Three more – for various definitions of three.
Posted: December 29, 2012 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: authenticity, blogging, education, higher education, resources, thinking, tools Leave a commentI have three more posts to make to complete my ‘year of daily posts’ – and this one doesn’t count, you’ll either be pleased or saddened to hear. I’m still torn as to when and how these will be written. I prefer the spontaneity of making the post on the day but I am very tempted by the thought of sitting around tomorrow morning to put the remaining two (by then) in the bag.
I’ll be very interested to see how much I will post after this is over. I may take Gas station without pump’s approach and publish a similar or greater number of words in a less scheduled way or I may fall completely silent. Right now I have no idea at all, which is fun and a bit scary at the same time, like almost all interesting things.
I’ve seen my fair share of abandoned blogs – you know the ones “Here is where I will detail my travels through my PhD” and the last post was back in 2006, it was only the third post and it amounted to “my brain, it hurts”. But life gets in the way and these blogs are the same as the diaries, started on January 1st, that start with “Wow, here’s my yearly diary! Every day I’m going to write something positive!” and wind up, a week later, as drink coasters or propping up the wonky sofa in the study. Life gets in the way.
Death gets in the way, too. I was reading someone’s LiveJournal years ago when they were diagnosed with cancer and the journal continues until their (far too early) death, with the final reflections of that person’s life taking place in other LJs, visible as a permanent artefact. I reread that LiveJournal, from first to last, earlier this year, to remind myself of a person who I had only known through this mechanism and, even knowing what the ending was going to be, the post where she announces that the test results had come back, and that it was cancer, shocked and upset me, almost to the point of throwing up. This vibrant, excited person, deeply in love with someone and working through all of the bits and pieces that happens when you and the person you love are in different countries, no longer updates their LiveJournal but it is still there. I have too many of these dormant LiveJournals on my list now. Death gets in the way, too.
This whole year, the good, the bad, the thoughtful, the preachy, the plain dumb and ill-informed, will stay here until this data corpus fries or the company gets sold to someone who wants to charge money for access or some such, but while it does that, it will reach more people than any other form of small-scale self-publishing has every achieved up until now. And while I have made some mistakes, it’s wrong to remove them just because I was wrong, as long as I’ve corrected them or noted where they should be corrected to be right.
This has been a part of my life. I wonder what role it will have from January 1st, 2013?
Typo Apology
Posted: December 28, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: blogging, education Leave a commentApologies for the spate of small errors in recent posts, I’m working on much smaller devices with touchscreens at the moment and reviewing is more difficult. Should be back to normal shortly.
Your definition of normal may vary. 🙂
Adelaide Computing Education Conventicle 2012: “It’s all about the people”
Posted: December 27, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: acec2012, advocacy, authenticity, blogging, collaboration, community, conventicle, curriculum, design, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, feedback, Generation Why, grand challenge, higher education, in the student's head, learning, principles of design, reconciliation, reflection, resources, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, universal principles of design 1 Commentacec 2012 was designed to be a cross-University event (that’s the whole point of the conventicles, they bring together people from a region) and we had a paper from the University of South Australia: ‘”It’s all about the people”; building cultural competence in IT graduates’ by Andrew Duff, Kathy Darzanos and Mark Osborne. Andrew and Kathy came along to present and the paper was very well received, because it dealt with an important need and a solid solution to address that need, which was inclusive, insightful and respectful.
For those who are not Australians, it is very important to remember that the original inhabitants of Australia have not fared very well since white settlement and that the apology for what happened under many white governments, up until very recently, was only given in the past decade. There is still a distance between the communities and the overall process of bringing our communities together is referred to as reconciliation. Our University has a reconciliation statement and certain goals in terms of representation in our staff and student bodies that reflect percentages in the community, to reduce the underrepresentation of indigenous Australians and to offer them the same opportunities. There are many challenges facing Australia, and the health and social issues in our indigenous communities are often exacerbated by years of poverty and a range of other issues, but some of the communities have a highly vested interest in some large-scale technical, ICT and engineering solutions, areas where indigenous Australians are generally not students. Professor Lester Irabinna Rigney, the Dean of Aboriginal Education, identified the problem succinctly at a recent meeting: when your people live on land that is 0.7m above sea level, a 0.9m sea-level rise starts to become of concern and he would really like students from his community to be involved in building the sea walls that address this, while we look for other solutions!
Andrea, Kathy and Mark’s aim was to share out the commitment to reconciliation across the student body, making this a whole of community participation rather than a heavy burden for a few, under the guiding statement that they wanted to be doing things with the indigenous community, rather than doing things to them. There’s always a risk of premature claiming of expertise, where instead of working with a group to find out what they want, you walk in and tell them what they need. For a whole range of very good and often heartbreaking reasons, the Australian indigenous communities are exceedingly wary when people start ordering them about. This was the first thing I liked about this approach: let’s not make the same mistakes again. The authors were looking for a way to embed cultural awareness and the process of reconciliation into the curriculum as part of an IT program, sharing it so that other people could do it and making it practical.
Their key tenets were:
- It’s all about the diverse people. They developed a program to introduce students to culture, to give them more than one world view of the dominant culture and to introduce knowledge of the original Australians. It’s an important note that many Australians have no idea how to use certain terms or cultural items from indigenous culture, which of course hampers communication and interaction.
