101 Big And Small Ways To Make A Difference In Academia
Posted: January 5, 2015 Filed under: Education | Tags: activism, advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, education, educational problem, ethics, higher education, resources, students, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, universal principles of design, workload Leave a commentThis is a quite remarkable list of ideas that I found only today. Please invest some time to read through it as you can probably find something that speaks to you about making a difference in Academia.
101 Big And Small Ways To Make A Difference In Academia.
A Meditation on the Cultivation of Education
Posted: January 2, 2015 Filed under: Education | Tags: agriculture, authenticity, community, cultivation, education, educational problem, gourd, higher education, learning, pumpkin, teaching, thinking Leave a comment“In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.”
David Hume, Section 10, Of Miracles, Part 1, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1758.
Why haven’t we “fixed” education yet? Does it actually need to be fixed in the first place? In a recent post, I discussed five things that we needed to assume were true, to avoid the self-fulfilling and negative outcomes should we assume that they were false. One of these was that fixing things was something we should be doing and the evidence does appear to support me on that. I wouldn’t call myself a wise man, although I’m definitely learning as I grow older, but my belief in this matter is proportional to the evidence available to me. And that evidence is both vast and convincing; change is required.
One of the biggest problems it that many attempts have been made and are being made on a daily basis to “fix” education and, yet, we seem to have many horror stories of these not working. Or, maybe something good was done, but it “won’t work here”. There are some places that regularly maintain high standards of education and this recent post in the Washington Post Answer Sheet Blog talked about how Finland does it. They don’t test teacher effectiveness as their main measure of achievement, they conduct a highly structured and limited entry program for teachers, requiring a masters level degree to teach above the most junior levels of school. By training teachers well and knowing what path people must take to become teachers, we can greatly raise the probability of getting good teachers at the end of the process. Teachers can then work together in schools to achieve good outcomes. That is, there is an excellent teaching environment, and the school plus the educational system plus the teachers can then help to overcome the often amazingly dominant factors of socioeconomic status, family and peer influence.
Finland has looked across the problem of education and carefully thought out how they can develop everything that is needed for success in order to be able to cultivate a successful educational environment for their staff and students. They develop an educational culture that is evidence-based and highly informed – no wonder they’re doing well.
If we look at the human traditions of agricultural cultivation, it’s easy to see why any piecemeal approach to education is almost doomed to fail because we cannot put in enough positives at one point to overcome negatives at another. About 11-12,000 years ago, humans started taking note of crops and living in a more fixed manner, cultivating crops around them. At this stage, humans were opportunistically taking advantage of crops that were already growing, in places that could sustain them. As our communities grew, we needed to start growing more specific crops to accommodate our growing needs and selection (starting with the mighty gourd, I believe) of more desirable variants of a crop lead to the domesticated varieties we enjoy today.
Things were not this easy 12,000 years ago.
But plants need what they have always needed: enough sunlight, enough food, enough water, enough fertilisation/pollination. Successful agriculture depends upon the ability to determine what is required from the evidence and provide this. Once we started setting up old crops in new places, we race across new problems. If a plant has not succeeded somewhere naturally, then it is either because it didn’t reach there or it has already failed there. Working out which crop will work where is a vital element of agriculture because the amount of effort required to make something grow where it wouldn’t normally grow is immense. (Australia’s history of monstrous over-irrigation to support citrus crops and rice is a dark reminder of what happens when hubris overrides evidence.)
After 12,000 years, we pretty much know what’s required (pretty much) and we can even support diverse environments such as aquaculture, hydroponics, organic culture and so on. Monoculture agriculture is not just a bad idea at the system level but our dependency on monocultural food varieties (hello, Cavendish Banana) is also a very bad idea. When everything we depend upon has the same weakness, we are not in a very safe position. The demand for food is immense and we must be systematic and efficient in our food production, while still (in many parts of the world) striving to be ethical and sustainable so that feeding people now will not starve other people, now or in the future, nor be any more cruel than it needs to be to sustain human life. (I leave further ethical discussion of human vs animal life to Professor Peter Singer.)
Everything we have domesticated now was a weed or wild animal once: a weed is just a wild plant that grows and isn’t cultivated. Before we leap to any conclusions about what is and what isn’t valuable, it’s important to remember how much more quickly we can domesticate crops these days but, also, that we’re building on 12,000 years of previous work. And it’s solid work. It’s highly informative work. You can’t make complex systems work by prodding one bit and hoping.
Now, strangely, when we look at educational systems, we can’t seem to transfer the cultivation metaphor effectively – or, at least, many in power can’t. A good teaching environment has enough resources (food and water), the right resources (enough potassium and not too much acid, for example), has good staff (illumination taking the place of sunlight to provide energy) and we have space for innovation and development. If we want the best yield, then we apply this to all of our crops: if we want an educated populace, we must make this available to all citizens. If we put any one these in place, due to limited resources or pilot project mentality, then it is hardly going to be surprising if the project fails. How can great teachers do anything with a terminally under-resourced classroom? What point is there in putting computers into every classroom if there is no-one who is trained to teach with them, if students don’t all have the same experience at home (and hence we enhance the digital divide) or if we are heavily constrained in what we can teach so it is the same old boring stuff but just on new machines?
Yes, some plants will survive in a constrained environment and some can even live on the air but, much like students, this is most definitely not all plants and you have to have enough knowledge to know how to wisely use your resources. Until we accept that fixing the educational system requires us to really work on cultivating the entire environment, we risk continuing to focus on the wrong things. Repeating the same ineffective actions and expecting a new and amazing positive outcome is the very definition of madness. Teachers by themselves are only part of the educational system. Teachers in a good system will do more and go further. Adding respect in the community, resources from the state and an equality of opportunity and application is vital if we are to actually get things working.
I realise students aren’t plants and I’m not encouraging anyone to start weeding, by any stretch of the imagination, but it takes a lot of work to get a complicated environmental system working efficiently and I’m still confused as to why this seems to be such a hard thing for some people to get their heads around. It shouldn’t take us another 12,000 years to get this right – we already know what we really have to do, it just seems really hard for some people to believe it.
5 Good Things to Start in 2015
Posted: December 31, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, collaboration, community, education, ethics, higher education, internet, on-line learning, reflection, student perspective, students, thinking, xkcd 1 CommentAt the beginning of December I wrote about 5 things that I’d learned and had (re)confirmed. There’s been a lot going on since then and it’s been astounding me how willing people are to make the same mistakes, especially in on-line communication, and just go out and do things that are hurtful, ignorant and, well, just plain stupid. I’m always writing this with the idea of being helpful to my students so here is a list of 5 things (not necessarily the only 5 things or the top 5 things) that would be good habits to commit to in 2015 when it comes to electronic communication. Think of it as the 5 things I’ve learned, specifically addressing the on-line world. Some of these have come up in the blog before but I think this is the only time they’ve all been in the same place. Eh, let me know. (Note: we’ve all done things like this at some point probably so this is a reminder from a fellow sufferer rather than a lecture from a saint. My feet of clay go up to my navel.)
- Just Because You Can See Something Doesn’t Mean You Have to Comment.
