Learn By Doing

A Lifelong Learner Shares Thoughts About Education

  • At this time of year, looking forward to next year, everyone always asks "Why teach a student to program?" Let’s just do office applications or keyboarding like we always have. The answer is that in today’s workplace, even those who don’t program need to know it. Does your school teach programming? How will your students compete?

    Software company wants all workers to know code

    Hoping to narrow technology divide between workers, the firm is requiring every employee to learn JavaScript

    By Katie JohnstonJessica Reinhard, a graphic designer, took notes at the JavaScript boot camp.

    PAT GREENHOUSE/GLOBE STAFF

    Jessica Reinhard, a graphic designer, took notes at the JavaScript boot camp.

    It’s lunchtime at FreeCause, a small software company located on the 11th floor in a building in Downtown Crossing, and Elizabeth Goncalves, a marketing manager, is attending a professional development session. But she’s not learning new ways to work with advertisers.

    She’s learning to write computer code — JavaScript, to be exact.

    “This gives me a flashback to high school math class,” Goncalves says as she walks to the front of the room to write a line of code.

    Like most of the people in the crowded conference room, Goncalves knew nothing about coding until earlier this year, when 29-year-old company chief executive Michael Jaconi told all 60 of his employees that they had to learn the programming language JavaScript. The idea is not to turn everyone into an engineer, but to give employees — from accountants to designers to salespeople — a better understanding of what goes into developing the company’s software.

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    Earlier this year, 29-year-old company president Michael Jaconi told all 60 employees that they had to learn the programming language.

    FreeCause employees learn JavaScript

      Antoine Hage, chief technology officer of FreeCause, explained JavaScript code.

      PAT GREENHOUSE/GLOBE STAFF

      Antoine Hage, chief technology officer of FreeCause, explained JavaScript code.

      Jaconi’s initiative is a recognition that technology has inserted itself into almost every aspect of modern life, and it’s a subject people increasingly need to know. In many companies, technology often creates barriers that separate technical from nontechnical workers.

      “There’s a pretty big divide between engineers and nonengineers, and what I wanted to do was bring those two camps closer together,” said Jaconi, a serial entrepreneur and former political campaign worker who is learning to code along with his employees. “I thought that this would facilitate more efficiency, bring teams closer together, and ultimately make our company perform better.”

      FreeCause creates software that allows brands with loyalty programs to reward members with virtual currency, such as airline miles, for searching and shopping on certain websites. For instance, members of Hawaiian Airlines’ loyalty program can download and use a toolbar created by FreeCause to shop on retail sites where they earn miles for their purchases.

      Jaconi launched the coding program in February, modeling it after an initiative taking place at FreeCause’s Japanese parent company, Internet services provider Rakuten. Rakuten is requiring each of its 12,000 employees to learn English in a project called “Englishnization.” Jaconi named his project “Codinization” in tribute.

      Jaconi enlisted the help of Codecademy, a free programming how-to site, to introduce his employees to the concept. Jaconi then mapped out a plan for a yearlong program, with a few hours a week devoted to Codecademy lessons, plus lunchtime boot camps and small-group sessions led by FreeCause engineers.

      By the end of the year, the goal is to have every FreeCause employee develop a product such as a Web page or toolbar component that could potentially be integrated into the company’s loyalty rewards software.

      “I was scared when I announced this, to be perfectly frank,” Jaconi said. “I didn’t know if they were going to say, ‘You’re nuts, I quit.’”

      Neither has happened. Initial skepticism has died down. The experiment has come under fire by some in the blogosphere who call it an “expensive management fad” that won’t go deep enough to be of real value, but FreeCause employees are enthusiastic. At the very least, they realize knowing JavaScript makes them more marketable.

      “It’s another resume builder for me,” said Doug Liberman, director of accounting operations.

      Elizabeth Goncalves, marketing manager, beamed after declaring a string variable on the board during a JavaScript class.

      PAT GREENHOUSE/GLOBE STAFF

      Elizabeth Goncalves, marketing manager, beamed after declaring a string variable on the board during a JavaScript class.

      There have been other tangible results. Meetings take less time, employees say, because fewer technical explanations are necessary.

      Data analyst Corinne Salchunas sometimes has to wait months for a busy developer to address one of her requests, but armed with her coding knowledge — and the help of her mentor — she was able to tackle a project herself in just a few days. Salchunas, 26, adjusted the wording and format of a notification that lets website visitors know they can earn points by shopping on a site.

      One of her new versions is attracting 14 times more clicks, and earning users up to 14 times more points than the previous version.

      Sales executive Ryan Cole, 27, said his new coding knowledge will allow him to better explain software attributes to clients instead of running to an engineer every time he needs a technical explanation.

      “The last thing you want is to hand things off to other people and for something to be lost in translation,” he said.

