On valuing staff...

 (This post has been deliberately delayed by a couple of months)

Earlier this afternoon, I managed to grab a moment with a colleague from one of our associate colleges to arrange a visit and to contribute a guest session to the course at her centre. We agreed the date and how my session would fit into the overall scheme of work. Straightforward. And then to the logistics--routine and trivial, of course.

Not any more. Not only have I been unable to observe students' teaching practice on several occasions because I have not got a CRB* clearance--I haven't "failed" it, but the university won't pay for it, and I don't see why I should do so from my own pocket... But at a completely different level, my colleague informed me that the date we had just agreed was also that of her routine annual "performance review". Without going into detail, this is all about targets. And if she does not satisfy the inquisition  panel she may no longer be employed by the time I get there.

(She continues to be employed, but this kind of punitive approach to management is getting ever more common in colleges--I was prompted actually to post by this reminder of an alternative vision, albeit in the school sector.)

---

* Now the even more Orwellian "Disclosure and Barring Service"; isn't it oxymoronic (or just moronic?) to call such an agency a "service"?

On knowing one's limits...

Last week my son called, seeking esoteric information about me. Do my ears have lobes?* What colour are my eyes? What's the term which describes my eyelids?**

Why? It's for my (step) grand-daughter's homework. On genetics. In primary school. Brilliant! I'm all for it.

Up to a point. As S and I discussed, since our son is not her biological father, it's all theoretical, and for once
that may be a Good Thing. And they didn't ask about blood group, thank goodness...

But. It's a minefield. How many primary school teachers (who are generalists--they teach children rather than subjects) are able to field questions about Mendelian genetics--particularly when they come from kids who begin to wonder about who they are? It's a Pandora's box.

My concern here is not really about transitory dissonances or the ethical issues (important though they are), but about teachers trying to teach things they themselves don't really understand. It's quite a courageous act to concede one's limitations, particularly in the face of children's expectations but with a required curriculum that may not be much of an option.

There are of course more and more topics like this, and there is no way teachers can keep up. The media fill the gaps, but often with scant regard for the accuracy or suitability of the information they put out, and with ever easier informal access to information, the authority of the teacher is undermined. That may well not be a Bad Thing--I was certainly taught a great deal of rubbish at school--but it calls for a re-think. Perhaps it is another push in the direction of a "new educational paradigm"; but even that can't be taken at face value.

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*  "How long have you known me for?" I asked. Of course you don't register such things with your nearest and dearest...

** epicanthic fold. Actually it's wrong, because in my case the fold is at the outer end of the eye--most famously exhibited by SuperMac.  But it's good enough for present purposes...

Items to Share: 26 May

Education Focus

• Encouraging Moral Behaviour | websofsubstance  Interesting discussion of conflicting moral principles (principally inclusivity versus utilitarianism) in the practice of class management. Good case-study.

• What makes great school leadership? | Pragmatic Education  A good piece, although easier said than done...

• A Don’s Life: Can computers mark exams? Mary Beard engages with the MOOC question.

• To encourage creativity, Mr Gove, you must first understand what it is | Ken Robinson | The Guardian  Contesting the view that you can only be creative when you have mastered the basics.

• The OFSTED Teaching Style | Scenes From The Battleground  Ofsted reports analysed on the basis of the boiler-plate phrases they appear to use, indicate discrepancies between espoused theories and theories-in-use--and probably between the leadership and the rank and file of the organisation.

Other Business

• How Creativity in Humor, Art, and Science Works: Arthur Koestler's Theory of Bisociation | Brain Pickings  Excellent attempt to condense the argument of Koestler's The Act of Creation (1964). His reputation has suffered since his death, but this book, The Ghost in the Machine (1967) and The Sleepwalkers (1959) are fascinating and highly readable. 

• Presence, Not Praise: How To Cultivate a Healthy Relationship with Achievement | Brain Pickings (again) On Stephen Grosz, building on Carol Dweck.

• Small Talk | The Point Magazine  Good overview, taking in Goffman, Heidegger and Malinowski--so it's not exactly an example of the genre.

• Beyond the Pale | The Weekly Standard "At ‘white privilege’ conferences, a lengthening list of victims issue an ever-more-detailed indictment of Western civilization"

Items to Share: 19 May

Education Focus

• The God of Data by Rob Barratt (video--with thanks to Neil Burton for the link)

• Don't Go Back to School: How to Fuel the Internal Engine of Lifelong Learning | Brain Pickings On learning beyond formal institutions, which is of course where we learn practically everything that matters.

• Donald Clark Plan B: MOOC on Human-Computer Interaction: 7 fails in screen design How can a course about something be so poor at the same thing? Although strangely it is not that unusual, as in most courses on how to teach...

