It appears you have a browser that doesn’t grok the HTML5 <audio> tag. You can download the MP3 directly: 2011-02-06 Teaching Anecdotes.

Transcript:

Good day, all. Rick O here. In this podcast I want to share with you a story about my experiences as a teacher. For the second course in my Master’s program I have been given an assignment to build a portfolio website and do a podcast about my previous teaching experiences. I’ve already got the website, so here’s the podcast. But enough intro, Rick, get to the good stuff.

It turns out that I don’t remember too many of my really great teaching experiences. I know I’ve had successes, but they don’t stand out as much as the total failures. That probably says something crucial about my personality, but there you go. So instead of a story of success, I’m going to give stories of failure, but with an underlying theme that has led to my success as a teacher.

Anecdote the first: I was in middle school, in a pre-Algebra class. This was the first time in my life I was given homework that I actually had to take home and do, instead of just finishing it while the teacher was talking in class. I don’t remember what the exact topic was, but at one point I was frustrated by something and called my mom over to help me. We looked at it, and tried a few dead-ends. We both got increasingly frustrated, and voices were raised, until she finally exclaimed “I can’t help you with this!” and went off to do something else.

I didn’t understand it at the time, but I had hit the limits of what my mom remembered about math. My mom’s a smart gal, but math isn’t her strong point, and it had been a decade or more since she’d had a serious math class. This was my first exposure to the idea that maybe adults didn’t know everything about everything nor do they have perfect recall.

Fast forward a few years to high school. My then-girlfriend-now-wife was taking a statistics class. She, too, was not a mathlete like I was. She asked me for help one night, and try as I might I couldn’t get her to see the connections in the math that I could. I completely failed as a teacher, and neither of us has forgotten how horrific that failure was. Again, I didn’t see it at the time, but this was my first indicator that maybe everyone didn’t learn the same way.

It took a while until she was willing to ask for my help again, but a few years later she was in an Intro to Programming class that used Pascal as the language of choice. This should have been a red flag for me—I had been about 8 years old when I devoured my first book on Pascal, even though I wouldn’t have access to a Pascal compiler for another 5 years. Yeah, I was one of those kids. Anyway, the lesson went about as well as could be expected—epic fail—and we made a tacit agreement that I would never again try to help her with her homework. The lesson here? It’s harder to teach things you are passionate about, because your students may not have that passion and it’ll break your heart to see how much they don’t care.

And now back to the present. I’ve been teaching for about a year and a half now. I’ve taken these failures to heart, and used them to make myself a better teacher. I don’t expect my students to have perfect recall, nor to remember the minutiae that is accumulated over years of constant exposure to a subject. I try to present my course material in as many formats as I can generate — pages of long form text, bulleted slides, screencasts, interactive examples, real-world examples, et cetera — because everyone will absorb it differently. And I know that my students probably won’t love what I am teaching. They may even hate it. But that’s okay, because I am not what I teach. I’m just the messenger.

My wife loves her new Sony Reader Touch. She’s got it synced up to check out books from the local library. She prints web pages and documents to PDF so that she can get to them from anywhere in a few seconds. She tried buying a book from the Sony store … but that didn’t work out so well.

But the burr under the saddle has been schoolbooks.

Her university has a partnership with a couple of different ebook retailers, but most of her books end up on iChapters, a.k.a. Cengage Brain. In theory, iChapters is an awesome business model: break up a textbook into ebook chapters and allow students to buy or rent them individually. For example, look at the prices for one of her textbooks, Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge, 12ed:

That particular book has 16 chapters. At $8 each, buying them individually would be only negligibly cheaper than buying the whole book outright. But some of her classes only require a handful of chapters, making individual chapters an absolute steal.

… and too good to be true.

