

Meaning you simply don't do it.

Which is almost what I did with the UCT Vula site Wiki which I was trying to set up for a course I am co-ordinating...but vasbyt! was the cry, and - like any good quest worth its name - rewards unfolded once the door had been knocked on enough.  Or hard enough.  Hey, Retroid once played a D&D scenario involving future-medieval Japan, ninjas and an old space shuttle for over two years (and still has the notes: I know who ate the Buddhist nun.  There is no escaping karma...B-); how hard could it be?

Hard, it turns out.  Decidedly not intuitive.  With very small links to things like "edit" commands, meaning my failing sight made it difficult to see what the hell to do.  But what rewards: layer upon layer of functionality; manifold rooms; instant access to class lists; updatable calendars; announcement and assignment folders....!!

Impressive: way more functionality than the free off-shore one I had been playing with; I shall abandon that without a qualm.

But I'm still not sure how the hell the students upload anything...ah, well; they're the generation that can figure out all of the functions on cellphones that make a Star Trek tricorder look primitive in less time than it takes to read this - so they'll figure it out.

Hopefully.

...so some more about "Viral Professional Development", which AFAIK first saw the light of day as an enunciated concept on the blog @injenuity - written by one "jennifer".

This was a fascinating discovery, which I chanced upon virally: as in, I caught it pretty much by chance, because I have an RSS feed from AJ Cann's MicrobiologyBytes site, where he has his del.icio.us links...you get the idea.

In her words:

"I call my strategy, “Viral Professional Development,” or “VPD,” because it is based on the popular definition of “viral,” that refers to a technology, tool, or teaching strategy that is quickly spread from one person to another."

Ummmm...OK, as a virologist I must say that that would actually be contagious, as in "Transmissible by direct or indirect contact; communicable", or "Spreading or tending to spread from one to another; infectious", rather than viral, but no matter - it sounds catchier as is.

Jennifer goes on:

• The most important characteristic of VPD is that the instructors learn to use the technology largely on their own and with support from each other as the enthusiasm spreads through the institution. ...
• You do not need a large staff to implement this.
• You do need at least a few instructors who are early adopters, enthusiastic about learning and testing new technology and willing to share their knowledge, experience, and materials.
• You cannot spend time worrying about the instructors who refuse to adopt instructional technology. Just let it go. 
• You MUST build a network for your instructors. This can be developed on any platform you wish, but should have the ability for participants to create profiles, contribute to conversation and share media files. I use Ning because of the ease of use, flexibility, and stability. You could also use a blog or wiki.
• You must participate in external networking. There is absolutely no other way you can keep up with the technology and quickly find solutions for your instructors. My primary networking source is Twitter.
• Workshops are NOT the foundation of a successful VPD program. Although they may be one component, you can’t spend a great deal of time planning for workshops, scheduling resources, developing materials and dragging in folks who will just never use the technology.
• Open. Open. Open. Expect to share everything. Plan to blog, podcast, tag, post and push out useful tips you learn from your personal network. Invite outsiders to participate in your network. Collaborate!
• Celebrate every success. Spread the word. Pass it up the chain. Let the administration know what you are doing and who’s doing well.

Sound familiar, anyone?  You see all the hallmarks of the successful research-led vision of OU^TM in these points?  As in: the complete lack of any such?

Well, then, you are one of the virally-infected - meaning you are an enthusiastic spreader of the gospel according to whoever it is who infected you - and off we all go together.

Bravely and blindly on into the future.

But it should be fun...B-)

So y'all wanna use Facebook/Vuisboek in education, do ya??  Retroid knew there were good reasons to be suspicious of these new-fangled thingies...B-)

From the Toronto Sun, 6th march 2008:

 "Freshman hit with 147 academic charges for online study network at Ryerson University

Mar 06, 2008 04:30 AM

Louise Brown
Education Reporter

Study groups may be a virtual trademark of the Ivory Tower – but a virtual study group has been slammed as cheating by Ryerson University.

First-year student Chris Avenir is fighting charges of academic misconduct for helping run an online chemistry study group via Facebook last term, where 146 classmates swapped tips on homework questions that counted for 10 per cent of their mark.

The computer engineering student has been charged with one count of academic misconduct for helping run the group – called Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions after the popular Ryerson basement study room engineering students dub The Dungeon – and another 146 counts, one for each classmate who used the site.

