Recent Reflection

On Franklin's Gambit

2012-02-01T13:44:00.002Z

Thanks to Jim Hamlyn's intriguing review, I have just finished reading John Kay's Obliquity. I'm not quite as enthusiastic about it as Jim is--it's easy to read, but also repetitious and wordy, almost padded. Nevertheless, it is the book I have been looking for, for some time, because it addresses an issue--namely tackling problems and challenges indirectly--which has interested me for some time, and to which there has not really been an accessible introduction I can point other people to, and say, "It's all there!" There's been a series of books, largely by economists (as Kay is), perhaps most notably by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2008), which touch on similar areas, but without the clarity of focus Kay brings to bear.

Kay starts thus:

For over ten years, I built and ran an economic consultancy business, and much of our revenue was derived from selling models to large corporate clients. One day, I asked myself a question: if these models were helpful, why did we not build similar models for our own decision making? The answer, I realised, was that our customers didn't really use these models for their decision making either. They used them internally or externally to justify decisions that they had already made.

They were playing what I now call Franklin's Gambit, after the American polymath Benjamin Franklin. He wrote: 'so convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.'

In my early days teaching, when we actually had long summer breaks, I moonlighted for a small management consultancy. I was so naive, that I reported back to the boss after a few days on an early assignment, that I didn't know what to recommend to him (the boss) to advise the client. He laughed and said, "You don't understand! The client has always already decided what to do. He employs us to give him good reasons for doing it, so your job is to go back there tomorrow and find out what he has already decided."

Today I was approached over the net by an overseas researcher seeking the views of academics on the various competing taxonomies of education objectives, helpfully accompanied by a handout summarising the models he was investigating. Some were familiar, and there were two I had never heard heard of; most were horrendously complicated. They were just unmanageable, and I couldn't imagine anyone actually using them. I thought, "these are not designed to be used. Despite appearances, the only person (if anyone) who got anything out of these was the person who designed them." That is not to say that the exercise of designing them was not useful, as a way of clarifying the designers' thoughts--it's just not directly communicable to other people.

I'm an unregenerate builder of conceptual models; my Doceo site is full of more or less half-baked ones, which people do occasionally tell me are useful, but I do try to keep them simple, with a focused and limited range of convenience.

...but even then, I suspect that most of even those are employed in the service of Franklin's Gambit--just seeking a legitimation for what someone was going to do anyway.

Which rather puts most educational theory in its place.

So now I've got to work out how to respond to 29 Likert-scale questions on learning taxonomies...

On "Borgen"

2012-01-28T23:39:00.000Z

I've just emerged from watching another two hours of Borgen on BBC4. It's possibly even better than the West Wing, principally because as a few critics have pointed out, Danish politics are more intimate and personal than the vast US stage.

Danish politics? After the Killing and of course Hamlet a while ago, that seam must be exhausted, surely? Far from it, but I am interested in just what compels me to commit two hours on a Saturday night to watching a pair of episodes (incidentally, one episode at a time is a feast; please don't force-feed us). And it is a compulsion. I did have a couple of other things to do this evening, but I didn't do them. I did not even open this infernal machine while it was on.

Partly that was because it demanded my full attention because it is subtitled (although there are occasional disorientating moments of perfect unaccented English). I could not let my visual attention wander and rely on background hearing to make sense of what was going on, so for example, checking email while watching is not an option. Similarly, but more surprisingly, muting the sound and relying on the sub-titles just does not work for some reason. The content is in the subtitles, but the paralanguage is on the soundtrack and the main visuals.---That is the takeaway point from a teaching perspective, but;--

It has lots of other things going for it... It's rather late to pick up many of the themes by now, but 80% of each episode stands on its own.

Just a pity if you missed the reason why Kasper is such a lying s**t. That didn't need subtitles, and I've never seen anything like it, but it was brilliantly both discreetly graphic and could not have offended any naive viewer. It does relate to this recent post.

Items to Share (28 January)

2012-01-28T16:46:00.002Z

The Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips

"On the Mechanics of Choice"; good summary article on the psychology of decision-making

A perceptive but sceptical discussion of Apple's further forays into the education market, raising again whether technology and education are on divergent paths.

Is this a game-changer? MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency.

Vindicated! The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance (review article)

Cambridge Nights: Late Night TV-Style Show Takes Deep Look at Scientific Thinking

It's been a slow week, but this is daftly delightful and even uplifting--even if you are not a Doctor Who fan! (15 mins)

...and forfeiting all intellectual gravitas, watch this on the Canadian space programme. (1:30)

On abuse undetected for years

2012-01-26T20:57:00.003Z

The story is here. A teacher at a primary school in Somerset was convicted today of 36 counts of the sexual abuse of children during his 15 years of employment at the school, many of them taking place during classes, and despite concern having been expressed by colleagues on thirty occasions. The head teacher has been dismissed.

How could that happen? All too easily. I wrote in a similar area here. In view of some of the comments I received on that post (now deleted, of course) I want to be clear that I am not making excuses for anyone and still less condoning child abuse.

Several times in my career I have come close to having to report abuse, of elderly people and people with learning disabilities and mental health issues as well as children. I'm relieved to say that I have never had to make the call because someone else more closely involved has beaten me to it. Once I decided not to make the call, and it appears that I made the right judgment, although...

I have also been on the fringes of many cases, talking to social workers and others about their experiences. And in a different capacity as a teacher trainer, I have sat in on many many "safeguarding" training sessions.

I do know the ropes, both in policy and principle, and in practice.

Cut to the chase... the reporting system is misconceived. It's a top-down idealised model. Whoever you are, if you have suspicions of abuse, report to your supervisor.

That is the worst possible scenario...

Your supervisor is your boss. An abuse report is the last thing she wants to hear--so unless you have a group of supporters (who may well evaporate at the least sign of opposition), you are not going to approach. It is not a good career move.
Because the boss may refer it up the line to her boss, but despite the formal procedures, boss1 is in the same position to boss2 as you are to boss1. Follow?
Regardless of the number of stages before external action is taken, the default action at each stage is of course denial: "It's probably all a misunderstanding/mistake/personal issue/ will sort itself out..."
And the longer that goes on, the worse will be the consequences if there is an inquiry, so cognitive dissonance sets in...

The problem is that supervisors/managers/headteachers are just not equipped to respond proportionately to concerns. My admittedly anecdotal experience over many years is that at their level the safeguarding training does not work. It is experience which counts. Faced with one case every few years, and a vague idea of what ought to happen (which rarely does) they have no idea of a graduated and nuanced response. There are two positions; Denial and Disaster.

The matter needs to be taken out of their hands.

However fallible our social workers are (and of course by the nature of their task they get no publicity for their unsung achievements, just their disasters) they've been there before. They are pretty good at sorting through malicious referrals, deluded suspicions, reasonable concerns, serious cases, and emergencies. Referrals do not faze them. They can do proportionate responses, discreet investigations, re-assurance of reluctant victims and families

Good grief! I've got a positive proposal!

So the safeguarding/reporting procedures need to be changed. Regardless of what you are taught: If you suspect abuse,

first report it to the NSPCC (the organisation is far from perfect, but it is accessible and ubiquitous and not in hock to any local interests), and
then to your boss.

You don't need to admit to having made the referral--it's better if you do, of course. Having a named referrer "gives the inquiry legs" as they say.

Many years ago I taught on a continuing professional development course on pastoral care for teachers. During the coffee break, one of them took me aside and sought advice about one of her pupils, who (she believed) was being abused at home. I explained the formal procedure, but she stopped me,"I know all that, but, if I pass this on, she'll end up in care--and I've seen what happens to children in care--her chances in life will be blighted. And if I don't, she'll continue to be abused, and learn that there is no point telling anyone because nothing happens..."

It's always a difficult call.

On the journal scam (ctd.)

2012-01-21T18:43:00.002Z

Following on from this earlier post; there is a protest here from someone much closer to the situation than me.

Items to share (21 January)

2012-01-21T16:22:00.003Z

Geoffrey Pullum on the demise of the apostrophe.

...and here on normal and formal language. I'm an ironic formalist; I know the "rules" and sometimes decide to break them (as does Pullum). It's not the same as not knowing the (sensible) ones.

What is the ACI?

Lecture by Nassim Nicholas Taleb on impact of failures within systems; one of the few people who seems to see systems as they are, rather than as we would like to believe them to be.

Be careful; there are 191 answers to this year's Edge question, and will take a l-o-n-g time to get through them.

We know crows are bright, but who would have thought they went in for snowboarding? Thanks to Ben Goldacre for the link

Need to write an article in a hurry? Send for Pootwattle.

Abraham Maslow in context:

"Maslow had a nobler humanity in mind than the one our cult of the self produces in barbaric multitudes. [...] The prospect of a race of moral giants has issued in a breed of selfish twerps, with a sizeable proportion of genuine degenerates. How the highest democratic longing — to realize the best in one’s nature — has been debased into a pervasive complacency, even a widespread monstrosity, is more than an interesting question in intellectual history; it is a grave and ongoing public catastrophe."

V S Ramachandran's quick tour of some of the most intriguing case studies revealing the powerful, adaptive potential of the human brain.

On disclosure

2012-01-19T20:57:00.001Z

Yet again I have been asked about my presence (or rather lack of it) on Facebook and Twitter, and Google+ and LinkedIn and... I'm not going to go in to all the details about what such sites expect one to disclose about oneself; it's all old hat. That isn't my problem.

My problem is about imposing on other people. I did sign up for Facebook some time ago, and obviously clicked some buttons without reading the small print, as 99% of users presumably do. It then proceeded to "invite" all my gmail contact to be my "friends" --I've been on the receiving end of this too many times to mention, and so I know how much of an imposition it is, not to mention the implied snub in refusing to "friend" someone. (The usual verb in the real world is "befriend"--that does have its dark side, too, but its paradigmatic relationship is rather richer than this impoverished online version.) I then spent over an hour crafting, pasting and editing dozens of apologies to them. Actually, it did bring some people to mind whom I had neglected, but that did not make up for my unintended imposition.

LinkedIn I can understand. It's about networking and business and work. I just don't respond because I'm semi-retired. I'm interested in doing things for people who are sufficiently interested in me to seek me out--which ain't difficult because there is a contact link at the bottom of all my web-pages. I'm no longer in the business of promoting myself, but I can see it makes sense.

But there is a degree of arrogance in other social networking sites, an assumption that other people will be interested in me and the minutiae of my life, to the extent that I can push it at them. It fits with and feeds off the inanities of "celebrity culture". To a certain extent writing a blog buys into the same idea, of course, so I'm already guilty, but I'm not going to compound the offence.

I suspect--although I can't see how to test this--that there is an inverse correlation between the interestingness (horrible clumsy word, but I can't find precise synonyms) of a person and their compulsion to project themselves to a diffuse cloud of acquaintance on the net. Up-dating a defined community of family, friends and colleagues is a different matter, of course. Even so, I'd rather be selective and incremental--it's about interaction and conversation rather than broadcasting.

No, Google+ circles are not the answer, although a tiny crawl in the right direction.

I've bored you long enough. Should I send this?

On journals (and Pozzo and Lucky...)

2012-01-16T23:44:00.000Z

I wrote recently about the arrogance of the publishers of academic journals. I have to declare that I have now heard from the real human editor of the journal in question, who took the trouble to write personally to apologise for the form letters from the publishers, and who is probably as put upon as the rest of us...

And today I came across this piece, which speaks for itself.

But it reminds me of one of the most bizarre incidents of my academic career.

It was a warm summer afternoon in the mid-'90s. My colleague and I were sitting on folding chairs on the grass outside our building near the campus entrance discussing something or other.

A man in an unseasonable heavy black overcoat came by, followed by his associate/assistant/servant/slave who was pulling a very large trolley case. Initially black overcoat asked for directions to Reception, but he had no clear idea of whom he wanted to see or details of any appointment, and being rather cravenly polite and not having a door to shut in his face, we allowed him to state his proposition/pitch.

(If you are familiar with Waiting for Godot, Pozzo and Lucky are the best parallels.)

Briefly, he wanted us to sign up PhD students from the Arabian Gulf area. He was not particularly interested in our areas of expertise or research, although when I referred to social sciences, he suggested that a Deputy Chief of Police in one of the Emirates would be an ideal candidate for me to "supervise". He was a little disappointed that we had no expertise on campus in chemical engineering--to his ?credit, my father's and brother's background in that field was not sufficient for him to point students my way...

The deal was that his clients would sign up for a part-time overseas doctoral programme with us. We would not have to do anything except process the proposal and the assessment. All the supervision could be arranged locally. For the viva (defense) the supervisor and external examiner (and companions) would be flown out to the Gulf and accommodated at 5* level, and would then be keynote speakers at a major conference to celebrate the award (for which a suitable fee would be arranged payable to the individuals rather than the institutions) extended to a two-week vacation, courtesy of /not clear/you don't need to know/.

The trolley-case was full of theses, and glossy commemorative volumes of the "conferences" including pictures and profiles of UK supervisors and mentors. (I never bothered to check up on them.)

And bound volumes of journals, with respectable titles such as those listed in the link above. All of them, Mr Overcoat was keen to stress, have ISSN numbers (as if that guaranteed academic respectability. I don't know if Viz comic has got one, but it could have). He could guarantee acceptance of papers in such journals, and even recommend us for the editorial boards or even editorships...

We accepted his business card, but explained that the registration process was a little more complex than that, and after an hour or so, he took the hint.

...and asked for directions to Cambridge...

Items to share (14 January)

2012-01-14T16:34:00.001Z

Rather a fallow week this week.

The New Semester Checklist Gina Barreca

Delightful animation--you can't do this with a Kindle!

Up-date on a 10,000 hour experiment.

What's the difference between a "neat" idea and a "brilliant" one? Or a "weird" one and a "terrible" one? Explore here.

I'm currently working further on rubbishing the notion of reflection. According to research pointed to in my piece on that, "grit" is a more reliable indicator for success as a teacher than any capacity for reflection; here is a TED talk on grit.

Late addition; if you despair about young people and their education, watch this. OK--these young women are exceptional, by definition, but the comment stream is also interesting.

Items to share (7 January)

2012-01-08T00:05:00.000Z

A murmuration of starlings (thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the link)

What Americans (and the rest of us) keep ignoring about Finland's school success by Anu Partanen

Here are Stuart Kauffman's new year thoughts, always worth reading, and actually quoting Gordon Brown with approval (in a tiny way).

1) Not only do you not know what will happen, you don't even know what can happen [...]. Then reason, dream of our Enlightenment, is an insufficient guide to living your life. We need reason, emotion, intuition, sensation, knowledge of our culture and our evolved humanity. 2) Because you do not know what can happen you cannot make normal probability statements about what you cannot know: [...]. (So management from the top as if you knew and could optimize is often deeply wrong). 3) Radical emergence occurs all the time, Turing machine to the Web to Google, Facebook and the Arab Spring.

Lord Sacks (the Chief Rabbi) argues cogently on the Limits of Secularism.

If you want to know how people go about thinking through courses from the bottom up, using experience, theories, coincidences, epiphanies... then read this piece by Paul Maharg on designing a graduate diploma in law. There's at least a term's work in it!

Francis Fukuyama on the virtues of analogue media.

At the nominating session for the American Dialect Society 2011 Word of the Year, Geoff Pullum made "a strong case for his favorite word of the year, assholocracy." (Thanks to Language Log)

An excellent debate on the "flipped classroom" model--the article is just the stimulus, the quality is in the comments (for once!)

...and the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, on the brain, by Bruce Hood, are now on line.

On phasing out feedback.

2012-01-04T15:45:00.002Z

Thanks once again to Bruno Setola for putting me on to this very interesting take on feedback (and I can recommend his site for some interesting further work on TCs).

This is an invited lecture (the whole video is 88 minutes) from Royce Sadler of the Griffith Institute for Higher Education, Griffith University, Brisbane, given for the WriteNow Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, and organised by Liverpool Hope University in May 2010.

At first sight Sadler directly contradicts Hattie's major finding from his meta-analysis--which is in itself interesting enough to make him worth listening to. But there is more to his approach than that, bearing in mind that he is talking about the assessment of complex learning among university students, rather than for example the development of simpler skills among children.

The abstract is here. I am not going to cover the entire lecture, but to give pointers to some of the most interesting parts of the argument below the video:

(The video starts with introductory remarks by Lin Norton and Bart McGettrick. The numbers are the time index from the very start of the video. Numbers in [square brackets] refer to my notes at the end.)

25:45 Sadler argues that feedback is over-rated, and outlines the basic argument.
35:00 Writing feedback on students' assessment tasks is both demanding and time-consuming for the marker, so we are entitled to ask about the return on investment of this activity. Many students don't even pick up their work after marking, still less read the comments, still less learn from them...
37:30 The basic problem is that giving feedback is about telling students what the problems are and how they might improve; we no longer think that the "transmission" model is a good way of teaching content, so why should we think it's a good way of conveying feedback?
44:00 Students are rarely familiar enough with the process of marking/grading work to have any idea what actually constitutes quality--a good piece of work--so often what we tell them means nothing to them and they don't know what to do with it. [1]
52:00 Accomplished practitioners in all disciplines no longer rely on other people giving them feedback based only on externally determined criteria. They know for themselves;

When and how to adjust their provisional plans, as they are going along.
What issues they can ignore; what doesn't matter (and of course what does).
They notice inconsistencies in their own work, and take steps to correct them as they are going along. [2]

58:00 But students do not yet have those skills. So the challenge is how to inculcate them. We have them, based on hours and years of practice in assessing students' work, but that does not mean that we can communicate them.
71:30 Sadler describes one approach to developing students' skills in self-monitoring and -assessment in tutorial:
He gives out a sample piece of submitted work. He asks the students;

Does it address the task as set?
Is it any good? (He refuses to set out the criteria for them. [3])
Why do you say that?
What advice would you give about how to make it better?

I don't think there is a single mention of "reflection" in the entire lecture!

[1] It's not only students. This is a little-mentioned feature of involving less-experienced colleagues, such as postgrads (and here), practice supervisors and mentors in the assessment process. They may be highly- experienced as practitioners, but not as assessors. A course on which I work matches each student with a work-place based mentor, who receives some training and undertakes some direct assessment of teaching, among other duties. But many mentors only work with one student, and often have fallow years with none at all. They will undertake just four formal observations with each student over two years--and those may well be the only occasions they use the observation protocol. The tutors do dozens or scores of observations every year, and develop a common approach to making judgements, but we can never be sure that mentors have had a chance to internalise those standards. No--you can't address the issue with more reams of spurious "guidance"...

[2] Sadler goes on to suggest that waiting to give feedback until after a piece of work has been finally and formally submitted is pointless and counter-productive. The point at which to make suggestions for improvement is when the student still has a chance to implement them. A course on which I teach and which I helped to design many years ago was recently severely criticised in an internal review for permitting "dry runs", when students could submit partially completed assessments in advance for just such feedback. The basis of the criticism was that it conferred an unfair advantage on those students who made use of it. This seems to me to suggest that the reviewers did not have a clue... They had lost sight of the idea that being able to produce a good piece of work on a well-designed assessment task is what we are all working towards; effectively handicapping students by denying them feedback when they can use it is a grodd distortion of the process. (Yes, there is a cap on how many times it can be done...)

