Context matters

As a professor, one of the ways I measure the success of my teaching is the “news article frequency”:  the frequency with which my students send me links to news stories that relate to something we talked about in class.  Lately, my news article frequency has been quite high.

I can’t imagine teaching computer science without context:  without bringing in real-world examples that relate to what we’re learning.  There are so many good stories in computer science, so many neat applications, so many people and organizations doing interesting and novel things with technology!

My big experiment this term in my intro class involves centering the entire course around context and applications, rather than around concepts.  It’s been a real mind shift approaching computer science in this way, but I’m finding that, so far, my students are grasping the more complex concepts faster than they’ve done in previous, more traditionally-focused intro sections.  And of course, it gives me an excuse to play around with fun problems. 

Last week I had the students in the lab implementing different encryption algorithms.  Today, in class, I discussed properties of strong encryption mechanisms and demonstrated how easy it was to crack a password, using simple “brute-force” (i.e., try a bunch of passwords until you find the one that works) methods.  Along the way, I told stories about the Cold War and discussed a bit about human nature and how this impacts our ability to choose good passwords.  This clearly piqued the interest of the students, and we had an interesting in-class discussion.  But I knew the topic was a winner when I received an email from a student linking to an article about bad passwords, covering the same ideas we’d discussed in class!

Perhaps the biggest success indicator, though, is when students continue to send me links to related stories even after the class has ended.  Last term, my students in my upper-level elective sent me news links faster than I could keep up with them, and a subset of students continues to send me news links related to the course, well after the course has ended.  I still occasionally get a link to a news story from someone who took my computer security elective last spring, too.  I like that my students are continuing to think about the course concepts  after the course has ended, and that they are using their critical thinking skills to evaluate outside sources.  (One student who sent me a link even critiqued the technical content of the story for me!)

One of the ways in which I’d like to improve as a professor, post-tenure, is to improve my story-telling.  I’d like to come up with a wider repetoire of stories to intersperse into class meetings.  I’d like to make sure that the examples I’m using are compelling, interesting, and challenging.  I’d like, when all is said and done, to keep that news article frequency high.

A (belated) anniversary, of sorts

With all the excitement and busyness that was December, I missed an anniversary:  the 10-year anniversary of earning my PhD.

Wow.  Was it really 10 *years* ago?  Seriously?

It’s funny, because some days I feel as green as a new PhD.  It’s sometimes hard to picture myself, or take myself seriously, as someone who Has Experience, who Knows Her Stuff, who is a Real Professional.  I sometimes feel like that grad student who doesn’t know anything, who needs guidance, and who’s the least experienced in any group.  (Um, impostor syndrome, anyone?)  Maybe this is because I went straight from grad school to a post-doc in a different subfield, so not only was I the most junior person by far, I was also the most inexperienced, at least in that subfield.  And then I went from there to an academic position, and again to being the most junior and most inexperienced person in my department.  Our self-perceptions die hard, apparently.

A lot changed in those 10 years.

When I graduated, I was not very confident in my own abilities.  I was a decent researcher, but not very good at publishing, or publicizing, my work.  I was good at finding interesting problems, but not very good at figuring out how to narrow those problems down—and I didn’t have a strong clue as to the type of problems I wanted to work on.

Now?  I am solo-authoring papers (and if all goes according to plan, I might have a solo-authored journal paper later this year) as well as publishing *with students*, and running *my own lab*.  I keep finding interesting and innovative problems to solve.  I’m mentoring people.  I’m teaching classes in subjects I formerly knew next to nothing about (like Computer Security).  I now feel like I Know Stuff (although I also more keenly realize how much I do not know!) and that perhaps I might have accidentally become a Real Professional.  And oddly, other people seem to think that I Know Stuff too, and apparently that I know what I’m doing/talking about.

So maybe I’ll celebrate by breaking out the old dissertation and giving it a read-through (hopefully without too much cringing).  Or maybe I’ll get in touch with my dissertation advisor and express my appreciation for his guidance (although I’m not sure how much he’ll like being reminded of it—if it’s making me feel old*, it will probably make him feel ancient ).  But I will enjoy the sense of accomplishment that the last 10 years have ultimately brought.

* Case in point:  some of the applicants for our job opening started college *after* I finished my PhD.  How’s that for making one feel old?