(From http://xkcd.com/386/)
There’s a famous XKCD comic about this (see above) and it is both a time sink and a road to unhappiness to think that everything that you can see needs to be dealt with by your intervention. Now there are times when it almost always makes sense to assist, much as in real life: when someone is being threatened, when someone is being bullied, when someone else is actively harassing someone. But when you notice that someone you vaguely know is happy about using a selfie stick and posts some silly pictures? No, that’s not the time to post an insulting video about selfie sticks and then link him in so he knows he’s being insulted. Really? That makes sense? Don’t be that person. We all have strong opinions about some recreational stuff but, most of the time, no-one’s getting hurt so why make someone else feel miserable?
It’s sometimes hard for people to know when to leap in and when not to but there are some clear indicators. Are you doing it to make someone else feel bad about something that they like? Yeah, why are you doing that? Go and find something better to do. Are you doing it to show how smart you are? It’s probably working in the opposite way. Are you bullying people to complain about people bullying people? Do you need to read that sentence again?
Doesn’t mean that you can’t comment but it means you need to choose when to comment and the best way to comment. If you really feel that something you run across needs input, don’t do it in a way that is thoughtless, mean, bullying, unnecessary or insulting. If someone says “Yeah, I don’t need your input” – then stop. If you really screwed up the communication – apologise. Simple. Learn. Try to do better in future.
- Vent BEFORE Typing
Oh, yeah. If only I could take back some of the things I typed when I was angry. These days, I try to be grumpy off-line so I’m constructive on-line. Way more effective and I have to apologise less. If someone isn’t getting the point, then don’t get ruder or START USING ALL CAPS. Back off. Use your energies elsewhere. The science is pretty clear that straight-up chest bumping arguments only solid opposing opinion. Discuss, back off, discuss again. Be cool.
(Ok, so sometimes I have a small vent at the air for a while and then grab a calming tea before I come back. This brings me to the next point…)
- The Internet Can Wait
The Internet is not a communications system that has hard real-time constraints. Guess what – if you don’t respond immediately then you can go back later and see if anyone else has said what you wanted to say or if the person commenting has read through some stuff and changed their mind. 3,000 people saying “HERP DERP” is not actually helpful and a pile-on is just mass bullying.
Especially when you are agitated, step away. Don’t step away into Day Z and get sniped by human hunters, though. Step all the way away and go and relax somewhere. 3D print a flower and look at that. (You may have actual flowers you can observe.) Watch an episode of something unchallenging. Think about what you want to say and then compose your response. Say it with the style that comes from having time to edit.
YUUIO ARE AA FMOROON! AA FDI CANNT BVEL(IEBE YOU WIULLD THINK THAGT !!!!!!??!?!?! HIIITLLER!
That’s really less than convincing. Take some time out.
What are you basing that on? I thought the evidence was pretty clear on this.
There. That’s better. And now with 100% less Hitler!
- Stay Actual Rather Than Hypothetical
It’s easy to say “If I were in situation X” and make up a whole heap of stuff but that doesn’t actually make your experience authentic. If you start your sentence with qualifiers such as “If I were..”, “Surely,” or “I would have thought…” then you really need to wonder about whether you are making a useful point or just putting down what you would like to be true in order for you to win an argument that you don’t really have any genuine experience to comment on.
It’s been so long since I’ve been unemployed that I would hesitate to write anything on the experience of unemployment but, given that my take on welfare is for it be generous and universal and I have a strong background in the actual documented evidence of what works for public welfare, my contributions to any thread discussing welfare issues can be valuable if I stick to what could be used to improve people’s lot, with an understanding of what it was like to be unemployed in Australia. However, I would almost never leap in on anything about raising children because I don’t have any kids. (Unless it was, I WANT TO BOIL MY CHILDREN, in which case it’s probably wise to check if this is a psychotic break or autocorrect.)
- Don’t Make People’s Real Problems a Dinner Party Game
One of the few times I have been speechless with rage was when I was discussing gay marriage with someone on-line and they said “Well, this would be a fascinating discussion to have over dinner!” and they were serious. No, human rights are not something for other people to talk about as it it were some plaything. (I walked away from that discussion and frothed for some time!)
And this goes triple for anyone who leaps in to play “Devil’s Advocate” on an issue that really does not require any more exploration or detailed thought. If we are discussing a legal argument, and not human rights, then sure, why not? If we’re talking about people not being allowed to use a certain door because of the colour of their skin? We’ve discussed that. There is no more exploration of the issue of racism required because anyone with a vague knowledge of history will be aware that this particular discussion has been had. XKCD has, of course, already nailed this because XKCD is awesome.
(From http://xkcd.com/1432/)
I see this now with many of the misconceptions about poverty and the pernicious myths that want to paint poor people as being “less worthy”, when a cursory examination of the evidence available shows that we are seeing a rapidly growing wealth divide and the disturbing growth of the working poor. The willingness to discuss the reduction of rights for the poor (compulsory contraception, food credits rather than money, no ‘recreational’ spending) as if this is an amusement is morally repugnant and, apart from anything else, is part of a series of discussions that have been running for centuries. We can now clearly see, from our vast data panopticon, what the truth of these stories are and, yet, go onto any forum talking about this and find people trotting out tired anecdotes, “Devil’s advocate” positions and treating this as an intellectual game.
People’s lives are not a game. Engage in discussions with the seriousness required to address the issue or it’s probably best to try and find somewhere else to play. There are many wonderful places to talk rubbish on the Internet – my blog, for example, is a place where I work and play, while I try to change the world a little for the better. But when I roll up my sleeves in big discussions elsewhere, I try to be helpful and to be serious. The people who are less fortunate than I am deserve my serious attention and not to be treated as some kind of self-worth enhancing amusement.
- Don’t Be Too Hard On Yourself
Gosh, I said there were 5 and now there are 6. Why? Because you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself when you make mistakes. I’ve made all of the mistakes above and I’ll probably (although I try not to) make a few of them again. But as long as you’re learning and moving forward, don’t be too hard on yourself. But keep an eye on you. You can be shifty. But don’t be strict about your own rules because rigidity can be a prison – bend where necessary to stay sane and to make the world a better place.
But always remember that the best guidelines for bending your own rules is to work out if you’re being kinder and more generous or harsher and meaner. Are you giving an extra point 6 when you promised 5? Are you stopping at 4 because you can’t be bothered?
We all make mistakes. Some of us learn. Some of us try to help others to learn. I think we’re getting better. Have a great 2015!
5 Things: Necessary Assumptions of Truth
Posted: December 28, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, curriculum, design, education, equity, ethics, higher education, in the student's head, learning, students, teaching, teaching approaches 5 CommentsI’m (still) in the middle of writing a large summary of my thoughts on education and how can we develop a better way to provide education to as many students as possible. Unsurprisingly, this is a large undertaking and I’m expecting that the final document will be interesting and fairly controversial. I suspect that one of the major problems will stem from things that I believe that we have to assume are true. Now this is always challenging, especially where evidence is lacking, but the reason that I present for some of these things to be held as true is that, if we hold them as false, then we make them false as a self-fulfilling prophecy. This may not be purely because of our theoretical framework but it may be because of what we do in implementation when we implicitly declare that something no longer needs to be worried about.
