Sit Cog Blog

Research Works Act

2012-01-25T15:49:00.000-07:00

I'm a little late to the party but recently heard about the Research Works Act. This is an effort out of the house to directly contradict an NIH policy that requires any research produced with government funding (e.g. taxpayer dollars) to be available for free to said taxpayers 12 months after publication.

Needless to say this is a horrible idea. It would constitute a bit of a blow to the open access movement. Now I've already established that I'm no fan of Springer so take this next bit with a grain of salt, but their statement about this legislation is cheeky at best. You want some measured, intelligent and constructive debate? Fine.

Your current value to the world of academic publishing is copy editing and typesetting. That's it. The research, the peer review, the editing--that's all done by academics who you don't pay. So in exchange for making sure our page numbers are in the right spot you have the highest profit margin of any US industry at 53% (or at least you did when I wrote this--looks to be an interactive dataset.

Now onto my favorite part. Your support for RWA in essence is that so called "green" open access is an unfunded mandate. That's really your position? That's your line in the sand? That NIH is requiring authors to do something when it's not clear where the money is coming from? Well your idea of "gold" open access is to charge me, an author, $3k to make my article free and open. I have a response to that:

I
gave
at
the
office

I guess in a way, I can see why you think it would cost too much--because you charge $3k and all, but USU is perfectly capable (and already has been for several years thank you very much) of hosting it's own repository and they do it for considerably less than $3,000 per article. In a measured debate, you look bad.

I'm going to go investigate buying futures in your demise. Stop selling ice, the refrigerators are already in the kitchen.

Flash is not dead (yet)

2012-01-10T08:29:00.000-07:00

So I fell into the trap. The trap of thinking that Flash was dead. It started, for me with the war between Jobs and Adobe. I wondered, when the iPhone and iTouch first came out without flash support how long the war could last. Flash had a huge developer/user base but Apple had huge market share in the mobile market. Not on a per device basis, but on sheer volume of Internet throughput (still no excuse for AT&T).

Then came what I thought was the final nail in the coffin. Adobe cut the Flash player out of mobile development. I thought they had basically given up. Here's the thing that few people are talking about. Adobe had a solution months ago: Adobe Air. The ability to build native iOS Apps from within Flash, or Flash Builder, or Flex. Boom. iOS done right? But last April Apple went out of their way to shut them down.

Now it's back. Here's a screen capture of an app I built in Flash CS 5.0 (old school I know) during faculty senate in about 20 minutes. I wanted to make sure the integration was meaningful so I experimented with connecting to the GPS data received by the phone. It works. And presumably the same functions would work on an android or a blackberry.

What took considerably more time was setting up the certificate and provisioning profile so that apple could know who was writing code, what device they were writing for, and have a record of what the app name was. Keep in mind that all of this was purely for testing purposes--not for distribution either at an enterprise level or in the app store.

My takeaway from this experience is that apple is a much bigger barrier (did I mention it costs $99/year to even get on the testing ride?) to app development on iOS than Flash is but time will tell if that continues to be the case.

Note that the flash player is still dead dead dead, and that means no seamless integration with web browsers. No flash video players as the ubiquitous media wrappers. But as someone who uses an iPhone religiously I generally prefer native apps anyway.

I am now officially astounded at how long Flash has persisted. I've been teaching it for 9 years. It remains in my mind one of the best IDEs for people with no programming background, because you can engage in so much GUI development. I'll be curious to see when someone finally sticks a fork in it.

Disparate business models

2011-08-26T13:06:00.002-06:00

I'm struck by the stark contrast between Comcast and Netflix. Without getting into a bunch of details I lack the time to provide I'll just say the following. My relationship with Comcast feels like an abuse cycle. We have a billing fight, they try to increase my rates, I threaten to leave, they cut me a deal for 6 months and we repeat the dance.

Netflix is all happy and chipper that I'm cutting back on services (going streaming only), customer service answers my question right away and even gives me the old rates until the end of my service cycle despite changing their rates on September 1st. Not because I asked for it, but because that's the way they roll. Comcast on the other hand happily charges me a higher rate for a reduction in services partway through my billing cycle. Who does that to their customers?

The really scary part is that they are now a conveyer of content and a producer of it--I'm sure I'll be able to trust them to push my Netflix streams as fast as the Today show because they're so magnanimous.

CPU bottleneck since 2004?

2011-05-11T16:20:00.003-06:00

So there seems to be a 6Ghz upper limit on processor speed that we can't break through since clear back in 2004. How did I miss that? As a result we've moved to doubling down so to speak with dual or quad core processor machines but only a handful of applications actually take advantage of that by offloading processes to multiple processors.

This seems like it prefaces a day of the designer, in which software engineers will have to be even more lean and mean than usual. As a side note, STATA (my favorite stats package ever). Offers licenses that take advantage of this but they want to charge for it. Who wouldn't right? It also prefaces a day of computing really starting to suck. We're supposed to double capacity every 18 months. I'm looking at buying a new macbook pro with a dual core processor that's pretty similar to what I have now and is almost 3 years old. Am I missing some nuance here?

Sustainability

2011-03-10T16:57:00.002-07:00

So I haven't been this excited about an alternate field of study in some time but just spent a couple of days with people who do work in sustainability. This would be things like designing urban renewal projects, fighting poverty or aids, or creating composting plans for a college campus. They are much more complex than that but that's the gist. They do a lot of work with teaching learners how to frame problems, design problem solutions, and execute problem solutions and they are using project and some problem based learning.

They deal with major complexity. They deal with almost any discipline under the sun. They are 10 years into being a field. They have so much energy they are their own renewable power source.

They make me tired. The oddest part is one of the big programs in this field is in Arizona. It would be like having the DNC headquarters in Logan Utah.

3k Washingtons, the price of open access

2010-11-15T14:51:00.003-07:00

We've been asking about sustainability of open access for quite some time. Springer has the answer. If I pay a mere $3,000 my latest article (co-authored with Dr. Gulfidan Can) could be made available for non-commercial use via the creative commons license (with commercial use rights reserved by Springer).

They do allow for institutional reserve or personal web site productions of pre-print versions of the article . . . 12 months after it comes out.

You are working yourself out of having a respected journal. You will loose to publications that make articles available to everyone because they'll get more citations. You need a new business model. Think services, think access to full data, think high resolution graphics, partner articles with your textbooks about statistics (a link that says--do you want to know more about Cronbach's Alpha? or see other forms of reliability) or qualitative analyses (do you want to know how to do a comparative case study?). Think advertising for statistical or qualitative analysis packages. You can live off your current g index for a little while, and find some solace in the fact that academia moves at a glacial pace but the days of your current business model are numbered and the time to make changes is now. I don't think that adding a $3,000 check box for creative commons is going to cut it, although I respect that you are trying.

You want to draw a line in the sand for contributions via copyediting and formatting--terrific. Let us have our pre-print manuscripts from day 1. Or earlier for that matter. Our acceptance notification for this article came in July. We're going on 4 months of possible citations flushed away and the clock is still running. You want an edge on your competition--provide links to our pre-prints before the issue comes out. How about having citations for articles still in press as a way of pumping up the old g index?

First of all, call the $3k what it is, it's an opportunity cost--it's what you think you will loose in revenue from this one article because libraries may cancel their subscription to the journal as a whole if they can get the article for free. The actual cost of making this open access as opposed to making it available only to subscribers is negligible. In addition to providing services you could also lower your costs. Get it out of your head that your are in the business of printing journals. You are in the business of publishing journals. Drop the hard copy, kill the infrastructure, stop renting that warehouse, kill all your shipping costs, stop giving your open access competitors such a cost advantage.

Print based journals are uniquely positioned to dominate this landscape, they have the best editors with the best reviewers, their journals have the best reputations (for now). They need to leverage that in a way that puts them on top of where academic research is headed: open access.

Attenuation of Effect Sizes

2010-03-12T16:11:00.006-07:00

So here's what I wanted to present at BYU last week but we hadn't finished our analysis yet. At AERA we're presenting a new meta-analysis about the quality of the research done in PBL. Quick rundown--still looking at student learning outcomes comparing PBL with traditional learning. We coded for research design, the degree to which the study reported validity of their measures, reliability of their measures, and the internal threats to validity present in each study.

The stand-out finding is reliability:

When studies report no reliability information on their measures, effect sizes are .20--a small effect favoring PBL that is pretty close to the overall mean for the past several meta-analyses done. When they engage in strong reliability reporting (meaning something along the lines of a

cronbach's alpha for their actual sample rather than falling back on data from someone else's study) then effect sizes jump to .47, a medium effect.

True random designs show larger effect sizes that favor PBL over traditional learning too.

The consistent trend seems to be that we are hamstringing the PBL literature base with weak research designs and little attention to measurement. When we pay attention to those things, and presumably reduce measurement error and a priori group differences--PBL shows improved student outcomes. Almost double what we find as a norm.

Figure design shamelessly stolen from Brett Shelton.

Red air, red state, blue resident

2009-10-22T11:49:00.002-06:00

Some of my favorite responses to our local newspaper's question about what Cache Valley residents intend to do toward reducing pollution with the cold season and inversion coming up. Some context: Because we live in a big bowl and have periods of almost no temperature change we get air that is neigh on unbreathable. Think NYC, or LA. We have "yellow air" and "red air" alerts when we're cautioned to not go outside and exercise because it can damage our lungs. We have University of Utah researchers doing breathing tests on our kids on red air days like we're the proverbial canaries in a coal mine. We've shot for the stars and obtained a level of air quality that requires federal intervention.

Here are the quotes:

"Absolutely not! First there was this huge hole in the ozone...Hmmm haven't heard much about that the last several years, huh? THEN they had us all believe that global warming was actually real.....as we continue to shatter cold records weekly!! Funny how that talk is ALSO starting to fade now, huh??

I agree...an inversion does trap air in the winter within this valley, however, the inversion is not an automatic thing that happens each year. But when it does occur, no doubt some bad air gets trapped..but that is life! Too bad! "

" Yes, I'm going to buy corks for my neighbors' cows. "

" Yes, I plan to ask CVTD to discontinue operation so that we can eliminate the exhaust emissions from engines of empty and near-empty buses. " CVTD is our local bus system. It's a no-fare system supported by tax dollars, some of the buses even run on natural gas

" Limiting my contribution to air pollution isn't the only consideration. Far from it. I plan to drive my vehicles when I feel it necessary. Oh, and I don't pay much attention to those silly flashing signs that indicate red or yellow air day. It's such a trivial aspect to my overall decision to drive to where I drive.

I'd like to see the Nibley CVTD run eliminated. It seldom has very many, if any people on it, but it sure spews out a lot of exhaust. "

" HELLL NO!!!! "

" Because cows produce so much methane, I will eat as many steaks as I can to reduce the cow population. "

" In the interest of seasonal fairness, I'm committed to producing equal levels of pollution throughout the year. "

" Feedback has the right idea, spend more time at the beav and cut back on pollution at the same time, win/win. On top of that I will ride my bike on any weather permitting day, even though its more for exercise than helping the pollution since I don't think its all that big of a problem here. "

" While reducing air pollution for the sake of public health and comfort is a noble goal the cost of such reductions can be measured in the millions of dollars in time and productivity if it even costs on average 5 minuets per person per day.
Reduce pollution when you can but keep in mind the cost of your actions, don't use it as an excuse to reduce productivity. "

" I plan to warm up my diesel truck an extra 10 minutes every morning!

MAN CAUSED GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX!! "

" Inversions are natural and occur in many places. The idea that we cause Cache Valley inversions has no supporting data.

Human induced climate change is unproven. There is no evidence that human production of CO2 is driving the temperature. All we have, at the moment, is debate about the idea. "

How do you get to a place where your response to those personally working towards improving everyone's air quality is not only "no" but "no, and screw you for trying." How does that happen exactly?

A culture of inclusion

2009-09-18T09:46:00.001-06:00

Just went to one of the Provost’s lecture series done by Mathew Ouellett. The topic was creating and maintaining a culture of inclusion diversity and social justice. I’m sure I’m going to misrepresent some of the thoughts/discussion so just keep in mind this is from my perspective.

