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!