Here are some bits of advice that I think will help anyone trying to model complex information systems in AirTable. Pursue Referential Integrity Like You’re Building a Database Referential integrity is a powerful concept. You should build your “base” as if it were a database in Postgres, Oracle or similar. You want your records to live in one place only. If you need to get their data, do not duplicate it. Built a series of associated records and lookups. AirTable lookup fields can go one “leap” so, occasionally, you might wind up doing something that feels a little…hack-y. Nevertheless, hacks can get improved but dirty, duplicate data denies deletion decidedly.

At the beginning of this document, I proposed that an accounting lets curriculum managers organize their teams, express logical dependence of learning goals and operate more effectively. I’ll give a brief taste of how AirTable helps us do exactly this at Flatiron Schol. Map Products to Learning Goals Airtable’s UI features a “stacking” user interface. Thus you can navigate from Learning Goals to the Product (a collection of two intermediate macro objects, Lessons and “Bricks") and vice versa. Here we are going from macro-level to the micro: Demonstration of tunneling through an AirTable-stored accounting macro-to-atomic ![List of Bricks Comprising a Product](/images/2019/10/17/01_brick_selection.

AirTable Scoring AirTable scores like this: Permit cycles (1) Permit calculated attributes (3) Changeset support (2) Schema changes are easy and cascade easily (3) Self-Documenting (3) Data can be delivered natively in a variety of views (3) Data is readily accessible to non-technical staff (3) Data is readily updated by non-technical staff (3) Price (2) Total: 21 Wow! Look at that total. Doubling and nearly tripling the points scored by our other two solutions! In the next post, I’ll explain how AirTable innovates out of this functionality gap.

Databases Scoring Let’s apply the same rating standard: Permit cycles (1) Permit calculated attributes (1) Changeset support (0) Schema changes are easy and cascade easily (1) Self-Documenting (0) Data can be delivered natively in a variety of views (0) Data is readily accessible to non-technical staff (1) Data is readily updated by non-technical staff (1) Price (3) Total: 8 This ranking surprised me! “Since a database is a more powerful application than a spreadsheet, surely it should score higher,” went my thinking. While clean data might be compelling enough to opt for a database, its interfaces are poor and less-accessible which hurts it badly in our criteria.

Spreadsheets Scoring Permit cycles (1) Permit calculated attributes (1) Changeset support (0) Schema changes are easy and cascade easily (0) Self-Documenting (0) Data can be delivered natively in a variety of views (0) Data is readily accessible to non-technical staff (2) Data is readily updated by non-technical staff (2) Price (3) Total: 9 When considering a data modeling question, one will rarely go wrong by opting for a simple spreadsheet as a first step toward a solution. After nearly 40 years of ubiquity, the low cost and near-universal comprehension of the UI/UX metaphors provide spreadsheets a compelling advantage.

In the previous post, we saw that spreadsheets and databases are insufficient for rendering proper accountings that will make our internal and external stakeholders effective. Spreadsheets have an accessible UI, but a poorly-structured model for managing data. Databases have a solidly-structured model for managing data, but their interfaces are inaccessible outside of a class of technical cognoscenti. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how AirTable provides a middle path. Kathy Sierra once said that when your tool sucks, people say “This tool sucks.” When the tool is great, people say “I’m so awesome with this thing.” AirTable makes me think I’m very awesome indeed.

In the previous post in this series, we concluded by recognizing several interactions our stakeholders need to undertake with our accounting. In this post, we’ll use their interactions to derive criteria for finding an appropriate IT solution for providing an accounting. We’ll see that neither simple, fast, and cheap spreadsheets nor standard databases (without extensive customization) are fully satisfactory. We conclude that the SaaS product AirTable provides the right mix of power with accessibility. As a warning, several product- or technical-workflows are demonstrated in the next few paragraphs. This is for those who desire extra assistance in understanding the workflow overhead occasioned by a spreadsheet or the PostgreSQL database system.

Introduction Creating a curriculum accounting is a non-trivial amount of work. Optimally, it should be the starting point of a curriculum. In my experience, however, it rarely is. Its lack is generally discovered as an afterthought when operational challenges and scale reveal gaps. These challenges and gaps mount up like debt (similar to developers’ “technical debt”), demanding more and more operational resources until they stifle execution speed. Invariably, this will occur at a critical and inconvenient time. Then the accounting is noticed missing, lamented as such, and must be built (under duress) to pay down the debt that’s been rung up.

Having defined what an accounting is, we recognize that the undertaking is considerable for an organization which maintains even a small set of knowledge assets. Given the investment that will be put into making the accounting, we should be very clear on the benefits that will be seen on the other side. In this section, we’ll identify large-scale goals that the accounting helps achieve. Subsequently, we’ll personalize those large-scale goals within the context of certain job functions in the next section. To Facilitate Educational Dialogue The accounting gives the learning organization better tools for organization and communication. Students might ask: “Why must I repeat ‘Pasta Foundations’?

