Oh No, Major Spam Offensive!

Posted: July 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: | Leave a comment

My WordPress comment feed just exploded with spam and I had to make a choice between deleting a bucketload of spam by inspecting them individually (and not writing tomorrow’s post) or hitting the ‘throw it all away’ button.

If you sent me a comment in the last 24 hours and you are not a bot, please try again!

If you are a bot, my, but you’re getting clever. Perhaps… too… clever.

Relationship Management: Authenticity

Posted: July 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

(Edit note: I tried to use a formatting mechanism that would make the e-mail examples stand out but in broke things for people with different browsers and for me on mobile browsers. I’ve switched it back to normal text and indented for clarity.)

I belong to the Qantas Frequent Flyer program and have a reasonable amount of status. The last time I hit ‘Gold’, they sent me a letter telling me about all of the perks if I then went to ‘Platinum’. This struck me as curious because, by doing so, they immediately reduced the reward of ‘going Gold’ (because it was now second best) and completely failed to show me that they had looked at my flying habits. To go to ‘Platinum’, I would have had to take all of the flights I just took – AGAIN. So, now, thanks to an ill-thought out letter I’m aware of two things: firstly, that Gold is for dummies and that the cool kids are Platinum, and, secondly, that the airline I’ve been flying with since the mid-90s doesn’t regard me as serious enough to track. It makes you question the relationship.

Now it’s not as if I’d actually expended any effort to go ‘Gold’, I’d just sat on a lot of Qantas planes, watched a lot of Futurama and Big Bang Theory, and accumulated points. What Qantas sent me was a message that basically said “Hey, just fly twice as often as you and, because you fly discount economy and we don’t give you that much for it, that means we want you to spend about 3 months of the year in the air. In Economy long haul.” That’s a bit irritating because, as someone who works with computers, it’s pretty easy to look at things like accrual rate, current time of the year and my flying pattern and realise that you were sending me the aviation equivalent of “Hey, you made your mortgage payment, want to buy Paris?”

There’s a lot of lip service given to the idea of relationship management and, while it’s easy to talk about, it’s hard to do. There’s a great deal of difference between sending students an e-mail if they’re not attending and trying to actually make a connection with the student. One of these can be done with a message like this:

From: Nick Falkner
To: Nick Falkner
BCC: list of students but put in to the mail message in a way that doesn’t show up.

Hey, I noticed that you haven’t been showing up in class for a while and that you also haven’t handed up a number of assignments. If you’d like to get in touch, please see me after class or send me an e-mail to organise a time.

Regards, Nick.

Now, this is, to me, disingenuous, because while it may all be true, it looks like it’s a personal message when it’s really a form letter. Hand on heart, yes, I’ve done this but, on reflection, it’s not really good enough. Yes, any attempt to get in touch with a student is better than nothing, but this has no personalisation to it. (Yes, large classes can be hard to personalise. We ran a course for 360 engineers and we had weekly assignments with a marking load of 36 hours. We had to use team marking, with me as quality control and arbiter. Because each student got the same marker each time, we managed to maintain a relationship through personalised feedback and consistency that would have been hard to manage with only one person – but, obviously, students in different blocks could have different experiences and we did have to swap in/out more than one marker.)

I spend a lot of time establishing relationships with my students but that means that I then have to spend a lot of time maintaining the relationships with my students. Even in large classes, if I’ve spoken to someone once, they expect me to remember their names! (And I certainly try to – I don’t always succeed but I’ve got better at it with practice.)

Even those students I haven’t yet managed to develop a relationship with can benefit from my attempts to try. So this is probably much closer to what I try to send. (My explanatory notes on this are also attached after two dashes — and in italics.)

From: Nick Falkner
To: Student Name — E-mail is to the student, not an anonymous list
CC: Any other lecturers in the course — This is so that the student knows that all lecturers are getting this info.

Dear Firstname, — This can be hard to know, even when you can see the full name, due to cultural issues. If you make a fair stab, most people help you out.
I was looking at the course “Underwater Knitting in Perl” and you haven’t submitted any work for assignments 2 and 3. I was wondering if you there was something that you wanted to talk about? If you have medical or compassionate extension requests for this time, then you do need to let me know, as we need to work out an alternative submission schedule if that’s appropriate. As a reminder, you do need to obtain at least 40% of the available marks in the assignment work component to pass but you can easily get back on track if you start doing the work again now.
— It’s not too late but it can be too late! You may need help! Can I help you?
If you’d like to talk to me in person, I have an office drop-in time from 2-4pm on Friday, and you can find me in office 9.99, Building 4, Third Circle, or you can call me on xxxxx if that’s easier. Obviously, e-mail is always great as that gets me wherever I am – but I don’t promise to reply immediately to e-mail sent at midnight! — How to get me! I also reserve the right to be inject humour randomly. 🙂
Are you available on Friday at 2pm? If so, please let me know.
— Easy question to answer. Last thing the student reads. Need to keep it short so it can be read quickly and easily. This may, actually, be slightly too long.

