GlasgowQC 1
…a little thing for a microphone on top.
Oh yes.
Otherwise there’s an inbuilt one, is there?
Yeah, but this is better.
Hmmm, it looks good.
Yeah, so it works very well, yeah. So this is Glasgow, it’s the 16th June and I’m talking to Quintin. And so what I want to talk about, is I want to talk about your teaching and the way you think about teaching in general; but we want to anchor it really in a module, you know: we want to talk about a specific instance, ‘cause otherwise it all gets a bit airy-fairy and it’s quite hard to be specific. So I want to think across sort of the stuff that you teach…
Hmmm hmm.
…and I mean it’s best to pick one that sort of displays what we call your “teacherly” instincts, you know; is there a module where you think that what you’ve done has made quite a difference?
Yes. I think the three courses that I teach: one is the Ambassador’s course which Phil and I set up so that was very much created by us and has worked incredibly well. I’m not quite sure how much of Phil’s and my part that is, you know. The Professional Skills and Issues course which is large… I’ve completely shaped that, just because I thought something was important. And… how successful is it? Kind of hard to say I suppose but unless… definitely shaped very much by what I think about Introductory Programming. Well, I certainly tinker with it an awful lot. ((laughs)) And I think a lot about it but...
So in a sense, in that one…
…not quite sure…
…you make a difference on a smaller granularity? But the others you made a difference in your design, in the original impetus and…
Yeah, I supp… yes. Whilst the Introductory Programming course is still an Introductory Programming course and therefore the aims and objectives are largely similar to any Introductory Programming course, I guess I’ve tried a lot of different things in the middle and that’s, yeah, through… I mean in the case of that course I’ve been trying to find better ways of teaching it for ten years or more, 12 years.
Gosh.
Yeah, and that’s what keeps it interesting…
Okay.
…otherwise I couldn’t have taught the same course for 12 years.
So that’s a reasonable one to think of?
I suppose that’s… I suppose that is probably the one to think of, yeah.
Well, just… I mean it’s one that you feel that you’ve made a difference…
Hmmm hmm.
…you’ve made a clear difference to doing. It would be different if someone else had been doing it, you know…
Hmmm. That’s true.
Okay, well let’s use that one. So, keeping that one in mind…
Hmmm hmm.
…and we might have a scribble about a timeline and see how things go on that. So how long have you been teaching overall, I mean just at all, how long have you been a teacher?
Um… since I think 1993, so that’s 15/16 years.
And that was firstly in higher education?
Yeah.
You didn’t do school teaching or anything before?
No school teaching; I did some… I’ve been a scuba diving instructor since about 1989.
Ooh.
And, in fact, I was so impressed by that programme, the programme of learning that they had in the British Sub-Aqua Club, I think that shaped a lot of what I do ‘cause I’m so impressed by the community building that is involved in that.
Oh, talk to me about it: what do they do? I know nothing about it.
Um… they probably don’t do the same any more because, for various reasons, you know, as you get more and more commercial the need is you can provide ticks on holiday, but the way they had it organised was it was very much club based, and it was a vocation kind of thing, you know, people who wanted to go and learn to dive, you know, you had to kind of want to do it a bit in that originally… I mean really before my day, it was I was in transition stage.
Okay.
But the way it built up was you had a bunch of enthusiasts who would go and cut out their own neoprene and actually glue together their suit and ((laughter)) all that kind of thing, you know.
Yeah, okay.
It very much had that flavour of a hobby that somebody would take up and then put their passion into it. And the top to bottom organisation of the thing was that the club actually was given responsibility very much for awarding qualifications to quite a high level in what is, let’s face it, a life or death sport, you know, so you really need to know that the people that you’ve given responsibility in that club, you know, the top guys, the diving officer… the diving officer really has to be somebody you can trust. And it was the…
Was it sort of an apprenticeship or…?
Well yeah, the kind of series of levels you go through from being an out and out novice in a swimming pool who knows nothing about anything and has to be completely hand-held by… what were they called? Well, should have been by an instructor, by a club instructor, but typically training could happen by people at a lower level and that was, you know, with appropriate supervision. And then you became what was called a sport diver and that meant you could dive with other people at that level, and then you became a dive leader where you could take a novice into the open water ‘cause you had enough responsibility to be trusted with that. And then you, when you’re an advanced diver, you could do that kind of stuff but you could actually organise trips, you know, you’ve been brought on to organise trips and organise a whole day’s diving for like 20 people and all the bottle filling and the…
Sounds quite scary actually.
