Thoughts on the Fauxpology
Posted: October 14, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, feedback, higher education, identity, in the student's head, learning, reflection, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools Leave a commentWe’ve had some major unpleasantness in the Australian political sphere recently and, while I won’t bore you with the details, a radio announcer has felt it necessary to apologise for a particularly unpleasant comment that he made about the Prime Minster, and the recent death of her father. It was not, I must say, either the most heartfelt or actually apologetic apology that has ever been delivered and the Prime Minster, who quite rightly has better things to do, has chosen not to take this man’s personal phone call for an apology. And, of course, neither should she feel that she has to. Let me state this in plain terms: the offender does not gain the right to demand the way in which an apology is presented, if they wish to proffer an apology. However, let me cut to the chase (for once) and say that an apology without a genuine sense that you have done something wrong, for which an apology is deserved and that will change your behaviour in future, is worthless.
In this case, the broadcaster has previously apologised for remarks, including that the legally elected and sitting Prime Minister of Australia be put in a ‘chaff’ bag and thrown out to sea. However, his apology for the chaff bag comment may have to be scrutinised, in light of what happened at the dinner function at which he made further deliberately offensive and unsubstantiable claims. At this event he, in between scurrilous remarks, signed a jacket made out of, you guessed it, chaff bags. Therefore, at least in the chaff bag case, it would appear that his previously apology was without conviction and possible not heartfelt: hence, worthless. He did not feel genuine regret or change his behaviour. In fact, if anything, he was now extending his behaviour and disrespect by aligning his signature with a physical representation of his statements.
When public figures mouth the words of regret, yet do not change or feel regret, we are in the territory of what has been neologised as the fauxpology. (Wikipedia refers to this as the Non-apology apology, if it has the form of an apology but does not actually express the expected contrition.) Let me give you some example words (not from said broadcaster I hasten to add):
“My recent comments may have offended some people and, if they did, then I wish to apologise.”
You are not sorry for the action, but you are sorry only because someone has taken offence, or your actions have been uncovered. Ultimately, the idea here is to say ‘sorry’ in such a way that it appears that you have sought, and may be granted, forgiveness without having to actually express responsibility. Of course, if you aren’t responsible for the problem and can move this to being the problem of the people that you’ve offended, then why should you change your behaviour at all? The example above is an “If apology”, where you are only apologising on a conditional basis. Other fine examples include such delightful phrases as “Mistakes were made” because, of course, one is studiously avoiding saying who made the mistakes.
The major problem with the fauxpology is that it is effectively a waste of time. Without a genuine desire to actually avoid the problematic behaviour, the only thing that may change is that the offender is more careful not to get caught. What bothers me from an educational sense is how pervasive these unpleasant non-apologies are.
I have too many students who feel that some sort of fauxpology, where they are sorry that an action has occurred but it is mysteriously not connected to them, is going to make things all better. I’m pretty sure that they haven’t learned it from me because I try to be honest in my apologies and then change things so that it doesn’t happen again. Am I always up to that standard? I’m probably pretty close and I strive to be better at it – but then again, I strive not to be a schmuck and sometimes that doesn’t work either. This separation of responsibility from outcome is a dangerous disconnection. It is most definitely someone’s responsibility if work didn’t get handed in on time and, while there are obvious exceptions and the spirit of charitable interpretation is still alive and well, a genuine recognition of whose responsibility it is leads one towards self-regulation far better than thinking of the work as something that is associated by accidental proximity rather than deliberate production.
I’m lucky in that I rarely expect my students to do anything where they feel they should be contrite (although there are examples, including being rude or disrespectful to their peers, although I wouldn’t push them all the way to guilt on that) but apologising for something as a recognition that whatever it was is both undesirable and now something to be avoided is essential, when you are actually at fault. But it has to be genuine or there is no point. I loathe being lied to so a false apology, especially when immediately backed up by recidivism, is a great disappointment to me.
My students are responsible for their work. I am responsible for their programs, assessment, and ensuring that they can achieve what is required in a fair and equitable environment. If I get it wrong, then I have to admit it and change behaviour. Same for the students. If something has gone wrong, then we need to work out who was responsible because we can then work out who needs to change things so it doesn’t happen again. This isn’t about ascribing punishment or blame, it’s about making things work better. The false apology, like foolish punishment, is easy but useless. As an example. I cannot think of a more useless punishment than writing lines on a blackboard, especially as the simple mechanics of this action lends itself to a deconstruction of the sentence into a form where the meaning is lost by the fifth time you’ve written “I will not challenge the ontological underpinnings of reality” but have really written “I I I I I I …” “will will wll wll wl wl” and getting steadily more squiggly. But this is useless because it is not really tied to the original offence (whatever it happens to be – talking in class, making fart sounds, shuffling the desk) and it has no teaching value at all. This punishment is the equivalent of the fauxpology in many ways: it looks like it’s doing something but not only does it not achieve its aims, it actually works against positive alternatives by providing an easy out.
I’m very disappointed by the public figures who recite these empty phrases, because the community and my students learn their empty words and think “If they can get away with it, so can I” and, ultimately, my students can’t. It’s a waste of their very valuable time and, at some stage, may lead to problems for the vast majority when someone demands more than a fauxpology and there is no real character substance to provide.