I am looking to build a better Machine for Education but such a thing is always built on the assumption that better is something that you can achieve.
“Machine”. Mono print on lino with wooden tools. (C) Nick Falkner, 2014
The reason for making these assumptions of truth is very simple. When I speak of a “Machine for Education”, I am not moving towards some cyberpunk dystopian future, I am recognising that we are already all embedded inside a framework that turns human energy into educational activity, it’s just that the current machine places stress upon its human components, rather than taking the strain in its mechanical/procedural/technological elements. An aeroplane is a machine for flying and it works because it does not require constant human physical effort simply to keep it in the air. We have replaced the flapping wings of early designs with engines, hydraulics, computers and metal. The reason an aeroplane is a good machine is because the stress is taken on the machine itself, which can take it, with sensible constructions of human elements around it that make it a manageable occupation. (When we place airline workers under undue stress, we see the effect on the machine through reduced efficiency in maintenance and decision making, so this isn’t a perfect system.) Similarly, the development of the driverless car is a recognition of two key facts: firstly, that most cars spend most of their time not being driven and, secondly, that the activity of driving for many people is a chore that is neither enjoyable nor efficiently productive. The car is a good machine where most of the wear happens in the machine but we can make it better as a transport device by further removing the human being as a weak point, as a stress accumulator and as a part of the machine that gets worn down but is not easy to repair or rebuild. We also make the machine more efficient by potentially reducing the number required, given the known usage patterns. (Ultimately, the driverless car is the ultimate micro-light urban transit system.)
So what are these assumptions of truth?
- That our educational system can always be improved and, hence, is ready for improvement now.
It has always surprised me when some people look at dull and lifeless chalk-and-talk, based on notes from 20 years ago, and see no need for improvement, instead suggesting punitive measures to force students to sit and pretend to listen. We have more evidence from research as to what works than we have ever had before and, in conjunction with centuries of careful thought, have a great opportunity to make change.
- That everyone on the planet can benefit from an improved educational system. Yes, this means that you have to assume that, one day, we could reach everyone on the planet. We cannot assume that a certain group can be ignored and then move on. This, of course, doesn’t mean that it all has to happen tomorrow but it does mean that any planning for extending our systems must have the potential to reach everyone in the country of origin and, by extension, when we have every country, we have the world.
- That an educational system can develop students in terms of depth of knowledge and skills but also in terms of their scholarship, breadth of knowledge, and range of skills.
We currently focus heavily on training for quite narrowly specified professions in the general case and we do this to the detriment of developing the student as a scholar, as a designer, as a thinker, as a philosopher, as an artist and as a citizen. This will vary from person to person but a rich educational grounding is the foundation for better things in later life, more flexibility in work and the potential for more creativity and autonomy in leisure. Ultimately, we want our graduates to be as free to create as they are to consume, rather than consigning them to work in tight constraint.
- That we can construct environments where all students can legitimately demonstrate that they have achieved the goals of the course. This is a very challenging one so I’ve worded it carefully. I have a problem with curve grading, as everyone probably knows, and it really bothers me that someone can fail because someone else passed. I also think that most of our constraints are highly artificial and they are in place because this is what we did before. If we start from the assumption that we can construct a system where everyone can legitimately pass then we change the nature of the system we build.
- That all outcomes in an educational system can be the combination of personal actions and systemic actions, thus all outcomes must be perceived and solutions developed through both lenses.
So students are handing in their work late? This assumption requires us to look across all of their activity to work out why this is happening. This behaviour may have been set in place earlier on in their educational career so this is a combination of the student activity triggers of value, motivation and instrumentality and a feedback system that is part of an earlier component of the educational system. This does not absolve the student of questionable practices or ‘anti-educational’ behaviour but it requires us to not immediately assume that they are a ‘bad student’ as an easy out.
Ultimately, these are just some of the things I’m looking out and I’m sure that there will be discussion in the comments but I have set these to stop the shortcut thinking that does not lead to a solution because it pushes the problem to a space where it does not have to be solved. If we start from the assumption of no bad students then we have to collect actual evidence to the contrary that survives analysis and peer review to locate where the help needs to be given. And this is very much my focus – support and help to bring people back to a positive educational experience. It’s too easy to assume things are false when it makes the job easier – as well absent a very human response for an over-worked sector. I think it’s time to plant some flags of assumed truths to change the way we talk and think about these things.
5 Things: Stuff I’ve Learned But Recently Had (Re)Confirmed
Posted: December 1, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, data visualisation, design, education, ethics, James Watson, reflection, resources, student perspective, teaching, thinking, tools 1 Comment
One of the advantages of getting older is that you realise that wisdom is merely the accumulated memory of the mistakes you made that haven’t killed you yet. Our ability to communicate these lessons as knowledge to other people determines how well we can share that wisdom around but, in many cases, it won’t ring true until someone goes through similar experiences. Here are five things that I’ve recently thought about because I have had a few decades to learn about the area and then current events have brought them to the fore. You may disagree with these but, as you will read in point 4, I encourage you to write your own rather than simply disagree with me.
- Racism and sexism are scientifically unfounded and just plain dumb. We know better.
I see that James Watson is selling his Nobel prize medal because he’d like to make some donations – oh, and buy some art. Watson was, rightly, shunned for expressing his belief that African-American people were less intelligent because they were… African-American. To even start from the incredibly shaky ground of IQ measurement is one thing but to then throw a healthy dollop of anti-African sentiment on top is pretty stupid. Read the second article to see that he’s not apologetic about his statements, he just notes that “you’re not supposed to say that”. Well, given that it’s utter rubbish, no, you should probably shouldn’t say it because it’s wrong, stupid and discriminatory. Our existing biases, cultural factors and lack of equal access to opportunity are facts that disproportionately affect African-Americans and women, to mention only two of the groups that get regularly hammered over this, but to think that this indicates some sort of characteristic of the victim is biassed privileged reasoning at its finest. Read more here. Read The Mismeasure of Man. Read recent studies that are peer-reviewed in journals by actual scientists.In short, don’t buy his medal. Give donations directly to the institutions he talks about if you feel strongly. You probably don’t want to reward an unrepentant racist and sexist man with a Hockney.
- Being aware of your privilege doesn’t make it go away.
I am a well-educated white man from a background of affluent people with tertiary qualifications. I am also married to a woman. My wife and I work full-time and have long-term employment with good salaries and benefits, living in a safe country that still has a reasonable social contract. This means that I have the most enormous invisible backpack of privilege, resilience and resources, to draw upon that means that I am rarely in any form of long-term distress at all. Nobody is scared when I walk into a room unless I pick up a karaoke microphone. I will be the last person to be discriminated against. Knowing this does not then make it ok if I then proceed to use my privilege in the world as if this is some sort of natural way of things. People are discriminated against every day. Assaulted. Raped. Tortured. Killed. Because they lack my skin colour, my gender, my perceived sexuality or my resources. They have obstacles in their path to achieving a fraction of my success that I can barely imagine. Given how much agency I have, I can’t be aware of my privilege without acting to grant as much opportunity and agency as I can to other people.As it happens, I am lucky enough to have a job where I can work to improve access to education, to develop the potential of students, to support new and exciting developments that might lead to serious and positive social change in the future. It’s not enough for me to say “Oh, yes, I have some privilege but I know about it now. Right. Moving on.” I don’t feel guilty about my innate characteristics (because it wasn’t actually my choice that I was born with XY chromosomes) but I do feel guilty if I don’t recognise that my continued use of my privilege generally comes at the expense of other people. So, in my own way and within my own limitations, I try to address this to reduce the gap between the haves and the have-nots. I don’t always succeed. I know that there are people who are much better at it. But I do try because, now that I know, I have to try to act to change things.
