Ceaseless Student

OK.

Here’s my website that I was super-excited about: OlinDocs.

This website is for archiving documents made at Olin in a way that’s easy-to-find. The goal is to have an answer to “Remember that expo poster someone made? I think it was about chaos and music or something…”

So you head over to OlinDocs and you type Expo into the search box, you go to refine and type chaos and you’re good to go. Hot.

So. Obviously I need to get some more documents. Right now it’s Meta plus anything I had handy (read new b/c the rest is on my external at Olin and I’m not for the next two weeks) that was worthwhile. If any of you have stuff that you’d like me to put up, send an email to boris@students. I need two things for document submissions.

1-The document
2-Some meta-info

I’d like the meta-info in a file titled db_params.txt it should follow this example:

Class Name
Semester (eg s07 or f06)
Teacher Names (First Last, First Last)
Author Names (First Last, First Last)

Awesome. I hacked together some neat python scripts to put a database together for me, so it’s fairly painless (I’ll probably post about this and the other mechanics of the site later). Oh yeah. If you’re sending in any group documents, could you please run it by the other people first? Sweet.

Edit: If any of the meta-info doesn’t make sense for your document (eg it wasn’t for any classes), just put it down as - (a dash) and include a note in your e-mail. Thanks!

Oh man. So excited.

Make me happy. Send me stuff. Expo stuff, final deliverables, Capstones, OSS papers… I’m waiting for cool stuff. I might even make the mistake of reading through far more of it than is healthy. Anyways. I’m gonna stop ranting. Sooo excited.

Here’s a sneak peek of my expo presentation for tomorrow. It’s about gaining insight into pedagogy by using an analogy to communications.

The general gist is that teachers are considered transmitters and students are considered receivers. In between, you have a lossy channel. That should make the first three pics make sense… at least a little bit.
The last slide is from our implementation of the model for simulation purposes. The waveforms on the right are the filters that the students/receivers use to decode/understand the information sent/taught by the transmitter/teacher. The transmitter/teacher is represented by a big q-mark because it/(he/she) is attempting to use the best possible filter/(pedagogical method) to encode the data.

Interestingly, best can be defined in a multitude of ways. Two examples of possible goals I’ll talk about in my presentation tomorrow are (minimizing the total data loss rate)/(maximizing the class’ total learning) and (minimizing the maximum individual receiver data loss rate)/(maximizing the minimum learned by any student).

G’luck parsing those sentences.

Time for bed and then expo.

*Exhales*

I’m done with SigSys. I’m done with everything but Meta actually. I ended up really liking my SigSys end-game. I wrote a sweet paper. It’s 6 pages long, but highly skimmable. Read the intro to the analogy if you’re going to read any of it. It’s about a model of the classroom that implements communications ideas. The goal is to be able to better understand pedagogy by linking it to something that is already pretty well-understood.

Man. I really like that paper.

Moving on to things I don’t like: stupid people. What the hell. I just don’t understand what these people were thinking. This article is about a Vegan couple that’s being tried for involuntary manslaughter for the death of their baby who was kept on a diet of soy milk and organic apple juice. Things like this make me so angry. How can they call this involuntary? Ignorance isn’t supposed to be protective. As parents they had a duty to know what their child needed. They consciously and purposefully failed to do what they should’ve done. Arguably they didn’t know better, but it was their responsibility to know better. People are frustrating.

I’m really quite good at this whole procrastinating thing. Instead of any work today, I’ve been all sorts of other things. I’ve played lots of Magic and Smash, eaten like 5 snacks, watched TV, and, of course, wasted as much time as is easily feasible on the internet. Part of what I worked on was my internet image.

Lifehacker had an article on the googleability of one’s name. Mine returns 50 hits (w/o quotes); the first 22 are me. I love my name. I claimed my blog on Technorati, pinged some sites using Pingoat, and set up an account to get site statistics for my blog at StatCounter.

I’d wasted a couple of hours pretty well, but I wasn’t done. No ladies and gents. I searched for every variant of my name imaginable. “I wonder how well do I show up with just my last name?” etc. Oh man. I was there forever. Also (for any hippies out ther) I came across an environmentally-friendlier version of Google called Blackle. The idea is that people save energy by reducing their monitor’s energy output. Cute huh?

