I am reading Richard Sennett's (2008) The Craftsman London; Allen Lane. It is a brilliant attempt to make explicit the implicit or tacit "knowledge" which underpins craft skill; and it fails. I've read a couple of reviews, such as Roger Scruton's in the Sunday Times and Fiona MacCarthy's in the Guardian. They are both respectful and enthusiastic, but also suggest that he has missed out somewhere. Perhaps we want him to. Perhaps craftsmanship ought to be a little mysterious?
Sennett tackles his topic in the form of an erudite meditation, in the manner of Montaigne, albeit at much greater length. This is becoming, it seems to me, an ever more popular genre; I've also just read Lewis Hyde's (1983/2006) The Gift, and Thomas De Zengotita's (2005) Mediated and I confess I have given up on Michael Frayn's (2006) The Human Touch. They are all fascinating and provoke admiration at the range of material and allusion they contain, but they do tend to attract attention more to the author than to the topic, and on the whole they stay within the author's intellectual comfort zone.
The linked article from the title of this entry (pardon the political allusions in it, which will soon be very dated) is much more hard-headed and of course journalistic. It is almost certainly more useful; and I wonder why Sennett (I must confess I still have 50 pages to go) does not draw on this well-established research tradition. After all, he draws lessons from playing music and boning a chicken...
However; watch this, and think about what kind of practice regime these guys have to engage in to exhibit this effortless and entertaining skill.
05 March 2008
02 March 2008
On creativity and education
TED is a brilliant site, full of thought-provoking stuff. Ken Robinson's piece is a virtuoso performance as a performance, as well as of course containing some really worth-while insights. Sadly, if you go to the TED site itself and read some of the comments, there is a distinct failure to understand that this is all part of a conversation and debate...
25 February 2008
On when to give up
(In a similar vein, see this article, too)
There comes a point when the sensible thing is to give up. The article describes several students who have made that quite rational decision; unfortunately the government does not seem to be capable of acting with similar rationality. Of course, to do so would be to concede that ordinary people are sometimes more sensible than governments, so perhaps their denial is a little more understandable.
The 50% participation figure was plucked out of the air anyway. It was quite a noble if naive aspiration, but it is clearly not going to work, and the money could be spent better elsewhere.
Both this and other educational targets for literacy and numeracy achievement wilfully ignore the bell-curve distribution of abilities within the population. (I say, "abilities" because it goes for athletic ability, and musical talent and even maturity and sunny disposition [sorry, now known as "emotional intelligence"] and good teeth just as much as it does for academic ability.) If that level is seriously low, probably lower than in comparable countries, then by all means try and improve it. You will probably succeed and make quite rapid progress at first. In the current cliche, which is quite accurate and Aesopian, you are "plucking the low-hanging fruit". But then it get more difficult; more and more effort and money is required for less and less gain; the law of diminishing returns has set in. This is the case in all such areas of public policy.
But what started out as emphasising increasing opportunities has become an end in itself, as usual; and the degree, the qualification rather than the learning which led to it, has equally become an end in itself. Just as have improving pass rates for national exams. It is not an ideological point to observe that such obsessions with meeting targets for their own sake must distort the processes they are supposed to improve. They must dumb down.
And the only thing which cannot be pursued for its own sake in this system is education; even the word itself, in a truly Orwellian move, has disappeared from the titles of the government departments supposedly promoting it.
It is time to give up.
There comes a point when the sensible thing is to give up. The article describes several students who have made that quite rational decision; unfortunately the government does not seem to be capable of acting with similar rationality. Of course, to do so would be to concede that ordinary people are sometimes more sensible than governments, so perhaps their denial is a little more understandable.
The 50% participation figure was plucked out of the air anyway. It was quite a noble if naive aspiration, but it is clearly not going to work, and the money could be spent better elsewhere.
