ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

My thanks goes to Aviva Dunsiger (web site http://adunsiger.com/, twitter @avivaloca) for prompting me to write this post. She made the following tweet:to which I replied
Aviva then expressed interest in how I had done so, hence this post.

OBSERVATIONS

The nature of the struggles that I set are governed by the subject that I happen to be teaching. The struggles needed for mathematics are quite different to those for English, for example. The subject of computer programming lends itself to making the nature its struggles easily explained.

LEARNING ACTIVITY
It is my practice to create learning activities where the goal is made explicit at the start, and the learners then have to solve a series of problems to be able to reproduce that result. For example, the goalcan be achieved with the following code:
private void show_colours() {
red_value.setText(String.format(“%d”,red_slider.getValue()));
green_value.setText(String.format(“%d”,green_slider.getValue()));
blue_value.setText(String.format(“%d”,blue_slider.getValue()));
show_red.setBackground(new Color(red_slider.getValue(), 0, 0));
show_green.setBackground(new Color(0, green_slider.getValue(), 0));
show_blue.setBackground(new Color(0, 0, blue_slider.getValue()));
show_rgb.setBackground(new Color(red_slider.getValue(), green_slider.getValue(), blue_slider.getValue()));
}
To present the above text to learners would simply be to over-face them. The learning activity consists of describing what each word means (for example, “setBackground” sets the background colour of something on the screen), and offering a collection of “code fragments” which they can use to build a working program. A “code fragment” can look like this:

show_blue.setBackground(new Color(0, 0, blue_slider.getValue()));

The struggle then comes down to three components:

1. Understanding how each code fragment works internally;
2. Working out how each code fragment contributes to the goal;
3. Figuring out how to assemble all the code fragments into a working whole.

The learners are usually very quiet during this activity: it is rare for any learner to ask anything. The learning activity allows self-evaluation: when the learner has completed it successfully, they know immediately. The most common issue that I find in such learning activities that a learner may have mistyped something, which then affords an opportunity for a whole-class discussion on debugging. In my experience, learners always feel happy when they complete such learning activities, and one learner went to far as to shout “Hooray!” to the whole of the class when he completed it.

CONCLUSION

I suggest that this can be related to similar problem-solving issues in other subjects. Using English composition, for example, how do you want to break down and organise your ideas in a blog post so that they are presented logically and can be easily understood by your audience. And at the risk of turning this blog post in on itself, you may care to critique it for those qualities.

A Good Start

I was recently in Adelaide, and I had cause to use a car park courtesy (if that is the right word) of Wilson Parking. The entry to the car park offered the use of a credit card by way of payment, with its obvious means of identifying both the duration of the stay in the car park and a means of payment upon exit. The entry was quite uneventful, with me inserting and retrieving my credit card in a wholly natural way.

Things Start Getting Exciting

Having spent a pleasant time in Rundle Mall, I returned to the car park to pay for the privilege using it, and my subsequent departure. It is at that point that things became exciting. The pay station that I used had a credit card reader, much the same as the credit card reader that I had used upon my entry to the car park. I put my credit card in, and nothing happened. I tried to extract my credit card, but without success. I then used a second credit card to force the first credit card in so far into the credit card reader to try to cause it to eject the first credit card, but still nothing happened. The credit card reader was plainly malfunctioning: it had failed to accept the first credit card, and it had failed to reset itself under a fault condition.

There was a communications station next to the pay station, complete with push-button, speaker and microphone. I pushed the button. Nothing happened. I pressed the button for longer, and still nothing happened. After about six attempts, all unsuccessful, I called the help telephone number displayed beside the communications station. The first call was dropped. The second call was dropped. I got through on the third attempt. The first question that I was asked was “which car park?”. I had no idea. There were no identifiers showing the car park in which I found myself. It was only the kindness of a passing stranger that help me to provide an answer. It took a very long time for the person at the other end to finally comprehend what had gone wrong, at which point me she informed me that the manager of the car park would arrive in 15 to 20 minutes to retrieve my credit card. He arrived late.

