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

On talking to ourselves

A few minutes ago I went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, and flipped on the radio, as I normally do. This link came up (but these things expire, so whether you will be able to listen to it again, I don't know).

It was an interesting programme about whether "youth" or "yoof" culture really belongs to the young any more. But what struck me was the tone; it was expressed in a manner which clearly said, "This is about 'yoof' culture; but in order to show that we are beyond that kind of thing, we will speak in a pompous academic cultural-studies jargon, lest you think we might actually enjoy it!" Several of the contributors managed to add irritating vocal mannerisms, just to make the point more clearly.

Actually, what they had to say was indeed quite interesting, once I had translated it. But the main message was one of distancing from the substance of the topic—to the extent that I wondered whom it was addressing. I have no idea who was listening (probably not many at 9 on a Sunday evening), but the interesting issue is the producers' fantasy about their potential audience and what they might be interested to hear. They seemed to assume that their listeners rather guiltily liked current youth culture, but being baby-boomer middle-aged, they needed some extrinsic justification for attending to it; they provided that by framing it in pseudo-sociological and "cultural studies" jargon.

Personally, I can't stand current "youth" culture [fifteen-page "grumpy old man" rant deleted]. And, as the programme argued (I think) it's important that the preceding generation find it objectionable, or else it would not belong to "youth". And defining oneself in terms of what one is not, by exclusion, is the crudest level of identity formation. But this kind of discourse is playing just the same game.

On getting feedback

I've finally cleared out my office. My successor starts work on Tuesday, and I wish her all the best.

For years I have stored all kinds of ancient files in my office, and moved them unthinkingly from institution to institution and office to office. Actually, last time I moved across campus, four years ago, I contrived to "lose" the contents of three whole filing-cabinets, and no-one ever noticed, least of all me. In fact, recently I have not opened my one remaining filing cabinet for months; and today I found a half-bottle of champagne and a box of chocolates in one drawer! And—I am pleased to say—evidence that supermarket plastic carrier-bags are really bio-degradeable; this one fell to pieces as I tried to lift it.

However, my really ancient files pre-date computer use, and the most ancient of them all were from my undergraduate days. Hand-written essays with hand-written tutor comments on them. First, I was struck by the detailed comments, at the same level as I aspire to nowadays. Then I read some of the summary comments at the end (we didn't get a grade for routine essays; all the assessment was by "finals"--three weeks of concentrated exams at the end of the whole three-year course.)

I was not at Oxbridge, but at Sussex, then known as "Balliol-by-the-sea", which adopted the same pattern of teaching. The only obligatory attendance requirement was at a weekly tutorial for each course (module); usually one or two students with a tutor. A student read out an essay, and it was discussed, and then another essay was set; so if there were two students, one produced an essay to read and discuss, and the other got written feedback on theirs.

And reading the comments on one of my first-year essays, I was transported back to the tutorial. I don't remember the details at the moment, but they'll come back to me; what I do remember is my mortification at reading those summary comments. Frankly, I was used to praise or encouragement for my efforts at school, but these were not like that. They provided feedback on the content, at an uncompromising academic level.

And I remember how I reacted. Just as we complain that our students react. (Yes, of course I know every sentence needs a verb in the main clause, you pedant!) I did not read them, until now, 40+ years later. I could not bear to. I just felt "put down". And so I did not benefit from their points.

Tutors gave critical feedback to the student who read their essay, of course. But it was verbal, and uttered in their presence (and in the presence of another student, usually) and therefore modified and often mollified by the conversational interaction and social context. I remember one tutorial in which a tutor took me to task for denying the sexual element of courtly love, in mediaeval literature. Even allowing for the waning inhibitions of the time (1964) he did so very gently, especially as my co-tutee was clearly much more worldly-wise than me. But what would he have written down, had I not been "presenting" that week?

Written feedback needs to be addressed to the student, not merely an expression of our own reactions. Consider how the student will read it (if at all--and, I now realise, don't castigate them for not reading and acting on it) and what you want to achieve by providing it.

I am now going to revisit the marking matrix (see http://www.doceo.co.uk/academic/marking.htm, for an up-coming module to check that it provides guidance on how to improve, rather than mere condemnation of aspects of failure. Perhaps then students will be able to summon up the courage to read it.

On jargon

This is not just another excuse to publicise the article the heading links to. Honest!

