TITLE: The Other OOPSLA Submission
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 30, 2008  8:50 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
In March I talked about a
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2008-03.html#e2008-03-19T00_40_23.htm">
   couple of OOPSLA submissions</A>
written by our merged ChiliPLoP groups.  In May
I wrote about the
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2008-05.html#e2008-05-09T08_03_49.htm">
   verdict on one</A>
but forgot to mention the other.  Maybe because the
rejection was so much more interesting!

Anyone, our second submission was accepted into the
<A HREF="http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2008/cfp/cfp-edusym.html">
   Educators' Symposium</A>.
It is not a paper, really, but an extended abstract
for an activity we will run: a code review recast as
it might happen in a software studio.  We hope to give
participants a snapshot of what a studio-based course
looks, feels, and works like.  This is something
instructors can try on a small scale in class and, if
it works for them, expand throughout their course.
Even if code reviews is all the farther they go, we
co-authors think that this will be a useful step for
many instructors.  It draws on experiences in the
<A HREF="http://hillside.net/plop/2008/index.php?nav=activities#writersworkshops">
   writers' workshops</A>
of
<A HREF="http://hillside.net/plop/2008/">
   PLoP</A>
helps students to think about the many design choices
they make when writing software, and to make them
reflectively rather than subconsciously.

The real trick to this activity will be the homework
we give before the symposium:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Before coming to OOPSLA, Educators' Symposium participants
will be asked to submit a program, in a language of their
choice (though using only standard libraries), which 
implements the core of a program to generate Tag Clouds
from a data set.  ...
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

My experience with many workshops in the past and especially
with the Educators' Symposium is that participants never do
this kind of homework.  Some are well-intentioned but never
make time for it, while others figure they can skate by
without having written the code.  (Sounds as if professors
are a lot like their students, huh?)  Without code to review,
a code review doesn't get very far.  We hope that we can
find a way to encourage symposium attendees to overcome
history and come with some code to workshop.
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