On manuals and text-books

The other day I indulged myself by going to one of the world's great physical bookshops to browse and buy.

Convenient as the online bookshops are, there is to my mind no substitute for physical browsing. And browsing in a bookshop and in a library are quite different experiences, which inform and feed off each other. In a library I look up the UDC/Dewey reference to find a text on a shelf and may browse round it to find associated stuff on a similar topic, but usually I am pretty clear what I am looking for, and either I find it or I don't.

The bookshop is different. Certainly it is organised--much more broadly--by subject area,  but then by author, which leads to some interesting juxtapositions on the shelves which you can't find anywhere else, other than perhaps in a particular person's library.

Almost as a penance for the browsing and buying motivated purely by my interests (and some potential presents--why else would I clean out their stock of Frankfurt H (2005) On Bullshit Princeton N J; Princeton University Press? *), I had a look on the education shelves, in particular those on teaching in post-compulsory education, to note if there were more recent editions of any of the standard works on our reading list.

There were, so I flipped through them to see where the differences were and, being in that context in the bookshop, I was instantly bored stiff. Truth to tell, of course, I have never read any of these things. I've raided them for bits of information and to give a reference to something for students, and I do read the next level of collections of papers and research-based studies and the like, but I don't read the text-books.

Thinking about this driving home, I realised anew that the text-books, in a professional/vocational discipline, may well be inimical to effective learning how to practise. The text-books have been contaminated, or perhaps more generously constrained, by the pernicious micro-managed compliance culture of post-compulsory education promulgated by LLUK and the now-defunct Learning and Skills Council (it's not often I link to something just to show that it's not there!), but that is not the whole story.

They have managed to reduce all the knowledge to something to be learned about (See here for a very quick and dirty exposition) rather than something to know by direct experience. (Sorry; that is a very sloppy usage of one of the most venerable distinctions in philosophy). It is a slab of indigestible dough sitting out there which needs to be consumed**. It is inert.

Some might recognise that "inert knowledge" like that, is another of David Perkins' categories of "troublesome knowledge" (2006).

Many of our teacher "trainees", especially those from craft and practical disciplines, experience these 400-page tomes as serious obstacles to learning how to practise. And Howard Becker, in his excellent 1972 article, which pre-figures all the "situated learning" discussions of the '90s onwards, shows how the culture and conventions of the educational system militate against the effective learning of practical disciplines.

Now Sean has identified another instance of this in the case of a textbook all about management which is a liability to his students who need to learn how to be entrepreneurs and to manage a small business.

This is not of course to deny that there is value in these books and their counterparts which fuel further investigation into policies and practices; after all, this blog in its trivial way fits within that tradition. But just as a weed is a plant in the wrong place, much of the literature is a stumbling-block to new practitioners.

As I drove home, I was asking myself why we were putting our new students through that obstacle course. There are many reasons, of course; the academic level of the course, the inspection regime, even our desire to show off our academic credentials by announcing that we know all this stuff--and a corresponding desire to put initiates through a rite of passage, whose irrelevance and futility is of course part of its potency. But none of it is about getting them to teach better.

So perhaps we should forbid them to read anything like these textbooks for the first year? (Bearing in mind that for some of the graduates, that will work as a paradoxical injunction which will guarantee they devour the reading list...) Let them gain knowledge by acquaintance first, like people do in the real world, perhaps?

Strangely, something like this is happening by accident. The current structure of teacher training in post-compulsory education in England and Wales requires that all new staff undertake a short, survival-oriented course at the start of their job (PTLLS) and then go on to a full two-year part-time programme as soon as possible. In practice, that "as soon as possible" may well be the beginning of the following academic year. So they get a year's experience under their belts (with support, theoretically) and will only then get all these books thrown at them. That won't reduce the academic step some craft colleagues have to take, but it will mean that they may be ready for this more formal approach to learning when it comes.

And the reference to manuals? There are some authors out there who have little interest in covering the standard ground, but just presenting concrete advice to newcomers. They don't write textbooks; they write manuals. Their agenda is set by what their readers want to know. At different ends of the scale, Sue Cowley and Phil Race stand out, but they are not alone. They may not go far, but they make a much better start.

On the other hand, avoid like the plague anything which is sub-titled "meeting the LLUK standards" or "achieving QTLS" (it doesn't matter what it means). Those sub-titles are testimony to the authors having lost the plot; they are writing to "cover" the inert knowledge entombed in the standards and the syllabi, as a very poor proxy for improving practice.


* Actually, I wasn't terribly impressed. The whole thing is really summed up on p.47, "the essence of bullshit is not that it is false, but that it is phony." It's a conceit, that's all.
** Sean has a very interesting blog post about bread-making, incidentally, here.

Becker H S (1972) "A School is a Lousy Place to Learning Anything in" American Behavioral Scientist vol 16: 85-105 doi:10.1177/000276427201600109
Perkins D (2006) "Constructivism and troublesome knowledge" in J H F Meyer  and R Land (eds.) Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge London; Routledge.

On writing a dissertation

This is what I have been up to when not posting to this blog. Honest!

These notes originate from my efforts to help an old friend undertaking a taught Master's course, at a university which seemed to devise its regulations around the key principle that under no circumstances should, or could, a supervisor be helpful. So my reaction to his first almost complete draft was to say that it needed to be completely re-organised; it was great content, but did not follow the conventions of a dissertation. Quite reasonably he asked how he was supposed to know that? This is a game he would only play once, whereas supervisors and assessors and external examiners are familiar with it. He suggested,

"I should have found (useful) a model outline for the MA, like

A. Intro could include..........and should not......

B. Literary review could..... and should not..............

C. Further Chapters could.... and should not...........

D. Conclusion could ...and should not...... "

So this is my attempt to provide just that. I had just assumed that it already existed in practically every text on Research Methods, but on the basis of the sample I have consulted. it doesn't. I've already modified it in response to some very useful suggestions from people on lists I belong to, and plan to continue to do so—so please write to me (address in the footer) and together we can improve it further. Thanks.

On one kind of American psyche

 Or--"Why I love my revolver more than my mobile phone."

I like Edwin Leap; I get his blog through RSS regularly, and if he is a little down-home Will Rogers-ish for a European taste, so be it. The list of awards to the right of the page testifies to how he is received in the US.

Every so often, though, a post from one of the US bloggers I casually follow acutely exposes a massive gulf between their mind-set and mine. (I am not so daft as to generalise this beyond the few people I follow, none of whom have been chosen for their extremism or freakery but simply for their interesting take on their world.) And this one is not merely any old gulf. It's a Grand Canyon (sorry about mixing geographical metaphors).

Actually, it is a classic statement and it is worth quoting at some length:

"The phone represents connection.  Especially a smart-phone, since it connects me not only to those I love, but in essence to the entire world in a way unfathomable a few short decades ago.  I can tap the World Wide Web from the comfort of my car or anywhere else, simply by pulling out my phone.  The phone represents the collective knowledge of humanity and our interdependency. [...] It allows me,  [...] to call others to my rescue, to ask others’ opinions, to check the collective opinion on millions of potential websites.

What about my little Smith and Wesson model 640?  Well, it isn’t about collective communication; though the sound of it being discharged will probably bring interested parties to investigate.  It has no communication device located anywhere on the frame.  It has three functions, as I see it.  It reassures me.  It may discourage those who would harm me or my family.  It is capable of causing harm.

Philosophically, it is light years from the phone.  Because it requires that I be master of my own fate.  It says, ‘no one will help you, but you, when the chips are down.’  The help summoned by a phone may not arrive for a very long time, as I live in ‘the sticks.’  The revolver says, ‘you must be accountable for this decision; you must carry and use me safely and you must use my capacity for injury with a profound awareness of morality, ethics and of the value of life.’   The revolver is about individuality.

Americans, Westerners in general, are slowly abdicating responsibility for self and embracing the collective.  The question is always, ‘who will help me?  Who will pay for me?  Who will give me? Who will come to me?  Who will allow me to do nothing while they do something?  Who can I blame?  Who will excuse me?’

This is a travesty.  This will be one of the deepest wounds to our nation, to our way of life.  Not the phone itself, which is merely a tool, but the abdication of accountability that communication can falsely represent.