He started off by talking about the admission requirements to Harvard University when it first started, having us all start off with hands raised and dropping them when we didn’t meet one of the criteria. First: Are we male? (I think over half the hands dropped, which is very interesting because I don’t think over half our faculty are women—this suggests that perhaps the topic or the lecture series as a whole is of differential interest). Second: Something along the lines of are we the sons of a minister which lost the rest of us. Later he summarized these slightly differently. 1) Male, 2) son of a landowner (meaning citizenship back then) 3) A Christian, being prepared for the ministry.

As an aside—this brings to mind something that we often forget about the way our country was formed. It was rule by the privileged not only in the sense that elected officials make the decisions, but that those doing the electing were not the population as a whole—only those who owned land. I remember being blown away by that back in high school history class.

Ouellett’s point was that we’ve all (even the White males among us) benefited from affirmative action. He then talked about the hierarchies that are in place within academia. We have a decided pecking order that starts with faculty vs staff, then pretunure vs tenured faculty, then whether or not you have grants and for what amount, then whether or not you have an endowed chair, etc . . . I have to confess that I take a lot of this for granted sometimes to the detriment of my interactions with others. In the last month or so I’ve had two doctoral students say something (one directly and one indirectly) about reacting negatively to my off-hand comments.

This is a new concern to me. I think in a lot of ways the doc students we have now are so much better than my cohort and I. They are publishing more, presenting more, know their methodology better. They have more grant writing experience, you name it and they’re doing better. But for some reason we seemed to have much more swagger back then than they do now.

The discussion then turned to a major theme and his buy-in for it was interesting. The theme is about collaboration and tolerance, and this worked into ways that you might not expect given the topic (see more below). The buy-in was brilliant. Collaboration is what we’re trained to do in the academy. None of us work in a vacuum, we’re the product of the people we’ve worked with and the people we’ve been mentored by, and I would argue, by the people we’re mentoring.

In a spirit of collaboration he encouraged us to find teaching partners. Especially ones coming from a different background than us with respect to diversity. This seems like it has several barriers. Especially recognition and teaching load. What does that look like in your binder? I appreciate that he gave a nod to the fact that formal teaching may not be realistic and he encouraged us to find less formal mechanisms to inform our teaching. This was a contrast to Ken Bain’s statement that we need to change the licensure exams in our respective fields if the assessment doesn’t fit our pedagogical practices. There’s nothing more paralyzing than hearing a far away goal without short term strategies to get there. I left with a feeling that Ouellet was not pitching rhetoric by trying to facilitate change.

Another theme of the talk was about picking your battles (although he didn’t phrase it exactly that way). He talked about having an office above a dormitory and having to ride the elevators and hear “that’s so gay” enough that he spent an entire day doing interventions. It wasn’t effective. It didn’t work because he didn’t have a personal relationship with any of the students—but when things happen in a class, and he mentioned a couple of examples, then you do have a relationship with the students and you have an opportunity to facilitate change.

I also appreciate (again with the spirit of collaboration), that his primary advice on facilitating change wasn’t about making statements but asking questions. One of the faculty mentioned students saying race wasn’t a problem here but was a problem in the ‘Southern States.’ He said it was an opportunity to ask the students about their own race identity, and suggested a couple of specific activities to get them thinking along these lines. If I were thinking about this in Piaget terms he was really asking them to force a moment of equilibration, getting them to think about past events in their own lives that contradict the thought of race not being an issue. He also recognized that there is value in their existing beliefs, that it isn’t about growing up with bad parents or incorrect thoughts.

The other big theme in his talk was failing with grace. As faculty, we don’t make our practice public. Which is so true. When I’m struggling with a new analysis I don’t do it in front of my students. I figure it out, then tell them what I did. As if I magically knew it all along. This is not something we can practice privately because it happens a bit off the cuff. We’ve got to be willing to fail, and most importantly willing to move on from there.

One outstanding question I have: At Lehigh, one of the full professors mentioned that he never brings up politics in his class. I used to quite a bit but since then I’ve resisted (or tried to anyway) precisely because of some of the power relationships Ouellet started off discussing. Who am I to force my opinions on graduate students? So where do we draw the line? It seems like a culture of inclusion is not political to me, but for some that is extremely political. I guess that’s the genius of asking questions rather than making statements, right?

Exceptionally Brazen Sophistry

2009-06-26T11:03:00.004-06:00

I think we're writing and reading total crap. Case in point: Medical reform. I was reading a conservative "news article" on this today at the National Review entitled Obama's Dirty Little Secret. At the heart and soul of the arguments expressed is the idea that private health insurance will be priced out of the market and we'll wind up with ObamaCare as the only option. The research for these claims is brought to you in part by the Lewin Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of United Health Group. That's right we get research about how bad it would be to change the private health care system from the private health care system. (I am staunchly resisting the temptation to make an analogy here . . . staunchly . . . and I might add, doing so with aplomb, decorum, and no small amount of class).

The really fascinating thing is that the article has a lot of .50 words. The phrase "exceptionally brazen sophistry"(1) is not something you hear on the street corner every day. This is clearly targeted at people who are smarter than the average bear--but it's incredibly easy to pull apart and dismiss. So why is a reasonably smart person trying to talk to reasonably smart people using "exceptionally brazen sophistry" of his own? I think it's a plot to lend relevance to Woody Allen movies and possibly high school literature like Catch 22.

Don't get me wrong, the National Review doesn't corner the market on ideological drivel. I get a regular helping from two facebook friends straight from the Huffington Post. I'd like to have news that is free of perspective thanks. I can form my own stinking opinions about who to vote for, I already know Glenn Beck is the most funny when he's trying to be deadly serious and frankly your attempt to explain it to me ruins the ride. I know I'm far from the first to feel this way--so where do I go for that sort of thing? Where do I get news sans commentary? Where do I get news about the system instead of from the system? Is there not a free market for that?

(1) As an aside, exceptionally brazen sophistry sounds like the height of stupidity. A subtle deception in argument that is in your face at the same time? Hmm subtle yet bold--sounds like we're describing a wine, possibly one that comes out of a box. How exactly does that work in argumentation? Well--I think we have two great examples here. Obama's claims about being able to keep your private insurer and this article's debunking of those claims as supported by private insurers.

Flash Video on OSX

2008-12-02T14:08:00.003-07:00

So now that I'm on a Mac, using WinFF isn't quite as handy as it used to be. I was having a great deal of trouble figuring out how to use ffmpeg on OSX until a student in the Flash class, Peter Blaire, found the missing link.

I was using ffmpegX, a shareware utility to convert video using ffmpeg (like WinFF it's a gui front-end). But none of the video was encoding with any meta-data. This is all kinds of bad becasue things like cue points and the total run time are incredibly handy for streaming and vital for publishing the screencasts I do. Aparently you need to install a little ruby on rails app, which you can find instructions on here:

http://www.ffmpegx.com/download.html#metadata

Note that the readme file works better than what you see here, as you need to sudo in the terminal before the install command:

ruby setup.rb config
ruby setup.rb setup
sudo ruby setup.rb install

Works like a charm! Thanks Peter.

Are Faculty Just Plain Stubborn?

2008-11-20T15:39:00.002-07:00

This is a figure from a meta-analysis that Heather Leary and I finished earlier this month. It's about tutor variables that moderate problem-based learning outcomes. I should add these are cognitive outcomes only for students (standardized tests, essays, etc . . . ). Each of the outcomes compared a PBL treatment with a "control" or "lecture" condition (although those can mean many different things). There's a lot going on here, the little (n=xes) need some attention as they show the number of outcomes. The very rough scale for effect sizes is .2 = small, .5 = medium, and .8 = large.

Many of these combinations don't have what you would call overwhelming amounts of evidence, but we do know a lot about faculty whether they received formal training as PBL tutors or not, and the difference in terms of student learning are non-existent. We have no causal data, which I can't emphasize enough--so maybe this is because faculty are immune to training, falling back on their lecture roots, maybe the training was poor, maybe it's because of Turkey burgers--but it's pretty shocking. My vote is for faculty resistance, other research points to epistemological beliefs being pretty stable by the time you hit undergrad. And for many, this kind of approach requires a fundamental shift in epistemological beliefs. There are documented cases of faculty tutors going into a small group PBL sessions and just lecturing, even after training. But research is not a democracy. Somebody could make a serious name for themselves figuring out why this is the case.

Nobody likes a hater

2008-11-20T14:52:00.003-07:00

But I'm going to be one anyway. 10 pages probably isn't a fair shake for any book, but last night I was reading "Twilight" to my daughter Rachel and wow, just wow. Some parents might worry about exposing their children to the occult or to suggestive content. Forget that. I'm worried about exposing her to bad bad writing. It's never good when a character's voice is "attractive" or "like velvet." And I've got to know how a BYU grad comes up with the name of Coach Clapp for the PE teacher.

This book offends me as an English major.

Learning The String Bass

2008-10-05T07:06:00.008-06:00

My daughter Rachel has been teaching me to play the String Bass lately. She started back in 4th grade so is going on her 3rd year. Me, I'm still stuck on "Ode To Joy." For those of you with children getting into the violin or viola (I'm thinking of you Jozanne) my deepest sympathies. No matter how bad you slaughter a Bass note it doesn't have that fingers on chalkboard sound that you can squeeze out of a higher pitched stringed instrument. So aside from having to schlep one around to various things I highly recommend the Bass.

I will also say Bass has made a huge difference in Rachel's life. Her confidence in other areas has taken a huge boost, she looks forward to orchestra each day at school and her private lesson each week. And of course she loves showing off and correcting my own attempts at technique (she even created a lesson plan for me).

To help myself memorize the notation, names, and fingerings of the notes (just first position so far) I set up a little flash project. You can get the gory details here or click on the screenshot below to try it out yourself (Flash 9 player required). The gory details link has stand-alone versions for Windows and Mac OS X.

The Evolution of Politicians

2008-09-22T06:13:00.004-06:00

I actually went to a local political debate between an incumbent Republican congressman and his Democrat and Libertarian opponents. It was sponsored by the ASUSU student organization and a terrific example of the concept behind a cross-sectional longitudinal research design when compared with debates on more of a national stage. You use this to get a look at development over time when you don't want to (or can't) spend the time doing so. Instead, you a snapshot of different phases of development and make the assumption that they are reflective of the normal process. So you might assume that politicians early in their careers are much more frank and willing to take a stand than they are later in their careers. Of course the analogy breaks down a bit because generally you'd be quantifying this and using much larger samples.

We'll start with the candidate (Libertarian) least likely to get elected. He was unabashedly forward about his beliefs, in fact at one point he talked about wanting the free market to prevail in three different things: business (he thought AIG should have been left for dead--as an aside, if we had regulated properly would we have a sole privately owned business with so much market share that it's going down would destroy the World's economy?), health care, and--here's the real kicker, he wanted to make sure the market could prevail on fighting terrorism. Now before you start thinking Blackwater I'm not sure that's where he wanted to go (because they're government contracted--or is it government subcontracted through the Vice President's former company?) but it does frankly strike me as out on the lunatic fringe. Mostly because a private company can't negotiate or engage in diplomacy on behalf of the US, and probably wouldn't have the kinds of incentives to fight poverty and other conditions that can lead to terrorism.

Next, the Democrat who in this year actually has more of a shot than you might think in Utah. He was willing to express his views, was a little more elegant, a little more educated (for instance he brought up the difference between radioactive and nuclear waste), but was still willing to be very direct at times, maybe to his own detriment. For instance, in that same question about storing nuclear waste in Utah he said we weren't currently, just radioactive but that he would be opposed to storing anything in our great state especially waste from overseas. He also called out the Republican for refusing to work with him on a bill to that effect and taking $26k from Energy Solutions.

