As much as I believe blogging is essential for my career(I got my first developer job because I was the only candidate who maintained a blog, however humble), for now I need to stop and concentrate on getting the thesis out of the way. I can always come back to it later. With better articles.
Also, I need to figure out what the next step will be, professionally(how can I best change the world right now?), but also on a more personal level(thinking about things like adoption, missing my friends in France, wanting to be with my family more often since we all had a very tough year, etc.).

So see you soon. I’ll keep in touch. You can comment on this post if you need me for anything.

—————–

Dooonc, comme on peut le voir ici(en anglais), je suis maintenant au coeur de l’écriture de ma thèse de doctorat. Ce qui veut dire que les choses commencent à devenir sérieusement stressantes. Ce qui veut dire que je dois faire des choix pour préserver ma santé mentale et la qualité de mon travail.
Il y a aussi fort à parier que je devrais travailler à temps partiel pendant les prochains mois, histoire de mettre un peu de beurre dans les épinards.

Je suis convaincu de l’utilité des blogs pour ma carrière(j’ai obtenu mon premier poste de développeur car j’étais le seul candidat avec un blog, même très humble), mais pour l’instant je dois arrêter pour me concentrer sur le bouclage de cette thèse. Je peux toujours revenir plus tard. Avec des articles de meilleure qualité.
Egalement, j’ai besoin de prendre du temps pour réfléchir à la prochaine étape, d’un point de vue professionnel(quel est le meilleure façon pour moi de changer le monde dans les prochaines années?), mais aussi d’un point de vue plus personnel(réfléchir à des choses comme l’adoption, mes amis de France me manquent, j’ai besoin de voir ma famille plus souvent après l’année très dure que nous avons traversé, etc.)

A bientot, donc. N’hésitez pas à me laisser un commentaire si vous avez la moindre question.

Dear thesis,
[...]I’m asking you to forgive me if I take the time to do other things, even see other people. I need my space. I need my sleep. I need to spend at least a few minutes every day with, you know, family, friends and things.[...]

Dear thesis,
in the past few years, I’ve been dreaming about you. I’ve prepared you, read hundreds of papers to feed you, prepared careful studies and experiment just so I could talk about them to you. I’ve been working like a slave for you. Because to me, you’re so worth it. And now, you are finally within my reach, and it makes me so happy.

We’ve spent a lot of time together lately: writing, crafting, revising, analysing, trying to come up with just the right words to tell the world what we’re about, what you’re about. It seems like all we do these days is hang out together, and that all I think about is you. And, again, you are worth every second of it.

I love those moments we have together. Really, I do. I’m passionnate about what we are doing, and I would never change any of that for the world. But, you see, lately I’ve been feeling a bit … how can I put this …smothered? We spend so much time together, I’m afraid its going to kill our relationship from the inside. Sometimes I stare at you for so long, I can’t remember what all this was about in the first place. I can’t find the right words, I get tired, I become cranky and I take it all out on you. I think you deserve better than that. You need my full attention, you need me at my best, rested and energised.
So I’m asking you to forgive me if I take the time to do other things, even see other people. I need my space. I need my sleep. I need to spend at least a few minutes every day with, you know, family, friends and things. Also, I need to exercise a little. You don’t want me looking fat and sluggish when I present you to the examiner, do you?
Don’t get me wrong, you’re my #1 priority right now, and I’m commited to this relationship, all the way up to graduation(aaah, graduation. It’ll be a glorious day, my dear. It’ll be our special day). But if we are going to do this, we need to do it right. I’m sure you understand. So I’ll see you after I get a bath, kiss my wife and get a good night sleep. Maybe I’ll spend an hour at the gym tomorrow, too.

With love,

Your PhD Student

Important message to PhD students all over the world: TAKE A BREAK! You thesis will thank you.

List of bullshit things they tell you about succeeding as a blogger/writer:

• You need to advertise to make money,
• Use pop-ups to invite people to subscribe,
• learn SEO and focus on that,
• Have “connections”/live in a tech-oriented city.

List of things you should do:

• Think about your readers first,
• Make great stuff that’s easy for them to find.

