Killing Your Darlings: The Cost of Innovation (CI 2012)

Posted: December 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’m going to take a little more informal approach to some of the themes expressed at CI 2012, because I have a lot of things to do, and you have a lot of things to do, so we can’t sit here waiting for me write everything up and you most certainly don’t want to read 100,000 words about What Nick Did In Late Spring In Melbourne. So let’s go forward.

Innovation is the introduction of the new, whether product, service or idea, but we know what this really means – it means that we have to let go of something old. Letting go of something old is not going to be easy, and how difficult it is can be a very complicated and emotional calculus, so innovation, which can already be hard, is made harder because change can hurt.

If you’re a writer, you may have heard the term “Kill your darlings”, which is attributed to Faulkner (the other one) and is a recasting of the following quote from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch:

“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – whole-heartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings”

On shallow reading, it appears that any attachment to something makes it eligible for extinction when what is really meant is that sentimentality is the enemy of objectivity. Innovative change is full of situations where your attachment to elements of your existing situation, or an entrenched commitment to the status quo (no, not the band), will compromise your ability to objectively assess whether you are making a correct decision.

There is a statement that every industry will go away at some stage – we’ve seen the rise and fall of so many that such a statement appears to have some credibility. But what about education? We have changed a great deal but will the industry of education every truly disappear? I honestly can’t say but I can talk about a simpler problem, which is what the “darlings” are in the traditional Higher Education system. And, sure enough, when we start talking about innovation and the threat of the new, we see these darlings protected in a way that doesn’t necessarily always seem objective. Now, we don’t have to kill any of them but change is inevitable and, if change is to come in, something has to go out. I have a starting list, which I’m planning to work on over time.

  1. Darling #1, The Lecture:

    We know that the traditional 1-to-many broadcast lecture is a successful way to occupy the time of everyone in the room but it is most certainly not the best way to get certain types of information across. There are many different aspects to this but conference talks and seminars are a world away from the traditional “today I will talk slowly about differential equations while I flash hundreds of slides past you at a speed that you can’t record and no you can’t have any notes or recording”.

    Yes, some lecturers are better than others but when information transfer and retention is important, the lecture is not the right delivery mechanism. Yet, it’s almost unassailable in its ubiquity. It’s a darling.

  2. Darling #2, The Exam:

    I was looking back at my Grand Challenges course, which had a 20% final examination of some of the core topics, and thought about what it had achieved. From my marking of the exam and review of how students prepared, my goal for the exam worked for most of the class. Most had reviewed all of the core material and organised it in a useful way to be able to summarise the core content of the course.

    But did it have to be assigned as a 1 hour exam in a giant examination hall? Did it anything to the course?

    You know, I’m not sure that it did. Next time, I might just assign an exercise to provide a portfolio of work from the course in an organised form and then have an assessment of that which is effectively a viva voce examination to assess that students had done enough work to produce a useful index and had sufficient familiarity to rapidly contextualise problems and knowledge. But, and this is important, far more conversationally.

    The examination can be made highly objective and has the advantage that you are really pretty sure that the student is doing the work – but we’re already seeing cheating technology that we will have more and more trouble dealing with. If the only supporting argument for the exam is that it’s harder to cheat, we need a better reason. If the argument is that it will force the student to learn the work, then we’ve got that around the wrong way. We need to bring motivation back into the rest of the course. Right now, the vast majority of learning happens 2-3 days before the exam and is forgotten by the following weekend.

    And yet, exams are everywhere. They’re entrenched institutional artefacts. Hello, darling.

  3. Darling #3, Me and my University:

    Oh no! Apostasy! But let’s be honest, the primary question around MOOC is whether we need the Universities that we’ve had for so many hundreds of years. If we’re questioning the University, then we’re starting to question the role and future of the teaching academic. Teacherless education was a theme that popped up occasionally at CI 2012 and, while I instinctively react to this in terms of ‘well, who builds these experiences’, we can still learn a lot by looking at what we actually need to make things work.

    I have a small office in a big and old University, with my academic robes hanging on the door for when I walk into the graduation ceremony in the giant old sandstone building once or so every year to farewell and congratulate my graduating students. How much of this is necessary recognition of achievement and how much is a darling?

    Let’s face it – we’re darlings ourselves.

Let me stress that I am not saying that everything must go, but innovation needs space and that means something else has to go. Rather than saying that everything is sacrosanct, we should really be looking at what can and should go, which will drive a search for the new and innovative. My hope would be that by looking at these things, we find the reasons why some of these could stay and belong in the future, rather than propping them up with sentimentality and an ultimately weak approach to necessary change and reinvigoration.