Moral Luck and Voluntary Action: Is There a Corresponding Pedagogical Luck?
Posted: October 10, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, blogging, community, curriculum, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, higher education, in the student's head, reflection, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, universal principles of design Leave a commentMoral luck (sometimes described as moral accident) describes a situation where someone is assigned moral blame or praise for something happening, even though the person was either not in control of what was happening or could not affect its consequences. There are many examples, including the traffic accident scenario described in the Moral Luck link, and there are several different classifications of moral luck but let me focus on one: the situation where you either take no positive steps to address a situation, or actively take negative steps, yet the outcome is still positive. To a consequentialist, this is a beneficial outcome and constitutes an example of Resultant Moral Luck. One of the most extreme examples is that you randomly stick your foot out, hoping to trip someone in the street, and accidentally bring down a criminal being pursued by the police. The outcome is good, you are possibly a hero, but any assignation of a moral intention to your actions is deeply flawed: you weren’t in control of the situation, you did not intend the outcome and, in fact, you had hoped to cause harm. The voluntary action that you took was in no way intended to cause this outcome. Yet, you are a hero.
When we look at methods and practices of teaching, it quickly becomes apparent that there are many different approaches and, upon doing some reading, that these have different utilities and efficacies. Your choice of pedagogy is rarely a one-size-fits-all approach and, especially if your institution takes a relatively traditional approach, we have to start to wonder exactly which part of the evolutionary selection stage we are in. Have we, by chance and/or design, arrived at an elegant and efficient design years ago that cannot be improved upon by recent findings or are we ripe for new development, new directions and entirely different ways of teaching?
I would argue that, if we are not taking steps to confirm where we are in the developmental timeline or we are not taking steps to examine what we do with the intention of improving, then we are wandering in an area that we could call pedagogical luck, where any positive teaching outcomes that may arise cannot be attributed to our voluntary actions and intentions. Are we in the territory that Feynman was referring to when he quoted Gibbon:
“The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous”?
The notion of pedagogical luck, much like moral luck, raises questions of responsibility and accountability. It also explains how we can misattribute blame, because we risk not having a clear ethical framework that can ascribe intention, action and outcome in a meaningful way. In moral luck two people can speed through the same red light, yet only one causes an accident because a child runs into an intersection and the other one may receive a fine for running the light. The outcomes could almost not be any more starkly different: in one a human is injured or killed, the other is a purely administrative outcome. We certainly will attribute more blame to the first driver than the second, despite the fact that both had no desire to kill, nor did they act any differently – the reason that this is resultant is because this is just the way things turned out.
If an academic works with a class and, as it happens, everyone passes, then we would usually assume some intention and voluntary action was involved on the part of that academic. The outcome, for the students and the academic, are both beneficial. It is… unlikely… that said academic would then walk around stating “I’m amazed that they all passed – I barely even showed up to class and I didn’t revise the notes.” However, where someone has done nothing (or has not taken a voluntary action to cause change) and all of the students fail, we can expect (with a reasonable certainty) that the usual statements of blame shifting may start to occur: the students were stupid, lazy, unprepared, insufficiently attentive, the material was pitched at the right level but the students didn’t work hard enough, et cetera. “I have kept the course the same, it is obviously the students who are at fault.” Of course, it’s easy to see why if we have not taken any active steps to change anything – why should we be held responsible for an action that has had either neutral or positive outcomes in the past? Why should we judge the killer-driver any more harshly than the red-light-runner? The outcome is a matter of luck.
This is highly undesirable behaviour so how can we avoid the issues involved in depending upon pedagogical luck? I’m tempted to delve into virtue ethics here and argue that, of all places, that if you can’t find a virtuous seeker of knowledge in a University then perhaps we should all go back to a simple agrarian existence and wait to die of some horrifically mutated bovine disease that we no longer have the wit or wisdom to cure. However, I suspect that we don’t need to all be virtuous, all the time, to adopt a simple maxim that commits us to seeking improvement in our learning and teaching, or to confirming that our approaches are still valid. Where possible, such endeavours should be public and shared widely, so that our lessons can be learned elsewhere. Yes, we’ve wandered fairly heavily into Kant because I’m effectively arguing good will as a stand-alone virtue, regardless of what is achieved. In the absence of a guarantee of virtuous people, and we all have bad days, then perhaps it is a commitment to scholarship, review and reflection that can allow us to take that fresh approach to pedagogical development and implementation that will cause us to be less susceptible to blame shifting where it is inappropriate and less likely to form cargo-cultish ideas as to why certain courses are succeeding or failing.
It is a simple idea: claiming beneficial outcomes as caused by us when we have done nothing is questionable, ethically, especially when we refuse to accept negative outcomes under the same scenario. By identifying that pedagogical luck is possible and readily identifiable in certain practices around the world, we clearly identify the need to avoid the situations where it can dominate.
Brief Stats Update: I appear to have written two more books
Posted: October 9, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, education, feedback, higher education, measurement, MIKE, reflection, SWEDE, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, work/life balance, workload 2 CommentsOn May 6th, I congratulated Mark Guzdial on his 1000th post and I noted that I had written 102,136 words, an average of 676 words per post, with 151 posts over 126 days. I commented that, at that rate, I could expect to produce about 180,000 more words by the end of the year, for a total of about 280,000. So, to summarise, my average posting level was at rate of 1.2 posts per day, and 676 words per post.