This isn’t perfect, obviously, and I’m sure I’ve broken any number of good rules by doing this but the most important thing is that the tone is very different. I’ve thought about this student and my concern appears more authentic because it is more authentic. Of course, it took me much longer to write but the chances of having a positive response are far greater. It’s also based on my knowledge of the student which, right now, is a little limited but at least I’ve dug up as much as I can. I’ve reminded them of the mechanisms that are in place to help, as an introductory step, without saying that there’s anything wrong with them and I’ve given them a reason to respond (you may put yourself at risk but it’s not too late) and a direct question (can you see me on Friday) to respond to.

 Unsurprisingly, the students who respond and stay in touch are usually the ones that I have the best relationship with – but the first e-mail and your demonstration of knowledge of the student, as well as the personalisation of the message, makes a difference. Today, I received an e-mail from someone who came to me with problems but, with some good e-mail and meetings, we got him through to a solid B – when he was on his way to an F. Here’s what he wrote:
[…] thanks for your help during the semester, without it I wouldn’t have been able to pass [the course]. I really appreciate it. I was actually a bit surprised to even manage a [B], so again cheers.
And that, I think, is all I really need to say on this.

The Extrinsic Reward: As Seen in the Wild.

Posted: July 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Why should I do it? What’s in it for me?”

How many times have you heard, said or thought the above sentiment, in one form or another? I go to a lot of meetings so I get to hear this one a lot. Reanalysing my interactions with people over the past 12 months or so, it has become apparent how many people are clearly focused on the payoff, and this is usually not related to their intrinsic reward mechanisms.

We get it from students when they ask “Will this be on the test?” (Should I study this? What’s in it for me?) We get it from our colleagues when they look at a new suggestion and say “Well, no-one’s going to do that.” (Which usually means “I wouldn’t do it. What’s in it for me?”) We get it from ourselves when we don’t do something because something else becomes more important – and this is very interesting as it often gives an indicator of where you sit on the work/life balance scale. Where I work, there are a large number of occasions where the rewards mechanisms used can result in actions and thinking patterns that, as an observer, I find both interesting and disturbing.

Let me give you some background on how research funding works in Australia (very brief). You have a research idea or are inside a group that has some good research ideas. You do research. You discover something. You write it up and get it published in conferences and journals. Repeat this step until you have enough publications to have a credible track record. You can now apply for funding from various bodies, so you spend 3-4 weeks writing a grant and you write up your great grant idea, write it up really well, attach your track record evidence as part of your CV, and then wait. In my discipline, ICT, our success rate is very low, and very few of the people who apply for Australian Research Council Discovery Grants get their grants. Now this is, of course, not a lottery – this is a game of skill! Your grant is rated by other people, you get some feedback, you can respond to this feedback (the rejoinder), and the ratings that you originally received, plus your rejoinder, go forward to a larger panel. Regrettably, there is not much money to go around (most grants are only funded at the 50% level of the 22% of grants that get through across the board), so an initial poor rating means that your grant is (effectively) dead.

This makes grants scarce and intrinsically competitive, as well as artificially inflated in their perceived value. Receiving a grant will also get you public congratulations, the money and gear (obviously) and an invitation to the best Christmas cocktail party in the University – the Winner’s Circle, in effect. The same is true if you bring in a heap of research cash of any other kind – public praise, money and networking opportunities.

Which, if you think about it, is rather curious because you have just been given a wodge (technical term) of cash that you can use to hire staff and buy gear, travel to conferences, and basically improve your chances of getting another grant – but you then get additional extrinsic rewards, including the chance to meet the other people who have risen to this level. This is, effectively, a double reward and I suppose I wouldn’t have much of a problem with it, except that we start to run into those issues of extrinsic motivation again which risks robbing people of their inclination to do research once those extrinsic rewards dry up. I note that we do have a scheme to improve the grant chances of people who just missed out on getting Australian Research Council (ARC) funding but it is literally for those people who just missed out.

Not getting a grant can be a very negative result, because the absence of success is also often accompanied by feedback that will force you to question the value of your performance to date, rather than just the work that has been submitted.

When an early career researcher looks at the ARC application process and thinks “What’s in it for me?” – the answer is far more likely to be “an opportunity to receive feedback of variable quality for the investment of several weeks of your life, from people with whom you are actively competing” rather than an actual grant. So this is obviously a point where mentoring, support and (yes) seed funding to be able to improve become very important – as it provides an ability to develop skill, confidence and (hopefully) the quality of the work, leading to success in the future. The core here, however, is not to bribe the person into improving, it’s to develop the person in order that they improve. Regrettably, a scheme that is (effectively) rewarding the rewarded does not have a built-in “and lifting up those who aren’t there” component. In fact, taking on a less experienced researcher is far more likely to hinder a more capable applicant’s chances. When a senior researcher looks at assisting a more junior researcher, under the current system, “What’s in it for me?” is mostly “Reduced chance of success.” Given that this may also cut you out of the Winner’s Circle, as funds dry up, as you are no longer successful, as it then gets harder to do the research and hence get grants, combined with the fact that you can only apply for these once a year… it’s a positive disincentive to foster emerging talent, unless that talent is so talented that it probably doesn’t need that much help!

