On hostages to fortune

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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.

On living in a different world

1. 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.
2. 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. 
3. 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...

...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...

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...

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

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



Enjoy!

On the next step beyond wikipedia

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...

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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"

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

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

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)

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

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)

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...

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...

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...

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

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"

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

http://www.worldometers.info/


All the very best for 2011!

On the "decline effect" again

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"

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.

On the health of Father Christmas

Enjoy!

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

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.”

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* 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

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...

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).