What are your darlings?

Systems Thinking (CI 2012 MasterClass on the Change Lab)

Posted: December 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I can’t quite believe how much mileage I’m getting out of the first masterclass but it’s taking me almost as long to go through my notes as it did to write them! I should be back into a semi-normal posting cycle fairly soon – thanks for any patience that you have chosen to extend. 🙂

Can we see all of a system if we’re only in contact with one part? The Change Lab facilitators used the old parable of the six blind man and the elephant to remind us that we can be completely correct about our perception but, due to limitations in our horizon, we fail to appreciate the whole. Another example that was brought up was the role of the police in the protection of abused women and children. If a police officer can look at a situation and think either “Well, I don’t think thats my problem” or “I don’t know what to do”, it’s easy to see how the protective role of the police officer becomes focused on the acute and the extraordinary, rather than the chronic and the systemic.

(That theme, a change in thinking and support from acute to chronic, showed up periodically throughout the conference and my notes.)

In the area of study, the police were retrained to identify what they had to do if they attended and thought that there might be a problem. The police had to get involved, their duties now included the assurance of safety for the at-risk family members and, if they couldn’t get involved themselves, their duty was to find someone else who could fix it and make the connection. We do have protective systems and mechanisms for abused people in domestic situations but there was often a disconnect between domestic violence events that police attended (acute and extraordinary events) and the connecting of people into the existing service network.

Of course, this was very familiar to me because we have the same possibility of disconnection in the tertiary sector. It’s easy to say “go and see the Faculty Office” but it’s that bit harder to ring up the Faculty Office, find the right person, brief them on what a student has already discussed with you and then hand the student over. However, that second set of events is what should happen if you want to minimise the risk of disconnection.

It’s possible to do a remarkable job in some parts of your work and do a terrible job in others, because you don’t realise that you are supposed to be responsible for other areas. It has taken me years to work out how many more things that are required of me as an educator. Yes, scholarship and the practise of learning and teaching are the core but how do we do that with real, breathing students? Here are my current thoughts, based on the police example:

  1. Getting Involved: If a student comes to me with a problem, then if I can fix it, I should try and fix it. My job does not begin when I walk into the lecture theatre and finish when I leave the room – I do have a real and meaningful commitment to my students while they are in my course. Yes, this is more work. Yes, this takes more time. Yes, I don’t know what to do sometimes and that’s scary. However, I do hope that my students know that I’m trying and, even when I’m moving slowly, I’m still involved.
  2. The Assurance of Safety: Students have a right to feel safe and to be safe when they’re studying. That means a learning space free from discrimination, bullying and fear, working in an atmosphere of mutual respect. If they feel unsafe, then they should feel safe to come to me to talk about it. This also means that students have a right to feel safe in the pursuit of their studies: no indifferent construction of assignment where 60% of students fail and it’s dismissed as ‘dumb students’.
  3. If You Can’t Fix It, Find Someone Who Can: Once you’ve done a PhD, one of the key things you work out is how much you don’t know. My Uni, like most Unis, is a giant and complex administrative structure. I don’t have the answer to all of the questions but I do have a spreadsheet of duties for people in my school and a phone book. However, saying “Go to X” is never going to be as good as trying to help someone by connecting them to another person and handing them over. If I can answer a question, I should try to. If I can’t, I should try and find the right person and then connect the student. The final part of this is that I should follow up where I can to see what happened and learn so I know the answer for next time.

The final point is, to me, fascinating because it has made me aware of how hard it can be to find the answer, even when you’re inside the system as a staff member! I always tell my students that if they need something done and aren’t making headway, get me involved because I have the big, scary signature block on my e-mail. Now, mostly our culture is very good and you don’t have to be a Professor or Associate Dean to get progress made… but it is funny how much more attention you sometimes get. I’m very happy to use my (really very insignificant) mild corner of borrowed status if it will help someone to start on the pathway to fixing a problem but I’m also very happy to report that it’s rare that I have to use it, except for the occasional person outside of the University.

It’s important to note that I don’t always succeed in doing all of this. I’m always involved and I’m always working to guarantee safety, but the work involved in a connected handover is sometimes so large that I don’t actually have enough time or resources to close the connection. This, to me, illustrates a good place to focus my efforts on improving the entry points to our systems so that we all end up at the right destination with the minimum number of false starts and dead ends.

