On getting oriented

I've been trying to read John Gray's Gray's Anatomy (Penguin, 2010) which is a selection of essays written over the past thirty years; and I've been finding it very difficult. That is puzzling, because his writings are not terribly technical, nor do they pre-suppose a vast amount of background knowledge. Most of them were first published in unabashedly intellectual but non-specialist magazines.

So it was interesting to come across the linked piece from Mark Bauerlein on the Brainstorm blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education. He starts:

Over the years, I’ve spent some time reviewing items on reading comprehension tests, evaluating the passages selected as texts and checking the following eight or ten questions for accuracy, validity, etc. It can be a draining activity, scanning rather dry and often remote informational text, then spotting ambiguities or confusions in the questions that must be corrected.

One thing, I’ve found, lightens the load: a little knowledge about the passage material. Just a little bit helps a lot. Indeed, the difference between no knowledge and a little knowledge means much more than the difference between a little knowledge and abundant knowledge.

 (My emphasis) He then goes on to discuss other people who have made a similar point, and relates it to the curriculum. In so doing he makes a good case for attention to the necessary background knowledge of the humanities without which students cannot get traction, as it were, to engage with more specialist--even scientific--advanced study.

And my problem with Gray is largely that. It's not that I don't know whom he is talking about when he refers to Edmund Burke or Isaiah Berlin (or Michael Oakeshott--one of the reasons I bought the book), it is that for him and probably anyone who read PPE, they are not individual thinkers but representatives of a tradition of thinking, which one is expected to be aware of. It is that allusive quality which makes his writing so rich--as I appreciate when I recognise what he is talking about.

In all the talk about millennial students (there's plenty of references out there), and the supposed imperative to engage with them in the present and to acknowledge that in their world our taken-for-granted knowledge is dead there is little acknowledgement that without an historical perspective to provide an entree to taught material no-one is going to get the allusions and links. No, you can't just ignore the facts because everone can look them up. You can't just teach students to think if they don't know what they are supposed to think about.

It's not only a matter of millennial students; we are becoming increasingly aware that as English becomes the first global language, more and more students and readers and listeners have access to what we say. Great! The more people learn English, the better we can communicate, can't we? Well, no. They are learning Englishes, not one monolithic language with a standard set of cultural referents everyone can be expected to share. Those are not merely the casual references to literature or even current TV shows (I don't get those) which we drop without thinking about it, but catch-phrases and abbreviations and the whole allusive apparatus. Know how difficult it is to make or understand jokes in another language? It's because you need all that apparatus to understand their layered meanings.

Where this is going is to argue for more attention to be paid to helping students orient themselves in general terms to their areas of study. I suppose that is what I find them thanking me for on Learning and Teaching. info And it is what a recent correspondent is asking for with reference to Foucault; of course, sometimes one just has to say it's not worth the effort!

On time travel

This has got little to do with teaching, for once. It is just extraordinary. Enjoy the technical stuff if you like (I do), but scroll down and watch the video. This is a test of Kodak colour movie film. From 1922.

As the linked article comments, it is like time travel; there is something about its immediacy which can't be accounted for by its obvious features. The colour process (two, rather than three colours were used), and the necessity for two lenses must have contributed to the soft focus effect and the translucency of the models' skin, but even so there is something very special about this glimpse of almost 90 years ago.

Some years ago some compilations of the Second World War in colour were shown on TV; there is a trailer and some extracts below:

We are used to seeing such material on the TV news in colour every day, and of course very familiar with the black and white images, and reconstructions in colour. And yet once again it is all so different when it is real and contemporary and yet in colour. The black and white versions and the reconstructions all serve to remind us that we are watching a completed story. Somehow the colour transports us back to when it was not clear how it would work out--rather like listening to the reminiscences of Battle of Britain pilots on the radio a week or two ago.

I'm sure the phenomenologists had a word for it!

On the maze of social work

Thanks to the Fighting Monsters blog, I've been introduced to this mini-action-maze on the Association of Directors of Social Work site. It has only four stages and is linear in format but it's a good try. It starts from a case-study, and at each stage you are asked what you would do and confronted with three alternatives, of which one is "correct" and leads to the next stage, and two are incorrect and take you back to the previous screen.

Going back to my now long-gone days teaching social work I have some reservations about its verisimiltude (why is this referral coming in at 4pm on a Friday? [OK, the Friday is necessary for the story] The school would have been aware of the injury from the morning. And I hate to say it, but the first response in many offices would be to leave it to the Emergency Duty Team--and it could be argued that would be right...) and about the practice, such as of going on a first visit alone. And although the responses to the wrong choices unveil what would have happened next had that choice been made, they don't actually explain why the choice is the wrong one. And it is enormously over-simplified...

