Casting Out Nines

You have to love this:

more graph humor and song chart memes

I’m not sure how I made it this far without GraphJam. Briliant stuff.

Jackie asked a series of good questions about the textbook-free modern algebra course and some of the student outcomes I was seeing in it. I tried to respond to those in the comments, but things started to get lengthy, so instead I will get to them here.

Do you think the results are only a result of a textbook free course?

To repeat what I said in the comments: I think the positives in the course come not so much from the fact that we didn’t have a textbook, but more from the fact that the course was oriented toward solving problems rather than covering material. There was a small core of material that we had to cover, since the seniors were getting tested on it, but mostly we spent our time in class presenting, dissecting, and discussing problems. We didn’t cover as much as I would have liked, but this is a price I decided to pay at the outset.

Most traditional textbooks don’t lend themselves well to this kind of class design. The ratio of text to problems in a typical textbook is probably something like 5:1 — a lot higher than that in some books. When you have a book in the course, it almost forces itself into the center of the class universe and everything tends to revolve around it, and take on its flavor. When the book spends most, almost all, of its pages on stuff for students to read rather than on problems for students to solve, then I guess it’s possible to have a problem-solving oriented class, but you’re going to be swimming upstream the whole way.

It works better, I think, to have no central book — and instead, provide problems via the course notes with just enough information to solve the problems. And if the students need more information, make it an assignment for library research or web queries.

Were there any negative outcomes? Anything you didn’t like as a result of choosing to structure the course in this manner?

There are some important algebra topics, in rings and particularly in fields, that are not going to get the time they really deserve. And I had to cut short or cut out some topics in group theory that are normally standard fare. At least, I see this as a negative; whether it really makes a difference in the long run is yet to be determined.

The way I select students to do course tasks in class basically involves randomly ordering the students and having them attempt the problems one after the other. It seemed like several times, students who had not presented much ended up first on the list on the days they didn’t have something and last on the list on the days they did. Call it bad luck or Murphy’s Law or what-have-you; but I didn’t like how there was no mechanism for making sure the lower-scoring students got more chances to work.

Some students in the class still struggle with basic problem-solving skills and writing proofs. I think they have enough education to carry out successful problem-solving on proofs most of the time. But not having me lecture has meant that they don’t get to see professionally put-together proofs very often unless they go do some reading.

And I think that this course structure caused stress and even ill will among the students who were not used to having so much personal responsibility in their college work. I think that’s an unintended consequence of implementing a course design that is basically sound; I regret that it happened, and I’d like students to have a more uniformly positive experience in the class, but I’m not going to change the basic course design.

Would you do this again?

You bet, although I believe this way of running the class works in some situations and wouldn’t work in others. I thought about running my differential equations class next semester like this, but that course is so focused on methods that a blind application of this course structure onto that course doesn’t seem appropriate. Maybe I’ll come up with some variant that works.

What would you keep the same? What would you change?

I would definitely keep my method for assigning problems to students, my rubric for grading course tasks, and just the overall procedure for running the class sessions that I used. And I’d keep the feature where students get to choose the weights on the various assessments.

I’d do a little more with the course wiki. Right now students are expected to write up their solutions to course note tasks on the wiki, but there is no point value in doing so nor a penalty for not doing so. The exams are open-wiki, though, so there is some incentive for writing results up well. But I think I would make the posting of solutions mandatory and enforce the rule.

I’d also try to have a complete set of notes before the course began. I have been writing things as I go, and it’s led to some snafus I could have avoided.

I might try writing the course notes so that rings and fields come first.

I’d seriously consider having proof techniques be offered as the subject of weekly help sessions or additional course work. Some students are still struggling with basic problem-solving techniques, and they really need more help than what they are asking for.

That’s that for the questions. Any more?

Apple just made major updates to the software I probably use the most, namely iWork and particularly Keynote. I downloaded the 30-day trial (which makes me wonder why we can’t just download software from Apple) and have given Pages and Keynote a very (VERY) brief once-over. I hope to have more later. But for now, here are some first impressions.