If the law were just, I would gladly carry my revolver everywhere.  I like the phone, and I find it useful.  But I am old school.  I am old Southern.  I am descended from patriots.  I have been responsible for others and continue to be for myself.  I believe in the individual.

Furthermore, I am a physician in an emergency department.  I know what humans are capable of doing.  I love people.  Some of my favorite patients have been in handcuffs.  I joke with them, I like them.  But humans are dangerous.  If you doubt it, read the newspaper.

So in the end, based on my life, my experiences and my philosophy, I can only say that when I reach around my side, I love the feel of that handle far more than the feel of that phone.  And I love what it represents far more than any capacity for communication."

On the difference between knowledge and wisdom

As the late Miles Kington put it (I paraphrase; original in the heading link...)

• Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit...
  
• Wisdom is knowing better than to put it in a fruit salad.

(Thanks to "Quote ... Unquote" on BBC Radio 4; I can't get at it to link at the moment.)

On ritual knowledge

Last Friday the hard drive on my principal machine unexpectedly and suddenly died, gave up the ghost, expired, exited this mortal coil...

Fortunately pretty well all my data was backed up, and so at one level and thanks to a very helpful (and reasonably priced) engineer --Paul West of Bedford Home Computers deserves the plug-- it was relatively simple to install a new drive (twice the capacity of course) and then to re-populate it with everything from scratch. The operating system, the main packages, and then the drivers and the add-ons and the tuning, and the little programs installed for free from magazine cover-discs years ago which have become integral to how I work (particularly ABC Snapgraphics, a really simple template-based vector drawing programme which is the tool which generated most of the graphics on my web-sites; runs under Windows 3.1, from 1995. I have many back-ups of that, some on a single floppy!), the list goes on and it took most of the weekend to get minimally functional again.

But that's the background. As I engaged in the tedium of finding stuff and installing and scrabbling for authorisation codes on packaging that had only narrowly escaped being thrown away years ago---I was reminded once again of David Perkins' discussion of the forms of "troublesome knowledge", particularly in the context of threshold concepts (of course). I'd like to link to his 1999 paper at this point [Perkins D (1999) "The constructivist classroom - the many faces of constructivism" Educational Leadership, Volume 57, Number 3], but it has disappeared from its former open-access home, so what follows is based on my understanding of part of his argument.

Troublesome knowledge may be associated with

• ritual knowledge
• inert knowledge
• conceptually difficult knowledge
• the defended learner 
• alien knowledge
• tacit knowledge
• troublesome language

Without going into all the detail, the point is that these features of the material to be learned--alone or in combination--make it difficult to learn.

And the longer we go on in teaching, the more inured we get to the difficulty of these forms of knowledge, because the more we are initiated into the little worlds of our disciplines and practices the more they come to make sense to us. And the longer that goes on, the more difficult it becomes to empathise with the difficulties experienced by our students. And of course to engage constructively with those difficulties...

Until it hits home. I have a lot of ritual knowledge about PCs. I know what I have to do to make certain things happen. I haven't a clue why they work (just as I no longer have a clue about how my car engine works, despite having done basic servicing on its predecessors for thirty or so years). But I know I have to go through the motions.

I've never been much of a computer geek, but in the 'eighties I could and did create (rather boring) programs for my son to practise basic maths in BBC BASIC, and later created crude interfaces in CP/M and MS-DOS. Then, as with the car, I at least enjoyed the delusion that I knew what was going on. Now I am disabused of that.

More important, I suspect that nobody knows what is going on.

In the 'eighties, the computer mags (my favourite was PCW Plus for the Amstrad 8/9000 pre-PC series) generally included in each edition an arcane article about programming in assembler, just one step away from machine code. It's of course possible that even in those days only the authors knew what they were talking about, but I wonder if any person (as opposed to a succession of programs and of course millions of machines) exists who can read a few hundred lines of low-level code and even see that they are the nuts and bolts of, say, a state-of-the-art image editor.

Analogously, that is like reading a list of thousands of pixels defined by their colour properties, and then answering Rolf Harris' ritual question, "Can you tell what it is, yet?" I do remember from one of those magazines, a throw-away remark that the difficult thing about programming was not writing code, but being able to read it.

The point? That in all my dutiful behaviour re-creating my desk-top, I haven't actually learned anything. Apart, perhaps, from obeying orders.

More important, for most of us there isn't anything else to learn. I can't reference an op-ed piece I read a few weeks ago pointing out that there is no single person on the planet who knows how your mobile phone works. Its operating system and "apps" have been assembled by specialists across the world who produce a library of "black box", mysterious modules which happen to work. But those who use them--not only the consumers but also the engineers and designers who package them for public consumption, neither need to know how they work, nor do know.

I've just been watching a re-run of one of the marvellous series on BBC TV on the Indian railways. Some of their locomotives are still steam-powered, and I admired the wonderful dance of well-lubricated pistons and shafts and eccentrics and wheels, and the knowledge and skill of the people who made them work. But then I thought--even I could potentially learn how these things work. I can see the components and their linkages. They are concrete objects harnessing abstract principles.

But that is not true of ICT, or of very much modern technology--even the ills of the internal combustion engine can nowadays only reliably be diagnosed by sensors and readouts, at several removes from the actual events causing the mis-fire or the overheating. Instead, one is at the mercy of the oracles...

I'm tangentially reminded of a birthday event I attended a few years ago, where I met up again with a former housemate, an early-retired (full) professor of maths, then working part-time with doctoral candidates at another university on the mathematics of financial derivatives. He, with an Oxford D.Phil long under his belt, was unstinting in his admiration for the technical competence of his high-flying candidates. He admitted that sometimes he was, if not struggling, at least exerting himself to keep up.  Dateline; February 2006.  About 18 months later the significance became apparent of the disconnection between the capacity of the analytical disciplines and and complexity of those all-too-real deals.

The inaccessibility to most of us of the technology which we can merely consume makes us dependent, and perhaps promotes learned helplessness (and hyperbole). Discuss!

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke (1961) "Profiles of The Future"

On neuromyths

The linked site focusses largely on school-based education, but it sets out to produce a balanced account of the rather faddish, fashionable, and often downright misleading or wrong contribution of neuroscience to learning and teaching. Based at the School of Education at Bristol University, it draws on sound research and scholarship both to address myths and to promote neuroscience-based approaches to teaching.

In particular, the site links to an excellent balanced chapter on "neuromyths" (pdf available here) from a recent book by the co-ordinator of the site (Howard-Jones P (2009) Introducing Neuroeducational Research London; Routledge). It's not as entertaining as Ben Goldacre's Bad Science but more comprehensive and informative, covering

• Multiple intelligences, 
• Learning styles, 
• Enriched environments
• Brain gym
• Water
• Omega-3
• Sugary snacks and drinks

--and even a sympathetic discussion about why there are (so many) neuromyths in education — and how to spot one?  Unfortunately, as simply a pdf of the chapter, the bibliography is not included—you'll have to get the actual book for that!

The site was recommended by Tony Fisher—many thanks.

On dissonance by any other name

The linked blog post is in turn based on this article (Nyhan and Reifler, 2010), which discusses why attempts to change people's political misperceptions and misunderstandings often don't work, and can in some cases backfire. The blog post relates the same processes to the teaching of science.

There is a certain sense of reinventing the wheel, here, and I'm interested that there is no reference to a vast and venerable literature on cognitive dissonance (here is a page of mine on that) which goes back to the 1950's. On the other hand, it is worthy of note that if you follow up the first external link from my page you come to a .pdf file of a textbook chapter on cognitive dissonance, with a note to say that it is on the web because it is no longer included in the latest versions of the textbook, so the whole thing may be a matter of fashion.

Incidentally, the epigraph to the substantive article is attributed to Mark Twain, as such things often are; I think the correct ascription is to Henry Wheeler Shaw writing as Josh Billings:

The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so.

(Josh Billings' Encyclopedia of Wit and Wisdom, 1874)

Nyhan B & Reifler J (2010). "When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions" Political Behavior, 32 (2), 303-330 DOI: 10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2

On being first with the latest moral panic!

You read it here first! Be in the advance guard! Worry! Act! But mainly worry!

How long before the Daily Mail gets it? The Sun with added fear!

(I thought Mustang was a horse, and of course the great North American P51B...)

Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the link.

