So I Don T Know If One Springs to Mind

So I Don T Know If One Springs to Mind

WS_30022(kentdb)

Okay. Super. So, here we are, on Thursday 20th August, at the University of Kent and this is an interview regarding the Changing Practice project so we’re going to be following you and doing a longitudinal study over the next two or three years, and so this first interview is sort of to ground your ideas of what you do and to get an idea of what you’re like as a teacher and how you make your choices as a teacher. And so it works best if we can anchor it in a specific module, a specific course.

Okay.

And you’ve taught a lot but it’s best to choose one where your skill has made a difference, and it might be design, delivery or what have you or something where you have, you know, your expression of yourself as a teacher is the fullest.

Right.

So I don’t know if one springs to mind.

Well there’s really only one primary course that I teach at the moment which is the Further Object-Oriented Programming in Java which…

Is that a good candidate for this or…?

I don’t see why not. I mean the course is modelled around material that Michael and I developed together and so the contents I’m getting across and the way I’m putting them across is an expression of my…

As much as…

…theme throughout… yes.

Yeah, okay.

So that’s a reasonable one to do I think.

We will choose that one then, okay. So you can refer back to that at any point as we move on but that’s the one we’ll choose to anchor the discussions in. So let’s move back away from that for a minute, so how long have you been teaching?

I have been teaching since 1980/81 I think probably, so 28 years.

What was that? What was the start?

That was ((laughs)) First Year Programming; I’ve always been doing First Year Programming. That was First Year Programming in… probably Algol 68.

And that was here?

No, that was in a small college in the University of London where I graduated from. So, having graduated, I joined the staff and started doing some teaching with them and was teaching on a first year course, mentored by somebody who I thought was a very good teacher and, when I first started going into the lecture room, we were… I was doing the paired lecture to one that he was doing to another group of students, so I would sit in on his lectures…

You were repeating it.

I was repeating his lectures. So I would sit in on his lecture, I would then deliver essentially the same lecture although with freedom to add my own variations to it, and he would sit in on that lecture and then give me feedback afterwards…

Wow.

…which I found very helpful and…

So was it attractive to you that you liked him or was that just chance that he was given to you as your mentor?

I think it was probably chance. I think it was probably just that he was the person teaching that course, although he had been the notional supervisor of my final year project. ((laughs)) I say notional supervisor because actually I had very little supervision ((laughs)) on my final year project.

Maybe you didn’t need it.

((laughs)) Well I’d pretty much finished it by the end of the summer vacation before the final year. So yes, yes. But we’d established a relationship anyway, so a relationship in which we were comfortable and I was comfortable with his views on my teaching, which helped me to develop I think.

And was that normal? Was that kind of someone in ((0:04:07.5?))

I don’t think it was. We were a relatively small department and there were a number of the younger lecturers who I think had probably been undergraduates there as well and then gone on to be members of staff. So there was at least some history of people coming on through and then teaching within department led ((0:04:31.0?)) students in, but it wasn’t formalised; I think it just happened that way. It’s easier to take on people you already know than unknowns from outside.

So does that mean that there was a very strong cultural sort of identity, “That this is how we do things here”?

Well I… oh, there was definitely a “This is how we do things here,” because this is the period, sort of late ’70s, early ’80s when structured programming was coming in big and was a little bit different and quite a dogmatic approach to teaching. We know how it should be taught, we do it in a particular way, we’re prepared to invest effort in providing the tools to make it done this way. And I probably bought into that as a philosophy.

Sure.

So, yes, there was quite a strong culture within the department about how teaching… how teaching programming particularly should be done. I wouldn’t say how teaching should be done because I think there was a huge variety in the teaching throughout the department, you know, good and bad, but I’d say most people who taught me as an undergraduate were committed teachers; I didn’t get the sense that, you know, they came in, gave their hour and then went away and couldn’t care less in the meantime.

And that was the environment that you just segwayed into?

Yes, yes, yeah.

So you were a committed teacher too.

I suppose I became a committed teacher, yes. ((laughs)) Yeah, because teachers were committed people, yeah, that’s probably it.

Yeah. So that was when you started. You didn’t do any sort of teaching before when you were…

I did undergraduate surgeries, so…

As, as…

…as a final year student I was paid to sit in a room and the students would bring their programs along and I’d find the bugs in them and help them and things, I did a bit of that, yeah.

