On writing a dissertation

This is what I have been up to when not posting to this blog. Honest!

These notes originate from my efforts to help an old friend undertaking a taught Master's course, at a university which seemed to devise its regulations around the key principle that under no circumstances should, or could, a supervisor be helpful. So my reaction to his first almost complete draft was to say that it needed to be completely re-organised; it was great content, but did not follow the conventions of a dissertation. Quite reasonably he asked how he was supposed to know that? This is a game he would only play once, whereas supervisors and assessors and external examiners are familiar with it. He suggested,

"I should have found (useful) a model outline for the MA, like

A. Intro could include..........and should not......

B. Literary review could..... and should not..............

C. Further Chapters could.... and should not...........

D. Conclusion could ...and should not...... "

So this is my attempt to provide just that. I had just assumed that it already existed in practically every text on Research Methods, but on the basis of the sample I have consulted. it doesn't. I've already modified it in response to some very useful suggestions from people on lists I belong to, and plan to continue to do so—so please write to me (address in the footer) and together we can improve it further. Thanks.

On one kind of American psyche

 Or--"Why I love my revolver more than my mobile phone."

I like Edwin Leap; I get his blog through RSS regularly, and if he is a little down-home Will Rogers-ish for a European taste, so be it. The list of awards to the right of the page testifies to how he is received in the US.

Every so often, though, a post from one of the US bloggers I casually follow acutely exposes a massive gulf between their mind-set and mine. (I am not so daft as to generalise this beyond the few people I follow, none of whom have been chosen for their extremism or freakery but simply for their interesting take on their world.) And this one is not merely any old gulf. It's a Grand Canyon (sorry about mixing geographical metaphors).

Actually, it is a classic statement and it is worth quoting at some length:

"The phone represents connection.  Especially a smart-phone, since it connects me not only to those I love, but in essence to the entire world in a way unfathomable a few short decades ago.  I can tap the World Wide Web from the comfort of my car or anywhere else, simply by pulling out my phone.  The phone represents the collective knowledge of humanity and our interdependency. [...] It allows me,  [...] to call others to my rescue, to ask others’ opinions, to check the collective opinion on millions of potential websites.

What about my little Smith and Wesson model 640?  Well, it isn’t about collective communication; though the sound of it being discharged will probably bring interested parties to investigate.  It has no communication device located anywhere on the frame.  It has three functions, as I see it.  It reassures me.  It may discourage those who would harm me or my family.  It is capable of causing harm.

Philosophically, it is light years from the phone.  Because it requires that I be master of my own fate.  It says, ‘no one will help you, but you, when the chips are down.’  The help summoned by a phone may not arrive for a very long time, as I live in ‘the sticks.’  The revolver says, ‘you must be accountable for this decision; you must carry and use me safely and you must use my capacity for injury with a profound awareness of morality, ethics and of the value of life.’   The revolver is about individuality.

Americans, Westerners in general, are slowly abdicating responsibility for self and embracing the collective.  The question is always, ‘who will help me?  Who will pay for me?  Who will give me? Who will come to me?  Who will allow me to do nothing while they do something?  Who can I blame?  Who will excuse me?’

This is a travesty.  This will be one of the deepest wounds to our nation, to our way of life.  Not the phone itself, which is merely a tool, but the abdication of accountability that communication can falsely represent.

If the law were just, I would gladly carry my revolver everywhere.  I like the phone, and I find it useful.  But I am old school.  I am old Southern.  I am descended from patriots.  I have been responsible for others and continue to be for myself.  I believe in the individual.

Furthermore, I am a physician in an emergency department.  I know what humans are capable of doing.  I love people.  Some of my favorite patients have been in handcuffs.  I joke with them, I like them.  But humans are dangerous.  If you doubt it, read the newspaper.

So in the end, based on my life, my experiences and my philosophy, I can only say that when I reach around my side, I love the feel of that handle far more than the feel of that phone.  And I love what it represents far more than any capacity for communication."

