Sensible Marks of Ideas

solri @ 2013-05-14T10:53:00

2013-05-14T08:03:29Z

Classes are drawing to an end, and as usual I'm getting slightly lumpy-throaty. While many look forward to the end of teaching, I don't. Maybe if I were a scientist or an archaeologist, I'd be looking forward to summer to get some "real work" done, but teaching is my "real work" - any research I do is kind of a hobby. After teaching finishes, there's just grading and meetings and planning and preparation until the middle of July, with just a conference to alleviate the boredom. (Oh yes, and upgrading Moodle - that should be fun.) The only reason I don't volunteer for summer school is that it comes on top of all meetings and planning and whatnot, not instead of it.

solri @ 2013-05-14T10:50:00

2013-05-14T07:50:21Z

Happy birthday sjcarpediem!

solri @ 2013-05-05T10:09:00

2013-05-05T07:09:58Z

Happy birthday, hfx_ben!

Gamifying Gamification

2013-05-02T17:46:56Z

Last week I had teams of students looking at gamification and serious games scenarios, like "You are an educational gaming start-up entering a competition by the Turkish government to find a game to teach Ottoman history to middle-school students" or "You are a group of students who have volunteered to design a serious game to help new students find out about the university during orientation week." To determine the order in which teams would get to pick their scenario, I first did a quick quiz. During the quiz, I noticed two students deciding which answer their team would pick by playing rock, paper, scissors. In other words, they were gamifying a gamification of a simulation about gamification.

solri @ 2013-04-17T11:24:00

2013-04-17T08:26:33Z

Quick poll for classical music lovers: Monteverdi – late renaissance or early baroque?

Pomodoro as Minimal Gamification

2013-04-16T12:29:10Z

Grading papers is the bane of any teacher's life, unless they teach the age-group where it's tears, runny noses and constant requests to go to the toilet. Don't get me wrong: I don't mind reading student papers as such; I just don't like having to read fifty on the same topic, highlighting the grammar errors as I go. As a university teacher interested in gamification, I have been trying to think of ways to gamify grading for some time, with remarkably little success. The closest I've come - and it has been quite a breakthrough - has been using Pomodoro. For those unfamiliar with it, the Pomodoro technique is a simple time-management system where you work intensely for a set time, usually twenty minutes, take a five-minute break, then repeat, with a longer break every now and then. You can use a kitchen timer (hence the name, since they are often tomato-shaped) or some software; I've been using a GNOME3 extension.

Those who are by now sick of hearing every crappy behaviour modification technique called "gamification" will immediately object that this is not in the least game-like. But bear with me. On the surface, it doesn't look very different from what I was doing before: I would read a paper, enter the grade, then take a break before going on to the next one. All I'm doing is setting the times, which is simple efficiency, preventing the classic "I'll just check my mail for five minutes," turning into an hour-long ramble round the Web. However, there is a little more to it.

First let me describe the system as I used it. I normally take 20-30 minutes to grade an essay of the type I was working on. I reckoned I could keep it down at the bottom end by working intensively and avoiding distractions, so I started with the default Pomodoro routine: 20 minutes work, 5 minutes for a short break, and 15 minutes for one of the rarer long breaks. If it took longer than 20 minutes, I broke the Pomodoro principle and sacrificed some of my break; if it took less, I allowed myself to do some other computer activity, like checking my mail or social media until it was time for the break. Breaks themselves had to be away from the computer. In the short breaks I would stretch and do breathing exercises (baduanjin) or perform a quick domestic activity like making a cup of tea or hanging up the washing. In the long breaks, I'd do taijiquan, take a shower or have something to eat. After a while I was able to reduce the work part to 17 minutes and also reduced the long break to 13 minutes. Using this method, I graded 36 papers over the weekend, and that allowed for a couple of lie-ins, a walk and a fair amount of TV. That is not particularly remarkable; what was remarkable was that I enjoyed it, and it was this that got me thinking about gamification.

I've defined a game elsewhere as "a structured activity designed to facilitate play," which means that the measure of successful gamification is not the presence of any particular piece of game mechanics but the cultivation of a playful attitude. And as I've also said elsewhere, there isn't a sharp distinction between play and work, or even a spectrum from play to work; there is a spectrum from play to drudgery, and work can come almost anywhere on it, even though lamentably it tends to be closer to drudgery. The fact that I was feeling enthusiastic about an activity that normally has me tearing my hair out alerted me to the fact that I was, at least to some extent, playing at grading as well as working at it.