VIDEO: Steal Like a Writer

Here is a video from Austin Kleon, an illustrator, web designer and poet(or, as he puts it himself, a writer who draws).
I take out a few ideas from the talk:

• Writing well is a valuable asset in the workplace. Given the choice, an employer will choose the better writer, simply because writing well usually means thinking well. And in this age of emails and social networks, solid writing skills are increasingly useful.
• You will never create anything truly original. You are just a vector of previous writing, a connection with other artists(or programmers, or researchers). Steal their stuff, and make it better, or at least unique.
• Discover your lineage. As a PhD student, I learned how to review what has been done in the field of virtual patients and create an academic lineage.
  You can (and should) do the same in any field: start with your favourite artist/designer/writer, discover his or her work, and find out were it got its influence from. Then do the same for the people who influenced this person, and so on.

Some excellent, no-nonsense advice for stressed-out PhD students. I have been doing this since I started my PhD, and so far the results have been excellent. I am not too stressed, and I delivered most things I needed too deliver on time, while keeping in shape and keeping my marriage together.
Be smart, and make good life choice, and you might just get that thesis done.

I recently contributed a few lines of code to OpenLabyrinth, an open-source virtual patient system(more on that later). OpenLabyrinth is currently being re-written from an old ASP version hosted on SourceForge.
The new version is hosted on the excellent GitHub, and I think that this is in iteself a significant improvement on the previous version. Not only is GitHub based on the amazing Git version management system(better than the older SVN), it is also very well designed for motivation, fun and engagement.

GitHub makes collaborating to open-source projects feel more like playing a game than like “doing work”. Several design features in GitHub help users get into the open-source game:

• Exploring projects: the search features are simple and straightforward, and it’s clearly designed for open-source coders. It just gets the job done: helping you find the project or user you’re interested in. Then, when you find a project or a user, you can explore what they’ve done, have a look at the code straight away, see the history, etc.
  It feel more like exploring a world of code than searching a database.
• Comparing scores: for each project, you can see who contributed over time, and how much, so it’s easy to notice the key players. You can also visualise the various branches, making each project feel like a sort of evolving animal.
• Team work and collaboration: the wiki and issue queue help teams communicate about the project, and work in team for a common goal (sort of like a quest in a MMORPG).

The sensible yet fun look and feel of GitHub(check out the cat-octopus collection), though it probably wasn’t planned that way, make it one of the most interesting game to play on the internet for programmers.

If you’re on GitHub, let me know about your project and your experience of GitHub in the comments.

This scenario, barely caricatured, explains why the development of technology for learning is so slow, costs millions to institutions and governments, all for a limited pedagogical benefit.
How can we break out of that deadlock?

In my humble opinion, two factors create this problem.
And it’s actually an old problem:

1. A lack of communication between disciplines.
   This question is vast, yet absolutely pressing in today’s society. It’s worth writing about a bit longer, but I’ll leave that to a future article.
   You can’t solve everything at once.
2. An lack of reflexion on the core problems posed by the very act of teaching anything.
   These problems, very often, are pretty old, even if today’s context is different. What are these problems, and how can we tackle them in today’s society, so we can take full advantage of current technological tools for pedagogy?

Motivation

One of the recurrent problems for teachers, and for a long time, is the students’ interest for the subject they study. How can you make a student passionate about mathematics, sciences, and literature?

To interest a small child in the world around him, the receipe is pretty simple: take a shiny object with bright colors, shake it in front of the child, and voilà, you have his complete attention for two seconds, five if you’re really good. Most pedagogical designs today adopt the same approach, using animations and little brightly colored characters to get the reader’s attention. For two seconds, five if you’re good.

Trouble is, the small child is not only interested in the object because of the pretty colors and the movements (that’s only the small nugget to indicate: “this is interesting”), but also because of all the discovering, exploring, understanding he can do with it: what is that strange thing? Does it look like this other thing I saw yesterday? Is it a toy? Can I eat it? This natural curiosity is the essential engine that gets the human brain started.
Why not take advantage of that as a factor for motivation? Using learning in itself as a motivation for learning, not bad. It’s a virtuous, self-maintaining cycle.

Information discovery can be used as a motivational element in our pedagogical designs, as can problem solving. Allowing users to build objects (physical or virtual) can also motivate learning.

Deep reflexion and efficient memorisation

Learning doesn’t only mean memorising lists and regurgitate them (this is only the first level of Bloom’s taxonomy of the cognitive domain). Learners need to be able to understand and apply knowledge, and demonstrate a capacity for analysis, evaluation and synthesis. This level of competency requires a deep learning process, based on the learners’s active implication on problems to solve.
As a consequence, it might be useless, or even harmful, to focus on impressive but useless graphics, to the expense of efficient scenarios. Content prevails on the package or, to be more precise, the package must fit the content perfectly. Design and technology at the service of a smarter pedagogy.

