The Future of the Text Book: A Printbook, an eText and a Custom walk into a bar.

Posted: October 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Well, 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?

The Reputation of Australian IT IS Enhanced: A Closing Point

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

Professor 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.

Enhancing the Reputation of Australian IT Research – by giving it away?

Posted: September 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

(Update: Gernot has responded to this blog and has found fault with both it and the original article. I have responded to him. You can read his article here and my comment below that, or just look at the comments on this post. Thanks again, Gernot, for the clarifications.)

(Update 2: 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!

As I noted on his blog post, the article took a tone that I responded to and, with additional information, I can clearly see both the benefit as expressed and the reasons behind such a decision. I have left this and the follow-up posts intact, with these updates, to show the evolution of the discussion. Please make sure that you read both Parts 1 and 2 of Gernot’s response if you’re going to read this!)

I stumbled across this article in the Australian (Australia’s national newspaper) inside their AustralianIT section. In it, it was announced that the Australian research body National ICT Australia had sold “groundbreaking technologies” to a US company, for virtualisation security software that was used on 1.6 billion mobile devices worldwide. The spun-off company that was sold, Open Kernel (OK) Labs, was sold in its entirety and with no provision of royalties back to NICTA. Now, before we go any further, let’s talk about NICTA. NICTA is Australia’s Information and Communication Technology Research Centre of Excellence, employing about 700 people and funded by the Australian government. One of NICTA’s primary goals is to apply the high-impact research it develops to create national benefit and wealth for Australia. Remember this, it’s important.

Now let’s go back to the sale of OK Labs and, if you read the article carefully, you’ll see that there is some serious non-discussion of how much money changed hands and whether the Australian government, or NICTA, would receive any payment back at all from the sale. The former CTO and co-founder, Professor Gernot Heiser, has stated that while he couldn’t reveal the cost of the technology, it was about 25 person years of development. He then goes on to point out that the original micro-kernel was open source and hence no royalties accrued, but they had received some payments for it. (In the past, I think?) The second kernel was developed after the original OK Labs had been spun off, with NICTA retaining a minority share, but that NICTA didn’t have any share or role in its development, hence that had transferred wholesale to the new US owner and, again, no royalties. The third micro-kernel was a research outcome from NICTA but hadn’t been deployed commercially – but this was moot as OK Labs had received an exclusive licence to use it, then purchased it outright and NICTA had obtained some equity without cash in OK Labs as a result.

Got that? Now let’s get to the profit sharing. Firstly, there has been no indication whether NICTA would receive any payment back from the sale to balance against the initial investment of taxpayer funds.

Hmm.

Any profit from the deal went to OK Labs investors initially and “anything left” is distributed to shareholders, which included NICTA. (Remember that they traded valuable and NICTA developed research for a greater stake of the pie, which will be valuable if “anything is left”.)

Hmmm.

Let me add the final paragraph of the article here, because I can’t do it any better justice:

Professor Heiser said professional bankers were engaged to make the sale “and they didn’t do it for free”. He said the sale of OK Labs enhanced the reputation of Australian IT research.

Financially, this is pretty much what has happened.

I can only hope that this is the worst-written, hatchet-job of an article because, otherwise, I’m flabbergasted. It appears that a government funded body has managed to develop and deploy a technology while systematically ensuring that any actual benefit from IP developed on these monies was distributed to everyone else before a single dollar flowed back in to turn over the research cycle once more. The investors are making money, NICTA traded some valuable IP for magic beans and may not get any money, the bankers are making money and, somehow, in the scope of this operatically complex financial dance, where the private benefit is enormous, Professor Heiser then turns around and sticks a public benefit statement on the end. We’ve enhanced the reputation of Australian IT research.

How does this … situation enhance anyone’s opinion of our research? Who is going to know in a year’s time where that research came from and why will they ever have to know?

