Why You Should Care About the Recent Facebook Study in PNAS
Posted: June 30, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: analysis, data analytics, education, ethics, facebook, higher education, learning, pnas, teaching 2 Comments
The extremely well-respected Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) has just published a paper that is causing some controversy in the scientific world. Volume 111, no 24, contains the paper “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks” by Kramer, Guillory and Hancock. The study itself was defined to evaluate if changing the view of Facebook that a user had would affect their mood: in other words, if I fill your feed with sad and nasty stuff, do you get sadder? There are many ways that this could be measured passively, by looking at what people had seen historically and what they then did, but that’s not the approach the researchers took. This paper would be fairly unremarkable in terms of what it sets out, except that the human beings who were experimented upon in this paper, over 600,000 of them, were chosen from Facebook’s citizenry – and were never explicitly notified that they were being experimented on or had the opportunity to give informed consent.
We have a pretty shocking record, as a scientific community, regarding informed consent for a variety of experiments (Tuskegee springs to mind – don’t read that link on a full stomach) and we now have pretty strict guidelines for human experimentation, almost all of which revolve around the notion of informed consent, where a participant is fully aware that they are being experimented upon, what is going to happen and, more importantly, how they could get it to stop.
So how did a large group of people that didn’t know they were being experimented upon become subjects? They used Facebook.
Facebook is pointing to some words in their Terms of Service and arguing along the lines that indicating that your data may be used for research is enough to justify experimenting with your mood.
None of the users who were part of the experiment have been notified. Anyone who uses the platform consents to be part of these types of studies when they check “yes” on the Data Use Policy that is necessary to use the service.
Facebook users consent to have their private information used “for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.” The company said no one’s privacy has been violated because researchers were never exposed to the content of the messages, which were rated in terms of positivity and negativity by a software algorithm programmed to read word choices and tone.
Now, the effect size reported in the paper is very small but the researchers note that their experiment worked: they are able to change a person’s mood up or down, or generate a withdrawn effect, through manipulation. To be fair to the researchers and PNAS, apparently an IRB (Internal Review Board) at a University signed off on this as being ethical research based on the existing Terms of Service. An IRB exists to make sure that the researchers are being ethical and, based on the level of risk involved, approve the research or don’t give it approval. Basically, you can’t use or publish research in academia that uses human or animal experimentation unless it has pre-existing ethics approval.
But let’s look at the situation. No-one knew that their mood was being manipulated up – or down. The researchers state this explicitly in their statement of significance:
…leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. (emphasis mine)
No-one could opt-out unless they decided to stop using Facebook but, and this is very important, they didn’t know that they had anything to opt out from! Basically, I don’t believe that I would have a snowball’s chance on a hot day of getting this past my ethics board and, I hasten to add, I strongly believe that I shouldn’t. This is unethical.
But what about the results? Given that we have some very valuable science from some very ugly acts (including HeLa’s cell line of course), can we cling to the scoundrel’s retreat that the end justified the means? Well, in a word, no. The effect seen by the researchers is there but it’s really, really small. The techniques that they used are actually mildly questionable in the face of the size of the average Facebook post. It’s not great science. It’s terrible ethics. It shouldn’t have been done and it really shouldn’t have been published.
By publishing this, PNAS are setting a very unpleasant precedent for the future: that we can perform psychological manipulation on anyone if we hide the word ‘research’ somewhere in an agreement that they sign and we make a habit of manipulating their data stream anyway. As an Associate Editor, for a respectable but far less august journal, I can tell you that my first impression on seeing this would be to check with my editor and then suggest that we flick it back as it’s of questionable value and it’s not sufficiently ethical to meet our standards.
So why should you care? I know that a number of you reading this will shrug and say “What’s the big deal?”
Let me draw up an analogy to explain the problem. Let’s say Facebook is like the traffic system: lots of cars (messages) have to get from one place to another and are controlled using traffic lights (FB’s filtering algorithms). Let’s also suppose that on a bad day’s drive, you get frustrated, which shows up by you speeding a little, tailgating and braking late because you’re in a hurry.
Now, the traffic light company wants to work out if it can change your driving style by selecting you at random and altering the lights so that you’re always getting red lights, you get rerouted through the town sewage plant and jamming you on the bridge for an hour. During this time, a week, you get more and more frustrated and Facebook solemnly note that your driving got worse as you got more frustrated. Then the week is over – and magically your frustration disappears because you know it’s over? No. Because you didn’t know what was going on, you didn’t get the right to say “I’m really depressed right now, don’t do this” and you also didn’t get the right to say “Ahh – I’ve had enough. Get me out!”
