Category Archives: Personal

Some thoughts on online training courses.

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I don’t know how it is where you are, but my summer “break” (such as it is) is rapidly winding down. Among other things, it means that I spent a few hours today in front of my computer completing online training courses.

I find myself of two minds (at least) on these courses.

On the one hand, many of these courses do a reasonable (or even excellent) job of conveying important information — broken down into modules that convey reasonably sized bites of content, enhanced with videos, case studies, and links to further information which one might bookmark for future reference. Indeed, the online training courses themselves can be accessed as a source of information later on, when one needs it.

It’s hard to beat the convenience of the online delivery of these courses. You start them when you’re ready to take them, and you can do a few modules of a course at a time, or pound through them all in one sitting. You don’t need to show up to a particular place for a particular interval of time, you don’t need to find a parking space, you don’t even need to change out of your pajamas.

Plus, many of these online training courses simplify record-keeping for whomever is responsible for ensuring that the folks who are supposed to take the course have actually taken it (and performed to the specified level on the accompanying quizzes) by emailing the completion reports to the designated official.

On the other hand … if you’re pounding through a 26-module course in one sitting (as I did today), you have to wonder a little about retention. Passing a quiz on a module immediately after you’ve read through that module may be do-able, but I’m less certain that it would be as easy to pass a month later. Indeed, if there had been a single big quiz after the 26 modules (rather than a quiz on each module that you take immediately after the module), I’m not sure I would have scored as well.

I imagine, too, that this mode of training is not necessarily beloved by people who have not made their peace with multiple choice tests. As well, for people who need to discuss material in order to understand it, the online delivery of modules may be a lot less effective than a live training with other participants.

What have your experiences with online training courses been? To you find them an adequate tool for the job, a poor fit for your learning style, or a big old waste of time?

Building a critical reasoning course: homework.

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I’m still working on planning that “Logic and Critical Reasoning” course I mentioned in an earlier post. As I noted there, the course is meant to give the students exposure to symbolic logic (looking at the forms of the arguments expressed with Ps and Qs, using rules of inference and truth-tables to evaluate the validity of those arguments, etc.), as well as to help them grapple with the arguments people make in natural language. While there’s clearly a connection between argumentation in the wild and formal arguments, students frequently need some time to get used to the Ps and Qs and not-Ps and backwards Es and upside down As.

In the normal course of things, getting used to symbolic logic means homework, and homework means grading. But, I’m looking at an enrollment of about 65 in a semester where there’s no earthly chance of money for graders. And, as you might recall from the last post on the course, the students are also required to write argumentative essays totaling a minimum of 3000 words. Among other things, this means I already have a substantial grading load for this course before the students do a speck of symbolic logic. However, symbolic logic is one of those things that seems to require practice if it’s to stick in your brain.

Luckily, my colleague Anand Vaidya shared a strategy with me that I hope will give the students the practice and feedback they need without drowning me in additional grading. We’re going to do “homework” in class.

The idea will be to save time at the end of each class period to work problems. Maybe there will be a set of five for the students to work individually, after which they will tell me how to do them at the board (asking questions as needed). Then there will be another set of five problems for the students to work in small groups, after which the groups will explain how to solve them and more discussion will follow. Maybe we’ll conclude by tackling some especially challenging problems together.

None of the problems will be handed in or graded. However, every two weeks we will have a quiz covering material that includes such problems. Presumably, this will give the students a strong incentive to come to class, do the problems, participate in the discussion, and ask questions until they understand. (Anand’s experience with has been that the students discover by the second quiz that they cannot blow off the problems worked in class, at least not if they want to do well on the quizzes.) I’ll probably make the problems available on the course website for those who might miss the class meeting (or who want to recapture the magic by working the problems again later), and I’ll entertain further questions on them during office hours, but it will be the students’ responsibility to make sure they know what we go over in class.

I am assuming here that grading quizzes will require less labor than grading homework assignments would (at least for the amount of homework required to master the material in advance of the quizzes). I’m also assuming that actually making up (and photocopying) the quizzes will be less work than grading all that homework would be. (There’s probably also a subconscious calculation about the amount of paper I’d be schlepping back and forth, one that favors the quizzes slightly.)

That’s my plan for the symbolic logic course content. The argumentative papers obviously won’t work this way. More on them in an upcoming post.

Zucchini utilization: two recipes.

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The Free-Ride family has spent the last several weeks dealing with an abundance of zucchini. Here are two of the smaller ones we harvested this week.

Since there’s a limit to how many zucchini you can give away without alienating your friends and neighbors, it’s good to have some tasty strategies for eating them. Here are to of the recipes we’ve been working.