They are really pushing Pages now as a word processor. Before, it was a little hard to know exactly what it was. Is it a word processor? Is it desktop publishing? Is it something in between? We didn’t really know, and I hardly ever used it unless I had a document to print that had a lot of graphics in it. But now, check out the updated toolbar:

Mercifully, you can now adjust stuff like font size, typeface, aligment, etc. from the toolbar — no more click, click, click to navigate through those damnable Inspectors to do such simple stuff. Just like… a word processor. And just so you don’t forget, it tags the name of the document with (Word Processing) at the top. Actually this appears to be because you can switch between “word processing” mode and some other kind of mode (”page layout”?). I didn’t play with it long enough to find out the difference.

I made out a document in Pages ‘08 just to see what it was like, and the experience was pretty much the same as with Pages ‘06. One thing I was thankful for was this commonly-used Inspector item for laying out objects within a document:

In ‘06, the choices here were “moves with text” or “fixed on page”. The latter option confusingly meant that the object being selected could be moved around and the text would wrap with it, which to me is the opposite of something being fixed on a page. “Floating” is a much better term for this.

Keynote ‘08 has some nice new themes to it and has the feature I have been secretly wishing for ever since I started using Keynote: The ability to animate an object along a user-defined path. There is also a new option that lets you export a presentation directly to YouTube — which is nice, but won’t the screen resolution be terrible?

There are more features to boot, and I hope to delve deeply into them later.

Finally, there is a new spreadsheet package with iWork called Numbers. From the Apple tutorials, it sounds… rudimentary. There are all sorts of media-rich enhancements, like the ability to edit images right in the spreadsheet, but honestly, I use a spreadsheet for number-crunching and data analysis. All I can say is, if it doesn’t do multiple forms of regression, it ain’t a spreadsheet, and I don’t care how media-rich it is. We’ll see how it stacks up to Excel pretty soon.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iWork, Numbers, Pages, Keynote

This post on the TV show Jericho has produced 13 comments, making it one of the top 5 most-commented-on articles I’ve posted here at CO9s. Almost all these comments are from new commenters. So welcome to all of you folks. I guess we’re witnessing the power of a Technorati keyword search at work.

Technorati Tags: Jericho, Technorati

I made it back from Reconnect 2007 safe and sound around 11:30 last night, and without a single flight delay! I didn’t have wifi at any point on the way back — see mini-rant below — so I kept a text file with some running commentary while I was waiting for my flights yesterday. Here you go:

- Both the Raleigh-Durham airport and the Newark Liberty Airport have wifi… for $7.95 per 24-hour period. That’s lame. Wifi in an airport should be free. Especially in Newark, which has one of the highest rates of traffic in the world — and one of the most boring gate areas. I’m writing this blog post offline at my gate in Newark, because of the non-free wifi, in case you were wondering.

- I’m hoping that Washington-Dulles has free wifi, because I was counting on snagging a Jericho episode from iTunes for the 90-minute flight back to Indy (in the dark).

Update: Dulles has three different wifi networks — each with its own set of rate plans. Nothing free. Lame, lame, lame. Guess I’ll have to find my in-flight entertainment elsewhere.

- Getting *in* to Newark is evidently a highly uncertain affair (see my reports from the inbound trip). But once you’re here, getting *out* seems to be no problem. Nothing is being delayed, lines are short, and people are moving on and off planes easily. What does this say about Newark?

- You cannot buy anything in the Newark airport with “New Jersey” or “Newark” on it. Millions of NYC items to buy, though. Again, what does this say about Newark?

- I had to take a hotel shuttle from Rutgers to the hotel, so I could catch my airport shuttle from the hotel to the airport. The hotel shuttle was supposed to pick me up at 12:30 and the airport shuttle was to pick me up at 1:50. The hotel shuttle was an hour late, almost causing me to miss my ride to the airport. How hard is it to drive a bus 10 miles?

