cruising.....

...through Think Again, and then, coming to dead halt........................


I did all of the work for week 9 on the 27th.  This was not as hard as you'd think.  Week 9's lectures are much more repetitious than I would wish.  (Only five pages of notes for a whole week of lectures?)

We're supposed to be able to speed up the video, so it plays faster, but that doesn't seem to work for me.  I could try a different browser, and see if it works there.....

In any case, I am now NOT BEHIND for the first time in weeks and weeks!  (Well, if you ignore the fact that I haven't taken the third quiz yet, I'm not behind....  "I am caught up on listening to lectures and doing exercises." -- that is a true statement.)

Week 10 is THIS WEEK.  Yay.


The contrast between the two people teaching this class is stark.

One of them has clearly taught this material MANY times, and has devoted considerable time and energy to refining his presentation.  He does a good job of covering what he means to cover, with enough-repetition-but-not-too-much, and his exercises give students a chance to make sure they understand the material (appropriate difficulty for what was taught, without excessive obfuscation).

In contrast, it's not clear that the other has ever taught it.  He seems completely familiar with the material, but the teaching veers between "stultifyingly repetitious" and "way too fast" (barely touching on important points).  I mean -- if you are about to launch into (at least) two weeks of lectures about various fallacies, don't you think it would be nice to define what "fallacy" means?  I was clear that there was something wrong, if something was a fallacy, but I did not know what the definition is, in this context........  I still have no idea what *he* thinks it means; I got my definitions off the web......

The video quality is, likewise, excellent in one case, and barely acceptable in the other (lighting so bad you can't see his eyes at all?  looming over the camera [and so, the viewer] like the Great and Terrible Oz?  No.  Really.  Just ... no.  Did ANYONE look at these lectures, before they were published?  Baffling....).

Wouldn't you think that an experienced professor who does a very good job (at teaching, and at teaching-on-video), working with ... someone else ... would help their partner-teacher do a good job?

I would expect it....  I mean -- I know that could be touchy, especially as we are not talking tweaks, here, we are talking MAJOR revision, but good grief.

The one looks much worse, interspersed with the other..................

And vice versa.  Hmm.  One doesn't want to conclude that's a reason for not helping the teacher-partner, but one does wonder..........

At least the feedback for the exercises I did yesterday gave the right answer, even if I gave an incorrect answer.  Before, with this teacher, you might have to take the exercises over and over, until you gave no wrong answers, in order to find out what he thought all the right answers were.

This more-complete feedback speeds up the exercise-taking to an acceptable amount of time spent.  A definite improvement.



It is clear to me that college teaching will move in the direction of "lectures in this on-line format."  Only the very best instructors will be doing this sort of teaching.  I am puzzled that people would put mediocre (at best) presentations of content out there on the web, for absolutely anyone to peruse.  It doesn't do their reputations any good, and it can't be good for the reputation of the institutions that actually pay them to teach, either..........  Odd.

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I wrote all of the above, yesterday morning, and then I listened to the first lecture in week 10.

I think lecture 10-1 is going to be the straw that breaks my back for this course. 

He spent 15 minutes talking about what he contends are three different sorts of ad hominem arguments.  He made the point that sometimes ad hominem arguments are justified.

He never defined two of the sorts of ad hominem arguments until the feedback for the exercises.  Not in the lecture.  Not in the exercises themselves.  In the feedback.

The last lecture from week 8 is about utility (overall expected value).  The utility of spending time trying to figure out the difference between a dismisser ad hominem argument and a denier ad hominem argument is nil, as near as I can figure. I understand why we care what an ad hominem argument is, and I understand why we care if that ad hominem argument is justified or not, but really, taking categorization of fallacies to this level of granularity?  Who cares. 

At the beginning of the class, we learned about the skeptical regress.  Every premise is the conclusion of a previous argument, which means -- in order to prove anything, you have to first prove its premises, and all of their premises, etc., etc., etc., back to the beginning of everything, which doesn't exist.......... 

