Procrastination man - Part 2

Remember, a couple of entries back, when I said it would be the last entry about the Warwick Uni shop? Well - I lied :-P
There's been some developments in the matter, and I now have a better understanding of the matter - see the dedicated page here
Hopefully this should be the last of this. But no promises this time eh?

Over the past couple of months, the breakdown of visitors to this website by country has surprised me a little - well, the proportion of American visits is impressively huge, I'm glad :-) so, if you're reading this... where are you from, and if I don't know you, how did you find this blog?
Cheers for reading!
Here are the stats for February (taking into account that me modifying the blog accounts for quite a bit of the French visits)

Normally, bringing in a new technology to the classroom/lecture theatres should only open up new possibilities. Thus, OHPs allowed for complex schematics to be shown, even modified at times. Then came the days of digital video projectors, a new medium available in class. And because of this, the number of slides-led lectures just went off the scale, whilst the good old-fashioned chalk tended to disappear.
The problem with a medium like PowerPoint, as opposed to OHPs, is that it seems to allow for everything - even for an entire lecture, whereas OHPs were always thought of as supporting material. As a result, the slides issue tends to be an all-or-nothing choice - either one uses PowerPoint for lectures, and goes all the way with it, actually stopping using the blackboard. Or, they only use the blackboard. Nowadays, in my opinion, it is quite rare to use OHPs when PowerPoint is made available.
Now, PowerPoint offers a whole lot more than blackboards in terms of variety of media involved. You can put graphics, or videos, even nice little fun animations (whose interest is debatable). If cleverly thought of, the whole slides thingy can, 'in discussion-led lectures', put the stress on what lecturers think is important. But it also changes the scope of the lecture.
The main inconvenient of the new medium is that it is, first and foremost, what didacticians would call written expression. As in, non-evolutive. It does not prevent interaction or didactics situations - but the interaction is based on what the author expects the reader to understand/believe, and therefore might go in the wrong direction. Admittedly, questions can be asked; but if the slides replace the use of the blackboard, the lecturer will tend to give an oral answer - and using PowerPoint actually limits the quantity of medium available!
One may ask, though, whether lectures at university level are not already interaction-free. Obviously, with lecture theatres of many hundred, one-on-one interaction is virtually impossible, and thus little interaction seems to happen on the visible level. When the lecturer asks a question, students may not dare answer out of social status reasons, or because they deem the answer to be too obvious; but interaction does not only happen on the oral level. Nods, or looking utterly lost, helps the lecturer inflex his material so that it is understood by the largest numbers. Conversely, when a lecturer looks at his students, he engages with them and an interaction situation is started - which does not happen when he's looking at his slides!

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Now, PowerPoint has its advantages - it prevents lecturers dirtying themselve with chalk, or felt-tip markers. As I said before, it allows to show more different types of media; and on a practical level, it comes up with a solution to lecturers' shabby handwriting. It speeds things up when it comes to showing quotes etc. that are relevant but not crucial to the lecture. But in lectures that are not just an outlook on a situation - one where the student has to understand the material, not just see it exists, i.e. any non-introductory course or non-discussion led course (which by the way implies smaller groups); then it is a hinderance to the actual lecture, insofar as it does not work alongside the blackboard but instead of it.
Good lectures are lectures which know how to take advantage of both the PowerPoint possibilities and what the blackboard has to offer. Maybe interactive whiteboards are the solution, as they let both media live alongside one another? But I must admit that I have never been entirely convinced by interactive whiteboards, though I fail to give proper reasons here. Maybe another solution would be to give access to a video projector that projects on a screen not behind the blackboard, but on the side of the theatre. This would lead lecturers to actually use the blackboard (more central) but still give access to other medium.
More thoughts on this: Andy's blog

So I stumbled upon this nice little video, made by a friend of mine. I'll let you watch:

A really classy idea. In my opinion, it may not be a major breakthrough in maths (obviously), but as an educationalist, I see it as a breakthrough, as it will give people a new way to think of complex functions. Indeed, graphs are quite intuitive for real functions; and 3D graphs work more or less for complex-to-real functions; and those representations, and more importantly switching from one to the other (other representations include a process, or the definition-based set of relations...), will allow for a better understanding of the mathematical object.
Ultimately, it would be interesting to see how usual properties (smoothness, continuity, ...) translate into Reflex. Sadly, to my knowledge, there is no topology on coloured planes, so it might be a long way to go still before breakthroughs are made via Reflex. Usability in schools depends highly on new technologies, but would be well cool.
And then, there's the Arts side. They do look nice, as fractals do. Maths can be nice!
More info on Reflex here

The undergrad Warwick times are well over now. Oxfam is no stranger to the closure of this nice chapter in my life. I have received answers to my letter of complaint; the first one was basically taking me for a fool, the second one was along the lines of "eff off and die". Needless to say I am hugely disappointed; but then, what was I expecting? I'm not sure. If it was, as I believe, internal politics and individuals' power struggles that led to the closure, they probably wouldn't admit it. Anyway, the full text of their email is available here, and hopefully I will be able to stop ranting about this particular topic on this blog. Ranting about Oxfam is a different matter.

Anyway, I'm not sure whether the eff off email I got on monday triggered several of the decisions I have made this week; or if I was going to do it anyway - it definitely sped the process up. But I'm stopping a lot of things I had started that were associated with Warwick. The hugest one is the BIE - the students' international office I had created in my university back in summer 06. It was a nice experience, and I got good friends out of it; and I believe it was not only useful, but simply necessary to create such a structure. Well, structure is a strong term, but at least I've planted the germ of an idea there; and hopefully it will go on after my times. Out of all that's been done, I'm proud of the setting up of the buddy scheme, and the redaction of a guide (heavy pdf, work in progress at the time of writing), as well as an online wiki guide.

So why stop? I guess I'm tired of getting involved in stuff; without it paying off in the long term. I'm sure both my work at Oxfam and in the BIE were appreciated, and had lots of short-term advantages. But in the end, it was very demanding in terms of energy, and rather than adding a service to international students, we were doing what the official international people should have been doing. Ah, well, at least the BIE will be taken over, and the guide will live; so there will be some long-term effects there.

I'm not sure the same can be said of the rock-gospel choir. Which I'm stopping too by the way. At least temporarily. The reasons are similar, even though the issue is different - it was too energy-consuming, and the pay-off was not that huge. It was good while it lasted, i.e. when people were coming. But lately, attendance has dropped drastically, and so has my motivation. At a time when exams are drawing near, there is no way I was going to keep on preparing entire rehearsals/songteaching for three people, when the future was not certain, as no-one who is motivated enough to take over is not in a position to commit to it.

Again, I have no regrets. It was nice while it lasted, and has had an impact on some people; who may have discovered hidden abilities (I'm still a fan of the Aims & Values, available on the Lyon Rev website), and it was fun, and amazing.

So, so long to all that. The only thing I'm still involved in is the Warwick Student Cinema. Cos' it's fun and not too energy-demanding, though I'm sure the people involved at higher levels than I, would probably disagree on that point!