- Real problems take decades to fix. Start now.
I’ve managed to make some solid change along the way but, in most cases, these changes have taken 2-3 years to achieve and some of them are going to be underway for generations. One of my students asked me how I would know if we’d made a solid change to education and I answered “Well, I hope to see things in place by the time I’m 50 (four years from now) and then it will take about 25 years to see how it has all worked. When I retire, at 75, I will have a fairly good idea.”This is totally at odds with election cycles for almost every political sphere that work in 3-4 years, where 6-12 months is spent blaming the previous government, 24 months is spent doing something and the final year is spent getting elected again. Some issues are too big to be handled within the attention span of a politician. I would love to see things like public health and education become bipartisan issues with community representation as a rolling component of existing government. Keeping people healthy and educated should be statements everyone can agree on and, given how long it has taken me to achieve small change, I can’t see how we’re going to get real and meaningful improvement unless we start recognising that some things take longer than 2 years to achieve.
- Everyone’s a critic, fewer are creators. Everyone could be creating.
I love the idea of the manifesto, the public declaration of your issues and views, often with your aims. It is a way that someone (or a part of some sort) can say “these are the things that we care about and this is how we will fix the world”. There’s a lot inside traditional research that falls into this bucket: the world is broken and this is how my science will fix it! The problem is that it’s harder to make a definitive statement of your own views than it is to pick holes in someone else’s. As a logorrheic blogger, I have had my fair share of criticism over time and, while much of it is in the line of valuable discourse, I sometimes wonder if the people commenting would find it more useful to clearly define everything that they believe and then put it up for all to see.There is no doubt that this is challenging (my own educational manifesto is taking ages to come together as I agonise over semantics) but establishing what you believe to be important and putting it out there is a strong statement that makes you, as the author, a creator and it helps to find people who can assist you with your aims. By only responding to someone else’s manifesto, you are restricted to their colour palette and it may not contain the shades that you need.
Knowing what you believe is powerful, especially when you clearly identify it to yourself. Don’t wait for someone else to say something you agree with so that you can press the “Like” button or argue it out in the comments. Seize the keyboard!
- Money is stupid.
If you hadn’t picked up from point 2 how far away I am from the struggle of most of the 7 billion people on this planet, then this will bang that particular nail in. The true luxury of the privileged is to look at the monetary systems that control everyone else and consider other things because they can see what life in a non-scarcity environment is like. Everyone else is too busy working to have the time or headspace to see that we make money in order to spend money in order to make money because money. There’s roughly one accountant for every 250 people in the US and this is projected to rise by 13% to 2022 at exactly the same growth rate as the economy because you can’t have money without accounting for it, entering the paperwork, tracking it and so on. In the top 25 companies in the world, we see technology companies like Apple and Microsoft, resources companies like Exxon, PetroChina and BHP Biliton, giant consumer brands like Nestlé and Procter and Gamble … and investment companies and banks. Roughly 20% of the most valuable companies in the world exist because they handle vast quantities of money – they do not produce anything else. Capitalism is the ultimate Ponzi scheme.If you’ve read much of my stuff before then you know that a carrot-and-stick approach doesn’t help you to think. Money is both carrot and stick and, surprise, surprise, it can affect mechanical and simplistic performance but it can’t drive creativity or innovation. (It can be used to build an environment to support innovation but that’s another matter.) Weird, reality distorting things happen when money comes into play. People take jobs that they really don’t want to do because it pays better than something that they are good at or love. People do terrible things to other people to make more money and then, because they’re not happier, spend even more money and wonder what’s wrong. When we associate value and marks with things that we might otherwise love, bad things often happen as we can see (humorously) in Alexei Sayle’s Marxist demolition of Strictly Come Dancing.
Money is currently at the centre of our universe and it affects our thinking detrimentally, much as working with an Earth-centred model of the solar system doesn’t really work unless you keep making weird exceptions and complications in your models of reality. There are other models which, contrary to the fear mongering of the wealthy, does not mean that everyone has to live in squalor. In fact, if everyone were to live in squalor, we’d have to throw away a lot of existing resources because we already have about three billion people already living below $2.50 a day and we certainly have the resources to do better than that. Every second child in the world is living in poverty. Don’t forget that this means that the person who was going to cure cancer, develop starship travel, write the world’s greatest novel or develop working fusion/ultra-high efficiency solar may already have been born into poverty and may be one of the 22,000 children a day to die because of poverty.
We know this and we can see that this will require long-term, altruistic and smart thinking to fix. Money, however, appears to make us short-sighted, greedy and stupid. Ergo, money is stupid. Sadly, it’s an entrenched and currently necessary stupidity but we can, perhaps, hope for something better in the future.
Rules: As For Them, So For Us
Posted: November 17, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, collaboration, community, Dog Eat Dog, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, feedback, games, Generation Why, higher education, learning, measurement, student, student perspective, students, teaching, teaching approaches, time banking 1 CommentIn a previous post, I mentioned a game called “Dog Eat Dog” where players role-play the conflict between Colonist and Native Occupiers, through playing out scenarios that both sides seek to control, with the result being the production of a new rule that encapsulates the ‘lesson’ of the scenario. I then presented education as being a good fit for this model but noted that many of the rules that students have to be obey are behavioural rather than knowledge-focussed. A student who is ‘playing through’ education will probably accumulate a list of rules like this (not in any particular order):
- Always be on time for class
- Always present your own work
- Be knowledgable
- Prepare for each activity
- Participate in class
- Submit your work on time
But, as noted in Dog Eat Dog, the nasty truth of colonisation is that the Colonists are always superior to the Colonised. So, rule 0 is actually: Students are inferior to Teachers. Now, that’s a big claim to make – that the underlying notion in education is one of inferiority. In the Dog Eat Dog framing, the superiority manifests as dominance in decision making and the ability to intrude into every situation. We’ll come back to this.
If we tease apart the rules for students then are some obvious omissions that we would like to see such as “be innovative” or “be creative”, except that these rules are very hard to apply as pre-requisites for progress. We have enough potential difficulty with the measurement of professional skills, without trying to assess if one thing is a creative approach while another is just missing the point or deliberate obfuscation. It’s understandable that five of the rules presented are those that we can easily control with extrinsic motivational factors – 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 are generally presented as important because of things like mandatory attendance, plagiarism rules and lateness penalties. 3, the only truly cognitive element on the list, is a much harder thing to demand and, unsurprisingly, this is why it’s sometimes easier to seek well-behaved students than it is to seek knowledgable, less-controlled students, because it’s so much harder to see that we’ve had a positive impact. So, let us accept that this list is naturally difficult to select and somewhat artificial, but it is a reasonable model for what people expect of a ‘good’ student.