I passed on the link above to my brother, who responded;

Thanks for the TES web site reference - I have just had a look at it although I didn't understand much of what it was about! [...] By the way, what are 'givens'?

How could anyone not understand it? Very easily. When Richard drew attention to it, I re-read it from the viewpoint of a non-teacher, and I was surprised by the jargon phrases which pepper it. We have developed a private/professional language which excludes those who are not privy to it, but it has crept up on us, so it takes an "outsider" to draw attention to it.

This problem (?) is endemic to all occupational groups. The more we develop a professional shorthand, the more we exclude those who do not share it. We expect it of doctors, lawyers, and engineers; it is part of their mystique, and some of them cultivate it for their own vested interests.

But teachers? We are supposed to be committed to the dissemination of knowledge, rather than to corralling it. OK, there is a necessary professional jargon, largely enshrined in abbreviations, about GCSEs, NVQs, OCN, SEN, NQF levels and the like (and don't worry if you don't know what all of them mean—that merely reflects sub-divisions within the whole).

But education belongs to everyone. In the jargon (of course) of current political discourse, everyone is a "stakeholder" in education. So our language should be as transparent as possible. (That, of course, is an example of the kind of insidious jargon I am talking about; it means "everybody should be able to understand what we are talking about")

Most of the feedback (what's that? It refers to email messages about my websites—yes, I know that is jargon, too, but how far can you prune it back? That's a serious question... as is the use of gardening metaphor... My brain hurts! And that's an allusion to Monty Python...)

As I was saying before I rudely interrupted myself— Most of the feedback about my sites compliments me on avoiding jargon (or at least on de-mystifying it), but it comes from people within the teaching/learning/education community, who just don't notice the extent to which we have developed a private language.

And: "what is a 'given'?" It is shorthand for a "given truth; an idea which is so self-evidently true that there is no point in questioning it. a.k.a 'no-brainer'. 'Given' as in 'handed down from above with impeccable authority'" Self-evident, isn't it? No. Not if you are a chemical engineer.

But then, I haven't a clue what he is talking about within his discipline.

The difference is, that apart from extreme situations like public inquiries into pollution, my brother has no obligation to be "transparent" to the rest of us. But educators do.

On laser spirit levels

A few weeks ago I picked up a cheap laser spirit level (£4.99) at a motorway service station, as an impulse buy. It was a good buy, because unlike the laser pointers (costing three or four times as much) you can buy to highlight parts of your presentation, it produces a line rather than a spot.

However, today I found a proper DIY job for it. Arrange a series of picture up the staircase. It dutifully generated the require line, and after a little tweaking I got it parallel with the dado rail, and hence (by trusting inference) with the stairs themselves. It was easy to measure regular intervals along the line and mark for the picture-hooks. Great!

Unfortunately, the pictures hang from cords, and it is impossible to tie the cords to precisely the same length, so despite the preparation, the overall array is a mess. Or was, until I spent goodness knows how long moving picture hooks and re-tying cords and testing by eye to get it right.

There's a moral here, related to Ashby's law of requisite variety ;

The most potent element of the system is the one you can't measure

It's certainly true of teaching.

That's what makes it so much fun!

On neuro-diversity

(On re-visiting this post, I find that the link I posted now leads to a gambling site which tries to trap you there; so I've removed the link—and hence most of the point of the post—but there's still some point to it. If I find the blog again I'll re-link.)

I was clicking along to "next blog..." when I came across this one. Having just had fascinating presentations at our course Symposium about neurodiversity, it rung bells for me; there is no information at all about the blogger, but is he (probably "he") an "Aspie"? (Apparently their preferred term for people with Asperger's syndrome.)

For more on Asperger's, go to http://www.neurodiversity.com/asperger_general.html and read "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" by Mark Haddon (London; Vintage, 2004); it may have been criticised by experts and clinicians, but for the lay reader it offers great insights into Asperger's, and it's also an intriguing read.

On e-learning

My (now former) university is keen on e-learning. We have a Virtual Learning Environment or "VLE" (Blackboard, in case you want to know; personally I think they should have gone with Moodle, which is open source and free and much more customisable, but they did go to a lot of trouble to make up their minds—although I don't remember Moodle ever being mentioned.)