[3] He is of course helping them to develop their own frame of reference, and capacity to notice factors germane to the quality of the piece. But I wonder how he learned this bit? I was asked a few years ago to contribute to a staff development event on "Assessment on Taught Master's Courses", a joint enterprise between two universities. I devised an exercise which was almost identical to Sadler's except that the participants were themselves experienced tutors and assessors at Master's level--and it ground to an embarrassing halt when they all claimed they could not judge how good the samples were without the rubrics and criteria to guide them. I felt very remiss for not having provided them, and--even worse--unprofessional, because I know what I am looking for, and the qualities and trade-offs to notice. I suspect now that they felt them same but could not admit it in front of their peers. I feel a little vindicated that Sadler adopts the same approach.

There is something similar underpinning this piece by Gary Klein--in quite a different context!

On celebrating ignorance

2012-01-01T00:21:00.001Z

The perpetual cry of all but the semi-mythical intrinsically-motivated student is, "What do we have to learn this for?" Although I do recognise that it is a legitimate question and do try to answer it, on the whole I don't empathise with it.

(And I don't count, "Because it will be in the exam!" as a legitimate response. On the other hand, I'm sometimes hard put to, to think of anything else in the case of some silly syllabi)

I've built what there is of my distinctive career on encountering and exploring resistance to learning, so why am I extolling not learning?

Because there are some areas in which learning really is just loss. There is no ultimate upside.

A good friend once gave me a small cushion embroidered, "Life is too short to drink bad wine". Perhaps. But only if you know that it is "bad". And as this study shows, despite all the hype and bull, nowadays "it's all a matter of taste" is much more significant than so-called authoritative judgements (as reflected in pricing).

Several years ago, I argued slightly differently: why should I learn more about wine, when all that would achieve would be to make me dissatisfied with what I could afford, and spoil my enjoyment? Now it appears that my dissatisfaction would itself be a con!

I have no doubt that there are some people who can tell the difference which warrants pricing some wines higher than others. But is that the same as claiming that some wine is "better" than another? I do remember about twenty or so years ago when it was possible to buy really execrable wines--a judgement which would be shared by almost everyone. But, like the spurious research on IQ differences between various demographic groups, closer investigation apparently shows that nowadays intra-group variability is greater than that between groups; and that comes down to acknowledging that personal taste is what matters.

So--all I might achieve by studying wine-tasting (given that I have no business interest) is to acquire some spurious basis for deprecating some wine which I would previously have greatly enjoyed. In favour of spending a lot more on other stuff of very dubiously demonstrable superior quality? Seems quite pointless.

Happy New Year, and feel free to enjoy cheap wine!

(in moderation, and qualified by all the weasel words of pusillanimous bureaucracy...)

And here is argument/evidence that the emperor's clothing effect may extend to musical instruments, too...

Items to share (31 December)

2011-12-31T10:43:00.015Z

Welcome to the Age of Overparenting

A varied selection of Christmas music!

Fill Your New Kindle, iPad, iPhone with Free eBooks, Movies, Audio Books, Courses etc.

Tyler Cowen on stories (transcript of TEDx talk) Kind of interesting talk on the limitations of story construction as a way of thinking, but offered with apparently little grounding in the substantial literature apart from Booker, 2005* (which is odd given Cowen's reputation as a voracious reader), so just an introduction. You can watch the video here, but it is out of sync so it is almost unwatchable.

On the less-than-obvious connection between photographs and the real world.

Frozen Planet's brinicle sequence explained Incredible dedication and effort and stunning results; but was it actually worth it? Discuss. (Some of these links are courtesy of Ed Yong's excellent Not Exactly Rocket Science blog. Many thanks!)

The psychologists' vow. For good measure, external examiners also take a vow to express concern over the quality of referencing...

And the inexplicable German New Year tradition of Dinner for One:

* Booker C (2005) The Seven Basic Plots: why we tell stories London; Continuum

On having a hinterland

2011-12-29T21:38:00.003Z

This may be a rather confused post: it is prompted by the season and its religious expression, without being particularly religious in content. It is also full of sweeping generalisations: I've left them like that because to qualify them would make the argument, such as it is, even less coherent than it is already.

On Christmas Eve I went as usual to Midnight Communion at a local (fairly high) Anglican church. I gave up on our actual parish church some time ago, because of its minimalist evangelical one-dimensional logocentrism--there is a point to this, I'm not merely being rude!

The church I attended had sung responses, and anthems from the choir as well as hymns, and rich vestments, and candles and even incense. It offered a multi-layered experience, at whatever level one wanted to take it--artistic, cultural, social or even "spiritual". (I'm not going to refer to "worship"--it is too pre-emptive a term in this context).

Two initial points: First, the evangelical church, with a faith centred on propositional assent to a creed, would not like such a multi-layered experience, to which different participants brought different backgrounds and commitments and from which they also took different things. Such a church prefers to sing in unison, or parallel. Ambiguity is not highly valued.*

It is highly unlikely that the congregation at the church I attended shared an articulated belief system in the same way as their more evangelical brethren*. The multiple layers of meaning are more flexible and tolerant than those which rely so heavily on an intellectual assent to the propositions of a creed.

That, however, poses the question what layers which participants at the service I attended had access to. And of course what significance they would have attributed to what they were witnessing; some might readily see the sumptuous vestments as offensive to the ideal of poverty propagated by Jesus, while for others those vestments may represent an offering of the very best materials and craft skills--anything less would be unworthy of their high purpose. For some, familiar with the ecclesiastical calendar, the colours of those vestments and of the altar-cloths, will be redolent with meaning--but probably completely arbitrary to most of us.

There were quite a few younger people present, and I wondered what they were making of the music, the chant, the solemnity, the symbolism, the arcane and archaic language (e.g. "...a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction,") --and even I had to admit that I didn't really understand a word of the sermon. But they come from a completely different world, or rather worlds.

So much of our ability to understand and feel at home in a culture rests on taken-for-granted understandings and allusions and "common sense" which needs no explanation. But it does need commonality, and I'm beginning to wonder whether that common foundation of shared experience and understanding is being eroded by the speed of change and the personalisation of technology.

(Incidentally, see the latest up-date of "The Visions of Students Today" 2011 remix and the latest versions of Beloit College's "Mindset List")

In all the celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the Authorised Version of the Bible (although everyone now refers to it as the "King James version"), there have been many comments about how much we owe to it for common phrases, and characters. See, for example, here.

...the King James Bible version swept round the globe in school assemblies, far flung churches, remotely stationed battalions ...it was the Book of the community of English speaking peoples. [...]
New words - we use them still: "scapegoat", "let there be light", "the powers that be", "my brother's keeper", "filthy lucre", "fight the good fight", "sick unto death", "flowing with milk and honey", "the apple of his eye", "a man after his own heart", "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak", "signs of the times", "ye of little faith", "eat drink and be merry", "broken hearted", "clear eyed". And hundreds more: "fishermen", "landlady", "sea-shore", "stumbling block", "taskmaster", "two-edged", "viper", "zealous" and even "Jehovah" and "Passover" come into English through Tyndale. "Beautiful", a word which has meant only human beauty, was greatly widened by Tyndale, as were many others. [From here]

How many people now have access to that range of reference and connotation, as the emphasis turns to functionality and clarity and simplicity, even in biblical language?

More broadly, of course, the emphasis in education is firmly on utility and measurable outcomes and "impact"; in relation to higher education there is a defensive debate in which the arts and humanities are increasingly being called upon (or their advocates feel that they are increasingly being called upon) to justify their existence, see for example Matthew Reisz here, Roger Lister here, and--with particular reference to the religious tradition--Eduardo de la Fuente here.

Things have moved on since I started teaching. In the late 'sixties I was appointed to teach "Liberal Studies" in a technical college. The very existence of the subject and its requirement as a part of technical and vocational courses testified to the assumption that cultural, social and even political issues could not be neglected in a modern educational system. As Bailey and Unwin (2008) document, the tide of humanism ebbed in the '70s, and the idea that it was possible for all young people to be liberally educated was eventually abandoned. Certainly I personally gave up on it and moved into more vocational areas--the heirs of Liberal Studies in technical education now are termed "functional skills", which in itself shows how things have changed. But perhaps the mistake was to believe that the desired appreciation of culture and history and society had to come through individuals. As Mary Beard put it just a few days ago at rather a higher level (my emphasis):

The important cultural point is that some people should have read Virgil and Dante. To put it another way, the overall strength of the classics is not to be measured by exactly how many young people know Latin and Greek from high school or university. It is better measured by asking how many believe that there should be people in the world who do know Latin and Greek, how many people think that there is an expertise in that worth taking seriously—and ultimately paying for. [Mary Beard, here]

The cumulative heritage of sensibility (wow! How's that for pomposity?) resides in the community rather than individuals...

But back to the beginning. These are in part my own banal reflections, but in the religious context they are both stimulated and extended by this exemplary piece, beside which I hesitate to place my fatuous musings:
The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible, by Marilynne Robinson. Of which Bryan Appleyard says:

"Hot damn, I thought, I must blog on this. But then I read it again and, well, what more is there to be said? So just read it and weep with gratitude for Marilynne, the New York Times, for the Bible, for all the wonders of the religious imagination and with pity for those poor militant atheists."

Quite...

I covered some of the same points from a different starting point in this earlier post.

* As I write this, I am reminded of precisely this issue emerging from my research for my dissertation in the sociology of religion (Dependence and the Practice of Religion unpublished M.Litt thesis, University of Lancaster 1974) and some of the research which contributed to it (Walker A G and Atherton J S (1971) "An Easter Pentecostal Convention; the successful management of a 'time of blessing'" Sociological Review vol 19 No 3 pp. 367-387)

And here is a different take from a similar starting point, which illuminatesa similar theme... On Going to Church on Christmas Morning December 27, 2011, by Michael Ruse

Reference:
Bailey B and Unwin L (2008) "Fostering ‘habits of reflection, independent study and free inquiry’: an analysis of the short-lived phenomenon of General/Liberal Studies in English vocational education and training" Journal of Vocational Education and Training Vol. 60, No. 1, pp. 61–74

Items to share (24 December)

2011-12-24T10:44:00.012Z

Santa's Christmas Eve Workload, Calculated and of course you can track him.

The Claus Hypothesis: from Piled Higher and Deeper

And of course it's (20-28 December this year) Hanukkah, to be celebrated in Santa Monica according to Tom Lehrer (83). (Thanks to Dr Grumpy for the seasonal reminder.)

Miracles and the Historians. It's Christmas, so this post is apposite (although I don't find it entirely satisfactory) but I've shared it as much because of who it is by; Peter Berger. Yes, that Peter Berger, now 82, author of Invitation to Sociology (1963), a slim volume that probably introduced more people to sociology than any other text, and co-author with Thomas Luckmann of The Social Construction of Reality (1966) --one of the most influential works of sociological theory ever. His blog is invariably worth reading.

There's hope for us yet! Why a Democracy Needs Uninformed People

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science: How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link. Basically a revisitation of cognitive dissonance theory, related to present topics, but worth reading.

The Future of History: Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class? Francis Fukuyama's sweeping analysis (available until 12.2.12).

The uselessness of "security theatre"

Just the information you need to make the season complete: How to Cite Recorded Music in APA Style (+ Playlist) !

Extraordinary, beautiful time-lapse video of Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, Manhattan, Chicago --and wilderness

Items to share (17 December)

2011-12-17T12:30:00.000Z

How to Write a Literature Review for a Dissertation: good practical guidance from Leo Casey

Walking through doorways causes forgetting. The paper does not mention going upstairs, but the model they propose would work for that as well. There's a friendlier version from Scientific American here.

A salutary reflection on how poor research leads to misconceptions in psychology. A comprehensive hatchet-job on a paper supposedly on embodied cognition, but addressing important questions about how research is communicated. A good paper to read for developing a critical perspective on research and its reporting.

Here's another one trying to get a paper published, replicating a now-famous study (Bem, 2011) on predicting the future, but contesting the findings.

How acquiring The Knowledge changes the brains of London cab drivers and see also here

And of course I can't let the week pass without a mention of Christopher Hitchens; there's a compendium of appreciations and memoirs here. And here is his brother's sensitive piece (and I never thought I'd use that word in the context of Peter Hitchens).

On refereeing

2011-12-16T16:07:00.002Z

I'm not sure why I haven't bothered to comment on this before; but I have just received yet another peremptory demand to referee an article for an academic journal. It came via boiler-plate email, demanding a report within 30 days, or that I go to a website to excuse myself...

It creeps up on us. I remember, 30-odd years ago, how flattered I was to be asked to review an article for a journal--and to be paid for it. In 1978, I received £25.00, for reviewing one such article. How things have changed!

Let's be clear. The "request" I received has nothing to do with the journal itself. It is entirely a manipulative bluff on the part of publishers who have cornered the market in journals, with an amazing business model:

The content is provided for free.
Publishers may even demand that authors or their institutions pay for publication, at the rate of hundreds of dollars per page.
The editors work for free
As do the editorial boards
And the referees
And increasingly the journals are not even printed in hard copy
And subscriptions are bundled together so that libraries which want just a few useful ones are compelled to accept a lot of dross as well--and to pay for it. At least they no longer have to find shelf space for it.

He's writing in the context of academic publishing in science, but David Colquhoun has a coruscating expose of the scam here: scroll down to the "Extortionate cost of publishing" sub-head for the most relevant stuff.

Be amazed at how much just one university (UCL) is paying these publishers! And then...
Discover how little most journals are read--in many cases not at all.

George Monbiot made similar points in the Guardian here.

It occurs to me that the situation makes a nonsense of any attempt to incorporate "impact" as a factor in evaluating research within the "Research Excellence Framework" (the notorious new system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions).

I'm really glad I am no longer in the rat-race--going to enormous lengths to produce article no-one will read. My stuff is not peer-reviewed pre-publication (although I get plenty of feedback afterwards) but it reaches a lot more people (more than the median annual usage of the Elsevier journals taken by UCL, every day). But the cartoon minutes of the panel DC attended (brilliant idea, incidentally) sum it up;

Of course there is a radical alternative--it addresses most of the problems, but doesn't actually publish anything...

On the wisdom of the Zuni

2011-12-15T22:25:00.003Z

In her classic Patterns of Culture (1934), Ruth Benedict discusses the "apollonian" culture of the Zuni pueblo native Americans of New Mexico. I was particularly struck by their principle (which I caricature for effect) that the only disqualification for public office is to seek it.

I've just been to the retirement celebration of a former colleague at another university. It was a very pleasant event, and it is really grossly unfair to her, and the respect and affection in which she is held by her colleagues and peers, to concentrate on one aspect of it which grated. Nevertheless...

I refer to the presence and manner of one very senior member of the university (PVC), who came late, after the speeches and the presentation (no, not a PowerPoint) of gifts and tokens of appreciation. I happened to be chatting to my former colleague at the time. The PVC arrived, excused himself perfunctorily, and ~~engaged her in conversation~~ talked to her about Optical Mark Readers, or OMRs, as he referred to them throughout (it took me a while to catch up). It had evidently not occurred to him that someone who is about to leave the university at the end of next week might not be able to care less about how out-dated the OMR software is. Nor that she was missing out on farewells from friends and colleagues who did not want to barge in on her "conversation" with a VIP...

The gentleman in question is clearly a self-serving boorish person. He was however, very skilled at communicating his own appreciation of his talents and meteoric rise to his present rank in a few seconds... "But that's enough about me! Let's talk about me!"

I suspect it was ever thus. The (ideal-type) university, wrapped in mythic collegiality, has been in denial about ambition for ever. Cornford's wonderfully waspish Microcosmographia Academica (1908) testifies to that as well as a string of novels from Cannan and Snow to Lodge and beyond. But as Ginsberg argues, the trend has accelerated over the last twenty or so years, on both sides of the pond.

I was coming to believe that the only effective prophylactic is the Zuni principle.

But I got home to watch "Rev" with the creepy archdeacon protesting "nolo episcopare" a little too much. Sorry, Zuni, the creeps are ahead of you!

But how about a Zuniversity?

Items to Share (10 December)

2011-12-09T21:54:00.001Z

The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters: by Benjamin Ginsberg, reviewed by Alan Ryan in THE. Wonderful sub-title: "A dean is nothing without a deanlet".

Monday’s medical myth: you can’t mix antibiotics with alcohol --just in case you get an infection over the festive season.

The snowclone silly season opens: Geoffrey Pullum makes another attempt to kill the "Eskimo words for snow" cliche.

How Universal Is The Mind? Excellent blog post on a fascinating subject; sails a little close to the Sapir/Whorf notion of language as a determinant of perception, but worth reading alongside Deutscher's take from a linguist's perspective on some parallel issues of perception.

The Evolved Self-Management System : Nicholas Humphrey in the Edge musing on what the placebo effect suggests about releasing human capacities in other directions.

Race And Intelligence: A Wrap from Andrew Sullivan; I don't claim to have read it all, but this is the kind of conversation which only a popular, moderated blog can deliver.

Inland Revenue has a sense of humour? This has been going around via email for quite a long time, but it was new to me: the link is to the original source.

More on the Khan Academy; getting behind the scenes and reporting on how analysts are drawing on their finance backgrounds to evaluate the effectiveness of the programmes.

A secular Sunday School for grown-ups: videos from Alain de Botton's School of Life.

Interesting introduction to the work of Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist who studies morality, as much as possible without preconceptions. I haven't read his latest, The Righteous Mind; why good people are divided by politics and religion, but I did enjoy his 2006 offering The Happiness Hypothesis; putting ancient wisdom and philosophy to the test of modern science (Arrow Books).

Correlation and causation; great graphics.

What's a crash blossom?

On the turning of the learning styles tide

2011-12-08T11:58:00.003Z

I would normally post a link under "Items to share", but this article and its comments is worthy of a post of its own:

Why Is the Research on Learning Styles Still Being Dismissed by Some Learning Leaders and Practitioners? by Guy W. Wallace

The very title is interesting; a few years ago, it would have implied that the "research" was pointing clearly in favour of learning styles--but read the article and you will see that it argues in exactly the opposite direction.

There are one or two unexplained abbreviations:

"ISPI" is International Society for Performance Improvement
~~"ATI" is--at a guess--Analysis of Training Interaction or something similar~~. (9.12.11: David Stone puts me right--it's Aptitude-Treatment Interaction)

New readers start here!

On re-working presentations...

2011-12-04T00:30:00.138Z

I have just been re-working a presentation from a couple of weeks ago to put out on the net as support material for the session I used it for. As usual it has taken much longer than I had intended. Good! The delay has helped me to evaluate some parts of the argument, and modify it sensibly in the light of some of the remarks made in discussion.

I use SlideShare to post presentations to my blogs and web-pages, but it doesn't handle fancy effects well (not that I use many of them, other than building up graphics). So I have to break down many slides into their components, and run them as a sequence...

What I have learned over the years, but never condensed/collapsed until now to the extent that I could post it or teach it (and probably all you readers are way ahead of me on this) is that powerpoint is rubbish at handling arguments and needs to be wrestled into submission.

I've written about this general issue before (here, with links to previous stuff) but not about the epistemology of presentation packages (you can get at Edward Tufte's and others' takes on this via the link above). There's a strictly practical view here.

In short, these packages are about hierarchical knowledge structures. As Tufte points out in relation to the NASA Challenger disaster enquiry, the presentation template allowed for six levels of detail. So the enquiry team followed that default model, and missed the point because it didn't fit--the package did not readily accommodate (the mot juste) impact from bottom to top as much as from top to bottom.