You have a reasonable expectation that, despite red-light cameras and traffic systems monitoring you non-stop, your journey on a road will not change because of who you are, and it most definitely won’t be unfair just to make you feel bad. You won’t end up driving less safely because someone wondered if they could make you do it. Facebook are, yes, giving away their service for free but this does not give them the right to mess with people’s minds. What they can do is to look at their data to see what happens from the historical record – I’m unsure how, across the size of their user base, they don’t have enough records to be able to put this study together ethically. In fact, if they can’t put this together from their historical record, then their defence that this was “business as usual” falls apart immediately. If it was the same as any other day, they would have had the data already, just from the sheer number of daily transactions.
The big deal is that Facebook messed with people without taking into account whether those people were in a state to be messed with – in order to run a study that, ultimately, will probably be used to sell advertising. This is both unethical and immoral.
But there are two groups at fault here. That study shouldn’t have run. But it also should never have been published because the ethical approval was obviously not quite right – even if PNAS did publish it, I believe it should have been accompanied by a very long discussion of the appropriate ethics. But I don’t think it should have run. It’s neither scientific nor ethical enough to be in the record.
Someone speculated over lunch today that this is the real study: the spread of outrage across the Internet. I doubt it but who knows? They obviously have no issue with mucking around with people so I guess anything goes. There’s an old saying “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” and it’s about time that people with their hands on a lot of data worked out they may have to treat people’s data with more decency and respect, if they want to stay in the data business.
The Antagonistic Classroom Is A Dinosaur
Posted: May 24, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, antagonism, collaboration, community, education, educational problem, educational research, higher education, reflection, students, thinking 2 CommentsIt’s been a while since I’ve posted but, in that time, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and a lot of thinking. I’m aware that as a CS Ed person whose background is in CS rather than Ed is that I have a lot of catching up to do in terms of underlying theory and philosophy. I’ve been going further back to look at the changes in education, from the assumption that a student is a blank slate (tabula rasa) to be written on (or an empty bank account to be filled) rather than as a person to be worked with. As part of my search I’ve been reading a lot and what has become apparent is how long people have been trying to change education in order to improve the degree and depth of learning and student engagement. It’s actually mildly depressing to track the last 250 years of people trying to do anything other than rote learning, serried ranks of silent students and cultural crystallisation. As part of this reading, and via Rousseau and Hegel, I’ve wandered across the early works of Karl Marx who, before the proletariat began its ongoing efforts to not act as he had modelled them, was thinking about the role of work and life. In essence, if what you are doing is not really a part of your life then you are working at something alien in order to earn enough to live – in order to work again another day. I’m not a Marxist, by any stretch of the imagination and for a variety of reasons, but this applies well for the way that many people see study as well. For many people, education is an end in itself, something to be endured in order to move on to the next stage, which is working in order to live until you stop working and then you die.
When you look at the methods that, from evidence and extensive research, now appear to be successful in developing student learning, we see something very different from what we have done before: we see cooperation, mutual respect, self-determination and a desire to learn that is facilitated by being part of the educational system. In this system, the school is not a cage for students and a trap for the spirit of education. However, this requires a distinct change in the traditional roles between student and teacher, and it’s one that some teachers still aren’t ready for and many students haven’t been prepared for. The future is creative and it’s now time to change our educational system to fully support that.
Ultimately, many of the ways that we educate place the teacher in a role of judgement and opposition to the student: students compete in order to secure the best marks, which may require them to withhold information from each other, and they must convince the teacher of their worth in order to achieve the best results. In order to maintain the mark separation, we have to provide artificial mechanisms to ensure that we can create an arbitrary separation, above the concept of competency, by having limited attempts on assignments and late penalties. This places the teacher in opposition to the student, an adversary who must be bested. Is this really what we want in what should be a mutually enriching relationship? When we get it right, the more we learn, the more we can teach and hence the more everyone learns.
If we search for the opposite of an antagonist, we find the following words: ally, helper, supporter and friend. These are great words but they evoke roles that we can’t actually fill unless we step out from behind the lectern and the desk and work with our students. An ally doesn’t force students to compete against each other for empty honours that only a few can achieve. A helper doesn’t tell students that the world works as if every single piece of assignment work is the most important thing ever assigned. A supporter develops deep structures that will hold up the person and their world for their whole life. A friend has compassion for the frailties of the humans around them – although they still have to be honest as part of that friendship.