For the students, they were required to put together an IT proposal, working with the indigenous community, that they would implement in the later years of their degree. Thus, it became part of the backbone of their entire program.
- Doing with [people], not to [people]. As discussed, there are many good reasons for this. Reduce the urge to be the expert and, instead, look at existing statements of right and how to work with other peplum, such as the UN rights of indigenous people and the UniSA graduate attributes. This all comes together in the ICUP – Indigenous Content in Undergraduate Program
How do we deal with information management in another culture? I’ve discussed before the (to many) quite alien idea that knowledge can reside with one person and, until that person chooses or needs to hand on that knowledge, that is the person that you need. Now, instead of demanding knowledge and conformity to some documentary standard, you have to work with people. Talking rather than imposing, getting the client’s genuine understanding of the project and their need – how does the client feel about this?
Not only were students working with indigenous people in developing their IT projects, they were learning how to work with other peoples, not just other people, and were required to come up with technologically appropriate solutions that met the client need. Not everyone has infinite power and 4G LTE to run their systems, nor can everyone stump up the cash to buy an iPhone or download apps. Much as programming in embedded systems shakes students out of the ‘infinite memory, disk and power’ illusion, working with other communities in Australia shakes them out of the single worldview and from the, often disrespectful, way that we deal with each other. The core here is thinking about different communities and the fact that different people have different requirements. Sometimes you have to wait to speak to the right person, rather than the available person.
The online forum has four questions that students have to find a solution to, where the forum is overseen by an indigenous tutor. The four questions are:
- What does culture mean to you?
- Post a cultural artefact that describes your culture?
- I came here to study Computer Science – not Aboriginal Australians?
- What are some of the differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians?
The first two are amazing questions – what is your answer to question number 2? The second pair of questions are more challenging and illustrate the bold and head-on approach of this participative approach to reconciliation. Reconciliation between all of the Australian communities requires everyone to be involved and, being honest, questions 3 and 4 are going to open up some wounds, drag some silly thinking out into the open but, most importantly, allow us to talk through issues of concern and confusion.
I suspect that many people can’t really answer question 4 without referring back to mid-50s archetypal depictions of Australian Aborigines standing on one leg, looking out over cliffs, and there’s an excellent ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) exhibit in Melbourne that discusses this cultural misappropriation and stereotyping. One of the things that resonated with me is that asking these questions forces people to think about these things, rather than repeating old mind grooves and received nonsense overheard in pubs, seen on TV and heard in racist jokes.
I was delighted that this paper was able to be presented, not least because the goal of the team is to share this approach in the hope of achieving even greater strides in the reconciliation process. I hope to be able to bring some of it to my Uni over the next couple of years.
The Emperor’s New Clothes Redux: The Sokal Hoax
Posted: December 26, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, derrida, design, education, educational research, ethics, feedback, higher education, post-modernism, principles of design, reflection, resources, sokal, sokal hoax, teaching approaches, thinking, tools 4 CommentsMaking way in a new area of scholarship can be challenging for many reasons, no matter how welcoming the community. One of the reasons for this is that there are points in our life where we are allowed to make larger mistakes, or be ignorant, but it is rarer for adults, especially those who are already employed within a job, to be allowed the latitude to say “I have no idea”. As I discussed yesterday, the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes explains this dilemma well, because children have more licence to be honest to the point of tactlessness where an adult is always weighing up the implications of admitting that they cannot quite see what everyone else is talking about.
Some of you will be familiar with the Sokal Hoax, where Professor Alan Sokal, from physics at NYU, submitted an article to a journal of postmodern cultural studies. The work, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, was accepted by the journal Social Text, which was (at the time) not practising academic peer review. Sokal did not intend for this article to be taken seriously or even expect it to published, although he did produce an article that he described it (in a follow-up article) as:
“a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense . . . structured around the silliest quotations … he could find about mathematics and physics”
The entire affair is worth reading and you can find the Wikipedia summary here and a good critique about some of Sokal’s less intended consequences here (transcript of a New York Review of Books article). Regrettably, what is less clear is whether Sokal actually achieved very much, in real terms, by carrying out this action. Yes, Social Text moved to an academic peer review system and that’s generally better for all concerned. For those who don’t know, peer review is the process by which submitted articles go to a number of other people in the field and they review the work to see if it is fit to publish. This reduces the load on the editors and allows for more, and more specific, areas of expertise to be involved. It is not, however, faultless as a poor combination of peers can still lead to substandard, or plain wrong, work getting through, especially if reviewers farm the work out to their grad students or review under time constraints. It is, therefore, not all that surprising that Sokal’s deliberately targeted paper, which identified how to get a paper published by these editors in this journal, succeeded, and less surprising when you hear the editors’ account that they thought the paper needed revisions (removing much of the handwaving and contradictory footnotes) and were concerned about the article but, as the journal at the time was one of opinion, they published it anyway.
Such generosity on the part of the editors does not forgive the publication of some of the deliberate misuse of terminology and physics that Sokal uses to highlight the lack of rigour in the journal and the editorial review process. However, one of the problems I have with this is that, as a Computer Scientist speaking to Educational researchers, people often take what I say as a true account of my field, especially given that they do not have the expertise in my discipline to know (or care) about things like computability or algorithmic performance. If I were to submit a scholarly paper to a journal of education, am I doing anyone any favours by deliberately misrepresenting the aspects of my field, given that I am identified by discipline and school on submission?
