On meltdown

The reductio ad absurdum of the loss of academic trust.

On primary sources of chaos

Nowadays, even respectable writing often relies on secondary sources. One of the most-cited ideas of the current period is that the flapping of a butterfly's/humming-bird's/mosquito's wing in Peru/Brazil/Panama (it's usually South America) can cause a hurricane/typhoon/tornado/flood in the US/Russia/wherever.

Click on the heading link for the primary source, from Ed Lorenz (1917-2008), and get the answers right next time you use it.

But thanks too for the secondary source which put me on to this (the full link will break the layout).

On gloriously silly evidence of education

A classicist's commentary on Doctor Who (12 April 08); but read the comments! Hint; scroll to the bottom and read them chronologically, id est upwards.

On dyslexia and the structure of language and learning

The linked article reports on neurological research on dyslexia among English and Chinese speakers, suggesting that its manifestations in brain activity are quite different.

That's not unexpected, given that the structure of alphabetic writing and that using Chinese idiographs (apologies if I got that term wrong) is so radically different. Chinese readers have to remember the shape of thousands of characters; alphabetic readers need to remember only about forty standard phonemes and a few wild variations (such as the notorious "-ough"), even in English.

Much of the work on cultural differences in approaches to learning, such as that of Biggs (1996)* comments on Chinese students' ability to (apparently) learn by rote, and their (apparent) adoption of surface learning approaches; but it goes on to suggest that this is deceptive. My own conversations with Chinese academics suggest that they do not recognise this account; indeed, the deep/surface distinction seems less than helpful to them.

Speculating wildly, but someone may even now be taking this up— might the difference in approach have little to do with "Confucian heritage", but more with orthography? Indeed, may both the Confucian heritage (do read Karen Armstrong's wonderful The Great Transformation [2007]) and the approach to learning stem from the "brain-training" associated with learning vast numbers of discrete items?

• Indeed (do excuse me, I feel a geekish episode coming on; feel free to stop reading) Nakamura (1964)** suggests that Chinese thought tends towards the concrete (rather than speculative or spiritual), which might perhaps reflect their ability to handle large numbers of discrete items in working memory at a time...?

However, does this pose questions not only for teaching and assessment methods but also the construction of curricula for Chinese students (given their ever-greater importance in both the HE and FE sectors)?***

*Search for [Biggs "confucian heritage" student learning] for a range of useful references
** Nakamura H (1964) Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples (tr. P Wiener) Honolulu; University of Hawaii Press [I knew I'd be able to cite that some day; it's earned its continuing place on my shelf!]
*** I'm not going down a Sapir/Whorf line on linguistic determinism, but the Chinese record on human rights, at home, in Tibet, and by neglect in Africa is very grim. It's just a little too tempting to speculate and generalise too much and sail close to the racist wind, though.

On personal preferences in learning

Not "learning styles"! That idea is useless and counter-productive, but nonetheless people do have preferences about how they learn best.

And the material on my sites certainly appeals to some of them; I'm lucky enough receive a handful of emails most days from readers who have taken the trouble to say they have found them useful. Some of them compare my work favourably with other material, not infrequently "official" material from a college or university. It's flattering, but in the interests of dispassionate evaluation it needs to be approached critically. Here's how I responded to one such email today—

"How nice of you to get in touch! Feedback like yours is always encouraging, and much appreciated.

But don't be too hard on [the university]! There's a lesson in all this...

• You turned to my page after wrestling with their material. It's quite possible that had they not laid the foundations you would not have been able to make sense of it with the help of my page.
  
  
• And quite possibly you looked at a few other pages before settling on mine; it just so happened that my approach clicked with you, just as I'm sure it fails to do with lots of other people who never tell me about it.

It has always been thus in teaching!

On e-tailoring (emperors, for the use of)

Excuse the cryptic title. The link is to Phil Beadle's stimulating column in Tuesday's Education Guardian. He discusses the current obsession with "e-learning" in education, in very sceptical terms.

Education is periodically swamped by waves of fads, which (usually) retreat leaving only a little damage. We are hearing a little less about "learning styles" nowadays, "accelerated learning" has passed by, but "inclusivity" is breaking all over the shore (it's made all the more potent because few people know what it is, and it appears to have no downside—until you try practising it, of course, and see what it does to all the students who are not "special"...)

But few of these illusory panaceas have been embraced as enthusiastically as e-learning, partly of course because it is a very profitable business. Beadle points out how in schools it introduces a layer of mediation between pupil and the topic of learning; instead of learning how to produce silk-screen prints, he points out, children are encouraged to simulate Warhol's effects on a computer. Calculators came in twenty or more years ago, and mental arithmetic had to be re-introduced as a specific disciplines because the mediating technology substituted for the mental skill. Richard Sennett points out that computers in architecture, for example, can actively militate against the development of craft skills.