Like I said, we’re normally pretty good but I think that we can be better – and thinking about our system as a system makes me aware of how many things I need to do as well as educate, when I’m calling myself an educator.

An Evening of Event: No More Fistbumping with Thoughtless Young Men

Posted: December 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sorry about the late post. I didn’t get back to my room until 2am this morning and I was a little too tired to blog – it has been a week! I’m staying with wonderful friends between conferences (as one does, dahhhlings) and we went out to dinner and drinks near where they lived. When we were in the bar, sitting around and catching up, we got into conversation with a younger couple and spent the next while chatting to them.

Now, let me restate that. We were actively engaged in conversation by another couple and they doggedly kept us in conversation for a while.

Does that change the context? Rather than just talking to people in a bar, when you’re ensconced in the comfy seats, does that seem different?

After some discussion, my friend and I are pretty much convinced that the couple were probably more along the con axis than the friendly axis. Their over-attentiveness, some of the actions, and, more importantly, the rapid transition from complete attentiveness to “exeunt and farewell”, which took about 2 seconds. Why did they say goodbye? I suspect because they worked out that no money was forthcoming. Having come from three solid days of “Create! Innovate! Change the world!”, I’m in a very interesting place, mentally. So when the guy started talking about how he’d always wanted to be a Royal Marine Commando, as part of a patter, we then spent the next two hours talking about why he wasn’t doing it, how he could prepare to go back and so on. If you’ve wanted to be a commando since you were 16, then sitting in a bar in Australia at 24 is a very funny way to be pursuing it, isn’t it?

Hang on, maybe that’s why they left so quickly! 🙂

Anyway, to the meat of the story, while I was up at the bar, a group of guys walked over to where our group was sitting and basically tried to chat both the women up. I walked back from the bar with the drinks and sat down. They noticed me and one of them said “Oh, sorry for talking to your women.” and held out his hand to fist bump.

What? It’s 2012 and you’re talking about “my women”? Now, lest you think this is just a figure of speech, it was completely clear to me that he was backing off because he was recognising my territorial claim.

I held my hand down and, in a relaxed way, met his gaze and said “They’re not my women. They’re their women.” Very reasonably and no aggression. His reaction was amazing – the embarrassment on his face was immediate. I wasn’t trying to embarrass him, seriously, but at the same time I wasn’t going to buy into some exchange of property rubbish. He and his friends disappeared very shortly thereafter (well, immediately and very apologetically) and, I hope, might think twice before saying something that silly again. Perhaps it was a figure of speech but the way that he and his friends were acting… it was the same old nonsense dressed up with good haircuts and nice clothes, but the same old nonsense that starts cheerily and then starts to go nasty quickly if things don’t go as the initiator wants.

I was reflecting on this when I woke up this morning and I’m happy that I did the right thing, in the right way. However, it’s that constant reminder of how much… rubbish people have to put up with and how far we still have to go in order to get a basic sense of equality going.

I worry about a society where we are happy to tell women not to dress in a certain way, rather than having the much clearer message of “respect other people and leave them alone when they want to be left alone.” Where the moment a women gets attacked, there is always the followup questioning regarding what she was doing in a certain place at that time. There’s a lot of judging going on of the victims, rather than the very simple recognition that it is the actions of the perpetrators that should be judged. Can you walk around without crapping yourself? You have enough physical self-control to not attack someone else.

Basically, if someone wants to walk down the street naked, in the middle of the night, then until our society is safe enough to do that (ignoring your feelings on public nudity for a moment) we still have to educate. We still have to say “This person is not mine, they’re theirs.” We have to teach people that perceiving something as an invitation is a perception, not an actual invitation. We still have to look at someone and say “Really? Is that what you think is reasonable?” And, maybe, slowly, people learn and in 30-40 years time we can go and deal with some of the giant problems that we’re having difficulty with because we’re making up artificial divisions between people and undermining trust by acting stupidly and without basic consideration.

I read recently about an assault charge where a man put his genitals on the face of a young man who had passed out in a fast food restaurant, a photo was taken and ended up on the Internet. People stood around and watched as this happened. A young man is defenceless, obviously after not making the best decisions, and a crowd allow someone to humiliate him and assault him in that way.

