Daily Archives: November 25, 2018

Quitting Facebook

Technology & Culture

I quit Facebook last month.

It wasn’t a rage-quit, or a “I’ve had it!” kind of thing. For me, the thing has just run its course. FB has little value to me at this point in my own life, and although I used to maintain the account to keep in touch with alumni, a lot of them aren’t using it anymore either.

There were a couple of precipitating events, perhaps, that did nudge me closer to the precipice. There was a tone-deaf Mark Zuckerberg being interviewed by Kara Swisher a few months ago. There was a phone call from an old friend a few weeks ago who let me know that she isn’t on Facebook, reminding me that such a thing was possible.

Knowing a little bit about how these things work, I’ve been bothered for years by the algorithmic manipulation of your News Feed. Facebook doesn’t display items in your feed in chronological order—it displays them in an algorithmically-generated “Top Items” order which (until very recently) you had no control over. If you’ve every wondered why you haven’t seen some friends’ posts on Facebook, it may well be that their comments were buried so far down in the algorithm that Facebook effectively never showed them to you, in favor of sponsored ads for socks from Sweden.

Last month I read this interview with Yuval Noah Harari, and it really resonated with me. Although the focus of the article wasn’t social networking, there was some discussion of technology and how we respond to it emotionally.

An excerpt:

I try to be very careful about how I use technology and really make sure that I’m using it for the purposes that I define instead of allowing it to kind of shape my purposes for me. That sometimes happens when you open the computer: you have a couple of minutes to spare, so you start just randomly browsing through YouTube, and two hours later, you’re still there watching all types of funny cat videos, car accidents, and whatever. You did not say to yourself, “Okay, I want to spend the next two hours watching these videos.” The technology kind of dictated to you that this is what you’re going to do by grabbing your attention in such a forceful way that it can kind of manipulate you.

How has removing those attention-grabbing technologies changed your quality of life?

I have much more time. I think it makes a much more peaceful… I mean, it’s not such a big secret. The way to grab people’s attention is by exciting their emotions, either through things like fear and hatred and anger, or through things like greed and craving. If somebody [is] very afraid of immigrants and hates immigration, the algorithm will show him one story after the other about terrible things that immigrants are doing. Then somebody else maybe really, really doesn’t like President Trump, so they spend hours watching all kinds of things that make them very, very angry. And it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not—they see this headline of “President Trump Said the World is Flat,” they feel this irresistible urge to click on it.

It grabs your attention because you already have this weakness. But if you kind of sit there and just read infuriating stories for an entire hour you are basically feeding your mind with things that make you more angry and hateful. And this is especially bad if many of these stories are just not true. Sometimes they are true, quite often they’re not. But the net result is that you now just spent an hour feeding your hate and your fury.

It’s the same way with the other side of the coin, with greed. Because if you really want something—the perfect body, the perfect car—and you watch all these videos, you want it more and more. And if you don’t have it, then you feel worse and worse that you don’t have this kind of body, or you don’t have this kind of car. So you just spent one hour feeding your cravings and your greed, and it’s really not good for you.

The better you know yourself, the more protected you are from all these algorithms trying to manipulate you. If we go back to the example of the YouTube videos. If you know “I have this weakness, I tend to hate this group of people,” or “I have a bit obsession to the way my hair looks,” then you can be a little more protected from these kinds of manipulations. Like with alcoholics or smokers, the first step is to just recognize, “Yes, I have this bad habit and I need to be more careful about it.”

So how do you get your news?

I rarely follow the kind of day-to-day news cycle. I tend to read long books about subjects that interest me. So instead of reading 100 short stories about the Chinese economy, I prefer to take one long book about the Chinese economy and read it from cover-to-cover. So I miss a lot of things, but I’m not a politician and I’m not a journalist, so I guess it’s okay I don’t follow every latest story.

So, ummm… yeah. I’m out.

It doesn’t feel as if I’ve really made a big decision or anything because I haven’t spent any significant time on FB in the last year anyway.

Also, to be clear, I haven’t deleted my account or anything. The few things I’ve uploaded in the past are all still there, and I’m sure my timeline is going to tick by just as it has in the past. I just won’t be paying any attention to it.

