On Peer Teaching/Learning

Since we are having the FB/iPad application seminar this evening, it seems fitting that I take some time to explain what we are trying to do with this exercise.

This is the 4th year that we're teaching CS3216 and also the 4th time that we're doing this seminar.

Obviously, I didn't quite get it right the first year and the seminar in its current manifestation is the result of several iterations.

It turns out that the seminar is not random assignment, but it is a specially designed component for CS3216 to promote peer learning.

First, since students are learning how to develop apps in CS3216, it is natural to study existing apps in order to learn the good, the bad and the ugly.

While it is easy for me to come up with a set of lecture slides articulating what is good, bad and ugly (and I did exactly that in my first year teaching CS3216), it quickly occurred to me that such an approach made little to no sense. That list is pretty common sense. Students would listen to me lecture, agree with me and I suspect would hardly remember a thing or be able to apply what they heard.

The FB seminar is the chance for students to come together to do a case study of an existing application to figure out what is good or bad about it. We hope that the very act of coming together to discuss would promote what's called "peer learning."

Thereafter, the act of presenting what each group had figure out further promotes peer learning and also helps students practise their presentation skills. It turns out that CS3216 typically have good presentation skills which is something that is helpful to learn through demonstration.

One of the mistakes I made for the first 2 years was not to control the duration of the presentations, and students then tended to ramble on and on. The seminar ran over time and learning was not optimal.

Since last year, we introduced Pecha Kucha, and the groups were "forced" to keep their talk to just 7 minutes. It turns out that this time limit has two advantages: (i) helped to ensure that class ended on time; and (ii) students are forced to think harder about what's important. :-)

Rambling is easy. Getting to the crux of what's important is hard and promotes learning.

Finally, the students are forced to focus on all the presentations because they are required to write a critique about one of the presentations (but not their own). This final act of "forced" reflection would hopefully encourage reflection and deeper learning. Students are also required to engage each other in the blogs for a week to promote further discussion.

We have no illusions that not every student would necessary learn what they are supposed to be learning in this process, but we try. While we ideally teaching to be highly uniform, information transfer is not the same as education. The efficient transfer of information is completely useless if students cannot actually apply what they learnt.

It is much more effective if students learn less but are able to apply, and more importantly, LEARN HOW TO LEARN in the process. The following lecture by a famous Harvard prof Eric Mazur probably explains what I'm trying to say in a more articulate way (for those who have the time and patience to watch the full lecture).

On Wealth

I'm so swamped this week, it's not funny.

It turns out that I did have something to write about but didn't quite get the chance to write about it. Until now.

It is something that I said to one student -- can't recall who now -- and it's about wealth. My point: the only real wealth that we have is our time, not money.

Case in point: Steve Jobs. He is one of the richest men in the world, but all the wealth in the world will do him no good if he doesn't have the time to spend it.

And to some extent, nature is fail. Regardless of king or pauper, we get 24 hours everyday. No more, no less.

While I'm *really* *really* short of time (at least at this moment in time), I'm really not too unhappy because I am spending my time doing things I chose to do.

This simple fact is something I am actually quite grateful for. :-)

Another interesting fact is that often times, money often used to buy time. For example, we might hire a maid to help us with household or spend money on medical treatments to expand our lifespans.

Not trying to be too philosophical here, but His Holiness The Dalai Lama, was quoted to have said the following when asked what surprised him most about humanity, “he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."

Back to Jobs, it seems to me that most of you will go on to live longer lives than Jobs. But what does that mean? Do you necessarily lead better lives?

If we model life as a candle, I would prefer to burn brightly for a shorter period than to be a dim glow for all eternity, but that's just me. :-)

It is now the third week of the semester and most students should have their lives overtaken by the first assignment, and very soon the second assignment and Final Projects.

What I hope that you will keen in mind is exactly why you are investing your time in CS3216. CS3216 is not to be taken for a grade. It is to be taken to learn something that will help each of you succeed in your chosen profession, or perhaps just provide you with the opportunity to understand yourselves.

