The Secret Project

For over a year, I've been part of a "secret" project. (Although I've mentioned it a few times, no one has asked me about it. You, dear readers, have the utmost respect for secrets!)

This project, led by the Arts Resource Centre, was intended to address two issues. One was in-class engagement. What would the classroom experience be like if every student had a tablet computer? Not a smartphone, not a laptop, but a tablet. Like, say, an iPad. All students involved in this project (a couple of intro psychology classes, some economics, and political science) were going to be given free loaner iPads. There would be an option to buy out the lease at the end of term, meaning students would get to use an iPad for free for 4 months, with the option to buy it at a discount. (Did I mention that it would be free?)

I went to seminars put on by Apple, got a loaner iPad 2 (the day before the iPad 3 came out, argh!), and experimented with a lot of apps. Apple even offered us the use of some of their app development team in Cupertino.Cool! In a too-good-to-be-true way.

Unfortunately, the lease cost of the iPads kept going up and up until it was out of our price range. (Hey, someone has to pay for all those iPads!) At that point, the focus shifted to the much less-expensive ASUS-made Nexus 7 tablet. Our experimental team members designed the research side of things, to measure how using tablets would affect student learning and engagement. Those of us on the instructional team used our loaner iPads to work out how we would engage students in class with this technology. The team leader applied for research funding. Everything was clicking along fine--until it all went off the rails.

Two days before the devastating provincial budget was released, we were told that our application for funding had been denied. The little money we had wasn't going to be enough to supply multiple classes of students with tablet computers. The many hours we spent meeting, discussing, reading, and preparing for this project were all for naught. Although, there was still the other part of the project...

I shouldn't really talk too much about the other issue that this project was going to examine--after all, this is still an ongoing research project (even if it is radically scaled back). If I blab about it and reveal our hypotheses, it may affect the results. I think it's safe to reveal that we are interested in how you learn outside of the classroom. In fact, I've got a meeting today with a publisher's representative who is working with me on this project. And we're collecting baseline data in my intro psych class today. Beyond that, I'm afraid everything else is going to have to remain...a secret.

Why aren't you studying?

The World Backup Day

It's March 31, so happy World Backup Day 2013! Yup, it's a real thing. You can spread the message by taking the pledge to backup your data. (I did.) You wouldn't want to lose you data, would you?

Imagine losing your digital photos. Or your music collection. Maybe those great videos you took of you last vacation. What if there were all gone? What if your term paper (which is due in a couple of weeks) were to disappear--with no backup?

Did you know they almost lost Toy Story 2? Of course they made backups--but backups be corrupted. There's a great video that explains what happened. (Warning: don't watch it if you have a weak constitution and/or you haven't backed up any of your data since there was a U.S. president whose name is a synonym for "shrub." On second thought, maybe then you should watch the video.

Not only do I make backups, I go one better. As soon as I save anything to a local hard drive, my data is immediately synced with my other computers, and is simultaneously saved to a server in the cloud. (My human factors and ergonomics students will know what this is called. It's not merely a backup, it's "active redundancy".) Last summer, the boot drive on my primary laptop died. It was an inconvenience--that's all, just an inconvenience. It wasn't the end of the world.

But just because you save your data to the cloud doesn't mean it's safe. The company you rely on likely uses another service to provide their storage. Somewhere out there, your data is sitting on a spinning disk. And those can fail--even in the cloud.

So: make an extra backup today. Save your term paper on a flash drive. Save it to a cloud storage service. Burn it onto a CD. Hey, copy it to a floppy, if you have one. And save your pictures, songs, videos, and everything else you don't want to lose. There's no excuse for losing your data. No, really. Saying, "My computer crashed and I lost my term paper" is today's equivalent of "My dog ate my homework."

Why aren't you studying?

The Budget and the Clocks

Late last year, I noticed that one of the clocks in the hallway of the psychology wing in the Biological Sciences Building was wrong. Not a big deal--every year or so, a clock goes wonky, so I make a call and it gets fixed. Only, not this time.

A few days later, another clock was out. Then, a couple more. Next, several clocks froze. One by one, all the clocks in the entire building started to fail. At first, it was kinda funny, in a stopped-clock-is-right-twice-a-day way. What wasn't funny was the fact that the clocks weren't being repaired.

