The Soft Marking Myth

Posted: April 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

I was reading the Australian, a national newspaper, and found a story about an investigation into a school of Journalism where, it was alleged, soft marking had taken place or had been requested to the benefit of two students with poor English language skills. I have no idea how often this actually happens in Australian universities but I know how many times people have insinuated to me that we must be practising this given how many international students we have – and it’s not a small number. (I must look shifty or something) It irritates me that in 2012, in a multi-cultural society dominated by the immigration waves of the last 200 years, we are still having this discussion!

Well, on the record, not only have I never done that, nor would I ever do that, but I have never had it insinuated, suggested, implied or stated that this is something I should even consider doing – on, off, around or through the record. Yes, I have guideline pass and fail rates but these are over entire courses, not for individual students and they are just that – guidelines. Why did I bring this up? Because I generally don’t really know someones intention when they ask this so I’m usually relatively neutral and polite in my reply. I suspect that I rarely state how offensive, discriminatory and wrong these allegations are, when made across a group as a blanket statement. Some people just repeat stuff they’ve heard in the media or bring things up because it suits their thinking pattern – and that’s necessarily part of a bigger agenda. So, sometimes, I answer the question and let it slide but here’s what I really think

Before I go into detail let me say that, yes, I believe that targeted soft marking can and does happen but, again, I have never seen it practised, heard it spoken of or seen evidence of it within my school – and I have access to one of the most comprehensive and detailed sets of student performance data in the Southern Hemisphere. So let me return to addressing what bothers me.

  1. It’s offensive to staff because it paints us as having no integrity, being (at best) mercenary and having no commitment to academic standards and professional ethics. When anyone says “Oh, you must give those Chinese/Malay/African kids an easier time because they’re paying” they may not realise it, but they’re very close to saying “… because you’ll do anything for cash, won’t you?”
  2. It’s offensive to students because it is inherently discriminatory and a wider generalisation would be hard to find. One instance does not define a class and the behaviour of a group does not allow complete prediction of an individual. This kind of accusation almost always falls along cultural or gender lines and seeks to diminish the achievements or standing of a group.
  3. It’s wrong to assume that it is something that happens at every institution or something that must occur if we are to retain our profile in the international educational market. It’s a short-sighted and destructive practice that would quickly erode the value of the degree if it was an incredibly widespread practice. Yes, I imagine some institutions may undertake it but a University’s testamur (the parchment) is supported by the reputation of the institution. Somewhere that gets known as easy marking or low quality will quickly lose reputation. Get a rep for easy marking for cash and you may never climb out of the hole. The graduates of the program will be of a lower professional quality – and word gets around if your CS graduates can’t program or your engineers’ bridges keep falling down.

My greatest problem is not having to explain this, it’s knowing that at least some of the people reading this will be thinking things like “Really?” or “Can we believe that given where he is?”or “Well, he’d say that wouldn’t he.” – and, at that point, I’d address you to point 1, except now you’re calling me a liar as well. 🙂

There many anecdotes out there about this and, yes, subversive behaviour often has concealed evidence trails, but many anecdotes do not produce anecdata – especially when so many are the same story retold and retold. Yes, it’s happening somewhere, no doubt, for monetary or similar reasons. Yes, it is a gross violation of the compact between University and student and makes a sham of academic integrity. You would be hard pressed to find someone who would campaign harder against unethical activities such as this than me.  If I thought it was happening right here, in my school? I’d be working to eradicate and leave if it didn’t go away – but, in a school full of diversity, I can’t see it. And, yes, I have my eyes wide open.

To me, sadly, while there may be basis in some places, and I’ll wait to see the outcome of the article in the paper, it always looks more like a mask for racism. Yes, we always do have and almost always will have cultural differences across our campuses but different doesn’t mean  bad or, far more importantly, mean that you can use lazy thinking to project racism out and disguise it as a concern over marking integrity.

Your Mission, Should You…

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

The ALTA meeting of the last two days has been really interesting. My role as an ALTA Fellow has been much better defined after a lot of discussions between the Fellows, the executive and the membership of ALTA. Effectively, if you’re at a University in Australia and reading this, and you’re interested in finding out about what’s going on in our planning for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Learning and Teaching, contact me and I’ll come out to talk to your school, faculty or University. I’m concentrating on engagement and dissemination – trying to bring the diverse groups in ICT education in Australia (38 organisations, 686 separate ICT-related programs) into a more cohesive group so that we can achieve great things.