Let me ask you some questions before we proceed.
- A student is always late for class. Could there be a reasonable excuse for this and, if so, does your system allow for it?
- Students occasionally present summary presentations from other authors, including slides prepared by scholarly authors. How do you interpret that?
- Students sometimes show up for classes and are obviously out of their depth. What do you do? Should they go away and come back later when they’re ready? Do they just need to try harder?
- Students don’t do the pre-reading and try to cram it in just before a session. Is this kind of “just in time” acceptable?
- Students sometimes sit up the back, checking their e-mail, and don’t really want to get involved. Is that ok? What if they do it every time?
- Students are doing a lot of things and often want to shift around deadlines or get you to take into account their work from other courses or outside jobs. Do you allow this? How often? Is there a penalty?
As you can see, I’ve taken each of the original ‘good student’ points and asked you to think about it. Now, let us accept that there are ultimate administrative deadlines (I’ve already talked about this a lot in time banking) and we can accept that the student is aware of these and are not planning to put all their work off until next century.
Now, let’s look at this as it applies to teaching staff. I think we can all agree that a staff member who meets that list are going to achieve a lot of their teaching goals. I’m going to reframe the questions in terms of staff.
- You have to drop your kids off every morning at day care. This means that you show up at your 9am lecture 5 minutes late every day because you physically can’t get there any faster and your partner can’t do it because he/she is working shift work. How do you explain this to your students?
- You are teaching a course from a textbook which has slides prepared already. Is it ok to take these slides and use them without any major modification?
- You’ve been asked to cover another teacher’s courses for two weeks due to their illness. You have a basis in the area but you haven’t had to do anything detailed for it in over 10 years and you’ll also have to give feedback on the final stages of a lengthy assignment. How do you prepare for this and what, if anything, do you tell the class to brief them on your own lack of expertise?
- The staff meeting is coming around and the Head of School wants feedback on a major proposal and discussion at that meeting. You’ve been flat out and haven’t had a chance to look at it, so you skim it on the way to the meeting and take it with you to read in the preliminaries. Given the importance of the proposal, do you think this is a useful approach?
- It’s the same staff meeting and Doctor X is going on (again) about radical pedagogy and Situationist philosophy. You quickly catch up on some important work e-mails and make some meetings for later in the week, while you have a second.
- You’ve got three research papers due, a government grant application and your Head of School needs your workload bid for the next calendar year. The grant deadline is fixed and you’ve already been late for three things for the Head of School. Do you drop one (or more) of the papers or do you write to the convenors to see if you can arrange an extension to the deadline?
Is this artificial? Well, of course, because I’m trying to make a point. Beyond being pedantic on this because you know what I’m saying, if you answered one way for the staff member and other way for the student then you have given the staff member more power in the same situation than the student. Just because we can all sympathise with the staff member (Doctor X sounds horribly familiar, doesn’t he?) doesn’t that the student’s reasons, when explored and contextualised, are not equally valid.
If we are prepared to listen to our students and give their thoughts, reasoning and lives as much weight and value as our own, then rule 0 is most likely not in play at the moment – you don’t think your students are inferior to you. If you thought that the staff member was being perfectly reasonable and yet you couldn’t see why a student should be extended the same privileges, even where I’ve asked you to consider the circumstances where it could be, then it’s possible that the superiority issue is one that has become well-established at your institution.
Ultimately, if this small list is a set of goals, then we should be a reasonable exemplar for our students. Recently, due to illness, I’ve gone from being very reliable in these areas, to being less reliable on things like the level of preparation I used to do and timeliness. I have looked at what I’ve had to do and renegotiated my deadlines, apologising and explaining where I need to. As a result, things are getting done and, as far as I know, most people are happy with what I’m doing. (That’s acceptable but they used to be very happy. I have way to go.) I still have a couple of things to fix, which I haven’t forgotten about, but I’ve had to carry out some triage. I’m honest about this because, that way, I encourage my students to be honest with me. I do what I can, within sound pedagogical framing and our administrative requirements, and my students know that. It makes them think more, become more autonomous and be ready to go out and practice at a higher level, sooner.
This list is quite deliberately constructed but I hope that, within this framework, I’ve made my point: we have to be honest if we are seeing ourselves as superior and, in my opinion, we should work more as equals with each other.
Ending the Milling Mindset
Posted: November 17, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, community, curriculum, design, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, failure rate, grand challenge, higher education, in the student's head, learning, measurement, reflection, resources, student perspective, students, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, universal principles of design 7 CommentsThis is the second in a set of posts that are critical of current approaches to education. In this post, I’m going to extend the idea of rejecting an industrial revolutionary model of student production and match our new model for manufacturing, additive processes, to a new way to produce students. (I note that this is already happening in a number of places, so I’m not claiming some sort of amazing vision here, but I wanted to share the idea more widely.)
Traditional statistics is often taught with an example where you try to estimate how well a manufacturing machine is performing by measuring its outputs. You determine the mean and variation of the output and then use some solid calculations to then determine if the machine is going to produce a sufficient number of accurately produced widgets to keep your employers at WidgetCo happy. This is an important measure for things such as getting the weight right across a number of bags of rice or correctly producing bottles that hold the correct volume of wine. (Consumers get cranky if some bags are relatively empty or they have lost a glass of wine due to fill variations.)
If we are measuring this ‘fill’ variation, then we are going to expect deviation from the mean in two directions: too empty and too full. Very few customers are going to complain about too much but the size of the variation can rarely be constrained in just one direction, so we need to limit how widely that fill needle swings. Obviously, it is better to be slightly too full (on average) than too empty (on average) although if we are too generous then the producer loses money. Oh, money, how you make us think in such scrubby, little ways.
When it comes to producing items, rather than filling, we often use a machine milling approach, where a block of something is etched away through mechanical or chemical processes until we are left with what we want. Here, our tolerance for variation will be set based on the accuracy of our mill to reproduce the template.
In both the fill and the mill cases, imagine a production line that travels on a single pass through loading, activity (fill/mill) and then measurement to determine how well this unit conforms to the desired level. What happens to those items that don’t meet requirements? Well, if we catch them early enough then, if it’s cost effective, we can empty the filled items back into a central store and pass them through again – but this is wasteful in terms of cost and energy, not to mention that contents may not be able to be removed and then put back in again. In the milling case, the most likely deviance is that we’ve got the milling process wrong and taken away things in the wrong place or to the wrong extent. Realistically, while some cases of recycling the rejects can occur, a lot of rejected product is thrown away.
If we run our students as if they are on a production line along these lines then, totally unsurprisingly, we start to set up a nice little reject pile of our own. The students have a single pass through a set of assignments, often without the ability to go and retake a particular learning activity. If they fail sufficient of these tests, then they don’t meet our requirements and they are rejected from that course. Now some students will over perform against our expectations and, one small positive, they will then be recognised as students of distinction and not rejected. However, if we consider our student failure rate to reflect our production wastage, then failure rates of 20% or higher start to look a little… inefficient. These failure rates are only economically manageable (let us switch off our ethical brains for a moment) if we have enough students or they are considered sufficiently cheap that we can produce at 80% and still make money. (While some production lines would be crippled by a 10% failure rate, for something like electric drive trains for cars, there are some small and cheap items where there is a high failure rate but the costing model allows the business to stay economical.) Let us be honest – every University in the world is now concerned with their retention and progression rates, which is the official way of saying that we want students to stay in our degrees and pass our courses. Maybe the single pass industrial line model is not the best one.
