On the fate of educational ideas

Two things. First, I promised a friend that I would put something down about the Threshold Concepts Conference in Dublin, from about a month ago; I've been remiss in not getting round to it.

What's prodded me to address it is the second thing; I've started (with another friend and colleague, P.) on a book--a sort of de-bunking book about teaching in post-compulsory education. It's not the best way to start such an enterprise, but I decided to begin at the beginning, in order to get the tone right. The draft will doubtless be amended many times. In the preface I wrote (forgive the lengthy quote):

Forget the silly and usually distorted and diluted nostrums which go by the labels of “inclusivity”, “differentiation”, “learning styles”, “assessment for learning”, and “reflective practice”… and the rest. They are too superficial to account for the complexity and richness of learning conversations.

They are however the current legacy of very well-meaning attempts to improve teaching, in most cases. (The exceptions concern some of the more egregious efforts of some learning-styles charlatans.) What has sadly happened, as Dylan Wiliam of “assessment for learning” fame has recently noted, is that they have been only half-understood, passed on through a process of Chinese whispers, and appropriated by managers—themselves under pressure to “raise standards”—until they are unrecognisable for what they originally were. They have been reduced to their proxies [...] in the form of whatever can be counted, and as always that process has lost sight of the wood for the trees. In many cases, by misdirecting teachers’ attention to the supposed signs rather than the real substance of an idea, they have become actively counter-productive and undermined efforts to develop a more sensitive and effective service.

And it should be said that the ideas in this book may well be headed for the same fate—they are not immune. Educational ideas have a limited shelf-life, and they may become actively toxic as they get to the end of it. That is not because the ideas were no good in the first place, rather it is because the environment has changed; as Heraclitus said, you can’t step into the same river twice. Each time needs its own prophets, and its own curriculum theorists, and pedagogues, and assessment gurus, all of whom eventually become out of date.

So it occurs to me that I should adopt the same stance in relation to threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. The ideas are about ten years old by now--possibly still not common knowledge, but the conference attendance was good (particularly given the general and Irish economic conditions: 280 delegates from 138 institutions, 16 countries and 4 continents) and generally enthusiastic. It has to be said that the conference was primarily the annual gathering of the National Academy for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning, which was hosting the TC conference as its theme--so it is possible that some of those attending from Ireland came primarily for that. And a decade is long enough to speculate about possible emergent trends. But of course I didn't get to attend all the parallel sessions, so these remarks are sweeping generalisations, as ever, another participant might feel she was at quite a different event.

The ideas have not been taken up by the educational establishment to the extent that they have become liable to the processes of distortion and dilution noted above. Partly this may be because they originate in the HE sector, which is not as regimented as compulsory education, and partly perhaps because as far as I can see, they don't serve anyone's vested interests (indeed, as we argued in our short paper at the conference, they may even be subversive).

The last conference I attended on TCs was the second one, four years ago--I wrote about it here, and I've been interested to re-read those remarks; they pointed to a degree of consolidation in the TC community, and a greater pre-occupation with liminality. That trend seems to have continued--although perhaps the fact that Ray Land's opening keynote in Dublin was on liminal spaces may have focused attention on it, and indeed Patrick Carmichael's closing keynote emphasised the learning journey, using Pilgrim's Progress as a trope. It may also have been because our contribution to a parallel session was also about liminality that it appeared to me to be a stronger theme than the idea of threshold concepts themselves.

Carmichael was also thinking about the ways in which TCs were being referred to at the conference, as:

• analytical category
• aspect of a model of learning
• point of departure or point of focus
• pedagogical strategy
• boundary making/crossing object
• materialising practice
• reflexive discourse

(He expands on the list 6m 05 into the lecture.) Was this versatility an indication of the strength or the weakness of the idea? Can this jack of all trades of an idea really offer anything distinctive? There seemed to be a feeling that TCs themselves were coming to be regarded as subordinate to the liminal state--that was the distinctive characteristic of meaningful learning and change, and perhaps a TC was just one of several portals into it. Rather than emphasising the "portal" quality of TCs, "stuckness" was the defining characteristic.

I wonder whether that change of emphasis might possibly be attributable to a certain sense of disappointment with the "productivity" of the TC idea. Four years ago, I had a sense of being on the threshold (of course!) of a breakthrough in curriculum development--TCs could do justice to both the epistemological (content) and the ontological (process and psychological) issues. If only we could unearth the TCs within a discipline, they would provide the scaffolding on which the rest of the curriculum could be built. They would be the way-points on the learning journey to which Carmichael referred. I get the feeling that perhaps the promise has not been fulfilled, and even that there may be a little cognitive dissonance around, as attention is displaced to liminality; it preserves the overall framework, but plays down the original idea. It will be apparent that I am being very tentative here.

In Dublin I was struck by the relative absence of reports of empirical research on what count as threshold concepts in different disciplines, and the impact of building curricula around them, but that is not surprising (and it's hard to tell from the abstracts). There seemed to be more of that at Kingston--and as any visitor to Mick Flanagan's superb bibliographic site can see, there is no shortage of papers.

In Sydney, David Perkins introduced three ways in which TCs might serve, as object (goes beyond his "inert knowledge", but the term gives something of the idea), as instrument (or analytic tool) or as action (or frame of reference, or lens), and unpicked the differences and uses of each. What I would like to think we saw in Dublin was a move from seeing TCs as knowledge objects, to their characteristics as instruments.

There was a smattering of critical papers, examining the falsifiability of the idea, for example, or its potentially uneasy relationship with other theories, which confirm that it is entering the usual academic debate, and testify to its maturity. However, those I attended which looked at it in relation to other tools, such as the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky) or developmental stages in the Perry or Piaget traditions emphasised compatibility and complementarity rather than dispute.

At least they have been spared being taken up by Ofsted; "for a lesson to be rated 'outstanding' it must contain at least three threshold concepts..." as P. caricatured it yesterday.

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This post was my evaluation of our paper.

On being a charlatan

Old joke: two old hands discussing a newcomer with lots of ideas; "They say he's a 'guru'." "Why do they call him that?" "Because they can't spell 'charlatan'."

Yesterday I met a former colleague on the street. She has just retired and we chatted about the Factory (as my partner refers to the university). The conversation turned to qualifications for teaching, and the various routes to getting them; she asked about mine;

"I haven't got any." I said. She expressed astonishment... so I explained:

"My whole career has been based on false pretences. I taught social workers for over twenty years without ever having been a social worker, and then I taught teachers without having a teaching qualification."

(As the conversation went on, I was able to say that while I had drifted into social work education, I had been appointed to my later senior post by a panel who knew all my background--I have never conned anyone about it. And as for [post-compulsory] teacher education, I may not have a professional qualification, but I did have a quarter-century of experience and a Master's in it and a related Doctorate by the time I was appointed. And then there was the one-week course I was sent on by mistake in 1967 which ran out of ideas by Wednesday afternoon...)

I've since been thinking about what (if anything), this "means"*.

I am under no illusions: I ended up in the School of Education because of some horse-trading in an institutional merger in the mid-90s. Despite my record, the dominant institution could not accept having a social work department headed by someone without a professional qualification--that was fine by me, because the occupation as a whole was getting increasingly toxic. It remained amicable and effective for our team, but not so for our students and the practitioners in the field--so we can only speculate about what it was like for the poor clients (sorry! "Service users").

