On Language as a Window into Human Nature (Pinker)

Another of the excellent RSA animations based on a talk by Steven Pinker:



...one of the few attempts I've encountered to engage with the issues raised by Watzlawick et al. (1967) in what they called (in those days) the "analogue" and "digital" aspects of communication. I made a clumsy attempt to articulate some of my thinking in the field here. I'd really like to get more into it, but I suspect that it is one of those areas where the vocabulary has been re-invented time and again by isolated researchers and writers, such that there is little by way of a community in which it can be discussed. Anyone out there who can offer any pointers? Suggestions gratefully received.

Thanks to Mind Hacks for the pointer.

On reference and allusion

(The link is to an earlier post which alludes to this)

Last night we had an induction session for the new intake of an established part-time course. For reasons beyond our control (the economic squeeze and an aggravating change in funding arrangements) we did not hit the threshold numbers and so it appeared the course would have to be cancelled. (The situation today is rather different, I'm happy to say.)

But as we were discussing the situation with the new potential intake, it occurred to me that they had a vested interest in doing some recruiting, so I encouraged them jokily to "go into the highways and hedgerows and compel them to come in" (Luke 14:23) ...to be met with totally blank looks of incomprehension. It wasn't even a particularly multi-cultural group, but it appeared that no-one picked up the quotation.

Perhaps it is just me, but I am increasingly frustrated/disappointed that I can't take for granted that even mature students will appreciate allusions and references, not only to the Bible but to Shakespeare and the literary canon, and historical events and political slogans...

But as someone pointed out last year--I haven't a clue about references to recent music in particular, or TV. Am I simply being elitist? (I'm guilty as charged on being elitist is some respects) Or is our communication impoverished by not sharing a cultural hinterland which enriches dialogue with such references?

Or, of course, has the insistence of managing with such a shared code been a covert means of limiting access to privileged education and employment to those who have had the surplus time and resources to join what has always been a restricted club? (Yes, but how much has it mattered?)

And what does it mean for how we express ourselves as teachers?

[Addition, 11.09 --how could I have missed the opportunity to link to the Beloit College Mindset list? Obviously it is highly US-centric, but it makes a telling descriptive but definitely not prescriptive point.]

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 pictures and words

Click here for larger version,

The other day a friend and former colleague and I met for lunch, as we do every few months. He, being a resident of the Potteries (that part of Staffordshire which came to prosperity in the early 19th century through the entrepreneurship of people like Josiah Wedgwood) gave me these two plates. Based on the familiar Willow Pattern tableware (originally from the Minton pottery) these up-date the familiar scene to reflect the Potteries (on the left), and London (on the right).

RK explained how he made use of them in short courses on promoting entrepreneurial activity; instead of setting a groupwork brief of writing the characteristics of a proposed project, he insists on it being drawn. He described the way in which the task divided groups, but also how profitable it was because of the effectiveness of the post-presentation discussion--what would be known in an art school context as the critique. (Identified by Lee Shulman as their "signature pedagogy".)

I was prompted to recall, on the train on the way back, I an exercise I used to use with students (on teaching programmes) around getting them to define their view of the teaching and learning process. Some of the more obvious images, from the trigger slide, are below; I used this in order to pre-empt participants from latching on to the cliches...

I used to ask them to work in groups to generate their own images of the process, to draw them on a flipchart or acetates, and then to present them (the delights of primitive technology--you can do it with an electronic whiteboard but it's a lot of hassle) to each other, and get the crit. going in that way. A useful variant was not to allow any verbal explanation by the presenters--the rest of the class had to deconstruct their offering.

And that in turn set me thinking about one of the texts I read long ago about a technique used in health-care for exploring critical incidents, known as "Illuminative Incident Analysis" (Cortazzi and Roote, 1975). This too centres around drawing the incident, in as cartoon-like a way as the group members are capable of, in response to guidance and structured questions. The authors insist on the use of pictures as a way of getting around how words can so easily be used to fudge meaning rather than reveal it.

(Of course it is precisely the capacity of language to carry so many connotations and levels of meaning which makes it so rich, but in this context that was seen as getting in the way of the task.)

As I recall, for example, a review of potentially serious incident on a hospital ward, included in a discussion the phrase, "a nurse in a tizzy". They draw out the possible connotations of that phrase, including implications about competence and stress (and nowadays they might note that for staff involved whose first language is not English, such an informal usage might be meaningless...) But if the speaker had to draw that nurse, so much more might emerge--she might be surrounded by clocks, cartoon patients, doctors, managers and even paper-work might be depicted pulling her in different directions and her head might be spinning. There would be the role-set, a picture of demands on time, all there at once (a completed picture is an instantaneous non-linear representation)...