My students and I win together when they achieve things. I don’t need to be smarter than them in order to prove anything and I don’t need them to beat me before they can demonstrate that they’re ready to go out into the world. If I held a pebble out in my hand and asked the student how they could get it, I would hope that they would first ask me if they could have it, rather than attempting some bizarre demonstration of hand-eye coordination. Why compete when we could all excel together?
We stand in exciting times, where knowledge can be shared widely and semi-instantly, but we won’t see the best of what we can do with this until we see an antagonistic classroom for the dinosaur that it is and move on.
CSEDU Wrap-up (#csedu14 #AdelEd)
Posted: April 4, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: academia, barcelona, blogging, community, computer supported education, conference, conferences, csedu14, education, higher education, learning, reflection, resources, students, thinking Leave a commentWell, it’s the day after CSEDU and the remaining attendees are all checking out and leaving. All that remains now is lunch (which is not a minor thing in Spain) and heading to the airport. In this increasingly on-line age, the question is often asked “Why do you still go to conferences?”, meaning “Why do you still transport yourself to conferences rather than participating on-line?” It’s a pretty simple reason and it comes down to how well we can be somewhere using telepresence or electronic representations of ourselves in other places. Over the time of this conference, I’ve listened to a number of talks and spoken to a number of people, as you can see from my blog and (if you could see my wallet) the number of business cards I’ve collected. However, some of the most fruitful discussions took place over simple human rituals such as coffee, lunch, drinks and dinner. Some might think that a travelling academic’s life is some non-stop whirl of dining and fun but what is actually happening is a pretty constant round of discussion, academic argument and networking. When we are on the road, we are generally doing a fair portion of our job back home and are going to talks and, in between all of this, we are taking advantage of being surrounded by like-minded people to run into each other and build up our knowledge networks, in the hope of being able to do more and to be able to talk with people who understand what we’re doing. Right now, telepresence can let me view lectures and even participate to an extent, but it cannot give me those accidental meetings with people where we can chat for 5 minutes and work out if we should be trying to work together. Let’s face it, if we could efficiently send all of the signals that we need to know if another human is someone we want to work with or associate with, we’d have solved this problem for computer dating and, as I understand it, people are still meeting for dinners and lunch to see if what was represented on line had any basis in reality. (I don’t know about modern computer dating – I’ve been married for over 15 years – so please correct me if I’m wrong.)
Of course, for dating, most people choose to associate with someone who is already in their geographical locale but academics don’t have that luxury because we don’t tend to have incredible concentrations of similar universities and research groups in one place (although some concentrations do exist) and a conference provides us with a valuable opportunity to walk out our raw ideas into company and see what happens. There is also a lot to be said for the “defusing” nature of a face-to-face meeting, when e-mail can be so abrupt and video conferencing can provide quite jagged and harsh interactions, made more difficult by network issues and timezone problems. That is another good reason for conferences: everyone is away and everyone is in the same timezone. The worst conference to attend is one that is in your home town, because you will probably not take time off work, you’ll duck into the conference when you have a chance – and this reduces the chances of all of the good things we’ve talked about. It’s because you’re separated from your routine that you can have dinner with academic strangers or hang around after coffee to spend the time to talk about academic ideas. Being in the same timezone also makes it a lot easier as multi-continent video conferences often select times based on what is least awful for everyone, so Americans are up too early, Australians are up too late, and the Europeans are missing their lunches. (Again, don’t mess with lunch.)
It’s funny that the longer I stay an academic, the harder I work at conferences but it’s such a good type of hard work. It’s productive, it’s exciting, it’s engaging and it allows us to all make more progress together. I’ve met some great people here and run into some friends, both of which make me very happy. It’s almost time to jump back on a plane and head home (where I turn around in less than 14 hours to go and run another conference) but I feel that we’ve done some good things here and that will lead to better things in the future.
A place for meeting people and taking the time for academic thought.
It’s been a blast, CSEDU, let’s do it again. Buenos dias!
