On writing well

I know, it's about time I did something more than merely point to other sources, but this is a piece which both exemplifies good practice as it explores it.

Other commitments are winding down and I am hoping to finish some interesting stuff shortly. Keep reading! Thanks.

On a thoughtful piece about assessment

Colleagues in the UK will recognise the concerns about quality assurance bureaucracy, which we now take for granted. But there is more to it than that...

On the perks of the job

My former colleague and I met for coffee today, and as ever the conversation turned to gossip/comparing notes--in the least salacious sense. Just in the past week:

• FP has asked for a reference for doctoral research
  
  
• RG got in touch to tell us about her new job at the OU
  
  
• JS had a bad time and dropped out; she's OK now and wants to complete the course
  
  
• JW asks if she can cite us as a reference for a new job; she moved 200 miles north about eight years ago

Keep it coming! It's what it is all about.

On blogging as reflective practice

A useful account from Ken Ronkowitz which is about just what it says on the tin.

On customised plagiarism and ghosting

This is the story of organised plagiarism, which is a not only a substantial business for providers, but also a gamble for clients and a big problem for colleges and universities.

See http://www.jiscpas.ac.uk/wp/index.php and of course follow up here. I must declare an interest in that I am currently working for the outfit which runs this course, but that aside, they are clearly at the forefront of this field. (Can you be at the forefront of a field?...)

About fifteen years ago, I gave (gave? No, frankly I didn't, because she did pay me, despite my protestations, an honorarium for my efforts. I can only plead that my contribution did not depend on her payment...) I "gave" quite substantial support to a friend undertaking a master's degree. It did amount to drafting some passages for her course work and dissertation, some of which she may well have used verbatim.

It so happens that her subject area was close to, but not the same as, mine. She was a social work practitioner, highly committed, highly skilled and highly experienced. She was also off work because of injuries incurred in the line of duty, so she decided to use the opportunity to get a master's. This information may or may not be relevant; have you noticed that is the way things are in the real world? It's only in academe that stuff is pre-selected for its relevance...

She had a big problem with organising her ideas into a coherent essay. She could do reports until they came out of her ears. The evidence for her arguments stood in foot-high piles on her spare-bedroom floor (in those days, my child, it was all printed on paper).

But she did not know how to play the academic game at this level. (Background; in those days the standard social work qualification was a Certificate of Qualification in Social Work at HE level 2/NQF 5 a.k.a equivalent to second-year undergraduate study. How she got admission to a Master's programme on the basis of that qualification, I do not know.)

I helped her to do that. I helped her very directly. Not only did I advise her, in the later stages I cut and pasted her points and re-assembled them and directed her to write a paragraph to argue such and such, and even got her to dictate that paragraph to me, while I typed it into the computer.

... you get the picture?

There was no "plagiarism" here, but was there "ghost-writing"? Where is the boundary of legitimacy?

(Incidentally, I took a keen interest in the feedback she got. I was appalled by its partisan nature, but that is another story...)

On cables

A propos of nothing. Enjoy!

On a master's level comprehension passage

This is a classic piece!* It's* not difficult to "understand"* apart from some grammatical jargon which of course* (should that interpolation have commas? It's a relevant question given that the passage [full stop?])* may be obsessively super-pedantic, a plea for clarity*, or a gigantic piss-take.

I could go on* but that would spoil the fun!*

But* it is here* as a candidate for a comprehension exercise which could work at higher HE levels. This is not a trivial point*. Testing comprehension generally involves selecting passages of increasing technical abstruseness in a particular discipline,* or of increasing obtuseness in a particular medium (e.g. the Waste Land).* This is a mainstream piece* (albeit from the New Yorker)* which nevertheless illustrates much of what* it critiques* at several levels.

* indicates what even I recognise as contentious grammatical and particularly punctuational usages for a "maven"* (Pinker, 1993).

On differ-ability

The morning session of the workshop to which I was contributing today was about student "diversity" --which is of course the current buzzword for "irritating students who do not fit our standard expectations..." (If you are a po-faced PC fundamentalist who does not do irony--don't bother to respond.)

Both of the contributors wanted to emphasise that being different does not mean being a "problem". My post yesterday about "eccentrics" in academe underlines this, but this TED video by paralympic athlete Aimee Mullins makes the point vividly (although most "impairments" do not offer as many options);

On the blanding of universities

"What we need are stratospherically intelligent semi-crazies. But what is left at the end of the modern process are hard-working, moderately intelligent dullards ... "

Similar factors, says Charlton, "apply throughout the educational system" to exclude those who are "too abrasive, impatient, impulsive". This approach would have left people such as Wittgenstein, F.R. Leavis in the humanities and many of the best scientists out in the cold.

