CNA Revised Headlines

mrbrown tweeted about how Channelnewsasia (CNA) revised their headlines and re-angled a news story featuring Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong this morning.

It’s 7:30pm, and I still see the same mess-up (left) on CNA’s website. But clicking on the old headline goes nowhere. Guess they didn’t want anyone to read it.

I found out after reading the fine print that I do not qualify for the National Service Recognition Award (NSRA), an award announced by the Singapore Prime Minister during this year’s National Day Rally speech to “provide sustained recognition and appreciation to citizens who serve NS”. I am (still) a Singapore citizen; I have served 2 and a half years of National Service (NS); I have completed numerous In-Camp Trainings (e.g. spending 40 days of 2008 out of office to play soldier).

Alas, no. The 5th paragraph of this Cyberpioneer article reads:

Full-time National Servicemen and Operationally Ready National Servicemen must have reached the milestones on or after 29 Aug this year to be eligible for the award.

I (and mrbrown) am unfortunate enough to have completed our 2.5 years of NS way before 2010 (2.5 years and, let’s not forget, In-Camp Trainings during our lifetime). Obviously, the NSRA is not meant to reward my platoon mates and me.

The spirit of this policy reminds me of the Ministry of Education’s (MOE) Connect Plan. In short, this is an initiative meant to retain teachers by dangling monetary rewards. If you looked at the Connect Plan Deposits here (under para. 8), you’d notice that the deposits increase steadily until the teacher reaches her/his 15th year of service. After that, the deposits drop drastically, signalling that the MOE possibly feels that there is no longer such a compelling need to “connect”  with the teacher (who would by then be arguably less ‘market-able’ in the Singapore workforce).

It appears that the Connect Plan is designed to retain younger teachers, just like how the NSRA is created to reward younger voters. Can we please everyone? No. Do MOE and MINDEF care for their staff? Well… With pragmatic policies come pragmatic citizens who sustain transactional relationships with the country/government (think, for example, of the numerous government scholars thinking about breaking their bonds). What goes around comes around.

I’ve just watched another episode of “Criminal Minds” and it dawned on me that every little piece of information, every word exchanged, and every object that the camera focused on had to be salient to solving the case. Indeed, Stephen King wrote in his book “On writing” that any event/description that is included must contribute to the story. Not a word more, not a word less.

That’s a limitation for TV and novels, primarily static and linear media. Our paper-and-pen school exams are pretty much the same (Dan Meyer compared solving problem sums to watching American television comedy series “Two and a Half Men” here). I’ve been a teacher: when I designed exam questions, I too had to make sure that my students had all the information/resources to answer the question. The worst case scenario was to include only salient information (click here for example); the best was to add in red herrings at times (just like in Criminal Minds). Regardless, everything had to be laid out on paper in advance.

My main concern stems from students encountering school exam questions knowing (1) that all the information they would need to solve the problem have been given on paper (no need to probe for more) and (2) that there was a pre-determined solution that their teacher (like the story writer of Criminal Minds) had crafted. The students’ job was to find that pre-crafted answer with and only with the given information. What real-world problems have such characteristics? How useful is second-guessing the teacher to solving real-world problems?

After watching several seasons of Criminal Minds, I’ve become quite good at guessing who the “Unsub” is: the camera’s focus leaves a clue or two; the timing and frequency of a character’s appearance help too. But that in no way implies that I’d make a good detective: I’m merely media literate (or just police-drama-literate).

Same with our students. Many of them (or “us” since I was once a student) are merely exam-literate. They may not be good mathematicians, scientists, etc.

This is a story of how my colleagues and I got 5 laptops connected to the Internet at a “leading edge teaching facility”.

I’m helping a colleague with a class where 5 groups of students will be experimenting with a web-based, in-house developed computer simulation using 5 laptops. Obviously, we needed to connect the laptops to the Internet. The wireless network at this teaching facility was too unstable (we tested) to work with this resource-heavy simulation. OK, so we opted to use the 16 LAN points in each classroom.

Alas, the only LAN points that are currently activated are the ones behind the teacher’s desktop.  To activate the other LAN points, we would have to fill in a form, wait for the points to get activated (up to 2 weeks), and pay $17.10 per point.

I admit we could have started the process earlier (we were going to rely on the wireless network, but well…), but I doubt many teachers are willing to go through this process daily.

I tried to vote twice but the system refused rightfully. So we can rule out spammers.

And mrbrown retweeted my observation: Wow

A friend of mine told me they were looking for a goalkeeper. I volunteered, played for a match, they were (more or less) happy, and I’ll be playing my 4th match with them this Saturday.

This is a trace of my journey in becoming a goalie (a relatively new identity for me). The first thing I did was to watch YouTube videos on goalkeeper training, read online articles on the basics of positioning, ball handling (e.g. what the “W-catch” is), etc (‘front-loading’ like in university). Then I rehearsed these moves in my courtyard (my neighbours might have wondered who the crazy guy throwing and catching the ball was… at 10pm!): i.e. I started doing goalkeeper-like things (shuffling sideways, jumping with 1 knee up) and strengthening the muscles I need AS a goalie. Then I got the gear (gotta look like one to be one).