Right, and so then you’d enjoyed it.

Very much, yeah. It was good.

So that was the pull.

Yeah.

You hadn’t done anything…

No, not as a teaching

…Scouts or… ((laughs)) okay.

Don’t go into the scouts. I’ll tell you, off the record, why I’m scarred about the Scouts. ((laughs))

Oh we’ll not mention the Scouts. ((laughs)) Okay, so that’s when you started, and ironically the same subject as… well almost the same subject that we’re going to talk about.

Yeah.

So this module that we chose to talk about, the Further Object-Oriented Programming, how long have you been teaching that?

Probably since ’97/’98, so over ten years, ten or eleven years, because we had the big shift from teaching Pascal… no, we went from Pascal to Modula-3; that really didn’t work so then we had to shift to Java and…

So how long was that gap?

Between Pascal and Java, it was probably about four years. It was long enough to realise that Modula-3 wasn’t really going anywhere, and the department had made a decision that it was going to go OO and nobody really knew anything about OO. I took the trouble to find about O… well, apart from Ian – he was the only one who really knew about OO. I took the trouble to find out about Java, actually wasn’t keen on Java being the language; I wanted it to be C++ but then once the decision was made for it to be Java I was asked to take on the Java teaching and did. I mean I had been involved in the first year teaching all the way through anyway so I was the obvious person to ask to do that.

Yeah, okay.

So about ten years.

So the history of this module is… grew out of departmental change or…? What’s the back story, if you like?

Well the back story is that the… your second and your third year modules will always require students to come through the first year having learned to program. So the first year modules have always been teach students how to program so that they can then do operating systems, software engineering, with a reasonable level of competency in programming. And I suppose we’d always taught programming in a standard procedural way up to this point. My feeling was quite strong that if we were going to teach an objected-oriented language then we should teach it as an object-oriented language and not as a procedural language with the objects stuck on afterwards.

So would you say that the procedural era… that the department was successful, that that course worked?

It did to a limited extent. I think it did a good job in teaching object-orientation and there’s a bit more to say really about the nature of the course, which I’ll say a little bit more about in a minute. Where the department was unsuccessful was buying into the whole OO thing as a whole, so I would say by and large what happened is that it’s like what’s happening on the surface of the planet, you know, your buildings are all the same but it doesn’t take account of the fact that there’s lava flows underneath or, you know, rivers are swelling and that something’s happened underneath that needs to affect what’s happening on the top, and I’d say the second and the third year courses really didn’t appreciate that what students would come out with at the end of the first year was a little bit different from what they were used to: there would be programming but they would know how to do different things, and I’m still not sure that even after ten years…

((laughs))

…the department has really appreciated that as a whole. But it had the… the course in the first year developed in two stages, so I originally developed all the material for the whole of the first year programming course, the two terms’ worth of course.

Okay, so if this is the beginning of the life of the course and this is today… I’ll draw a line down there…

Yeah.

So this is a long time ago, and you made every decision about the course.

I did make every decision about the course, yes. I had free rein really to put what I wanted into the course and…

Right, who gave you that free rein? They just said, “Go do it,”?

Yeah, I think part of the departmental culture is when you’re asked to teach a course nobody really cares what you teach in it ((laughs)) as long as the results look alright at the end, so nobody’s going to come along and say, “Oh, please make sure you’re doing this,” or “Please make sure you’re doing that,” or “I hope you’re doing this before that,” so I really did have a free choice to do that and so I just got on and did it.

So do you remember what choice you made first? Was it a textbook choice or a... assessments or…?

It would’ve been the philosophy that said I’m going to teach students to write classes that have multiple instances in view; there will be instantiating multiple instances of classes, they will be making… they will have object interactions so they’ll have objects of different classes and these objects will invoke methods on each other, so it was a pure object-oriented approach.

So it’s almost learning outcomes in a sense.

Yes, I suppose so; I suppose so, although I wouldn’t have described it as that.

No, you wouldn’t have used that vocabulary, no.

I don’t know if we had that vocabulary in ‘97/’98. Yes, I had in mind that what I wanted students to know at the end of the course was how do I write object-oriented programs. And I identified a textbook which was Lewis and Loftus, which I felt fitted in with my kind of aim… oh and also Budd’s Understanding Object-Oriented Programming, which at the time I don’t think there was a Java version of… so it was this one, it’s the Platypus book…

Oh I know the one, yes.

