why programming?

At the end of the meeting I have a quick chat with Doug (Director of BBIM) and Alison (Coordinator of BBIM) about the courses that I teach and also the discipline of information management (IM) in general. It has always been challenging to teach business students anything related to information technologies, and particularly difficult to teach programming. Students simply do not see any value of it.

Why do we teach programming in the BBIM?

Well to start with we would like to differentiate our degree with the more popular buisness degree BCOM under the same Business School. Our degree has a compulsory IM major, plus a second major in either Accounting or Marketing. The IM major is a strategic component in the degree to embrace information technologies that exist today or in the future, teach our students how they impact the business, society and every human being (e.g. Web 2.0). Programming is part of the major because we want to make sure our graduates can end up with a career in the IT field if they want to, or they can communicate well with software developers as a business consultant or analyst, or they can have their own startups etc. We have no intention to train them into hardcore programmers thou, as this is what computer science or software engineering are aiming to do. We just want them to be technical enough to act as solution provider to solve business problem related to IT, and in some cases they can “assemble” a software by writing some code together with external resources from here and there.

So the experience in programming is more for the sake to learn how to learn, rather than the context itself. We use .NET from Microsoft as our vehicle (well because we are fully supported by MSDNAA and a long partnering history with them), but our focus is on problem solving and innovation. This is my firm belief so far for the last 5 years to support my teaching, until recently I find only myself is thinking in that way.

Colleages in the IM discipline has other thoughts. They think that programming is too hard for the business students, and also for themselves too coz they are mostly researchers with no programming background. They treat IM as a supporting component in the BBIM, and perhaps Excel is what IM tool to them which can solve 90% of the business problem. Maybe they are right I dont know, but this creates a significant gap among my courses with theirs. Obviously if that continues I can end up being the most unpopular lecturer around the place, teaching something no one understands its value.

Should I insist to continue what I am doing? Is this the time to change? Alison is always worried about the relatively high failing rate in my course; and even Doug agrees with what I believe in but he claims that he does not have the required knowledge to make any judgement.

I think I should find a way to change how I define and structure my course, but for as long as I am teaching I will insist to teach programming. Not because I think .NET is going to rule the world, but because thru the learning process students would gain insights how to learn anything new in the technological world later on in their lives. They can challenge the status quo or even modify them. As it is well said in here – how lives for 5 years, why lives forever.

a moment of reflection

The first semester is finally over to me after the BBIM examiner meeting today, and I feel like to briefly summarize what I have done and experienced for the first half of 2007. I hestitate for a while because I read this some time ago about how to prevent your blog from sucking; but let’s be realistic – probably I am the only one who would read this blog anyway and so who really cares about that?

Officially I have been telling people that first semester was pretty tough for me. I was assigned to teach 4 courses in total with almost a 1000 students involved (normally my colleagues teach only 2 courses max in one semester); and I also took 2 courses myself from the Management Department in preparing for my PhD programme in the second semester. But is it really that bad? I mean honestly I still have time to play video games, watch heaps of TV series (i.e. finish with House season 3, Lost season 3, Heroes season 1, Scrubs season 6, 24 Season 6, D. Housewives season 3; and still watching Traveler season 1 and Studio 60 season 1 in the meanwhile) and movies (i.e. … just too many of them), and spent considerable amount of time with my girlfriend who would never agree to that anyway. Yeah perhaps if I have more time I could do better in my teaching and studies; but after knowing myself for almost 3 decades I think the most likely outcome is a longer period of procrastination and still the same results. So in some way making myself busy is actually a positive thing from an economic point of view, unless I am motivated by my internal values … which at the moment is only absolute laziness but nothing else that is productive.

Resolution? Hmm… I think I need to make things around me a bit more interesting to start with, like my courses or the research I am working on. Maybe I should include more people in those activities (coz I tend to work in isolation most of the time) so that either I can learn something from them that inspires me, or I can make fun of them. When I was struggling with my exam markings the last three days, my mind keeps on thinking about new stuff I can teach or new way of delivering them etc. I should get them into action, and revise my course completely to make it more challenging, even selfishly just for my own sake.