Yes, people should use terms correctly and there is a great deal of misuse of science for uninformed or nefarious purposes, with some of the writings coming from post-modernist inspired writers being completely wrong. However, when one is not a physicist, one depends upon the knowledge gained from other people as to what physics is. There is a part of me that thinks that Sokal wasted an opportunity to actually fix a number of misunderstandings – for example, making a clear distinction between linear in strict mathematical and physical terms and linear, in post-Derridan terms, where the meaning is (quite deliberately) less well-defined and often pejorative. Words change. Terms change. Knowledge can still exist and continue to connect terms if we make the effort to bridge, rather than to mock or deride.
The post-modernists, especially Derrida, have attracted a great deal of negative interest, often for what appear to be semi-religious objects to their approach, although I would be the first to say that Derrida’s obsession with repurposing words, redefining concepts when it suits him, and providing grammatical constructions that further, rather than reduce, ambiguity do make him a valid target for at least a raised eyebrow on many occasions. I do not have a strong opinion as to whether the Emperor, in this case, is clothed or not, but I must be honest and say that I do not believe that the outputs and constants of science are a purely cultural construction, although I do agree that the mechanism of the scientific academy is very much a cultural artefact and if anything deserves to be reduced to its components for inspection, it is an institution that almost systematically seems to avoid recognising the contribution of women and non-western people except where unavoidable. I mention Derrida here, mostly because Derrida was the first point of media attack when Sokal’s hoax was revealed. This speaks volumes for the bravery of Sokal’s attack – when the media will leap up and put a face on a stick to wave it about because “philosophy X is all mumbo-jumbo and here is the head witch doctor” you really have to wonder what a non-peer reviewed opinion piece in a journal dedicated to same is actually achieving. Derrida thought that the major problem with the piece was that it would make a later, serious, attempt to discuss such issues impossible to achieve.
Of course, although Sokal’s Hoax is a triumph of exposing the publication of works based on their source. authority and obscurity, this is most certainly not restricted to post-modernist journals of opinion. A friend of mine called me in once to read through a paper that used such unusual terminology, for him, that he was unsure as to whether it was good or bad. Fortunately, it was in my discipline and, because I know and can use the word ontology without dying, I was able to identify it as a low-level rehash of some basic work in the field. It was sound work, using the correct terminology, but it certainly wasn’t at the level of the conference it had been sent to – to my friend, however, it was as meaningless as anything that Sokal mocked from Derrida. I am well aware that some of my areas, including knowledge management and educational research, are seen by others to be exactly the same as the post-modernist repurposing of scientific terminology that Sokal attacks.
The point is not who is lying to whom, or whether there is anything behind some of the more obscure utterings of the Post-Modernists, but it is whether deliberately winding people up with a hoax would achieve more than a genuine attempt to reach out to and correct a community, using your expertise and developing a voice in the other discipline to provide a sound translation. Epistemology, theory of knowledge, is important and I’m really not sure that hoaxing and mockery really achieves all that much, especially as, like any extrinsic punishment approach, it tells you not to do something but not how not to do it.
The Emperor’s New (Insert Noun Here)
Posted: December 25, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, design, education, educational research, ethics, higher education, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools Leave a commentI’ve always enjoyed the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, because it has a number of different readings. We can speak of the tactless honesty of the innocent, the child who sees the emperor as he is, or of the willingness to uphold the status quo when it is imposed from a sufficiently high point, in the people who pretend that the emperor is clothed. We can also look at the villains of the piece, who weave a suit that is invisible to those who are stupid, incompetent or unfit to hold a position. This is, of course, genius because it forces the viewer of the suit into that most difficult of decisions: do I speak up (and force someone to explicitly work out if I have sufficient worth to counter the prevailing interpretation) or do I stay silent (to not be seen to be a fool).
There are some quite entertaining logical issues to wrestle with, starting from some fairly reasonable assumptions. Imagine that you are Courtier X, arriving in the room after Courtier 1, and you observe the Emperor. Now you know, full well, that the Emperor has always been up to this point clothed, and in the finest clothes of the land, and he is not know for his propensity for streaking. Walking into the room, you would expect the Emperor to be clothed. Let us assume that, out of a sense of survival and fellow-feeling, Courtier X-1, the one who arrived before you, hisses “He’s wearing a suit that is only invisible to idiots.” Surviving in the Royal Court would have prepared X for a life of rapid adjustment to changes of circumstance brought about by pique and the accidental collision of coronial concerns, so this information would immediately have shot through his mind and, whether you believed that the suit was there or not, behaving otherwise has some quite obvious downsides. Firstly, the Emperor obviously believes that he is wearing this suit. Secondly, there are X-1 other courtiers in the room who have now gone along with it. Thirdly, you have a family to feed and it’s not as if you could go off to another court.