Yeah, you know, it is a… But that was the whole point you see, in that, when you first walked into the swimming pool, all you had to do was put your head under the water with the gear on and then you could stand up if you were unhappy, so there was a real scaffolding I think, and that was what was so impressive, is the scaffolding was there.
And so what did you end up as in this? Did you…?
I ended up as Advanced Diver and Club Instructor, and so the Club Instructor was a national qualification: you had to go outside the Uni, because it was a university club, so you had to go outside the grounds to get a qualification, yeah.
Yeah, outside your club, yeah.
And, you know, there was a First Class Diver and there was an Advanced Instructor, so there were levels I just… couldn’t get, you know, it became a bit too formalised by then. But for me, at every level, you were getting something from it, so for a volunteer organisation to always be gaining. So even when you were… even the people who’d been in the club for years and years and years and were grandees and they’d been the diving officers, they’d been the advanced… you know, they’d done everything, they still had an important role because they were advisers to the people who were doing that, you know. There was always somebody to fall back on if you were a little bit scared and out of your depth. So at every level you were gaining. And so from the point of view of trying to set up… and yeah, and that was in the University which of course has a huge turnover, and so between first year and fourth year you were producing people who could run the club, this life and death sport, you know, and there was something very exciting about that.
And so that turnover happened every four years.
Every four years… well…
Well, it was a four year cycle.
…yes, what you hoped is you’d get a few who would go into post-grad as well ‘cause then you get them for seven years and that’s a lot ((laughs)) better, you know, seven or eight years.
((laughs)) A little more stability.
That wasn’t me. I mean I was there for four years of post-grad time and then another three years of post-doc, so I mean I was there for seven years. But one other thing that was important: it’s not something I’ve managed to enact in the University but it was a perfect model for a voluntary organisation, and often you want things to be student run. And a voluntary organisation is only going to work while everybody is still gaining from giving up their time.
And you came in to formal edu… formal teaching, formal university teaching, with that sort of already behind you, as it were, as a model of…
Yes, ‘cause I came in halfway through my post-doc time and… I suppose… what did I get? I mean I say that’s shaped my teaching a lot. I suppose the point is I had already done quite a lot of dive training lectures, and of course they’re designed for not smart academic types but they’re designed for anybody off the street so there was a certain… you know, they were quite nicely crafted to pick up and all that, so maybe there was an idea of not ‘speaking to the masses’ but actually having lectures that would actually work for everybody, maybe.
Well, no… but I mean you had that before you started.
Yeah, definitely.
Okay. So you’ve been teaching anything since about 1989? You were thinking that was about the beginning?
Um… yes.
And so you’ve been teaching Computing Science…?
From 1993 I think. I got handed down a lecture course.
What was that?
Er… C++ Programming, and it was only put on as a stop-gap measure by the Department; as a sop to those in the Department who wanted to stop teaching S-algol as their… ((laughs)) as the language teaching, so we had to have these two and… yes, a bit out of my depth but that’s…
Alright, and how was that, that first…?
Um… well the thing that always sticks in my mind about that was the surprise at how little they actually learned. ((laughs)) And, in a way, that was just the expectation of staff, you know. You have these highfaluting learning objectives, and back in 1993 they were probably weren’t learning objectives, it were just a curriculum you learned, so there was always stuff we were going to cover. And then, when you actually look at what the students could do in an exam after a, I suppose it was a, I can’t remember, 20 lecture course or something like that.
Oh, so it was over a year or it was over one…
20 lectures over one term I’d have thought.
Over one term, right, okay.
Probably, yeah, two lectures a week I would think over a term. They really hadn’t learned very much and I remember talking to one of my colleagues and he said, “Oh yeah, that’s just like that; you’ll get used to it,” you know. So I mean in a way the expectations were low in the institution.
Were you comfortable with that?
Not terribly. Never been very comfortable with that, never been very comfortable with that because to me it’s just somehow such a failure of engagement, you know, not to get them more enthused or get them deeper in here, then of course there’s that struggle, well how do you do that and how do you do it efficiently is the key, you know: one to one fine, but how do you do it when it’s one to 50.