I ended up finding out that some dude with my last name (Stefan Dieseldorff) was on IMDB. He evidently produced a 60 minute film called Kreator: Hallucinative Comas. It doesn’t seem like that movie was well-received. Actually, it barely seems like the movie was received at all.

Anyhow, Technorati alerted me to the fact that my blog had been linked to by a sneaky member of the Olin community who’s blog is not on PlanetOlin. Speaking of PlanetOlin and other rss readers, I doubt my blog counter will end up getting anyone other than me… oh well.

And now folks, I leave you to do some work. Before I go to sleep I will have finished Signals & Systems work. This means that, after my final at noon, I will only have one class left. Meta. Oh Meta. History paper. Communication paper. Final deliverable. Presentation. I might be missing something? *sigh* I feel sadly unmotivated… Time to get to work. I’ll do The SigSys project writeup. That seems awesome still. I’ll problably be posting something about that either soonish or around expo time.

People are so predictable. It was a normal evening. All of a sudden people realize that the water’s out. Oh noes. What now? Well… people start to feel exceptionally thirsty. People actually became thirsty because there was no water to be had. It’s pretty weird to think that thirst is caused by both how hydrated you are and your body’s best prediction of future hydration. It makes perfect sense and is an obvious survival tool, but it still seems silly. That being said, I noticed that people were reacting in that silly way, but it didn’t keep me from doing the same. Oh well.

Oh man. The end is near. One more circuits postlab. One UOCD design review. One FBE presentation and one FBE video. For sigsys: a short writeup of our project and one homework assignment. And for Meta… Well OK. Maybe the end isn’t so close there, but that’ll get done too.

Wow. I have a lot of work to do. I just finished taking data for a circuits lab (2 hours starting at 2 AM). Now I think I’ll go do some Meta. Soooo much work. Most of it’s Meta in a variety of incarnations, butt he other subjects are pinging me pretty good too.

Today I learned a little bit about how misunderstandings make people angry. So for our communications paper in Meta, I’m doing the organizing. A few days ago, I sent out the general structure of the paper and assigned work to the four other people working on this in pairs. Now here’s the fun part. A and B are working together; C and D are working together. A thinks my structure is one thing, but C thinks it’s something else. Both groups get some sort of a start and then realize… well it’s not going to work. The paper will not work if the pairs are doing things with a different structure (they’re both doing case studies). So I met with A and C. We talked. And talked. And eventually we reached some manner of compromise.

Then I had a standard rice party and, unfortunately, all of Meta came. I say unfortunately only because of the way things played out. Neither A nor C had talked to their partners since they’d reached a compromise. So, when the topic came up, B and D had different views on the structure of the paper. Things got a little bit heated and the rest of Meta was sort of firefighting. It was good times.

The moral: discuss things. An e-mail can (evidently) be interpreted in different ways. Discussion allows for feedback and we all know that feedback is good.

(Random quip about miscommunication in the communications module; teehee)

In other news, I think I’ll be moving my blog to Wordpress soonish. The rss feed from Wordpress doesn’t butcher my formatting… yummy.

I read through a lot of Honor Board minutes from the bygone days to the current days. I seriously question how much things have changed. It seems that Olin has always been moved by a small subset of the population. It also seems that our conversations today are just like the ones they had 6 years ago on the board. Sad… I’ll write more on this once I have a more cohesive view on things…

In other news, Mel put up a post kinda in response to a post I made! My name is in the first sentence! w00t! …The idea of an epic intra-Olin flame war in the blogosphere has been floated…
Also random: I’m gonna stop with the [Alt+Shift] tag.

Early post? Yup indeed. I’m going to be driving go karts and shooting peeps with lazers later tonight and so yeah. Early.

Let’s start with numbers. These all come from Promoting Active Learning by Meyers and Jones.

-While teachers are lecturing students aren’t attending to what’s being said 40% of the time.
-In the first 10 minutes, students retain 70% of the info
-In the last 10 minutes, students retain 20% of the info

Well damn. That sucks. So what do we do? Mix it up.

