Taught for a Result or Developing a Passion

Posted: December 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

According to a story in the Australian national broadcaster, the ABC, website, Australian school children are now ranked 27th out of 48 countries in reading, according to the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, and that a quarter of Australia’s year 4 students had failed to meet the minimum standard defined for reading at their age. As expected, the Australian government  has said “something must be done” and the Australian Federal Opposition has said “you did the wrong thing”. Ho hum. Reading the document itself is fascinating because our fourth graders apparently struggle once we move into the area of interpretation and integration of ideas and information, but do quite well on simple inference. There is a lot of scope for thought about how we are teaching, given that we appear to have a reasonably Bloom-like breakdown on the data but I’ll leave that to the (other) professionals. Another international test, the Program for International School Assessment (PISA) which is applied to 15 year olds, is something that we rank relatively highly in, which measures reading, mathematics and science. (And, for the record, we’re top 10 on the PISA rankings after a Year 4 ranking of 27th. Either someone has gone dramatically wrong in the last 7 years of Australian Education, or Year 4 results on PIRLS doesn’t have as much influence as we might have expected on the PISA).We don’t yet have the results for this but we expect it out soon.

The PISA report front cover (C) OECD.

The PISA report front cover (C) OECD.

What is of greatest interest to me from the linked article on the ABC is the Oslo University professor, Svein Sjoberg, who points out the comparing educational systems around the globe is potentially too difficult to be meaningful – which is a refreshingly honest assessment in these performance-ridden and leaderboard-focused days. As he says:

“I think that is a trap. The PISA test does not address the curricular test or the syllabus that is set in each country.

Like all of these tests, PIRLS and PISA measure a student’s ability to perform on a particular test and, regrettably, we’re all pretty much aware, or should be by now, that using a test like this will give you the results that you built the test to give you. But one thing that really struck me from his analysis of the PISA was that the countries who perform better on the PISA Science ranking generally had a lower measure of interest in science. Professor Sjoberg noted that this might be because the students had been encouraged to become result-focused rather than encouraging them to develop a passion.

If Professor Sjoberg is right, then is not just a tragedy, it’s an educational catastrophe – we have now started optimising our students to do well in tests but be less likely to go and pursue the subjects in which they can get these ‘good’ marks. If this nasty little correlation holds, then will have an educational system that dominates in the performance of science in the classroom, but turns out fewer actual scientists – our assessment is no longer aligned to our desired outcomes. Of course, what it is important to remember is that the vast majority of these rankings are relative rather than absolute. We are not saying that one group is competent or incompetent, we are saying that one group can perform better or worse on a given test.

Like anything, to excel at a particular task, you need to focus on it, practise it, and (most likely) prioritise it above something else. What Professor Sjoberg’s analysis might indicate, and I realise that I am making some pretty wild conjecture on shaky evidence, is that certain schools have focused the effort on test taking, rather than actual science. (I know, I know, shock, horror) Science is not always going to fit into neat multiple choice questions or simple automatically marked answers to questions. Science is one of the areas where the viva comes into its own because we wish to explore someone’s answer to determine exactly how much they understand. The questions in PISA theoretically fall into roughly the same categories (MCQ, short answer) as the PIRLS so we would expect to see similar problems in dealing with these questions, if students were actually having a fundamental problem with the questions. But, despite this, the questions in PISA are never going to be capable of gauging the depth of scientific knowledge, the passion for science or the degree to which a student already thinks within the discipline. A bigger problem is the one which always dogs standardised testing of any sort, and that is the risk that answering the question correctly and getting the question right may actually be two different things.

Years ago, I looked at the examination for a large company’s offering in a certain area, I have no wish to get sued so I’m being deliberately vague, and it became rapidly apparent that on occasion there was a company answer that was not the same as the technically correct answer. The best way to prepare for the test was not to study the established base of the discipline but it was to read the corporate tracts and practise the skills on the approved training platforms, which often involved a non-trivial fee for training attendance. This was something that was tangential to my role and I was neither of a sufficiently impressionable age nor strongly bothered enough by it for it to affect me. Time was a factor and incorrect answers cost you marks – so I sat down and learned the ‘right way’ so that I could achieve the correct results in the right time and then go on to do the work using the actual knowledge in my head.

However, let us imagine someone who is 14 or 15 and, on doing the practice tests for ‘test X’ discovers that what is important is in hitting precisely the right answer in the shortest time – thinking about the problem in depth is not really on the table for a two-hour exam, unless it’s highly constrained and students are very well prepared. How does this hypothetical student retain respect for teachers who talk about what science is, the purity of mathematics, or the importance of scholarship, when the correct optimising behaviour is to rote-learn the right answers, or the safe and acceptable answers, and reproduce those on demand. (Looking at some of the tables in the PISA document, we see that the best performing nations in the top band of mathematical thinking are those with amazing educational systems – the desired range – and those who reputedly place great value in high power-distance classrooms with large volumes of memorisation and received wisdom – which is probably not the desired range.)

Professor Sjoberg makes an excellent point, which is that trying to work out what is in need of fixing, and what is good, about the Australian education system is not going to be solved by looking at single figure representations of our international rankings, especially when the rankings contradict each other on occasion! Not all countries are the same, pedagogically, in terms of their educational processes or their power distances, and adjacency of rank is no guarantee that the two educational systems are the same (Finland, next to Shanghai-China for instance). What is needed is reflection upon what we think constitutes a good education and then we provide meaningful local measures that allow us to work out how we are doing with our educational system. If we get the educational system right then,  if we keep a bleary eye on the tests we use, we should then test well. Optimising for the tests takes the effort off the education and puts it all onto the implementation of the test – if that is the case, then no wonder people are less interested in a career of learning the right phrase for a short answer or the correct multiple-choice answer.

Core Values of Education and Why We Have To Oppose “Pranking”

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

I’ve had a lot of time to think about education this year (roughly 400 hours at current reckoning) so it’s not surprising that I have some opinions on what constitutes the key values of education. Of course, as was noted at the Creative Innovations conference I went to, a corporate values statement is a wish list that doesn’t necessarily mean much so I’m going to talk about what I see when education is being performed well. After I’ve discussed these, I’m then going to briefly argue for why these values mean that stupid stunts (such as the Royal prank where some thoughtless DJs called up a hospital) should be actions that we identify as cruel and unnecessary interpretations of the term ‘entertainment’.

