Code V.igoro.us - Education

Users and their Motivations

nospam@example.com (Dustin J. Mitchell) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:44:34 +0000

I stumbled upon a summary of the Drefyus model of skill acquisition by Andrew Hunt today, copied out of the powerpoint here. There's a bullet point in there that I hadn't seen before:

Level 1: Beginner
- Little or no previous experience
- Doesn't want to learn: wants to accomplish a goal
- No discretionary judgement
- Rigid adherence to rules

I've been toying with the idea of a beginner's guide to Amanda for some time. My vision was of a shallow but broad description of how Amanda fits together: clients and servers, applications, holding disks, changers, devices, and so on. Scaffolding, in the constructivist sense. The intent was to head off some of the more ignorant questions about Amanda, and give beginners a base on which to build their own Amanda configurations.

But this won't work! A beginner does not want to learn, and anything that tries to "teach" a beginner is just so much noise to him or her. In fact, most beginner guides are nothing of the sort -- they are probably only useful to those already at level 2.

This is all the more the case with Amanda: like plumbing, Amanda users just want backups to happen so they can concentrate on their core business, so even smart folks will happily remain at level 1 if they can make it work. So what can we do to support these users? And how can we encourage people to move to the next level?

More girls + math

nospam@example.com (Dustin J. Mitchell) — Sat, 31 May 2008 17:26:16 +0000

I'm watching the DNC's Rules & Bylaws Committee meeting, discussing the fate of the Michigan and Florida delegations. This committee consists of the elite among the Democratic superdelegates. These are all powerful, intelligent, important people (including the wonderful Donna Brazile).

What has me upset is that I've now heard two women explain that they don't have the "mathematical genius" to work out the proper representation for these states; no men have made such a declaration. First of all, that's bull: anyone can work out what 33% of 128 is. The difficult part is in the politics, and everyone on this committee is an expert on politics.

More importantly, though: why is it OK for these women to brag about their mathematical ignorance? What message does this send to PoliSci students struggling through calculus? One of the women to mention this was Alice Travis Germond, who was a VP of NARAL -- hardly an advocate of keeping women barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. What is she thinking?

[UPDATE] The other woman to brag about her innumeracy was Tina Flournoy -- Gore's finance director! Finance!

Girls and Math

nospam@example.com (Dustin J. Mitchell) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 14:46:03 +0000

Every girl gets the memo:

To: Girls
From: The Establishment
Re: Math

Math is hard, and you'll never need it anyway.  
You'll just be cooking and making babies, after all.

cc: Boys

But most teen girls, being the modern anti-establishment type, reject this sentiment as "the man" trying to keep them down. They look to the female role models around them for guidance as to what "real life" is like. That comes down to teachers, moms, aunties, and big sisters.

Last week, while I was working on an algebra problem with a group of 7th-grade girls, the classroom teacher (a woman) said, "I'm not good at math."

To: Girls
From: Grown-up Girl
Re: Math

I never learned math, and now I'm a teacher, so you can safely ignore it.

But what did this teacher really mean? She can solve the problem we were working on, no problem. What's hard is teaching math. As with most subjects, a teacher needs to be agile enough to dance around the math, attacking it from all angles, spotting the misconceptions and shreds of understanding in a student's responses, and asking the right questions.

That's legitimately hard, and I think it's unreasonable to ask someone to be this good at more than one subject. I'm a pretty OK math teacher, but if you plop me down in front of a language arts class, I'll struggle. I'm OK with that, but the proper phrase is "I'm not good at teaching language arts," not "I can't read."

"Teaching Problem Solving: You Can and You Should" (Elizabeth Zwicky)

nospam@example.com (Dustin J. Mitchell) — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 16:06:49 +0000

Mrs. Zwicky gave a really excellent talk that balanced real research in education, in problem solving, and in systems administration. She teaches systems administration to Navy recruits for a defense contractor, in a tutoring setting. The talk addressed the common belief that problem solving skills are essentially innate and can't be taught. She discussed the problem-solving process in general, using lots of examples (well, "war stories") from systems admin. Finally, she talked about some of the techniques and skills needed to teach problem solving (or anything, really).

These techniques included scaffolding -- building the learners' conceptual understanding by presenting the right tasks, offering the right support, and convincing the learner to talk about the concepts, not just "what do I type". Also included was "spotting", which I assume comes from sports -- the idea here is to make sure that the learner doesn't suffer any horrible consequences from making mistakes. This topic was interesting to me, as someone who bridges education, systems administration, and development. I think it's important for well-trained, intelligent people to think about and participate in education -- systems administrators included (for the record, I'm happy with the NSF's requirement that scientists do some sort of "community service" as a part of their work for a grant).

I found it relevant to me in two ways. First, the person who replaced me at my previous job is a very green admin. He's been doing basic IT legwork for a few years -- repairing computers, user support, etc. Now he's in charge of a heterogenous Linux/Windows shop with a bunch of web services, funky applications, and so on. Since he's in a production environment, questions are always "how do I do XYZ?" rather than "how does SSL work." That makes it hard to concentrate on teaching the problem-solving that underlies all of this.

I have also tried to teach varoius IT-related things to a bunch of students (programming, administration, etc.). For most, the motivation was missing, and I never figured out how to get around that. For one, though, I found that spotting was an effective way to motivate her to actually try to solve a problem, rather than just requesting and following steps. I asked her to add a printer to a Windows network, but said I wouldn't answer any questions, but would fix anything that broke while she was working on it. It took a few iterations of the assurances before she started, and it took her a while to work through the process, but she now reflects on this as the best learning experience of our time working together.

During the Q&A session for this talk, I was somewhat disappointed that all of the questions focused on Problem Solving / System Administration -- horror stories, "what kind of problem solving is this", etc. -- nobody was interested in the teaching of these skills.