July 2022

Editorial

Dear 

If there's a blank space after the "Dear" above it means you haven't subscribed. Why not??

I thought that as we're all pretty tired and, if you live in the UK, fried, boiled, steamed and every other kind of heated up because of the recent heatwave, you might like a break from edtech. Therefore, some of the books suggested below aren't directly edtech related. 

In case this will be a profound disappointment to you I have also tried to relate the books to edtech anyway, and I've cited a few resources you might like to explore while you're loafing around on a beach somewhere.

Enjoy!

By the way, although you will agree that I am amazingly erudite, eloquent, articulate and modest, you may be interested to learn that this is what the original editorial looked like before my proofreader suggested I replace the placeholder text:

Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio. Nam libero tempore, cum soluta nobis est eligendi optio cumque nihil impedit quo minus id quod maxime possimus, omnis voluptas.

Please don't email to say that's the most articulate and profound thing I've ever written, even though it's true!

All the best

Terry

Westminster Forum conference on Computing education

First impressions

As the heading above may suggest, I have not yet finished reading and making notes on the transcript of this conference, which was kindly sent to me by the organisers.

A few things strike me though.

Firstly, the organisation clearly uses an automated speech-to-text application, which nobody checks. Thus as well as the occasional spelling error we are treated to all the verbal ticks that speakers have. I'm not complaining, merely pointing out that no matter how good the software you use for speech-to-text, it isn't enough to obviate the need for a human being to proofread it and tidy it up. At least, not yet.

It seems to me that a transcript full of verbal ticks is fine because all the reader wants is to get the gist of what people are saying without having to do too much deciphering and interpreting. But if you are thinking of preparing a bid for money, a report on computing in your school, or an article for a newsletter, I would humbly suggest that you do not completely rely on an algorithm.

Turning to the contents of the report, I've picked up on two things so far. The first is the depressingly long-standing question of making Computing interesting for girls. Drawing on the recent Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education) report on Computing in schools, it was acknowledged that one of the things thrown out with the old ICT Programme of Study was the attractiveness of the subject to girls. 

There's nothing new in this. Many people predicted it even before the new Programme of Study came into force. I wrote about it in It Wasn’t Me Wot Done It, Sir! The Depressing State Of Computing As A Subject

A possible solution, and one that I have not only favoured but found to work in the past, is to devise a problem-based approach, where the problems are (a) interesting, and (b) lend themselves to collaborative effort. The subject is still seen as geeky and something that only boys are likely to find interesting. This is quite a challenge, because in my opinion the Programme of Study itself is intrinsically geeky and, frankly, boring unless you're in the right frame of mind. I've always thought that ICT or something like it should have been retained, rather than forcing students to choose Computing or something else entirely. Oh, and just for the record, I'm as geeky as the next person. I spent a few hours this morning messing about with command line instructions, and in my youth a girl friend (ie a friend who was a girl) and I stayed up till 2am figuring out DOS commands. 

Anyway, the second problem that was discussed is what to do about the fact that when students enter secondary school some of them can't even use a keyboard. Well, the way I dealt with this issue was as follows:

I sent an email to my counterparts in all of the local feeder primary schools outlining what we would be covering in the first term of the first year, along with the skills I expected the students to have when they arrived. In case that gave some people the fright of their lives, I also offered to run 'catch-up' classes for those primary school pupils who were going to be joining my school (with their teacher in attendance, of course). That worked very well.

With a bit of luck, if the current heatwave has not completely fried my brains, I'll have more to say about this conference after the summer break.

In the meantime, you may wish to read Miles Berry's views on the current state of Computing education and what might be done to rescue it. I do not disagree with his suggestion.

THE BATSFORD BOOK OF CHESS FOR CHILDREN NEW EDITION

Check, mate

Strangely enough, I had never really considered how learning chess might help kids learn programming, until I received an email from a nice person at Batsford asking if I'd like to review this new book. She wrote:

"Of course, it’s not strictly an IT book. But I thought since computer chess is very big, perhaps it could of interest?"

Definitely, not just because computer chess is of interest (and ties in with looking at machine learning and AI), but it strikes me that the game of chess involves holding several possibilities (variables) in your head at once, predicting how various moves are likely to play out, and remembering what each piece is allowed to do and not allowed to do.

It's a bit 'out there', but then so is my inclination to use cryptic crosswords as a way of getting people to think in a different way in the context of computing. By the way, did you know that 'schoolmasters' is an anagram of 'the classrooms'? Well you do now!

I look forward to reviewing the chess book in due course. In the meantime, check it out by clicking on the picture of the cover.

