Last week I had another of my education conference abstracts accepted. This time for the Global Learn Conference in Melbourne in March. This one is about developing a classification for types of criterion referenced assessment in university level mathematics. I probably don't really fit in at the conference, which is quite general rather than discipline specific...but they accepted the abstract, so fine!
Soooo...I'm in Sydney at the 15th CTAC conference. I'm talking tomorrow at about 11am I think. I just wrote my talk this evening and you can take a sneak peak (those of you who are here in Sydney) or just a look (those of you who don't get the chance to be here). Should be interesting - I decided to go with a "I'll do the expert overview" type talk, since Masoum (my PhD student) is talking straight after me. So it's quite generic with a bit of chat about the problems related to Chlamydia, multiscaledness etc. No real maths as usual...I'll work on that for my next talk on this sort of stuff, where I will put at least one equation in :-)
I started working on my conference proceedings paper too. It's interesting to do that after writing the talk I think. I'm finding it quite a nice way to go about starting a draft to a paper - I'll have to keep an eye on whether that is really a good idea or not. I'm interested to hear what other people's thoughts are too.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Day 35 - Good news!
So apart from a totally shitey day due to having to attend the examiners' meeting and listen to blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, today was quite a good one. Two reasons: 1. My PhD student Masoum found out that her paper that she presented at the recent International Conference on Computational Biology won Best Student Paper! 2. My submission (with Jen Flegg) for the 14th Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education Conference next February was accepted - three reviews came back with one quite favourable and the other two just over the line. Lots of work needed on the paper itself.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Day 34 - First paper submitted!
It's Day 34 and today I submitted my first paper of the non teaching period! It's called "Non-native English speakers' difficulties in English language mathematics classrooms" and I've submitted it to Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education. This is the paper that's been rejected previously, I think, because I poorly thought out my choice of journals to aim at. Here's hoping this is a better choice.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Day 27-31
So I'm about a month in. What's happened so far...? I guess nothing concrete. Lots of progress on lots of different things, but no definite outputs at this stage.
I've *almost* got one paper ready to submit - I've been working on that a bit this week. It started when I went to Colombia last year and on the way, sat in on a statistical modelling class at Universidad Adolfo Ibañez in Chile. The class was taught in Spanish and what I noticed was that I could understand what was going on when the Prof was doing a structured part of the class, but I had trouble when they went into a bit of freestyle Q&A among the class. This got me thinking about how my own non-English speaking background students cope in my classes - especially given that I am a pretty informal person (lots of messing around, colloquial language etc). The paper is about that experience and realisations that it provided me and ideas for coping with classes of different backgrounds in better ways (eg making sure you constantly tag your notes/chalkwork with references to the text or your prewritten notes etc so students can follow).
It has been rejected from 2 journals already, but I think that is mostly because I didn't think about where I was sending it. That's an important lesson in itself that hasn't really effected me previously.
I did a bit of work on a paper that Masoum (my PhD student) is working on. It's about effects of chemokines like interferon-gamma in the chlamydial infection process. It's PDE based and we worked a little on refining the model itself, as well as putting some thought into the type of literature that we wanted to refer to in our intro. Going well I think.
I've also been continuing my literature search to back up a paper I'm working on related to a nifty little assessment strategy that Tim Moroney uses in comp maths. It's basically the 'design by contract' concept from IT applied to computational mathematics. It's difficult to find any literature out there, so that's definitely good from the perspective of this being something novel at least in the mathematical context.
Off the research topic for a moment, I am actually more finished teaching now since I completed my marking and grade uploads yesterday - that feels good. Especially since there was a lot that I didn't do!!! :D
Also, on Wednesday I was one of two after-lunch speakers at the University's promotion luncheon (where all the new profs and a/profs get dined by the VC and chancellor and co). That went extremely well. For about the first time since grade 12 English assignments, I actually prepared my talk - so I was nervous as hell! I very rarely get nervous at all if I just talk. I talked about my upbringing and how I got to where I am and so on, and then about what promotion means to me. But it went really really well. People actually clapped and seemed to mean it (instead of just out of habit) and lots of people came up to me and talked about my story etc.