Both this and other educational targets for literacy and numeracy achievement wilfully ignore the bell-curve distribution of abilities within the population. (I say, "abilities" because it goes for athletic ability, and musical talent and even maturity and sunny disposition [sorry, now known as "emotional intelligence"] and good teeth just as much as it does for academic ability.) If that level is seriously low, probably lower than in comparable countries, then by all means try and improve it. You will probably succeed and make quite rapid progress at first. In the current cliche, which is quite accurate and Aesopian, you are "plucking the low-hanging fruit". But then it get more difficult; more and more effort and money is required for less and less gain; the law of diminishing returns has set in. This is the case in all such areas of public policy.
But what started out as emphasising increasing opportunities has become an end in itself, as usual; and the degree, the qualification rather than the learning which led to it, has equally become an end in itself. Just as have improving pass rates for national exams. It is not an ideological point to observe that such obsessions with meeting targets for their own sake must distort the processes they are supposed to improve. They must dumb down.
And the only thing which cannot be pursued for its own sake in this system is education; even the word itself, in a truly Orwellian move, has disappeared from the titles of the government departments supposedly promoting it.
It is time to give up.
21 February 2008
On another swallow--but still far short of a summer
Another voice to add to the general trend identified in previous posts—a recognition that the instrumentalism of HE has gone too far.
18 February 2008
On the restoration of sense
I am indebted to a correspondent from New Zealand (whose actual email I have accidentally deleted, it appears) for drawing my attention to this article, apropos of my remarks a few days ago about the theremin player. I can only whole-heartedly endorse Pring's remarks.
14 February 2008
On special music
First; enjoy!
Second; Watch this clip and Pamelia's absorption in making music. I noted, for what it is worth;
Second; Watch this clip and Pamelia's absorption in making music. I noted, for what it is worth;
- How abstract the theremin is; she is getting no tactile feedback as she would have if playing a 'cello, for example.
- Her total absorption in the task, and her limited ability to talk about it; no criticism implied, other than of our "educational" system which identifies skill and expertise with the ability to write about having it...
02 February 2008
On cultural ignorance
One can take many different stances on Woolworth's withdrawal of a range of children's furniture called "Lolita". My take is about education and cultural background.
Woolworth stores are an enormous organisation. They doubtless employ thousands of graduates. Some of them will not be business studies or IT or whatever specialists. Some will be humanities graduates...
And none of them recognised the connotations of "Lolita"?!
That is what happens when instrumentalism takes over.
Woolworth stores are an enormous organisation. They doubtless employ thousands of graduates. Some of them will not be business studies or IT or whatever specialists. Some will be humanities graduates...
And none of them recognised the connotations of "Lolita"?!
That is what happens when instrumentalism takes over.
21 January 2008
On saying it yet again, but never too often...
This article is an old staple, re-worked every year. It needs to be, particularly for teachers. I know I am violating the rule with this cryptic introduction, but if teachers don't express themselves clearly, how will learners do so?
The article even mentions one of the current education buzz-words, "diversity". Its current counterpart is "inclusivity". They are both used so much that they no longer mean anything. They merely point to a poverty of thought at the heart of an educational system which has lost all confidence in the value of what it teaches.
The article even mentions one of the current education buzz-words, "diversity". Its current counterpart is "inclusivity". They are both used so much that they no longer mean anything. They merely point to a poverty of thought at the heart of an educational system which has lost all confidence in the value of what it teaches.
17 January 2008
On feeling at home
"In Our Time" is one of the most improbable glorious media successes imaginable. Melvyn Bragg discusses one unashamedly intellectual topic with three academics for three-quarters of an hour. Yet more evidence that Radio 4 is the Enlightenment.
Just look at the topics for this series, in reverse order;
But today's programme topped the lot! As an undergraduate at Sussex in the 60s, I effectively took a term out from the formal course requirements (I went through the motions, as most undergraduates do nowadays [sorry!], but my heart and most of my head was elsewhere) to pursue the grail myth; Eliot was my starting point, through Weston to Frazer and R S Loomis to Malory and de Troyes via .... It was an exhilarating quest; I pestered librarians in the basement of Falmer House before the proper library was completed, to drag obscure stuff out of the stacks for me, and went back day after day in the hope that they might have arrived...