On filtering and abstracting

This is pure ignorant speculation, but I was interested in the linked article and its argument that much infant learning is so efficient (particularly, it suggests, early language learning) because the child's brain is insufficiently developed to filter information, and has to swallow it whole, as it were.

One issue that frequently comes up when covering the basics of memory as a precursor to learning theories is the existence (or not) and form of photographic (or eidetic) memory. I'm not going into detail because I do know I don't know enough about it even to be a reliable guide to other sites. Insofar as it is agreed to exist, it is much more common in children than in adults. That would seem to fit with the argument of the post and article. It appears that eidetic memory stands in the same relation to an "ordinary" memory as a picture of a document does to a version scanned with a print recognition utility. The eidetic memory will take up much more of (in this case a computer's) memory because it includes all the information of the document as a physical object (such as folds and smudges in the paper) regardless of their importance. The scanned text of course loses such irrelevant information, becomes much leaner, and of course editable.

I am reminded of Bruner on the enactive, iconic and symbolic modes of representation and the issue of whether being almost confined to an enactive mode (as an eidetic image is--granted that an image is by definition iconic to some degree) is as much a limitation to learning as a resource. Certainly that is the case for people with autistic spectrum disorders.

On giving handouts

The link is to an account of some empirical research on the much debated issue of when to give out handouts accompanying a lecture--at the beginning or the end?

The findings provide preliminary evidence that lecturers should provide their students with handouts during the lecture. ... In no case ... did having the handouts during a lecture impair performance on the final tests. Even when there were no differences in final test performance, students still benefited in the sense that they reached the same level of learning with less work.

In my view it all depends on the task of the lecture, the kind of knowledge one is imparting and how one hopes that students will engage with it. The reported research relates to students watching videos of short 12-minute presentations on science topics; whether it would also go for other content I don't know. (But it is an easy project to research, and might make a useful small-scale project for students.)

I don't use handouts at all any more--I set up a blog or a web-page on which I can post not only the presentation, but also the references and links, and photos of points made in discussion written up on a flip chart or white-board. I may make it available before the session, but I invariably edit it afterwards to reflect the actual material taught.

This is more like the minutes of the meeting which actually took place rather than the session I planned to give. But that suits me because my subject areas are typically both "soft" and applied, and the discussion in the (relatively small) group is more important than the content I plan to "cover". I rarely stick to a session plan in any case, so advance notes could actively confuse the students.

It's probably more important to have a worked-out rationale for doing what you do (including telling the students what you expect of them) than doing it in a particular way.

Marsh, E., & Sink, H. (2009). Access to handouts of presentation slides during lecture: Consequences for learning. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24 (5), 691-706 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1579

and acknowledgements to the BPS Research Digest blog for the pointer

On validations and grading

I'm now quite an old hand on validations panels.

(New readers start here: it is standard practice in the UK that a new course, and indeed a substantially modified established course, is scrutinised by academic peers --colleagues within a school, within the university but from a different school, and beyond the university-- before it receives the university's imprimatur.)

I have taken part in two in the last couple of weeks. One was a complex master's programme with generic and named routes, and different but sometimes unexplored understandings of what constitutes M level work. And today's was a humble 60-credit certificate at NQF 5.

In both cases I have been really impressed by the quality of discussion. Something has changed for the better over the past few years (in my experience).

On the Master's programme we had a great and appropriately unresolved discussion about transformative learning and whether one can "require" it in assessment (among other things) [Yes, I will post on that in more detail as promised as soon as I know what I think...]

..and today we grappled with how to assess "reflection" and whether its proxy for assessment  could be graded. And I found myself arguing that it could be graded!

Thinking back over a dozen or so validations in which I have participated recently --some internally but more externally, at all levels from level 4 certificates to professional doctorates-- for once I have to concede that the system has got better. Not necessarily at the level of formal regulations--in practice one only hits those when really difficult technical issues obtrude-- but in both the quality and the culture of the debate.

I (and I'm not a lone voice, albeit a timorous one) have inveighed against (moaned about) the "compliance culture" stifling serious discussion of course content, structure and processes. But that seems to come principally from the accreditation bodies rather than academic institutions themselves.

I'm very pleased to find that within those institutions, "quality assurance" has moved on from covering institutional arses by ticking boxes, to a genuine enquiry into how learning can be promoted and the student experience enhanced.

I'll have to lie down--it has all been a bit of a shock!

On ecstasy, sort of.

In the sense of ec-stasy, or standing-outside-of.

In the informal coffee and cake melee after my session on Monday (more on that to follow), several people approached me to discuss "standing outside one's taken-for-granted world" as a threshold concept.

• It so happens that tonight is the launch of Al-Jazeera English on Freeview channel 89.
  
• Russia Today is also available on Freeview channel 85.

Both channels are wonderful correctives to the usual perspectives on news. It misses the point to allege that they are "biassed" or "spun". In many cases, the stories they report just do not figure on our news--just as few domestic stories do not reach their lists. This is not like the Mail or the Sun or the Guardian spinning the same stories differently. It is about quite different priorities about what counts as a story.

Encourage students to watch!

On something else the Germans do well!

On one reason not to grade...

It presupposes a degree of maturity on the part of students, but the course with which I am still associated, operates only on a pass/refer basis (one opportunity to re-submit referred work; fiture at that point is failure and requires a re-take of the whole module, at best). Many students don't like it--particularly those who are themselves graduates and have a long history of assessing themselves by their marks, often of course relative to their class-mates.

The situation Mary Beard describes in the linked post is one reason (and it is incredibly time-consuming to adopt her solution, particularly for big courses).But it goes a bit further than that.

Let's apply the Dale/Bruner “Cone of Experience” to the situation--slightly odd, but it fills the bill and such tools are never more than pragmatic devices. In terms of assessment;

• what the students actually know/can do etc. is at the enactive level. It's real life. It's incredibly rich and complex and inherently unassessable because of that, so
  
• we devise means of assessing which necessarily lose a lot of detail in order to be manageable. Sometimes the detail we actually lose is precisely what we wanted to assess in the first place, but we just get it wrong. This is at the iconic level. The students do the assessment, but in order to compare them against a standard, or even against each other, or previous performance...
  
• we have to assess the assessment, and that gets even more abstract and symbolic. And attaching a single number or letter is as abstract as one can get (apart of course from manipulating those number mathematically) --or in other words loses the most information.

Assessment is always a lossy process, but numerical marking exacerbates the situation. That magic number is a distant and distorted proxy for the blooming buzzing complexity (if not confusion) of the student's experience and conduct; which moreover obscures that enactive level. We have made grades etc. so central to a mass education system (no, I don't know the alternative either) that once one has been issued it is almost impossible to get through any more sophisticated message to the student;

"Yes, it did only get a C+, but that was solely down to those daft mistakes you made with the statistics; if you'd got them right it would probably have been an A-"

"Yeah, right..."

Such practices are actively inimical to effective feedback and assessment for learning, in the current jargon.

On "benign" myths

In the car this morning, I caught part of "Woman's Hour" on Radio 4. (Heading link goes there, available for seven days, relevant bit about 30 minutes in.)

It was a discussion about drinking in pregnancy, and it was very refreshing. One of the contributors talked about how some of the strident advocates of prohibiting alcohol consumption in pregnancy, saw the topic of possible foetal damage principally as a way of "telling a good story" which would command attention in a wider campaign against the evils of drink. Another, asked about the labelling of alcohol in the US with warning about drinking during pregnancy, agreed that the initiative was principally traceable to the desire of drinks companies to cover themselves against litigation, regardless of the truth of the claims. Further asked if the labels had made any difference to the incidence of foetal alcohol syndrome, she was very clear--none at all.

This discussion exposed more clearly than anything I have heard or seen in mainstream media for years, the supposedly benign drift from factual reporting of risk to supposedly benign but infantilising myth-making, which not only undermines the capacity of grown-up people to make their own judgements of risk, but also undermines their confidence in anything they are told by the Ministry of Truth.

Not that it is new; Plato started it. Different context, same principle:

How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we lately spoke—just one royal lie which may deceive the rulers, if that be possible, and at any rate the rest of the city?....

...Such is the tale; is there any possibility of making our citizens believe in it?

Not in the present generation, he replied; there is no way of accomplishing this; but their sons may be made to believe in the tale, and their sons' sons, and posterity after them.

