Enhancing Electronic Voting With A Dual-Blockchain Architecture
19 Mar 2021The article that Jai Punjwani and I authored for Ledger Journal is now live. It is accessible as an open access publication at the journal website.
Welcome to the academic home page of Dr. Kees Leune. Everything here is related to my affiliation with Adelphi University as associate professor and chair of the computer science department. Use the navbar on the side to find main content.
The article that Jai Punjwani and I authored for Ledger Journal is now live. It is accessible as an open access publication at the journal website.
Ledger Journal was launched in 2015 to address the growing need for a traditional academic journal dedicated to cryptocurrency research.
I am pleased to write that the journal accepted a paper that Jai Punjwani and I co-authored as a result of his Honor’s Thesis research. The title of the paper is Enhancing Electronic Voting With A Dual-Blockchain Architecture, which fairly accurately describes its content.
The article will be included in an upcoming issue of the journal. Once it is published, I’ll announce it here.
IEEE ISEC’21 is a conference where academic discuss cutting-edge research and experiences with integrated approaches to the study of science, math, and technology through experiences and activities based in engineering and other design disciplines.
Katherine Herbert, Thomas J. Marlowe, Robert M. Siegfried, Jeanette Wilmanski and I collaborated on drafting a work-in-progress paper in which we explore the effectiveness of establishing computing competencies in interdisciplinary STEM education.
The paper will be published in the conference proceedings and will be presented at the 2021 Integrated STEM Education Conference (ISEC). Once it is finalized and accessible, I’ll post a public link here.
Several times per year, I start feeling very overwhelmed by all the work that must be done. At the same time, I start feeling sad about the work that could get done, but isn’t.
I recently came to the conclusion that one of the reasons for that was that I let my professional life be dictated by my email Inbox. This came as somewhat of a surprise, since I have spent quite a lot of effort to automatically filter much of the stuff that isn’t time-sentitive into folders. Years ago, I have also turned off all email notifications, thinking that it would help not getting overwhelmed.
Obviously, that wasn’t enough.
So, on top of all of that, I have adopted a new approach that seems to be working well for me. It is based on the simple premise that Email is not a To Do manager.
Sure; many To Do items will come in via email. Explicitly recognizing them as To Do-items, and taking the effort to manage them separately from email is indeed a bit more work in the short term. However, that short-term effort pays back in long-term piece of mind.
The Inbox-0 movement is not new, and I did not invent it. I have tried many times to adopt it, since I have always like the idea. This is the first time that I feel that I might have found a method that is based on its ideas, but omits some of its shortcomings.
For the last month, I have used the following principles:
Reading email and properly responding to it is a task in its own right. Do not confuse it for overhead, and make sure to only open your Inbox when you can spend time on processing it properly.
Be generous with delete. Much of the email we get is unnecessary and does not warrant your (scarce/valuable) intellectual cyles.
Email is not a To Do-manager. A To Do-manager is a To Do-manager.
If you choose not to delete an email, your options are:
Respond immediately
Archive (away from Inbox) for later reference
Create a To Do-list item to address it
Do not stop this cycle until your Inbox is empty.
In tandem with this switch, I also turned off Google’s conversation view. I wish I could go back to “old school” email threading, but I understand that the Gmail approach is different and doesn’t allow for that. However, turning the feature off allows me to consider each email that makes it to my Inbox separately.
I chose to use the Things To Do-manager. It has a number of features I was looking for, even though it is not the cheapest one out there. Specifically, I looked for:
Product must be actively maintained and supported
Non-distracting UI
Ability to assign deadlines, but not require them
Ability to add notes
Ability to add tag items
Cloud sync across devices
Ability to define recurring To Do-items
Ability to turn reminders off
Not “just” a web app
Things provided all of these. I wish there were a Windows and/or a Web App of the manager as well, but since my primary productivity infrastructure consists of a Macbook and an iPhone, this wasn’t a deal breaker.
Context
The Fall 2020 semester turns out to be one of the stranger semesters that I have experienced, and Spring 2021 looks like it will be much the same. Many faculty members (myself included) have opted to teach online this semester. We reached this decision after much discussion and debate. In the end, being able to avoid exposing students to the COVID-19 virus, but also to limit the chance of catching/spreading it ourselves was our main driver.
Initially, I was a little reluctant to do so since it is harder to interact with the class and watch their comprehension of the subject material. However, I have to say that my students this semester are doing at least as well as they have other years, and maybe might be doing a little better.
I did not expect that.
I teach four classes this semester: one first-year class, two sophomore classes, and one second-year graduate class. The first one, our CSC190 Computer Science Orientation Seminar, is a 1-credit class that meets only once a week. I opted to teach it synchronously. The course introduces new students to computational thinking and it coaches them in the logistics of being a college student.
The other three courses are also fully online but are delivered as a mix of synchronous teaching and asynchronous teaching. In synchronous instruction, everyone is on a video call simultaneously. There is real-time interaction among the students and between students and faculty. In asynchronous education, students are responsible for watching videos that I post to YouTube and for doing readings on their own time.
To verify that they actually watch the lessons and complete the readings, I ask students to submit their notes and take a short quiz (8-10 questions) at the end of each week. One the one hand, it keeps them engaged with the materials. On the other hand, it allows me to check comprehension.
I use the synchronous classes to review the lecture materials in about 20 minutes. I use the remainder of the time for q&a, discussions, and in-class activities.
Checklists
Why this elaborate intro? I felt that it was needed to illustrate that, while nothing in this is hard, there are many moving parts that I, as the instructor, need to monitor. For each class, I want to make sure that it opens on time, that I have an opening slide that is displayed before the start of the class, that classes are recorded, and that recordings are posted. For each class, I must make sure that all activities are posted, with deadlines and appropriate exceptions, etc. Nothing is hard. But, with four courses, it is easy to miss a step.
The title of this post is Using Checklists in Online Teaching. I realized that I was making mistakes in presenting the materials to the students almost from the start of the semester. They were often minimal issues that didn’t impact the content of the lesson. Still, they do have an effect on the experience. Errors like setting appropriate quiz deadlines, making sure that students with accommodations have the extra time, ensuring that I record each session and making it available, etc. are easily made.
Years ago, I read the Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. In it, the author makes a compelling argument that checklists, in all their simplicity, are excellent tools to ensure that steps aren’t skipped, and avoidable mistakes aren’t made. Checklists are not meant to be step-by-step instructions; instead, they provide a quick, lightweight mechanism to ensure that nothing was missed.
Many industries — notably aviation and medicine — use checklists. This semester, I decided that I would give them a go too in my teaching. Overall, the outcomes have been very positive. I catch mistakes easier and earlier, which means that I get fewer emails from students with avoidable questions. Because of that, my courses are now more predictable, allowing students to prepare better, and get better outcomes.
My checklists are available here. Feel free to use them for your own courses, or develop new ones based on them. If they help you out, please let me know! I would love to hear about your experiences and see what improvements you made!