On abuse undetected for years

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is the worst possible scenario...

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

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

The matter needs to be taken out of their hands.

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

Good grief! I've got a positive proposal!

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

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

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

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

It's always a difficult call.

On the journal scam (ctd.)

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

[Up-date 26.02.12] More.

Items to share (21 January)

• Geoffrey Pullum on the demise of the apostrophe.

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

• What is the ACI? 

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

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

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

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

• Abraham Maslow in context:

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

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

On disclosure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On journals (and Pozzo and Lucky...)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Items to share (14 January)

Rather a fallow week this week.

• The New Semester Checklist Gina Barreca

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

• Up-date on a 10,000 hour experiment. 

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

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

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

Items to share (7 January)

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Francis Fukuyama on the virtues of analogue media. 

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

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

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

On phasing out feedback.

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

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

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

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

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

• 25:45   Sadler argues that feedback is over-rated, and outlines the basic argument. 
• 35:00   Writing feedback on students' assessment tasks is both demanding and time-consuming for the marker, so we are entitled to ask about the return on investment of this activity. Many students don't even pick up their work after marking, still less read the comments, still less learn from them...
• 37:30   The basic problem is that giving feedback is about telling students what the problems are and how they might improve; we no longer think that the "transmission" model is a good way of teaching content, so why should we think it's a good way of conveying feedback?
• 44:00   Students are rarely familiar enough with the process of marking/grading work to have any idea what actually constitutes quality--a good piece of work--so often what we tell them means nothing to them and they don't know what to do with it. [1]
• 52:00   Accomplished practitioners in all disciplines no longer rely on other people giving them feedback based only on externally determined criteria. They know for themselves;
• When and how to adjust their provisional plans, as they are going along.
• What issues they can ignore; what doesn't matter (and of course what does).
• They notice inconsistencies in their own work, and take steps to correct them as they are going along. [2]
• 58:00   But students do not yet have those skills. So the challenge is how to inculcate them. We have them, based on hours and years of practice in assessing students' work, but that does not mean that we can communicate them.
• 71:30  Sadler describes one approach to developing students' skills in self-monitoring and -assessment in tutorial:
• He gives out a sample piece of submitted work. He asks the students;
• Does it address the task as set?
• Is it any good? (He refuses to set out the criteria for them. [3])
• Why do you say that?
• What advice would you give about how to make it better?

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

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

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

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

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

On celebrating ignorance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Items to share (31 December)

• Welcome to the Age of Overparenting

• A varied selection of Christmas music!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On having a hinterland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quite...

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

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

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

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

Items to share (24 December)

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

• The Claus Hypothesis: from Piled Higher and Deeper

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

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

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

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

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

• The uselessness of  "security theatre"

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

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

Items to share (17 December)

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

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

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

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

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

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

On refereeing

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.