resources | schmidt & hopper, 1992 [research interview]
Naomi Schmidt and Mary Hopper, Passages from Personal Interview, March 4, 1992
Passage 1
Schmidt: My job right now is called Manager of Educational Planning and Support
in Academic Computing Services. I have two roles. One is managing the faculty
liaisons group, who are four people who provide direct internal support for
faculty developers. We try to do things to make it easier for them. For example,
one of my staff is writing some documentation on guidelines for software development,
and we are also putting together a locker with sample code. I also do some work
with faculty myself, and I serve as an intermediary between the technical staff
in the faculty meetings. I'm a broker, in a way, being able to speak both languages.
Passage 2
Schmidt: One problem we had was as our operating system matured from
X-Windows System, Version 10, to X-Windows System, Version 11, that
programs had to be redone. And so developers had to anticipate what
the future was going to be, so that they knew what kind of abstraction
to put into their programs, and they had to write it so that the parts
that they would pull out and replace were at the right level of what
was going to change. The problem is that in this business nothing
lasts for more than about 5 years. It is not like writing a book.
When you write a book, the paper doesn't decompose. But here, we
have a few generations of hardware at any given time. We bought the
oldest machines 5 years ago, and we have machines that were purchased
a few months ago. And we hope to renew a quarter of the environment year,
and pull out the lowest quarter of obsolete machines, so that
the environment improves. Our system will work on
the oldest machines, but that moves up as we replace machines, or else the
system is never going to improve in capability. As our system evolves, if
we always made everything run on the oldest machines we would never
move. One of the things is that at MIT is that we really believe that we want
to keep our computing environment state of the art, leading edge.
Passage 3
Schmidt: I think what faculty do is take how they teach a course and
they think about how they can teach better, how can they do what they
are already doing, but better. I think it stems from what they're
specifically trying to teach. I don't think they think in terms of
pedagogical theory. I think they think more from their own experience
in the classroom and their own experience with the assignments they
give students. They might think, "if a student could do one pass or
two passes of something by hand, if I let them do it on a computer
where they can put in parameters and see how things change they
could do 10, and that will give them so much more of an intuitive
feeling." That's the reason a lot of the engineering software has
been to give students this intuition and let them change parameters
and see what if, to do simulations.
Passage 4
Schmidt: Sometimes these things have to be ported, and during that
process you have to make little modifications because things are
written with a specific system in mind. And so the source code
needs to be available, because you can't use just the binaries.
We need the source code. We are also trying to help faculty members
get their source code in good working order. Some of these programs
are huge, so it is important to use standard software engineering
techniques. You have Make files and you organize your directories
in certain ways, and when you revise software, there's a system called
Revision Control System (RCS), where if you make a change it records
the change, it says who does get it and when, and the changes are made
so you can back them out. Another thing that is valuable is that only
one copy of any file needs to be around on a central file system,
so that even when a faculty member goes away we know where the source
code is stored.
© Mary E. Hopper [MEHopper] |
MEHopper@TheWorld.com
[posted 01/01/01 | revised 02/02/02]