Students, get ready to be messed up, big time!

Okay this is short summary of what I have done in the first semester at uni, roughly:

1. Teaching INFOSYS110, INFOSYS120, INFOMGMT192 and INFOMGMT291. It is pretty neat to teach in the FPAA lecture theatre in our new Business School building, which seats 600 students with 2 gigantic screens (just like in a cinema) and fancy AV and computer equipments. Normally I dont use a microphone in lectures coz I do have a loud voice, but not for this one coz the room is just too big. INFOSYS120 is a new course but basically the content is very close to INFOMGMT192. Oh also I have organised a real-life project for INFOMGMT291 to build a fully featured website for a charity organisation. I should continue to have real-life project for next time as well.
2. Enrol in MGMT724 and MGMT737 as part of my PhD application. MGMT724 is a leadership course at postgraduate level, which changes my perspective about leadership in a lot of ways. I am lucky that I have chosen this course purely because it fits with my busy timetable initially, and it turns out to be a great learning experience and gives me a chance to meet the brillant professor and lecturer – Brad and Brigid. MGMT737 is a reading course with my supervisor Kenneth, who is perhaps the only person right now who can ask me to do something that I will actually finish it on time. Both courses involve lots of essay writings and literature reviews, but I guess I should get used to that if I am serious about my PhD later on.

Looking forward I would like to do the following before the start of next semester:

1. Finish my PhD proposal for enrolment, so that I can start the Doctorial Scholarship and change my contract to part-time, earning a salary around 30% of what I use to have for the next 3 years. Yeah, the road is tough but I am going to make it!
2. Revise the course structure for INFOMGMT192, employing new tutors and get them all excited to work for the course. Investigating new teaching techniques, and also see how I can incorporate new material like WPF into the course that only teaches VB for now.
3. Reserve some time to start a commercial project via TechNet, so that I can have a few months of electricity or groceries….
4. Pick up a new sport and start to do exercise more regularly

Yeah I feel boring even just write them out, I should do them instead of planning. Let’s see how that goes.

safari on windows

Originally my experience with Safari was only limited to the occasional usage of my girlfriend’s iMac, and I always like the idea of no status bar in the bottom but showing the loading progress of a page right inside the URL textbox at the top. After knowing that the newest version of Safari 3 (in beta) is made available to Windows, I immediately download and install it to my work computer which runs on Windows XP to check it out. In fact I am writing this post using it right now.

First impression – it runs noticeably faster than IE7 and Firefox 2. It uses different font types with everything inside the browser, and the look-and-feel is similar to iTunes in Windows (actually this article explains pretty well the difference of fonts between apple and windows). The tabs are repositionable which is the same as IE7, but I can also pull them out as a separate window. I personally like this feature coz 90% of the time I would have all the browsing done under the same window with multiple tabs, but 10% of the time I may want to compare the information between 2 tabs side-by-side and this feature can be useful. One thing that surprises me is that when I minimize the Safari window, the memory usage drops from 24MB to less than 2MB and it happens instantly. Of course when I restore the window it goes back up. Still I dont see the same thing with IE7 or Firefox 2. Also Safari picks up a history list of websites that I have visited before from somewhere, but some of them looks like I havent visited for a long time so I am not sure what it is.

Since it is still in beta there are a few glitches. The maximize button takes almost a second to work; and if I minimize and then restore it forgets that it has been maximized before every time. Try to play with some videos in Microsoft’s Silverlight and it does not work properly as expected. Browsing from one page to another occasionally the browser would lose its focus for no reason. Live.com does not work at all. Gmail works fine, but the built-in Google Talk is not. Yahoo mail works with warning messages popping out. I finally test Safari against Microsoft’s Popfly, and it crashes completely.