So the extrinsic manipulation here has a built-in feedback loop and is, regrettably, prone to splitting people into two groups (successful and not) very early on, at the risk of those groups staying separated for some time to come.

If the large body of work in the area is to be believed, most people don’t plan with the long term outcomes in mind (hence, being told that if you work hard you might get a grant in five years is unlikely to change anyone’s behaviour) and on top of that, as Kohn posits, praising a successful person is more likely to cause envy and division than any real improvement. How does someone else being praised tell you how to improve from your current position?

So what does all of this hot air mean for my students?

I have just finished removing all ‘attendance-based’ incentive schemes from my courses – there are no marks being given just for showing up in any form, marks are only achieved when you demonstrate that you have acquired knowledge. Achievement will not generate any additional reward – the achievement will be the reward. Feedback is crucial but, and this will be challenging, everything I say or do must provide the students with a way to improve, without resorting to the more vague areas of general praise. I will be interested to see if this appears to have any (anecdotal) effect upon the number of times someone asks “What’s in it for me?”

Puppet on a String: A Summary of My Corruption by Extrinsic Rewards

Posted: July 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

I recently posted that I was thinking about my own contributions and asking what, if anything, would denote something that could be recognised as my mastery of my discipline. On thinking about this, I realised that, once again, I was asking someone else to value my work. For those of you who are educational specialists, rather than a discipline researcher who is on his way to becoming an educational researcher within the discipline, this is probably somewhat amusing, given I keep talking about the need to reduce extrinsic motivation in my students.

I have changed career several times and, if you look at why I’ve done this, a pattern quickly emerges. I tend to leave at the point where I have become competent enough that other people start to tell me that what I am doing is useful, valuable and start trying to reward me. Yet, I go into jobs seeking that kind of recognition and reward. I am corrupted in my intent, by the rewards, and then my intrinsic reward mechanisms become compromised and, after becoming deeply unhappy, I leave.

I realised, over the weekend, that I was becoming so pre-occupied with external approval that it was making me extremely vulnerable to criticism and it was corrupting me in trying to do something that is, whether I like it or not, very important and that I also happen to be good at.

Right now, I am in the middle of trying to work out how to divorce myself from the external rewards that I, irritatingly, crave and that, ultimately, then reduce the joy I take in doing things for my own reasons. It’s not surprising that the tasks that I enjoy the most at the moment are the big challenges, the ones where I’m working several levels above my pay grade or the usual expectations of someone of my level. I’m doing these things because they’re important and, because I’m doing it ‘out of cycle’ so to speak, I can’t be externally rewarded for them – I can just do a good job.

It’s in this same mode of thinking that I’ve decided not to spend any time applying for any local teaching and excellence awards. (I was about to comment on my potential eligibility but this is just another quest for a pat on the head – so I’ve deleted it.) I am either doing my job in the way that I should, and the expectations should be of a satisfactory performance that provides students with an excellent experience, or I should receive guidance, counselling and remedial assistance from my employer. Ultimately, if I don’t meet the standards then I should probably be fired. But if I’m doing well, then that is my job and I don’t need a piece of paper or a cheque to make things better. In fact, that money and time (in deciding upon the awards or writing the applications) should be directed to people who need the improvement, not people who are excelling. I have a meeting with my boss on Friday week and he will tell me whether I’m meeting standard or not.

Now there is a great deal of difference between writing a long application for an award (which is probably not the best investment of time and is seeking extrinsic recognition) and being sent on a course that might be useful because you’ve demonstrated an ability to do something (providing you with useful skills and the ability to develop further). As a general principle, skill development is going to be more useful than a pat on a head. Skill development also works for everyone, it’s just that the courses you use for development vary from person to person.

But this is, of course, completely at odds with the extensive systems of measurement that are now being placed on academics. We are (with widely varying levels of accuracy) measured extensively in terms of learning and teaching, research and administration. By not applying for these awards, I may be significantly altering my possibility of later promotion and opportunity. And, yet, I have to ask myself if I really need to be promoted? What does it mean? I’ve already discovered that people are happy to let you do a wide range of jobs without the requisite ‘academic level’ if you can demonstrate enough aptitude. Sure, it would mean I’d never be able to do certain jobs but, having a look at those jobs, I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing. 🙂

This is a strange time for me. I can now see the strings around me and how they’ve pulled me around for all of my life. Because I am such a strong believer in being as honest as possible with my students, it has forced me to be honest with myself, as I tear apart the framework I teach within to see how I can improve it and help my students to become self-regulated, intrinsically motivated and happy. Authenticity is the core for me and it is why I can teach with passion.

