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����������Teaching Pair Programming at the Edinburgh Futures Institute�Be like Sophie!���Dr Beatrice Alex�Edinburgh Futures Institute and School �of Literatures, Languages and Cultures�Head of the Edinburgh Language�Technology Group�Chair of Edinburgh Clinical NLP Group

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b.alex@ed.ac.uk

@bea_alex

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Teaching text mining and computational text analysis to humanities and social science students in a fusion environment��(with Dr Clare Llewellyn, Dr Pawel Orzechowski �and Dr Anouk Lang)�

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Text Mining for H&SS Students

  • Developed a Carpentries Text and Data Mining course
  • Pivoted to online teaching during Covid
  • Now teaching two fusion courses at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (25-30 students, in the room and online):
    • Future Governance: Text Mining for Social Research
    • Narrative Futures: Narrative and Computational Text Analysis

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Edinburgh Futures Institute�

Tackling today’s increasingly complex issues by bringing people and disciplines together to spark the unexpected and make better futures possible.

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Course Badges

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Tools

  • Learn Ultra, the University of Edinburgh’s virtual learning platform for instructions, material and videos)
  • Jupyter Notebooks (for coding)
  • Edinburgh Noteable (to load/run the notebooks)
  • Collaborate for video
  • Python, NLTK, spaCy to work with data

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Pair Programming

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Negotiating Fusion Pairs

  • We want to integrate the class and make it feel like a single cohort.
  • We constantly change how each student interacts during pair work. Pairs are either single mode (room-room or online-online) or mixed-mode pairs (room-online).
  • We change the setup every hour and each student pair must negotiate how they work together, who leads, how they interact with instructors.��

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Ghost Helper

  • During mixed-mode pair work we therefore consciously choose to use online helpers only.
  • Each team member swaps mode (sometimes being in the room, sometimes just online). This way we have experience of both modes (eg. technology, blockers, social elements) so we can best help all students.
  • We have witnessed students in the room getting spooked, when a teacher they had just spoken to, in person, suddenly appeared in their ear, like a friendly ghost.
  • Comprehending that Clare online and Clare in-person are the same person was a peculiar experience. This was the case for students and instructors.��

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Feedback

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Lessons learned

⭐️ Students generally enjoy pair work and enjoy it more as they got through the course and get used to working this way.

⭐️  Students also generally enjoy being paired up and working with students in another mode.

⭐️ Where possible we try to pair students with some Python knowledge up with those who are new to programming.

⭐️ We thought that students with some programming knowledge would get bored but often they enjoy the pair programming just as much as they understand what they know by explaining it.

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Lessons learned

⭐️  Pairs for group work cannot be pre-arranged (for flexibility). Students join, leave, change mode.

⭐️  During the day some students change how they participate (online or in-person). Students move in both directions. Some students need to leave completely.

⭐️  We thought that working within one mode was easier (eg. both online, both in-person). This isn’t always the case. For some tasks, the cognitive load is lower when working across the online boundary (eg. to share screen, hear audio) compared to working in in-person model only.

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Lessons learned

⭐️ The students being in different modes having teachers also in multiple modes binds the fusion cohort together.

⭐️ The team needs to coordinate and communicate continuously for things to work well.

⭐️ There was always at least one invisible teacher helping students online. We needed to learn to pick up the cues that students were talking to that teacher online.

⭐️ Constant feedback helps us teachers to make changes where possible.

⭐️ Some things are out of your control so you mustn’t worry about them (wifi down, power cut).

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Lessons learned

⭐️ We usually have one or two real champions of pair programming in a class, e.g. Sophie. We’ve learned to make use of such students’ enthusiasm carrying across to others in the class and spreading the magic. Be like Sophie!

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Thanks to

  • Dr Clare Llewellyn, Dr Pawel Orzechowski and Dr Anouk Lang
  • Our teaching assistants: Luke Stephens and Fabian Yii
  • All our funders and supporters: EFI, CDCS and Carpentries
  • To the invitation to speak today.
  • And to you for listening!

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Questions?