Well I am sure Safari will get better in the future, and releasing it on Windows is a great move for Apple. They have done it with iTunes + iPod before, and even this time it may have little to do with iPhone’s release they do it again with Safari. More importantly Safari is indeed faster than other browsers, and they are now available for both Mac and Windows user to experience it.

to procrastinate or not

Sadly I am a 100% procrastinator!

If I am given a week to finish a task, chances are I would be spending the first 5 days doing absolutely nothing about it, but the last 2 days (sometimes even worse – the last 2 hours) rushing like a mad man. Even when the deadline is really close, I would still battle with myself when is the “ideal” time to start: maybe after a bit of tv; maybe after dinner, or maybe after I have a hot shower. After I pull it off, I remind myself how painful it is and swear I would not go thru the same thing again. Yet it just happens every single time.

There is an old say in Chinese - “the most difficult thing is to start”. I totally blame it, coz it gives me perfect excuse not to start “pre-maturely” when I dont feel I am ready.

Also recently I discover that I am getting smarter in knowing what the real deadline is to other people. Usually I will exercise all appropriate strategies to ask for different kinds of extensions. Every time it is a learning experience about the level of tolerance from others which would further strengthens my ability to procrastinate. Honestly even I feel sick about all these, at the same time they bring me some joy when I finish whatever in an extreme short period of time under a lot of pressure. I really dont understand why I behave like this, and apparently cannot help to change it no matter how much I want to.

So I look it up in Wikipedia and see what exactly causes procrastination:

It is the avoidance of an action or task to a later time, which may result in stress, a sense of guilt, the loss of productivity etc. Even it maybe normal for individuals to procrastinate to some degree, in some cases it maybe a sign of an underlying psychological or physiological disorder.

What??

Even I am not sure if there is anything wrong with my prefrontal cortex (which supposingly the area of the brain responsible for executive brain functions such as planning, impulse control, attention etc), I surely dont have the issues of anxiety, low sense of self-worth or a self-defeating mentality. Also I dont think I am depressed, nor having attention deficit disorder (as I can really concentrate when I read or when I play tv games).

Then I move on to the section talking about perfectionism. What a relief! Yes I am a perfectionist and therefore I procrastinate – it is a very comfortable explanation that I can live with. While I am excited to know there is better reason than laziness regarding my behaviour, it goes on to talk about academic procrastination. Perfect, is not just me but also my job and the environment I am working with. I feel so positive and energetic about procrastination. Maybe that is just going to be part of my life.

If I cannot stop procrastination, is there anyway I can benefit from it?

I am very glad to find this article and it talks about structured procrastination. It is no surprise that the author is also an academic, and he justifies procrastination as long as we do not lose productivity from it. Basically we need to maintain a list of tasks that we need to do ordered by their importance. Because we procrastinate, we will try to avoid doing the most important thing in the list by doing something else. The trick is as long as that “something else” is also a task that we need to do, we do not lose any productivity overall. It is a system that we need to fool ourselves (which for a procrastinator we are good at that by nature) what is most important and control what we do when we are procrastinating. My gut feeling tells me that this perhaps is the reason why people have so much time to write blogs or participate in open source software development even they have a full time job. Assuming they have done their job right, then they become super productive in other activities because they procrastinate skillfully and put their energy in the right place.

Combining with a personal productivity guide from here, I would start to write a list of things that I want to do (i.e. to-do list) the next day at every night. Then as expected the most important item usually would be done last, but I would still feel happy and productive as long as I finish everything I list for a particular day. Then I also keep a watch list with stuff that I have to do some time later (e.g. revising all the lecture slides or learn 3D features in WPF). Whenever I need to procrastinate from the to-do list, I would keep myself busy working on the items in the watch list. Hopefully then I will start to gain productivity from my procrastination!

What about time to relax and do absolutely nothing? Well I think I still need that kind of “quality” time, but with this plan I provide myself with some other options (i.e. the watch list) when I need to procrastinate. I am not saying everytime I would pick up some meaningful stuff to do and become a super useful human being, but at least I know I can be positive about procrastination when it hits me.