I was looking at Facebook recently and thinking about the “Like” button. I use it to mean “I am happy about this” or “I support you” but, rather than telling someone this, I hit the “Like” button. I’ve recently noticed that there are “Like” levels in WordPress and as I’ve hit, arbitrary, milestones I’ve received insincere automated badges.

Some of my readers (thank you, again) have been letting me know how they have been using the stuff from here and that has been really helpful for me. I realise that, in this community, “Like” generally means “I agree” or “Nicely written thoughts that ring true” but getting an actual account of how someone has used something that I said turned out to be really powerful. (Unsurprisingly, given how much Kohn I’m reading at the moment!)

So – where to from here? The first thing is to keep to my 40-45 hour working week. That has allowed me to get enough reflection time to get to this stage. I suspect the next is to keep plugging away at everything. This is most definitely not the time to throw everything in the air and meditate in a field. I’ve been trying to think about the advice that I would give to a student in a similar situation and I think I would tell them to keep doing everything and set some time aside over the next couple of weeks to identify the key issues, then start stripping away clutter until they were able to get a clear view of how they could achieve what was important to them. It will, at least, be a start.

Training for Resilience: Building Students from Steel, not Pot Metal

Posted: July 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Resilience is “… the inherent and nurtured capacity of individuals to deal with life’s stresses in ways that enable them to lead healthy and fulfilled lives” (Howard & Johnson, 1999)

Pot metal can be prone to instability over time, as it has a tendency to bend, distort, crack, shatter, and pit with age. (Pot Metal, Wikipedia)

The steel is then tempered, […]which ultimately results in a more ductile and fracture-resistant metal. [S]teel [is] used widely in the construction of roads, railways, other infrastructure, appliances, and buildings. Most large modern structures […] are supported by a steel skeleton. Even those with a concrete structure will employ steel for reinforcing. (Steel, Wikipedia)

Building strength, in terms of people and materials, has been a human pursuit for as long as we have been human. Stronger civilisations were able to resist invaders, bronze swords shattered and deformed under the blows of iron, steel allowed us to build our cities, our ships, our cars and our air travel industries. Steel requires some care in the selection of the initial iron ore that is used and, for a particular purpose, we have to carefully select the alloy components that we will use to produce just the right steel and then our smelting and casting must be done in the right way or we have to start again. Pot metal, on the other hand, can be made out of just about anything, smelted at low temperatures without sophisticated foundry equipment or specialist tools.

One of these metals drives a civilisation – the other one flakes, corrodes, bubbles, fails and can’t be easily glued, soldered or welded. Steel can be transformed, fused and joined, but pot metal can only be as fit as the day it was made and then it starts a relatively rapid descent into uselessness. Pot metal does have one good use, for making prototypes before you waste better metal, but that just confirms its built-in obsolescence.

One of the most important transitions for any student is from external control and motivation to self-regulation, intrinsically motivated and ready to commit to a reasoned course of action. Of course, such intention is going to wither away quickly if the student doesn’t actually have any real resilience. If the student isn’t “tough enough” to take on the world then they are unlikely to be able to achieve much.

The steel industry is an interesting analog for this. There are many grades of iron ore and some are easier to turn into steel than others because of carbon levels or things like phosphorus contamination. (No, I’m not saying any of our students are contaminated – I’m emphasising regional and graded difference.) While certain ore sources were originally preferred, later developments in technique made it possible to use more and more different starting points. Now, electric arc furnaces can convert pig iron or scrap metal back to new steel easily but require enough power – sensible use of the widest range of resources requires a cheap and plentiful power source.

The educational equivalent of pot metal manufacture is the production of a student who is not ready for the world, is barely fit for one purpose when they graduate and whose skills will degrade over time – because the world develops but their fragile skills base cannot be extended or redeveloped.

Steel, however, can be redeveloped, reworked, extended. We can build ultra-flexible steels, strong steels, hard steels, corrosion resistant steels and we can temper it to make it easier to work with and less likely to break. The steps that we take in the production process are vital but they incur a cost, require careful planning, take skill and can undergo constant improvement if we keep putting effort into the process.

The tempering process is as vital for students as it is for steel because we want the same things. We want a student who will stand strong but be able to bend without breaking. We want a student who is held up by strong ideas, good teaching and a genuine faith in their own abilities – not the rough and ready imitation of completeness that we get from throwing things together.

I’m not suggesting that we heat up our students and throw them into cold oil, as we would quench and temper steel, but it’s important to look at why we heat steel for annealing/tempering and what we intend to achieve. By understanding the steel and the materials science, we know that reaching certain temperatures changes the nature of the material, changing properties such as hardness and ductility. Sometimes we do this to make the material easier to work, sometimes to make it more flexible in use. The key point is that by knowing the material, and by knowing what happens when we apply changes, we can choose what happens. By knowing which factors to combine at key points we can build something incredible.

There’s a lot of literature on resilience, a lot dealing with disadvantaged students, and the words that spring out are things like “attention” and “caring”, “support” and “trust”. Having a positive and high expectation of students helps to build self-esteem and sense of intrinsic worth through the application of extrinsic factors – you don’t have to make life easy for people because all you’re doing then is taking the Pot Metal approach. But making life too hard, through ignorance or carelessness, doesn’t produce resilience. It breaks people.