10 weeks will pass in a jiffy. It always does.

I would like to encourage you to read each others blogs and to engage each other in conversation. Much of the learning in CS3216 is also peer learning.

To conclude, I quote my wife, "You can vote for the wrong President, you cannot marry the wrong woman." :-P

Finishing Strong

Blogging is stressful. I do it because I always believed in walking the talk.

It didn't take me too long to realize that students (children) don't do what we say, but do what we do.

For teachers to have the moral authority to preach, they unfortunately will have to practise what they preach.

It turns out that I can sorta write, so writing is not entirely stressful. The reason why blogging for this class is stressful is because there is this pressure to "say something smart".

The problem is that this is the fourth time that I'm teaching this course and the third time I'm writing a blog because of this class. I don't actually read through what I wrote in the past (really don't have that sort of time or energy), but it also means that I risk repeating what I said in the past.

Fortunately for me, something struck me while I was reading the class blogs and it's something that I think is extremely important: finishing strong.

NUS does have its fair share of good and talented students. Yet, one quality that I have found that is often lacking is the tenacity to see something to the end.

It is quite common to find students get excited about something and work very hard at it (especially in CS3216).

The problem with life is that most things that are worth doing, are, well, HARD. While things can look really good at the beginning, things get more dreary and more painful as time goes on. There are also often problems. Sometimes, many, many problems.

And often times, people end up going through motion towards the end, or perhaps they just give up.

Three things I would like to say on this topic of "Finishing Strong":

1. Life is more often a marathon rather than a sprint and so there's a need to conserve energy for the long haul and also manage morale. People often give up because they under-estimate how long it takes.
2. Only the paranoid survive. It is easy to get lulled into complacency. The job is never finished until we are past the finishing line. We should not celebrate prematurely and let our guard down. I'm teaching CS1101s for the sixth time (and teaching CS3216 for only the fourth time). I almost have Scheme coming out of my ears and I can probably teach CS1101S backways. Nevertheless, if you ask my tutors, both classes are treated as "fresh enemies" and not a single stone is left upturned to make sure that nothing goes wrong (as best as we can help it).
3. We don't always do things because it "feels good". To finish strong, sometimes we need to appeal to our conviction that we need to do some things just because "it is right" not because we "feel like it". If you asked me, I'd really rather be on a beach sipping pina colada than writing a blog, but we do what we need to do.

Confession

It is hard to imagine that again it's the day before CS3216 starts. This is the fourth time.

Every semester I get to teach CS3216, I get ulcers. This semester is likely to be worse than normal since I also get to teach CS1101S concurrently.

How cool is that? :-)

Do I not always say "what doesn't kill you, makes you strong?"

Always good to eat your own dog food. :-)

For the information of the new batch of CS3216 students, I blog because I think it's important to lead by example. Also, over the years, I have found blogging to be a very effective way for students to reflect upon what they really learn in the class, and also for me to understand how they think and to engage them.

In ordinary times, I would probably be responding to every single blog and most posts that students make. But these are not ordinary times. Even if I don't sleep I probably couldn't manage. >.<

What can assure every single student however is that I will be reading every blog post they make religiously and I mean it. :-)

Then I have a final confession to make.

I really don't know HTML5 and CSS3 even as we speak. :-)

This is probably very shocking because people will be wondering HOW it is possible that students are expected to learn about HTML5 and CSS3 if the prof has no clue.

It turns out that if we go back in time 3 years ago when I first started this course, I had no clue how to build Facebook apps either.

We are working with pretty bleeding edge stuff in CS3216 (and thanks to Facebook's capriciousness in how they change their APIs without telling anyone, there will be quite a lot of bleeding over the semester).

If we wait till the prof figures it all out before we conduct this course, this course would never exist.

Obviously, I have also figured out a way to conduct CS3216 without knowing a whole lot. The truth of the matter is that it is possible for me to conduct such a course because the course is not about *stuff* to being with, but about learning how to learn. :-)

I think that honesty is a virtue and it's important for us all to know what we know and more importantly, what we DON'T know.