Enter the incumbent. He's been to Washington, knows the ropes and his response to the
questions was this. In a slightly rough moment (that or massive hubris) he said it wasn't $26k but $28k, and not from Energy Solutions but from employees who "happened" to work at Energy Solutions (which makes all kinds of difference to me, let me tell you--that and the fact that 14 people gave him about half my annual salary for an election campaign makes him sound like a real regular Joe). Now it's possible that I missed what the bill was about or the framing of the original question, but when both of the other debate participants seemed squarely focused on what was happening in Utah this guy proceeded to do something you'll see more about below. He said he'd do whatever Utah wanted, but he refused to work on this particular bill because he saw it as a states rights issue. He was very elegant, he talked about Washington State importing waste from Vancouver and was concerned that the bill would limit the ability of other states to make decisions about what they wanted. My concern is that he never really answered the question.

Now let's take a look at the National stage where Obama and McCain have very close views on Abortion and Gay Marriage. This is a radical over-simplification but they essentially both refer to these as State's rights. It's not their role as executive to push federal law to ban abortion, but it should be up to individual states to decide. I went to WSU after the fact, but heard the stories about how the sovereignty of states creates really interesting consequences. Back in the day the Idaho legal drinking age was lower than Washington's. As a consequence the seven mile stretch of highway 26 between Pullman Washington and Moscow Idaho had no small number of legal/underage drinkers returning home and go figure some of them were driving. I may not be a political scientist but both of these issues have consequences for other states. I think people who fall on either side of these issues should be really mad that their candidate of choice refuses to make a choice (no pun intended).

Even Optimists Can Be Presented With An Undeniable Vision of Impending Doom

2008-09-11T14:25:00.005-06:00

One of my favorite short stories is "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J.D. Salinger--the easiest way to grab a copy is in a collection titled "Nine Stories" and I highly recommend it. It's not a spoiler in any way to say that one of the big themes is a deeply disturbed character (Seymour Glass) who is seeking refuge in part in the innocence of children (but not in a creepy way, I promise). To make a short story long, he finds out it's not as much of a refuge as he thought it was. Even though I've always loved the story--I've never quite believed it. I get misty-eyed when I hear the song "you are the new day" (especially when coupled with a public television ad and b-roll of Sesame Street and children playing). I tend to think the best about people and about future events, but now I can see why Salinger has cut himself off from the world. For me it's not the lack of childhood innocence. I’m not ready to give that up yet. For me, it’s the train wreck that children are walking into.

Last weekend I cleaned out the garage, which included three different items for the dump: A computer (desktop & monitor), some flooring tiles, and some scrap metal (an old vent for a swamp cooler we had removed). I knew the computer and monitor had to go there for proper disposal, I knew the metal could be recycled, and I was hoping they could recycle the tile too. We also had a bunch of stuff for DI (the local "goodwill")--which happened to be my first stop. I'm unloading there and I pull out and set aside the scrap metal to get at some other stuff, and one of the helpful workers decides he's going to do me a favor and throw my scrap metal in their dumpster--which also happened to be full of cardboard. This is my first sign of our impending doom, a guy trying to do me a solid by sending my recyclable waste off to the landfill. After rescuing my scrap metal out of the dumpster along with other recyclables I decide that individuals can still make a difference--and got pretty jazzed about taking so much to the dump, none of which is actually going into the landfill. As a further boost, the woman at the scales says I can toss my flooring tiles in with the concrete, so I guessed right and they can be recycled too (side note: Jen wanted to try gluing them down again--so not such a great thing after all).

Still, I'm on a high note. Until about 12:30am. We live across from a park that has a dumpster right next to it. I wake up to someone tossing in a truckload of something or other. The next morning I take a peek and it's mostly construction waste--including a good bit of recyclable scrap metal, and some wood and sheet rock.

The amount of green waste we see go in that dumpster from otherwise nice, friendly, and intelligent neighbors is astonishing. What's more astonishing is that they will pick up green waste at your curb if you pay $4/month for a green waste bin. $4/month for weekly pickup! This town makes it incredibly easy to recycle everything from leaves to plastic and we still can’t pull the trigger.

These are pragmatic pressures (proximity of a dumpster vs driving to the landfill or spacing out your tree pruning over a couple of weeks). Imagine the financial pressures faced by big corporations. Heck, I remember a few years ago insurers wanting to know if employees were bike commuting because it presented additional risk that companies either had to pay for or pass on to their employees.

We’re doomed.

Somebody give me some good news. Tell me I’m wrong, tell me you stopped a baby seal from getting clubbed to death (metaphorically speaking).

Thompson Reuters needs to rethink their life

2008-08-25T11:58:00.003-06:00

After taking a bit to update their plug-in for Word 2008 (maybe a bit understandable given that it's supposed to be a different structure). The folks who make the End Note software have opted to not make CWYW ("cite while you write") available on Word 2008 for older versions of End Note--namely version X.02 which I use right now. Not only that but they'd charge me $91 to "upgrade" to version X1! To really let this sink in the build date on my version is 2007! That's right, it's a year old and no longer capable of doing what I need it to do.

This isn't even remotely acceptable behavior on their part. As a result, I've now downgraded to office 2004 and I'm anxiously awaiting an alternative bibliographic option. It looks like my best bet so far is Zotero (thanks for the referral Melynda!) which is an open source alternative to a program that I refuse to even mention again by name. There are times when a small part of me feels a little sorry for niche software developers when an open source alternative comes along. Then something like this happens . . .

My favorite facebook ad

2008-08-02T01:13:00.004-06:00

I'm sure there will be others, but this one is my first love. I don't really own a bikini but if my swimsuit had unwanted hair I would definitely want to have it removed (the bikini too). Not only does it remove unwanted hair from swimwear, but it also removes it from your "etc . . . " which is just dang helpful. Of course, ever since I first saw Buck Rogers I always wanted to own a personal laser, so the fact that it can remove hair from my etc is just a bonus.

Did you ever think . . .

2008-07-02T16:18:00.002-06:00

I'm trying to think back to my earliest experiences with video games (at least at home). I remember my brother and I saved our money for an entire summer to get an Atari 2600. It came with space invaders (which just celebrated its 30th anniversary) and we bought asteroids at the same time, if memory serves.

When we got it home my mom plugged it in and played for about an hour--which was probably a sign that a broad market appeal system like the Wii has been long overdue.

Never in a million years did I think that the words gaming and industry would be mentioned in such close proximity, nor did I think that it would be such an enormous juggernaut that it would spawn such creations as gaming journalists. I mean seriously, who saw that coming when they were playing turtle graphics and load runner on their C-64s? The worst part is that I can see a niche market for gaming journalism that isn't being filled right now. I read these reviews for Wii games and I've still been burned twice. We got Mario and Sonic at the Olympic games and EA Sports Playground, both got decent reviews with people saying in general that "it would be great for kids." Not so much--my kids have played far more of Super Paper Mario (a game graciously handed down from a college age Uncle who didn't like it). And Rabbids 2--which also got good reviews and which the kids loved far longer than I would have expected. My daughter in fact just the other night did a disturbingly spot on rendition of "funky town" in the Rabbid's heavily modulated and high pitched voice. So hey, they were 1 for 3. A "gaming journalist" that could actually do a decent review for games from a kid's perspective would be fantastic because right now I think they're maybe a bit too knowledgeable and possibly a little jaded.

A long digression away from may main point though--this industry is huge. In a day and age when the supposedly "recession proof" Starbucks is decommissioning some 600 stores (although to be fair I swear 599 of those are stacked up on a single street corner in Seattle). The Video Game industry is going strong. More than strong. It's beating DVD sales like a tired dog, it's even dictating some of what happens in movies. Raise your hand if you thought a 1980s arcade game would be made into a movie. I've seen the imdb listing for Spy Hunter and I'm still not convinced I should put mine up.

I would classify myself as a gamer. I've always played something, but kept to PC games (mostly real-time strategy and first person shooters). I've owned a total of three consoles in my life: The Atari 2600; A Sega Genesis (I know, I know); and now a Wii. I feel like I've blinked and a whole new economy has grown up overnight.

This has got to be a good time to be involved in gaming research (thanks be to Brett Shelton and Mary Ann Parlin who just did the heavy lifting on a DOEd grant for game design using problem based learning--keep your fingers crossed).

A good problem to have

2008-06-26T09:50:00.003-06:00

It looks as if we're driving less (at least according to the US Department of Transportation). The more miles people drive, the more tax revenue the DOT collects from gasoline taxes. Here's the part that gets me. The secretary of transportation Mary Peters is saying this is a bad thing because "History shows that we're going to continue to see congested roads while gas tax revenues decline even further."

Hmm, people are driving fewer miles. Fewer miles means fewer cars. Fewer cars means more congestion? I got lost somewhere. To avoid being completely disingenuous a point is also made that people are choosing more fuel efficient cars, which have the potential to keep the number of cars similar while decreasing tax revenue. That's fine, increase the federal gas taxes for private use. It shouldn't have the downside that a private and commercial tax would have (except of course for tourism) and it appeals to me because roads are essentially being subsidized by the worse pollution offenders (thirsty SUVs would pay more per mile than a little smart car). This fits because in addition to cranking out more CO2 emissions, they put far more wear on the road.

Here's my favorite part of this whole discussion. The "walk away price" for gasoline at the pump. Where a consumer decides to not pay and try something else instead. According to the Louisiana Oil & Gas Commission that price is $7.50. I think you'd need to be the mayor of crazy town to think that still holds true. It's obvious that we're at the front edge of the "walk away price" right now. And think about the context too. Our whole life is structured around car travel. For most of us our housing is miles away from where we work and public transportation is not at all convenient. I live right on a free bus route that takes me pretty much door to door I'd say I have to walk a total of about 20 yards, and my travel time is about 15 minutes including wait time. But I'm a huge anomaly and my schedule fits perfectly. The average American commuter is spending about 100 hours a year in their car. So I think given how much of a life change this represents for the average commuter, a 4.3 percent year to year drop in miles driven means the "walk away price" for gas is here right now.

The question is what are we going to do about it? The message from the DOT is blind panic about lost tax revenues for a system that we should be looking towards replacing with public transit options. The message from oil companies is a not so subtle Jedi mind trick "we're not the problem you're looking for . . . move along." Here's my message. This is a fantastic problem to have. Many Republicans have appropriately called this a supply and demand problem and want to start drilling offshore. Well, that takes a fair amount of time--and why would you only work on one side of the equation anyway? Why is increasing supply the answer--how about decreasing the demand. Bush's statements about gas, cars, and the commuter culture being an "American way of life" and status-quo approach to our economy have finally made a decision for us. We can't go indiscriminately drilling in protected areas because it won't help us in time--we have to decrease demand now and the American consumer is starting to do it for us.

Multiple Paper Dissertations

2008-05-09T16:54:00.002-06:00

On the books we've had a policy in place for some time for students to forgo a traditional dissertation and instead do several academic papers. What we have not had in place is a structure for how they go about doing that. I'm kind of excited that we're putting one together (Nick Eastmond has taken the lead). I think this holds some decent potential for students but there are also several dangers. By necessity a proposal that involves the methods of say two research papers is going to give far less detail than we get with a dissertation, but that said how many of us have written journal articles with that much detail?

I think this ups the ante on the proposal stage. Because there will be less detail the committee and student had better be on the same page going into the research and then the final defense. As a current state there is a draft document in place for the summer and we'll hopefully come to agreement as a faculty during our retreat this Fall.

Not Today

2008-04-24T11:08:00.003-06:00

I'm an Obama supporter and I'll tell you why. I like that at least for a period of time he ran a somewhat clean campaign focused on what he had to say as opposed to what Hillary has said or done wrong. That's obviously changed, but way back when I voted in the Utah primary it was still true, and even if I was voting now I'd still vote for Obama in the dim hope that it would send a message to politicians and commentators alike. I also like him on certain issues. When Hillary Clinton was voting to support the Iraq War, Barack was speaking at anti-war rallies. But that's not a deal breaker for me with respect to Hillary Clinton at all. She was basing her vote on inaccurate information and at the time I agreed with her. They're so close in other respects that it doesn't really matter to me.

