RUME Conference - Portland - Day 3 further thoughts

Darryl and I also got talking about a couple of things that came up in one of the talks. In particular:

1. "trimming"
2. "decompression"

when teaching mathematics.

By trimming, I guess we are talking about the instructor, acting as expert/guide, trimming away potentially distracting surplus or unnecessary details when they teach a course.

By decompression, we are talking about taking what is sometimes quite dense and maybe even simplified mathematical results or statements and unpacking them, maybe even making them more complicated (in some sense anyway) to teach them to people. 

Does anyway have any thoughts on these? Particularly if you teach yourself and either actively do these, or (like me) did them without realising what you were doing?

RUME Conference - Portland - Day 3

Here's a thought. If you hold a conference and the last day is a half day only...particularly on a Sunday, people WILL leave early. This should be avoided. a) it's somewhat embarrassing I think, to the organisers, b) it's not pleasant for the speakers, particularly if they are new to the community at the conference/students - they can feel like nobody cares about them. How to avoid it: a) put higher profile speakers on the last day, b) don't have a half day at the end if possible (eg, remove breaks between talks and squeeze the program into a shorter time.

Submarine and Interstate 5 from Full Sail

I watched a couple of talks today about blended instruction/online teaching - these were interesting enough. It was cool to see someone in mathematics employing the Elluminate Live! technology (this is a tack-on to blackboard/LMS sort of a cross between skype, online whiteboard and powerpoint). They used it for teaching a graduate level course to teachers in remote areas (Colorado and Wyoming I think from memory). This is something that I'd like to do myself with my idea for a GradCert in maths for Qld/Aus teachers who are interested in upskilling their mathematics. It seems unpopular though with folks at work...not to worry.

Full Sail Bump in the Night and Mathffiti on the copper table top

Anyway, I feel like I was a good boy for actually going to a few talks on the last half day. But at the end, it was good to head out (even though it was freezing and raining) and wander around town, grab lunch and drink some Full Sail (cask aged Bump in the Night). We also got all cultured and headed to the Portland Art Museum for a couple of hours. Not a lot of artworks that I liked, but some. Some of the African American stuff was powerful - but there was a particularly lame bit which was basically video and bits and pieces made from experiments of cells dividing. Darryl and I are thinking of approaching an artist and giving them some matlab vids of solutions to the diffusion equation. We iz artists.

RUME Conference - Portland - Day 2

[delayed post]

So day 2. Apparently this is a record cold day for Portland - it was about -7C this morning (worse with windchill) - needless to say I didn't go outside and certainly didn't join the conference attendees that were going for a jog - morons. I guess there are all types though - people like me who sleep til 7 then have breakfast, and those who don't but rather strap on their jogging suits and hop around in the freezing cold along a river bank.

I saw another interesting student talk this morning. Grad student this time. She spoke about college maths faculty at research 1 (ie top level research...like our Group of 8 kind of) universities and their efforts and interest in improving their teaching. She had just completed a pilot study and run into problems such as very low response rate etc. But it was interesting nonetheless to think about the fact that we really don't get training in how to teach. Basically you just get the *opportunity* to go in front of the class and you figure it out as you go. I know at QUT we have our tutor training day, but really, compare that with the years of training you need to be a teacher and you start to see what I mean. University students are just as diverse (if not moreso) than school students - it makes you think whether there should really be more training in how to teach. Still - while there are some absolutely shocking lecturers, some people do just fine without any training.

My talk was just before lunch. I think I mentioned yesterday it was almost the same as the CRA talk I gave at QANZIAM last year. Apparently it went well - Darryl said so, and I trust him :-) It was interesting to see the reaction to my (in my opinion friendly and not cynical) explanation of the policies and procedures that we are subject to when teaching at QUT (in particular, with regards to assessment, unit outlines, etc).

So...now to write the full paper.

RUME Conference - Portland - Day 1

I'm currently at the Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education (a special interest group of the Mathematical Association of American) conference in Portland Oregon (in the US) [see conference website]. I flew into LA from Brisbane 2 days ago and then up to Portland yesterday, after coming back from the Philippines and family holidays 3.5 days ago. I am massively tired! This is also the coldest place I have ever been! It's been below 0 almost the entire day. Foolishly I went out for dinner and to visit a microbrewery (Deschutes) and I am now fairly sick with sinus and headache kind of stuff ... not good.

