activity list (alias "Wot I did in the summer holidays") (was Re: ALC reviews)

Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 21:58:16 +0100
From: Iain Stewart <ids@doc.ic.ac.uk>
To: Anne O'Neill <aon@doc.ic.ac.uk>, Nicola Rogers <ncr@doc.ic.ac.uk>
CC: academic-list@doc.ic.ac.uk, ta-list@doc.ic.ac.uk,
 	csg-list@doc.ic.ac.uk, phd-list@doc.ic.ac.uk
Subject: activity list (alias "Wot I did in the summer holidays") (was Re: ALC 
 reviews)

Anne O'Neill <aon@doc.ic.ac.uk> wrote:

Dear All
The ALC reviews will take place during the week of 22nd May. The committee
will need a brief summary (1 page) of your activities over the last
year. Please submit these to me by Thursday 18th May at the latest.
If there are any problems or you need any further information please
contact me.
Many thanks
Anne
Anne O' Neill
Department Administrator
Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine
180 Queens Gate
London SW7 2BZ
Tel: + 44 20 7594 8273
Fax: + 44 20 7581 8024
email: aon@doc.ic.ac.uk

Hello... and first of all, apologies for my delay in getting this done. This is principally just because of being swamped by pressure of work at this time of year - *real* work, not "make-work" like activity lists! - but also because it sounded from the various e-mails as if this activity list business was exclusively to do with applying for promotion. Some time ago now (presumably a previous occasion of this sort) Sue Eisenbach gently explained to me the perhaps not all that surprising news that the position I have, which one might call a "TAA" [="teaching assistant's assistant"; or should that now be "teaching associate's associate"?], supporting and assisting the officially named post of first year lab organiser but not actually holding any such named post myself (that person being then and now Peter Cutler)... where was I? oh yes - Sue gently broke the news that such a "TAA"-type position is not the stuff that ALC3 is made of. I hasten to add this is not a problem for me - indeed perhaps at some half-subconscious level I secretly like the comfortable obscurity of "TAA-land" - but it does mean that ever since then I've simply discarded any e-mails to do with the rules and rituals of promotion. However, I then learned (from a chance meeting with Anne O'Neill) that this time round, and rather counterintuitively perhaps, an activity list is required even from those *not* seeking promotion. So: please accept my apologies for the delay; and - here it is!

Iain.

Activity list (alias "Wot I did in the summer holidays")

by Iain Stewart, Saturday 27th May 2000

Note for lawyers: I'm writing this in a bit of a rush (hey! what are weekends for?), and a year is a long, sprawling mass of time not guaranteed to stick in one's memory to the extent one might wish, so this activity list should be taken as "including, but not limited to" the items below.

My principal activities on the job, both in amount of time and level of priority terms, are those relating to the first year integrated laboratory course, which I and Peter Cutler run jointly, Peter being the lab organiser. This course is taken, in various forms, by both Computing Science / Software Engineering full-time students, and students on our interdisciplinary courses (ISE, JMC) run jointly with other departments (Elec Eng, Maths respectively). My activities on this course include the following.

Developing (and keeping in step with curricular and systems-level changes) lab exercise specs, and associated sample solutions, executable lab versions for student use, etc, and documentation on the use of the lab facilities generally.

Helping the students, in lab sessions and lab workshops, and at other times when possible.

I am responsible for the development, updating to keep in step with various exercise-level and systems-level changes, and smooth running generally, of the electronic submission system whereby the first year students submit their lab work for marking by their PPTs.

Likewise for the automated testing system. This system assists PPTs in the marking process by providing comparisons of the compile-time and run-time behaviour of the students' submissions with that of our sample solutions. It is not an "automated marking system" though - marking remains very much a human process, while we await some 30th-century "true artificial intelligence" system. [How does one refer to a vague unspecified future time now that the 21st century is the present? "22nd-century" sounds a bit of a damp squib somehow. "30th-century" will hopefully do, at least for the next 899 years.] (And who knows - maybe the 30th-century AI will have an agenda of its own, that it prefers to marking first year labwork?) What it does do, at its best, is take a lot of the donkey work out of the marking process; and sometimes reveal bugs or problems in students' code that would likely not have come to light in a purely manual assessment.

As well as these regular week-by-week activities, the first year lab also involves activities that occur only at certain times of year. These include "driving tests" (lab tests taken at the machines in exam conditions), and big, "project-style" labs in term 3. Again, I help with these both "publicly", in the sense of taking lab sessions and/or lab workshops, invigilating, etc, and "behind the scenes", in the sense of setting up infrastructural software to help in handling the admininstration, electronic submission, autotesting and assessment needs of these special case events, and marking a subset of them.