Sadly, profs really don't know everything and don't have all the answers.

In fact, not all questions have answers. Though the process of formal education has this nasty tendency to persuade students otherwise. :-'(

As they say, in teaching, you tell them what you want to tell them, you tell them and then you tell them that you told them.

Parents send their children to university, hoping that they will get an education. What exactly is that?

IMHO, there are only two things that matter in education (might add more to the list if I figure out more things later): MINDSET and VALUES. The world is changing too fast for *stuff* to matter too much and learning *stuff* is really the easy part.

My goal as a prof is to help students succeed (whatever that means). Success doesn't always mean getting rich, though often it might. I am absolutely convinced that having the right "growth" mindset and the right work ethics is pre-requisite and enabler for success.

Much of CS3216 is structured around creating the environment within which students can build up that mindset. Much of it involves some amount of shared suffering. Suffering, as it turns out, builds character. >:-)

The other key element is values. By this I mean honesty and integrity. Those who are driven and highly motivated often do succeed, but without the right moral compass, we might just have another Enron on our hands, which is obviously NOT a good thing.

To conclude, I would like to share a short speech, given by Caleb Chao, who was SoC Valedictorian last year, and also one of those students crazy enough to have taken CS3216 in his freshman year when the course was first offered 3 years ago.

Random Stuff to Check Out

I have a habit of posting random stuff in the IVLE Discussion Forum for CS3216 in past classes. One student suggested that instead of posting them in IVLE to post them on this blog. I will still continue to post random stuff in the IVLE Discussion Forum this year, but what I will also do is to continue adding stuff to this list as we go along. Thanks to the Internet, there is so much knowledge and wisdom out there that's accessible with a click of a button. It would be criminal not to learn from them. :-)

Anyhow, here some of the interesting stuff to read/check out:

1. Steve Job's Stanford Commencement Speech 2005 (Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish)


2. The Art of Teaching Entrepreneurship and Innovation


3. Adrian Tan's NTU Convocation Speech


4. Randy's Lecture on Time Management


5. David Rose on Pitching


6. How Bill Gates hopes to make a difference


7. Nick Vujicic


8. Barry Schwartz on Common Sense/Wisdom


9. Pattie Maes on Sixth Sense, a next-generation Minority-Report-like user interface.


10. Richard St. John's 8 secrets of success


11. Anthony Robbins: The Power of Clarity & Purpose


12. Kiran Bir Sethi teaches kids to take charge


13. Cameron Herold: Let's raise kids to be entrepreneurs


14. The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination, JK Rowling


15. Secrets of a $110 million dollar man


16. Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn


17. Is Your Life Just One Big RPG? Part I, Part II, Part III


18. Anthony Robbins: Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better


19. Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!


20. Paul Graham: The Power of the Marginal

Note: this is an old blog entry that I moved forward in time.

Teaching as a Learning Process

As students are "forced" to reflect on what they have learnt this past semester as their swan song, I thought that it would be helpful for me to do the same -- but more than that, I decided that I would reflect not only on the current semester, but on the three-year journey that is CS3216.

At the heart of CS3216 is my belief that Singapore is much too mediocre a society and what we really lack are peaks. By mediocrity, I don't actually mean bad. Mediocre actually means "average" and in the context of Singapore, it's a pretty high average.

However, what I had come to realize by observing what's been happening in recent times is that a high average isn't going to cut it. Not by a long shot. :-(

The world at large is getting increasingly complex. We are slowly but steadily running out of oil. China is fast becoming bigger and more unstable. US is fast moving towards implosion and bankruptcy. The picture really isn't pretty.

In this light, what I felt what that what Singapore really needs are peaks.

I also had a very dim view of the old farts like myself. I've missed my chance to be a Page or Zuckerberg. The future really belongs to the youth of today and the leaders of tomorrow. Education is the answer.

Then the question was: how in the world do we go about creating those peaks?

Then I watched The Last Lecture and decided that maybe Randy Pausch knew what he was talking about and saw that Facebook was like the best thing since sliced bread and created CS3216 - because I thought, maybe if we did something different, some good might come out of it.