If you need me, you know where to find me. And it won’t be on FB. :)

Parsons Problem Lesson: quad_functions

AP Computer Science, Computer Science, Education reform, Lesson, Teaching

Learning Programming is Hard

Many challenges face the new Computer Science learner. One of the most interesting times for students learning to program is that period after they’ve learned a new feature or programming strategy, but before they’ve had a chance to really master it. The syntax may still be unfamiliar, or the strategy is “the same, but different” as something that they’ve seen before.

A Parsons Puzzle

I first stumbled upon the “Parsons Problem” type of question in a paper by researchers Denny, Luxton-Reilly, and Simon, Evaluating a New Exam Question: Parsons Problems, published in 2008, which led me to Parsons and Haden’s original paper Parsons’ programming puzzles: a fun and effective learning tool for first programming courses.

A “Parson’s Puzzle” is a programming problem delivered via computer, in which code fragments, manipulated via a drag-and-drop interface, may be assembled to form a correct, working program. Clicking a “Check” button would provide some sort of feedback. Parsons and Haden proposed that the nature of the puzzle would improve engagement with the topic, provide better structure for students still struggling to understand fundamental logic, strategies, or algorithms, and even intentionally allow for common errors so that a student could get immediate feedback on fundamental misunderstandings.

Parsons and Haden’s original idea of helping to teach students with an automated system was adapted to a paper-based means of assessing students by Denny, Luxton-Reilly, and Simon. Along the same lines, it’s certainly possible to use a paper-based strategy of helping students develop and clarify their thinking on any given computer programming topic.

A Paper-Based Parsons Problem in the Classroom

In an introductory computer science course taught using Python, students had recently learned about functions, and had had the chance to learn how to use functions in several different contexts. Students were paired randomly and given a paper copy of the activity here [PDF], and asked to a) arrange the lines of code into strips of paper that they would assemble into a working version of the program, and then b) enter their code into the computer to verify that it works as intended.

"""
quad_functions.py
This program solves quadratic equations using three functions:
* one function to get the coefficients a, b, and c
* one function to calculate the two roots, and
* one function to print out the results
@author You
@version 1.0
"""

def get_coeffs():

def get_coeffs(a, b, c):

def calculate_roots(a,b,c):

def main():

def calculate_roots():

def display_solutions(root1, root2):

def display_solutions():

main()

a, b, c = get_coeffs()

root1 = (-b + (b * b - 4 * a * c) ** (1/2)) / (2 * a)

root2 = (-b - (b * b - 4 * a * c) ** (1/2)) / (2 * a)

x, y, z = get_coeffs(a, b, c)

display_solutions(r1, r2)

return root1, root2

display_solutions()

display_solutions(a, b, c)

print(root1, root2)

return a, b, c

print("The solutions are: ")

a = eval(input("Enter coefficient a: "))

b = eval(input("Enter coefficient b: "))

c = eval(input("Enter coefficient c: "))

r1, r2 = calculate_roots()

a, b, c = get_coeffs()

r1, r2 = calculate_roots(a, b, c)

if __name__ == "__main__":

#!/usr/bin/env python3

Observations

Students took the assignment seriously, and seemed to appreciate the nature of the puzzle, and the fact that all of the information was available to them—they just had to (literally) put the pieces together. There were some lively discussions—”Do we need a function header with parameters or not? Do we need the function to return a value or not?”—as well as a desire to get done with the puzzle-solving as quickly as possible in order to move onto entering the code into the computer to test their program.

For a larger assignment or project with many variations, the Parsons approach is not well-suited: there are too many variations that need to be considered. For students just learning to master a new topic, however—functions, conditionals, while-loops, for-loops, etc—the Parsons Problem strategy is a great way to build students’ skills and confidence in programming.

References

Paul Denny, Andrew Luxton-Reilly, and Beth Simon. 2008. Evaluating a new exam question: Parsons problems. In Proceedings of the Fourth international Workshop on Computing Education Research (ICER ’08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 113-124.

Dale Parsons and Patricia Haden. 2006. Parson’s programming puzzles: a fun and effective learning tool for first programming courses. In Proceedings of the 8th Australasian Conference on Computing Education – Volume 52 (ACE ’06), Denise Tolhurst and Samuel Mann (Eds.), Vol. 52. Australian Computer Society, Inc., Darlinghurst, Australia, Australia, 157-163.