Professor for one year (week 14): Consultation-hours

When you teach and supervise student projects, students sometimes want to discuss something.  They come to your consultation-hours.

If you don't have a walk-in policy, because you don't want to be interrupted constantly, you have a dedicated time when students can come to your office.  I offer consultation two hours a week on Tuesdays.  However, sometimes nobody will show up, sometimes five students are waiting in line.  So some consultation management is needed.

The traditional way is to use a sheet of paper.  You print a list (or draw one by hand) with consultation slots and pin it to your door.  Students have to sign up for a slot beforehand and then they can come for consultation.  However, this means you have to remember to pin a new sheet of paper each week (or you need a secretary for this task), and students have to come by twice.  Sometimes they even have to stop by your office more often in case all slots for this week have been filled already.  This is very inconvenient, especially when your office is on a floor no student comes by regularly.  I also don't think it is a good idea that everybody can see who is coming when for consultation -- sometimes students even have to write the topic they want discuss.  And I don't want to pin paper to my door -- it's ugly and there are fire authority regulations.

For some time now, I have been looking for an electronic solution.  I have only a few requirements:

1. I want to set up all the slots at once with as least effort as possible.
2. Students should sign up some days in advance -- I prefer to plan my days and maybe skip the consultation-hours completely if nobody will come.  So no surprises an hour before, please.
3. I want to be notified who is coming when.
4. No costs.
5. Oh, and I just want to have this tool only, no fancy add-ons.  No need to create a bigger structure.

I thought about using Doodle, but this would not meet the requirement #1, and also for requirement #2 it would not work.  Of course your LMS (learning management system) or your university's CMS (content management system) would be the perfect plase for a tool like this.  However, they usually don't offer this kind of functionality. 

The University of Konstanz uses ILIAS, and you can have a personal calender -- as for most LMS.  This calender also has a "Consultation hours" functionality.  Perfect!  And you can integrate this calendar into all your courses.  Even better!

But then it doesn't meet requirement #5.  Of course, it is nice to have this calender in all the courses I use for lectures.  But some students I supervise do not attend any of my courses.  So they cannot access this calendar.  Unless I create another course with this calendar only -- no, wait, I have to ask someone to create such a course, I cannot do this myself because of the right managament.  There is no structure element in ILIAS where students could access calendars for consultation-hours of lecturers.  They have to sign up for a specific course first and then they can access this calendar and book a consultation appointment.

So in the end, I do have a sheet of paper pinned to my office door -- a description on how to sign up for consultation.  At least I don't have to remember to print a new one each week.

Professor for one year (week 13): Teaching since 19 weeks and it goes on and on

Last week was my 19th week of teaching without a break and I have two more weeks to go.  How is that possible, as terms in Europe are 14 or 15 weeks?

In February, I started teaching at the University of Basel.  Spring term in Switzerland starts mid-February and ends in early June (week 8 to 22).  Fall term starts in September and ends the week before Christmas (week 38 to 51).  After lectures end there is a three-week period for exams (for Fall term this period starts in the first week of January).  This schedule has been in place since 2005.  Before that, we had Winter and Summer terms, starting and ending ca. 5 weeks later than today's Fall term and Spring term.

Why did Switzerland change term schedules?  Well, that's easy, the Swiss wanted to be "compliant with the European term schedules."  And rumor goes that the then Rektor of the University of Zurich (UZH) was the main figure causing this change -- he simply stated that UZH would switch to this schedule anyway, so all the other members of the CRUS (Rectors' Conference of the Swiss Universities) had to follow.

The idea was to have similar times for starting and ending terms, to make it easier for students in Europe to switch universities.  Sounds reasonable, right?  Except: The surrounding countries still stick to their original term schedules of Summer and Winter terms.  

For a lecturer like me, one effect is extreme long teaching periods.  When teaching in Basel ended, I had 7 more weeks in Konstanz.  And I already feel exhausted, but I still have two more weeks.

For students it means extremely short breaks when coming from a non-Swiss university to a Swiss university, or extremely long breaks when going from a Swiss university to a non-Swiss university  -- OK, there are far more worse things than long breaks.

For the scientific community and the role of Swiss universities as conference organizers, the impact is worse: A perfect month for conferences in Europe is September -- everybody had their summer vacation and the next term will start mid October.  However, Swiss universities start teaching mid September, making it impossible to find a reasonable large room for a whole day (or even a week!) that is not needed as lecture hall.

