SIGSCE Day 2, “Focus on K-12: Informal Education, Curriculum and Robots”, Paper 1, 3:45-5:00, (#SIGCSE2014)

Posted: March 8, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The first paper is “They can’t find us: The Search for Informal CS Education” by Betsy DiSalvo, Cecili Reid, Parisa Khanipour Roshan, all from Georgia Tech. (Mark wrote this paper up recently.) There are lots of resources around, MOOCs, on-line systems tools, Khan academy and Code Academy and, of course the aggregators. If all of this is here, why aren’t we getting the equalisation effects we expect?

Well, the wealth and the resource-aware actually know how to search and access these, and are more aware of them, so the inequality persists. The Marketing strategies are also pointed at this group, rather than targeting those needing educational equity. The cultural values of the audiences vary. (People think Scratch is a toy, rather than a useful and pragmatic real-world tool.) There’s also access – access to technical resource, social support for doing this and knowledge of the search terms. We can address this issues by research mechanisms to address the ignored community.

Children’s access to informal learning is through their parents so how their parents search make a big difference. How do they search? The authors set up a booth to ask 16 parents in the group how they would do it. 3 were disqualified for literacy or disability reasons (which is another issue). Only one person found a site that was relevant to CS education. Building from that, what are the search terms that they are using for computer learning and why aren’t hey coming up with good results. The terms that parents use supported this but the authors also used Google insights to see what other people were using. The most popular terms for the topic, the environment and the audience. Note: if you search for kids in computer learning you get fewer results than if you search for children in computer learning. The three terms that came up as being best were:

  • kids computer camp
  • kids computer classes
  • kids computer learning

The authors reviewed across some cities to see if there was variation by location for these search terse. What was the quality of these? 191 out of 840 search results were unique and relevant, with an average of 4.5 per search.

(As a note, MAN, does Betsy talk and present quickly. Completely comprehensible and great but really hard to transcribe!)

Results included : Camp, after school program, camp/afterschool, higher education, online activities, online classes/learning, directory results (often worse than Google), news, videos or social networks (again the quality was lower). Computer camps dominated what you could find on these search results – but these are not an option for low-income parents at $500/week so that’s not a really useful resource for them. Some came up for after school and higher ed in the large and midsize cities, but very little in the smaller cities. Unsurprisingly, smaller cities and lower socio-economic groups are not going to be able to find what they need to find, hence the inequality continues. There are many fine tools but NONE of them showed up on the 800+ results.

Without a background in CS or IT, you don’t know that these things exist and hence you can’t find it for your kids. Thus, these open educational resources are less accessible to these people, because they are only accessible through a mechanism that needs extra knowledge. (As a note, the authors only looked at the first two pages because “no-one looks past that”. 🙂 ) Other searches for things like kids maths learning, kids animal learning or kids physics learning turned up 48 out of 80 results (average of 16 unique results per search term), where 31 results were online, 101 had classes at uni – a big difference.

(These studies were carried out before code.org. Running the search again for kids computer learning does turn up code.org. Hooray, there is progress! If the study was run again, how much better would it be?)

We need to take a top down approach to provide standards for keywords and search terms, partnering with formal education and community programs. The MOOCs should talk to the Educational programming community, both could talk to the tutorial community and then we can throw in the Aggregators as well. Distant islands that don’t talk are just making this problem worse.

The bottom-up approach is getting an understanding of LSEO parenting, building communities and finding out how people search and making sure that we can handle it. Wow! Great talk but I think my head is going to explode!

During question time, someone asked why people aren’t more creative with their searches. This is, sadly, missing the point that, sitting in this community, we are empowered and skilled in searching. The whole point is that people outside of our community aren’t guaranteed to be able to find a way too be creative. I guess the first step is the same as for good teaching, putting ourselves in the heads of someone who is a true novice and helping to bring them to a more educated state.

 

 

Getting it wrong, offensively so. The scales ARE biassed.

