On time to learn

And on a lesser-known facet of Benjamin Bloom, who did do other things in the course of a long career.

As Lee Shulman points out, "mastery learning" rose and fell. It had quite a lot going for it, and to a large extent, our Adult Basic Skills programmes in the UK are influenced by it. And Bloom had a serious point, as does Shulman today. And we know that the practicability of responding to their point is limited by timetables and course designs and assessment regimes—and of course funding. But beyond a certain point, how much of the story is about "not enough time"?

Even at the level of basic skills, learning is not simply the incremental acquisition of ever more items of knowledge or skill. At some point it has to involve the capacity to organise and deploy that knowledge and those skills, and that is a different order of learning. As Bateson suggested, and the current thinking about threshold concepts supports, more at the same level will never of itself make the leap.

But we still don't know how reliably to teach this second-order stuff.

On the perfect lesson

Last night I watched Heston Blumenthal producing the "perfect" chilli con carne. There is of course no such thing. (I had not thought of using cumin, I admit.)

And the notion of "perfection" (whatever it means, pace any surviving Platonists) is one which can appeal only to commercial caterers, to whom the food consumed is the single criterion by which a "meal" might be judged. The rest of us know, of course, that as long as the food does not fall below a certain threshold, we will judge the meal by the ambience and the company much more than their gastronomic pretensions.

Similar considerations apply to the evaluation of teaching sessions. Yes, there are clear(ish) thresholds below which practice fails to contribute to learning and may indeed inhibit it. But beyond that we can judge only very broadly. And that is where Ofsted inspectors and QAA reviewers (now of blighted memory) get it all wrong;

• They tend to assume that the perfect lesson is the result of following a standard recipe (they deny it, of course, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary). For Blumenthal, it may be true. The "perfect" chilli is contained in his recipe. But there is no guarantee that the diner will like it. Technically, the system is defined too tightly, according to that which lends itself to measurement/judgement.
  
  
• They assume therefore that the process of teaching (and learning) is a series of tableaux or set pieces, which can be judged independently. Were the lesson objectives spelt out at the start of the lesson? (Yes = good; No = bad.) Thus we inculcate ritual knowledge (Perkins, 1999) with no understanding of its significance. Are the experiential targets spelt out at the start of the opera? the stand-up routine? the liturgy?
  

I could go on (I have just done you a favour and deleted five more bullet points), but, from Socrates to Laurillard (how is it to be in that league, Diana?) the highest-level learning is a conversation. It's dynamic, it's fluid... Time, and its story, is of the essence.

And the best chilli is rarely the hottest.

On a brilliant initiative

I heard about this site through BBC Radio 4's iPM programme/show—which is in itself a very interesting innovation, structured as it is around a blog to which listeners can contribute ideas for features and spots within the programme.

But Planet-scicast? Not only is it about interesting young people in science (target group about 12-16 year olds, I think), but it is employing the methods of Web 2.0—YouTube, FaceBook, BeBo etc. to do so. Because the content is created by the students; that is a superb exercise in itself, it publishes the material (and it is quite an addictive, "sticky" site to visit) and they learn from watching others' videos, and it's a resource for teachers (using creative commons licensing).

Shut up, Atherton!—let them see for themselves; http://www.planet-scicast.com/films.cfm

On more IQ debate

Here is more to go with my post of a week or so ago. Don't just read the main item, another essay by Flynn, but check out the follow-up ripostes and comments in the column on the right.

On felicitous phrasing

In the midst of a deeply serious and concerning article about the manufacture of psychological ailments by the labelling activities of big Pharma, I came across this gem;

...Lane is not a psychiatrist but a psychoanalytic literary critic who aligns himself with such empirically insouciant authorities as Jacques Lacan...

What a lovely phrase! It means "couldn't give a damn about the facts." With intellectual style.

On IQ back in the news

James Watson really stirred things up the other week with his remarks about Africa, and has been met with universal condemnation. Without wishing to endorse--or reject outright-- a long and complex paper with both good and not-so-good stuff, do read this counterblast.

It does pose the seriously difficult question of whether or not political factors should be taken into account in the publication of awkward findings. There is a lot of poor science out there which comes to facile conclusions about that endlessly contestable concept of "race" (see here for another blog making that point), but it is not all by definition poor.

At the same time, see here for a review of What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect by James Flynn. Flynn is a political scientist (of all disciplines) from New Zealand, who has noted the year on year rise in average IQs across the world (known as the "Flynn effect"), and has unpicked its significance—which is much more complex than at first appears.

On where to go

Assuming that you have not set up an RSS feed to alert you to my latest words of wisdom, you have probably stumbled idly on this blog. Instead of stumbling idly in the vain hope of finding something stimulating, go to ted.com. I'm not going to describe it--go there and find out for yourself. It is the web at its best, both in content and in implementation (although I have not yet checked how accessible it is to people with disabilities; I suspect that its reliance on video marks it down on that front).

On expressing an opinion

In the UK, the clocks go back an hour tonight. We revert to "Greenwich Mean Time" from "British Summer Time" a.k.a. daylight saving time. I, with many other people, think this is silly, so I thought I might make a comment on it on the blog.

It was then that I was struck with the curse of academic integrity. When was BST introduced? Who invented it (it was William someone). If the counter-argument to the reversion (how about that for abstraction calculated to lose one's readership?) concerns traffic accidents as children go to school in the dark in Scotland (which is a major plank in the argument. [Isn't it? where's the evidence?]) then how realistic is it? And is it still true today, when fewer children walk to school? (Is that true? Particularly in Scotland?)

• Norway extends even further North than Scotland (doesn't it?) How do they handle that problem? (Can I get that from http://www.regjeringen.no/en.html?id=4 ?)
• And Sweden, and Canada, and Russia...

And what, for goodness' sake, does all this mean in the context of what someone has apparently called "wikieality"? Can't remember who they are, but it was in today's paper somewhere...

More seriously, the gap between the double standards is getting wider.

Asserted opinion seems to be winning; incontrovertible evidence-based research is losing (partly, of course, because there is no such thing. It's a boojum [or is it a snark? I need to check that out].)

OK, 'twas ever thus. (Prove it!)

This post clearly needs the services of a fact-checker in the New Yorker tradition. At least I can support the notion that there are (or were, of course; all evidence pertains to the past) such people. Or can I? The link was to wikipedia...

Draw your own conclusions!

On students' experience

A friend has sent me this link;


I'm not entirely sure what to make of it; it's a class exercise (probably a very good one for freshers) but the methodological implications of developing ideas via wikis is something I need to think about...

Can it be trusted? Is it a true picture? Is it different in the UK? If it is true, and these are the "millennial students" we hear about, what does it say about our teaching methods? Is it incumbent upon us to adjust to their experience and expectations, or on them to "get real" and "grow up"? Or both?

On taking risks

Today we had a really good staff development meeting across the college network on the pedagogic rationale (hey! that sounds good, must use it again...) of our new Study Days programme. [If you have just stumbled across this blog, you don't need to know this.] The underlying principle will be "Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge" (papers on this very promising angle on learning and teaching can be downloaded from http://www.tla.ed.ac.uk/etl/publications.html)

However, as we were discussing what constitutes a "threshold concept" in our own discipline (no, I'm not going to explain. Read the papers from the link above. And it doesn't really matter for the sense of this entry.) ... we got onto spontaneity and risk-taking in teaching.

And it is a real battle-ground within institutions nowadays. Quality assurance procedures and watchdogs (such as Ofsted) insist on a "consistent product". They insist on believing in a self-serving myth of setting "minimum standards"; teaching will never fall below these standards, but is (of course) free to soar way beyond them.

Bul***it. In the real world, setting minimum standards involves setting maxima, too; because reaching for the stars involves the possibility of failure.

We didn't set out to make the point, but it became clear as we proceeded that our systems have made the "good the enemy of the best"*

We did that in social care, too, twenty years ago; I'll return to this.

* Yes, I know. This is a deliberate inversion of "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien" Voltaire (1772)

On PowerPoint (again)

It doesn't say it all, but it does say a lot.

On machines to solve crosswords

I don't often buy the "Telegraph"—honest! :-)

The paper came with a brochure for a mail-order company, one of whose products is "the world's most powerful pocket crossword solver". I'm sure it is very good at what it does. I'm not at all good at cryptic crosswords* but the last thing I want is a machine to solve the clue for me! All the fun resides in the fact that it is difficult and that it is only one's personal brainpower which solves it. It is in the process rather than the product that the enjoyment resides.




* Not the "sauce made from meat juices" clue, but the "Victory enlivens monochrome sauce!" clue. The answer to both is "gravy". If you are wondering "how?" you have got the point.

On old textbooks

A correspondent (who happens to host this disturbing and important site on how schools blindly and blithely ignore pupils' rights) has been in touch about a more benign but fascinating issue.

Do you remember your school textbooks (regardless of the subject)? How they presented their subject was hugely influential on their generation of pupils, and it is a much neglected source for research today.