Why carve back to try to reveal people, when we could build people up instead?
Enter the additive model, via the world of 3D printing. 3D printing works by laying down the material from scratch and producing something where there is no wastage of material. Each item is produced as a single item, from the ground up. In this case, problems can still occur. The initial track of plastic/metal/material may not adhere to the plate and this means that the item doesn’t have a solid base. However, we can observe this and stop printing as soon as we realise this is occurring. Then we try again, perhaps using a slightly different approach to get the base to stick. In student terms, this is poor transition from the school environment, because nothing is sticking to the established base! Perhaps the most important idea, especially as we develop 3D printing techniques that don’t require us to deposit in sequential layers but instead allows us to create points in space, is that we can identify those areas where a student is incomplete and then build up that area.
In an additive model, we identify a deficiency in order to correct rather than to reject. The growing area of learning analytics gives us the ability to more closely monitor where a student has a deficiency of knowledge or practice. However, such identification is useless unless we then act to address it. Here, a small failure has become something that we use to make things better, rather than a small indicator of the inescapable fate of failure later on. We can still identify those students who are excelling but, now, instead of just patting them on the back, we can build them up in additional interesting ways, should they wish to engage. We can stop them getting bored by altering the challenge as, if we can target knowledge deficiency and address that, then we must be able to identify extension areas as well – using the same analytics and response techniques.
Additive manufacturing is going to change the way the world works because we no longer need to carve out what we want, we can build what we want, on demand, and stop when it’s done, rather than lamenting a big pile of wood shavings that never amounted to a table leg. A constructive educational focus rejects high failure rates as being indicative of missed opportunities to address knowledge deficiencies and focuses on a deep knowledge of the student to help the student to build themselves up. This does not make a course simpler or drop the quality, it merely reduces unnecessary (and uneconomical) wastage. There is as much room for excellence in an additive educational framework – if anything, you should get more out of your high achievers.
We stand at a very interesting point in history. It is time to revisit what we are doing and think about what we can learn from the other changes going on in the world, especially if it is going to lead to better educational results.
Thoughts on the colonising effect of education.
Posted: November 17, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, colonisation, community, cultural colonisation, curriculum, education, educational problem, games, higher education, in the student's head, learning, racism, teaching, thinking 2 CommentsThis is going to be longer than usual but these thoughts have been running around in my mind for a while and, rather than break them up, I thought I’d put them all together here. My apologies for the long read but, to help you, here’s the executive summary. Firstly, we’re not going to get anywhere until all of us truly accept that University students are not some sort of different species but that they are actually junior versions of ourselves – not inferior, just less advanced. Secondly, education is heavily colonising but what we often tend to pass on to our students are mechanisms for conformity rather than the important aspects of knowledge, creativity and confidence.
Let me start with some background and look at the primary and secondary schooling system. There is what we often refer to as traditional education: classroom full of students sitting in rows, writing down the words spoken by the person at the front. Assignments test your ability to learn and repeat the words and apply this is well-defined ways to a set of problems. Then we have progressive education that, depending upon your socio-political alignment and philosophical bent, is either a way of engaging students and teachers in the process for better outcomes, more critical thought and a higher degree of creativity; or it is cats and dogs lying down together, panic in the streets, a descent into radicalism and anarchy. (There is, of course, a middle ground, where the cats and dogs sleep in different spots, in rows, but engage in discussions of Foucault.) Dewey wrote on the tension between these two apparatus (seriously, is there anything he didn’t write on?) but, as we know, he was highly opposed to the lining up on students in ranks, like some sort of prison, so let’s examine why.
Simply put, the traditional model is an excellent way to prepare students for factory work but it’s not a great way to prepare them for a job that requires independence or creativity. You sit at your desk, the teacher reads out the instructions, you copy down the instructions, you are assigned piece work to do, you follow the instructions, your work is assessed to determine if it is acceptable, if not, you may have to redo it or it is just rejected. If enough of your work is deemed acceptable, then you are now a successful widget and may take your place in the community. Of course, it will help if your job is very similar to this. However, if your deviation from the norm is towards the unacceptable side then you may not be able to graduate until you conform.
Now, you might be able to argue this on accuracy, were it not for the constraining behavioural overtones in all of this. It’s not about doing the work, it’s about doing the work, quietly, while sitting for long stretches, without complaint and then handing back work that you had no part in defining for someone else to tell you what is acceptable. A pure model of this form cripples independence because there is no scope for independent creation as it must, by definition, deviate and thus be unacceptable.
Progressive models change this. They break up the structure of the classroom, change the way that work is assigned and, in many cases, change the power relationship between student and teacher. The teacher is still authoritative in terms of information but can potentially handle some (controlled for societal reasons) deviation and creativity from their student groups.
The great sad truth of University is that we have a lot more ability to be progressive because we don’t have to worry about too many severe behavioural issues as there is enough traditional education going on below these levels (or too few management resources for children in need) that it is highly unlikely that students with severe behavioural issues will graduate from high school, let alone make it to University with the requisite grades.
But let’s return to the term ‘colonising’, because it is a loaded term. We colonise when we send a group of settlers to a new place and attempt to assert control over it, often implicit in this is the notion that the place we have colonised is now for our own use. Ultimately, those being colonised can fight or they can assimilate. The most likely outcome if the original inhabitants fight is they they are destroyed, if those colonising are technologically superior or greatly outnumber them. Far more likely, and as seen all around the world, is the requirement for the original inhabitants to be assimilated to the now dominant colonist culture. Under assimilation, original cultures shrink to accommodate new rules, requirements, and taboos from the colonists.
In the case of education, students come to a University in order to obtain the benefits of the University culture so they are seeking to be colonised by the rules and values of the University. But it’s very important to realise that any positive colonisation value (and this is a very rare case, it’s worth noting) comes with a large number of negatives. If students come from a non-Western pedagogical tradition, then many requirements at Universities in Australia, the UK and America will be at odds with the way that they have learned previously, whether it’s power distances, collectivism/individualism issues or even in the way that work is going to be assigned and assessed. If students come from a highly traditional educational background, then they will struggle if we break up the desks and expect them to be independent and creative. Their previous experiences define their educational culture and we would expect the same tensions between colonist and coloniser as we would see in any encounter in the past.
I recently purchased a game called “Dog Eat Dog“, which is a game designed to allow you to explore the difficult power dynamics of the colonist/colonised relationship in the Pacific. Liam Burke, the author, is a second-generation half-Filipino who grew up in Hawaii and he developed the game while thinking about his experiences growing up and drawing on other resources from the local Filipino community.
The game is very simple. You have a number of players. One will play the colonist forces (all of them). Each other player will play a native. How do you select the colonist? Well, it’s a simple question: Which player at the table is the richest?