The standard shining light in Australian IT from public funding is the CSIRO WiFi patent which is scheduled to attract royalty payments of roughly $1 billion over the next 5-10 years. This is the model that everyone explains to you when you first get into University research and, if you have anything commercialisable, expect a knock on the door from your local research innovation group because everyone wants another CSIRO patent. A billion dollars buys a lot of research.

I don’t know how you can possible slice up 25 person years of time and trade that for a peppercorn in potentia, with federal funding and the dominant position of NICTA on the Australian academic research scene, and possibly call this enhancing the reputation of Australian IT Research. Why, yes, I’m sure investors will want to come back, get us to pay for it, trade it away, sell it to them with no hope of recouping our investment and then not require royalties. I have no doubt that this may bring more investors but in the same way that a wounded fish attracts sharks. The enhanced reputation of the fish is a fleeting experience and is hardly enjoyable.

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.

The Complex Roles Of Universities In The Period Of Globalization – Altbach – Part 3

Posted: September 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

To finish this triptych, I’d like to look at Altbach’s assessment of contemporary issues. Private education providers are one of the most obvious recent developments and, with the erosion of the public good motivator, this is no real surprise. It’s less of a surprise when you affix the word “Profit-making” in front of the words ‘education provider’. Given that there is growing demand for education and also given that we are blurring the lines between the institutions, it becomes easy to see why a new market has exploded for people who wish to provide education, or something like it, at a reasonable fee with a possibility of making lots and lots of money. This, however, has an impact on the public sector because it reduces the students who may have come to us for a variety of reasons, especially when the private institutions are targeting the more wealthy in some way. Suddenly, we find ourselves having to justify which kinds of knowledge we are teaching in the public sector because the type of knowledge, and the jobs it leads to, become an issue when you are competing for students inside certain professional areas. Faculties of Arts across the world are very much feeling themselves caught in this pinch. It is hard to imagine many older Universities making such a bald statement such as “There is no need for History or English Scholars”, yet by pumping resources into their professional and technical streams they are saying it through their resource distribution. If something does not provide income or attract the right market, a jaded eye is cast across it and, depending on the wealth and capacity of the institution, this leads to the shutting down of schools or entire faculties.

Why is this such a problem? Because restarting a discipline is much harder once the number of participants drops down too far. Reduce the number of people in a discipline and their shared publications and venues also shrink. Given that publication is vital to perceived success in many ways, this shrinkage will make it harder to publish OR lead to accusations of irrelevance as the overall citation level drops because there are so few people in the area. We are so heavily measured and assessed, as individuals and as universities, that we are beleaguered by league tables and beset by set publication standards. Our management structures, modes of accountability, the way that we have worked and thought for centuries are not a good fit for this new modality. This is not the golden age ramblings that I have previously pointed to as dreaming of better days – in this case, it’s true. Our systems don’t work with the new expectations.

Opening ourselves up to students from anywhere is a noble goal, and one I support wholeheartedly, but it brings great challenge. Can we pursue anything that interests us, relevant or not, and expect to meet the demands of the new century? If we can, I don’t think we can do it with the systems that we have and certainly not while we’re being measured on externally applied metrics of success. Even deciding on whether a student should be admitted or not is now a matter of school ranking, bonus points, place availability, status and, in murkier waters, the two speed entry system of public and privately-funded places in the same institution, where admitting one party may (in the worst case) prevent another from entering. As Altbach notes, our ideas of governance are changing as our scale grows and our complexity increases. Senior Professors used to set our course but now we either need or have taken on trained administrators who do not think as we do, have not had our training and, in many ways, treat us as a standard business with a strange product. We are more accountable than ever, while we wander around being randomly measured and trying to work out what it is that we need to do in order to be measured accurately and then try and perform our tasks of learning, teaching and research. How do we reconcile the community of scholars with the bureaucracies that run our institutions?