(Plato, the Republic, book III)

 

On "potential" (self-indulgent rant)

I do realise that this is of little interest to anyone else, but it's my blog, so read or move on!

I am prompted by hearing on BBC Radio 4 news of all places that something or someone is a "potential threat" to whatever.

This is not merely oxymoronic, it also dilutes the original idea to "threat of a threat".

The following list is not exhaustive,  but the notion of  potentiality is not merely implicit but clearly embedded in the following:

• chance
• danger 
• opportunity
• probability 
• risk 
• threat

 So to qualify them with "potential" is to weaken them.

"Potential" is a useful qualifier for something concrete--indeed certain-- such as "result", "outcome" "consequence"--but whose qualities are as yet unknown.

[Incidentally... "more/few/fewer" is the term for items which can be counted. "more/less" is the term for quantities which need to be measured. (Yes, I know, "term" is not the best term...]

Who says? You may well ask, but that's a whole new ball-game.

On the problem of self-limiting adequacy

I'm not sure whether or not it is true, but the story goes that Ofsted has declared that their Grade 3, "Satisfactory" is no longer satisfactory. Or perhaps it is (i.e. "satisfactory"), once again, given that the common inspection framework has "raised the bar". (I've looked up the urls for the links, but don't expect me actaully to read this stuff. I'm retired, remember?)

I hate to say it, but they may be right.

For Father's Day one of our sons gave me a premium, organic, long-matured, etc. rib of beef. I don't usually roast a joint on the bone, so I consulted Delia, naturally (in book form rather than online). Of course her advice was impeccable, and even Susi commented on the better flavour and texture than our usual supermarket joints. (This may prove to be expensive if we have also raised Susi's bar...)

For me, and indeed a generation of conscientious UK cooks (domestic cooks, rather than "chefs"; it's a very different discipline), Delia's books are the bible [that statement is grammatically "correct"].

Next to the guidance on roasting beef was, of course, a recipe for Yorkshire Pudding. (No, I am not going to post a link to a similar recipe.)

It was different from my usual one. That is of course fine; there is no canonical recipe for a traditional dish. And mine works very well, thank you. Most important, it is reliable. Sometimes a pudding comes out as a dome rather than a bowl for some unknown reason; but turn it upside down and it is like all the others.

I didn't try it. I know what I always get with my own recipe, so why risk it? If I were floundering; if my puddings came out like biscuits, I would go for it. And perhaps if I were cooking just for me, I might try it; but I am trying to produce a meal for Susi, too. (And the dog, but being diabetic, he couldn't have the pud in any case...)

So in Ofsted's insistence on "capacity to develop further" they may just be onto something. "Satisfactory" is not only not good enough, but inimical to further development. Discuss...

(Principally, Delia says you don't have to let the batter stand, but then she does add water as well as milk. I've always believed that standing the batter in the fridge until the last half-hour of roasting lets the liquid do something to the flour which helps with the rising process --because it is plain flour after all, and the egg is not whipped to retain air, souffle style. A proper scientist would not take any of this on the authority of the blessed Delia or even St Jamie, but rely on the experiments. OK, fund me!)

On manual work, feedback and fulfilment

I've just finished Matthew Crawford's (2010) The Case for Working with Your Hands; or why office work is bad for us and fixing things feels good London; Penguin/Viking, published in the USA last year as Shop Class as Soulcraft; an inquiry into the value of work. It's not very long, and highly readable.

To a certain extent, Crawford is in the same territory as Richard Sennett (see links below) in lauding craftsmanship and painstaking skill, but whereas Sennett rambles self-indulgently around the workshops of violin-makers in Cremona, and discusses literary approaches to cooking a chicken, Crawford is more grounded. He does not use the effete term "craft", but concentrates on the manual "trade". And his paradigmatic trade is repairing motorbikes.

He has an impressive academic background, including a degree in physics and a doctorate in political philosophy, and enough form as an office worker to reject it on an informed basis. He can also appeal to having practised as an electrician on small-scale construction sites.

He runs a motorbike repair shop as his main business. He knows what he is talking about, as some fascinating stories testify, even if readers may not really understand them.

There's much too much for a blog post here, and of course if I go into it too much you may not read the book, and there are reviews here, here and here. But...

• He celebrates work which gives direct and unmediated feedback; do it right and the machine works again. Do it wrong and it doesn't. 

• He bemoans current systems which don't do that--but he talks about them as if they were deliberately constructed as if to obscure feedback. They aren't. It's just that in most areas of practice today you don't find out at once if something is working or not (see Jaques "time-span of discretion") 

• And he castigates managers and modern work practices for focusing on process and compliance rather than outcomes and results. I have a lot of sympathy, and I moan about it myself, but complex organisations are just like that. Sorry!

• Crawford's conception of manual work is somewhat idealised. He nods in that direction in his acknowledgement that working as an electrician on new-build work is less interesting than repairing faults. And of course, manufacturing new motor-bikes on a production-line represents exactly the de-humanising work against which he inveighs.

• It's symptomatic of the fragmentation of work about which Crawford complains, that some of the most relevant work of recent years, such as situated learning, deliberate practice and even threshold concepts, does not get a mention.

Well worth reading, but particularly for his discussion of the intellectual component of practical work in the first five chapters.

• Here's an earlier post on Richard Sennett
• Another on the importance of practice
• and another

On learning and being taught

My son has just called round (he's 28), initially to print out a spreadsheet, but then to email it. Before that, though, he wanted me to show him how to add up a column of figures on the spreadsheet.

He couldn't email it from his own laptop because of the security settings, so he had to copy the file across via a flash-drive, with which he needed my help.

The file was simply in his main "My Documents" folder, called  "Expenses.xls". I pointed that out. He didn't understand that it was a problem...

I was irritated, to say the least. Apart from games consoles, he has had his own computer since before he went to university. I remember helping him to create graphs for a project when he was still at school.

After he left, I had something of a moan to Susi. In her inimitable way, she suggested that it was not surprising because because I am a useless teacher (guilty! I am hopelessly impatient when it comes to procedures) and when I responded by pointing out how long he has had to acquire these basic skills, she wondered if he had ever been taught them at school or university.

I love learning. I hate being taught.

In particular, I don't understand the assumption which underlies so much current discourse in the field, that learning depends on being taught.

Texting is not taught at school,  but the "achievement" of young people in this field is phenomenal. (Hint to Michael Gove; if you ever want to massage figures upwards, introduce a Diploma in "Social Communication", where txtg is a major component.)

I remember an epiphany in 1974, after a discussion at an annual Easter houseparty with friends in a rented cottage, in this case on the Nefyn peninsula...  That beyond the basic three "R"s and foreign languages (and some of that was dodgy -- did you every meet a French person who enquired, "Comment allez-vous?"?) ..beyond that almost everything I had been taught at school was;

• trivial and/or
• irrelevant (to what? Almost anything in the real world.) and/or
• wrong

So I love learning. I hate being taught. Misapplied teaching inhibits, distorts and blocks learning.

But somehow the conventional wisdom is that being taught is a prerequisite of learning.

And of course that a paper qualification is a reliable proxy for learning, knowledge and skill.

No. It's merely a proxy for having been taught.

On pictures and words

Click here for larger version,

The other day a friend and former colleague and I met for lunch, as we do every few months. He, being a resident of the Potteries (that part of Staffordshire which came to prosperity in the early 19th century through the entrepreneurship of people like Josiah Wedgwood) gave me these two plates. Based on the familiar Willow Pattern tableware (originally from the Minton pottery) these up-date the familiar scene to reflect the Potteries (on the left), and London (on the right).

RK explained how he made use of them in short courses on promoting entrepreneurial activity; instead of setting a groupwork brief of writing the characteristics of a proposed project, he insists on it being drawn. He described the way in which the task divided groups, but also how profitable it was because of the effectiveness of the post-presentation discussion--what would be known in an art school context as the critique. (Identified by Lee Shulman as their "signature pedagogy".)

I was prompted to recall, on the train on the way back, I an exercise I used to use with students (on teaching programmes) around getting them to define their view of the teaching and learning process. Some of the more obvious images, from the trigger slide, are below; I used this in order to pre-empt participants from latching on to the cliches...