Other Business

• ISS Music Video Putting Chris Hadfield's cover of Space Oddity into context.

• Freelancing Rules of Thumb | The Freelancery Seriously tongue-in-cheek--clearly rings bells with commenters.  

• Growing Concern that News Photos Are Being Excessively Manipulated - Spiegel Online ...and what are the boundaries?  

• Crime and Punishment: Juvenile offenders study Russian literature - The Washington Post  

Items to Share: 12 May

Education Focus

• Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley | Video on TED.com Sir Ken's latest.  

• Princeton Alumni Weekly: The future of education? Quite a long and considered article on MOOCs. 

• Peace, love and understanding | websofsubstance Harry Webb on using rote-learnt rules to solve maths problems--is it acceptable? 

• David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech “This is Water,” Remixed in a Short Video Rather hyped, but interesting 

• infed.org | Informal learning: theory, practice and experience 

Other Business

• Doctor Who Is the Greatest Jew on TV – Tablet Magazine ? 

• Are you inside the circle or outside? | Daniel Pink  Annotated global map--where the people are. 

• How to Spot a Weak Argument by Daniel Dennett. Simple, and it must surely be accurate... 

• He Conceived the Mathematics of Roughness by Jim Holt | The New York Review of Books On Benoit Mandelbrot 

• Philosophy, lit, etc.: A Kierkegaard bicentennial roundup I started gathering pieces on SK's 200th birthday, and then found that Paul Raymont had done it already.

• Your 5-Step Self-Defence Program Against Neuro-Nonsense | Psychology Today      

• The psychology of menus | Life and style | The Guardian

Items to Share; 20 April

I shall be away for a few weeks, and I'll resume sharing when I get back.
Education Focus

• Do we really have high expectations of our students? Or is it just talk? Part Two: Curriculum. | Tabula Rasa 'I want to [...] suggest that low expectations are so entrenched in the system that even the curriculum we teach perpetuates poor standards. The rhetoric of high expectations continues to chime throughout the halls of my school and I wonder once again: is it just talk?'

• How could assessment & accountability unshackle schools? | Pragmatic Education

• First steps into learning and teaching in higher education  A free OOC from the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development (disclosure--I worked there for a while) principally for people new to the field. For a fee, it can be assessed for 10 Master's level credits. 

• Perspectives on Kirschner, Sweller, Clark (2006) | websofsubstance 'In the period since I published a post linking to the original Kirschner, Sweller, Clark paper and the various responses to this paper, there has been some comment on Twitter and in other blogs. Some of this is thoughtful and considered; some of it is less so. I would like to respond to the main points that have been raised and of which I am aware.' 

• Advocates of RCTs in education should look more closely at the differences between medical research and education research | British Politics and Policy at LSE  'So does the Secretary of State for Education have a “huge enthusiasm” for rigorously evaluating policy, as Goldacre claims? His decisions over spending and the commissioning of policy papers suggests that, like his predecessors, he cares more about appearing interested in evidence rather than actually committing to invest any serious money on gathering it.'

Other Business

• The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens: Scientific American 'How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read?'

• Is Brain Science Really Changing How We See Ourselves? | Psychology Today 'There is in fact very little research into the way neuroscience findings are affecting the way we talk and think about ourselves.' 

• Wringing out a washcloth in space Fascinating video.

• Friedrich Nietzsche & Existentialism Explained to Five-Year-Olds (in Comical Video by Reddit) | Open Culture  'A web series inspired by a subreddit, “Explain Like I’m Five” has explained other complicated subjects to five year-olds, including the crisis in Syria and the volatility of the stock market. In this episode, our two presenters prime their students for a discussion on slave morality with the question “who here thinks they’re a good boy or a good girl?”'

No comment...

Dear webmasters team,

I need to advertise an essay writing service. I have just found your Education resource http://learningandteaching.info/ and I'm interested in text link placement at your website. Are you interested in putting my link (education related service) at homepage or inner pages FOR MONEY?

Please, email me your rates for 3/6/12 month placement. 

If you have some other quality educational resources for advertisement, please, send me the list of them!

I am waiting for your positive reply!

Regards, Andrew

Items to Share; 14 April

Education Focus

• Successful Plagiarism 101 - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education  (It's satire.)
   
• Donald Clark Plan B: Keep on taking the tablets: 7 reasons why this is lousy advice A properly sceptical discussion of the use of tablets (as in computers) in schools.