  • Truth. 

    We start from the assumption that we only educate or train our students in what we, reasonably, assume to be the truth. We give the right answers when we know them and we admit it when we don’t. Where we have facts, we use them. When we are standing on opinion, we identify it. When we are telling a story, where the narrative matters more than the contents, we are careful to identify what we are doing and why we are doing it. We try not to deceive, even accidentally, and we do not make a practice of lying, even to spare someone’s feelings. In order to know the truth, we have to know our subject and we try to avoid blustering, derision and appealing to authority when we feel that we are being challenged.

    There is no doubt that this can be hard in contentious and emerging areas but, as a primary value, it’s at the core of our educational system. Training someone to recite something that is not true, while still popular in many parts of the world, is indoctrination, not education.

  • Respect.

    We respect the students that we teach and, in doing this, we prepare them to respect us. We don’t assume that they are all the same, that they all learn at the same rate, that they have had all the preparation that they need for courses or our experiences, nor do assume that they can take anything that we feel inclined to fling at them. We respect them by treating them as people, as individuals, as vulnerable, emotional and potentially flawed humans. We evaluate their abilities before we test their mettle. We give them space to try again. We do all this because it then allows them, without hypocrisy or obligation, to treat us the same way. Respect of effort and of application does not demand perfection or obsession from either party.

  • Fairness.

    We are objective in our assignment and assessment of work and generous in our interpretations when such generosity does not compromise truth or respect. We do not give false praise but we do all give all praise that is due, at the same time giving all of the notes for improvement. We strive to ensure that every student has the same high-quality and fair experience, regardless of who they are and what they do. When we define the rules, we stick to them, unless we have erred in their construction when, having fixed the rules, we then offer the best interpretation to every student. Our students acting in error or unfairly does not allow us to reciprocate in kind. The fairness of our system is not conditional upon a student being a perfect person and its strength lies in the fact that it is fair for all, regardless. What we say, we mean and what we mean, we say. A student’s results are ultimately the reflection of their own application to the course, relative to their opportunities to excel. Students are not unfairly punished because we have not bothered to work out if they are prepared for the course (which is very different from their own application of effort inside the course, which is ultimately their responsibility moderated by the unforeseen and vagaries of life), nor does the action of one student unduly influence the results of another, except where this is clearly identified and students have sufficient autonomy to control the outcome of this situation.

These stupid pranking stunts on the radio are usually considered acceptable because the person being pranked is contacted after the fact to ask if it can be broadcast. Frankly, I think this is bordering on coercive (because you risk being a bad sport if you don’t participate and I suspect that the radio stations don’t accept a simple first ‘no’) but some may disagree. (It’s worth noting that while the radio station tried to contact the nurses, they failed to get approval to broadcast.)

These pranks are, at heart, valueless lies, usually calculated to embarrass someone or expose them undertaking a given behaviour. They are neither truthful nor respectful. While this is often the high horse of pomposity (haven’t you got a sense of humour), it is important to realise that truly funny things can usually be enjoyed by everyone and that there is a world of difference between a joke that involves old friends and one that exploits strangers. The second situation just isn’t fair. The radio station is setting up a situation that is designed to elicit a response that everyone other than the victim will find amusing, because the victim is somehow funny or vulnerable. Basically, it’s unfair. You don’t get to laugh at or humiliate someone in a public forum just because you think it’s funny – didn’t we get over this in primary school? A lack of fairness often leads to situations that are coercive because we impose cultural norms, or peer-pressure, to force people to ‘go along with the joke’.

I had a student in my office recently, while another academic who happened to be my wife was helping me clear a backlog of paper, and before I discussed his final mark, I asked my wife if she would mind leaving the room. This was because there was no way I could ask the student if he minded discussing his mark with my wife in the room and not risk the situation being coercive. It’s a really simple thing to fix if you think about it. In order to respect the student’s privacy, I needed to be fair in the way that I controlled his ability to make decisions. Now I’m not worried that this student is easily coerced but that’s not my call to make – it’s not up to me to tell a student if they are going to be comfortable or not.

The Royal prank has clearly identified that that we can easily go down very dark and unexpected roads when we start to treat people as props, without sticking to the truth or respecting them enough to think about how they might feel about our actions, and that’s patently unfair. If these are our core values, and again many would disagree, then we have to stand up and object when we see them being mucked around with by our society. As educators, we have to draw a line and say that “just because you think it’s funny, doesn’t mean that you were right to do it” and we can do that and not be humourless or party-poopers. We do it because we want to allow people to still be funny, and have fun, muck around and have a joke with people that they know – because we’ve successfully trained them to know when they should stop, because we’ve correctly instilled the values of truth, respect and fairness.

“You Will Never Amount to Anything!”

Posted: December 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I am currently reading “When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin” by Mick Wall. I won’t go into much of the detail of the book but the message presented around the four members of the group is that most of them did not have the best experiences in school and that, in at least two cases, the statements written on their reports by their teachers were profoundly dismissive. Now, it is of course entirely possible the that the Led Zep lads were, at time of leaving school, incapable of achieving anything – except that this is a total nonsense as it is quite obvious that they achieved a degree of musical and professional success that few contemplate, let alone reach.

You’ll often read this kind of line in celebrity biographies – that semi-mythical reforging of the self after having been judged and found wanting. (From a narrative perspective, it’s not all that surprising as it’s an easy way to increase the tension.) But one of the reasons that it pops up is that such a statement is so damning that it is not surprising that a successful person might want to wander back to the person who said it and say “Really?” But to claim that such a statement is a challenge (as famously mocked in the Simpsons where Principal Skinner says that these children have not future and is forced to mutter, with false bonhomie, ‘Prove me wrong, kids, prove me wrong.’) is confused at best, disingenuous and misdirecting at worst. If you want someone to achieve something, provide a clear description of the task, the means to achieve that task and then set about educating and training. No-one has ever learned brain surgery by someone yelling “Don’t open that skull” so pretending that an entire life’s worth of motivation can be achieved by telling something that they have no worth is piffle. Possibly even balderdash.