On the difference between knowledge and wisdom

As the late Miles Kington put it (I paraphrase; original in the heading link...)

• Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit...
  
• Wisdom is knowing better than to put it in a fruit salad.

(Thanks to "Quote ... Unquote" on BBC Radio 4; I can't get at it to link at the moment.)

On ritual knowledge

Last Friday the hard drive on my principal machine unexpectedly and suddenly died, gave up the ghost, expired, exited this mortal coil...

Fortunately pretty well all my data was backed up, and so at one level and thanks to a very helpful (and reasonably priced) engineer --Paul West of Bedford Home Computers deserves the plug-- it was relatively simple to install a new drive (twice the capacity of course) and then to re-populate it with everything from scratch. The operating system, the main packages, and then the drivers and the add-ons and the tuning, and the little programs installed for free from magazine cover-discs years ago which have become integral to how I work (particularly ABC Snapgraphics, a really simple template-based vector drawing programme which is the tool which generated most of the graphics on my web-sites; runs under Windows 3.1, from 1995. I have many back-ups of that, some on a single floppy!), the list goes on and it took most of the weekend to get minimally functional again.

But that's the background. As I engaged in the tedium of finding stuff and installing and scrabbling for authorisation codes on packaging that had only narrowly escaped being thrown away years ago---I was reminded once again of David Perkins' discussion of the forms of "troublesome knowledge", particularly in the context of threshold concepts (of course). I'd like to link to his 1999 paper at this point [Perkins D (1999) "The constructivist classroom - the many faces of constructivism" Educational Leadership, Volume 57, Number 3], but it has disappeared from its former open-access home, so what follows is based on my understanding of part of his argument.

Troublesome knowledge may be associated with

• ritual knowledge
• inert knowledge
• conceptually difficult knowledge
• the defended learner 
• alien knowledge
• tacit knowledge
• troublesome language

Without going into all the detail, the point is that these features of the material to be learned--alone or in combination--make it difficult to learn.

And the longer we go on in teaching, the more inured we get to the difficulty of these forms of knowledge, because the more we are initiated into the little worlds of our disciplines and practices the more they come to make sense to us. And the longer that goes on, the more difficult it becomes to empathise with the difficulties experienced by our students. And of course to engage constructively with those difficulties...

Until it hits home. I have a lot of ritual knowledge about PCs. I know what I have to do to make certain things happen. I haven't a clue why they work (just as I no longer have a clue about how my car engine works, despite having done basic servicing on its predecessors for thirty or so years). But I know I have to go through the motions.

I've never been much of a computer geek, but in the 'eighties I could and did create (rather boring) programs for my son to practise basic maths in BBC BASIC, and later created crude interfaces in CP/M and MS-DOS. Then, as with the car, I at least enjoyed the delusion that I knew what was going on. Now I am disabused of that.

More important, I suspect that nobody knows what is going on.

In the 'eighties, the computer mags (my favourite was PCW Plus for the Amstrad 8/9000 pre-PC series) generally included in each edition an arcane article about programming in assembler, just one step away from machine code. It's of course possible that even in those days only the authors knew what they were talking about, but I wonder if any person (as opposed to a succession of programs and of course millions of machines) exists who can read a few hundred lines of low-level code and even see that they are the nuts and bolts of, say, a state-of-the-art image editor.

Analogously, that is like reading a list of thousands of pixels defined by their colour properties, and then answering Rolf Harris' ritual question, "Can you tell what it is, yet?" I do remember from one of those magazines, a throw-away remark that the difficult thing about programming was not writing code, but being able to read it.

The point? That in all my dutiful behaviour re-creating my desk-top, I haven't actually learned anything. Apart, perhaps, from obeying orders.

More important, for most of us there isn't anything else to learn. I can't reference an op-ed piece I read a few weeks ago pointing out that there is no single person on the planet who knows how your mobile phone works. Its operating system and "apps" have been assembled by specialists across the world who produce a library of "black box", mysterious modules which happen to work. But those who use them--not only the consumers but also the engineers and designers who package them for public consumption, neither need to know how they work, nor do know.