Altbach then moves on to discuss developing countries and the special challenges that they face. Many of these countries have broken links to their indigenous cultures, due to colonisation, occupation, war and civil unrest, and, when combined with the colonial trend to keep investment in higher education low, this means that many of these countries are systematically disadvantaged. Their systems are so small that expansion is hard – insufficient training grounds for new educators, delay in building and resource appropriation and the threat of instability combine to make it very hard to kickstart anything. Poverty and lack of local government resources move some of these attempts across to the ‘impossible’ category. As it becomes hard to limit enrolments, overcrowding is the norm and, while you can’t limit enrolment, you can use draconian measures to ensure that anyone who falls behind is ejected, in the hope that freeing up that slot might ease some of the crush on the resources. This is a very unforgiving approach to education: you have one chance, you blew it, goodbye. Given that this is one of the only paths out of poverty in many of these countries, and that it is very easy to fall behind in a poor and resource-starved system, this is a nasty little feedback loop. Where other institutions are built up in response to demand, these newer academies tend not to offer the same level of education and we once again have the problem of a piece of paper that is not as worthy as another: we are providing education in name only and creating yet another two-speed system. Where the job market and the educational bodies don’t keep up with each other you may have that most awful ghetto: the educated unemployed, who have invested time and money into a degree that grants them no advantage at all.

Where we are over-stretched, we tend to only do those things that generate the most benefit and this is also true in the case of these third world Universities. Teaching earns money so teaching dominates. Research is sidelined, international collaboration is sidelined and staff have no time to do anything except teach because they are trying to keep their salary coming. Unsurprisingly, this is not a stage set of excellence and advancement – these universities are falling further and further behind.

Altbach concludes by talking about the pressure that we are all under and that have made the majority of our institutions reactive, limiting our creativity to solving pressing problems in a response to external pressures. Right now, we are running so fast that we do not have time to question why we are even on this treadmill, let alone take any real steps to make serious change that is truly strategic rather than reactive. We have lost our autonomy to a degree, as well as our identity. We are enmeshed in society but in a role that favours the market forces and makes us dance in response to it. Altbach ponders what our role should be and proposes a move towards the broader public interest, moving away from market forces and towards academic autonomy.This is not the selfish “leave me alone” cry of a spoiled child, this is a recognition of the fact that we have many more things to offer than a diploma and a vocation: universities are societies of thinkers and are far more complex and diverse than our current strictures would make us appear. All universities are important, says Altbach, and it is at society’s peril that it ignores the many roles that a University can provide. Looking at us as profit-making, degree factories, or as an elite streaming system, ignores the grand public benefit of an educated society, the value of the public intellectual and the scholarly community. We deserve support, says Altbach, because serve the goals of society and the individual. Let us do our jobs properly.

I found it to be a very interesting article to read and I hope I’ve capture the essence reasonably well. I look forward to discussing it! Thanks again, RV!

The Complex Roles Of Universities In The Period Of Globalization – Altbach – Part 2

Posted: September 24, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Continuing from my previous post, Altbach deals with the University as a focus of the international community. We host other people, share interests, cross-populate each other with PhD students and professors – sometimes it’s a wonder that we don’t get spontaneous germination of new Universities just from all of the swapping! Because of our mission, we tend to have a much greater ability to look, think and act on the international level. This is an interesting contrast to the role of the Uni as a national stabiliser, as the more one travels and looks outward, the more one realises that your country is just one of many. I travel a fair bit for work and I can tell you that, right now, I haven’t run across a single issue that is not being felt by at least two (or more) Universities at an equal level of pain, yet most people who don’t travel or share their world view feel isolated and that “no one else would understand.” The realisation that all countries are really very similar (yes, with one or two exceptions) and that Unis are the same all over the world sets the academic even further away from the people outside and again increases the obligation to communicate with people outside of academia. Hoarding knowledge or sneering at the uninformed do not come with the territory – Universities have traditionally been the centres of connectivity, even before the internet, and now that most Unis end up being the default Internet distribution point in many regions, this is becoming even more important.

This ties in with the next topic that Altbach mentions, our role in social mobility. Education transforms people. While you have to the son of the King to (most likely) become King, anyone can become an engineer (with a few caveats, to keep my colleagues in Eng happy!) with access to education. Expanding Universities from a small and elite focussed approach to a larger scale, massified, model has brought access and equity to a much larger group of people. This is not a given, of course, as the first-in-family do face a lot of challenges but, where the right attention is given to support and scholarships, great things can be achieved.