That is the heart and sole of the problem with this primary. If they are so close on policy then what is there to talk about? Well the news media is happy to fill that gap with questions focused on controversy. The Pennsylvania debate was a serious travesty. All of the initial questions had to do with not just old news, but previously covered missteps. I already know about Hillary's sniper fire debacle. I already know that Barack has attended church with a pastor who said "G** D*** America" they've both had several opportunities to talk about it--why do we need to ask them again? Because asking them about policy is boring. Because bickering gets higher ratings than meaningful discourse. Because health care doesn't make for a decent sound bite.

Here's a quote from that same debate:

SENATOR CLINTON: Well, Charlie, I'm going to do everything I possibly can to make sure that one of us takes the oath of office next January. I think that has to be the overriding goal, whatever we have to do.

Obviously we are still contesting to determine who will be the nominee. But once that is resolved, I think it is absolutely imperative that our entire party close ranks, that we become unified.

I will do everything to make sure that the people who supported me support our nominee.

I will go anywhere in the country to make the case. And I know that Barack feels the same way, because both of us have spent 15 months traveling our country. I have seen the damage of the Bush years. I've seen the extraordinary pain that people have suffered from because of the failed policies; you know, those who have held my hands who have lost sons or daughters in Iraq, and those who have lost sons or daughters because they didn't have health insurance.

And so, regardless of the differences there may be between us, and they are differences, they pale in comparison to the differences between us and Senator McCain.

So we will certainly do whatever is necessary to make sure that a Democrat is in the White House next January.

It didn't make the news summaries, even though both candidates expressed a similar sentiment. What do we get instead? We get Charles Gibson asking them if they would commit to being on a ticket together regardless of the primary outcome and both of them being silent. It's funny, and it seems to be making a point that they don't like each other. The real point is that Charles needs to address questions to a candidate by name in a debate.

Now according to this story it seems that race is an issue for 18% of Pennsylvania Democrats, so much so that 68% of that group wouldn't support Barak Obama in a general election. That sounds like a staggering number. A damning commentary on our current opinions about race and the electability (which is not a word btw) of Barack Obama. But let's unpack this number a bit 68% of 18% is about 12%. 12% doesn't sound quite so edgy and divisive but man 68% sure makes the eyes pop out. I say let's stop making the Today Show news writers the biggest swing vote. I say stop trying to make news and just freaking report it.

The news is that both these candidates want a Democrat in the White House, but the "story" is that they are tearing each other apart and that their supporters would rather vote for McCain than the opposing camp. Here's my pitch to the commentators/chief political correspondents/White House Bureau chiefs: If you talk about what's actually happening, you'll be novel enough to get those ratings you're trying to drum up.

Falling out of bed

2008-04-17T09:53:00.003-06:00

So several years ago I was first exposed to Mac OS when I taught development courses at Lehigh University (specifically on Director, which I would loosely classify as an abomination of a development environment--an assessment largely based on Lingo) and on Flash, which I still teach to this day (also in a Mac Lab here at USU). But I've never run Mac as my primary OS until just a couple of weeks ago.

So far, so good. I did break down and get a license for End Note because after a day and a half of searching for an open source alternative it looked like the Tex based alternatives weren't quite what I need them to be. Which is really too bad because Office is not exactly my favorite piece of software. Allegedly the next version of open office is going to have bibliographic support built in, and that's kind of the "last mile" problem I'm having right now. I need to be able to insert citations into a word processor that I could use on a daily basis, and mimicking the cite while you write functionality of End Note is also an important feature for me.

I'm slowly breaking down my dependence on SPSS. I got R running and I've successfully been able change the default packages and to import SPSS data. A CSV file generated by Excel hasn't been quite as easy to do.

I do have to say that as a machine (I'm using an old PowerBook Pro with a PowerPC chip (not intel based) this thing has a lot of nice mechanical features out of the box. For instance, if I hook it up to my external display while it's in sleep mode but the cover is still shut, it comes out of sleep mode with the external monitor as the sole display. Which is especially nice because I hate the way dual displays runs on the mac (with program menus always at the top of the screen, I wind up going back and forth--although I did find a keyboard shortcut utility to pop up the current program menu on either screen).

Mostly, I have yet to have any sort of trouble hooking up to a wireless network. And even though it's only been a couple of weeks, I've connected to 3-4 networks, all of which my Dell (which had dueling drivers from XP and my wireless card) had non-stop trouble with.

Oh, and I have a logitec wireless mouse and keyboard that I use in my office. It was plug and play with this PowerBook. After telling it the keys adjacent to my shift keys it was off and running, including use of the volume/mute play/pause buttons on the side of the keyboard. As David Wiley would say, using this thing is like falling out of bed.

Now if only I had the new touch pad on this thing. I'm still not used to having to press the button w/ my thumb.

"Riot" Police

2008-04-07T16:01:00.004-06:00

Ok, so don't get me wrong, I like the French. I've only been to Paris and Avignon and I was just a kid in middle school, but it was a fun time (considering I was a typical middle school kid) and I think we as Americans often give them far too hard of a time. So it's with a great deal of reluctance that I point to this picture (you'll have to click on pic #9 yourself) in which I couldn't help but notice that the police who are set to protect the Olympic bus are wearing inline skates!

I'm all for bike cops, and I'm sure inline skates have their place in police work (on say a TV show involving swimsuits and Michael Hasselhoff). But if you're expecting to do crowd control, is it really a good idea to strap a few wheels to your feet? I'm no hand to hand expert but I think that might affect your game a bit.

Dan Pratt Lecture

2008-03-05T14:00:00.002-07:00

I started writing these down as thoughts for my P&T binder (one of the big messages I got this last review was a better documentation of my teaching practices). Then I thought (as all semi-neurotic partly narcissistic assistant professors are prone to do--I know I know, the labels are a bit redundant) that maybe others would like to read this as well:

Dan started off by acknowledging a certain tacit fear of examining problems in our own teaching. I thought this was dead on. He did lose me a bit when he discussed our inverse excitement about discussing problems in our areas of research. In research, problems have to do with a line of inquiry—we get excited about them because they are an opportunity for work, grants, articles, etc . . . In that respect he's right, but I don't think he was talking about a parallel thing. Problems in a line of inquiry are different than problems with a line of inquiry. I would classify the later as more of an analogous problem to problems with our teaching. If you've ever challenged a person's line of inquiry as a whole, then you'll see the similar white knuckled response as you tend to get when you ask them fundamental questions about their teaching. Ask a biologist doing basic research about the practical application of finding a genetic connection to fin length and you'll get a sense for what I'm on about. And don't mistake that for a rant against basic research. I'm a fan of basic research, applied research, research to practice, and practice to research.

He went on to illuminate a couple of models for teaching with component parts of teacher, student, content, and context. One was an apprenticeship model--and he specifically cited what is now one of my favorite books (Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation by Lave & Wenger)--note this came after years of labeling it as "foo foo situated" and much later than members of a doctoral cohort that was much smarter than me (including people like Erin Brewer) came to that realization--although I still reserve the right to call it "foo foo situated." I like to think that I align with what Dan would call an apprenticeship model of teaching but I noticed several large departures--some of which I'll do my best to address and some of which may be much more difficult to address.

One thought is that in an apprenticeship model (and this is certainly backed up by Lave & Wenger) learning happens in the context and in the physical place of work. While there are models for this in graduate education they are not all that common. A case that comes to mind because of recency is the Master's degree at George Mason University. Brenda Bannan-Ritland was recently explaining to us an immersion program for their program that involved teams taking on actual projects from actual organizations that covered their actual tuition. I would love to do that with something like my Flash course but have thus far chickened out--in large part because every time I hear someone talk about something similar, they describe how much work it is--and how it was a programmatic effort, etc . . .

Note this is a bit easier to do in the context of doctoral students but you have to mix and match. We were asked by our NSF program officer to due a literature review of online communities for teacher professional development (just a small request). I encouraged Yan Ma, the RA assigned the task to add in a small component on Problem-Based Learning (which plays a small roll in the grant) which would then enable her to use the work she's getting paid for as a final paper in the PBL class I'm currently teaching. Actual learning tied to actual work--not instantly an apprenticeship model by any means but congruence at a high level.

Another thought I had was the level of congruence between assessment in my classes and assessment in real life. I've posted before about maybe grading students on an accept, accept with major revisions, reject scale (see far far below) as a nod towards this idea but I'm not convinced that I currently do this in my Flash course.

In the real world, assessment seems to be about the surface features of a project rather than the underlying mechanics. You can get rewarded a bit even for putting something together quickly that may not be easily changed, adapted, or extended--but the exact opposite is true for my class. I reward for minimizing instances, for writing code that doesn't include magic numbers, etc . . . I'll want to take a look through some of my rubrics and seriously think about what it is that I value and more importantly how that matches up with what practitioners value.

Other ideas that stood out to me were asking students to write a reflection of what they've learned over the course of the semester. Or promoting a culture of practice. Right now, students come in on Thursdays to talk to me about problem they're having with their assignments. Everything happens in isolation. What if they presented problems they were having with their assignments or their projects to the class as a whole? In thinking more about Lave & Wenger, their examples were all about groups working collaboratively. They may have been focused on different stages of production, but they were all producing, all engaging in norming behaviors, etc . . . Right now the only one most of my students are engaged with is me.

Open content brought to you by open source software

2008-02-04T14:07:00.001-07:00

So I finally stopped my addiction to Camtasia and started using Cam Studio. I also weaned myself off of the flash video encoder and I'm using ffmpeg instead for some post-processing. All of which is talked through in a screencast about screencasting here.

For reference purposes, here's the settings described/shown in the video:

CamStudio

use: Camstudio lossless codec v1.0
60% quality
set key frames every 30 frames
capture frames every 50 milliseconds
playback rate 20 frames/second
uncheck auto adjust

audio options
22.05 bytes/sec, mono, 16 bit
interleave every 20 frames
PCM compression

winFF (FFMPEG)
flash video (flv) for Web use (16:9) for base settings
bit rate 256
frame rate 10
video size 800x600 (or desired)
check 2 pass
audio sample rate 22050
audio bit rate 48k

Corresponding websites

Sample screencasts using these settings:
http://inst.usu.edu/~aewalker/videos/flash5270.2/

Camstudio software:
http://camstudio.org/

WinFF software (comes with FFMPEG built in):
http://biggmatt.com/winff/

The downside:

Camstudio is PC only (ugh) and of course, there's the fact that I use flash for the front end (not at all open source, and that I mostly use this for screencasts about a course on Flash).

UI resources

2007-11-20T16:52:00.001-07:00

So like all good instructional designers I have just enough knowledge to know that I don't know much at all about a wide variety of topics, one of those being interface design. I have a brother-in-law who is currently working as a contractor for Microsoft, on a UX (user experience) team for a product that he could tell me about . . . except for some pesky little non-disclosure agreement. I did, however, ask him what he tends to read as background material for his job--here was his response:

The design of everyday things (or the Psychology of Everyday Things) is still considered good. The principles of interactive design haven't changed that much by what I know. There's a great book just put out by MIT press called Designing Interactions, highly recommended but not a textbook, per se.

The book that gets the most circulation around my office is Don't Make Me Think by Krug. For usability issues, it's great and still current, and specifically about web pages. The irony is, it's almost impossible to really make it work across the board for an application like the one we are building, which has a really high learning curve and such a specific alpha user base. Objective: teach marketing professionals how to break into the search ad world. Jakob Nielson still gets some play, but is outdated and more or less out of touch. There are also a number of blogs that get some play. Blogs are really valuable and getting more so all the time, beyond books I think.

Agreed on the last point (with obvious exceptions like http://sitcogblog.blogspot.com, I mean really, who is writing this crap?). Joking aside I always get interested in what practitioners do. After all if they get paid to do it, it must be worth something right?

Come big or stay at home?

2007-10-18T12:45:00.001-06:00

One of my favorite expressions that seems to sum up a Washington Post Story from 12 former Army captains

There is one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately. A scaled withdrawal will not prevent a civil war, and it will spend more blood and treasure on a losing proposition.