I used to ask them to work in groups to generate their own images of the process, to draw them on a flipchart or acetates, and then to present them (the delights of primitive technology--you can do it with an electronic whiteboard but it's a lot of hassle) to each other, and get the crit. going in that way. A useful variant was not to allow any verbal explanation by the presenters--the rest of the class had to deconstruct their offering.

And that in turn set me thinking about one of the texts I read long ago about a technique used in health-care for exploring critical incidents, known as "Illuminative Incident Analysis" (Cortazzi and Roote, 1975). This too centres around drawing the incident, in as cartoon-like a way as the group members are capable of, in response to guidance and structured questions. The authors insist on the use of pictures as a way of getting around how words can so easily be used to fudge meaning rather than reveal it.

(Of course it is precisely the capacity of language to carry so many connotations and levels of meaning which makes it so rich, but in this context that was seen as getting in the way of the task.)

As I recall, for example, a review of potentially serious incident on a hospital ward, included in a discussion the phrase, "a nurse in a tizzy". They draw out the possible connotations of that phrase, including implications about competence and stress (and nowadays they might note that for staff involved whose first language is not English, such an informal usage might be meaningless...) But if the speaker had to draw that nurse, so much more might emerge--she might be surrounded by clocks, cartoon patients, doctors, managers and even paper-work might be depicted pulling her in different directions and her head might be spinning. There would be the role-set, a picture of demands on time, all there at once (a completed picture is an instantaneous non-linear representation)...

Prompted by the latest round of marking I am struck by the current ubiquity of the bullet-point. The use of a bulleted list is quite a pointer to the student not having really got the idea, because paradoxically it removes the structural dimension from the account, indeed my contribution to an educational Devil's Dictionary would include;

• Bullet points: the most effective way of reducing an idea to less than the sum of its parts.

(Yes, it's deliberate) But draw a picture (much better than a diagram) and you have to pin your colours to the mast.

I wonder what is gained and lost in the interpretation of, say, a novel into a graphic novel (or vice versa) as well as the re-telling of tales on film and video.

I have no time for the "learning styles" rubbish, but the use of many different media in communication for teaching is not merely a matter of pandering to that fad, it provides opportunities to explore different features of the content, too.

Cortazzi D, Roote S (1975) Illuminative incident analysis London; McGraw-Hill

see also:

Rich A and Parker D (1995) "Reflection and critical incident analysis: ethical and moral implications of their use within nursing and midwifery education" Journal of Advanced Nursing 22:6 pp 1050-1057

On trivial learning

This is tricky. What I learned about was far from trivial. The fact that I learned it, was.

I have just watched a programme about aerial warfare in the first world war. It was fascinating and haunting. And irritating.

Because Albert Ball was exalted as the great ace (crudely, 44 kills). Mick Mannock (61) was not even mentioned. Surely class was not a factor, 95 years later?

And the position of the propeller shaft of the SE5 was wrong, probably because of the exigencies of reconstruction. I'm sure someone even geekier than me will make a devastating contrary case about this. But the objective facts are not the point, here---

My interest is in the fact that I read something about this when I was about 12. More than 50 years ago. I made no effort at all to "learn" it. Amazongly I have just found the source (Jones, 1954) Watching the programme, I was irritated by the continual references to 56 Squadron. I wanted to claim the primacy of 73 squadron. Actually it should have been 74 squadron...

I am drawing no conclusions, just questions.

On distraction

Nicholas Carr has written on The Shallows; what the internet is doing to  our brains. Note that I have not linked that title to Amazon or anywhere. That's because his blog post (which is of course linked from the header) explores whether embedded links (as opposed to the those gathered at the end of a post or a page in the manner of a bibliography) tend to distract the reader and to fragment the reading experience, and possibly the capacity to follow an argument:

"Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they're also distractions. Sometimes, they're big distractions - we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we've forgotten what we'd started out to do or to read. Other times, they're tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don't click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it's there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension."

So if we place a premium on clarity and communication, is it stylistically better to gather the links at the end?

On critically evaluating inspiration

Here is Sir Ken Robinson speaking at TED 2010. Apart from his tendency to chuckle at his own jokes (a fault he shares with President Obama) he's pretty inspirational. This is the follow-up to his 2006 talk (one of TED's top ten).

He's inspirational and aspirational and I share his vision, but is he rational... what planet is he living on? No, I haven't signed up to the Gradgrind tendency, but his vision pretends that human fulfilment is possible without sewers, mines, window-cleaning, accountancy, fish-gutting, and a host of other occupations on which any creative and artistic superstructure can be built.

I detest the economically-driven utilitarian arguments about the purposes of education:

To achieve stable and sustainable growth, we will need a well-educated, well-equipped and adaptable labour force. To cope with rapid change and the challenge of the information and communication age, we must ensure that people can return to learning throughout their lives. We cannot rely on a small elite, no matter how highly educated or highly paid. Instead, we need the creativity, enterprise and scholarship of all our people.
BLUNKETT D (1998) Foreword to The Learning Age: a renaissance for a new Britain
 Department for Education and Employment Green Paper; London HMSO

But don't knock it--within limits (and what those limits are is debatable...) --it's essential to make all the interesting stuff possible.

On teaching from requisite ignorance

In my first teaching job in the late 'sixties, I remember passing time with a more senior colleague, while waiting for our evening classes to start. He posed the question, "Is it possible to be too intelligent to be a good teacher?"

In those days, when I could claim to be "quite bright" on the basis of a "good" degree from a very fashionable university--but without benefit of much experience of life, work, serious relationships or anything much--I thought that was rubbish. That was before I found out how rubbish a teacher I was (and still am, in some respects).

Sadly, Martin Gardner has died, at 95. The heading link is to Alex Bellos' blog of interviewing him in 2008 (the opening paragraphs give the background). But I was particularly struck by this exchange:

What about the complicated maths in the column?

I worked very hard to understand it. I am basically a journalist. Beyond calculus I am lost. That was the secret of my column’s success. It took me so long to understand what I was writing about that I knew how to write about it so most readers would understand it. If I had been a better mathematician I couldn’t have done that.

(My emphasis)

No further comment necessary.

On "facts"

I've just responded to a sponsorship appeal for a medical charity. That's not the issue. But I am a little concerned about the acknowledgement email, which says;

Thank you very much for your kind donation. 1 in 50 will suffer from MM [Malignant Melanoma] during their lifetime, 1 in 4  of those sufferers will die from it. These are FACTS ...

Are they? This suggests that 0.5% (1 in 200) of all deaths, from all causes, worldwide, are accounted for by this particular form of cancer. I've pursued this on the net, and I can find no evidence to support such broad-brush claims. (Show me and I'll take this post down and publish a retraction.)

"According to a WHO report about 48,000 melanoma related deaths occur worldwide per year." On that basis the total annual death toll of humanity would be about 9.6m p.a. But if there are about 6bn of us, and assuming optimistically that all of us live 100 years, even those figures would produce a death toll of 60m p.a. ...

I, like most respondents to the appeal, am not really bothered about this kind of statistic. Indeed, an appeal to the rarity of a condition might be equally potent in eliciting a donation. But it does make me uneasy when such assertions are made without evidence. It undermines my confidence in such appeals.

On degrees of research ethics constraints

As ever, this reflection is prompted by the juxtaposition of two events.

I came down from the study a few minutes ago and looked in on my wife, who was watching a reality TV programme which included CCTV footage, to ask if she would like a cup of tea (stupid question). It just would not have been practicable to get the broadcast consent of all the people who appeared, but the material was sent out to millions of potential viewers without--it appears--the consent question ever having been raised.

But up in the study I was looking at partial drafts of master's dissertations, and checking off among other things, whether ethical clearance has been obtained for the empirical research component. It did not arise this time, but I do remember a few years ago when a student--who happened to be employed by the National Health Service--wanted simply to pilot a questionnaire to see whether the questions were clear and unbiassed, etc. She was daft enough to follow the regulations, and request ethics clearance to ask half a dozen of her colleagues whether the questionnaire made sense (admittedly she was not the only daft one; the university's regulations also required clearance by employers and other stakeholders, without a clue of the implications.) The date for the Ethics Committee to consider her request merely to pilot the instrument was later than the submission date for the entire dissertation. (She actually got the group together over lunch on a day off, off NHS premises, and they talked about her ideas... The survey was much improved as a result.)

