Familiarity: Breeding Contempt or Just Contextually Sensitive?

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

One of the strangest homilies I know is “Familiarity breeds contempt”. Supposedly, in one reading, the more we know someone, the easier it is to find fault. In another, very English, reading of it, allowing someone to be too familiar with you reduces the barriers between you and allows for contempt. (It’s worth noting that being over-familiar with someone and using their first name or a diminutive ahead of an often unstated social timeframe was a major gaffe in society. Please, call me Nick. 🙂 )

What a strange thought that is – that we must maintain an artificial distance lest we be found to be human. There’s a world of behaviour between maintaining professionalism and being stand-offish – one allows you to maintain integrity and do things like provide an objective mark, the other drives a wedge between you and your students. This is a very hard line to handle when you’re teaching K-12, because the winnowing hasn’t occurred yet. In the Higher Ed sector, as I’ve noted before, everyone who couldn’t concentrate or acted up is probably already gone. I have the polite ones, the ones who passed, the ones who didn’t sit there and cut pieces off people’s hair or be generally anti-social.

I have to walk a careful line on this one when I teach in Singapore, because it is a more formal society. Business cards are presented formally, business relationships have more structure and my students prefer to call me Sir or Dr Nick (Hi, everybody!). Now, I’m happy for them to call me Nick but, here’s the tricky thing, not if that means that they have moved me into the box of people that they don’t respect. That’s a cultural thing and, by being aware of it, I manage the relationship better. Down in Australia, I expect my students to call me Nick, because we don’t have as heavily formalised a society and I feel that I can manage my objectivity and relationships without the strictures of being Dr Falkner. But I have a lot of international students and sometimes it just makes them happier to call me Dr Falkner or Sir.

Ultimately, as part of this juggling act, it’s not my view of what is and what is not formal that matters – it’s how the student wants to address me that they feel that I am their teacher, and that they are getting the right kind of education. This then allows us both to work together, happily. If someone calling me Nick is going to put fingernails down the blackboard of their soul, then me insisting upon informality is inappropriate.

When I’m in the US, I take the trouble to explain that I have a PhD and am a tenured Assistant Professor in US parlance, a Lecturer Level B in Australian jargon, because it helps people to put me into the right mental box. This is the other trick of familiarity – you have to make sure that your level of being familiar is contextually correct. It bugs me slightly that I have given talks where people’s attitudes towards me and my material change when they find out I’m tenured and a Doctor, but it’s always my job to work out how to communicate with my audience. If I presume that every audience is the same then I risk being over and under-familiar – and, because I haven’t done my research as to how to deliver my message to that audience , that’s when I risk breeding contempt.

Another Airport Land Speed Record: Can My Students Make Their Connections?

Posted: February 29, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

As I was running through San Francisco Airport last week, I was thinking many things. Among them were:

  1. Why am I running through yet another airport?
  2. How long will it be before my bad knee gives out? (Surgery last November)
  3. Is my wife still behind me?
  4. Do I ever do this to my students?

Two people running through an airport.

The reason that I was, once again, running through an airport was that delightfully evil concept – the legal connection. This is the minimum connection time estimated for your incoming and outgoing flights, through a given airport. When your travel organiser goes to make flights, they plug all of your destinations and restrictions into their computer, add some seriously manual machinations, and then receive a set of results that all meet the legal connection limits. These are connections that the airlines say are legitimate and, if you miss a flight, they will assist you in making another one. There’s only one problem with the so-called legal connection. Any variances to the schedules, caused by weather, delay in customs, late arrival of other planes, maintenance or unexpected construction in the airport, can make it hard to impossible to make your (so-called) legal connection. Hence, I run a lot in airports. I very rarely miss planes but I run past a lot of people who do – people who don’t know that there’s only one bus every 40 minutes between the international and domestic terminals. People who don’t know where the bus is or that it’s more reliable to catch a cab. People who don’t know which way to go and there isn’t enough signage to assist – Frankfurt Airport, with your sign that says ‘Terminal X this way” and a sign that points in both directions, I’m looking at you.