You! Prove me wrong!

You! Prove me wrong!

The phrase “You Will Never Amount To Anything” is, in whatever form it is uttered, a truly useless sentiment. It barely has any meaning (isn’t just being alive being something and hence amounting to a small sort of anything?) but, of course, it is not stated in order to achieve an outcome other than to place the blame for the lack of engagement with a given system squarely at the feet of the accused. You have failed to take advantage of the educational opportunities that we have provided and this is such a terminal fault, that the remaining 90% of your life will be spent in a mobile block of amber, where you will be unable to affect any worthwhile interaction with the universe.

I note that, with some near misses, I have been spared this kind of statement but I do feel very strongly that it is really not anything that you can with any credibility or useful purpose. If you happen to be Death, the Grim Reaper, then you can stand at the end of someone’s life and say “Gosh, you didn’t do a great deal did you” (although, again, what does it mean to do anything anyway?) but saying it when someone is between the ages of 16 and 20? You might be able to depend upon the statistical reliability that, if rampant success in our society is only given to 1%, 99% of the time, everyone you say “You will not be a success” will accidentally fall into that category. It’s quite obvious that any number of the characteristics that are worthy of praise in school contribute nothing to the spectacular success enjoyed by some people, where these characteristics are “sitting quietly”, “wearing the correct uniform” or “not chewing gum”. These are excellent facets of compliance and will make for citizens who may be of great utility to the successful, but it’s hard to see many business leaders whose first piece of advice to desperate imitators is “always wear shiny shoes”.

If we are talking about perceived academic ability then we run into another problem, in that there is a great deal of difference between school and University, let along school and work. There is no doubt that the preparation offered by a good schooling system is invaluable. Reading, writing, general knowledge, science, mathematics, biology, the classics… all of these parts of our knowledge and our society can be introduced to students very usefully. But to say that your ability to focus on long division problems when you are 14 is actually going to be the grand limiting factor on your future contribution to the world? Nonsense.

Were you to look at my original degree, you might think “How on Earth did this man end up with a PhD? He appears to have no real grasp of study, or pathway through his learning.” and, at the time of the degree, you’d be right. But I thought about what had happened, learned from it, and decided to go back and study again in order to improve my level of knowledge and my academic record. I then went back and did this again. And again. Because I persevered, because I received good advice on how to improve and, most importantly, because a lot of people took the time to help me, I learned a great deal and I became a better student. I developed my knowledge. I learned how to learn and, because of that, I started to learn how to think about teaching, as well.

If you were to look at Nick Falkner at 14, you may have seen some potential but a worry lack of diligence and effort. At 16, you would have seen him blow an entire year of school exams because he didn’t pay attention. At 17 he made it into Uni, just, but it wasn’t until the wheels really started to fall off that he realised that being loquacious and friendly wasn’t enough. Scurrying out of Uni with a third-grade degree into a workforce that looked at the evidence of my learning drove home that improvements were to be made. Being unemployed for most of a year cemented it – I had set myself up for a difficult life and had squandered a lot of opportunities. And that is when serendipity intervened, because the man who has the office next to me now, and with whom I coffee almost every morning, suggested that I could come back and pursue a Masters degree to make up for the poor original degree, and that I would not have to pay for it upfront because it was available as a government deferred-payment option. (Thank you, again, Kevin!)

That simple piece of advice changed my life completely. Instead of not saying anything or being dismissive of a poor student, someone actually took the time to say “Well, here’s something you could do and here’s how you do it.” And now, nearly 20 years down the track, I have a PhD, a solid career in which I am respected as an educator and as a researcher and I get to inspire and help other students. There’s no guarantee that good advice will always lead to good outcomes (and we all know about the paving on the road to Hell) but it’s increasingly obvious to me that dismissive statements, unpleasant utterances and “cut you loose” curtness are far more likely to do nothing positive at all.

If the most that you can say to a student is “You’re never going to amount to anything”, it might be worth looking in a mirror to see exactly what you’ve amounted to yourself…

A tragic and unintended outcome of an act with no benefit

Posted: December 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Recently, a pair of radio hosts from the Sydney 2Day FM station prank-called the hospital in which the Duchess of Cambridge was receiving treatment for medical issues associated with her pregnancy. Pretending to be the Queen, at 5:30am UK time, they managed to fool the nurse who was staffing reception (as the normal reception staff were not on duty) and got put through to the ward, where they managed to extract some information. Exceedingly sadly, after the hoax became apparent, this rather thoughtless and unfunny invasion of privacy has now had a tragic final act, in that the nurse who was believed to have passed the call through, Jacintha Saldanha, has been found dead, apparently by her own hand. You can read about this in a reasonable summary from the Sydney Morning Herald.

There is (currently) no direct connection between the prank event and the death of Ms Saldanha but, given who the people and the profile that we are talking about, one can easily imagine the pressure (real or imaginary) that someone would be under if they had failed to protect any patient, let alone the one that we are discussing. Of course, the radio show hosts did not intend for this outcome and, before there are any more calls for their heads, let us remember moral accident and the fact that, while their action was an inexplicable invasion of privacy, foolish, unfeeling and in poor taste, it was never intended to be lethal. Should they face questions? Yes.

Why?

Because it is not hard to summon the modicum of empathy required to understand why a woman who is experiencing any difficulties at all during pregnancy might have the reasonable expectation to be left alone and not be picked on for the delight of two radio hosts and their audience. Regardless of which family the Duke of Cambridge was born into and into which the Duchess of Cambridge has married, they are people and, by all accounts, live a surprisingly normal life for the couple who will (most likely) one day rule as the King and Queen of the United Kingdom. It is none of my business as to the details of the Duchess’ illness or condition, unless she wishes to release it, any more than it is the Queen’s business to prank call me into revealing the mark I received for Numerical Analysis I the first time I sat it, in the hopes of embarrassing me.