I'm interested in Prezi, as an alternative to powerpoint (I concede the term has achieved default status like "hoover" and "xerox", so the "tm" stuff is pointless) but its zoom structure is still based on hierarchy, and it's not easy to create a pan-and-zoom display which neither induces nausea, nor attracts attention to itself to the detriment of the content. Nevertheless, its general approach of offering a large (pretty well infinite) virtual canvas, which can be examined in greater and greater detail--and then in broader and broader context, so that relations between material are clear--is promising.

C-map tools, which can also be persuaded to work as a presentation package--although the process is not exactly intuitive--is good at presenting connected components of an argument. The nodes are simple labels, but the connections invite labels by default, such as A implies B, or C includes D. However, it is the least flexible package in terms of the incorporation of any other media or external material.

The presentation as part of a system

When I use a presentation in a live lecture, it is of course subordinate to the address itself, which carries the burden of the argument. I may choose to put it on line, or distribute a handout based on it, but it does not stand alone; it is a gloss on a verbal event.

Of course that is why simply making your slides available on the VLE is pretty useless. In most cases they just do not make sense as they stand. The same tends to be true of handouts. We often sort-of acknowledge this, and make the slides ever more verbose and comprehensive so that they will make stand-alone sense--but in so doing we make them less effective as a supporting act for the lecture. We end up reading out verbatim the content of the slides (often facing the screen to do so and thus turning our backs to the class)... Yuch!

Everything in teaching, including syllabi, schemes of work, session plans, presentations, exercises, assessments, evaluations... Everything needs to be considered as part of, and interacting with, the rest of the teaching and learning system. So everything needs to be modified according to its place in the system.

(One of my least pleasant experiences in thirty-five years of teaching in colleges and universities occurred this summer, when, for reasons which are neither fully understood nor relevant, but which were clearly motivated by disproportionate vitriolic animus, a kangaroo court was mounted under the guise of an "internal review" of a course with which I had a long-standing relationship. The part of this which most clearly affected me was the "critique" of the course handbook, which I have edited for fifteen years, and indeed the only outcome of this review process [rant deleted...] was an annotated Word file of the handbook demanding more than two hundred revisions [including, I concede, some useful observations--perhaps five of them.] The supposed justification was variation from the formal quality assurance template. But the handbook is for students. Their concerns are different from QA mavens. [And incidentally, the handbook had been commended by QAA and Ofsted and the external examiners, and even the university's head of quality assurance, as a model of its kind.])

Sorry! But the comprehensible part of the dispute can be attributed in part to the assumption by QA obsessives that everyone needs to be told the same thing in the same way at the same level of detail... An insistence on (too many) absolute (and potentially incompatible) values distorts the system. (The same mistake may lead to the collapse of the euro. I did try warning them in the late '90s, but no-one was listening...)

Back at the important stuff! If I post the material on a blog or SlideShare or the VLE, even with podcast support, the burden of the argument is borne by the visuals. If you have looked at the page where all this started, you will have seen that my solution (for which I make no great claims--I am sure there are better ones), is to include explanatory call-outs on most pages which at least hint at what I said in person at the live event.

Forms of knowledge and media for presentation

As the presentation in question touches on, I'm renewing my interest in the distinction Hudson articulated in 1966, between convergent and divergent thinkers. I've revisited the original account, in which he discusses testing the intelligence of schoolboys (forgive the dated expression):

"Initially I had hoped, [...] that open-ended tests would cut across the arts/science distinction, and give some reflection of boys' brightness; of their level, in other words, rather than their bias. The results were a surprise. Far from cutting across the arts/science distinction, the open-ended tests provided one of my best correlates of it. Most arts specialists, weak at the IQ tests, were much better at the open-ended ones; most scientists were the reverse. Arts specialists are on the whole divergers, physical scientists convergers. Between three and four divergers go into arts subjects like history, English literature and modern languages for every one that goes into physical science. And, vice versa, between three and four convergers do mathematics, physics and chemistry for every one that goes into the arts. As far as one can tell from the samples available, classics belong with physical science, while biology, geography, economics, and general arts courses attract convergers and divergers in roughly equal proportions." (Hudson, 1966: 42. My emphasis.)

It is, I concede, principally on the basis of this (and similar) passage(s) that I argue that convergence and divergence are not primarily attributes of people but of disciplines. The distinction is epistemological rather than psychological (on balance, of course; like all these constructs it's a bit of both. And the issue of match between discipline and learner makes a difference. And I bow to Jim Hamlyn's point about the plethora of categories of knowledge...)

It's not a particularly original step to argue that different disciplines call for different pedagogies, but the proliferation of technologies now poses new questions about what suits what. I got into this in a minor way, years ago, when the options were limited (here). The questions are still more important than the answers. In relation to the session I started this reflection from, you can see the resulting revision and make your own judgement about what I got right and what wrong...

But that is the wrong question...

What did this approach to presentation "privilege" (emphasise) or "deprecate" (play down)?

How did the choice of this medium affect the power-balance in the room?

How would the choice of any other method/medium have covertly affected the expectations/experience of the participants?

How seriously would they nowadays take a presenter who walked in with no notes and just occasionally wrote a keyword or drew on a flip chart--although she could be much more responsive to the group*? **

What difference does it make how handouts are handled (no, there is no universal rule)?

What does the manner of presentation (and of course discussion etc.) say about the presumed status of the material? Is it an object, a tool or a frame?

Enough. Bottom line: Media, methods*** and content all influence and constrain each other in an elaborate dance. You can't (or at least shouldn't) treat any element in isolation. But the conventional theories of pedagogy don't help. Ask the questions, and develop your own answers.

* There's another rub. To what extent do your class members identify with the class group? Does "responding to the group" largely mean going along with the louder members' concerns, regardless of their self-appointed status...

** There'll be more on the bottom-line of this in a different context, in a day or two...

*** This post has been deliberately conservative about "methods", partly because the original stimulus concerned a very conventional seminar presentation, but more because even that was very complex under the surface, and I wanted the post to make at least some semblance of sense.

Items to share (3 December 2011)

2011-12-03T00:10:00.001Z

Are we the teachable species?

How to communicate about risk. From the Freakonomics blog.

"...I think lots of people are beginning to realize that accusing your audience, and depressing your audience, and guilt tripping your audience, and trashing your opponents is not a winning formula."

The re-design of the BBC's weather pages: a great insight into how a serious player on the web goes about re-designing what was already a pretty good site.

"In Our Time" on Judas Maccabeus (podcast download; webpage here.):

"...the most beguiling thing to me was the notion that had not Judaea come together and formed a nucleus of a serious Jewish state, then Judaism would not have thrived in the way it did and led to Christianity and then to Islamism, and the world would be a totally different place. It's one of the great "might not have beens" of history. (Melvyn Bragg's newsletter)

Another spuriously precise and prescriptive model of learning contested.

Kidnapper sues victims who escaped for breach of contract

A useful cloud-based tool for students (or anyone) with sight impairment or reading difficulty.

A step beyond the bland platitudes on "critical thinking".

And a continuing thread on Andrew Sullivan's blog about the "race" and intelligence debate--conducted in, as he puts it, a "surprisingly civil" way. Simply, is the issue too hot to handle? What are the conceptual and epistemological issues involved in formulating it? And what are its possible consequences? None of the answers are simple... (Up-date 6 December--the wrap)

Interesting discussion of the Khan Academy approach and its claims (see this post for earlier references).

On damp kindling

2011-12-02T00:49:00.000Z

I got a Kindle for my birthday.

I didn't buy one for myself for many reasons, chief of which was that it purported to be a solution to a non-existent problem (leaving aside the relatively trivial sustainability argument--clearly it is trivial when Amazon, pleading VAT regulations, can charge more for a virtual edition than for a lovely case-bound hardback).

Granted, I discovered that I could download free sample chapters from some prospective purchases, which may be a step up from bookshop browsing. And there is a substantial back catalogue of free or almost-free texts; most of them could be found on the net, but I have to concede that they are easier to read on the Kindle.

The flicker of a constantly refreshing screen is subliminal, but even so it is there on a monitor, and although the kindle screen has a way to go, it is more comfortable for prolonged reading. Indeed, its font and format options are great for anyone whose sight is at all impaired. The days of the large-print book may well be numbered.

There are nevertheless limitations to the display. The contrast and grey-scale, and apparently limited standard templates, restrict the layout and formatting, not to mention the graphics. Of course, embedded links to colour graphics and even video can be incorporated, just not implemented in this incarnation.

I have just made my first proper purchase.

(Yes, it is legitimate to ask what right I have to pontificate on this on the basis of one purchase. But sometimes it is useful to remember the first time for technical reasons... Oh, get over it :-) )

It is frighteningly, seductively easy. My security system requires me to register specific items of kit with the wifi router via their MAC address; that took less than five minutes from a baseline of total ignorance. And I already had one-click enabled.

So I can find any Kindled item on Amazon, and buy and dowload it to my Kindle with three clicks. They say it takes a minute, but that's pessimistic.

At one level that is brilliant, but I can see myself acquiring a backlog of unread stuff because of momentary impulses. I do that now, of course, but at least I can see the reproachfully growing piles of unread physical books, prompting me to make inroads,

I checked out the hard-copy version of the book I had downloaded, courtesy of Heffers in Cambridge (not that I asked them. But they only had three copies, and none in the front of house displays) I was disappointed by the referencing of the Kindle version, and had wondered whether it was dumbed-down for the digital market. It wasn't--but then it would require more editorial effort to do so than to leave it as it was... and even more to plug it in to the infinite net.

But of course Kindle couldn't have an index, when the pagination is dynamic, could it? Well, yes, with one-click links. And a search function--which has a system of identifying "locations" within a text; I have not yet worked out whether those remain consistent despite formatting changes, and whether they can be shared. A blogger I follow has just posted a link to a key passage in a kindle text, but the link just took me to my own notes page rather than his... this is not yet intuitive practice.

So the annotation/ highlighting/ mark-up facilities are limited and a pain to use at the moment--in the case of the Kindle 4 in large measure because of the clunky virtual keyboard. But they do exist, however rudimentary the form. And since a substantial proportion of users will never use them, and older versions of the kit do include a basic keyboard, and there is at least the opportunity to share annotations, which is a great idea... Amazon is on a good track.

OK, I'm 67, from a receding generation, and I'm hooked on physical books; books do furnish a room after all. I can't see myself adopting Kindle as my default reading format. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I don't read the page in quite the same way as a book. The line length is shorter, by default, and so I don't have to scan as much as I do on a normal printed text. I can skim more easily. That's good for some things and less so for others.

I have not mentioned that the Kindle is not restricted to displaying Amazon material, and the fraught question of online availability is one I shall leave aside here; but it is easy to transfer rich text files so that you can readily have to hand all the documentation for a meeting without a single piece of paper. I very rarely do meetings like that any more, thank goodness, and there are other ways of achieving the same end, but for the moment this is an elegant solution.

Somehow I suspect that just as the afterthought of SMS messaging became the unexpected killer app. of the mobile phone, the e-reader may find its niche far from the novel-reading commuter who is its present target.

Items to share (26 November 2011)

2011-11-26T11:02:00.000Z

Sorry! I've just lost half-a-dozen items. Moral, don't compile stuff like this directly in the Blogger editor!

The unseen academy: Thomas Docherty's take on the compliance agenda driving "real" scholarship underground. Comments well worth reading
Now this might persuade even me to watch a Saturday night competition show.
Why do we have a sense of humour?
Daniel Kahnemann explains the essence of his book on fast and slow thinking. I know he was first with many of the ideas behind the current (understandable) obsession with risk and judgement (see Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Dan Gardner--who is particularly good on Tetlock-- Dan Ariely, even Malcolm Gladwell in 2005) but he's late to the party with a popular account, so I hope it's good.
Barry Schwartz talking about the "paradox of choice" and the possible up-side of economic downturn. I hope his work is more stimulating than Renata Salecl's The Tyranny of Choice (Profile, 2011) which gathers opinions from a formidable range of writers, but very little evidence for anything.
More on the effort vs. talent debate, swinging back towards IQ here.

On staying offline

2011-11-22T23:13:00.000Z

We have our milk delivered. It does cost more than buying from a supermarket, and I suppose I am motivated a little by trying to keep alive an old-fashioned model of service (and more to the point, a service which ensures that a customer is visited at least every other day, and notices if the milk has not been taken in...).

So S. is away for a couple of weeks. I put out the milk bottles, and knowing that I won't use much, I stick a rolled-up piece of paper in the neck of one which says, "No more milk until December, thanks," and includes the house number to save the milk-person from having to remember it. Simples! Elegant! Effective!

I get a call from Patrick*. Come to think of it, when did I give the company my number? I must have started on the slippery slope when I opted to pay by direct debit... He wants me to sign up to place my milk order (and overpriced orange juice and... I shouldn't mock; if I were housebound I'd really value this service) online.

Why? Because then I wouldn't have to leave notes for the milk-person if I wanted to change the order. Use the website up to 9pm the night before, and I can change whatever I like.

But I can leave a note in a milk-bottle up to a second before the delivery, or I can actually speak to a real person if I catch them at the right moment! This is progress?

Oh, I know where the company is coming from. Orders changed on the doorstep make for inefficient loading... and when this is a premium service they need to preserve their edge.

But! It's simple. It's reliable. It has no intermediaries. It requires no more technology than a pen and paper. It even permits a degree of human interaction.

* But all credit to Patrick (that's the name he gave me). When I said "no", he didn't push it; he signed off in a resigned manner. I got the feeling he had got the same message many many times today.

Items to share (19 November 2011)

2011-11-18T21:58:00.000Z

Having lost the "share" button on Google Reader, I'm adopting Jim's suggestion to offer a compilation each week:

HD footage of Earth from the International Space Station: stunning! Thanks to Kottke.org for the link.
Here is a lesson from the Khan Academy on basic physics. If you are in the teaching business, get together with colleagues and discuss and evaluate it...
Fraud Scandal Fuels Debate Over Practices of Social Psychology
Cheating is the new learning.
Citogenesis from xkcd
"The Educational Lottery" on the four kinds of heretics attacking the gospel of education. American, but also goes for the UK; thanks to The Browser for the link.
Humor in the Classroom: Reviewing the Research by Maryellen Weimer in Teaching Professor Blog
Teaching the world to sing--a TED talk about creating a virtual choir (thanks to Mark Berthelemy for the link)
And this about grammatical errors, and in the linked paper, which is indeed a classic, the hypocrisy of the language "mavens" as Pinker calls them. The linked paper is indeed great fun (in a nerdy way), but what is really interesting about this piece is that the topic is a regular concern in the general US higher education press and blogosphere, and very rarely appears over here. We merely bemoan our students' lack of writing skills, and provide individual remedial services; for them, composition is a routine and obligatory freshman requirement...

It's been fun collecting this ("curating" is the in-word)--I think I'll carry on....

On the ceremonial of remembrance

2011-11-13T22:39:00.000Z

(Nothing below is intended to disparage remembrance and respect for the fallen and maimed in any military conflict, including honorable foes.)

I've just been watching this ceremony of remembrance as I always do. (The link will expire a week from posting, and may not work outside the UK). I had my reservations about the show-biz contributions, and I wonder about the (post-Diana?) shift to sentimentality rather than stoicism, but sensibilities and fashion change, even at this level.

It's the context and the communal dimension which confers the genuinely moving nature of this ceremony.

In 2006 I attended the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington D.C. (the video is not mine--it's from YouTube).

I was very disappointed. For all the precision and spit-and-polish and solemnity, it struck me as camp. More mincing than marching.

Then this year I witnessed the parallel ceremony in front of the Presidential Palace in Athens.

Our guide included it, I think, because her son had been a member of the honour guard when he did his obligatory military service. She was clearly very proud. But I'm afraid it reminded me too much of Monty Python...

I'm not saying this to mock. I just found myself speculating about how these peacocks' tails of rituals came about. Perhaps the ultimate example is the pantomime at the India-Pakistan border in Kashmir:

In each case (apart from the Ministry, of course), there seems to be something important and solemn to be commemorated, which confers prestige on those who perform the ritual, and apparently permits its evolution through generations of young men without checks and balances. And of course the significance of the ritual lies simply in the fact that it takes place. While the performance in Kashmir does refer to the rhetoric of contempt, as Michael Palin comments, there is no meaningful symbolism in the presenting of arms or the goose-stepping of the other ceremonies.

Cut loose from meaning, there is merely performance. On the one hand, those who perished deserve better than that. On the other, they too were young men like these--perhaps it is what they would have done--before they did the other things young soldiers do given the chance...

On academic ritual

2011-11-12T22:08:00.000Z

(Post delayed.)

Another two graduation ceremonies, yesterday. I had thought six years ago that one might have been my last, but a year later it was still going strong, and it has done ever since. But circumstances have changed; from three graduands six years ago, the PCE courses now dominate not one but two ceremonies, albeit in a smaller venue. Pity that the non-graduate and the post-graduate students, who have studied in the same rooms and times for two years, were separated arbitrarily by label for the ceremonies, rather than by grouped locations--but it has still been progress. I think.

After all, one of our nominations for the award of an honorary doctorate was accepted! Pity that the ceremony selected had nothing to do with education, and none of the people who nominated him were able to attend, and the audience who heard his address probably had little idea of what he was talking about. To be fair, he did feature as a guest speaker yesterday, for one of the ceremonies, before he jetted off for a conference elsewhere--and his address was as pointed as can be. It's not often that you hear an academic--admittedly claiming Glasgow dialect--using the term "bulls**t" in a formal speech...

And the guest speaker for the evening ceremony may not have had the same credibility for those of us in the PCE community, but he was very accomplished and had his own impressive record.

But... for all the rhetoric about celebrating and valuing achievement, what does it say to our graduating students attending, that in the opening address, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor celebrated at some length the achievements of the Faculty without a single mention of the post-compulsory education sector--from which hailed about 75% of the graduands about to be presented? (To be fair to her, her remarks were scripted by someone else, probably, but that someone should have known better.)

Moreover, every single graduating student present passed across the dais to shake hands with the officiating... officials. Somehow, one would have assumed that after shaking hands and exchanging a few banal phrases with mature students (mean age 35+ and current maximum 68--or was that when you started the course, Maurice?) the platform party would have twigged that these are not callow 21-year-olds taking their first steps into a big scary world? (This stereotype is both unfair and disturbingly accurate.)

However, although our invited guest speaker adopted the ingenious rhetorical device of re-evaluating the advice he had been given at his original graduation in 1964,* and a recognition that the world is changing so fast that any advice for today will he useless tomorrow, the tone inexorably tended towards "wise advice".

Afterwards, my colleagues and I rated the performances (it's what we do!) No, we don't keep a league table... We were pretty scathing that no-one performing on the platform seemed to have given any thought to the context of the event, and that this failure to learn has characterised them for years. They simply dust off last year's remarks (after all very few people other than the academics ever hear them twice) and just possibly update them with reference to the ever-tougher job market (in which your new degree will stand you in good stead) or some other nugget of news which is recognisable of the current year. If I had been one of this cohort of graduates sitting through the ceremony, I should have been pretty insulted to be ignored and treated as a stereotyped 21-year-old...