I've just been watching a re-run of one of the marvellous series on BBC TV on the Indian railways. Some of their locomotives are still steam-powered, and I admired the wonderful dance of well-lubricated pistons and shafts and eccentrics and wheels, and the knowledge and skill of the people who made them work. But then I thought--even I could potentially learn how these things work. I can see the components and their linkages. They are concrete objects harnessing abstract principles.

But that is not true of ICT, or of very much modern technology--even the ills of the internal combustion engine can nowadays only reliably be diagnosed by sensors and readouts, at several removes from the actual events causing the mis-fire or the overheating. Instead, one is at the mercy of the oracles...

I'm tangentially reminded of a birthday event I attended a few years ago, where I met up again with a former housemate, an early-retired (full) professor of maths, then working part-time with doctoral candidates at another university on the mathematics of financial derivatives. He, with an Oxford D.Phil long under his belt, was unstinting in his admiration for the technical competence of his high-flying candidates. He admitted that sometimes he was, if not struggling, at least exerting himself to keep up.  Dateline; February 2006.  About 18 months later the significance became apparent of the disconnection between the capacity of the analytical disciplines and and complexity of those all-too-real deals.

The inaccessibility to most of us of the technology which we can merely consume makes us dependent, and perhaps promotes learned helplessness (and hyperbole). Discuss!

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke (1961) "Profiles of The Future"

On neuromyths

The linked site focusses largely on school-based education, but it sets out to produce a balanced account of the rather faddish, fashionable, and often downright misleading or wrong contribution of neuroscience to learning and teaching. Based at the School of Education at Bristol University, it draws on sound research and scholarship both to address myths and to promote neuroscience-based approaches to teaching.

In particular, the site links to an excellent balanced chapter on "neuromyths" (pdf available here) from a recent book by the co-ordinator of the site (Howard-Jones P (2009) Introducing Neuroeducational Research London; Routledge). It's not as entertaining as Ben Goldacre's Bad Science but more comprehensive and informative, covering

• Multiple intelligences, 
• Learning styles, 
• Enriched environments
• Brain gym
• Water
• Omega-3
• Sugary snacks and drinks

--and even a sympathetic discussion about why there are (so many) neuromyths in education — and how to spot one?  Unfortunately, as simply a pdf of the chapter, the bibliography is not included—you'll have to get the actual book for that!

The site was recommended by Tony Fisher—many thanks.

On dissonance by any other name

The linked blog post is in turn based on this article (Nyhan and Reifler, 2010), which discusses why attempts to change people's political misperceptions and misunderstandings often don't work, and can in some cases backfire. The blog post relates the same processes to the teaching of science.

There is a certain sense of reinventing the wheel, here, and I'm interested that there is no reference to a vast and venerable literature on cognitive dissonance (here is a page of mine on that) which goes back to the 1950's. On the other hand, it is worthy of note that if you follow up the first external link from my page you come to a .pdf file of a textbook chapter on cognitive dissonance, with a note to say that it is on the web because it is no longer included in the latest versions of the textbook, so the whole thing may be a matter of fashion.

Incidentally, the epigraph to the substantive article is attributed to Mark Twain, as such things often are; I think the correct ascription is to Henry Wheeler Shaw writing as Josh Billings:

The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so.

(Josh Billings' Encyclopedia of Wit and Wisdom, 1874)

Nyhan B & Reifler J (2010). "When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions" Political Behavior, 32 (2), 303-330 DOI: 10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2

On being first with the latest moral panic!

You read it here first! Be in the advance guard! Worry! Act! But mainly worry!

How long before the Daily Mail gets it? The Sun with added fear!

(I thought Mustang was a horse, and of course the great North American P51B...)

Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the link.

On filtering and abstracting

This is pure ignorant speculation, but I was interested in the linked article and its argument that much infant learning is so efficient (particularly, it suggests, early language learning) because the child's brain is insufficiently developed to filter information, and has to swallow it whole, as it were.