I've never been an "insider". That's had a couple of consequences;

• I'm seen as the archetypal ivory-towered out-of-touch academic, with a string of degrees and without a clue about the "real world".  That has been a challenge; particularly in my social work education days, teaching courses to qualify social workers to perform statutory (ASW/AMHP) duties under the Mental Health Act, and taking them through possible practice scenarios; I couldn't claim I'd "been there, done that", as a couple of my colleagues could. Instead I had to become an empathic "sink" for the cumulative experience of the hundreds of practitioners we worked with, sharing their experiences rather than mine. It's been a brilliant discipline, but I don't know how to share it. No, "reflection" is not it.

• But I have been able to maintain some distance from the hegemonic discourses (sorry! "taken-for-granted ways of talking about work stuff") of the discipline. I've added the theory (and encountered the ideology) after the practice. I had 12 years' teaching experience before I went for my M.Ed. (and most of the rest of the class had a similar background). The principal lesson I took away from those two (part-time) years was not to pay attention to academic educationalists, and to distrust much of what passes for research in education. That is because I only took the programme, in "Teacher and Higher Education" because there was none in "Social Work Education", but it was as close as I could get.

Swings and roundabouts.

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*       Of course it doesn't mean any single thing... (I make this point to forestall commenters who write directly to me to make such fatuous points without being prepared to subject their inanities to public derision [I wish] on the blog comments.

Items to Share: 5 August

Education focus

• Beatrice the Biologist: The Joy of Learning

• Does PowerPoint Help or Hinder Student Learning? | Faculty Focus

• What is Deliberate Practice?

• The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge | Brain Pickings

• The Bad Habits You Learn in School | DoubeleThought Web

Other Business

• Language Log: Conversational game theory: the cartoon version 

• New Statesman - What some people call idleness is often the best investment

• Swazi Teens win 'Science in action' award (Scientific American Blog Network)  Young people develop hydroponics systems for their own communities--brilliant on so many levels. 

• How to Choose Wine Infographic | Wine Folly

• Oscillatory Thoughts: The deception ratchet (Bradley Voytek)  On Jonah Lehrer's slippery slope 

• The Olympics as Ritual : The New Yorker One thing the piece does not mention is the extent to which the Olympics have become a kind of potlatch; they go over budget but the hosts can never prune them back, and of course they are displays of wealth and power and status... Read Ruth Benedict's classic account (starts on p.125). There is also a potlatch blog which has been mentioning the Olympics from quite another perspective.

On what's become of universities

According to Simon Critchley (philosopher, formerly at Essex and now at the New School in New York):

Universities used to be communities; they used to be places where intellectual life really happened. They were also places where avant-garde stuff was happening. And that’s – in England anyway – completely ground to a halt. Universities are largely sold as factories for production of increasingly uninteresting, depressed people wandering around complaining. There’s been a middle-management take-over of our education, and it’s depressing. So universities, like the university I was at – Essex, which was a radical, experimental, small university, but had a bad reputation but did some great stuff – have become a kind of pedestrian, provincial university run by bureaucrats. That was one of the reasons why I got out when I got out in 2004.

So, I think what’s happened to British higher education is really terribly depressing. A lot of it was self-willed as well; you can blame a succession of governments. It began after the Labor government in the late 70s accelerated by Thatcher and then Major. We went from a model of there being a coherence, a union structure in higher education, to one where – with the disillusion [sic] of the gap between universities and polytechnics in 1992 – universities were increasingly treated like sort of small-scale corporations, yet with none of the inventiveness and freedom of small-scale corporations because they were still dependant upon the block grant subsidies from the government. So it’s a bewildering set of stupid policy adjustments over the last 20-30 years, which has meant that education is harder and harder to get, and teaching is of no importance. All that matters is research and such things. I’ve got a fairly bleak view of education, and certainly in the U.K.

 From an interesting interview here, via Andrew Sullivan

Items to Share: 29 July

Education/academic focus

• Mini-theme of the week: Referencing!  Citation Obsession? Get Over It!  (Chronicle of Higher Education) : Throwing the Citation Handbook Away  (Chronicle of Higher Education)   A Don's Life: Damn footnotes  (Mary Beard) [My own contribution is here.]

• APA Style Blog: Data Is, or Data Are? Related to the above--yet more prescription from those helpful folks at APA! Could such "guidance" possibly contribute to this kind of writing? Neuroskeptic: Why Don't Social Scientists Want To Be Read?

• Evidence based teachers network OK, but it elides into The outstanding lesson and even educationevidence.com It's not a game, folks!

Other Business

• Fall, Mortality, and the Machine: Tolkien and Technology - Alan Jacobs Slightly disappointing piece, overall, but some good comments.

• The Power of the 8-by-10 Film Camera - NYTimes.com Interesting piece on how, in effect, the bulk and clumsiness (?) of the equipment imparts a different feel to its products...

• Psychological principles as guidelines for effective PowerPoint presentations and Presentation Zen: Tips on how to be more creative by John Cleese

• George Miller has died It's amazing to find how authors of utterly classic papers in psychology have been with us until so recently--the reference to his Magic Number Seven--plus or minus two is in the linked piece.

• Fairies (Chronicle of Higher Education) Geoff Pullum seems to be fated perpetually to kill the hydra-headed "Eskimo words for snow" myth, but "British words for rain" may be a contender for replacement.

• The Wisdom of Not Being Too Rational - ScienceNOW Are crows hedgehogs and children foxes?

• Language Log » Not true that they cannot say they aren’t?

• The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread: A Brief History of Sliced Bread - Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg - The Atlantic

• Rethinking Labels Boosts Creativity

• Cultural History Gem: Saul Bass's Original Pitch for the Bell Systems Logo Redesign, 1969 | Brain Pickings

Oh--and these...

• BBC News - London 2012: A 12-part guide to the UK in 212 words each

• There's money in them there Olympic words...

• Lodnon 2102 - the official Oimplycs site 

On the myth of perfection

Ofsted has just published the new Common Inspection Framework for Learning and Skills. It is supposed to "raise the bar" yet again.

While looking for something else, I came across Frank Coffield and Sheila Edward's excellent--and, for an academic article, very outspoken--2009 paper; "Rolling out 'good', 'best' and 'excellent' practice. What next? Perfect practice?"*  It's a critique of the muddled thinking and confused rhetoric which has beset the efforts to impose arbitrary top-down "improvement" targets on the "learning and skills" sector in the last decade, and a litany of ill-conceived initiatives based on assumptions, preconceptions, political imperatives and almost anything other than evidence and research. Indeed, Coffield and Edward make a good case for saying that the sector was never broken, so attempts to fix it were always likely to do more harm than good.

Taking a slightly different approach, I want to question the whole idea of standardised quality criteria. C and E discuss the decontextualised approach of Ofsted, but they don't really engage with the way standards work differently according to the level of skill to which they are applied, and thus the inherent philosophical inconsistency of applying set criteria. I have argued more generally (here) that at the level of competence, one practitioner of a discipline will share almost all her relevant skills and attributes with her colleagues, but as she becomes more proficient and eventually expert, her skill-set will become more individual. Indeed, as anyone gets more experienced in a field, she or he will draw on a stock of learned responses, behaviours, tactics, expressions--all for better or for worse arising from having tried them and found them to be good enough (that is of course why getting the experienced person to change entails loss, and is hard to manage). It is highly probable that not all of those responses will represent "best practice"--but that is difficult to judge**. What is fairly likely is that they will be relatively consistent, and the fact that they fit together may be more important than isolated peaks of excellence.