Avenir, 18, faces an expulsion hearing Tuesday before the engineering faculty appeals committee. If he loses that appeal, he can take his case to the university's senate.

The incident has sent shock waves through student ranks, says Kim Neale, 26, the student union's advocacy co-ordinator, who will represent Avenir at the hearing.

"All these students are scared s---less now about using Facebook to talk about schoolwork, when actually it's no different than any study group working together on homework in a library," said Neale.

"That's the worst part; it's creating this culture of fear, where if I post a question about physics homework on my friend's wall (a Facebook bulletin board) and ask if anyone has any ideas how to approach this – and my prof sees this, am I cheating?" said Neale, who has used Facebook study groups herself.

 

Ryerson officials have declined to comment while the case continues.

Ryerson's academic misconduct policy, which is being updated, defines it as "any deliberate activity to gain academic advantage, including actions that have a negative effect on the integrity of the learning environment."

Yet students argue Facebook groups are simply the new study hall for the wired generation.

Avenir said he joined the Facebook group last fall to get help with some of the questions the professor would give students to do online. As the network grew, he took over as its administrator, which is why he believes he alone has been charged.

"So we each would be given chemistry questions and if we were having trouble, we'd post the question and say: `Does anyone get how to do this one? I didn't get it right and I don't know what I'm doing wrong.' Exactly what we would say to each other if we were sitting in the Dungeon," said Avenir yesterday.

He is still attending classes pending his hearing but admits the stress of the accusations is affecting his midterm exam results.

"But if this kind of help is cheating, then so is tutoring and all the mentoring programs the university runs and the discussions we do in tutorials," he said.

Neale said the Facebook account appears to have been pulled offline yesterday, although Avenir said it has not been in use since the course ended in December.

He had earned a B in the class, but after the professor discovered the Facebook group over the holidays, the mark was changed to an F. The professor reported the incident to the school's student conduct officer and recommended expulsion.

Neale said Avenir missed two meetings to discuss the matter because of a miscommunication. Tuesday's hearing was arranged to give him a chance make his case against explusion. Ryerson is not obliged to do so.

While Neale admits the professor stipulated the online homework questions were to be done independently, she said it has long been a tradition for students to brainstorm homework in groups, particularly in heavy programs such as law, engineering and medicine.

Each student in the course received slightly different questions to prevent cheating, she said, and she did not see evidence of students doing complete solutions for each other. Instead, she said, they would brainstorm about techniques.

"They'd say to each other stuff like ... `Remember what to do when you have positive cations (a type of positively charged ion)' and that sort of thing," she said.

But Neale admitted the invitation to the Facebook group may have been what landed them in trouble. It read: "If you request to join, please use the forms to discuss/post solutions to the chemistry assignments. Please input your solutions if they are not already posted."

Still, said Neale, "no one did post a full final solution. It was more the back and forth that you get in any study group." "

Yes.  Well.  Over-reaction, anyone??  Sounds like something that could be got around without too much problem - remember when we only had to worry about people writing things on themselves, or very,very small on tiny pieces of paper - and not about SMSing answers in after surreptitiously photographing and sending out pictures of exam/test papers??  Hey, I still remember the first time calculators were allowed into UCT tests!  In 1974, as it happens.

Nice thing about blogs, BTW: you can modify them according to comments received.  So my point was...OK, this has happened, and maybe we need to take it on board, BUT it probably makes a lot more sense to exploit Facebook rather than ban it.

Guesting on View From the North:

 I just had to comment on this function: I had ignored what I thought was a boilerplate invitation, only to be told sternly that they really did want to see me there...so I went, and I was glad I did.

Prawns.  Serious three-corner jobs and hot sauce.  Fruit kebabs.  Satay chicken.  A more-than-passable Merlot/Cab blend....

Oh, and folk from the Shuttleworth Foundation, a public signing of the Declaration - and some very interesting conversation with folk that I only ever meet at occasions like this.  Nice to see you again, Gudrun!

And new ones: well met, Transplant_Ed; it is time again to blog!  No matter that people don't comment; they read - and things happen as a result.

Great also to meet Eve Gray, AND son: putting faces to good blogs is always good; getting into some depth on the discussions sparked by blogs doesn't hurt either.