On this occasion, my knee held out and my wife WAS behind me, which is just as well as the hotel is booked in her name. But it really made me think about the layout and structure of STEM curricula. We set up pathways through our courses that are designed to develop knowledge and produce a graduate with the right combination of skill and knowledge. But what else do we assume? If we have provided bridging to bypass a pre-requisite, are we secretly assuming that the student will have aced the bridging or just passed the bridging? Do we introduce Boolean algebra in second year because “almost every student will have enrolled in Logic I” even though it’s not formally part of our course progression?

We can look at our programs as being legal connections, but with that comes all of the darker aspects that this entails. We’ve recently redesigned our curriculum, just in time for curriculum 2013, and part of this was removing some of the implicit assumptions and making them explicit. Providing pathways for the less-experienced. Matching expectations so that a Pass in a pre-req was sufficient for the next course – you didn’t need 60. We build giant pyramids of knowledge throughout our courses but, of course, a pyramid only works one way up and is far less stable if we don’t have all of the supports. If too many of these building blocks are assumed, and not explicit, then our legal connection is next to impossible to make. And we all know what the cost of that is.

I don’t want to run through anymore airports, and I strongly suspect that when we ask our students to do so, we lose a fair few of them on wrong turns or leave them stranded somewhere along the way, without ever making their destination.

Yes, you can! (Sorry, Mr President)

Posted: February 23, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I put in a long post yesterday and today’s reward is that this post is short. I want to remind you all that you don’t have to be some sort of amazing educational designer to bring good design into your work. When most people think ‘design’ they think of graphic design, high-concept art, artistic ability and lots of words that aren’t in their standard vocabulary. I hope that, over the last three days, you’ve realised that we’re all using good design principles all the time – everywhere – and that’s it a matter of being aware of what we’re doing, so we can re-use those principles elsewhere. I’m certainly no expert but I can explain things fairly well and I like to bring new vocabularies to new audiences. I have a secret theory that most of the problems we have stem from people not being able to communicate and express themselves – maybe not all problems, but certainly a lot of those that lead to disengagement and frustration among our students.

One of the aspects of President Obama’s campaign that was both praised and ridiculed, depending upon which side of politics you found yourself, was the use of simple messages and clear design to make it easy for people to identify the campaign and associate with it. The imagery is simple and powerful. The logo includes references to the President’s initial (O), patriotic symbols and sunrise – a new beginning. That kind of simplicity and power takes some serious work and that’s where professional designers make their money. (I’ve deliberately not linked or included the logo here. I’m aware of the political divide in the US and don’t want people to think I’m advocating one political party or another – the title of this post is probably enough that I’ll get some interesting comments. You can easily find the logo for yourself by searching for Obama logo.)

But that’s not what we’re doing. We’re just trying to make our teaching more accessible, our materials easier to use and our students more knowledgable. By considering things we may not have considered, we can reduce problems. We can make our lecture notes available in ways we hadn’t thought of before. We can make a difference that assists our students in engaging with us and what we’re trying to teach them.

Electing a president? That’s probably beyond you. Looking at some of the things that I’ve been talking about and possibly helping a student learn from you? Yes, you can!

Challenging For All Or Just Impossible For Some? (Come back, Claude Shannon, we need you!)

Posted: February 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , | 2 Comments

Back at the start of this blog I drew up a learning and teaching diagram, which I reproduce here:

The idea is simple. We learn from inputs and, having learned, can then teach and pass this information on to other people. This diagram represents a single person and shows the benefits of learning and teaching as separate and fusion activities. But can we guarantee that our outputs will reach someone else’s inputs without distortion – without information loss?

Well, that depends very much upon us and the receiver. If we’re not prepared to explain ourselves then our transmission will be less than 100%. If the student isn’t listening then their reception will be less than 100%. Combine these (by multiplying them) and we will definitely get less than 100%. If we add the medium into the mix, the environment that the transmission moves through to get to us from them, then we introduce another potential point of loss. I now have three places to reduce my efficiency. No wonder we spend so much time on trying to engage our students, to use sensible techniques and to present our ideas clearly!

Final transfer = %age of transmission * %age of successful medium passage * %age of reception.