In complex areas, judgement of advanced practice comes down largely to matters of what one can only call "taste". Was Britten "better than" Walton (or Mozart); Cezanne "better than" van Gogh? Music or art critics may perhaps venture (at their peril) to argue the point--but that is the point, the comparison is essentially arguable. So it is with teaching. You can only pretend that such a quality as "perfection" exists if you can arrive at a consensus.

But teaching is about trade-offs and opportunity costs and implicit (or even explicit) values. Which matters more in the piece of written work--the ideas, originality and creativity? Or correct punctuation and gramma and spelling? Both, of course, but in any given case you are likely to privilege one set of values over the other, and it's all arguable. What matters more in this session--following up on that fascinating digression a student has raised? It may not be central to the syllabus, but it may open the door to a deeper understanding of the principles of the subject. Or making sure that you stick to the scheme of work, because otherwise your colleague who takes the parallel seminar will be out of step?

The pursuit of perfection or any single model of excellence is a self-limiting process under messy conditions--it guarantees that none of the several potential peaks you could have reached will be attained. And by extension, that is why an adversarial inspection regime creates a dead hand of mediocrity on a venture; it is time for that approach to be used on the banks, but perhaps teaching might enjoy the more collaborative, consultative and even "cosier" regime they have enjoyed. But not bonuses***.

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* British Educational Research Journal, vol. 35; no. 3; pp 371-390. (Not available on open web.)

**Kahneman D (2012) Thinking--fast and slow (London; Penguin) is very good (chs 21-22) on questions of such judgement, pointing out that in well-defined situations, simple algorithmic approaches often work better than more sophisticated ones, but that in messy situations, nothing at all may work. Teaching is a messy business, and Ofsted have very little evidence base to give any credence to their judgements on the basis of the tiny sample of practice they observe; which is not to say that they may not be much more valid and reliable in their approach to other products of their inspections. It's just that in relation to their core business they ought to be "in special measures".

***Watts D J (2011) Everything is obvious, once you know the answer London; Atlantic Books.  p.51 on the distorting features of financial incentives, among many studies.

On changing the name

You may have noticed that the masthead of the blog has changed--although I don't quite follow all the implications of changing the url, etc., so I've left them with the original "Recent Reflection" label.

As I've commented a number of times--most comprehensively here--the idea of "reflective practice" has come to mean less and less, and have fewer demonstrable benefits, in the 30 or so years since its popularisation, so it seems hypocritical to trade on it in the title to the blog. The intentions and the content will not change, of course.

Thanks for reading!

Items to Share: 15 July

Education Focus

• Why do I do all this ESOL stuff anyway? (Sam Shepherd's Blog)  What it's all about.

Other Business

• Magnifying the Universe Amazing scaled infographic. (The scientific counterpart of this playful one by Istvan Banyai.)

• At 100, Woody Guthrie Still Resonates (NPR)  He died 45 years ago, but you would not know it from all the tributes for his 100th birthday.

• "Lying eyes" may be a myth (Boing Boing)  and  Liars look to the right, right? Wrong. (Neurobonkers.com) Another one in the eye for NLP...

• Hobson-Jobson: The words English owes to India (BBC News)

• Here's What the Higgs Boson Sounds Like (Megan Garber - The Atlantic) Is this the music of the spheres?

• Visual Field (xkcd)

• Upper Class Twit Of The Year 2012 A useful corrective to all this Olympic stuff (via Andrew Sullivan)

Items to Share: 8 July

Education focus

• Levitt_et al. Short-Term_Incentives  (pdf) The Impact of Short-term Incentives on Student Performance

Other Business

• "Flame Challenge," a science communications contest for young people (video) (Boing Boing) Explain a flame to an 11-year-old

• The Little-Known History of How the Modern Olympics Got Their Start (Smithsonian Magazine)  The writing is pretentious and affected, but it's a good story 

• n+1: The Stupidity of Computers --particularly their inability to understand natural language.

• The Good News About British Dyspepsia  (Andrew Sullivan)  At last! Noel Coward's own version of  There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner online; no longer any need to put up with that awful Robbie Williams version. 

• Does infinity exist? (plus.maths.org) John Barrow explains. 

• One more flash mob (Copenhagen Metro)  Delightful! What a way to start a day! 

• The Higgs Boson Explained on Vimeo  from PHD comics

On a short conference paper

(As I start to write)  This time last week I had just presented a very short piece at the 4th International Threshold Concepts Conference in Dublin, on behalf of colleagues Peter Hadfield and Peter Wolstencroft, and myself. They were not able to attend. I'll post more about the conference when I've digested it a bit more. This is about the paper, and the experience of presenting it.

This page has the slides, synched to my talk, and a draft of the paper version which will be amended and put forward for the proceedings volume (subject to peer review, of course).

The first thing to strike you is probably that there is precious little resemblance between them. This is the first time I have been asked to submit a written draft of a whole paper before delivering it, and the experience has clearly underlined the enormous difference between the media. At another session, one of the presenters started by actually reading his paper--and although not technical, it was almost completely incomprehensible. Fortunately, he abandoned the tactic after five or six minutes, and the whole thing immediately came alive.

The call for papers originally went out at the end of 2011, and we duly prepared an abstract which represented some of our thinking at that time. Of course, once it was accepted, we largely turned our attention to other things, and only returned to it a month or so before the conference--by which time, of course, our reading in the area had deepened, and we had gathered more research material (the source material was all collected by ourselves and colleagues through the normal processes of running a course--student work, professional journals, records of teaching observations, material from class discussions, etc.) Some of the original ideas did not hold water, some were much stronger; and all had been changed by our discussions; neither of the final products bore much resemblance to the original abstract.

So, for example, the written paper has many more references to the social policy and organisational context of teaching in vocational education, which could be expressed concisely with a few references. But those do not work in a live presentation to a diverse international audience. Instead, the whole argument is addressed in one slide with a caption (10-11 minutes in), of a concept map of pressures and influences and responses within the sector--about which all one could say, and the only impression one could leave, was that it is all terribly complex but also consistent, a perfect storm of a need for control.

The verbal/visual presentation has of course to unfold in real time. And it was not helped by the incidental factor that on the second day the 20-minute limit was cut back to 15 minutes to allow for questions; it was a sensible decision but it could have been anticipated--there must after all be a vast amount of practical wisdom out there about running academic conferences. But perhaps it is not deemed important enough to record, report and share? Given the typical arrogance of academics, that would not surprise me.

The written version, on the other hand, permits cavalier leaps up and down the text, and re-reading and pursuit of references. It does not have to rely on first hearing as the definitive version, so it can handle complexities which a listener cannot process at one pass. (I'm sure all this has been exhaustively researched by others who have lots of other interesting points to make, but I really can't be bothered to pursue the trail. It's a downside of access to literature online, that it's not just a possibility, it's an obligation.)

More than that, I can't talk academic (academically?). Let me loose in a classroom or a tutorial in the coffee-shop, and I'm all analogies and metaphors, and anecdotes and illustrations. Every new jargon term is naturally linked with a (usually) apologetic (in two senses) illustration. Ask me to write, and I employ economically dense terminology because a reader has discretion over the time she devotes to the text which she encounters more or less all at once...

But, of course, the real-time presenter has more control over pace, and (although barely acknowledged in academic circles) dramatic effect. (Except when you lose 25% of your time a moment before you start...)

So the whole thing was a bit of a damp squib; all build-up, and no bang. So it goes.