To say that this is going to be exciting is an understatement. To omit the words ‘challenging’ and ‘slightly frightening’ would also be an understatement. But I always love a slightly frightening and exciting challenge – that’s why I eat durian.

ICT education in Australia does not have the best image at the moment. That information is already out there. A lot of people have no idea what we even mean by ICT. But let’s be inclusive. It’s Computer Science, Computing, Information Systems, Information Science, Communications Science, Information Technology… everything else where we would be stronger standing together than apart.

There are important questions to be answered. Are we a profession or professions? Are we like engineering (core competencies with school-based variation) or more like science (core concepts and very different disciplines)? How do we improve the way that people see us? How do we make 13 year olds realise that they are suited for our profession – and that our profession is more than typing on a keyboard?

How do we change the world’s perception so that the first picture that people put on an article about computing does not feature someone who is supposed to be perceived as unattractive, socially inept, badly dressed and generally socially unacceptable?

If you are at an Australian University and want to talk about this, get in touch with me. My e-mail address is available by looking for my name at The University of Adelaide – sorry, spambots. If you’re from overseas and would like to offer suggestions or ask questions, our community can be global and, in many respects, it should be global. I learn so much from my brief meetings with overseas experts. As an example, I’ll link you off to Mark Guzdial’s blog here because he’s a good writer, an inspiring academic and educator, and he links to lots of other interesting stuff. I welcome the chance to work with other people whenever I can because, yes, my focus is Australia but my primary focus is “Excellence in ICT education”. That’s a global concern. My dream is that we get so many students interested in this that we look at ways to link up and get synergies for dealing with the vast numbers that we have.

The world is running on computers, generates vast quantities of data, and needs our profession more than ever. Its time to accept the mission and try to raise educational standards, perceptions and expectations across the bar so that ICT Education (or whatever we end up calling it) becomes associated with the terms ‘world-leading’, ‘innovative’, ‘inspiring’ and ‘successful’. And our students don’t have to hide between their brave adoption of semi-pejorative isolating terms or put up with people being proud that they don’t know anything about computers, as if that knowledge is something to be ashamed of.

We need change. Helping to make that happen is now part of my mission. I’m looking for people to help me.

A Dangerous Precedent: Am I Expecting Too Much of My Students?

Posted: April 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Anyone with a pulse is aware that there is a lot of discussion at the moment in some important areas of Science. If we scratch the surface of the climate and vaccination debates, we find a roiling frenzy of claim and counter-claim – facts, fallacies and fury all locked in a seething ball. We appear to have reached a point where there is little point in trying to hold a discussion because we have reached a point of dogmatic separation of the parties – where no discussion can bridge the divide. This is the dangerous precedent I’m worried about – not that we have contentious issues, but that we have contentious issues where we build a divide that cannot be bridged by reasonable people with similar backgrounds and training. This is a sad state of affairs, given the degree to which we all observe the same universe.

I don’t teach politics in the classroom and I try not to let my own politics show but I do feel free to discuss good science with my students. Good science is built on good science and, ultimately, begets more good science. Regrettably, a lot of external interest has crept in and it’s easy to see places where good science has been led astray, or published too early, or taken out of context. It’s also easy to see where bad science has crept in under the rug disguised as good science. Sometimes, bad science is just labelled good science and we’re supposed to accept it.

I’m worried that doubt is seen as weakness, when questioning is one of the fundamental starting points for science. I’m worried that a glib (and questionable) certainty is preferred to a complex and multi-valued possibility, even where the latter is correct. I’m worried that reassessment of a theory in light of new evidence is seen as a retrograde step.

I have always said that I expect a lot of my students and that’s true. I tell my research students that will work hard when they’re with me, and that I expect a lot, but that I will work just as hard and that I will try to help them achieve great things. But, along with this, I expect them to be good scientists. I expect them to read a lot across the field and at least be able to make a stab at separating good, replicable results from cherry-picking and interest-influenced studies. That’s really hard, of course, especially when you read things like 47 of the most significant 53 cancer studies can’t be replicated. We can, of course, raise standards to try and address this but, if we’re talking about this in 2012, it’s more than a little embarrassing for the scientific community.