OuLiPo and the Mathematics of Literature

Totally tantalising, this tome

The Oulipo is a writing movement that uses constraints to produce ‘potential literature’. (Oulipo is an acronym in French: Workshop of Potential Literature.) It was co-founded by Raymond Queneau, who created 100,000 billion sonnets. It’s been estimated that if you were to read one a minute for 24 hours a day it would take you around 200 million years to get through them all. 

If you’re wondering what any of this has to do with computing, consider the following:

• Queneau created his massive sonnet collection by writing 10, but cutting up the pages in such a way that line 2 of the first poem, say, could be replaced by line 2 of the eighth poem. Some people have reproduced this using computer programming. See the picture below to see what I mean. It is taken from the Penguin Book of Oulipo.
• On the subject of programming, there is a group of programming languages known as ‘esoteric languages’, or ‘esolangs’. These are languages that have been developed for experimentation, not to do anything useful. That experimental focus seems very Oulipian to me.
• Going back to to the poems, I haven’t tried to re-create that idea. However, I did have some fun creating a spreadsheet to mash up proverbs. This is another Oulipian approach, the results of which are called ‘preverbs’. I wrote about preverbs here: Using preverbs to break writer's block.
• And, of course, generally speaking constraints can be very useful in computing.

In the recent course I ran, I was more concerned with writing and literature than programming so I won’t dwell on it here. (Should you be interested, I will be running an extended version of the course in June 2023 (5 hours). For more information go here: Writing the Oulipo.)

Having established my love of Oulipo, I should turn my attention to this book or, to be more accurate, monograph. Many of the early Oulipians, such as Queneau, were amateur mathematicians, so this book is not as unlikely as its title may suggest. Indeed, the more I read about the connections, or possible connections, between the Oulipo, the less inclined I am to accept completely Snow's description of the "two cultures".

Berkman has written an interesting and very academic examination of the links between maths and literature. As I have yet to finish reading the book, I am loth to comment any further for the time being. But, as the saying goes, watch this space.

Incidentally, or actually not that incidentally, the heading for this piece is an example of a tautogram. This is an Oulipian technique whereby every word begins with the same letter. Easy enough for a short heading, but try writing an intelligent-sounding paragraph!

Algorithms

Ok, if you insist

<Sigh> I am trying my best in this newsletter to steer you away from edtech and towards having a proper break. Yet you insist on bringing the focus back to computing. Well, how about this? Jeff Erickson has made his book on algorithms (the title is a bit of a giveaway) available for free. You can download it as a complete work, or as individual chapters. There is also a website to go with it.

I've had a quick look and it seems pretty good. It's the basis of of a university course, so it might be a bit too detailed for school use. Well worth digging around in it though I think. 

Click the cover to see the details.

Translating myself and others

What's the problem? Won't Google Translate sort it?

Last year I discovered Jhumpa Lahiri through a short story course. I loved her "The Third and Final Continent" which is in the New Penguin Book of American Short Stories. (If you live in the UK, and have a Kindle or Kindle app, you're in luck: the Kindle version of this book costs just £1.99.)

Lahiri has recently written a book called Translating Myself and Others, a book of literary essays. I've been sent a copy to review, and am greatly looking forward to reading it. I've already started it, and my initial impression is that it's a really interesting exploration of the issues involved in translating. It's not simply a matter of converting a word in one language to its equivalent in another (assuming there is an equivalent). It is usually more nuanced than that.

Although the book does not, as far as I know, touch on using Google Translate, this seems the right time to consider that. Why bother asking someone to translate anything, given that Google Translate will probably do a reasonable-ish job in a fraction of a second? I think the point about nuance provides the answer. Google Translate can't decide what the best word is in a given context to convey the mood of the piece. It's fine for getting the gist of a website or something like a restaurant menu, but otherwise it's a bit like using Roget's Thesaurus to find a synonym without knowing what the synonym you've chosen actually means or how to use it. I've come across some unintentionally humorous examples, such as someone stating that they like this "quite a great". Well, you can see what he meant, but it's not the point.

Back to "Translating...", the book is a series of essays, and is produced on beautiful quality paper. I shall report here more fully in due course. In the meantime, if you click on the cover of the book (above) you will be instantly transported to its page on the Princeton University Press website.

Still blogging

The writing doesn't stop

Even if I don't manage (or feel inclined) to write about edtech over the summer, I will still be writing about other things. That's my intention at least.

I'll be waxing lyrical about education in my What Now? newsletter. To obtain a flavour of my writing there, I've reproduced the most recent article here: 

Some Thoughts On Memory, And Especially 'Working Memory'

I also write about more general things, including books and articles I've read, and life in general, here:

Eclecticism

You don't have to subscribe to read most of the articles, and you don't even need a paid subscription to read most of them, so it may be a good place to go in order to escape from education and edtech for a bit!