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A couple of weeks ago, Barb and I were awarded Georgia Tech’s Service Award for our work with Georgia Computes!. At the same awards ceremony, across the table, was David Collard of Chemistry who was getting the Professional education award.  He’s been part of an effort (described below) called cCWCS which teaches chemistry faculty how to teach better — and the program has taught over a thousand faculty!

A thousand faculty?!?  I’ve blogged about how hard it is to get CS faculty to come to our workshops, either Media Computation or Georgia Computes.  I’ve talked to other folks who offer workshops to CS faculty, and they say that they have to invite high school teachers, too, or they won’t have enough people to run the workshop.  Why do so many Chemistry professors show up, when we struggle to get CS professors to show up at teaching workshops?

Barb had an interesting insight: Maybe it’s because Chemistry is taught to everyone.  When you teach something to everyone, you have to teach…

Computing Education Blog

The council that administers the Law School Admission Test has agreed to make its entire Web site accessible to blind law-school applicants who use screen-reader software, the association announced on Monday. That move is part of a settlement of a lawsuit filed in 2009 by the National Federation of the Blind. Three blind students also joined in suing the association and four law schools that either encouraged or required applicants to apply through the admission council’s Web site. The council says its technology updates should help resolve those lawsuits as well.

Wired Campus

I’m about to start teaching Greenfoot in my data structures class (the one where we introduce data structures in explaining how the wildebeest’s charge over the ridge in Disney’s The Lion King) — I’m a big fan, and am glad to hear that they’re providing more support for teachers.  They just announced support for using Microsoft Kinect with Greenfoot, demoed at SIGCSE 2011.

Millions of young people are expected to benefit from a University of Kent-established international teacher training network for Greenfoot, a free-to-download software tool that teaches computer programming to pupils from 14 years upwards.

Free and available for download at www.greenfoot.org, Greenfoot was designed by members of the University’s Computing Education Research Group and colleagues at La Trobe University in Melbourne to engage pupils through an interactive environment which enables them to easily create games and simulations. To date, more than a million pupils around the world have been able to…

Computing Education Blog

When W. Pitt Derryberry, an associate professor of psychology at Western Kentucky University, began to survey college students about their technology use, he expected to find technology responsible for declines in moral judgment among students. What he found was that it was how students used technology, rather than just the amount of time spent with high-tech tools, that led to moral lapses.

Male students, for example, reported less use of technology than did their female counterparts, but they were more likely to indicate that their use was for self-serving purposes.

Mr. Dewberry and Meghan M. Saculla, an adjunct psychology instructor at Flagler College, surveyed 279 students to look at connections between their use of technology and their moral judgment—particularly their ability to understand the societal implications of their behavior. Their paper on the results of the study will be presented at next week’s American Educational Research Association conference.

Over all,…

Wired Campus

A new study suggests that while open access appears to increase the readership of scholarly articles, it doesn’t increase how often they’re cited.

The study stands in contrast with earlier research that suggested open-access articles were referenced by other scholars more frequently.

Philip M. Davis, a postdoctoral associate in the department of communication at Cornell University, was given access to 36 subscription-based journals produced by seven different publishers. In 2007 and early 2008, he randomly made approximately 20 percent of their articles free.

He tracked the number of abstract views, full-text downloads, PDF downloads, and citations within the next year for the 3,245 articles in the study. The findings were published Wednesday in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal.

Free articles were downloaded more than twice as frequently as the paid-access articles, and PDFs of the free articles were downloaded 1.6 times more frequently.

But…

Wired Campus

“The artist has only one ambition: to master his material in such a way that his work is independent of the value of the raw material.”

-Adolph Loos, ‘Building Materials’

In my current Marketing for Makers course, someone brought up her typical pricing strategy:

cost of materials x 3 +20% = wholesale price

As someone who has spent some time in the jewelry field, this formula of cost of materials times three isn’t new to me.

But it’s also one of my least favorite pricing guidelines.  I might even go so far as to say I hate it.

First off, it fails to take into account labor, which is important to factor in when you make things by hand.  True, if your materials are more expensive, then multiplying their cost by three will probably account for your labor.   But if your materials are inexpensive (or free, if you happen to thrift or reuse them) then this formula is sadly lacking.

That’s why I prefer this pricing formula:

materials + labor + expenses + profit = wholesale price

But still,…

Crafting an MBA

I hear it at craft shows and trade shows all the time, “You’re so lucky you make X, because I make Y and so does everybody else.”

Regardless of whether you’re a jeweler, potter, or photographer, you probably feel the same way – like you’re in a very crowded product category.

{image via The Great Northern on Etsy}

The great thing about sites like Etsy is that the barrier to entry is so low that you can start a business really easily.  But the bad thing is that so can anyone else.

With each passing day, more and more people throw their hat in the ring when it comes to running a craft business.

And as your category gets more and more crowded, it can be a struggle to get your products to stand out.

But getting your products to stand out in the sea of jewelry, soap, photography, or screen printed t-shirts is essential if you want your business to be a success.

So how do you stand out in a crowded product category?

By focusing your products on a niche.

Focusing on a niche means picking…

Crafting an MBA

There’s a challenging and interesting paper being presented this afternoon at SIGCSE 2011 Exploring the Appeal of Socially Relevant Computing: Are Students Interested in Socially Relevant Problems? by Cyndi Rader, Doug Hakkarinen, Barbara Moskal, and Keith Hellman from the Colorado School of Mines. I’ve worked with Barbara Moskal before, and know her to be a careful and thoughtful evaluator. So, when I read their abstract, especially the bottom line, I was surprised and intrigued.

Prior research indicates that today‘s students, especially women, are attracted to careers in
which they recognize the direct benefit of the field for serving societal needs. Traditional
college level computer science courses rarely illustrate the potential benefits of computer
science to the broader community. This paper describes a curricula development effort
designed to embed humanitarian projects into undergraduate computer science courses. The impact of this program was measured through student…

Computing Education Blog

I strongly agree with this.  Certainly, we can show learning in short-term studies.  But the most important issues in education (e.g., motivation, attitudes, broadening participation, success in later academic career, success after graduation) can’t be studied in the standard three years of an NSF grant.

A group of education researchers and representatives of private philanthropies argued on Monday for more money for long-term studies of education. Such studies, they said, are often harder to find money to support but tend to be more effective than shorter-term projects at decisively answering key research and policy questions.

The researchers and philanthropists made their case at a gathering on Capitol Hill, titled “Payoffs of Long-Term Investment in Education Research,” that was organized by the American Educational Research Association, the Education Deans Alliance, and the National Academy of Education.

via Researchers and Grant Makers Call for More Long-Term Education…

Computing Education Blog

I’d like to see more on socioeconomic status and teacher preparation in this study.

• When more students starting taking the SAT, the lowest quartile SES students got really low scores.  Those scores rose, but for awhile, more people coming in at the bottom drew down the average.
• Similarly, I would expect the students of new AP teachers to be lower, then improve as the teacher improves.  As AP test-taking grows, we grow the AP teacher pool, and we can expect  those initial grades to be poor.

Neither of these explanations for more students failing AP tests is immediate cause for alarm.

As record numbers of high-school students are taking and passing Advanced Placement exams, a rising percentage are scoring at the lowest level possible, according to national data on 2010 graduates released Wednesday.

Students posted 1′s, the lowest score possible, on 23% of all AP exams. Ten years ago, that number stood at 14%, according to the College Board, the nonprofit group that administers the…

Computing Education Blog