What I try to get across to my students is that, in case of pressure, I expect them to be ethical. I try to convey that a genuine poor (or null) submission is preferable to an excellent piece of plagiarised work, while tracking and encouraging them to try and stay out of that falsely dichotomous zone. But, my goodness, look at the world and look at some of the things we’ve done in the name of Science. Let’s look at some of those in the 20th century with something approaching (semi)informed consent. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. Milgram’s experiment. The Stanford Prison Experiment. I discuss all of these with my students and a number of them think I’m making it up. Until they go looking.

Now, as well as unethical behaviour to contend with, we have divisive behaviour – people trying to split the community for their own purposes. We always had it, of course, but the ease of self-publishing and the speed with which information can be delivered means that it takes days to spread information that used to percolate through doubt filters and peer review. Bad science can often travel faster than good science because it bypasses the peer review process – which has been unfairly portrayed in certain circles as an impediment to innovation or a tool of ‘Big Science’. The appeal to authority is always dangerous, because there is no guarantee that peer review is flawless, but as we have seen with the recent “Faster than the speed of light/ oh, wait, no it’s not” the more appropriately trained eyes you have on your work, the more chance we have of picking up mistakes.

So I expect my students to be well-read, selective, ethical, inclusive and open to constructive criticism as they work towards good or great things.

I still believe that there is a strong and like-minded community out there for them to join – but some days, reading the news, that’s harder to believe than others.

The Value of Investment… in People

Posted: April 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment

I apologise in advance because this post is less about learning and teaching as practice and more about protecting those people who provide the learning and teaching. It’s probably more political than usual, although I’m trying to be neutral here there’s some inevitability, so please feel free to skip it.

As many of you will know, a number of Australian Universities have had to slash their budgets in the wake of the global financial crisis, often due to a large amount of their operating budget coming from investments, rather than Commonwealth funds for student places or localised research and consulting incomes. As part of this, the rounds of staff retrenchments, targeted redundancies and the general theme of ‘reducing sail’ seems to show up on the news sites with increasing regularly.

Now, you might not be a huge fan of the American airline Southwest, but their continued profitability and growth after the horror of 9/11 was attributed to a number of key strategies that the airline took during that difficult time. Most other major airlines cut their routes and their staff to reduce their expenditure and, as we all know, staff are expensive. Southwest carried out no layoffs, instead looking at the situation as a possibility for expansion. If everyone else was reducing presence, well, soon enough, people would want to fly again. (I note that this was only really possible because Southwest had committed to keeping their debt low and their cash on hand high, which meant that they didn’t have to service dead debt or carry out a fire sale to strip out the debt or make their interest payments.) From what I’ve read, Southwest still pays some of the highest salaries, is still profitable, has surprisingly good ongoing relationships between management and labour, and, despite some hiccups, is proceeding pretty well.

Pilots take years to train. Crew take years to reach recognised higher levels of competency. A Captain requires somewhere between 10-20 years of experience, thousands of hours of flying, skill tests, commitment to physical fitness. Good cabin crew are also hard to find and take time to train, to give your airline the consistency and excellence of experience that keep people coming back. Who do you fire when the money starts getting squeezed? Senior people (and lose their expertise) or your junior people (and artificially age your workforce)? Worse still, when people start getting fired, what behaviour will you get from the rest? Solidarity, where you drive a wedge between management and worker because the workers unite for good or ill, or treachery, where workers turn on each other to scrabble up the side of the ship to get out of the water? A climate of fear takes focus away from your core business.

Academics take years to train. Senior educators, researchers and administrators take years to reach recognised higher levels of competency. A Professor takes 10-20 years of experience, thousands of hours of reading and writing, millions of dollars in grants, PhDs and other skill test, commitment to … ok, well there the analogy stops but a lot of us run or work out because we’re desk bound. Good administrative support people and professional staff members are hard to find and take time to train, to give our academy the consistency and excellence of experience that keep people coming back.