Education and Paying Back (#AdelEd #CSER #DigitalTechnologies #acara #SAEdu)
Posted: March 22, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: ACARA, advocacy, collaboration, community, cser, cser digital technologies, curriculum, design, digital education, digital technologies, education, educational problem, educational research, Generation Why, Google, higher education, learning, MOOC, Primary school, primary school teacher, principles of design, reflection, resources, school teachers, secondary school, sharing, teaching approaches, thinking, tools 2 CommentsOn Monday, the Computer Science Education Research Group and Google (oh, like you need a link) will release their open on-line course to support F-6 Primary school teachers in teaching the new Digital Technologies curriculum. We are still taking registrations so please go the course website if you want to sign up – or just have a look! (I’ve blogged about this recently as part of Science meets Parliament but you can catch it again here.) The course is open, on-line and free, released under Creative Commons so that the only thing people can’t do is to try and charge for it. We’re very excited and it’s so close to happening, I can taste it!
Here’s that link again – please, sign up!
I’m posting today for a few reasons. If you are a primary school teacher who wants help teaching digital technologies, we’d love to see you sign up and join our community of hundreds of other people who are thinking the same thing. If you know a primary school teacher, or are a principal for a primary school, and think that this would interest people – please pass it on! We are most definitely not trying to teach teachers how to teach (apart from anything else, what presumption!) but we’re hoping that what we provide will make it easier for teachers to feel comfortable, confident and happy with the new DT curriculum requirements which will lead to better experiences all ’round.
My other reason is one that came to me as I was recording my introduction section for the on-line course. In that brief “Oh, what a surprise there’s a camera” segment, I note that I consider the role of my teachers to have been essential in getting me to where I am today. This is what I’d like to do today: explicitly name and thank a few of my teachers and hope that some of what we release on Monday goes towards paying back into the general educational community.
You know who this is for.
My first thanks go to Mrs Shand from my Infant School in England. I was an early reader and, in an open plan classroom, she managed to keep me up with the other material while dealing with the fact that I was a voracious reader who would disappear to read at the drop of a hat. She helped to amplify my passion for reading, instead of trying to control it. Thank you!
In Australia, I ran into three people who were crucial to my development. Adam West was interested in everything so Grade 5 was full of computers (my first computing experience) because he arranged to borrow one and put it into the classroom in 1978, German (I can still speak the German I learnt in that class) and he also allowed us to write with nib and ink pens if we wanted – which was the sneakiest way to get someone’s handwriting and tidiness to improve that I have ever seen. Thank you, Adam! Mrs Lothian, the school librarian, also supported my reading habit and, after a while, all of the interesting books in the library often came through me very early on because I always returned them quickly and in good condition but this is where I was exposed to a whole world of interesting works: Nicholas Fisk, Ursula Le Guin and Susan Cooper not being the least of these. Thank you! Gloria Patullo (I hope I’ve spelt that correctly) was my Grade 7 teacher and she quickly worked out that I was a sneaky bugger on occasion and, without ever getting angry or raising a hand, managed to get me to realise that being clever didn’t mean that you could get away with everything and that being considerate and honest were the most important elements to alloy with smart. Thank you! (I was a pain for many years, dear reader, so this was a long process with much intervention.)
Moving to secondary school, I had a series of good teachers, all of whom tried to take the raw stuff of me and turn it into something that was happier, more useful and able to take that undirected energy in a more positive direction. I have to mention Ken Watson, Glenn Mulvihill, Mrs Batten, Dr Murray Thompson, Peter Thomas, Dr Riceman, Dr Bob Holloway, Milton Haseloff (I still have fossa, -ae, [f], ditch, burned into my brain) and, of course, Geoffrey Bean, headmaster, strong advocate of the thinking approaches of Edward de Bono and firm believer in the importance of the strength one needs to defend those who are less strong. Thank you all for what you have done, because it’s far too much to list here without killing the reader: the support, the encouragement, the guidance, the freedom to try things while still keeping a close eye, the exposure to thinking and, on occasion, the simple act of sitting me down to get me to think about what the heck I was doing and where I was going. The fact that I now work with some of them, in their continuing work in secondary education, is a wonderful thing and a reminder that I cannot have been that terrible. (Let’s just assume that, shall we? Moving on – rapidly…)
Of course, it’s not just the primary and secondary school teachers who helped me but they are the ones I want to concentrate on today, because I believe that the freedom and opportunities we offer at University are wonderful but I realise that they are not yet available to everyone and it is only by valuing, supporting and developing primary and secondary school education and the teachers who work so hard to provide it that we can go further in the University sector. We are lucky enough to be a juncture where dedicated work towards the national curriculum (and ACARA must be mentioned for all the hard work that they have done) has married up with an Industry partner who wants us all to “get” computing (Thank you, Google, and thank you so much, Sally and Alan) at a time when our research group was able to be involved. I’m a small part of a very big group of people who care about what happens in our schools and, if you have children of that age, you’ve picked a great time to send them to school. 🙂
I am delighted to have even a small opportunity to offer something back into a community which has given me so much. I hope that what we have done is useful and I can’t wait for it to start.