We are also engines for economic development, in that our knowledge can be commercialised, spun-off, licensed and re-used, through adjacent Science and Technology Parks or through relationships with industry. There are entire twins in the US that would shrivel up overnight without their co-located University. Academic research is still a key driver in innovation both directly and indirectly, through the production of research staff who then go to corporate research facilities.

But a number of these are fairly recent developments. International focus requires knowing about the world and having a method of travel, as well as not being at war with the place you’re trying to visit! The change from small and elite to large and massive requires vast amounts of money and resources and the changes have taken place with staggered effects across most of the second half of the 20th Century, into this new century. It’s not just the number of students, Altbach emphasises, it’s the range of post-secondary options that have sprung up to meet technical and industrial demand. These new institutions have new charters, new focus areas, different lengths and types of degree and we suddenly find that, much as oranges are not the only fruit, training at a University that can grant PhDs may not be the best preparation for working at an institution that is post-secondary yet nothing much like the places that its teachers have come from. The ‘pinnacle’ research institutions, prestigious and few in number, serve a smaller group and are probably the most complex institutions in the spectrum, training the most professionals and receiving the lion’s share of research funding. This introduces tension, between the doctoral graduates of the pinnacle who may transfer to other institutions and find themselves at odds with a very different mission, and because any system where an entrenched elite receive advantages that allow them to stay elite is always going to cause tension. Massification has led to greater disparity. Yes, almost anyone can go to college, but it appears that achieving that has meant that we have now risked devaluing the term ‘college’ along the way. In Australia, students say they’re going to ‘Uni’ when that could mean TAFE (Technical and Further Education), adult education, or actual University. (We had a comprehensive shake-up some time ago that turned all of the institutes of technology into Universities, or we would have that distinction as well. The previous separation of degrees and ‘applied’ degrees had actually worked quite well, at least in my reading and opinion, but government initiatives are what they are, and we will talk more about this in the discussion of public and private good.) Should it matter what one does when the word ‘college’ is mentioned? No, it shouldn’t. The problem is when the issue becomes confusing or we provide a service that we call ‘college’ to all of our citizens, yet some citizens get a better version than others for reasons that are not transferable or equitable. To quote Altbach:

Massification inevitably creates more variations and diversity in academic systems. It creates opportunities for access that are unprecedented in world history, but at the same time it creates systems that are less equal and more difficult to support financially.

This brings us squarely into Altbach’s next point, the issue of public versus private good, a debate that rages unabated today. Changes in Australian University funding have very much been under the presumption that the greatest good is being enjoyed by the private citizen who receives the education, rather than the society to which they contribute, hence the citizen should bear more of the load for their own education. (My response is ‘piffle’, the benefit to our society of the educated is hard to overestimate,  but I’ve already discussed this in an earlier post.) As noted in the article, whether the state can or cannot support public education is moot as many states are just shifting the burden to the citizen and their families. This inevitably creates a two-speed system, where some go to college and some do not, because of influences and decisions that may have had an impact on the grandparents and parents of the student, rather than any personal merit. Given that, even in a meritocratic system, training programs and preparation schools can make all the difference, and these are usually private and expensive, any meritocratic system risks quickly falling into the same two-speed divide. Even if a place is available at the correct type of institution, the costs of relocating, leaving a secure community and moving from a more socialised and low-cash environment to an isolated, pay-up-front and distant location to attend a college may place another bar in the way of the prospective student from a less advantaged area. Mass higher education is supposed to be for the masses but solving the issues of nomenclature, access and preparation do nothing if no-one can actually attend unless they’re rich. Many of our activities are linked, in one way or another, to the public good and we are well aware that feeling that you are an active and contributing member of your society is usually associated with greater motivation to participate and be involved with this good. Any restrictive mechanisms driven by forcing the burden back on to the citizen, defended by the notion of personal benefit dominates any public benefit, undermine the ability of people to join and contribute to greater society: this undermines the public good, as well as setting the stage for disenfranchisement and a disengagement from society. Every time we do this, we risk casting another generation out of the circle of those who will go to college.