Do I really need to go on? At a time when the rest of the world is reeling from the GFC, Australia has had some interaction with it but, from most accounts, nothing like the impact elsewhere. When the world recovers, we want to be able to take as many students as possible, into well-established, well-staffed and actively growing programs. If we don’t do that, then somebody else will. There are new Universities going up all over the regions that we have traditionally seen as our student recruiting grounds. (Some Unis here are already changing their acceptance policies to address this but, with reduced staff, you have to wonder how extra intake is going to be balanced.)

This is the moment where we could go in many different directions – and only some of them are good.

We have an amazing opportunity to take what I believe to be a generally excellent educational basis at the tertiary level and make ourselves more available to the domestic and international markets. Shrinking a school, or an area, to half of its staff is not a 1 or even 5-year decision, it’s a 10-20 year decision. Could we be more efficient? Yes, I think we could. Do we need to keep quality levels high? Yes, but then let’s have that discussion and tell people what we want to achieve. Is there a finite amount of increase a given academic can take? Yes. There’s only so far we can squeeze before we risk compromising long-term sustainability, quality and excellence. It’s pretty obvious that there’s a lot of house cleaning going on at the moment, for a range of reasons, and I can’t help thinking that a lot of that can be handled through good management, rather than broad brush activities like this. But I’m a junior woodchuck, so my view may be heavily compromised and rose-tinted.

I’m always scared that these staff reduction exercises take out core aspects of our elders, remove the unlucky and encourage those who are capable in many fields to go elsewhere – at least as much as they remove people that we may actually want to “get rid of”. Worse, the climate of fear, of losing your job or having to shoulder the load as being one of the ‘lucky’ ones left behind, takes focus away from our core business – excellence in learning, teaching and research.

I look at Southwest and, yes, it’s a bit of a stretch, but I wonder what would happen if we committed to riding this out and seeing what opportunities opened up – with no need for division, enforced solidarity or encouraged treachery.

Teaching CS in the 21st Century: CS as a fundamental skill.

Posted: April 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Today’s Guardian has a feature in their Computer Science and IT section that includes a lot of very interesting pieces, ranging from what’s scaring girls away from coding, to why we need to be able to program and, John Naughton’s proposal for rebooting the computing curriculum – as an open letter to the Education Minister for the UK. Feel free not to read the rest of my piece if you’re pressed for time – the links on the first page will keep you busy for quite a while.

For those who are still reading, here’s a picture of ubiquitous access to computers in the developing world – giving people the possibility of doing anything with their lives. (Image is from this World Food Programme page, the food aid branch of the UN, showing the Nepalese deployment of the XO Laptop, with a programme focused on bringing young people into education, combined with a cooking oil-based incentive scheme if daughters attend at least 80% of the time.)

Children using a cheap high accessibility laptop.

What I took away from reading the Guardian feature is the overwhelming message that we should teach programming and computer awareness for the same reason that we teach maths and science to all students, regardless of where they’ll end up – because that’s the world in which they live. To quote Naughton’s article:

We teach elementary physics to every child, not primarily to train physicists but because each of them lives in a world governed by physical systems. In the same way, every child should learn some computer science from an early age because they live in a world in which computation is ubiquitous. (Item 3, A Manifesto for Teaching CS in the 21st Century.)

I’ve read too many articles about various government programs that try to raise standards but do so in a way that concentrates effort on some areas in a way that starves all of the other areas, or sidelines them at the least. If we don’t see Information Communication and Technology (ICT) skills as vital, then we won’t assign priority to them. They’ll get shunted out of the way for other topics, like Maths, Language skills and Science. ICT is not more important than these but, in the world that our students will have to occupy, ICT needs a seat at the table. As many other, and better, commentators have noted, the transformation of the workforce continues apace and programming and computer use is now a vital skill in many jobs.

We need the focus in schools, because then we can hire the teachers, which drives the job market, which causes the teacher training, which improves the quality, which improves the number of competent graduates, and ultimately leads to knowledgable and fully-participating members of our civilised democracies where those little boxes on desks aren’t a mystery or intimidating. I can’t take more people into my Uni-level courses than are being produced by schools – and, sadly, not everyone who has the skill or training at school goes on to use it. I can’t wave a wand and turn the “less than 20%” of women who start my degree into 50% by the end. (Well, yes, I can, but I can’t do it fairly or ethically.) I can do the best I can with the people I get but I’d really love to get a lot more people with the skills!