In general, I like the concept of Spring and Fall terms better than the Summer and Winter terms -- which is what was in place when I studied.  In June and July it can be pretty hot in Europe (and also in Switzerland), so everybody would prefer to be at the lake -- and most of the students (except when forced to attend a lecture) will simply go there.  The most annoying term, however, is the Winter term.  You have to start teaching (or learning) again after the Christmas/New Year break.  It is OK to have exams after New Year, or as lecturer it is OK to assess exams and seminar papers in January.  But motivation to teach another 4 weeks after the Christmas/New Year break is really low.

If there is a proper place to call for changing German term schedules, please let me know.

Professor for one year (week 12): Lessons learned

You learn from errors.  It would be great if you could just learn from errors made by someone else.  But sometimes I even make the same error again and again -- at the first sight it looks like a different situation, but in the end it's not.  However, here is a short list of lessons I hope I finally got:

Don't trust the nice guys

This is the academic equivalent of "Give him an inch and he will take a mile."  There are deadlines and guidelines.  Both are there for a purpose.  Sometimes, people ask you for an extension of a deadline.  And if you think the person will be able to meet the new deadline and deliver something of high quality, you agree -- even more, if you think it's a nice person and everything will go smoothly.  But then people start negotiating this and that and you spend a lot of time discussing and explaining that of course you expect guidelines to be carefully attended.

Don't make verbal contracts

Although in Switzerland (and maybe in Germany, too?) contracts don't necessarily have to be signed by the involved parties, it's not a good idea to only have verbal contracts.  I made this error twice.  The last time, I accepted a job without even asking about the payment.  I was lucky enough that the payment is OK.  Before this, I got an offer including a statement about payment.  I agreed, resigned my former job and started the new one.  I hadn't signed a contract for the new job.  Two weeks after my first day I got the contract -- with a much lower payment.  It turned out that even the salary stated in this contract wasn't correct.  I could negotiate a bit, but I regretted having resigned my old job.

Don't procrastinate

This is easy, you should start a task as early as possible and necessary.  Most of the time I estimate the time a job will take.  And I start just the estimated amount of time before the deadline.  Sometimes it is easy and my estimation is correct.  But most of the time it is not.  Some jobs or projects take longer and then I have to work until very late, I get tired, and I'm angry about myself.  Sometimes I get a job done a lot faster than estimated -- but then I'm angry about myself too, because I spend more time planning and thinking about the task and defining the best point to start than for the task itself.  If I would have started immediately, I could have had more time for something else.

You always underestimate the time needed for a software project

"Software project" refers to every kind of programming task, may it be small or large.  Even with a lot of experience, every project is something new and every project comes with surprises.  Clients change specifications on the fly, you start without any specification at all, nobody is available for beta-testing -- it just has to work now! --, you don't have a backup structure or even a backup strategy.  You spend hours with debugging, because you have been interrupted in the middle of programming a structure.  You work with a not-so-mature framework.  Documentation is only available for a different version of the framework than you are using.  The data you work with is bigger than expected and interactive processes have to be transferred to batch processes.

But what to learn from all this -- don't program at all?  The better lesson is probably to learn to estimate better.  Somewhere I read that for programming you estimate the time needed, then double the amount, and then take the next larger time unit -- for a task estimated to be done in one hour, this will result in two days you should allow for.

End then you have to take into account the user of the code you produce.  If it is only you, you can skip comments and keep it simple (like using default variables, anonymous datastructures, short versions of control structures, etc).  For other programmers being the users, you need to add more information and you should do error handling.  The next step would be a program someone will call from the command line.  Even more effort is needed for a web application.  And even more time you need for adding a nice GUI and converting it into an actuall application.  I think there was an article in the Communications of the ACM some months ago basically saying that each step increases the time needed by factor ten.  And of course being a computational linguist, most of the time your "clients" will be linguists or other non-technical users -- so whatever you program it has to have some kind of interface and user guidance.  Meaning that you are creating actual applications, not scripts that just output a number or a string.

Don't reschedule your plans and don't discuss programming with non-technical people

Having said that programming will allways need more time than you had estimated -- the Hofstadter's law -- you should never agree to reschedule your plans because your users think they need the things to be done just now.  The only effect this will have is more stress on you and constant arguing with your users.  People without any experience in programming usually cannot assess the complexity of a task --  How costly is sorting large data?   How long does it take to create a frequency list?  What does it need to allow users to make searchable comments during annotating corpora?  What does it mean to "have everything in a database?" -- You are the expert, you estimate the time needed and you decide if a feature should be implemented at all.  There is no sense in spending a lot of time in implementing a "probably-nice-to-have feature" just to find out that no-one will use it.  If users don't provide a specification and are not willing to create a specification together with the programmer, it's up to the programmer to create something.  With usually tight schedules in projects, there is no time for specifying something on the fly or to make substantial changes after a first version has been tested.