- - - - -

Yesterday, the provincial government released the budget. It was not good news for Alberta's post-secondary institutions. In fact, President Samarasekera was "horrified," it was that bad. To keep up with inflation (for example, rising costs of physical goods and increases in salaries), the UofA needed an increase of 4%. (The government had promised an annual increase of 2% a year for three years, which still wasn't enough.) Instead, what was delivered was about a 7% cut.

For the past few years, because of insufficient provincial funding, faculties and departments have had to make cuts, on the order of 3%. This is why I don't hand out paper copies of the syllabus in all of my classes any more, and it's part of the reason why the Department of Psychology has one fewer Faculty Lecturer in Science. There's no more room to make sweeping across-the-board cuts. The main cost in the UofA's budget is salaries: academic staff and nonacademic staff. These salaries are negotiated with UofA administration, and cannot simply be cut, similar to teachers. (Interestingly, teachers are allowed to go on strike, whereas the UofA's academic staff are not.)

- - - - -

A few weeks ago, the clocks started disappearing. All that remained were a few dangling wires. (Some of them, with one clock remaining on the other side freak me out. They remind me of the fembots from the 1970s Bionic Woman show. Brrr.)


Is this a good sign? They're taking the clocks out to be fixed? Or replaced? Maybe it's a bad sign. They've never had to remove the clocks completely. And they haven't been replacing any of the clocks. They're just...gone.

It turns out that the clocks are so old, they can't get parts anymore. Maybe they're trying to salvage what they can to scavenge parts from some of them and get a few clocks running again. Maybe the days of having the luxury of a clock in every hallway are gone.

- - - - -

The government has put the UofA in a bad spot. Costs cannot be reduced further (at least, not without some pretty serious consequences like declaring a Financial Emergency). Revenue cannot be increased (the government has prohibited tuition increases to cover a shortfall). So what's left? Apparently, the magic bullet will come in the form of "mandate letters" that the government will send out, dictating to each institution what their role will be in a "more unified" post-secondary education system.

See, the government apparently sees a lot of waste due to duplication. The UofA confers undergraduate degrees in Arts, as does MacEwan University (and the UofC, and Mount Royal, etc.). That's inefficient! It's waste! Let's consolidate and increase efficiencies! Yeah, I don't see it either. Is it going to mean that, if you want an undergraduate degree in arts in psychology, you'd go to the UofA, but if you want economics, you'd have to go to the U of Lethbridge? Or maybe, the UofA would do away with all undergraduate degrees entirely, and just focus on professional degrees (nursing, law, medicine) and graduate degrees. Hmm, good luck with that.

The government also wants post-secondary institutions to be engines of economic diversity. That means doing research to solve real-world problems, forge patents, and bring in some money to the province. But don't you think that if some researcher was sitting on a goldmine idea, they would have already tried to cash in on it? What about the fact that most research is not applied, but basic (that is, designed to tell us about ourselves and the world we live in)? And what about those not doing scientific research, but scholarship in the arts? How do you commercialize that? This whole idea is: stupid.

- - - - -

People in government must know what they're doing, right? I mean, they consolidated all the different regional health authorities into one big Alberta Health superboard, and that turned out...oh, right. It was a colossal screwup. Well, I'm sure they've learned their lesson, and they won't do anything like that again, right? Right?

Do I have any better ideas? Sure I do. Increase royalty rates on natural resources. Institute a sales tax (hey, as a lifelong Albertan, it pains me to say it, but with such volatile resource revenues, it just makes sense now). Scrap the flat tax and have progressive income tax instead. Each one of these would work--if there's any backbone of political will.

- - - - -

Some people need clocks. The admin staff in the Psychology office need to time-stamp papers that students hand in. Students and instructors have to get to class on time. I synchronize my watch to the clock in my hallway to make sure I wasn't late to class. (if I'm 1 minute late to a class of 400 people, I've just wasted 400 people-minutes of time, or over 6 hours). The Department of Psychology has dipped into its budget and gone to Grand & Toy to buy a bunch of clocks.