As you can tell, the game starts in uncomfortable territory and, from that point on, it can be very challenging as the the native players will try to run small scenarios that the colonist will continually interrupt, redirect and adjudicate to see how well the natives are playing by the colonist’s rules. And the first rule is:
The (Native people) are inferior to the (Occupation people).
After every scenario, more rules are added and the native population can either conform (for which they are rewarded) or deviate (for which they are punished). It actually lies inside the colonist’s ability to kill all the natives in the first turn, should they wish to do so, because this happened often enough that Burke left it in the rules. At the end of the game, the colonists may be rebuffed but, in order to do that, the natives have become adept at following the rules and this is, of course, at the expense of their own culture.
This is a difficult game to explain in the short form but the PDF is only $10 and I think it’s an important read for just about anyone. It’s a short rule book, with a quick history of Pacific settlement and exemplars, produced from a successful Kickstarter.
Let’s move this into the educational sphere. It would be delightful if I couldn’t say this but, let’s be honest, our entire system is often built upon the premise that:
The students are inferior to the teachers.
Let’s play this out in a traditional model. Every time the students get together in order to do anything, we are there to assess how well they are following the rules. If they behave, they get grades (progress towards graduation). If they don’t conform, then they don’t progress and, because everyone has finite resources, eventually they will drop out, possibly doing something disastrous in the process. (In the original game, the native population can run amok if they are punished too much, which has far too many unpleasant historical precedents.) Every time that we have an encounter with the students, they have to come up with a rule to work out how they can’t make the same mistake again. This new rule is one that they’re judged against.
When I realised how close a parallel this, a very cold shiver went down my spine. But I also realised how much I’d been doing to break out of this system, by treating students as equals with mutual respect, by listening and trying to be more flexible, by interpreting a more rigid pedagogical structure through filters that met everyone’s requirements. But unless I change the system, I am merely one of the “good” overseers on a penal plantation. When the students leave my care, if I know they are being treated badly, I am still culpable.
As I started with, valuing knowledge, accuracy, being productive (in an academic sense), being curious and being creative are all things that we should be passing on from our culture but these are very hard things to pass on with a punishment/reward modality as they are all cognitive in aspect. What is far easier to do is to pass on culture such as sitting silently, being bound by late penalties, conformity to the rules and the worst excesses of the Banking model of education (after Freire) where students are empty receiving objects that we, as teachers, fill up. There is no agency in such a model, nor room for creativity. The jug does not choose the liquid that fills it.
It is easy to see examples all around us of the level of disrespect levelled at colonised peoples, from the mindless (and well-repudiated) nonsense spouted in Australian newspapers about Aboriginal people to the racist stereotyping that persists despite the overwhelming evidence of equality between races and genders. It is also as easy to see how badly students can be treated by some staff. When we write off a group of students because they are ‘bad students’ then we have made them part of a group that we don’t respect – and this empowers us to not have to treat them as well as we treat ourselves.
We have to start from the basic premise that our students are at University because they want to be like us, but like the admirable parts of us, not the conformist, factory model, industrial revolution prison aspects. They are junior lawyers, young engineers, apprentice architects when they come to us – they do not have to prove their humanity in order to be treated with respect. However, this does have to be mutual and it’s important to reflect upon the role that we have as a mentor, someone who has greater knowledge in an area and can share it with a more junior associate to bring them up to the same level one day.
If we regard students as being worthy of respect, as being potential peers, then we are more likely to treat them with a respect that engenders a reciprocal relationship. Treat your students like idiots and we all know how that goes.
The colonial mindset is poisonous because of the inherent superiority and because of the value of conformity to imposed rules above the potential to be gained from incorporating new and useful aspects of other cultures. There are many positive aspects of University culture but they can happily coexist with other educational traditions and cultures – the New Zealand higher educational system is making great steps in this direction to be able to respect both Maori tradition and the desire of young people to work in a westernised society without compromising their traditions.
We have to start from the premise that all people are equal, because to do otherwise is to make people unequal. We then must regard our students as ourselves, just younger, less experienced and only slightly less occasionally confused than we were at that age. We must carefully examine how we expose students to our important cultural aspects and decide what is and what is not important. However, if all we turn out at the end of a 3-4 year degree is someone who can perform a better model of piece work and is too heavily intimidated into conformity that they cannot do anything else – then we have failed our students and ourselves.
The game I mentioned, “Dog Eat Dog”, starts with a quote by a R. Zamora Linmark from his poem “They Like You Because You Eat Dog”. Linmark is a Filipino American poet, novelist, and playwright, who was educated in Honolulu. His challenging poem talks about the ways that a second-class citizenry are racially classified with positive and negative aspects (the exoticism is balanced against a ‘brutish’ sexuality, for example) but finishes with something that is even more challenging. Even when a native population fully assimilates, it is never enough for the coloniser, because they are still not quite them.
“They like you because you’re a copycat, want to be just like them. They like you because—give it a few more years—you’ll be just like them.
And when that time comes, will they like you more?”R. Zamora Linmark, “They Like You Because You Eat Dog”, from “Rolling the R’s”
I had a discussion once with a remote colleague who said that he was worried the graduates of his own institution weren’t his first choice to supervise for PhDs as they weren’t good enough. I wonder whose fault he thought that was?
Today, I am furious.
Posted: October 16, 2014 Filed under: Opinion | Tags: advocacy, Anita Sarkeesian, authenticity, blogging, community, death threat, ethics, feminism, reflection, sarkeesian, thinking 10 Comments[Not tagged as education, for once. This is still part of my philosophy but has no direct teaching relationship.]
It turns out that my mention of Anita Sarkeesian (@femfreq) in a previous blog was horribly prescient. It now turns out, after having death threats made against her (again) for a talk she was going to give in Utah, that Utah’s concealed carry laws meant that any number of people in the auditorium could have been legally carrying weapons and the police could not scan for these or remove them as it was public space. As a result, she has cancelled her talk because she is, quite understandably, wanting to stay alive.
Most of you will know the amount of trolling that the owner of this site has endured for (perfectly reasonably) pointing out that women are badly represented and served by most video games.
I am incandescently angry today. Because, once again, for having the audacity to say that “Video games have some pretty stupid female stereotypes” and advocating female equality, Sarkeesian has once again been threatened in a vile and cowardly manner and she has had to take sensible steps to protect her own life. Like the other poor women caught up in the sewer of GamerGate who have had to leave their homes because cowardly attackers have published their home addresses and exhorted people to rape and murder them for, basically, being women.
There are many disingenuous arguments being bandied around under GamerGate but, if you look, you’ll note that they’ve been discredited, so now we’re just down to that game that weak men never seem to get tired of – blaming and attacking women because they feel out of control.
I’m sure that some people will say “Ah, but the presence of good guys with guns in the audience will mean…” and then you will stop because, having thought this through, you will realise that human reaction times and the fact that most gun carriers have not trained for urban conflict means that an attacker can stand up and shoot the speaker before anyone does squat. Yes, great, then all of the handgun heroes can shoot down the bad guy – Pow! Pow! Except that people aren’t fungible and gun vengeance will not miraculously bring the speaker back to life. In Utah, guns were used in 51% of all murders in 2011, an 18% increase over 2010, so people have a right to be scared of guns when a death threat (for a ‘massacre’) has been issued. As Ms Sarkeesian wrote herself on Twitter:
To be clear: I didn’t cancel my USU talk because of terrorist threats, I canceled because I didn’t feel the security measures were adequate.