One issue that frequently comes up when covering the basics of memory as a precursor to learning theories is the existence (or not) and form of photographic (or eidetic) memory. I'm not going into detail because I do know I don't know enough about it even to be a reliable guide to other sites. Insofar as it is agreed to exist, it is much more common in children than in adults. That would seem to fit with the argument of the post and article. It appears that eidetic memory stands in the same relation to an "ordinary" memory as a picture of a document does to a version scanned with a print recognition utility. The eidetic memory will take up much more of (in this case a computer's) memory because it includes all the information of the document as a physical object (such as folds and smudges in the paper) regardless of their importance. The scanned text of course loses such irrelevant information, becomes much leaner, and of course editable.

I am reminded of Bruner on the enactive, iconic and symbolic modes of representation and the issue of whether being almost confined to an enactive mode (as an eidetic image is--granted that an image is by definition iconic to some degree) is as much a limitation to learning as a resource. Certainly that is the case for people with autistic spectrum disorders.

On giving handouts

The link is to an account of some empirical research on the much debated issue of when to give out handouts accompanying a lecture--at the beginning or the end?

The findings provide preliminary evidence that lecturers should provide their students with handouts during the lecture. ... In no case ... did having the handouts during a lecture impair performance on the final tests. Even when there were no differences in final test performance, students still benefited in the sense that they reached the same level of learning with less work.

In my view it all depends on the task of the lecture, the kind of knowledge one is imparting and how one hopes that students will engage with it. The reported research relates to students watching videos of short 12-minute presentations on science topics; whether it would also go for other content I don't know. (But it is an easy project to research, and might make a useful small-scale project for students.)

I don't use handouts at all any more--I set up a blog or a web-page on which I can post not only the presentation, but also the references and links, and photos of points made in discussion written up on a flip chart or white-board. I may make it available before the session, but I invariably edit it afterwards to reflect the actual material taught.

This is more like the minutes of the meeting which actually took place rather than the session I planned to give. But that suits me because my subject areas are typically both "soft" and applied, and the discussion in the (relatively small) group is more important than the content I plan to "cover". I rarely stick to a session plan in any case, so advance notes could actively confuse the students.

It's probably more important to have a worked-out rationale for doing what you do (including telling the students what you expect of them) than doing it in a particular way.

Marsh, E., & Sink, H. (2009). Access to handouts of presentation slides during lecture: Consequences for learning. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24 (5), 691-706 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1579

and acknowledgements to the BPS Research Digest blog for the pointer

On validations and grading

I'm now quite an old hand on validations panels.

(New readers start here: it is standard practice in the UK that a new course, and indeed a substantially modified established course, is scrutinised by academic peers --colleagues within a school, within the university but from a different school, and beyond the university-- before it receives the university's imprimatur.)

I have taken part in two in the last couple of weeks. One was a complex master's programme with generic and named routes, and different but sometimes unexplored understandings of what constitutes M level work. And today's was a humble 60-credit certificate at NQF 5.

In both cases I have been really impressed by the quality of discussion. Something has changed for the better over the past few years (in my experience).

On the Master's programme we had a great and appropriately unresolved discussion about transformative learning and whether one can "require" it in assessment (among other things) [Yes, I will post on that in more detail as promised as soon as I know what I think...]

..and today we grappled with how to assess "reflection" and whether its proxy for assessment  could be graded. And I found myself arguing that it could be graded!

Thinking back over a dozen or so validations in which I have participated recently --some internally but more externally, at all levels from level 4 certificates to professional doctorates-- for once I have to concede that the system has got better. Not necessarily at the level of formal regulations--in practice one only hits those when really difficult technical issues obtrude-- but in both the quality and the culture of the debate.

I (and I'm not a lone voice, albeit a timorous one) have inveighed against (moaned about) the "compliance culture" stifling serious discussion of course content, structure and processes. But that seems to come principally from the accreditation bodies rather than academic institutions themselves.