I’ll finish this tomorrow, with a discussion of the contemporary issues, from the report, and my own thoughts overall.

This Is Your Captain Speaking: Turn Off Your Gadgets

Posted: September 22, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

This is your Captain speaking. Shortly,I’m going to push on a set of levers that will allow fuel to pour into the steel cylinders affixed to the side of the plane and, in the presence of well-engineered flame, create a series of small and controlled explosions that will allow us to lift roughly 400 tonnes of metal and flesh into the air and propel you towards your destination.

As part of this, when the plane heads down the runway, we will pass a threshold known as V1. Do you know what V1 means? V1 is the takeoff decision speed  and is the speed at which we will try and take off, even if one engine fails. Basically, V1 is the speed at which we are travelling so fast that we are safest in the air – we are beyond the realm of air brakes or the rather amusingly useless brakes on the wheels. You know that mechanical brakes can evaporate on trucks when they’re going too fast, right? Think an even faster “pfft, bloooo” for planes.

Having gone through V1, we will reach V2. That is the speed at which, having committed to take-off, we will attempt to rotate the nose up and we will safely be able to take off, even if one engine is down. You know this speed. We trundle down the runway and you might miss V1 but the moment we rotate the nose up, that’s V2.

If I can’t easily find out when either of these speeds are, we’re stuffed. I need the read-outs in front of me to give me a reliable idea of these speeds or my co-pilots and I will be working on guesswork and you, seriously, do not want that.

There are two points when you are seriously vulnerable in an aircraft: takeoff and landing. During both of these moments, our proximity to the ground and reduced speed combine to form a major liability: any misjudgement at this point can lead to catastrophe because we have not got any time to recover from disaster. This, of course, is why we ask you to turn off every single possible source of interference to out aircraft systems, which includes phones, iPods, iPads, MP3 players, Kindles, Kobo readers, whatever. We want to have the best chance possible to let the plane tell us everything that it can.

Some of you don’t turn the gadgets off and, as your Captain, let me berate both you and the people who educated you. You, because you ignored the legal requirement to comply with my instructions and your teachers, because they failed to adequately instruct you in the importance of cause and effect, personal responsibility, and anecdotal evidence.

If you, as a person, opt to leave your gear on despite being asked not to, you are saying to the roughly 500 other passengers that your need to read a book in an electronic form, or watch a movie, trumps their fundamental right to personal safety. Now, we’re not 100% sure that this will cause a problem but, as we’re also not sure that it won’t interfere with our systems and we do need to know lots of stuff about the aeroplane at these critical times, we ask you to switch this gear off. Will it cause an accident? Probably not. Is it safe? We don’t know. Right now, you’re not demonstrating an adequate knowledge of cause and effect or personal responsibility.

Oh, so your Uncle Willie left his mobile on and nothing happened? Great! Fantastic! Was it this type of plane? Same avionics? Was there unforeseen confusion in the flight deck that no-one mentioned (Probably not but you don’t know.) Hey,  I hear Uncle Willie drove through an intersection once against the red lights at 100 mph – why don’t you try that?  Anecdotal evidence, especially one exceptional case, proves nothing.

Actions have repercussions but this doesn’t mean that there will always be a 1:1 match-up between them. If mobile phones always crashed planes, we’d search you and confiscate them. It’s the possible and unlikely interaction of plane and gadget that we’re worried about and this is why we sincerely hope that your teachers have managed to get this idea through to you, along with the fact that rationalisation doesn’t equal reason and one contrary exemplar does not state a uniform case.

Let me remind you that we will shortly be flying in a 400 tonne piece of metal that hurtles through the sky at 650 mph on top of 2-4 engines of burning flame.

Do you actually want to make it harder for me to control this?