The Accounting

An “accounting” can be grasped by this graphic:

Italian Cooking Pasta Meats Pasta Foundations Sauce Foundations ... How to boil water How to drain water How to assess pasta readiness

To translate into words, the accounting:

1. documents the binding between atomic student capabilities ("Learning Goals") and macro-objects ("Lessons") or nth-order macro-objects (e.g. "Unit", "Modules", or "Products"), and
2. calculates the chain of dependencies for any given capability that includes its recursive dependencies back to first principles (i.e. transitive dependencies)

Introduction

Over the last year, my team and I have created a single-source-of-truth accounting for the Software Engineering program at The Flatiron School built on AirTable. I believe this system offers a superior means for managing curriculum development, documentation, and collaboration.

I’ve written a series of posts documenting this solution that starts here.

The audience for the full series is fellow-educators or content-production pipeline managers. In this post, I’ll provide an introduction to the problem at hand.

Thanks

Let me express thanks to our executive sponsor, my boss, Brian Tobal as well as my staff: Jen, Maxwell, Mohawk, our previous collaborators Jason and Daniel. Let me also thank the countless issue-reporters or pull-request authors that helped along the way. It was Brian’s faith in the idea of “modular” curriculum and support for it at the organizational level when the ROI was murky that gave us the time to prove the payoff to our convictions.

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I believe that the secret to designing thoughtful educational experiences as well as teams that design them is building a robust artifact that I call an accounting.

“The Accounting”

An “accounting” can be grasped by this graphic:

Italian Cooking Pasta Meats Pasta Foundations Sauce Foundations ... How to boil water How to drain water How to assess pasta readiness

To translate into words, the accounting:

1. documents the binding between atomic student capabilities ("Learning Goals") and macro-objects ("Lessons") or nth-order macro-objects (e.g. "Unit", "Modules", or "Products"), and
2. calculates the chain of dependencies for any given capability that includes its recursive dependencies back to first principles (i.e. transitive dependencies)

As I mentioned in my piece about the textbook of schoolgirl Maud Fenstermaker, I am fascinated by the old-style of pedagogy from the late 19^th century which continues to use the axiomatic listing styles of Euclid’s Elements.

While it might not be surprising that a book on English Grammar or Latin Grammar or Geometry would retain this structure, even a book on penmanship used this format. I recently borrowed “Spencerian Handwriting: The Complete Collection of Theory and Practical Workbooks for Perfect Cursive and Hand Lettering” by Platt Rogers Spencer” from the NYPL and, to my great surprise, this is also written in an axiomatic style.

More after the jump

Like many people, I have a huge book backlog. I have books that I’ve intended to read for many moons, many moves, and many homes. While Kindle and library usage has made this some better, I can’t claim that my throughput rate in any way matches my acquisition rate. What’s to be done?

As noted in my post on Adler and van Doren’s How to Read a Book, “Inspectional Reading (IR)” is a two-phase technique that answers the question of whether a book requires deeper (“Analytical”) reading to be understood and whether the reader will benefit from such an understanding. The first phase locates the “big reveal” of the argument and its key premises first. In the second phase, the reader works to embellish that scaffolding here and there but moves through the content quickly.

As a result, readers have an augmented skeleton of the book such that the skeletal elements are fitted to the premises in a way that nets the conclusion.

I used this technique on Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?.

My determination is that IR, when practiced consciously, with notepad handy, does produce a strong grasp of non-fiction materials. For this book, I invested approximately 90 minutes of time and finished with several good ideas that I could present in cocktail party conversation and will likely integrate into some of the educational material my team curates.

I’m nearing my first year anniversary at the Flatiron School and was thinking about the projects I’ve undertaken and what I’ve learned in the last year. While doing so, it struck me that I had never written about how I came into education from a career in corporate IT and full-stack programming. This is, after all, my second go at being a manager of a curriculum-producing team. When did doing this become my life’s work more than a career of pursuing code?

But moving into education wasn’t a new move as much as it was a return to a fork that I’d opted not to take as I graduated in 2000. In my last year at university, I’d faced the question of whether to pursue the academic life or a life working in business. I had been planning on an academic life, but I chose the other path at the last moment.

But now I realize that the fork I chose gave me lessons that I was able to add to the lessons that my most-fondly remembered teachers gave me. And now, in my role, I get to bear those golden fruits of the dollar and the philosopher to a new generation at a scale hitherto unimaginable.

Here is the story of my trajectory toward an educational path, how I came to delay traveling it, a recollection of some of the most important lessons I learned and people I met along the way, and how I hope to honor them and their teachings as I work in this new model of education.