(With the greatest respect, Your Majesty, it was a 23 Fail because I did not attend lectures or do enough of the preparatory work. I would be grateful if you would consider using that knowledge wisely, Ma’am.)

As it stands there is the usual angry media reaction (and popular backlash) one sees when a stupid prank goes horribly wrong but what was never truly questioned is why on earth we persist with this nonsense in the first place? I often ask my students very direct questions when they tell me things. “Why did you do this?” is, apparently, a startling question to some of my students because it seems to stun them with its simplicity.

“You performed this action that had no positive value or it had a negative and unpleasant impact on the world. Why did you do this?” is the simplest, sanest question that should be asked whenever anybody does something like that. No doubt all of my poor Grand Challenge students are waiting for me to type Cui Bono? so I’ll get that out of the way but, in reality, cui bono (who benefits) seeks to locate the benefiting party to assign malign intent, rather than quisquam bono?, which is what I’m asking here: does anyone actually benefit. (My Latin is very rusty so I welcome corrections from classical scholars and revenant Romans.)

I often mutter things along the lines of “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”, mainly because I’m now middle-aged and it’s somewhat expected, but also because I strongly believe that we are moving into an age where the ability to do stupid things on the global scale is now within the reach of anyone with a telephone, a web browser and a general lack of empathy or kindness.

It is because I understand people, and I do have empathy, that I have the deepest sympathies for the family of Ms Saldanha, a husband and two teenagers, who must be suffering through a terrible and public loss, but are doing so with a great deal of dignity as I understand it. However, it would be wrong not to have some feeling for the radio hosts themselves because it would be the most egregious error to assign intent to their thoughtlessness. They did not set out to create this situation. However, and let me be clear, any situation that they did set out was almost completely without benefit to anyone, lacked respect, lacked empathy, was invasive, was unpleasant and should never have been attempted. Their lack of genuine apology could be seen, until recently, in the Tweeted advertisements carried in one of the host’s feeds until it was suspended. (For me, it is the lack of empathy that is sadly unsurprising. Why should Michael Christian be doing anything other than his job in this situation: producing high impact media buzz and then tapping it to drive up ratings? Of course, if he had a real sense of what he was doing, he would have pulled the prank either before it started or once they got past the reception, because they were about to violate someone’s privacy. Are we at fault because of who we select to hold the broadcast roles? Can you blame the gladiators for being bloodthirsty when we’re screaming around the circus?)

My next question to my students would normally be “So what now?” What is it that the student is planning to change in order for this situation to not occur again? In the case of my students, they are juggling work, family and being young. However, almost all of the things that my students do have some benefit (pub crawls notwithstanding). In this case, the CEO of the radio station has offered that, while no-one could have foreseen this, prank calls had been going on for years… Yes. And? We died of cholera for years, too. Let’s not argue tradition for something that has as its prime fruits the embarrassment and humiliation of another person, where we play with people without knowing how robust they are for this game.

Jacintha Saldanha is, tragically, dead and it does appear that this questionable act of entertainment may have been associated with her death. Perhaps, now is not a bad time to put the prank call into the same giant old wardrobe where we put all of the behaviours that never really made any sense and certainly make no sense when we should know so much better – and let’s stop the practice.

Why are we doing something? What is the benefit? Is our enjoyment really worth humiliating or embarrassing someone else on public radio? Where is the benefit in this, for anyone? If my students can drag together sensible and coherent answers to this when asked, so can our broadcast institutions and our journalists.

Brief Stats Update: Penultimate Word Count Notes

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

I occasionally dump the blog and run it through some Python script deliciousness to find out how many words I’ve written. This is no measure of worth or quality, more a metric of my mania. As I noted in October, I was going to hit what I thought was my year target much earlier. Well, yes, it came and it went and, sure enough, I plowed through it. At time of writing, on published posts alone, we’re holding at around 1.2 posts/day, 834 words/post and a smidgen over 340,000 words, which puts me (in word count) just after Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” (311,596) but well behind her opus “Atlas Shrugged” (561,996). In terms of Objectivism? Let’s just say that I won’t be putting any kind of animal into that particular fight at the moment.

Now, of course, I can plug in the numbers and see that this puts my final 2012 word count somewhere in the region of 362,000 words. I must admit, there is a part of me that sees that number and thinks “Well, we could make it an even 365,000 and that’s a neat 1000 words/day” but, of course, that’s dumb for several reasons:

  1. I have not checked in detail exactly how well my extraction software is grabbing the right bits of the text. There are hyperlinks and embellishments that appear to be taken care of, but we are probably only on the order of 95% accuracy here. Yes, I’ve inspected it and I haven’t noticed anything too bad, but there could be things slipping through. After all of this is over, I am going to drag it all together and analyse it properly but, let me be clear, just because I can give you a word count to 6 significant figures, doesn’t mean that it is accurate to 6 significant figures.
  2. Should I even be counting those sections of text that are quoted? I do like to put quotes in, sometimes from my own work, and this now means I’m either counting something that I didn’t write or I’m counting something that I did write twice!
  3. Should I be counting the stats posts themselves as they are, effectively, metacontent? This line item is almost above that again! This way madness lies!
  4. It was never about the numbers in the first place, it was about thinking about my job, my students, my community and learning and teaching. That goal will have been achieved whether I write one word/day from now on or ten thousand!

But, oh, the temptation to aim for that ridiculous and ultimately deceptive number. How silly but, of course, how human to look at the measurable goal rather than the inner achievement or intrinsic reward that I have gained from the thinking process, the writing, the refining of the text, the assembly of knowledge and the discussion.

Sometime after January the 1st, I will go back and set the record straight. I shall dump the blog and analyse it from here to breakfast time. I will release the data to interested (and apparently slightly odd) people if they wish. But, for now, this is not the meter that I should be watching because it is not measuring the progress that I am making, nor is it a good compass that I should follow.

