RIT/Laboratory principles and practices

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[edit] Principles

We assume that both students and instructors enjoy independent discovery. Your extended literature and laboratory investigations give you opportunities to develop your critical faculties. Louis Pasteur's statement, In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind, [1] describes an important learning principle.

What are the characteristics of a prepared mind? Knowledge and activity are the most significant features. Preparation involves learning the skills and techniques of your particular calling. The laboratory problems in this course are intended in part to give you practice in techniques—not just those of computing and information systems, but also those of communication, an indispensable tool in any field. Attaining skills is not enough to ensure that your mind will be prepared—it must also be active. An active mind exhibits a priceless habit of carefully weighing experience. You can become a questioning observer if you are now only a passive one. All your faculties improve with practice, and thinking is no exception. If you learn nothing else from this course except to apply your mind well to the experiences that accost it at every moment of the day, your time will have been well spent.

[edit] Practice

Traditionally, the authors of textbooks wish their users a smooth journey through the text; our fondest hope is that courses that use this guide will not run smoothly. The main path we suggest is free of deliberate roadblocks, but we hope that you will be tempted to stray often enough to make trouble for yourselves. If there are no taxing situations, no places for students and instructors to learn together, then neither of you will really have much fun.

There should be many places in the lab guides where you can and must exercise your imagination and creativity. When an experiment involves a great deal of new technique, the procedure will be given in detail so that you will not have to waste your time groping. On the other hand, in some sections there is very little technical detail and you must devise your own approach. You will find questions posed that should enliven the work if you consider or tackle them as they arise. At the end of almost every experiment there are suggestions for practical problems that go beyond those presented in detail. To answer these questions, conceptual and practical, you must recall ideas you have gathered from lectures, homework, collateral reading, discussion, and laboratory work; ideas that you have examined and made your own.

Your imagination may, and we hope will, lead to suggestions for improvements and refinements to the course material. You may find a much more efficient method of data collection, reduction, or reporting; you may find better ways to solve the experimental problems; or you may find that a proposed experiment leads nowhere. We would very much like to learn about any such interesting ideas. Include them on the discussion pages of this wiki.

[edit] Tools, Techniques, Totems, & Taboos

Observation with me is second nature. --Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, A. Conan Doyle

[edit] Preparation

Before you set foot in the laboratory, there will be background material and principles to be read, thought about, and digested. You should read actively. Does the text pose a problem or an illustrative example? Imagine solving the problem before reading the printed solution. Allow yourself time to think about the material you have read. What don't you understand? It is not necessary or expected that you will understand everything the first or even the second time through. Bookmark the sections that give you trouble and come back to them later. Will some secondary reading from a reference help? Ask your instructor or classmates for recommendations about collateral reading and about material you don't understand. Develop these study habits, and you will soon find that you comprehend the points being made much more quickly and more clearly.

The laboratory instructions for each experiment or exercise are not recipes. In all cases, there is thinking for you to do before coming to the laboratory. Sometimes your thinking will be guided by questions and instructions as you read the experiment; you will have to do other planning on your own. An outline of the operations you expect to carry out during a laboratory session will be very useful and will help you make economical use of your time. Do any necessary calculations, resource acquisitions, or software verifications before coming to the laboratory. Try to understand the reason for each of the operations you are to perform. Are there missing dependencies in your setup? What would be the impact of insufficient privileges or connectivity? Often such preliminary thinking can help you save an experiment by appropriate changes in procedure if you make a mistake at first.

Once in the laboratory, your preparatory thinking is reinforced by physical confrontation with circumstances. Are the resources still where they were supposed to be? Will the procedure take longer under network or processor load? The ability to anticipate such conditions is a matter of practice and observation. Developing this ability is essential for efficient laboratory work. As a result of the habits developed during your preparation for laboratory work, you will become a more effective practitioner. When you read a statement or proposition, challenge the inherent assumptions to assess their strength. Often relative terms are used, such as fast, small, easy. A good habit is to search for a quantitative qualifier for any such value judgement. As you get more and more into the habit of preparatory thinking, this response will become automatic.

As you use these guides, during the first stages of your term, many of the pitfalls will be worked out of the experiments for you. As the term progresses, however, it will become your responsibility to plan and carry out your own experiments, and the role of preparatory thinking will become paramount. You will need to learn the limitations of your equipment and of the techniques or tools available. You must ascertain whether it is feasible to obtain the results that you wish or whether some change in your system during the experiment will override or overwhelm your plans. Those who have learned to question actively in all situations can save hours, days, or even years of labor on a fruitless or improbable endeavor.

[edit] Literature

Your knowledge of the literature (on the Internet or other libraries) is an important tool for successful work in all areas. Time spent learning those resources will often eliminate hours of frustrating and fruitless laboratory time. Here are some suggestions:

Learn well the cataloging and search systems available.
Bookmark the resources which you might consult most often.
- (Enter your best links here.)
Spend time familiarizing yourself with the resources, their structure and conventions. As a novice, you may feel that much of the content is unfathomable to you. But how can you say this before you try? This quotation is quite apropos:

Frequently a student's inability to grasp a difficult concept is due not to his innate impenetrability, but rather to a particular author's lack of "penetrating power". ... Early in the game it is useful to learn to scan difficult treatises in search of a clarifying paragraph, sentence, word or picture—and then pounce on it! It is a rare ..work which is completely comprehensible to the average reader on its first reading.[2]

[edit] Wikis

A wiki is a collaboration tool. Just about everything you see on a wiki page you can edit.

Don't be put off in fear of offending the authors. They want you to read, think, and add your valuable thoughts to the collective effort. Click on the 'Edit' link above the page title now.
Notice the sentences just below the text entry box. The wiki is a free and open source of information. Abandon some of those closed-source inhibitions, and make yourself welcome in a free and open source project by following this simple policy:
1. Do no harm.
  (… To readers and the project; worry less about the particular content version.)
2. Respect other's work.
  (Think here of their abstract contribution, less the particular, potentially insufficient presentation of it.)
3. Contribute first what you know.
  (Readers are more interested in what you know than what you wish or believe, depending of course, on the topic of the page. Your opinions are welcome on many pages, and generally welcome, especially with constructive suggestions, on the discussion or talk page.)
4. Be helpful.
Don't be afraid of messing things up. All edits are kept and accessible through the 'History' link above the page title. Take a look at it now.
There you see built-in tools to review, compare, & undo page edits.

Over time, independent agenda of authors may lead to wiki page clutter and incongruence of content. So, after studying the project and page intent, boldly edit, restructure, and reformat the content to better serve the project. Actively involved authors will have set watches on pages so they will be alerted of page changes. You can adopt this practice by setting preference settings for email and your wiki watchlist. See Special:Preferences.

[edit] Tool4

These sections are for guides to using essential tools of Free and Open Source Software. You are welcome to enter short, instructive guidelines written from the perspective of a master for apprentice.