Ray Bradbury died a few days ago and I’ve been feeling rather reflective about his work and what it means to me. I’ve read many of the “classic” science fiction authors: H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Asimov and Bradbury. What strikes me as most special about Bradbury was that his voice was perhaps the most human of them all. Like Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s, his voice never stopped being human. Vonnegut said he always found it odd that his work was classified as “science fiction,” a genre associated with pornography and kooks when his messages were fundamentally human ones. But the best science fiction is never about the “them,” it’s always about the “us.

Introduction Recent developments in free education (Khan Academy, Lynda.com, etc.) have lead many to suggest that college is unnecessary: too expensive, too slow, to focused on physical in a digital world, etc. Peter Theil, Paypal founder and venture capitalist, has even gone so far to arrange that young, college-attending entrepreneurs apply to him to receive funding for ideas but that they drop out of school to pursue them. As ever, my friend Daniel Miessler has already added his voice to the discussion. This post is a response to that and is thus important background. Why Is it That Only College-Graduated Voices Are Proclaiming College’s Obsolescence?

I really enjoy my Latin classmates, they all are fine students, committed to the cause of studying something strictly for its beauty, its import, and its bond that it makes us feel to yesteryear. As an advice to anyone in languages let me recommend that you always be bold: come in, try to do that horrendous Dutch guttural ‘g,’ fully nasalize your French vowels, etc. When you’re unafraid to err, you open up the possibility that you will actually learn. I say this as preface because one of my peers made an error which induced a laughter such as I have never seen before in a language class.

Randy Nelson of Pixar University is filmed at Edutopia talking about hiring the best, and most creative, people possible. It’s a 10-minute video that won’t take much time to watch, but which has some great insights. Here’s the link: http://www.edutopia.org/randy-nelson-school-to-career-video Here were my rough notes: Failure avoidance (in test pilots) was not the quality [NASA] wanted, failure recovery is the mark of the person they desired in this innovative field [i.e. walking on the moon]. “Remember the proof of a portfolio versus the promise of a resume.” For those of you in-between jobs right now, I think this is an important one.

What? You don’t know what “223 872245489” means? Guess what, I didn’t know what this meant either: The alphabetical phone number must have been a marvel back in the day when Ma Bell leased you a phone, but in the age of cell phones where price and button real-estate is at a premium, I found myself baffled as to how to call. Why? My phone doesn’t put the alphabet on the buttons; nor does the screen simulation have them. Why would you not make the image hot-clickable to a real number? Or under the FAQ list the phone number as something besides the alphabetical number?

As it may have stuck the regular reader, I have been up to my nose in closing out my summer school class, Trigonometry. Walking into the final I had only three of my exam scores and the information about my in-class work. Test 1: 92 Test 2: 29 Test 3: 90 Daily work: 15 points. And yes, you’re reading that right, Test 2, saw me make a 29. You’ll note that I had been away on business two weeks ( Boston and SJ ) during that time thus leaving very little time to uh, well, do anything but fly home and take the test with what I happened to know based on on-the-plane readings.

I take my final in Trigonometry this afternoon.

At Vespaio this weekend one of the other guests had mentioned the mysterious fricative consonant unique to Czech: ř. I had been thinking about this sound and the statement “Language X has difficult sound Y” ( particularly the hard “g” in Dutch ) and how one acquires the ability to reproduce that sound in the intervening days and decided that I would like to hear that sound in person. Fortunately, one of my peers in my C++ class is Czech and I knew I could go to the source. After class I leaned across the table and I asked said lady, “Say, I heard that in Czech you have a consonant that no other.

Day Four: It’s a good day. The reason day 4 is a good day is because you’re out of “how rich is this language and how many other key concepts must I learn to be functionally literate” phase. You see, you’ve covered the dead basics on the first day. Day two is a real challenge because you’re learning the bits of the language that are advanced and that you will need to know to really be able to work “out of the middle section of the book”: the part where it moves from introductiory to non-trivial. Day three is the hardest, as I’ve detailed in great detail previously.

The Leauge sent in an email to see if I had fallen off the edge of the world. Although it appears irony has fallen upon The League, for as I type this, his web site has, in fact, fallen off the edge of the world: Blogger appears to be down. I have not left the gravitational field of this big, blue, glob. There’s a bunch of interesting work stuff going on ( more later ), my mom was in town and I started classes at Austin Community College. I’m taking two classes: Intermediate Algebra and C++. First, this is the kind of mathematics I learned in high school ( or should have learned better ).

This morning I finished: “A History of Britain.” It was a very good introduction to British history. Here’s one of the more interesting things I learned, Queen Elizabeth had beautiful handwriting:

Post-hip Chick a teacher in SJ apparently had to teach this poetic gem by Robert Frost to her 8th graders: I stepped on the toe/ Of an unemployed hoe. It rose in offense/ And struck me a blow…