I used to argue against e-learning on the grounds that the technology placed an accessibility barrier between the learner and the material; until the computer interface was transparent and taken for granted, it would be very difficult to engage with the material. The ubiquity of computers is such that nowadays such a consideration does not apply for most university students, although it may well matter for older learners. However, when e-learning substitutes for rich direct experience, it cannot but deliver an impoverished version; it needs to be relegated only to those areas where it unequivocally adds to the overall experience as nothing else can.

On seeing

The "next blog" link at the top of most Blogger pages is horribly addictive. There is an option to turn it off, but it really irritates me to find a site which has done that, so I can't do it myself.

I gave in to the urge this evening, and came across this page. It's not really that remarkable, I suppose. But I see these pictures of rather mundane objects (particularly the toilet roll) and wonder at the gift this photographer has to frame and select this stuff to produce two or three stunning images a day. I carry a camera at all times, but I don't see what this person sees.

How do people learn that? (I don't buy that "innate talent" fudge; people get better at this kind of thing so they must be learning...) And how does one teach it? (Oodles of supportive but honest critical feedback is a sine qua non I know, but what else?)

On books and blogs (roughly)

You may have noticed that the blog has had a re-design. Frankly, I managed to break the previous template with a tweak too far, so I had to choose another but then I couldn't resist messing with it a bit...

So, being self-referential, that coincides with a message from a correspondent enquiring whether I have written or am going to write, the book of the site. I get such emails every other week or so, which is gratifying, but I usually respond very briefly; "No!" or words to that effect. Perhaps because I have been working on (grandiose term! I have been messing about with...) the re-design, on this occasion I decided to explain myself a little. And the more I got into it, the more interesting the issue became. (And of course, now I have a ready-made explanation to refer other correspondents to in future.)

I hear [an author my correspondent mentioned rather unflatteringly] is doing well out of his books and his consultancy; good for him and others (some of them friends of mine) in the same business. But in business terms his "offering" is really rather different from mine. People pay up-front for his expertise. Either they buy books (or more likely, libraries buy books), or they engage him for staff development sessions and pay for it. They do this because they have reasonable expectations of the quality of what he will offer, and he doubtless takes considerable care to deliver to meet those expectations. It's a traditional model, and it does tend to lead to slightly staid and conventional material.

The web is an entirely different medium; it is far more casual. People only have to click on a link to come to my site, and they can leave just as easily. They can glance at a page for six seconds (I read that somewhere, but this is not a topic I reference punctiliously); if it is not what they are looking for they can move on at no cost.

I get over a million unique visitors a year (as you may know, web hosting companies provide incredibly detailed statistics). But over a quarter of those visitors (28% at the latest count) only look at one page; presumably they then decide it is not for them and they move on. I get appreciative notes from people like you who stick around—and many thanks for them—but all I know about the others is that they did not stick around, because visiting a web-page is not like picking up (still less, buying) a book.

And for me that means that I can mess about a bit. I'm not constrained by much of a contract with the reader, and certainly no financial one. I can do my "heterodoxy" stuff, without taking it too seriously; see http://www.doceo.co.uk/heterodoxy/index.htm I can crack jokes, and if some people don't like them and move on, that is no big deal. I can take risks.

I could of course even misrepresent ideas and be sloppy or biassed or unfair about the material, and that is the risk you as a reader take if you decide to trust me. Even Wikipedia is monitored by editors; personal sites aren't. There is no peer review process, and no quality assurance mechanisms. (Actually, I did take the first steps to setting up an "advisory committee" in 2005. Several of the people I approached pointed out it was a bad idea—the Unique Selling Point of the "brand" was my distinctive voice. Of course they may just have been trying to get out of serving on it...) Certainly, no-one should trust just my site.

There is also another, quite different reason for choosing this medium. It is what accounts for its appearance in the first place: and although books can manage it quite well, readers rarely make use of the facility;

Hyperlinks, and non-linear reading. About half of the present material on the "learning" side of the site started life in the form of handouts in the mid-90s. I used to give handouts to support lectures. But they were only about one topic—the topic of the lecture. And it frustrated me that my students, even Master's level students, were not making the connections between the topics. They were not fitting individual ideas into a coherent (or even incoherent—even better) whole. I was impressed by how the "Help" files of various packages used hyperlinks to help create such connections, and I found a package which would build such .hlp files from word-processor files. So I distributed these things on floppy discs... Eventually, web access came along and I put them up there. (Fortunately before VLEs, or the whole thing might have got stuck in that dead-end, but that's another story...) But the hyperlink is critical; it enables readers to construct their own mental image of the topic, rather than being dragged along by an author.

That's the rationale behind the web-sites. The blog is different again.

The point, in terms of teaching? We use many media, and often treat them as interchangeable. They're not. Often the differences don't matter much, but sometimes they do, and they go quite deep.

On process and fluidity

(The link relates to the programme of 20 March 08, on Kierkegaard; there may be ways of retrieving it after 27 March, but you may have to root around for them!)