- Upon checking in at the US Air counter, I entered my information only to get a message that my reservation couldn’t be found. When I checked with an agent, I was told that I was actually on a United flight. I guess I should just regard the fact that “USAIR” was printed on the ticket as just a decoy to test my critical thinking skills.

- State Shuttle, the airport shuttle service I used, has been the only transportation-related service I’ve used on this trip that has demonstrated anything approaching competence. And the drivers I had were very friendly and fun to talk to. If you are flying into New York or Newark and need ground transportation, I highly recommend them.

- One good thing about Newark: Electrical outlets in plentiful supply. Charlotte’s airport had great, free wifi but nowhere to plug your computer in except really inconvenient places (e.g. in front of entries to bathrooms).

Technorati Tags: Jericho, Airports, Wifi

I found out during one of my interminable waits in the Charlotte airport that CBS has this site called Innertube, where you can view entire episodes of some of its shows for free. Included in that list of shows is the entire first series of Jericho, a drama that has become a cult favorite even though it was cancelled after its first series. I watched the first episode in the airport, and I was hooked.

It’s about life in a small town after a devastating terrorist nuclear attack on the United States. I have always been a sucker for post-nuclear holocaust fiction — call it a morbid holdover fascination from having grown up in the 80’s. Jericho is small-town slice-of-life drama, meets post-holocaust, meets government conspiracies — all in a neat, weekly serial package. This is one of the few TV shows I’ve made an effort to watch lately, and I’m not the only fan. There’s the Emmy-nominated web site and even a Jericho wiki where the real paranoids theorize about who attacked us, what’s in Hawkins’ basement, and more.

I’ve watched three more of the episodes on line during my free time here in Jersey and I am thoroughly indoctrinated into the cult. You can buy the whole first season on iTunes for $30 and I am seriously considering it, for the flight back to Indy.

Technorati Tags: Jericho

Here are some bits from around the blogosphere this morning:

• Leo at Zen Habits says that David Allen, the inventor of the alternate lifestyle personal organization method Getting Things Done, has a GTD system that is way too complicated. And he (Leo) goes on to explain how to simplify it.
• Presentation Zen (no relation) explains why the Japanese saying that one should “eat until 80% full” is not only good dieting advice, it also makes your presentations, speeches, and meetings better. Nothing ruins a good presentation than going five minutes too long.
• Wes Fryer is wondering how schools should teach children how to do complex web searches and other nontrivial computer tasks. I made the point in the comments that Vernor Vinge, as usual, saw this issue coming a decade earlier in his short story “Fast Times at Fairmont High“. And I agree with Wes that executing a precisely targeted search contains some very high-level cognitive tasks that can’t be taken for granted among kids.
• Here’s another story debunking the idea that there is no such thing as liberal bias in the faculty hiring process.
• Republic of Geektronica has 11 predictions about the iPhone. Most are less than positive. The last one seems particularly true: “The next iPhone will be even better, and people who wait for the 2nd iteration will not be sorry that they did.” I’ve said before, I’m not an early adopter, except when it comes to my kids.

Technorati Tags: GTD, iPhone, Liberal bias

I’ve got some thoughts and a link to an article about Montessori schools over at Prone to Wander. This might be the first of many Montessori-blogging posts, as Doodlebug will be starting a Montessori school here on June 4.

Technorati Tags: Montessori

WordPress.com has a random blog feature — a little button you can click on to see a randomly-selected WordPress.com blog. This is the one I just got:

Er, OK. I didn’t realize the entire Sanskrit alphabet consisted only of the question mark. No wonder it’s hard to learn!

This is slightly off-topic, but cool nonetheless: We found a surprise at our house on Sunday afternoon.

It’s a bird’s nest — tucked away between the front door and the wreath hanging on the door. What’s more, we’ll be getting four new residents at our place soon:

Now the trick is to avoid letting birds in the house when we open the front door.