Posted: February 11, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

6874balance_scale

Mark Guzdial has put out some excellent posts recently on Barbara Ericson’s ongoing work on analysing AP CS exam attempts and results across the US. Unsurprisingly, to those of us who see the classrooms on a day-to-day basis, women are grossly underrepresented. In this interview, Barbara is quoted:

Barbara Ericson, director of computing outreach at Georgia Tech, has made a startling claim. She said not one female student in three states – Mississippi, Montana and Wyoming — took the Advanced Placement exam in computer science last year.

Ericson appeared on Weekend Express to discuss the gender gap and explains why more women aren’t interested in computer science.

Now, I’m not going to rehash all of these posts but I did want to pick on one blogger who took the AP data and then, as far as I’m concerned, not only got it wrong by making some fundamental interpretational errors  but managed to do so in a way that so heavily reeked of privilege that I’m going to call it out.

I hesitate to link to the article on the Huffington Post but it’s only fair that you should read it to see what you think, even though it will generate traffic. The article is called “Memo to Chicken Little: Female Scientists Do Roam Among Us, and Gasp! Some Even Wear Lipstick”. So before we’ve even started, we’ve got one good stereotype going in the title.

Look, I’m not planning to drag apart the whole article but I will pick on one point that the author makes because it really irritates me. Here’s the paragraph:

As a woman who likes science as a bystander but chose not to pursue it professionally, I’ve got a couple of problems with all this handwringing. Mostly, well-intentioned as it is, it implies that women need “help” choosing a field of study. High school girls are exposed to exactly the same science and math courses they need to graduate as boys are, but in the eyes of the handwringers, girls are either too shallow or simple to choose for themselves, or need to be socially engineered into the correct balance of male vs. female, regardless of their choices. I appreciate your concern, but frankly, it’s pretty demeaning.

Frankly, I’ve never seen a more disingenuous interpretation of attempts to undo and reverse the systematic anti-female bias that is built into our culture. I’ve never seen anyone who is trying to address this problem directly or indirectly label girls as shallow or too simple to choose – this is a very unpleasant strawman, constructed to make those of us who are trying to address a bias look like we’re the ones with the attitude problem. We don’t need to socially engineer girls into the correct balance, we need to engineer society to restore the balance and articles like this, which make it appear that women are deliberately choosing to avoid STEM, are unwelcome, unnecessary and unfair to the many young women who are being told that the way that our society works is the way that it should work.

Need I remind people of stereotype threat? The PNAS study that shows that women are as automatically likely to harshly judge women and lessen their rewards as their male colleagues? Looking at the AP attendance and performance doesn’t show equality, it shows the outcome of a systematically biased system.

To say that “High school girls are exposed to exactly the same science and math courses they need to graduate as boys are” is a difficult statement. Yes, women rack up roughly the same number of course credits but on the critical measurement of whether they choose to go on and pursue a profession? No, something breaks here. The AP test is a great measure because it is an Advanced Placement exam and your intention is to use this to go further.  Is there clear evidence of far fewer women, as a percentage, going on from high school to college in STEM despite scoring the same kinds of grades? Yes. Is there evidence that some of these problems (anxiety about maths, for example) can start with perceptions of teachers in primary school? Yes. Is there a problem?

Yes.

And the question is always, if your previous exposure has not been fair, then is it reasonable to pick an arbitrary level of course that would be fair to people who haven’t been discriminated against? For years, racism was justified by culturally-based testing that could not be performed at the same level by people outside the culture – which was then used to restrict their access to the culture.

To me, that statement about exposure summarises everything that is wrong with glib arguments about constructing equal opportunity. If we’re going for a big job and there’s a corporate ‘interview dinner’ for 20 people, then we’ll all be on our best behaviour at dinner. For someone to lose the job because nobody showed them how to use a finger bowl or because their family uses a knife in the ‘other’ way, is to provide an equal exposure in the present that is blatantly unfair because it doesn’t take into account the redress of previous bias to bring people up to the point where it is really equal opportunity.

I think history supports me in the statement that we have been proved wrong every other time we’ve tried to segregate human ability and talent based on fixed physical abilities that were assigned at birth. Isn’t it about time we started investing all of our effort into producing truly equal opportunity for everyone?