A minor milestone – 500 posts!
Posted: March 17, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: blogging, education, higher education 2 CommentsI realise I’m in the middle of live blogging but this is my 500th post and I didn’t want it to get lost. Wow, that’s a lot of typing. I can only hope that some small fraction of all those words have been useful to someone! Happy half-millenium!
Getting it wrong, offensively so. The scales ARE biassed.
Posted: February 11, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: Advanced Placement exam, advocacy, authenticity, Barbara Ericson, community, computer science, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, High school girls, higher education, in the student's head, learning, mark guzdial, principles of design, reflection, sexism, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking 1 Comment
Mark Guzdial has put out some excellent posts recently on Barbara Ericson’s ongoing work on analysing AP CS exam attempts and results across the US. Unsurprisingly, to those of us who see the classrooms on a day-to-day basis, women are grossly underrepresented. In this interview, Barbara is quoted:
Barbara Ericson, director of computing outreach at Georgia Tech, has made a startling claim. She said not one female student in three states – Mississippi, Montana and Wyoming — took the Advanced Placement exam in computer science last year.
Ericson appeared on Weekend Express to discuss the gender gap and explains why more women aren’t interested in computer science.
Now, I’m not going to rehash all of these posts but I did want to pick on one blogger who took the AP data and then, as far as I’m concerned, not only got it wrong by making some fundamental interpretational errors but managed to do so in a way that so heavily reeked of privilege that I’m going to call it out.
I hesitate to link to the article on the Huffington Post but it’s only fair that you should read it to see what you think, even though it will generate traffic. The article is called “Memo to Chicken Little: Female Scientists Do Roam Among Us, and Gasp! Some Even Wear Lipstick”. So before we’ve even started, we’ve got one good stereotype going in the title.
Look, I’m not planning to drag apart the whole article but I will pick on one point that the author makes because it really irritates me. Here’s the paragraph:
As a woman who likes science as a bystander but chose not to pursue it professionally, I’ve got a couple of problems with all this handwringing. Mostly, well-intentioned as it is, it implies that women need “help” choosing a field of study. High school girls are exposed to exactly the same science and math courses they need to graduate as boys are, but in the eyes of the handwringers, girls are either too shallow or simple to choose for themselves, or need to be socially engineered into the correct balance of male vs. female, regardless of their choices. I appreciate your concern, but frankly, it’s pretty demeaning.
Frankly, I’ve never seen a more disingenuous interpretation of attempts to undo and reverse the systematic anti-female bias that is built into our culture. I’ve never seen anyone who is trying to address this problem directly or indirectly label girls as shallow or too simple to choose – this is a very unpleasant strawman, constructed to make those of us who are trying to address a bias look like we’re the ones with the attitude problem. We don’t need to socially engineer girls into the correct balance, we need to engineer society to restore the balance and articles like this, which make it appear that women are deliberately choosing to avoid STEM, are unwelcome, unnecessary and unfair to the many young women who are being told that the way that our society works is the way that it should work.
Need I remind people of stereotype threat? The PNAS study that shows that women are as automatically likely to harshly judge women and lessen their rewards as their male colleagues? Looking at the AP attendance and performance doesn’t show equality, it shows the outcome of a systematically biased system.
To say that “High school girls are exposed to exactly the same science and math courses they need to graduate as boys are” is a difficult statement. Yes, women rack up roughly the same number of course credits but on the critical measurement of whether they choose to go on and pursue a profession? No, something breaks here. The AP test is a great measure because it is an Advanced Placement exam and your intention is to use this to go further. Is there clear evidence of far fewer women, as a percentage, going on from high school to college in STEM despite scoring the same kinds of grades? Yes. Is there evidence that some of these problems (anxiety about maths, for example) can start with perceptions of teachers in primary school? Yes. Is there a problem?
Yes.
And the question is always, if your previous exposure has not been fair, then is it reasonable to pick an arbitrary level of course that would be fair to people who haven’t been discriminated against? For years, racism was justified by culturally-based testing that could not be performed at the same level by people outside the culture – which was then used to restrict their access to the culture.