Today, I reanalysed the blog to see how I was going. This post will be published on Tuesday the 9th, my time, and the analysis here does not include itself. So, up until all activity on Monday the 8th, Central Australian Daylight Saving Time, here are the stats.
Total word count: 273,639. Total number of posts: 343. Number of words per post: 798. Number of posts per day: 1.23. I will reach my end of year projected word count in about 9 days.
I knew that I had been writing longer posts, you may remember that I’ve deliberately tried to keep the posts to around 1,000 where possible, but it’s obvious that I’m just not that capable of writing a short post! In the long term, I’d expect this to approach 1,000 words/post because of my goal to limit myself to that, with the occasional overshoot. I’m surprised by the consistency in number of posts per day. The previous average was a smidgen under 1.2 but I wanted to clarify that there has been a minor increase. Given that my goal was not to necessarily hit exactly 1/day but to set aside time to think about learning and teaching every day, I’m happy with that.
The word count, however, is terrifying. One of the reasons that I wanted to talk about this is to identify how much work something like this is, not to either over inflate myself or to put you off, but to help anyone out there who is considering such a venture. Let me explain some things first.
- I have been typing in one form or another since 1977. I was exposed to computers early on and, while I’ve never been trained to touch type, I have that nasty hybrid version where I don’t use all of my fingers but still don’t have to look at the keyboard.
- I can sustain a typing speed of about 2,500 words/hour for fiction for quite a long time. That includes the aspects of creativity required, not dictation or transcription. It is very tiring, however, and too much of it makes me amusingly incoherent.
- I do not have any problems with repetitive strain injury and I have a couple of excellent working spaces with fast computers and big screens.
- I love to write.
So, I’m starting from a good basis and, let me stress, I love to write. Now let me tell you about the problems that this project has revealed.
- I produce two kinds of posts: research focused and the more anecdotal. Anecdotal posts can be written up quickly but the moment any research, pre-reading or reformulation is required, it will take me about an hour or two to get a post together. So that cute high speed production drops to about 500-1000 words/hour.
- Research posts are the result of hours of reading and quite a lot of associated thought. My best posts start from a set of papers that I read, I then mull on it for a few days and finally it all comes together. I often ask someone else to look at the work to see how it sits in the queue.
- I’m always better when I don’t have to produce something for tomorrow. When the post queue is dry, I don’t have the time to read in detail or mull so I have to either pull a previous draft from the queue and see if I can fix it (and I’ve pretty much run out of those) or I have to come up with an idea now and write it now. All too often, these end up being relatively empty opinion pieces.
- If you are already tired, writing can be very tiring and you lose a lot of the fiero and inspiration from writing a good post.
I have probably spent, by all of these figures and time estimates, somewhere around 274 hours on this project. That’s just under 7 working weeks at 40 hours/week. No wonder I feel tired sometimes!
I am already, as you know, looking to change the posting frequency next year because I wish to focus on the quality of my work rather than the volume of my output. I still plan to have that hour or so put aside every day to contemplate and carry out research on learning and teaching but it will no longer be tied to an associated posting deadline. My original plan had an output requirement to force me to carry out the work. Unsurprisingly, oh brave new world that has such extrinsic motivating factors in it, I have become focused on the post, rather than the underlying research. My word count indicates that I am writing but, once this year is over, the review that I carry out will be to make sure that every word written from that point on is both valuable and necessary. My satisfaction in the contribution and utility of those posts I do make will replace any other quantitative measures of output.
My experience in this can be summarised quite simply. Setting a posting schedule that is too restrictive risks you putting the emphasis on the wrong component, where setting aside a regular time to study and contemplate the issues that lead to a good post is a far wiser investment. If you want to write this much, then it cannot be too much of a chore and, honestly, loving writing is almost essential, I feel. Fortunately, I have more than enough to keep the post queue going to the end of the year, as I’m working on a number of papers and ideas that will naturally end up here but I feel that I have, very much, achieved what I originally set to to do. I now deeply value the scholarship of learning and teaching and have learned enough to know that I have a great deal more to learn.
From a personal perspective, I believe that all of the words written have been valuable to me but, from next year, I have to make sure that the words I write are equally valuable to other people.
I’ll finish with something amusing. Someone asked me the other day how many words I’d written and, off the top of my head, I said “about 140,000” and thought that I was possibly over-claiming. The fact that I was under claiming by almost a factor of two never would have occurred to me, nor the fact that I had written more words than can be found in Order of the Phoenix. While I may wish to reclaim my reading time once this is over, for any fiction publishers reading this, I will have some free time next year! 🙂
The Future of the Text Book: A Printbook, an eText and a Custom walk into a bar.
Posted: October 4, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, blogging, book, community, design, eBook, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, Generation Why, higher education, measurement, principles of design, resources, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking 4 CommentsWell, it’s still Banned Books Week so I thought I’d follow up on this and talk about text books. I’ve just come from a meeting with a Leading Publishing House (LPH) who, in this fine age of diversification, have made some serious moves into electronic publishing and learning systems. This really doesn’t identify any of the major players because they’re all doing it, we just happen to have a long term relationship with LPH. My students are not the largest purchasers of text books, a fact that LPH’s agent confirmed. While Engineers buy a lot of books, Computer Scientists tend not to buy many and will, maybe, buy one serious text if they think it will be of use to them.