And I did leave out at least one critical point. That was the principle of equifinality (written version) or "ending up in the same place from many different starting points" (verbal version). What the system seems to be trying to engineer out of the system is the possibility of students floundering, getting lost, disoriented, demoralised... Those are indeed psychological correlates of liminality, but they can also occur for many other reasons--they are not in themselves evidence of liminality, which is an ontological, not a psychological, condition. They also happen when courses are poorly designed, or students poorly matched to them, or teachers lack enthusiasm, or... And they can also arise when you try to squeeze out the possibility of liminality. So possibly the liminality argument is not falsifiable in Popper's terms. (No-one picked up on that.)

On expectations...

Thinking back* on that easy tutorial (see previous post), I was reminded of how much I (and colleagues) have come to expect a pattern following Kubler-Ross's "five stages of grief":

• denial
• anger
• bargaining
• depression
• acceptance

Actually, although most references discuss these stages in relation to the prospect of death, K-R identified them as "Five Stages of Receiving Catastrophic News"--which may make them more apposite for a failing grade than a death sentence.

And indeed I have encountered all these responses in tutorials--but not necessarily all of them, nor necessarily in that order. There's an interesting critical article on them here.

I'm struck by the potency of the stage model, and the apparent desire of end-of-life and bereavement counsellors to latch onto it despite its lack of evidence. Going back to an earlier discussion of Berger and Luckmann's externalisation/reification/internalisation process, the K-R model seems to have been reified and then internalised, despite the externalisation impetus being relatively weak. Interesting!

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Kubler-Ross E (1969) On Death and Dying (various editions)

* I don't do "reflection".

On an easy tutorial

I did a "recovery" tutorial today. The label varies across institutions, and indeed I don't think we use the term, but it's a tutorial for students who have failed an assessment and have another chance to "recover" it so that they can progress to the next year. They are often difficult, with students in argumentative denial, and so I prepared carefully (on a "just in case" basis because it was clear this referral was an outlier for this student), and cursed the fact that for some reason I couldn't get the commented hard-copy submission or even the Turnitin report. So I felt a little under-prepared...

Interesting, isn't it? I feel under-prepared to uphold a judgement I--and the second-marker and the moderation system--have delivered on a piece of work. The rule is clearly "pass until proven fail". That may be an analogue for the judicial process, but in academe you used to be obliged to earn a pass. Or was that always a fantasy?

I met the student in the coffee-shop (I don't have an office any more). She greeted me by waving a printout of her work, and declaring, "Well, I've just read it again, and it's a load of total twaddle, isn't it? I can see why you failed it." (No mention of  family difficulties she had experienced at the time which meant that it was an achievement to submit anything at all.)

OK! No defensiveness here. On to stage two--what to do about it?

This is tricky. How much guidance can one offer? Coaching to the goal is clearly not acceptable. Students need to get there under their own steam. But in many cases it's a matter of piecemeal revision--a bit more on this, some evidence for that, a more balanced judgement on the other. But sometimes there's a flaw at the heart of the piece. Somehow it has set off in the wrong direction from the start and no amount of patching will get it back. That's a tough judgement to give, and even tougher to accept.

She was there before me. "There's no point in messing about. It's back to square one. I need to re-write from scratch."

There followed a few minutes' discussion of the balance between theory and practice, and how she had failed to discuss theory in the context of practice and vice versa, and whether she could use an historical perspective to evaluate changing approaches to teaching and assumptions about learning...

I don't really need to see that piece of work.

On the peak of academic achievement: now what?

Anonymous graduate: TCD 29 June 2012

Items to Share: 2 July

Apologies for the delay--I've actually had other things to do.

Education Focus

• Raiders of the lost archives (THE) On the almost forgotten joys of searching the stacks 

• Confusion Helps Us Learn (Scientific American Podcast) Another vote for liminal spaces 

• Do Khan Academy Videos Promote “Meaningful Learning”? (Open Culture)

• Is Queen Mary University of London trying to commit scientific suicide?

Other Business

• That would be an ecumenical matter (The Dabbler) On discussing wine, when you know nothing about it.

• Apes With Apps - IEEE Spectrum Bonobos using iPads to communicate

• TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): 1,143,839,622,748,050,000,000,000,000 sonnets 

• Blithering idiocy on the subjunctive (Language Log)

• Language as a Window into Human Nature (RSA Animate)

• National Geographic Traveler Magazine: 2012 Photo Contest  Self-explanatory 

• The man who made his own toaster (Boing Boing)

• Dan Ariely explains why we cheat and steal, and how we're generally wrong about this (Boing Boing)

• The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains (part I) (Empirical Zeal)

• Tunes without composers: music naturally evolves on DarwinTunes (Not Exactly Rocket Science)

• James Dyson on invention and failure

On the Italian restaurant problem

Went out for a very pleasant evening yesterday with the finishing students. They clearly don't read the website--I drop heavy hints about my preferences for Greek food, although to be fair there's not much about in this town, currently.

But I was stupid enough to be surprised that when I suggested at the outset that we work out a policy for dealing with the bill, I wasn't exactly shouted down, but met with a wave of denial. "We'll just divide it up equally! It'll be OK!" I did suggest that wasn't necessarily the case and that this was a classic problem in game theory, but they were all sober and enjoying the oxytocin flush of relaxing with friends.

I  made my excuses and left quite early (for good reason, because I still had a paper to finish for a deadline today), just as the debate was beginning about who was planning to have dessert and who had drunk what... (I just put down cash worth more than I had eaten and drunk, and left it on the table).

But it did remind me of the eurozone crisis...

On Bloomsday

Today is the centenary of the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. Or at least the 108th anniversary of the day (16 June 1904 a.k.a. "Bloomsday") which it supposedly chronicles.

Readings have interrupted regular scheduling on Radio 4 (which is tantamount to lese-majeste)

[Full disclosure: I am not, and have no relationship with, the James S Atherton, Joycean scholar and author of The Books at the Wake. But in my first days at university, in 1963, I did look up my own name in the card index--and found that reference. I found it on the shelf, and glanced in it for at least two minutes, before putting it back and beginning to wonder about the point of literary scholarship--beyond, of course, of its intrinsic delight, like that of solving a cryptic crossword puzzle.]

But I have read Joyce. My copy of the 1969 Penguin edition of Ulysses is beside me as I write, with pencil marks up to page 687. I confess that unlike my namesake, I never tackled the Wake.

So? Skip to the conclusion. Joyce invented literary bling.

I wanted to finish this post on Bloomsday, but I've missed that deadline (at least in BST terms). So, in short;

Ulysses is an  amazing tour de force. But the harder it tries the more contrived it gets.

Items to share: 16 June

Education focus

• Inklings: Please Rate the Overall Likability of the Instructor On evaluation instruments

• A Don's Life: What poems did you learn at school?

• A Master List of 500 Free Courses From Great Universities (Open Culture) It's just a list, but useful nonetheless

Other business

• How mapping neurons could reveal how experiences affect mental wiring (Wired UK) On the connectome and how it relates to the genome and the physical structure of the brain.

• Is War Inevitable? (Discover Magazine)  E O Wilson reckons it's part of human nature--just to cheer us all up! 

• Smart people are especially prone to stupid mistakes - Boing Boing  Jonah Lehrer on Daniel Kahneman 

• Separated by a common language: introducing yourself  In Britain and in the US--when do you mention your name?

• Deirdre N. McCloskey: Happyism (The New Republic) But how do you measure it?