To me, that statement about exposure summarises everything that is wrong with glib arguments about constructing equal opportunity. If we’re going for a big job and there’s a corporate ‘interview dinner’ for 20 people, then we’ll all be on our best behaviour at dinner. For someone to lose the job because nobody showed them how to use a finger bowl or because their family uses a knife in the ‘other’ way, is to provide an equal exposure in the present that is blatantly unfair because it doesn’t take into account the redress of previous bias to bring people up to the point where it is really equal opportunity.
I think history supports me in the statement that we have been proved wrong every other time we’ve tried to segregate human ability and talent based on fixed physical abilities that were assigned at birth. Isn’t it about time we started investing all of our effort into producing truly equal opportunity for everyone?
You want thinkers. Let us produce them.
Posted: February 2, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, community, design, education, educational problem, ethics, feedback, higher education, in the student's head, learning, measurement, reflection, student, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, universal principles of design, work/life balance Leave a commentI was at a conference recently where the room (about 1000 people from across the business and educational world) were asked what they would like to say to everyone in the room, if they had a few minutes. I thought about this a lot because, at the time, I had half an idea but it wasn’t in a form that would work on that day. A few weeks later, in a group of 100 or so, I was asked a similar question and I managed to come up with something coherent. What follows here is a more extended version of what I said, with relevant context.
If I could say anything to the parents and future employers of my students, it would be to STOP LOOKING AT GRADES as some meaningful predictor of the future ability of the student. While measures of true competency are useful, the current fine-grained but mostly arbitrary measurements of students, with rabid competitiveness and the artificial divisions between grade bands, do not fulfil this purpose. When an employer demands a GPA of X, there is no guaranteed true measure of depth of understanding, quality of learning or anything real that you can use, except for conformity and an ability to colour inside the lines. Yes, there will be exceptional people with a GPA of X, but there will also be people whose true abilities languished as they focused their energies on achieving that false grail. The best person for your job may be the person who got slightly (or much) lower marks because they were out doing additional tasks that made them the best person.
Please. I waste a lot of my time giving marks when I could be giving far more useful feedback, in an environment where that feedback could be accepted and actual positive change could take place. Instead, if I hand back a 74 with comments, I’ll get arguments about the extra mark to get to 75 rather than discussions of the comments – but don’t blame the student for that attitude. We have created a world in which that kind of behaviour is both encouraged and sensible. It’s because people keep demanding As and Cs to somehow grade and separate people that we still use them. I couldn’t switch my degree over to “Competent/Not Yet Competent” tomorrow because, being frank, we’re not MIT or Stanford and people would assume that all of my students had just scraped by – because that’s how we’re all trained.
If you’re an employer then I realise that it’s very demanding but please, where you can, look at the person wherever you can and ask your industrial bodies that feed back to education to focus on ensuring that we develop competent, thinking individuals who can practice in your profession, without forcing them to become grade-haggling bean counters who would cut a group member’s throat for an A.
If you’re a parent, then I would like to ask you to think about joining that group of parents who don’t ask what happened to that extra 1% when a student brings home a 74 or 84. I’m not going to tell you how to raise your children, it’s none of my business, but I can tell you, from my professional and personal perspective, that it probably won’t achieve what you want. Is your student enjoying the course, getting decent marks and showing a passion and understanding? That’s pretty good and, hopefully, if the educators, the parents and the employers all get it right, then that student can become a happy and fulfilled human being.
Do we want thinkers? Then we have to develop the learning environments in which we have the freedom and capability to let them think. But this means that this nonsense that there is any real difference between a mark of 84 and a mark of 85 has to stop and we need to think about how we develop and recognise true measures of competence and suitability that go beyond a GPA, a percentage or a single letter grade.
You cannot contain the whole of a person in a single number. You shouldn’t write the future of a student on such a flimsy structure.
Three Stories: #3 Taking Time for Cats
Posted: January 12, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, community, education, educational problem, higher education, in the student's head, learning, reflection, storytelling, student perspective, students, work/life balance, workload Leave a commentThere are a number of draft posts sitting on this blog. Posts, which for one reason or another, I’ve either never finished, because the inspiration ran out, or I’ve never published, because I decided not to share them. Most of them were written when I was trying to make sense of being too busy, while at the same time I was taking on more work and feeling bad about not being able to commit properly to everything. I probably won’t ever share many of these posts but I still want to talk about some of the themes.