Most obviously, the implicit values of old textbooks on history and geography can tell us so much about the world-views of their period. Consider E H Marshall's "Our Island Story", which has been reprinted and can now be read on the web.

But what can textbooks in English, Maths, French, Latin tell us about the expectations of pupils at various ages in the past? "Deconstructionist" documentary research in education does not seem to have the profile it deserves. (I am very far from a fan of the emperor's-tailoring of postmodernism, but diluted with a nice cup of tea, the general idea that what has been written says something about the writer's world, is acceptable.)

And put that together with the exam. papers of the era... I would not wish to pre-empt the results of any research, but it's a fruitful seam to mine.

Are there any collections of old textbooks out there? Is there a research tradition of which I know nothing? Are there others interested in exploring this area of research? Get in touch!

On fuzzy terminology

A few weeks ago, some colleagues (Peter, UK, Tony and Renee, US) were presenting at a conference in Sydney on how students learn to "think like" professionals or practitioners of disciplines. The session went quite well, but it would have been so much better had it taken into account this paper from 2003. I had never heard of it; nor apparently had any of the two dozen or so other people, from the UK USA Canada, Australia and New Zealand, attending our session, because it was not mentioned in the discussion.

I don't know how I came across it, other than undertaking a "random walk" across the web, but it has a lot to say, and it is based on empirical research. So why did none of us find it before? Because we work in disciplines where the labels attached to ideas are relatively arbitrary, so we don't know what to search for, even on the web. Meyer and Land, following Perkins (1999) talk about "troublesome knowledge"; one reason for it being troublesome is that it may be "alien" and disorientating. It might challenge earlier learning. I researched that in the late 80s and published on it in the 90s, but I called it--from a slightly different angle--"supplantive learning". Our labels are both reasonable, but there's no way for anyone to work from one to another.

The "semantic web" has a long way to go, and there's still no substitute for just meeting colleagues and making arbitrary connections.

On 'A' level results

The mantra of the day—congratulations, everyone, but...

No, I'm not going to pontificate; I'd just like to commend this page for its presentation of the stats. The different sex profiles and subject profiles are fascinating, and if you teach research methods or associated areas, they clearly show how existing documentary statistics can be interrogated.

On 60 cows and 20m people

One for those of you teaching media studies;

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/6930684.stm ; the breaking news of sixty cattle likely to have foot and mouth disease. It's the top story on BBCNews 24.
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/6927389.stm Twenty million people have been displaced by floods. To do the BBC credit, it is their second story on the website, but...?

Even Stalin said (allegedly) "one death is a tragedy, a hundred are a statistic".

I know you will have picked up the point already; this post is in case you hadn't checked out the urls.

On something completely different

Yes, it is a curiosity, but what else?...

On Potter punctuation

On p.345 "it's a damn' sight"

Right! Oh, the story's quite good, too.

Roger Scruton on the nature of education

• 'What we teach in school, what subjects we encourage in universities and the methods of instruction are all subject to the one overarching test: what do the kids get out of it? And this test soon gives way to another, yet more pernicious in its effect, but no less persuasive in the thinking of educationists: is it relevant? And by “relevant” is invariably meant “relevant to the interests of the kids themselves”.
• 'From these superstitions have arisen all the recipes for failure that have dominated our educational systems: the proliferation of ephemeral subjects, the avoidance of difficulties, methods of teaching that strive to maintain interest at all costs – even at the cost of knowledge.

Discuss!

On an academic's job description

A friend and colleague has just been told that as a course leader, it is his job to make sure the accountants have set up a project accounting system for a particular course event.

Over coffee, he went over his responsibilities for the course. It is now his job to;

• write the course advertisements, brochure and prospectus entry
• tell marketing where and when to place the advertisements
• respond to prospective student enquiries
• invite suitable students to interview
• interview them
• manage the course induction (across nine centres)
• co-ordinate staffing
• manage quality assurance procedures
• set the agenda for and chair course boards
• respond to any student complaints and manage that procedure
  
• run staff development sessions for colleagues in the associate centres
• liaise with the professional validating body, which includes
• re-designing the programme to comply with their new standards
• preparing the documentation for university validation
• co-ordinating that validation across all the centres
• writing new course handbooks;
• oversee the assessment procedures
• set work
• mark work
• moderate work
• liaise with external examiners
• visit centres to ensure consistency of teaching observations
  
• ensure all assessment data is entered onto the system
• check the accounting procedures and ensure the budget is balanced (although he is not trusted with authorising expenditure)
  
• attend graduation
• provide references for former students

In other words he has to do everything.

Except for one thing.

The university has decided not to run a cohort in the university itself any more.

So he doesn't get to teach on it.

On nostalgia—or serendipity, or something.

I enjoyed it, too! Serendipitously, clicking on "next blog" occasionally yields some gems.

BUT! Is the act of clicking through random "next blogs" worth it, on the off chance there may be something worthwhile among the dross (and this blog may well be among the dross)?

In parallel, how does one evaluate the truth-value of a list like this? I hate to be a spoil-sport, but I grew up in the '50s, and we were terrified by the spectre of polio... Perhaps our parents would have kept us at home if they had access to ways to to entertain us there.

What is happening? de Zengotita, T (2007) Mediated; how the media shape the world around you London; Bloomsbury has produced an exasperatingly (and certainly deliberately) ill-referenced rant about this.

I've changed my mind. I'm not going to ask you what you think. You can do that for yourself.

Or can you?

On "slow blogging"

This is a thoughtful post about how blogging to students works as a process of reflection and learning. (OK, it is occasionally a bit pretentious if your background is not in the humanities, but hey! she knows it!)

On academic pomposity

I've just received one of those "message undeliverable" emails which tells me the system could not deliver my posting to whom I never sent anything anyway. But I was intrigued by the address in the message history, so I went there; and this is what I found;

• "The Dog Trainer's Journal is being moved to the International Institute for Applied Companion Animal Behavior and expanded to include other companion animals. The new journal will remain the same in most respects but be attached to an established and respected institution. The new journal will be called The Journal of Applied Companion Animal Behavior (JACAB). Please visit the IIACAB web site and check out the journal page.

My dog is not impressed.

On good vibes, for once.

(Note that the site linked to is being revised, so the link will not work for long--and it's boring, in any case)

I am just back from a couple of days with about 60 National Teaching Fellows, in York. Many thanks to everyone in the Association of NTFs responsible for organising the event, which struck just the right balance between structure and flexibility, for me. We met up and compared notes. That's all. That's all?

The delight was that;

• the bitching (insofar as there was any at all), was a very low level undercurrent; OK, we all knew how privileged we were to be NTFs (but not merely "privileged", everyone except me clearly deserved the honour!) but even so it was delightfully odd to be at a meeting of academics who were so positive.
• there was a real sense of collegiality, of sharing and mutual support.
  
• and hence of wanting to go on and do even greater things!
  

Why? Because in a world/arena/sector/whatever increasingly characterised by sticks—accountability, micro-management, performance-related pay—there was evidence that carrots work. People who had been rewarded for their achievements were meeting to conspire to build on those achievements. There was no "resting on laurels". Prior success was and is an incentive for later success...

I've posted a couple of positive items in the past month; that may take me over the threshold for Pollyanna syndrome. I'd better get myself tested!

On Edu-Babble

I caught this feature (early part of the programme) on Radio 4 last night and again today. Very salutary!

Incidentally, the QCA's definition of "scaffolding" is not, as I understand it, the same as Bruner's use of the term.

But the item did present a challenge; perhaps I should re-write all this current validation documentation in plain English, with no jargon whatever. Would it then be longer or shorter?

On some advice on learning

I'd really like some feedback on this reply I gave to a correspondent a few minutes ago. We had exchanged emails a few months ago as he sought a study strategy for a technology course he was doing. His message this time suggested that my advice had been helpful on that occasion. Now he has moved on to a different part of the course, with a higher science and maths content, and once again he felt he was floundering. Was he just "bad at" this stuff?

"You have stumbled on something which many people (including some researchers) believe to be the case; that some people are "naturals" for maths and others aren't, (See http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/multiple.htm ) and some people handle technical stuff better or worse than "artistic" stuff (http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/converge.htm)

However, it is not as clear-cut as may at first appear, and although I can't "prove" it, I suspect that this is partly a matter of how abstract ideas appear to be. In the old days of photography before everything went automatic and even digital, we were recommended to "bracket" our exposures. Work out the recommended exposure, take a shot at that setting, and then also take one with the lens one stop more open and one stop more closed. All of us have levels of abstraction with which we are comfortable (and maths tends to be very abstract). On the whole storytellers (very concrete) are not great analytical philosophers or mathematicians (very abstract) and vice versa (OK, Sartre was one exception...). But we can still engage effectively with other levels on either side of our comfort zone.

The problem is that maths etc. tends to be taught at one level (and possibly tested at a slightly more concrete level). If you can't work with the level at which it is being taught, move down (not academically but concretely) and ask yourself to generate examples of how all this works out in practice; or move up, and look for the underlying patterns, of which the stuff you have been taught is just one instance.