Today I'm home with the boy while Charisse is doing her annual report for her Masters degree at UNSW. Tonight the honours students are coming over to drink away the pain of their talks this afternoon! :-)
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Day 24
So what does one do when one no longer has access to data from experimentalists? Use their published data from papers and GraphClick. Very nifty.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Day 23
Today I actually did some stuff!
First, I did a read through and edits of a paper Jen Flegg has been writing that is all about engineering students' perceptions of the usefulness of their maths units to both their later studies and to their careers (as well as some other matters too). It's quite interesting to see that many of them seem to trust that it is relevant, but don't actually see it themselves. Our conclusion, or probably more of a suggestion for improvement of the situation, is that this implies more collaboration is required between mathematicians and engineering academics in the design of these service mathematics units.
Jen is doing the Graduate Certificate in Higher Education (you basically get a scholarship to do it if you are a new staff member at QUT) and each of the units I think allows/requires you to undertake an action research project like this. It's really great I think. So many positives: improving teaching, improving learning, increasing publications, opening up new research areas.
After lunch, Tim and Graeme and I had a beer-meeting (over a bottle of chimay). We had a chat about extending some of my hybrid CA-PDE models to the third dimension. Tim is providing some really useful input since he knows things about solving reaction diffusion equations in three dimensions quite quickly using fancy intel libraries or something or other. Sounds great. We also talked about some work on arteries and lipid deposits and such - this seems to be a problem Peter Johnston from Griffith is working on (Peter may also be known as "father of 2010 Maths Dean's scholar Stuart")...I'm not too clear on this yet, but it seems like at the early stages, blood flow can be ignored and we simply look at the movement of the lipids through the artery wall using a porous media style model.
We've been without internet here at home for 3 days now - it's like the dark ages. Oh, except for the fact that I can tether my android and use that (thank god).
First, I did a read through and edits of a paper Jen Flegg has been writing that is all about engineering students' perceptions of the usefulness of their maths units to both their later studies and to their careers (as well as some other matters too). It's quite interesting to see that many of them seem to trust that it is relevant, but don't actually see it themselves. Our conclusion, or probably more of a suggestion for improvement of the situation, is that this implies more collaboration is required between mathematicians and engineering academics in the design of these service mathematics units.
Jen is doing the Graduate Certificate in Higher Education (you basically get a scholarship to do it if you are a new staff member at QUT) and each of the units I think allows/requires you to undertake an action research project like this. It's really great I think. So many positives: improving teaching, improving learning, increasing publications, opening up new research areas.
After lunch, Tim and Graeme and I had a beer-meeting (over a bottle of chimay). We had a chat about extending some of my hybrid CA-PDE models to the third dimension. Tim is providing some really useful input since he knows things about solving reaction diffusion equations in three dimensions quite quickly using fancy intel libraries or something or other. Sounds great. We also talked about some work on arteries and lipid deposits and such - this seems to be a problem Peter Johnston from Griffith is working on (Peter may also be known as "father of 2010 Maths Dean's scholar Stuart")...I'm not too clear on this yet, but it seems like at the early stages, blood flow can be ignored and we simply look at the movement of the lipids through the artery wall using a porous media style model.
We've been without internet here at home for 3 days now - it's like the dark ages. Oh, except for the fact that I can tether my android and use that (thank god).
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Day 22
Today we had the ALTC Science Discipline scholars visiting from UTasmania. These folk, Brian Yates and Sue Jones, are the leaders of the Science part of the Learning and Teaching Academic Standards Project run by the ALTC.
The Australian Government has awarded the ALTC $2 million to facilitate and coordinate discipline communities’ definition of academic standards as the higher education sector prepares for a new regulatory environment and the creation of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency.