Start with good grapes, don’t mess them up.

Posted: February 2, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realised.” Daniel Burnham

I was watching a film today called “Antiviral”, directed by Brandon Cronenburg, and one of the themes addressed was what we choose to do with technology. Celebrity cell reproduction is the theme of the movie and it is quite bizarre to see a technology that could be so useful (in building new organs and prolonging life) being used to allow people to have the same colds that their idols do. (Because of the rating of this blog, I must state that Antiviral is an adult film and there are themes that I will not discuss here.)

We have many technologies that are powerful and we are developing more of them, daily. We have developed the ability to print human organs (to a limited fashion, although 40 days for a liver is another month of life for someone) and we in the foothills of printing food. Our automated and autonomous systems become more capable and more effective on a daily basis, although Amazon’s drone network won’t be buzzing your house tomorrow.

One of the most profound reasons for education is the requirement to ensure that the operators of powerful things are reasoning, thinking, informed human beings. As humans, we tend to build amplification engines, it’s just what we do, but in so many cases, a good intention is then amplified to a great one, and a malign intention can be amplified to massive and evil result.

Our production processes for food and drink often take a similar form. To make good bread, you grow good wheat in good soil and then you use good yeast, clean conditions and control the oven. You start with good ingredients and you use technology and knowledge to make it better – or to transform it without damage. The same is true of wine. I can make good wine from just about anything but if you want me to make great wine? I have to start with good grapes and then not mess them up!

Good grapes!

Good grapes!

Our technologies are, however, able to go either way. I could burn the bread, cook the yeast, freeze the wine, just as easily if I was poorly trained or if I had malicious intent. Education is not just about training, it’s about preparation for the world in which our students will live. This world is always changing but we have to move beyond thinking about “Driver’s Ed” as a social duty and think about “Resource Ed”, “The Ethics of Cloning” (for example) and all sorts of difficult and challenging issues when we try and teach. We don’t have to present a given viewpoint, by any means, but to ignore the debate and the atmosphere in which we (and I in particular) are training young tertiary students would be to do them a disservice.

This starts young. The sooner we can start trying to grow good students and the sooner that we make our educational systems transform these into wonderful people, the better off we’ll be. The least I would hope for, for any of my students, is that they will always at least think briefly of some of the issues before they do something. They may still choose to be malign, for whatever reason, but let it be then a choice and not from ignorance – but also, let the malign be few and far between and a dying breed!

You want thinkers. Let us produce them.

Posted: February 2, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I was at a conference recently where the room (about 1000 people from across the business and educational world) were asked what they would like to say to everyone in the room, if they had a few minutes. I thought about this a lot because, at the time, I had half an idea but it wasn’t in a form that would work on that day. A few weeks later, in a group of 100 or so, I was asked a similar question and I managed to come up with something coherent. What follows here is a more extended version of what I said, with relevant context.

If I could say anything to the parents and  future employers of my students, it would be to STOP LOOKING AT GRADES as some meaningful predictor of the future ability of the student. While measures of true competency are useful, the current fine-grained but mostly arbitrary measurements of students, with rabid competitiveness and the artificial divisions between grade bands, do not fulfil this purpose. When an employer demands a GPA of X, there is no guaranteed true measure of depth of understanding, quality of learning or anything real that you can use, except for conformity and an ability to colour inside the lines. Yes, there will be exceptional people with a GPA of X, but there will also be people whose true abilities languished as they focused their energies on achieving that false grail. The best person for your job may be the person who got slightly (or much) lower marks because they were out doing additional tasks that made them the best person.

Please. I waste a lot of my time giving marks when I could be giving far more useful feedback, in an environment where that feedback could be accepted and actual positive change could take place. Instead, if I hand back a 74 with comments, I’ll get arguments about the extra mark to get to 75 rather than discussions of the comments – but don’t blame the student for that attitude. We have created a world in which that kind of behaviour is both encouraged and sensible. It’s because people keep demanding As and Cs to somehow grade and separate people that we still use them. I couldn’t switch my degree over to “Competent/Not Yet Competent” tomorrow because, being frank, we’re not MIT or Stanford and people would assume that all of my students had just scraped by – because that’s how we’re all trained.