No. This is wrong. Someone who has passed out because they drank too much has been silly, because they’ll feel bad tomorrow and they’re risking medical issues, but the vulnerable are not legitimate targets for the cruel and the thoughtless. You don’t get to be judge and jury on this one, no matter how stupid you think someone has been. You don’t get to punish someone for silliness that isn’t a crime, no matter how amusing you find it. The weak and the vulnerable need the support of the strong and privileged – not their exploitation.

I’ve come out of the last three days with an enormous amount of energy and I’m ready for a big challenge – the first stage in this is never letting something like this (helping other people or protecting other people) slip by again. If it means asking people if they’re ok, and risking getting involved, then I’ll have to swallow my trepidation and just do it. If it means getting dirty, or maybe having someone throw up on me, I can wash my clothes and have a shower. If it means running late for something that isn’t life threateningly urgent because I’ve stopped to help someone, then I will be late. I haven’t always been very good at this and I’ve always had really good reasons… or at least that’s what I thought.

Last night reminded me that it doesn’t have to be violent or unpleasant, but it does require you to keep your eye on things and not get sucked into the implicit privilege of the colour of my skin, my educational background or my gender. No more fist bumps for stupidity and, with any luck, no more convenient business to allow me to turn a blind eye.

More on the Change Lab: Creative Innovations 2012 Day 1 (still)

Posted: November 30, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

(Yeah, I’m slowly adding content. I just came from a dinner that pretty much defies description so you’ll have to just give me love for actually taking the time to write this at midnight instead of going to bed. 🙂 )

I spoke before about the Change Lab but here are the key steps.

1. An innovative approach that is systemic, participative and creative
2. Collective effort to address a vital, complex challenge in a given systems
3 A committed alliance of political, economic and cultural leaders in the system
4 A rhythmic process of acting and reflecting
5 A structure container for building capacities for co-initiating co-sensing co-presencing co-creating and co-evolving
6 A safe space for practising how to exercise both power and love

Whoah – what? Power and love? This is a form of framing to show how two very different camps think about the work.

POWER: One camp says that the only thing that matters is individual interests, ambitions and capacity to act.
LOVE:  Other camp focused on what’s good for the whole, the best solution, that’s the only thing that matters

Here’s the quote from the Reverend Martin Luther King, Junior:

“Power without love is reckless and abusive. Love without power is sentimental and anaemic.”

So we must attend to both the power and the love as part of the whole.

Ok, this kind of things is easy to say but the guy who was saying this was Dr Adam Kahane – he’s gone to places to look at difficult situations and if he thinks this works then I’m willing to listen. Adam was in Bogota with politicians and militia in one room, including people who had made death threats against each other, and had guerrillas calling in on the phone to be part of the scenario generation.

“Do I have to agree to a ceasefire to take part in the scenario?” (Random guerrilla)

(The answer was no – no preconditions to the scenario because you just wanted people in the same place)

What we have to face is that some problems are so big that it will take more than our friends and family to solve them. We may have to work with strangers – or our enemies.

Think about that.

You’ve been fighting someone for so long that you don’t really remember all the details – but you know that you hate each other and that you have both done bad things to each other recently. Suddenly, something comes up and it’s huge. It’s a wicked problem, one that is complex and hard to deal with or even understand. You can’t solve it alone. Your enemy can’t solve it alone.

Can you solve the initial problem of getting these two people into the room just to even talk about things? Then, having done that, can you work out how to work together on the thing that threatens you both and, somehow, act in concert to deal with it?

What if it’s so big that it’s bigger than both of you? Now, not only do you have to work together on something, you have to find someone else who will work with your semi-dysfunctional mutual hatred society. Maybe the only person who can help you is the person that you both hate second to each other? Point 2 of the approach talks about a collective effort and 3 demands that the leader, the people with agency who can change things, are the people who should be at the table.

Does it have to be Kings, warlords or CEOs? It depends on how entrenched they are in the status quo. If all the CEO is going to say it “Hey, we’re great”, then send someone who is nearly as powerful but actually has their eyes open.

I spoke to Adam tonight at the dinner and our exchange went like this:

Nick: “Thanks for a great talk, Adam. Listening to you talk about Bogota gave me hope. I don’t have to deal with warlords and guerrillas, I just have to get some academics around a table.”

Adam: “You’re welcome, but I was trying to change academics for years and I just gave up. Remember Kissinger’s quote about academics? (Kissinger, who was apparently quoting Sayre on Issawi)”

Issawi (from the grave): “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.”

Sayre (from the grave): “That is why academic politics are so bitter.”