I'm very pleased to find that within those institutions, "quality assurance" has moved on from covering institutional arses by ticking boxes, to a genuine enquiry into how learning can be promoted and the student experience enhanced.

I'll have to lie down--it has all been a bit of a shock!

On ecstasy, sort of.

In the sense of ec-stasy, or standing-outside-of.

In the informal coffee and cake melee after my session on Monday (more on that to follow), several people approached me to discuss "standing outside one's taken-for-granted world" as a threshold concept.

• It so happens that tonight is the launch of Al-Jazeera English on Freeview channel 89.
  
• Russia Today is also available on Freeview channel 85.

Both channels are wonderful correctives to the usual perspectives on news. It misses the point to allege that they are "biassed" or "spun". In many cases, the stories they report just do not figure on our news--just as few domestic stories do not reach their lists. This is not like the Mail or the Sun or the Guardian spinning the same stories differently. It is about quite different priorities about what counts as a story.

Encourage students to watch!

On something else the Germans do well!

On one reason not to grade...

It presupposes a degree of maturity on the part of students, but the course with which I am still associated, operates only on a pass/refer basis (one opportunity to re-submit referred work; fiture at that point is failure and requires a re-take of the whole module, at best). Many students don't like it--particularly those who are themselves graduates and have a long history of assessing themselves by their marks, often of course relative to their class-mates.

The situation Mary Beard describes in the linked post is one reason (and it is incredibly time-consuming to adopt her solution, particularly for big courses).But it goes a bit further than that.

Let's apply the Dale/Bruner “Cone of Experience” to the situation--slightly odd, but it fills the bill and such tools are never more than pragmatic devices. In terms of assessment;

• what the students actually know/can do etc. is at the enactive level. It's real life. It's incredibly rich and complex and inherently unassessable because of that, so
  
• we devise means of assessing which necessarily lose a lot of detail in order to be manageable. Sometimes the detail we actually lose is precisely what we wanted to assess in the first place, but we just get it wrong. This is at the iconic level. The students do the assessment, but in order to compare them against a standard, or even against each other, or previous performance...
  
• we have to assess the assessment, and that gets even more abstract and symbolic. And attaching a single number or letter is as abstract as one can get (apart of course from manipulating those number mathematically) --or in other words loses the most information.

Assessment is always a lossy process, but numerical marking exacerbates the situation. That magic number is a distant and distorted proxy for the blooming buzzing complexity (if not confusion) of the student's experience and conduct; which moreover obscures that enactive level. We have made grades etc. so central to a mass education system (no, I don't know the alternative either) that once one has been issued it is almost impossible to get through any more sophisticated message to the student;

"Yes, it did only get a C+, but that was solely down to those daft mistakes you made with the statistics; if you'd got them right it would probably have been an A-"

"Yeah, right..."

Such practices are actively inimical to effective feedback and assessment for learning, in the current jargon.

On "benign" myths

In the car this morning, I caught part of "Woman's Hour" on Radio 4. (Heading link goes there, available for seven days, relevant bit about 30 minutes in.)

It was a discussion about drinking in pregnancy, and it was very refreshing. One of the contributors talked about how some of the strident advocates of prohibiting alcohol consumption in pregnancy, saw the topic of possible foetal damage principally as a way of "telling a good story" which would command attention in a wider campaign against the evils of drink. Another, asked about the labelling of alcohol in the US with warning about drinking during pregnancy, agreed that the initiative was principally traceable to the desire of drinks companies to cover themselves against litigation, regardless of the truth of the claims. Further asked if the labels had made any difference to the incidence of foetal alcohol syndrome, she was very clear--none at all.

This discussion exposed more clearly than anything I have heard or seen in mainstream media for years, the supposedly benign drift from factual reporting of risk to supposedly benign but infantilising myth-making, which not only undermines the capacity of grown-up people to make their own judgements of risk, but also undermines their confidence in anything they are told by the Ministry of Truth.

Not that it is new; Plato started it. Different context, same principle:

How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we lately spoke—just one royal lie which may deceive the rulers, if that be possible, and at any rate the rest of the city?....