I was talking to Mel and she’s an extremist on this one. She thinks ‘unschooling’ might be effective. The premise [Alt + Shift] is that people are far better at learning things that they find interesting. Unschooling takes this to the extreme sand says “OK, we’ll have some resources, but you figure out what you want to learn and how. Then do it.” That’s really intense. The idea sounds wonderful, but I’m more than a little skeptical about the pragmatic side of this sort of thing. How many people are truly motivated enough to push themselves hard? As hard as school pushes them? I think I could do it. But I’m not completely sure. And I tend to think highly of me in this regard. Learning on your own is hard. It’s also often unbalanced. I think I might spend a disproportionate amount of time lifehacking and stuff or playing Smash. Oh wait. I do. All right so that’s not the issue. The real question is one of content. Are certain topics really crucial to have mastered at a certain point in time? If they are, unschooling does not seem like the way to go.

That all being said, I guess this is my goal for the summer. I’m sure I’ll whine about it when I’m in the middle of it. I have a lot I want to learn. By myself. Because I’m excited. I hope it works. /me crosses fingers

Interesting note about teachers paying attention. Evidently, teachers tend to neglect their dominant hand’s side of the room. So if you want to be the center of the teachers attention, front and non-dominant or front and center are fine. But be wary of the front with weak hand.
Stikkits seem promising; I’m starting by using them to replace del.icio.us among other things…

Alt + Shift

So the other day Meta watched a movie called “A Private Universe.” We also watched some other video, but I forget what that one was named. Anyhow, the movies were all about how traditional teaching methods fail. The movie was the result of an NSF study and was really quite striking. For example, they asked 23 Harvard students, alumni, and professors “What causes the seasons?”

Two of them got it right. Two. That’s so sad. Most people cited the elliptical orbit of the earth and claimed that winter was when the earth was farther from the sun. I’d bet anything that every single one of these people knew that the southern hemisphere has summer when we have winter, but they never caught that fallacy. The most interesting part was their theory on how these people arrived at this misconception: The people doing the study proposed that the way textbooks diagram the seasons is what causes the misconception. In order to show the tilt of the earth, textbooks regularly show the diagram from an angle. This perspective drawing makes the orbit of the earth seem very elliptical when in fact it’s just barely shy of being circular.

There were other examples including questions about what causes the phases of the moon and whether or not sight depended on the presence of light. My other favorite one was one about lighting a bulb using a battery and a wire. The interesting part was where all of the people were sure they could do it. And then they couldn’t. Teehee.

A quote from a friend: “Think about the median person in America. Now think about how 50% of the people are dumber than that.”

So I got a few responses to my little rant. Just to emphasize apathy at Olin, I got to see all of 16 people go to my class election assembly. Sad. Truly sad. Only about a third of our school votes in the Honor Board. Oh so sad. What do we really expect out of a representative government like our nation purports to have when we don’t even vote in a situation where our vote does matter. It matters very visibly. btw - about half of voting-age Americans vote in presidential elections. That’s not that much, but at least it’s more than our tight-knit community can muster.

Not to worry. I still love Olin. I understand people are really really busy. In fact I accounted for 16 people at class elections and about half of that again had good excuses. And I wasn’t really asking around or anything. Yay busyness, yay overload, yay Olin! (yay burnout??)

As part of my MetaOlin IS, I’m reading through all of the honor board minutes I can get my hands on. The first step was easy; most of the minutes were easy to find on a network drive. That being said they were all organized at different times by different people and even in different formats.

The different formats were easily the most annoying.

Since word documents are slow to load, mutable and otherwise annoying I decided to make everything a pdf. I started out by using PrimoPDF to print to pdfs; however, Zamzar was a much faster solution. This site lets you upload files and then it converts them to another format; super-chouette! Changing names in batches is much easier with 1-4a Rename.

Also, Foxit Reader is much faster than adobe acrobat reader.

So I’ve had this conversation a number of times. The basic premise is that everyone at Olin has to swear loyalty to someone in the class directly above them. The question is: which senior has the biggest kingdom? Please speculate in the comments.

Alt + Shift