The child’s voice is unaffected by such concerns. The child sees, he thinks, he speaks. Children are very frank when they deal with difficult matters such as the apparent ugliness or facial eructations of an aged relative, the apparent size or adiposity of strangers, or the details with which bodily functions are announced. (I can, however, see a Romulan reading of the tale where the child is sent into battle for his outspokenness and fails to achieve victory – but cultures always vary in these matters.) However, everyone is now embarrassed – doubly so because not only is the Emperor nude, but everyone around him has lied to him. With any luck the Imperial Executioner was in on the lie as well, so that he can run off ashamed before he has to behead everyone else.
Speaking truth to power is a difficult matter and we often seem to confuse it with “saying any old thing because it’s our opinion” and the two are really not the same at all. I have previously referred to the “just saying'” mentality, where offensive or bigoted commentary is presented because it is truthful, when it is quite obvious that it is designed to be hurtful and the words are hiding behind a pretence of honesty. Telling the Emperor that he is naked is the duty of the Emperor’s staff, because it allows us to deal with the real villains of the piece, rather than the difficult (and more likely) outcome that a small child went to bed that night with no supper. Telling the Emperor that he is fat really doesn’t serve any purpose unless you are genuinely concerned for his health and attempting to reduce his adiposity.
The Emperor’s New Clothes is often used to refer to other situations of social hypocrisy or the collective agreement on something that is not true and, as such, it is so heavily used in some areas that its coinage is seriously debased. One reading that I find fascinating is that we can regard the suit as the “words we may use to cloak our fears” (Naomi Wood, KSU) but these words do not protect us from the reality of the situation. The child is free of adult corruption, certainly, but this is also a colder and harsher world, a situation at odds with our normal thoughts on childhood.
I strongly believe that one of the key problems some of my colleagues have with educational research, and its associated vocabulary, is that some of them are convinced that we are somehow playing the Emperor’s New Clothes with them. After all, we are asking them to look at the old fabric, find it wanting, and then we are talking of a new one, describing it in terms that may not be used that often in the standard discipline. Worse, every so often I bet we make it look like any sensible person would be able to understand that this was a better approach – and this is quite damning of whoever says it, whether they are talking to students or staff. Speaking truth to power is as important peer-to-peer as it is student-to-teacher or peasant-to-king but we must distinguish between being rude and dismissive and genuinely seeking answers. I may not always succeed but I do try to use evidence, published work and, of course, the far more influential work of the real leaders in this field! I am nowhere near attaining expertise here but at least I now know where to look and where to start the discussions. I do not yet have a suit of knowledge, but I have a pair of shorts that I can wear in the company of the besuited so that we can have some discussions without me exposing myself too badly! 🙂
The antithesis of the New Clothes phenomenon also occurs frequently: people are looking at a fully-clothed person and pretending that they cannot see the clothes. Obviously, neither approach is sensible when pushed to the extreme. Sometimes we just have to use our eyes and our brains and tell people what we see. And that can be one of the hardest things to do – as well as the most valuable.
Pressganging Story into Service: The Dickens, you say?
Posted: December 24, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: a christmas carol, bill murray, blogging, charles dickens, community, education, feedback, higher education, reflection, resources, scrooged, teaching approaches, thinking, tools Leave a comment
“Marley was dead” and so begins Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” which has been reprinted and remade so many times it is near impossible to avoid the cultural impact of this work in English-speaking areas. For those who have avoided it, for whatever reason, it is a simple story. An unpleasant miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, believes Christmas to be nothing but humbug, a waste of time, a period for the stupid to amuse themselves, and a way for those who work insufficiently hard to deprive him (Scrooge) of his hard-won money. Scrooge’s transformation within the book is the core of the story, initiated by the visit of his (long dead) business partner, Marley, who warns him that only a bleak and unpleasant afterlife awaits him after death. Marley tells Scrooge that three ghosts will visit him and to change while he still can.
The first ghost, Christmas Past, shows Scrooge a younger version of himself, when he was innocent and those obstacles he faced that put him onto his current (unpleasant, unloving and unloved) trajectory. The second ghost, Christmas Present, shows him the London he is in now. The joy of family and reuniting with old friends. The ghost takes Scrooge to visit the house of Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s underpaid and overworked clerk, who lives with a large family and a seriously ill child, Tiny Tim, for whom no medical treatment is forthcoming because Scrooge pays Cratchit so little. Finally, Christmas Yet To Come arrives, and takes Scrooge on a dark journey to the death of Tiny Tim still as a young boy, Scrooge’s own death and the human vultures who pick over his belongings, and his untended grave in a dark corner of a forgotten cemetery.
Scrooge, reminded of his humanity, surrounded by humans and warned of the outcomes to others and himself of his perilous course, awakens on Christmas morning a changed man. His entire demeanour is permanently changed, not just for Christmas Day, but because he now seeks to be not just a better man, but the best man.
I have several film version of this that I like: the Patrick Stewart is good and the Bill Murray comedic-version “Scrooged” is slightly more delightful because Scrooge (Cross, in this version) is redeemed well before his course is as set. (And I like a happy ending.)
Yesterday I spoke about finding stories and myths that I could use and, even stripped of any religious overtones associated with the word Christmas, there’s still a lot to think about in the framing of A Christmas Carol. Dickens had suffered deep and lasting humiliation as a child and the engines of the Industrial Revolution had, by this time, ground up many older traditions and families along the way. Dickens appeal to the charity of those who can afford it is a core part of the work, as well as drawing back to pre-Cromwellian Christmas traditions that had been stamped out under the dour washed-out grey heel of the puritans. But, back to the framing.