My Moodle wish list

Here at Carleton, we use Moodle as our course management system.  It’s open-source software, and it does a lot of things really nicely.  And yet, I am a power-user of Moodle, and a computer scientist, and so of course I’m going to be critical of a lot of Moodle things, from functionality to interface.  This is front and center in my mind today, because I spent a few hours last night fighting with Moodle creating labs and assignments and posting them on Moodle, am spending a chunk of my time today on Moodle posting course content and whipping the course calendar into shape, and spent a bit of time last week hearing some student complaints about Moodle.

There are a number of things that I wish Moodle would do, or would do better, that it doesn’t currently do, and it strikes me that at least some of these would not be that hard to implement individually:

1. Show all calendars associated with a user under a single view. If I’m teaching more than one class, Moodle does not provide me with a way to see both class calendars.  (You can see both calendars from Zimbra, our mail/calendaring system, but it would be nice to log in to Moodle and see everything that’s posted to any of my Moodle calendars.)  So when I’m figuring out due dates for assignments, or test dates, I’m constantly switching back and forth between my course pages.  More importantly, there are some events that are common to both courses:  office hours, for instance.  I have to post office hours, or dates I’m going to be out of town, or whatever, separately for each course on each separate course calendar.  I should be able to specify that a calendar event should apply to all courses for which I am an instructor.  Similarly, students should be able to log in to Moodle and see all of their due dates, etc. in one place—from what I understand, they currently also have to go to each course individually to see this information.
2. Better HTML editing. I use the Assignment module for lots of things:  HW, labs, other in-class activities.  I also like to post other course content as web pages as well, to give me more control over layout and formatting.  The HTML editing in Moodle, frankly, sucks.  It does weird things with tags—even if I manually edit the tags, it will sometimes decide that it knows better than I do and change the tags!  More annoyingly, the editing window is maybe 5 lines tall.  Now, I’m a very visual person, and when I’m creating a document, I need to see as much of the layout as possible—it helps me organize my thoughts.  I’ve now resorted to composing my content in a text editor, manually adding the tags, and then posting the content into Moodle’s HTML editor.  (Which then tries to change my tags! So I end up re-editing my content after putting it in Moodle anyway.)  It would be lovely if the HTML editing window, at the very least, could be expandable.
3. Have default font size as a course-wide setting. Moodle’s default font size is stupidly tiny.  I like it bigger.  I can’t set a default font size for the course—I have to change the font size for every element.  And if I go back and edit something I’ve already posted?  Moodle sets the font size back to “stupidly tiny”—which means some of my postings go from normal font to smaller font and back again.
4. Retain layout preferences across courses. I’ve used pretty much the same layout for every Moodle page since the beginning.  I figured out a layout I like that makes sense for me.  I should be able, when I import a previous course, to retain that course’s layout.  Nope!  I have to reinvent the wheel for every. single. course.  Alternately, I should be able to create and save a layout template and use that for any course.  Nope, can’t do that either.
5. Be smarter about importing content from a previous course. Let’s say that I import a previous course—say, last spring’s Intro—into my current course.  I want to reuse, say, all of my labs.  I can do that.  BUT.  If any of those labs have links to course files, those links get hosed in the import.  Which means I have to go in, find all the links to course files, and change each link.  Now, I have a lot of course files:  sample programs, images, graphics, documentation, etc.  This means I spend a lot of my time hunting down and updating links.  And really, the only part of the link that changes is the course number!  Why the import process does not take the simple step of changing the course numbers in file links (which is a simple global search-and-replace operation) is a mystery to me.
6. Inconsistency within modules. The Assignment module, for instance, has four different types of assignments (upload a single file, upload multiple files, offline activity, online text).  One of them—upload multiple files—has the really great feature that you can post the assignment, but have the actual text hidden until a certain date.  This way, the students can see that, for instance, in Week 3 they will be doing a code-breaking assignment, and that the assignment is due that Friday before class, but they won’t be able to see the rest of the assigment until the end of Week 2, after we cover the necessary material.  Neat, right?  Except the other three types don’t allow this option.  This makes absolutely no sense to me at all.  Sometimes I will use the assignment module for in-class activities where the students don’t have to hand anything in, but if I don’t want the page to “go live” until classtime, I have to use the “upload multiple files” assignment type.  I then have to field all sorts of questions and confusion about “what do we have to hand in?”, because Moodle includes an upload link at the end of the assignment.  Grrr.  If all four types are part of the same module, they should exhibit the same behavior.  This is Bad Programming 101.  And don’t get me started on the god-awful Lesson module….

Moodle should make my life easier, not harder.  I do appreciate what it allows me to do—post course content without having to fashion an entire course web page on my own, include RSS feeds from other sources, have one central location for grades and hand-ins and such—but I feel that sometimes it is more lacking for power users than for beginners.  Good software should accomodate beginners, advanced beginners, power users, and experts equally well, and in this sense Moodle fails.