It’s not hard to see why. Many programming language or application books are obsolete within weeks or months, sometimes even before they arrive, and when the books cost upwards of $100 – why buy them when you can download all of the documentation for free? Unlike Humanities, where core texts can remain the same from year to year, or Engineering and Physics, where the principles are effectively established, my discipline’s principles are generally taught by exposure to languages and contextualisation in programming. There are obvious exceptions. Bentley’s Programming Pearls, almost anything by Knuth and certain key texts on algorithms or principles (hello, Dragon Book!) all deal with fundamentals and the things that don’t change from year to year – however, this is not the majority of recommended texts in CS, which tend to head towards programming language guides and manuals. With very few exceptions, any book on a specific programming language has a shelf-life and, if we are updating the course to reflect new content, then we really shouldn’t be surprised if students don’t feel the need to keep buying the new book.
Ah, the Dragon Book.
In other disciplines, the real text book is still being sold extensively and, interestingly, in Australia the eBook is generally sold in a bundle with the real text, even when we know that the student has some form of eBook reader. The model appears to be “work at home from the book and have the eCopy for skimming at Uni”. Both of these forms are still the text book and, if we’re talking about the text book, it appears to be that if students see the need, they’ll buy it. However, the price is becoming more and more important. Is there a widespread model where students can only buy the chapters they need, much as you can buy individual songs from the iTunes Store, and wait until later to see if they want to buy the whole thing? Well, yes, but it’s not widespread in the text book world and, as far as LPH is concerned, it’s not something that they do. Yet.
What is interesting is the growing market in textbook mash-ups. It is now possible to pick a selection of chapters from a range of a publisher’s offerings, add some of your own content, get it checked for copyright issues and then *voila* you have your own custom printed book with only the chapters that you need. All thriller, no filler. Of course, any costs involved in this, especially costly copyright issues, get passed on to the people who buy it. (The students.) This, fairly obviously, restricts the mash-ups to easy to mash materials – books only from one publisher where the IP issues are sorted, open-source images and the like. One problem that surfaces occasionally are people who put their own work in to be included in such a custom run and it turns out that some of the content is not actually original. This can be an oversight and even due to inheritability sometimes. Suppose that Person A created a course from a text, B inherited the course and made some changes based on the course, then continued to change it over the years. It’s a Boat of Theseus problem because the final work is the work of A and B but probably retains enough of the original text source to cause copyright issues when combined back into a new book. Copyright issues can often be overcome but it increases costs and, as stated, that costs the student more.
Given how expensive text books (still) are and that the custom market still operates at a high-ish price point, I’m still waiting for one of the LPHs to take the radical step of providing books at a price point that makes them effectively irresistible. Look at the Orange Penguin reprints, which I do often because I own a million of them, they cost $10 (cheaper in a bundle) and you can pick them up anywhere. Yes, there is an amelioration of the editing costs because these are all reprints of previous versions. Yes, there are no cover arts costs and they are using relatively mainline stock for the printing. But, hang on, isn’t this exactly what we can do in the custom sense, if we stick to jamming together existing chapters? Yet my early researches indicate that there is no large market of custom textbooks that are anywhere near this cost.
I’m going to put up the naïve and relatively ignorant flags here as I’m sure that LPH actuaries have been all over this so, rather than say “Surely…” (and have to kick myself), let me make this a wish.
“I wish that I could assemble a useful book for my students from key chapters of available works and, with low presentation costs, get a book together for under $40 that really nailed the content required for a year level.” I’d be even happier if that $40 was $20. Or even free. There are some seriously successful free text book initiatives but, as always, there is that spectre of reimbursement for the effort expended by the author. I’m certainly not advocating doing authors out of their entitlements but I am wondering how we can do that and, with minimal overhead, make all of these books as useful and widespread as they need to be.
There are some books and sets of chapters that I’d love my students to have, while respecting the author’s right to receive their entitlements for the work and setting a fair price. To be honest, it really seems like I’m expecting too much. What do you think?
Banned Books Week: Time to Hit the Library!
Posted: October 3, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, banned books, blogging, community, curriculum, education, educational problem, ethics, higher education, in the student's head, principles of design, reflection, resources, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools Leave a comment
It’s Banned Books Week until October the 6th so what better time to talk about the freedom to read and go off and subversively read some banned or challenged books? There’s a great link on the American Library Association’s site with the top 100 Banned/Challenged Books 2000-2009. Some of them are completely predictable and some of them are more surprising. The reasons given for withdrawing books are, in the words of the ALA site:
Books usually are challenged with the best intentions—to protect others, frequently children, from difficult ideas and information.