Information and Education: Other Cultures, Other Views

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

I’ve had the good fortune to be able to start finding out about how other cultures deal with information and education. This is important for several reasons. Firstly, it helps to remind me that the perception of the dominant monoculture is both primarily a perception and an accident of history, geography and timing. Secondly, it reminds me how easy it is to slip into the monocultural assumption. Finally, it helps me to prepare my students for a world that could be very different from this one.

I’m not a true relativist, I think that some cultural practices (including but not limited to formalised child abuse and female circumcision) are indefensible because they are far too great an imposition on the individual. So let me get that cultural bias onto the table to allow you to frame what I say next. Some ideas, especially when we start dealing with the value of wisdom, and the specific roles of the knowledge keepers in the dispensation and passage of that wisdom, fascinate me but I am still not sufficiently versed to be able to discuss it with any authority or detail. I can, however, discuss ideas with my students such as secret knowledge, without being a Mason, or gendered knowledge, without being of a practising culture, because to do so allows them to realise that there is more to the world than European-derived cultural norms. We don’t have to necessarily agree with all of these other ideas, especially where gender discrimination is preventing access to essential knowledge or limiting advancement, but it is important to understand that it exists.

The role of the knowledge keeper varies with culture and it can be quite confronting for my students to encounter a situation where a single person has the knowledge and may not be available all the time. At the recent Adelaide Computing Education Conventicle that I ran, two presenters from the University of South Australia presented work on integrating Australian Indigenous Culture into ICT project work and discussed the way that it changed the projects. The person needed is in hospital for treatment? Then you’ll have to wait until they get back because they are the person that you have to talk to. A friend has told me about this before in the context of geological information in the Australian Outback. You want to know about this section of the land? Well, you can’t ask the men about it, it’s not their land. If you want to ask the women, then you’re going to have to work out who can ask it and what can be told in a way that can be viewed from people outside (and men).

Just because we want to know something from a specific culture does not give us the right to demand it and getting this across to students is, I think, one of the most important steps in establishing a mutual respect between cultures and a way of avoiding misunderstandings in the future. It’s easy to start jumping up and down in that tiresome Western manner about this kind of information management but I think we can be pretty sure that the majority of the indigenous population of Australia would have quite a lot to say about having to conform to our cultural norms, so we should think pretty carefully before we start placing our rule sets over their knowledge.

Uncle Lewis O’Brien, Elder of the Kaurna people, noted once that it was common to welcome newcomers to your land, to show them around so that they could see how good the land was and how much care was being taken of it, but it was always done in the understanding that, one day, the visitor would go home. As he noted, wryly, perhaps his people should have been clearer on that last bit with the original white settlers. But we were here now.

Cultural issues are important to the people in that culture and working out how we can marry these requirements allows us to demonstrate our maturity as people and our level of comfort with our own beliefs. If, one day, somebody shows me something so amazing and truthful that I start believing in a new belief system or an entirely new way of living, then I hope that I would be able to cope with it and make sense of it. In New Zealand, Maori medical researchers are working through the cultural taboo of handling the dead in order to meet the educational requirements of working with tissue samples. If we can work with closing shops on Saturday or Sunday for Synagogue or Church (as we did for centuries), then we can have some thinking about incorporating the living beliefs of other cultures without dying of shock or making racist statements about ‘backwards cultures’. You go and thrive in the middle of Australia for a while and tell me how much knowledge it required to avoid dying of thirst on the third day.

I’m always worried when we start rejecting other cultures because monocultures are not strong, they’re weak. By definition, they are static and immutable – the rock, not the water. They’re prone to a single attack vector and, if they fail, they fail on the massive scale. I’m not talking just about our unnatural dependency on one banana or one wheat, I’m talking about real disasters that have occurred because of a lack of resistance to animal-borne diseases. The current thinking is that both North America and Australia were far more heavily populated than the original European explorers thought, but that earlier contact had introduced devastating levels of disease that almost wiped out the populations – making the subsequent colonisation and seizure of land easier. These were accidental resistance monocultures, caused by geographical isolation. Now we are connected and we have no excuse for this.

What my students have to understand is that the world of three hundred years ago was not the world of two hundred or one hundred years ago. Empires rise and fall. Cultures come and go. Today’s leader is tomorrow’s footnote. Learning how to work with other cultures and how to reduce the dependency on a single strand may be what changes the way that our history unfolds. I’m not naive enough to believe that we’re at the end of history (the end of conflict) but I think that we’re sufficiently well connected and well informed that we can tell our students that not everything different is wrong and scary, and that not everything familiar is right and just.

I wonder what they’ll be saying about us, in 2112?

The Invisible Fragility of our World of Knowledge

Posted: December 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

If I were to mention that I was currently researching Rongorongo, as background for a story in which the protagonists communicated in a range of reverse boustrophedonic texts, there are three likely outcomes.

  1. You would roll your eyes and close the browser, or,
  2. You would think “Aha, that’s what I was talking about last night at the Friends of Rapanui Quiz Night. How apt!”, or,
  3. You would go and look up Rongorongo and boustrophedon in Wikipedia.

What I am fairly sure that most of you will not do, is to go and look up the information in a book, go to a library or even ask another human. (Some of you will have used physical means such as books or libraries because you are being deliberate physical users. I am after the usage patterns that your adopt unconsciously, or as a matter of actual habit, then those that are employed because of a deliberate endeavour to use another source.) There is no doubt that we live in an amazing world of immediately available information and that it has changed the way that we use, store and retrieve information but this immediacy has come at a cost: we tend not to use or consult physical media as much. As a result, there is less of the physical to hand, most of the time. I have noticed a major change in the way that I use information and, while I tend to read and annotate material on printed paper (using a fountain paper, no less, so I am not judging anyone for their affectations), I search and edit in the digital form. Why? Each form has its own efficiencies.

A physical artefact that we can no longer read.

A physical artefact that we can no longer read.

The absence of the physical artefact is often not noticeable unless we are cut off from the Internet or from our stored versions of the material. Last week, my laptop decided that it would no longer boot and I realised, with mounting horror, that my only copies of certain works in progress were sitting on this ‘dead’ machine. Why weren’t they backed up? Because I was not connected to the Internet for a few hours and I had left my actual backup device at home, to reduce the risk of losing both laptop and backup in the same localised catastrophe.