So, let me tell you a story about cats.
One of the things about cats is that they can be mercurial, creatures of fancy and rapid mood changes. You can spend all day trying to get a cat to sit on your lap and, once you’ve given up and sat back down, 5 minutes later you find a cat on your lap. That’s just the way of cats.
When I was very busy last year, and the year before, I started to see feedback comments from my students that said things like “Nick is great but I feel interrupting him” or I’d try and squeeze them into the 5 minutes I had between other things. Now, students are not cats, but they do have times when they feel they need to come and see you and, sometimes, when that time passes, the opportunity is lost. This isn’t just students, of course, this is people. That’s just the way of people, too. No matter how much you want them to be well organised, predictable and well behaved, sometimes they’re just big, bipedal, mostly hairless cats.
One day, I decided that the best way to make my change my frantic behaviour was to set a small goal, to make me take the time I needed for the surprising opportunities that occurred in a day.
I decided that every time I was walking around the house, even if I was walking out to go to work and thought I was in a hurry, if one of the cats came up to me, I would pay attention to it: scratch it, maybe pick it up, talk to it, and basically interact with the cat.
Over time, of course, what this meant was that I saw more of my cats and I spent more time with them (cats are mercurial but predictable about some things). The funny thing was that the 5 minutes or so I spent doing this made no measurable difference to my day. And making more time for students at work started to have the same effect. Students were happier to drop in to see if I could spend some time with them and were better about making appointments for longer things.
Now, if someone comes to my office and I’m not actually about to rush out, I can spend that small amount of time with them, possibly longer. When I thought I was too busy to see people, I was. When I thought I had time to spend with people, I could.
Yes, this means that I have to be a little more efficient and know when I need to set aside time and do things in a different way, but the rewards are enormous.
I only realised the true benefit of this recently. I flew home from a work trip to Melbourne to discover that my wife and one of our cats, Quincy, were at the Animal Emergency Hospital, because Quincy couldn’t use his back legs. There was a lot of uncertainty about what was wrong and what could be done and, at one point, he stopped eating entirely and it was… not good there for a while.
The one thing that made it even vaguely less awful in that difficult time was that I had absolutely no regrets about the time that we’d spent together over the past 6 months. Every time Quincy had come up to say ‘hello’, I’d stopped to take some time with him. We’d lounged on the couch. He’d napped with me on lazy Sunday afternoons. We had a good bond and, even when the vets were doing things to him, he trusted us and that counted for a lot.
Quincy is now almost 100% and is even more of a softie than before, because we all got even closer while we were looking after him. By spending (probably at most) another five minutes a day, I was able to be happier about some of the more important things in my life and still get my “real” work done.
Fortunately, none of my students are very sick at the moment, but I am pretty confident that I talk to them when they need to (most of the time, there’s still room for improvement) and that they will let me know if things are going badly – with any luck at a point when I can help.
Your time is rarely your own but at least some of it is. Spending it wisely is sometimes not the same thing as spending it carefully. You never actually know when you won’t get the chance again to spend it on something that you value.
“Begrudgingly honest because we might be surveilled?”
Posted: January 3, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: blogging, community, design, education, ethics, Generation Why, higher education, O'Reilly Community, online conference, panopticon, principles of design, resources, thinking, tools, universal principles of design 1 Comment
The Plans of the Panopticon
O’Reilly Community are hosting an online conference on “Data, Crime, and Conflict”, which I’m attending at the rather unhealthy hour of 3:30am on the morning of January the 8th (it’s better for you if you’re in the UK or US). Here’s an extract of the text:
A world of sensors gives us almost complete surveillance. Every mobile device tracks moves, forming a digital alibi or new evidence for the prosecution. And with the right data, predictions look frighteningly like guilt.
How does a data-driven, connected world deal with crime, conflict, and peacekeeping? Will we be prisoners in a global Panopticon, begrudgingly honest because we might be surveilled? Or will total transparency even the balance between the enforcer and the citizen?
Join a lineup of thinkers and technologists for this free online event as we look at the ways data is shaping how we police ourselves, from technological innovations to ethical dilemmas.
I’ve been interested in the possible role and expansion (and the implications) of the panopticon since first reading about it. I even wrote a short story once to explore a global society where the removal of privacy had not been the trip down into dystopia that we always expect it to be. (This doesn’t mean that I believe that it is a panacea – I just like writing stories!) I’m looking forward to seeing what the speakers have to say. They claim that there are limited places but I managed to sign up today so it’s probably not too late.