However, it is always easy to see where such noble intentions have been subverted and politics or other overtones have come into play. Let’s look at the Top 10 from 1990-1999 as an example:
- Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz (7)
- Daddy’s Roommate, by Michael Willhoite (-)
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou (6)
- The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier (3)
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (14)
- Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck (5)
- Forever, by Judy Blume (16)
- Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson (28)
- Heather Has Two Mommies, by Leslea Newman (-)
- The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger (19)
Book 1 is scary and has gruesome illustrations. Book 2 deals with homosexual parents.Book 3 contains a rape involving an eight year old girl. Book 4 is about bullying and also contains a masturbation scene. Book 5 is … book 5 is Huckleberry Finn!!! Of course, HF is probably in here because of the fairly extensive use of racial pejoratives and stereotypes, even if argument can be made that the book itself is anti-racist. Book 6 is a magnificent book but, between the deaths and a dead puppy, it’s not exactly an easy book. Book 7 has teen sex in it but nowhere near the same tone or difficulty as some of the previous. Book 8 is a surprisingly depressing book that manages to balance a fantasy world with death and disappointment. Book 9, well, what a surprise, another book on homosexuality has made the list. Finally, we have Catcher, full of profanity and sexual depiction.
Looking at this list, we see sex, racism, homosexual relationships and death being the major themes. (Notably, to be banned for sex, depictions that range to the explicit are required for heterosexual activity, but it is merely the existence of the relationship that can suffice for homosexual relationships.) Those numbers at the end are, by the way, where they feature in the top 100 of 2000-2009. Let’s look at that to see what appals and is too complicated for children or library users in the first decade of the 21st Century, I’ve bolded the new entries:
1. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
2. Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
3. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
4. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
5. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
7. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
8. His Dark Materials (series), by Philip Pullman
9. ttyl; ttfn; l8r g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
I’ll come back to Harry Potter in a moment. Number 2, the Alice series, covers a wide range of topics, including our old friend sex, so it’s for the sexual content that it made the list – topping the list in 2003. Number 4 is a children’s book based on the observed behaviour of two male penguins who became a couple and raised a hatchling. (You can read about Roy and Silo here.) Number 8 has some nasty moments across the trilogy but, in the main, has drawn most of its criticism because of a negative portrayal of religion in general, and Christianity specifically. Number 9 is on the list because, from a Banned Books story in 2010, “Preoccupied with sex and college, the teen girls encounter realistic situations that feature foul language, drugs and alcohol in a less than casual way.” Finally, the new number 10 contains references to suicide and death, as well as the usual teen cocktail of drugs, alcohol and sex that guarantee requests for banning. Oh, and there’s also a gay friend and there is a reference to child molestation. But none of it is graphic and it’s written up as a series of letters to a friend.
So the themes are now sex, drugs, bad language, homosexual penguins (Penguin Lust!), discussion of real teenagers and… fantasy novels? Let me return to Harry Potter which contains teens who are so heavily plasticised that they appear to have no real functioning genitalia, never smoke drugs, don’t swear seriously even when being threatened with death and are laughably vanilla in so many ways that the dominant fantasy conceit of the HP universe is not the magic, it’s that teenagers would actually function this way! This, and the inclusion of His Dark Materials, appear to show the direction that book banning has taken over the last decade: removing a point of view for reasons that appear to have little to do with protecting children from difficult ideas and information, but to remove them from ideas that have been stated as unacceptable by some form of organised body.
I strongly suggest looking at both lists, side-by-side, so that you too can have the moments that I had of cocking your head to one side and thinking “why is that on there?” Then coming to the slow, and unpleasant realisation, that the answer is not “because it’s too dark or encourages drug use” but “because of an organised campaign by a group who are trying to orchestrate the removal of a book that, ultimately, is a fairy tale and of no more harm to children than any other”.
There are sometimes good reasons to restrict access, by age or maturity, to certain materials and, definitely, there are lines that you can’t cross and expect to show up on a public library on the shelves – this is a far cry from completely removing or destroying a work. But what appears to be happening now is that the political reasons for banning are starting to dominate, with Internet and local organisation allowing a majority to form that can request a book’s withdrawal. Fortunately, the Internet can bring books to anyone but, with existing models, e-Books may not be as widely available as we often think so the local and school library forms a valuable point for students. I read voraciously when I was younger and, despite reading many of the banned books on the lists, I don’t appear to have turned out too badly. (I know, I know, anecdotal existential evidence doesn’t count. But I can say that not everyone who reads The Chocolate War turns into a psychopath, so why is it always in the top 5? If anything, it made me aware that the adult advice on bullying was generally an empty mechanism that never dealt with the real problem: bullies are not always cowards, don’t fear the same type of repercussions and, sometimes, are in charge. I know – how subversive!)
Let me leave you with an example of how things have changed in the last two decades. One inclusion on the banned book list only showed up in the last decade, despite being published decades earlier, and it’s number 69 on the 2000-2009 list. I’m scared how high it will be driven in the 2010-2019 list and it is yet another example of why we have to be very careful about how we construct any list of books that we wish to treat differently. Or ‘sanction’. You might have heard of it.
It’s called Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury.
The Reputation of Australian IT IS Enhanced: A Closing Point
Posted: October 2, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, design, education, ethics, feedback, higher education, nicta, thinking Leave a commentProfessor Gernot Heiser has released the second part of his response to my blog post and the originating Australian IT article, and you can find it here. On reading both parts, I have amended my original posts to include links to Gernot’s responses, because they address both of the key questions from the original posts: by identifying why a process like this would be followed and how national benefit is served by it. The most important point to realise is that NICTA still owns a great deal of associated work from this project – rather than the cloak-and-dagger fire sale that was alluded to in the newspaper piece.