"In our time" today was about my old mate, Kierkegaard. The gloomy Dane. Not a barrel of laughs, most of the time. But nevertheless capable of being witty and playful on occasion. I did not understand that when I first read him, on the cusp of my twenties; but then I was never good at "framing" what I was reading, at that age. I took it all terribly seriously. Jane Austen was great literature and therefore "profound" and certainly not funny; no wonder I didn't enjoy her. Then.

To the point(s);

• I've read a large proportion of Kierkegaard. I have read and still possess Kaufmann's definitive two-volume critical biography. I took a course on him. I've used his work even in the unpromising context of a manual on professional supervision in group care (Atherton, 1986). I've relished getting the allusions and jokes in David Lodge's Therapy (1995)...
  
  
• But I may have missed his point. The contributors this morning suggested that K. used so many pseudonyms in his published work because there was no definitive K-ian position. Like his hero, Socrates, his point was in the process rather than the product; in the debate rather than the conclusion.
  

(This is where we begin an asymptotic approach to relevance to learning and teaching...)

• Did I miss the point as an undergraduate because I was simply not intellectually mature enough to engage with these shifting points of view? Quite possibly; certainly Perry would suggest as much. (I'm working on my own page on Perry.)
  
  
• So, is it reasonable to expect undergraduates to exhibit this required sophistication? This is a big deal. It may lead us to decide that there are some ideas we can't teach (to standard, school-leaver) undergraduates. If we do, they'll get them wrong. It's not their fault or their lack of intellectual capacity, they are just not ready for them, yet. This is the same argument as Loukes and others engaged in about children's capacity for religious understanding in the '60s.
  
  
• I suspect (nay, know) that we frequently get this wrong. In a well-meaning attempt to steady a moving target, we attempt to render "that which is to be learned" as something static. Just as mathematics was almost incapable of dealing with moving (and certainly accelerating/decelerating) objects without the tools of calculus, we can't conceptualise the learning (still less, the teaching) of something which is perpetually changing.
  
  
• We try to freeze it, so we can teach it. Flexible skills are reduced to standardised techniques. We don't teach languages for fluency, we teach for "getting by in routine situations--always assuming the native speaker responds in a standard fashion". We don't teach cookery, we teach recipes and isolated skills... We don't teach appreciation of literature, we teach either the pre-existent opinions of earlier critics, or standard "methods" (a.k.a. recipes) of analysing/deconstructing the "text". But there are qualitative leaps (almost like Kierkegaard's leaps between his "spheres of existence") between these levels of understanding.

• Regrettably all of this is made almost obligatory by the rhetoric of "achievement" instantiated (I wondered whether I would ever manage to use that word! Look it up.) in—of all things—the funding formulae of further and higher education. It comes back to the goal displacement I discussed earlier.
  

Moral? Gooood question! It relates to Bateson's levels of learning, certainly, but also to a number of other issues... I'll return to the theme.

On the return of rhetoric

It's not got much to do with the topic of this blog, but this must be a candidate for one of the great speeches of the decade, at least.

Even Andrew Sullivan agrees.


Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

On goal displacement/mission drift in Further Education

On Tuesday the Guardian published a paid-for supplement for the Quality Improvement Agency for lifelong learning. Its front-page article, "Progress Report" includes this;

"This is the first year ever that in all types of providers--work-based learning, adult and community education and colleges--the failure rates are below 10%," says Andrew Thomson, the QIA's chief executive. "They are about 3 or 4% in the case of colleges. And success rates are the highest ever."

Success in further education is tightly defines as the percentage of people signing up for a course that finish having achieved all the requirements. The success rate across the sector in 2006/7, according to data just released, had risen to 77%.

The same edition of the paper's Education Supplement includes an article expressing concern at the standard of training received by early years child care staff. After discussing the alleged decline in standards embodied by the current NVQ2 and even NVQ3 qualifications in the field, the article concludes;

So, are training providers passing students who don't make the grade?

Davies words her answer carefully. "Naturally colleges want to get 100% pass rates, so some of the students who are coming through these courses are being very much supported. Which is good, of course, but it is very much in the college's best interests to support those students to pass."

Two points; "success" and "achievement" are now defined solely in terms of retention and qualifications, and there is no longer any necessary connection between those "qualifications" and actually knowing or being able to do something. Qualifications, which are proxies for capabilities, have become aims in their own right. This is something which disturbs teaching staff in all sectors.

Second, this does not just lead to a dumbing down of the qualification to the level where only 3-4% fail, it also leads to unrealistic coaching to get people through. That might not matter so much in areas where there is no expectation that the holder of a qualification will at the very least be a safe practitioner, but it is unacceptable when issuing what are effectively licences to practice.

More on this from a slightly different perspective here.

On deliberate practice

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

On special music

First; enjoy!

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...

However; play it again!

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.

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.

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;

• 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

It has a mission to bridge Snow's two cultures, but blow that! It simply and unashamedly delights in ideas. I would gladly pay my licence fee for this programme alone. Lord Bragg is (in the best senses only) the Lord Reith de nos jours.

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...