Now, frankly, this specific advice may be total rubbish! But it still works! Because it is not the specific exercise, but as you say, your engagement with the material which makes the magic happen. I'm just saying, don't take it at face value as your teacher or the text book presented it; you can manipulate it and manage it as you will--and at the most basic level, you will find yourself remembering it, and being able to apply it.

I'll say no more!

On dumbing down---or not

I am prompted to write, tonight, by a chance hearing of a Radio 4 programme on "The Rise and Fall of the Hapsburgs" as I was going to bed. I'm not a great history buff, but the fact that such a prgramme could go out on one of the four major UK radio networks (albeit just before midnight) suggests that we are not yet totally dumbed down.

And then there is "In Our Time" (Thursdays, 0900-0945, Radio 4). Having tried several times to draft an encomium for this consistently brilliant programme, I can't encompass it. There is its reach and scope. The selection of articulate experts. Melvyn Bragg's chairing (having dropped all pretence of spontaneity; it is paradoxically more immediate). And the newsletter. This is an exemplar of radio at its very best.

But that is not all. Last week, I found myself showing an American friend around the tourist sites of Cambridge and central London. St John's College, King's College Chapel, Peterhouse... Parliament Square, Westminster Abbey, the Manet to Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery... It was almost twenty years since I had last been to these places. The Abbey had not changed much (but, hey, it has been there for about 950 years!) but other places had changed, and not in the direction of "dumbing down". They were more accessible (physically, intellectually, socially) than they were, but they did not compromise their integrity. For once, without irony, I was simply impressed.

And! We went on the London Eye. It is not part of the intellectual and cultural heritage; it is too new for that. But it is a great tourist experience on its own terms, and it is also a brilliant feat of engineering.

And as we went, we listened to our fellow tourists. And perhaps the most gratifying and uplifting part of the tour was to hear how well-informed many of them were. OK, perhaps the groups were self-selecting (apart from the, many, school groups); rubber-neckers may not make it into the basement of the National Gallery. Even so... here were unapologetic "culture-vultures" seeking out the very best; and there were unapologetic elitist "providers" (I have no idea what to call the people who manage these sights/sites) who knew that you can't beat an original Picasso or van Gogh.

I spend too much of my life only engaging with the problems of people who are marginalised disenfranchised oppressed and exploited, if I have no time to raise my sights to what we aspire to for them. Moreover; how come I have stayed away from this for twenty years?

On Inclusive Learning

Yes, I know the connection between the title and the link is not self-evident, but the link is the source for most of the nonsense I have just been struggling with.

New readers start here: sexy but politically correct Svetlana Ukridge (a.k.a SVUK), daughter of crusty Llywellyn Ukridge (a.k.a. LLUK) is .... Sorry! There are new regulations afoot, from the aforesaid LLUK, governing teacher training for post-16 education in the UK (now known as the "Learning and Skills Sector"*) These have to be incorporated, at vast effort but no benefit, into existing teacher education** programmes, for the next academic year. Like every other university offering such programmes, mine is currently struggling to accommodate the new regulations and retain at the same time to retain some vestige of academic integrity.

* "Learning and Skills Sector"? Learning is a process; skills are achieved capacities to perform (albeit always improvable). How do they constitute a "sector"? OK, it means a part of the education system. But (assuming that one can thus yoke together such disparate concepts—sorry! Can't remember the right phrase; Helen Gardner on the metaphysical poets? If anyone reads this, please put me right.) but, what part of education is not about "learning and skills"?

** they think (as their "guidance" eloquently testifies) that one can "train" teachers. We know that trained teachers are useless, whereas educated ones...

The "guidance" notes are obsessed with "inclusive learning". I thought—naively—that I had escaped fatuous political correctness when I escaped from the gulag of social work education. Not so.

There is a whole unit called; "Curriculum development for inclusive practice". There are so-called "assessment criteria" like;

'Explain ways in which theories and principles of learning and communication can be applied to promote inclusive practice.

'Analyse how theories, principles and models of inclusive curriculum design and development are used to inform own practice and the provision in own specialist area.

I'm not sure what these actually mean; I certainly do not know what would count as satisfactory evidence for their achievement, but beyond that...

What does "inclusive learning" mean? The phrase originates from the Tomlinson Report of 1996 (for which I have great respect);

'By "inclusive learning", therefore, we mean the greatest degree of match or fit between the individual learners' requirements and the provision that is made for them.'

OK. Remember that the report was specifically about students with learning difficulties and disabilities. It proposed that in contrast to the usual approach, of defining the course according to the requirements of the subject and the level, and then providing support to help students with disabilities could attain that level; the "inclusive curriculum" should be designed around the "individual learners' requirements".

That is fair enough, in the "special needs" area. But most students in PCE do not have "special" needs in that sense. This is the politically-correct tail wagging the dog, and to elevate it into the major principle underpinning the education of all future teachers in the post-16 sector is stupid.

• either it brings the teacher education process into disrepute (the more likely and less damaging result) or
• heaven help us—people may believe it! What will that do to our confidence in our plumbers, chefs, care staff... ?
  

On academic game-playing

A former colleague and student, having moved jobs, is now undertaking a "teacher training" course at his new institution, and sent me a draft of one of his essays. I have changed some details of my response to anonymise it, but retain the argument:


What a joy to read!

We have corresponded, you have sat in my sessions and you have participated in them (not necessarily the same thing), but I have never actually read any of your stuff, apart from emails.

Did you choose this topic? Was it up to you to suggest it, or a choice from a list? I suspect it is the former. Much as I enjoyed the TV adaptation of the Delderfield novels--I confess I didn't read the primary source-- there is something of a mismatch between the Arnoldian ideal of the teacher which suffuses Delderfield and (to continue the Arnold [Matthew this time] reference) the Hebraist, utlilitarian construction of the role in the present.

Were I marking this, I would be in a real quandary. There is no doubt as to its academic quality; argument, sourcing, ... they are all there. (And frankly, although there may be dispute about the grade, this is a clear pass at M level, regardless).

But, this does smack of an expert playing an academic game. It takes one to know one! As you know, we set up assessment systems for all kinds of reasons and in response to all kinds of pressures. Very few of those pressures are about demonstrable improvement in professional performance, for all kinds of reasons, including the sheer difficulty of specifying a valid task. But the game is not the real world. The map is not the territory (I know, someone else articulated that before Korzybski, but it's Friday night!)

This submission clearly demonstrates that you can play the game. But how does it contribute to showing how your performance has improved as a teacher? It doesn't. You asked for my opinion on this as a submission for assessment; I've been through the criteria, and there is clearly no problem with any of them-----------given the choice of topic, of course.

Now to get brutally real.

• I would not have accepted this title, but I would have insisted on it (the title) being submitted and approved in advance, so you would never have written it.
  Delderfield's romantic vision of (school) education for a privileged elite between the wars has very little connection with "bod standard" (i.e. post-1992) universities today. You do not show how any connection might be made.
• I can't see how working on this essay (not just writing it) has challenged or stretched your understanding of teaching and learning (apart perhaps from the reference to your changing view of Friere).
• Playing structured games is about maximising performance within given rules and parameters. It's not about stepping outside them and seeing whether such skill works in the real world. We devise games as pale imitations of the real world, and the educational game is the most hubristic of them all, as you know. Perhaps it is because you know that, that you play the game so knowingly!

I may meta-comment later!

On bandwagons

I have been contacted by someone who obviously knows that the blog exists, although I have no idea whether he has ever read it. He wants me to plug the conference which the header links to; I declined, but I'm doing it anyway. This is a great way to earn the opprobrium both of fans of the conference, for not endorsing it properly; and of opponents, for not simply ignoring it!

However! I'm actually mentioning it because of a phrase in the email commending it to me; "delegates have lots of opportunities to become inspired to try new ideas and leave with 'use it on Monday' materials!" Gee-whiz! This is two (quite expensive---£325 + VAT for the conference alone---and it's "not for profit"?) two days which will revolutionise attenders' teaching? What do these people know, and what can they impart in two days which teachers did not get in a year's PGCE training and another year's NQT mentoring, and a programme of CPD ever since (apologies to those of you not familiar with the initials, but you'll get the gist)?

No only do quick fixes not exist, but most claims to them back-fire. Remember "learning styles" and "multiple intelligences" and "accelerated learning"? You should, because they are still current. But what do such ideas actually do?

• They declare that if teachers adjust to ever more variables in planning and fine-tuning their teaching (as if they ever could do any more than have broad-brush plans given all the variables which come into play when you get into the classroom) — then students will miraculously learn better!
• And if students don't learn (sorry, "achieve") better, it is of course the fault of the teachers for not adopting this refined approach. (No way, of course, has it anything to do with the half-baked, untested and unresearched dogma underlying this snake-oil prescription.)