Three Stories: #2 Why I Don’t Make New Year’s Resolutions
Posted: January 1, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: authenticity, education, Generation Why, higher education, in the student's head, learning, reflection, resources, storytelling, student perspective, teaching approaches, thinking Leave a commentThis is a story I’ve never told anyone before, but I hope that it will help to explain why I think many students struggle with making solid change in their academic and life practices. They focus on endpoints and set deadlines reactively, rather than focusing on process and finding a good time to change. Let me explain this in the narrative.
When I was younger, I was quite a bit heavier than I am now – by about 30% of my body mass. As I got older, this became more of a problem and my weight went up and down quite a lot as I tried to get a regular regime of exercise into my life and cut back on my eating. Unfortunately, when I get stressed, I tend to eat, and one of the things I used to get stressed about was … losing weight. It’s a common, vicious, circle. Anyway, one year, after a Christmas where I had found it difficult to fit into my ‘good’ clothes and just felt overstuffed and too hot most of the time, I decided that enough was enough. I would make a New Year’s Resolution to lose weight. Seriously. (As background, Christmas in Australia is in Summer, so we sing snows about snow and eat roast turkey while sitting around in 90-100F/32-38C heat – so if your clothes are squeezy, boy, are you going to feel it.)
I can’t remember the details of the New Year’s Eve party but I do remember waking up the next day and thinking “Ok, so now I lose weight”. But there were some problems.
- It was still very hot.
- Everything was closed because it was a public holiday.
- I was still stuffed from Christmas/NY indulgence.
- I was hungover.
- I had no actual plan.
- I hadn’t actually taken any steps towards either dietary change or exercise that I could implement.
So, instead of getting out of bed and doing anything healthy, I thought “Oh, ok, I’ll start tomorrow.” because it was just about impossible, to my mind, to get things started on that day. I made some plans as to what I’d do the next day and thought “Ok, that’s what I’ll do tomorrow.”
But then a friend called on the 2nd and they were in town so we caught up. Then I was back at work and it was really busy.
And… and… and…
When I finally did lose the weight, many years later, and get to a more stable point, it wasn’t through making a resolution – it was through developing a clear plan to achieve a goal. I set out to work up to walking 10 miles as loops around my block. Then, when I achieved that, I assessed myself and realised that I could replace that with running. So then, ever time I went out, I ran a little at the start and walked the rest. Finally I was (slowly) running the whole distance. Years later, a couple of bad falls have stopped me from long-distance running, but I have three marathons and numerous halves under my belt.
Why didn’t it work before? Well, lack of preparation is always bad, but also because New Year’s is one of the worst possible times to try and make a massive change unless you’ve actually prepared for it and the timing works for you. Think about it:
- New Year’s Eve is a highly social activity for many people as are the days after- any resolutions involving food, alcohol, sex or tobacco are going to much harder to keep.
- It’s high stakes, especially if you make your resolution public. Suddenly, failure is looming over you and other people may be either trying to force you into keeping your resolution – and some people will actively be trying to tempt you out of it.
- There’s just a lot going on around this time for most people and it’s not a time when you have lots of extra headspace. If your brain is already buzzing, making big change will make it harder.
- Setting your resolution as a goal is not the same as setting a strategy. This is really important if you fall off the wagon, so to speak. If you are trying to give up smoking but grab a quick cigarette on the 3rd, then your resolution is shot. If you have a plan to cut down, allowing for the occasional divergence, then you can be human without thinking “Oh, now I have to abandon the whole project.”
- New Year’s Resolutions tend to be tip of the mind things – if something had been really bothering you for months, why wait until NYE to do it? This means that you’re far less likely to think everything out.
After thinking over this for quite a long time, I’ve learned a great deal about setting goals for important changes and you have to try to make these changes:
- When you have a good plan as to what you’re trying to achieve or what you’re just trying to do as a regular practice.
- When you have everything you need to make it work.
- When you have enough headspace to think it through.
- When you won’t beat yourself up too badly if it goes wrong.
So have a Happy New Year and be gentle on yourself for a few days. If you really want to change something in your life, plan for it properly and you stand a much better chance of success. Don’t wait until a high stakes deadline to try and force change on yourself – it probably won’t work.
Nick Falkner 