For example, if you have no way of getting information to your students, then the %age of successful transmission is 0 and nothing is transferred. This is not anything amazing – it’s a simple application of the product rule. This is the effective percentage of the information that you sent out that is reaching the student. How bad is this? Let’s say you have a bad day and give a lecture where everything is working except you. You give a 30% lecture. Nothing else gets in the way. Your aids all work, your students are awake. Final result: 30% * 100% * 100% = 30%. Basically, if you don’t put it into the process at the start, nothing else is going to come out. (There are many ways to think about this, including ways with mathematical proofs, that I will discuss later in this post.)

How much does a student need? Good question! Some students will get by on a small amount and go off and do excellently. Some need a lot more. Unless you have a very good understanding of your students abilities, or a very tight cohort, the line between making something challenging and making it impossible is very hard to see.

I must be frank with you in that I find that some people I have observed, over the years, have not made it easy for the students to obtain the knowledge. As you can see from the model, if you’re not communicating 100%, then it doesn’t matter if the student is desperately trying to get information out of you – they can’t get what you’re not saying. Similarly, if you put it in a form that is muddled or confused then, once again, we reduce the chances of information going across.

If you’re in engineering or ICT you’ll probably have heard of Claude Shannon. Shannon effectively founded the field of Information Theory back in 1948, but also founded both digital computer and digital circuit theory 11 years earlier, as a masters student. A lot of Shannon’s work revolved around how much information you could transmit, given the physical characteristics of the medium you were using and how noisy it was. Rather than my primitive equation above, which talks in terms of probability (or possibly efficiency), Shannon’s Channel Capacity equation very sensibly states this in terms of the largest amount of information that can be shared. If you like, you can’t fit a bowling ball through a garden hose at the same rate you can push a bowling ball through a large pipe. When the pipe is full of noise, say water or concrete, you can’t treat it like a big pipe. If it gets full enough of noise, it will be a garden hose and things slow down. (My apologies to engineers, I didn’t feel up to a discussion of mutual information and input distributions.) The medium in this case is a noisy channel – a channel where things can and do go wrong, much as happens to us every day. Because most of us are time locked (lecture time, semester duration), any decrease in efficiency that requires more time will lead to us having to omit information.

Our lives are full of noise, distraction and days when things don’t go right. Whenever I see someone who is not making it easy for their students by trying to make the students drag information out of them, I think of the noisy channel that we have every day, and the fact that students may not have the best day sometimes. And then I think of what I get paid to do, which is to try and keep my part of the system transmitting as well I can, through the least noisy channel possible. There are enough things to go wrong, without me thinking that I’m making it challenging – and I may be making it impossible.

(If you’re interested, look up Claude Shannon, Channel Capacity, Shannon-Hartley Theorem and the Noisy Channel Coding Theorem. They’re a little mathematical but, if you add Nyquist-Shannoninto the mix, you’ll find out what the maximum frequency is that CDs can store. Have fun!)

 

Walking the walk: How Mark Guzdial Nearly Created a University of Programmers

Posted: February 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment

My apologies to Mark, who reads this periodically, but I’d like to introduce more people to Mark’s blog and I thought I’d frame this in terms of a teaching anecdote. Mark, no doubt, has millions of followers, but for those who have entered the CS Ed blogging community through me, you should know that oranges are not the only fruit. And there is some excellent fruit out there!

Mark has an excellent blog that, at least in part, helped to inspire my blogging activity here. There are many reasons you should read this – basically, I believe we should all be reading the edublogosphere more widely for simple reasons of immediacy and accessibility –  but the main one is that the information and discussion contained therein are well-written, easy to digest and based on a solid, authentic foundation.

My last post was about authenticity and, in many ways, I’m a very difficult student because I go along to demonstrations and talks by teaching advocates and educational specialists expecting them to really inspire me and teach me things. I go in with very high expectations and am very demanding in terms of authenticity. Occasionally, if I know the lecture theatre, I will deliberately sit in the worst place, to simulate what students would do. Now, this sounds really harsh, but if someone is going to talk to me about how to improve my teaching – then they have to be able to teach well, reach out to me, wherever I am and stop me from drifting off. (I make myself sound like an ogre – I do give people a lot of time and space to do their thing but, well, if you’ve sat through a bad teaching talk, you know what I’m talking about.)