• Moving up Bloom’s Taxonomy in an Introductory Course: What's Being Done | Faculty Focus  '“Of the 9,713 assessment items submitted to this study by 50 faculty teaching introductory biology, 93% were rated Bloom’s level 1 or 2—knowledge and comprehension. Of the remaining items, 6.7% rated level 3 with less than 1% rated level 4 or above.” (p. 437)' 

• The myth of learning styles | thInk Again... No reference to UK studies of course...

• Brain-Training Games Don't Actually Make You Smarter : The New Yorker 'Last year, the New York Times Magazine published a glowing profile of the young guns of brain training called “Can you make yourself smarter?” The answer, however, now appears to be a pretty firm no—at least, not through brain training. [Meta-analysis concludes] the games may yield improvements in the narrow task being trained, but this does not transfer to broader skills like the ability to read or do arithmetic, or to other measures of intelligence. Playing the games makes you better at the games, in other words, but not at anything anyone might care about in real life.' 

• The most commonly discovered approach to teaching | websofsubstance 'Discovery approaches may have a place with more expert students, but I worry that sometimes we end up choosing things that are easy to discover, or methods that we find fun over things that the students need to learn. And we also run risks that being straightforward and expository avoid.' and The Kirschner, Sweller, Clark (2006) Cycle of Papers  Why "minimal guidance" approaches to teaching do not work--and that's pretty well everything apart from direct instruction. It's a contested view! 

• It’s either a false dichotomy or a bathtub full of spinach | websofsubstance  --- well worth saying because false dichotomies are legion in what passes for educational "debate".

Other Business

• What was the most comforting condolence sentence you ever heard?  Not sure how I got here, but this is web 2.0 at its best... 

• Charles Crawford on Bruce Sterling as a modern orator--  very interesting analysis of a "free-wheeling" closing speech by a great author of SF.

• Tom Lehrer’s Mathematically and Scientifically Inclined Singing and Songwriting, Animated | Open Culture 'Nobody can deny the importance of learning how to subtract or how to tell one element from another, but we’d do well to keep Lehrer’s sharp human insights, present implicitly in all his music and explicitly in some of it, in mind. So put one of his records on the next time you have a birthday of your own, taking a bracing shot of his wit before you continue, as he put it in “Bright College Days", "sliding down the razor blade of life.”'  He's just celebrated his 85th birthday

• Anxiety and Avoidance - NYTimes.com  'When avoidance prevents one from dealing with life, it is maladaptive. But when avoidance is proactive and part of active coping and agency, it helps the person control the accelerator, brakes, and the track switches. It is a useful adaptive activity.' 

• Pakistani Musicians Play Amazing Version of Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Classic, “Take Five” | Open Culture 'How’s this for fusion? Here we have The Sachal Studios Orchestra, based in Lahore, Pakistan, playing an innovative cover of “Take Five,” the jazz standard written by Paul Desmond and performed by The Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959. Before he died last year, Brubeck called it the “most interesting” version he had ever heard.' 

• NCBI ROFL: Left-handed people avoid using exact numbers. : Discoblog  (You can't always tell whether the articles referred to were intended to be taken seriously)

• Denver Airport Flash Mob - Neatorama  Swing!
  

On spurious academic "tools"

The other day I was contacted about advertising on learningandteaching.info. That is not unusual, and I always turn it down--the site is not a commercial venture, and the expenses are trivial at the moment. However, on this occasion the proposal was to promote free plagiarism checking services, and suggested links from my page on plagiarism.

There is indeed a good case for such services. Probably most students' institutions now use plagiarism checking software, principally Turnitin, and require its use at every point of assessment submission. That's fine for them, but not such a good deal for the student, who is frequently not allowed to use the service to get formative feedback on their work--there are various reasons for this, but they chiefly focus on security issues. So, although the sheer size of the checking database is important, a lighter-weight service tailored to the student's needs can be very useful as a way of ensuring that they do not stumble unintentionally into plagiarism--after all the consensus is that much plagiarism is the consequence of ignorance of academic conventions about citation and originality, rather than deliberate cheating. (See links from the page cited above.)

So I entertained the idea of linking to some of these services, as a service of my own rather than via their advertisement, and I went to the urls provided, to find both of them point to Grammarly, which sells itself principally as a grammar checker and whose plagiarism tools are very limited in the free version.

The other plagiarism checker is apparently free-standing, but touts itself as a means of ensuring that web content is original, because that helps with search engine optimisation. That is not quite the same as assuring academic integrity, and of course it works only from public web pages. It also has a (proper) grammatical error in its submission box; "watch the article re-writer do it's thing". I suppose it may be some limited use, but if you can access a proper service, do so.