If you’re an employer then I realise that it’s very demanding but please, where you can, look at the person wherever you can and ask your industrial bodies that feed back to education to focus on ensuring that we develop competent, thinking individuals who can practice in your profession, without forcing them to become grade-haggling bean counters who would cut a group member’s throat for an A.

If you’re a parent, then I would like to ask you to think about joining that group of parents who don’t ask what happened to that extra 1% when a student brings home a 74 or 84. I’m not going to tell you how to raise your children, it’s none of my business, but I can tell you, from my professional and personal perspective, that it probably won’t achieve what you want. Is your student enjoying the course, getting decent marks and showing a passion and understanding? That’s pretty good and, hopefully, if the educators, the parents and the employers all get it right, then that student can become a happy and fulfilled human being.

Do we want thinkers? Then we have to develop the learning environments in which we have the freedom and capability to let them think. But this means that this nonsense that there is any real difference between a mark of 84 and a mark of 85 has to stop and we need to think about how we develop and recognise true measures of competence and suitability that go beyond a GPA, a percentage or a single letter grade.

You cannot contain the whole of a person in a single number. You shouldn’t write the future of a student on such a flimsy structure.

The Bad Experience That Stays With You and the Legendary Bruce Springsteen.

Posted: January 30, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I was talking with a friend of mine and we were discussing perceptions of maths and computing (yeah, I’m like this off duty, too) and she felt that she was bad at Maths. I commented that this was often because  of some previous experience in school and she nodded and told me this story, which she’s given me permission to share with you now. (My paraphrasing but in her voice)

“When I was five, we got to this point in Math where I didn’t follow what was going on. We got to this section and it just didn’t make any sense to me. The teacher gave us some homework to do and I looked at it and I couldn’t do it but I didn’t want to hand in nothing. So I scrunched it up and put it in the bin. When the teacher asked for it back, I told her that I didn’t have it.

It turns out that the teacher had seen me put it in the bin and so she punished me. And I’ve never thought of myself as good at math since.”

Wow. I’m hard-pressed to think of a better way to give someone a complex about a subject. Ok, yes, my friend did lie to the teacher about not the work and, yes, it would  have been better if she’d approached the teacher to ask for help – but given what played out, I’m not really sure how much it would have changed what happened. And, before we get too carried away, she was five.

Now this is all some (but not that many) years ago and a lot of things have changed in teaching, but all of us who stand up and call ourselves educations could do worse than remember Bruce Springsteen’s approach to concerts. Bruce plays a lot of concerts but, at each one, he tries to give his best because a lot of the people in the audience are going to their first and only Springsteen concert. It can be really hard to deal with activities that are disruptive, disobedient and possible deliberately so, but they may be masking fear, uncertainty and a genuine desire for the problem to go away because someone is overwhelmed. Whatever we get paid, that’s really one of the things we get paid to do.

We’re human. We screw up. We get tired. But unless we’re thing about and trying to give that Springsteen moment to every student, then we’re setting ourselves up to be giving a negative example. Somewhere down the line, someone’s going to find their life harder because of that – it may be us in the next week, it may be another teacher next year, but it will always be the student.

Bad experiences hang around for years. It would be great if there were fewer of them. Be awesome. Be Springsteen.

EMBRACE YOUR AWESOMENESS! Don't make me come over and sing "Blinded by the Light!"

EMBRACE YOUR AWESOMENESS! Don’t make me come over and sing “Blinded by the Light!”

Three Stories: #3 Taking Time for Cats

Posted: January 12, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

There are a number of draft posts sitting on this blog. Posts, which for one reason or another, I’ve either never finished, because the inspiration ran out, or I’ve never published, because I decided not to share them. Most of them were written when I was trying to make sense of being too busy, while at the same time I was taking on more work and feeling bad about not being able to commit properly to everything. I probably won’t ever share many of these posts but I still want to talk about some of the themes.