The story starts with the description of Scrooge as someone who is happy with their lot, but shouldn’t be. His negative interpretation of the world is as much at odds with reality as his positive perception of the many flaws of his partner, Marley. Marley’s visit forces Scrooge to listen to the one person who could start him on his journey – because no-one else would have the authenticity to speak to him.
The journey begins with advice from a mentor who wishes you to avoid making their mistakes.
The three ghosts appear to force Scrooge to identify how he has changed, how flawed his perceptions are and that his actions, or inactions, will most likely have consequences that extend beyond his lifetime.
In order to understand why (or if we need to change), we need to understand:
- How we have already changed to this point
- What our environment really looks like
- Why change might be necessary
And none of this is any surprise for anyone who has read one, two or many self-help or realisation books – except that Dickens’ story is full of emotion and a reason for changing. In all of its forms, I have found the thread of the Cratchits to be one of the most moving. Scrooge’s loss and decline one could almost (well, I can’t but some could) write off as the unfortunate actions of a man who attained what he thought he wanted: wealth, and thus a derived happiness. Scrooge is obviously not happy but there are far too many who would ponder ‘why’ when he was so rich! (For every aphorism regarding “money not buying happiness”, there are many examples apparently to the contrary and Dave Gilmore’s famous riposte “… but it will let you park your yacht right next to it.”)
TinyTim, for me, is the core of this myth because Tim is ill, through no fault of his own but because of the time, the body and the family that he was born into. It’s not Tim’s fault but that simple fact is not enough to save him from dying – he needs other people to realise that he deserves better just because of what he is (a child) rather than who he is (a child of poor parents). Scrooge is not an evil man, although he is most certainly not a good man at the start, and the death of the child is never what he intended, because it would never have occurred to him the Cratchit would have that much of a life outside of the office. Scrooge’s indifference to the world, to the city of London, to Cratchit and to his own humanity is part of the initial transformation that he undertook, to become the Scrooge that we saw. That is the essence of Scrooge – he can change because he changed before. When Scrooge changes, he finally starts down the path to happiness, which appears to hold him in this enlightened and positively changed state for the rest of his long (and happy) life.
I enjoy the story and it’s something I always revisit leading up to Christmas because it is very easy to start getting all ‘bah, humbug’ in the face of commercialism, over expectation and the sheer hype of the holiday season. However, looking at it as a story about change, I’m forced to think about who could come to me and say “Don’t be like me”. How have I changed from where I was 20, 10 or even 5 years ago? What am I ignoring around me that I could be appreciating more?
Where will this path take me?
What would you expect to see, if the mentor and the three ghosts came to see you?
John Henry Died
Posted: December 23, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, collaboration, community, curriculum, design, education, educational problem, ethics, feedback, Generation Why, grand challenge, higher education, in the student's head, john henry, learning, meritocracy, principles of design, reflection, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, workload Leave a commentEvery culture has its myths and legends, especially surrounding those incredible individuals who stand out or tower over the rest of the society. The Ancient Greeks and Romans had their gods, demigods, heroes and, many times, cautionary tales of the mortals who got caught in the middle. Australia has the stories of pre- and post-federation mateship, often anti-authoritarian or highlighting the role of the larrikin. We have a lot of bushrangers (with suspiciously good hearts or reacting against terrible police oppression), Simpson and his donkey (a first world war hero who transported men to an aid station using his donkey, ultimately dying on the battlefield) and a Prime Minister who goes on YouTube to announce that she’s now convinced that the Mayans were right and we’re all doomed – tongue firmly in cheek. Is this the totality of the real Australia? No, but the stylised notion of ‘mateship’, the gentle knock and the “come off the grass, you officious … person” attitude are as much a part of how many Australians see themselves as shrimp on a barbie is to many US folk looking at us. In any Australian war story, you are probably more likely to hear about the terrible hangover the Gunner Suggs had and how he dragged his friend a kilometre over rough stones to keep him safe, than you are to hear about how many people he killed. (I note that this mateship is often strongly delineated over gender and racial lines, but it’s still a big part of the Australian story.)
The stores that we tell and those that we pass on as part of our culture strongly shape our culture. Look at Greek mythology and you see stern warnings against hubris – don’t rate yourself too highly or the gods will cut you down. Set yourself up too high in Australian culture and you’re going to get knocked down as well: a ‘tall poppies’ syndrome that is part cultural cringe, inherited from colonial attitudes to the Antipodes, part hubris and part cultural confusion as Anglo, Euro, Asian, African and… well, everyone, come to terms with a country that took the original inhabitants, the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, quite a while to adapt to. As someone who wasn’t born in Australia, like so many others who live here and now call themselves Australia, I’ve spent a long time looking at my adopted homeland’s stories to see how to fit. Along the way, because of travel, I’ve had the opportunity to look at other cultures as well: the UK, obviously as it’s drummed into you at school, and the US, because it interests me.
