On living in a different world

1. A little while ago I was helping my son to do some basic DIY involving screws. He's coming up for 30, and I was amazed to find him muttering to himself the the mantra; "Righty-tighty, lefty-loosy" to ensure he screwed them in correctly.
2. Last year, at a study day for our in-service vocational teaching students about threshold concepts, the engineering special interest group suggested that "Righty-tighty, lefty-loosy" was an important threshold concept for their students to acquire. 
3. Just now, confronted with a rather odd mixer tap (faucet) in the bathroom where I am staying, and trying to balance the flows, I found myself having to use it, too. (There were two tap heads mounted horizontally opposing each other at the base of a common outlet pipe.)

But where has it come from? Why do students of 16+ years have to be taught it? Isn't it just more complicated than the metaphor we have "always" used--clockwise and anti-clockwise? Yes it is, but I've just realised that these students grew up in a digital era. I read somewhere in the last few days the claim that 60% of people check the time on their mobiles, even after they have just looked at their watches. That struck me as rubbish, but it does suggest that the analogue clock face is no longer the universal trope it once was. (Hey! I finally used that word! Probably never again.)

On the police getting younger...

...but not so young they need to be nannied like this?

Just what goes through the so-called "minds" of the people who devise this rubbish? And do they give a thought to what message it sends to rank-and-file officers about how their seniors view them?

On a prediction come true...

Harold Camping's response to the failure of his eschatological prediction of the "rapture" (pardon my ignorance, but this is a term which appears only to been used in the past ten or so years, associated with the amazingly/bizarrely successful "Left Behind" series of novels) is exactly as might have been predicted by Festinger et al.

But Mr. Camping said that he's now realized the apocalypse will come five months after May 21, the original date he predicted. He had earlier said Oct. 21 was when the globe would be consumed by a fireball.

Saturday was “an invisible judgment day” in which a spiritual judgment took place, he said. But the timing and the structure is the same as it has always been, he said.

“We've always said May 21 was the day, but we didn't understand altogether the spiritual meaning,” he said. “May 21 is the day that Christ came and put the world under judgment.”

(source here: retrieved 25 May 2011; my emphasis)

But what strikes me most forcibly is that he took the "spiritual/non-empirical" way out. He took the Pauline (Paul-eye-ne) option. Jesus was open to empirical claims and tests. The most important was that he would rise from the dead: even Paul took this on board ( I Cor. 15:14), but it remains unclear about what this meant/means. Jesus claimed a gospel of liberation:

he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised... (Luke 4:18 [AV]) 

But there was precious little evidence of it happening (not his fault: I remember a vox pop interview in South Africa at the time of the first free elections, and the interviewee, who had been queuing for hours to vote, being asked what she expected from the ANC and Nelson Mandela. She recited a long list of perfectly reasonable but utopian aspirations. How long would all this take? asked the interviewer. "I'll grant them three months.")

If you can't deliver what you have promised--promise even more, but in less specific terms...Or those further removed from testable reality... Until no-one can tell whether or not you can deliver.... Prophets and politicians and perhaps pedagogues all do it.

Sometimes--not at all often, I hope--it's the best thing to do. Better than setting yourself up to repeat the same error five months down the line.

On the rapture--or not...

There's a good piece here on the possibility that the promised eschatological event won't happen.

As it points out, end-of-the-world scenarios have been fruitful research material for social psychologists since the mid-50s. And I have no doubt that there are dozens of research teams already busy this time around.

I've tried to apply the research on cognitive dissonance to less cataclysmic learning situations here.

See you Sunday! Perhaps.

On something completely different; Les Parapluies de Cherbourg

dir Jacques Demy (1964). Imdb entry here. Open Culture comment here.



Enjoy!

On the next step beyond wikipedia

Students are routinely warned not to cite wikipedia as a source in their work. However, sometimes it is the quickest and easiest way to get an overview of a subject--if only one could drill down to its sources (some good pages do reference them, but many don't) and evaluate them. They are not as transient as a wikipedia page, and they can be cited (if authoritative enough).

That facility is on its way. A new site--still in beta--seems to have adapted a similar technology to that used in Turnitin (plagiarism detection software) to find phrases and sentences in a Wikipedia article which also appear elsewhere on the web, to highlight and show the resemblances in a pop-up window, and to display the source information as a link so you can go there and check it out. Amazing! Semantic search is effectively here.

The team have not yet incorporated all of Wikipedia, which it why it is still in beta, but it can only get more useful.



I have a few anxieties about what this might do to some desk research--it just pushes the issue of evaluation further back, in that you still have to evaluate the source material rather than the secondary wiki article, but you do still have to evaluate it.

It may encourage a student in a hurry simply to read (and even quote and attribute) a single sentence from a primary source and never read enough of it to get a useful overview, or appreciate the significance of that sentence within an overall argument or body of evidence.