...Such is the tale; is there any possibility of making our citizens believe in it?

Not in the present generation, he replied; there is no way of accomplishing this; but their sons may be made to believe in the tale, and their sons' sons, and posterity after them.

(Plato, the Republic, book III)

 

On "potential" (self-indulgent rant)

I do realise that this is of little interest to anyone else, but it's my blog, so read or move on!

I am prompted by hearing on BBC Radio 4 news of all places that something or someone is a "potential threat" to whatever.

This is not merely oxymoronic, it also dilutes the original idea to "threat of a threat".

The following list is not exhaustive,  but the notion of  potentiality is not merely implicit but clearly embedded in the following:

• chance
• danger 
• opportunity
• probability 
• risk 
• threat

 So to qualify them with "potential" is to weaken them.

"Potential" is a useful qualifier for something concrete--indeed certain-- such as "result", "outcome" "consequence"--but whose qualities are as yet unknown.

[Incidentally... "more/few/fewer" is the term for items which can be counted. "more/less" is the term for quantities which need to be measured. (Yes, I know, "term" is not the best term...]

Who says? You may well ask, but that's a whole new ball-game.

On the problem of self-limiting adequacy

I'm not sure whether or not it is true, but the story goes that Ofsted has declared that their Grade 3, "Satisfactory" is no longer satisfactory. Or perhaps it is (i.e. "satisfactory"), once again, given that the common inspection framework has "raised the bar". (I've looked up the urls for the links, but don't expect me actaully to read this stuff. I'm retired, remember?)

I hate to say it, but they may be right.

For Father's Day one of our sons gave me a premium, organic, long-matured, etc. rib of beef. I don't usually roast a joint on the bone, so I consulted Delia, naturally (in book form rather than online). Of course her advice was impeccable, and even Susi commented on the better flavour and texture than our usual supermarket joints. (This may prove to be expensive if we have also raised Susi's bar...)

For me, and indeed a generation of conscientious UK cooks (domestic cooks, rather than "chefs"; it's a very different discipline), Delia's books are the bible [that statement is grammatically "correct"].

Next to the guidance on roasting beef was, of course, a recipe for Yorkshire Pudding. (No, I am not going to post a link to a similar recipe.)

It was different from my usual one. That is of course fine; there is no canonical recipe for a traditional dish. And mine works very well, thank you. Most important, it is reliable. Sometimes a pudding comes out as a dome rather than a bowl for some unknown reason; but turn it upside down and it is like all the others.

I didn't try it. I know what I always get with my own recipe, so why risk it? If I were floundering; if my puddings came out like biscuits, I would go for it. And perhaps if I were cooking just for me, I might try it; but I am trying to produce a meal for Susi, too. (And the dog, but being diabetic, he couldn't have the pud in any case...)

So in Ofsted's insistence on "capacity to develop further" they may just be onto something. "Satisfactory" is not only not good enough, but inimical to further development. Discuss...

(Principally, Delia says you don't have to let the batter stand, but then she does add water as well as milk. I've always believed that standing the batter in the fridge until the last half-hour of roasting lets the liquid do something to the flour which helps with the rising process --because it is plain flour after all, and the egg is not whipped to retain air, souffle style. A proper scientist would not take any of this on the authority of the blessed Delia or even St Jamie, but rely on the experiments. OK, fund me!)

On manual work, feedback and fulfilment

I've just finished Matthew Crawford's (2010) The Case for Working with Your Hands; or why office work is bad for us and fixing things feels good London; Penguin/Viking, published in the USA last year as Shop Class as Soulcraft; an inquiry into the value of work. It's not very long, and highly readable.

To a certain extent, Crawford is in the same territory as Richard Sennett (see links below) in lauding craftsmanship and painstaking skill, but whereas Sennett rambles self-indulgently around the workshops of violin-makers in Cremona, and discusses literary approaches to cooking a chicken, Crawford is more grounded. He does not use the effete term "craft", but concentrates on the manual "trade". And his paradigmatic trade is repairing motorbikes.