My doctoral research would be impossible today, because the interviews at the heart of the empirical component were undertaken under a pretext. By current standards I was insufficiently explicit about my research topic. But had I been more explicit I would have pre-empted many answers... and invalidated the research. There was no way in which the interviews could have harmed or disadvantaged respondents, but...

Lord Triesman was apparently recorded making indiscreet remarks about football cheating by a supposed "friend". The transcript (or perhaps a third-generation selectively edited copy) was distributed to the media, and he has resigned from whatever position he had. (Full disclosure--all I know about this is based on a minute or two of radio news. But by media standards, that's due diligence.)

Double standards?

On the effects of inspection

The professional education programmes at the university with which I maintain a tenuous association were Ofsteded last week. (PCE provision got 2 and 2, since you ask.)

(Ofsted=Office for Standards in Education. The militant wing of the Department for Education. Yes!  We now have a ministry which acknowledges "education" in its title; the Department for Curtains and Soft Furnishings is no more!

Incidentally, "to be Ofsteded" is a rare example of a deponent verb in English--one where the passive voice is the default. Inspectors don't say, "I ofsted, you ofsted...", they say, "I inspect," etc. Freire would say "to be Ofsteded" is the language of the oppressed...)

Given that we now have a new government which is making noises about rolling back the centralised micro-management regime of the last 13 years, and also that cuts mean that the regulatory body LLUK can no longer inspect us, I found myself thinking about whether the Quality Assurance approach actually works, and was reminded (as so often by an insightful question from a student) of work I had done on this 20 years ago, in the different context of social care.That suggested that the issue was not simple, but was comprehensible.

So I have re-visited that work and put it on the web here. Hope someone finds it useful.

On the test you can't teach to

Or to which one cannot teach! It sort of puts SATs into perspective, even if even this has been dumbed down.

On priorities

No comment!

On game-changing

I have my doubts about "reflection" as a panacea for professional development, despite the title of this blog. But in practical terms, my most effective learning from experience occurs when I find that themes from several different instances/areas/events/ideas come together to make a point.

But! I find myself warning some of my best and most curious students (I don't mean "freakiest", although the categories are not mutually exclusive...) against producing spurious syncretist theories of everything. I may be guilty of that, too.

What prompts this thought is a political debate (of course), editing a video (discussed more in the 10 May post), and a TV series on the history of science.

Politically, proportional representation as a form of electoral reform is a game-changer. It's irreversible short of a period of anarchy/revolution. I'm all for it, incidentally, as long as the system maintains an adequate link between representative and locality (which is a little more specific than "constituency"). But it is a BIG step.

It's an instance of second-order change (Watzlawick et al 1974)

• First-order change: Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose... The more things change, the more they stay the same (attributed to Karr, 1849)
• Second-order change: Things will never be the same again.

I note in the post on 10 May "On another threshold concept, rediscovered" that Kuhn's notion of "paradigm shifts" is an instance of second-order change in the history of science. Mosley's excellent BBC2 series (linked to above, and on again at 9pm today) has very effectively explored such instances, and in so doing demonstrated that--for later students--they constitute threshold concepts.

The video includes some plenary discussion of students' conceptions (and misconceptions) of threshold concepts, and watching it over and over again for editing purposes is a good way of at least forming some hypotheses about their understanding (getting feedback from them, as Hattie emphasises). I am struck by how "safe" are the TCs they chose to mention, in particular. As commentators Peter H and myself found ourselves challenged potentially to accept the proffered examples as they stood, even when they did not quite hit the target--thereby running the risk of diluting the idea to the status of "statements of the bleeding obvious", which a few students obviously thought we did, from their evaluations. Apart from the initial statement about the limitations of the applicability of TCs to practice with students with Special Education Needs, clearly students did not want to "show themselves up" in front of the assembled multitude by risking a contentious suggestion. And interestingly, few referred to their own learning of their discipline--which was what the exercise asked--but reverted to issues about teaching it.

What all this is reminding me of, apart from the general point about the much-neglected emotional agenda in teaching and learning, is just how disconcerting and disorienting is the liminality of TCs, and how much people may avoid it, because they have not got their bearings in the new space. Just as I hear politicians on the radio resiling for fear of what lies beyond the portal of PR, which is indeed scary until you think that it is what every other European democracy bar one uses. Just like scientists wishing no-one had ever discovered quantum physics.

On another threshold concept, rediscovered

Threshold concepts are not only like portals, they are also like buses. You wait ages for one, and then three come along together.

I've been editing the video of our joint presentation on them at a Study Day last month (here) so I am sensitised to keep finding (or rediscovering) them.

Today I was listening in the car to a Radio 4 (of course) programme in which "Matthew Taylor discovers what the latest scientific research can tell us about the human need for religion". In the programme, he interviewed anthropologist David Sloan Wilson (Darwin's Cathedral Chicago; U Chicago Press, 2002) who drew the distinction between "practical" (survival oriented) beliefs and "factual" (accurate/truthful) ones, and averred* that in the real world practical beliefs win every time. And in order to practise as an anthropologist, you need to adopt the perspective of the practicality/utility of a belief rather than its factual accuracy. That is a threshold concept. It is a dizzying prospect. But a moment's thought shows how it opens up the way into a new and potentially fruitful understanding of other people's beliefs.

I was only struck by this because I am sensitised to look for TCs at the moment. I myself made a similar point about the nature of myth in ch. 6 of Atherton (1989). I make no great claim for this insight. I was merely making a point in passing about what I meant by "working myth". And interestingly, I suspect that most of my (very few!) readers, thought, "OK, so what?" and plodded on to more interesting and relevant stuff.

So, the idea needed a context in order to become a TC. It is the interaction between the discipline and the TC which gives the latter the potential to transform understandings. Drop an explosive idea into a tank of inert gas, and nothing happens. Drop it into oxygen and all hell breaks loose.

More precisely it is to do with how closely-coupled is the contextual system. A TC in the form of a paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1962) --when accepted--overturns the consensus of "normal science". Generally speaking a similar bomb in the humanities splutters into oblivion enveloped by tenuously connected fluffy fibres of unconnected meanderings......

Which poses the question of how the humanities were hi-jacked by "Theory" Assuming the contention is correct (I'm not convinced, but I have to admit that it is more fun than scholarship)...

*  I've been waiting for years for a chance to use that word!

Atherton J S (1989) Interpreting residential life: values to practise London; Tavistock

On the election

What's Iain Dale doing plugging a Labour candidate's blog? Watch and enjoy!

On a succinct account of the ills of English education, from policy to practice

Something to think about as we consider the possibility of yet more change in the system from tomorrow.

Yes, but what has Semmelweis to do with my professional development as a tutor?

"This report asks the poignant question of teaching professionals - 'What changes do I need to make to those aspects of my professional thinking and practice which I suspect are doing more harm than good?' This was the central question posed by Ignaz Semmelweis, a young Hungarian doctor who, as a result of painstaking research, reduced mortality rates in childbed fever to less than 1% by challenging the practices of his contemporaries in 19th century Vienna. Now, more than 150 years later, Professor Frank Coffield, Emeritus Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, examines how we can use this remarkable story to challenge and improve some current professional practices in teaching and learning." (From the publisher's blurb)

Free download (pdf) from the Learning and Skills Network.

On PowerPoint's unintended consequences

(See also Edward Tufte on Powerpoint here--a detailed discussion of NASA's use of PowerPoint in relation to the Columbia disaster of 2003-- and more generally here.)

The link is to an article in the (US) Armed Forces Journal (thanks to the Browser for the link) about the impact of using PowerPoint on staff decision-making in the Forces. It sees the very fact of using a presentation as changing the manner of passing on information, of conducting discussions, and of making the decisions. It even changes the structure of staff officers' working days. I have no idea whether or not is an accurate account, but it is an exemplary piece of analysis of the unintended effects of a minor technological change.

Interestingly, the author (a retired Marine officer now undertaking a doctorate at Oxford) largely exempts the use of PPt as an instructional tool. Tufte is much more scathing about that usage, too. It is a matter worthy of much thought among teachers and lecturers.

Update:  See also here and here, and (28 April) here.

On problem-solving crows

I've used Betty the Crow (bottom of the page) as an example of animal problem-solving for some time, but this material from New Zealand puts her in the shade.