• Dilbert makes up some numbers

• (Language Log) Young dialect mimic with a future? (Video)

• 'Sexual depravity' of penguins that Antarctic scientist dared not reveal (The Observer)  "March of the Penguins" was never like this... 

• First Contact (Colossal) Child meets manatee

• “Are you experienced?” (More or Less Bunk)  Guest post on what students actually learn on-line--and reflections on hunting for a first teaching job (US).

On "assessment for learning"; the petrifaction of a process.

I've been reading with interest a detailed blog on ESOL by Sam Shepherd, and in particular a point from a (fairly) recent post:

My personal experiment here was around learning outcomes, the value of “sharing” them I have always wondered about. And I have to be honest and say that for this lesson  I might as well have just whistled the learning outcomes at the beginning, for all it meant to the learners. [...] But the whole learning outcomes thing, really, not impressed. For this group it just didn’t make sense. [...] But I want to emphasise that it was just one lesson: and in the spirit of research and experimentation, I am going to persist and see how we get on.

from Playing it Straight « Sam Shepherd's Blog 

This is an issue which crops up regularly in my own classes with people already teaching in post-compulsory education taking a part-time teaching qualification, and I usually come in for some stick from "students" who tell me they are obliged by college policy to announce the learning outcomes of every session at the start, and one very upset man told me that the only reason Ofsted had not deemed his class "outstanding" was because he had been too nervous to recite them. My usual response is to say that the only decent reason I can see for doing it is that it's a bit of ritual which you can use to communicate, "this is where the class really starts", but there are lots of ways of doing that. (I used to illustrate this by reciting at least one of the module outcomes in Anglican chant--I gave up on that when it became clear that it meant nothing to most students, and I don't have the voice for it... Pity.) 

So what is my objection? It is certainly not about wanting to confuse the students (although sometimes that is legitimate and effective; surprise can be an effective teaching tool). I've no objection to outlining what we are going to be doing, or "looking at" in this session, or giving an idea of about how much time we are likely to be spending on something; especially when it is a two-hour session, they like to know when the comfort-break is likely to come up. 

Students don't understand them--why should they?

My first objection is precisely what Shepherd identifies. Learning Outcomes (LOs) are written in teacher-speak gobbledygook. Even my students frequently don't understand them--and at the beginning of the module we do actually study not only what the outcomes say but also how they are written. They were difficult enough in the days when my colleagues and I wrote them, but since they have been laid down centrally by the now-defunct and unlamented "Lifelong Learning UK" they are well-nigh impossible. Granted that these are at the module level rather than the session level, here are two examples from the 2007 LLUK specification:

Understand the application of theories and principles of learning and communication to inclusive practice.
Understand how to apply theories and principles of learning and communication in planning and enabling inclusive learning.

(Shepherd's outcomes are SMART; one thing anyone formulating LOs learns from the outset is that "understand" is not an acceptable verb for an LO. See here and here for my heretical take on that. But the guardians of the Gradgrindian fog at LLUK used it all the time.) It's not clear what they mean. It's not clear how you show their LOs have been met. And there are two of them, and it's not clear what the difference is between them! They add nothing. Time spent on introducing them could be spent more profitably on doing practically anything else.

Such as using an Advance Organiser. OK, the evidence for its effectiveness as a teaching device is not very high, but it's a respectable tool to have in the box, and it takes very little effort to use it. AOs (let's carry on with this silly game) refer to the students' experience, so they engage them, and set them up for the session. LOs on the other hand, distance them, and assure them that teaching is about to be done to them, so that they will emerge at the end of the session having been reliably processed through the sausage-machine.

Where's the evidence? Substitution of the sign for the signified.

My second objection is that there is no evidence that this is good practice. (This is a more convoluted and longer argument.)

A few months ago a correspondent got in touch about my Heterodoxy pages;

Very interested in your article re reflective practice, much of which can, in my opinion, be attributed to today's idea which cannot be questioned - 'Assessment for Learning'.

It seems to me that the impact of this seemingly effective form of practice has not born fruit [...] and that opportunities for practicing a particular skill or trying something more difficult have been replaced by pointless navel gazing. 

I'd like to see you take a swipe at AfL.

(Link above inserted). I'm not "taking a swipe" just because CJ requested it (but apologies to him/her for taking nine months to get into this), but because this kind of issue is a classic case of the ritual ossification of what he/she describes as "this seemingly effective form of practice"--concentrating on a relatively arbitrary sign rather than on the substance towards which it is supposed to point. And to explore it is also to explore the fate of many other educational innovations...

So I've done a lot of reading and talked to a lot of people--no, I didn't "do a literature review" and "interview respondents"--I live in the real world nowadays! And I'll spare you (most of) the references.

I am a fan of assessment for learning. The real McCoy, though, not the institutionalised tick-box version being peddled by Ofsted and their intimidated toadies. But how did we get the version we have now?

How did the principle of maximising feedback to learners, and thereby getting feedback from them, become this sterile ritual observance of reciting LOs, testing in every class, recapitulating the pre-determined learning points, and then writing it all up as if it constituted evidence of something?

There are several complementary perspectives on the process, and they all tend to push in the same direction...

The (proximate) origins of AfL

To cut through a lot of the origins of the idea, we can say that while it was enshrined in a Department of Education and Science report in 1988, it was championed by Black and Wiliam (1998), although they of course acknowledged that it was what good teachers had been doing for decades or even centuries--certainly at least long enough for them to amass 250 studies for a meta-analysis. They note:

"Typical effect sizes of the formative assessment experiments were between 0.4 and 0.7. These
effect sizes are larger than most of those found for educational interventions." (1998 p.3)

And Hattie's much larger meta-analysis, published 2010, confirms the figures (my take on it is here, including a note on what "effect-sizes" are).

But were they talking about what is commonly understood today as "Assessment for Learning"? It's clear from re-reading Black and Wiliam that they envisage a long-term cultural shift in classrooms. They repeat several times that it will be a slow process. It will be characterised by introducing measures which enable teachers to get a clearer picture of where their students are, in relation to particular topics and skills within a subject area, drawing on, inter alia, student self-assessment. Open communication is the key.

But Black and Wiliam are too experienced to believe that teachers can re-adjust simply on the basis of principles--they need concrete practices to follow:

"Teachers will not take up ideas that sound attractive, no matter how extensive the research base, if the ideas are presented as general principles that leave the task of translating them into everyday practice entirely up to the teachers. Their classroom lives are too busy and too fragile for all but an outstanding few to undertake such work. What teachers need is a variety of living examples of implementation, as practiced by teachers with whom they can identify and from whom they can derive the confidence that they can do better. They need to see examples of what doing better means in practice." (1998 p.10)

That is entirely understandable. I don't want to over-simplify the convoluted processes of change, particularly in education, but I suspect that nevertheless one unintended consequence of such thinking, exemplified in professional development programmes at one end of the scale, and in Ofsted inspection frameworks at the other, is to concentrate on the outward and visible signs, rather than the more elusive and protean processes of cultural shift. (We also need to see this process in a political and historical context, of obsessional micro-management of public services under the Labour government...)

We are also now looking at a second or even third generation of teachers since the desirability of AfL became the conventional wisdom--and quite possibly because of the way these teachers have themselves been taught--they have simply accepted all these signs and rituals as given, with no realisation of the rationale or principles underlying them. Reflective practice (from ten years earlier) has similarly become a matter of going through the motions without knowing why.

