barralopolis

Vertical turntable.

I started writing this post back in October- after experiencing my first MOOC. They have been discussed all over the place now- from the NYT to the Chronicle of Higher Education and everything in-between.  By the way, those links are only examples: search and you will find. Lots. About. MOOCs.

As I started reading about the topic, a distant memory came back to me: my first visit to Sweden in the late 80s. Wide-eyed and young in my first visit to a Western country, I tried to absorb as much as I could of all the new and exciting things around me. At one of the collaborator’s home, his son (in his early 20s or younger) showed us, Third world visitors, two novelties: a small Macintosh computer where he was playing some rudimentary game, and a vertical LP player. Of those two objects, one moved forward and the other never made it. Looking back to that memory, I recall how I was much more interested in the playfulness of the first than the supposed exquisiteness of the other. Which is surprising as at that time I was much more into music and stereos than computers (personal computers did not arrive to Cuba until some years later).

Somehow this reminds me of the current MOOC madness. And no, I don’t think they are an example of a vertical LP player- I actually think MOOCs are here to stay.

If you have not heard or read about Massive Open Online Courses, well probably your best bet is to google it up. It is not my intention here to do a review of the current MOOC situation…but to comment on some of the controversies and disputes around it.

I have a good opinion about MOOCs because my first was exceptionally good. My opinion “exceptionally goo” is based in my view as an online instructor. I spend a lot of time trying to make my online courses easy to navigate, clear, fair, not too hard but not too easy, connected to real time, responsive, novel…you name it. So taking an online course that was all that and more- the professionally made and perfectly chunked lectures with doodles and little questions interrupting the text to keep our attention; the quizzes that one could not answer by word-searching or googling, the assignments that addressed real life applications with crispy grading rubrics.

Okay, n=1 is not a basis for a scientific opinion. But the truth is, I gained valuable knowledge…for free, in a rather efficient way. Not only that- the course was surrounded by a variety of forums, from a Facebook group to a LinkedIn group, connections occurring in real time between people located in different continents. If I wanted, I could have joined a bunch of meetups close to my geographical locations. It was an energizing experience.

Let’s step back for a second. A lot of people in that course were from developing countries. As somebody coming from a developing country, I know about the power of knowledge. Those online students were empowered, and their energy shone through their postings.

Going back to my original analogy of the vertical turntable versus the primitive videogame on the Mac- did I know? Could I feel the difference in destinies? I did not, I could not. But the game on the Mac, silly as it seemed, it was fun to watch. The vertical turntable was, in a way, boring. Exquisite, refined, but boring.

MOOCs are fun.

Just sayin’.

Carousel horse- for some reason, it appealed to me. Mirroring my oftentimes disjointed mental state? 

For the past month or so I have been thinking and sometimes even drafting blog posts related to four different topics:

1. Life as a new full-time faculty: insights, rant and raves
2. Gamification as an educational tool: my Coursera MOOC experience
3. Old school versus new school: how to balance team work with assertiveness while developing online classes.
4. Running as a way to keep my sanity AND a great way to connect with students in anatomy/physiology courses.

Of course, these are all aspects of the same thing. As part of my new position, I have become lead faculty for a set of introductory biology courses, both onsite and online. The latter, developed several years ago, are in dire need of revamping. In my quest to learn more about new trends in online education, I wandered into the MOOC realm by taking a Coursera course about Gamification. I also collaborate with other online projects, which tend to be team-based. Often I have been on the learning end within a team, actually my favorite position because I love learning from people who are experts and trailblazers. However sometimes I happen to be more ahead of the game. As I personally dislike conflicts but now they are inevitable for progress, I have been recently found myself in situations where I have to decide if I want to fight for something all the way or not. And while I have practiced the tools of consensus building, the process is not easy to complete over a one hour conference call.  So when I hang up feeling that I have been either too pushy or too meek, I can feel my epinephrine (better known as adrenaline) levels shooting up. That is when running do wonders for me. Few things are as effective as a long run to clear the mind and burn the stress. And to make things even better, talking running has been a very effective way to discuss anatomy/physiology issues in my classes. There are always runners in any class- current or former. I have used running-related examples from carbo-loading through  barefoot running to water toxicity in my classes, and they tend to connect easily.

Months have passed since my latest blog post, and I decided just to throw this one out and hope I can go deeper into each.