I was talking about this with my better half yesterday, and he said "The Axioms!  In math, everything stems from the Axioms!"  Alas, this is philosophy, rather than math, and I suspect the only Axiom in philosophy is that there ARE no Axioms............

Anyway -- like the skeptical regress, this "categorizing down to finer and finer granularity" could also go on forever.  We could take ad hominem deniers, and deny because of clothing choices, accent, gender, ethnicity.....  Then we could deny because of this accent, that accent, some other accent........  It could go on and on, just like the skeptical regress could go on and on, as we gave new names to all of the narrower and narrower categories...........


Whatever. Enough is enough.  This class is too weird.  Partly interesting and informative, partly obscure and obtuse and way too much noise-to-signal.  I'm done trying to pick the signal out of the noise.

If the good teacher teaches more of the class, I'll listen to him, but I'm done spending time listening to the other.  I haven't take quiz 3, and can't see any point in taking it if I'm not taking the final quiz.  (The lectures for weeks 11 and 12 are not available now; I can't tell who is going to teach them.)


I misunderstood the description of this class. I thought it was going to be much more practical than it is.

If one single change is made before the class is offered again, I vote for changing the class description to make it very clear how much of the class is "Should you bet your last $100,000?" and how much is "picking the definitions for dismissers and deniers out of the feedback from the exercises."

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Thinking

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I have now finished all the Think Again work for weeks 6-8, except the quiz.  I'm waiting for a stretch when I can have the computer for 5 hours, just in case the quiz takes that long (as the one for weeks 4-5 did)...........  Once I finish the quiz, I'll "only" be two weeks behind in the course......

I went ahead and listened to the first lecture in week 9, as you can see by the green check.

The lecture on the Paradoxes of Vagueness has very little content, given its length.  That's ok with me, as long as the exercises and quiz on this material are as straightforward.....

The Vagueness has to do with at least one of an argument's premises depending on a vague (NOT precisely-defined) concept.  Like "heap" or "soft" or "late".........

Or "vague"...............

My better half was in the room as I listened to lecture 9-1, and was even paying attention to part of it.

Some time after the lecture had finished, and we'd both checked our email, I turned to him and said "'Vague' is a vague word."

His reply?  "No, it isn't." 

lol.............................................................


Ok, now that we have collected ourselves (and have given yet another fond thought to Monty Python) -- did you look at the topics for week 9 & 10?  "Fallacies of Vacuity"?????  "Circularity and Self-Sealers"???

Hmmmm.................

Well, at least the exercises for 9-1 were not awful.  It is probably too much to hope that the quiz for the last section of the class will not be awful, given how this instructor's quiz over weeks 4 and 5 was, but I suppose we can hope for improvement...........



I think I need a certificate saying I have a PhD in (on?) the Fallacies of Vacuity......   Though I may change my mind after I find out what it is supposed to mean!

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January 25

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More frost.  So cool......

Closeups.

Later that morning.....  The sun is out.  The new snow has been swept off the sidewalk.

A day in the life.  A rare kind of day.  It's not often the case that all three of us are home....

My better half is downstairs sorting paper.

I'm here in front of the computer.

Listening to Walter.

My daughter is in the other room, listening to Italian for her class.

Willard is asleep, in the sunshine, on the cowshe.

The whole house smells like the bread pudding in the oven.  Cinnamony...........

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.............

A good day.

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still cruising

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I have done week 7 of Think Again within the last 24 hours.  Yay.

That's the fastest I've ever done a week's worth of work in either Coursera class.

I'm coming to think that a lot of this work is like studying grammar.  It is entirely possible to speak grammatically, without knowing the names of the rules for doing so.

For me, a lot of the logical parts of this class are obvious.  I don't know the names of the rules, or how you would do the proofs, but I can look at the facts and say "it was the red wine, combined with the fish, that killed the unfortunate diners (given the data that is available!)"............ 