      Tsedal Neeley, a professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School who has studied Rakuten’s Englishnization initiative, interviewed many FreeCause employees before the project started. Learning something new can create bonds between employees and raise morale, she said, but it also raises questions of whether the program adds a burden on engineers charged with mentoring co-workers.

      But, she said, Codinization could prove to be an innovative concept that gives employees a new understanding of their company’s products.

      “You can imagine, conceptually, this being a powerful thing,” Neeley said. Jaconi “might be starting something new.”

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    • Rise-of-Coding-Finall

    • While my school, District, State is not OER yet, we will be.  Any other way won’t let us compete for students or provide them competitive resources.

      Here is some of the current thinking on the subject of Open Textbooks.  From Getting Smart: OER Textbooks Cut Costs.

      The Open TextBook Challenge

    • Use Google Drive as a “Stepping Stone” to 3D Learning

      Use Google Drive as a “Stepping Stone” to 3D Learning

      “Use Google Drive as a “Stepping Stone” to 3D Learning” by Jennifer Funk first appeared on the Edcetera blog.

      Craig Roberts, assistant director of education at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, believes his students learn better when they explain things visually. So, he has them build fruit fly brains out of Play-Doh, and construct human brain cells out of miscellany from The Scrap Exchange, a local nonprofit creative reuse center. More often, he sends them to the whiteboard to illustrate core concepts using a splash of color and lots of lines.

      These strategies work, says Dr. Roberts, because when students are forced to communicate in visual or spatial language, they’re able to root out each others’ misunderstandings early.

      But there are limitations to the whiteboard method, in particular. Only one student is designated the illustrator, for example, and while that student faces the whiteboard, the others are bent over their books pulling out information to advise the illustrator. It’s a rather disconnected way to go about group work.

      So, Roberts and his collaborator, David Wilson, devised an experiment where they asked students to do the same visual representations of learning they always have, but to do them in 2D and 3D online environments.

      Roberts wanted to know: Would learning gains be greater in these high-tech environments? And, if so, which one was better?

      What he discovered offers new insight into the future of online learning, as well as some best practices for using Google Drive (the 2D environment) in the classroom.

      2D VS. 3D LEARNING: WHICH IS BETTER?

      For the experiment, students worked in small groups to construct visual representations of findings from research articles they were studying in Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. For three weeks they worked in a 2D environment using Google Drive’s drawing function (fig. 1) followed by three more weeks in a 3D environment called Open Cobalt (fig. 2).

      Throughout, students were given both subjective and objective learning assessments. Interestingly, while students self-reported greater satisfaction with the 2D environment, objective test results showed the 3D environment yielded greater learning gains.

      Roberts attributes this to the fact that students operated more comfortably in the 2D environment, which led them to believe they were learning more. It was the 3D environment, however, that revealed much promise for the future of online learning.

      But for now, says Roberts, it’s just that — the future. Despite the results of his experiment, he recommends instructors wait to use 3D software until a robust and user-friendly platform is available. (Open Cobalt was still in development.) Until then, he recommends instructors become competent using Google Drive, a stepping stone of sorts to the 3D environment and a solid learning tool in its own right.

      4 RULES FOR USING GOOGLE DRIVE IN THE CLASSROOM

      Google Drive (formally Google Docs) is a cloud-based space to create, edit, share and store documents. What makes it particularly useful for learning is the feature that allows users to edit the same document simultaneously, as Roberts’ students did.

      Set-up is simple and you can find detailed explanations of it here and here.

      Roberts advises the following best practices. While his experience is specific to creating visual representations, these practices apply no matter the specific learning goal.

      Rule #1: Have students work from the same physical location. It’s critical that students work in a face-to-face environment even if it is also online. This way, students can edit the same document while also conducting real-time, meaningful discussions about learning concepts and the best way to represent them. Roberts gives students individual laptops and directs them to sit with their teams as they work in Google Drive (fig. 3).

      Rule #2: Keep teams together. Whether you select the teams or they they do, students become really effective team members only after the third or fourth time they work together. “They get to know each others’ strengths and weaknesses and we see a real jump in their performance,” he says.

      Rule #3: Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. It’s natural to resist attempting again a project that didn’t work the first time. Still, for something like Google Drive (or any other new tech tool), it’s important to keep exposing students to the environment. Although Roberts said most of his students were already familiar with Google Drive, it took them a couple opportunities to get re-acquainted and to feel comfortable with his specific assignments.

      Rule #4: Let students take responsibility for their learning. This is closely related to Roberts’ encouragement for instructors to try new things — a willingness he says that can be impeded when they worry students will respond negatively to tech and other experiments. And often, they do. But Roberts has an answer to that: “Give students some initial guidance but then realize it’s their responsibility to make things happen,” he says. “It’s not longer your responsibility for them to learn in this kind of process.”

      If you’ve used Google Drive in the classroom, what best practices would you add?