Forced to the choice, I'll go for prescribing fish-oil and better diet. The methodology of the "research" is just as flaky, but it has other spin-off benefits, it helps school meals staff feel valued (and even university catering staff—let's hear it for them!—they're brilliant and seriously under-valued) and even if it doesn't help with learning it protects joints and the cardio-vascular system. (I haven't checked out that research in detail, I confess, but I'll take the media reporting on trust for once.)

On visualisation

Wow! If you like visual representations of all kinds of phenomena, this site is amazing. There's no more to say, other than to recommend that you not go there if you have anything else planned for several hours.

On VLEs

I have just come across this wonderful rant! I agree with it all (at least, the bits I can understand), and it is a superb examination (some might even say "deconstruction") of the educational, cultural and even political assumptions contained in them.

One thing the author does not mention, however, is that a Virtual Learning Environment (or Learning Management System/LMS) requires a sophisticated infrastructure; small educational "providers" can't support them. Then again, they may need them even less than the rest of us, because people might actually talk to each other... On the other hand, the net has evolved. "Web 2.0", the social web is here. Practically everything a VLE can do can now be done better and more easily using free tools on the wider web; I'm working on a paper on "DIY VLE" about this.

Any ideas and comments would be welcome!

On the skills crisis

For all those of you in technical and vocational education; listen to this BBC "File on 4" programme to find out how present policies are causing distortions in the system.

On a passing tradition

This posting is unashamedly academic, elitist and reactionary.

I was sad to read today of the death of Tony Nuttall, who taught me as an undergraduate at Sussex in the 'sixties. But I was also deeply struck by his obituary by Laurence Lerner, another of the founding faculty at Sussex, and the values implicit in it. Lerner starts;

"A. D. Nuttall once gave a lecture at Sussex University about some difficulties in the Darwinian theory of natural selection, of which the first sentence was: "This lecture is the rashest act yet committed in an admittedly rather unadventurous life." [...] the sentence is a splendid glimpse of the intellectual atmosphere of the early years of Sussex (a new university in 1961) which he did so much to create.

"As a literary scholar, Tony Nuttall was willing to explore all intellectual issues that seemed to him to impinge on our way of seeing the world: [...] he showed his lecture to his colleague John Maynard Smith, one of the world's leading Darwinians, who took its objections wholly seriously.

Where and how would one now find;

• A specialist in English Literature capable of lecturing seriously and critically on Darwin?
• An institution which could offer him the opportunity to do so?
• One in which academics in English actually know any of their biologist colleagues?
• ... to the extent that each would look over the other's lectures?

As Lerner goes on;

"At Sussex, [...] he played a leading part in the development of the contextual course on the Modern European Mind, which placed some of the great modernist writers in their intellectual context, so that students read Dostoevsky or Lawrence along with Freud, Conrad or Sartre along with Marx, Thomas Mann along with Nietzsche. This course was an unforgettable intellectual adventure for several generations of students - and for their teachers.

It was indeed; it was certainly one of my greatest privileges to have taken some of it. Some of it, because at its heart was a lecture circus, as one of the faculty called it; three lectures a week throughout the year, one on each of three strands for the term. On that basis, it was estimated that, provided no more faculty wanted to join in (gloriously forlorn hope!) it would be possible to begin to repeat the sequence in five years or so. (The undergraduate programme lasted then as now three years.) Indeed, the sheer chutzpah of offering a course too big for anyone to grasp the whole of it was an academic statement in its own right.

We could not do it now. What would be the "learning outcomes"?

On completion of a glimpse of this module, students will;

1. Have been permitted to stay up late, creep into a corner of a sometimes hushed and sometimes raucous debating room in the library and begin to participate in the "conversation across the ages" which is the glory of our culture.
2. Have found their heads to be the battlegrounds of competing ideas on the most important (and occasionally the most trivial) topics of our time.
3. Have realised that there are no static answers, nor should there be, and that it is our obligation to ensure that there never are ...?

Devise an assessment scheme for that!

The author of this obituary, Laurence Lerner, gave me the only A+ grade I ever got. It was for an essay on "Was Henry James a philistine?", in which I discussed "Portrait of a Lady" in the framework of Kierkegaard's "spheres of existence". Not that it mattered what grade one got, in terms of degree classification; all summative assessment was by sudden-death final exams in three weeks at the end of the third year (perhaps there are some areas in which we have made progress).

I'm not bemoaning, "where did it all go?" (even at Sussex). I'm asking if there is any chance we might get some of it back?

On Spring

It may be some way off, but—for all you literacy buffs out there;

What is the past participle or simple of "spring"? Is it;

1. springed
2. sprung
3. sprang
4. sprought
5. spromething else?

On Academese

I'm thinking of signing up for a conference in June in Poland. I went to their website and found—great idea—that they had set up a blog for the session proposals as they came in. (That's the link in the title.)

Then I read the abstracts. Oh dear! All my prejudices about my fellow-academics are confirmed. Just read them for yourself!

I'd still like to attend (but only because I know from experience that this silly pretentious language is—in most cases—confined to the formal academic jousting of the event, and bears little relation to how people talk informally); but I can't play this game. Nor do I want to.

And for all the pretentions, there are still no hotel recommendations or costings. Forget it!

On References

Very best wishes to you all for 2007!

The link in the title to this post is primarily a bit of fun, but I do enjoy a beautifully crafted reference!

On Christmas messages

I have not posted over the holidays themselves, because I have stayed away from this machine (under threat of dire consequences). You could say I went "cold turkey". Or perhaps not... :-)

If you are interested in a couple of fun Christmas messages, check out;

• http://christopher.plaquet.free.fr/christmasday/concertoduperenoel.swf
  

or for something a little funkier;

• http://www.thecompassgroup.biz/merryxmas.swf

Or if you are into something a little darker (although I am sure it is unintentionally so), consider this message, which was passed on to me via email as these things are. I have extracted some of the text only from a very slick PowerPoint slideshow;

• If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep... You are richer than 75% of this world.
• If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish some place ... You are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy
  
• [...]
  
• Have a good day, count your blessings, and pass this along to remind everyone else how blessed we all are.
• You are wished a Merry Christmas

(There are ten slides in all, with cosy images as backgrounds; the whole thing is seductive enough for me to make a deliberate effort not to become part of a viral campaign). My brother commented; "it reminds me a bit of those shopping malls where they introduce a fragrance into the plenum system to evoke misty eyed memories of long ago seasons so you will go into the stores and spend more money than you planned to. Or am I getting more and more cynical?"

No! I don't think that reaction is cynical enough. These po-faced "messages" embody a really miserable double message (technically a "double-bind", following Bateson and Watzlawick...)

1. You are so much better off than practically everyone else, you have an obligation to be happy
2. How can you possible be happy when the rest of the world is in such a mess?

...and to foist that on us in the guise of a "Merry Christmas" greeting is a little disingenuous? hypocritical?

There is no way one can emerge from such a message feeling "merry". (Although I concede that despite the ubiquity of the injunction, it is not indeed the "point" of the season.)

Indeed the final paragraph; "You are wished a Merry Christmas" is really insidious, carrying as it does the sub-text, "...but you don't deserve to be!"

Some day I may start a theological blog, but this is not it; this one is about learning. But these messages carry messages in turn about learning...

• about the levels of messages carried by our material
• and particularly for adult learners--what messages do they imply about the learners themselves?

(Plonking comments on something very subtle and quite powerful. Revisit later?)

On standards

The new professional standards for teacher/ tutor/ trainer education in the lifelong learning sector have finally been published! Deep joy!

Great news, particularly for people like me who make a living from squeezing really good teacher education programmes into these artificial shells. It's a bit like pre-revolutionary China, and binding girls' feet...

Seriously: where is the evidence that conformity to these specifications makes any difference to students' learning? What research underpins this speculative exercise? Where is the evidence that "trained" teachers are better than "untrained" ones in vocational education? Are we sure what "better" means, here?

On "Completing"

Two people died today. Not of course counting all the Aids victims in Africa, all the children with malaria, all the refugees in Darfur and elsewhere, and 150+ in Iraq. And all the others.

Why comment on two deaths? Because they touch me, in quite different ways.

Nick Clarke was the consummate broadcaster. There are well-deserved tributes on the BBC site, as there should be. I shall miss him. Much as I respect the "Today" confrontational interviewing style, Nick embodied a wonderfully courteous but forensic manner (and the term "forensic" has cropped up in so many tributes).

But Den died today, too. Susi knew him much better than I did. I only met him once, when I drove him and his cat ("Jennifur") on her last trip to the vet. Susi was late for dinner on Sunday, when she went to visit him; she had to wait for a loaf to finish baking so she could take it home. It's wholemeal. It's still edible. But Den (who was well into his 80s) collapsed in the street this morning and was pronounced dead at the hospital later, despite their best efforts.

Den was a gloriously cantankerous eccentric. Not that he set out to be so. He would have despised such affectation. He was a vegetarian; he believed that central heating undermined civilisation; he was a slave to his cat; he was a hellenophile--he married a Greek woman he met during WW2 (I think) ...