Still, there is a requirement for every course to show how it is making use of the VLE; there is now a 25-question form to fill in for every validation. In practice, of course, this means that academics mostly use it as an electronic cupboard; they upload their presentations and handouts when they remember to.

Obviously, I'm quite keen on making use of the net (I use the term advisedly) to complement and support learning, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this. But I detest the VLE; it's clunky, putting material on it is slow (ftp is much faster and more flexible and takes about five minutes to learn at most), and accessing mainstream web pages from it is a joke. The VLE does set out to do a lot of things, but it ends up doing none of them very well.

Today we had a Course Board, which includes reports from student representatives about their experience of the course, which we take very seriously. There was a clear theme through all the student reports (among other things); the VLE does not work. They complained about problems with accessing it, and navigating it if and when they got in (it takes five or six clicks through various layers to get to any substantive content, and for technical reasons half our students can't work in groups with the other half). And this was after major efforts to promote it at induction and throughout the course, and much whip-cracking by our e-learning co-ordinator to ensure that staff posted materials on it (she threatened to remove their buttons if they did not comply—a fearsome threat!)

This might merely have been a matter of dubious gripes, (although I did get a mini-cheer in the committee when I floated the notion that the whole enterprise might be over-blown—tempered with later points which indicated, in the nicest possible way, that I am a respected but eccentric old-timer) but;

Later on we had an evaluation of our residential event based on a questionnaire of everyone attending. I had slipped in a question about "Are you finding the VLE a useful resource for the course as a whole?" The results were unequivocal; (n=82 out of a possible population 0f 108)

• Very useful; 2%
• Quite useful; 21%
• Not at all useful; 77%

I admit that there may be technical issues here. Some of the colleges in which our students work use Moodle, and they are generally quite enthusiastic about it; there may be issues about the implementation of our VLE, and we did not ask any follow-up questions. Even so...

Someone commented to me afterwards; "If you had asked about usage of your website, you would have got a very different answer!" Maybe. I'd like to think so (and some spontaneous comments by students suggest this is not merely a fantasy) but we still have a long way to go to make e-learning really useful to those who are not forced—by course design—to use it.

(We didn't ask about it in the evaluation, but many people commented in the face-to-face review session on how useful they found the opportunity to go to the library)

On immediate reflection

I haven't posted for several days partly for technical reasons (not being able to get a connection at "the only free 'top to bottom' wireless hotel in the Madison area") but partly simply being very busy at the above conference and meeting with colleagues and new friends in the University of Wisconsin system. There has been so much to think about...

Hang on! Isn't that what reflection is meant to be about? Thinking about what happens and what we do? Yes, but... It takes time.

It so happens that today I caught "How to write a political diary" on BBC Radio 4, while driving (listen again, for a week, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/pip/3fb2t/ ) It suggested various rules for the genre, including Immediacy and Indiscretion (I didn't catch the other two). But the virtue of a diary may be the vice of a reflective journal. The latter requires digestion.

For the political diarist, immediacy is essential; it doesn't matter if you prove to be wrong, it is the thought of the moment which captures the political process. One contributor to the programme said he only wrote his diary the following morning, when the passions--and inebriation--of the previous day had subsided; but Tony Benn (who is teetotal--with the emphasis on the "tea" [sic]) always dictates his before going to bed.

Reflection is one stage further down the line. Reflection in action is rarely recorded, important though it may be; reflection on action calls for a mental process of digestion and contextualisation. That is often tortuous and trying to record it at the same time as thinking and feeling it is very difficult for most of us.

It's the process of writing which is the key. It is not mere transcription (transcription of what, precisely?) It imposes a discipline of coherence; and the tension between spontaneity and coherence is a real one. A reflective journal should not (in my view; "shoulds" are problematic) be either a mere emotional abreaction to the events of the day, nor a rationalised public account of its achievements. Its essence is to be somewhere in-between.

At least, that's my excuse for not saying more about Wisconsin. Yet.

Apart from the self-evident truths that we had a busy week, a great time, relished the disorientating subtle differences in culture between the UK and USA, were bombarded with ideas which need thinking through, and met some great people in the University of Wisconsin system, and... this is a sentence without a main clause verb.

When I start writing like that, it's time for bed (Zebedee (c. 1970) The Magic Roundabout (ed. E Thompson) London; BBCTV
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When I start referncing like that, it's definite!