The managerial argument has been: If we are looking for a more open flow of information about understanding and achievement within the classroom, how do we know that it is happening? We need it to be reported. We need ILPs (Individual Learning Plans) to be set up and recorded on forms, and in order to ensure that the information is hard enough, that needs to be based on testing.

But! Given the time it takes to set up and implement and record such tests, and their inherent bias towards summative assessment, and Black and Wiliam's point above that "[Teachers'] classroom lives are too busy and too fragile for all but an outstanding few to undertake such work." --it's not surprising that their point that:

For assessment to function formatively, the results have to be used to adjust teaching and learning; thus a significant aspect of any program will be the ways in which teachers make these adjustments.  (1998 p.4, emphasis added.)

has in many cases not been met. It's just too much effort to complete the circle, and as with any cyclical model, there is nothing more disappointing that trying again and again to start something which continually peters out. (Think of trying to start an engine with a pull-cord--or even a starting-handle--when it won't "catch".)

The social construction of learning and its institutions.

Nevertheless, there is a venerable descriptive cyclical model in play here--see Berger and Luckmann (1967). (It is consistent with Wenger (1998): the cycle can start at any point.)

Put very crudely, it represents how we put ideas out into the world (externalise them). We do that by talking, writing, making objects. Ideas become social "things" (reified), such as institutions, laws, languages, art, etc. but of course changed in the process; and we in turn internalise them, which changes us and the next ideas we try to externalise. It is the reification of AfL which has lost the point (or if you like, the spirit) of the whole thing, and this cycle carries on independently of the will of the teachers. (There are fairly clear parallels with this model.)

What happens in the process of reification is that the idea, for want of a better word, has to accommodate to all the other reified ideas out there if it is to survive, and it is this adapted version which we (and the next generation) internalise. Thus, any social institution (and any approach to teaching is a social "institution" in a broad sense) gets knocked into shape by the dominant political, economic, technological and other powerful cultural factors of the day.

This is not merely an "academic" digression. What counts as "learning"--especially in the sense of "what is supposed to go on in education institutions"--is socially constructed. And so, therefore, is its assessment. At the level of universities, Stephan Collini writes (2012 ch.5) on  the substitution of metrics and superficial proxies for valid evaluative tools, because the rhetoric of "a public good" is no longer recognised as a reason for doing anything unless it can also be justified in primarily economic or other instrumental terms. (He writes as an apologist for the humanities.)

And he notes that inspection and evaluation of processes of delivery have taken over from any engagement with disciplines and content themselves, because of the value-questions which are inevitably encountered through such an engagement.

So, much as Ofsted and other quality assurance institutions would wish us to believe that their work is value-neutral, and that an "outstanding" class is better than a merely "good" one on any terms, that is not the case. (I grant there are some practices clearly to be avoided in teaching, so there is likely to be a more substantial consensus on distinguishing between "outstanding" and "failing".)

In other words, what kind of learning is "assessment for learning" about? The choice of what kind of assessment to focus on is critical in determining what kind of learning is promoted. In assessing a piece of written work, what counts most? Is it spelling and grammar? Elegance of expression? Originality of ideas? Arguments based on evidence? Underlying research? All of them, of course, but emphasising some beyond others depending on the age and stage of the learner, the subject matter of the essay, and so on. Choosing the "correct" criteria, choosing what to pay attention to and what to ignore are all based on those socially constructed values.

(The issues are of course generally much more straightforward in STEM* subjects.)

Accept only substitutes!

Frankly, all that is too hard to measure, so the system contents itself with these relatively trivial, perhaps harmless (other than their cost in time, effort and morale, and distortion of priorities) proxies which at one time might have pointed towards the quality of classroom communication, but have long since lost the connection. And perhaps that is all one can do in and inspection of just a few days. But it's not surprising if institutions focus on compliance with the letter rather than the spirit of the approach. (I'm giving inspectors, principals and other managers the benefit of the doubt here; my suspicion is that they no longer realise that there is a problem.

Just to round off, though, there is of course a quis custodiet question about these guardians of teaching standards: here's an interesting take on that, and more generally here is one on all those who presume to diagnose, predict and treat within ill-defined systems, exhibiting "deluded self-limiting prescriptivism".  Thanks to David Stone for the link.

But see here for a post on an LSE blog which rather grudgingly concedes some validity to Ofsted's judgements.

Update 27 July: Dylan Wiliam himself is now pointing out how misunderstood the AfL is, and how little implemented (TES, 13 July)

---

*Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

Berger P L and Luckmann T (1967) The Social Construction of Reality London; Penguin (And Peter Berger is still blogging--largely about the social practice of religion--here.)

Collini S (2012) What Are Universities For? London; Penguin (Review here)

Items to share: 9 June

Education Focus

• How should mathematics be taught to non-mathematicians? (Gowers's Weblog)  A long and engaging post on a sixth-form "Use of Mathematics" curriculum--but in a good way.

• The Neurocritic: G r e a t e r / l e t t e r / s p a c i n g / helps reading in dyslexia

• The Benefits of Making It Harder to Learn  (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
  Not only a matter of "cognitive disfluency" but also of a degree of cognitive dissonance, perhaps. The comments are worth reading, too.

• A Technological Cloud Hangs Over Higher Education (The Chronicle of Higher Education) A bit of a jeremiad, but principally about how technology is mediating the encounter with subject-matter (particularly in the sciences) and hence distancing students from it. Some interesting links from the comments on the PowerPoint trope.

• Will Your Citations Pass or Fail?  (The Chronicle of Higher Education) Since it's the season for examiners' ritual complaints about the quality of referencing, here's a glimpse of what's involved at a professional/obsessional level.

Other Business

• The history of the paper clip: It was invented in 1899. It hasn't been improved upon since. (Slate Magazine)

• Haslam (2012) Toilet psychology  Redressing a history of neglect...

• Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee (The Atlantic) Picture gallery (the first one is brilliant).

• Mrs Windsor, anyone? (FT.com) on the conspicuous failure of republicanism to make any progress in the UK.

• Urbanscreen Light: Sydney Opera House (YouTube) The projection onto Buck House at the Jubilee concert had nothing on this.

• Leonardo of the Deep - "Gas pods" (small bumps on the roof of a car) are claimed to increase fuel efficiency by mimicking the effects of similar bumps occurring naturally on whales and lobsters.

• Atul Gawande: Failure and Rescue (The New Yorker) In medicine, it's not the ability to forestall failure which counts in survival rates, it's the capacity to respond and recover when it's happened.

Items to share: 2 June

• Sixty years of progress? (Simon Jenkins: Prospect) A token recognition of the Jubilee 

• Queueing theory: What people hate most about waiting in line. (Slate Magazine)

• Richard Dare: The Awfulness of Classical Music Explained Or at least the pretentiousness of the culture of devotees (comments worth reading, too). 

• Steven Pinker on the false fronts in the language wars. - Slate Magazine Prescriptivists vs. descriptivists.

• Derek Thompson: The New Economics of Happiness (The Atlantic)  And the sequel The 10 Things Economics Can Tell Us About Happiness.

• Monday 31 May 1669 (Pepys' Diary) The final entry. 

• As our languages make clear, context is a human specialty (LA Times)  "Research shows that humans are remarkably good at divining one another's intentions using context — a skill that computers have not yet mastered." Just a taster.

• Daniel Kahneman: Thinking That We Know (3quarksdaily) Almost as good as reading his book.

• The Perfected Self - The Atlantic  The resurgence of behaviour modification in the era of the app. (particularly for weight loss). 