As a side note, this apparently didn't make the op-ed print section, and is only available online. You wouldn't be alone in asking why they ran an op-ed piece on a movie producer but didn't run this one. But you'd still be shy an answer.

So this is a nice bi-partisan slap really (which is always something I prefer), the open hand is delivered to "stay the course" advocates whose one variation is a troop surge (which the captains specifically refer to as a method of getting insurgents to relocate as opposed to just plain getting them, and pissing off local populations in the process), and the back-hand is delivered to the steady withdrawal folks. Thus the come big or stay at home comment--start a conscripted military or send them back home as quickly as possible.

I honestly don't know what to think either way, but I do know that if you're one who claims to listen to commanders on the ground, here's 12 of them talking.

I do know one thing. I remember on 9/11 Tom Nickel (one of our best and brightest doctoral graduates) came into our office and was talking about our history with Osama Bin-Laden, that we trained him and armed him as a fighter in the Afghanistan war against the former Soviet Union. This was all news to me at the time. The reason I bring this up is that this is one of our current strategies in Iraq. Frustrated by the gloves we put on in not wanting to use overwhelming brutal force (acting as insurgents to fight insurgents) we're choosing to wage war by proxy, arming Sunni militias to oust Al-Qaeda operatives. We train them, we arm them and then (at some point) we have to leave. A former ruling minority surrounded by their former oppressed majority. Looking in my crystal ball, I gotta say this can't be a good thing for us.

School Vouchers, Oreos, and Cheesecake

2007-10-15T10:25:00.000-06:00

So I can't help but weigh in on this issue, with the vote coming in a few weeks' time. For those of you outside the state of Utah, we're considering a measure to put between $500-$3,000 dollars (per student) into the hands of families who send their children to private schools. The summary bullet points for the pro-voucher folks are some pretty good sound bites. According to the folks at UtahVouchers.com, this is about:

Your Money
Your Child
Your Choice

One of my favorite ads for the voucher program is a couple explaining it with an Oreo analogy. Each child in a class of thirty has an Oreo for every thousand dollars spent on them (7,000 per child), one goes to a private school, taking the maximum 3,000 and the remaining amount stays in the school. The argument is a smaller class size, with more money for the public school--plus the one child gets an opportunity for private school they might not otherwise have.

Here's my problem with it (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). First, the $4k stays in the school district for only 5 years. I'm not clear on where it goes after that, but it goes--presumably to the private schools where it is being spent, more likely back into the general fund that is supporting the voucher program (more on that in a bit). The idea is that natural enrollment increases will replace those dollars--which sounds great as long as our per pupil funding stays the same, and gets adjusted for inflation (note this would just be to support the status quo, we'll talk opportunity costs in a bit too).

So during that first 5 years, where is the money coming from? The state general fund, not the uniform school fund (as UtahVouchers.com is quick to point out). A seemingly fabulous idea, but here's the opportunity cost. What if you took the 9.2 million dollars for vouchers and put it into the poorest of our school districts? Increasing teacher pay/professional development/mentoring/retention, reducing class sizes, increasing access to technology, providing more vocational classes and programs? Yes it's a drop in the bucket in terms of the 3.5 billion dollar uniform school fund, but here's the thing. It isn't one bucket. It's several different buckets and you're dropping it in the one that's already full. What's more, you're doing it with everyone's tax dollars.

Briefly let's talk about another fact that UtahVouchers.com openly discloses:

. . . the state's cost of every child in private school is supplemented by money paid by their parents, since the voucher normally does not cover the entire cost of tuition

This makes a tremendous amount of sense, private schools can get expensive. In fact, according to ChoiceInEducation.org, the median tuition rate is $3,800 per year. Let's crunch some numbers. Someone in the middle of the low income 2 person household (say a single mom) making $12,210/year qualifies for the full $3,000. She has to make up the $800 difference--which is about 6.5% of her annual income spent towards education. A single mom in the middle of the 2nd highest bracket earns $57,989/year and qualifies for only a $1,000 voucher. She makes up the $2,800 which amounts to 4.8% of her annual income. So it looks like we're helping the low income families, and that's certainly the way school choice is being pitched, but in reality we're helping people who don't need that much help at all. All of this assumes, of course than an equal range of income families participate and that the only costs of private school are tuition. Every additional dollar spent on things like transportation, school uniforms, etc . . . can be subsumed by the wealthier family a lot more easily. My bet, is that this will consist of a series of $500 tax breaks for the wealthiest families who already send their kids to private schools.

The honest sound bite for vouchers is

Your Money (I've got plenty of my own)
My Child
My Choice

We may not be taking Oreos away from public education, but we are adding Oreos to the education pie, just concentrating them into a tiny little slice that goes to the guy who already ate all the cheesecake, and the bon-bons, and a whole box of dove ice cream bars.

The power of large numbers

2007-10-03T16:36:00.000-06:00

I just got the following message that gmail somehow failed to flag as spam (I can't possibly be reading my messages faster than other folks--so what gives? I've grown accustomed to certain advantages in not keeping up to the minute with my email).

Dear Friend,
I am Mr.Chi-Lin Huang I work with Bank Sino Pac, formerly known
asInternational Bank of Taipei as Executive Vice President & Deputy Head
of Division,Wealth ManagementI have a deceased client funds in my bank of
$17.3M USD and I need you to front as beneficiary,your benefit is 50% of
the total funds.Ifinterested
contact me with your Name,Address and Phone number,for more information on

Email:hchilintw57@yahoo.com.tw

Email:huang_chilin2000@yahoo.com.tw
Sincerely,
Huang Chi-Lin

As much as I hate to decline potentially lucrative business deals (and of course my whole life I've being dying to front as a beneficiary) I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm not going to fall into 8.74 million dollars by contacting Huang Chi-Lin. And my guess is that millions of the recipients of this message feel the same way. So why go phishing with such lousy bait? Because even if you only git one nibble in a million, you've come out ahead. You've literally made almost no investment to get started.

What do we have in education that compares to this--a relatively low investment (near negligible) with the potential for high payoff? I got thinking about this after a DRK-12 conference in which there was much discussion of the "next generation" of educational problems. Several of these discussion points were closely related to web 2.0 kinds of issues (flickr was explicitly invoked for example) along with (as you'd expect MMORPGs/environments like 2nd life). While there might be tremendous benefit to seeing someone put together a learning environment in 2nd life and then share it with the world it is not what I would characterize as "almost zero investment" quite the contrary, open education is all about investment--and in some sense the ROI isn't all that grand. To date, the biggest re-use I've seen of my (admittedly quite small) contribution to the community has come from/to myself. Students going through the new CS3 version of the flash class can choose to use the Flash 8 materials if they have an old version of the software--and pull them down from OCW.

I'll grant that this has been tremendously useful. But--this still involved a fair amount of effort to put up (although I'll admit I didn't do much of the heavy lifting). So if open courseware and open education aren't the exciting investment opportunity of the educational domain what is? What comes at a minimal cost with the long odds of a high payoff? I see it in bad ways of course, my kids negotiate everything and I mean everything. Talk literally is cheap, so they've learned to speak up and see what happens--because they know it's a non-zero chance that we'll cave or change our minds. Sounds a lot like some of the behaviorist "pigeon pecking" experiments.

But can't this be a force for good? How about open content spam? You email a Shakespearean sonnet to the in boxes of teeming millions with the hope that a handful will actually read it. You add commentary/critique/discussion opportunities with the hope that 10% of them will continue on after just reading the sonnet.

Everything new is old . . . again

2007-09-26T12:59:00.000-06:00

So what is a next generation console game? According to this BBC article, and the fine folk helming Halo 3, it's this:

We're expanding our ability to empower our fans to really take the game and make it their own.

Halo 3 will include tools to let gamers edit their own game movies and share them among friends, swap photographs from games, as well as re-build many of the maps the makers have provided, through a feature called Forge.

This sounds really cool, really innovative. Ground-breaking. Sort of a Web 2.0 vision of console gaming, that nobody has ever even conceptualized before, much less put on store shelves . . . Oh wait tic, maybe this has been done before. In fact, this is really just about game mod tools--which have been around at least since 1991 - with the Bard's Tale Construction Set. I personally didn't use the BCS, but I did play the Bard's Tale series a *cough* few times. And if I hop in my way back machine I can remember the Adventure Construction Set, also on my C-64 but back in 1985. I had this really cool Star Trek adventure where you had to repel a bunch of Klingon boarders and then storm their ship. But I digress. Granted, this is a bit different since it's difficult to build much of a developer community when the majority of people transfered files on a 5 1/4" diskette. But here's the thing:

It's
been
done
before

Not that that's a bad thing--the market clearly is ready to support it, and would like to see it again.

Here's my takeaway on a professional level. Chances are excellent that whatever you're working on, it's been done before too. PBL for instance. You could say that it started with Howard Barrows in the late 60s and you'd be right, but whether or not he created it with a blind eye to educational theory it has clear conceptual ties to Dewey and the broader educational reform movement, and that's just taking one step back in time.

We are really good at putting our conceptual blinders on and forging ahead, perhaps covering territory that's already been done--which isn't a bad thing in and of itself, I'm a big fan of replication research, but when you replicate inadvertently, that's a very bad thing. In general, you want to tweak the design a bit--explore an outcome that the initial study didn't, or modify the intervention slightly. And the best way to move forward is to read what's already been done to help inform your replication work. Lit review, lit review, lit review. Probably the most glossed-over practicum experience in any doctoral program--which is bad since doc students produce such a huge amount of the primary research.

Annunciation is key

2007-09-13T10:58:00.000-06:00

So, Deonne, Sarah, and I were at a PI conference in D.C. early this week up until the morning of 9/11. For the most part I didn't think about it too much. We did get a chance to walk the mall on 9/11 before our flight and decided to tour the capital building (where the senate meets). For those of you who haven't been, I highly recommend it, especially if you have someone with you who has been there before. All of the museums were free, as was the tour of the capital building, and there are some dang cool museums too (we went briefly into the holocaust museum, but only had about 45 minutes before we had to hop on the Metro). The Metro is very easy to work with (although I still managed to almost get on the wrong train just about every time--a special thanks to Deonne and Sarah for not letting me head out to the burbs. Oh, and the announcements left a lot to be desired, a bit like the speaker at the drive through).

Anyway, back to the capital building, they gave us what my colleague Kathryn DiPietro (who spent several years in Tennessee) would call a "come to Jesus" talk about the security measures. This involved saying in a loud and clear voice that we were not to leave any belongings in the capital building for any reason, and that we could not bring anything we could eat or drink into the building. This was backed up with very capable steely-eyed flat bellied professionals wearing sunglasses despite the clouds and rain, carrying rifles that (as Danny Vermin might say) could shoot through schools. So I'm a little nervous about the details, and even though Deonne was assured that gum was okay, I decided to confirm with one of said steely-eyed flat bellied professionals and asked "but gum's okay right?" at the second (of three!) checkpoints. Turns out that it's extremely important to emphasize the "m" in gum. Because it sounds a lot like "n" and I got a look (this one was not wearing sunglasses) that made me want to rethink my life.

Something is seriously wrong here

2007-09-04T12:07:00.000-06:00

I had no clue about this but according to this article we've got PZEV (partially zero emission vehicles) being sold in 8 states that are illegal to sell in the remaining 42. Now, this isn't necessarily about improved gas mileage, but it is about clean air. As an example of just how clean the air can be:

As the California Air Resources Board has noted, the tailpipe emissions of these cars can be cleaner than the outside air in smoggy cities.

Which may not seem like a big thing here in cache valley, except when you think about our inversion, which can spike us to the top of the list for poor air quality. The cost looks to be about $400 for these cars, which IMO doesn't necessarily price people out of buying a new car, and that's assuming all those costs are passed on to the consumer. Honda, is partially eating these costs on the Accord, and I'm sure there's an economies of scale issue here--if they weren't building two of the same vehicle, and were building more PZEVs that cost should come down. So why I ask you, can't we legalize these vehicles in all 50 states? Better yet, why can't we mandate them? We have the worst vehicle emissions standards in the developed world. Bar none. There are big clean air offenders like China who have cleaner vehicle emissions standards than us, and I don't think we're doing our auto manufacturers any favors by keeping our standards low because their vehicles are often illegal to operate in other countries.