Even so, it does pose real questions and could be used as a teaching aid in a wide variety of courses, even for qualified staff.

My own first take on the action maze idea was originally about supervision in a residential social work setting, but I've put one on the web about mentoring new staff in higher education, which people can try here. (Warning; it's technically pretty crude--it's been around for eight years now--and you may have to resize your browser window to get it to show properly.) I'm mentioning it principally because this one does not have any right or wrong answers; it simply has opportunity costs. Unlike undertaking a role-play or other simulation, all the possible outcomes are pre-determined (this maze has about half-a-million potential routes through it), so the cost of the mentoring session you do have is all the others you could have had but didn't. And since it simply has to stop when its (simulated) time is up, the judgement you make of what you have achieved is principally up to you. And actually, that is probably truer to the reality of most social work (and teaching) practice than the neat and tidy "Child Protection Challenge".

Incidentally Peter Davies (Davies and Mangan, 2007) argues that opportunity cost is a threshold concept in economics; it would be an interesting exercise to see whether a maze might provide an effective way of addressing it.

Davies P and Mangan J (2007) "Threshold Concepts and the Integration of Understanding in Economics" Studies in Higher Education 32 (6)

On being WEIRD

A fascinating study which goes beyond tentative speculation (which has been around for a long time) to explore cultural issues in psychological research. And hence in educational research.

There has been a minor but significant interest in what Hansen (1979) called "educational anthropology" but it has tended to be highly occi-centric (is that a word? It is now. OED take note!) It is a substantial step to recognise that the responses of WEIRD* students are not necessarily the default. Even Biggs (2007) starts from a WEIRD-centric position.


* What does WEIRD stand for? Admittedly it is contrived, but read the linked article at least to find out.

Biggs J and Tang C (2007) Teaching for Quality Learning at University: What the Student does (3rd edn.) Buckingham; OU Press and Society for Research Into Higher Education

Hansen J (1979) Sociocultural Perspectives on Human Learning: an introduction to educational anthropology Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall

On reductionism in assessment

The link (valid until 23 August only, and only in the UK) is to a Radio 4 programme on the Advanced level examination in UK schools (except for those in Scotland) taken at the age of 18. It pays particular attention to A level English literature, concentrating on a question on Hamlet.

It considers how principally how the examination game is played and how students are trained unashamedly to get the maximum marks by engaging with the "Assessment Objectives" (AOs) of the subject, to the extent of a student readily saying that they can't start discussing the "texts" in class because that might take them away from the AOs, when they only have four weeks for each of their six texts.

The AOs for English Literature are;

1. Articulate creative, informed and relevant responses to literary texts, using appropriate terminology and
   concepts, and coherent, accurate written expression.
2. Demonstrate detailed critical understanding in analysing the ways in which structure, form and language
   shape meanings in literary texts.
3. Explore connections and comparisons between different literary texts, informed by interpretations of other readers.
4. Demonstrate understanding of the significance and influence of the contexts in which literary texts are written and received.

There's nothing much wrong with them as they stand. They do constitute a sub-set of the skills a critical reader ought to have, but...

• To see a work of literature as a text, a technical product, is very partial. Babies and bathwater spring to mind.
• This approach is even more stultifying that the French explication du texte.
• But most of all it is disabling; I now have a much clearer idea of what my humanities colleagues are complaining about when they bemoan the inability of first-year undergraduates in particular to work independently, to value their own responses to a work independently of what will feature in the assessment, and even to read the whole of a novel or play or poem as a work of art. 
• They have been drilled to fake appreciation.

On manuals and text-books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

On writing a dissertation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On one kind of American psyche

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the difference between knowledge and wisdom

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

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

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

On ritual knowledge

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

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

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

Troublesome knowledge may be associated with

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On neuromyths

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

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

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

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

The site was recommended by Tony Fisher—many thanks.

On dissonance by any other name

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

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

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

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

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

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

On being first with the latest moral panic!

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

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

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

Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the link.

On filtering and abstracting

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

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

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

On giving handouts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and acknowledgements to the BPS Research Digest blog for the pointer

On validations and grading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On ecstasy, sort of.

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

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

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

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

Encourage students to watch!

On something else the Germans do well!

On one reason not to grade...

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah, right..."

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

On "benign" myths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Plato, the Republic, book III)