He has an impressive academic background, including a degree in physics and a doctorate in political philosophy, and enough form as an office worker to reject it on an informed basis. He can also appeal to having practised as an electrician on small-scale construction sites.

He runs a motorbike repair shop as his main business. He knows what he is talking about, as some fascinating stories testify, even if readers may not really understand them.

There's much too much for a blog post here, and of course if I go into it too much you may not read the book, and there are reviews here, here and here. But...

• He celebrates work which gives direct and unmediated feedback; do it right and the machine works again. Do it wrong and it doesn't. 

• He bemoans current systems which don't do that--but he talks about them as if they were deliberately constructed as if to obscure feedback. They aren't. It's just that in most areas of practice today you don't find out at once if something is working or not (see Jaques "time-span of discretion") 

• And he castigates managers and modern work practices for focusing on process and compliance rather than outcomes and results. I have a lot of sympathy, and I moan about it myself, but complex organisations are just like that. Sorry!

• Crawford's conception of manual work is somewhat idealised. He nods in that direction in his acknowledgement that working as an electrician on new-build work is less interesting than repairing faults. And of course, manufacturing new motor-bikes on a production-line represents exactly the de-humanising work against which he inveighs.

• It's symptomatic of the fragmentation of work about which Crawford complains, that some of the most relevant work of recent years, such as situated learning, deliberate practice and even threshold concepts, does not get a mention.

Well worth reading, but particularly for his discussion of the intellectual component of practical work in the first five chapters.

• Here's an earlier post on Richard Sennett
• Another on the importance of practice
• and another

On learning and being taught

My son has just called round (he's 28), initially to print out a spreadsheet, but then to email it. Before that, though, he wanted me to show him how to add up a column of figures on the spreadsheet.

He couldn't email it from his own laptop because of the security settings, so he had to copy the file across via a flash-drive, with which he needed my help.

The file was simply in his main "My Documents" folder, called  "Expenses.xls". I pointed that out. He didn't understand that it was a problem...

I was irritated, to say the least. Apart from games consoles, he has had his own computer since before he went to university. I remember helping him to create graphs for a project when he was still at school.

After he left, I had something of a moan to Susi. In her inimitable way, she suggested that it was not surprising because because I am a useless teacher (guilty! I am hopelessly impatient when it comes to procedures) and when I responded by pointing out how long he has had to acquire these basic skills, she wondered if he had ever been taught them at school or university.

I love learning. I hate being taught.

In particular, I don't understand the assumption which underlies so much current discourse in the field, that learning depends on being taught.

Texting is not taught at school,  but the "achievement" of young people in this field is phenomenal. (Hint to Michael Gove; if you ever want to massage figures upwards, introduce a Diploma in "Social Communication", where txtg is a major component.)

I remember an epiphany in 1974, after a discussion at an annual Easter houseparty with friends in a rented cottage, in this case on the Nefyn peninsula...  That beyond the basic three "R"s and foreign languages (and some of that was dodgy -- did you every meet a French person who enquired, "Comment allez-vous?"?) ..beyond that almost everything I had been taught at school was;

• trivial and/or
• irrelevant (to what? Almost anything in the real world.) and/or
• wrong

So I love learning. I hate being taught. Misapplied teaching inhibits, distorts and blocks learning.

But somehow the conventional wisdom is that being taught is a prerequisite of learning.

And of course that a paper qualification is a reliable proxy for learning, knowledge and skill.

No. It's merely a proxy for having been taught.

On pictures and words

Click here for larger version,

The other day a friend and former colleague and I met for lunch, as we do every few months. He, being a resident of the Potteries (that part of Staffordshire which came to prosperity in the early 19th century through the entrepreneurship of people like Josiah Wedgwood) gave me these two plates. Based on the familiar Willow Pattern tableware (originally from the Minton pottery) these up-date the familiar scene to reflect the Potteries (on the left), and London (on the right).

