Terminally Incoherent

I previously wrote about two of my observations regarding use of email among the young and technologically clueless college students. First observation was that none of my students ever had a straight POP3 or IMAP email account in their life. Every single email account they have ever used had a webmail interface and so in their minds, email is something that you do on a webpage. Email client to them is an oxymoron or some strange archaic piece of software, about as useful to them as a floppy drive.

Their primary mode of communication is IM, texting and naturally Facebook/Myspace. Email is something you when you need to send Christmas wishes to your grandmother, or complain about your grade to your professor.

Second observation was that if allowed, most of my students (as well as my coworkers) will try to avoid ever managing the file system directly. They use their desktop or My Documents folder as a big Temp file, and either delete files from it afterwards, or just ignore them and live with the mess. Very rarely do I see thought out directory trees or any hierarchical sorting in the file system on their machines.

My third observation is a direct outgrowth of the second one, and is related to the first. Since students no longer really use email as primary communication tool they decided to use it for something else - storage. They understand email, but do not understand the file system. So whenever they want to save something for later, they just email it to themselves - and i t becomes instantly available to them from anywhere via an easy to use web interface.

I think this mentality is heavily influenced by student mobility. Since not everyone owns a laptop, some people find themselves working on computers they do not own - for example workstations in a public computer lab, a laptop borrowed from a room mate, their home desktop and etc… How do you easily transfer files between computers in such an environment? You could use a flash drive but these are easy to loose or forget. Online storage is the only reliable way to handle it. And what is the easiest way to implement online storage? Via email of course.

I have to admit that I’m guilty of using my email this way as well. Each day I alternate between my home desktop, my work laptop, and one of the 3 or 4 teacher workstations at school. When I’m in a hurry I will sometimes send something to myself to pick it up from a different machine later because it is often the fastest, and least complicated thing to do. That of course doesn’t mean I approve of this behavior. To me it just doesn’t feel right. Email was not meant to be used this way and the whole procedure is silly. Your file ends up being stored twice - once in the inbox, once in the Sent Mail folder, and it makes a short trip between the webmail server, the outgoing server, the incoming server and back to the webmail. It’s a waste of bandwidth and it bothers me.

Are there alternatives? Yes, but none are as convenient or n00b friendly. Ideally, you would want a web service which is as easy t use as email whose sole function would be providing you with online storage. One such service I have been using recently is Xdrive. It’s not perfect though. Their online interface is horrid - cluttered, counter intuitive, and way to busy with buttons, panels and color. It insists on showing you your files both as a list and as a tree at the same time. It also has an impressive array of buttons, links and controls which are often redundant. It is the quintessential AOL school of design - seeing how these are the folks behind the application.

While I’m on the topic, I wanted to mention that there are two distinct ways to design your UI. There is the interface driven way, and the content driven way. The former puts emphasis on buttons, panels, levers, switches and blinkenlights and then stuffs contents into some small view port hole surrounded by interface elements. The later shows you content, and tries to minimize interface elements handling interaction in context aware way. Google excels at making context driven interfaces both for the web and for the desktop. Everyone else seems to be falling short in the web based area. AOL was always notorious for creating horrid interfaces that looked sleek, but were barely usable.

So it’s surprising that Xdrive Lite client is a content driven application. It sports a much cleaner interface, with much fewer buttons. There is virtually no clutter and the app is extremely easy to use. You copy files to your online storage space by simply dragging and dropping them from your file explorer application. It is actually working fairly well in Linux but not thanks to AOL or Xdrive naturally. It works because Adobe Air now runs on linux and so, accidentally the Xdrive client does too. File manipulation and downloads are done via clear, intuitive context menus.

I must say that I really like this app. So I often use it to shuffle small files between my work computer, my home desktop and my laptop in a hassle free way. It works great, it is light on resources and feels much more appropriate than spamming my own inbox.

Still, this is not a perfect solution for my rather clueless students because they inherently despise client software. Installing something is always a hassle. AIR apps install rather quickly and easily, but you need to have AIR installed first. So it is at least a 2 step procedure. Not to mention that public lab computers often do not have admin privileges that would allow them to install stuff. The web interface on the other hand is just to clunky to be useful. They’d have to learn to use it, and I’m sure that this would be a nuisance.

All our students naturally have Novell Netdrive accounts but the web interface for that thing was also designed by professional contortionists. I make them use it when they create HTML websites but I often must walk them through the process 4 to 5 times before it starts sinking in. Not that it is hard, or complex - it’s just new, and not very intuitive. Or rather what is intuitive to me (public websites go into PUBLIC_HTML folder) is alien and incomprehensible to them. Logging into webmail and emailing themselves is just more convenient, straightforward and familiar. I could try to break this habit, but then again who am I to say how people should use technology that’s available to them. If they want to use email as storage, then more power to them I guess… No matter how that annoys me.