What made this activity a little more playful, I think, was the pomodoro gave me something to concentrate on outside the task itself. I was working hard to finish each paper on time, not so I could get through the bloody papers and eventually go and do something else (that is the the mind of the drudge) but simply for the pleasure of meeting the target. Similarly, shaving a few minutes off my time-per-paper and reducing the pomodoro time to 17 minutes was like levelling-up - the reward was not that I would eventually finish grading quicker (although I would)but simply the knowledge that I'd beaten my own score.

solri @ 2013-04-02T11:31:00

2013-04-02T08:31:31Z

Happy birthday, miss_next!

solri @ 2013-03-17T13:15:00

2013-03-17T11:20:08Z

I would really like to see (a) a high school drama where the most popular girl is a nice person, (b) a dashing, rebellious hero who fought for the Union in the Civil War.

solri @ 2013-03-10T14:07:00

2013-03-10T12:07:37Z

happy birthday, asteriskhere!

You Too Can be a Saint (reprise)

2013-03-09T12:14:39Z

This article about Mother Theresa's misdeeds prompted me to dig up and reprint my own blog entry on the subject from way back when John Paul II was pope and blog entries were handcrafted and FTPed. Looks like I was prescient.

Pope John Paul II currently holds the record for canonisation, having created about 300 saints, and is apparently about to process another dozen this month. Cynic though I may be, I still found the sheer scale of saint-making staggering. I didn't even know that there were that many saints in existence, let alone that they were the work of one pontiff.

Of course, with this saintly inflation there must inevitably be some devaluation of the divine currency. Saints are not what they used to be. In the good old days, they sat on the right hand of God and had odd parts of their bodies distributed among churches throughout Christendom (miraculously preserved, of course). Kissing some martyr's detatched toe could cure anything from paralysis to infertility (though not, ironically, leprosy). Nowadays, a saint is merely, according to the Vatican, someone whose life and/or death may be taken as an example by the rest of us, and only two attested miracles are required, healing the sick being the most popular choice.

Leading the candidates for canonisation is Mother Theresa, who does not even have to wait the customary five years after death before her case is considered by the spiritual Olympics Committee. In the miracle stakes she is at a distinct advantage because of the nature of her work running hospices. Hang around dying people long enough and you're bound to encounter a few who suddenly fail to die for no obvious reason. Of course if you're a real doctor in a proper hospital, you just shrug your shoulders and say “Spontaneous remission,” but if your main function is to pray, it must be tempting for onlookers to see the hand of the Almighty at work.

People may start to boo and hiss at this point, but I have to say that I am not impressed by Mother Theresa. In fact, I don't even like her very much. Since not liking Mother Theresa is at least a venal sin, and maybe even a mortal one, I should explain myself.

It is true that Mother Theresa went and lived in fairly uncomfortable surroundings to comfort the poor, sick and dying, but she was a nun, for God's sake. That's what nuns are supposed to do, and thousands of them get on with their nunly business without all the fanfares. It is not as though they are giving up a life of luxury and sensual pleasures to do so, and I imagine any girl wanting to join Holy Orders on the condition that she didn't have to deal with the poor and sick wouldn't get very far. More to the point, it is not necessary to have a divine mission to help people. Doctors Without Frontiers recently won a well-deserved Nobel prize, but I imagine there are plenty of atheists in their ranks. Moreover, they do not wrap up their good deeds in an aura of self-sacrificing piety; a friend of mine who worked alongside some of them summed up their attitude as “Get in, get out, get drunk.”

Perhaps part of the appeal was the fact that Theresa ministered to non-Christians, but in this age a little religious tolerance should not be so surprising. After all, doctors treat bodies without considering their race or religion, so why shouldn't the same apply to doctoring souls? The Dalai Lama once blessed some talismans for a friend of mine who was not only not a Buddhist, but a follower of the notorious Aleister Crowley, who in his lifetime was called “the wickedest man in the world.” You can't get more interdenominational than that.

Apart from prayers, hand-holding and a few dubious miracles, did Mother Theresa do any good? Well, she might have made quite a few people happy, which is to be applauded, but again this is hardly a criterion for sainthood, otherwise we would also have St. Elvis of the Pelvis. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that Mother Theresa did more harm than good (pause to duck flying cyber-tomatoes and rotten eggs). India's most pressing problem is poverty, and one of the most important factors in this poverty is over-population. To go into a country like this and preach the sanctity of poverty and the evil of birth control is counter-productive, to say the least. To be sure, our saint-elect was acting with the best of intentions, but good intentions are said to pave a certain road ...

If I believed in the idea that the pope could sanctify people in the same way that the Roman senate used to deify them, my candidate would be the Dalai Lama. I don't go all goopy over the Dalai Lama like a lot of Westerners do, but he seems like a decent chap, not only personally, but also politically and religiously. If it weren't for the inconvenience of troops of pilgrims passing through the living room, he's the kind of person you'd quite like to share a flat with. I'm not sure how he does in the miracle business, but someone who's spent that long meditating ought to be able to pull off a few good ones. Making him a Catholic saint would be a major advance in inter-faith co-operation, and it would also be a wonderful way to annoy Jiang Zemin on his European tour. One thing the Dalai Lama said that I particularly liked went something like “People often think that behaving ethically is something to do with spirituality. In fact, behaving ethically is just part of being human.” Amen to that.