Grammarly gave no useful information at all about what content was not unique; as I had rather expected, payment would be required for any more detail. It emphasises its use as a grammar-checker. Moreover, the list of "grammatical rules" which flashed past was spurious. It included "split infinitives" and "prepositions at the end of sentences" and use of the passive voice among many other items which concern obsessive pedants and no-one else. It gave a "score" of 44% to a section of a forthcoming book which has already been proof-read and edited by real live people. Of course there was no recognition of the register or style of the piece (that is available on paid versions), nor of differences between US and UK usage and spelling.

It has been reviewed to similar effect and in more detail here, and here.

But it's not merely the technical incompetence of the service which concerns me. More pernicious is its impact; if I were a less-than-confident student getting a report like that I would feel incompetent and highly discouraged. I am not in favour of "going easy" on students lest they be discouraged--they do need accurate, stimulating and usually uncompromising feedback. They do not need to be treated as "fragile learners" to use Kathryn Ecclestone's term*.

But services such as these are nit-pickers on steroids; they mistake adherence to aribtrary "rules" for good practice in writing, and generate innumerable Type I errors as testimony to their rigour. They are con-tricks, and should be avoided, which is why I have not linked to them.

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* Ecclestone, K. (2010) Transforming assessment in lifelong learning, Buckingham: Open University Press

Items to Share: 7 April

Education Focus

• The Practical University - NYTimes.com  (David Brooks) The article itself is pretty useless, but the comments are stimulating. 

• It's a Flipping Revolution - Do Your Job Better - The Chronicle of Higher Education  'For those who haven't been paying attention, "flipping" is a teaching technique that involves abandoning the traditional lecture (or just not relying on it so much) and replacing it with interactive approaches that experiment with technology and require students to gather information outside of class and be prepared to engage the material in class, rather than sit passively listening to a faculty member talk.' 

• The philistines have taken over the classroom | Frank Furedi | spiked "In recent decades, education has been transformed into an instrument of public policy, a means for achieving objectives that are entirely external to learning. Education is now expected to put right the failures of adult society, to transform apathetic youngsters into responsible citizens. Education is meant to promote social mobility, multiculturalism, responsible sex, sound financial behaviour and emotional wellbeing, and to provide youngsters with a variety of key skills. [...] The teaching of knowledge itself, for its own sake, is frequently dismissed as an old-fashioned custom that is not relevant to the twenty-first century." Frank lays about him with characteristic gusto! 

• 6 Tips for Successful Mobile Video Assignments in the Classroom - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Other Business

• Bank pays for costumed flashmob to recreate Rembrandt's Nightwatch in a mall - Boing Boing

• BBC News - The Great British class calculator: What class are you?  'The BBC teamed up with sociologists from leading universities to analyse the modern British class system. They surveyed more than 161,000 people and came up with a new model made up of seven groups. To find out where you fit in use this calculator below.' Also: The British class system is becoming more polarised between a prosperous elite and a poor ‘precariat’ | British Politics and Policy at LSE   'Mike Savage discusses the results of the largest British class survey ever conducted. It shows that class divisions remain very powerful and are becoming more entrenched. There is a growing gulf between the elite and the lower classes, and what used to be termed the middle and working classes seem to be splintering into social classes with systematically differing amounts of cultural and social capital.' (The tool is actually simplistic and useless--but that seems to be what passes for sociology nowadays.)

• How a differential gear works --and see this follow-up post of Richard Feynman explaining how trains manage the same problem in quite a different way--a model of lucid explanation.

• Is CPR for the victim or the bystanders? : The Last Word On Nothing  'David Newman, director of clinical research in the department of medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, says: “It’s crazy talk to believe that everybody should always get this invasive, punishing burdensome procedure when we know that the overwhelming majority — even the people who might be considered the most appropriate — are not going to survive it,” ' 

• Dyslexia Workarounds: How Henry Winkler, Gov. Dan Malloy, Delos Cosgrove Got Creative to Get Ahead - WSJ.com  '"I frankly think dyslexia is a gift. If you are supported in school and your ego remains intact, then you emerge with a strong work ethic and a different view of the world."' 

• Nothing Personal: The questionable Myers-Briggs test | Science | guardian.co.uk

On potential pedantry...

Sadly, Oliver Kamm is now behind the (London) Times paywall, but I'd be interested in his take on this...

On the (BBC Radio 4) news a few minutes ago, there was yet another reference to the "potential threat" from N. Korea's nuclear weapons.

What other kind of threat is there?

A threat refers to something which may happen, detrimentally, in the future*. It is by definition potential. To qualify it as "potential" --or indeed "actual"-- is otiose, superfluous** and indeed meaningless.

And the same goes for danger, risk, and more positively opportunity.

I ought to get out more..
 

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* Sorry! "going forward". Yeugh!.