The same thing, but better

It’s unnecessary to create new problems artificially, just because we now have new technological toys to play with. They’re just tools anyway. How about just using technology to solve old problems we already have, crucial problems at the heart of the teaching and learning process?
Successful web companies solve simple and recurrent problems. Only, they do it better than others. Or in a more innovative way. Or they just massively simplify everything.

In the same vein, good pedagogical design allows the resolution of good old problems in education, only better than before.
So which pedagogical problem did you solve today, using technologies and good design principles?

This is a great article by my fellow Southampton PhD student Nicole Beale.

She proposes a few clever ideas to finally bridge the gap between shy and sometimes slightly stuck-up universities and the free-flowing, slightly anarchic world of open information.

A few ideas from the article:

• Using Wikipedia as an excuse for students to show off their expertise while improving Wikipedia itself,
• Creating events for Wikipedia writing in the university.
• Encouraging collaborations, using Wikipedia as a tool.

Blowing up maths: making mathematical balloon sculptures

Doodle Music

In which Vi create visual and mathematical music.

9.999… reasons that .999… = 1

My PhD work is focused on virtual patients; I’m particularly interested in how we can use the semantic web to create more flexible, smarter virtual patient systems.
But why bother with semantic web technologies when a simple relational database could do? Well, the fact is that semantic web technologies have several benefits over relational database for the design of web-based virtual patients.

First, the semantic web is a common standard, well formalized and clearly designed to be used independently of any particular implementation. Thus, the data is understandable in the same way across different systems. By contrast, SQL for instance, despite being a standardized language, is not implemented in the same way by all software vendors, which is obviously a problem. Classic databases are also not designed to work on the web specifically, in the sense that it isn’t possible to query an SQL database from the web directly. On the other hand, the semantic web provides SPARQL endpoints to do just that.
Then, RDF (one of the building blocks of the semantic web) provides a clear semantic to define simple statements about virtual patients (or anything else for that matter). The statement “Mr. X is a virtual patient” can be represented using a very simple triple:

<http://www.example.com/> rdf:type <http://example.com/VirtualPatient>

With a relational database, there are a number of ways to represent this statement, which would be very specific to each individual developer’s choice, and vary widely in complexity and clarity. As a consequence, doing anything complex with the data, such as generating dynamic feedback (as I’ll demonstrate later) becomes also very idiosyncratic, and it’s easy to end up with a system that only you and your team can understand and maintain. This is prohibitive in a world were collaboration is badly needed due to lack of resources.
Sadly, this is the current state of affair in the field of virtual patients: ad hoc systems designed to work on a given platform, in a given medical school. The efforts to standardize virtual patients using XML with Medbiquitous have gone a long way towards changing that, but mere XML lacks the powerful features available with the semantic web.
Finally, the interoperability and clarity offered by the semantic web allow use to reuse data from external sources on the web to enrich the data we already have about the virtual patient. You can query knowledge from DBpedia, Freebase and others and use that to generate feedback or add pictures and information about specific symptoms or conditions. Of course, you need to provide a clear way for virtual patient authors to verify the knowledge that’s pulled out from these external source, as it might not be accurate.

What the model looks like

To see if the semantic web can actually generate useful feedback, I created a very basic model to represent a virtual patient and the knowledge we have about it.
This picture shows, for instance, how to represent the following interconnected statements in a machine-readable manner:

• Mr Smith is a Virtual Patient,
• Mr Smith has a Muscle Ache,
• Mr Smith has Fever,
• Muscle Ache is a symptom of the Flu,
• Fever is a symptom of the Flu,
• Mr Smith has the Flu.

Representing Students’ Actions

To generate feedback, we have to design a model representing what the student is doing. This picture shows a model of how we represent the fact that Tim, the student, has asked a question about aching or stiffness.

The model is based on the notion of a “work session”. A session is linked to a virtual patient and to a student, which means that every time a student logs in and starts a virtual patient, a new, unique session is created. This also means that if a student stops his work and logs off, next time he or she comes back all the previously asked questions are recorded and displayed to the student.

Using the data linked to the student’s work session, we know everything the students has done. And because of the information we have about the patient’s symptoms, we can also infer that the student should probably think about flu as a potential diagnosis. If we add more data, we can infer many other plausible conditions that the student should look at, and generate feedback dynamically based on each student’s choices.
I will explain how this feedback generation works in more detail in my next post. In the meantime, please leave your comments if you have ideas about what a model of a virtual patient should include, or if you have any other question