Tag Archives: curation

Curation: A liquid syllabus at university?

The PolyBlog
November 11 2022

From time to time, I find interesting articles and link to them from my website. They could cover a whole range of topics, but I generally group them under the heading of “articles I like”, or my new title, “Curation:”. What they have in common is some sort of idea that I found intriguing or provocative. Today’s topic: A liquid syllabus.

The short mechanics of it are misleading, as you could simply see it as a syllabus that a professor has created for their course but which they place on their own personal website rather than on the internal university system. I initially thought what they were really talking about was creating an evergreen syllabus for a course, something that would allow them to update it more easily, or to link to other materials out in the wild that didn’t fit well for links and approvals within a stodgy university computer platform. Just another form of academic freedom, I thought. But I clicked through to the article for two reasons — one was to understand the liquid syllabus but the other was that it talked about improving access for vulnerable groups yet leaving the professor somehow more vulnerable.

How could it help vulnerable groups? And was the professor more vulnerable because it was more innovative and emerging issues? I had to know what the conversation looked like, coming so close to the interests I have in online learning, educational governance, and computers.

Reaching vulnerable groups

The initial elements were fascinating. They noticed that at some colleges, the biggest drop in enrolment happened between the enrolment point online and the first day of school. Some of that could be explained away by the finances of it all, some would easily be able to “register” without paying, but when the tuition bill came due, they didn’t have the money after all. But for many vulnerable groups, there was something else at play too. The university world seemed daunting and mechanical, with few humanizing elements.

A syllabus is often considered a contract between an instructor and their students. It communicates how the course will be taught, outlines how students will be evaluated and promotes the values of an institution or an individual instructor.

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But a syllabus that is difficult or impossible to access during the vulnerable period between when a student registers for a class and when the student starts the class may never make an impact—positive or otherwise. That’s because students often arrive at college with mind-sets. Those from nonmajority groups, for example, may wonder about whether they belong, a phenomenon known as belongingness uncertainty. Some may also feel at risk of confirming negative stereotypes associated with their identities, known as stereotype threat. Others from varied racial groups and genders suffer from impostor syndrome.

A brief, if imperfect, welcome video as part of an instructor’s liquid syllabus can help mitigate students’ sense of belongingness uncertainty, Pacansky-Brock said. Ideally, the faculty member would film the video in a nonacademic setting, use welcoming language that speaks to social inclusion and offer a window into who they are outside the classroom.

Most important, when the welcome video is part of a liquid syllabus that is accessed via a public website, students do not encounter the barrier that learning management systems, which require usernames, passwords and navigation tools, sometimes present.

Frictionless access to mobile-friendly syllabi supports equity, as Black and Hispanic U.S. adults are less likely than white adults to have a traditional computer and broadband at home, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center study.

“In order for us to really close equity gaps, we have to begin thinking about how students access college materials, especially something as important as a syllabus,” Ortiz said, noting that when she was in college, she found the contractual language on syllabi intimidating. Her students access her liquid syllabi much more frequently than when the syllabi were stored in a learning management system. Many return to the documents throughout the semester, for example, for the hyperlinks she added to campus resources such as counseling, disability accommodations and basic needs.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/11/11/frictionless-syllabus-access-some-bypass-college

Of course, they still have to provide the formal thing for the official version in the university’s online system, faculty management documentation, etc. But they can provide a more “humanized” version online, including in part, more plain-language context around key factors. It’s more work, but potentially more effective.

Vulnerability

Again, as I mentioned above, I was thinking that the obvious risk was that they would be using material somehow in the liquid syllabi that wasn’t sanctioned by the university. Extreme academic freedom, perhaps. Nope, the risk is more about trolls and safety.

Liquid syllabus websites that stand apart from the college’s learning management system and college website are not without risks. Because the websites are public, faculty who create them could be targeted due to controversial topics they teach or because of their identities.

“I’ve talked to the faculty of color who are concerned about sharing their appearance in video because they don’t want to be judged and discriminated against by their students,” Pacansky-Brock said. “There’s a lot that needs to be untangled. It’s complicated.”

Lisa Paciulli, a lecturer in the biology department at North Carolina State University, generally avoids putting personal information online, but she paid a graduate student with her own money to create her public, online syllabi because she feels strongly that students should have easy access to information about her courses.

Why did it resonate with me?