Theme for 2010: “Defining”

Around these parts, we don’t do new year’s resolutions—we do new year’s themes.  A new year’s theme is kind of like a guiding principle for the year.  A theme allows for reflection, for more thoughtful goal-setting, and hopefully for more meaningful day-to-day decisions.

I’ve been doing this for a few years now, with varying levels of success.  In previous years, the idea for the year’s theme came easily to me.  This year, I struggled a bit to come up with just the right theme.

In reflecting on what I want 2010 to be for me, it struck me that I’ve spent my entire career, from grad school until now, jumping through other people’s hoops.  My entire career has been defined by others, whether that’s when to defend (grad school), what to publish (grad school and postdoc), what topics to work on (postdoc), what to do in the classroom (current job), how to partition my time (current job), etc.  This job offers a lot of freedom, but pre-tenure, I had to think very carefully about everything I did.  I took risks in the classroom, but not to the extent that I would have liked—because I needed great teaching evaluations.  I did not take as many risks in my research, because I needed publications.  I didn’t always speak up when I wanted to, because I couldn’t risk pissing off my colleagues.  External forces defined how I did every aspect of my job.

Now that I’ve been recommended for tenure, I get to set my own rules.  I get to define my own hoops.  I get to determine what risks I want to take, where I want to spend my time (within reason!), how I want to teach my classes, where I want my research to go.  I’ve never had this luxury before!

So with that in mind, my theme for 2010 is DEFINING.  This year will be all about defining what I want my career to look like, what my priorities are (in teaching, in research, and in service), and where I want to concentrate my energies.  I know that tenure will bring new opportunities and new responsibilities, so I want to make sure I’m ready to make smart decisions about what I take on.  I also want to make sure that I define smart boundaries between my work life and my personal life, so that I make time for all of the important things and people in my life too.

What’s your theme for this year?

9 (career) lessons I’ve learned in 2009

9.  If you’re offering a brand-new course in a somewhat new-to-you subject, you might want to consider using a textbook.  Even if all the existing textbooks suck, something is better than nothing.

8.  When traveling to a conference where you are giving a talk or two, do not forget the video adapter for your Mac.  Alternately, make sure you check your PDF before you give your talk to make sure that all of the slides converted properly.

7.  Never underestimate the power of a well-designed rubric.

6.  Nothing will ever be perfect.  Get it to “good enough” and get it out the door, pronto!

5.  The things (tasks, confrontations, responsibilities) that cause you the most discomfort also provide the greatest areas for growth.  Discomfort can beget opportunity.

4.  Talk to everyone at conferences.  You never know where your next collaboration, or collaborator, or great idea, may come from.

3.  Asking for help is not a sign of weakness—rather, it’s a sign of strength and self-awareness.

2.  If you’re working on a big initiative with someone you don’t know very well, sit down and lay out expectations, responsibilities, etc. clearly and concretely before you begin.  Make sure everyone’s working with the same information and assumptions before moving forward.

1. Being authentically yourself, and true to what you believe, may not always be comfortable or easy, but will lead you to a place of success and peace.

What lessons have you learned this year?

How much does environment affect women’s sense of belonging in CS?

That’s the question asked by Sapna Cheryan, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington.  Sapna uses Second Life to set up virtual classroom spaces:  one a stereotypical CS classroom, with Star Trek posters and computer parts and soda cans strewn about; and one a more neutral space, with art posters, plants, a desk lamp, etc.  She then has subjects navigate through these virtual spaces and asks them questions about how likely they were to take a CS class in one or the other space, as well as their general attitudes about CS.

Cheryan’s results show that environment does have a big impact on women’s feelings about studying CS.  According to the article,

Girls in the study consistently rated themselves less interested, less capable and less similar to the inhabitants of the “geek room” than the neutral room.But what if it had nothing to do with the objects, Cheryan asked? What if they just thought all CS majors were boys? She did the study again, this time asking students to imagine they were joining an all-female team at a company. The only difference between the two teams was the objects in their office. Girls flocked to the non-geeky job.

Every time they changed the study, the results were the same: Most women avoided the geek space. When prompted, many said it gave them a masculine vibe. The more masculine they found the room, the less they liked it.

“The extent to which women don’t like that room was pretty surprising,” Cheryan says. “No matter what we do to that room, even if we make it all female, women just don’t feel like they belong there.”