You can find the whole discussion still on my blog as I feel that the ongoing and evolving discussion illustrates one of the key advantages of the new technological models that we have: the ability to exchange ideas, update our published text and construct more accurate representations of knowledge. I would like to thank Professor Heiser for his responses, especially as it would have been very easy to either ignore them or be very dismissive. Instead, he’s provided a great deal more information that has certainly informed me as to how these decisions are made and what they mean.
I hope that you have enjoyed reading this as well, and that you have found the whole exchange useful.
October Reflection: Planning for 2013
Posted: October 2, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: authenticity, blogging, cyberpunk, eat your own dog food, eating your own dog food, eating your own dogfood, education, educational problem, higher education, measurement, reflection, resources, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, universal principles of design, work/life balance, workload Leave a commentWhen I was younger, I used to play a science fiction role-playing game that was based in a near-ish future, where humans had widely adopted the use of electronic implants and computers were everywhere in a corporate-dominated world. The game was called “Cyberpunk 2013” and was heavily influenced by the work of William Gibson (“Neuromancer” and many other works), Bruce Sterling (“Mirrorshades” anthology and far too many to list), Walter Jon Williams (“Hardwired” among others) and many others who had written of a grim, depressing, and above all stylish near future. It was a product of the 80s and, much like other fashion crime of the time, some of the ideas that emerged were conceits rather than concepts, styles rather than structures. But, of course, back in the 1980s, setting it in 2013 made it far away and yet close enough. This was not a far future setting like Star Trek but it was just around the corner.
The game had some serious issues but was a great deal of fun. Don’t start me talking about it or we’ll be here all night.
And now it is here. My plans for the near future, the imminent and the inevitable, now include planning calendars for a year that was once a science fiction dream. In that dark dream, 2013 was a world of human/machine synthesis, of unfeeling and mercenary corporate control, of mindless pleasure and stylish control of a population that seeks to float as lotus eaters rather than continue to exist in the dirty and poor reality of their actual world.
Well, we haven’t yet got the cybernetics working… and, joking aside, the future is not perfect but it is far less gloomy and dramatic in the main that the authors envisioned. Yes, there are lots of places to fix but the majority of our culture is still working to the extent that it can be developed and bettered. The catastrophic failures and disasters of the world of 2013 has not yet occurred. We can’t relax, of course, and some things are looking bleak, but this is not the world of Night City.
In the middle of all of this musing on having caught up to the future that I envisioned as a boy, I am now faced with the mundane questions such as:
- What do I want to be doing in 2020 (the next Cyberpunk release was set in this year, incidentally)
- Therefore, what do I want to be doing in 2013 that will lead me towards 2020?
- What is the place of this blog in 2013?
I won’t bore you with the details of my career musings (if my boss is reading this, I’m planning to stay at work, okay?) but I had always planned that the beginning of October would be a good time to muse about the blog and work out what would happen once 2012 ended. I committed to writing the blog every day, focussed on learning and teaching to some extent, but it was always going to be for one year and then see what happened.
I encourage my students to reflect on what they’ve done but not in a ‘nostalgic’ manner (ah, what a great assignment) but in a way that the can identify what worked, what didn’t work and how they could improve. So let me once again trot out the dog food and the can opener and give it a try.
What has worked
I think my blog has been most successful when I’ve had a single point to make, I’ve covered it in depth and then I’ve ducked out. Presenting it with humour, humility, and an accurate assessment of the time that people have to read makes it better. I think some of my best blogs present information and then let people make up their own minds. The goal was always to present my thought processes, not harangue people.
What hasn’t worked
I’m very prone to being opinionated and, sometimes, I think I’ve blogged too much opinion and too little fact. I also think that there are tangents I’ve taken when I’ve become more editorial and I’m not sure that this is the blog for that. Any blog over about 1,100 words is probably too long for people to read and that’s why I strive to keep the blog at or under 1,000 words.
Having to blog every day has also been a real challenge. While it keeps a flow of information going, the requirement to come up with something every, single, day regardless of how I’m feeling or what is going on is always going to have an impact on quality. For example, I recently had a medical condition that required my doctor to prescribe some serious anti-inflammatory drugs and painkillers for weeks and this had a severe impact on me. I have spent the last 10 days shaking off the effects of these drugs that, among other effects, make me about half as fast at writing and reduce my ability to concentrate. The load of the blog on top of this has been pretty severe and I’m open about some of the mistakes that I’ve made during this time. Today is the first day that I feel pretty reasonable and, by my own standards, fit for fair, complex marking of large student submissions (which is my true gauge of my mental agility).
How to improve
Wow, good question. This is where the thinking process starts, not stops, after such an inventory. The assessment above indicates that I am mostly happy with what came out (and my readership/like figures indicate this as well) but that I really want to focus on quality over quantity and to give myself the ability to take a day off if I need to. But I should also be focused on solid, single issue, posts that address something useful and important in learning and teaching – and this requires more in-depth reading and work than I can often muster on a day-to-day basis.