But used with care, it has potential...

Thanks to Amy Cavender at ProfHacker for the tip--read her take at the link.

On the theory and practice of the right to be heard...

I've just been watching Newsnight and a discussion of the privacy/freedom of the press/injunctions issue. The participants were a well-known actor, a lawyer, a magazine editor, and a "former escort"*

Much of the discussion concerned how rich men were able to exploit the present legal provision to cover up their discreditable activities, often to the oppression of others involved who were prohibited from telling their stories.

The discussion was articulate and cut-and-thrust, good TV. For three of the four participants. The chair, Emily Maitlis, did a great job trying to ensure that the former escort had her say. She (the guest) made her points well, but she was out of her depth when the discussion took off, and just sat waiting to be invited to join in.

(And substantively she had the most nuanced case to argue...)


Three confident and assertive professionals in their (more or less) natural habitat. And one not. And her non-participation said more about whose interests are really being served than any of the points being made verbally by the others.


Watch it on iPlayer until 20 May, here.


* All respect to the woman who was prepared to appear on the programme;
(her name appeared on screen so anonymity is not an issue, just irrelevant.) I'm sure it was not a trivial act.

On e-text books

The heading link is to an interesting piece by Nicholas Carr, on the limitations of the Kindle & co. e-readers as vehicles for text-books.

On the death of OWK

I'd normally just link to this page from "shared items", but this is worth a direct mention!

Not just because it's an exemplary spoof, but also because of what it says about how news is routinely mediated. (Click in the top-right corner for the original story.)

Thanks to Boing-Boing for the link.

On managerialism

Fred Inglis in the Times Higher Education this week:

The language of managerialism, as the immortal parodies written every week for these pages by Laurie Taylor assure us, is a language in which it is impossible to tell the truth.

(A fine line and point--even if he is lauding Leavis.)

On not strutting

This is silly at one (or several) levels. I looked for a forum or comment stream to post it to, but didn't find one, so it's here.... (Oh! missed this!)

I am a great fan of The West Wing; a candidate for the greatest ever TV drama series.

The real world counterpart of their situation room is a little less dramatic, but recognisable:

The decision not to release the pictures of bin Laden's corpse is explained here with another take here.

Or, as Leo McGarry put it in Series 2, ep. 8 in a different context: "We do not strut. Ever".

More deconstruction of the photo here. I'm not going to mention all the photoshopped crap out there.

On dividing up groups (and other tools)

Being practical for once; a ProfHacker article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (a free US on-line magazine) drew my attention to Malcolm Sparrow's Excel-based tool for creating small groups from large classes taking into account several variables called the GRumbler.

It may be overkill given generally smaller class sizes in the UK even on undergraduate programmes, but nevertheless a useful tool.

And while I'm at it, here are a few more conceivably useful tools I have come across recently--and given that I am a skinflint, they're all free (for Windows--some may have Mac or even Linux versions, but I haven't checked):

• Teach history, politics, social admin? Then take a look at Dipity. It's an on-line tool to create interactive timelines. At the moment the demo. on the homepage concerns (of course) the history of Al-Qa'eda, but if you have a story to tell and it has been covered on the web, you can see how effective it may be.
• If you ever need to create screen-shots or screen-casts, then the simplest way has to be Jing, from Techsmith. It sits unobtrusively on your screen ready to grab static images or movies of whatever is going on, from any package. Only reservation; if configured to autorun at startup, it can slow down the boot process.
• Concept-mapping? When planning teaching, particularly out of one's direct speciality, it's sometimes difficult to relate concepts and ideas and items of information to each other, to see where they fit, and what other material may be important to mention... That is where C-Link comes in. It's another on-line tool: in its basic configuration you simply enter two terms which can be found in a particular knowledge repository (to begin with, Wikipedia serves very well)
• This is a Jing capture (saved as .swf) of C-Link at work (sorry the sound is fuzzy, but it doesn't add anything) It's almost an instant syllabus/book outline/essay generator.
• And this:
  
  
• ...is a concept-map exported from the site, and imported into C-Map Tools; which is a concept-mapping package (of course), also free and available from here. Concept-mapping is not the same as mind-mapping, as you can probably tell from the image. C-map Tools is a powerful package, incorporating its own presentation-authoring package--if you can find it--but not particularly friendly, and it insists on storing your files where it wants, not where you want. Nevertheless it does things others can't. (The image was once again captured by Jing in screenshot mode and slightly edited and cropped.)

On a new(ish) approach to presentation

Just in passing: I'm probably late to the party, but I'm coming across more and more examples of an excellent approach to adding animation to talks.

It's associated particularly with RSA Animate: the latest example concerns a talk by Ken Robinson on changing educational paradigms.

...but Jorge Cham is also in on the act: see his take on the physics of dark matter, here.