There are some interesting quotes at the end of the article, too, from some women computer scientists, who blanch at the idea of “neutralizing” the geeky CS image—the women quoted clearly and comfortably associate themselves with the geek image, and feel a bit threatened by the idea of changing this image.

This article was very interesting to me, as someone who has never felt like she fit in with the culture of engineering or computer science.  There are subtle cues in any environment, not just from the people but from the objects, the conversation topics, etc.  When I think about culture in CS issues, though, I tend to concentrate on the people, the conversations, the interactions.  I wonder what our CS spaces are saying about us?  What our classrooms and labs say about us?  We are currently in the midst of redesigning our student lounge, which had become totally unusable and unwelcoming—-for many of the reasons this article points out (well, no Star Trek posters, but computer junk everywhere).  I’d love to see if any of the suggestions from these studies would actually make a difference to the students…and if a simple thing like redecorating our lounge could change the message we’re sending about what CS is all about?

“Time off” for academics

It starts up about this time of year:  well-meaning friends, relatives, strangers off the street, acquaintances, etc. say to me some variation of, “Well!  Aren’t you glad that classes are over for the term?  So what are you going to do with all that time off?“

Indeed.  What am I doing in my five weeks “off”?

• Majorly revamping my intro course.  I’m moving from the traditional topic-based approach (strings, loops, conditionals, functions, classes, etc) to a case-study approach (cryptography, image processing, data mining).  Which means I have to rewrite all of my in-class activities, lectures, and quizzes, and I have to write an entirely new set of assignments and labs.  I’m very excited about this, but it requires a ton of work.
• Writing 25 letters of recommendation.  Sure, a lot of those are for the same students, but each school wants something a little different, and/or has their own online form that asks slightly different questions, etc.  So even once I have the letters written, it will still take some time to tweak/submit them for each school.
• Revising and resubmitting a journal article.  This is the second round of revisions, and in the grand scheme of things the revisions are minor (no new experiments or analysis, just argument reframing), but it will take some careful thinking and phrasing to get it right if I want it to come back as an “accept” next time.  Plus, there’s the letter to the editor that needs to be drafted, and those take some time too.
• Miscellaneous computer stuff.  I need to move my research repositories from CVS to Subversion, install Subversion on my laptop, and upgrade my laptop to 10.6 from 10.4 so that I can create podcasts for my classes on my laptop, and not have to wait until I’m in my office.
• Strategic research planning.  I’ll be hiring a new batch of students in the winter.  I need to figure out what they’ll be working on, and figure out how to get them up to speed quickly on the project.  I’ll be running a new round of experiments in the winter (hopefully) too, which means we might will  have to update the measurement tool, and think carefully about recruiting subjects, and set up the testbed, and do a million other little things to make sure things go off without a hitch.  Plus I am going to start hiring summer researchers in January, and I need to think carefully about what I want them to do this summer.  Oh, and there are a zillion follow-up things to the real-time stream quality prediction paper I presented last week that I need to get moving on, because we’ll need something beyond preliminary results in order to move forward!
• Trying not to contemplate the fact that at this very moment, a committee of my colleagues is determining whether I will have job security for life, or whether I will be out on the streets (metaphorically) come June.  Yeah, that’s not stressful at all….
• Co-organizing a regional women in computing conference.  In October, when my co-organizer and I were discussing dates, we thought a mid-February date would give us plenty of time to get everything done.  Ha.  Ha ha ha ha ha.  February is way too soon, people!  I need to have a program ready by, well, yesterday.  Plus I need to be stalking confirming our potential keynote speakers, setting deadlines for posters and session proposals, and doing a number of small detail-y things.

And this is in addition to all of the December holiday-stuff too.

So yes, in a sense I am “off”, but just from the day-to-day teaching.  And I’m not writing this from a woe-is-me-I’m-so-overworked perspective (although I am, and you should feel free to send me chocolate.  Or wine.  Or both.).  But I think it’s important that we keep shining the light on what we academics do, day-to-day, so that non-academics understand that being a professor does not mean we “only” work the number of hours a week that we are physically in the classroom, and that while this is a very rewarding job, it does not come without costs or stress.

What’s new in the lab

Fall has traditionally been my toughest term.  It’s the term I traditionally teach an overload (of sorts), so I don’t usually have any students working for me, and research is done in bits and snatches whenever I get 20-30 minutes of free time (such as, er, during faculty meetings).  That said, research is Still Happening, even if some weeks it’s only happening in my head or as a wistful item on my to-do list.