In short, I’m looking to change my blog style for next year to a shorter and punchier version that gives more important depth, maintains an overall high standard, but allows me to get sick or put my feet up occasionally. What is the advice that I would give a student? Make a plan that includes space for the real world and that still allows you to do your best work. Content matters more than frequency, as long as you meet your real deadline. So, early notice for 2013, expect a little less regularity but a much more consistent output.
It’s a work in progress. More as I think of it.
Educating about Evil
Posted: October 1, 2012 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, education, educational problem, ethics, feedback, higher education, in the student's head, racism, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools Leave a commentWhile we focus on our discipline areas for education, we can never lose sight of the important role that teachers have in a student’s life. As I’ve said (in ones way or another) repeatedly, we have large footprints and a deep shadow: thinking that we are only obliged to worry about mathematics or the correct location of the comma is to risk taking actions that have a far greater impact than intended.
This is why I have no time for educators who sleep with their students, because they have reduced anything positive or supportive that they ever said to the student into a part of the seduction and it contaminates the relationship that the student will have with authority, possibly for the rest of their life. In the strongest terms I condemn this, not the least because it is almost always illegal, immoral and wrong, but because it is, at its heart, unscholarly, unthinking and anti-educational. If you want to teach, then you’ve put yourself in a position where your voice is going to carry more weight – and this brings responsibilities. Naively enough, one of the key responsibilities for me is that we must think carefully about our actions so that, by our thoughtless action or inaction, we do not facilitate evil.
I do not have a belief system that gives me a convenient Devil so, for me, evil is a concept that is very abstract, but no less real for not having a trident and cloven hooves. I know it when I see it. I know it when I see its hand at work and it is the shape of evil’s hand that I generally discuss with my students. Let me show you.
Elizabeth Eckford, girl in dark sunglasses, attempting to enter Central High in the Little Rock School District. (Photo: Will Counts)
Can you see it? Let me show you from another angle.
The girl screaming racist abuse is Hazel Massery. The year is 1957. (Photo: Will Counts)
That’s a 15 year old girl standing at the front who is, under established legal precedent, trying to enter a previously all-white school. The girl behind her, about the same age, is yelling this: “Go home, n____! Go back to Africa.” Those soldiers you see are national guardsman, stationed not to help an isolated 15 year old girl but, instead, to keep her and the other 8 students who haven’t shown up today, from bringing their black selves into this white classroom.
I see the hand of evil all over this incident but, via these photographs, but I see it most with its scaly digits clutched around Hazel Massery’s mouth. She had a family with troubles and a background entrenched racism, and Hazel was a troubled girl but, in this moment, she was a hysterical, screaming puppet, baying for the blood of a 15-year old girl who was just another human being. The people around Elizabeth are yelling “Lynch her!” “Drag her away!” Women who look like your grandma are spitting on her. But look at Hazel Massery. It’s hard to find a more spectacular example of the evil of the mob than this?
Fifty-five years ago this month, nine students tried to make it into the school and, finally, after being turned away three times by National Guardsman, they managed to enter, escorted by soldiers of the 101st Airborne. Some of the people in that crowd, smiling, chuckling, taking pictures – they are teachers. Elizabeth’s ongoing problems at school, and they were many, included one teacher who would not even take anything directly from Elizabeth’s hands because of the colour of Elizabeth’s skin. Elizabeth was systematically abused, isolated and bullied up until the time that the school got closed and she had to try and complete her studies by herself.
After months of abuse, one entry from Elizabeth’s experience reads: “She said that except for some broken glass thrown at her during lunch, she really had had a wonderful day.”
When I was a teenager, I attended a talk where a minister said that he had always expected the test of his faith and integrity to be a suave man with horns and a tail, wearing a good suit, who offered him a dollar to smoke a cigarette and spit on the Bible. As he got older, he realised that evil, in many forms, was much harder to recognise and, of course, that sometimes doing nothing counted as evil, if you didn’t take the opportunity to do good. (As I later realised, in the style of Edmund Burke!)
You know, I don’t expect that much of a lot of people, if no-one has gone to the trouble to actually educate them and shake those xenophobic beliefs that seem to accumulate when we’re in small, scared bands and huddled in the dark. But I do expect a great deal of anyone who takes up the role of educator. I expect them to stand up for the truth. To go looking for the light if they realise that they’re in the dark. To treat all students as what they could be rather than what they have been assumed to be.
But, base level, in any activity regarding students and mobs, formed from stupidity and bigotry, I expect the teachers to be in a circle around the students and facing out, standing between the mob and their charges, certainly not facing in and taking part in the discrimination.
There’s a Vanity Fair article where you can read more about this. We have, I am thankful to say, come a very long way but it is quite obvious that there is still some way to go. The VF article talks a lot about the good people of the community, who stood up, who helped up, who realised that this was wrong and you should read it because it is a story of hope. But let us never lose sight of what evil looks like, because I need to train my students to see it so that they can stamp on it.
Push it back into the darkness where it belongs and blind it with truth, facts, science, reasoning, enlightenment and goodness. In 100 years time I want someone who sees that picture to not even be able to understand why this would have happened. I want cute kids to cock their heads to one side and look confused – because they can see an obviously visual difference but not inequality or divide, and hence not establish it as in immutable categorical statement of worth or ability. I think we’re all part of the glorious pathway that will lead to that great and wonderful time. Naive? Yes. But we have to start somewhere and, fifty-five years ago, Elizabeth and eight other brave young people did just that. We’re just carrying it on.