Think about the possible impact of your actions, comply with crew directions and, for a few minutes at the start and end of the flight, do what I ask you to do and turn off your gadgets. It might not do anything, but it might give you a chance to be irritated by a similar announcement on a subsequent flight.

Thank you for your attention.”

A Puzzling Thought

Posted: September 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Today I presented one of my favourite puzzles, the Monty Hall problem, to a group of Year 10 high school students. Probability is a very challenging area to teach because we humans seem to be so very, very bad at grasping it intuitively. I’ve written before about Card Shouting, where we appear to train cards to give us better results by yelling at them, and it becomes all too clear that many people have instinctive models of how the world work that are neither robust nor transferable. This wouldn’t be a problem except that:

  1. it makes it harder to understand science,
  2. the real models become hard to believe because they’re counter-intuttitve, and
  3. casinos make a lot of money out of people who don’t understand probability.

Monty Hall is simple. There are three doors and behind one is a great prize. You pick a door but it doesn’t get opened. The host, who knows where the prize is, opens one of the doors that you didn’t pick but the door that he/she opens is always going to be empty. So the host, in full knowledge, opens a known empty door, but it has to be one that you didn’t pick. You then have a choice to switch to the door that you didn’t pick and that hasn’t been opened, or you can stay with your original pick.

Based on a game show, Monty Hall was the name of the presenter.

Now let’s fast forward to the fact that you should always switch because you have a 2/3 chance of getting the prize if you do (no, not 50/50) so switching is the winning strategy. Going into today, what I expected was:

  • Initially, most students would want to stay with their original choice, having decided that there was no benefit to switching or that it was a 50/50 deal so it didn’t make any sense.
  • At least one student would actively reject the idea.
  • With discussion and demonstration, I could get students thinking about this problem in the right way.

The correct mental framework for Monty Hall is essential. What are the chances, with 1 prize behind 3 doors, that you picked the right door initially. It’s 1/3, right? So the chances that you didn’t pick the correct door is 2/3. Now, if you just swapped randomly, there’d be no advantage but this is where you have to understand the problem. There are 2 doors that you didn’t pick and, by elimination, these 2 doors contain the prize 2/3 of the time. The host knows where the prize is so the host will never open a door and show you the prize, the host just removes a worthless door. Now you have two sets of doors – the one you picked (correct 1/3 of the time) and the remaining door from the unpicked pair (correct 2/3 of the time). So, given that there’s only one remaining door to pick in the unpicked pair, by switching you increase your chances of winning from 1/3 to 2/3.

Don’t believe me? Here’s an on-line simulator that you can run (Ignore what it says about Internet Explorer, it tends to run on most things.)

Still don’t believe me? Here’s some Processing code that you can run locally and see the rates converge to the expected results of 1/3 for staying and 2/3 for switching.

This is a challenging and counter-intuitive result, until you actually understand what’s happening, and this clearly illustrates one of those situations where you can ask students to plug numbers into equations for probability but, when you actually ask them to reason mathematically, you suddenly discover that they don’t have the correct mental models to explain what is going on. So how did I approach it?

Well, I used Peer Instruction techniques to get the class to think about the problem and then vote on it. As expected, about 60% of the class were stayers. Then I asked them to discuss this with a switcher and to try and convince each other of the rightness of their actions. Then I asked them to vote again.

No significant change. Dang.

So I wheeled out the on-line simulator to demonstrate it working and to ensure that everyone really understood the problem. Then I showed the Processing simulation showing the numbers converging as expected. Then I pulled out the big guns: the 100 door example. In this case, you select from 100 doors and Monty eliminates 98 (empty) doors that you didn’t choose.

Suddenly, when faced with the 100 doors, many students became switchers. (Not surprising.) I then pointed out that the two problems (3 doors and 100 doors) had reduced to the same problem, except that the remaining doors were the only door left standing from 2 and 99 doors respectively. And, suddenly, on the repeated vote, everyone’s a switcher. (I then ran the code on the 100 door example and had to apologise because the 99% ‘switch’ trace is so close to the top that it’s hard to see.)