We all know this is a challenge because we have so many acronyms that might mean ‘Computer training’ – are we teaching ICT, IS, IT, CS, CSE? To step back from the acronyms, and their deliberate placement for emphasis, are we teaching computational or algorithmic thinking (problem solving and solution design), are we teaching computer usage at a fundamental level, are we teaching people how to use certain packages, certain techniques – where does programming fit into all of this?

All of us are need at least a subset of these skills now, in the 21st century. On a daily basis, I download more software updates and modifications and program more items around my house, than I ever did in the years before 1995.

As always, time and resource budgets are tight and, because of this, this is not a problem we can solve at one college, one school or even one state. This is why governments have to make this a national priority if initiatives like this will succeed. This doesn’t have to mean standardised testing or fixed curricula – it means incentive to provide quality education in certain areas, with supportive high-level goals and curriculum consideration, as well as allocated money for training and community building. Of course, there are many existing initiatives like the UK revamp of the high school curriculum and available on-line resources but, here in Australia, we still don’t seem to have strong linkage between a senior school course and University entry and it must make it hard to direct students into a certain path if there is no benefit for them. There are some excellent starting points, however, such as the Australian Government’s Digital Education Revolution, so there is certainly some hope for the future, but we need long-term vision and bipartisan support for these initiatives if they’re going to continue and make real change over time.

 

Post #100: Why I Haven’t Left My University

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

In light of all of the posts from people telling us why they have left their jobs (Goldman Sachs, Google and the Empire, with the meme still rising), I wanted to spend my 100th post telling you why I’m not leaving my job.

  1. I’m not disillusioned. A lot of the “Why I Left” (WIL) posts talk about the authors discovering that their job wasn’t what it seemed, or that it had changed and the culture was gone, or that terrible things had happened and either evil Ring Lords had taken over their world or, in some cases, Evil Hobbits had killed the Benevolent Dictator. (Perspective is important.) Yes, University culture is changing but, firstly, not all change is bad and, secondly, a lot of positive change is taking place. Is this the job I thought it was when I started? Well, no, but that’s because I didn’t really understand what the job was. Education, knowledge, learning, teaching, research, integrity, persistence, excellence. Sometimes the framework it comes in can be irritating (matrix management I’m looking at you) but the core is solid and, because of that, the house stands. I’m now spending effort to get into positions where I can help that change occur in a good way and with a good goal.
  2. I don’t work for shareholders. Or, if I do, I work for 22 million of them.This is a big one. Most Universities in Australia are public Universities – government money, i.e. taxes, go to the universities to pay about half of their bills. Everyone who pays tax invests in the Universities that educates them and their children. Because we live in Australia, even if you can’t pay tax at the moment, then while it is not as equitable and accessible as it used to be (we could fix that, you know) it is still possible for people to go to college. Yes, it would be nice if it were free again but that certainly wouldn’t happen under a profit-driven shareholder vested model. I work for the people and, because of that, I have to be ready to educate anyone, anywhere, anytime. I don’t get to fail off a group of people because I’ve decided that they’re not smart enough for me – I need to look at what I need them to do and what they can do and get them from one place to the other. Maybe they need more help to get to that stage? That’s my job to work out as well, at my level. Some of them won’t make it, sure, but I never want it to be due to anything that I didn’t do.
  3. My job is fantastic.On a given day I can be discussing new developments in technology, encouraging a group of students to code, writing applications for my own research or getting time to stare at a wall and think about how to make the world a better place. Better yet, I have AMAZING ROBES OF POWER in which to do this in times of high celebration. Yes, every so often someone says “Those who can do, those who can’t teach” but I have been and I have done, and I continue to do, and now I also teach (I’ve posted in the past about authenticity). The most useful thing about that phrase is that, when it’s said seriously, you’ve just been saved a lot of effort in character assessment. 🙂
  4. I am a small part of a large community doing the most important job of allFrom kindergarten to PhD, the preparation and training of the next generation is one of the most important things that will ever get done. Since we developed writing, we’ve been able to scale our expert numbers up to match the number of trainees with increasing ability – first we had to copy by hand, then print and now we have electronic distribution. But we still need educators to complete the process of developing knowledge and enabling people to be able to receive and develop knowledge. But what we do is important because, without it, society goes away. Knowledge erodes. Things fall down. The machine stops.
  5. Every so often, someone says thank you. Every so often, one of my students comes back, covered in the dust of the real world and thanks me for what I’ve done. Yes, they often say things like “Wow, that thing you told me – did you know it was right?” but I know what they mean. All that sitting in lecture theatres and working on assignments – it had a purpose. That purpose was the right one. Thank you.