Follow-up on the post “Enhancing Australian IT Research”
Posted: September 28, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: authenticity, blogging, community, education, higher education, research, thinking Leave a comment[Edit: Gernot has put a further discussion of the points raised both in the previous post and this one, which you can find here. In this one, Gernot clearly explains why approaches were taken the way they were, how NICTA is benefiting from the ongoing work (as are we) and further identifies that the original article didn’t manage to capture a lot of the detail of what had happened. My thanks again to Professor Heiser for taking the time to respond to this so thoroughly and so patiently!]
I’ve put this back up on the top so that you can read Professor Gernot Heiser’s response to the points I raised in my blog post “Enhancing the Reputation of Australian IT Research – by giving it away?” Gernot’s main point is that I don’t understand the spin-off and VC process, which has thus led to the misinterpretation of the Australian IT article (which he also finds fault with). He has taken the time to write a blog post on it that you can read over here. I have also edited the original post to include a reference to this, which I’ve put there for people reading it from scratch, as I am very serious about the final statement on the piece, namely that:
If Professor Heiser is reading this, then I welcome any clarification that he can make and, in the Australian have miscast this, then I welcome and will publish any supported correction. I sincerely hope that this is merely a miscommunication because the alternative is really rather embarrassing for all concerned.
I also posted a comment on Gernot’s blog that he hasn’t yet had time to moderate (I posted it late last night so I’m expecting that he’s asleep!), so I post it below, because the Internet is immediacy. (You’ll note that I used ‘posted’ instead of ‘written’ for the Australian – I’m becoming contaminated!)
“Hi Gernot,
I welcome the correction, as I noted in the original article. However, what was posted in the Australian left, to my reading, some serious questions open and, while you have addressed most of these here, they weren’t addressed in the original article. I, as I referred to it in my blog post, was reading the Australian and questioning the content because, in my opinion it cast this whole situation in a strange light.
I do find it interesting that you find my blog less accurate than the article as I had believed that I had addressed the article specifically and raised questions where I asked you, if you were reading it, to clarify issues. I never claimed to be the final interpreter on this – the note I finished on was (and I quote):
“If Professor Heiser is reading this, then I welcome any clarification that he can make and, in the Australian have miscast this, then I welcome and will publish any supported correction. I sincerely hope that this is merely a miscommunication because the alternative is really rather embarrassing for all concerned.”
I can assure that my search for clarification and expansion of, what now appears to be, a misleading piece of reportage was genuine. As you have placed a comment on the blog, which I have now approved, people can read both and now see a true dialogue – the power of the Internet.
One point that you don’t seem to have addressed, which I expect will occur in post 2, is how this specifically enhanced the reputation of Australian IT research. You mention that “NICTA isn’t a software business, it’s a national research lab, which produces world-class research and then gets the results out into the real world for the benefit of the nation.” – we’re obviously on the same page here – so are you arguing benefit in terms of to the VCs (as selling the product to an overseas owner is not, to my perspective, of immediate benefit to Australia except as a one-off payment, which is not being returned as originally discussed) or in terms of local jobs retained, despite the foreign ownership? (Although this was not reported in the original article – the intention is to retain the staff of the start-up as a remote division.)
Had I read the original NICTA release, dry and short though it is, I would have had very few questions. What piqued my curiosity was the way that the situation was reported in the paper and, as I believe we both agree, this did raise a number of questions, the vast majority of which you have addressed above.
There are, however, two things that I would like to note. You state that I misinterpret the role of start-ups, when I don’t believe that I refer to them in any way. There may be a subtlety that I’m missing so, again, clarification is welcome. You also say that claims that NICTA sold the labs are wrong, however, from the original article:
“NICTA last week announced it had sold one of its spin-off companies, Open Kernel Labs, that had developed virtualisation security software used on 1.6 billion mobile devices worldwide to the US giant.” (This was the Australian. A similar story was run on ZDNet and elsewhere. On digging, the GD and NICTA pages themselves refer to ‘acquisition’, without stating a seller.)
Given that most of us are not privy to the internal workings of NICTA, you can see how such an interpretation would have arisen, as there are (as you have identified) so many models to choose from. Yes, the investors may have decided it but we on the outside can only go on what we are told and the Australian and ZD reports are pretty decisive – although wrong as it turns out.
Thank you again, very genuinely, for the clarification. I look forward to section 2!
Regards,
Nick.”
“This is simply the standard VC investment model. If you don’t like it, don’t ask for venture capital!”
And I will address this. I always understood why the VC investors got their money, and why the bankers got theirs. I even understood why NICTA would trade away IP in attractive deals in order to attract funding. What, and I realise that this may be me just being slow, I am asking is how a project that has taken at least a chunk of federal funding, which has then parlayed that into a bigger company, is giving a national benefit return on that initial investment, given that it was the catalyst for the later financial structures.
I reiterate that I welcome the clarification as I feel that we have all benefitted from the extra information but I’m not sure that I introduced anything new into that Australian IT story than a dissection and contemplation, again, because it was so damn odd. I am really looking forward to Part 2, which I hope will further discuss the realities of running organisations like NICTA in the 21st Century.
Nick Falkner 