(from http://www.altc.edu.au/standards)
They discussed their project and threshold learning outcomes with a small group of interested folk this morning and then again this afternoon, in more depth, with the design team of QUT's proposed Bachelor of Science degree. It was quite interesting to hear the learning outcomes that they have drafted together so far, that are intended to cover the pass-level outcomes for a graduate of a science degree from fields such as biology, chemistry, physics, earth sciences, mathematics etc...quite broad, so somewhat generic but at the same time "sciency".
I also managed to finally do some work on the summaries from some curriculum renewal workshops that we held. These were workshops with academic staff from around the faculty where we discussed ideas like revitalising practical activities in our courses, streaming students at different learning stages or with different learning intentions (eg international experience vs research preparation, etc), and the concept of an inverted curriculum. These all form part of our plans to put in a swag of ALTC grant applications next year (or possibly one large consolidated one).
The Australian Government has awarded the ALTC $2 million to facilitate and coordinate discipline communities’ definition of academic standards as the higher education sector prepares for a new regulatory environment and the creation of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency.
(from http://www.altc.edu.au/standards)
They discussed their project and threshold learning outcomes with a small group of interested folk this morning and then again this afternoon, in more depth, with the design team of QUT's proposed Bachelor of Science degree. It was quite interesting to hear the learning outcomes that they have drafted together so far, that are intended to cover the pass-level outcomes for a graduate of a science degree from fields such as biology, chemistry, physics, earth sciences, mathematics etc...quite broad, so somewhat generic but at the same time "sciency".
I also managed to finally do some work on the summaries from some curriculum renewal workshops that we held. These were workshops with academic staff from around the faculty where we discussed ideas like revitalising practical activities in our courses, streaming students at different learning stages or with different learning intentions (eg international experience vs research preparation, etc), and the concept of an inverted curriculum. These all form part of our plans to put in a swag of ALTC grant applications next year (or possibly one large consolidated one).
Day 21 (Tuesday)
Chazzle and I went down to Folio Books on Albert to have a squizzy. They have some good books, but I'm a tight arse, so I'm not paying $30 for paperbacks when I can get them for $10-15 on bookdepository or amazon. Nonetheless interesting.
Then we went next door to Zarraffas, the actual purpose of the post lunch trip, to work on her Bayesian network for passenger wayfinding at the airport. This was really fun - I've never done something like that before. Basically, from my perspective, it was all about thinking what influences the quality of wayfinding at an airport...things like human system and airport system, what they are composed of (eg signs, iconography, pathways, spatial design, language, speaker systems for announcements etc). It was quite interesting putting it all together. More on this in Day 22.
I also looked at an invitation to contribute to a special issue of a newish journal called "Cancers". It's an issue on tumour immune system interactions (which I have done a little modelling of). It's not really the kind of journal that I can publish in - it's quite focussed on experimental work. But I have written to the guest editor asking if they might be interested in a short paper of a few pages, discussing the methods I use (hybrid cellular automata essentially) and how they can be employed as a pre-experimental stage to refine hypotheses etc and hopefully save some money on experiments. Haven't heard back yet...but hopefully they will be interested - it's always good to get the word out to the experimental community.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Day 18 (Saturday)
Nothing to report for Saturday really. Unless you count Scott's wedding. Twas good - held in West End...in fact, we realised that his house, his Buck's party pub crawl and his wedding venue were all within about 3 blocks of each other.
Warning - social commentary: It was sad to hear the official words that the celebrant speaks that include defining for us all that marriage is "between a man and a woman". Besides being just plain wrong, it was just so out of place at what was otherwise a great progressive sort of wedding. The Bertrand Russell reading by Angela's mum kind of balanced things back to rationality though, so that was good.Good luck Scotty and Angela! Don't forget you still have 9 papers left in the dozen before you get your Leffe and only a couple of months to go!
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Day 17 (Friday)
I've been doing a fair bit of literature review work the last couple of days, mostly for some educational research papers I'm writing up. It's kind of interesting that completely by accident I decided to try out some collaborative small-group work stuff in my units this semester, when it is just about to become a focus (well sort of) within science and tech as well as the engineering faculty at QUT.