The majority of the on-line information repositories are remarkable in their ease of use and sheer utility – as long as you can connect to them .We, however, have an illusion of availability and cohesion that is deceptive and it is the comfortable analogue of the printed page that lulls us into this. Wikipedia, for example, presents a single page full of text, just like a book does. It is only when you look at the History and the Discussion that it dawns on you that each character on the page could have been contributed by a difference source. While the printed page is the final statement of a set of arguments between the authors, the editors and their mutual perceptions of reality, it is static once printed. In Wikipedia, its strength and its weakness is that the argument never ends. Anything on a publicly editable page is inherently fragile and ephemeral. What is there today may not be there tomorrow and there is no guarantee that what appears sound now will be anything other than horrible and deliberately broken in a second.

The fragility doesn’t stop there, however, because we don’t actually have any part of Wikipedia inside our offices, unless you happen to be Jimmy Wales. (Hi!) Wikipedia.org, the domain name of Wikipedia, is registered in California, but the server I was connected to (for the queries I put above) was in Washington State, and there were some 17 active network devices involved in routing traffic from me (in Adelaide) to the server (in Washington) and then getting the information back. This doesn’t count the active electronic devices that I can’t see in this path and, believe me, there will be a lot of them. Now we build a lot of redundancy into the global network that we call the Internet (the network of networks of networks) but a major catastrophe on the West Coast will quickly force so much traffic onto those backup links that information flow will stop and, for some good technical reasons, it will then start to fall over.

So the underlying physical pathways that actually shunt the network information from point to point could fall over. At that point, if I had a book on the linguistics of Easter Island, I could read it by torchlight even if I had no local power. A severe power failure here or in enough places along the way, or at Wikipedia’s data centres? Suddenly, my ability to find out anything is blocked.

But let’s look at the information itself. People have been editing the Rongorongo page for over 10 years. The first version (that we can see, Wikipedia can invisibly delete revisions) is recorded for the 25th of November, 2002. Happy double digits, Rongorongo page! Since then there have been roughly 3000 edits. Are all of them the same quality? Hmm. Here are some comments:

14 April 2006, “reinstate link to disambiguate Rongorongo, wife of Turi, NZ”

18 May 2006, “If I want to be blocked, why do I improve these pages? REMEMBER LIUVIGILD! TRY BLOCKING ME!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA” (sic)

18 May 2006, “Excuse my insolence. This is not vandalism, as it is all true. Why do you insist on reverting it? Please send a PERSONAL message of explanation. Sincerely, 64.107.172.130”

28 April 2007, “Inhabitants of Easter Island have many names for it.”

7 April 2011, “A picture of a banana leaf is not helpful here. I looked on this banana leaf for scribblings. I know what one looks like, and if someone doesn’t, they can read about it at banana.”

12 November, 2012, “What’s wrong, Kwamikagami? It is what it is, isn’t it? Just a straight up comparison of rongorongo and Indus Valley glyphs, nothing more. I’d love to know which ones are ‘not true”‘according to you”

There are periods when this page is changing every few minutes and sometimes the data is the same for days or even months. But most people don’t know this because they never think to look in the history or talk sections. Right now, it appears that someone is disputing the authority of Kwamikagami, a person who has carried out a lot of edits on this page. This is important because if you say to someone “Hey, look at this page” then 3000 edits over 10 years says that the chances of the page changing in a day is something like 80%. The burstiness would have an impact on this but the general idea is that the simple page on a dead text(?) is more likely to change on a daily basis than not.

Does this make Wikipedia any better or any worse than the printed page? I think it makes it different because we have to treat it as an evolving discussion that we have walked in on, because of its inherent fragility and ephemeral nature.

We live in amazing times, where I can use a small hand-held device to access almost everything that our species has created. And yet, when I go to look at how robust this knowledge source is and how vulnerable we are to losing our connection to that knowledge, I am reminded that we are going to have to work out how to do this properly. If we give up the fixed physical forms (books, CDs, DVDs), then so be it, but we must make sure that we deal with this fragility before we become too seduced by the immediacy.  We have to think about this for our students too. How do we provide them with artefacts that they can consult down the line, when they need to look something up? Books have no licensing agreements, never expire and do not have to be abandoned when a digital format changes. Yet, they have none of the advantages.

I mention this because I am really looking forward to seeing how people address and solve this challenge – how can we have the best of the immediate and convenient, while having the enduring presence and guarantee of future access? Rongorongo itself is a physical artefact for which we have lost the knowledge of reading, or if it is even a text at all. It’s a reminder that we have faced this problem before and we have not solved it sufficiently well. Perhaps this time.

David and Goliath: Who Needs The Strategy? (CI 2012 Masterclass)

Posted: December 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I attended a second masterclass on the first day of Creative Innovations, this one entitled “Strategic Diagnosis and Action”, given by Richard Rumelt from UCLA. Richard gave a fascinating and well-polished presentation on how you can actually get a strategy that you can use, as oppose to something that you can print up, put on the wall, and completely ignore. Richard’s definition of strategy is pretty straightforward:

A strategy is a coherent mix of policy and action designed to surmount a high-stakes challenge.

As I believe I’ve noted before, having a strategy is not just useful in terms of knowing where you’re going, it also allows you to make a choice between two (apparently) equal choices. Richard’s question is “What are we going to do in order to meet a challenge?” and, in my application, this makes any choice a matter of “which of these choices will give me the greatest assistance in meeting the challenge?”

As Richard said in his talk, when David met Goliath, if you’re Goliath you don’t think you need a strategy. David, however, has a high-stakes challenge and better be as fast with his mind as he is with his feet. Goliath winning? That’s not a strategy story; a strategy story is about the discovery or creation of strength (where we’re surprised to see it).

David has a post-negotiation debrief with the head of Goliath industries.

David has a post-negotiation debrief with the head of Goliath industries.