I'm now "only" three weeks behind.

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cruising.....

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I am now halfway through Think Again.  Yay.

I can't remember when I began listening to the lectures for week 5, but this week I have done all the exercises for week5, have taken the quiz for weeks 4 and 5, and have done all the work for week 6.

I have now passed two quizzes (of four), and have completed six weeks of work (I have listened to all the lectures, and have done all the exercises).

At the moment, I am three weeks behind.  I'm about to launch into week 7....

(The deadline for all of the coursework is the middle of March, even though the class ends in the third week of February, so I've got time to finish, if I don't run into another "I can't touch that! for three weeks" roadblock.....)

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Still Thinking.....

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Yesterday I suited up for the COLD, and walked the dog, and walked me.

When I got home, I decided not to attempt the unit 2 quiz for Think Again.  I realized that I could start listening to the videos for week 6 without taking the quiz over weeks 4 and 5.  Duh.  So that's what I did.

I find this material less intuitive than the material in weeks 4 and 5, but the exercises actually follow from what was taught, and are not ridiculously obfuscated.

Yay.

(as always, click on an image to embiggen)

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Thinking..........

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For reasons that escape me, I can't seem to walk away from Think Again.  Sort of like picking a scab, I keep coming back...........

The content in weeks 4 and 5 have fit quite neatly into the way my brain works.  I even found most of the exercises for week 4 to be (mostly) clear and easy to understand, bushels of egregious obfuscatory negations and all.

However.  The exercises for week 5?  Oy vey.

Again with the egregious obfuscation, and not only via negation.  Why does the point that "obfuscation makes it 'harder,' but NOT IN ANY MEANINGFUL WAY" escape people who are supposed to be college professors?  I heard a rumor that the exercises (and quizzes) are being written by grad students, and I believe it.  Why are those grad students apparently getting no supervision by the actual professor(s)?  I'd like to hear the answer........

It seems to me that the lectures in weeks 4 and 5 have spent a grossly inordinate amount of time going over and over and over and over (and over and over and over and over) the simplest things, while only the briefest of glossings are given to the actual concepts.

TONS of the "how it works" and essentially none of the "so what?".............  Sort of like explaining the four-stroke combustion engine over and over and over, to someone who's never seen a car, and then saying "oh, and you can use the car to get to work" as they walk out the door after class..........


When I took Model Thinking, I really wanted to be able to go to office hours for clarification on some points.  In this class, I really want to go to office hours and yell "WTF?????  WT*F*F, you )(*^$!  Have you ever taught this before?  SHAME on you!"

Do paying undergraduates today put up with this sort of treatment?  I wonder.......  (And, if so, why are their parents, who may well be the ones actually paying, down with it?  Maybe they don't know?)


Anyway.

After you do a set of exercises, you get feedback which tells you why the answers you picked were right, or wrong.  You can ponder the error of your ways, and take the same set of exercises again, presumably giving different answers to the questions you failed to answer correctly before, and get more feedback, which you can ponder.....

Note the editorial comments I've added, in pink -- you can take this exercise 10,000 times!

My better half wandered through, as I was working on the exercises, and said "NO ONE IS EVER GOING TO OFFER YOU AN ARGUMENT THAT HAS THREE NEGATIVES IN IT."

True.  True, all true.  (Well, except for in this class...........)

It took me four attempts to get 12 out of 12 on the second set of exercises for week 5.  It only FELT like 500 or 600 tries..... 


I now have an elaborate word document with the questions, the Venn diagrams, my answers, the feedback, my answers, the feedback, my answers, the feedback.....

Sheesh.

Now I'm facing the quiz for weeks 4 and 5 -- and then I'll "only" be 5 weeks behind......

I think we only get 5 attempts at the quizzes.  I can't decide if I want to blow one now, or give myself a break (having already spent HOURS on this class today....).....

On the other hand, it is REALLY cold out, and the idea of going for a walk is not appealing.  Even though the sun is out, at the moment......