** Yes, to use both almost synonymous adjectives is itself either one or the other, but can it be both?

Items to Share: 31 March

Education Focus

• A Response to Ben Goldacre’s Building Evidence Into Education Report. Part 1 and  Part 2 | Scenes From The Battleground "Goldacre has not realised that much, or even most, educational debate is about worthless nonsense that can already be shown to be wrong long before the RCT stage. He assumes that education is like medicine was in the 1970s, whereas it is probably more like medicine in the 1370s. He assumes that we have clear aims and sound theories which need to be refined with better empirical research to identify those situations where we have been misled. However, it would be fairer to say we are at war in education over our ultimate aims and over the underlying theories. We are not 1970s doctors needing information about the effectiveness of certain drugs, we are medieval doctors trying to find the correct balance of the four humours." 

• What can we learn from Dylan Wiliam and AfL? | Pragmatic Education "Few education concepts have been more distorted in a shorter time span than formative assessment: teachers falling prey to gimmicks, schools mandating unhelpful AfL policies, and government policy confusing AfL with national levels." 

• Why Doesn’t Teacher Feedback Improve Student Performance? | Faculty Focus  '“regardless of levels of motivation to learn, students cannot convert feedback statements into actions for improvement without sufficient working knowledge of some fundamental concepts.” Because they evaluate student work so regularly, teachers bring to the task a working knowledge of these concepts. Unfortunately, they provide feedback assuming students have the same knowledge, which they do not.' 

• Presentation Zen: Eric Mazur: confessions of a converted lecturer  "To many people, the approach Dr. Mazur advocates may hardly seem new or controversial. After all, many instructors work hard today to make their classes more interactive. However, the one-way, didactic approach to teaching is still common in many schools today. " Yet another edu-brand.

Other Business

• BPS Research Digest: You can wibble, quack and squeak and get away with it   (Report 01.04.13) 

• HTwins.net - The Scale of the Universe  Fascinating interactive infographic. Thanks to Kalliopi Monoyios for the link

• To be sure, journalists love cliches - Washington Post  "But ultimately, the list begs the question: If even this hastily convened national conversation can midwife a new way of writing — call it Journalism 2.0 — will the tightly knit community that is the mainstream media finally begin thinking outside the box?"

• Graphene super-toys last all summer long  "researchers at UCLA discovered they could make single-layer sheets of graphene by coating a DVD with graphite oxide and then "playing" the disc in a plain old DVD drive. And then [that it] could be used, for example, as a mobile phone battery that lasts all day, charges in a few seconds, and can be thrown into a compost bin after use." This does sound like a proper breakthrough.

• When TED Lost Control of Its Crowd - Harvard Business Review  A refreshingly sceptical account of TED.

On the assessment game

I've been thinking quite a bit about assessment recently, partly because I'm working on a piece for the website on "assessment drift", but also because I'm currently editing the video of a very interesting keynote by Kathryn Ecclestone at our course Study Day last Saturday (references below).

So it was more than usually intriguing to get an email today from a reader of something I had written long ago on the use of essays for assessment. As a throw-away at the end of that piece, I wrote: "Incidentally, and rather self-indulgently, I had a go at one of my son's set essays a while ago, free of all the constraints about how someone might see fit to assess it. How would you mark it? (There are at least two spelling mistakes)." But the link did not work--I restored it (thereby uncovering a piece which had been effectively invisible for at least a decade), and read it again.

I still think the question it poses is interesting, and the invitation to grade the piece (preferably with reasons, and conceding the absence of "learning outcomes" and "grading criteria") stands--via comments or email. If I get enough feedback, I'll try to make sense of it in a blog post.

---

Ecclestone, K. (2002) Learning autonomy in post-16 education: the politics and practice of formative assessment, London: Routledge


Ecclestone, K. and Hayes, D. (2009) ‘The therapeutic FE college’, in  The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, London: Routledge

Ecclestone, K. (2010) Transforming assessment in lifelong learning, Buckingham: Open University Press

Items to Share: 24 March

Education Focus

• What can science tell us about how pupils learn best? | Pragmatic Education "In this blog post I want to strip cognitive science down to its essence, and apply two litmus tests: One. To what extent is the scientific research robust, peer-reviewed and rewarding when re-read? Two. To what extent does the scientific evidence have practical classroom applications that reward re-using?"

• I Came, I Saw, I Learned...: Adobe Captivate, TechSmith Camtasia Studio, Articulate Storyline: Production Times  "In my experience, it will take you approximately 2 hours of labor to produce 1 minute of eLearning playtime if you use Adobe Captivate..."