Professor for one year (week 11): What does University contribute to Society?

Last week, I participated in the Global Perspectives Programme, a joint program from University of Basel and Virginia Tech to foster academic exchange about Higher Education.  This year, the topic of the program was "University and Society: Meeting Expectations?"  We explored various aspects of "Society," "University," and "Expectations."  There are so many definitions and views of these broad concepts, that one could discuss hours and hours.  One aspect, however, is what university is expected to contribute to society.  Is it about providing solutions to current or future problems?  Is it about foreseeing future problems?  Is it about developing resources to be used for society's needs?  Is university urged to serve society and provide what society explicitly wants or to provide what society unconsciously needs?  So far, we wondered, what kind of solution universities would produce.

Most of the time, faculty and administration talked just about the questions we were exploring.  During our one-week trip in the US, the Basel group also visited Virginia Tech and had a vivid conversation with faculty of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI).  Christopher Barrett, Scientific Director of the VBI, argued that universities would provide methods and tools to be used by society, i.e., policy-makers, to solve problems.  He emphasized that universities do not contribute solutions for current or future problems.

This statement made me wonder: At the one hand, with an attitude like this -- universities provide resources and tools to be used by others -- there is much room for basic research, i.e., research with no urgent application but that could be useful in the future.  Researchers are freed from the pressure to explicitly show usefulness in today's society.  And it makes clear that society is responsible for solving problems and for making use of the provided resources and tools.  A very comfortable statement for research, I think.

On the other hand, it reminded me a bit of the drama "Die Physiker" (The Physicists) by Friedrich Dürrenmatt from 1961 and the Manhattan Project (Einstein later regretted having signed the letter to Roosevelt in 1939 recommending that atom bombs be made).  And more so as Barrett told us that he had worked at Los Alamos before coming to VBI.  When universities -- or more precisely: researchers -- say that they only provide tools to be used by whomever, researchers implicitly say that they are not responsible for any outcome.  A researcher invents something, hands it over to the public and then doesn't care about how and by whom it is used. 

Although I appreciate the attitude to provide resources and tools rather than tailored solutions, I think universities should carefully state how to make use of their tools and emphasize the intended use.   Researchers should always take into account possible use of their findings -- the affordances -- and how to prevent criminal, inhuman, or warlike use.

Professor for one year (week 10): I'm substituting

My current job title in English is "Acting Professor", although I'm not sure if this is correct and what impression people have when they read it.  The German term is "Vertretungsprofessorin", showing my gender, confirming that Germans love compounds, and providing a precise job description, all at the same time.  One also finds this position translated as "Guest Professor" or "Visiting Professor".  However, these two are different as the guest or visiting professor can choose on their own what to teach, a "Vertretungsprofessor" teaches the courses the professor she substitutes for would have taught.  The term "Substituting Professor" seems to cover the duties, but reads rather odd.

I guess, "Vertretungsprofessor" is a rather European or even German concept.  When a professor cannot teach, someone else with equivalent qualifications is substituting for her.  This can be rather planned for professors on sabbatical or for the period after a professor retires and before a new one has been chosen.  Sometimes you can even apply to substitute, because there will be an official advertisement.  Most of the time, the person substituting for a professor will be contacted directly.  So one should have a good network, have an uptodate website, and be prepared to teach something new on short notice.  There are also rather unplanned occasions, when a professor get's seriously ill or even dies, when a professor applies for some kind of sabbatical that might or might not be accepted, or when a professor accepts a new position at another university on short notice.

Several concepts exists how substituting works: Other faculty members or staff members teach single courses as additional teaching load to their regular classes.  Sometimes a course is taught by an external or internal lecturer who is paid for this course as an adjunct lecturer. So the teaching load of the professor is split up between several lecturers.  It's not uncommon in Germany that adjunct lecturers get paid rather symbolically, the paiment is a few dozen Euros per hour taught, i.e., excluding time needed for preparation, grading assignments, or answering students' questions. 

The fact that another researcher -- who in principle would be eligible for professorship -- acts for the professor on sabbatical, is rather special.  The substitute does not only do the teaching, but also overtakes all duties and responsibilities like supervising masters' theses, grading final exams, and attending meetings.  However, most of the time the substitute gets paid according to the PostDoc scale -- i.e., according to the current status of the substituting person.  The University of Konstanz pays acting professors according to the salary scale of the professor who is substituted for.  This is rather unusual, I guess.