Zucchini Faux-Risotto

Wash and trim about 3 pounds of zucchini. Halve them lengthwise and slice into semicircles (about 1/8 inch thick).

DIce one large onion.

Put a large pot of water on the stove to boil.

Heat up a couple tablespoons of olive oil in a large skillet. Add the onion and zucchini and toss to coat with oil. Cook on high heat without stirring too much (so that the zucchini and onions brown a bit). As you cook, the onions will get translucent and the zucchini will cook down significantly.

Meanwhile, boil 1 pound of orzo. (Ours is al dente after about nine minutes.) Drain, add to the skillet with the onion and zucchini, toss gently, and turn heat off.

Finely grate some asiago or other hard cheese until you have 1/2 to 1 cup. Toss with the orzo and vegetables. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

This dish is good hot or at room temperature.

Zucchini Bread

Preheat your oven to 350 oF. Lightly grease a standard loaf pan, or line with parchment paper.

Grate a very generous 2 cups of washed, unpeeled zucchini. (In a two-cup Pyrex liquid measuring cup, you want it to be overflowing with the grated zucchini.) If you have a food processor with a grating disk, this is a good time to break it out.

Put the grated zucchini in a large bowl with 3/4 cup sugar, 1/4 cup vegetable oil, the finely grated rind of half a large lemon, and a large egg. Beat together with a fork.

Sift together into the zucchini mixture 1.5 cups flour (this last batch I used 1/2 cup whole wheat, 1/3 cup white whole wheat, and 2/3 cup all purpose), 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 1/4 teaspoon baking powder, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg, 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger, and 1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom. Stir together until incorporated.

Pour into the loaf pan and bake for about 55 minutes. Cool before removing from the loaf pan and slicing.

This is so moist that you won’t even think about buttering it until after you’ve gobbled it down.

Just before I woke up this morning

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… I had figured out a really elegant way to test an hypothesis, complete with two separate treatment groups and a control group. While the population under study was blog readers, I had come up with a reasonable plan to protect the human subjects, even mentally drafting the IRB short form.

I was very excited at how well it was all coming together. And then I woke up.

Which means I have no earthly recollection of either the hypothesis or the clever strategy for testing it.

Building a critical reasoning course: getting started with the external constraints.

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My Fall semester is rapidly approaching and I am still in the throes of preparing to teach a course I have never taught before. The course is called “Logic and Critical Reasoning.” Here’s the catalog description of the course:

Basic concepts of logic; goals and standards of both deductive and inductive reasoning; techniques of argument analysis and assessment; evaluation of evidence; language and definition; fallacies.

The course involves some amount of symbolic logic (and truth-tables and that good stuff) but also a lot of attention to argumentation “in the wild”, in the written and spoken word. My department usually teaches multiple sections of the course each semester, but it’s not the case that we all march in lockstep with identical textbooks, syllabi, and assignments.

The downside of academic freedom, when applied to teaching a course like this, is that you have to figure out your own plan.

Nonetheless, since critical reasoning is the kind of thing I think we need more of in the world, I’m excited about having the opportunity to teach the course. And, at Tom Levenson‘s suggestion, I’m going to blog the process of planning the course. Perhaps you all will have some suggestions for me as I work through it.

Part of why my department offers multiple sections of “Logic and Critical Reasoning” is that it fulfills a lower-division general education (G.E.) requirement. In other words, there’s substantial student demand for courses that fulfill this requirement.

For this course to fulfill the G.E. requirement, of course, it has to meet certain pedagogical goals or “learning objectives”. So, where I need to start in planning this course is with the written-and-approved-by-committee learning objectives and content requirements:

Course Goals and Student Learning Objectives
“Logic and Critical Reasoning” is designed to meet the G.E. learning objectives for Area A3.

A.
Critical thinking courses help students learn to recognize, analyze, evaluate, and engage in effective reasoning.

B.
Students will demonstrate, orally and in writing, proficiency in the course goals. Development of the following competencies will result in dispositions or habits of intellectual autonomy, appreciation of different worldviews, courage and perseverance in inquiry, and commitment to employ analytical reasoning. Students should be able to:

  1. distinguish between reasoning (e.g., explanation, argument) and other types of discourse (e.g., description, assertion);
  2. identify, analyze, and evaluate different types of reasoning;
  3. find and state crucial unstated assumptions in reasoning;
  4. evaluate factual claims or statements used in reasoning, and evaluate the sources of evidence for such claims;
  5. demonstrate an understanding of what constitutes plagiarism;
  6. evaluate information and its sources critically and incorporate selected information into his or her knowledge base and value system;
  7. locate, retrieve, organize, analyze, synthesize, and communicate information of relevance to the subject matter of the course in an effective and efficient manner; and
  8. reflect on past successes, failures, and alternative strategies.