For like a week or two now, I noticed something strange and yet not entirely unpleasant happening to my inbox. There were no angry emails from students complaining that I didn’t grade their homework submitted 3 weeks late the very second when they submitted it on Sunday evening at 3AM. My spam filter has already learned to automatically and quietly file away the mail from all the MSU specific mailing lists to my SPAM folder so I didn’t really notice any decrease in traffic.

Here is a side note for those of you who haven’t attended my lovely alma matter, and current teaching grounds. When you start as an undergraduate and get your university based email address you get automatically subscribed to 5 million mailing lists with creative titles such as [allstudents], [undergraduatestudents] and etc. The mailings range from weather announcements, information about campus events, bookstore deal, off campus events, local events, events that have nothing to do with the school, job opportunities, random shit and a etc. On average you can get 60+ emails per day. If you are silly enough to come back as a grad student you get signed up for another million mailing lists, some of which double up on functionality with the undergrad ones so you get upwards of 100+ emails per day. If you become a faculty member or an adjunct after that you… Well, you get the picture. Naturally, your mailbox has 15 MB quota so if you go on vacation and don’t download any of your emails for a week your mailbox will fill up, and new emails will get rejected. Best system evar!

Before they took away my school unix account I was using a simple procmail script to sieve all this crap to /dev/null. The script was actually written by my former mentor who was also sick of this crap.

But let’s get back to the matter at hand. Apparently several of my students told me they were trying to reach me via email for days with no success. I went digging in my inbox and my SPAM folder, and my fears were confirmed. There was no recent email there. Everything was few weeks old. What happened?

Worst part is that there was almost no way for me to notice this. There were no error messages, no notifications, no bounced emails. KMail had no problems connecting and authenticating against the POP server and kept telling me that there was simply no messages on the server. Hell, I could even log into the school’s web mail service to see this:

I called OIT today and confused the hell out of them too. Apparently I was still using my student email account and these expire after a year. But while my email expired, my login was inexplicably tied to other services which I was still using - such as the course management service, the online storage, and dozen of other things. So it appears that I appear as a teacher in some school systems, as a student in other, and even as neither in some. In other words, whatever was done to my account(s) last may was done wrong and it set off a time bomb destined to explode in a year. And that’s what happened here. And the timing couldn’t be worse either since this is the very end of the semester - the time when students always have tons of questions about their grades, projects and etc.

I guess few grad students turned adjuncts stick around for longer than a year around here. It seems that my case is fairly unique and unusual. Let’s hope they can figure out how to fix it without totally fucking up my login to all the school services.

I wanted to share with you a final slide from a presentation made by one of my students. I wish I was making this up, but I’m not. You can judge whether this is funny or very sad by yourself:

I assumed a honest typo resulting from the student making the whole presentation 15 minutes before the class, and then winging it. I prefer to think that my students are just lazy and don’t care about the class - this way I can keep my sanity and hope for the future in situations like this one.

It is reassuring that most of the class seemed to catch onto it, and there were subdued chuckles from the back rows. I believe that I even heard someone patiently explaining “cause there was like no computers in 1800’s…” to their confused neighbor.

Someone later suggested to me that you could technically count Charles Babbage as an early hacker. He was active in the 1800’s so the statement above would be at least partially correct… Well, excluding that bit about the internet services. And getting caught…

For the record, I didn’t assign the presentation topics, nor did I restrict them to just technology. Students were free to pick any topic they wanted, and I provided them with a list of potentially technology related topics if they could not come up with a topic on their own.

The semester is almost over. I was convinced that I will actually have one regular class in May before the finals, but I was wrong. The regular schedule at MSU ends on the 5^th and then we go into the two week final examination period. Since I teach an evening class, I get to give the exam on May 13th which is I think the very last day of exams. So naturally I already have students clamoring that we should push the exam up.

One guy even told me he booked a trip on the 10^th and he doesn’t know what to do now. Sigh… I could understand this if the official final exam schedule was not posted on the university website on like the first day of the semester. But it was, and I could have told him the exact date and time of the final on Sept 1 if he asked. Sigh… I had professors who didn’t even tell us when the final was - they expected you to look it up and show up at the right time, or they failed you. I sometimes wonder how some of these folks actually survive in college.

So I’m not moving the exam up (I’ll work with my “special” cases on individual basis, and figure out what to do with them) but since I only have 1 regular lab period left I think my students will get to skip the LOGO exercise. I actually never did this lab before and it was supposed to be sort of a test run. But they won’t have enough time. will need to skip it.

Back in February I asked you what programming language should we teach first to CS majors. We pretty much established that it is usually a good idea to start with a lower level language like C or C++ and then bump them up to something more friendly like Java or Python as needed. What do you teach non CS majors though? It is generally a good idea to expose people to programming to show them it is not some sort of scary arcane magic.

This is where LOGO comes in. It is a is a functional programming language considered to be a distant cousin of Lisp. It doesn’t share Lisp’s peculiar syntax though. It is actually very, very simple - it uses one word which usually take a single argument. There are no brackets, semicolons or fancy control structures. It supports very simple loops and naturally recursion (after all it is based on lisp) - which is probably not something I would show to my 109 class. Simple iteration though is probably something that they could handle.