…which I thought was really good and I derived a lot of my understanding and vocabulary from Budd’s book. He did then write a Java version which actually I didn’t then use because by that time I think I’d probably decided I was writing my own.

((laughs)) So you were given the course.

Yes.

You conceived the philosophy “This is what this course is going to do.”

Yes.

And then what: you read loads of textbooks; you read every textbook you could find?

I read as much as possible. I felt that it really needed to be credible; I really need to immerse myself in Java. I’d already read through Gosling and… Arnold and Gosling’s first edition Java book as a way of getting to know Java so I was already programming in Java before I started preparing the course, and in fact that was kind of my what I did with learning C, so for my final year project I learned C, I got hold of the Kernighan and Ritchie book and I read it and I learned C that way. I applied the same philosophy to the Arnold and Gosling book, here were the authorities on Java: if I read their book I’d know the lingo, I’d know how to do things properly, so it was about immersing myself in that.

And that’s the sort of typical behaviour…

Typical, yes.

…you would say if someone asked you to teach.

Yeah, it would be go to the authorities, immerse yourself in them and be able to think as they would think, yeah. There were other Java books around at the time that I was fairly disdainful of – I won’t mention the authors’ names…

No, please don’t ((laughs)) but you’ll point. ((laughs))

…but I’ll show you on my shelf – and was very cynical about those people who had written books for other languages and not taken on board that OO and Java was a completely different beast.

Yeah, and they were just doing a template about…

Yeah, and I felt that was really unfair on students, so I tried to make it a credible OO…

Right, so you’re immersing yourself.

Yeah.

You’re designing in Java, you’ve got the philosophy, you’re immersing yourself here, then what? So you chose the textbook, you chose the Loftus…

Well I chose Loftus but, okay, another thing that really… again influence from my undergraduate days, was that people often produced copious course notes, they would write notes for the course you were taking, and that was a principle I tended to adopt when I came here, whether as a compiling course or a programming language course, I’d write and I’d make it available to students. So I started writing course notes…

And was that a completely in advance or was that the night before or the week before or…?

I certainly started it in the summer before I taught the course, and I’d had a go at turning my course notes into a textbook in the past; I’d actually…

Where was that?

That was when people were beginning to move from Pascal to C, although I actually came a little bit late to that so we… I taught a second year course where our students knew Pascal and I taught them C so I wrote course notes for that and then thought, “Well let’s see if a publisher would be interested in this.” And I realised I’d left it a little bit late: the wave had passed really.

Okay, so the publishers weren’t interested.

The publishers weren’t interested.

((laughs))

And this time I thought, “I’m going to give it another go. When I write these course notes I will have in mind that I will write a textbook as well.”

Okay. This was right at the beginning?

This was right at the beginning, yes.

So you went into the idea that this was going to be…

Yeah.

…not just for these students here?

No. That’s right. And I can remember approaching a publisher at ((Sixsy?)) in 1997 when the first Java books were beginning to come out, and talking to a publisher and, you know, it’s easier for them to then encourage you to go away and write stuff, but I did say my book was going to be different from most of the other books that were out there.

Because…?

Well because I was disdainful of the ones that were out there… ((laughs))

((laughs))

…and I didn’t think they were doing a good job.

Yeah.

So I can’t remember when, what the timing of that was, but it was probably… I’d probably got quite a lot written during the summer before the course was given, which I then sent off to the publisher.

Before you started teaching?

I think before I started teaching even… I think. And the publisher was really excited, you know, it was one of those, “Ooh, this is fantastic,” and so from that point on I was writing as I was delivering the course and…

So you’d use… let’s say chapter one in a week, in a lecture…?

Yeah, so I would give… I can’t remember exactly how I did it, but for the early stuff I would’ve written it well in advance. So at the beginning of the course I would’ve been ahead of myself.

But did you then… were you then revising that whilst you were teaching methods and theory?

Yes, I probably was, yes, and usually trying to write ahead but I might have not been writing very far ahead, and I wouldn’t have… the notes I gave out to students wouldn’t have been as fleshed out as they were for the final textbook…

No, of course.

…but the students were getting, you know, pretty chunky blocks of course notes. And of course the PowerPoints as well, I was doing the PowerPoints to go with them, which the publisher also wanted, so the book was developing along with the course, but it probably took over two years, so there were probably two iterations of the course.