On cited authors in the humanities (2007)

Foucault came top.  D G Myers comments, concluding;

The “enchanting crisscrossing of names” from France—Foucault, Bour­dieu, Derrida—suggests that humanists remain bogged down in the slough of Theory. They are engaged in a common pursuit, all right, but it is not the pursuit of truth. It is the pursuit of intellectual fashion, even if the fashion is a little worn and threadbare after four decades.

I've got a lot of sympathy with that viewpoint, although it's a bit tough on Bourdieu, who may be unreadable but has more going for him than those other posturing purveyors of intellectual flatulence.

But one is bound to be disappointed if one sees studies in the humanities in terms of the "pursuit of truth" with a sub-text of the possibility of making "progress". I don't even see what would count as "progress" in those areas.

On the other hand, note that the list includes Albert Bandura at number 4, Anthony Giddens at 5 and Erving Goffman at 6. All of them have a body of empirical (and incidentally very accessible) work to their credit, and may indeed be credited with useful new knowledge, sometimes in terms of answers, but sometimes too in terms of new questions. What of course the current authors were doing as they cited them is a different matter--probably rubbishing them! Citations cut both ways.

On academic writing, again

The link is to a salutary essay on pretentious and obscure academic writing--worthy of note particularly at this time of the academic year, as people prepare their assignments and dissertations.

The author (Rachel Toor) cites George Orwell on modern (not so modern, actually, given that he was writing in 1946) academic prose: "It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug."

On getting others to mark student work

It's not just call-centres now--the linked piece is about how a professor in Texas is out-sourcing the marking of assignments to India. She and the entrepreneurs running the service in India make a good case; her teaching assistants are not trained or even skilled enough to mark, she has enrolments of up to 1,000 students, and each of them produce 5,000 words... It facilitates using essays, projects and report--free-text writing--rather than computer-marked multiple-choice and short-answer questions. The students get a faster turn-around, too.

But what I found particularly interesting were the comments--81 of them when I last looked--which are overwhelmingly hostile. The first two pick up on a major shortcoming, which is that while the students may be getting good feedback, the professor is not getting the feedback about their understanding she would if she actually read at least a sample herself.

I have mentioned before the work of John Hattie (here) and discussed it (currently being revised) here. I'm currently reading--indeed, I have even bought--his excellent Visible Learning... London; Routledge 2009. His syntheses of meta-analyses has lead him to emphasise the importance of feedback / formative assessment / "assessment for learning" etc., but;

...one of the major results presented in this book relates to increasing the amount of feedback because it is an important correlate of student achievement. However, one should not immediately start providing more feedback and then await the magical increases in achievement. [...] increasing the amount of feedback in order to have a positive effect on student achievement requires a change in the conception of what it means to be a teacher; it is the feedback to the teacher about what students can and cannot do that is more powerful than feedback to the student, and it necessitates a different way of interacting and respecting students  [...].  [...] It is important to be concerned about the climate of the classroom before increasing the amount of feedback (to the student or teacher) because it is critical to ensure that "errors" are welcomed, as they are key levers for enhancing learning. It is critical to have appropriately challenging goals as then the amount and directedness of feedback is maximized. Simply applying a recipe (e.g.,"providing more feedback") will not work in our busy, multifaceted, culturally invested, and changing classrooms. (Hattie, 2009 p.4; emphases added)

One of the limitations of end-of-module assessment is that this information arrives too late to use it for the current cycle (and the next one may be different) but it is streets ahead of no such information; and although it may have received little direct attention as you sit and plough your way through interminable assignments, its message is quite likely to have got through.

On being canvassed

In my more politically active days, door-to-door canvassing scored bottom out of the range of preferred activities. (Even that scored higher than door-to-door evangelism in my more religiously active days.)

I read something in the past few days about how it has all changed in the internet era. I can't find it to link to it, but you can reconstruct the argument for yourselves in half a minute.

I know how I am going to vote. My partner has a "plague on all your houses" approach, and won't vote (I don't agree of course but that is not the business of this blog). So people will be wasting their time calling round; I've decided to save them and us a lot of trouble with the following notice on our front door:

To all candidates and canvassers:
Please do NOT call or deliver leaflets.
To do so guarantees that we will not vote for your party.
Thank you

(No copyright claimed--feel free to copy and distribute, and of course improve... On reflection. "So to do" is more elegant than "To do so", ..)

This is win-win. You don't get bothered, and canvassers will be relieved to know that there is no point in expending time and effort where it will clearly be counter-productive.

And of course there are variants. I don't write it down, but I do set out the ground rules for when the Jehovah's Witnesses come round, which they do regularly round here;

Thank you for calling! My great-aunt was a Witness and played the organ at the local Kingdom Hall (true) I have the greatest respect for your commitment, and particularly the suffering of Witnesses under the Nazis but...

you are not going to convert me, and I don't even want to convert you.

..but I really enjoy theological arguments, and although my Biblical scholarship is a little rusty, it will all come back to me. So if you have a couple of hours to spare, let's make a date...

The last time anyone took me up on that was 40+ years ago.

This is not about cheap points at the expense of political or religious canvassers, but about understanding the pressures on them. The last thing they want is an enthusiastic time-waster. Pity! It's great fun. I can recommend it.

PS. If a canvasser of whatever ilk asks you a question, please don't answer it directly, as posed. That marks you as a mug/prole/voter. Apart from the crude "litany" recitation favoured by politicians themselves, there are several more elegant response strategies, of which two are:

• I don't understand the question, or even if you are of a positivist bent, the question is meaningless (be warned--you may have to justify that proposition).
• Please define your terms.

See here!

On a minor dilemma

...which probably afllicts many people with a web presence from time to time.

I was approached by email, and very politely and punctiliously, by someone requesting permission to use material from my site, on a course this person was running. No problem. The pages are explicitly covered by a standard form of Creative Commons licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).

But the email included a link to the site of the institute/clinic my correspondent represented. Frankly I found it dubious, promoting a range of "alternative" therapies and "wellness" interventions. I have no problem with the latter. If people want to spend their money on something which they believe will make them feel even better, regardless of any evidence, that is up to them; but I have serious reservations about the former. If there is evidence to support "alternative" medicine, it's not "alternative", it is just medicine.

The use to which my correspondent wished to put my material seemed quite straightforward--to print it out as a handout to support a teaching session on a mainstream and almost uncontentious topic. And my correspondent did not have to ask. I'm sure my stuff is printed out and used thus hundreds of times a day without anyone taking the trouble to ask. And the Creative Commons licence does specify;

Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

So, should/could I have applied different rules to this request because of my views of the ideology of the sponsoring institution?

On betraying my faith

As you can tell--I started this a while ago...

Probably in two senses. I revealed my background, but I am a "backslider" from it. It's Good Friday tomorrow, so perhaps a good time to take stock...

(The notice about "Easter Opening" at our local Tesco carefully avoids mentioning either "Good Friday" or "Easter Sunday". Why? Who do they think is going to be offended? --apart of course from professional victims.)

It's the end of term, and happily as usual the class arranged an informal gathering after the session in the local pub. (It happens to be the national tenanted pub of the year, last year--not just your average local) For some reason, however, they seemed really keen on the cheesy chips... I digress.

One student took the opportunity to ask me about my religious beliefs. That was interesting, because I have always treated teaching as a secular zone, and apart from one member of the class who wears the hijab (I don't go looking for other more subtle iconography; she didn't join us in the pub, which was a pity, but I think she had practical logistical reasons for getting away and she was not the only one) I was not aware of any religious allusions in my teaching.

(There is one on the web, though, at the end of the page on memory.) 

I asked what prompted her question. (Teachers, like politicians, are not good at straight answers, much as we may expect them of others.) She referred (she was certainly concentrating) to a throwaway remark about how Kolb seemed to be able to map his four-point learning cycle onto any set of four items, such as the seasons, or the four gospels; Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And in discussing e-learning, I had alluded with reference to the need for the transparency of the media, to Herbert's "The Elixir"

A man that looks on glasse
On it may stay his eye,
Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,
And then the heav’n espie.

I was a little surprised by the reference to the gospels. To me, their labels (as opposed to their contents) are no more than taken-for-granted cultural reference points, like Father Christmas or the Grand National (no--I am not going to look for a link for a horse-race).