• Noise and Signal — Nassim Taleb (Farnam Street) Why it is a mistake to obsess about indicators

• The Moral Molecule  (WSJ.com) The role of oxytocin in fostering reciprocity and trust (book review).

Items to share: 26 May

Education Focus

• School inspections: can we trust Ofsted reports? (British Politics and Policy at LSE)

• And David Stone, referring back to last week's re-posting of a critical piece about Ofsted draws my attention to this piece: Revisiting why incompetents think they're awesome (Ars Technica) (Many thanks, David!)

• Are we asking the right questions? (Boston Globe) On the art of asking questions in order to learn, and explicitly teaching it.

• Lessons from Room 10  ...on the importance of high expectations.

• Google releases new research tool  and  Google Docs Research Tool: A Review (Chronicle of Higher Education) Not really much of a leap forward--particularly if it helps students to be even lazier...

• Study Shows Promise and Challenges of 'Hybrid' Courses (The Chronicle of Higher Education)  And another report of the same study: Report: Robots stack up to human professors in teaching Intro Stats (Inside Higher Ed ) Sounds like a reasonable study, for once, but it's interesting that it's about a traditionally dull but required course.

• The road to academic success is paved with stylish academic writing (British Politics and Policy at LSE)

Other Business

• The descent of Edward Wilson by Dawkins.This is shaping up to be a great spat! Watch this space.

• The Zombie Within : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR On knowledge and skills becoming second nature--"unconscious competence".

• Experimental psychology: The roar of the crowd (The Economist)  A new one for the research methods module--crowd-sourced experiments on the net-- with potential to overcome the WEIRD selection bias in most Western psychological research. (You'll have read the piece to find out what the acronym means.)

• Essentialism (Edge Conversation)  Bruce Hood: what if the "self" is not real?

• The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning (Brain Pickings)

• Mind-Pops: Psychologists Begin to Study an Unusual form of Proustian Memory: Scientific American

• Infographic: When The Lights Go Out, The World Eats Junk (Co.Design)

• New word order - FT.com On the challenges of translating literature 

• The Hot And Cold Of Priming (Science News) Among other things, more interesting points on the unreliability of the published research base in social sciences.

• What a Physics Student Can Teach Us About How Visitors Walk Through a Museum |(Articulations)

• The Benefits of Being Bilingual (Wired Science)

Asides

• Greatest wedding proposal ever: the lip-dub - Boing Boing

• Random Wodehouse Quote Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the pointer.

• Yoram Bauman the 'Stand-Up Economist' at Lancaster University Management School - YouTube

• Epic video of a Slinky on a treadmill

On handing on...

(19 May 12) The Olympic torch has arrived, and the relay begins...

Chelsea (football/soccer team) have won the European champions' league, in what some commentators have claimed to be the last gasp of an ageing team. I have no idea about that in detail, but the handover to the next generation is a periodic make or break challenge for any long-term organisation.

When Star Trek returned to TV in the 1987, the series was identified as "the Next Generation", and indeed it represented a shift in values, perhaps from the free-wheeling '60s to the more formal and task-oriented '80s.

And at a minor level, the coincidence of minor personnel "churn" and institutional re-organisation in our network of teaching centres means that at unpredictable ("stick and slip") intervals we are faced with the challenge of passing on the torch--or even the "brand"--of the programme to a new generation.

All of which brings to mind the challenge of passing on--or adapting--underlying values, rather than formal structures.

In the case of  the PCE programme, the quality assurance procedures have been mind-boggling. For various reasons (none to do with the programme itself) it has been inspected by Ofsted three times in the past five years as well as reviewed by its validating body (now abolished); it has recently emerged from a routine quinquennial review by the university, and last year a couple of typos in the documentation prompted an intrusive (and, it transpires, unauthorised) review apparently motivated by the personal animosity of a senior figure in the Faculty, who is now no longer with the university...

Stefan Collini (2012:107ff.) points out that the procedures and metrics of "quality assurance" are good at ensuring and indeed enhancing the rigour and comprehensiveness of everything which does not really matter in universities.

But how does one pass on the vision and the distinctiveness of the programme, which cannot be contained by the details of second-marking samples and moderation and module specifications (syllabi)?

It could of course be argued that possibly they should not be passed on. Perhaps they were misguided to begin with. Perhaps they have been overtaken by social, political, economic--even heaven help us, technological changes. After all, this programme was first validated in 1996.  It's true that it has dropped increasingly out of step with relentless policy initiatives in the sector, but even the hostile unauthorised review of 2011 did not try to make a case on that basis.)

The community of practice which is the teaching team on the programme (around forty people at any one time in ten colleges, and fifteen or so who regularly attend network meetings) is the bearer of the (sorry! Hate to use the term, but it is  the most powerful) of the "brand". Its ultimate origins may be found in a range of philosophers and educational theorists and practitioners but its proximate base rests on the two people who have been with it from the beginning, and both of us have now retired.

For the rest of the community, the characteristics of the programme can seem quirky, because they have only encountered them in their "mature" form, and were never involved in their development. The programme leader who has recently retired--and who has been by far the most significant figure in the development of the course--has frequently commented over the past few years how much time in network meetings has been spent in explaining over again the original rationale behind, for example, the policy of negotiating submissions through learning contracts rather than setting assignments--and occasionally discovering that the policy has been sacrificed to administrative convenience by some (generally peripheral) tutors.

So do we now have to recognise that it is futile to cling to the past out of some misguided delusion that the course is our own creation? Indeed, may we have become so obsessed with its quirks that we are no longer able to evaluate them dispassionately? May they be merely trivial decorative flourishes which mean nothing or may--as some students and probably tutors believe--actually obstruct learning?

Quite possibly. But then it may be the sense of working on something different and distinctive which enthuses and energises colleagues teaching the course, and gives them a sense of belonging to a team... even if that which is distinctive does not instrumentally matter that much. That certainly seems to be the experience of colleagues at one of the colleges in the network, which has changed their validating university, for irrelevant reasons; they have reported a sense of loss. One neglects such an agenda at one's peril.

But spare a thought for those who are taking up the baton, and their challenge of making the course their own--putting their stamp on it--while engaging with issues of loyalty to a prior generation.

And read the Saber-Tooth Curriculum. (There's a note on it, here.)

---

Collini S (2012) What are Universities For? London; Penguin

On reasonable demands

This is one of those confluence posts--when several sources flow together... (started a couple of months ago, but re-animated by further prompts--5 onwards below).

1. We have just had a Study Day at which Kathryn Ecclestone raised pertinent questions about current approaches to assessment--particularly in the further and vocational education sector, but also at more advanced levels. The students discussed those issues in discipline/setting specific groups and articulated their particular concerns and solutions on posters.
2. A few months ago I was an external member of an exam board when I had to express concern about the very detailed brief--almost a recipe--for the production of an assessed piece of work at Master's level. (Since fixed)
3. But the leader of the dissertation module on one of our Master's programmes has recently approached the tutorial team, requesting suggestions for reading as the basis of the literature review for the dissertation
4. ...and in the past few hours I've had two, much appreciated, thank-you emails from readers of my pages on the structure of a dissertation, and writing at Master's level. #1 is the proximate cause of this post, but it is fuelled by #2 and #3, and #4 poses the question whether I am complicit in this game--if that is what it is.
5. A couple of former colleagues* and I are working on a conference paper concerning the inability of current educational systems to accommodate liminal states on the part of students. Liminality occurs in conditions of qualitative change (I've elsewhere used the term disorientation for the experience of liminality, with a slightly different emphasis). A precursor of the paper can be found here.
   Karl Marx (Capital vol 1.) argues that "Merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes." We can turn that on its head and suggest that because that is the case, and qualitative change generates liminality, therefore quantitative changes need to be constrained below that trigger point.
6. Stefan Collini (What are Universities For? Penguin, 2012) in a well-argued (but padded, repetitious and under-evidenced enlightenment-style "pamphlet") contends that the managerialist rhetoric of current neo-liberal politics in which everything has to be accountable and costed, has forced those who would run universities (and indeed other educational institutions) to embrace spurious metrics as distorted proxies for fuzzy contestable aims such as "education" and "scholarship" which are no longer accepted as goods in themselves. In particular he refers to fatuous notions of "continuous improvement" "beyond excellence"--that can only work if the standards do not change. Discontinuities--gear changes--are inimical to the model...