We are building this huge new science and technology precinct which is supposed to feature some so-called new age teaching and learning spaces (think new GP library, new S block levels, new O303a). Lot's of collaborative workspace, flexible room setups and (re)movable furniture. etc. When I saw the new level 4 S block lecture room with the glass walls, I wasn't impressed...in fact, I'm still not. It actually isn't any different so far as I can tell, besides the glass walls, from what it was when I was an undergrad 12 years ago. The furniture may even be identical.
But that's not the point... the point is I finally thought a little bit about what else I could do in their besides standing up and talking to people doing examples. The room in question has those large two-student flat desks that you can move around just like any old table. So I thought, bugger it, I'm going to get people to talk with each other and work on problems on purpose (rather than because that's what they decide to do). Another fortuitous (or not) thing was the closure of the students work room in O block. There wasn't really as easy an opportunity any more for students to just sit around and work on their maths with each other. In a sense, I tried to mimic that atmosphere, probably not very successfully, in my collaborative classroom activities.
Personally, I think we over lecture. 3 hours a week isn't really necessary. That doesn't mean I don't want to spend the 3 hrs teaching or in the classroom, but just that I don't think I need to be talking up the front all the time. I think in many cases, a 1 hour overview is more appropriate and then the remaining 3 hours could be spent in structured, small-group learning activities. What do I mean by structured? Well, not just a sheet of questions... more like worksheets that guide the students through constructing the ideas for themselves. You can't go too far off track because the guiding worksheet always brings you back to the path, but at the same time you would need to draw on your prior knowledge to figure out where to go and what to do.
This is also, in a sense, what I tried out with my collaborative activities. A couple of them were actually used as the introduction to a topic. THat is, I didn't teach the topic first, I got students to work on a structured, small-group worksheet. That probably seems weird and unfair...but it's actually quite good I think. It allows each student to build their own concepts and to arrive at a place in the progression of learning about something before I come in and sterilise their viewpoint with that of the so-called expert. I think it is even empowering to some people when they realise they can learn by themselves and that anything I provide is just reinforcement or guidance.
We are building this huge new science and technology precinct which is supposed to feature some so-called new age teaching and learning spaces (think new GP library, new S block levels, new O303a). Lot's of collaborative workspace, flexible room setups and (re)movable furniture. etc. When I saw the new level 4 S block lecture room with the glass walls, I wasn't impressed...in fact, I'm still not. It actually isn't any different so far as I can tell, besides the glass walls, from what it was when I was an undergrad 12 years ago. The furniture may even be identical.
But that's not the point... the point is I finally thought a little bit about what else I could do in their besides standing up and talking to people doing examples. The room in question has those large two-student flat desks that you can move around just like any old table. So I thought, bugger it, I'm going to get people to talk with each other and work on problems on purpose (rather than because that's what they decide to do). Another fortuitous (or not) thing was the closure of the students work room in O block. There wasn't really as easy an opportunity any more for students to just sit around and work on their maths with each other. In a sense, I tried to mimic that atmosphere, probably not very successfully, in my collaborative classroom activities.
Personally, I think we over lecture. 3 hours a week isn't really necessary. That doesn't mean I don't want to spend the 3 hrs teaching or in the classroom, but just that I don't think I need to be talking up the front all the time. I think in many cases, a 1 hour overview is more appropriate and then the remaining 3 hours could be spent in structured, small-group learning activities. What do I mean by structured? Well, not just a sheet of questions... more like worksheets that guide the students through constructing the ideas for themselves. You can't go too far off track because the guiding worksheet always brings you back to the path, but at the same time you would need to draw on your prior knowledge to figure out where to go and what to do.