Why didn’t the discussion phase change people’s minds? I think it’s because of the group itself, a junior group with very little vocabulary of probability. it would have been hard for the to articulate the reasons for change beyond much ‘gut feeling’ despite the obvious mathematical ability present. So, expecting this, I confirmed that they were understanding the correct problem by showing demonstration and extended simulation, which provided conflicting evidence to their previously held belief. Getting people to think about the 100 door model, which is a quite deliberate manipulation of the fact that 1/100 vs 99/100 is a far more convincing decision factor than 1/3 vs 2/3, allowed them to identify a situation where switching makes sense, validating what I presented in the demonstrations.

In these cases, I like to mull for a while to work out what I have and haven’t learned from this. I believe that the students had a lot of fun in the puzzle section and that most of them got what happened in Monty Hall, but I’d really like to come back to them in a year or two and see what they actually took away from today’s example.

 

Howdy, Partner

Posted: September 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I am giving a talk on Friday about the partnership relationship between teacher and student and, in my opinion, why we often accidentally attack this through a less-than-optimal approach to assessment and deadlines. I’ve spoken before about how an arbitrary deadline that is convenient for administrative reasons is effectively pedagogically and ethically indefensible. For all that we disparage our students, if we do, for focusing on marks and sometimes resorting to cheating rather than focusing on educational goals, we leave ourselves open to valid accusations of hypocrisy if we have the same ‘ends justify the means’ approach to setting deadlines.

Consistency and authenticity are vital if we are going to build solid relationships, but let me go further. We’re not just building a relationship, we’re building an expectation of continuity over time. If students know that their interests are being considered, that what we are teaching is necessary and that we will always try to deal with them fairly, they are far more likely to invest the effort that we wish them to invest  and develop the knowledge. More importantly, a good relationship is resilient, in that the occasional hiccup doesn’t destroy the whole thing. If we have been consistent and fair, and forces beyond our control affect something that we’ve tried to do, my experience is that students tolerate it quite well. If, however, you have been arbitrary, unprepared, inconsistent and indifferent, then you will (fairly or not) be blamed for anything else that goes wrong.

We cannot apply one rule to ourselves and a different one to our students and expect them to take us seriously. If you accept no work if it’s over 1 second late and keep showing up to lectures late and unprepared, then your students have every right to roll their eyes and not take you seriously. This doesn’t excuse them if they cheat, however, but you have certainly not laid the groundwork for a solid partnership. Why partnership? Because the students in higher education should graduate as your professional peers, even if they are not yet your peers in academia. I do not teach in the school system and I do not have to deal with developmental stages of the child (although I’m up to my armpits in neo-Piagetian development in the knowledge areas, of course).

We return to the scaffolding argument again. Much as I should be able to remove the supports for their coding and writing development over their degree, I should also be able to remove the supports for their professional skills, team-based activities and deadlines because, in a few short months, they will be out in the work force and they will need these skills! If I take a strictly hierarchical approach where a student is innately subordinate to me, I do not prepare them for a number of their work experiences and I risk limiting their development. If I combine my expertise and my oversight requirements with a notion of partnership, then I can work with the student for some things and prepare the student for a realistic workplace. Yes, there are rules and genuine deadlines but the majority experience in the professional workplace relies upon autonomy and self-regulation, if we are to get useful and creative output from these new graduates.

If I demand compliance, I may achieve it, but we are more than well aware that extrinsic motivating factors stifle creativity and it is only at those jobs where almost no cognitive function is required that the carrot and the stick show any impact. Partnership requires me to explain what I want and why I need it – why it’s useful. This, in turn, requires me to actually know this and to have designed a course where I can give a genuine answer that illustrates these points!