Prompted by the latest round of marking I am struck by the current ubiquity of the bullet-point. The use of a bulleted list is quite a pointer to the student not having really got the idea, because paradoxically it removes the structural dimension from the account, indeed my contribution to an educational Devil's Dictionary would include;

• Bullet points: the most effective way of reducing an idea to less than the sum of its parts.

(Yes, it's deliberate) But draw a picture (much better than a diagram) and you have to pin your colours to the mast.

I wonder what is gained and lost in the interpretation of, say, a novel into a graphic novel (or vice versa) as well as the re-telling of tales on film and video.

I have no time for the "learning styles" rubbish, but the use of many different media in communication for teaching is not merely a matter of pandering to that fad, it provides opportunities to explore different features of the content, too.

Cortazzi D, Roote S (1975) Illuminative incident analysis London; McGraw-Hill

see also:

Rich A and Parker D (1995) "Reflection and critical incident analysis: ethical and moral implications of their use within nursing and midwifery education" Journal of Advanced Nursing 22:6 pp 1050-1057

On distraction

Nicholas Carr has written on The Shallows; what the internet is doing to  our brains. Note that I have not linked that title to Amazon or anywhere. That's because his blog post (which is of course linked from the header) explores whether embedded links (as opposed to the those gathered at the end of a post or a page in the manner of a bibliography) tend to distract the reader and to fragment the reading experience, and possibly the capacity to follow an argument:

"Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they're also distractions. Sometimes, they're big distractions - we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we've forgotten what we'd started out to do or to read. Other times, they're tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don't click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it's there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension."

So if we place a premium on clarity and communication, is it stylistically better to gather the links at the end?

On evaluating the one-off lecture

OK, it happened, and indirect feeedback via a colleague who could not attend but who spoke to people after the event was that it had been well-received, even remarked on as a "proper academic lecture" (not sure whether or not that is a compliment!)

There are of course standard procedures for evaluation, including the usual feedback sheets and the like. Such procedures are unsurprisingly not routine on this course, and it didn't seem appropriate to introduce them--after all, this was from the students' point of view just another session in a regular timetable. It was my decision to get all self-conscious about it.

So just a few remarks on practical aspects, and then a more general thought.

• time-keeping and pacing is always tricky the first time around; I seem to have got it pretty well right, though.
• The presentation? You can see it via the link on yesterday's post, but the version there has been annotated and expanded. I don't like too much content on the slides, and I tried to use them as headings to show the students where we were. That was OK with a heading like "fashions and fads", but not really satisfactory when I talked ever so briefly about a particular theorist; I was using slides cannibalised from another lecture including images which may not have been the very best choices. 
• Delivery? A guy at the back said he couldn't hear me in the first few seconds. I thanked him and talked louder, but I didn't continue to check--which I could have done very easily with the traffic-light cards all the audience had. Specifically everyone had a red, a yellow and a green A5 card, with which they could signal answers to questions, like "If you have never heard of Skinner, show a red card. If you've heard of him but don't know much about his ideas, show yellow. If you know quite a bit about him show green..." It's clickers-lite, but a lot easier to manage spontaneously.
  
• As to use of the cards; they were appreciated and commented on afterwards, and they are so easy to use. No downside, if you sort out the logistics of distribution. As ever, it is not merely the technical advantage they confer above a simple show of hands which makes the difference--it is what the very fact of issuing them and using them says about the kind of interaction the lecturer wants within the session. They send a message--"I want you to be able to communicate back to me".
• And as for that great bug-bear of the lecture, attention-span, that little bit of activity every few minutes seemed to get the students re-engaged. Visual clues suggested they were still with me at the end of the session.
• The two-minute buzz-group exercise came almost exactly half-way through; frankly it was as much about breaking the session up as it was about content, but some of the ideas were interesting enough to weave into the rest of the session. It also gave me a chance to nip out and buy an extortionately priced bottle of water--why no water-coolers?

More generally, though; did the session achieve its objective of providing an orientation to learning theories so students can engage with them on a fairly deep level? As ever, I think the argument was clearer to me than it was to them, and I perpetrated the sin I have been trying not to commit for years and years (and which I can avoid as a part of regular teaching); I elaborate arguments in the hope of making them clearer, but in practice I am obscuring and burying them in a mass of marginally relevant detail. Once I get into the swing of a lecture I can always think of more stuff to pile in. When it is something I do regularly, I can prune it and filter it so that what gets said is what needs to be said and no more, but I'm still not good at that on a one-off basis.

