Reading Apprenticeship Inspired Assignment or Lesson
Reading Apprenticeship Inspired Assignment or Lesson
The goal of this activity is to give students an opportunity to connect what they are learning in class to real-world applications and ongoing research. This will allow them to both see how the same approaches are used in their undergraduate education and throughout the future careers.
The goal of this activity is to give students a connection between what they are learning in class and real world and research systems. Students will take a research publication and analyze it based on the factors and approaches we introduced in class. They will then present what they have learned and their understanding of it both by writing up their findings and also by presenting their findings in a video presentation.
This has a twofold goal. First, it gives students a change to apply what they have learned and analyze whether they fully understood it. Second, it gives students insight into how what they have learned in class forms a basis for ongoing understanding and learning.
This assignment will be an ongoing assignment in the last four weeks of class. This gives students time to learn the core concepts of class, including core techniques used in operating systems, as well as evaluation metrics. This also gives students a chance to contextualize what they read about in terms of what they have learned, and apply it to the final exam.
This assignment will take part in the last four weeks of the semester. This timing is based on wanting to ensure that students have had time to be introduced to the core concepts in the class and how we approach problems in operating systems, such as virtualization of resources and metrics for determining how well we are accomplishing our goals. This will allow them to be able to see how others are applying these concepts to real-world problems. Furthermore, this allows students time to become comfortable with reading academic literature earlier in the semester.
Evaluation of this assignment will consist of both group and individual parts. The group parts will include a written submission summarizing the connections between the course and the chosen research paper, while a video recording will give students a chance to summarize and present their understanding. The individual component will be two assignments, one to summarize a number of abstracts of papers and the other being a reflection on contributions and understandings.
The core goal of this assignment is to have students connect what they are learning in the course with larger concepts. One of the core concepts I intend to instill in the Operating Systems class is that small, simple approaches to problems can be applied at larger and larger scales, and while they might seem complex the core simplicity still survives. The metacognitive goal is to have students be able to reflect on their work and see how the same principles apply throughout other aspects of systems research.
This assignment consists of three major parts. The first part is an individual exploration of potential research papers, where students will pick the abstracts of 5 papers to read and assess how well they seem to connect to the topics we’ve covered in class, their interests in computer science, and ordering them based on these categories. The second part will be a team-based exercise where students work in teams of 3-4 to read the paper together, analyze its contents, summarize them and present them via a written document and a video recording. Third, there is a final individual assignment where students will reflect on what their findings were and their individual contributions, as well as any questions that still linger.
One key component of metacognitive conversation is the ability to reflect on what has been learned, potential misconceptions and misunderstandings, as well as the ability to follow implications. This assignment would be intended to encourage this through individual work (compelling students to come up with their own ratings), as well as in group work (explaining to others and working together to figure out gaps in knowledge). It also aims to encourage students to accept when they are facing challenges and gaps in understanding.
The tentative timeline of weeks 10-12 individual students will summarize paper abstracts, weeks 12-14 will have students working in groups to write and record a presentation, and then weeks 14-16 written a summary and reviewing each other’s presentations.
The students will be working with research papers (5-12 pages) from computer science conferences. These will necessarily have a number of diagrams and plots that students will be encouraged to closely analyze. The papers will come from relevant conferences, including OSDI, NSDI, and potentially specialized conferences like DEFCON and workshops such as HotOS. Potentially, the last of these will be used to introduce students to short papers throughout the semester, preparing them for full papers by the end of the semester.