The notion of the modern steel foundry is probably quite apt here as we’re at a point in our history where we can offer education to most people, with a reasonable expectation of a good outcome. Our processes are steadily improving, resources for assisting students who have previously been disadvantaged are becoming increasingly widespread, students can now study anywhere (to a great extent) and we have a growing focus on educational research as it can be applied back into our teaching institutions. The problem, of course, and as we have already seen with the Electric Arc Furnace, is that smart and powerful machinery needs power to run it.

In this case, that’s us. The high quality students of the future, coming from every possible source, don’t depend upon limited amounts of rare earths and special metals to form the most resilient people. They need us to make sure that we know our students, know how we can build their strength through careful tempering and then make sure that we’re always doing it. The vast majority of the people that I know are doing this and it’s one of the things that gives me great hope for the future. But no more Pot Metal solutions, please!

Thomas Pynchon on Education, as Quoted in Playboy Magazine

Posted: July 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I greatly enjoy reading and I read fairly widely. There are books that I enjoy more than others, certainly, but it’s rare that I find a book that doesn’t have something to teach me: in terms of conveyed knowledge, shared experience or the importance of editing. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) I was thinking about the works of Thomas Pynchon recently and some of the quotes that we have from the author himself, as well as those contained within the books, and one that sticks out for me was:

Why should things be easy to understand?

(Pynchon to Jules Siegel regarding the complexity of “V”, from a Playboy interview, 1977)

“Run away with me.” said Roseman when the coffee came.
“Where?” she asked. That shut him up.
(The Crying of Lot 49, 1966)

It’s a very good question and one I think about a lot. “Too clever by half” and “too difficult to understand” are very easy ways to dismiss people or things that you don’t like. From an educator’s viewpoint, this is a constant hurdle that we have to leap across, especially if the students in our care have only been exposed to the easily digestible up until now. I’ve talked before about dependence on a single point of authority, which will give you all the answers in due time, and it’s not a great way to train critical thinkers – of course, it’s the antithesis.

Most things are not easy to understand, which is why teachers exist. If we could have solved the transfer of knowledge problem the moment we set stylus to clay on the banks of the Tigris, then we would have done so. Our history is full of easy discoveries of things that just happen, as well as the more complex that required diligence and sacrifice of effort. Grapes turn into wine in the presence of oxygen – the wine industry was going to happen the moment the first time a goatherd noticed her goats falling over. Knowledge does not flow from person to person as easily. There are internal barriers to deal with in transmission from you to the world, then the mutagenic ether of knowledge transmission from person to person, and finally the barriers inside the head of the receiver.

If it was going to happen, then perhaps it would have happened when we developed libraries. You could go in and browse the collected thoughts of generations. Yet, we still needed teachers and educational institutions and, while it is easy to say that this is a requirement for certification and the associated authorities, the successful person has not needed an armful of qualifications and parchments until relatively recently, so while we are suffering from a deluge of over-dependence on certification, I don’t see this as the leading justification for the role of the teacher in knowledge transfer.

One of the critical roles of the educator is to take things that are complicated and hard to understand and, with a knowledge of what the students need and their developmental stage, present the information in a way that it is comprehensible. Now, I realise that this puts me at odds, again, with people who believe that students have to struggle to attain knowledge, to demonstrate their effort and to maintain the worth of the discipline. I don’t believe that’s the role of an educator – I think that life will throw up quite enough barriers to achieving success without me force-failing someone because he or she slightly under-performs relative to other students. It’s not as if you send a child to primary school expecting that 25% of them will validly fail. (If you do, I’m both stunned and I’d love to see your reasoning!) I’ve talked with educators who are required to fail students, as part of curve grading, because their entry requirements allow anyone to come in, with any level of preparation. Those same educators are, for the most part, demoralised and unconvinced of the path that they are required to take – but they have families, and mortgages, and would like to eat tomorrow. When we walk about making things hard to understand, or not making them easier to understand, we are not only robbing the students of the joy of discovery and the thrill of legitimate achievement, we are robbing ourselves of the joy of the student who actually gets it. Yes, education is more than a linked set of “A-ha” moments but they are the sweetest fruit in a vast, ancient and ever-growing orchard.

No, I’m not (and am never) saying that anyone should automatically pass. But if someone has done what we’ve asked them to do and we have not demanded some supplication to a towering monument of obscurity in order to make them fight their way through to the facts, then I would expect a reasonably prepared student to ‘pass’ – and by that I mean take in the knowledge, incorporate it and be able to make use of it, building upon it in the future.

I, like most academics in Australia, get a lot of sample textbooks to assess for use in courses and my assessment criteria are very simple. How far can I read through the book before I get confused? How useful is the index in dealing with that confusion? Can I find the answer to a straightforward and relevant question within a couple of minutes? Can I find my way through the book?