Now I realise that Adam was being facetious, he’s a highly amusing man, but it is slightly scary to hear this from a man who was willing to tell people to stop complaining about sitting next to someone who had tried to kill them five times, because he was trying to stop the sixth attempt.

I like the Power and Love framing – I think I’m far too prone to that sentimental ‘love’ approach,without giving enough attention to the requirement of people to be people! I think I’ll have to buy Adam’s book tomorrow!

First day of Creative Innovations 2012

Posted: November 29, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

It has been a hectic day. Up early to go to the gym and then, from 9am on, it’s been solid meeting, thinking, talking, networking and writing furiously. Regrettably, it appears that almost all of my notes may have just disappeared due to an application crash but, to be honest, I learned a great deal from writing it all down! (I’m still trying to recover all the notes!) (Whew – after a nervous hour that included a complete failure to boot, we appear to be going again. Sleep? Who needs sleep?)

This morning started with the Change Lab: solving complex social problems through design thinking. The key to all of this is, instead of getting caught in Challenge/Response cycle, you take a step back, get the useful (active) parties involved and get all of the problems out onto the table. I’ve given a very, very high level description but I’m going to need some time to go through my notes to distill it properly!

However, we were looking at problems in terms of whether they were dynamic (cause and effect a long way apart and interdependent), social (no one has the same lens on the problem) and/or generative (products of an uncertain and unknown future). We were asked to think about the problems in our institutions and how we’d classify them. I thought about two:

  1. Gender imbalance in the Engineering and ICT disciplines, which I assessed as dynamic (a dearth of female students years ago has not helped the numbers today) and social (in the amount of argument about this, due to personal perspectives and agendas).
  2. Increasing student workload to self-support. Most of today’s students are working to pay bills while they’re at Uni. I regard this as dynamic (changing social structures over the last few decades as well as reduced government funding), social (because the view of how people ‘should’ go to Uni is highly subjective) and generative (as we have no idea what this will do in the future and how we will really tackle it.)

I found it an interesting way to think about the problems in their overall scope. Other people’s problems included the health sector and their shift from acute care to chronic care as the population ages, and what was happening for students who don’t even make it to Cert IV in a workplace where further education has become expected. We then got a question that, to be honest, is one of the core themes of this conference:

What is the single greatest challenge you’re facing in trying to make progress in this problem(s)?

Well, that’s a good question. Speed of adaptation is a big one here – just because we were taught a certain way doesn’t make it right by any stretch of the imagination. Getting everyone who can solve either of my problems to even meet in the same room can be tricky, let alone agreeing to anything. We may end up spending all of our planning and organising time just putting a meeting together!

The Change Lab approach is designed to be systemic, participative and creative – so you need to be able to address the whole system and talk to all of the key players, while being able to step outside of the current constraints. (Hey, no-one said it would be easy!) The big problem with a big problem is that you can get stuck. You do the same thing because it’s what you do, even when you know it’s not working. Are we there yet? I don’t think so, but as someone else said today  (and I paraphrase) “The time to innovate is not when it’s inevitable, it’s when it looks like it’s not yet time.” We have some bad situations (gender balance being one of them) but we’re not yet completely stuck in it and there’s a lot of action for change.

Ok, must get some sleep but will blog again shortly.

Rapid Fire Quote: Creative Innovations 2012

Posted: November 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Attended a great panel over supper on “Now to Next: How will Science and Technology help solve our wicked problems” moderated by Robyn Williams, with Baroness Susan Greenfield, Michael T Jones, Professor Nadia Rosenthal, Dr Iain McGilchrist and Jason Drew. Tons of great stuff from a very talented panel but my favourite quote of the night was from Iain McGilchrist:

“We are in a race between education and catastrophe.”

(Edit: Alan has noted that this is normally attributed to H. G. Wells. Thanks, Alan!)

Can you think of a better description of what we do or a more important reason to get up in the morning? The burning deck analogy, where crisis forces us to act, may not always apply – after all, as Baroness Greenfield noted, Quantum theory wasn’t developed because of a looming crisis, Barry Marshall’s work on ulcers wasn’t because of war and global warming had nothing to do with the work on Nerve Growth Factor. So thinking of scientists as firefighters is not a good way to think. But thinking of educators as essential and of education as the way to avert disaster – now that’s a much more useful approach.

Creative Innovations 2012

Posted: November 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

So much to blog about from the conventicle but, surprise!, I’m not at home, I’m in a hotel preparing to attend the first day the Creative Innovations 2012 conference. I have a ‘wild card’ entry (sponsored ticket) courtesy  of the Vice President of Services and Resources of my University and I’m really looking forward to it.