The story has fascinated me ever since but even so, today's discussion--if it did not actually tell me anything new--put a lot of material into perspective. The notion of the grail as an object to be possessed even after the loss of the holy land in the crusades... How the first world war provided a lens to view the Waste Land... Wow!
Next week plate tectonics...
Just look at the topics for this series, in reverse order;
- The Fisher King - the wound that does not heal
- The Charge of the Light Brigade - "All in the valley of Death rode the six hundred"
- Albert Camus - Rebel with a Cause
- The Nicene Creed - when Christ became God
- The Four Humours - yellow bile, blood, choler and phlegm in the original theory of everything
- The Sassanian Empire - in the shadow of Ancient Persia
- Genetic Mutation - the error-strewn secrets of life
- The Fibonacci Sequence - the numbers in nature
But today's programme topped the lot! As an undergraduate at Sussex in the 60s, I effectively took a term out from the formal course requirements (I went through the motions, as most undergraduates do nowadays [sorry!], but my heart and most of my head was elsewhere) to pursue the grail myth; Eliot was my starting point, through Weston to Frazer and R S Loomis to Malory and de Troyes via .... It was an exhilarating quest; I pestered librarians in the basement of Falmer House before the proper library was completed, to drag obscure stuff out of the stacks for me, and went back day after day in the hope that they might have arrived...
The story has fascinated me ever since but even so, today's discussion--if it did not actually tell me anything new--put a lot of material into perspective. The notion of the grail as an object to be possessed even after the loss of the holy land in the crusades... How the first world war provided a lens to view the Waste Land... Wow!
Next week plate tectonics...
15 January 2008
On learning outcomes and the study of English
The Quality Assurance Agency is an easy target for UK academics. It is incredibly bureaucratic, and preparing for its "reviews" (inspections) soaks up vast amounts of time which could certainly be spent on other things. It has contributed to the development of a compliance culture in teaching in universities which is quite counter-productive, and it is great fun when someone like Thomas Docherty of Warwick swings his trusty broadsword of iconoclasm at it. (It is far from as much fun when Peter Williams, chief executive of the QAA, contrives to be waspish, patronising and smug in his response, all at the same time.)
But... Docherty is really against the notion that universities exist to get students to reach pre-determined learning outcomes. He teaches English, and I am right behind him on that. For English. I did my first degree in English. It was, I am happy to say, almost totally useless; that is not a criticism. So it did not matter what we actually learned, directly. We learned an enormous amount indirectly, but it was probably different for each of us. That was fine.
One thing I did learn, though, was how almost lethal it is to one's enjoyment of literature to have to read it and write about it every week. A week to compare Richardson's "Clarissa" (well over a thousand pages) and Fielding's "Tom Jones" (500 pages)? Stupid--but, yes, I did actually read them. Immediately after finals I turned to reading science fiction and touched nothing with any literary pretensions for twenty year, to my loss.
Perhaps we ought to specify in advance some non-learning outcomes; what we shall do our utmost to ensure that students do not learn from a course...
However, I digress. I wonder if English is not unique, or at least exceptional, in being a discipline where pre-determined outcomes may indeed be inimical to learning? They certainly make very good sense for any discipline which is in any sense instrumental or professionally focused. English is also largely a divergent discipline; convergent ones take to pre-determined outcomes much more readily. I wonder what fine art academics make of the point?
And of course there is the question of level; I know that knowing what happens in "Vanity Fair" does not really qualify as the study of English Literature, but familiarity with the canon (heresy!) is surely a sine qua non? And that requires pre-determined outcomes. They may not apply to the higher slopes of Bloom's taxonomy but they certainly apply at the lower levels.
However, I should recognise that I am out of touch; the study of English has changed enormously since my day having been colonised by the intellectual flatulence and empirical insouciance of incomprehensible French writers. Not that it matters that they are incomprehensible, or whether there are any learning outcomes associated with teaching about them; it is in the nature of post-modernism that it is impossible to be wrong!