Sadly, his family were not with him when he died. But in all probability he never regained consciousness. And that, from all I have heard, is exactly as he would have wished it. It was impossible to imagine him surviving in residential care, for instance. He would have been sad about the shock of his death to his loved ones (and particularly his cat, of course!) but it was the best way to go. For him.

"Completion" is a euphemism for "death" in Ishigoru's novel Never let me go. "Euphemism" is not quite the right term; read the novel to understand what I mean. It haunts me. "Haunts" is here the right word...

"Completion" implies a pre-determined purpose, and for Ishigoru's characters that is a given. For most of us, it isn't. But had Nick or Den "completed"? Will I?

On defining the situation and the latest James Bond movie

No! You can find the link for yourself.

Tonight, I got my opinion in first. A group of us went to see "Casino Royale". You know the scenario as the group leaves the cinema or theatre (unless the verdict is self-evident). There is this tentative social shuffling as people try to suss out what the party line is going to be. Was it the greatest movie since Casablanca? Or is it a turkey? (Given that it is Thanksgiving for folks in the US, that might not be such a bad thing...) Whoever expresses a clear opinion, loudly and confidently enough, "defines the situation" and resolves the ambiguity, and provides a framework for the subsequent discussion... (Unless of course, they happen to be the low-status prat in the group who is always wrong...)

My opinion is below.

It is of course irrelevant. My concern is with the way in which small groups in educational settings slip into the same pattern. Actually, it is worse for them, because they are not just trying to suss out the consensus within the group; in many cases they are trying to guess what answer the teacher wants. How can we create a working culture which diminishes this process and boosts real debate? Discuss. [No, I'm not giving the "answer". All I did was go to a movie!]

Here is my opinion of Casino Royale:

If you get the chance to see the latest James Bond movie, don't bother.

It's got good reviews from practically all the papers except the Sunday Times, which makes a point of being perverse; but I was bored after less than an hour, and it was two and a half hours long. Every time I thought it was finishing, there was another ending, which took a further twenty minutes. Not since John Ford's She wore a Yellow Ribbon has the ending been so much of the film.

The plotting is clunky; the penultimate ending sequence is triggered by a phone conversation which would have failed a freshman script-writing class. Much has been made of the "character development" of Bond in the course of the film; but it is not demonstrated, it is merely asserted in dialogue. Daniel Craig is OK, but the script does not give him much of a chance to be anything else. I never found out who the "Bond girl" is this time (the label seems to be the kiss of death to an actress's career anyway---sorry! I think it's more PC to say "female actor") because the only credits were at the end, and I just wanted to get out by then.

There are no original set pieces--all the fights and chases have been done before, often better. (Apart from the torture scene, which does have the merit of being low-tech, but is resolved crudely by someone being shot by someone else--I think they were both villains, but then everyone except Bond is a villain...)

And there is only one joke! After some punch-up, Bond appears at the bar and orders a vodka martini. The barman asks if he wants it shaken or stirred. Bond replies "Do I look as if I care?" That's it. Pity, really; an enormous amount of effort and attention to detail, not to mention money and real talent has gone into it (although I'm sure I did detect a continuity error concerning whether a car door was open or closed, at one point!), and it's still boring!

On another graduation ceremony

Clicking on the link will take you back to this time last year. My reflection has not changed, overall (apart from a degree of surprise that I ended up on the platform again).

A couple of additional observations, though. At one stage, a few years ago, we had just three people graduating in post-compulsory education; at this ceremony, the entire first half, and a substantial chunk of the second half, were PCE awards. (OK, that is of interest only to immediate colleagues and myself; but perhaps it ought to be of interest to... Never mind!)

One reason for the increased numbers is that people graduating in the network colleges are taking the trouble to travel up to 110 miles (180 km? in my head--correct me, adult numeracy teaching people) each way in order to graduate at the formal ceremony. They don't have to. But they do, and they bring their families. And some, former students and families, are visibly moved.

This is a great event! And so say all the speeches from the great and the ("good"? Discuss) of the university. But why can't they say it with a little more conviction and enthusiasm? I know that they do this four times in two days on our campus. But this is a one-off event for the graduands; and this is a School of Education. And the bottom line of practice in education is to be able to put oneself in the position of the student, and to relate to that...

So please don't diminish it with droning speeches and body language which says "why do I have to do this? I could be auditing the accounts!"

But celebrate!

On teachers' and learners' perspectives

Aishah Azmi has lost her case (on three counts out of four) for discrimination in her dismissal form her post as a teaching assistant, for wearing the veil (or niqab).

I am not commenting on the case as such, you will be relieved to know. But according to what I think I heard on a news report a few minutes ago, she said, "I am perfectly capable of teaching with the veil; it has never presented a problem."

• It's not about that! All she is saying here is that she is thinking about her performance as a teacher; but effective teachers are not concerned with that. They are concerned with the pupils'/students' experience as learners.
• I really did not want to get into this, but—leaving aside all the reasons—she is on the inside of her self-presentation. Would she see it as not a problem if her pupils were wearing the veil?
• This is a current (but rare) issue in colleges and universities; lecturers are concerned that fully-veiled students give little feedback about their understanding in large lectures. In smaller sessions, of course, they may contribute verbally. Frankly, although I would find it disconcerting to be "faced" by a classroom full of veiled students, there is less of an issue here than there is of teaching on-line, or even doing a tutorial on the 'phone. It is a matter of adjustment. But....
• Teaching at a distance, by phone or online, I readily accept that we both have to find ways round the limited channels of communication. But face to not-face, as it were?
• If I were being taught by David Blunkett (sorry! he's in the news again and the highest-profile blind man in the country--and a former teacher in further education) I would accept my responsibility as a student to adapt to his impairment. I would not, for example, put my hand up in class and expect to be called upon to speak. He the teacher cannot change his capabilities, so I have to. Put crudely, "he can't help it". OK.
• But when someone "can help it", and--for whatever reason--decides unilaterally to close down a channel of communication, then that person must be responsible for the consequences. They, and of course other "stakeholders", may ultimately decide that it was all worthwhile. Fine. That is another debate.

And, of course, we have no valid evidence that it (wearing the niqab veil) was or was not a problem. Primary school children have wonderful views of the world, but they tend to accept hierarchies and the oddities of adults as "just the way things are". One of the first things they learn in school is that they do not know enough to have valid opinions on anything.

However, if, as we might reconstruct, Ms Azmi was unveiled as long as there were no adult males in the room... What was she "teaching" when she veiled in the presence of a man?

I do not wish to engage with the substance of this debate. That is a different issue. I am asking about the learners' experience and perspective, because that is what matters.

On "write-only" documents

I can't reference this, but I know thousands of people who can (994,000 according to Google)! I think I picked up the idea (even the "meme", dodgy though that concept is) from either;

• Pratchett T (2006) Thud! London; Corgi Books, or
• Pratchett T, Stewart I and Cohen J (2003) The Science of Discworld II; the Globe London; Ebury Press

I did think of reading them both again in order to track down the reference, which would have been fun, but a little self-indulgent; I decided to leave it to you to find it! The search will be great and illuminating fun. Go on--read Pratchett, and blame me!

Substantively, you are familiar with "read-only" documents, such as Acrobat files. This brilliant idea is that there is a class of documents which "need" to be written, but which will never be read.

I am currently engaged in the stupefying exercise of "mapping" some standards onto something else. The content does not matter, because the result will be a "write-only" document. Some bureaucrat somewhere will check whether the document exists, tick a box, and move on to the next item. S/he will certainly not read the document.

I know that is the case--I may have blogged this before, but it's worth a repeat! A couple of years ago, a module with the following "learning outcome" went through our entire quality assurance procedure unchallenged;

• On completion of this module, students will: Be able to discourse animatedly on the positions of several educational thinkers so as to bore the pants off acquaintances at parties.

Nowhere in the documentation is it specified what criteria determine what constitutes "bor(ing) the pants off acquaintances" That is clearly unacceptable, but no-one raised the matter.

So--it is just possible that several thousand pounds were spent on the production of "write-only" documents, whose sheer existence counts for much more than their content.

Draw your own conclusions.

On manipulating meetings

We had the meeting today, about bidding for a "Centre for Excellence". And I did it again, although I didn't want to. To explain; I have a really annoying pattern of contribution to meetings.

It's not a "tactic" or even "strategy" because I don't do it deliberately. It is just a pattern I slip into, and it may annoy only me, because I find it happening again and again. In most meetings, my colleagues have no idea that it is a "pattern". I used to be proud of it, and the way committee meetings etc. ended up "seeing things my way"; now I've grown up and I find it a liability.

What is the tactic/pattern? It's simple, and it seems to work whenever other people lack passionate ideas.

• Criticise other people's contributions, quite reasonably and without animosity, just enough to undermine them; and then
• suggest something different which has clearly been thought through, and addresses the other concerns.Create a vacuum, and then fill it!

Yuch! I used to enjoy how it worked. Now it bugs me. Partly because it is testimony to my inability to maintain "negative capability", and partly because what superficially appears to be my manipulation of the committee is really my manipulation by the committee because I can't stand the disorder of indecision!