I'm so grateful that the clean air act is protecting us from the sub-humans who would actually attempt to buy a PZEV for use in a state that doesn't have these standards. I would shudder to think that anyone is actually trying to curb pollution.

Linux Home Web Browser

2007-08-29T11:13:00.000-06:00

Ok, so there's apparently a big reason why my father-in-law was about ready to throw out this machine. I've succeeded in getting kubuntu 7.04 installed on this lovely work of art but I think I'm going to stop there. Attempts to do anything creative with the video card have not been successful and frankly it's a bit of a miracle I managed to boot off the CD-ROM drive at all. (it essentially ate my first copy of the install disk by marking it up a ton--almost as if a hamster were inside the machine trying to scratch a line on it as it rotated). So kubuntu linux is running great but that's as far as I'm going for now. My father-in-law did ask me to spec out a box to do something more interesting, so I'll keep you posted if anything comes of that.

Linux Home Media Center

2007-08-22T16:25:00.000-06:00

I was at my in-laws this past weekend and my father-in-law was all set to discard a 1.6 Mhz 512 RAM Dell Optiplex machine (it even has a firewire card he added on). Putting aside for one moment that these specs are almost on par with my work laptop--and realizing that in retrospect I should have just calmly packed it into the van and said goodbye, I decided to follow up on an ambition I've had for the last couple of years--a home media center that uses Linux. Unfortunately, if it works I'll be giving it back to him because I opened my pie whole a bit too early. Not to mention something like this at our house, with our "TV" and our "stereo" would be a bit like putting a fresh coat of paint on a pig.

So far I'm just at the stage where I'm reading, and Jen is giving me weird looks about the conspicuous box parked in our living room, but I'm starting to get optimistic (when I see videos about people popping in a DVD and having it automagically work right out of the box) and at the same time a bit nervous overall (when I read about a 30 minute project turning into an hours long nightmare). But hey--the hardware (so far) is free right? I'll keep you all posted on just how well this works out.

Right now, the plan is pretty simple (which should help):

No TV in (they get HD and I don't think this machine could take that kind of heat).
Simple DVD playback
.mp3 playback
web browsing
arcade emulation (when is the last time you played a nice game of space invaders--or the game that could have funded my first year of college: cyberball). This, incidently is the other reason why we can't have something like this in our house.

Large Scale Wireless

2007-08-18T19:32:00.001-06:00

So, I pulled this from search engine watch. Apparently Google is part of a coalition of companies petitioning the FCC for some of the airspace that will be vacated by broadcast television when the move to digital TV takes place in a couple of years.

Personally, I like this idea. I currently have one viable option for high-speed: cable through Comcast, and I'll just say that as an ISP they leave a whole lot to be desired. We generally have a couple of down times a month.

Look whose making edits now

2007-08-15T15:11:00.000-06:00

This BBC story discusses a tool called Wikipedia Scanner, which harvests some of the traffic on the site and sources edits by their IP address. Of course, there are ways around leaving these kinds of tracks (e.g. spoofing) but I'm willing to be there's a fair amount of accurate data out there.

So my favorite highlight was that an entry on Rush Limbaugh's audience reads

Most of them are legally retarted

Yikes.

I think this story is interesting on a couple of levels. For one, it's probable that CIA employees, someone in the Vatican, and folks in the private sector have edited Wikipedia entries that do things like impact their public image or relate to their work (with notable exceptions like CIA-sourced edits on Oprah Winfrey, unless . . . . nah couldn't be). So if there were any doubts before about the quality, importance, and relevance of Wikipedia then they've got to be diminishing by now.

The other thing that's interesting is peer review for topics that are steeped in controversy. Who do you pick to manage the page on Rush Limbaugh for instance? Clearly I would be a poor choice, as I do tune into the show sometimes (in spite of my mediocre mental faculties) for the comedic value--but I don't tend to laugh with Rush, more at him. At the same time I can think of several friends who would be an equally poor choice for the opposite reason, they love the show and nod right along with him when he talks about the environment being "just a political issue". And let me tell you he's spot on because Ralph Nader has ridden that horse all the way to the White House.

Can't we all just get along?

2007-07-16T11:34:00.001-06:00

There was a recent editorial in the local paper on biking. I'll quote it below because I'm not sure just how long the link will persist:

Back in the ’50s and ’60s when I was growing up in Logan, we respected the traffic laws and vehicles on the roadways when we rode our bicycles. We also had to buy a license plate for our bikes every year which cost us $.50. If you didn’t have one you were ticketed. Now when I ride around the valley, there is no respect. Total disregard for the vehicles and above all the stop signs and traffic lights.

It’s time our legislators start making these people pay tax and license these two wheelers. The police should start writing tickets for stop sign and red light runners.

We pay our road tax on everything we own. It’s past time for them.

Jerry Jensen

Hyrum

I like the idea of a license as long as the fee is commensurate with the provided services. We have no bike lanes, and the amount of wear we put on the road is negligible. So I don't think the licensing fee should amount to much, and I'll gladly pay it. As for ticketing I completely agree. If cyclists break the rules of the road, they should be fined like anyone else. I do think (and see) lots of contradictions to the idea that there is no respect for motorists. Cyclists have a tremendous amount of respect for motorists--by necessity as you tend to outweigh us by orders of magnitude. I put my life in drivers' hands every time I ride, and for the most part that trust is very well placed.

The times I've seen motorists do stupid things (two have pulled out right in front of me, and one cut me off to make a turn, forcing me to slam on my brakes or get side-swiped) in the past year are a drop in the bucket compared to the number of cars that have passed me, or even motorists going out of their way to make sure things are safe for everyone.

You should try it out, this is a great place to bike. For the most part people are very friendly, it's good for you, it's good for the valley, and it saves a ton of money.

Google Scholar has made life even easier

2007-07-02T11:23:00.001-06:00

I just got clued into this from one of our doctoral students (Curtis Castillow). Apparently you can set up Google Scholar so that it can directly export to your bibliography manager of choice. Well, there's 5 choices at least but it covers my manager of choice--End Note. You can set this up under the preferences section. I always thought it was cool they recognize your institution and provided links to local holdings, but this is a nice additional step. Of course it's probably been around a long time and I'm just now getting around to figuring it out . . .

What the heck?

2007-06-12T08:46:00.000-06:00

So I've got an article in the final stages of publication and had an interesting email this morning. This particular journal was recently bought out by a major publisher and had it's price jacked up an unbelievable amount. I recall a debate a few years back between David Wiley and a publisher about the journal racquet. This is from memory but I think his big claim was that we provide the actual content (authorship), the peer review, and the editing at no cost to most journals. Which is quite true. The rebuttal was that the journal provides copy-editing.

Now back to my email. I get a URL to print-ready .pdfs and a request to . . . (wait for it) . . . copy-edit. No joke. Within two days. I gotta say that it's fabulous to do all the work and then get the privilege of buying back the work that I and my co-authors did.

So exactly what are we paying for now? Server space? I can't imagine how we got to this point--and the best part is that the prices keep going up! Libraries consistently have to reduce their subscriptions because journals are literally pricing themselves out of a job. I think the average is something like over 10% a year (the particular journal I'm talking about far exceeded the 10% average).

Hacking is about to get really fun

2007-06-05T15:51:00.000-06:00

Remember back in the day, where all the action for hackers was in the computer (the movie Tron comes to mind). Now, with more and more fully networked devices--it seems like hacking could take on a surprisingly tangible quality. Getting hit by MyDoom was a serious bummer, particularly the version that blocked anti-virus sites but hey--it's you're computer right? Somebody gets a backdoor to it, it starts participating in a Denial of Service attack, your friendly neighborhood IT department blocks your network port, you have some downtime and you move on. You're partly to blame for not keeping up to date with security patches, virus updates, and by opening an attachment, but hey--no big deal.

Now though, we've got some real potential for fun. We're getting ready to wire our cars and put them out on the grid. I'm envisioning a future world in which kids walk around with a 5.9Ghz device that can at the click of a button inform every car within 1 km that it's about to have a wreck and it needs to slam on it's breaks. Better yet--not all of those cars will either be enabled or set to respond to a pending wreck--so figure that 40% of the cars slam on their breaks and the other 60% rely on their human operators to figure out what's going on (maybe they'll get an audio warning like "you're about to crash, Dave").

And it's not just cars--how would you like to have some kid convince your fridge that it's out of milk for 30 days in a row--the same fridge that's set to automatically order milk when you run out? Or turn on your stereo full volume at 3am? Life could get really interesting soon . . .

An Open Letter to Wilton Sekzer

2007-05-25T12:42:00.001-06:00

I just finished watching Why We Fight and was touched by the story threaded throughout the documentary of a retired NYC police officer named Wilton Sekzer. (Spoiler warning--this reallly is a great movie to watch, and if you're interested you might want to do so before reading). To catch up those who haven't seen the film, he lost his son in the 9/11 attacks and after hearing that Saddam Hussein was connected to them asked to have his son's name placed on some sort of a munition used in the Iraq war. Hopefully you'll glean the rest (especially the important parts) from my letter.

Dear Mr. Sekzer--

I'm so sorry for the loss of your son. I can't imagine what that's like. I've lost family members but never to a violent attack, and never my own children. Parents aren't supposed to outlive their kids. I remember having the same response as you when I saw the news coverage--wondering why they kept showing the buildings falling down over and over again and wishing that they'd just stop out of respect for the dead, the dying, and for thier families and loved ones.

I think I can understand your desire to have some sort of revenge--in part because I don't think it was purely a desire for revenge. It was a desire to make some sort of a tribute to him and to his loss. At the time you asked for his name to be placed on a weapon you thought it was a meaningful tribute, that it was a way for him to strike back at his attackers.

When the Iraq war first started I took the administration at face value too. I knew there wasn't a connection with Al-Queda they hate each other. But I beleived them when they said Saddam Hussein was a threat to us, and that he had weapons of mass destruction. I believed (and still believe) he was a tyrrant to his own people, and beleived Cheaney when he said the Iraqi people would welcome us with open arms.

You didn't make a bad call. Like you say in the movie, you acted on what you were told. I think the thing that chills me to the core is part of the email chain you read during the movie. It came from someone at a Marine Air Division in response to your request and read "Can Do, Semper Fi." My brother has been in the Corps for 20 years now, and served in Desert Storm and the Iraq War (several times). He is always faithful, the marine from your email is always faithful and so are all the men and women in our armed forces (even if they don't use the same motto). They have to be. Our democracy has to stop at the recruiting station or else the military will never be able to act. They have to follow orders that from their perspective appear to be legal or else the whole thing will collapse. If those stealth bomber pilots who dropped the opening salvo questioned every target, or even a single target then they wouldn't be able to function. The problem can come with who they have to be faithful to.

Your choice doesn't tarnish the name of your son, or reflect badly on you. I respect that you're a man of action--that when the news coverage was so devastating to you, that you called up the network and asked them to stop showing the buildings collapsing. I respect that you wanted to memorialize your son. Our military men and women aren't tarnished either. They made commitments and they're honoring those commitments. What is tarnished is our president and his administration.

Thank you for talking so openly about something so hard, for sharing your loss with us, and for your justifiable outrage.

--Andy

Some highlights from the film:

A 2,000 pound smart bomb with "In loving memory of Jason Sekzer" written on it was dropped on April 1, just a couple of weeks into the War.
Of the 50 smart bombs dropped in the opening weeks of the war, all in an effort to hit leadership targets--none of them achieved their goals.
Civilian causualities during the opening weeks were about 90%. The smart bombs are not so smart.

The film discusses Iraq only as a talking point, it's actually about things that are far more disturbing than that--the relationship between military contractors and our government and this crosses political lines. The fact that our current president is a Republican is completely arbitrary. Democrats are just as invested in the war machine.