On tools for reflection 2

The linked post is about Brookfield's four "lenses" of reflection--a useful framework.

On something for VLE people to bear in mind...

Don't worry. If the heading doesn't mean anything to you, ignore!

On-line learning (aftermath 1)

First, given that part of the idea of this blog is to model "reflection", it is worth noting that while I got my previous posts in before the course window closed, the duration of the course is a quite artificial constraint. Reflection knows no such boundaries, for better or for worse.

Two themes have stuck with me;

• First, the "group in the mind"; the phrase comes from Bion (1961), (as discussed here) who uses it in a slightly different way from what follows, but it still seems apposite. Bion suggests that once we have joined a group, it stays with us, and a fantasy image of it remains in the mind (and of course eventually fades with memory). Certainly that happens to me whenever I take a new class, regardless of its size. That image tends to be typified by some salient features; the faces of some of the members, the room in which it meets, even the temperature of the room. Any of them can trigger a complex set of memories and feelings related to comfort, discomfort, security, enjoyment, stimulating exchanges... which bring the group alive.
• I realise I never got that with this exclusively on-line course. For all the ice-breakers and "arrivals lounge" and photos, even some synchronous chat, the group in the mind never formed. My interaction was purely task-focused, with no sense of relationship. I responded to posts on the discussion forum, and not to people.

And second;

• Going back to my earlier reflection on the consensual nature of the interaction and the derivative literature base; the course was all about socially constructed knowledge. Crudely, if someone said something and everyone agreed, it became true. I don't think anyone was ever told (however politely) that they were wrong (and I certainly deserved to be told that on more than one occasion). This of course may be a function of the topic ("on-line tutoring" in case we've drifted too far to remember), which is pretty "soft"; but I also wonder whether it is not merely a matter of choosing the appropriate Web 2.0 tools to fit the topic and its implicit epistemology, but also of the choice of tools dictating how a discussion can proceed? That would after all be consistent with Berger and Luckmann's original argument in 1967, way before the web.
  

On a potentially amazing resource

I don't usually simply plug other sites, but one cannot but admire the chutzpah of this site;

"Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

We invite those who share our passion to explore our website, participate in our online community, and help us continue to find new ways to make learning easier for everyone."

On mandatory Master's

Ed Balls (Secretary of State for Curtains and Soft Furnishings --sorry! Children, Schools and Families) has declared that social work (specifically children's services) should require a Master's degree, joining teaching as an aspirational occupation. Generally speaking I can't argue with that, having been continually frustrated in the 80s and 90s at the failure of government to grasp the nettle of making it a graduate occupation.

But, I am witnessing close-up what is happening with the Master's initiative in teaching, and standards are clearly being dumbed-down. The actual study requirements are being eroded by over generous accreditation of prior learning; the assessment load for modules and the contact hours (either face to face or on-line) are being trimmed... All in the interests of getting people to take the courses. One university with which I have some acquaintance is claiming that its numbers on Master's programmes will have increased twenty-fold (yes, not by twenty percent, but twenty-fold) in two years. The courses now cost teachers nothing, and ingenious arrangements confer credit at Master's level for the Newly Qualified Teacher (NQT) year, together with some components of the PGCE assessed at Master's level...

It's the educational philosophy of the Wizard of Oz;

Wizard of Oz: They have one thing you haven't got: a diploma. Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitartus Committiartum E Pluribus Unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of ThD.
Scarecrow: ThD?
Wizard of Oz: That's... Doctor of Thinkology.

This has got nothing to do with learning, and still less with demonstrably improved practice, or indeed with ability to work at higher academic levels... And attempts to align the latter two elements are flakey in any case.

But at least teaching has pretensions to academic underpinnings (if they are relevant and if the award of a diploma/Master's testifies to anything relevant). For twenty-five years I taught social workers at all levels from home helps (as they were then known) to senior managers, from day-release in-service introductory courses with no academic credit through qualifying programmes to post-qualifying courses for practice teachers and "approved" mental health social workers.

The correlation between effectiveness in practice and academic performance was--beyond a certain threshold--zero. Social workers require a vast range of skills and qualities, some technical and more personal. Their tacit knowledge and judgement, their empathy and their scepticism, their tenacity and perseverance and resilience... all these have to be demonstrated at high levels day in day out.