Then came the first match. I introduced myself to the team as the “new goalie”, put on the goalie jersey for the first time (costume play… haha), and some of them put me through my (goalie) paces. They called out “keeper!” when they needed my attention (I have yet to call out “keeper!” when I need to tell them I’ve got the ball… perhaps I’ve yet to identify myself strongly enough as a keeper).  During the match, I could ‘see’ why rehearsing SOME of the goalkeeper-like moves (e.g. shuffling sideways, in-ready positions) was useful to playing my role of keeping the ball out. I’m starting to select which form of training is most crucial at this beginning stage of my development.

Do I call myself a goalie? Well, yes and no. The SENSE I have developed as a goalie is certainly not as strong as the other identities I am more comfortable in (e.g. “bassist”, “educational technologist”, “father”, “husband”).  But I am slowly gaining confidence, especially since my friend offered me the “player of the match” title last week (acceptance of my identity by the community).

(screenshot from http://pocketgaming.blogspot.com/)

I’m recalling gaming moments when I had to notice stuff myself to win. Here is one moment that I remember vividly. I was one of the liaison officers for the World Bank meetings in 2006. While waiting for my chef de mission (who was going from long meetings to more long meetings), what better way to kill the time than to play FIFA 2006 on my DS.

I’m an advocate for reviewing performances as a form of professional development: I regularly record my own classes and conference presentations, re-listen to them, and have a good laugh. In FIFA 2006, there is the instant replay feature that allows players to review goals (or any significant moment). Players can control the speed and camera angle of the replay.

I was reviewing one of the goals I scored when I noticed that there was something similar across many of my goals. If I were to release the ball a split second after the goalkeeper starts closing in on me, I would usually score a goal (well, assuming I was shooting in the right direction, etc.). I had spotted an underlying algorithm of the game. Well, this rule may be an open secret, but the point I’m making is that gamers often have to notice such things themselves to win in computer games.

In my quest to look for examples of ways of “reading”/thinking as a professional, I came across A. B. Downey’s How to think like a computer scientist.

The goal of this book is to teach you to think like a computer scientist. This way of thinking combines some of the best features of mathematics, engineering, and natural science. Like mathematicians, computer scientists use formal language to denote ideas (specifically computations). Like engineers, they design things, assembling components into systems and evaluating tradeoffs among alternatives. Like scientists, they observe the behaviour of complex systems, form hypotheses, and test predictions. (p. 1)

I’ve only read the first few pages (free from Amazon.com), and here are my first impressions. I like how the author listed the similarities in what the various professionals do to cope with the tasks at hand, but I would go further and add that thinking like a computer scientist means valuing the use of formal language to denote ideas, valuing the need for tradeoffs among alternatives, and valuing hypothesis-formation in problem-solving. In a certain sense, valuing these characteristics gives meaning to what we do.

Here is one of A. B. Downey’s suggestions of how budding computer scientists  should read “programming” as:

So you can think of programming as the process of breaking a large, complex task into smaller subtasks until the subtasks are simple enough to be performed with one of these basic instructions. (p. 3)

Learning to interpret “programming” in this way is crucial to becoming a computer scientist (I feel). I wonder what lecturers are currently doing to help students adopt this way of “reading the world“.

Downet, A. B. (2009). Python for software design: how to think like a computer scientist. Cambridge University Press.

Did it happen?

(picture from elreves.files.wordpress.com)

While cycling during lunchtime (I seem to ‘get’ many ideas while cycling), I realised that I may have to answer a question that empiricists may have (regarding my emphasis on the “reading” of a phenomenon over its actual happening): Did the event actually take place? Did Zidane actually head-butt Materazzi?

My short answer is: Yes (regarding the head-butt, since many people from around the world concurred that they had seen it on TV too), but what matters (to most of us) is not whether it happened, but how it happened (or rather, how we interpreted it to have happened). Bringing the debate back to the university, let’s take the “big questions” that academics dedicate their lives to providing a plausible interpretation:

• “Why is there more matter than antimatter, at least around here?” (Particle Physics)
• “the Poincaré Conjecture and Fermat’s Last Theorem to open questions such as the Riemann hypothesis, P vs. NP, and the Navier-Stokes equation for fluid flow and turbulence” (Mathematics)
• “What wins wars? Why do empires rise and fall? What makes a great leader? What causes nationalism? How do spiritual movements spread?” (History)
• “how new meanings arise through language use, especially the various ways in which speakers and writers experiment with uses of words and constructions in the flow of strategic interaction with addressees” (Linguistics)

In a certain sense, how we read the situation results in certain events ‘happening’ (in certain ways).

How the Germans saw the head-butt

How the French saw the head-butt

How the Italians saw the head-butt

The educational point I’m trying to make is: If being able to “read” the situation as a German/French/Italian is a big part of being & becoming a German/French/Italian, how helpful would it be to develop the ability to “read the world” as pharmacists/ mathematicians (remember the scenes from A Beautiful Mind below)/ financial analysts in our universities? If so, in what ways are our current learning outcomes, teaching methods, and assessment modes satisfying this goal of helping students “read the world” as somebody?