Now that I have the whole system up and running, I can obviously tell a story about how brilliant I was when I "conceived" of CS3216. However, the truth of the matter is much less glamorous. I hardly knew what I was doing and I was mostly making things up as I went along. :-)

What I DID know however was that what I really wanted to do was to help facilitate the formation (not creation) of those peaks that we need so badly. The idea is that the peaks were already there, but we just haven't quite been able to bring them out or the systems and structures we have in place were perhaps and impediment.

I really didn't know but as Randy says, "Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you."

Because I didn't really know what I was doing, I ended up talking to a lot of people, mostly successful people --- and it wasn't too long before it became conclusive that there is no "formula" for success. The unfortunate corollary of this finding is that we can't really create peaks the way we used to train engineers.

What I did find however was that successful people tend to think differently from the regular folks. It's really not about IQ. It's all about mindset.

I think Anthony Robbins articulates this in a way that I cannot possibly:

"Guess how many emotions people typically experience? Less than 12 and half of them make them feel like sh*t".

Along the way, I have indeed found that notwithstanding differences in natural talent (or what's typically referred to as "Nature"), that people are products of their own experiences (or "Nurture"). Nurture is not just about how many tuition teachers one has had in the past. It's *much* deeper and more profound.

Much of this I sort of figured out along the way as a scientist observing the world and the people that run around in it. In recent times, I've come to learn about this thing known as "Neural Linguistic Programming" and I'm in the midst of figuring out how it all works. :-) It's nice to have someone else work out the theory for you instead of having to start from first principles.

The theory here is that most people typically have a lot of potential to do a lot more, except that they are "programmed wrongly". Well, it turns out that I'm a Computer Scientist. If it's just a buggy program, then I'm right at home. Debugging is probably no sweat lah. Just have to figure out how the heck to load the darn thing into memory without frying someone's brains. :-)

Teaching CS3216 has been really rewarding for me because I've also actually gotten a lot smarter about a whole bunch of random things along the way. It's sometimes not even clear to me (like it's not clear to the students) that I've actually been teaching, but I've definitely learnt a lot.

It's funny, but I came up with this conjecture earlier this evening that maybe CS3216 is just a class I created for myself to learn stuff I wanted to learn..... and along the way, I just sort of collected some students to learn with me? :-P

I really like to learn stuff. I hope that to a small extent, some of the students this past semester have also started to appreciate the value of keeping their eyes open and learning random stuff. :-)

The motto for CS3216 is "make a difference". Now that the course is coming to an end and we're moving on to bigger and badder things next year, it might be timely for me to share my views on this matter.

I think it's HARD to actually make a difference. Like I said during the Last Lecture, most people are a lot less important than they think they are and our existence in this world is really quite transient. What is a 100 years in the face of eternity? Anyone knows his/her great-grandfather?

Does it therefore mean that we should therefore give up and life an "ordinary life"? Well, that's a choice that each and every person must make for himself/herself.

What I do think however is that to stand a chance at making a difference, we first have to BELIEVE that WE CAN MAKE a DIFFERENCE.

At the very least, we can try (though I also say "Do or Do Not, There is no Try".... maybe I'm a bit schizophrenic :-P).

Trying doesn't guarantee success. Sometimes the Gods will seem to conspire against us. What can mere mortals do? :-)

That said, what I do know is that if we don't try, we fail by default.

To conclude, I shall leave the students with one (hard) question that they should attempt as homework: WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?
Not to worry. It's not graded - at least not by me. ;-)

This question doesn't have a model answer I think. Because everyone is built differently, it's likely that the answer will be different for each student. But this is actually an important question because the answer will reveal the sort of person we are and also be a guiding force to our short existence.

To make the point more poignant (sorry this is a bit morbid), imagine yourself lying in your deathbed with hours left to go and someone asks you: "what the heck have you been doing with your life?" What will your answer be?

On Wealth and Execution

I haven't blogged for a while and I realized that many students haven't blogged as well - but we'd talk about that later.