But there is little or no overlap with the demonstration of academic skills required by traditional Master's programmes, Raise the status of social work by all means (more pay and more respectful management, and of course more manageable workloads would be a start...) but to go down the Master's route risks disenfranchising some great practitioners, and/or devaluing Master's awards, and/or just missing the point.

On catching up

I acquire a lot of stuff which I mean to write about, but real life tends to get in the way; every so often I'll pass on a list of things other people might find interesting, with minimal comment;

• The seven lessons taught in (US) schools (Gatto, 2006)
  

1. Confusion
2. Class position
3. Indifference
4. Emotional dependency
5. Intellectual dependence
6. Provisional self-esteem
7. One can't hide

• Using a blog to create an on-line journal for a class; self -explanatory and eminently replicable

• Capturing the Visible Evidence of Invisible Learning (This is quite a substantial essay.)

• The Importance of Conversation in Learning and the Value of Web-based Discussion Tools --which would have added to my experience of the on-line tutoring course over the past month.

On believing pundits

Given the extent to which we are exposed nowadays to toxic levels of punditry, it is gratifying to be reminded by Bryan Appleyard of Tetlock's (2005) psychological investigation of the reliability of pundits (New Yorker article on it here).

One of the findings was broadly that the more certain the pundits were, the more likely they were to be wrong, which is consistent with good old-fashioned cognitive dissonance.

This goes along, I guess, with another related issue I am exploring in my usual desultory way; the notion that the less meaningful a belief, the greater the passion and dogmatism with which it is held. This was observed by Swift (the war between the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians in Gulliver's Travels, 1726, ch. IV) so it's not exactly original, and of course as in that story, it is religious disputes which spring to mind as the most obvious examples. But there is more to it than that; Mary Douglas (1966) —if I understand her correctly, which is far from certain—came close to arguing that distinctions in the external world (particularly among, loosely, social artefacts) say much less about that world than they do about the sense of identity of those who make them. In other words, people and groups define themselves as "the kind of people who believe that..." and whatever it is that they believe is much more important than objective distinctions can sustain... I'm trying to follow this up in Douglas (1973) and one would think that returning to that book 35 years after I first read it, I would find it easier. No.

Any pointers gratefully received!

Douglas M (1966) Purity and Danger; an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo London; Routledge and Kegan Paul
Douglas M (1973) Natural Symbols London; Penguin

On-line learning (6 and final)

This is a response to the final reflective task of the "On-line tutoring" course, but I hope it may be of interest to anyone else who happens to stumble by here.

First, and most important, I need to say how much I was impressed by the quality of the course, its design, materials and tutorial support. To declare an interest, it is offered by the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development which happens to be my current temporary employer---but I wanted to work with them because of what I knew of their work, rather than I want to puff them because I am working there this semester.

And to look at this within a framework; following (roughly) Kirkpatrick's (1994) four levels of evaluation;

1. Did I enjoy it? No. The only time which came close to "enjoyment" was the final week's scenarios exercise. But clearly I was in a minority. I reject the notion of learning styles, but I do have preferences (which are at this level rather than 2,3,4) and this approach--and it doesn't matter what "this approach" is--just doesn't suit me. See below for expansion.
   
   
2. Did I learn anything? Yes. A lot. I'm not sure it was the same as the course set out to teach, though, and that is an interesting issue about this medium for learning. More on this below.
   
   
3. Will it make any difference to my practice? Yes, although since I am semi-retired this is not significantly important. It reinforced what I already knew about the commitment required of the on-line tutor (more, it has to be said, from the model set by the Centre--which was not stinting in its allocation of resources--and the tutors themselves, who were always there, than from what the course explicitly taught.) The difference it will make (at which point some people may legitimately heave a sigh of relief) is that I shall be even more reluctant to tutor on-line than I was before.
   
   
4. Will that affect the practice of my organisation? Probably not in the case of my current employer, but it might make a difference to the advice I offer to others in the future, and particularly to my approach to a staff development session I am scheduled to offer for another university in a couple of weeks' time on just this topic.
   

More idiosyncratically;

• The course emphasised on-line group interaction using the Virtual Learning Environment in particular but Web 2.0 tools in general;


• I found this difficult for various reasons. In their inventories of significant features of the design of on-line tutoring systems (the penultimate activity of the course), many members identified "comfort with the technology" as a basic issue to address. I am comfortable with some of the technology as this blog testifies, but I dislike VLEs. They seem invariably to complicate things which can be done more easily with other web tools.