Other Business

• Why Americans Are the WEIRDest People in the World  --and what that does to the body of psychological knowledge gained by studying them. (White, Educated, Individualistic, Rich and Democratic.) And that might link with this: The Emergence of Niceness | Synthesis  The body of economic literature will have to change, suggests new research. [...]The results explain some intriguing findings in experimental economics and [the authors] call for a new economic theory of “networked minds”. 

• How Your Language Affects Your Wealth and Health: Scientific American  "An international study suggests languages shape how we think about the future, and how we plan for it." Interesting, but correlation ain't causation--and another example of flakey but eye-catching "research" from a Business School. 

• Sign Painters: What a Disappearing Art Teaches Us About Creative Purpose and Process | Brain Pickings "Sign painting appealed to my logical nature. It’s a way to pursue art with a right and a wrong." 

• Big History: David Christian Covers 13.7 Billion Years of History in 18 Minutes | Open Culture  Big History is a meta discipline that “examines long time frames using a multidisciplinary approach based on combining numerous disciplines from science and the humanities.” 

• Reasoning Training Increases Brain Connectivity Associated with High-Level Cognition | Beautiful Minds, Scientific American Blog Network "...these findings do serve as proof of concept that reasoning training– even as brief as 3 months– can significantly alter connectivity in a brain network critical for high-level reasoning. These findings should not be understated, as they challenge traditional notions that intelligence is fixed,.." (with caveats, of course) 

• wuglife: Exploring grammar via Sesame Street.  "This is some of my favourite linguistics work - taking common prejudices and expectations and showing that things are a whole lot more nuanced and impressive than that. It’s the kind of work you want to share with as many people as possible to start breaking down the very judgmental ideas many have about language." 

• Marc Fisher: A Sex-Abuse Scandal at Horace Mann : The New Yorker  An extraordinary tale of a real-life variant on Tartt's 'Secret History' without the murder... Update 28 March: ...and here is a different take from Ben Yagoda in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

• NCBI ROFL: Zip-related genital injury. : Discoblog  "Apparently, it’s horrifyingly more common than you might think; fortunately, there are several ways to get it unstuck."

• Happy Birthday, OK! - Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Items to Share: 17 March

Education Focus

• OFSTED Under Fire | Scenes From The Battleground "If inspectors have raked in the cash for telling schools “you must do groupwork, discovery learning and stop teachers from teaching” it makes it far less likely that they will then go into schools and act as if they have no preferred style of teaching." (Andrew Old) 

• How can we tell snake oil from science? | Pragmatic Education  ‘why is so much research in education purest snake oil?’

• Here’s my paper on evidence and teaching for the education minister. – Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)

• Seven Steps to Creating Screencast Videos for Online Learning | Faculty Focus

Other Business

• Google Reader Is Shutting Down; Here Are the Best Alternatives

• In the Digital Era, Our Dictionaries Read Us - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education "With the spread of digital technologies, dictionaries have become a two-way mirror, a record not just of words' meanings but of what we want to know. Digital dictionaries read us." 

• Jane Kramer: A History of Culinary Revolution : The New Yorker  Review of Bee Wilson's "Consider the Fork", which sounds fascinating. Ignore the first few self-indulgent paragraphs, though.

• Funny French toilet paper TV commercial - Boing Boing

• Obituary for Harry Stamps, 1932-2013  Who? Doesn't matter--clearly a great "character".

• Quite - Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education  'How can a sensible word sometimes mean “absolutely” and sometimes mean “only moderately”?' (Geoff Pullum) 

• n+1: There Is Only Awe  On Julian Jaynes' strange ideas about the origin of consciousness. 'Richard Dawkins wrote that [his book] is “either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between!”' 

• Alfred C. Hobbs: The American who shocked Victorian England by picking the world’s strongest lock. - Slate Magazine

• Gorgeous, informative song about techy details of evidence based practice (Ben Goldacre)

• Why Don’t the French Speak English? - The Daily BeastThe Odd Story of C.S. Lewis, An Extremely Odd Man - The Daily Beast  What makes Lewis such a surprising figure is that he who understood so little about the emotional life can still, 50 years after his life, speak so eloquently to millions upon millions of human souls, not one of whom would have found him a soulmate if they had actually known him.

• Donald Clark Plan B: Negroponte: 10 reasons why his Ethiopian project smacks of Educational Colonialism  "These parachute interventions are easy but not at all informative. Indeed, they may well be counterproductive, leading to the wrong type of spend by Governments keener on photo-opps than real learning."

Items to Share: 10 March

Education Focus

• OFSTED Best Practice Videos | Scenes From The Battleground "Here are the recent OFSTED videos in order of terribleness with the least terrible first."  See also the preceding four posts, well researched and  highly critical of Ofsted. [Oh! Update.]