But... Docherty is really against the notion that universities exist to get students to reach pre-determined learning outcomes. He teaches English, and I am right behind him on that. For English. I did my first degree in English. It was, I am happy to say, almost totally useless; that is not a criticism. So it did not matter what we actually learned, directly. We learned an enormous amount indirectly, but it was probably different for each of us. That was fine.
One thing I did learn, though, was how almost lethal it is to one's enjoyment of literature to have to read it and write about it every week. A week to compare Richardson's "Clarissa" (well over a thousand pages) and Fielding's "Tom Jones" (500 pages)? Stupid--but, yes, I did actually read them. Immediately after finals I turned to reading science fiction and touched nothing with any literary pretensions for twenty year, to my loss.
Perhaps we ought to specify in advance some non-learning outcomes; what we shall do our utmost to ensure that students do not learn from a course...
However, I digress. I wonder if English is not unique, or at least exceptional, in being a discipline where pre-determined outcomes may indeed be inimical to learning? They certainly make very good sense for any discipline which is in any sense instrumental or professionally focused. English is also largely a divergent discipline; convergent ones take to pre-determined outcomes much more readily. I wonder what fine art academics make of the point?
And of course there is the question of level; I know that knowing what happens in "Vanity Fair" does not really qualify as the study of English Literature, but familiarity with the canon (heresy!) is surely a sine qua non? And that requires pre-determined outcomes. They may not apply to the higher slopes of Bloom's taxonomy but they certainly apply at the lower levels.
However, I should recognise that I am out of touch; the study of English has changed enormously since my day having been colonised by the intellectual flatulence and empirical insouciance of incomprehensible French writers. Not that it matters that they are incomprehensible, or whether there are any learning outcomes associated with teaching about them; it is in the nature of post-modernism that it is impossible to be wrong!
04 January 2008
On improbable research
To brighten up your day; that wonderful institution, "The Annals of Improbable Research" is now online for free. The site's strap-line says it all; "Research that makes people laugh and then think". Unlike other humour sites, though, this one is factual.
03 January 2008
On new posts on sister blog
In preparation for some imminent study events, I am posting a few further thoughts about threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. Click on the heading link to catch up over the next few days, and do get back to me even if you are not on that course—it's open to all.
01 January 2008
On the Edge of a New Year
If you only read one website this year (apart from this, of course), you find enough at the Edge to keep you going all year.
31 December 2007
On the passing of a year and an era
I wrote some time ago about the death of Tony Nuttall. Now I've heard, a little late, about the passing of his more gloriously disorganised friend, Stephen Medcalf.
I knew him, Horatio... But there's not the point. The point is made well by Gabriel Josipovici (my personal tutor, although he won't remember that) in the obituary;
Going through the obituaries, the word which sticks in my mind is "inspirational". He was probably deemed "research inactive" for the Research Assessment Exercises before he retired. The Quality Assurance Agency would have thrown up their hands in horror at him (more mundanely, it is claimed that the university cleaners refused to enter his office...) Some students would have not had a clue what to make of him.
But read this (which he was apparently encouraged to write by a former student, a certain Ian McEwan) for an insight into the mind of a humanist (not in the religious sense; Stephen was a devout Anglican). There are depths of significance and resonance here which are not merely affectations for publication; they were simply the waters in which Stephen swam, and they have a natural richness which few of us can share, for all our striving.
Alongside all the conventional wishes for health, happiness, prosperity, etc., I can't just wish Stephen's sensibilities to you; they represented years of committed and serious scholarly enjoyment, but it's never too late to start. So I had better get on with it!
I knew him, Horatio... But there's not the point. The point is made well by Gabriel Josipovici (my personal tutor, although he won't remember that) in the obituary;
He would not have lasted long in the present academic climate, which is the poorer for turning its back on people like Medcalf ... who felt that what they were there for was to teach, to impart to their students the values they themselves had learned from their teachers and from the authors they admired.