The stories of Horatio Alger, from the US, fascinate me, because of their repeated statement of the rags to riches story. While most of Alger’s protagonists never become amazingly wealthy, they rise, through their own merits, to take the opportunities presented to them and, because of this, a good man will always rise. This is, fundamentally, the American Dream – that any person can become President, effectively, through the skills that they have and through rolling up their sleeves. We see this Dream become ugly when any of the three principles no longer hold, in a framing I first read from Professor Harlon Dalton:
- The notion that we are judged solely on our merits:For this to be true, we must not have any bias, racist, gendered, religious, ageist or other. Given the recent ruling that an attractive person can be sacked, purely for being attractive and for providing an irresistible attraction for their boss, we have evidence that not only is this point not holding in many places, it’s not holding in ways that beggar belief.
- We will each have a fair opportunity to develop these merits:This assumes equal opportunity in terms of education, in terms of jobs, which promptly ignores things like school districts, differing property tax levels, teacher training approaches and (because of the way that teacher districts work) just living in a given state or country because your parents live there (and can’t move) can make the distance between a great education and a sub-standard child minding service. So this doesn’t hold either.
- Merit will out:Look around. Is the best, smartest, most talented person running your organisation or making up all of the key positions? Can you locate anyone in the “important people above me” who is holding that job for reasons other than true, relevant merit?
Australia’s myths are beneficial in some ways and destructive in others. For my students, the notion that we help each other, we question but we try to get things done is a positive interpretation of the mild anti-authoritarian mateship focus. The downside is drinking buddies going on a rampage and covering up for each other, fighting the police when the police are actually acting reasonably and public vandalism because of a desire to act up. The mateship myth hides a lot of racism, especially towards our indigenous community, and we can probably salvage a notion of community and collaboration from mateship, while losing some of the ugly and dumb things.
The tunnel went through.
Horatio Alger myths would give hope, except for the bleak reality that many people face which is that it is three giant pieces of boloney that people get hit about the head with. If you’re not succeeding, then Horatio Alger reasoning lets us call you lazy or stupid or just not taking the opportunities. You’re not trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps hard enough. Worse still, trying to meet up to this, sometimes impossible, guideline leads us into John Henryism. John Henry was a steel driver, who hammered and chiseled the rock through the mountains to build tunnels for the railroad. One day the boss brought in a steam driven hammer and John Henry bet that he could beat it, to show that he and his crew should not be replaced. After a mammoth battle between man and machine, John Henry won, only to die with the hammer in his hand.
Let me recap: John Henry died – and the boss still got a full day’s work that was equal to two steam-hammers. (One of my objections to “It’s a Wonderful Life” is that the rich man gets away with stealing the money – that’s not a fairy tale, it’s a nightmare!) John Henryism occurs when people work so hard to lift themselves up by their bootstraps that they nearly (or do) kill themselves. Men in their 50s with incredibly high blood pressure, ulcers and arthritis know what I’m talking about here. The mantra of the John Henryist is:
“When things don’t go the way that I want them to, that just makes me work even harder.”
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this when your goal is actually achievable and you apply this maxim in moderation. At its extreme, and for those people who have people standing on their boot caps, this is a recipe to achieve a great deal for whoever is benefiting from your labour.
And then dying.
As John Henry observes in the ballad (Springsteen version), “I’ll hammer my fool self to death”, and the ballad of John Henry is actually a cautionary tale to set your pace carefully because if you’re going to swing a hammer all day, every day, then you have to do it at a pace that won’t kill you. This is the natural constraint on Horatio Alger and balances all of the issues with merit and access to opportunity: don’t kill your “fool self” striving for something that you can’t achieve. It’s a shame, however, that the stories line up like this because there’s a lot of hopelessness sitting in that junction.
Dealing with students always makes me think very carefully about the stories I tell and the stories I live. Over the next few days, I hope to put together some thoughts on a 21st century myth form that inspires without demanding this level of sacrifice, and that encourages without forcing people into despair if existing obstacles block them – and it’s beyond their current control to shift. However, on that last point, what I’d really like to come up with is a story that encourages people to talk about obstacles and then work together to lift them out of the way. I do like a challenge, after all. 🙂
Vitamin Ed: Can It Be Extracted?
Posted: December 22, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, blogging, community, curriculum, design, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, Generation Why, higher education, in the student's head, learning, measurement, principles of design, reflection, resources, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, vygotsky, workload Leave a comment
Mmm. Taste the learnination.
There are a couple of ways to enjoy a healthy, balanced diet. The first is to actually eat a healthy, balanced diet made up from fresh produce across the range of sources, which requires you to prepare and cook foods, often changing how you eat depending on the season to maximise the benefit. The second is to eat whatever you dang well like and then use an array of supplements, vitamins, treatments and snake oil to try and beat your diet of monster burgers and gorilla dogs into something that will not kill you in 20 years. If you’ve ever bothered to look on the side of those supplements, vitamins, minerals or whatever, that most people have in their ‘medicine’ cabinets, you might see statements like “does not substitute for a balanced diet” or nice disclaimers like that. There is, of course, a reason for that. While we can be fairly certain about a range of deficiency disorders in humans, and we can prevent these problems with selective replacement, many other conditions are not as clear cut – if you eat a range of produce which contains the things that we know we need, you’re probably getting a slew of things that we also need but don’t make themselves as prominent.