So! We met today. The meeting was supposed to be 10-11 routine business; 11-1 the CETT. (What is the CETT? Who cares? It makes no difference to the story other than that it was a significant agenda item.) Routine business does not concern me any more, so I drifted in at about 10.30. That agenda actually carried on until 11.45 (no failure of chairing etc. simply blurred boundaries of agenda items). The CETT meeting started then; people had had various ideas beforehand, but they were not really prepared to argue for them, and given that my proposal was based on prior conversations with several members, it was accepted.

Oh dear! Don't get me wrong. I think my proposal is not only strategically good, but also really will contribute to real-world improvements. I have no axe to grind; my ideas are disinterested. (Obviously not "uninterested", of course. Please explain the difference.) But I suspect that there is an optimal level of disagreement in planning meetings. Too little, and decisions are made with no sense of engagement, and hence no ownership and no commitment to contributing to their implementation. Too much, and the dispute undermines the process and the decision—we are all too familiar with that. Somewhere in between is the honest (even romanticised) position of engaging in argument, and accepting and even committing to an outcome. (That will be the position of some members of the UN Security Council if a Chapter 7 resolution is agreed against North Korea.)

On Blackboards again

Apropos my post of 9 June, this has come up again, again prompted by a mathematician.

On cultures in adult education

It's the new academic year! Time for new year resolutions:

• I resolve only to blog things which will make sense to me a week later.

Let's see if it works.

I am a student again! On Tuesdays, that is. 10-12 am; I take "The Problem of Evil" at the Retirement Education Centre. 6-9 pm; I take "Introduction to Macromedia 'Flash'" at the local FE college.

I have blogged previously about the wonderful REC courses. This time around they are even better because the so-called "assessment" requirement has become even more tokenistic and hence honest; now all the University expects is a two-paragraph essay proposal, rather than a pretend essay. Now it is clear to everyone that this is a game about funding, and nothing else; we know where we stand. All pretence of measuring "education" has now been abandoned. It's a gentleman's agreement (I did think of correcting for sexism, but then decided the principle goes too far back). It helps that the University involved is Cambridge; whichever way you cut it, this is one of the top five universities in the world; even the Higher Education Funding Council for England (you don't really want a link to their website, do you? How sad can you get?) hesitates to pick a fight with them.

It's not like that in the Further Education (FE) sector. Their funding comes from the local and national Learning and Skills Councils through a convoluted formula which takes account of the costs of offering a course (logical, but far from the whole story) adjusted with reference to under-represented groups in further education (including in my case, the over-60s, so I got a half-price deal on the up-front fee) and retention and completion rates. These are sausage-machine systems.

I hate to admit it, but it comes down to class. I and others (with much more reason and experience) resented the previous regime of accountability on the Cambridge courses. I don't know the details, but the funding bureaucrats are backing off; they are progressively conceding ever more liberal course requirements.

It doesn't work like that in FE. FE students have little voice. They have little engagement with their college. For many of them it is simply a place to access teaching. Many of them don't even know how to recognise good teaching.

At the REC, there is an equal dialogue between the class and the teacher. OK, there is a degree of manipulation;

• Tutor; I am supposed to introduce "student-centred" methods into these classes, such as setting you tasks to perform in small groups. Do you really want to do that?
• Class; No!

We were all aware of the game we were playing (although it was sad that the tutor was forced to go through the motions) and probably I was the only person present who knew what was fundamentally going on, but who cares?

[Note; we did do a small-group exercise in week 2, regardless of the class' judgement. It would take too long to disentangle that, now; email me if you are desperate!]

In FE, you can't treat it as a game. I did some calculations and worked out that, assuming a balanced 50% marginal and 50% overhead rate, and 14 students, this course would more than meet its costs, regardless of LSC subsidy. In fact there were 20 students last week, so assuming about 20% attrition....

I hate this. I know. Wherever you start it comes back to this. But....

We'll revisit this when I can think beyond feeling something is wrong.

On not being able to say something.

I drove back from a short break this evening, and became increasingly impatient with Radio 4's unctuous celebration of the centenary of the birth of a pretentious and patronising second-rate poet. I'm not usually po-faced, but to write;

• "Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!/It isn't fit for humans now,"

in the same year as Guernica (not sure of the exact chronology) is not post-modern ironic (neither of which ideas would have made sense to Betjeman [even if they do to any of the rest of us {I must get out of these nested brackets}]) No brackets; it is simply crass.

Is this a rant about Betjeman? No, actually. It is just an illustration of an issue I fell to thinking about having switched off the radio.

My substantive meditation (if there is such a thing) was around the extent to which we are conditioned to think of "learning" as a static state which can be assessed by "snapshot" methods such as examinations. In email exchanges with several correspondents (thanks, Renee) I have come to suspect that this may be inadequate--and indeed that it is not "merely" academically inadequate, but that it seriously constrains educational policy and practice... Exciting stuff! I'll write an article about it!

But--leaving aside the fact that fewer people will probably read the article than will read this blog--how long will it take me to produce an academically acceptable piece which will pass peer review, by including a literature review testing the proposition that the conventional wisdom of educational theory treats "learning" as a static achieved state..? It's the kind of task you assign to a Ph.D student, so assuming you are a nice supervisor who is going to grant him or her a few months to add their original gloss for a thesis---30 months? Forget it.

Of course, a journalist could make the same point on the basis of a couple of days on the net and ringing up a few interested parties for quotes.

And a blogger doesn't even have to get past basic editorial control.

• Did Betjeman write those lines before or after Guernica? I don't know; it may simply be a cheap shot on my part with little basis in fact. Regardless of the historical facts, did B. know about Guernica? Where were his sympathies (if any) in the Spanish Civil War?

But this line of thought raises further questions. What is the premium of ---shall we say, "credibility"--- actually conferred by full academic referencing? Does it actually matter very much?

• Clearly it does in some subjects, which are more or less clearly cumulative; Newton stands on the shoulders of giants.
• But in the humanities and the social sciences and professional disciplines, when did you last read a dispassionate literature review (other than from a librarian)? Indeed, when did you last check such a review? There is so much stuff out there that there is no way I could read it all, still less evaluate it. And I certainly do not know whether this literature review or that "truly" represents the literature in a particular area.

Academic practice may need to be scrutinised as a form of restrictive practice. In many cases it serves no particular purpose apart from making it difficult to get published, prolonging the process, and inflating the egos of those of us who edit and referee the journals. (RAE aside).

It certainly has very little to do with increasing anybody's understanding of anything.

On drilling or dancing

A couple of days ago, one of those juxtapositions which really get the reflective juices flowing.

I have been marking some assessments which require the inclusion of schemes of work and session plans. I have been both impressed and appalled by what has been submitted. I'm impressed by the precision of the paperwork, especially the required itemisation of the special needs and learning styles within the class. This one, for example, has "three learners with possible ADHD, and four with possible dyslexia, although none are yet fully assessed." Fine; I have little problem with that. The "little" problem concerns how the pre-emptive labelling is handled, and that is not revealed in the documentation.

Alongside that, we have session/lesson plans which are specified to the minute. Seven minutes to take the register and introduce the objectives of this session. Twelve minutes of PowerPointy presentation of the substance...

I have also just been reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" It's a well-written journalist's book. It betrays its journalistic origins in that any point made more that 1500 words previously has to be re-stated in case it has been forgotten; and it is peppered with quotations from interviews. OK; this guy took the trouble to go and interview his informants, but given that they have (almost) all published their results and findings, why? (OK, we know why--it adds that human touch, he told me, as he stirred his latte with four sugars...) The material was actually covered rather better in 1998 by Guy Claxton.

They come at it from very different angles, but dig beneath the surface, and there are very different views of thinking and learning implicit in these sources. It's easy to see the first as "mechanical". It's the sausage-machine model. Get the teaching right (including all the spuriously reified differentiation of learners--the must-know, should-know, could-know stuff, and the "extension activities" to stop any disruption from learners who manage to finish ahead of schedule) ...and they will learn. "Build it and they will come!" This is a bizarre inversion of the Field of Dreams idea.

In the interests of alliteration, for me it is the "drilling" model. I'm not going to get all touchy-feely romanticised naive-humanistic about this. My experience has been, I admit, mainly in "soft" teaching areas. Not with "soft" students and classes, by any means; but the bottom-line cognitive taxonomy issues have not loomed terribly large. And I know that they count for much more for other teachers, but...

Even in those areas, like teaching law (which is precise and even pedantic) the best laid plans are often waylaid by events (...oh boy! we've just moved into a whole different discourse. I'll leave it with this link) In the real world, as Gladwell suggests, teaching is more like a dance.

Dancing (at which I am very bad) involves (or did until 50 years ago, and I confess to being occicentric here --- hands up if you have encountered that term before) momentary dynamic flexible sensitive response to one's partner.

That's relatively easy one-to-one, of course. One Fred; one Ginger. And they rehearsed! Result--superb craft and perhaps art. One teacher; 30 learners? Can they dance?