This is not a free lunch. (Readers of fine literature will know that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.) I need to look at the activities of the next three days through a lens that could bring five concrete proposals back to the University. I must be honest – I had been expecting something like this because it’s too good an opportunity to go to waste. Take a group of people from the Uni and throw them into a giant melting pot of entrepreneurs and creative thinkers… well, you’d hope to get at least five ideas!

Our Uni is a big place, with many complex systems, so I’ll definitely have my thinking cap on for the next few days!

This entry is short because I suspect I’ll be live blogging quite extensively tomorrow.

And I have my conventicle notes to write up as well.

…

Expect a lot from me over the next few days!

First Adelaide Computing Education Conventicle

Posted: November 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Well, my hosting duties are done and I’m relaxing at home, having hosted the first successful Adelaide Computing Education Conventicle! I’m absolutely exhausted and I have to jump on a plane very soon and so I crave your indulgence because today’s post is going to be a reposting of my welcoming speech to the Conventicle. My thanks to all of the guests, presenters and attendees – we started a new tradition well. I look forward to filling in the details over the next few days. Without any further ado, here is my speech:

“Welcome to the first Adelaide Computing Education Conventicle.

I would first like to acknowledge that we are meeting on the traditional country of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide plains, the original inhabitants of the land upon which the University of Adelaide was built, and who have shared with us a name for this building. Ingkarni Wardli means ‘place of learning’ or, my favourite, ‘the house of inquiry’ and is the first building in the University’s history to have a Kaurna name. I recognise and respect their cultural heritage, beliefs and relationship with the land, and I acknowledge that they are of continuing importance to the Kaurna people living today.

In the spirit of today’s events, I would like to share with you the history of the name of this building, to emphasise the importance of today’s meeting – a meeting of people who are dedicated to learning, to knowledge and to sharing what they know with other people. This building had a working name of “Innova21” but a new name was always sought and, after a great deal of discussion, the then-Dean, Professor Peter Dowd, decided to seek advice on a name from the Kaurna people.

It would have been very easy to look at what we, as outsiders, know of the Kaurna language and pick a name that seemed right – especially when the word for knowledge “Ingkarni” was so close to the word “Innova”. However, the Kaurna language is protected by its custodians, because of people with less than perfect understanding or, in some extreme cases, a desire to exploit by association, so we needed to seek approval before the naming. As it turns out, calling the building “Ingkarni” by itself would have been nonsensical and would have undone the intent of the namers, which was to recognise and respect the cultural traditions of the Kaurna, in their role as educators.

If you have ever had the good fortune to hear the Kaurna Elder, Uncle Lewis O’Brien, you will know that the Kaurna placed great value on education and were respected among the neighbouring communities as educators and conference leaders. When big decisions were being made, when important knowledge had to be shared, the Kaurna were generally to be consulted and would have an instrumental role in the process. What better name for a building that contains science and education than the name “House of Enquiry” from a people who were known for their knowledge and their importance in the sharing of wisdom?

Today, we gather to discuss our knowledge of education, to share our successes and to understand and to seek to address those areas where we are yet to succeeed. I would like to thank the Australian Council of Deans of ICT’s Learning and Teaching Academy, for funding both me and Simon under the Fellows program. I would like to thank the inimitable Simon for his encouragement to run this, and to thank our other interstate guest, Dr Raymond Lister, for being here today to share his research. I would also like to thank you all for agreeing to present, or to just show up and listen. It is far easier to ignore alternative approaches to learning and teaching than it is to sit in a room and prepare to discover that you might be able to do things differently, with greater effect. I welcome you all and I hope that this is the first of a long and fruitful cycle of Conventicles. It is now my pleasure to introduce Simon!”

 

Amplification of Thoughtlessness

Posted: November 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve been taught by, met, taught and am colleagues with a wide range of educators. The more people I meet, the more I realise how similar people are and the more I realise that one of the key differences in educators is how much they care. Caring more about your students is generally a good thing, as is caring about your commitment to scholarship and ethics, but caring is also a terrible amplifier of thoughtlessness and, regrettably, people can be truly thoughtless at times. When people are thoughtful, then being a caring educator is fantastic because you get that great feeling from finding out that people valued what you did, the effort that was expended and the final result that was achieved. I love it when students get back in touch with me, sometime down the track, or send me e-mail to let me know that something has really resonated with them. Sadly, the people who are thoughtless, or attempt to be unpleasant in some way, seem to stick in my mind a lot more than the success stories do.