Unfortunately, we can't afford to pay for clocks for the whole building. So I might be a bit late for class sometimes.

Say, do you have the time?

Why aren't you studying?

Update 3/8/2013 12:55p.m.: Half of the lights are out in Biological Sciences, the projectors in my first class were dead, and I can't log in to update my website. This does not bode well...

The Open Comments: 6

I'm up to my ears in midterm-essay marking--half-done, yay. That means it's time for open comments.

Anything you want to say? Any questions you want to ask? Can't hear what I'm saying in class? Now's the time to let me know. Comments can be anonymous, and I'll make sure moderator kitteh approves ur submishinz.

Why aren't you studying?

The Awards: 8

The ISSS Hosts
Dr Peter Lee
Thank-you very much to the ISSS (Interdepartmental Science Students' Society) for their Instructor Appreciation Night last Friday. I was surprised and honoured to have been nominated for excellence in teaching, along with 13 of my colleagues in the Faculty of Science--including Dr Peter Lee from the Department of Psychology (that's him looking quite dapper in a tux). Although I did not win the Outstanding Professor Award, it was still a great time. It's nice to hear from students directly; I talked to a few who appreciated the work I did in teaching them. You're welcome! (I did have to duck out a bit early to help put my daughters to bed, sorry. But they liked the balloons very much.)

If you want to see the kind of professional-looking job the ISSS did, you can watch the YouTube video that kicked off the evening.

I am also pleased to report that I was named to the Department of Psychology's Teaching Honour Roll with Distinction (modestly) for the two courses I taught in Summer, 2012 term. Yeah, I'm a bit late. I was going to read my comments and post the best ones (as I've done in the past), but haven't had time. I've got my hands full with a secret project, a MOOC that I'm contributing to, and the new...well, that's going to be another post. A series of posts, in fact, about something that been in the works for over 2 years...

Why aren't you studying?

The Google Map of Campus

It looks like Google mapped the UofA campus (North, South, St. Jean, and Augustana) with Street View in July, 2012. Not just roads, but walking paths, too. (The University of Calgary did not get mapped. Heh.) Here’s a pic of the Google Mapper reflected in the windows of Earth Sciences. Hmm, I was teaching last summer, but never noticed anyone riding a bike with 9 eyes.

Why aren't you studying?

The Star Wars Identities

The Telus World of Science Edmonton is currently hosting an exhibition called Star Wars Identities. I'm all about science, but you had me at "Star Wars." Walk around a big room filled with actual props and costumes from the movies? Woot!

I went to SWI on the opening weekend with my good friend--and fellow nerd--George. (You should do the same. Er, but get your own friend. They don't have to be named "George," either.) He does an awesome Chewbacca, and his impression of a TIE fighter is...eerie. Go ahead and geek out, that's what it's about. Well, actually, it's about more than that, and that's what really impressed me about the exhibit.

The developers of the exhibit have added depth, meaning, and personal relevance to what otherwise might be a big room full of dusty old things. As you go through the exhibit, you create a Star Wars-universe character of your own, making choices about many aspects of its (your?) life. There are 10 different components: species, genes, parents, culture, mentors, friends, events, occupation, personality, and values. These are ordered ontogenetically--er, that is, reflective of human development, from childhood to adulthood (or "Origins, Influences, and Choices").

It became clear to me pretty quickly that there was some actual science behind this, and some careful thought. The developers consulted with scientific committee, including two neuropsychologists, three psychologists, and a some other experts in related scientific fields. For example, mention is made of the influence of different parenting styles (authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, or uninvolved) from the point of view of Anakin versus Luke. And the personality component brought up the Big 5 personality traits of agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness. (Try this Big 5 personality test yourself.)

At the end of it all, you get to choose to be either good, or, you know, choose the Dark Side. And then you see the character who you created. Here's mine:

The character in the background on the right is the one created by my friend George: a Jedi named Juh. (Yeah, so we're not great at coming up with names. What, is "Jar Jar" any better?)

Actual science and Star Wars together. Cool. Star Wars Identities runs until April 1, 2013. Highly recommended.

Why aren't you studying?

Update 1/20/2013: Wired.com has an article on Star Wars Identities.

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