The idea is fascinating to me as so much of what is in there is outside my wheelhouse. Starting with the vulnerability side, I blog a LOT. I’m probably closing in on 2M words at this point. So the public risk of putting myself “out there” is one I dealt with a long time ago. But I’m not a PoC and I don’t push a very active agenda on anything. I blog about niche topics, generally explain how things work for those who aren’t in the same realm, or I’m blogging about my own relatively simple life. I’m not out clubbing seals nor saving the rainforests. And I’m a white male. I don’t put much of “me” out there visually, few photos or videos of “me being me”, but I’m also not a professor who stands in front of a new class every year for the first time.

I took a course from two professors online, I was auditing the course so they didn’t “see” me as a student, but i found the one female professor particularly engaging on the topics. They divided up the syllabus a bit between them, and the stuff she covered (identity in games, culture, etc.) was fascinating. If I was on-campus and taking the course in person, I probably would have tried to talk to her after class about some of the topics or attended tutorials she offered. Virtually? I’d have to settle for whatever she had online. But she had also blogged previously about the Gamergate world out there, and how women were subject to trolling at disproportionate rates, etc., and the reaction online was, well, predictable. As a result, she seems to have almost no online presence. Maybe she’s out of that academic world, maybe she’s changed her name, who knows. I’ve been roasted and attacked online a few times, so I have some small inkling of attacks based on gender rather than content, but it’s not the same as what they experience nor likely to ever be so. Which means my risk/reward calculation looks very different from hers or theirs.

But the accessibility stuff also seems alien to me. If I was looking at a course, I’d research the crap out of it. I’d kick in the doors, take names, download every file I could, enter every computer system I could, etc. I would have no qualms at all about whether I “should” be there, or “would” be there. Which is not to say I don’t suffer from imposter syndrome in the other aspects with crippling anxiety that I can’t do something or whatever, but I’m an analytical introvert. I might not show up for a mixer, I might fear being rejected by the cool kids, but online interactions with a syllabus? That poses ZERO friction for me. Hell, I have downloaded syllabi from universities where I don’t even know anyone who attended that university! Free curation of a topic? Hell yeah. I think all syllabi should be available from every university online for free. 🙂 Cuz I’m not the one paid to create it only to risk other professors stealing all my work and offering the same course at their university.

Liquidity in Canada

Which gives me a thought. How public are syllabi in an area I know? What if I search for public administration, Canada, course and the term syllabus? It’s a TERRIBLE methodology, but I’ll give it a go.

  • The University of Alberta has diploma programs geared towards municipal government, and while they have lots of videos showing a diverse population, none of their content is easily accessible, looks like all syllabi are in the learning management system once fully registered.
  • Kompass has pages to get you to give them your info and they’ll send you something, but virtually no details seem to be available beforehand.
  • UBC has some decent course offerings, lots of videos and descriptions, but no obvious details on course content beyond a general overview.
  • Waterloo has some syllabi directly available online although considerably out of date (2012). Good videos, poor quality images of “striving to show diversity” which was weird since it is already abundantly apparent in their profiles they’ve got it covered.
  • Dalhousie had a decent syllabus publicly available, just the raw version, recent enough.
  • USask had a really good one, good resources, but it required a bit of clicking to get through and was very dry and academic looking. Certainly not “liquid” in any way.
  • York is easily accessible, but no liquid factor at all.
  • Queens has its syllabus — for its program, not its courses.
  • Carleton has one available, but out of date.
  • I had high hopes for Athabasca given that it was “online” before everyone else. Nope, generic website, nothing special.
  • McGill’s site wasn’t bad, just not enough detail. Their “welcome” aspects were okay though.
  • Cape Breton U had an okay page, looked welcoming for design, but just not enough info to help me understand their approach.
  • Ryerson/Metro has an okay program, very business-like in its approach, but again, not much on the actual courses beyond a blurb.
  • I did find the Atlas of Public Management site. It is really intriguing, so I have set it aside for further perusal. A database of public management courses around the world, lifting a lot of it from individual university websites. A curated overview, if you will.
  • Guelph was an abbreviated version.
  • The joint URegina and USask school had great online stuff for their past syllabi, albeit abbreviated versions.
  • Adler had some interesting stuff, but presentation was a bit odd…Their “liquid” benefits were all at the bottom of the pages.

It took me a really long time to get to a version that wasn’t on official university sites. I found one on a private page of a UofT professor. It’s a pretty static “about me” site, a professional academic’s site so to speak. It’s not a blogging setup, for instance. Does it meet the definitions of “liquid”? I don’t know. It wasn’t as obvious where the pieces were for his courses, Google found them, not me just browsing his site.