In a way this makes sense because a successful student, or a successful course, doesn’t require any changes to be made. However, given that my job is to educate, anytime something goes wrong, it not only means that there is something to be fixed, it means that I didn’t do my job properly – or, at least, someone is perceiving that I have not done my job properly. You don’t have to care much to feel that fairly deeply. Caring about what you do is great because it makes you take work seriously and responsibly, but it also leaves you vulnerable. It saddens me that I have seen a handful of students who have gone out of their way to exploit that – but it saddens me more that they could have been through the educational experience that we still have to offer (it may not be perfect but it is still pretty impressive) and come out the end so determined to make somebody else unhappy or so utterly ignorant of the impact of their thoughtlessness.

I can clearly remember the first time years ago that a student’s relatively thoughtless act had a big impact on me, when I received a really nasty student evaluation for three students in a group of 140+. I had enforced some penalties for plagiarism and, mysteriously, a number of my students equal to the number of plagiarists had decided that I was awful, that I hated my students, I had acted unfairly and I was bigoted and discriminatory. It really shook my faith in my ability to teach. Overall, my figures were fine but I usually attribute the depth of passion to the extremity of the commitment and the fact that three people took the trouble to label me as a completely unacceptable teacher hit me hard.

When I first applied for Federal research funding, I received a reviewer’s comment that was so manifestly unpleasant, dismissive and vindictive that I went to the head of school pretty much assuming that I would have to resign and go and find other work. The reviewer all but told me to get out of academia or, maybe, in a decade’s time, I might not bring down another grant too badly. Those words, which I would laugh off in other arenas or at other times, came through a channel and at a time when I was going to place great import upon them.

There is a lot of difference in how you can say things and, the older I get, the more I realise that some things just don’t have to be said. There is no shortage of people who are happy to tell people things “for their own good” when, in reality, they are telling them for far less altruistic reasons. I have seen a lot of vindictiveness over the years dressed up as thoughtlessness, pretending to be an accidental overstatement. Of course, being human, I’ve sometimes made the mistake myself and I unreservedly apologise to anyone that I ever offended – if I haven’t already found you to apologise!

I sometimes wonder what some of my students want. If I didn’t care, if I showed up with the same slides from the last 20 years and rattled through them, never updating, handing all marking off to inexperienced TAs, failing people just because I’ve classified them as ‘dumb’, then I would be untouchable. I’d be untouchable because I would have divided the world into people who matter and people who don’t, slotting myself clearly into the ‘matter’ while leaving all of my students elsewhere. My students couldn’t matter to me and have me still teach them so badly. The problem arises when you do care about your students and some people, for whatever reason, decide that this is a weakness. Something to game for their own advantage or for their own amusement.

I suspect that I have taught less than 10 such people over my years in education, which is great in a way because it means that there aren’t that many of them, but it’s terrible to consider that such a small percentage of the students I’ve seen could still stick so much in my mind. However, these students, despite themselves, help to make me better at what I do. Yes, they get under my skin but I turn around and work out if any of what was said was valid. Could I improve? Could I help other people? This doesn’t defend unpleasantness- a positive outcome ascribed through moral accident is no validation of vindictiveness. But, by digging through the comments, sometimes I looked at myself and thought “Well, I’m not that bad but I could make some improvements here.”

Despite everything, we probably never will give up on these students. They may not understand that and they will probably never appreciate it, but the community of educators is one of the most inclusive, forgiving and amazing groups I’ve seen. Because we know what it’s like to learn and some things take longer than others, and sometimes people do dumb and thoughtless things. Fortunately, it turns out that caring can amplify thoughtfulness just as well as it amplifies thoughtlessness.

Game Design and Boredom: Learning From What I Like

Posted: November 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

For those of you poor deluded souls who are long term readers (or long term “receivers of e-mail that you file under the ‘read while anaesthetised’ folder”) you will remember that I talked about producing a zombie game some time ago and was crawling around the house to work out how fast you could travel as a legless zombie. Some of you (well, one of you – thanks, Mark) has even sent me appropriately English pictures to put into my London-based game. Yet, as you can see, there is not yet a game.

What happened?