• Do we ‘collect’ data? or – beware the ontological slip … | patter  (Pat Thomson) More interesting thoughts on educational research, this time on reification--I'm not convinced this time, however.

• Michael Sandel’s Famous Harvard Course on Justice Launches as a MOOC on Tuesday | Open Culture "In a single offering, Sandel will bring his course to more students worldwide than he did through his decades teaching at Harvard."

Other Business

• TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): Is there "no such thing as a stupid question" ? Er... no. 

• Maslow Re-visited and found wanting (Dick, 2001) It's a pity that the ancient Wahba and Bridwell paper (1976), referenced here, is not available in a more legible format than here.

• Liam Heneghan – Pooh bear and the ecology of childhood In part on the most egregious act of cultural vandalism of the last century--the disneyfication of Winnie-the-Pooh. 

• 'Dr. Garbage' Studies Local Tribe Many Prefer to Ignore - News - The Chronicle of Higher Education '"What do you dream to teach that no one else teaches?" an NYU administrator asked Ms. Nagle not long after she went to work there. The answer, it turned out, was trash, a fascination she traces to a garbage dump she encountered on a family camping trip when she was 10.' 

• Stanford Magazine - Seeing at the Speed of Sound - March/April 2013  Fascinating piece on lip-reading

• Protesting Too Much About #OverlyHonestMethods » Sociological Images More tweets about how research really works.  

• What Coke Contains — Kevin Ashton "The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all."

• John Lanchester rides the London Underground | Books | The Guardian "Londoners treat the underground not as a stage set, a place where we're on display, but as a neutral space, one in which we don't overtly direct our attention at each other. People sneak glances at each other, of course they do, but the operative word is "sneak". They don't look openly, in the way they would elsewhere. The main focus of people's attention is inward. They go into themselves." 

• This Story Stinks - NYTimes.com  "Comments from some readers, our research shows, can significantly distort what other readers think was reported in the first place." (With 400 comments, some of which clearly support the hypothesis, even as they deny it.)

Items to Share: 3 March

Education Focus

• What can we learn from John Hattie? | Pragmatic Education (Joe Kirby) "To distil the evidence base, I take Nietzsche’s advice: to say in ten sentences what others have taken entire books to say. So I summarise John Hattie’s ideas in a few sets of ten sentences: in his own words; in ten of his most helpful checklist points for teachers; and then ten of the most useful classroom insights he calls ‘signposts’." 

• APA Style Blog: How to Cite a Mobile App

• Critical Thinking Is Best Taught Outside the Classroom: Scientific American Principally a short plug for museums, but worth looking at.

Other Business

• Len Deighton’s Bomber, the first book ever written on a word processor. - Slate Magazine  in the late '60s; poses the question whether there are some kinds of books which can not be written any other way.

• Flying Plates Learn To Catch Flying Poles In Switzerland : Krulwich Wonders... : NPR  Amazing! 

• BPS Research Digest: Was Proust really a neuroscientist?  No, but...

• Inside Robbers Cave on ABC Radio | Advances in the History of Psychology On the Sherifs' classic '50s experiments on inter-group relations--they'd never get past the ethics committee today!

• Ben Schott | Assembling a Film’s Billing Block - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com 
  

Items to Share: 24 February

Education Focus

• Donald Clark Plan B: Too cool for school: 7 reasons why tablets should not be used in education Excellent piece--I could not agree more. 

• Who will watch the OFSTED watchmen? (Pragmatic Education) The espoused theories of the Chief Inspector versus the theories-in-use of the inspecting minions.

• The lesson you never got taught in school: How to learn! (Neurobonkers | Big Think)

• We all know David Starkey was a terrible teacher… don’t we? (Scenes From The Battleground)  "What if it had been cut to show the quality of the teaching rather than the difficulty of the students’ behaviour?" 

• Methodology isn’t methods.. or… what goes in a methods chapter | Patter Research education, academic writing, public engagement, funding, other eccentricities. (by Pat Thomson) 

• Freakonomics » How to Game a Grading Curve (The professor) grades exams on a curve — the highest grade in the class, whatever it may be, becomes 100 percent, and “everybody else gets a percentage relative to it.” So students collectively planned a boycott:...

Other Business

• Encapsulated Universes (Edge.org) "We have 7,000 languages. Each [...] encompasses a world-view, [...] the ideas and predispositions and cognitive tools developed by thousands of years of people in that culture. Each [...] offers a whole encapsulated universe. So we have 7,000 parallel universes, [...] this great diversity is a real testament to the flexibility and the ingenuity of the human mind." and more in this vein: Five examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think

• Language Log; An invented statistic returns Women do not talk three times as much as men 

• A Tale of Two Cows | Visual.ly The famous tale of poltical systems updated.