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so interesting, how differently people's brains work

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Think Again has been full of "maybe" and "might" and "it depends on context."

In Week 4, we have "true" and "false." 

My particular brain leaps up and embraces "true" and "false" with a glad cry:  "Hooray!  *At last* something we can depend on!!!!  It's true, or it's not.  Period.  The end.  Yay!!!!"

It is so interesting that the point made in the purple rectangle is clearly not joyously obvious to everyone.

The first Think Again lecture which touched on this point spent at least five minutes going over it.

The second, likewise. 

We conclude that what is beautifully and crystally clear to some is muddy and impenetrable to others.


I am reminded of a point from Model Thinking -- that a diverse group of people, working on a problem, are more likely to come up with a good solution than are a group of people who are not as diverse.  I bet this sort of diversity, whatever you want to call it, between people for whom this sort of classical logic is clear and lovely, and people for whom it ... isn't, would be one of the kinds of diversity that is helpful..................

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still Thinking.....

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I took the first quiz in Think Again today.  It covered the first three weeks' worth of material.  I didn't time myself, but I think it took around an hour, for 30 questions.

I got 23 out of 30, which is 76.66%, and 70% is passing.

I don't know how to do close analysis.  I know how to identify some of the sorts of things we're supposed to know, but there are a lot of things I don't know how to identify.  I asked about this in the fora ("How can we tell what is what?") and didn't get an answer that was comprehensive or definitive.  Not even "here is a list of the words that *might be* evaluative (say), depending on context."

Oh well.

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to finish the class, and I think the the chance that I'll ever do close analysis again, in my life away from the class, is about nil.  So if I can't do it now, I don't really care.

There are two instructors for this class, and I think the one I've never heard yet does the lectures for weeks 4 and 5.....

We'll see.

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Thinking Again

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Yesterday I decided to give Think Again another shot.  I'm in Week Three (Week Seven started yesterday, so I am way behind).

Week Three is extremely lecture-heavy.  I listened to almost an hour of lectures yesterday, of about three hours of lecture for this week.

I did all four sets of exercises for the first three videos in Week Three, and the one point I lost was a stupid error (checking something when I meant to check something else), so I guess I'm doing ok.

I think there is a lot of valuable info in this class, and I didn't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater........

This morning I listened to the fourth video, and missed a point on the exercises when he gave us something more complicated to do than had yet been demonstrated.

The exercises are not graded.  I appreciate the ability to gauge how I'm doing by what happens with the exercises........

So far I  haven't done anything I've been graded on for this class.  The first quiz is at the end of Week Three..........



As you might guess, a lot of classes are starting up on Coursera just now.  I urge you to have a look at their offerings -- so many different sorts of information, all available to all of us..........  Excellent.

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News from Think Again

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Here's the news from Think Again.... 

"At the end of exactly one week of the course, the total number of active users during that week was recorded at a whopping 86,050. I believe that this is a new record both for the highest total active users and possibly also for the highest activity percentage among registered users (then 171,719) in Coursera history."


!!!!!  I mean!  Goodness.  171,719 is bigger than the population of Ann Arbor (even including the students, I think).  Amazing.

Coursera's got some work to do.  There are a number of things they could fix that would make our (students') lives easier.

• When they send us email, letting us know there is a new message in a thread we are following in the discussion fora, they could give us a link to the exact message.  A link to the top of a very busy (pages and pages of comments!) thread is not very useful.
• They could give us a "within thread" search.
• There could be human intervention when new threads are created.  It's hard enough to keep track of one enormous thread, but when there are multiple threads on the same topic -- forget it!  (Coursera may provide for this, and the people running the class have to use it; I don't know.)

I am sure Coursera had no idea they were going to get these sorts of numbers, so quickly, and they're clearly not ready to handle it neatly.

It's exciting to be in on the ground floor of something new, but being the guinea pig as the bugs are worked out would not be my first choice.