I was planning to have them use Tortue which is a Java based app with a built in interpreter and a canvas for drawing shapes. I actually found it via the CMPT 109 community on blackboard and it seems for this purpose. It doesn’t support all of LOGO but it does support a significant portion. In fact, it makes the language even simpler. For example, it does not support the short versions of the keywords, or the square bracket notation, which make code more compact, but may impact readability if you are a fresh user.

I like it because it requires no installation (which is something students cannot do in the lab) and is astonishingly simple. Students simply type the code in the left pane, hit run, and the results are drawn on the canvas. Yes, logo programming revolves mostly around drawing shapes. Let me show you a very simple code snippet:

REPEAT 4
	FORWARD 100
	LEFT 90
END REPEAT

This little snippet for example will draw a 100 pixel wide square on the screen. Tortue basically only supports drawing functions and very basic arithmetic. Logo itself is actually full featured and can be used to solve complex problems, but drawing on a canvas is really it’s favorite thing to do.

I’m not exactly sure what kind of program I would assign them. Probably something really simple that could be accomplished even without loops. I was thinking along the lines of tetris blocks since there is more than one way to draw them. You can either use stacked squares, rectangles, or just draw them with a single continuous line.

Perhaps I’ll manage to squeeze this exercise in next semester. What do you think about this approach? I’m not really expecting to teach these people any hard core programming. I just want to expose them to coding, debugging and solving problems. Or is logo to complex? I know some teachers use the 3D Alice framework to teach these concepts. It was being pimped at the same community portal where I found Tortue and I actually saw Alice files all the computers in the adjunct office so someone out there is using it. I looked at that toolkit, the first impression kinda to my first time using Macromedia Flash - I was overwhelmed by it’s complexity. I had to look at the tutorials to actually figure out what was one supposed to, so I can only imagine how my students would feel.

In comparison, simple textual commands like FORWARD 100 or LEFT 90 don’t seem that bad. Which reinforces my long standing opinion that CLI interfaces are actually easier to learn. While a well designed GUI can be self explanatory and can be learned by instinct, complex ones quickly become overwhelming. CLI on the other hand has to be learned gradually and because of it’s inherent modal nature, the user is only exposed to small portion of the system at once.

If you had a choice, would you teach Alice or Logo?

I just think Alice

Here are few literary gems from my inbox. These emails were sent to me by some of my students over the few last semesters. I will preface this by saying that the strange linguistic constructs you will see below were produced mostly by A or B students, native speakers of English - who at other times sent me much more coherent and understandable correspondence. Names were naturally removed to protect the innocent.

First one is from my “Subject field does not have spellcheck” category:

Subject: ques tion reguarding hwk

Reguarding kinda reminds me of havening. It’s kinda my new favorite word. Then again, maybe it was a honest typo. I have done much worse in the past (and on this very blog). Still, I can’t help but thing I had the famous George in my class and I didn’t even know it.

Some of my students apparently subscribe to the “punctuation inhibits communication” school of thought:

hello quick question for the hw 2 is it due next class

Careful analysis, tells me that this would have made perfect sense as an IM or a text message. Think about it for a second and the places where one would hit enter will become obvious. It seems that the art of writing email is slowly forgotten by the generation of people who use IM exclusively.

Then again, I wish all the letters I get were this coherent. For example, look at this one (reproduced complete with the weird spacing and etc..):

Hi prof on may 7 at 23:45 after the class I send my hw thru d
        But today today i checked my grades and i didn’t any grades for     it then I check m the file which i
      i send it to u It didn’t’ say that u received it the file.( i don’t know maybe i could submit it rite way or?
   well anyways i am resending it.

I’m not sure what was going on in there, but I guess the gist of this message is that the person is re-submitting their homework because they didn’t see their grade listed in the LMS. It took me a while to figure this out, but the last sentence is the key.

Btw, there is a lesson I have learned over time - if I add a new assignment in the online grade book but do not put the grades right away, I get students trying to re-submit their work thinking it didn’t go through or that I somehow missed it. It’s even better when I add a project that I didn’t assign yet in there. I get few dozen emails with people begging me to email them the instructions because they never got the handout them in class. These days I don’t add anything to the online grade book until I have graded it.

Sometimes I just can’t tell what an email is about. I found one like this in my mailbox last semester and I could not figure out how to respond:

Hello, professor….I completed lab was an able to do so at home because i do did not windows 2007. So i completed in the comp. lab on campus.

Did he complete the lab? I think my response went something among the lines of “Thats ok. Let me know if you can’t submit it before the deadline”.

Also, Windows 2007 FTW. When I ask them on the test whether MS Office 2007 is an Operating system, or if Windows XP is Application Software most of them get it right. But they still use Office and Windows interchangeably in common speech.

I actually don’t I mind the odd punctuation, innovative spelling and fragmented sentences. As long as I can make sense of it, I will try to reply to it, or grade it to the best of my ability. Sometimes I wonder how professors with degrees in English cope with this sort of things.