In the meantime, my partner had gone to a second communications station, and had got through. She informed the person at the other end that the communications station that I was using was non-functional, and the person at the other end denied that this was the case. She was asked by the person at the other end which pay station was causing the issue. There were no identifiers on either of the pay stations.

While we were waiting for the manager, we were informed by other car park users that these pay stations had a reputation for swallowing credit cards.

The manager turned up, and was unable to retrieve my credit card. He felt the need to ask me if I actually had a credit card in the reader. He then stated that he would need to get a technician in to retrieve my card, and that this would take some time. We agreed that we should make contact with him in an hour or so. As we were planning on going elsewhere at that time, this then raised security issues, and the manager stated that me quoting the first four digits of the credit card would be an adequate identifier. Anybody with even a rudimentary knowledge of credit card security knows that this is inadequate.

I work with information technology as a matter of course, and I am normally more tolerant that most other people of its foibles. When we left the car park, I was livid and my partner was distraught.

An Analysis

I formed the following opinions, and here I must choose my words with extreme care, this for obvious reasons.

• The pay stations also had a ticket entry point, and appear to require the insertion of a ticket (not provided to me at the point of entry), before the insertion of a credit card. This might indicate a failure to fully think through how the whole system worked.
• The software within the pay station was inadequate. Whether this was due to an inadequacy of the Use Case diagram at the system design stage, or a coding failure, or an omission from the test procedures, I cannot determine.
• The technology exists to prevent a credit card being inserted into a reader at inappropriate times. This had not been selected at the design stage.
• The failure to eject any contents under either a fault condition or a reset condition could be considered a design failure.
• The reputation for swallowing credit cards could indicate a design weakness, or quality control issues during manufacturing, or some combination of both.

Finally

On returning to the car park about an hour and a half later, the technician had just retrieved my credit card, and gave it back to me.

My Thanks Go To …

My thanks goes to Gail Poulin (Blog: http://poulingail.edublogs.org/, Twitter: @poulingail) for asking a question about something that seemed to be going wrong on a computer.

Background

Gail, others and I were in a Blackboard Collaborate room when she reported that all the hyperlinks were opening OpenOffice for her, rather than taking her web browser there. I was not able to solve this in the time available in the webinar, so we agreed that I would find an answer, and get back to her, and I am using this post to do just that.

The Cause?

It is not possible to be completely confident that I have found the cause until the proposed solution has been tested and been found to be effective. With that disclaimer out of the way, it seems that there is something wrong with something known as “file associations” in her Windows 8 computer. The “http” protocol (don’t worry if that is meaningless to you) was linked to OpenOffice instead of her default web browser.

A Solution?

Gail is running Windows 8, so the steps below are tailored for that environment.

1. Start Windows 8.
2. If required, log on.
3. Press the Windows+W key. The search panel should appear.
4. Type in the word “default” (without the double-quotes). A list of items should appear.
5. Click on the”Default Programs” item. A “Default Programs” window should appear.
6. Click on “Associate a file type or protocol with a program”. A list of file extensions should appear.
7. Scroll down to the bottom, and look for “URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol” in the description column.
8. Verify that the “Name” field looks like “OpenOffice” (or possibly “OpenOffice Writer”, or just “Writer”)
9. Click on that line. It should become selected (i.e. be displayed in blue).
10. Click on the “Change program” button. A dialogue box should appear.
11. Click on “Internet Explorer” (or, if your preferred web browser is different, click on that one instead). Wait a few moments, and check that your change has been effected.
12. If necessary, repeat the above few steps for “URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol with Privacy”.
13. Close the “Default Programs” window.
14. Verify correctness of operations.
15. This procedure is complete.

INTRODUCTION

My thanks goes to Rodney Turner (web site http://techyturner.blogspot.com.au/, twitter @techyturner) for prompting me to write this post. He mentioned the word “firehosing” in connection with professional development sessions, and brought into sharp focus something that had been at the back of my mind for some years. I then tweeted which provoked two retweets and some jaundiced exchanges about professional development.