Another point that was clearly emphasised is that if you take a challenge focus to your strategy, your strategy can be specific to that challenge and, as a result, clearer and more goal focused. The example of Apple was given. When Steve Jobs returned in 1997, he had to implement a new strategy but it wasn’t one of growth or market domination, it was a survival strategy. Cutting 15 desktops to 1? Survival. Cutting 5 of the 6 national retailers? Survival? Off-shoring everything possible  to reduce expenditure? Survival. This is a coherent strategy with clear and sharp action – this is a survival strategy. The strategy is all about addressing the most important challenge that you have. If it’s survival, fix that first.

The speaker had apparently spoken to Jobs in 1998 and Jobs had said that he was going to “wait for the next big thing”. Well, in 1998 that made sense. Rather than being a second-rate (or small share) PC producer, Apple’s approach was to find a new market where they could dominate. The survival strategy kept the company going for long enough that they could switch to a new strategy of dominating the new music and mobile markets. And, of course, by doing this, Jobs got to set the new rules for that area. There’s a reason that iPods, by default, only work with iTunes and that Apple has complete vertical control. That reason is predominantly because it allows Apple to totally control that market, to avoid having to go through the hard lessons of 1997 and 1998 again.

So, taking this into my Educational Sector setting, what is the strategy that Universities should be employing? Well, first of all, the global tertiary sector is not one business so we’re restricted to individual institution decision making, even where state and federal guidelines are in play. The survival strategy is, to me, effectively off the table. If global education is under an extinction threat then we are facing a catastrophe of such proportion that human survival is probably the requisite strategy. If the MOOC is so successful, and of the required quality, that it can replace the University then a survival strategy for the Unis is ethically questionable as we are spending more money to achieve the same result, assuming that when MOOCs are fully costed they end up being cheaper.

So, either way we slice it, a survival strategy for Universities doesn’t actually look like a valid one. But what does a strategy for a University look like anyway? Let’s step back and ask what Richard things a general strategy is and isn’t.

Firstly, strategy is not a set of goals and, according to Richard, you know it’s a bad strategy when it’s all performance goals and no diagnosis and analysis. “We will increase revenue by 20%.” Great. How?

You know it’s a bad strategy when it’s all fluff. “Our fundamental strategy is one of customer-centric intermediation” from a bank. Good, you’re a retail bank, now what? How do you apply a values statement meaningfully to 30,000 people? Richard sees this as a childish approach – a third grade recitation of “I will not chew gum in school” and not productive when contaminating a strategy.

If no-one has bothered to diagnose what the problem is – bad strategy. To act with intelligence and to get a good strategy, you need to define the nature of the problem. (One of the most refreshing things about the new strategy that is about to be released for my Uni is that I know that a great deal of problem definition underpins it – so I’m quite looking forward to reading it when it’s released shortly. I am quite hopeful that little or any of the critique here will apply.)

What about if you have 47 strategies, 178 Action items and Action Item #122 is “Develop a strategic plan”? It’s a dog’s dinner that everything has gone into that you could find in the fridge, with no discipline, diagnosis, analysis or thought.

So how do we make a good strategy? Diagnose the challenge. Provide guiding policy. Build a set of coherent actions into the strategy and don’t just provide goals as if they are self-solving problem elements.

In terms of Universities, and the whole higher education sector, this means that we not only have to work out what our challenges are, but we have to pick challenges that we can solve. (A previous Prime Minister of Australia famously declared that “by 1990, no Australian child will be living in poverty.” Given that the definition of poverty in Australia is relative to the affluence enjoyed by other sectors, rather than the ‘true’ international definition of subsistence, this is declaring war on an unwinnable challenge. The goal “Stop the drug trade” is equally fraught as it requires legal powers that do not, and may not, exist.)

What are the key challenges facing Universities? Well, if we take survival off the table for the institutions, we change the challenge focus to “what are the key challenges facing the post-school education market in Australia?” and that gives us an entirely new lens on the problem.

I have a lot of thinking to do but, as I said, I’m looking forward to what our new strategic plan will look like for the next 5 years, because I hope that it will help me to identify a subset of challenges that I can look at. Having done that, then I can ask “which are the ones I can help to solve?”

Systems Thinking (CI 2012 MasterClass on the Change Lab)

Posted: December 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I can’t quite believe how much mileage I’m getting out of the first masterclass but it’s taking me almost as long to go through my notes as it did to write them! I should be back into a semi-normal posting cycle fairly soon – thanks for any patience that you have chosen to extend. 🙂

Can we see all of a system if we’re only in contact with one part? The Change Lab facilitators used the old parable of the six blind man and the elephant to remind us that we can be completely correct about our perception but, due to limitations in our horizon, we fail to appreciate the whole. Another example that was brought up was the role of the police in the protection of abused women and children. If a police officer can look at a situation and think either “Well, I don’t think thats my problem” or “I don’t know what to do”, it’s easy to see how the protective role of the police officer becomes focused on the acute and the extraordinary, rather than the chronic and the systemic.

(That theme, a change in thinking and support from acute to chronic, showed up periodically throughout the conference and my notes.)

In the area of study, the police were retrained to identify what they had to do if they attended and thought that there might be a problem. The police had to get involved, their duties now included the assurance of safety for the at-risk family members and, if they couldn’t get involved themselves, their duty was to find someone else who could fix it and make the connection. We do have protective systems and mechanisms for abused people in domestic situations but there was often a disconnect between domestic violence events that police attended (acute and extraordinary events) and the connecting of people into the existing service network.

Of course, this was very familiar to me because we have the same possibility of disconnection in the tertiary sector. It’s easy to say “go and see the Faculty Office” but it’s that bit harder to ring up the Faculty Office, find the right person, brief them on what a student has already discussed with you and then hand the student over. However, that second set of events is what should happen if you want to minimise the risk of disconnection.

