Valparaiso, Chile — Enthusiastic Students in a Unique City

After a three-week family vacation in the Middle East and a few days at home on either side, I inaugurated my 2017 teaching schedule with a week in Valparaiso, Chile. Among other activities during the week I delivered my “Overview of Big Data — Promises and Pitfalls, Tools and Techniques” introductory talk for the 20th, 21st, and 22nd times, and I conducted my eleventh all-day workshop on Design Thinking & Collaborative Problem Solving. It was fun to be back at it, but also nice to have had a break.

I had a few different mixes of students throughout the week, hailing from Valparaiso and nearby Santiago. They were uniformly enthusiastic, attentive, eager to learn, and appreciative. It was the first time I had more students rather than fewer show up for the second half of a two-day Big Data course (word of mouth, apparently), and the first time most of the participants kissed me at the end — on the cheek, Latin-style of course. The students were so engaged and outgoing that several of them volunteered excellent suggestions for improvements to the material. It amazes me that no matter how many times I teach the same material, I always find ways to improve or extend it; no hotel evening has gone by yet when I’m not making a few refinements to the topics I taught that day.

The Big Data participants were a healthy mix of students, faculty, & professionals, and an especially enjoyable group to work with.

In addition to Big Data and Design Thinking, I held an informal roundtable discussion with women faculty and professionals. I learned about machismo (which I’d heard of) and machistas (which I hadn’t), and about a local university that received 80 applications for their new Information Technology program, exactly zero of them from women. It’s important in these sessions to stay constructive and not degenerate to pure whining and complaints. When I felt it might be heading in that direction I wondered aloud if each participant could make a point of finding a young woman to mentor; that suggestion managed to set things back on course.

Valparaiso was a perfect location to spend a January week of teaching. It’s first and foremost a port city, and a bit gritty one at that. But the many extremely steep hills make for a dramatic setting and wonderful views, and it’s particularly known for its colorful ramshackle buildings with murals or graffiti (or something in between) covering every available space, and a developing art scene. What better setting for an invigorating walk and rooftop pisco sour after a full day of teaching, especially when the temperature is ideal and it stays light well past 9:00 PM?

A typical street in Valparaiso: steep and colorful.

One difference this week was that I brought along my own teaching assistant, rather than relying on the local host to provide one or two. I developed my Big Data material by teaching a new course at Stanford last spring, and as with most courses (including the many that I’m teaching this year), a few outstanding students populated the front row. One of them was Wyatt Horan, now a senior. When I discovered that Wyatt is fluent in Spanish, I invited him to play hooky from his Stanford classes and join me for a week of his choosing in a Spanish-speaking country. Although the Chilean’s English turned out to be better on average than I expected, the variation was large. In the Big Data courses Wyatt was immensely helpful for the handful of students who simply couldn’t follow the English. (If you look carefully you’ll find him helping out in the classroom photo above.) But, surprisingly, in the Design Thinking & Collaborative Problem Solving workshop, Wyatt’s translations were essential. The workshop drew a wide variety of participants, many of them from non-technical fields, and their English was even more variable. It also became apparent that when guiding team-based problem-solving activities, more complex and subtle communication is needed than when explaining, say, how to use a relational database management system.

Stanford student Wyatt Horan came along as teaching assistant and translator, but he was also a valued member of this fun-loving design-thinking team.

Some people have asked how the teaching agendas at each university are set, especially for Big Data, which is such a Big Topic. (Design Thinking workshops are always one full day, and Women-in-Tech roundtables always 1–2 hours.) When universities are planning a Big Data short-course, they’re offered a menu of options to choose from. (I do force them to choose, just to make sure they’ve given some real thought to what’s most suitable for their students.) I created a very detailed fact sheet — perhaps too detailed, as many hosts seem not to read it entirely — outlining what “modules” are available, what background each module requires and how long it takes, and which modules need to precede which others. I always start with a 1–2 hour overview, but from there it can go in many directions: data mining, machine learning, data visualization, database management systems, spreadsheets (surprisingly powerful and versatile for data analysis!), and data-specific features in the programming languages Python and R. All of the modules include a mix of some presentation with lots of hands-on activities and exercises. When the sabbatical is over perhaps I’ll conduct some data analysis of my own to see which modules were most popular and successful.

I’ll be back in Latin America in a month or so for a 3-week teaching stint in Peru and Mexico; in the meanwhile: Africa!