Okay. So you started teaching at all in 1999; you started teaching Computer Science in 1993: when did you start teaching Introductory, this module that we’re going to anchor.
This one… 1996.
Quite early in your career then?
Yes. Not exactly in this form…
No, no, no.
…but it was an Introductory Programming course, yeah, at Glasgow, yeah very early on actually. I mean it’s obviously defined me while I’ve been here, you know, as “What does Quintin do? He teaches that…” yes.
So can you tell me sort of the story, the back story. I mean you came to it in 1996; what was it before then? What was it…?
Um… standard Introductory Course, principally designed for students intending Honours. Like, okay, so Scottish university, you’ll always get a large number of students who are taking this as a second or third subject in first year.
Oh okay, so it’s a wild card they’re going to throw away.
Yes, or… um… and so I suppose broadly I took on a course that had been specifically really for the Honour students because, prior to this course, there had been an A and a B stream, and the B stream was more for those who were interested, and the A stream was more for… sorry, those who were taking it speculatively, and the A stream was more for those who were intending Honours I think. And yet then the Department, for whatever reason, decided to merge them into one course.
In 1996 when you took it on?
When I took it on, that was the first time it had been merged together, so that there wasn’t an A and a B stream.
And you don’t know why they made that decision?
Um… I’m sure they may… Well, yeah, there was an unhappiness in the Department that students could take the easiest stream through first and second year and still get into Honours, and that didn’t seem to be fair somehow.
A stop-gap.
And of course that’s complete rubbish. I mean it doesn’t really matter, really, how they get there and many of those B stream students who ended up in Honours did perfectly well because we’d only let them out of a B stream on a fairly high grade so they were obviously competent studiers, you know, there was no problem; but anyway I think that was the reasoning. And that’s one of those classic examples in higher education that I observe is that higher education seems to have no memory, you know, and so one just goes round and round in the circle again and again, you know, until you change to a split course, and then a single and then a split, then a single, then a split, you know, we staved off the split course. But of course it is…
Is there momentum to bring it back?
Interestingly, there’s momentum to try and do something like that again, because it is so obvious and has always been obvious that the ability range we try and deal with in introductory courses is crazy. But, having said that, those who were proponents of a single course said, “But ever it was thus, even in the split course you had those…” you know, so you’re not necessarily much better off. Where are we going?
I’m just looking at the history or back story, or you know. Who taught it before you took it over?
Peter Dickman and Tom Melham were jointly responsible and then…
And they just got tired or… why didn’t one of them take it over, take over the new joint one?
I think they’d been teaching it for three, four, five years; probably ready for something else.
Yeah, okay.
I mean and, like I said, I would’ve been ready for something long ago if we hadn’t also chosen to make changes quite often about the structure and the way we did things, and so there’s been a kind of newness ‘cause we tried such a lot of different things along the way. So it had been taught… in Pascal we were shifting to Ada; we shifted to Ada because the, well, language was discussed in the Department, what we were going to teach. There were great enthusiasts against functional programming, for functional programming and sort of I think Ada was a halfway house to avoid it being a functional language. Not that Ada’s in any sense functional at all, but it was neither in one camp nor the other: it was something that…
Yes, something everybody could agree was acceptable.
Well… and the decision had been made literally months before Java became a thing and so, you know, one could imagine that a year later it would’ve undoubtedly been a trendy move to Java, whereas instead of which we stuck with Ada for years.
Yeah.
Now actually I have a lot of faith in our language choices. I can talk about that now or later.
You can talk about it whenever you like.
It’s almost like… I don’t see it written down in our literature anywhere as an aim of the course but it’s undoubtedly an aim that we want our students to be able to pick up new languages and systems with great facility. And our employers say undoubtedly we do; our students manage to do that. They always comment that they seem to be better than other HE students, and I think that’s because we give them a slightly weirdo language in first year and force them to use that and then, when they get to the trendy language, they all want to learn that, so they’re forced to use these different languages and similarly we make our third year a required Unix/Linux year, so they have to shift from Windows to Linux, and that’s all they’re allowed to use that year and so they’re forced to, you know, so…
And you think that starts with this first course that you’re responsible for?
Well, because we don’t start with Java. We start with something that they don’t know; I mean they won’t have even heard of Ada; many of them… it’s now Python, they won’t really know about Python, probably.