October, 1999

solri @ 2013-03-06T14:51:00

2013-03-06T12:51:24Z

Happy birthday trochee!

solri @ 2013-02-20T11:08:00

2013-02-20T09:08:54Z

Happy birthday b0rg!

solri @ 2013-02-07T00:19:00

2013-02-06T22:19:55Z

Happy birthday, deepforestowl!

Bach, Set Theory and the Titanic

2013-01-19T10:58:55Z

Dear Radio Producers,
Please do the math and consider the size of the intersection of the set of people who like Bach and the set of people who like the theme from Titanic. Chances are that it is smaller than the intersection of the set of people who like Bach with the set of people who like Dethklok (of whom I happen to be a member). Remember that an angel once went back in time to stop the Titanic sinking just so he wouldn't have to listen to that song. OK, it was a fictional angel, and he was lying in any case, but it sounds credible, doesn't it? So really, the first intersection probably consists of you and completely tone deaf people. Put simply, tacky film music on a classical music station = bad idea.

solri @ 2013-01-17T17:34:00

2013-01-17T15:35:55Z

The great thing about doing my ENG 102 games course next semester is that I can play games and call it course preparation.

Hopefully

2013-01-05T10:47:20Z

When I was at school, I was taught that sentences like this were worthy only of those louts who took CSEs instead of "O" levels:

Hopefully, Uncle Albert will come.

Teachers would explain, in tones reminiscent of "Another Brick in the Wall", that the offending sentence, if it meant anything, meant that Uncle Albert would come with hope in his heart.

Like so many other grammar rules, this is, of course, nonsense. But it was only today that I asked myself exactly why it was nonsense. Let's change the sentence to

Unfortunately, Uncle Albert will come.

This obviously means "It is unfortunate that Uncle Albert will come," not "Uncle Albert came in an unfortunate manner." So why do some people insist that an initial "hopefully" can't mean "it is hoped that"? Is it the "full" part, I wonder? But we could still interpret it as "The prognosis is hopeful," couldn't we?

Let's consider a very different case:

Angrily, Sally left the room.

I propose that the only reason we ascribe the anger to Sally and not to the situation is that this is the only interpretation that makes sense. On the other hand, if we say

Sadly, Sally left the room.

is it Sally who is sad, or are we just talking about a sad situation? If the people who despise initial "hopefully" are correct, then only the former interpretation is possible, but common sense tells us both are plausible.

Hopefully, I'm not making an ass of myself here.

solri @ 2013-01-02T12:03:00

2013-01-02T10:05:39Z

I thought it would be great to have a science fiction story where the hero visits some exotic planet, lives with the natives and learns their culture, then decides their culture is so obnoxious it should be destroyed. Then I remembered Iain Banks has already done this. Twice.

solri @ 2013-01-02T07:57:00

2013-01-02T05:57:46Z

Happy birthday, regyt!

You what?

2013-01-01T00:16:36Z

"Solri.livejournal.com is ranked 119 in the world (among the 30 million domains), a low rank means that this website gets lots of visitors. This site is relatively popular among users in the Russia. It gets 52.4% from Russia. This site is estimated worth $392,540,900USD." (http://www.webstatsdomain.com)

OK, if anyone is interested in buying my LJ, I'm offering a knock-down price of three hundred million.

solri @ 2012-12-26T12:45:00

2012-12-26T10:46:46Z

"The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed." And the more you describe something as "the big lie", the more people will believe it is a lie.

solri @ 2012-12-23T20:50:00

2012-12-23T18:50:56Z

I don't read history any more. Too many spoilers.

solri @ 2012-12-13T09:44:00

2012-12-13T07:45:00Z

Happy birthday bram!

solri @ 2012-12-08T23:00:00

2012-12-08T21:02:20Z

Total number of pieces of student work read this semester is now 281. Given my interest in gamification, I'm thinking I should make a badge to award myself when I get to 300.

solri @ 2012-12-08T18:45:00

2012-12-08T16:46:57Z

I just wrote on a student paper "Rowling is not saying the same thing with death-eaters as Tolkien is with orcs," and felt very thankful that I have the kind of job that lets me do this.

solri @ 2012-12-08T16:54:00

2012-12-08T14:56:27Z

IT has taught us what academia has always known: you often don't know what data will be useful until you've collected a ton of it. Please bear this in mind the next time you're tempted to criticise academics for doing "useless" research.