I have four degrees, including a PhD. I am well-read and pretty literate. I have knowledge built around industry, Army, manual labour and academia. If a textbook is confusing me then it is utterly useless for my students. There is no need for things to be easy to understand but, if I am going to educate people, then I have to make sure that I put things together in a way that a reasonably prepared student can learn the knowledge that I need her or him to learn. We don’t need to require that everything be simple, we just have to remember that there is already an army of knowledge transformers, teachers, who are there in order to turn the complex into the simple for the purposes of learning.

We can retain our complexity, as long as we retain sight of our requirement to educate fairly and honestly. Pynchon’s question is ageless and still, very, valid.

The Fisher King: Achievement as Journey, rather than Objective

Posted: July 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

(There are spoilers for the 1991 movie “The Fisher King” contained within, so proceed forewarned.)

It is sometimes hard for students to understand why undertaking a particular piece of work, in a certain way and at a certain time, is so important to us. For us, as educators, knowledge is developed and constructed through awareness, practice, understanding and application, as well as the further aspects of higher-level intellectual development. When we teach something, doing the assigned homework or assignment is an important reinforcing step. We can regard these assignments in two ways: formative (where we provide feedback and use it to guide improvement) and summative (where we measure the degree to which the students have achieved the standard required, compared to some benchmarks that are important to the course). Summative activities tend to be at the end of instructional units and formative tend to be throughout, for the obvious reasons, but, more pertinently to the discussion at hand, summative activities are often seen as “high-stakes”, where formative are seen as “low”.

The problem with a high-stakes activity is that we can inadvertently encourage behaviour, such as copying, plagiarism or cheating, because students feel so much pressure to achieve and they don’t feel that there is sufficient possibility of redemption in the face of not achieving the required standard. (And, yes, from a previous post, some people start out with the intention to cheat but I shall ignore them for all of the reasons that I have previously stated.)

Ultimately, all of our assignments contribute to the development of knowledge – or they should. The formative ones, as we know, should be placed to encourage the exchange of views between student and teacher, allowing us to guide and shape in an ongoing way, where the summative ones allow us to draw a line and say “Knowledge attained, now we can move on.” Realistically, however, despite the presence of so many summative assessments during and at the end of each course, the journey through University is just that – a journey – and I sometimes present it in this light to those students who have difficulty understanding the “why” of the assignments. I try never to resort to “because I say so”, as this really exchanges no knowledge, but I’m too honest to tell that I’m not at least tempted to say this sometimes!

One of my favourite movies is the 1991 Terry Gilliam film “The Fisher King“, with Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, Mercedes Ruehl and Amanda Plummer. This is loosely based on legend of The Fisher King, from the often contradictory and complicated stories that have arisen around the Holy Grail over the last few hundred years, and I don’t have the time to go into detail on that one here! But the core is quite simple. One man, through a thoughtless and cruel act, causes a chain of events that leads to the almost total destruction of another’s world. Meeting each other, when both are sorely wounded by their troubles, they embark upon a journey that offers redemption to the first and healing to the second. (This is perhaps the most vague way to tell a fantastic story. I strongly recommend this movie!)

The final aspect of the movie is Jack’s quest to retrieve a simple cup that Parry has identified as the Holy Grail, and that Parry has been seeking since his descent into madness. After a beating that leaves Parry comatose in hospital, Jack dons Parry’s anachronistic garb and breaks into the house of a famous architect to retrieve the simple cup. When there, he also manages to save the architect’s life, redeeming himself through both his desire to challenge his own boundaries to seek the cup for Parry and by counter-balancing his previous cruelty with an act of life-saving kindness. The cup is, of course, still a cup but it is the journey that has brought Jack back to humanity and, as he hands the simple cup to Parry who lies unseeing in a hospital bed, it is the journey that transforms the cup into the grail for long enough that Parry wakes up.

We are all on a journey, one that we set out on when we were born and one that will finish when we breathe our last, but I think our reactions to the high-stakes events in our lives are so often a reflection of those who taught us, seen through the lens of our own personality. That’s why I like to talk to students about the requirements for the constant challenges, the quests, the moments that are high-stakes, in the context of their wider journey – in the quest for knowledge, rather than the meeting of requirements for a degree.

Are you just after the piece of paper for your degree? Need the credits? Then cheating is, in some ways of thinking, a completely valid option if you can rationalise it.

Are you on a journey to develop knowledge? Need to understand everything? Then cheating is no longer an option.

Knowledge is transforming. There is no doubt about this. We learn something new and it changes the world, or us, or both! When we learn something well enough, we can create new knowledge or share our knowledge with new people. There is no doubt that the journey transforms the mundane around us into something magical, occasionally something mystical, but it is important to see it as a journey that will help us to build our achievements, rather than a set of objectives that we tick off to achieve something that is used as a placeholder for the achievement.