Summertime.

I have been away for quite a while. After my rewarding and exciting molecular/cell biology courses I threw myself into moving, both geographically and symbolically. The difference between sunny San Diego and sunny Orange County is not huge, but the one between being a freelancer/consultant/higher ed professional and a full time professor is quite remarkable.

Some years ago I talked to a friend of mine, a “up-to-his-eyeballs” busy professor. He mentioned he basically volunteered to participate in some kind of strategic planning committee. When I expressed surprise that he would dedicate his valuable time to such an endeavor, he replied that he saw a chance to “get things done.”

Well, getting things done sounds easier than it is in reality. For the past month, my first in the position, most of my time has been dedicated to matters unrelated to teaching. I spend hours writing and replying to emails. I spend lots of time talking to people. Funnily enough, I spend quite a time interviewing people.

I am immensely grateful in hindsight to all (or almost all) my former supervisors. I feel also blessed that my life has carried me through different cultures (academia, private industry, education) in different parts of the world. All that experience is serving me well.

I bow my head to the supervisors who taught me how to write politically correct emails with copies to strategically chosen parties. I am grateful for the corporate experience where I learned how to schedule my life through Outlook, and for the recent long-distance collaboration that flowed seamlessly with the help of Google tools. And my deepest appreciation goes to those who trained me, the former breezy postdoc, to be strict about lab safety and management.

Today is a good day. My next posting will be about an incredibly inspiring conversation I had with my cubicle neighbor, an educational technology expert. In less than one hour I got so many ideas that I can’t wait to implement.

But I had the chance for this conversation because I finally finished a Best Practices document whose writing I was assigned to organize, found a couple of new promising adjuncts to teach Spring courses, found a sub for a September Saturday, wrote a guide for todays’ lab, posted grades, ordered textbooks for a variety of courses, RSVPd to several activities…should I go on?

But I hope to start having fun now!

Guinness Beer (By Sami Keinänen (www.flickr.com) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons)

Definition of random distribution can be applied to objects (each portion of space has the same probability of containing an object, and the occurrence of one does not influence the occurrence of the other), events in time (substitute space for time, and object for event), or periods of time.

The Poisson distribution is important in describing random occurrences when their probabilities are small.

A practical application of this distribution was made by Ladislaus Bortkiewicz in 1898 when he was given the task of investigating the number of soldiers in the Prussian army killed accidentally by horse kick; this experiment introduced the Poisson distribution to the field of reliability engineering.

(Copying here shamelessly from wikipedia): The Poisson distribution arises in connection with Poisson processes. It applies to various phenomena of discrete properties (that is, those that may happen 0, 1, 2, 3, … times during a given period of time or in a given area) whenever the probability of the phenomenon happening is constant in time or space. Examples of events that may be modelled as a Poisson distribution include, among others, the number of yeast cells used when brewing Guinness beer. This example was made famous by William Sealy Gosset (1876–1937).

This interesting fact made me digress from Poisson long enough to learn about Gosset, who seems to be a very interesting character. From Tales of  Statisticians:

Gosset earned a degree in chemistry at Oxford, and joined the Guinness brewery firm in 1899. His work for Guinness led him investigate the statistical validity of results obtained from small samples (previous statistical theory had concentrated instead on large samples). He took a leave of absence to spend 1906/1907 studying under Karl Pearson at University College, London. His publications in Pearson’s journal Biometrika were signed “Student,” not because of a Guinness company policy forbidding publication, as is often said, but more precisely because of a company wish to keep secret the fact that they were gaining an industrial advantage from employing statisticians. Gosset’s most important result is known as the “Student’s t” test or distribution, published in 1908.

Returning to Poisson_ still working on it, but found some pointers.

You will have a variable “x” which is what your random variable is,

then u is the average success (divide n by X)

and you have to use the constant e in your calculations

Poisson Formula. Suppose we conduct a Poisson experiment, in which the average number of successes within a given region is μ. Then, the Poisson probability is:

P(x; μ) = (e^-μ) (μ^x) / x!

where x is the actual number of successes that result from the experiment, and eis approximately equal to 2.71828.

Life became much simpler when I found an online calculator.

To be continued…

BioTechniques – Remote-Controlled Gene Expression.

To Keep Yourself Healthy: Brush, Floss, and Measure Your Microbes Daily?.

Very interesting!