I prefer apples from the tree, thanks

2007-05-18T12:59:00.000-06:00

I'll admit to being a wuss this Winter. I maybe averaged one day a week riding my bike into work. Now that I have fenders, maybe I'll take it up a notch during the next cold season. I have noticed, now that it's good Summer weather in the Springtime the return of one of my least favorite things: Horse apples. Now I am an animal lover (as in I love to eat them). And I understand that they need space to do their thing so that we can exploit them in various ways. I don't mind riding by cow pastures, or the sheep at the ag research station--a small price to pay. A pitance in fact, for things like mutton. But for a guy that never rides on horse trails. In fact, I pretty much only ride on the road, I see an amazing amount of horse excrement.

Now I've always been of the philosophy that we should share the road. So saddle up I say--but how about bringing a shovel along? Sure it's less toxic than dog poop, sure it's bio-degradable. But it sits there for months.

Perhaps I'll have to start a poop rellocation program of my own . . .

Publication lag

2007-05-16T15:30:00.000-06:00

Just got finished coding a study for our meta-analysis. I found two sources from the same authors, one in 1993 (a conference paper) and one from 2000 (a journal article). Turns out they're the exact same paper. So it took them 7 years to publish it. Having gone through the process myself I can believe it in theory, I once had a journal keep a manuscript for over a year--but 7 years from conference proceeding to journal article? Wow. Now, some of the lag has to be due to the authors (perhaps waiting to submit, revisions, etc . . . although the final article looks amazingly identical to the initial conference proceedings). But some blame has got to rest with the existing peer review/publication process as well. I have a hard time believing that the authors sat on this for 7 years.

A couple years back I took a subset of this data (preliminary results of the meta-analysis) and looked at lag between time of data collection and time of publication. The average was 4 years across 57 outcomes (not sure about the number of studies but something < 27). A different benchmark, because this includes time to prepare the manuscript whereas the authors in the study above already had a finished manuscript. And again, part of the time is the authors preparing the manuscript after collecting the data. But all of that said, this still seems to point to journals holding on to manuscripts for a long time. In our field, anything longer than a year from submission to print is probably too long and I'm willing to bet the average is actually longer than that.

That's Not Extremism and I Sniff Mean It!

2007-05-09T11:50:00.000-06:00

Brett Shelton just sent me a link to this article in the Herald Journal. I should preface this by saying that I'm a card carrying Democrat (although I'm thinking of abolishing that practice--not because I prefer the Republicans, I still consider myself a liberal, but I'm starting to think that both parties are more than a little ridiculous.

All of that said, I'm having a hard time believing that this article was representative of the convention. How could any group of individuals honestly be this stupid even some of the time--knowing that they are in the public eye? A couple of choice quotes:

Illegal aliens are in control of the media, and working in tandem with Democrats, are trying to "destroy Christian America" and replace it with "a godless new world order -- and that is not extremism, that is fact," Larsen said

If you have to say that it's not extremism . . . then it's probably extremism.

At the end of his speech, Larsen began to cry, saying illegal immigrants were trying to bring about the destruction of the U.S. "by self invasion."

There's got to be a better way to say that.

Republican officials then allowed speakers to defend and refute the resolution. One speaker, who was identified as "Joe," said illegal immigrants were Marxist and under the influence of the devil.

You know that makes sense, I always wondered why they called Utah a red state. Thanks "Joe"! Perhaps instead of asking for green cards we should start looking for bifurcated tails.

Senator Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, spoke against the resolution, saying Larsen, whom he called a "true patriot and a close friend," was embarrassing the Republican Party.

igns of intelligence (except perhaps the bit about him being a close friend). Although I do admire somebody who doesn't deny a standing friendship despite such an obvious need to distance yourself from the person.

Greene said she was disappointed in BYU professors who protested Dick Cheney's visit to campus, calling them "self-appointed intellectuals."

Ok, I'll admit that I'm not one to uphold the sanctity of the ivory tower. I agree wholeheartedly that intellectual pursuit happens outside the academy and that it should continue to be that way. That said--college professors are, by definition intellectuals. It's like trying to insult chicken by calling it "self-appointed poultry."

All of the speakers praised those gathered. Lt. Governor Gary Herbert said Utah County Republicans are "guided by correct principles"

This just isn't funny to me at all. It's an overt appeal to LDS church members (of which I am one) and is a specific reference to a message that we hear over the pulpit every election year. In part, that message states that we should pick candidates not based on their political party but pick those who, in our opinion, are guided by correct principles.

If the following is a Republican rebuttal to accusations of ethics violations, then they really have no leg to stand on:

. . . Cannon said Democrats have just as many corrupt party members as the Republicans but the media does not report Democratic ethics violations.

Here is my cut at an abstract of the article: Republicans have just as many members as Democrats who stray from correct principles, but hey--we're not Marxists, and we're not influenced by Satan--that embezzlement thing was the natural man all the way baby. Plus also *crying* we're not extremists.

Which truthfully (and thankfully) isn't the whole picture. At least according to this article Republican officials were denouncing Larsen's proposed resolution before it was even discussed at the convention. It's good to know they're not that moronic as a whole. I still wonder why they'd give him such free reign--he may be free to talk but can't you put a lid on something that has no shot at passing and is a sure bet to make you look incredibly stupid?

Reading Dissertations

2007-04-16T16:30:00.000-06:00

I've been reading a lot of dissertations lately as part of the PBL meta-analysis that I'm working on. I have slightly mixed feelings about them so far--in some cases they are amazing sources for additional literature (in fact the bulk of my time is spent chasing some of these references, and the nice thing about reading the dissertations is they usually give you a lot more information about what they're citing than a journal article--e.g. I generally have a good idea about whether or not the article will be codeable for our purposes). Some of them are downright horrible, I'm amazed at how little information can be packed into 180 pages. Some are really quite strong and some (this is my epiphany for the day) are quite reflective about the makeup of the dissertation committee behind them.

I for instance recently read one such dissertation (on PBL) that contained an extensive review of behaviorism. I don't want to start an epistemological argument or anything, but my general view (shared by several others) is that PBL is quite pragmatic. I know others feel that it's very post-positivist or constructivist and I can certainly see the merits of this opinion. I've even seen efforts to tie PBL in with cognitive information processing, and yes there's some good connections to be made there, but I have yet to see (with the exception of this dissertation) a tie to behaviorism. Ok ok, I know I'm traversing categories of educational philosophy as well as learning theories, but at the end of the day I haven't seen a whole lot of people making ties between behaviorism and PBL. The dissertation in question wasn't using behaviorism as the only tie-in, in fact constructivism was given a great deal of prominence as well. What the lit review read like was one or more committee members with strong epistemological beliefs insisting that both "views" be represented. If that was indeed the case then yikes.

It's also got me thinking a lot more about how much a dissertation reflects the committee that participated in the effort, and the department/program the dissertation came out of. It seems like that would be a good set of glasses for all of us to put on as a dissertation reaches the closing stages. And of course it gets me thinking about whether or not I've made unreasonable requests as a committee member . . . I don't think I have but I've got a sneaking suspicion that I'm probably the worst person to make that call.

Flash class finally up on OCW

2007-04-02T11:51:00.000-06:00

Thanks to my teaching assistant Garth Mikesell, my Flash Course is finally up on USU's Open Courseware archive. Among other things, the last snag was editing out a segment that used a copyrighted comic from the New Yorker in the introductory video. So thanks to Garth, and to Marion and his team for all of their work on this (the biggest holdup by far in this project was me). Of course the downside is that this will be obsolete in a few weeks with the pending release of the Adobe CS3 bundle. Man, guess I'll be spending this summer doing some more screencasting.

Hat Trick

2007-03-26T10:27:00.000-06:00

So I've been playing ice hockey now for about seven months at the local ice center. A loooooong time ago I played street hockey and roller-hockey, then last summer I took a few lessons, played a few pick-up games and then started my first season in a pretty low-key adult (non-checking) league. We just finished up our last game of my second season and I got a hat trick! Even better, 2 of the 3 goals were what I would describe as real goals (mostly I get garbage goals, putting in a rebound while the goallie is on his/her back), all three were off of actual passes--and man all three were good passes, right on my stick and right in front of the net.

I also almost got my first penalty, and did witness my first gloves-off fight (which is an automatic ejection and suspension for the next game, no questions asked). This is by far the most fun that I've had playing a sport of any kind. Even the games where I barely touch the puck are fun. The really good thing about the league is that even though there is a huge range in abilities, most of the good people are pretty nice about getting newbies like me involved in the plays and lettings us know where we should be and what we should be doing.

Development Arrested

2007-03-12T16:33:00.000-06:00

So this last week I finished the Arrested Development TV series. It originally aired on Fox, I don't think I caught a single episode while it was actually on--man they needed marketing bad. Below is my review for Netflix (of which I think I've written about two total):

If you consistently find that comedies you love get cancelled then this show is for you. Critical acclaim, amazing acting and some of the best writing that I've ever seen on network television. The biggest vote of confidence I can pass on is this: One of my friends refuses to watch the third season because she doesn't want to admit the show is done. Some recommendations: Watch these in sequence--you can't miss out on anything as the show will draw on material from several episodes back. Also, don't skip the "next time on Arrested development" shots--these are not actually reproduced in the next episode and they're just dang funny (like everything else).

Note the show is available for "free" through MSN although it comes with commercials and an annoying habit of drop-frames, IMO it's worth the hit to your rental queue to watch this off the DVDs. I've never owned a TV series on DVD but I just might consider getting this one. One more warning, the show is more than a little racy in parts. No nudity, but lots of sexual humor.

I simply can't believe this show is over. Well, maybe I can a little. The show goes to great pains to poke fun at existing television (for example the lead character Michael Bluth had a visibly adverse reaction to people calling Orange County the "OC" and would immediately say "don't call it that"), but the trick is you have to have heard of the OC to know they were making fun of it--I barely made the connection. So you pretty much have to be familiar with shows that suck in order to appreciate a show that makes fun of them--no wonder only the critics loved it. It's a release for years of pent-up frustration. Oh well, I still think it has legs for the rest of us.

Cell Phones, American Idol, and other Impairments

2007-02-26T13:32:00.000-07:00

I almost got hit this morning by some clown on a cell phone who gave serious thought (about four feet of foward motion woth of serious thought) to pulling out in front of me while I was riding my bike. Which got me thinking about just how much cell phones impair our driving and it turns out it a fair amount:

Drivers using cellular phones are four times as likely to get into a crash that can cause injuries serious enough to send them to the hospital.

Yikes, or in this case send me to the hospital. Now I don't own a cell phone, and if I do (not sure how long I can hold out--I'm starting to get weird looks) I'll have to resist the temptation to use it in the car because I can barely drive as it is. But, I think I do have plenty of impairments in my life anyway. For instance, I've started watching American Idol while working at night. In addition to having to resist the temptation to write "I'm sorry, it's a no" on the papers I'm grading, I'm wondering just what the heck I'm wasting my time on this for anyway. Although the chances of me getting into a crash while on my couch are pretty close to zero I'm convinced that they're four times more likely when I'm watching American Idol.

Free Science at Utah State?

2007-02-20T10:57:00.000-07:00

We currently have a very active student organization in our department--and oh what a difference it makes. In our two candidate searches they've been invaluable in coordinating (and conducting) student meetings with the prospective faculty, they're engaged in outreach, they're pushing us to think about curriculum issues and it's just generally good all around--and that's just from a faculty perspective I think the bulk of their contribution has been between and among students. One of their projects is starting an online journal--which I think is an admirable thing to take on but I wonder if an expansion of the free science movement into instructional technology/educational technology/learning sciences might be a better usage of time.

I'll express my own ignorance here--perhaps it's already being done elsewhere. I guess there is something related with the IT Forum in that papers are discussed, but I'm talking about a widespread pre-print and (where it doesn't violate the publication guideliness of journals) in-print archive of manuscripts. We've tried to start an online journal in the past and the biggest problem was getting quality submissions. Heck after reading some of the articles in established print-based journals I think they have the same problem . . . This would be a step in the right direction that doesn't come with all the overhead of starting a journal. If enough interest is started with the manuscript archive, then a journal could be started from there.