I may do some more research on professors with their own sites in Canada, but for now, it was an interesting article to think about today.

Articles I Like: Tracking Emerging Cryptomining Threats

The PolyBlog
May 13 2018

The WordPress security plugin, Wordfence, published a blog entry describing how one of its techs working on cracking malware goes about doing the various steps in a recent day, analysing and developing responses to specific threats.

While the post seems at first to be highly technical, it’s quite readable by the informed layperson, and quite interesting to see. It also dispels the cryptocurrency baitclick headline to note it could have been running anything off the site, it just happened to be doing CCs.

One of our sources of threat data at Defiant is cleaning hacked websites. In this case, Ivan, a member of our SST team had cleaned a hacked site and handed me the forensic data for analysis. The site had been hacked for months before the owner discovered that it had been compromised.

My normal routine is to start by verifying the files we already detect to check if there is any new information inside any of them. Usually there is not, and this infection did not yield any surprises in the files that Wordfence already detected.

What did surprise me is that the server had a large number of malicious files we have not seen before. The server had been infected for a long time, which may have left the attacker feeling confident enough to upload more valuable code.

For us, a server with code we have not seen before is a treasure trove, because it immediately allows us to add new detection capability to the Wordfence malware scanner. If an attacker is caught in this situation, they generally have a bad day, because many of their files that may have previously been undetected by malware scanners will now be detected by our scan.

The first thing that made this attacker different from others is that, instead of using a standard javascript code obfuscator that just scrambles the code, they were using a finite wordlist to replace variable and function names in the code. When you look at the code, the variable and function names just seem like gibberish.

I immediately searched for other similar files out of the remaining samples and found several, then proceeded to write new signatures to detect those files. That accomplished, I moved on to the next file in the list. That was a basic PHP file that selectively redirects regular users, not search engines, to a malicious website. This is a standard thing we see, so I wrote a signature to detect this updated malware variant and moved on.

WordPress: Tracking Emerging Cryptomining Threats

Even the opening approach is quite illuminating, seeing the real work of defenders, not the Hollywood version.

Articles I Like: The Law of Unintended Consequences: Shakespeare, Cobra Breeding, and a Tower in Pisa

The PolyBlog
March 4 2018

This is another article from Farnam Street, and I confess up until a few days ago, I’d never heard of them. Run by a guy named Shane Parrish, he’s based here in Ottawa. Some really fascinating stuff on there, with decent curation and a lot of links. This article highlights that:

Not all of our grand schemes turn out like we planned. In fact, sometimes things go horribly awry. In this article, we tackle unintended consequences and how to minimize them in our own decision making.

The Law of Unintended Consequences: Shakespeare, Cobra Breeding, and a Tower in Pisa | Farnam Street

You might think that the article is going to be about train wreck ideas or the butterfly effect causing tsunamis. Not really. In fact, I would say it is more about linear thinking from good intentions to good outcomes, without taking into account side effects. Some unknown, some unforeseeable, some just missed because they stopped thinking early. The article has a great quote from a book by William A. Sherden:

Sometimes unintended consequences are catastrophic, sometimes beneficial. Occasionally their impacts are imperceptible, at other times colossal. Large events frequently have a number of unintended consequences, but even small events can trigger them. There are numerous instances of purposeful deeds completely backfiring, causing the exact opposite of what was intended.

The conclusion is simple — systems thinking or second-order thinking is needed, but the article doesn’t pay much attention to the fact that often the culprit lies in defining the system too narrowly, when in fact the small system is part of a larger system, and it is the larger system that often has the other effects (like the examples of releasing a predator into a land to control one local population, not realizing that the predator will spread into the larger system). What I do like is the idea that sometimes the failure is in over-estimating the size of the system, assuming there are too many variables, and thus not trying at all to figure out ancillary effects.

Yet, if we know they exist (or in hindsight think we should have), the article explains some of the most common reasons:

Sociologist Robert K. Merton has identified five potential causes of consequences we failed to see:

Our ignorance of the precise manner in which systems work.

Analytical errors or a failure to use Bayesian thinking (not updating our beliefs in light of new information).

Focusing on short-term gain while forgetting long-term consequences.

The requirement for or prohibition of certain actions, despite the potential long-term results.