But it occurs to me that we may have got this entirely wrong.Our speaker did refer to the ritual aspects of academic life--the robes, the processions and the certificates. And both speakers recognised that the status of "graduand", like that of bride, is a very ephemeral one. It is transitional, or indeed liminal. Graduation (like the whole business of going to "uni" for mainstream students) is a rite of passage, the principal object of which is to manage and communicate the change in status, to self and others.

* I didn't believe a word of it. At my graduation the address was given by the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. I have no idea what he said.

On new film library

2011-11-06T16:30:00.001Z

Thanks to the Advances in the History of Psychology blog for publicising this new initiative from the University of Chicago, digitising and making available some classic clips, including Watson's "Little Albert" conditioning experiments from 1920.

Until recently, I should just have added it with one click to my "Shared Items", and a link would automatically have popped up in the side bar, but Google Reader has now dropped that feature (in favour of forcing one to use Google+, which is not the same thing at all. So "Shared Items" will gradually dwindle and I'll have to post directly about stuff which catches my eye.

On a whimsical tale

2011-10-31T19:37:00.000Z

Delightful; worthy of Chesterton! Thanks to Krulwich wonders at the NPR blog.

On referencing--yet again

2011-10-31T15:59:00.000Z

The heading link is to an interesting argument calling for a less obsessional approach to citation and referencing in student work, because it distracts attention from content and style. As might be expected, it generates a lot of comments.

My own take on it has been covered here (and here and here).

On perspectives

2011-10-12T23:53:00.000+01:00

Overheard today: an administrator is showing a new colleague around---

"We call this the HR corridor, because that's where their office is..."

...and two dance studios, a gymnasium, several seminar and music practice rooms, and a dozen or so academics' offices.

But their take on the academy is elegantly explored here.

On coaching and mentoring

2011-09-26T22:51:00.000+01:00

Everything from Atul Gawande is worth reading and learning from, but this is a classic.

On generational transmission

2011-09-23T20:59:00.000+01:00

My son (30), in the pub, after work. He called me. We've been discussing a book I passed on to him. He is not particularly serious:

"I hate this! I'm turning into you! In a few weeks' time, when it gets cold and dark outside, and they light the fire here... [Gestures to the genuine open fire-place beside our seats] I'll think there is nothing better than to come in here after work, and sit in this corner with a pint and a book. And I'll glare 'meaningly' (like Paddington Bear) at anyone who tries to interrupt."

Me:

"Sorry! It's genetic. Don't try to fight it..."

That's my boy!

On a labour of love--what the web can aspire to

2011-09-14T23:17:00.000+01:00

Occasionally I stumble across some site which represents to me the best the web can do. I've got a lot of respect for such sites whenever I find them, but when they are personal efforts, self-funded, and with no axe to grind, I am really impressed. Add in the research behind something such as this, and I am blown away.

At first sight, the history of workhouses and the Poor Laws is not a particularly fun project. Indeed, it isn't, but the history, policy and practice of dealing with the poorest in society has ramifications to the present day. Someone needed to take it on and indeed humanise the dry records, and in this case it was Peter Higginbotham. He's done a fantastic job--I've checked out some locations with which I am familiar, and there are maps and photographs (many taken by him personally) and census records...

What a change from the necessarily generally critical and sceptical tone of my post, to endorse a truly public-spirited and selfless contribution. Thank you.

On marking as a mirror

2011-09-08T01:02:00.000+01:00

I've taken on doing some marking (grading) for another university, for a (postgraduate) course with which I have no other involvement.

I'm fascinated by the difference. Not in the quality of the work I am marking, but in the experience of doing it.

I approach with trepidation the task of marking assessment of stuff I have taught. I have no such concern about this marking, or about reviewing the assessments of courses to which I serve as an external examiner.

Why?

I suspect the difference lies in the extent of the marker's engagement with the project (sorry! I just need a term to refer to the whole business of producing and evaluating some assessable work).

Bottom line: If I taught the module/course/unit/whatever*, when I read the assessment I am looking in a mirror. I am seeing my teaching reflected back at me (with glosses of course from the student's experience).

I am assessing myself.

And if several students have missed the point of, say, behaviourism, but have got the other stuff... That poses a question about how I taught it as much as about how they learned it. I chose the example deliberately; it's not a difficult topic, and although I continually revise the presented material and the exercises etc. the evidence of the assessments has generally been that it has been well understood.

I should have been (I was--to a certain extent) alerted to a problem by one student (a military trainer, for whom behavioural objectives etc. are meat and drink) on this run of the course, who didn't get behavioural theory as an approach to teaching. He used it every day, but I had conspicuously failed to get over its underlying principles; we discussed them in class several times, but I suspect that in practice, instead of clarifying matters for him, our conversations served to confuse them for other class members.

Aside from (or, in this strangely infiltrating usage "absent") the ethical/professional issues raised by this particular example--should I be more lenient in my marking because I realise that this time I did not teach the topic as well as previously? ...

...aside from that, and assuming that the assessment is well designed, this is raw gold-standard evidence of the effectiveness (at least Kirkpatrick 2) of your teaching.

So I approach it with trepidation. My apologies to the 2010 Unit 2 cohort; I clearly pitched some stuff wrong, and did not manage to retrieve it in our subsequent discussions.

Now I'm approaching this other material, solely as an assessor (who is agreed not to be a subject expert).

When I come across an issue in this material it does not point (potentially) backwards in time to my teaching, but forwards to a new area the student might explore. It's not a mirror but a window.Of course, windows are always a little reflective...

* I think it is the standup (interesting label in itself) Michael McIntyre who jokes that practically any adjective can be used as a synonym/euphemism for "drunk". The same might be said of nouns in the context of eduspeak, although I confess I am struggling with epiglottis and ... (this started as a rather silly exercise of finding another noun which had no educational connotations. An hour later, I haven't found one! This may be the basis of a great teaching exercise. Or not. In any event if you follow it up, please tell me/us about it... Or perhaps it is simply evidence of my being moduled if not totally epiglottised?)

On surrogates and assessment

2011-08-25T15:06:00.002+01:00

I'm starting off with two observations about quite different things.

The first is this one from Ben Goldacre's brilliant "Bad Science" blog at the Guardian. His topic concerns a press release about a potential new treatment for Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy.

"...this story is also a reminder that we should always be cautious with "surrogate" outcomes. The biological change measured was important, and good grounds for optimism, because it shows the treatment is doing what it should in the body. But things that work in theory do not always work in practice, and while a measurable biological indicator is a hint something is working, such outcomes can often be misleading."

And later...

"...improvements on surrogate biological outcomes that can be measured in the body are a strong hint that something works – and I hope this new DMD treatment does turn out to be effective – but even in the most well-established surrogate measures, and drugs, these endpoints can turn out to be misleading."

A fairly basic point, of course, but it did set me thinking about how the extent to which we have become obsessed with measurement in many fields, including teaching and learning, had led to increasing reliance on fairly dubious surrogates.

And then I came across this commentary on Standard and Poor's revision of the the US credit rating:

"[Ratings agencies] ..are human enterprises, fallible institutions—and like other institutions, they have procedures, interests, and histories. Their records deserve inspection. In the scientific spirit, in the spirit of show me, they deserve scrutiny."

A credit rating is a complex construct (I presume). Since it is supposed to have predictive value (other than merely being part of a self-fulfilling prophecy), it must be put together from a raft of surrogate measures, presumably of directly observable factors which co-vary with an institutions credit-worthiness. But it is only as good as the choice of those surrogates*.

Which led to some general thoughts in relation to education.

Today is the day when GCSE results are published (the exams taken at age 16 by practically all pupils in the UK). The press stories are predictable, suggesting grade inflation and the exams being dumbed-down. (Or of course if the pass-rates were not an improvement on last year, there would be jeremiads about further decline in educational standards...) The press discussion will not be sophisticated, but it will at least acknowledge what the politicians and the educational establishment will deny, namely that the examinations are not realistic proxies for educational achievement.

This is leaving aside the issue of the tail wagging the dog, of "teaching to the test" without ever asking whether the test is valid or reliable. Beyond that, the logistics and practicalities of mass assessment distort the process, and it has ever been thus. When Liam Hudson (1967) discussed convergent and divergent thinking styles, he noted that convergent thinking was privileged in school at least in part because its testing could be standardised.

But these artificial surrogate assessments are increasingly separating the formal educational system from the "real world", particularly that of communities of practice. This is not an original observation; while I'm on "golden oldies", I'll refer to Becker's wonderful 1972 paper School is a Lousy Place to Learn Anything In, which is based inter alia on a similar argument.

It is out of an awareness of the intrinsic limitations of such surrogacy that a course on teaching with which I have long been involved has attempted to develop a more authentic assessment strategy. Of course, teaching courses have always routinely involved direct observation of teaching, but not everything is amenable to direct observation. The traditional solution on most** other courses has been set assignments; our course moved away from that to negotiated submissions based on a learning contract. Learning outcomes are specified and students decide, in consultation with a tutor, of course, what evidence they will submit to demonstrate that the outcomes have been met. This is a step closer to reality, but of course only insofar as the specified learning outcomes correspond to the real world.

The course has just been internally reviewed for routine reasons, and it is apparent that the bureaucrats hate the assessment scheme. Work is not graded, for example. The scheme is not suited to anonymous submission, because the students are talking about their own practice and work setting (it is an in-service course). Not all work is suited to electronic submission via Turnitin.... the list of complaints goes on.

The real problem is that validity, reliability and fairness--the traditional requirements of an assessment scheme--are now subordinated to standardisation, administrative convenience, and security***.

These are considerations for the legitimation of surrogates and proxies--the same kind of consideration as applies to the regulation of second or third-order derived financial instruments which no longer bear any relation to buying and selling stuff which is any actual use.

* I am not relying entirely on a single blog-post here! See also Dan Gardner's excellent and accessible Future Babble: Why expert predictions fail and why we believe them anyway. (London; Virgin Books, 2011) It's a great corrective to all the doom and gloom surrounding us. Incidentally, he draws a lot on the work of Philip Tetlock, the subject of this interview by Jonah Lehrer in Wired.

** Most but not all, our approach owes much to work at the University of Huddersfield, particularly in the early '90s.

*** Security in the sense of not being vulnerable to plagiarism, although the emphasis on discussion of one's own practice and production of examples and resources means that the approach is fairly protected in any case.

Becker H (1972) “School is a Lousy Place to Learn Anything In” American Behavioral Scientist (1972):85-105, reproduced in R G Burgess (ed.) (1995) Howard Becker on Education Buckingham: OU Press

(Update later today: Many thanks to David Stone, who writes; "I was happy to discover that my institutional subscription gave me access to the original Becker article. Just in case others should be as lucky, here is the DOI link:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/000276427201600109 ")

Hudson L (1967) Contrary Imaginations; a psychological study of the English Schoolboy Harmondsworth: Penguin

On teaching objects, tools, and frames

2011-08-20T19:56:00.001+01:00

This post is prompted by interesting points made by Bruno Setola in a substantial post on his blog Gamification.nu, which is well worth reading (and I'm not just saying that because he makes some kind remarks about my sites). The relevant piece is headed "Levelling Up".

His post is packed with ideas and efforts to synthesise them into an approach to teaching Cross-Media Communication, amongst which he finds Threshold Concepts to be a very useful tool. When I first read his thoughts, though, I thought he hadn't really got the idea; he was emphasising the acquisition of a frame of reference rather than the actual content of the concepts.

However, in the course of the discussion he refers to a keynote at the Third Biennial Threshold Concepts Symposium in Sydney last year, given by David Perkins. Unfortunately I couldn't get to that meeting, but that made me even keener to watch the video, below. (Note that it is almost an hour long, but well worth the time. You might find it helpful to have the .pdf file of the full set of slides open so that you can switch to them, because the camera does not dwell on the screen.)

In essence, Perkins is now talking about threshold experiences rather than concepts, and explores the epistemic shifts which take place as they develop from object to tool to frame. (Hence the shift of emphasis in Bruno's account.)

Selectively, because there's a lot in the address, my attention was drawn to Perkins' thoughts about what is involved in managing these shifts and teaching material to serve as a tool rather than an object. (For more detail on the content of the tables, do watch the video; these notes are only about the gist of some parts which strike me on the basis of current interests.)

I was reminded of a couple of pretty poor classes I've observed this year, commented on here and here. In both cases the problem was not really with the actual teaching, but with the syllabus, and the way in which it treats each item of learning as a gobbet of what Perkins elsewhere calls "inert knowledge". Each item was to be stored in the students' brains, to be taken out and shown when called for, but there was no sense of doing anything with it. The academic level Perkins was talking about was higher than the classes I had observed, but he discussed how using the approaches in the left hand column of the table below tend to promote learning of material as a set of concepts, rather than tools to work with.

Object role	Tool role
Key features, 'toy' applications	Fully developed applications
Rival academic concepts	Rival tacit operative concepts
Comparison and critique	Select among several and apply

(Do not be tempted, incidentally, to see "Object" as merely equivalent to the lower levels of Bloom in the cognitive domain, and "Tool" as signifying applying the material. It is possible to teach at a very advanced level, still working with objects--and indeed as Perkins notes, that is often entirely appropriate, when the material is a "destination" rather than a "route"*, an end in itself or object of scholarship rather than something which earns its keep by serving as a tool.)

Tool role	Frame role
Several concepts	One concept
Somewhat closed problems	Somewhat open problems
Abundant time	Low-stress real time
Solo or large group	Small group, rapid turns

Tools have specific tasks, and need to be selected appropriately, and although they may become "extensions of the body" in practical tasks, they are nevertheless also objects which can be studied and refined (Setola discusses the "extensions" point in his post).

The third way in which ideas/knowledge/concepts etc. may be used is as a frame. A frame is an idea through which one sees stuff; a tool is an idea with which one works; an object is an idea one knows about. The critical difference is that by default a frame is part of oneself. It is not experienced as something other; indeed it may be very difficult to step outside one's habitual way of seeing things and take "my habitual way of seeing things" as an object of study.

Frames are what reveal the "inner game" of topics of study, for better or for worse, as Perkins (2009: ch.5) discusses. It needs to be emphasised that frames are not "superior" forms of knowledge (or skill, or values) to tools or objects. As Perkins' use of the term "role" suggests, it is a matter of what job you want this knowledge to do, and so how you teach it.

Bruno's concern is principally about how these transitions might be managed and "taught". Scaffolding, for example, with its implications of incremental development, no longer works when one reaches a discontinuity, such as this kind of epistemic shift between object, tool, and frame.

In short, I'm not sure it can reliably be managed. That is the nature of a threshold experience--the liminality, uncertainty, and indeed risk (although I don't want to over-dramatise) of how experience is re-organised by a new idea.

On the other hand, does it need to be managed? Does trying to manage it make it more likely to happen? Or is it wasted effort? But that's a question which might actually succumb to ingenious empirical research...

I'm reminded of Gestalt shifts in perception. But also of Ramsey (1967). I remember, almost 45 years ago, listening to Ian Ramsey delivering a guest lecture at Sussex on religious language--he must have been speaking about work in progress, because this was before 1967. He spoke about parallelisms in the psalms (I'm not going to digress that far) and the analogy of the polygon and the circle. Start with the simplest regular polygon--an equilateral triangle. Add a side = a square. Go on and on and the figure gets more and more circular, until at some point it is indistinguishable from a circle, and so it is a circle***.

And I hazily remember some basic physics from even longer ago! I seem to remember that phase transitions (such as ice melting, or water boiling) require an energy premium (not the correct phrase, I know)... A catalyst may help, chemically, but the basic transition is the product of "more of the same". It's just that in teaching, the "more of the same" needs to be about the epistemic status one is aiming at, not that which one is emerging from.

These properties are emergent...

This kind of thinking underpins Perkins (2009), where he is concerned about developing appropriate approaches to teaching to promote learning for understanding. (It's a term he is quite comfortable with, and discusses at some length on p.48 ff.)

The book is to a certain extent a reflection on his experience of learning to play baseball as a child; he found it easy, he argues, because he was exposed to the whole game. He practiced the components, of course, but he knew where they all fitted in and he saw them in context.

In formal education, on the other hand, there is in many cases no overall introduction to the whole game of a subject or discipline. Instead, each element of the knowledge base and skill set is likely to be introduced separately, and in isolation. Clearly this inhibits understanding of how it fits together; he calls this unfortunate curriculum strategy "elementitis".

And even if the whole is introduced, it is often discussed at a distance. In baseball (or other sport, or music, or language learning) newcomers get to play, from very early on. In education, the subject is described rather than participated in; he calls this aboutitis. (Perkins does address the question how the "whole game" can be introduced when it is enormous--such as mathematics, or science. He argues that just as baseball is introduced through a simplified form--simpler even than Little League--it is possible to develop an appropriate "junior" form of the game which students, of whatever age, can grasp.)

Back to practice. The sessions I observed were--inappropriately--focused on learning objects rather than tools, still less frames. But that was what the syllabus required. The mechanistic fragmentation of the whole into learning units and outcomes and assessment criteria effectively precluded any other approach. Moreover, the "whole game" was almost inconceivable. As the Wolf report suggests--although one could have wished for more detail--the arbitrary assemblage of "competences" into courses, does not make for coherent and teachable programmes.

I may be critical of my students' application and implementation of their learning, but seen through this frame (or "lens" as Brookfield puts it) it is not clear how they can get better. Bottom line: if you are forced to teach a whole which does not make sense, the parts can't make sense either.

So that is what I did on my holidays.

7/10. You need to get out more.
Teacher

Notes/Asides

I agreed with practically all of Perkins' book. I also found it highly readable, in part because does not let his references interrupt his flow--the evidence is there, but it is in the very accessible notes at the end.
Indeed, I recognise much of his approach in mine, although he is more rigorous than me on "working on the hard parts" (ch.3), which is my failing. I would promise to do better next time, but at my age, there may not be a next time!
His chapter on the "inner game" is a classic (ch.5), particularly on the hidden curriculum embodied in the physical and logistical elements of the classroom**.
I'm being presumptuous here, but he does divide the basic idea, of concentrating on the whole, into seven principles, each of which has several aspects, each of which can in turn generate several strategies or exercises... Of course, if you approach the material as a tool-kit or even a frame, that's good. But, although I say it myself, I'm very good at that. I try to employ it all the time, but I did find I could not sustain the necessary frame all the way through the book. Perodically, I did lapse into thinking, "Do I have to learn all these particular techniques?" (Object orientation)
P. writes in a US context. Syllabi in the UK (particularly in vocational, professional and further education), are much more prescribed and regulated. Frequently very badly. With very little understanding on the part of awarding and validating bodies about what it is like to study on their programmes. (See here on who writes syllabi, if you've not been there already.

* my terms rather than Perkins'.

** This excerpt concerns the explication or deconstruction of the chair desk (chair with flap-over writing surface) based on Luttrell (2004) (full source on Perkins p.238; author referred to here as "Wendy")

A chair and a desk are fused into the same convenient unit, the desk component a rather small platform upon which the student can rest a book or a notepad. Books usually can be stored under the seat. Wendy provokes people to realize that this very ordinary instrument of education embodies numerous tacit assumptions and expectations that deserve a second thought. [...]

[...][T]he conventional chair-desk favors right-handed students; the writing platform is almost always to the right. The working surface is not very large, so apparently students are not expected to coordinate multiple sources of written information or develop complex representations. Also, the chair-desk gets in the way of students forming working circles and deprives them of common desk space, as when five or six pupils sit around a table. Learners work alone! Normally chair-desks come in one size for a classroom. One-size-fits-all!