It turns out that iChapters does a little bit of a bait-n-switch. The sample chapters are in PDF format, but the paid-for chapters are in SPDF format—a “sealed” PDF, slathered in DRM. Really, the SPDF file extension is misdirection: Acrobat can’t read it. You need an Acrobat Reader plugin to “unseal” (read: unencrypt) the PDF. This isn’t the DRM that Adobe built into PDFs. That DRM is pretty much transparent, and works flawlessly with the Sony Reader. Library ebooks use the built-in Adobe DRM to time out after 2-3 weeks, when the physical book would have to be returned.

No, let me be perfectly clear: iChapters SPDF files can only be read on your computer. They can’t be read on any eReader: the Sony Reader, Nook, Kindle, or what have you.

Better yet, the unsealer plugin disables printing to PDF (as you figure it would).
… and the files are watermarked on every single page with a large background image right in the middle—behind the text and diagrams making them tricky to read.
… and absolutely no conversion of formatting has been done—books that are formatted badly on paper, requiring lots of flipping back and forth, retain the bad formatting and now require jogging back and forth with the scroll bar.
… and the PDFs aren’t optimized: they are huge files with 300dpi images and layers obscured by other layers.
… and many of the images and text blocks have been removed, with large “unavailable due to copyright restriction” messages. (wtf, really?)
… and, oh yeah, the chapters are really rentals, too. The license to read them times out, even though you don’t learn that until after you “buy”.

In short: excellent idea, horrible execution.

All this can be yours … for $0.50 per page. I pity the fools rushing out to buy an iPad as an eBook reader. If they think the user experience is going to be any better … ha!

I get the feeling that eBooks are now where MP3s were 10 years ago. I had the same experiences trying to buy MP3s to put on my Rio back then. We’ll get to a point where people stop being stupid … but it’s going to take a few more years.

“Intended to require near-zero configuration, FW/1 lets you build your application without worrying about a framework getting in your way.”

This is mostly dead-on. I’m not a frameworks guy, and even I thought FW/1 was pretty simple to get up and running around with. It wasn’t perfect—but it was noticeably easier than the other CF frameworks I’ve used.

As I mentioned in my previous post, in the ColdFusion courses I teach the two final lectures are on ORM and Frameworks. Both lectures use a simple blog front-end as example code. I translated that code over to FW/1, mostly via copy-and-paste. You can download it, if you like:

Simple Blog Front-End using CF9 ORM and FW/1
Zip Archive, 12KB

There’s not much to it, really. I suspect you’d gain more from Ray’s posts on the subject.

I ran into the same problem that Ray initially had: the default method is named “default”, which is a reserved word in CFScript. This code breaks:

public function default(required struct rc) {

This means you’re limited to either CFML-based Controllers or you need to be extra careful about using defaults. I admit that the new CFScript is growing on me—especially for Controllers, Models, and Services—so this is a bit of a drawback. (Hacking your local copy of the framework to use defaultItem instead of default may not be a horrible idea, but may potentially limit the distributability of your code … if you care about such things.)

My other nitpick is that the FW/1 documentation is upside-down. The Controller examples show how to add service calls to the queue:

variables.fw.service( "myservice.myaction", "myresult" );

But it’s not until you get to the very end of that page that you find out that to get this variable you have to set it up yourself—it’s not one of the magic variables that the framework provides:

function init(fw) { variables.fw = fw; }

I spent half of my time banging my head against the wall with writeDump() statements trying to figure out what I was doing wrong … before I scrolled down to see that.

Beyond those two relatively minor nitpicks, it’s not a bad framework. All of the implicit invocation is nice, and the structure is logical and easy to work with. I love the way the Service objects are called with argumentCollection so that they don’t have to care about the framework. I’m not a huge fan of the way Views are done, though: there’s too much hand-wavey magic. Personally, I’d prefer to code Views as functions, too, if only to have nice, explicit arguments like the Services do. But I admit that might just be my OCD kicking in. The fallback for Views and Layouts is nice.

In all, FW/1 doesn’t suck. That’s high praise coming from an anti-framework guy like me.