George Herbert is a little more esoteric, but in fact it was only J's question in class which (apart from a vague reference to "heav'n" in the quotation) imbued the reference with any religious significance.

But she had sniffed out the religious references, and she asked me about my faith--directly. That's one of the great things about these informal meetings with mature students; they recognise that our tutor-student relationship is relatively trivial, and other aspects may be much more significant. I used to think this was a big deal which required careful "management"; actually it's routinely conducted common-sensically.

So she asked me whether I was a Christian. Put like that, it's a challenge. Or at least I still experience it that way, because I used to be a Christian (bold "C" if your browser doesn't render it). Given the impoverished and banal ritual of my brand of evangelicalism, I still have my "decision card" signed on 29 March 1959, and stuck inside the front of one of my bibles.

I didn't know how to reply. Yes would be unrealistic--I haven't been a regular church-goer (if that is a proxy for belief) for many years. I no longer know what the creeds mean, apart from the outcomes of hard-fought disputes at councils at Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451), etc.

No would be stupid. I have a problem. Our beloved dog, Rupert, is over 13 (human) years old. He is diabetic and consequentially blind. He won't last much longer. But he--like his predecessors, William and Harriet--orders my offices. Strange expression? Simply, walking the dog is my time to pray. I value that a lot. How will I do that without him? Is he an icon, in the orthodox tradition?

In the jargon of the moment, my "spirituality" is very important to me. On the other hand, such "spirituality" seems largely to be soft self-indulgent bul***it.

But the authoritarian diktats of much religiosity have been exposed, from biblical scholarship to the latest scandals, to be self-serving obstacles to faith. The greatest, largely artistic, expressions of religion are among the highest creations of the human spirit, refined over the ages--albeit often in ignominious ways. I celebrate them. Particularly as they are manifest in (what we think we know of)  the teachings of Jesus and even some parts of Paul.

But I reject all the false dichotomies I am asked to choose between.

Strangely, this may matter to me but not much to anyone else. So many thanks if you have read this far, and apologies if you sought an answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.

SIn! You didn't mention sin!

True

On assumptions about the value of teaching

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if people are to learn things, they should be taught them. But is that necessarily true? We know, of course, about all kinds of things people learn without benefit of teaching, from sexual practices to texting. But there is an assumption that culturally and economically important learning depends on teaching.

There are of course a number of contrary voices. Here is Ivan Illich;

A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives. [Illich I (1973) De-schooling Society London; Penguin p.20]

and Lave and Wenger (1991) make similar points about the acquisition of vocational skills. Even a review within the mainstream of educational research recommends that children in the UK should start school later (see here) as indeed they do in most other European countries.

But the Benezet experiment reported in the article link above was more specific. Children may go to school, but they should not learn arithmetic until 6th grade (12 years old; read the article for Benezet's reasons, noting that his work dates from the early 1930s). That does seem somewhat extreme, and there does not seem to have been any systematic exploration of what the best age is to start mathematics, but nowadays the policy would not doubt draw on the insights of developmental psychology.

The underlying principle is one of readiness, both for the subject and for--in a wider context--participating in the institution of a school itself. Without readiness, enormous effort may be expended to no benefit or even harm.

And that is the conclusion I am coming to about the much-vaunted practice of reflection in professional practice; it's no good plugging it until a practitioner is ready for it, and she will not be ready until she has attained a degree of pretty well unconscious competence or even proficiency in the routine practice of the discipline. The implication for professional education may actually be the desirability of discouraging reflection to begin with. That might even have the paradoxical effect of making people ever more enthusiastic about reaching the stage of being ready to do it...

(Thanks, Ruth, for your earlier comment which goaded me towards these thoughts...)

On some sense at last on libel

Simon Singh has won at the Appeal Court!

(I commented on the case earlier, here.)

It's a small step, but a real one. Go to http://www.libelreform.org/ for a much better commentary than I can offer. Momentum is gathering. Jack Straw (Justice Secretary) is sympathetic... The major hurdle is of course a general election, which will put the issue on the back burner regardless of cross-party support. Even so, today's ruling may indicate a sea-change in judicial attitudes towards libel suits--let's hope so.

On not making it simpler

Sometimes things just come together...

• I was checking out Phil Race's site today and in one of his presentations he refers to Einstein's dictum; ‘Everything should be made as simple as possible,but not simpler’ (I'm assuming a legitimate provenance.)
• Yet again today someone complained about the "jargon" of the module outcomes--"can't you make them easier to understand?" As if we deliberately set about making them more difficult to understand. (OK, it's not unknown in academe, I admit.)
• And at the last programme-wide Study Day, one of the invited participants in the concluding summary claimed he couldn't "see what all the fuss is about. We teach, the students learn, they go away happy. That's all there is to it."

Just for the record, I (and I'm pretty sure I speak for colleagues) have no interest in making anything needlessly complicated. But sometimes things are difficult. For Real.

I'm reading Michael Foley's (2010) The Age of Absurdity; why modern life makes it hard to be happy London; Simon and Schuster, at the moment. I haven't yet decided whether it is "merely" an entertaining if erudite cheap rant--well, yes it is, but that's what it sets out to be, so no shame there. But chapter 8 "The Rejection of Difficulty and Understanding" hits this nail on the head.

And chapter 7 rubbished "reflection" fairly effectively, too.

On print-friendly versions of web-pages

I don't usually plug anything, but...

I have been working my way through my to-do list as one does in idle moments and came up against an item I have sent to the back of the list several times. Readers want a printer-friendly version of the site's pages, and I was not looking forward to sorting that out. I no longer have external funding for a developer to do it, and I could envisage that my shaky grasp of javascript and/or css would lead to many hours of frustration, not to mention the pain of inserting the scripts into every one of 500-odd pages if they couldn't go into a server-side include...

Of course I googled for solutions, and there were many of the kind I had envisaged, and then there was this one! A snippet of code, much like the "embed" instructions for YouTube or SlideShare, to copy and paste into the standard page footer (there are only three of them across the sites) and it was done! Ten minutes max. I went for a walk in the park in the time I had saved, grinning stupidly (until it started to rain, but even that saved me from having to wash accumulated crud off the car...) Sometimes things do work out!

There's another variant, too, of more interest to readers than webmasters; you can simply drag a button from the site to the browser toolbar (it's a bit more complicated for IE apparently), and there is an instant widget to create a printer-friendly page from whatever you are looking at.

Except that I don't understand what the business model can be. The service is free. You don't even have to register. There are no ads (so far, and it appears to have been going for several months), and I wouldn't have found it but for my fairly specific search. Can it survive?

On Reflection; an idea whose time is past?

I have at last managed to finish writing up this opinion piece--which is the principal reason why I have hardly blogged for the past fortnight or so. I look forward to responses and hope I get some because otherwise it will have been something of a waste of time, but moderation is on, so constructive disagreement only, please!

On diversity training

According to the linked article, it doesn't work. News?

But the article does make the point that training is itself not a particularly effective intervention, for reasons I explored in an old paper here. And when the course itself bears any resemblance to this one, it's not surprising!

On molehills becoming mountains. (This is a molehill)

..or indeed, given the state of the roads around here, a pot-hole. Systemically they are the same thing...

However! I was struck by this elegant account of how a student almost gave up because of a really trivial issue.

We (sorry, I) tend to concentrate on what we are supposed to be teaching, which is fair enough, but... What happens when exercises and of course assessments presuppose competence in quite different areas? Colleges often acknowledge that in gross terms, such as ICT skills (actually, "such as" is a misnomer... that's the only area, apart from "disabilities") but what about laminating? Selecting media? Poster design? Factors in competition construction? Guidance on how long it takes to process results of exercises?

These are the craft skills of teaching. I've addressed some of them at http://www.learningandteaching.info/teaching/ but queries about other topics are always welcome, even if the answer is, "I don't know" because an enormous amount depends on the discipline and subject and context.

Still, there is one rule. In your first year, always ask someone. (In your second to fifth year, excepting gross structural change, you risk looking like a prat, but so what?) (After your fifth year, you can claim to be an established eccentric... Or at least you could when I was starting out; I suspect things have changed now.)

On building a better teacher

A long article from the New York Times about moves to reform (school) teacher training in the States on the basis of evidence-based practice. The word "reflect" does not appear!