This is also, in a sense, what I tried out with my collaborative activities. A couple of them were actually used as the introduction to a topic. THat is, I didn't teach the topic first, I got students to work on a structured, small-group worksheet. That probably seems weird and unfair...but it's actually quite good I think. It allows each student to build their own concepts and to arrive at a place in the progression of learning about something before I come in and sterilise their viewpoint with that of the so-called expert. I think it is even empowering to some people when they realise they can learn by themselves and that anything I provide is just reinforcement or guidance.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Day 16
Day 16 Part 2
QUT Beamer template [zip download]
So as promised, here is the first version of the QUT beamer template I put together with the help of my wonderful wife. Updates are sure to follow as it is pretty skeletal. Let me know if there's anything you suggest...I'll get around to it eventually.
QUT Beamer template [zip download]
So as promised, here is the first version of the QUT beamer template I put together with the help of my wonderful wife. Updates are sure to follow as it is pretty skeletal. Let me know if there's anything you suggest...I'll get around to it eventually.
Day 16 - AIM proposal
So, many years ago (ok 5) I went to a research workshop at a place called the american institute of mathematics (http://www.aimath.org). The workshop was on modelling cancer immunology and stuff like that and was organized by prof lisette de pillis (I did my postdoc with her math @ hmc) and some other folk (amy radunskaya and chuck wiseman). There were about 30 people from math and cancer immunology, oncology etc who all came together to work on problems in cancer treatment using mathematics. It was great fun. If you've ever been to maths in industry study group or maths in medicine study group, it was kind of like that.
I got an email from aim a few weeks back looking for proposals for workshops for next year. So I've quickly whipped one up with the help of graeme and scott and sent it off today. It's on modeling skin and related conditions. If it gets up there is a free trip to California in it for us and everyone else involved!
I got an email from aim a few weeks back looking for proposals for workshops for next year. So I've quickly whipped one up with the help of graeme and scott and sent it off today. It's on modeling skin and related conditions. If it gets up there is a free trip to California in it for us and everyone else involved!
Day 15
Bayesian beginnings
With Charisse doing a phd which involves modeling with Bayesian networks, I'm starting to read up on this sort of thing myself (so that we can still talk to each other). I've been skimming her books and also getting a few myself from the kindle store (I seem to be able to get around to reading things if they are on my iPad). The idea seems quite simple so that is good for someone like me - I don't really get statistical type modeling really. But it seems to be all about directed graphs where the connections represent the existence of some sort of probabilistic relationships between the nodes being connected.
For example, say I have A and B where A can take on values 'good upbringing' or 'bad upbringing' and B can have values 'future male stripper' and 'future chief justice' then we might have a graph of the form
A --> B
Then perhaps have probabilities like
P(B=fcj | A=gu)
P(B=fcj | A=bu)
P(B=fms | A=gu)
P(B=fms | A=bu)
And these could be calculated as an output (think bayes theorem) given certain input data like probability of good upbringing etc.
Well that's my very early limited understanding of the idea. I'm sure you folk reading this can clear me up.
Students
So this all got me thinking when someone publishes a paper in this type of stuff, what do they write about in terms of results? For example when I write a paper with say PDEs for some biological application I present graphical output for example of spatial or temporal or both, solutions. Or I present an analytical result that might uncover a key parameter relationship. So what is the equivalent for w Bayesian network paper?
Then i got to thinking about students and research training. Perhaps sometimes, because of our (researchers) familiarity with what we are doing, we forget that the actual idea behind writing a paper and presenting results is not so intuitive for everyone. I think that's something I will definitely be keeping in mind in the future with my student supervision.
With Charisse doing a phd which involves modeling with Bayesian networks, I'm starting to read up on this sort of thing myself (so that we can still talk to each other). I've been skimming her books and also getting a few myself from the kindle store (I seem to be able to get around to reading things if they are on my iPad). The idea seems quite simple so that is good for someone like me - I don't really get statistical type modeling really. But it seems to be all about directed graphs where the connections represent the existence of some sort of probabilistic relationships between the nodes being connected.