And that’s five good reasons why I’m still here.

Soft Power follow-up

Posted: March 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

The magazine “Monocle” has covered soft power in previous issues and, amusingly enough, about 24 hours after I put the previous post into the queue, they ran another article featuring a hard/soft comparison that was very similar to mine – I hadn’t seen it and, obviously, they neither saw nor cared about mine but the coincidence amused me. However, other discussions of soft power in the media include what will happen to the Cato Institute, which has had a significant cultural influence (whether for good or ill I leave to the reader) and now appears to be moving towards a less diverse controlling board. I’m not advocating for Cato (most certainly not) but this is a salient reminder that soft power is used by many different people to attempt to carry out non-military or confrontational change for whatever they consider to be the correct way to live or carry out activity x.

Putting Education into this sphere of “things that you should really think about” seems even more appropriate in this context. But, and it’s a big but (and I cannot lie), it is as easy to place material into the public eye that attacks teaching as it is to defend it. Regrettably, enough people are influenced by the first argument that they say which even vaguely aligns with their beliefs – it becomes a fact and attempts to argue against it just reinforce the fact. What this means to me is that positive, constructive examples should be seen everywhere.

Which comes back to us. I’m still a bit jet lagged but it’s right on top of my to do list. “Be educationally excellent – frequently.” 🙂

Education: Soft Power but Hard Sell

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

In 1990, Joseph Nye coined the term soft power to mean “the ability to obtain what one wants through co-option and attraction” (Wikipedia), in contrast to using payment and coercion, which is hard power. In the realm of nations, we can cast hard power as the military might and cash resources, but soft power is harder to pin down. There are many (conflicting) discussions about the accuracy of this separation and what falls into which category but what is generally agreed is that a nation’s culture is one of its most engaging forms of co-option and attraction.

And one of the most enduring contributors to a nation’s culture, and an indication of its future culture, is its education system.

While a country’s military might is generally directly linked to all of its other hard power indicators, its educational influence and culture are harder to pin down. I can count tanks, or dollars in the bank, but should I be measuring number of students, number of academics, world standing, literacy or some complex composite measure?

Consider France. The French Alliance Française has been one of the most important ways of spreading French language and culture in the period following the decline of French as the dominant language of diplomacy. It’s an educational approach that spreads a very distinct cultural message – French is sophisticated, fun and something desirable. Do we measure its success by number of French tourist, French speakers or number of Alliance Française offices?

We are all aware that many governments are trying to quantify the efforts of educators, using standardised tests and other performance measures, but this is generally more linked to funding measures and notional ranking structures. What if we could quantify our educational contribution to culture then we can immediately provide a lever for a government in terms of dollars or cultural impact.

Imagine that we could say that investing $10,000,000 in education was equivalent to the impact of a strong positive leadership decision. Or that it would bring in 5,000 more students, who would then take our education culture back out to the world.

If we could get soft power and hard power on to the same table, could we ever say that an centrally-funded teacher post-graduate study program was equal to an aircraft carrier in terms of regional stabilisation. Soft power needs hard currency, which means that the funding agencies and the government have to be willing to put money into it. And the first step is making sure that the decision makers understand how important soft power, cultural impact and education are. The second is making sure that it’s the kind of importance that gets funded, rather than recognised and left without money.

Obviously, this is a difficult problem to solve – but the first problem is reminding people that education makes our culture and our culture has a strong influence on the world’s view of us. Regrettably, soft power is easy to talk about but, ultimately, it’s a very hard sell.

 

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!)

 

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