I do think our librarians are already thinking along these lines--at least with the manuscript archive (and maybe have an archive up already), would be great to partner with them in some way. If USU is known so well for open education, it seems like a natural step to start building a reputation for open research.

Back into development

2007-02-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

Even though I only put in about 10 hours or so on this .php project (see below) I'd forgotten how much I like doing development work. Of course, maybe I liked it so much because it was only 10 hours or so. I'll admit to a few moments of frustration when I tried to roll out a new class that supports MySQL for my database abstraction scheme.

It's decidely odd to be on grants now where most of the heavy lifting on development is done by other folks. I can barely keep up with the conversations now, and in the case of the COSL work they're using languages that I'd never heard of back when I got started.

ES Free is up

2007-02-13T11:46:00.000-07:00

The important part: I've just posted a website that let's you calculate effect sizes (called ES Free and available here). Now for the mundane stuff. This is a project that I've been working on for quite some time, but just recently migrated it to a linux server using mysql & php (previously it was just a resource I intended to use for myself and was running on windows xp, apache, php, and used MS access as the database, about two MS products too many for my taste. The big push for the migration was actually some hideous error in which .php was partially parsing scripts and then decided to give up about halfway through. The intention of the tool is to assist in computing and storing effect sizes for meta-analysis (so it's organized around studies and outcomes for studies). Right now I don't have a whole lot of ambitions for improvement--other than adding computations as I need them as part of my own work. If anyone wants to run with it then I'm happy to release the source code. If you run into any bugs let me know. I did (partly for my own sanity) add a help feature that explains the computations and when they are appropriate to use.

Non-commercial Clause

2006-09-01T13:05:00.000-06:00

I recently heard through David Wiley that several people are concerend about the non-commercial use clause in the license used for Open Course Ware. Specifically, that they weren't sure if their activities were breaking the license. I know this may cause some open content advocates to cringe but I could care less if you make money off of my freely accessible class materials (first I'd have a bit of skepticism about how you could go about doing that)--especially since my class has yet to be posted. But as long as you aren't able to restrict the use of those materials by any other person (including repurposing) then I'm fine with it.

I admit that I'm fairly ignorant of what exactly is meant by non-commercial use, and I understand one of the keynotes at the 2006 Open Education conference is going to address exactly that.

PBL - a bit of a response

2006-01-23T10:34:00.000-07:00

We're starting to discuss Problem-Based Learning a la Barrows (initially) in a special topics class I'm teaching this semester. One of the participants, Mark Mason has a great post on his reactions to some of the first readings, that I want to take a minute and respond to.

I think Mark has very astutely brought into question some of the theoretical underpinnings of PBL (which by the way are post-hoc as Barrows had no theory in mind, this was a technological approach in the purist sense of the term). I think the ties to Dewey and Freire work (although I've seen Dewey's name invoked for quite a range of things) in the sense that this is, essentially about an attempt to embed instruction in authentic practice (or as authentic as you can get safely and with a reasonable cost)--I'm not sure that Barrows is as interested in empowerment per se in the sense that Freire discusses it but I don't think Mark is making that claim either.

Mark essentially proposes an alternative or enhancement to the lecture based approach that is deeply rooted in cognition:

To be able to retrieve something from memory, information must be encoded from short- to long-term memory. If the problem is merely one of inappropriate learning objectives we could easily divide out the tasks into a stepwise process, create the learning objectives, and proceed. The following procedures might suffice: 1) Requires students to memorize neuralgic information; 2) provide sufficient testing to ensure facts are encoded in long-term memory; and 3) encourage students to review information until retrieval is necessary, such as clinical experience. . . . According to Barrows students memorized the information the freshman year and then were not expected to use it until their junior year. But isn’t the problem with this approach the lack of additional timely experience requiring students to demonstrate their ability to understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create? So what would PBL add to this scenario that more solid instructional design would not?

Mark makes a great point here. It is perhaps a bit of a straw man to compare PBL to straight lecture, developed and delivered by faculty of all people--the majority of whom receive absolutely no training about how to teach much less engage in instructional design. I say this as an equal offender by the way, if I had a dollar for every behavioral objective I haven't written for my own classes or audience analysis I've skipped I think I could make my next house payment. Ok, maybe not a house payment but I could get an iPod. But I digress, so in a head-to-head between a principled instructional design approach lecture format class and PBL what is the difference? I would say ostensibly not a whole lot. An effort to supply opportunities to apply, analyze, evaluate, and create in relation to new knowledge might lead you to something fairly proxmiate to PBL (certainly in comparison to traditional lecture--whatever that means). I think the biggest points of divergence are 1) forcing students to take a leadership role in identifying their own learning issues (through meta-cognitive prompts) and then resolve them (by seeking out and evaluating information) with respect to a given problem, 2) a happy consequence of forcing leadership; increased propensity to engage in lifelong learning (if you go through medical school having everything handed to you, you wind up with the typical graduate school dilemma--now that I'm responsible for figuring out what it is that I want to learn, and how to go about doing it I'm not quite sure how to get started, 3) a practitioner focus, which deserves a more elaborate explanation.

Mark infers the purpose of PBL as "[encouraging] learners to become independent problem solvers." Which I think is close but not quite on. I think if you asked medical school faculty who lecture about their teaching responsibilities they'd say "I teach medical students" or perhaps "I teach (insert discipline here) to medical students." Put differently they'd say "I'm in the business of teaching students about medicine." PBL is not attempting to teach students about medicine, it's in the business of making doctors. This is embodied perhaps best in a quote from a PBL student found in Schwartz et al. (1992):

“We would dive into the case, and soon it would be students teaching other students about the information we had found. I also found these group sessions encouraged questions to be asked about cost of treatments, benefits of a treatment or patient options.” (emphasis added)

In short, students in a PBL approach start to focus on the practice of being a doctor, some of the less tangible questions (costs, dealing with HMOs, etc . . . ) that are often the focus only after medical school is over. Now you can certainly apply Mark's argument here that this is something ISD would pick up as well--it's a content issue, you aren't giving the entire picture because you having gone through a principled input/output analysis, gap analysis, etc . . . I would say that's quite true, but that Seels and Richey would still put you on a path to learning about what it's like to be a doctor, and not necessarily about being a doctor.

Mark invoked cognition, which I think is important to address. I'll go back to some of the basic (and quite famous) research done by Hyde & Jenkins (1969) on enhancing rehearsal/recall. They had three comparison groups, one "intentional" group that memorized a list of words and attempted to recall as many as possible. If I remember correctly the time spacing for all three groups was such that it involved long-term memory. I'll equate that with a great deal of overgeneralization and partial hubris to "traditional lecture", the other two groups were not told they would be asked to recall the words at all (thus no conscious attempt was made on their part to encode them into long-term memory). One group was asked to identify the words that contained the letter "e", the other was asked to rate the "pleasantness" of the words. The unintentional "pleasantness" group did as well as the group that used rote rehearsal. I would (again with much in the way of overgeneralization) equate the pleasantness group to PBL in that students are making evaluative judgements about information and it's application and relevance to a given problem (as they seek out and encounter that information). In essence, PBL affords additional retrieval cues, when (as Mark describes it well) they are contextualized in patient cases. Looking back, I think Mark discussed this point a bit better than me (certainly more concisely).

I do question the claim about transfer, however. PBL affords highly contextualized knowledge. I'm not convinced that highly contextualized knowledge will transfer more easily to novel situations. Certainly, many PBL advocates claim this--but if you read between the lines they are typically talking about novel patient cases. When I think about transfer I'm thinking about a discipline switch--which I think you will get with your weak (broad) problem solving strategies, but I'm not convinced you'll get good transfer--or more to the point, better transfer of your knowledge over a more traditional lecture approach. To take this out of the abstract I've encountere Maslow's heirarchy of needs in the context of a parent-child relationships class in the field of Human Development, a management course in the context of Business, and motivation (learning theory) in the context of Instructional Design. All of them through traditional lecture--I'm not sure that learning Maslow's Heirarchy through PBL would help me transfer what I know to these different disciplines.

Anyway, that's my long-winded response. Thanks for the post Mark.

I hate grading

2005-12-12T11:18:00.001-07:00

Being on a 50/50 load (research and teaching) or as some would refer to it a 50/60/10 load (teaching, research, and service respectively--and yes I'm aware that adds up to more than 100%) would be just fine for me except for one thing: I can't stand grading. I'll do just about anything to avoid it (hanging Christmas lights, reading blogs, even watch a Peanuts holiday special *shudder*).

What's more I don't think I'm alone. I can distinctly recall a class during my graduate years in which the instructor had the rest of the class provide the grades. I wasn't able to attend the grading session but as I understand it, various class members left the room while the rest of the class came up with what grade they should receive. Genius, pure genius I say.

I have a feeling that what we should really do is dispense with grades altogether. What ever happened to criterion referenced evaluation? How about P = I think you should continue on or F = Nope, no thanks, I just finished lunch and I'd like to keep it down.

I think the worst part of this job (listen to me complaining about my dream job) is what I call "grading bleed over." We review grant proposals, we review journal articles, and we review conference presentations. Although I do tend to like the grading scale much better: Accept, Accept w/ revisions, Reject. Who am I to say one paper is an A- and another is a B+? Comments I can handle, feedback I enjoy giving, letter grades? Not so much.

Blogger Bib

2005-11-04T13:38:00.000-07:00

For those of you where are into blog research here's a tidy little blog bibliography I came across today on my RSS feed from Oishii!. If you haven't used it, Oishii! harvests the 30+ n bookmarks that fly by the del.icio.us front page. Despite the fact that oishii! suffers from what I would call tyranny of the masses in that it's a best of/most recent link set from the whole show of del.iciou.us users, I still think this is a fabulous way to run across interesting stuff (not to mention engage in grading avoidance behavior--which is one of my favorite pasttimes).

The Mighty Have Fallen (and they can't get up)

2005-10-17T14:04:00.000-06:00

Goggle (which at one time was one of the last search engines to not display search results on the basis of receiving compensation) has now fallen (old news, but this is a discussion topic in one of my classes this week). I think Google currently does a good job of shunting the paid links off to the side, but I'm still concerned about the implications of this for educational uses. Kids have a horrible problem with information literacy, and I'm not convinced that it will be immediately obvious to some of them that these are paid. Even if they make the connection they may not see the implications (since their levels of trust for websites on a scale of 1-10 are what I would call "scary high").

One of the biggest offenders in my mind is Yahoo. Yahoo (because it also has a heirarchical search mode) adds searchable content through the use of human editors. As you can imagine, they can't really keep up with the number of web sites being created. Since some people have extra cash, Yahoo will let you pony up 299.00 a year if you want to expedite this process (a 7 day turnaround guaranteed! woo-hoo). The sites that pay the extra "3 Benjamins" are not (as far as I know) flagged in any way as having paid this money.

I think this is bad in the context of education. Espcially when you consider who has extra money laying around (not to mention who doesn't). And let's stop and think about this for a second. You need to pay an annual fee or else your coverage gets dropped? Do they send Nunzio over to make the collection?

Accelerate This

2005-10-14T11:59:00.000-06:00

My daughter's 3rd grade class is using a piece of software called Accelerated Reader. As near as I can tell kids read books then come into the classroom and take a short quiz (measuring the lower levels of Bloom's taxonomy). It also looks as if they price two things. 1) The software itself, and then 2) the quizzes--which quickly become out of date. My daughter is reading newer books that the school doesn't have the money to purchase quizzes for. My favorite part of this, is that the software has a feature for teacher generated quizzes. I thought great, I'll help our teacher out because I'm sure that teachers (who as one of my colleagues often says, love to share) probably have a website that they post their own quizzes to. Well my first google hit referenced a cease and desist order for a teacher who tried to do just such a thing.

I say let's build our own. We're not talking about rocket science here. The next time I teach a web-database class this will be the final project.