The only way to stop guns being used in a venue is to remove the guns. When a death threat has been issued, the easy availability of guns makes them the most likely form of effective implementation of that threat. But, apparently, Ms Sarkeesian did not deserve a safe venue and her talk had to be cancelled.
(Before anyone starts on my gun fears, I was a soldier and have fired everything from 9mm pistol up to tank weapons, including rocket launchers and grenades. I have no fear of weapons, I just don’t trust many people who carry them around with them all the time for what appears to be no reason, especially in the terribly fragile urban environment.)
This is a terrible day for everyone. As a species, we have failed to protect women. As a state, Utah has failed to provide safety for people wishing to freely express their opinions. As a group, the thugs and bullies who have been harassing women are making the world a horrific place.
A number of you will stop following me today. Ok. A number of you will want to say “Ah, but those women…” to which I say “Shut up and come back to me when you have a sound justification for rape and death threats in the face of criticism, you idiot.” Today I have no patience with dissemblers, “Devil’s advocates” (seriously, he needs help?) and men who want to blame everything wrong in their lives on women who dare to keep striving for an equality that they have not yet achieved. Today I have no time for people who make arguments that more guns make things safer, when all that more guns do is put more guns into the equation, especially in spaces where a known threat is in effect.
I am already worried that, by writing this, I have made myself a target. There are people out there, searching for women and their supporters, so they can bring harassment to our doors, expose our personal details, and drive us off the Internet so that the only voices are theirs. I am proud to be a supporter of women, of their ongoing fight for equality, and for the perfectly legitimate cause of feminism. Tomorrow, I may be regretting this because some little person with a computer has decided to ruin my life. I’m scared and there is no way on Earth that my tiny blog, read by hundreds of people, should have such weight that I should be worried. And, yet, I am because the people who are attacking women and their supporters have made it clear that there is no low point to which they will not stoop in order to silence people that they don’t agree with.
We have built a miraculous machine to send information around the world in microseconds and we are using it to hurl our faeces. If you ever wanted proof of our descent from a common ape ancestor, there it is.
Today, I am furious. And so should you be. A woman was silenced by threats and people stood by and did not do enough to protect her. We should all be furious because this is not the world that we want. Let the last words here be Anita Sarkeesian’s:
I’m safe. I will continue my work. I will continue speaking out. The whole game industry must stand up against the harassment of women.
5 Things: Blogging
Posted: October 14, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, education, ethics, feedback, higher education, students, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking 2 CommentsI’ve written a lot of words here, over a few years, and I’ve learned some small things about blogging. There are some important things you need to know before you start.
- The World is Full of Dead Blogs. There are countless blogs that start with one or two posts and then stop, pretty much forever. This isn’t a huge problem, beyond holding down usernames that other people might want to use later (grr), but it doesn’t help people if they’re trying to actually read your blog sometime in the future. If you blog, then decide you don’t want to blog, consider cleaning up after yourself because it will make it easier for people to find your stuff when you actually want that to happen. If you’re not prepared to answer comments but you still want your blog to stand, switch off comments or put up a note saying that you don’t read comments from here. There’s a world of difference between a static blog and a dead blog. Don’t advertise your blog until you’ve got a routine of some sort going, just so you know if you’re going to do it or not.
A great example of an
“I’m still alive” from http://insocialwetrust.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/a-link-to-a-link-to-some-more-links/ - Regular Blogging is Hard. It takes effort and planning to pump out posts on a schedule. I managed every day for a year and it damn near killed me. Even if you’re planning once a week/month, make sure that you have a number of posts written up before you start and try to always keep a couple up your sleeve. It is far easier to mix up your feeds to keep your audience connected to you by, say, tweeting small things regularly and writing longer pieces that advertise into your Twitter feed semi-regularly. That way, when people see your name, they realise that you’re still alive and might read what you wrote. If you can, let people know roughly how often you’ll be writing and they can work that into their minds around what you’re writing.
- Write What You Want To Write But Try To Be Thematic. It’s easy to get cynical about things like how many people are following you and try to write what other people would like to read. Have some sort of purpose (maybe 2-3 different themes tops) so that what you write feels authentic to you, fits into your interests and is on a small range of topics so that people reading know what to expect. I stretch the rubber band on education a lot but it still mostly fits. I have a different blog for other things, which is far less regularly updated and is for completely different things that I also want to write. Writing somebody else or on something that you don’t really know about almost always stands out. Share your passion in your own way.
- Be Ready For Criticism. At some stage, someone is not going to like what you write, unless you are writing stuff that is so lacking in content or that is so well-known that no-one can argue with it. If you express an opinion, someone is probably going to disagree with you and if they do that rudely then it is going to sting. Most people who are reading you, and yes you can see the number of readers, will read you and, if they say nothing, have no strong feelings or probably agree with you to some extent. People are more likely to comment if they have strong disagreement and many of the strong disagreers in the on-line community are card-carrying schmucks. Some of them are genuinely trying to help but there are any number of agendas being pushed where people are committed (or paid) to jump on on-line fora and smash into people holding discussions. Some people are just rude bozos who like making other people feel bad. Hooray.
SADLY, YOU MUST HAVE A STRATEGY PREPARED FOR THIS. I don’t condone this, I’m working to change it and I think we have a long way to go in our on-line social structures. However, right now, it’s going to happen. Whether this means that you will take steps if people cross lines and become genuinely abusive, or whether you have other strategies, think about what will happen if someone decides to have a go at you because of something you wrote. The principles of freedom of speech start to fall apart when you realise that some people use their freedom to remove that of other people – which is logically nonsensical. If someone is shouting you down in your own space, they are not respecting your freedom of speech, they are not listening to you and they are trying to win through bullying. John Stuart Mill would leap up from the grave and kick them in the face because his idea of Freedom of Speech was very generous but was based on a notion of airing bad ideas in order to replace them with good. If he had been exposed to the Internet, I suspect he would have been a gibbering wreck in two days.
Most of you will know the amount of trolling that the owner of this site has endured for (perfectly reasonably) pointing out that women are badly represented and served by most video games.
Remember: someone else who feels strongly can always start their own blog to air their views. You do not owe idiots space on your comments just so they can abuse people who agree with you or spout nonsense when they have no intention at all of changing their own minds. You going mad trying to be fair is completely unreasonable when this is the aim of the Internet Troll.
- Keep It Short and Use Pictures. This is the rule I have the most trouble with. I now try to limit myself to 1,000 words but this is, really, far too long. Twitter works because it can be scanned at speed. FB works for longer things that you are bringing in from elsewhere but falls apart at the long form. However, long blogs get ranty quickly and you are probably making the same point more than once. Pick a size and try to stick to it so your readers will know roughly what they are committing to. Pictures are also easy to look at and I like them because they throw in humour and colour, which break up the words.
Don’t just do image searches randomly – “digital image short” returns this highly rewarding item. Trust me when I say that you shouldn’t just image search for “short”. Trust me.
There’s a lot more to say but I’m more than out of words! Hope this helped.
Nick Falkner 