Here’s the basic rule: If you’re going to talk the talk, you had… well, you know the rest.

I had the good fortune and pleasure of meeting Mark and Barbara the night before both of their talks, over dinner, and it very quickly established that both talks were going to be really interesting because it was quite obvious that the speakers were knowledgable, experienced and authentic. Both Mark and Barbara were talking within the framework of our Festival of Learning and Teaching, with Mark presenting “Introducing Computing with Media, with a Pedagogical Side Tour” and Barbara presenting “The Georgia Computes Outreach program”.

Over the course of his talk, Mark showed examples, played musical instruments, demonstrated software, did small programming exercises and, down the front of a multi-hundred seat lecture theatre filled with people from across a University, drew people in more and more. Sitting down the front, I had the opportunity to observe the crowd who were listening, avidly. Phones were away, laptops were being used for note taking and, even more amazingly, people from completely non-technical disciplines started asking programming questions. Sometimes I can’t get third-year Computer Science students to ask programming questions!

This is, basically, why you may find Mark’s blog interesting. His talk was based on things that had actually been done, or were being done, at Georgia Tech. They were authentic. His teaching techniques had obviously been well-practiced and his resources were well-used, well-prepared and worked. What he did made people think, question and wonder. He held the attention of a crowd of academics, sitting around in an average lecture theatre, from every discipline in the University, over the course of the talk, when everyone had many other things they could or should be doing.

Once again, my apologies to Mark for the semi-hagiographic tone. I had originally written this some time ago, as his talk made me think long and hard about my own teaching path and communicating my thoughts, and then he started following my blog, which meant that I shelved the post out of a combination of embarrassment and self-awareness. But, if you like my blog, Mark’s part of the reason that it’s here and, if you like this blog, I think you’ll really enjoy his.

James Frey’s Legacy: Authenticity needs to be authentic!

Posted: February 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

James Frey is an American author who has been in the news on and off over the last few years. He published a book called A Million Little Pieces, which purported to be memoirs of his struggle with addiction, association with criminals and time in jail. On the strength of this account of his fall and rise, and his defeat of his demons, he sold a lot of books, went on Oprah and probably got to dive, Scrooge McDuck-like, into a giant pool filled with money.

There’s only one problem. Despite being billed as autobiographical, it turned out that his claims that, minor details aside, it was all true were false. It was sold as a memoir, an account of the life of the subject, and it was not an account of his life, but that of, in his own words, “about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience.”

Many people claimed to find inspiration in James Frey’s work, including Oprah, and the backlash against the book was severe. Once it was established that the path to redemption outlined in the book didn’t start from a sufficiently dark place, or wasn’t really based on fact, questioning arose over what could be learned or derived from a semi-fictional work, rather that a true memoir.

The question here is one of authenticity. If you, as a recovering addict, tell me that the way to beat addiction is to dance the Lambada (the forbidden dance) 7 times a day because that’s the only thing that stops the cravings and I act on this, then I am depending upon your representation of how you beat your demons as being accurate. This assumes that you were actually a drug addict in the first place. That you did dance the Lambada. That it did, to the best of your knowledge, deal with your problems. If you were never an addict in the first place, your undisputed credibility is now disputed and you have no authenticity.

James Frey is a writer. Not one that I enjoy, being frank, but there is no doubt that he can write and produce a book. If he wrote a book entitled “A Million Giant Suckers: How I Turned a Nation’s Obsession with Suffering and Redemption Into Cold, Hard Cash“, I would probably buy it because his credibility is beyond doubt in this regard! (I really want that swimming pool full of paper money, too. Note: never dive into gold, it’s not that soft.)

So how does this apply to teaching? There are two important aspects of authenticity in terms of teaching, for me. Firstly, that when we talk about something from ‘the real world’ outside of academia, that we have either directly experienced it or we have trustworthy accounts of it being in use. (And, in the case of reportage, we clearly state that it is reportage.) Secondly, when we present students with ‘real-world challenges’ that are experiences that will prepare them for the world outside!