THE INSIGHT

Rodney’s comment made me re-evaluate both the professional development (PD) sessions that have been to, as well as those where I had been an observer. What, I wondered, would people remember of being talked at for eight hours in a PD session? A little bit of Internet research came up with a study which can be summarised as learners remember

• 10 percent of what they read;
• 20 percent of what they hear;
• 30 percent of what they see;
• 50 percent of what they see and hear;
• 70 percent of what they say; and
• 90 percent of what they do and say

(Metcalf, T. (1997) Listening to your clients, Life Association News, 92(7) p16 – 18). Adult learning principles indicate that activities in a PD session should as varied as possible. See, for example this article by the Journal of Extension. There is one sentence in that article which is particularly telling: “Their motivation can be blocked by training and education that ignores adult learning principles (Knowles et al., 2005)”.

There is also the question of the amount of information that is presented in any one day of PD. If the PD is properly planned and executed, this would be the same amount of information that you would expect your own adult learners to learn in the same amount of time. From what I have seen for myself, and what the jaundiced exchanges would also indicate, is that this does not happen!

Why do we, who are educators and who should know better, allow this sort of disjunction between when we know to be good practice and what we allow to be done to ourselves? Why are we wasting our time, our presenters’ time, and our administrators’ budgets on this sort of thing? How many people can remember all the relevant details of the first session in a day’s PD by the end of the day?

My gut feeling is that less than 20% of all the relevant information is retained at the end of such a day. To put it into the perspective of personal finances, would you be happy for your garage to charge you five times as much as normal for an ordinary service for your car? No, I though not.

A WAY FORWARD

Enough of this bellyaching on my part.

Rodney described a situation where PD is built into the method of work. There is no “once a year formal PD session”. There is, however, a culture of continuous learning. (As I write, it occurs to me that this mirrors a culture of continuous [self-]improvement.) Just-in-time learning comes to mind here. As an aside, when I have seen Information Technology (IT) specialist come across a novel problem (and given the nature of information technology today, there are plenty of those), the first thing they do is use the Internet to see if somebody has already found a solution. Rodney’s comments made it plain that this just-in-time IT solution can be morphed effectively to suit educators.

A FINAL THOUGHT

What would it take to sell this idea to the relevant decision makers?

MOTIVE

I have often wondered what technical writing was all about, and my curiosity finally reached the level where I decided to find out.

IN ESSENCE

Technical writing is about the transfer of knowledge and understanding from one person to another.

DISCUSSION

The foregoing definition hides a multitude of details. This post outlines my own understanding of technical writing.

RESEARCH

My first move was to see how other people were describing technical writing. This included a Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_writer (accessed 10 March 2013), as well as course summaries from four training organisations. While the levels of detail differed in every case, they all had a number of common themes.

Drawing on my own experiences in both education and information technology, I was able to recast those themes in my own terms.

TECHNICAL WRITING IS …

A useful starting point is to identify who is involved in the technical writing process. There are three main groups:

1. The subject matter expert,
2. The technical writer,
3. The people who need to acquire the subject matter expert’s knowledge and understanding (the target audience).

When viewed like this, the technical writer is acting as a conduit between the subject matter expert and the people with the need to know.

This has a number of implications for the technical writer:

• A good interview technique
• The ability to record the subject matter expert’s knowledge and understanding accurately
• A good understanding of aspects of the target audience:
  • existing knowledge and understanding,
  • vocabulary,
  • culture,
  • expectations.
• A thorough grasp of language
• A facility to present the knowledge and understanding using words that are readily understood by the target audience (“plain English” if you like)
• An ability to organise all the material in a logical and coherent fashion
• The ability to use authoring tools efficiently and effectively, including word processors, web page builders, and image editors
• A good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different communications technologies, and how this impacts on the target audience’s learning experience
• An ability to work well within the client’s documentation styles and conventions
• A strong desire to produce a first-class document, this requiring persistence and patience.

With the exception of the first two items, educators who prepare their own delivery materials can be expected to have all of the above. Even so, the ability to read and fully understand a curriculum document is similar to the first item, and consulting colleagues on any of points of concern bears a resemblance to the second item.

HOIST WITH MY OWN PETARD?