And there is more...

*** (Update 29 August) I now discover that this idea originates from Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). See here for a brief but more detailed exposition than mine, and a discussion of how he attempts to use it as a proof of the existence of God, but the writer claims eventually proves exactly the opposite.

References

Perkins D N (2009) Making Learning Whole; how seven principles of teaching can transform education San Francisco; Jossey-Bass

Ramsey I T (1967) Religious Language London: Macmillan

On the impossibility of philosophical progress

2011-08-11T12:17:00.002+01:00

The link is to an enjoyable, accessible and iconoclastic article by Eric Dietrich, entitled "There is no Progress in Philosophy". (The first four sections are the most entertaining; the remainder is more technical, but still not particularly hard going.) From the Abstract:

Except for a patina of twenty-first century modernity, in the form of logic and language, philosophy is exactly the same now as it ever was; it has made no progress whatsoever. We philosophers wrestle with the exact same problems the Pre-Socratics wrestled with. Even more outrageous than this claim, though, is the blatant denial of its obvious truth by many practicing philosophers. [...] The final section offers an explanation for philosophy’s inability to solve any philosophical problem, ever. The paper closes with some reflections on philosophy’s future.

This is in contrast, of course, to the achievements of science.

If you accept the argument (which I think I do with some reservations), it is interesting to speculate whether the same can be said of the rest of the humanities, albeit in a weaker form. It is fair to argue that no progress has been made in the study of literature, for example, partly on the contingent basis that determining what constitutes "progress" in such a field is a philosophical question. Of course the stock of literature is ever-increasing, so we may have quantitative growth if not qualitative. I take it that the sterile deviation of "theory" (now apparently in retreat) is evidence that attempts at "progress" can only achieve the feat of disappearing up the proponents' own nether regions. A similar argument applies to the study of history (but again not to the creation of history)... As Alan Ryan observes in today's Times Higher Education (a propos of a nanced discussion of the relationship between teaching and research):

The corpus of available Greek literature that has escaped the ravages of time is finite and scholars have just about all of it under their belts. Interpretations of that finite corpus are another matter; they are, if not infinite, certainly indefinitely many. Nor is there any particular technique likely to yield insights that will be definitive, irresistible, part of a cumulative project of explaining everything there is to explain about Greek literature. Physicists may fantasise about finally reaching the "theory of everything", but it is unimaginable that anyone will produce the definitive way to read Aeschylus.

This is of course not good news for the practitioners of the humanities, which are under threat in the academy yet again. But are these disciplines about "making progress"? Or are they the stuff of Oakeshott's "conversation across the ages" (quoted here by Mike Love)?

As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries.

But like all conversations (including the arguments of philosophers which are Dietrich's starting point):

"In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no 'truth' to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing. [...] It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another."

And that is a delight. But does it make sense to try and "professionalise" it? And what are the implications for higher education of accepting such an argument--namely, that the humanities are not "subjects" in the same way as other subjects which do make progress?

(The original liberal arts, in the trivium and quadrivium, for example, are more focused than the usage adopted today in the US traditional liberal arts college; one might argue that only philosophy got a look in, under the heading of "logic" or "dialectic". So the historical argument for their centrality to the curriculum, weak as it already is, doesn't wash. And the study of English Literature is positively new--the University of Cambridge only appointed its first endowed chair in this dubious area of study in 1911, although interestingly there was a chair at the University of Glasgow from 1862.)

There is of course a recurrent debate in educational circles about knowledge and skills--which I am not going to reference because of its ubiquity. It's not merely a matter of liberal arts versus practical and vocational arts, lively though that discussion is. It is about how one goes about cultivating the higher reaches of critical understanding. Is it a matter of cultivating the skills of critical thinking first, with the knowledge base as an underpinning resource? Or is it a matter of transmitting the knowledge base, so that students are equipped to make judgements on the basis of real knowledge--and trusting that the skills will emerge?

False dichotomy of course. Both-and rather than either/or. But Bloom implies that the way to the skills is through the knowledge. And if the point of the knowledge is ultimately that the skills of creative thinking are engendered ("Creating" is the highest stage in the Krathwohl and Anderson revision of the Cognitive Domain) then it may not matter that the knowledge base itself is not going anywhere at a scholarly or cultural level. It is going somewhere for a particular learner.

And--just possibly--there may be something to learn from its substance regarded substantively rather than instrumentally, for its own sake rather than in the service of some other objective.

Jim Hamlyn touches on some associated questions here.(Although as I have revised this post, we may have diverged.)

Reference
Oakeshott, M. (1962) "The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind," Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London: Methuen, 197-247.

The original pointer to the Dietrich essay was from the Browser. Many thanks.

On evidence-based study tips

2011-08-10T11:16:00.000+01:00

I don't often simply post a link on this blog, but this is a digest from the British Psychological Society of study tips with links to sources--very useful, in preparation for a new academic year.

On hostages to fortune

2011-08-04T01:47:00.000+01:00

I'm quite pleased with myself. It appears that after forty or so years in the further and higher education system, I am still naif. (The masculine--if connotationally effete--form of "naive". Not the same as "naff", although that may also apply...)

How do I know? Some time I may tell the tale of the great Course Review (but, like that of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, the world is not yet ready). But my bit of the fallout is to revise the Course Handbook. There are two hundred or so revisions required.

Since many of them are uncontentious technicalities such as updating the names of committees to this year's fashion, why can't the administrators--who know the answers--just correct them, instead of telling academics they are wrong and they need to look up the latest regulations?
It's not surprsing the committee wants changes. The course has now been running for fifteen years, and we have amended the handbook every year to accommodate its growth and perpetual updating. It was last formally reviewed in 2007, with no comments on the handbook or regulations. Because no-one read them. For years I've been slipping in asides and jokes and odd footnotes--and I admit many of them have been self-indulgent and even confusing for students who don't share my odd sense of humour. No-one has noticed because no-one has read it. (Tip for authors of this stuff. Plant an "easter egg" in the middle of the verbiage, and see whether anyone finds it. More.)

But beyond the legitimate stuff (and of course there is some) and other issues which are primarily attributable to the culpable negligence of a succession of dubiously competent "senior" staff ...

...my principal concern is the number of occasions on which I have been peremptorily instructed to insert the standard university material, rather than what we developed for ourselves to suit our course in the light of our experience. Invariably (and I do know what that means, and I use the term advisedly) the standard bumf is a qualified, weasel-worded, diluted fudge of our undertakings.

(One exception! Although I may argue with the approach and style of the Library's guide to citation [it's prescriptive without sufficient attention to the underlying pricniples], it is both compact and comprehensive, and I have happily replaced our own amateur guidance with it.)

In particular, we have been instructed not to refer to an independent support website (because it "might confuse the students")

Critical remarks about items on the reading lists are not allowed: but all the texts are curate's eggs, we know (including mine) And we can't refer to a "curate's egg" or latin abbreviations such as "q.v." or "inter al." because they too might confuse the students!

This is a deeply patronising and downright insulting approach to mature students.

If it is naif to believe that, then so be it.

On welcoming change

2011-07-25T16:23:00.000+01:00

The link is to a piece by Steven Levitt at the Freakonomics blog.

He's just learned a new approach to putting (in golf). That kind of change is often resisted, as I explored here. Levitt does acknowledge a minor downside, but no sensation of loss, even after, by his own admission, he has been barking up the wrong tree for the putting proportion of 5,000 hours of golf.

Is it a matter of mind-set? And is sport an activity which promotes an incremental mind-set?

On being condemned to expertise

2011-07-21T20:25:00.000+01:00

I've just been reading Matthew Syed's excellent Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice (2011, Fourth Estate*). I'm not a great sport fan, or music or chess buff, and those are the fields he discusses most, but he has an entertaining approach to Ericsson, and Dweck and other usual suspects.

I may be perverse but I do wonder about the opportunity cost of acquiring such expertise. In other words, what is the trade-off between what these people could have done with their childhood and adolescence, and what they ended up doing with it? I'm sure that they learned a great deal about perseverance and commitment and mind-set; but... Often it wasn't their idea--the Williams sisters and Tiger Woods and many more had to forgo many "normal" experiences of growing up because they were too busy and too focused--and it was not nexessarily their vision which drove them. See the controversy provoked by Chua's (2011) Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother London; Bloomsbury.

See also this post and its links

* I'm not signed up to Adsense or any other scheme, and I have decided not to link to Amazon any more. If you want it you can find it--preferably at an independent local, physical bookshop. I'm prompted to this by a belated epiphany. I had occasion to go to Ampthill yesterday and came across Horatio's bookshop (and artist's materials purveyor...). Quirky and independent--and I'm sure endangered (although according to the website it started in 2009). And what about Topping's in Bath and Ely? Or even grumpy County Town Books in Bedford... Use them or lose them! Yes, they're not as cheap, but buying the book is only a small part of your investment in it--consider how long you spend reading it.

On learning in a technological age

2011-07-17T19:59:00.003+01:00

No, this is not about the use of technology to enhance learning and teaching--it's a different angle.

Nicholas Carr's (2011) The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember (London: Atlantic Books) is a well-written popular account of what it says in the title. Naturally it is selective and tends to assume its conclusions from the outset, but its fair.

There have been a couple of substantial blog posts this week, too, exploring similar issues;

from Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science on "The extended mind – how Google affects our memories" and
from The Neurocritic on "The Google Stroop Effect?" (read it to find out what a stroop effect is!)

The Yong article seems to have been the source for a number of shorter pieces in the serious newspapers.

The very basic underlying argument is a variation on Dr Johnson (1775);

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

Broadly it suggests that since the net (or Google as its metonym) has made it so easy to know where to find out, it has made it unnecessary to hold the information ourselves. There is a further argument that just as Socrates argued against writing in the Phaedrus (274e-275b);

...writing is inferior to speech. For it is like a picture, which can give no answer to a question, and has only a deceitful likeness of a living creature. It has no power of adaptation, but uses the same words for all. It is not a legitimate son of knowledge, but a bastard, and when an attack is made upon this bastard neither parent nor any one else is there to defend it. The husbandman will not seriously incline to sow his seed in such a hot–bed or garden of Adonis; he will rather sow in the natural soil of the human soul which has depth of earth; and he will anticipate the inner growth of the mind, by writing only, if at all, as a remedy against old age. The natural process will be far nobler, and will bring forth fruit in the minds of others as well as in his own.

...so the adoption of technological extensions to human capabilities ultimately undermine those abilities. Calculators replace the ability to do mental arithmetic, for example. It's an old argument.*

And to a certain, nuanced, extent it is true. As it has been through the ages. The introductions of writing, of printing, of local printing, etc. have all had their impact. They have changed what it means to "learn". ~~The challenge for education...~~ Sorry! Scrub that cliche! So how have they changed what it means to "teach"?

(I recividistically** and opportunistically try to weave too many themes into a post, but this is about "reflection" and this does reflect how I think, for better or for worse...)

My colleagues and I have just been subject to a (insert derogatory adjective of your choice but don't forget nugatory) review of a course. One perfectly proper and reasonable question focused on the assessment strategy. "Why don't you use a wider variety of assessments? Quizzes? Timed tests?..." etc.

We didn't answer in these terms, but it did occur to me that the choice of assessment is an epistemological issue. What kind of knowledge/skill/value do you think you are testing? And on this kind of professional course, sheer memorization as assessed by a multiple choice test does not matter very much.***

It's a matter calling for thoughtful consideration, not knee-jerk answers.

[Although the other book I've just been reading--which poses similar questions from a very different angle--is Matthew Syed's (2011) Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice London; Fourth Estate, which touches on similar material to that I've discussed earlier.

What I don't see in much of the popular literature--and the textbooks, indeed--is much recognition of how fundamentally different the learning issues are in different disciplines and contexts.]

* ...and of course my discovery of these links and references relied heavily on the availability of the linked material online.

** I'm not sure if this is a "proper" word (it only gets three hits on google, at the time of writing, in the adverbial form) but I commend it as "in the manner of a repeat offender".

*** which is not to say it doesn't matter a great deal on other professional courses, such as medically or perhaps legally-based programmes, where there is indeed a body of knowledge to be acquired for instant access--"there's a fracture of the thingy-bone and a puncture of the whatsit-artery. Sorry! On the tip of my tongue! I'll just go and look them up..."

and--great minds think alike corner--here is another piece.

On insight

2011-07-08T14:09:00.002+01:00

The link is to an excellent article from Edge magazine. It's a conversation with Gary Klein on the nature of intuition and the decision-making of experts.

Judgments based on intuition seem mysterious because intuition doesn't involve explicit knowledge. It doesn't involve declarative knowledge about facts. Therefore, we can't explicitly trace the origins of our intuitive judgments. They come from other parts of our knowing. They come from our tacit knowledge and so they feel magical. Intuitions sometimes feel like we have ESP, but it isn't magical, it's really a consequence of the experience we've built up.

There's enough material here for an entire course
In particular, it poses interesting questions about the much-vaunted notion of reflection.
Because it is an interview piece (although we only get Klein's contribution) it is very accessible. It's even exciting in parts!

(It's also available as a video on this page.)

On---I'm exasperated about silly arguments!

2011-07-07T20:20:00.000+01:00

This one is about pedagogy vs. andragogy. If you need primary sources; See here and here.

I have been teaching for forty+ years (whether my students have been learning for the same period is of course contestable).

I have never yet encountered any exclusively behavioural learning (even with our wonderful Westies) or "cognitive" or "humanistic" or any other label.

And as for pedagogy versus andragogy... It's a spurious distinction whose primary achievement was to raise the profile of Malcolm Knowles. But read his piece here. Is that about treating people as grown-ups?

What these theorists never (OK! rarely) discuss is what is being learned. You want to learn a foreign language? At some point you are going to have to memorise a lot of vocabulary. You want to throw pots or improve your tennis? You need to practise, and there are people who can do it much better than you and you would be stupid to ignore their advice. You want to study political philosophy (OK, this is the most difficult)? Most people, of course, don't study it. They go straight to teaching it in the saloon bar... But...

And that is to say nothing about STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths), where it is self-evident that there is an enormous (and growing) body of knowledge into which you must be inducted before you can make any contribution.

As I complain here, andragogy is not an approach to teaching--it's a brand. And one which gets in the way of making appropriate decisions about how to teach a particular subject/topic/skills to a particular group of learners.

On angels, pinheads and APA

2011-07-01T21:14:00.002+01:00

I've been here before, and here. And I'm marking again, so the old referencing bug-bears come out of hibernation.

The obsessional scholasticism of the "style" manuals fascinates me, and this post from the APA blog apparently takes the biscuit. Read it before continuing.

What really irritates me is of course that it privileges a US convention, that colons are followed by capitals: that is not the British style. But the convention imposes an arbitrary divide: it's no longer a matter of style, taste and preference, but of right/wrong, good/bad. (Which may translate into assessment grades and even immediate career prospects.) [Check out the arguable solecisms of this paragraph.]

There are several standards in play here. I hold to my opinion that we should not get our knickers in a twist about material up to Master's level. (Including such colloquial phrases).

That is what we might call domestic level citation. It's a matter between student and tutor/supervisor. Its test is whether the t/s can trace evidence back to source. In the fairly rare event that an assessor does such a trace, it will be done manually; with considerable tolerance of punctuation, case, and formatting. All my complaints about obsessional and pedantic compliance requirements stand, up to this point.

But I'm reluctantly changing my mind beyond that point.

I don't use EndNote or any other citation management software: I don't understand what most of its fields mean, and the prospect of importing a lifetime's references is unattractive in any case. And I don't need it. But I can see why many people do need something like it. Preparing literature reviews or surveys for publication is made so much easier; such tasks go beyond the domestic level and call for industrial strength solutions. And once data has to be "normalised" (made consistent) for use in a database, such arcane minutiae as the place of a colon matter. The question of whether the colon is followed by an upper-case letter could determine whether the whole title is treated as one field, or as two--title and sub-title.

Such is the stupidity of machines that we have to do their bidding.

Incidentally, in one of those earlier posts I noted that Jude Carroll;

"...went so far as to say that this obsession with "correct" referencing was a phenomenon of the last ten years, and implied that it was symptomatic of a crisis of confidence on the part of academics in their own authority in a post-modern world."

But perhaps that is in itself a humanistic perspective, and the same time-scale could be accounted for by the rise of the machines?

But the Oxford comma? (And here.) I don't think there is any excuse for getting worked up over that.

On classic sociology; they don't write them like this any more

2011-06-28T22:47:00.000+01:00

I'm reading Becker et al. (1961) The Boys in White; student culture in medical school. It's the first time I've actually read it. I have of course raided it before, searching the index for a gobbet of material to use for a particular purpose, but I've never had the time to get into it. It is after all over 450 pages, and even now I am not reading from beginning to end.

At one level I am disappointed--I got it out of the library in order to raid it yet again, for a blog post yet to appear on professional socialization as the hidden curriculum, in the light of a recent study of how medical students' empathy declines through medical school--and I couldn't find what I expected to find. But then... I began to read more leisurely, taking the book on its own terms rather than imposing my own imperious demands on it, and I rediscovered a lost genre.

From the Lynds' Middletown studies (1929 on) to Becker and co.'s own Making the Grade (1968) there is a whole seam of big, sprawling, accessible and humane case studies*, more like current anthropology than sociology, which may be theoretically "naive" to current researchers for whom fieldwork is a (not entirely) necessary obstacle on the shortest possible path between idea and rateable article for the REF score... **

I have no idea how these people pitched for the funding to do the research, but it certainly wasn't by predicting what they would find out before they started looking for it, as current researchers have to do writing their bids. They did "grounded theory" before Glaser and Strauss invented it (I suppose it could be argued that it only had to be formulated as a "theory" because it was then becoming necessary to legitimise proposals with a "theoretical", even "scientific" base).

But these works are rich. They are full of--often unnecessary, by current standards--transcribed interviews, and observational anecdotes. Some of the subjects become old friends--oh, here's Jackson again! Wasn't he complaining about not being able to see the actual surgery on his obs/gyn rotation?

What's happened? Partly this kind of common-sensical description has been taken over by a generation of academics scrabbling to be more "scientific" (or more likely more "post-modern" aka incomprehensible) than thou. Partly it has drifted into the realms of reportage: the rise of popular non-fiction has probably lowered the stock of accessible scholarly writing.

It's all moot. But we'll all be the poorer if it disappears in any form; and there was a lot to be said for academic rigour and a concern for balance.

* I'm sure someone will argue with these arbitrary chronological boundaries; I concede in advance that I can't be bothered to research the field properly. It's potentially a whole academic career...

** I'm referring to US studies, but the UK tradition is not to be sneezed at, see for an intro (if you can find it) Frankenberg R (1967) Communities in Britain London; Penguin. And belated thanks to Frankenberg for accepting my first (actually, only) respectable sociological article in 1971 when he edited the Sociological Review.

On learning by naming

2011-06-17T17:24:00.000+01:00

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.

Reed, Henry. "Naming of Parts." New Statesman and Nation 24, no. 598 (8 August 1942)

(Do read the rest of this very funny, but also cutting and sometimes beautiful, long poem about the absurdity of war, from the link above.)