And is a lecture, at this stage in their programme, the appropriate means of communicating such a message? Probably not, but given the constraints it was a reasonable strategy to choose.

One comment my colleague heard was that I had rubbished some current fads, or even sacred cows. Indeed I had, and I now wonder whether or not I should have done. After all there was a team of about a dozen other colleagues attending, most of whom I don't know, and I may well have stepped clumsily on a few people's toes. I'm pretty sure the students enjoyed it, but that's not the point. Had I had more notice I could and should have circulated some of the proposed content in advance for comment; who knows, perhaps one of those colleagues will have to deliver a session next week advocating learning styles! An interesting and open question about the responsibilities one has to the rest of the team...

Still, I have to admit that I enjoyed myself thoroughly; not something to be aimed for, but a good spin-off if it happens.

On another overview of on-line education. Are the geeks backing off?

A few days ago I drew attention to a report from the US Department of Education on on-line learning.

I should have waited, because now there is an interesting parallel report from the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities / Sloan National Commission on On-line Learning.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Marc Parry introduces his piece thus;

They worry about the quality of online courses, say teaching them takes more effort, and grouse about insufficient support. Yet large numbers of professors still put in the time to teach online. And despite the broad suspicion about quality, a majority of faculty members have recommended online courses to students.

That is the complicated picture that emerges in "The Paradox of Faculty Voices: Views and Experiences With Online Learning," part of a two-volume national study released today by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities—Sloan National Commission on Online Learning. ...

The major survey of public colleges and universities found that 70 percent of all faculty members believe the learning outcomes of online courses to be either inferior or somewhat inferior, compared with face-to-face instruction.

Professors with online experience are less pessimistic. Among those who have taught or developed an online course, the majority rated the medium's effectiveness as being as good as or better than face to face. But in a potentially controversial finding, even among professors who have taught online, fully 48 percent feel it is either inferior or somewhat inferior.

And for those hooked on the hard stuff, here is a discussion of attending a virtual conference in Second Life.

Rather more polemically, Mark Bauerlein draws attention to the impoverished nature of on-line and mediated communication in the WSJ. Read the comments, too. (And incidentally he mentions the recent death of Edward T Hall, anthropologist and author of "The Hidden Dimension"--on cultural aspects of the management of physical space--and "The Silent Language", to which Bauerlein refers. Hall was 95; his website has not yet caught up with his death.*)

It's all interesting in its own right, but most encouraging is the more considered and balanced evaluation of technology-based teaching and learning which is emerging. The Second Life example particularly is a comment on the former geek rhetoric, "We can, therefore we should". Instead, there is a more realistic question about the added value of doing stuff on-line (and the added costs).

But there is also an issue about whether people like us are really equipped to comment on what the student experience might be. They, it is argued, are "digital natives" who have grown up with all this technology and to whom it is totally transparent and natural. We did not, so we shouldn't project our own reservations onto them...

---

* Oh dear--I can't resist. The question of who will up-date one's website with news of one's death is a new problem. But it is not as exotic as the question concerning, it appears, some American evangelicals who believe in the Rapture (Google it if you are not into eschatology), when Jesus will return and true believers will be taken into heaven, leaving the rest of us behind. The problem is, who is going to look after the dog? No worries! Rapture Pet Care has it sorted. A dedicated band of atheists will...

On being able to speak

I've no idea whether I can make this nuanced point. So--if you go no further, just watch this. It's President Obama's speech to the centenary conference of the NAACP.

It's 37 minutes long, so if you haven't got that much time start at 25 minutes. That is when he both makes his critical substantive points and displays his rhetorical genius which is amplified by his audience...



On that final twelve minutes: who else could say that? (That also goes for the Cairo speech, and the Ghana speech.)

This is not a political point (of course it is a political matter about which I have decided feelings, but that is not the angle from which I am addressing it). It is a variation on the old soap-opera line, "You tell him. He'll take it from you!" Never before has there been an unassailable figure who could make those points to that community. (Obama is not totally unassailable in the eyes of some hard-liners--he is not of slave-stock to put it crudely--so notice how he enlists Michelle in his argument.

I'm fascinated by multiple levels of communication and how they interact. Several years ago I wrote a brief note on this but my investigations ran into the sand.

A few days ago I came across a very indirect but potentially fruitful lead. If your thinking is twisted enough to make similar connections, do get in touch! If note, I hope that at least you have listened to a magnificent speech. (Apart from the sound/video sync, that is. How can state-of-the-art crews and kit get that wrong?)