To me, this means that when I quote statistics in support of arguments – they are real statistics, with credible sources, in the correct context. This means that I try and get industry involved where possible, if I don’t have the experience myself, and talk to people to get informed. I used to work in industry but that was over 10 years ago and industry has changed a lot in that time. Yes, I’m still a sys admin and network admin at heart, but I’ve never had to implement BGP or MPLS or run a Lion server cluster, and that means that I need to keep reading and talking to other people to maintain my credibility.

For me, though, I have to careful what I claim. I’m the first to admit that, while I have a good skill basis, I’m now rusty at systems because I’ve spent all my time polishing my research, teaching and admin. I’m comfortable talking here, because I feel have sufficient credibility to discuss these matters, but you wouldn’t find me holding forth on the administration of Linux boxes any time soon.

I don’t want my students to learn a good lesson if I’m presenting bad information to them – that, to me, has always been the cold comfort of scoundrels, that someone learnt a valuable life lesson from their dastardly deeds. I don’t think James Frey ever set out to go as far as he did, I doubt he’s that calculating, but taking an unsuccessful novel and turning it into a successful memoir may make good business sense… but it’s a terrible, terrible lesson on the value of authenticity.

Juggling the load – some free advice without the $4 words.

Posted: February 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

I have a list of things written on my wall, which I copied from “How to get things done” – one of my favourite ‘do something’ books. My favourite is:

Renegotiation: How can I achieve something AND make it awesome?

As I sit in my hotel room, at 10:48pm, after a fairly long day spent on planes and in talks, I have a chance to reflect on how I’m managing things. I’ve talked before about OmniFocus, mailboxes and to-do lists but, as always, there’s something else. Fortunately, I have no wish to get you to send me $1000 for the secret and I’m tired, so I’ll keep it short.

I realised that I’m handling things in a very ‘thought into action’ way. I have now assembled my tools, my iPad, my laptop and my phone, so that I can spring into action when I need to with the minimum of fuss. It doesn’t take me 15 minutes to locate something because it’s either in a paper folder or I can find it by searching electronically. This is not just liberating (because I am not bound to my office) but it allows for an immediacy of action. If I need it, I know where it is or I can find it easily. This reduces most problems down to read, think, decide, act, store. Once you take out ‘scrabble around on desk’ or ‘try to remember if you took this home’ or (worse) ‘become immobile because searching is now infeasible’, a lot of things start to look more possible.

It’s much like I imagine zen archery. The arrow is plucked from where the arrow must be, the arrow is set, the bow is drawn, the arrow is released and it flies through the air, inevitably striking the target. If there is another target, I already have my next arrow waiting. One motion, no hesitation.

Fluid. Efficient.

It has taken me weeks… possibly months… to get to a point where things are working smoothly but it has been worth it. A year ago I would have crumbled under this, especially with the teaching about to start again. Currently, things are working.

If I’m being perfectly honest, and I try to asymptotically (*ding* $4) approach this, sometimes I still miss the odd thing but it’s most likely to be a conscious choice. I can see it coming and I have to work out if I can do it or if I have to push that load off somewhere else. There’s still room for improvement, which is always good.

Looking back at what started this post, I’m now achieving things and, with luck, I can increase the overall level of awesomeness as well.

Awesome! 🙂

If you’re going to put the disadvantaged into a box, why not just nail it shut?

Posted: February 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , | 2 Comments

I’m currently attending a set of talks on preparedness for teaching first-year mathematics (if you’re at IISME, hi!) and the ‘pre’ talk was by Professor Celia Hoyles, from the UK, talking about her experiences in trying to get mathematics out of the doldrums in the UK.

Three things struck me about her talk.

  1. She had put a vast amount of effort into local and national initiatives, but there was no certainty in the future funding because of budget cuts.
  2. Too many students were exposed to mathematically-underqualified teachers. These teachers did not have sufficient mathematical training to actually be mathematicians and, in many cases, had no higher mathematics at all yet were teaching into that space.
  3. Even where funding was put into developing teachers, professional development was the first thing to be cut and the government-supplied teacher training scholarships, originally paid at a  flat rate, was being awarded based on performance in the teaching degree.

The first fact is demoralising but it is the world we live in.

The second is terrible, because the vast majority of students in disadvantaged areas would never see a mathematics specialist, or someone who had seen any mathematics at all beyond that which they learned at 16 – certainly not at University.