I was reminded of this as I drove back from another teaching observation this morning, (the same circumstances as this earlier one). I'm happy to report that the student is making good progress, but she is still stuck with another hopeless course. The Wolf Report on vocational qualifications makes no bones that the quality of many of those qualifications is dubious, they are not fit for purpose, and effectively deceive young people into believing that they are going to lead somewhere. What I observed this morning clearly met those criteria. It was a Level 3 National Diploma in "Sports Development and Football"--a spurious concoction of a curriculum, even by vocational education standards, clearly not well understood by students or even the tutor. (To be fair, I must concede that today's lesson on planning activity sessions for children did have some practical merit--despite being enirely classroom-based.)

Its recurrent theme was matching up all activities with "the" four Benefits of Exercise. Not three, not five, not twenty-two, but four. It appeared that these were so doctrinally significant that they had to be taught dogmatically; they could not be discussed and discovered. And then they had to be written down and incorporated into the (written) assignment. (Without attribution--despite this being Level 3, which is just one level below first-year undergraduate level, the question, "Who says?" was never raised. No wonder freshers are thrown by their university experience...)

And there was no Japonica in a garden outside, but it came to me as I drove back that I had sat in on a session about naming of parts. At this level, it appears (on the basis of the previous observation and class discussions) that most of the learning is about attaching an approved label to a concept or experience. Rather like the magical belief in the potency of naming as a means of gaining power over an object, the assumption is that to name is to know, and that is all that is needful.

At least in Reed's case, the naming was clear labelling of concrete objects, even if one of them "you have not got"...

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

On frameworks

2011-06-15T22:33:00.000+01:00

I'm sure the stats facilities of Blogger could tell me how many people have dropped by this blog, once, and then moved on. I do it all the time, dipping into blogs via RSS feeds. The really interesting ones I subscribe to, but I have to admit that many of them (principally those thrown up by my "teaching+learning+college+practice+teach+reflect" search string) are full of pious jargon-ridden bulls**t. Usually immaculately referenced.

Occasionally I come across sites like this one, or Don Clark's. I'm impressed by the amount of study and thought and experimentation which have gone into Don's ADDIE model. I wish I could be as systematic and organised. I wish I could bring together such an eclectic range of reading as does the author of the other linked site (although it does feel like a required assignment).

A while ago, I was trying to put something together on planning for teaching, and I made some effort to research the topic. Every textbook has something to say about it, and indeed the first pages I wrote for my main site were about how to do it. (You can see it is ancient--I still believed in "learning styles" then!)

In higher education, the most popular approach seems to be Biggs' "constructive alignment" (and here). But see David Jones' blog for a dissenting view-- I'm in awe of his scholarship, too. I'm just not convinced by any of them.

I don't believe anyone actually works like this; that they proceed step by step through a planning checklist or algorithm and eventually end up with a lesson plane or scheme of work of impeccable provenance which they actually implement (other than when they are being observed for assessment or inspection purposes, of course).

If I try to do that, I come up with something which is deeply boring and/or superficial, and I find myself back-tracking to change earlier stages in order to come up with something I can actually see myself teaching.
Which is a little embarrassing, because I teach this stuff!

And that's another problem, because students keep pressing me for a clear planning procedure.

So I was relieved to come across this (sort of) confession by Dan Ariely. It's not about teaching as such (but it is about how he teaches a subject in response to those demands), it's about marketing, but there are similarities of simplistic prescriptions;

Ariely's full blog posts with comments is here.

(Er--just don't tell my poor students who have to jump through these irrelevant hoops, particularly as they are submitting their final assessments! Although, to be fair, some of the simpler stuff can be justified on the basis of scaffolding, at the start of a career.)

On "Toy Stories"

2011-06-15T00:40:00.001+01:00

Simply the most entertaining hour of TV for (in my limited experience) years. It does take an hour to watch, it's unashamedly "boys' toys", and probably inaccessible outside the UK, but enjoy!

On academic inhibition

2011-06-11T15:43:00.000+01:00

A few days ago I wrote quite a long post about teamwork, nearly posted it, and then didn't, cut a large chunk and reinstated some of it, and then finally posted it yesterday and immediately had second thoughts...

It made no mention of teams in other contexts, of sports teams for example. (Because I know nothing about them.) It did not discuss Belbin on management teams (often misapplied and contestable as it is). The list of what is missing is endless.

It is also highly self-indulgent; much of it is about team membership in my own not-very-exciting career, and there is little reason to suppose that anyone else will be interested in that. At least I had the decency to put that beyond a jump break.

Why am I bothered? Even to the extent of boring stiff my few readers with this kind of meta-reflection? After all, the blogosphere is precisely a place where people notoriously pontificate about stuff they known nothing about, make stuff up, are unremittingly egocentric. There are no rules about citing evidence for assertions and claims, there is no requirement to confine oneself to relevant argument, or to keep within one's realm of knowledge and competence.

But those qualities are precisely those I bang on about all the time as an academic, and seek to instil in students. And it is their absence which leads me to be cautious about accepting students citing from the web in general and the blogosphere in particular...

And I have internalised them rather too much, to the extent of discounting the value of any other kind of writing, particularly on my own part. Even to the extent of gradually ceasing to voice opinions on anything on which I am not an expert--hence, on practically anything at all.

I'm planning a book; working title, "The Secret Life of the Classroom". It's proceeding rapidly. Backwards. It's not original research, but intended to be research-based and I suppose scholarly but accessible. It will be based on material I have taught for years--but the further I get with planning, the further away I am from actually starting, because in order to be credible I realise how much more work I need to do and how much I don't know.

Still, I have the time, I hope. So watch this space in a year or two, or five...

On a team

2011-06-10T15:59:00.002+01:00

I was in prison the other day (just visiting for a teaching observation).

My student and I were just beginning our post-session discussion when one of his colleagues knocked on the classroom door to remind him that the morning team meeting would begin in a couple of minutes. He asked whether I wanted to attend. I wasn't sure it would be appropriate, because I was an outsider, but I needed an escort to get back to the gatehouse and no-one would be available until after the meeting, so I acquiesced.

I was so pleased I did. It only took ten minutes, and nothing exciting happened; some nagging about locking doors (of course), some reporting back on "incidents" last week which some people may not have known about, with a clarification of reporting procedures...

There were a dozen or so people present, most of them standing up, in the dingy outer office. About four or five people spoke in response to the chair's invitation for anything to share.The "manager" was not even there (and I'm sure she's not happy with her formal label--she was a student of ours several years ago) but it all happened regardless. I have no idea whether anyone took notes. I hope not, because there is nothing more toxic to teamworking than having an eye to an audit trail.

I was the outsider, and stayed physically on the periphery. But I felt totally at home.

It may be that working as a teacher, in a prison, focuses one's thinking on the clash of educational and custodial values. (Although it does occur to me that these meetings may be part of the standard operating procedure and that the prison officers on the wings do the same thing... I don't know enough to have a view on that.)

But what really struck me was the sense of team membership. Interdependence counts in an uncertain environment (although in practice of course prison education is much less hassled than in any open environment). It's the culture I have spent most of my working life in, and although not a demonstrably sociable person, it's one I value enormously.

And it is almost totally absent in most teaching in higher education*. (Big generalisation, carefully qualified, and of course not properly evidenced... B-?) It exists in research teams, sometimes very powerfully, but not much in respect of teaching.

I think there is probably more of a sense of being a team amongst staff teaching on a professionally-- rather than academically--oriented programme. The modules of a professional programme are jigsaw pieces rather than free-standing units**, and (apart from notorious instances where the staff are at vicious loggerheads with each other) the staff need consciously to work together. Numbers of students and of staff are probably more manageable, too.

On academic programmes, particularly those such as humanities where there are few prerequisites, the structure (and options) of the course typically follow the individual interests of the faculty. ("Fred's retired, so we'll have to drop 'Origins of the novel' this year, but Gabby needs some hours, and so we could offer 'Queer theory and early 20th century poetry' instead...")

Academe has an ambivalent relationship with teamwork. It's both a highly individualistic environment and highly mutually dependent (and the extent depends a lot on the discipline--the more equipment you need, the more you have to depend on each other). But it's a tremendous and yet little explored resource.

Incidentally, real Teamworking has absolutely no connection at all with what Human Resources departments think it is, with their obscene expenditure on external "team-building" consultants whose only impact is to unite the potential "team" in visceral hatred of HR and probably management in general. It has to be a bottom-up phenomenon (and of course as such it can--for better or for worse--interfere with top-down initiatives) but when it comes together it is transformative.
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On living in a different world

2011-05-30T20:56:00.000+01:00

A little while ago I was helping my son to do some basic DIY involving screws. He's coming up for 30, and I was amazed to find him muttering to himself the the mantra; "Righty-tighty, lefty-loosy" to ensure he screwed them in correctly.
Last year, at a study day for our in-service vocational teaching students about threshold concepts, the engineering special interest group suggested that "Righty-tighty, lefty-loosy" was an important threshold concept for their students to acquire.
Just now, confronted with a rather odd mixer tap (faucet) in the bathroom where I am staying, and trying to balance the flows, I found myself having to use it, too. (There were two tap heads mounted horizontally opposing each other at the base of a common outlet pipe.)

But where has it come from? Why do students of 16+ years have to be taught it? Isn't it just more complicated than the metaphor we have "always" used--clockwise and anti-clockwise? Yes it is, but I've just realised that these students grew up in a digital era. I read somewhere in the last few days the claim that 60% of people check the time on their mobiles, even after they have just looked at their watches. That struck me as rubbish, but it does suggest that the analogue clock face is no longer the universal trope it once was. (Hey! I finally used that word! Probably never again.)

On the police getting younger...

2011-05-30T19:08:00.000+01:00

...but not so young they need to be nannied like this?

Just what goes through the so-called "minds" of the people who devise this rubbish? And do they give a thought to what message it sends to rank-and-file officers about how their seniors view them?

On a prediction come true...

2011-05-26T00:35:00.000+01:00

Harold Camping's response to the failure of his eschatological prediction of the "rapture" (pardon my ignorance, but this is a term which appears only to been used in the past ten or so years, associated with the amazingly/bizarrely successful "Left Behind" series of novels) is exactly as might have been predicted by Festinger et al.

But Mr. Camping said that he's now realized the apocalypse will come five months after May 21, the original date he predicted. He had earlier said Oct. 21 was when the globe would be consumed by a fireball.

Saturday was “an invisible judgment day” in which a spiritual judgment took place, he said. But the timing and the structure is the same as it has always been, he said.

“We've always said May 21 was the day, but we didn't understand altogether the spiritual meaning,” he said. “May 21 is the day that Christ came and put the world under judgment.”

(source here: retrieved 25 May 2011; my emphasis)

But what strikes me most forcibly is that he took the "spiritual/non-empirical" way out. He took the Pauline (Paul-eye-ne) option. Jesus was open to empirical claims and tests. The most important was that he would rise from the dead: even Paul took this on board ( I Cor. 15:14), but it remains unclear about what this meant/means. Jesus claimed a gospel of liberation:

he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised... (Luke 4:18 [AV])

But there was precious little evidence of it happening (not his fault: I remember a vox pop interview in South Africa at the time of the first free elections, and the interviewee, who had been queuing for hours to vote, being asked what she expected from the ANC and Nelson Mandela. She recited a long list of perfectly reasonable but utopian aspirations. How long would all this take? asked the interviewer. "I'll grant them three months.")

If you can't deliver what you have promised--promise even more, but in less specific terms...Or those further removed from testable reality... Until no-one can tell whether or not you can deliver.... Prophets and politicians and perhaps pedagogues all do it.

Sometimes--not at all often, I hope--it's the best thing to do. Better than setting yourself up to repeat the same error five months down the line.

On the rapture--or not...

2011-05-20T22:41:00.000+01:00

There's a good piece here on the possibility that the promised eschatological event won't happen.

As it points out, end-of-the-world scenarios have been fruitful research material for social psychologists since the mid-50s. And I have no doubt that there are dozens of research teams already busy this time around.

I've tried to apply the research on cognitive dissonance to less cataclysmic learning situations here.

See you Sunday! Perhaps.

On something completely different; Les Parapluies de Cherbourg

2011-05-17T20:22:00.000+01:00

dir Jacques Demy (1964). Imdb entry here. Open Culture comment here.

Enjoy!

On the next step beyond wikipedia

2011-05-14T15:58:00.000+01:00

Students are routinely warned not to cite wikipedia as a source in their work. However, sometimes it is the quickest and easiest way to get an overview of a subject--if only one could drill down to its sources (some good pages do reference them, but many don't) and evaluate them. They are not as transient as a wikipedia page, and they can be cited (if authoritative enough).

That facility is on its way. A new site--still in beta--seems to have adapted a similar technology to that used in Turnitin (plagiarism detection software) to find phrases and sentences in a Wikipedia article which also appear elsewhere on the web, to highlight and show the resemblances in a pop-up window, and to display the source information as a link so you can go there and check it out. Amazing! Semantic search is effectively here.

The team have not yet incorporated all of Wikipedia, which it why it is still in beta, but it can only get more useful.

I have a few anxieties about what this might do to some desk research--it just pushes the issue of evaluation further back, in that you still have to evaluate the source material rather than the secondary wiki article, but you do still have to evaluate it.

It may encourage a student in a hurry simply to read (and even quote and attribute) a single sentence from a primary source and never read enough of it to get a useful overview, or appreciate the significance of that sentence within an overall argument or body of evidence.

But used with care, it has potential...

Thanks to Amy Cavender at ProfHacker for the tip--read her take at the link.

On the theory and practice of the right to be heard...

2011-05-14T10:40:00.000+01:00

I've just been watching Newsnight and a discussion of the privacy/freedom of the press/injunctions issue. The participants were a well-known actor, a lawyer, a magazine editor, and a "former escort"*

Much of the discussion concerned how rich men were able to exploit the present legal provision to cover up their discreditable activities, often to the oppression of others involved who were prohibited from telling their stories.

The discussion was articulate and cut-and-thrust, good TV. For three of the four participants. The chair, Emily Maitlis, did a great job trying to ensure that the former escort had her say. She (the guest) made her points well, but she was out of her depth when the discussion took off, and just sat waiting to be invited to join in.

(And substantively she had the most nuanced case to argue...)

Three confident and assertive professionals in their (more or less) natural habitat. And one not. And her non-participation said more about whose interests are really being served than any of the points being made verbally by the others.

Watch it on iPlayer until 20 May, here.

* All respect to the woman who was prepared to appear on the programme;
(her name appeared on screen so anonymity is not an issue, just irrelevant.) I'm sure it was not a trivial act.

On e-text books

2011-05-12T14:50:00.000+01:00

The heading link is to an interesting piece by Nicholas Carr, on the limitations of the Kindle & co. e-readers as vehicles for text-books.

On the death of OWK

2011-05-11T19:14:00.000+01:00

I'd normally just link to this page from "shared items", but this is worth a direct mention!

Not just because it's an exemplary spoof, but also because of what it says about how news is routinely mediated. (Click in the top-right corner for the original story.)

Thanks to Boing-Boing for the link.

On managerialism

2011-05-08T16:25:00.000+01:00

Fred Inglis in the Times Higher Education this week:

The language of managerialism, as the immortal parodies written every week for these pages by Laurie Taylor assure us, is a language in which it is impossible to tell the truth.

(A fine line and point--even if he is lauding Leavis.)

On not strutting

2011-05-05T01:01:00.000+01:00

This is silly at one (or several) levels. I looked for a forum or comment stream to post it to, but didn't find one, so it's here.... (Oh! missed this!)

I am a great fan of The West Wing; a candidate for the greatest ever TV drama series.

The real world counterpart of their situation room is a little less dramatic, but recognisable:

The decision not to release the pictures of bin Laden's corpse is explained here with another take here.

Or, as Leo McGarry put it in Series 2, ep. 8 in a different context: "We do not strut. Ever".

More deconstruction of the photo here. I'm not going to mention all the photoshopped crap out there.

On dividing up groups (and other tools)

2011-05-04T15:05:00.000+01:00

Being practical for once; a ProfHacker article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (a free US on-line magazine) drew my attention to Malcolm Sparrow's Excel-based tool for creating small groups from large classes taking into account several variables called the GRumbler.

It may be overkill given generally smaller class sizes in the UK even on undergraduate programmes, but nevertheless a useful tool.

And while I'm at it, here are a few more conceivably useful tools I have come across recently--and given that I am a skinflint, they're all free (for Windows--some may have Mac or even Linux versions, but I haven't checked):

Teach history, politics, social admin? Then take a look at Dipity. It's an on-line tool to create interactive timelines. At the moment the demo. on the homepage concerns (of course) the history of Al-Qa'eda, but if you have a story to tell and it has been covered on the web, you can see how effective it may be.
If you ever need to create screen-shots or screen-casts, then the simplest way has to be Jing, from Techsmith. It sits unobtrusively on your screen ready to grab static images or movies of whatever is going on, from any package. Only reservation; if configured to autorun at startup, it can slow down the boot process.
Concept-mapping? When planning teaching, particularly out of one's direct speciality, it's sometimes difficult to relate concepts and ideas and items of information to each other, to see where they fit, and what other material may be important to mention... That is where C-Link comes in. It's another on-line tool: in its basic configuration you simply enter two terms which can be found in a particular knowledge repository (to begin with, Wikipedia serves very well)
This is a Jing capture (saved as .swf) of C-Link at work (sorry the sound is fuzzy, but it doesn't add anything) It's almost an instant syllabus/book outline/essay generator.
And this:
...is a concept-map exported from the site, and imported into C-Map Tools; which is a concept-mapping package (of course), also free and available from here. Concept-mapping is not the same as mind-mapping, as you can probably tell from the image. C-map Tools is a powerful package, incorporating its own presentation-authoring package--if you can find it--but not particularly friendly, and it insists on storing your files where it wants, not where you want. Nevertheless it does things others can't. (The image was once again captured by Jing in screenshot mode and slightly edited and cropped.)

On a new(ish) approach to presentation

2011-04-28T12:15:00.000+01:00

Just in passing: I'm probably late to the party, but I'm coming across more and more examples of an excellent approach to adding animation to talks.

It's associated particularly with RSA Animate: the latest example concerns a talk by Ken Robinson on changing educational paradigms.

...but Jorge Cham is also in on the act: see his take on the physics of dark matter, here.

For some reason it greatly appeals to me--I'd be interested in other examples (there are plenty of RSA animates on YouTube I know about) and information on the practical implementation. Is it done with something like SmoothDraw, perhaps? Apparently that is what Sal Khan uses for the Khan Academy clips (which are well done, for all my reservations about the pedagogy).

On "cognitive theft"

2011-04-26T13:53:00.020+01:00

When I observe students teaching, one of the commonest issues to draw to their attention is the use of rhetorical questions--not in the sense in which a politician might use them in a speech, but in the much more mundane sense of asking the class (usually) or an individual (occasionally) an apparently straightforward question, but then answering it for them.

Partly, it appears, this arises because of fear of "dead air", as broadcasters call it. I would say "silence", but part of the fear is that it won't be silence--it will be filled with a cacophony of off-task chatter, and that may take previous minutes to settle again. There's also the self-doubt which comes from being unsure whether you have pitched the question at the right level, or whether indeed the class have learned anything which may enable them to answer it.

At one level, of course, the unintended effect of such practice is efficiently to train students not to bother to answer questions. After all, all they have to do is keep quiet and you will do it for them. Moreover, there is zero chance of being humiliated by getting the answer wrong, and only the most trivial chance of being challenged with a follow-up.

This post takes the matter further. The author argues that in relation to teaching maths at least, to deprive the student of the opportunity of answering (by doing it for her) is to commit "cognitive theft"--the denial of an opportunity to learn.