C.

  • Students will analyze, evaluate, and construct their own arguments or position papers about issues of diversity such as gender, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.
  • Reasoning about other issues appropriate to the subject matter of the course shall also be presented, analyzed, evaluated, and constructed.
  • All critical thinking classes should teach formal and informal methods for determining the validity of deductive reasoning and the strength of inductive reasoning, including a consideration of common fallacies in inductive and deductive reasoning. … “Formal methods for determining the validity of deductive arguments” refers to techniques that focus on patterns of reasoning rather than content. While all deductive arguments claim to be valid, not all of them are valid. Students should know what formal methods are available for determining which are which. Such methods include, but are not limited to, the use of Venn’s diagrams for determining validity of categorical reasoning, the methods of truth tables, truth trees, and formal deduction for reasoning which depends on truth functional structure, and analogous methods for evaluating reasoning which may be valid due to quantificational form. These methods are explained in standard logic texts. We would also like to make clear that the request for evidence that formal methods are being taught is not a request that any particular technique be taught, but that some method of assessing formal validity be included in course content.
  • Courses shall require the use of qualitative reasoning skills in oral and written assignments. Substantial writing assignments are to be integrated with critical thinking instruction. Writing will lead to the production of argumentative essays, with a minimum of 3000 words required. Students shall receive frequent evaluations from the instructor. Evaluative comments must be substantive, addressing the quality and form of writing.

This way of describing the course, I reckon, is not the best way to convince my students that it’s a course they’re going to want to be taking. My big task, therefore, is to plan course material and assignments that accomplish these goals while also striking the students as interesting, relevant, and plausibly do-able. In addition, I want to plan assignments that give the students enough practice and feedback but that don’t overwhelm me with grading. (The budget is still in very bad shape, so I have no expectation that there will be money to hire a grader.)

I have some ideas percolating here, which I will blog about soon. One of them is to use the blogosphere as a source of arguments (and things-that-look-like-arguments-but-aren’t) for analysis. I’m thinking, though, that I’ll need to set some good ground rules in advance.

Do these learning objectives and content requirements seem to you to call out for particular types of homework assignments or mini-lecture? If you had to skin this particular pedagogical cat, where would you start?

2010 blog-reader census.

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DrugMonkey’s Google calendar must have told him that it’s time for the meme in which bloggers ask their readers what they’re doing here, a meme whose originator is the esteemed Ed Yong.
Having played along myself in 2008 and 2009, I’m on-board to mount the 2010 version of this blog-reader census. Please respond to at least some of these questions in the comments so we can avoid the expense of sending people with clipboards to your front door:

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Necessity is the mother of longer text messages?

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Recently, I traded up from my nowhere-near-smart phone to a slightly more advanced (but still nearly obsolete) phone — one maybe about a year newer (in terms of technological endowment) than the old one.
Practically, what this means is that I am now able not only to receive text messages, but also to send them. And, tremendous Luddite though I am, I have discovered contexts in which sending a text message actually seem reasonable (e.g., to contact a fellow conference-goer in the morning after a night of conference-carousing, when a phone call might interrupt sleep or networking or something else important).
However, I’ve run into an unforeseen complication:

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Corrupting the youth at freshman orientation.

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The funding situation in the California State University system being what it is (scary-bad), departments at my fair university are also scrambling to adjust to a shift in the logic governing resource distribution. It used to be that resources followed enrollments — that the more students you could pack into your classes, the more money your department would be given to educate students.
Now, in the era of enrollment caps (because the state can’t put up its share of the cost for as many students as it used to), it’s looking like resources will be driven by how many majors a department can enroll (without violating caps on total enrollment for that department’s course offerings — this is a seriously complicated optimization problem).
Plus, because we (i.e., the bean-counters and the tax-payers) don’t want students frittering away tax-payer subsidized coursework (i.e., taking a single unit in excess of the minimum number of units needed to earn a degree), there is an imperative for incoming frosh to declare a major within two semesters, and for incoming transfer students to declare a major within one semester — and then, once the major has been declared, it is permanent. Like a tattoo. (Because, see, changing majors often requires doubling back to complete the requirements of the new major to which you have switched, which pushed you beyond the minimum number of units needed to earn a degree.)
Among other things, this means my department is working hard at this summer’s weekly freshman orientation events to drum up prospective majors. To that end, my colleagues Anand Vaidya and Jim Lindahl put together something of a top 10 list:

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