In terms of our diet, while the debate rages about precisely which diet humans should be eating, we can have a fairly good stab at a sound basis from a dietician’s perspective built out of actual food. Recreating that from raw sugars, protein, vitamin and mineral supplements is technically possible but (a) much harder to manage and (b) nowhere near as satisfying as eating the real food, in most cases. Let’s nor forget that very few of us in the western world are so distant from our food that we regard it purely as fuel, with no regard for its presentation, flavour or appeal. In fact, most of us could muster a grimace for the thought of someone telling us to eat something because it was good for us or for some real or imagined medical benefit. In terms of human nutrition, we have the known components that we have to eat (sugars, proteins, fats…) and we can identify specific vitamins and minerals that we need to balance to enjoy good health, yet there is not shortage of additional supplements that we also take out of concern for our health that may have little or no demonstrated benefit, yet still we take them.
There’s been a lot of work done in trying to establish an evidence base for medical supplements and far more of the supplements fail than pass this test. Willow bark, an old remedy for pain relief, has been found to have a reliable effect because it has a chemical basis for working – evidence demonstrated that and now we have aspirin. Homeopathic memory water? There’s no reliable evidence for this working. Does this mean it won’t work? Well, here we get into the placebo effect and this is where things get really complicated because we now have the notion that we have a set of replacements that will work for our diet or health because they contain useful chemicals, and a set of solutions that work because we believe in them.
When we look at education, where it’s successful, we see a lot of techniques being mixed in together in a ‘natural’ diet of knowledge construction and learning. Face-to-face and teamwork, sitting side-by-side with formative and summative assessment, as part of discussions or ongoing dialogues, whether physical or on-line. Exactly which parts of these constitute the “balanced” educational diet? We already know that a lecture, by itself, is not a complete educational experience, in the same way that a stand-alone multiple-choice question test will not make you a scholar. There is a great deal of work being done to establish an evidence basis for exactly which bits work but, as MIT said in the OCW release, these components do not make up a course. In dietary terms, it might be raw fuel but is it a desirable meal? Not yet, most likely.
Now let’s get into the placebo side of the equation, where students may react positively to something just because it’s a change, not because it’s necessarily a good change. We can control for these effects, if we’re cautious, and we can do it with full knowledge of the students but I’m very wary of any dependency upon the placebo effect, especially when it’s prefaced with “and the students loved it”. Sorry, students, but I don’t only (or even predominantly) care if you loved it, I care if you performed significantly better, attended more, engaged more, retaining the information for longer, could achieve more, and all of these things can only be measured when we take the trouble to establish base lines, construct experiments, measure things, analyse with care and then think about the outcomes.
My major concern about the whole MOOC discussion is not whether MOOCs are good or bad, it’s more to do with:
- What does everyone mean when they say MOOC? (Because there’s variation in what people identify as the components)
- Are we building a balanced diet or are we constructing a sustenance program with carefully balanced supplements that might miss something we don’t yet value?
- Have we extracted the essential Vitamin Ed from the ‘real’ experience?
- Can we synthesise Vitamin Ed outside of the ‘real’ educational experience?
I’ve been searching for a terminological separation that allows me to separate ‘real’/’conventional’ learning experiences from ‘virtual’/’new generation’/’MOOC’ experiences and none of those distinctions are satisfying – one says “Restaurant meal” and the other says “Army ration pack” to me, emphasising the separation. Worse, my fear is that a lot of people don’t regard MOOC as ever really having Vitamin Ed inside, as the MIT President clearly believed back in 2001.
I suspect that my search for Vitamin Ed starts from a flawed basis, because it assumes a single silver bullet if we take a literal meaning of the term, so let me me spread the concept out a bit to label Vitamin Ed as the essential educational components that define a good learning and teaching experience. Calling it Vitamin Ed gives me a flag to wave and an analogue to use, to explain why we should be seeking a balanced diet for all of our students, rather than a banquet for one and dog food for the other.
We’re Still Here
Posted: December 21, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: authenticity, blogging, education, higher education Leave a comment
Or not.
I realise that the ‘appointed’ date of doom hasn’t come yet but we see no evidence of the Apocalypse here in Australia.
We now resume our normal blog production.
(My apologies to any Mayans for the sheer irritation that this cultural misappropriation may have caused.)
“We are not providing an MIT education on the web…”
Posted: December 21, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, blogging, collaboration, community, curriculum, design, education, educational research, ethics, Generation Why, higher education, in the student's head, learning, measurement, moocs, principles of design, reflection, resources, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, vygotsky Leave a commentI’ve been re-watching some older announcements that describe open courseware initiatives, starting from one of the biggest, the MIT announcement of their OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative in April, 2001. The title of this post actually comes from the video, around the 5:20 mark, (Video quoted under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence, more information available at: http://ocw.mit.edu/terms)
“Let me be very clear, we are not providing an MIT education on the Web. We are, however, providing core materials that are the infrastructure that undergirds that information. Real education, in our view, involves interaction between people. It’s the interaction between faculty and students, in our classrooms and our living group, in our laboratories that are the heart, the real essence, of an MIT education. “
While the OCW was going to be produced and used on campus, the development of OCW was seen as something that would make more time available for student interaction, not less. President Vest then goes on to confidently predict that OCW will not make any difference to enrolment, which is hardly surprising given that he has categorically excluded anyone from achieving an MIT education unless they enrol. We see here exactly the same discussion that keeps coming up: these materials can be used as augmenting materials in these conventional universities but can never, in the view of the President or Vice Chancellor, replace the actual experience of obtaining a degree from that institution.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I still think that the OCW initiative was excellent, generous and visionary but we are still looking at two fundamentally different use cases: the use of OCW to augment an existing experience and the use of OCW to bootstrap a completely new experience, which is not of the same order. It’s a discussion that we keep having – what happens to my Uni if I use EdX courses from another institution? Well, ok, let’s ask that question differently. I will look at this from two sides with the introduction of a new skill and knowledge area that becomes ubiquitous, in my sphere, Computer Science and programming. Let’s look at this in terms of growth and success.