(The post includes an interesting video of a TEDx talk by Gary Stager around this issue. The tone is rather self-important, and of course school-focused, but excerpts would make a good discussion starter in class.)

The post goes on to discuss the maths teaching approach of Sal Khan (of the Khan Academy) who emphasises direct instruction in techniques to solve problems, and suggests that it comes close to cognitive theft, too. Khan's approach has attracted quite a lot of attention in the maths-teaching blogosphere, and there are some thoughtful posts on it here.

The issues posed go much wider than maths education and schools; from my own area of interest, instruction in algorithms to reach the right answer but without knowing why --in any field--is a way of faking an understanding of threshold concepts, and is ultimately self-limiting and another form of cognitive theft.

Update

Thanks to Jim Hamlyn; he thought he'd missed the boat because of my frivolous later post, it appears, but commented:

A post on cognitive theft disappeared into the ether and I'd just dug out a link especially. Och well, here it is anyway:

http://www.connectedprincipals.com/archives/2939#comment-3896

...on the Khan argument.

On a bank holiday

2011-04-26T00:37:00.000+01:00

What was supposed to take an hour or two took all day in the garden. As ever, coming back to doing this kind of stuff after months away, I found tools missing, broken, or blunt. I went up to son's to collect stuff he'd borrowed and not returned--he wanted advice on something to do with the electrical circuits--so that took an hour. (And he'd broken some of the implements he'd borrowed yesterday...)

(Almost) everything which could go wrong with the trellis project did go wrong, including drill bits breaking in the hole and wood splitting, and the trellis coming apart while being cut to size...

But no sooner had I finally got it in place, than (same) son phoned--he and partner had bought some new curtains and a curtain pole. Could he borrow the power drill again to put it up? And--since he'd never done this before--could I show him how to do it? As well that I did, because he met the traditional problem of trying to drill into a hidden steel lintel. I had to come back home to find some different screws, but we got it up.

By this time I realised I had only eaten a banana and a croissant for breakfast and nothing else all day, but there was no time to cook anything much for dinner, so I'd call at the supermarket and pick up something nice. It's a public holiday, so they closed at six and thanks to the steel lintel it was now half-past...

We found some leftovers in the fridge, of course, and son came round later to take me for a pint... So all's well that ends well, but I'm glad that everyone is back at work tomorrow (briefly--there's another holiday for some reason on Friday and the following Monday is May Day Bank Holiday), so perhaps I can relax!

On challenging beliefs

2011-04-24T20:28:00.000+01:00

This post draws attention to:

...self-affirmation.[...] Basically, it goes like this: when your beliefs or world view is threatened in some way, you’re likely to respond defensively. However, if you are able to affirm another part of your world-view positively, you are likely to be less defensive in the first instance.

(It's not new--the reference [full citation in the linked post] is dated 2000--but it's one of those things you are unlikely actually to come across unless you search on just the right terms, and every researcher seems to invent their own.)

My personal terminology for challenging existing ideas is learning as loss, or "supplantive learning". A quick glance at the link (or an even quicker one here) will establish the parallels.

What I find interesting about the slightly different perspective of the research discussed here is the way in which it meshes with what I discovered empirically and even experientially about the critical importance of personal credibility when trying to teach people things which run counter to what they already know.

For teaching (adults) in the context of professional practice it is utterly critical. Self-affirmation seems to suggest a relatively weak effect of establishing common ground with someone over practically anything (as Robinson's musical taste examples show) which nevertheless grants you a hearing and overcomes some resistance. The issue in a professional context is not merely about some areas of cognitive agreement, but about whether you have ever actually been there and done that... (see the links below for examples).

"In my experience" trumps "research demonstrates". No contest.

Unfortunately experience may be crap...

See also (manually generated):
On credibility (30.10.10)
On credibility (25.2.06)

h/t David Robinson

On deliberate practice (golf)

2011-04-20T16:36:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Jason Kottke for the pointer to this site, where Dan McLaughlin is putting the "10,000 hours deliberate practice" idea to the test, to see if he can get up to professional standard in golf.

The principle is attributed to Malcolm Gladwell (who doesn't need any more free publicity--there's less to him than meets the eye) but the research is based on the work of K Anders Ericsson (here's a link to an accessible article.)

So what does correlate with success? [...] All the superb performers he investigated had practiced intensively, had studied with devoted teachers, and had been supported enthusiastically by their families throughout their developing years. Later research [...] revealed that the
amount and quality of practice were key factors in the level of expertise people achieved. Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence showed that experts are always made, not born. These conclusions are based on rigorous research that looked at exceptional performance using scientific methods that are verifiable and reproducible. (p.1)

Our research shows that even the most gifted performers need a minimum of ten years (or 10,000 hours) of intense training before they win international competitions. In some fields the apprenticeship is longer: It now takes most elite musicians 15 to 25 years of steady practice, on average, before they succeed at the international level. (p.4)

It's interesting to put the idea to the test in this way.

The definitive reference is: Charness N, Feltovich P, Hoffman R and Ericsson K (2006) The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance Cambridge; C.U.P. (Beware, it's 900 pages!)

I've also discussed the idea here, here, and here.

On approaching the task of research

2011-04-20T15:35:00.000+01:00

The link is to Keith Lyons' blog, where he has an interesting piece extracted from the introduction to his Ph.D (which accounts for the datedness of the references) about the relationship between personal experience in the education field, and undertaking research about it, particularly the relationship between the research and his (or her) subjects.

For any of my dissertation students embarking on their empirical work, and anyone looking back on their own research journey, it is highly recommended.

On Dorling (2011)

2011-04-18T20:24:00.000+01:00

I've finished a book!

Not writing one--that has a couple of years to go at least--but reading one. I blame the net. Not only am I constantly washed over by waves of RSS feeds with fascinating and informative diversions (you don't know about RSS? You don't want to know about it. It's third only to twitter and facebook as addictive net; I've eschewed the first two, but RSS...) but Nicholas Carr may be right.

That's not entirely fair or accurate, but occasionally I have a log-jam on reading. I have six or seven books literally piling up to read.

(Six or seven? The "or" is MacGregor's (2010) History of the world in 100 objects . When I was a child in the '50s, I was occasionally given a sweet bar (similar to our currant (sorry!) cereal bars, but made principally of dried fruit) by a shop-keeper uncle. My mother never let me have more than a quarter of it, on the grounds that it would be "too rich" for my digestion. (Come to think of it, that other three-quarters seemed to vanish never to re-appear) Like those bars, I am rationing myself on this book, just as I am on J D Barrow's (2008) Cosmic Imagery; key images in the history of science [I've now lost track of all these recursive parentheses, sorry!]

But! I finished the one linked to from the heading. Incidentally, I'm not signed up to any ad-sense-type scheme. Here's --edited with l'esprit de l'escalier what I posted on Amazon...

He's a (human) geographer, not an economist. And I mean "human" as opposed to "physical", rather than "robot"... But he writes like an economist. A Scandinavian economist.

I bought this book because I enjoy quirky takes on social issues, and the teasers on the cover e.g. "Why more divorced people live by the sea than anywhere else" attracted me. But it is far more political and structural than that. The entertaining stuff is there, but it tends to be buried under rather preachy rhetoric.

So: I liked--

A refreshingly different angle on Britain. There's a confluence of social disciplines (they're not "sciences"), in which economists, sociologist, and now geographers comment on the same things from different angles. Dorling relies on public data for his raw material, and ingeniously and persuasively interprets it. And he is not afraid to celebrate the positives and to castigate the scare-mongering press and politicians.

But:

There is statistical overkill. Some sections are like being beaten over the head with a statistical piledriver. Nerd that I am, I quite like teasing the implications out of stats, but not like this.

And there's a lot of repetition. Repeated with slight variation. Several times... The editor should have been much more ruthless.

And the route from observation to data to interpretation to solution is far from as linear as Dorling implies. Hence the preachiness. (I incline to agree with him, which actually makes the sermon more irritating.)

On making learning easier by making it more difficult...

2011-04-11T18:37:00.000+01:00

This is the other side of the coin (although from a different angle) from this post.

Do you make your handouts and slides clearly legible and easy to read? This article argues (inclusivity considerations aside) that you may be doing your students a disservice.

Up to a point, perhaps... But it's always interesting to entertain a counter-intuitive angle.

On being condemned to be free...

2011-04-06T00:49:00.001+01:00

This is a somewhat self-indulgent post, so feel free to move on. But it is my blog...

A confluence of stimuli as usual:

First, a succession of tutorials this afternoon with students trying to get to grips with the course policy of (not merely permitting or encouraging but) demanding that they construct their own "submission" of evidence that they have met the required outcomes at the required level. A majority, as usual, started by saying something to the effect that they had never encountered anything like this before, and they didn't know how to draft the learning contract... and then they (and their more confident colleagues) proceeded to explain brilliantly how they would do it with reference to their practice and their dilemmas and alternatives and... And then they were disconcerted when I said, "Great! How are you going to tell that story?"

Second, my partner is away for a week. It so happens that today marks six months since our dog died. In his final year he needed a lot of care; walks of course (v e r y s l o w walks), frequent measured feeding, and insulin injections twice a day. And for a decade or more we have not been away together overnight because in part of his distress. (Yes, we know... don't bother to comment!)

I dropped my partner at the station, and drove back home. And let myself back into a house with no human or animal presence making any demand on me. Bereavement, in a sense, but not quite the same. It's the disorientation rather than the loss which takes the foreground. The requirement to make choices in the absence of guidelines/parameters...

So. I'm up beyond my bed-time.... Perhaps I would be more empathic to the students were I to have the tutorials tomorrow!

(Incidentally, the heading refers to J-P Sartre's (1945-49) tetralogy (I think) Les Chemins de la Liberte. Don't bother to read them--life is too short.)

On a special date...

2011-04-01T18:59:00.000+01:00

Just came across this classic from Panorama on 1 April, 1957.

Unfortunately embedding is disabled, although the NYT seems to have managed it (with better quality) here
.

On making assumptions explicit

2011-03-30T18:58:00.001+01:00

From Tyler Cowen's blog:

This is from a child and adolescent mental health group at University College London, but it could and should also count as “Ethos of the Blogger”:
•All research is provisional
•All research raises as many questions as it answers
•All research is difficult to interpret and to draw clear conclusions from
•Qualitative research may be vital to elaborate experience, suggest narratives for understanding phenomena and generate hypotheses but it can’t be taken to prove anything
•Quantitative research may be able to show hard findings but can rarely (never?) give clear answers to complex questions
And yet, despite all the challenges, it is still worth attempting to encourage an evidence-based approach, since the alternative is to continue to develop practice based only on assumption and belief.
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.

And I'll point all my dissertation students to it.

Pity there's no original source cited; if anyone knows it, I'll be pleased to attribute.

On the "front line"

2011-03-24T16:45:00.000Z

A while ago I watched a "Newsnight" discussion on what it means to preserve "front-line" public services in an era of cuts. A couple of speakers tried to argue that the definition of "front-line" wasn't easy, but they came across as self-serving reactionaries preserving "jobs for the boys" [the sexism of the expression matches the datedness and factionalism of the principle].

The context was that of policing, and the simplistic distinction implicit in the discussion was between "proper" (sworn constables with powers of arrest) officers and everyone else. Proper police are more expensive than other employees, but there was no discussion of the more complex question, with which police managers are no doubt struggling every day, of the relationship between proper police and "civilian" staff.

As a rule of thumb, the role of back- or middle-office/support/admin. etc. staff is to enable the "front-line" staff to do their jobs. Sometimes, the best way of supporting the front-line staff is to increase their support.

I wrote this about two and a half years ago. It is generally proclaimed that the major tasks of a university are teaching and research, and that the people who actually perform those tasks are the academics.

So it is ironic that structures have developed such that a colleague has been increasingly required to undertake the "back office" functions to the exclusion not only of research, but also of teaching. In a School of Education.

Sometimes the way to make front-line services more efficient, effective and economic is to support (not "manage", "regulate", "quality-assure", "put in irrelevant services people in the front line couldn't give a damn about but which sap their time energy and motivation") them.

On defensive teaching

2011-03-19T22:49:00.006Z

The Wolf Report says;

Recommendation 9
Students who are under 19 and do not have GCSE A*-C in English and/or Maths should be required, as part of their programme, to pursue a course which either leads directly to these qualifications, or which provide significant progress towards future GCSE entry and success.

It so happens that earlier this week I observed a class on just such a programme. About a dozen students at a Further Education college, about to try to get their GCSE A-C Maths for their third or fourth time. I gather that when no-one other than their teacher (and possibly a Learning Support Assistant) is present to observe, they are quite lively (largely "off-task", as the current jargon puts it); but in the presence of (three--don't ask) observers they were subdued, compliant and even cowed.

Some had special needs, including one on the autistic spectrum.

I was there (such is the apostolic succession/endorsement of our quality assurance systems) to observe the directly observing tutor and mentor, rather than the actual teacher... OK:

How soul-destroying is it for a learner to go round this track yet again? Some of those with "special needs" (who may excel in other areas) may never get to the finishing line. Is that going to shut them out from all further educational opportunities?
The assumption is that better teaching can overcome all obstacles. And "teaching to the test" is the way to do it...

The teacher, currently a student on a qualifying course (which is how I got involved), made a good stab at it. She used models and work sheets and a bingo game...

But the college had seemingly long ago given up all aspiration to anything beyond "getting the learners through". The lesson plan was resolutely focused on drilling learners for the test. A third of the time was devoted to recapitulating how to calculate area (about 8-year-old stuff I think) before moving on to the volume of rectangular and triangular prisms...

The observing tutors made some useful and ingenious suggestions about how she could improve her lesson and her practice within it. Some of them had not occurred to me, and I was impressed; clearly she is getting great support and she is already an accomplished teacher. She also had lots of ideas of her own.

But they're risky. They're unproven. They creep up on ignorance and lack of skill from behind and ambush it... They may not transfer to the exam situation....

When we do know conclusively on the basis of two or three failures that conventional approaches don't work?

On proper reflection

2011-03-08T12:16:00.000Z

The link is to a post in Sean's reflective journal, and I'm linking to it in answer to the occasional request for examples of good reflection.

Why do I rate it so highly?

Because it is task-focussed. It is about teaching and doing it better and getting better results.
Because it is not about blaming anyone (so much so-called "reflection") is.
Because it shows careful planning of practice based on previous experience and (of course) reflection.
Because it entertains several potential explanations for changes, and lives with the complexity and uncertainty they entail.
And it sets up hypotheses for testing.

On Saturday I attended an excellent lecture by Kathryn Ecclestone, on the rise of "therapeutic education" (quick introductory article here, and Amazon.co.uk book link here) in which, among other things, she explored the extent to which "reflective practice"--and especially writing about it--has morphed into highly individualised and feeling-focussed introspection, rather than being about doing the job. This sample helps to reclaim some of that ground.

(And here is my own critique of reflection as often practised.)

[Disclosure; this is in danger of becoming incestuous, because this blog also appears on Sean's blog list, and I've commented briefly over there.]

On technology and quality assurance

2011-03-03T21:14:00.000Z

From a London Review of Books piece on Nicholas Carr's The Shallows:

There are two ways that computers might add to our wellbeing. First, they could do so indirectly, by increasing our ability to produce other goods and services. In this they have proved something of a disappointment. In the early 1970s, American businesses began to invest heavily in computer hardware and software, but for decades this enormous investment seemed to pay no dividends. As the economist Robert Solow put it in 1987, ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’[...] it wasn’t until the late 1990s that some of the productivity gains promised by the computer-driven ‘new economy’ began to show up – in the United States, at any rate. So far, Europe appears to have missed out on them.

The original IBM PC was launched in 1981. Deming formulated the principles of "Total Quality Management" in 1982.

I previously wrote about "write-only" documents in the context of compliance and quality management here and here.

I wonder if there is a kind of Parkinson's Law about quality assurance, and one of the factors behind its explosion in the past twenty years is the availability of the technology to generate the verbiage on which it lives. Reinforced perhaps by spurious analogies between organisations and computers?

Would insistence on only original handwritten documents restore some sanity to the process?

On Language as a Window into Human Nature (Pinker)

2011-02-19T11:24:00.001Z

Another of the excellent RSA animations based on a talk by Steven Pinker:

...one of the few attempts I've encountered to engage with the issues raised by Watzlawick et al. (1967) in what they called (in those days) the "analogue" and "digital" aspects of communication. I made a clumsy attempt to articulate some of my thinking in the field here. I'd really like to get more into it, but I suspect that it is one of those areas where the vocabulary has been re-invented time and again by isolated researchers and writers, such that there is little by way of a community in which it can be discussed. Anyone out there who can offer any pointers? Suggestions gratefully received.

Thanks to Mind Hacks for the pointer.

On a life

2011-02-06T23:36:00.000Z

A propos the Japanese Sumo scandal (sorry! Google it yourself) there was a BBC News24 interview with Doreen Simmons, billed as a Sumo commentator. She's much more than that! See here.

And she is still going strong as I write!

On a thoughtful debate

2011-02-01T11:59:00.000Z

The link is to Angie Greenham's Craft Baker blog, which I have just come across. Angie is a fan of Ken Robinson, and she follows up the linked piece with another continuing the argument.

Incidentally, here is a link to an animation of one of Sir Ken's recent talks (October 2010) which is not only impressive as a multi-channel communication exercise, but a whirlwind tour of his thinking.

I'm afraid that as I commented some time ago, I find Sir Ken's thinking utopian, sympathetic though I may be to his vision. He is thinking along similar lines to Matthew Crawford and Richard Sennett, but I can't help thinking that their vision is a sort of 21st century arts and crafts movement, and about as relevant to most of us as William Morris and co. were to their contemporaries.

Even so, it's a good debate to have, even if the answers need to be different.

On the next step in online searching

2011-01-25T00:38:00.000Z

I gather this was launched today, but it is designed to grow by the accretion of user comments. My initial impression is that it is more suited to casual browsing than targeted searching, but it's welcome nonetheless, and who knows?

On rejection

2011-01-23T16:51:00.000Z

Why did no-one think of this before? Just think of how much effort it will save!

Acknowledgements to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution.

On a brilliant utility

2011-01-21T21:32:00.000Z

Arising out of the previous post--probably this is old news to everyone else and I am the last to discover it (that's not unusual) but if you have a site or a blog, just register it on this site, and you'll get a few lines of javascript to past into your page or template or server-side-includes.

And thereafter whenever anyone copies and pastes from your material, the source URL will automatically be added to their paste.

At one level this is a nudge to any student attempting to plagiarise from your site (although of course it can be deleted), but
at another level it is a service to them if they are building up notes for an assignment, because a clickable trace back to the original is automatically generated.

Brilliant. (And free.)

On a useful link exchange

2011-01-21T20:37:00.000Z

I don't usually rise to the bait of link exchanges, particularly if they claim that this blog is in the "top 100" of anything--albeit at 92, and based on one post.

But this one was interesting enough to be worth a visit, and repaid the effort. Lots of useful ideas and resources, including a few I would link to directly, except that would undermine the effort Jennifer and colleagues have put into developing it--which would itself be a form of plagiarism!

On/in memoriam: Nat Lofthouse

2011-01-18T00:47:00.000Z

I'm not a sport fan, at all. But having lived in Bolton, for whose team Nat played for his entire career (apart from his England appearances), I cannot but commemorate/celebrate the passing of an icon of another era.