For some reason it greatly appeals to me--I'd be interested in other examples (there are plenty of RSA animates on YouTube I know about) and information on the practical implementation. Is it done with something like SmoothDraw, perhaps? Apparently that is what Sal Khan uses for the Khan Academy clips (which are well done, for all my reservations about the pedagogy).

On "cognitive theft"

When I observe students teaching, one of the commonest issues to draw to their attention is the use of rhetorical questions--not in the sense in which a politician might use them in a speech, but in the much more mundane sense of asking the class (usually) or an individual (occasionally) an apparently straightforward question, but then answering it for them.

Partly, it appears, this arises because of fear of "dead air", as broadcasters call it. I would say "silence", but part of the fear is that it won't be silence--it will be filled with a cacophony of off-task chatter, and that may take previous minutes to settle again. There's also the self-doubt which comes from being unsure whether you have pitched the question at the right level, or whether indeed the class have learned anything which may enable them to answer it.

At one level, of course, the unintended effect of such practice is efficiently to train students not to bother to answer questions. After all, all they have to do is keep quiet and you will do it for them. Moreover, there is zero chance of being humiliated by getting the answer wrong, and only the most trivial chance of being challenged with a follow-up.

This post takes the matter further. The author argues that in relation to teaching maths at least, to deprive the student of the opportunity of answering (by doing it for her) is to commit "cognitive theft"--the denial of an opportunity to learn.

(The post includes an interesting video of a TEDx talk by Gary Stager around this issue. The tone is rather self-important, and of course school-focused, but excerpts would make a good discussion starter in class.)

The post goes on to discuss the maths teaching approach of Sal Khan (of the Khan Academy) who emphasises direct instruction in techniques to solve problems, and suggests that it comes close to cognitive theft, too. Khan's approach has attracted quite a lot of attention in the maths-teaching blogosphere, and there are some thoughtful posts on it here.

The issues posed go much wider than maths education and schools; from my own area of interest, instruction in algorithms to reach the right answer but without knowing why --in any field--is a way of faking an understanding of threshold concepts, and is ultimately self-limiting and another form of cognitive theft.

Update

Thanks to Jim Hamlyn; he thought he'd missed the boat because of my frivolous later post, it appears, but commented:

A post on cognitive theft disappeared into the ether and I'd just dug out a link especially. Och well, here it is anyway:

http://www.connectedprincipals.com/archives/2939#comment-3896

 ...on the Khan argument.

On a bank holiday

What was supposed to take an hour or two took all day in the garden. As ever, coming back to doing this kind of stuff after months away, I found tools missing, broken, or blunt. I went up to son's to collect stuff he'd borrowed and not returned--he wanted advice on something to do with the electrical circuits--so that took an hour. (And he'd broken some of the implements he'd borrowed yesterday...)

(Almost) everything which could go wrong with the trellis project did go wrong, including drill bits breaking in the hole and wood splitting, and the trellis coming apart while being cut to size...

But no sooner had I finally got it in place, than (same) son phoned--he and partner had bought some new curtains and a curtain pole. Could he borrow the power drill again to put it up? And--since he'd never done this before--could I show him how to do it? As well that I did, because he met the traditional problem of trying to drill into a hidden steel lintel. I had to come back home to find some different screws, but we got it up.

By this time I realised I had only eaten a banana and a croissant for breakfast and nothing else all day, but there was no time to cook anything much for dinner, so I'd call at the supermarket and pick up something nice. It's a public holiday, so they closed at six and thanks to the steel lintel it was now half-past...

We found some leftovers in the fridge, of course, and son came round later to take me for a pint... So all's well that ends well, but I'm glad that everyone is back at work tomorrow (briefly--there's another holiday for some reason on Friday and the following Monday is May Day Bank Holiday), so perhaps I can relax!

On challenging beliefs

This post draws attention to:

...self-affirmation.[...] Basically, it goes like this: when your beliefs or world view is threatened in some way, you’re likely to respond defensively. However, if you are able to affirm another part of your world-view positively, you are likely to be less defensive in the first instance.

(It's not new--the reference [full citation in the linked post] is dated 2000--but it's one of those things you are unlikely actually to come across unless you search on just the right terms, and every researcher seems to invent their own.)

My personal terminology for challenging existing ideas is learning as loss, or "supplantive learning". A quick glance at the link (or an even quicker one here) will establish the parallels.

What I find interesting about the slightly different perspective of the research discussed here is the way in which it meshes with what I discovered empirically and even experientially about the critical importance of personal credibility when trying to teach people things which run counter to what they already know.

For teaching (adults) in the context of professional practice it is utterly critical. Self-affirmation seems to suggest a relatively weak effect of establishing common ground with someone over practically anything (as Robinson's musical taste examples show) which nevertheless grants you a hearing and overcomes some resistance. The issue in a professional context is not merely about some areas of cognitive agreement, but about whether you have ever actually been there and done that... (see the links below for examples).