So, let me tell you a story about  cats.

One of the things about cats is that they can be mercurial, creatures of fancy and rapid mood changes. You can spend all day trying to get a cat to sit on your lap and, once you’ve given up and sat back down, 5 minutes later you find a cat on your lap. That’s just the way of cats.

When I was very busy last year, and the year before, I started to see feedback comments from my students that said things like “Nick is great but I feel interrupting him” or I’d try and squeeze them into the 5 minutes I had between other things. Now, students are not cats, but they do have times when they feel they need to come and see you and, sometimes, when that time passes, the opportunity is lost. This isn’t just students, of course, this is people. That’s just the way of people, too. No matter how much you want them to be well organised, predictable and well behaved, sometimes they’re just big, bipedal, mostly hairless cats.

One day, I decided that the best way to make my change my frantic behaviour was to set a small goal, to make me take the time I needed for the surprising opportunities that occurred in a day.

I decided that every time I was walking around the house, even if I was walking out to go to work and thought I was in a hurry, if one of the cats came up to me, I would pay attention to it: scratch it, maybe pick it up, talk to it, and basically interact with the cat.

Over time, of course, what this meant was that I saw more of my cats and I spent more time with them (cats are mercurial but predictable about some things). The funny thing was that the 5 minutes or so I spent doing this made no measurable difference to my day. And making more time for students at work started to have the same effect. Students were happier to drop in to see if I could spend some time with them and were better about making appointments for longer things.

Now, if someone comes to my office and I’m not actually about to rush out, I can spend that small amount of time with them, possibly longer. When I thought I was too busy to see people, I was. When I thought I had time to spend with people, I could.

Yes, this means that I have to be a little more efficient and know when I need to set aside time and do things in a different way, but the rewards are enormous.

I only realised the true benefit of this recently. I flew home from a work trip to Melbourne to discover that my wife and one of our cats, Quincy, were at the Animal Emergency Hospital, because Quincy couldn’t use his back legs. There was a lot of uncertainty about what was wrong and what could be done and, at one point, he stopped eating entirely and it was… not good there for a while.

The one thing that made it even vaguely less awful in that difficult time was that I had absolutely no regrets about the time that we’d spent together over the past 6 months. Every time Quincy had come up to say ‘hello’, I’d stopped to take some time with him. We’d lounged on the couch. He’d napped with me on lazy Sunday afternoons. We had a good bond and, even when the vets were doing things to him, he trusted us and that counted for a lot.

Quincy is now almost 100% and is even more of a softie than before, because we all got even closer while we were looking after him. By spending (probably at most) another five minutes a day, I was able to be happier about some of the more important things in my life and still get my “real” work done.

Fortunately, none of my students are very sick at the moment, but I am pretty confident that I talk to them when they need to (most of the time, there’s still room for improvement) and that they will let me know if things are going badly – with any luck at a point when I can help.

Your time is rarely your own but at least some of it is. Spending it wisely is sometimes not the same thing as spending it carefully. You never actually know when you won’t get the chance again to spend it on something that you value.

New Zealand cutting student allowances for mature students.

Posted: January 1, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , | 1 Comment

As reported here, the NZ government has reduced student allowances for tertiary study for the over-40s to a maximum of three years, with people over 65 no longer eligible at all for student allowances. Given how much re-skilling is already needed and will continue to be needed as economies and industries shift, this doesn’t appear to be a very positive move on the part of NZ government. Wouldn’t you rather be paying people to study so they can continue to work, rather than paying unemployment benefits?

I’ll try to keep abreast of this but, given the supposed focus on life-long learning we’re all interested in, this does seem out of step.

Three Stories: #2 Why I Don’t Make New Year’s Resolutions

Posted: January 1, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

This is a story I’ve never told anyone before, but I hope that it will help to explain why I think many students struggle with making solid change in their academic and life practices. They focus on endpoints and set deadlines reactively, rather than focusing on process and finding a good time to change. Let me explain this in the narrative.