For example, say I have A and B where A can take on values 'good upbringing' or 'bad upbringing' and B can have values 'future male stripper' and 'future chief justice' then we might have a graph of the form
A --> B
Then perhaps have probabilities like
P(B=fcj | A=gu)
P(B=fcj | A=bu)
P(B=fms | A=gu)
P(B=fms | A=bu)
And these could be calculated as an output (think bayes theorem) given certain input data like probability of good upbringing etc.
Well that's my very early limited understanding of the idea. I'm sure you folk reading this can clear me up.
Students
So this all got me thinking when someone publishes a paper in this type of stuff, what do they write about in terms of results? For example when I write a paper with say PDEs for some biological application I present graphical output for example of spatial or temporal or both, solutions. Or I present an analytical result that might uncover a key parameter relationship. So what is the equivalent for w Bayesian network paper?
Then i got to thinking about students and research training. Perhaps sometimes, because of our (researchers) familiarity with what we are doing, we forget that the actual idea behind writing a paper and presenting results is not so intuitive for everyone. I think that's something I will definitely be keeping in mind in the future with my student supervision.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Day 14 - fuzzy
I'm half way through a paper on fuzzy decision making for locating goods distribution centres...I thought it would be interesting, but to be honest, I'm kind of bored. It's called "A multi-criteria decision making approach for location planning for urban distribution centers under uncertainty" by Awasthi et al [see here] in the latest Mathematical and Computer modelling. I'll stick it out and read the example and see if that makes it any better.
I think I have an unhealthy obsession with fuzzy logic and associated things. I'm pretty sure it has a place in formalising the way I apply rules in my CA models, but I haven't put much thought into that yet.
Note to self: put thought into that.
I think I have an unhealthy obsession with fuzzy logic and associated things. I'm pretty sure it has a place in formalising the way I apply rules in my CA models, but I haven't put much thought into that yet.
Note to self: put thought into that.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Day 13
Today I mostly did teaching related stuff due to the fact that my DEs class had their exam this morning and the PDEs class has theirs on wednesday. So lots of students visiting to ask questions. Plus I had to write the exam and solutions!
This evening though I read a paper I downloaded from a recent issue of Mathematical and Computer Modelling. Patanarapeelert et al reported on as study they carried out where they took the data generated by CA models of tumor growth ( like the ones I do ) and applied some technique to it to determine the coefficient functions for a stochastic de model of the form
dX_t = h dt + g dW.
Thereby allowing for a macroscopic model to be derived from a microscopic model.
I think I get the majority of it, but it's not all clear for me unfortunately. Plus the language was a bit scrappy but that's ok.
The problem is I'm not exactly sure I get the point of what they did. They very briefly skim over what I consider to be the most important bit in the last sentence or so. That being that they could use microscopic understanding to build a CA model, generate in silica data, build the macroscopic model and then use it to make recommendations or conclusions at the macroscopic level (eg x will happen to the tumor due to y being applied to the immune system).
Anyway I think i will ask dr Simpson if it's worth looking into it any further... Or if we (he) can do something better to the same end.
This evening though I read a paper I downloaded from a recent issue of Mathematical and Computer Modelling. Patanarapeelert et al reported on as study they carried out where they took the data generated by CA models of tumor growth ( like the ones I do ) and applied some technique to it to determine the coefficient functions for a stochastic de model of the form
dX_t = h dt + g dW.
Thereby allowing for a macroscopic model to be derived from a microscopic model.
I think I get the majority of it, but it's not all clear for me unfortunately. Plus the language was a bit scrappy but that's ok.
The problem is I'm not exactly sure I get the point of what they did. They very briefly skim over what I consider to be the most important bit in the last sentence or so. That being that they could use microscopic understanding to build a CA model, generate in silica data, build the macroscopic model and then use it to make recommendations or conclusions at the macroscopic level (eg x will happen to the tumor due to y being applied to the immune system).
Anyway I think i will ask dr Simpson if it's worth looking into it any further... Or if we (he) can do something better to the same end.
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