• But that was not the major point. Diana Laurillard's (2001, maybe later--I'm being cavalier about referencing--this is a blog, remember, count yourself lucky to get any references at all...!) Laurillard's point was that e-learning tools need to be judged principally by their capacity to approximate the richness of a face-to-face learning conversation.


• Real conversation wanders. It moves up and down through levels of abstraction (Dale and Bruner); it drifts off by free association and returns to the main topic (sometimes); it is not constrained by rigid topic boundaries. This is very difficult indeed to replicate in an on-line environment; threaded posts, tags etc. all help, but they do require conscious and constraining decisions on the part of the poster, and complex discussions are defined as much by what people do not access (still less read, still less respond to...) as by what they do.


• I was inhibited by this. One week I hardly posted at all. Each of the list headings I looked at seemed to prescribe a certain kind of response--one which I did not want to make. I looked in vain for one labelled "None of the above" or "Contrarian"! But. I know... I am not criticising, just discussing a real problem to which I do not have a solution. And if you think lists labelled as above are a solution, think through their likely impact on the whole. And look at the research...




• Ah! The research! Considerable effort was devoted to the scholarship of learning and teaching on-line. There was a required textbook and links throughout to useful papers. Some of them were thought-provoking (as is this post, I hope) with plenty of references to previous papers, some endorsed, some qualified, some opposed. All the stuff of SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning).


• I may well be wrong here, because I cannot claim to have traced to their roots all the references cited in the readings for the course, but although they may be scholarly and (more important) informed by the experience of practice, they are a crust of accretions of legitimated opinion.


• I confess it is now six years since I really pursued this. I was supervising a master's student (in learning and teaching in nursing, specifically) whose dissertation related to e-learning in in-service nursing education. She had produced a very scholarly literature review, comparing and discussing different models... I had pushed her for hard evidence behind these peer-reviewed and published papers. She was upset--who was I to query the evidence? So I undertook the trail back through half a dozen of her sources, to make the point. It took a long time (before Google Scholar) and was I confess incomplete. (Come to think of it, why did I not publish? The evidence is discarded now!) But three generations back on six of her sources, roughly 216 sources, I found only ten which were unequivocally empirically researched, and at least two of those relied on research instruments which have themelves been questioned...


• Wandering now, but... I have been reading Nick Davies' book on the state of journalism*, which talks about "churnalism", where the demands of the system lead to stories being repeated without checking, and to rumour mills, moral panics and vulnerability to PR... It happens in educational "research" too. Next weekend, in one of my other jobs, I shall be working on a study day for 350 students. The visiting speaker will be Frank Coffield, the principal protagonist in the de-bunking of the egregious scam of "learning styles"--as a spurious, self-serving, commercially brilliant and politically convenient load of ordure. It, and other associated fads such as "accelerated learning" have prospered because pressured academics and practitioners have grasped at straws--and these ideas hovered tantalisingly on the edges of common sense (whatever that is...).



• Back to the mainstream. Consensual, interactive, social constructed knowledge was privileged (sorry about the jargon). We did not explore the nature of authority on-line. And that is a big, but concealed issue. (I am reminded of a phrase from "Cold Comfort Farm" which cannot be repeated nowadays.) The "subject matter" of the course was considered as an inert given, in the sense that it would not affect other processes, or indeed be affected by them. It's a noble gas, man :-) It isn't.

But I want also to thank my fellow participants. No, I didn't really get to know you. Sometimes I am sure that my tone was irksome and boorish. But your responses were unfailingly courteous and constructive, or you benignly ignored me--probably the best strategy (sometimes I wish I could ignore me, but it doesn't seem to work...)

The above goes a fortiori for the long-suffering tutors.

Many thanks!


* Davies N (2009) Flat Earth News London; Vintage Books.

On-line learning (5)

[This post is added pretty well "as is", several days after its original composition. The delay is accounted for by my self-imposed rule not to post if I wouldn't drive (a.k.a. I had a couple of drinks before I drafted it). The parallel is quite close. Mostly what follows is coherent and indeed representative of my views, but observe the twee infantilism of the initial paragraph... I draw attention to this simply because it is so difficult to gauge the state of mind of a contributor on-line, unless they flag it in some way...]

I've been a good boy this week. Or at least a better boy than the hissy-fitting curmudgeon of last week. Why? Fundamentally because a member of our small working group and a tutor were nice to me. That's very basic, isn't it? I got stroppy over something, doubtless in an "immature" way (maturity is independent of age, despite what people seem to think: I'm 64, and I do "immature" much better now than I did at 14...) --and I thought I had burned my boats with the group. Remember that the channels of communication are very limited on-line.