"In my experience" trumps "research demonstrates". No contest.

Unfortunately experience may be crap...

See also (manually generated):
On credibility (30.10.10)
On credibility (25.2.06)

h/t David Robinson

On deliberate practice (golf)

Thanks to Jason Kottke for the pointer to this site, where Dan McLaughlin is putting the "10,000 hours deliberate practice" idea to the test, to see if he can get up to professional standard in golf.

The principle is attributed to Malcolm Gladwell (who doesn't need any more free publicity--there's less to him than meets the eye) but the research is based on the work of K Anders Ericsson (here's a link to an accessible article.)

So what does correlate with success? [...] All the superb performers he investigated had practiced intensively, had studied with devoted teachers, and had been supported enthusiastically by their families throughout their developing years. Later research [...] revealed that the
amount and quality of practice were key factors in the level of expertise people achieved. Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence showed that experts are always made, not born. These conclusions are based on rigorous research that looked at exceptional performance using scientific methods that are verifiable and reproducible. (p.1)

Our research shows that even the most gifted performers need a minimum of ten years (or 10,000 hours) of intense training before they win international competitions. In some fields the apprenticeship is longer: It now takes most elite musicians 15 to 25 years of steady practice, on average, before they succeed at the international level. (p.4)

It's interesting to put the idea to the test in this way.

The definitive reference is: Charness N, Feltovich P, Hoffman R and Ericsson K (2006) The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance Cambridge; C.U.P. (Beware, it's 900 pages!)

I've also discussed the idea here, here, and here.

On approaching the task of research

The link is to Keith Lyons' blog, where he has an interesting piece extracted from the introduction to his Ph.D (which accounts for the datedness of the references) about the relationship between personal experience in the education field, and undertaking research about it, particularly the relationship between the research and his (or her) subjects.

For any of my dissertation students embarking on their empirical work, and anyone looking back on their own research journey, it is highly recommended.

On Dorling (2011)

I've finished a book!

Not writing one--that has a couple of years to go at least--but reading one. I blame the net. Not only am I constantly washed over by waves of RSS feeds with fascinating and informative diversions (you don't know about RSS? You don't want to know about it. It's third only to twitter and facebook as addictive net; I've eschewed the first two, but RSS...) but Nicholas Carr may be right.

That's not entirely fair or accurate, but occasionally I have a log-jam on reading. I have six or seven books literally piling up to read.

• (Six or seven? The "or" is MacGregor's (2010) History of the world in 100 objects . When I was a child in the '50s, I was occasionally given a sweet bar (similar to our currant (sorry!) cereal bars, but made principally of dried fruit) by a shop-keeper uncle. My mother never let me have more than a quarter of it, on the grounds that it would be "too rich" for my digestion. (Come to think of  it, that other three-quarters seemed to vanish never to re-appear)  Like those bars, I am rationing myself on this book, just as I am on J D Barrow's (2008) Cosmic Imagery; key images in the history of science [I've now lost track of all these recursive parentheses, sorry!]

But! I finished the one linked to from the heading. Incidentally, I'm not signed up to any ad-sense-type scheme. Here's --edited with l'esprit de l'escalier what I posted on Amazon...

He's a (human) geographer, not an economist. And I mean "human" as opposed to "physical", rather than "robot"... But he writes like an economist. A Scandinavian economist.

I bought this book because I enjoy quirky takes on social issues, and the teasers on the cover e.g. "Why more divorced people live by the sea than anywhere else" attracted me. But it is far more political and structural than that. The entertaining stuff is there, but it tends to be buried under rather preachy rhetoric.

So: I liked--

A refreshingly different angle on Britain. There's a confluence of social disciplines (they're not "sciences"), in which economists, sociologist, and now geographers comment on the same things from different angles. Dorling relies on public data for his raw material, and ingeniously and persuasively interprets it. And he is not afraid to celebrate the positives and to castigate the scare-mongering press and politicians.

But:

There is statistical overkill. Some sections are like being beaten over the head with a statistical piledriver. Nerd that I am, I quite like teasing the implications out of stats, but not like this.

And there's a lot of repetition. Repeated with slight variation. Several times... The editor should have been much more ruthless.

And the route from observation to data to interpretation to solution is far from as linear as Dorling implies. Hence the preachiness. (I incline to agree with him, which actually makes the sermon more irritating.)

On making learning easier by making it more difficult...

This is the other side of the coin (although from a different angle) from this post.

Do you make your handouts and slides clearly legible and easy to read? This article argues (inclusivity considerations aside) that you may be doing your students a disservice.

Up to a point, perhaps... But it's always interesting to entertain a counter-intuitive angle.