The third fact caps it all off by saying that programs are doomed to be cut unless people put a priority on these programs! The kicker in the statement about training scholarships is that student teachers who completed a teaching and mathematics program at university would receive 20,000 pounds for a 1st Class degree, 15K for 2:1, 9K for 2:1 and nothing for a 3rd class degree. Now, for those unfamiliar with the UK system, 3rd class is not just a pass – it’s a little (not much) more than a pass. So you have passed your exams but we will pay you nothing for it. If that’s what you were depending upon – tough. Go and do something else. Even though you passed.

Would a University qualified mathematics teacher, whatever the degree, be more likely to have better mathematical knowledge than someone who didn’t study it all the way to the end of school?  If the answer isn’t ‘yes’, then some serious introspection is required at certain higher educational institutions!

Fact 1 leads to Fact 3 – budget cuts lead to reduced expenditure and the most likely way to do that is to allocate money so that a reduced bucket goes to the ‘more deserving’. This is a tragedy in the context of Fact 2, because Fact 3 now means that a number of perfectly reasonable teachers may end up having to leave their degree because their funding dries up. Which means that the money expended is now wasted. So Fact 1 gets worse and Fact 2 gets worse.

Professor Hoyles started her talk by stating that her fundamental principle was that every student who wanted to study mathematics should be able to study mathematics, but 1, 2 and 3 conspire against this and restrict knowledge in a way that create a pit from which very few students will crawl out.

She mentioned a couple of reports, in outline, that I refer to here:

Report: The Schools White Paper – The Importance of Teaching
Report: “A World-Class Mathematics Education For All:…” Carol Vorderman (Chair) Aug 2011. Nuffield Foundation 2010.
 I have no answers here, just food for thought.

It’s getting more opinionated!

Posted: February 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

The next few posts will feature some more opinion, some of which border on the implications of reducing government teacher funding. Some of you, politically, may find that distasteful but it is pretty mild.

I try to keep my politics out of this blog however, much as Wikipedia took steps to address something that it saw as a threat to its existence, I’m not sure there’s anything overtly political about opposing measures that would destroy the future of education or my career.

Either way, now you know.

To give you a constructive reason for reading this post, I’m currently reading ‘Visualise This’ by Nathan Yau – the definitive ‘how-to’ guide for data scientists who want to take the noisy, difficult-to-work-with numbers that they have and turn them into convincing and accurate visualisations. Be warned! Once you start going down this path, you may learn R, or python. Worse, you may enjoy it!

If you’re a teacher and you’re looking for something to keep the advanced kids busy, get them to take an area of public record data and turn it into visualisations that they then present to the class to see if everyone can work out what they’re talking about. It’s a good lesson that context is not always transferable and can really help guide people in how they communicate with other people. You can get all of the software that you need for free, for whatever platform – why not give it a try?

It’s okay to Karaoke (but why don’t you sing, instead?)

Posted: February 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , | 1 Comment

Today’s post focuses on the difference between memorising information and gaining knowledge. I don’t normally lead off with a descriptive sentence but I have to in this case because I’m going to talk about my previous life as a karaoke singer. I don’t want you to think I’ve accidentally posted on the wrong blog.

I quite enjoy singing and I have a reasonable karaoke voice – you’d never pay to hear me sing but you probably wouldn’t pay me to stop. When we used to sing in bars, when the machines first hit, you’d sing, people would listen, sometimes they’d clap and the assessment of the whole activity was based on how much you enjoyed it and, if you decided to compete, which of the dud t-shirts you won. For the record, my best placing was third place, a Yellow Cutty Sark t-shirt that made me look both jaundiced and leprous (a clever trick). I loved that t-shirt because, although third place was the best I ever achieved, but it was based on what the crowd felt and it was honestly earned. (I sang Prince’s Kiss in the style of Tom Jones, to complete this confession, so you may weigh the honesty for yourself.)