When I was younger, I was quite a bit heavier than I am now – by about 30% of my body mass. As I got older, this became more of a problem and my weight went up and down quite a lot as I tried to get a regular regime of exercise into my life and cut back on my eating. Unfortunately, when I get stressed, I tend to eat, and one of the things I used to get stressed about was … losing weight. It’s a common, vicious, circle. Anyway, one year, after a Christmas where I had found it difficult to fit into my ‘good’ clothes and just felt overstuffed and too hot most of the time, I decided that enough was enough. I would make a New Year’s Resolution to lose weight. Seriously. (As background, Christmas in Australia is in Summer, so we sing snows about snow and eat roast turkey while sitting around in 90-100F/32-38C heat – so if your clothes are squeezy, boy, are you going to feel it.)

I can’t remember the details of the New Year’s Eve party but I do remember waking up the next day and thinking “Ok, so now I lose weight”. But there were some problems.

  1. It was still very hot.
  2. Everything was closed because it was a public holiday.
  3. I was still stuffed from Christmas/NY indulgence.
  4. I was hungover.
  5. I had no actual plan.
  6. I hadn’t actually taken any steps towards either dietary change or exercise that I could implement.

So, instead of getting out of bed and doing anything healthy, I thought “Oh, ok, I’ll start tomorrow.” because it was just about impossible, to my mind, to get things started on that day. I made some plans as to what I’d do the next day and thought “Ok, that’s what I’ll do tomorrow.”

But then a friend called on the 2nd and they were in town so we caught up. Then I was back at work and it was really busy.

And… and… and…

When I finally did lose the weight, many years later, and get to a more stable point, it wasn’t through making a resolution – it was through developing a clear plan to achieve a goal. I set out to work up to walking 10 miles as loops around my block. Then, when I achieved that, I assessed myself and realised that I could replace that with running. So then, ever time I went out, I ran a little at the start and walked the rest. Finally I was (slowly) running the whole distance. Years later, a couple of bad falls have stopped me from long-distance running, but I have three marathons and numerous halves under my belt.

Why didn’t it work before? Well, lack of preparation is always bad, but also because New Year’s is one of the worst possible times to try and make a massive change unless you’ve actually prepared for it and the timing works for you. Think about it:

  1. New Year’s Eve is a highly social activity for many people as are the days after- any resolutions involving food, alcohol, sex or tobacco are going to much harder to keep.
  2. It’s high stakes, especially if you make your resolution public. Suddenly, failure is looming over you and other people may be either trying to force you into keeping your resolution – and some people will actively be trying to tempt you out of it.
  3. There’s just a lot going on around this time for most people and it’s not a time when you have lots of extra headspace. If your brain is already buzzing, making big change will make it harder.
  4. Setting your resolution as a goal is not the same as setting a strategy. This is really important if you fall off the wagon, so to speak. If you are trying to give up smoking but grab a quick cigarette on the 3rd, then your resolution is shot. If you have a plan to cut down, allowing for the occasional divergence, then you can be human without thinking “Oh, now I have to abandon the whole project.”
  5. New Year’s Resolutions tend to be tip of the mind things – if something had been really bothering you for months, why wait until NYE to do it? This means that you’re far less likely to think everything out.

After thinking over this for quite a long time, I’ve learned a great deal about setting goals for important changes and you have to try to make these changes:

  1. When you have a good plan as to what you’re trying to achieve or what you’re just trying to do as a regular practice.
  2. When you have everything you need to make it work.
  3. When you have enough headspace to think it through.
  4. When you won’t beat yourself up too badly if it goes wrong.

So have a Happy New Year and be gentle on yourself for a few days. If you really want to change something in your life, plan for it properly and you stand a much better chance of success. Don’t wait until a high stakes deadline to try and force change on yourself – it probably won’t work.

HNY2014

Matt Damon: Computer Science Superstar?