I was very glad to discover that the penetration of computer technology in to education at UCT has come a long way since the old M(M)EG days, of which Martin Hall reminded us - and that WebCT, which I found so clunky I never got into it, despite trying hard - is completely superseded by Vula.

I have had Web material up for teaching at UCT - and anywhere else that wants to use it - since late 1994, so I am a natural convert to the concept of "open source" educational material.  However, my material is very static, in that there is no way for students to interact with me or the material except via email - and preparing new Web pages is a bit clunky.

I have lately been enthused, then, by my introduction to the use of blogs and wikis via the offices of my far-off colleague Alan Cann, at University of Leicester: he runs a very successful blog called "MicrobiologyBytes", on which I have done a number of guest articles.

Enough to accumulate the courage to actually set up my own, on the WordPress server: this is "ViroBlogy", and is aimed at providing current news for Virology students at UCT (or anywhere) - and an opportunity for them to comment on it or ask questions on it.  It is also examinable...B-)

I plan a wiki next, to allow solicited contributions from students - which will also be examinable.  Nothing like a little technology to add some new spark to teaching!

 But I am waaaay behind the curve on this: I was very pleased to hear at the Declaration that so many at UCT are using the new toys - it makes my life easier, as I can just just follow in well-trodden footprints and use Vula, and avoid all the kinds of mistakes I made when setting up HTML teaching for the first time.

So thanks, all at CET / CHED; thanks also to Martin Hall and Ken Masters et al. for all their early enthusiasm for the technology: it really HAS been a success story.

 Ed Rybicki

Consider this: a connected set of Web pages is a network, existing as a linked series of snapshots that reflect the current update.  Every single change alters the network - yet where is this recorded?  If you are lucky and have a hard drive the size of the Empire State Building, or if you are disciplined enough to actually back things up as successive versions, then perhaps you have an accurate historical record of how things changed - but no-one else will.  And given the fact that most normal people are not disciplined enough to do the necessary, you probably don't either....

So how does one even approach the problem of constructing a history of any particular corpus of Web-published material?  We are confronted with a situation not dissimilar to the one which confronts would-be chroniclers of any ordinary human life: the only material available for research is the latest version (if still extant), and a mess of isolated snapshots and pages, if we are lucky.

I took a look back over my teaching material the other day, which I started formulating back in mid-1994, round about the time the Web came into existence for us non-professionals.  I don't have a single file dating back to that time, not one: the only thing left is a grandfathered filename (virtut1.html) that it would be too complicated to change.  The earliest I can get back to - on a dusty CD-ROM backup unearthed from a bottom drawer, from a PC I gave away at least three upgrades ago - is 1998, and then only for some of the files I actually updated at the time.  My first Web pages are thus irretrievably gone, vanished into entropy - unless they are fossilised on some long-lived legal or illegal mirror server somewhere, like some of my outdated pages I found quite by accident on a computer in Cambridge, and only got removed by threat of copyright infringement action.

So why bother at all?  Of what interest is the history of some half-baked, amateurish attempts at porting teaching material from overhead projection transparencies to the Web?

Weeeeeelllll...it's not really for me to say, is it?  I can't predict who might be interested in the historiography of virology pedagogics - but it's just a little sad to think that so much work has vanished into free electrons, wandering the universe until the inevitable heat death stills them all.  I mean, look at my Virology course textbook: this now in a third edition, and all three are available to anyone who wishes to compare them.  I can't even find Versions 1 - n-1 of my material, so all you're left with is Version n, of 2007.  It's paradoxical that in this electronic age, it's still the traditional medium of print that still has the best potential for survival.  I may even still have some of my original hand-printed overheads from 1981, if they survived the last office-cleaning purge!

But be that as it may...my continuous rolling upgrade of the Web pages has reached a 2006 version in most cases, and 2007 in a few - with a lot of visual material still stuck in a dark age.  There is actually not that much incentive to do too much about that, frankly, given the wealth of graphics now out there in Webspace: but nearly everything is copyrighted, so putting it up on my site could be courting prosecution.  Which is why linking to things via the Web is the way to go...if I only had time!!  Aaaaarrrgghhh!!!

So I dream...of no orphan pages; no lost links...and a daily backup, so that a complete history is available to some future Webnaut, somewhere out there.  Rock on.

Ed Rybicki

Cape Town, June 7th 2007