The big lab news is that I am presenting 2 papers next month at a conference and co-located workshop (QShine and AAA-IDEA, respectively).  This is exciting because both papers represent major steps forward in the research agenda of the lab.

The QShine paper is something that came from the work of 2 students in the summer of 2008.  (The students are co-authors on the paper, too.)  It is a major proof-of-concept of something that our lab has been speculating about and alluding to for, oh, maybe 4-5 years now:  is real-time prediction of streaming video quality possible?  The students’ work demonstrated that it may in fact be possible, because we can get a pretty accurate idea of video quality from pretty small portions of the video stream (10 seconds).  So these results, while preliminary, are pretty significant for our lab.

The AAA-IDEA paper is interesting because it is my first invited paper (yay!), and because it represents a full-circle point for me.  Back in 2002-2003, while I was still at HP Labs, I wrote a paper discussing a proposed architecture for a streaming video quality assessment system.  This paper became the basis for my subsequent research work.  In the position paper, I revisit my design decisions and comment on what I got right and what I had to amend.  It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to think deeply about architectural issues, and the act of writing the paper rekindled my interest in some long-abandoned research questions.  I’m thinking I’m going to get back to some of these big-picture, system questions as a regular part of my research agenda.

Looking ahead to Winter term, I’m planning on a new round of user experiments for another conference paper, possibly a journal article too.  I may also hire one or more students work specifically on the real-time stuff.  And I’m thinking ahead to summer and possible projects for our new CBL fellows, as well as trying to figure out how many students I can and want to support in my lab  next summer.

The end of an (Internet) era

Tomorrow, Yahoo! is shutting down GeoCities.  This move is a bit unusual, in that Yahoo is not just taking GeoCities offline, but deleting it altogether.  And thus, it is taking a large part of early web history with it.

GeoCities was the first true consumer-friendly and free web-hosting service, at a time when web hosting was pricey enough to lock out hobbyists and others who just wanted to experiment with HTML programming.  GeoCities pages were often popularly maligned for their amateurish design (example: the infamous hamster dance).  And GeoCities was confusingly organized, around a model of content “cities” which hosted pages on different topics (such as “Hollywood” for fan/celebrity pages).  But because GeoCities was free to all, it holds a rich history of the early Internet—not all of which is archived in other places.  And, it is still the 198th most popularly-visited domain, according to Alexa.

GeoCities’ passing is troubling, because it points to the ephemeral nature of web content.  With so much of our lives online, we really are dependent on the companies that host our data—in a sense, it makes it much easier to rewrite history.  Luckily, there are a few efforts to save as much of the GeoCities domain content before everything goes away tomorrow—one by the Internet Archive (home of the Wayback Machine), and one by Jason Scott.  It remains to be seen how much will ultimately be saved, but it sounds like both groups have been working very hard to get as much archived as possible, and thus preserve a bit of Internet history.

RIP, GeoCities.

Tenure limbo

There are some things that one expects about the tenure process:  the deadlines set by the dean’s office, the format of the prospectus and the student letters, the general flow of events, etc.  And then there are the many things that don’t come to light until one is going through the tenure process.

Nobody warned me about “limbo time”.

My dossier was handed in a month ago, and earlier this week I got the call that my student and external reviewer letters are in and ready to be read.  I made appointments to read the letters, and to meet with the dean to discuss the letters, for next week.  I finally get to see the letters on Tuesday afternoon, for the first time.  Since then, I’ve felt very much….detached, for lack of a better word.  In a sense, like a dead man walking, or maybe a living ghost?

I’m guessing this is because right now, my future truly is in limbo.  I don’t know what those letters say, but I do know that they will have a huge impact on what happens between now and December.  I also know that next Friday, when I meet with the dean, will be my last chance to have any say in my tenure case.  But I can’t actually do anything at this point: all I can do is wait, wait, and wait some more.

Campus life, and real life, of course, go on, and I go on with them.  But I really do feel detached.  I discuss future plans with my colleagues, about hiring and what we all want to teach next year and what I might want to do on my next sabbatical.  I go about my committee work, plan my classes, think about textbooks for next term.  But in the back of my mind, I’m wondering if I even have a future here.  I think and discuss and do all of these things almost in the third person, because I can’t really commit myself to them unless and until I know whether my future lies here.  And it’s not that it’s scary, it’s just….weird.

I don’t know if limbo will go away even after I see the letters, or if it will just persist until the final decision comes down.  I suspect there will be different shades of limbo between now and then.  But I do know one thing:  I really dislike being in limbo.