It has been done. It is done every day; more often than one might think.

But a drilling ideology will never result in dancing.

So, on the whole, being an optimistic kind of guy; I look at those minute-by-minute session plans and think, "These are bureaucratic fictions". And when I sit in to observe teaching, it worries me if you follow them. OK; the minuet is a very prescribed dance. Oh pursue the analogy for yourself................

Interesting, isn't it?

On groping for the day

• "Carpe diem!" "Seize the day!"
• Great motto/slogan (although not one I have really practised, being an academic rather than a venture capitalist...)
• Still--it seemed like a good title for a blog post. Except that all my post headers seem to be in the form, "On..." (This was never a strategic decision, just a habit, but not one I feel inclined to break.)
• So! 'On "carpe diem"' ? That would work were I to be meditating on the phrase as such, but I'm actually going after the underlying sentiment. So I need to say something about "on Seizing the Day". That is banal; it needs the Latin. Prefixed, of course, with the trademark "on".
• So what is the construction? "carpentem diem" would seem to make sense. It is the logical extension of assuming that "carp -o -ere" is second (or indeed fourth) conjugation, and constructing the present participle from that root. But is the present participle the relevant part of speech? Depending on its place within the grammatical structure of the sentence, it may function as a gerund or indeed a gerundive (I have never understood what the difference is between them--and the more I quiz others [including my old friend Rodney, who must be the only surviving specimen of that wondrous species--the passionate classics master] about it, the less I understand.)
• So should I write "On 'carpentem diem'"? Or, of course, does the preposition take the dative or the ablative? It doesn't matter in practice, because the results will be the same....

However! What was this post supposed to be about? Sorry! I've forgotten.

I tried to sort out merely the title of this piece in an largely-forgotten and little practised language. At least the script was familiar.

Do you have overseas students?

On negotiating deferrals

I have just done my last teaching observation of the year, probably. It concerned a post-graduate course at another university, intended to develop the business skills of free-lance artists.

This post is not about the session itself, but some administrative business that I happened to witness. The course tutor came in, partly to greet the students for their last session of the year (good), and partly to nag them about getting their assignments in on time (bad, in my book).

In particular, one "student", in his late forties (?) had not submitted a particular piece of work. He had suffered sunstroke, he had been hospitalised for a few days, and he had been unable to work for two weeks. All that meant that, as a self-employed person, he had been unable to work and had probably lost 5% of his annual income... (OK, artists' incomes do not follow the same pattern as those of trades people, but they probably average out similarly.)

This guy had been chatting previously about how useful he had found the course; about all the new ideas he had gained about strategic planning, about how to bid for public commissions, about how to manage his taxes, and the like. He wanted to progress to the next stage of the programme, simply because this part had been so useful, he wanted to find out more. In reality, the acquisition of academic accreditation was way down on this list of priorities.

So the programme leader came in and started asking him whether he could produce medical evidence of his incapacity to submit for the deadline....

This kind of academic arrogance really bugs me! Even the medical profession has got beyond this! Who cares how long it takes him to get his work in? He'll only try to meet the deadline in order to stay on to the next stage of the programme anyway; letters after his name do not mean anything in his real world. It is the utility of the learning which keeps him going.

Well, my academic colleagues riposte--why should he have more time to complete this assignment than his fellow-students, unless he has a good excuse? He will have an unfair advantage. Grow up! Competition, if it exists in this group, is trivial. They want the learning, not the "qualification".

Luther (he'll see through that crude encoding, if he reads this) has finally submitted his work for module 5 of the PGCE. Four years late. So? [So he is lucky that I am not so retired that I will not mark it!] He needs to learn about deadlines, argues Phil Race (www.phil-race.com and I am not going to be more specific because the site is full of gems, so see you in a couple of hours...) Luther is a journalist by profession; he is the British "stringer" for several German newspapers. He teaches German "on the side". As a native speaker, he is in demand as a teacher. From an employment point of view, his "native speaker" status is vastly more important than a teaching qualification, but it is entirely to his credit that he sought one. Who are we to insist that he should complete it in a time-scale of our imposition?

A few years ago, when I sat on the university's "Research Degrees Committee", an agenda item concerned the compulsory termination of "out-of-time" students. One student had taken eight years, so far, on his Ph.D. The motion was to "terminate" him, despite the fact that he had dutifully paid his fees every year. This was clearly contrary to the Levinsky rules etc. Further questioning, however, revealed that this "student" was well into his seventies. He was simply fascinated by his subject. He had no real need to sign up for a Ph.D, but he thought it would at least ensure he could have someone (a.k.a. "supervisor") with whom to share his enthusiasm for whatever his topic was. He might complete; he might not. From the university's point of view, does it matter?

Would we bother, of course, were we not concerned to demonstrate the "completion" or "achievement" rates the government wants? Probably not.

What happened to valuing "learning", "study", "scholarship" etc. as opposed to "qualifications", "retention" and "achievement"?

On blackboards

Or "chalkboards" if you have highly-tuned PC sensors/censors! (They were originally physically black; you can still buy "blackboard" black paint at the DIY store. They turned green in the '70s because it is supposedly easier on the eye, before being largely abandoned in favour of "whiteboards". No-one makes any PC points about whiteboards...

• But not about "BlackBoard", which is a Virtual Learning Environment, which I personally detest as one of the clunkiest packages I have ever had to deal with, and which most of our students try not to use if they can avoid it. The interesting thing is how such a powerful brand was developed with such an un-PC name. Could it possibly suggest that most of the world does not share the (occasional) academic obsession with Political Correctness?
• No, this is about writing on boards with chalk. (What that? I hear you cry... Actually it is a form of gypsum, rather than "rock" chalk.) It predates whiteboards and pens, and is the basis of the usually derogatory phrase, "chalk and talk" used to describe pedestrian teaching.

As usual, a few things came together to promote this reflection;

• A correspondent made the point that in discussing "media" on the teaching site, I had ignored the traditional blackboard, and pointed me to the wonderful article linked to from the title of this piece, and
• The other day I called in at our resources centre for something obscure, and noticed that they still sell packs of chalk, both white and coloured. I asked Jo about this.
• (Jo is the assistant/technician/administrator/manager—I have no idea of her technical title—who manages this wonderful room from which students and staff can get everything from sheets of coloured card and glue-sticks to video-editing facilities. She does it with unfailing patience, good humour and expertise, even at this time of year when she and her part-time assistant are overwhelmed with student teachers trying to complete their final projects at the last minute.)
• She explained that while there are a few schools which still use chalkboards, students also use chalk for marking up, for example, mensuration exercises in school yards. There ain't no substitute.
• And I occasionally sat on committees with an economics professor who really annoyed everyone else by banging on about how chalk was the only practicable medium for economists.
• And my correspondent pointed out that in mathematics lectures, where substantial amounts of space are needed to write out equations, only chalk has the thickness of line to be legible from the back of a lecture theatre.
• And mathematicians need lots of space to write up their equations, so big, rolling chalkboards are just the thing.
• And Koerner's piece (link in title of this post) is, among other things, about the lecture as an unfolding narrative.

In other words, don't knock it. Every medium has its uses!

On reflective journals

It's that marking (grading) time of year again. One fascinating aspect of that is to get to read students' learning/reflective/professional journals. They go by a variety of names, but they are all thoughtful accounts of practice, which identify areas for development and make links to general principles (a.k.a. "theory").

Frankly, I haven't a clue how I mark them. That is phrased carefully. I know "how to" mark them; I authored the criteria in the tutors' handbook for the course. But that is different from the way I actually do it.

Students writing journals are frankly in a bind. Should they 'fess up to everything which went wrong, and gain marks for honesty and reflection? Yes; but of course they may lose marks for sheer incompetence. Or should they spin to emphasise success? Yes; but we can mark them down for being insufficiently self-critical.

It's the same kind of bind that convicts experience when applying for parole. If they admit their offences and exhibit remorse, they will be let out. But if they continue to protest their innocence, they stay in prison. What do they do if they are actually innocent? There have been a few recent cases which have highlighted this. (OK, I should reference them, but it's late and it's complicated to search for them... Are you going to mark me down on this?)

I'm glad I don't have to produce a reflective journal. Actually, I do, and this is it. But you are not going to mark or grade it (althought there is an occasionally-used comment facility; please use that more). But I don't have to do it. I do it because I find it useful to do it; and it does not matter very much what anyone else thinks.

Could I write like this if I thought someone would mark it? I'd like to think so, but frankly I don't believe it. Setting a "reflective journal" as an assessment task is highly problematic.

On the other side of the coin

This is viral, but not very reflective!

A friend just passed this link on to me; apart from being "The Onion" at its best, it puts a different slant on all those, "my computer crashed and I lost my work!" excuses.

On encouraging surface learning

I'm bemused! On 3 May I posted about the Cambridge University Extension Course I am taking at the local Retirement Education Centre, the content of which continues to be stimulating and enjoyable.