The administrative side of first year lab is mainly handled by Peter Cutler as lab organiser but once again I have been instrumental in developing a suite of "infrastructure" software scripts to assist in automating as far as possible (or at least "systematizing", when automation is not feasible) the various tasks involved.

I have been involved in the teaching and assessment of courses other than the first year integrated laboratory ones. These include tutorials of various courses (mainly first year imperative, functional and logic programming language courses), and the so-called "topics", aka "future directions in computing".

Although other years than first year are dealt with by other TAs as appropriate, and it does not fall on me as a formal burden to have anything to do with the labs of those years, I have informally helped out when appropriate and within my competence, both in helping other TAs out on occasions when they happen not to know about some technical area that I do know about - it can happen the other way round of course! - and in developing "lab-wide" infrastructural software which can be of use to TAs generally, e.g. helping in creating and maintaining a lab-wide setup (which individual year setups can then be built on). This is a task which of its nature falls in some vague sense on "the TAs collectively" but not on any individual one, and I think I can safely say I've put in at least my fair share of such behind-the-scenes supporting activity.

On a more formal basis, the TAs collectively have regular meetings with our systems folk to make sure we're all in step with each other with respect to each other's needs vis-a-vis software for lab usage, the setup of the lab machines, and so on. Changes and upgrades to any one part of this "tangled web" can have knock-on effects on other parts, necessitating the continued testing of the whole lab setup - both its public aspects (as used directly by the students) and its behind-the-scenes aspects (as used by the TAs). Once again, I think I can say I've put in at least my fair share of this activity - where possible going beyond just finding what bugs or problems there may be, and on to doing "detective work" (as far as I can go as a non-super-user anyway) such as can be helpful in the quest for solutions.

This past year as for many years, I have set and supervised several individual projects. (http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ids/dotdot/misc/projects/my_proposals.html) [This is of course continuing as I write this, the project due dates being June and September for undergraduate and MSc students respectively. - Also, I speak of setting and supervising, but I should mention I've chipped in with second marking and moderating too.] This activity is not required of the TAs, but I do it because I get real pleasure out of bringing slightly "wacky", "offbeat" or "cutting-edge" subject matters - of a sort that I find intensely interesting, and which may be the seeds of bigger things to come in (you guessed it) the 21st century - into the fold of the teaching and learning process. This year I've offered quantum computing (http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ids/dotdot/misc/projects/QuantumComputing/proposal.html); the future look and feel of the web (http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ids/dotdot/misc/projects/AnnotatingTheWeb/proposal.html); artificial life (http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ids/dotdot/misc/projects/ArtificialLife/proposal.html); and one tiny corner of the vast subject of game theory (http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ids/dotdot/misc/projects/Conquest/proposal.html). So far the first, third and fourth have been taken up by at least one student at undergraduate and/or MSc level. The projects I've second marked and moderated are too numerous to list individually here.

No TA's activity list would be complete without mentioning exam invigilation. Oh, the joys! :-)

And finally: no-one asks me to do this, but I try as best as I can to keep up with science generally - especially physics, and within physics (or on the rich and fertile boundary between physics and computing), with quantum computing. (http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ids/quantum_computing.html) It goes without saying that the 21st century will see a flowering of interdisciplinary scientific activity, with the old subject boundaries breaking down as we watch: a centre of excellence like IC DoC will self-evidently be moving into ever richer collaborations with other departments and other research and teaching entities, with today's inter-departmental research groups and today's joint courses (ISE with Elec Eng, JMC with Maths) being a mere foretaste of the dense web of collaborative activity yet to come. (Who knows - will a few more years into the new century see a "JPC" course, with quantum computing as a key plank? Or a "JBC" course, featuring the management of the terabyte and petabyte databases that will gush forth from the human genome project and its successors? Or a cornucopia of courses, streams and options that can't even be given names that match any of the departments you'll see listed in today's IC prospectus?) We certainly can't "pull up the drawbridge" and believe computing can survive in splendid isolation from the rest of the human scholarly endeavour. - But quite apart from such pragmatic, worldly considerations, I've found great enjoyment and insight in trying to keep up with "this thing called science"; and I can unreservedly recommend the effort to everyone.

--
They said "Smile. Things could be worse." So I did. And they were.

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