Going through the obituaries, the word which sticks in my mind is "inspirational". He was probably deemed "research inactive" for the Research Assessment Exercises before he retired. The Quality Assurance Agency would have thrown up their hands in horror at him (more mundanely, it is claimed that the university cleaners refused to enter his office...) Some students would have not had a clue what to make of him.
But read this (which he was apparently encouraged to write by a former student, a certain Ian McEwan) for an insight into the mind of a humanist (not in the religious sense; Stephen was a devout Anglican). There are depths of significance and resonance here which are not merely affectations for publication; they were simply the waters in which Stephen swam, and they have a natural richness which few of us can share, for all our striving.
Alongside all the conventional wishes for health, happiness, prosperity, etc., I can't just wish Stephen's sensibilities to you; they represented years of committed and serious scholarly enjoyment, but it's never too late to start. So I had better get on with it!
22 December 2007
On plagiarism
I came across this story when idly pursuing links. (I can heartily recommend the site to check out scare stories and urban myths on the net.)
There is a variant in my experience. In about 1974 or '75 I was teaching on the "Certificate in the Residential Care of Children and Young People" (CRCCYP) programme at Salford College of Technology. Our external examiner was Chris Beedell of Bristol University. Following standard practice, we sent him a sample of student work before the assessment board meeting.
On this occasion, he took aside a colleague to say, "You may be excused for not noticing that three pages of this assignment have been copied directly from my book, but not for giving it only a 'D'!"
There is a variant in my experience. In about 1974 or '75 I was teaching on the "Certificate in the Residential Care of Children and Young People" (CRCCYP) programme at Salford College of Technology. Our external examiner was Chris Beedell of Bristol University. Following standard practice, we sent him a sample of student work before the assessment board meeting.
On this occasion, he took aside a colleague to say, "You may be excused for not noticing that three pages of this assignment have been copied directly from my book, but not for giving it only a 'D'!"
18 December 2007
On an online petition
I got this from Chris Pegler at the Open University, and I'm happy to pass it on. The petition already has over 16,000 signatures.
You are probably already aware that the government is intending to withdraw funding for students studying courses which are a lower or equivalent qualification (ELQ) to that which they already hold. They are perhaps studying a PG Certificate course and already have a Masters Degree. The idea behind this is to prioritise spending on those who do not yet have that level of qualification, but the change is likely to: a) cause problems to delivering lifelong learning - as it will affect older students and those changing career/reskilling; and b) be a nightmare to administer as there is no clear record of what courses students may have done previously. Students on the same course will pay different fees.
There are some proposed exceptions and the changes will be phased in over three years. There is also an enquiry. This is operating to tight deadlines and the DIUS recently announced a change to the date for submission of evidence. Submission now has to be made by 7 January 2008 (instead of 14 January).
The relevant web site address is http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/ius/ius_061207.cfm
You may be interested in responding yourself, or belong to an institution which you feel should respond. Or you might like to sign the petition at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ELQFunding/
You are probably already aware that the government is intending to withdraw funding for students studying courses which are a lower or equivalent qualification (ELQ) to that which they already hold. They are perhaps studying a PG Certificate course and already have a Masters Degree. The idea behind this is to prioritise spending on those who do not yet have that level of qualification, but the change is likely to: a) cause problems to delivering lifelong learning - as it will affect older students and those changing career/reskilling; and b) be a nightmare to administer as there is no clear record of what courses students may have done previously. Students on the same course will pay different fees.
There are some proposed exceptions and the changes will be phased in over three years. There is also an enquiry. This is operating to tight deadlines and the DIUS recently announced a change to the date for submission of evidence. Submission now has to be made by 7 January 2008 (instead of 14 January).
The relevant web site address is http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/ius/ius_061207.cfm
You may be interested in responding yourself, or belong to an institution which you feel should respond. Or you might like to sign the petition at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ELQFunding/
13 December 2007
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.
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.
04 December 2007
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;
And the best chilli is rarely the hottest.
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?
And the best chilli is rarely the hottest.
02 December 2007
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
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
01 December 2007
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.
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