I must leave it to others to decide for themselves how well this post meets the requirements listed above. If you are interested in also evaluating my work with images, you might want to critically review this article on managing images.

Acknowledgment

My thanks goes to Julian Sims (web site http://www.bbk.ac.uk/management/our-staff/academics/sims-julian, twitter @juliansims) for prompting me to write this post.

Background

Julian and I had a long and wide-ranging discussion on Twitter about some of the causes of the recent disasters experienced by banks when it came to delivering services to their customers. Examples include the Lloyds Banking Group and Bank of America. This was underpinned by Leo Kelion’s article entitled “Why banks are likely to face more software glitches in 2013” which examined the causes of such events. One of the key phrases in that piece is “dead code was brought back to life”. This is often known as “zombie code”, hence the title of this post. The problem with such zombie code is that it was created for another age – it is much the same as asking a stagecoach driver from 1750 to drive a modern day Ferrari: the result is guaranteed to be a disaster.

Discussion

Julian and I were were tweeting each other about possible causes of zombie code, and one of his tweets “@philhart in the UK Aspergers is labelled ‘learning difficulty’ rather than ‘learning specialty’ – could that be part of the problem?” jolted my thinking out of its usual ruts. My short answer to that question is “No”, but that answer needs justification.

Before I go too far, I should mention that Asperger syndrome covers a range of symptoms, one of which includes “Intense preoccupation with a narrow subject” (Wikipedia, accessed 3 February 2013). It is entirely conceivable that this would manifest itself in the way such an individual would write software. I have seen examples where software writing was done in such a way that it was obvious that the software writer had an intense preoccupation with over-applying a particular design style. It is not obvious to me how the software writer’s style would have been influenced by his educators’ use of the labels “learning difficulty” or “learning specialty”.

Once a piece of software has been written and properly tested, it will continue to do the same thing forever, regardless of whether or not its author had Asperger syndrome. We now need to look at the business context in which this happens. Business rules change over time, and financial products come and go. In particular, a new financial product with a strong resemblance to a previous financial product can arise. The key point here is “a strong resemblance”, meaning that it is not identical. In particular, there is something different, and the piece of software that worked correctly for the old financial product is not guaranteed to work with the new product: it has been resurrected, and has turned into a zombie.

By way of a thought experiment, imagine that “cash account” has been changed into a “ready cash account”, and with a change to at least one of its rules, such as what happens when an attempt it made to go overdrawn. It is a new product, but the decision maker, usually somebody high up the organisational tree, is unaware of its impact on the piece of software that is about to become a zombie. The individual responsible makes the assumption that the old software will work correctly with the new financial product. The behaviour of the piece of software then becomes undefined. At the lowest level, cash could simply disappear – this would be picked up by an internal audit and rectified, and the general public would be none the wiser. At the other extreme, it can cause the whole system to crash, and everybody knows about it.

To the Future

Re-casting Leo’s words, I think it is something that we may need to learn to live with. 🙁

Acknowledgment

My thanks go to Derek McCoy (web site http://mccoyderek.wordpress.com/, twitter @mccoyderek) for bringing my attention to this post entitled “Save or Save As: Should Third Graders Know How Computers Work?”

My reaction to that article can be summed up with with this image:

Background

Working as I do in information technology, I use the tools of the trade. I use files and folders for a variety of purposes, in exactly the same way as a 19th century artisan. I have them organised in such a way that I can find everything that I need easily and efficiently. It is a skill, or perhaps a habit of mind, that is well over 200 years old.

Analysis

Today’s children are growing up in an information age. In terms of learning how to be organised, it is no different to children growing in the technological age that has been with us for well over a century. Today’s teachers have a duty to help their charges learn to function as effectively as possible in their own futures. (Teach not what you were taught yesterday, for their futures belong to them.)

Failure to help today’s children learn such skills amounts to a dereliction of duty.

A Way Forward

It is ludicrous that this situation was allowed to arise in the first place. I suggest that every concerned parent takes this matter up with their relevant educational authority, with the aim of having it fully resolved by the end of 2013.