Poet Ponders the Digital

Hamerschlag Hall is one of the principal teaching facilities of the Carnegie Institute of Technology (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley July 8, 2013 Deadline August 2013 Issue Finding My Way: Four Flawed Navigation Apps Pittsburgh, like many older cities, was not designed on a grid. It wasn’t planned at all, according to one historian I’ve met. Instead, the roads were created as landowners divided and connected their properties. The hilly terrain complicated the hodgepodge streets, with some climbs steeper than those of San Francisco, resulted in winding roads that twist and turn so sharply a compact car can barely make the corners. Freeways start and stop with little warning, including Interstates 279 and 579. This fall, I will be teaching as an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University, located in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. This summer, I’ve managed to miss freeway exits and one-way city streets nearly every trip into the city. Th...

Notice that technical courses and courses that were "automated" had higher completion rates.  New study of low MOOC completion rates | Inside Higher Ed : The course with the highest rate of completion was "Functional Programming Principles in Scala," from Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, offered on the MOOC platform Coursera. According to Jordan's research, some 19.2 percent of the 50,000 students who enrolled completed the course.  At the other end of the spectrum was "A History of the World since 1300" by Princeton University, also hosted by Coursera, which reportedly recruited 83,000 students with just 0.8 percent reaching the end.  Five of the top six most-completed MOOCs relied on automatic marking alone, meaning that no peer assessment was required. Courses that relied purely on peer grading generally fared far worse in terms of the percentage of students reaching the end. My assumptions: Technical students do...

Pittsburgh TechFest was Saturday, June 1, 2013. For me, this is like going to a county fair or theme park… minus the junk food I adore. Technology captures my imagination, and I do love new hardware, software, gizmos, and gadgets. But, reality has set in, yet again, and I cannot immerse myself in tech and do everything else I enjoy doing. As readers know, I've been trying in fits and starts to relearn programming concepts, and then teach myself Objective-C for OS X and iOS applications. I really do love code almost as much as I love creative writing of the English variety. The "almost as much" is the problem. Annually, TechFest features seminar "tracks" on everything from careers development to Web development. You can go from database sessions to object-oriented programming. It's wonderful, the skills on display and the discussions. Yet, I am forced to choose between writing or coding, because both require more than a full-time effort for success. ...

I overuse some words and phrases in my writing. Most writers have some problem words. It isn't that the words should never be used, or that we use them incorrectly. We simply use them too frequently. The following Microsoft Word VBA macro marks words I should check for overuse. Also included are words and phrases I should avoid. Feel free to copy and modify this macro. I encourage my students to try this macro, too. Once you have the macro in Word, you can alter the word list to reflect your preferences and habits. Sub macWordsToAvoid() Dim vFindText As Variant Dim txtWord As Variant 'list the exceptions to look for in an array vFindText = Array("about", "all", "almost", "a lot", "already", "always", "along with", _ "anxiously", "absolutely", "as well", "believe", "certainly", "clearly", "definitely", _ "eagerly",...

As I was writing a post about "comments" in computer programming source code, I noted that I like comments and marginalia when I write for "human" readers. Even when writing for myself, I like to preserve my notes. One of the things we lose with the transition from paper to digital media is the marginalia and other marks readers and writers leave as they read and write. Reading and Marking My wife and I both love books. We revere books. Because of this respect for the printed page, neither of us is an active highlighter, annotator, or scribbler. When I took a class that required marking in a book, it pained me to be destroying the pages with green and orange highlights. When I buy a book, especially a textbook, I don't want someone's marks on the pages. First, the previous reader(s) might have marked the wrong passages as important. Second, it is distracting. I want to read and think about a text on my own, at least initially. I do take notes, and I...

The three PlayStation consoles side by side. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley May 20, 2013 Deadline July 2013 Issue Letters from the Mailbag Questions and suggestions from readers arrive every month. It’s always nice to help people with a technical question, and many of the questions inspire columns. This month, I’m sharing some questions with short responses. When I don’t have a good answer, I’m sharing that, too. Q: Do you have a favorite gaming console? A: When buying a console, consider the games first. Many games are platform exclusives, especially for the Nintendo consoles. Other games ship first for one or two consoles months or years before the games are available for other devices. The gamers I know tend to own Sony and Microsoft consoles, while parents of young children seem to prefer Nintendo devices. I own a dust-collecting Sony PlayStation 2. Consoles have largely replaced personal computers for gaming, but I dislike the types of ga...

I like comments in computer programming source code. I've never been the programmer to claim, "My code doesn't need comments." Maybe it is because I've always worked on so many projects that I need comments  to remind me what I was thinking when I entered the source code into the text editor. Most programmers end up in a similar situation. They look at a function and wonder, "Why did I do it this way?" Tangent : I also like comments in my "human" writing projects. One of the sad consequences of moving to digital media is that we might lose all the little marginalia authors and editors leave on manuscript drafts. That thought, the desire to preserve my notes, is worthy of its own blog post — so watch for a post on writing software and notes. Here are my rules for comments: Source code files should begin with identifying comments and an update log. Functions, subroutines, and blocks of code should have at least one descriptive comment. ...