On the trustworthiness of research--again.

2011-01-09T22:33:00.000Z

Sorry to keep coming back to this yet again, but there does seem to be a surge of interest in the topic.

On the New Year

2011-01-03T16:46:00.000Z

http://www.worldometers.info/

All the very best for 2011!

On the "decline effect" again

2010-12-30T14:00:00.000Z

The link is to a post by Michael White, as a commentary on the Jona Lehrer piece to which I referred in my previous post. It argues with Lehrer's spin, but for my purpose serves to underline the difference between what passes for research in education, and in science.

On not trusting "the research"

2010-12-28T16:32:00.001Z

The new Dean is energetic and enthusiastic and keen to raise the research profile of the Faculty, and has been trying to get me involved in bidding for EU funding for research in post-school education. I don't think I shall rise to the bait--I am after all now retired, and I have never been one for large-scale research projects.

However, the process, together with my post of about two weeks ago about published research and the comment on it from a volunteer on one of the All Results Journals has set me thinking about the practicalities of doing research and the how they impact on the results and quite conceivably on the value of it all. I'm not talking about methodology as such, here, but the story of how research actually comes to be done in universities and beyond, and how we get to know about it and use it. I'm sure it varies according to discipline and institutional setting, of course, but some features are fairly common.

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On the health of Father Christmas

2010-12-26T18:28:00.006Z

Enjoy!

On making learning more difficult by making it easier...

2010-12-16T14:47:00.002Z

Who writes curricula, or rather syllabi?

In further (rather than higher) education, on the whole they are not written by people who have studied on the kinds of course they are designing. The course designers are, probably, graduates who have progressed to their present positions via quite a different route from that followed by the students who will take their course.

(I'm sure there are counter-examples, of course, and I can remember that when I started in FE teaching 40-odd years ago, there were respected vocational teachers in the college who had come up "through the ranks", as it were, and were actively involved in designing ordinary and higher national certificates and diplomas in shorthand and typing, in office practice, and other vocational areas. They represented the community of practice in the Lave and Wenger sense, even if they were located in a college. But the process has become more professionalised since then, and the practitioners' voice is fainter, with the exception of some of the National Vocational Qualifications.)

And of course the writers are older and experienced (and quite probably experienced teachers in the area).

What these factors mean is that designers have a totally different perspective on the content from that of the learners. That is not surprising, but it appears to have some less obvious consequences.

Let us also throw into the mix the pressure on the awarding bodies (for whom the designers work) to create courses on which "learners" (i.e. students) can "achieve" (i.e. pass); colleges get a bonus for students who pass.

I have undertaken several teaching observations recently on such courses, and on the whole they have not been very good. At one level that is only to be expected; the teachers I observed have only just come to the end of the first term of a two-year part-time course and in these cases they have little experience under their belts.

But that is not the whole story. In one case the teacher thoughtfully provided me with some of the course documentation including photocopies of pages from the "official" textbook which she was using as a handout.

(Not best practice, but with a heavy timetable and no time to develop her own resources, understandable.) So I could see that she was following the required Scheme of Work almost to the letter. The handout declared authoritatively that there are four theories of such-and-such (well, it all depends... and two of the theories were simply variations on a third, but there was no acknowledgement of that), and the teacher was supposed to "get through" these at the rate of ten minutes each, and to test that they had been "learned" (whatever that means in this context). Being fair to her, again, she was not very familiar with the area she was teaching, and so she had to stick largely to what the book told her*. She offered few examples, because she was not confident they would be "correct".

And I could tell that some of the information on the handout was misleading and even simply wrong.

The students, rather sadly, were bored but compliant. They "researched" allocated topics (Googled them), and paraphrased what they found and the relevant paragraph from the handout, and two of them gave short presentations by the time the session ended. They spoke when spoken to, but volunteered nothing. They exhibited a weary familiarity with yet more half-understood gobbets of information they were supposed to "learn", without a clue as to why.

The teacher and I had our post-observation discussion. I checked on the academic/vocational level of the programme (3; the next level below first-year undergraduate level). She agreed it was dumbed-down to near meaninglessness, because that is seen as the way to get the students to "achieve".

As I drove back I realised how many times before I had been to such a class. I wrote about one in 1999.

It's to be hoped that with more experience, and a little (well, a lot of) reading round the subject, and confidence from her training, this teacher will like so many others get to lighten up a little and her proficiency will lead to more learning. But it's difficult when she is constrained by the limitations of the curriculum.

What appears to have happened is that in order to ensure that the students pass (and thereby ensure that this particular awarding body continues to be used by the college in this vocational area) the content has to be made as easy or simple as possible. Einstein is frequently paraphrased as saying “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Courses like this appear to have violated that threshold. In an attempt to reduce the "learning" to discrete gobbets of information, they have ignored the context and the connections between those items, so that learning one provides no assistance with the next one.

(A few weeks ago, one student offered a micro-teaching session on an introduction to Chinese calligraphy; it was principally a practical session but of course provoked many questions from group members, some about the difference between a logographic and an alphabetic system of writing. C. pointed out that every character in a logographic system has to be learned from scratch; while some are composites, the link between the elements is not mediated by phonemes in the same way as in an alphabetic system. So one character offers little as a clue to another; it's the same issue. And learning three or four thousand separate characters is a formidable task!)

After another session I compared the content with a bowl of beads. They can be mixed up any way you like. Pick one out (teach it) and it has no implications for the rest. There is no system of knowledge. It cannot be other than inert. But thread the beads together, and picking one up will bring others with it... Context and connection are not optional extras.

In trying to make things simpler, this curriculum made them a whole lot harder.

The designers seem to have forgotten, at their distance from the students, what it is like to study this stuff. The teachers (we hope) and the designers have an overview of the field. They know where everything fits in so it makes sense. The students on the other hand are just thrown one thing after another in a seemingly arbitrary fashion. They are like puzzlers trying to make sense of the jigsaw without the picture on the box.

Surface learning and at best the unistructural level of the SOLO taxonomy is as good as it can possibly get. There is a special challenge in “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

* One little-remarked feature of vocational programmes is that of course they include some necessary background material which may be based on academic areas of study which may not be the teacher's own area--physiology, sociology, even physics, for example. Since each of these specialist topics may not feature very much, it falls to the main teacher to be a jack-of-all-trades teaching all of them even when her or his knowledge is shaky. (Yes, a great opportunity for e-learning indeed, but not much used.)

On the vagaries of published research

2010-12-15T16:54:00.000Z

I've just come across the linked article (via ALD). It is questioning the consensual view that peer review is the most effective way of ensuring the quality of research published in academic journals. (Peer review is the process through which a submitted article is sent by the editor to two or three established scholars/researchers in the field, for comment. The comments are made anonymously, and may result in rejection of the article, requests for amendments or even acceptance without amendments.) The article refers specifically to medical research, but the process applies to all kinds of research and scholarship.

It so happens that I recently had a very interesting discussion with a student who was wondering what she could do with the interesting phenomenon of a totally zero response rate to a questionnaire, which led us to thinking about the publication process and the biases it may well (we don't really know and don't even know how to find out) introduce into what we think we know from out reading of what is published.

I also came across this blog post, which is interesting because of its rarity: it refers to a published article on ‘The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of A Case of Writers' Block’ (my emphasis, and it is not entirely serious). It is of course very unusual to publish an experiment which did not work--most researchers will self-censor and decide not to submit. At a simple level, there is no telling how much futile duplication of effort takes place simply because it is not publicised that something does not work.

And it is plausible to argue that the tendency of the publishing system to "privilege" positive results leads to a higher probability of Type 1 or "false positive" errors being published (see here for a discussion of this issue in relation to assessment procedures).

...and of course the corresponding neglect of negative results (both true and false). These do creep in, to be fair, via attempted replication and literature reviews, but you have to be pretty dedicated to find them. Perhaps there's a case for a wikibullsh*t.org site?

That might account in some measure for much of the egregious rubbish which pollutes the educational literature as touched on here, but the relative paucity of proper critical evaluation of fads and fashions.

Of course, the other variable which makes a difference is enthusiasm, that's a magic ingredient which transforms dross into gold. Apparently. But sometimes the effect is strong enough to withstand even the rigours of (such self-serving) publication practices. It's just not strong enough to stand up to replication by anyone other than a true believer...

On the "uncanny valley" effect in learning...

2010-12-08T21:29:00.000Z

Just occasionally one of those paradoxical situations occurs in teaching where a frankly poor situation pays off in spades in terms of learning.

The other evening was such a situation. We were on the last session of micro-teaching (that is where students teach something to the rest of the group for twenty minutes and the group and the tutor then provide feedback on it). In our set-up the students choose their own topics. Someone has to go last, and on this occasion it was G. It so happened that most of the topics he would have chosen had been taken, so he took commendably took a chance with something he was not sufficiently familiar with to be comfortable. And despite his best efforts he fell into a heffalump trap...

He chose to teach the principles of "positive reinforcement" as promulgated by Aubrey Daniels, a proponent of "performance management". The minor problem was that he could not address the issue properly in twenty minutes.

The major one was that he did not check out levels of prior knowledge in advance. Had he done so, he would have found that at least five of the other ten members of the class thought that they knew quite a lot about positive reinforcement, because their education in other disciplines had involved at least some exposure to the principles of behavioural theories in psychology.

The problem is that despite using very similar terminology and there being a substantial overlap of ideas, Daniels' branded and corporate-focused angle on reinforcement is not quite the same as the classic behaviourist tradition (making no judgements--I'm not a behaviourist and this was the first time I'd ever heard of Daniels).

Trying to provide a framework for the subsequent review, I was reminded of the "uncanny valley" phenomenon:

See here for the general principle, and
here if you have hours to waste for examples (although I think they expand/dilute the idea too much)

(This has cropped up previously on this blog under a different guise.)

Expressed simplistically, it comes out as "Tiny differences are more difficult to handle than gross ones".

We have no problem processing obvious differences between objects, categories, ideas. But it gets more difficult when the differences are subtle and may not even be real. That requires serious attention and concentration... "I'd like to take these colour samples outside to compare them in daylight..." "I need to hear that again..." "Does Daniels mean the same thing as Skinner when he refers to 'reinforcement'? I'm not sure..."

If the problem is up-front, then at least we can argue about it, bitter though such arguments may be (in inverse proportion to their importance in the real world, of course, as here).

But if it is not acknowledged, for whatever reason, there is a real problem. Such was the case in the session the other night, when those in the role of "student" were confused, asking themselves; "Am I just being stupid? Have I been misunderstanding this all along?" or "This guy has got it all wrong. But he is supposed to be the teacher and I want to be constructive--how do I confront the point without undermining him?" And that is without going into the possibility of any personal investment in prior beliefs...

I'm doing my DIY carpentry. I've drilled a 4mm hole, but it is out of alignment by 2mm. Much more difficult to correct that than one which is 10mm out.

I'm driving down a rutted road; I need to steer a fraction to the right. I could do a right-angle turn, but I can't make that fine adjustment. The circumstances conspire against it...

I'm going beyond my exemplar here, but perhaps I'm discovering what many people --particularly perhaps in the coaching field-- have known (and probably written about) for centuries.

And a great deal of teaching at advanced levels is about precisely this level of detailed adjustment. It calls for great open-ness on the part of the learner, and deep conviction on the part of the teacher that this "trivial" point is worth getting right (which may well lead to the traditional accusation of "arrogance", of course).

On not networking...

2010-11-29T20:53:00.000Z

I'm now on Facebook! By mistake. It all got out of hand, and I have been deluged with messages, some from people I have never heard of who want to be my "friend", and others from people I really respect and like who are--if not offended--at least bemused.

I'm backtracking fast! But presumably there is some point to all this social networking stuff. How come I don't get it? Apart from being a socially inept introvert, that is? I've sent a variant of the following post to everyone I believe might have been affected...

My apologies to everyone who has received gratuitous and importunate messages from Facebook in my name. I did not expect that those of you who steer clear of it--as I did until I followed up a link onto the slippery slope--would be approached to sign up.

I joined in the first place to investigate whether it was a viable alternative to the clunky Virtual Learning Environment used by the university (particularly for those of our students in community education programmes who do not have access to such portals). The team discussed it and decided that it was not secure enough, so dropped it.

In a moment of madness last night--prompted in part by nagging emails from Facebook about some people I know trying to reach me (FB knows where I live, of course) I revisited the site. I was invited, I thought, just to check who, on my address lists in gmail, etc. was already on the site. I was naive and didn't understand how it worked; it asks for an inch and takes a mile.

So far, the only reason I can see not to "deactivate" (apparently there is no way to delete completely) my account is that it would be rude to those of you who are making good use of it. I'll keep it open for a week or so, in case someone wants to persuade me otherwise.

A few people have noted that they can't "friend" me. I must have had the good sense to disable that option when I first signed up.

In the meantime I have battened down the privacy settings to their tightest. There is some marginal convenience in being able to send the same messages to all one's "friends" at once of course, but all email packages offer the same facility. But why on earth I would want "friends of friends" to know anything about me by default, I can't imagine. And if I want something completely public it goes on the blog.

On the other hand, you are of course entitled to conclude that I'm a miserable luddite curmudgeon and you are better off without me. That's fine; there's no need to tell me, because that is the default position... :-)

On the Socratic method

2010-11-27T00:44:00.001Z

I came across this quotation while marking over the summer:

“...the Socratic approach where you do not need to tell students anything, just ask them the right questions so that they will find out for themselves...” (Reece and Walker, 2006: 118)

At least the referencing was punctilious. I must be missing something, I thought, because the quotation is a gross distortion of the "Socratic method" (if indeed there is such a thing).

And then I thought--I'm pretty sure this student has not read Plato*, because otherwise s/he would not have had to refer to one of the standard textbooks to explain what the "method" is.

But (I merely raise the question--the answer may be a clear "yes!" [in the original Greek]) have R and W (standing simply as proxies for many other writers in the field) actually read any Plato?
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On toxic training

2010-11-19T21:03:00.000Z

Has teacher training become part of the problem rather than the solution? I'm speaking of the Higher (HE) and general Post-Compulsory Education (PCE) sector here.

As so often, I'm prompted by events and discussions which seem to be pointing in a general direction.

First--perhaps trivial, but perhaps symptomatic. Two MA students, whose dissertations I was supervising, confessed that they weren't interested in what mark they got, they just needed to pass. One teaches in PCE, the other at a university. They explained they were very busy, and so they had to be careful with how they invested their time, but that they needed the post-graduate award for career purposes. It is hard to think of a more cynically strategic approach to study--and this from people engaged in teaching beginning professionals. (They got their wishes, but only just.)

Second--Sean posted about his experience on his own MA course, on this occasion drawing attention to his fellow course members' lack of inclination to do any work outside class, resulting in ill-informed discussions and a general sense of futility. (Earlier, though, he commented on similar reluctance to work beyond the session in the very different setting of a WEA class on navigation--I may get round to that in another post...) He asks,

"Has the education system now bent so far backwards to accommodate strategic learners that even people who presumably must once have been interested in getting to grips with the thing they were studying now do the bare minimum? Or is this (as I hear it may be) how most PGCEs are now, rewarding conformity, strategic learning, and technical compliance, rather than any deeper understanding?"

Both, I think.

Third--(and slightly tangential, I confess)... Graham Gibbs' short but magisterial report on educational achievement in HE appeared in August and I blogged about his presentation based on it it here. Among his observations (p.24) is:

"High levels of detail in course specifications, of learning outcomes and assessment criteria, in response in part to QAA codes of practice, allow students to identify what they ought to pay attention to, but also what they can safely ignore. A recent study has found that in such courses students may narrow their focus to attention to the specified assessed components at the expense of everything else (Gibbs and Dunbar-Goddet, 2007). Students have become highly strategic in their use of time and a diary study has found students to progressively abandon studying anything that is not assessed as they work their way through three years of their degree (Innis and Shaw, 1997).

I learned at the age of about seven that it is possible to have too much of a good thing. (I was visiting neighbours on my own, and for the first time I was allowed to have as much sugar in my tea as I wanted. I put in four heaped teaspoonsful, and it was revolting!) The same goes for designing teaching, as for any other complex activity. Complex interactions between ingredients/variables do not seem to have occurred to the powers that be...

(Is there anywhere in LLUK standards or Ofsted criteria or similar bumf, a call for less of anything? Have they never heard of the art that conceals art?)

There is a perfect storm conspiring to distract us all in the direction of surface --or at best strategic-- learning, to attention to the signifier rather than the signified.

Perhaps it will all change next week...

References

Atherton J S (2010) Doceo; Values, Effort and QA [On-line] UK: Available: http://www.doceo.co.uk/tools/values_qa.htm Accessed: 19 November 2010

Gibbs G (2010) Dimensions of Quality York: Higher Education Academy [On-line] available: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/York/documents/ourwork/evidence_informed_practice/Dimensions_of_Quality.pdf Accessed: 19 November 2010

Gibbs G and Dunbar-Goddet H (2007) The effects of programme assessment environments on student
learning. York: Higher Education Academy

Innis K and Shaw M (1997) "How do students spend their time?" Quality Assurance in Education 5 (2), pp. 85–89.

On unintended consequences down the line...

2010-11-16T19:46:00.000Z

(Actually this post has been held back for several weeks to anonymise it for readers who may also be my students; some details have been changed for the same reason.)

I've put it off for several days, but I've finally commented on a complicated (second) draft submission from a student. It's complicated because although she is British by birth, English is her second language. She is a graduate (in fine arts) but her written expression is nowhere near graduate level. And when my colleague pointed out that problem to her, on her first module assessment, she protested that no-one had ever picked her up on it all the way through university, probably because of her ethnicity (and perhaps because literacy was not much assessed in fine arts, and even dyslexia is becoming "normalised"--not necessarily a bad thing of course...).

But now she is teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL)! She has been seriously let down by PC sensibilities, and she won't pass the course if she can't catch up, and if she doesn't pass she can't carry on working... She's clearly trying very hard, but I'm not sure she has the background knowledge to make full use of my feedback, and there's a limit to how much assistance it is fair for me to give...

So. Do I provide feedback as I would to anyone else? Do I make allowances for her linguistic heritages? Or is that simply patronising and indeed colonialist? Or do we arrange specialist support for her? Or do I disregard her claimed (but so far unassessed) dyslexia as worthy of support, but not her heritage? ....

Do I apply the same pass criteria as I would to anyone else? I have to answer "Yes", to that. The obligation to guarantee minimum standards for the sake of the students and even the employers must outweigh others. But clearly her teachers at school and university have colluded in the past to avoid confronting problems. Moreover, the exam boards must have done the same, because her grades were sufficient for her to get to university.

(This bit is current) On Saturday we had one of our Study Days. The theme on this occasion was "Race and Gender, Inclusivity and Diversity"; and the speaker quoted from the report of the Victoria Climbie inquiry (Laming, 2003),

“It may be that assumptions made about Victoria and her situation diverted caring people from noting and acting upon signs of neglect or ill treatment”

More telling, however, in the present context:

"It was the belief of two senior staff managers from Haringey that some staff had difficulty in reading practice guidance because of problems with literacy. (Laming, 2003, para. 1.60)

I've commented on this tragic case in relation to the ultimate cruelty of "kindness" here. (For some reason, the transcript of the Climbie Inquiry to which I refer is no longer on-line.)