It’s possible to do a remarkable job in some parts of your work and do a terrible job in others, because you don’t realise that you are supposed to be responsible for other areas. It has taken me years to work out how many more things that are required of me as an educator. Yes, scholarship and the practise of learning and teaching are the core but how do we do that with real, breathing students? Here are my current thoughts, based on the police example:

  1. Getting Involved: If a student comes to me with a problem, then if I can fix it, I should try and fix it. My job does not begin when I walk into the lecture theatre and finish when I leave the room – I do have a real and meaningful commitment to my students while they are in my course. Yes, this is more work. Yes, this takes more time. Yes, I don’t know what to do sometimes and that’s scary. However, I do hope that my students know that I’m trying and, even when I’m moving slowly, I’m still involved.
  2. The Assurance of Safety: Students have a right to feel safe and to be safe when they’re studying. That means a learning space free from discrimination, bullying and fear, working in an atmosphere of mutual respect. If they feel unsafe, then they should feel safe to come to me to talk about it. This also means that students have a right to feel safe in the pursuit of their studies: no indifferent construction of assignment where 60% of students fail and it’s dismissed as ‘dumb students’.
  3. If You Can’t Fix It, Find Someone Who Can: Once you’ve done a PhD, one of the key things you work out is how much you don’t know. My Uni, like most Unis, is a giant and complex administrative structure. I don’t have the answer to all of the questions but I do have a spreadsheet of duties for people in my school and a phone book. However, saying “Go to X” is never going to be as good as trying to help someone by connecting them to another person and handing them over. If I can answer a question, I should try to. If I can’t, I should try and find the right person and then connect the student. The final part of this is that I should follow up where I can to see what happened and learn so I know the answer for next time.

The final point is, to me, fascinating because it has made me aware of how hard it can be to find the answer, even when you’re inside the system as a staff member! I always tell my students that if they need something done and aren’t making headway, get me involved because I have the big, scary signature block on my e-mail. Now, mostly our culture is very good and you don’t have to be a Professor or Associate Dean to get progress made… but it is funny how much more attention you sometimes get. I’m very happy to use my (really very insignificant) mild corner of borrowed status if it will help someone to start on the pathway to fixing a problem but I’m also very happy to report that it’s rare that I have to use it, except for the occasional person outside of the University.

It’s important to note that I don’t always succeed in doing all of this. I’m always involved and I’m always working to guarantee safety, but the work involved in a connected handover is sometimes so large that I don’t actually have enough time or resources to close the connection. This, to me, illustrates a good place to focus my efforts on improving the entry points to our systems so that we all end up at the right destination with the minimum number of false starts and dead ends.

Like I said, we’re normally pretty good but I think that we can be better – and thinking about our system as a system makes me aware of how many things I need to do as well as educate, when I’m calling myself an educator.

More on the Change Lab: Creative Innovations 2012 Day 1 (still)

Posted: November 30, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

(Yeah, I’m slowly adding content. I just came from a dinner that pretty much defies description so you’ll have to just give me love for actually taking the time to write this at midnight instead of going to bed. 🙂 )

I spoke before about the Change Lab but here are the key steps.

1. An innovative approach that is systemic, participative and creative
2. Collective effort to address a vital, complex challenge in a given systems
3 A committed alliance of political, economic and cultural leaders in the system
4 A rhythmic process of acting and reflecting
5 A structure container for building capacities for co-initiating co-sensing co-presencing co-creating and co-evolving
6 A safe space for practising how to exercise both power and love

Whoah – what? Power and love? This is a form of framing to show how two very different camps think about the work.

POWER: One camp says that the only thing that matters is individual interests, ambitions and capacity to act.
LOVE:  Other camp focused on what’s good for the whole, the best solution, that’s the only thing that matters

Here’s the quote from the Reverend Martin Luther King, Junior:

“Power without love is reckless and abusive. Love without power is sentimental and anaemic.”

So we must attend to both the power and the love as part of the whole.

Ok, this kind of things is easy to say but the guy who was saying this was Dr Adam Kahane – he’s gone to places to look at difficult situations and if he thinks this works then I’m willing to listen. Adam was in Bogota with politicians and militia in one room, including people who had made death threats against each other, and had guerrillas calling in on the phone to be part of the scenario generation.

“Do I have to agree to a ceasefire to take part in the scenario?” (Random guerrilla)

(The answer was no – no preconditions to the scenario because you just wanted people in the same place)

What we have to face is that some problems are so big that it will take more than our friends and family to solve them. We may have to work with strangers – or our enemies.

Think about that.

You’ve been fighting someone for so long that you don’t really remember all the details – but you know that you hate each other and that you have both done bad things to each other recently. Suddenly, something comes up and it’s huge. It’s a wicked problem, one that is complex and hard to deal with or even understand. You can’t solve it alone. Your enemy can’t solve it alone.

Can you solve the initial problem of getting these two people into the room just to even talk about things? Then, having done that, can you work out how to work together on the thing that threatens you both and, somehow, act in concert to deal with it?

What if it’s so big that it’s bigger than both of you? Now, not only do you have to work together on something, you have to find someone else who will work with your semi-dysfunctional mutual hatred society. Maybe the only person who can help you is the person that you both hate second to each other? Point 2 of the approach talks about a collective effort and 3 demands that the leader, the people with agency who can change things, are the people who should be at the table.

Does it have to be Kings, warlords or CEOs? It depends on how entrenched they are in the status quo. If all the CEO is going to say it “Hey, we’re great”, then send someone who is nearly as powerful but actually has their eyes open.

I spoke to Adam tonight at the dinner and our exchange went like this:

Nick: “Thanks for a great talk, Adam. Listening to you talk about Bogota gave me hope. I don’t have to deal with warlords and guerrillas, I just have to get some academics around a table.”

Adam: “You’re welcome, but I was trying to change academics for years and I just gave up. Remember Kissinger’s quote about academics? (Kissinger, who was apparently quoting Sayre on Issawi)”

Issawi (from the grave): “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.”

Sayre (from the grave): “That is why academic politics are so bitter.”

Now I realise that Adam was being facetious, he’s a highly amusing man, but it is slightly scary to hear this from a man who was willing to tell people to stop complaining about sitting next to someone who had tried to kill them five times, because he was trying to stop the sixth attempt.

I like the Power and Love framing – I think I’m far too prone to that sentimental ‘love’ approach,without giving enough attention to the requirement of people to be people! I think I’ll have to buy Adam’s book tomorrow!

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