On refereeing

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Monbiot made similar points in the Guardian here.

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


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 My stuff is not peer-reviewed pre-publication (although I get plenty of feedback afterwards) but it reaches a lot more people (more than the median annual usage of the Elsevier journals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

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

On the wisdom of the Zuni

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But how about a Zuniversity?

Items to Share (10 December)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Correlation and causation; great graphics.

•  What's a crash blossom?

On the turning of the learning styles tide

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

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

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

There are one or two unexplained abbreviations:

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

New readers start here!

On re-working presentations...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The presentation as part of a system 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forms of knowledge and media for presentation

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

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

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

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

But that is the wrong question...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Items to share (3 December 2011)

• Are we the teachable species?

• How to communicate about risk. From the Freakonomics blog.

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

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

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

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

• Another spuriously precise and prescriptive model of learning contested.

• Kidnapper sues victims who escaped for breach of contract

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

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

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

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

On damp kindling

I got a Kindle for my birthday.

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

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

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

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

I have just made my first proper purchase.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Items to share (26 November 2011)

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

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

On staying offline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Items to share (19 November 2011)

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

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

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

On the ceremonial of remembrance

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

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

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

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



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

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



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



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



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

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

On academic ritual

(Post delayed.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On new film library

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

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

On a whimsical tale

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

On referencing--yet again

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

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

On perspectives

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

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

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

But their take on the academy is elegantly explored here.

On coaching and mentoring

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

On generational transmission

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

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

Me:

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

That's my boy!

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

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

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

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

On marking as a mirror

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

I am assessing myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

---

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