RK explained how he made use of them in short courses on promoting entrepreneurial activity; instead of setting a groupwork brief of writing the characteristics of a proposed project, he insists on it being drawn. He described the way in which the task divided groups, but also how profitable it was because of the effectiveness of the post-presentation discussion--what would be known in an art school context as the critique. (Identified by Lee Shulman as their "signature pedagogy".)

I was prompted to recall, on the train on the way back, I an exercise I used to use with students (on teaching programmes) around getting them to define their view of the teaching and learning process. Some of the more obvious images, from the trigger slide, are below; I used this in order to pre-empt participants from latching on to the cliches...

I used to ask them to work in groups to generate their own images of the process, to draw them on a flipchart or acetates, and then to present them (the delights of primitive technology--you can do it with an electronic whiteboard but it's a lot of hassle) to each other, and get the crit. going in that way. A useful variant was not to allow any verbal explanation by the presenters--the rest of the class had to deconstruct their offering.

And that in turn set me thinking about one of the texts I read long ago about a technique used in health-care for exploring critical incidents, known as "Illuminative Incident Analysis" (Cortazzi and Roote, 1975). This too centres around drawing the incident, in as cartoon-like a way as the group members are capable of, in response to guidance and structured questions. The authors insist on the use of pictures as a way of getting around how words can so easily be used to fudge meaning rather than reveal it.

(Of course it is precisely the capacity of language to carry so many connotations and levels of meaning which makes it so rich, but in this context that was seen as getting in the way of the task.)

As I recall, for example, a review of potentially serious incident on a hospital ward, included in a discussion the phrase, "a nurse in a tizzy". They draw out the possible connotations of that phrase, including implications about competence and stress (and nowadays they might note that for staff involved whose first language is not English, such an informal usage might be meaningless...) But if the speaker had to draw that nurse, so much more might emerge--she might be surrounded by clocks, cartoon patients, doctors, managers and even paper-work might be depicted pulling her in different directions and her head might be spinning. There would be the role-set, a picture of demands on time, all there at once (a completed picture is an instantaneous non-linear representation)...

Prompted by the latest round of marking I am struck by the current ubiquity of the bullet-point. The use of a bulleted list is quite a pointer to the student not having really got the idea, because paradoxically it removes the structural dimension from the account, indeed my contribution to an educational Devil's Dictionary would include;

• Bullet points: the most effective way of reducing an idea to less than the sum of its parts.

(Yes, it's deliberate) But draw a picture (much better than a diagram) and you have to pin your colours to the mast.

I wonder what is gained and lost in the interpretation of, say, a novel into a graphic novel (or vice versa) as well as the re-telling of tales on film and video.

I have no time for the "learning styles" rubbish, but the use of many different media in communication for teaching is not merely a matter of pandering to that fad, it provides opportunities to explore different features of the content, too.

Cortazzi D, Roote S (1975) Illuminative incident analysis London; McGraw-Hill

see also:

Rich A and Parker D (1995) "Reflection and critical incident analysis: ethical and moral implications of their use within nursing and midwifery education" Journal of Advanced Nursing 22:6 pp 1050-1057

On trivial learning

This is tricky. What I learned about was far from trivial. The fact that I learned it, was.

I have just watched a programme about aerial warfare in the first world war. It was fascinating and haunting. And irritating.

Because Albert Ball was exalted as the great ace (crudely, 44 kills). Mick Mannock (61) was not even mentioned. Surely class was not a factor, 95 years later?

And the position of the propeller shaft of the SE5 was wrong, probably because of the exigencies of reconstruction. I'm sure someone even geekier than me will make a devastating contrary case about this. But the objective facts are not the point, here---

My interest is in the fact that I read something about this when I was about 12. More than 50 years ago. I made no effort at all to "learn" it. Amazongly I have just found the source (Jones, 1954) Watching the programme, I was irritated by the continual references to 56 Squadron. I wanted to claim the primacy of 73 squadron. Actually it should have been 74 squadron...

I am drawing no conclusions, just questions.