Of course, the fact that I can retrieve this fact, some 20 years down the track and well after the t-shirt was consigned to the rag pile, tells you a lot about the impression that this feedback had on me. However, the point of this anecdote is not that successful reinforcement is memorable (although that’s a good point) but that I wasn’t performing for points into a karaoke machine, I was using the technology to sing to subjective, analogue measuring devices – people, in other words. Now, the whole time I was singing, I had my own auditory feedback and (potentially) some crowd-based feedback but, being realistic, the only feedback I had was at the end if I won a t-shirt or if my friends either said ‘Yeah!’ or passed me a drink with a supportive expression. (Don’t judge me until you’ve attempted “Take On Me” by A-ha in a public space.)

Fast forward to today and you can have a karaoke machine in your home for the price of a PS2, PS3, X-Box or Wii. SingStar, Guitar Hero and Rock Band all provide you with the ability to play like a star and be adulated, and win awards, in the comfort of your own living room. Don’t like to rock out with pants on? Your lounge room – your rock and rules, baby! How, in this context, do we provide guidance that what you’re doing matches the song on screen? How do I award you a yellow Cutty Sark t-shirt?

In most cases, there is a ‘correct’ interpretation of the musical line – based on tone for singing and choice of input pad and timing for the other instruments in rock band. If you perform the right action (with varying degrees of tolerance) at the right time (again, with tolerance) you are recorded as having done the right thing. Based on this you get points, awards, more opportunities. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this – this is a valid feedback mechanism. The problem arises when you don’t regard the score as assessing the activity, but the activity as a means for maximising the score.

I was slightly surprised the first time I saw Rock Band being played by a group and the singer, instead of singing, mumbled the tones into the microphone, at a volume I could barely hear, in order to exactly match what was going across his screen without the risk of missing the note or stumbling by getting a word wrong. Sure enough, excellent score. I’ve seen people ace SingStar while singing out of tune because they completely repeated every phrasing, every tonal movement and every pause, but stayed within the tolerance, despite it being nearly painful to the human ear. Why were they still singing? Look at the score! I’m doing it right! I bet I can make a higher score if I sing the same song another 10,000 times!

At the same time, I’ve seen professional singers get canned by SingStar and given terrible scores, despite putting together a beautiful performance of the song. What’s going on?

Anyone who’s played any of these games probably knows why this is: SingStar (and RockBand to a great extent) reward memorisation and recall, not interpretation. It’s the degree to which you can recite the song that matters, not your knowledge of how the song is constructed and how it can be rearranged, while still being that song – or better.

Musically speaking, it takes a reasonable amount of experience and knowledge to be able to start interpreting songs in a way that sounds good. Anyone can hit vibrato and wave around the song like a 90s boy band on a roller-coaster – it takes talent to harmonise, built, manipulate cadence and involve the audience in something that makes them breathless. It takes even more talent to know that you don’t do that all the time but in the right place and at the right time. SingStar has no easy way to assess anything outside of the norm so it will reward you if you hit note X at time Y within tolerance Delta. If you decide to mess with the cadence or add some colour, which are both demonstrations of a sound knowledge of the underlying work and the techniques that are valid for manipulating it, you won’t do well. This makes sense from an electronic game designer’s perspective – you can’t encode all of musical theory into the game but you can easily check for conformity.

(To its credit, Rock Band does allow some room for free-styling on certain instruments and at certain times. However, I think it’s probably good that Keith Moon is dead or he would have personally picked up every kit and eaten it after his first encounter with that particular game.)

It should come as no surprise that I believe that we often fall into the trap of requiring memorisation and recitation, effectively in lieu of demonstration of knowledge. Recited answers are easy to mark, manually and automatically. Knowledge requires the marker to be knowledgeable – subtleties abound and there are fewer templates. Electronic systems often lean in this direction for exactly the same reason as SingStar. A simple script to check the output of something is far easier to write than a detailed analyser with all human knowledge in this area.

Knowledge has to be built upon a strong foundation of information – there have to be core facts to provide a basis for your learning (such as the multiplication tables or the names of human anatomy, as two obvious examples). But at the higher level, at the 2nd and 3rd year level of University, we shouldn’t be rewarding people purely for mumbling our own words back to us in the microphone. We’re after knowledge and the demonstration of knowledge and that means more than training parrots.

A bit of karaoke never hurt anyone, but we in higher ed should be training our students to interpret to the fullest, to learn everything and to be able to show us what they know in ways that surprise, delight and, yes, challenge us.

They should be singing.

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