However, I'm still a PostDoc, I'm not a regular Professor and I'm not allowed to use this title.  In some occasions a researcher substituting for a professor might even be allowed to use the title during the time they substitute.

Professor for one year (week 9): Lots of trouble

Last week was a busy week.  I spent two days with the GPP13 participants in Riva San Vitale (TI) with lots of discussions and interaction.  Students at the University of Konstanz had to solve assignments on their own in the computer lab.

Before I started the trip to Riva, I got a message that over the weekend somebody committed burglary at the university.  They stole some items from the athletics office.  This office has a connecting door to our computer lab.  And there we had a dozen iMacs and a dozen MacMinis.  All of the Minis have been stolen!

Now this has various impacts:  Most obviously, my colleagues have to deal with the police and probably with the insurance company.  Then we have to by new computers and set them up.  For the moment, the technician is busy with configuring old iMacs to make sure teaching can go on.  I don't know yet how I will conduct the computer-based exam at the end of July.

Not so obvious are some other effects:  The lab is a bunch of stand-alone computers, you start the computer and then log in using a local account.  There is no connection to any net-based disk space.  Everything is stored locally.  That means that everything students had stored on the MacMinis (e.g., programs and notes) is lost.  Some students already had started to work on projects; unless they had stored these data on a private device, this work is lost, too.

So it is always a good idea to have backups on a local device or to send everything to yourself via e-mail.  But of course it would be even better to offer access to net-based disk space.  When you log in, you connect to your university account and you can store everything there.  This also means that you always use your personal account, not a local one.  That's the way computer labs at the University of Zurich work.  So students don't have to remember which computer they worked with during the last lecture and they can access their data from everywhere.  Also OLAT, the LMS used in Zurich provides some personal storing space; students can use this to store data they want to access from different locations or they want to share with student fellows for project work or the like.  Unfortunately, ILIAS (the LMS used in Konstanz) does not offer this.

When I was just recovering from the burglary message, I got another message basically asking, if I was aware that next semester I would not teach the courses I offered to teach some days before -- instead of a research colloquium, I'm supposed to offer a seminar for students enrolled in teacher training for German.  Aha!

This week is a "normal week", I hope.  Next week I will be in the US, again with GPP13.  I hope surprises will be kept to a minimum.

Professor for one year (week 8): Hey professor!

How do professors talk to students, how do students talk to professors?  And what about written communication like e-mail messages?

When I was a research assistant and taught programming courses, I used to talk to students on a first-name basis and they also talked to me in a rather informal way, both face-to-face and in e-mail messages.  I did not ask for permission, though.  At that time, I was only five years older than them and some students were even older than I.

But time changes, and now my students start to be only half my age.  As a PostDoc in Basel I still talked to students in an informal way addressing the group as "Ihr" and not as "Sie" and addressing single students as "Du."  At the beginning of the course I asked students if this would be OK and they agreed.  I did not explicitly offer that they could use my first name, but I was fine with that.  Of course, in face-to-face communication, you can often avoid to directly address the other person.  Although most of the students talked to me rather informally, the majority did not use my first name in written communication.  Here they were back to "Frau Mahlow" and "Sie."  So I got messages starting with "Hallo Frau Mahlow" or "Liebe Frau Mahlow."  When answering them, I used the form they had chosen in the first place:  if someone addressed me as "Frau Mahlow", I answered in the formal way, but would still talk to them using "Du" instead of "Sie."  Sounds complicated?  Yes it was.

When I started substituting in Konstanz, I decided to completely switch to the formal style.  So I would communicate with all students in all situations addressing them as "Sie."  That's rather simple.  However, in Germany, academic titles seem to be more important than in Switzerland.  So I get messages starting with "Sehr geehrte Frau Professor Mahlow" (although I am an acting professor, I'm not allowed to use this title), "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Mahlow", "Hallo Professor Mahlow", "Hallo Dr. Cerstin Mahlow" and so on.  Some salutations read rather odd and you can feel that the student was unsure about how to address me -- the English speaking student addresses me as "Dear Dr. Cerstin."

When I started my academic career in Zurich, I thought it was rather awkward that my supervisor was on a formal basis with all students, but as soon as they graduated he offered to use the informal communication form.  Sometimes as last thing in the oral exam.  But now I think that this in fact a good solution; I changed it a bit and with my student assistants I also communicate on a first-name basis before they graduate.  It feels comfortable this way.