As I always say to my students, “If you have the knowledge, then you’re really likely to pass the course and do well. If you just try and study for the exam, then you’re not guaranteed to have the knowledge.” Formative or summative, if you regard everything we’re doing as steps to increase your knowledge, and we construct our teaching in order to do that, the low stakes and the high stakes have similar benefit, even if one isn’t so much constructed for direct feedback. If we also make sure that we are not dismissive in our systems and can even offer redemption in cases of genuine need, then our high stakes become less frightening and there is no Red Knight stalking our moments of peace and happiness, forcing us into dark and isolated pathways.

The Big Picture and the Drug of Easy Understanding: Part II (Eclectic Boogaloo)

Posted: July 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

In yesterday’s post, I talked about the desire to place work into some sort of grand scheme, referring to movies and films, and illustrating why it’s hard to guarantee consistency from a sketch of your strategy unless you implement everything before you make it available to people. While building upon previous work is very useful, as I’m doing now, if you want to keep later works short by referring back to a shared context established in a previous work, it does make you susceptible to inconsistency if a later work makes you realise that assumptions in a previous work were actually wrong. As I noted in yesterday’s post, I’m actually writing these posts side by side and scheduling them for later, to ensure that I don’t make any more mistakes than I have to, which I can’t easily correct because the work is already displayed.

Some strategies are easier to imagine than others.

Strategic approaches to the construction of long term and complex works are essential, but a strategic plan needs to be sufficiently detailed in order to guide the works produced from it. You might get away with an abstract strategy if you produce all of the related works at one time and view them together. But, assuming that works are so long term that they can’t be produced in one sitting, you don’t want to have to seriously revise previous productions or, worse, change the strategy. This is particularly damaging when you are working with students because any significant change to the knowledge construction that you’ve been working with is going to cost you a lot of credibility and risk a high level of disengagement. Students will tolerate an amount of honest mistake, assuming that you are honest and that it is a mistake, but they tend to be very judgmental regarding poor time planning and what they perceive as laziness.

And that, in my opinion, is completely fair because we tend not to allow them poor time planning either. Going into an examination with a misunderstanding of the details of the overlying strategy will result in a non-negotiable fail, not extended understanding from the marking groups who are looking at examination performance. For me, this is an issue of professional ethics in that a consistent and fair delivery of teaching materials will facilitate learning, firstly by keeping the knowledge pathways ‘clean’ but also by establishing a relationship that you are working as hard to be fair to the student as you can, hence their effort is not wasted and you establish a bond of trust.

Now while I would love to say that this means that I have written every lecture completely before starting a new course, this would not be the truth. But this does mean that my strategic planning for new works and knowledge is broken down to a fairly fine grain plan before I start the course running. I wrote a new course last semester and the overall course had been broken up by area, sub-area, learning outcome and was built with all practicals, tutorials and activities clearly indicated. I had also spent a long time identifying the design of the overall course and the focus that we would be taking throughout, down to the structure of every lecture. When it came to writing the lectures themselves, I knew which lectures would contain ‘achievement’ items (the drug aspect where students get a buzz from the “A-ha!” moment), I knew where the pivotal points were and I’d also spent some time working out which skills I could expect in this group, and which skills later courses would expect from them.

We do have a big picture for teaching our students, in that they are part of a particular implementation of a degree that will qualify them in such-and-such a discipline. We can see the discipline syllabi, current learning and teaching practices, our local requirements and the resources that we have to carry all of this out. But this is no longer a strategy and, the more I worked with things, the more I realised that I had produced a tactical (or operational) plan for each week of the lectures – and I had to be diligent about this because one third of my lectures were being given by someone who was a new lecturer. So, on top of all the planning, every lecture had to be self-contained and instructionally annotated so that a new lecturer, with some briefing from me, could carry it out. And it all had to fit together so that structurally, semantically and stylistically, it all looked like one smooth flow.

Had I left the strategic planning to one side, in either not pursuing it or in leaving it too late, or had I not looked at all of the strategic elements that I had to consider, then my operational plan for each week would have been ad hoc or non-existent. Worse, it may have been an unattainable plan; a waste of my time and the students’ efforts. We have far less excuse than George Lucas does for pretending that Star Wars was part of some enormous nine movie vision – although, to be fair, it doesn’t mean that this wasn’t somewhere in his head, but it obviously wasn’t sufficiently well plotted to guarantee a required level of consistency to make us really believe that statement.

The Big Picture is a framing that helps certain creative works drag you in and make more money, whereas in other words it is a valid structure that supports and develops consistency within a shared context. Our work as educators fits squarely into the final category. Without a solid plan, we risk making short-sighted decisions that please us or the student with ‘easy’ reward activities or the answers that come to hand at the time.

I’m not saying that certain elements have to be left out of our teaching, or that we have to be rigid in an inflexible structure, but consistency and reliability are two very important aspects of gaining student trust and, if holding it together over six serial instalments is too hard for Stephen King, then trying to achieve this, without some serious and detailed planning, over 36 lectures spanning four months is probably too much for most of us. The Big Picture, for us, is something that I believe we can find and use very effectively to make our teaching even better, effectively reducing our workload throughout the semester because we don’t have to carry out massive revisions or fixes, with a little more investment of time up front.