But last week I was slightly surprised that the lecturer introduced the session by telling us how to write an essay on the material covered to date (the tri-partite nature of knowledge). He explained that as it had to be 1500 words, it would consist of seven (or perhaps eight) paragraphs, and then summarised on the whiteboard what each paragraph should contain. Odd, I thought. One does not expect this kind of thing on a course such as this.

Today, after the coffee break, he raised the assessment issue again. It is important, he explained, because the funding of the course, and hence that of the Centre, is affected by the number of people passing the course. A discussion ensued, of course. If this were an Oxford course, he told us, we could have passed by merely producing a two-paragraph proposal, but under current Cambridge regulations we do actually have to write the essay, and it needs to be at least 1300 words. I asked whether we were confined to the set titles. Absolutely, he replied; after, all they did between them "cover the whole syllabus".

Did it matter, then, since the assessment was merely to secure the funding stream, whether we passed or not? He was surprised but then explained about the sheer hassle which would be created if anyone submitted and failed. But there was no reason to fail, he said, because he would explain exactly what was required...

Cambridge University is one of the great universities of the world. It is a bastion of liberal, if sometimes antiquated, educational values. The very idea of teaching a course on epistemology to a bunch of retired people who can only be expressively motivated is a wonderful remnant of liberal education in an increasingly instrumental world. What has it come to, then, when they are apparently forced to adopt an assessment regime which is both inherently anti-andragogic (sorry for the jargon—it's just shorthand) and even anti-humanistic, in one of the great traditional humanities disciplines?

It is, moreover, the kind of assessment which is almost forced to promote surface learning, in a group of students who would naturally tend towards deep learning. It virtually rules out engaging in the higher levels of the SOLO taxonomy, and indeed I would tell my students that it pitches at the lower levels of Bloom (or Krathwohl and Anderson)

Interested as I am in the notion of hidden and unintended curricula , (and especially given that the course is about the nature of knowledge), I am bemused by these contradictory messages.

Apparently only one person has ever submitted and failed (and he was a former Fellow of an Oxford College). Sorry, there may be another on the way!

On excusing oneself

This may well be one of those fatuous late-night "insights" which seem profound at 2.03 am but prove to be merely banal in the morning, but;

I have attended several conferences recently. It is a commonplace observation that conferences are as much about "networking" as about the substantive content of the sessions. "Networking" means, I think, making face-to-face contact with people who may be useful in developing one's ideas or promoting one's projects. That sounds exploitative, and in a sense it is; but if everyone knows the nature of the game, and has a mutual interest, the process is more accurately described as "symbiotic".

I am not good at it. I don't really want to be good at it. I prefer to meet people on the basis of being interested in each other, or at least in each others' ideas, for their own sake. Still, it is a fact of life, so it worth reflecting on.

The other day, at a day conference, I psyched myself up to approach several people I had never met before, to make myself known. I admit that I did so mainly for "networking" reasons. After all, I am now self-employed, so I have to make my "brand" known.

I have never attended any training on doing this (thank goodness), but I can imagine that if I were to do so, it would concentrate on how to introduce oneself (and cite much spurious research on the importance of first impressions).

But would it say anything about how to excuse oneself and get away?

There are several options, of course. Most famously, Mr Polly in H G Wells' novel, used to mutter, "Little dog!" and scurry off leaving the other person bewildered.

• The most obvious option is to let the other person break it off; but that may well mean that you have outstayed your welcome.
• You can always pretend to have spotted someone else you must talk to, across the crowded room; but that sends a message about the person you are currently talking to being less important than your next 'prospect'.
• You can of course acknowledge that the other people are busy, and say, "Well, I must let you get on..."; that's fine when there is more than one of them, but a bit phoney when you are going to leave them standing alone...

Some months ago, a friend and I were at a reception attended by a cabinet minister. Whatever my view of his politics and performance (I generally steer clear of such issues on this blog, but I confess he and his preceding lecture did impress me), I was really struck by his ability to "work the room". He spent several minutes with us, doing a good job of appearing to be interested in our work (which he almost certainly wasn't, of course, but I'm not going to accuse him of hypocrisy; I would rather that he feign interest rather than be dismissive), and then moved on. Sadly, I did not have the opportunity to observe his "moving on" technique; a Nigerian post-grad was brought into the conversation and he took the opportunity to bend the minister's ear about corruption in Nigeria, so we were simply isolated and drifted away.

Perhaps, if you are the focus of attention, that is the optimum strategy; let your previous interlocutors feel important and interesting, but be dragged away by prior obligations. But if you are not that important? And you just don't want to stand there mouthing inanities until you are dismissed or ignored?

(After all, the essence of "networking", I gather, is never to out-stay one's welcome. The scale of reception ranges from enthusiastic embrace through polite reception to [equally polite] rejection. One never wants to get a "rejection" on one's record...)

Frankly, I'm neither good at managing this nor interested at getting better at it. But it is an interesting cultural issue...

On self-assessment

A friend has sent me this link to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (the US equivalent of the THES). I discussed it with colleagues yesterday, and we agreed that it did not really accord with our experience of self-assessment exercises. On the whole our students tend to under-estimate their competence rather than over-estimate it.

We hypothesised (OK—guessed) that if true, this might be because our students are more mature than undergraduates (even clinical students in medical school), and/or it might be a cultural difference between the UK and the USA.

So some questions to anyone who actually reads this blog! It's about time you did some work—as if reading my ramblings were not work enough;

• Does anyone know of any UK research which focuses on similar issues? and in particular,
• Do you know of anything which compares the UK and the US on this? and/or
• Compares undergraduates and post-grads/professional course students?

Thanks, looking forward to hearing from you.

On nostalgia

Yesterday I grasped the nettle. I am actually retired, so I went to my first course at the Retirement Education Centre. It is a brilliant initiative in our town, which has now been going for a quarter-century or more (and with which I had occasion to argue twenty years ago).

The REC decided they wanted to add an extension to their building, and sought planning permission for it. In so doing they drew the attention of the local authority to the planning permissions which attached to all the properties in the Square where the REC is located; and it became apparent that the building in which I then worked did not have planning permission for use as a teaching facility. So we had to move out to a temporary building on another campus, where we stayed for nigh-on twenty years. If the REC had never mentioned it, our Social Work Education Centre might still be in that wonderful old Victorian house...

I signed up for a Cambridge University Extension course on epistemology, but I missed the first session last week, unfortunately. We are a group of about sixteen people; I may be the youngest, and the oldest is clearly well into his eighties (I hope I am as acute, when/if I reach that age). We are also, sadly, entirely white and --I suppose almost by definition-- middle class.

However, I got a course outline (two sides of A4) which specified a "syllabus" with "aims" and "content" but no "objectives", a sheet of guidance for the essay (it was already clear that submission of the assessment was primarily to ensure the continued funding of the course by the university, and had little to do with assessment of learning, although one can apparently accumulate credits towards a certificate if so inclined), and a reading list.

The session was around two hours, with a coffee-break. The tutor lectured, with occasional questions and thought experiments directed at us, and occasionally (well, quite regularly) having to field spontaneous questions from "students". He had a white-board, on which he wrote basic propositions, about three times. There were no handouts. There were no transparencies. There was no PowerPoint.

It was brilliant.

I can't wait to go back. This was andragogy at its best. There was absolutely no sense of being patronised; there were no assumptions ("objectives") about what we should "learn"; here was a teacher simply exposing his knowledge so that it might be shared by others, for no reason other than that it is interesting.

It was not about the tutor's technique. (He might of course read this, although it's highly unlikely unless I tell him about it.) He was clear, sometimes pedantically so. Occasionally he put down a contribution from the floor rather flatly, "No, that's incorrect, because..." (And he effectively told me I would have failed the undergraduate module on this because although my answer was right, I did not have the correct reasoning to reach it! Fair enough.) He made no concessions in terms of academic integrity to his audience of old buffers, which was great. I could see ways in which he could have judiciously illustrated some concepts to clarify them. But it was not about technique or tactics.

(I am not just basing my remarks on this one occasion; I have observed my students teaching here for several years.)

It was about "strategy" or really values. The REC's strategy/value base is clearly one of respect for their self-determining learners; they probably have to claim health benefits or something in bids for funding, but it's all run by the members. I know little about their funding streams. Members/students have to pay a subscription and a fee for each course, so they may be a self-financing "club" (which will of course exclude quite a lot of retired people, who have other financial priorities). Clearly the Learning and Skills Council will not be interested, because members have by definition finished "work", in the sense of making an economic contribution.

However; this is what "life-long learning" is really all about, as far as I am concerned. Who knows what people are gaining from it? Who knows how it is affecting the economy? Who knows whether these economically unproductive people who are about to die, will pass on their knowledge to their grandchildren, the workers of the future? Who cares?

Still, the bottom line is that somewhere there are still scholarly learning opportunities for intrinsically motivated learners, which are about liberal education, based on the conviction that it is a Good Thing. Per se. Deontologically.

Long may it continue!

See also the University of the Third Age