I also wanted to do an experiment to test if students would blog if I didn't blog. Sad to say, not many did. :-(

What came to me earlier today is something quite philosophical, and thats the question: what is wealth?

I recently get in touch with Nipun Mehta who has an interesting perspective on this question:

His solution is the "gift economy", which attempts to "redefine wealth as contributions, not possessions".

While interesting, and perhaps noble, such a definition is a little too abstract for me.

So I approached this question from a more basic angle: if I can have an infinite amount of anything I want, what would it be? Money?

Sometimes when you ask questions the "right way", you the get the "right" answers.

My answer was pretty obvious: TIME.

If only I had more time. I have so many thing I have to do. I have so many things I wanna do. I never seem to have enough time to do them all. :-( Simple as that. Instead of a daily struggle to pay the bills, mine is a struggle to stay afloat.

Let's try to get everything squared away without blowing anything up yeah?

If you will think a little deeper. There are two things that the world cares about: energy and money. To some extent, the two are actually interchangeable. Energy is money, albeit in a different form.

Why do we need money or energy? Basically to buy time.

Because we have money, we can take a plane or drive a car instead of walking on foot. That saves us hellaluvalot of time.

Because we have money, we can go to the restaurants, we don't need to hunt down the animal, skin it and cook it ourselves.

Because we have money, we can hire a maid to take care of the housework so that we don't have to do the laundry.

Because we have money, we might be able to pump ourselves with more advanced medical treatments so that we don't die so early and have more time.

You get the point. But suppose we all agree that wealth is really time, then there are two obvious corollaries:

One, life is very fair, because regardless of king or pauper, we all have the same amount of time everyday: only 24 hours. No more. No less.

Two, what should we do with our time?

I am not about to suggest that there is a model answer to the second question. To each his own. I am merely sharing a perspective.

The second point I want to touch on in this blog entry is execution, which coincidentally is the theme for the second part of CS3216, if people still remember.

It turns out that CS3216 is not the easiest class to teach. Because of the way it is structured, there are a lot of random variables.

I don't know beforehand who I can get as speakers. I don't know who will turn me down. I don't know who will agree to come talk to the class, but have to cancel and/or reschedule.

I don't know whether the new Google Wave assignment will work out. I didn't even know what Google Wave was about when we started. Thank God it worked out. :-P

Because I am teaching this class for the third time, I am obviously much smarter than when I started, but there are (always) surprises.

For example, while I had expected all the teams to do well for the milestone portion of the Facebook assignment, some teams blew up on and I had to make up some new rules to remedy the situation and to put the course back on track.

Now that we're nearing the end of the semester, I must say that I'm quite pleased to see how things have turned out and as far and I'm concerned, we're pretty much cruising to the end.

There's still the poster session next Wed, but it's quite manageable.

The only other loose end that I need to tie up is the Blogging King/Queen business. As it turns out, this current batch of students dun really like to blog and dun blog consistently. This is very different from the last batch -- but why am I surprised? :-)

Upon careful deliberation, I hereby declare MYSELF the Blog King for this batch 'cos I think I have blogged much more consistently and conscientiously than any of the students.

Because there can only be one, and I'm the one, this means that the no one gets a free A by blogging for this batch. At least not the way it was envisioned at the start of the semester. Sorry.

Am I upset that blogging didn't quite work out this semester? Actually, no 'cos the point of the class is not about blogging. Everything that's done for CS3216 is supposed to go towards promoting learning. While the blogging component this year hasn't been quite so successful, some good has come out of it and that's about as good as it gets.

In case people are wondering if this means it's the end of blogging for the rest of the semester. The answer is no. However. more will be revealed at the Last Lecture on Monday. Akan datang.

People should not forget that I'm the evil prof. >:-P

To conclude, the point I'm trying to make about execution is that it involves focussing on the big picture and high-level goal, without losing sight of the details and begin able to adapt to unexpected events and being able to improvise as you go along. Yeah, it's a mouthful. Go chew on it. :-)