(Afterthought: I had no idea that Dr Steele has released an album called “Eclectic Boogaloo”. I was riffing on the old “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo” thing. In my defence, it was the 80s and we all looked like this:

This is considered one of the worst movies ever made. Yes, even when you take Gigli into account.

)

The Big Picture and the Drug of Easy Understanding: Part I

Posted: July 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

There is a tendency to frame artistic works such as films and books inside a larger frame. It’s hard to find a fantasy novel that isn’t “Book 1 of the Mallomarion Epistemology Cycle” or a certain type of mainstream film that doesn’t relate to a previous film (as II, III or higher) or as a re-interpretation of a film in the face of another canon (the re-re-reboot cycle). There are still independent artistic endeavours within this, certainly, but there is also a strong temptation to assess something’s critical success and then go on to make another version of it, in an attempt to make more money. Some things were always multi-part entities in the planning and early stages (such as the Lord of the Rings books and hence movies), some had multiplicity thrust upon them after unlikely success (yes, Star Wars, I’m looking at you, although you are strangely similar to Hidden Fortress so you aren’t even the start point of the cycle).

From a commercial viewpoint, selling something that only sells itself is nowhere near as interesting as selling something that draws you into a consumption cycle. This does, however, have a nasty habit of affecting the underlying works. You only have to look at the relative length of the Harry Potter books, and the quality of editing contained within, to realise that Rowling reached a point where people stopped cutting her books down – even if that led to chapters of aimless meandering in a tent in later books. Books one to three are, to me, far, far better than the later ones, where commercial influence, the desire to have a blockbuster and the pressure of producing works that would continue to bring in more consumers and potentially transfer better to the screen made some (at least for me) detrimental changes to the work.

This is the lure of the Big Picture – that we can place everything inside a grand plan, a scheme laid out from the beginning, and it will validate everything that has gone before, while including everything that is yet to come. Thus, all answers will be given, our confusion will turn to understanding and we will get that nice warm feeling from wrapping everything up. In many respects, however, the number of things that are actually developed within a frame like this, and remain consistent, is very small. Stephen King experimented with serial writing (short instalments released regularly) for a while, including the original version of “The Green Mile”. He is a very talented and experienced writer and he still found that he had made some errors in already published instalments that he had to either ignore or correct in later instalments. Although he had a clear plan for the work, he introduced errors to public view and he discovered them in later full fleshings of the writing. He makes a note in the book of the Green Mile that one of the most obvious, to him, was having someone scratch their nose with their hand while in a straitjacket. Not having all of the work to look at leaves you open to these kinds of errors, even where you do have a plan, unless you have implemented everything fully before you deploy it.

So it’s no surprise that we’re utterly confused by the prequels to Star Wars, because (despite Lucas’ protestations), it is obvious that there was not even a detailed sketch of what would happen. The same can be said of the series “Lost” where any consistency that was able to be salvaged from it was a happy accident, as the writers had no idea what half of the early things actually were – it just seemed cool. And, as far as I’m concerned, there is no movie called Highlander 2.

Seriously, this is just someone attempting Photoshop. Anything else is untrue.

(I should note that this post is Part 1 of 2, but I am writing both parts side by side, to try and prevent myself from depending in Part 2 upon something that I got wrong in Part 1.)

To take this into an educational space, it is tempting to try and construct learning from a sequence of high-reward moments of understanding. Our students are both delighted and delightful when they “get” something – it’s a joy to behold and one of the great rewards of the teacher. But, much like watching TED talks every day won’t turn you into a genius, it is the total construction of the learning experience that provides something that is consistent throughout and does not have to endure any unexpected reversals or contradictions later on. We don’t have a commercial focus here to hook the students. Instead, we want to keep them going throughout the necessary, but occasionally less exciting, foundation work that will build them up to the point where they are ready to go, in Martin Gardner’s words, “A-ha!”

My problem arises if I teach something that, when I develop a later part of the course, turns out to not provide a complete basis, reinterprets the work in a way that doesn’t support a later point or places an emphasis upon the wrong aspect. Perhaps we are just making the students look at the wrong thing, only to realise later that had we looked at the details, rather than our overall plan, we would have noticed this error. But, now, it is too late and the wrong message is out there.

This is one of the problems of gamification, as I’ve referred to previously, in that we focus on the drug of understanding as a fiero (fierce joy) moment to the exclusion of the actual education experience that the game and reward elements should be reinforcing. This is one of the problems of stating that something is within a structure when it isn’t: any coincidence of aims or correlation of activities is a happy accident, serendipity rather than strategy.

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll discuss some more aspects of this and the implications that I believe it has for all of us as educators.

And let’s try that again – Katrina’s Blog

Posted: July 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Sorry, quality control is out the window at the moment. You can find Katrina’s blog at katrinafalkner.wordpress.com. I’ve fixed it in the original but this is for those of you who only read via subscription. Sorry!

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