I'm talking tomorrow on much the same talk as I gave at QANZIAM late last year - that is, student perceptions of criterion referenced assessment in an ODEs class. This is good because I've already written the slides.

Some thoughts for the day:
- Don't be an ass. When you become an important person in your particular field, try not to be a jerk. It's unnecessary.  One of the talks I was at today was by an undergraduate student who had done a research project. I thought it was a good talk - not necessarily a really high end piece of research, but certainly good and worthy of presentation at the conference. Anyway, one of the invited speakers was up the back and in the Q&A session, she essentially ripped this guy a new one. I thought it was really uncalled for. She even did the "I don't mean to attack you" etc...but she was.
- Frozen water. Frozen water should be found in two places: 1) refrigerators/freezers, 2) drinks. That's it. Not on footpaths, not on car boots/trunks, not in water features/fountains. NO. That is just not right.
- Theme. Conferences have topics/areas of interest of course. But usually there is also an underlying style or theme that might not be obviously advertised (intentionally or otherwise). Often the community involved in the conf or just the organiser has a particular slanted view of the world. This is definitely the case here. Although, even thought the majority may have a particular style there are enough outsiders (like me) to dampen this a little and make it more inviting/welcoming for other outsiders. This is perfectly illustrated by the three reviews I received for my initial conference paper - two trashed it, barely passing it as acceptable while the third gave it brilliant reviews. Can't please everyone.

One interesting thing to come out of this is that the undergrad student I mentioned above is actually interested in some of the same topics in maths ed that I am. He is also looking for somewhere to do a PhD, so I'm going to drop him an email to discuss - imagine a conference being a useful networking opportunity! Crazy.

Media tart

Today (actually the last few days) I embarked on something new - media releases.

QUT news story

I've always been the type to be annoyed by mainstream/popular media. Sensationalism, misquoting etc - it all annoys me to know end. And the fact that the lack of education of most of the population (often through no fault of their own) is preyed upon to make money in that way just makes it worse.

So all this flooding is of course actually quite sensational, but nonetheless, they still try to make it even bigger. "areas as big as nsw" flooded, "one in 100 year flood" etc. These are the types of lines that get used. Everyone wants to feel that their life, their story, their situation is important, newsworthy. I understand that. But the 1 in 100 year thing really annoyed me - this is even dangerous. I've actually heard people say that they aren't worried because we've already had a big flood. Or worse still that they won't take any notice of the BOM or the police because we are having "another 100 year flood" so obviously they don't know what they are talking about and aren't worth listening to. So this news story was born.

An interesting part of the process was finding out how the actual text comes into existence. I'm sure it isn't always like this but this was my experience. I wrote a one page rant first of all and sent it to QUT media services. Then I had a chat on the phone with someone from their and then a new version of what I wrote came back. It had been changed into the style of an interview - quite weird to see your own words requoted back at you. Then a couple more iterations and a couple of corrections and then release to the world.

Good news is apparently some outlets including AAP have picked up on the story so it might start to float around the same media I am secretly whining about soon!

Day 68-69

This will just be a short post. It's basically a flag to myself in that I am going to promise to deliver something here and hopefully that will keep me to my promise. I've started to teach myself optimal control for ordinary differential equations. That is, looking at solving systems of ODEs which involve some "control" that is involved in some other quantity that we wish to optimise in some way.

For example, say we have an exponentially growing tumour (#cells is x) being treated with some drug (concentration u) such that the governing equation is
x'(t) = ax(t) - u(t), x(0)=0.
Say that drug is also harmful to healthy cells as well. Then we might wish to minimise both the tumour size at some endtime (T) and also the effects over time of the drug. eg:
min { x(T) + \int_0^T u^2 dt }.

So basically I'm looking into optimal control theory for such problems. It doesn't look too horrific actually. I tried looking at this years ago when I did my postdoc (my boss had published some papers on optimal treatment of tumours) but it was over my head. Now I think I can actually understand some of the material that's available on the subject and I think I can write about it myself.

The plan is to write some short notes on the topic that are understandable and make them available here soon (next couple of weeks). Then y'all can let me know what you think. yay :-)

Day 65 - update

Things are coming together nicely!!! Some simple matlab-ing has led to some simulations that suit the needs of the paper perfectly! Outstanding!