The creation of self-defeating prophecies (for example, due to worry about inflation, a central bank announces that it will take drastic action, thereby accidentally causing crippling deflation amidst the panic).

However, the article goes even further, adding in over-reliance on models and predictions (mistaking the map for the territory), survivorship bias, the compounding effect of consequences, denial, failure to account for base rates, curiosity, or the tendency to want to do something.

Of course, the article leads to the article I shared earlier (Articles I Like: Mental Models – The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (113 Models Explained)), and the use of other mental models to help prevent a failure to consider other effects.

Cool stuff, love the site.

Articles I Like: 10 breakthrough technologies this year

The PolyBlog
March 1 2018

Technology Review has released their list for “10 Breakthrough Technologies” for 2018. It’s hard to argue with the list having some important developments in it:

  • 3-D printing with metal — this could drastically disrupt manufacturing and give rise to lighter, stronger parts;
  • Artificial embryos — not exactly coming to a lab near you, but basically creating an embryo from another cell without an egg or sperm…great for research, but the ethical issues haven’t been worked out;
  • Smart-design for urban settings — using sensing technology and integrating tech into high-end design has always been part of the “future” in various sci-fi movies, but Quayside in Toronto will make some of it a reality;
  • Dueling neural networks — computer AI’s are bad at “creating”, but new techniques teaching them to learn off each other is creating a pseudo creativity with amazing applications for modelling, virtual entertainment, design, etc.;
  • Babelfish earbuds — auto translation in an earbud is great in theory, but I’m not convinced it will move out of the tourist zone as rapidly as some claim, particularly as early designs by no less than Google have been pretty clunky;
  • Zero-carbon natural gas — obviously, it’s still a non-renewable fuel, but having a clean version with no GHG emissions would be amazing, even if “Net Power’s technology won’t solve all the problems with natural gas, particularly on the extraction side. But as long as we’re using natural gas, we might as well use it as cleanly as possible.”;
  • Perfect Online Privacy through zero-knowledge proof — the idea is that you can provide “proof” of something (age, financial balance) without actually providing access…not quite a simple “proxy”, more like a cryptographic tool that says “You want to check if that record over there shows the person is over 18? Let me ask it”, and rather than performing the check itself, the cryptography gets the yes/no without seeing the original data…kind of like PayPal on steroids, but that doesn’t solve all the privacy issues online, it just makes the anonymous transparency of blockchains a bit more practical;
  • Genetic Fortune-Telling — the ethical issues of using DNA to predict health issues or even IQ are ridiculously bad, and based on the discrepancies in DNA testing for geneology, it can make economics look like a pure science; and,
  • Quantum leaps — building quantum computers is one thing, figuring out what to do with one is another…but modelling of molecules for design seems like a great first use.

However, for me, the one “breakthrough” that I think will affect us the most is the one the magazine dubs “AI for Everybody”:

Artificial intelligence has so far been mainly the plaything of big tech companies like Amazon, Baidu, Google, and Microsoft, as well as some startups. For many other companies and parts of the economy, AI systems are too expensive and too difficult to implement fully.

Machine-learning tools based in the cloud are bringing AI to a far broader audience. So far, Amazon dominates cloud AI with its AWS subsidiary. Google is challenging that with TensorFlow, an open-source AI library that can be used to build other machine-learning software. Recently Google announced Cloud AutoML, a suite of pre-trained systems that could make AI simpler to use.

Microsoft, which has its own AI-powered cloud platform, Azure, is teaming up with Amazon to offer Gluon, an open-source deep-learning library. Gluon is supposed to make building neural nets—a key technology in AI that crudely mimics how the human brain learns—as easy as building a smartphone app.

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Currently AI is used mostly in the tech industry, where it has created efficiencies and produced new products and services. But many other businesses and industries have struggled to take advantage of the advances in artificial intelligence. Sectors such as medicine, manufacturing, and energy could also be transformed if they were able to implement the technology more fully, with a huge boost to economic productivity.

Most companies, though, still don’t have enough people who know how to use cloud AI. So Amazon and Google are also setting up consultancy services. Once the cloud puts the technology within the reach of almost everyone, the real AI revolution can begin.

You’ll want to keep an eye on these 10 breakthrough technologies this year | Technology Review

My only disagreement with the last one is the timing. They argue it’s available now, partly based on things like Siri and Alexa invading homes. Combined with the dueling neural networks, there are great things to be accomplished. I just don’t think they’re as close as they optimistically project they are already.