What happens if schools start teaching programming to first year level?
Let’s say that we get programming into every single national curriculum for secondary school and we can guarantee that students come in knowing how to program to freshman level. There are two ways of looking at this and the first, which we have probably all seen to some degree, is to regard the school teaching as inferior and re-teach it. The net result of this will be bored students, low engagement and we will be wasting our time. The second, far more productive, approach is to say “Great! You can program. Now let’s do some Computer Science.” and we use that extra year or so to increase our discipline knowledge or put breadth courses back in so our students come out a little more well-rounded. What’s the difference between students learning it from school before they come to us, or through an EdX course on fundamental programming after they come to us?
Not much, really, as long as we make sure that the course meets our requirements – and, in fact, it gives us bricks-and-mortar-bound entities more time to do all that face-to-face interactive University stuff that we know students love and from which they derive great benefit. University stops being semi-vocational in some aspects and we leap into knowledge construction, idea generation, big projects and the grand dreams that we always talk about, yet often don’t get to because we have to train people in basic programming, drafting, and so on. Do we give them course credit? No, because they’re assumed knowledge, or barrier tested, and they’re not necessarily part of our structure anymore.
What happens if no-one wants to take my course anymore?
Now, we know that we can change our courses because we’ve done it so many times before over the history of the Academy – Latin, along with Greek the language of scholarship, was only used in half of the University publications of 1800. Let me wander through a classical garden for a moment to discuss the nature of change from a different angle, that of decline. Languages had a special place in the degrees of my University with Latin and Greek dominating and then with the daring possibility of allowing substitution of French or German for Latin or Greek from 1938. It was as recently as 1958 that Latin stopped being compulsory for high school graduation in Adelaide although it was still required for the study of Law – student demand for Latin at school therefore plummeted and Latin courses started being dropped from the school curriculum. The Law Latin requirement was removed around 1969-1970, which then dropped any demand for Latin even further. The reduction in the number of school teachers who could teach Latin required the introduction of courses at the University for students who had studied no Latin at all – Latin IA entered the syllabus. However, given that in 2007 only one student at all of the schools across the state of South Australian (roughly 1.2-1.4 million people) studied Latin in the final year of school, it is apparent that if this University wishes to teach Latin, it has to start by teaching all of Latin. This is a course, and a discipline, that is currently in decline. My fear is that, one day, someone will make the mistake of thinking that we no longer need scholars of this language. And that worries me, because I don’t know what people 30 years from now will actually want, or what they could add to the knowledge that we already have of one of our most influential civilisations.
This decline is not unique to Latin (or Greek, or classics in general) but a truly on-line course experience would allow us to actually pool those scholars we have left and offer scaled resources out for much longer than isolated pockets in real offices can potentially manage but, as President Vest notes, a storehouse of Latin texts does not a course make. What reduced the demand for Latin? Possibly the ubiquity of the language that we use which is derived from Latin combined with a change of focus away from a classical education towards a more job- and achievement-oriented (semi-vocational) style of education. If you ask me, programming could as easily go this way in about 20 years, once we have ways to let machines solve problems for us. A move towards a less go-go-go culture, smarter machines and a resurgence of the long leisure cycles associated with Science Fiction visions of the future and suddenly it is the engineers and the computer scientists who are looking at shrinking departments and no support in the schools. Let me be blunt: course popularity and desirability rises, stabilises and falls, and it’s very hard to tell if we are looking at a parabola or a pendulum. With that in mind, we should be very careful about how we define our traditions and our conventions, especially as our cunning tools for supporting on-line learning and teaching get better and better. Yes, interaction is an essential part of a good education, no argument at all, but there is an implicit assumption of critical mass that we have seen, time and again, to implicitly support this interaction in a face-to-face environment that is as much a function of popularity and traditionally-associated prestige as it is of excellence.
What are MIT doing now?
I look at the original OCW release and I agree that, at time of production, you could not reproduce the interaction between people that would give you an MIT education. But our tools are better now. They are, quite probably not close enough yet to give you an “MIT of the Internet” but should this be our goal? Not the production of a facsimile of the core materials that might, with MIT instructors, turn into a course, but the commitment to developing the tools that actually reproduce the successful components of the learning experience with group and personal interaction, allowing the formation of what we used to call a physical interactive experience in a virtual side? That’s where I think the new MIT initiatives are showing us how these things can work now, starting from their original idealistic roots and adding the technology of the 21st Century. I hope that other, equally prestigious, institutions are watching this, carefully.
Nick Falkner 