• Short Sharp Science: Higgs may spell doom, unless supersymmetry saves us 

• Raising the stakes on life’s big choices - FT.com Using a coin-flipping website, an experiment aims to investigate how people make the most important decisions (by Tim Harford) 

• The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food - NYTimes.com "What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive." 

• Polishing Your Prose, (The Chronicle of Higher Education) How to refine your writing, word by word, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence. By Steven M. Cahn (Until eventually you say nothing at all.)

On the spirit and the letter...

I've just received a rather dispiriting email from a really good student about her anxieties about the work she is drafting. Specifically, she is referring to Brookfield's "lenses" for curriculum evaluation, as I discussed them here (see slide 5 in particular for my point). Her concern is whether she is using the labels correctly. Is she getting it right?

It's dispiriting because she has missed the point, particularly in treating the lenses--the ideas--as objects to be learned about (rather as historical "facts" are) rather than as tools* to be used as appropriate, but otherwise to be set aside.

• The task is what matters. What tool do I need to do this? 

• Rather than; I've got this tool. What can I do with it?

(I admit that the perspective switch is not always clear, and sometimes the second question is important.)

But it is my fault that she has walked away with this misapprehension, and that is what is dispiriting. What we (those of us brought up as academics in particular) teach, defaults to being an object. Whereas in many cases it should be a tool. 

And it is our academic context which has forced this distortion. We insist on accurate regurgitation of stuff out of context, and don't ask about its utility and how it can be used **.  And (how ironic it is!) as teacher trainers in vocational education, in particular, our approach devalues that utilitarian/instrumental perspective which comes quite naturally to many of our students, and insists on "privileging" our "academic discourse".

All that is a bit heavy to put into an email response to an innocent enquiry. So what I wrote was (redacted):

Don't worry! As I understand Brookfield he holds no particular brief for the specific "lenses" he identified--still less for the labels he gives them. All he wants is for us to look at our work in several different ways, or put ourselves in the shoes of different "stakeholders" and see how it looks from their point of view--there is no definitive list of whose perspective/lens matters or (still less) is "best".  Each lens has something different to offer, and they are all valuable. Sad to say, there are links to the pervasive discourse of ... er, discourse....

He's arguing for what is now sometimes referred to as 360 degree evaluation/ appraisal/ feedback, although he goes beyond that in entertaining conflicting views.

• The most obvious is probably the "dumbing-down" argument--the popularising lens/perspective/value base wants ideas to be accessible to all, while the scholarly lens protests that they are being distorted and over-simplified. Or the employers' perspective --"I couldn't care less what they understand about what they are doing, as long as they do it right"-- versus the educationalists' --"they need to know what they are doing".

• There's a great argument rumbling at the moment, from Atul Gawande's piece on the Cheesecake Factory. He is arguing that medicine and surgery has a lot to learn from the fast food industry! Totally different traditions and lenses, but what a potentially fruitful argument.

The notion of frame of reference is a variation on "lens".

...but does this kind of argument help a student make the shift*** between the forms of knowledge?

---

* I'm using the terms "object", "tool" and "frame", here. Perkins (2010: video) uses "concept", "instrument" and "action" to mean something very similar--I'm presumptuous enough to think that my labels are clearer for someone coming to the ideas for the first time, but his much more thorough and learned exploration is well worth watching.

**It is not that one is better than the other, as a moment's thought will demonstrate. It is that we should have access to both (and more) perspectives, and be able to deploy and value them appropriately.

*** It is of course an epistemological shift; but I now hear that, and ontological, bandied about so much and so vaguely, that I am backing off from using the terms unless there is no alternative.

Items to Share: 17 February

Education Focus

• The passion for procedures to fix ailing arteries and hearts may be misguided | Harvard Magazine Mar-Apr 2013 "Self-evidently effective" treatments which don't work. Just like many practices in education. 

• High School Safety in Northern Virginia  A parent derides the "security theatre" which turns a school into a fortress, and the implicit curriculum of fear of the world.

Other Business

• 50 Years Ago: The World in 1963 - In Focus - The Atlantic;  excellent selection showing what the US was like then (50 photos)

• Nigeness: '... chiefly it is intended for xenophobes and anglophobes' On "How to be an Alien" by George Mikes: an utter classic (1946). 

• 3quarksdaily: The River of Myths by Hans Rosling  Another stunning animated infographic from Rosling--with good news for once on child mortality rates 1963-2030. 

• Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists: 'Embodied Cognition Is Not What You Think It Is' - the paper!  "As soon as you allow things other than the brain to be central players in cognition, it changes the game entirely, and cognitive science will have to change to match." A modest aspiration!