Nevertheless, I'm glad to be here.  There.  Involved.  (lol......)



Ok.  I am off to learn/practice "close analysis" by looking carefully at Robert Redford's Washington Post op ed piece on the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

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Think Again

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I mentioned that we got email, as Think Again began, saying the course would begin by defining what an argument is, and I embedded video of the Monty Python bit that came immediately to mind.

I was tickled when one of the first lectures sent us to that same skit.

This is the longer version:


The prof pointed out that the other offices in the skit offered things that are NOT arguments (though they are often mistaken for arguments).  "Hitting on the head" lessons.  Verbal abuse.  Complaints.

Gotta love a class that begins with Monty Python.............


In other Think Again notes -- it is apparently the most popular class ever offered at Coursera -- 160,000 students.  !!!!!

I am finding the material interesting, and much easier to absorb than Model Thinking.  No numbers, no calculations............  Think Again has about half as much content per week.  About one hour of lectures, in Think Again, as contrasted with two hours, in Model Thinking.  Think Again does have optional "go deeper into the concepts" lectures (which will not be included in any quizzes or exams).

Think Again has exercises after every lecture, so we can check that we have understood the content of that lecture.  I hadn't realized the exercises were there, so I did a bunch of exercises at once, after I understood they were there for us.

I accidentally began exercises for a lecture I hadn't heard, yet, and I was able to figure out the right answers to all the questions.  THAT was never happening in Model Thinking!

As you would guess, with 160,000 students, there is so much going on in the discussion fora that it is impossible to keep up.  (And the way Coursera organizes and presents it doesn't help.  There's no way to search within a thread, for example.....)  There's a lively thread on whether non-human animals can argue.  The formal definition for "argument" that the class is using requires use of language.  Given that definition, I believe that, at this point, we do not have evidence that non-humans can argue.  Not to say they can't but we can't demonstrate that they do.........

In another discussion thread, people talked a bit about other Coursera classes they've taken.  Modern Poetry was well-liked by everyone who spoke up, and I've heard good things about World Music, and a "design of everyday objects" class, too...............

This method of presentation-of-material is clearly a work in progress, but -- how cool to be in on the ground floor!

I urge you to check out the offerings and take a class.  It's free, and you can watch lectures without doing any of the quizzes or whatever..........  No risks.  Give it a try.  :-)


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And in other breaking news..........

I bet you noticed the changes to the sidebar.  I rearranged things, just a bit, and added the connection to Mary Ann Moss's Ticket to Venice online class.

I have signed up to go along, virtually, on this gluing/pasting/drawing/stitching/photographing/story-telling voyage.

Mary Ann taught the stenciling class I took a couple of years ago.  I love her work, and I love the way she talks about what she is doing (whether teaching a class, or "just" taking us with her as she travels through life)......

Any time you want a break from your humdrum existence, go to her blog, Dispatch from LA, and have a look at one of her travel journals (in the sidebar on the right).......  I suggest Amalfi, or Norway.........

Mary Ann is going to Venice next month.  She will be sweeping the lot of us who have signed up for the adventure along with her.


I signed up for Think Again 'way back when I signed up for Model Thinking, and only after that did I discover that Mary Ann would be teaching a travel-journal class..........

I have looked with envy and greed at other people's travel journals, especially Mary Ann's, and the opportunity to take this class was not something I was going to miss.

With trepidation (remembering how hard I worked in Model Thinking!), I am going to take both classes.  At once.

It's good that this coincides with the slow blogging (nothing to take pics of!) season......

And it's good that the classes begin at different times.  I have a couple of weeks to get settled into Think Again, and to accumulate materials for Venice, before Mary Ann heads for Italy.


Arrividerci!  (Italian: goodbye for the present, until we see and meet again)

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argument

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My Think Again: How to Reason and Argue class begins today.  We got email from the profs who will be teaching the class, which said that the first lecture will inform as to "What is an Argument."

Of course it will.  My thoughts went instantly to this:





lol.........................

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