All this is not to fall into a jeremiad about the state of further and higher education; there's plenty of evidence of its achievements, and I continually come across people producing great work, for whom and for which I have great admiration. But they're having to do it despite the structures and the culture of the institutions.

And many of them are not even aware that it could be different. Or that by becoming complicit in merely implementing a cravenly incremental model of curriculum and learning, they are becoming part of a problem rather than that of a solution.

---

* Peter Hadfield and Peter Wolstencroft

Items to share: 19 May

Education Focus:

• On Vessels Filled and Fires Kindled (Wonders & Marvels) Plutarch and digital culture (a slight piece but the links are interesting).

• The Learning Spy - Who inspects Ofsted? General verdict--the model is not fit for purpose. (I'm working on a post on what happens to good ideas in education when they become institutionalised.)

Other Business

• Bryan Magee’s In-Depth, Uncut TV Conversations With Famous Philosophers (1978-87) (Open Culture)

• Coffee associated with the opposite of death, according to new scientific study (Boing Boing) Is that because if you are drinking coffee you can't be dead? And while we are on coffee: Walking with coffee--why does it spill? "Here we report on the results of an experimental study of the conditions under which coffee spills for various walking speeds and initial liquid levels in the cup. These observations are analyzed from the dynamical systems and fluid mechanics viewpoints as well as with the help of a model developed here." Summary here.

• How a book is born (because you kids love the infographics) (Weldon Owen) Approximately.

• Replication studies: Bad copy  (Nature News & Comment) Draws attention, inter al., to the problem of spurious research results getting published, but their refutations not being.

• ...and a parallel story on sloppy reporting: Science stories, revisited (Language Log) 

• What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (Barnes & Noble Review) On Michael Sandel's latest.

• Views From the Night Sky: London and the U.K. (The Atlantic) Superb aerial views

• Sir Patrick Moore and the Cult of the Amateur (The Dabbler) ... he also used to compose operas and play the xylophone rather well. I remember him coming to my school to talk about the moon--probably about 55 years ago. His clothes didn't fit then, either.

• World's Subways Converging on Ideal Form (Wired Science) Are the overall patterns indicative of an element of self-organisation?

• Presentation Charts (Chart Porn) Dilbert's take.

• Fantastic time lapse map of Europe, 1000 - 2005 A.D. via Kottke.org

• Is Death Bad for You? (Chronicle of Higher Education)

On hoarding

There have been a number of recent TV programmes in the UK on compulsive hoarders. The programme template is simple; show us the grotesque extent of the subject's hoarding compulsion (including revealing pest infestations and their by-products...); dramatise their struggles to throw out their stuff, with the alleged help of therapists [discounting the potentially much more potent and prolonged presence of a TV crew with a clear story to tell, backed up of course with a legal contract...]

Eventually, the former hoarder is shown in their now uncluttered and cleaned up house, protesting their relief at having room to move, and being able once again to access their bathroom and kitchen.

The formula raises a host of issues. Let's leave aside the question of the status of compulsive hoarding as a psychiatric disorder (a very live issue since we are currently in the consultation period for an [or even the] authoritative manual on this), important though it is.

Instead, let's return to the former hoarder, consider how long she or he remains free of the problem and a rather more venerable way of describing what happens:

Luke 11:24-26:
²⁴ When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out.
²⁵ And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished.
²⁶ Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

Unsurprisingly, treatment is very difficult and uncertain. Without necessarily adopting any kind of religious discourse, it's all about taking something which served some psychological purpose--however bizarrely and counter-productively--and often not offering anything in exchange. One of the few frameworks which addresses this explicitly is drama therapy, in particular the Magic Shop exercise.

Its principles are applicable not only in cases of pathology, but also in teaching, wherever learning or change is experienced as loss.

Items to share: 12 May (belated)

Education focus:

• Do We Need the Next Generation Science Standards?: OK, the question presupposes "No", of course. It's US-centric, so the point of the link is not the detail--it is the downright incomprehensibility of the whole thing, and losing sight of the wood for the trees.

• Very Open Universities (Ben Goldacre) Ben muses on the possible implications of open access courses from Stanford, MIT etc. The comments are sensible, too. 

• John Bohannon: Dance vs. powerpoint, a modest proposal (Video on TED.com): Fascinating; and a wonderful discussion starter. (Many thanks to Laura Gibson for drawing this to my attention.)

• Prezi - The Zooming Presentation Editor Prezi continues to evolve and become more flexible, but I confess I haven't found it as useful as I expected. Its vertiginous zooms require great restraint, and are often more distracting than illuminating (same goes for the dancers above), and there are ways of getting the same effects (for teaching purposes, at least) with more conventional means.

• xkcd: Every Major's Terrible You really need to be familiar with the Major-General's song from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance, and of course even better--Tom Lehrer's setting of the Elements, as performed by a 3-year-old...

Other business:

• Turning the Tables: FDR, Tom Sawyer, and me (Dan Ariely)

• Happy Birthday, Richard Feynman: The Key to Science in 63 Seconds (Brain Pickings)

• Five Historical Misconceptions Debunked (Open Culture)

• Our Gift for Good Stories Blinds Us to the Truth (Bloomberg) Another one of those promising articles which then runs into the sand--and which seem to be much more common in the business press--but it does have some interesting links.

• Cardinal Brady Should Resign (Alex Massie in The Spectator): I don't usually link to topical posts, but this one revisits the theme of child sexual abuse--in the case by clergy in Ireland, going back to the '70s--which I commented on here. 

• The Flight From Conversation (NYTimes.com) By Sherry Turkle--taster for her "Alone Together" (Thanks to Farnam Street for the pointer). 

• The Trouble with Profiling : A guest post by Bruce Schneier : Sam Harris: From the maths to the politics. Moral--just give up on the "security theatre".

• Saturday 8 May 1669 (Pepys' Diary): Why mention this now? Because this "real-time" replay of the world's most famous diary--with scholarly annotations--concludes at the end of this month, and although the archive will continue, there's something about the quotidien revelations which relies on their sequential publication, especially because much of Pepys' life was as boring as ours! I hope there will be a replay. 

• Jacques Tati Film Festival: Four Rare Performances, 1935-1967 (Open Culture): It's amazing how small Tati's oeuvre is; just five substantial films in about thirty years--so even small additions are valuable. 

• Brain Scans Reveal Dogs' Thoughts: Scientific American

• Dan Pink's travel tips (Boing Boing) A little obsessional, perhaps, but some are useful.

• The Illusion of Choice - Chart Porn ...but then again...