I joined in the conversation again with the merest hint of apology (actually a crass face-saving, "I woz bein' ironic, innit?" angle), and they scuppered my plans to flounce off by being very understanding and building on the few constructive remarks I had made... So! Another attempt to do a good flounce is thwarted. Will I never manage it? Flouncing is a young man's game. Well, no, it's traditionally a woman's ploy... Sorry! the deconstruction of flouncing was not a designated learning outcome for this course!

But was I really back in the group? How much is anyone "in" the group? Regardless of how much I might have offended or alienated the other members, the system posts messages to the group to all of us. Engage paranoia; are there back channels? Does it matter? What is the difference between formative and summative assessment in this context? However...

The above reflections (posh term; incoherent self-mumblings might be a better term) stem from the basic observation that unlike the real world, what happens in the virtual class is either up-front visible or not. "Not" is speculation or fantasy... I don't need to spell out the sequelae...

However! Different tack. I have responded to a number of different threads and forums this week. Actually I have responded to particular points made by individuals who have already posted, and I have done so with reference to those posts, not to the theme set by the tutors. On a couple of occasions I have realised that I could have posted about this issue here, but I have already done so to a doubtless more limited readership, there.

This is a function of the site design, and it has been a continuing bugbear of the whole course. And indeed of all systems which seek to regulate communication.

On restricted and elaborated code

I started reading this simply out of interest in the topic, but as I read on I realised that among other things it was an exploration of Bernstein's restricted and elaborated codes. I don't need to elaborate; but understanding is restricted to those who know the background (in two or even three senses).

This is of course not simply a pure illustration of the distinction; as in the real world (this may even be part of the real world!) it is embedded in and muddied by another discussion.

On-line learning (5)

We have been set up in small groups to work on a task, preferably via a wiki.

The group is self-managing. That is probably the right strategy, because imposing the burden of chairing a group on an individual is unfair when it will last for a week or more, and when the tutors have had no chance to assess capabilities... But. A chair will emerge, and it is interesting to reflect on who will assume that role under the circumstances. Is that person likely to preside over the best possible "product" from the group?

It so happens that for various reasons I took my eye off the ball this week (that might not be the best metaphor, since I have never been able to catch balls even when looking directly at them, but...) With two consequences;

• I don't know where to find the group report, still less contribute to it, so
• I feel more left out, and less inclined to log in to find what I am left out of...

I report this not to complain, by any means. ("For Brutus is an honorable man“ OK!) but to reflect on the limitations of on-line communication.

There are no back-channels. For good reasons, I can't "whisper" to a friend, "What's going on?". Nor is there a "new readers start here" facility. A course leader might well argue that to incorporate such a facility would be to give carte blanche to every free-loading lurker to check in when it suited them and to feign participation. But it all depends on what you think people are there for, and I confess that I am now highly ambivalent about the course.

On the one hand, I am ever more intrigued by the challenge faced by course designers and tutors, of reducing the subtleties of pedagogy to the concreteness of rubrics and procedures, like trying to capture the flow and tumble of water in stone. And I am impressed not only by the skill of the tutorial team, but also by their commitment.

On the other, I am frustrated by what seems increasingly to be the demonstrable failure of the model. Rightly, I think, the tutors are trying to promote interaction between the course participants. But I have only the vaguest idea of who they are. We did an introductions exercise, but the other people are still merely labels to me. I have no sense of them as people. Earlier, I went back to the introductions to check on who was "speaking", but it was too much hassle. So I found myself responding to everyone in the same way...

The introduction of small group working is an interesting shift. OK, it's not surprising that I can't hold in my mind the distinctive characteristics and characteristic opinions fo a couple of dozen people. But perhaps I ought to be able to do so for half a dozen? Perhaps. I have failed because I took my eye off the ball, but I don't know what would have happened had I not. (As it were!)

So perhaps this conversation within the group and a broadly socially-oriented pedagogy and indeed epistemology is a challenge too far for e-learning? Or just for a 64-year-old? Or is this topic the ultimate challenge for e-learning? (For new readers, the topic is "on-line tutoring and blended learning")

Incidentally, I have finally got the book. It came from India--there's globalisation for you.

I'll stick with it, but if I started with a motivation score of 7/10, it is now about 3/10. Of course, if I had not been distracted and kept up a constant contact every day, the outcome might well be very different...