The first thing I wanted to do was to go through the design process and work out if I could produce a playable game that worked well. Along the way, however, I’ve discovered a lot of about games because I have been thinking in far more detail about games and about why I like to play the games that I enjoy. To quote my previous post:

I play a number of board games but, before you think “Oh no, not Monopoly!”, these are along the lines of the German-style board games, games that place some emphasis on strategy, don’t depend too heavily on luck, may have collaborative elements (or an entirely collaborative theme), tend not to be straight war games and manage to keep all the players in the game until the end.

What I failed to mention, you might notice, is that I expect these games to be fun. As it turns out, the first design for the game actually managed to meet all of the above requirements and, yet, was not fun in any way at all. I realised that I had fallen into a trap that I am often prone to, which is that I was trying to impose a narrative over a set of events that could actually occur in any order or any way.

Ever prepared for a class, with lots of materials for one specific area, and then the class takes a sudden shift in direction (it turns out that the class haven’t assimilated a certain foundation concept) and all of that careful work has to be put away for later? Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you prepare – life happens and your carefully planned activities get derailed. Even if you don’t get any content surprises, it doesn’t take much to upset the applecart (a fire alarm goes off, for example) and one of the signs of the good educator is the ability to adapt to continue to bring the important points to the learner, no matter what happens. Walking in with a fixed narrative of how the semester is going to roll out is unlikely to meet the requirements of all of your students and if something goes wrong, you’re stuffed (to use the delightful Australian vernacular, which seems oddly appropriate around Thanksgiving).

In my head, while putting my game together, I had thought of a set of exciting stories, rather than a possible set of goals, events and rules that could apply to any combination of players and situations. When people have the opportunity to explore, they become more engaged and they tend to own the experience more. This is what I loved about the game Deus Ex, the illusion of free will, and I felt that I constructed my own narrative in there, despite actually choosing from one of the three that was on offer on carefully hidden rails that you didn’t see until you’d played it through a few times.

Still my favourite computer game!

Apart from anything else, I had made the game design dull. There is nothing exciting about laying out hexagonal tiles to some algorithm, unless you are getting to pick the strategy, so my ‘random starting map’ was one of the first things to go. London has a number of areas and, by choosing a fixed board layout that increased or decreased based on player numbers, I got enough variation by randomising placement on a fixed map.

I love the game Arkham Horror but I don’t play it very often, despite owning all of the expansions. Why? The set-up and pack-up time take ages. Deck after deck of cards, some hundreds high, some 2-3, have to be placed out onto a steadily shrinking playing area and, on occasion, a player getting a certain reward will stop the game for 5-10 minutes as we desperately search for the appropriate sub-pack and specific card that they have earned. The game company that released Arkham has now released iPhone apps that allow you to monitor cards on your phone but, given that each expansion management app is an additional fee and that I have already paid money for the expansions themselves, this has actually added an additional layer of irritation. The game company recognises that their system is painful but now wish to charge me more money to reduce the problem! I realised that my ‘lay out the hexes’ for the game was boring set-up and a barrier to fun.

The other thing I had to realise is that nobody really cares about realism or, at least, there is only so much realism people need. I had originally allows for players to be soldiers, scientists, police, medical people, spies and administrators. Who really wants to be the player responsible for the budgetary allocation of a large covert government facility? Just because the administrator has narrative value doesn’t mean that the character will be fun to play! Similarly, why the separation between scientists and doctors? All that means is I have the unpleasant situation where the doctors can’t research the cure and the scientists can’t go into the field because they have no bandaging skill. If I’m writing a scenario as a novel or short story, I can control the level of engagement for each character because I’m writing the script. In a randomised series of events, no-one is quite sure who will be needed where and the cardinal rule of a game is that it should be fun. In fact, that final goal of keeping all players in the game until the end should be an explicit statement that all players are useful in the game until the end.

The games I like are varied but the games that I play have several characteristics in common. They do not take a long time to set-up or pack away. They allow every player to matter, up until the end. Whether working together or working against each other, everyone feels useful. There is now so much randomness that you can be destroyed by a bad roll but there is not so much predictability that you can coast after the second round. The games I really like to play are also forgiving. I am playing some strategy games at the moment and, for at least two of them, decisions made in the first two rounds will affect the entire game. I must say that I’m playing them to see if that is my lack of ability or a facet of the game. If it turns out to be the game, I’ll stop playing because I don’t need to have a game berating me for making a mistake 10 rounds previously. It’s not what I call fun.

I hope to have some more time to work on this over the summer but, as a design exercise, it has been really rewarding for me to think about. I understand myself more and I understand games more – and this means that I am enjoying the games that I do play more as well!

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