Posted: December 31, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

There was a recent article in Salon regarding the possible use of celebrity presenters, professional actors and the more photogenic to present course material in on-line courses. While Coursera believes that, in the words of Daphne Koller, “education is not a performance”, Udacity, as voiced by Sebastian Thrun, believes that we can model on-line education more in the style of a newscast. In the Udacity model, there is a knowledgeable team and the content producer (primary instructor) is not necessarily going to be the presenter. Daphne Koller’s belief is that the connection between student and teacher would diminish if actors were reading scripts that had content they didn’t deeply understand.

My take on this is fairly simple. I never want to give students the idea that the appearance of knowledge is an achievement in the same league as actually developing and being able to apply that knowledge. I regularly give talks about some of the learning and teaching techniques we use and  I have to be very careful to explain that everything good we do is based on solid learning design and knowledge of the subject, which can be enhanced by good graphic design and presentation but cannot be replaced by these. While I have no doubt that Matt Damon could become a good lecturer in Computer Science, should he wish to, having him stand around and pretend to be one sends the wrong message.

Matt Damon demonstrating an extrinsic motivational technique called "fear of noisy death".

Matt Damon demonstrating an extrinsic motivational technique called “fear of noisy death”.

(And, from the collaborative perspective, if we start to value pleasant appearance over knowledge, do we start to sort our students into groups by appearance and voice timbre? This is probably not the path we want to go down. For now, anyway.)

 

Three Stories: #1 What I Learned from Failure

Posted: December 31, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

It’s considered bad form to start ‘business stories’ with “Once upon a time” but there’s a strong edge of bard to my nature and it’s the end of a long year. (Let’s be generous.) So, are you sitting comfortably? (Ok, I’ll spare you ‘Once…’)

Many years ago, I went to university, after a relatively undistinguished career at school. I got into a course that was not my first preference but, rather than wonder why I had not set the world on fire academically, I assumed that it was because I hadn’t really tried. The companion to this sentiment is that I could achieve whatever I wanted academically, as long as I really wanted it and actually tried. This concept, that I could achieve anything academic I wanted if I tried, got a fairly good workout over the next few years, despite evidence that I was heading in a downward spiral academically. What I became good at was barely avoiding failure, rather than excelling, and while this is a skill, it’s a dangerous line to try and walk. If you’re genuinely aiming to excel, which includes taking the requisite planning steps and time commitment you need, and you fall short then you will probably still do quite well and pass. If you are focused lower down, then missing that bar means failure.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that I was almost doomed to fail when I tried to set my own interpretation of what constituted the right level of effort and participation. If you are a student who has a good knowledge of the whole course then you will have a pretty good idea of how you have answered questions in exams, what is required for assignments and, if you wanted to, you could choose to answer part of a question and have some idea of how many marks are involved. If you don’t know the material in detail, then your perception of your own performance is going to be heavily filtered by your own lack of knowledge. (A reminder of a previous post on this for those who are new here or are vague post-Christmas.)

After some years out in the workforce, and coming back to do postgraduate study, I finally learned something from what should have been quite clear to me, if it hadn’t been hidden by two things: my firm conviction that I could change things immediately if I wished to, and my completely incorrect assumption that my own performance in a subject could be assessed by someone with my level of knowledge!

I became a good student because I finally worked out three key things (with a lot of help and support from my teachers and my friends);

  1. There is no “lower threshold” of knowledge that allows you to predict if you’re going to pass. If you have enough grasp of the course to know how much you need to do to pass, then you probably know enough to do much better than that! (Terry Pratchett covers this beautifully in a book called “Moving Pictures“, where a student has to know the course better than the teachers to maintain a very specific grade over the years.)
  2. Telling yourself that you “could have done better” is almost completely useless unless you decide to do better and put a plan in place to achieve that. This excuse gets you off the hook but, unless it’s teamed with remedial action, it’s just an excuse.
  3. Setting yourself up for failure is just as effective as setting yourself up for success, but it can be far subtler and comprised of many small actions that you don’t take, rather than a few actions that you do take.

Knowing what is going wrong (or thinking you do) doesn’t change anything unless you actively try to change it. It’s a simple truth that, I hope, is a useful and interesting story.

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