“Because I said so,” is the last resort of the tired parent and it shouldn’t be the backbone of an entire deadline methodology. Yes, there are deadlines and they are important but this does not mean that every single requirement falls into the same category or should be treated in the same way. By being honest about this, by allowing for exchange at the peer-level where possible and appropriate, and by trying to be consistent about the application of necessary rules to both parties, rather than applying them arbitrarily, we actually are making our students work harder but for a more personal benefit. It is easy to react to blind authority and be resentful, to excuse bad behaviour because you’re attending a ‘bad course’. It is much harder for the student to come up with comfortable false rationalisations when they have a more equal say, when they are informed in advance as to what is and what is not important, and when the deadlines are set by necessity rather than fiat.

I think a lot of people miss one of the key aspects of fixing assessment: we’re not trying to give students an easier ride, we’re trying to get them to do better work. Better work usually requires more effort but this additional effort is now directed along the lines that should develop better knowledge. Partnership is not some way for students to negotiate their way out of submissions, it’s a way that, among other things, allows me to get students to recognise how much work they actually have to do in order to achieve useful things.

If I can’t answer the question “Why do my students have to do this?” when I ask it of myself, I should immediately revisit the activity and learning design to fix things so that I either have an answer or I have a brand new piece of work for them to do.

De Profundis – or de-profounding?

Posted: September 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“It is common to assume that we are dealing with a highly intelligent book when we cease to understand it.” (de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy, p157)

The notion of a lack of comprehension being a fundamental and innate fault of the reader, rather than the writer, is a mistake made, in many different and yet equally irritating ways, throughout the higher educational sector. A high pass rate may be seen as indicative of an easy course or a weak marker. A high failure rate may be attributed to the innate difficulty of the work or the inferior stuff of which the students are made. As I have written before, under such a presumption, I could fail all of my students and strut around, the smartest man in my University, for none have been able to understand the depths and subtlety of my area of knowledge.

Yet, if the real reason is that I have brought my students to a point where their abilities fail them and, either through ignorance or design, I do not strive to address this honestly and openly, then it doesn’t matter how many of them ultimately pass – I will be the biggest failure in the class. I know a great number of very interesting and intelligent educators but, were you to ask me if any of them could teach, I would have to answer that I did not know, unless I had actually seen them do so. For all of our pressure on students to contain the innate ability to persevere, to understand our discipline or to be (sorry, Ray) natural programmers, the notion that teaching itself might not be something that everyone is capable of is sometimes regarded as a great heresy. (The notion or insistence that developing as a teacher may require scholarship and, help us all, practise, is apostasy – our heresy leading us into exile.) Teaching revolves around imparting knowledge efficiently and effectively so that students may learn. The cornerstone of this activity is successful and continuing communication. Wisdom may be wisdom but it rapidly becomes hard to locate or learn from when it is swaddled in enough unnecessary baggage.

I have been, mostly thanks to the re-issue of cheap Penguins, undertaking a great deal of reading recently and I have revisited Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, de Botton and Wilde. The books that are the most influential upon me remain those books that, while profound, maintain their accessibility. Let me illustrate this with an example. For those who do not know what De Profundis means, it is a biblical reference to Psalm 130, appropriated by the ever humble Oscar Wilde as the title of his autobiographical letter to his former lover, from the prison in which he was housed because of that love.

But what it means is “From the depths”. In the original psalm, the first line is:

De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine;
From the depths, I have cried out to you, O Lord;

And in this reading, we see the measure of Wilde’s despair. Having been sentenced to hard labour, and having had his ability to write confiscated, his ability to read curtailed, and his reputation in tatters, he cries out from the depths to his Bosie, Lord Douglas.

De profundis [clamavi ad te, Bosie;]

If you have the context for this, then this immediately prepares you for the letter but, as it is, the number of people who are reading Wilde is shrinking, let alone the number of people who are reading a Latin Bible. Does this title still assist in the framing of the work, through its heavy dependence upon the anguish captured in Psalm 130, or is it time to retitle it “From the depths, I have cried out to you!” to capture both the translation and the sense. The message, the emotion and the hard-earned wisdom contained in the letter are still valuable but are we hurting the ability of people to discover and enjoy it by continuing to use a form of expression that may harm understanding?

Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Folio 70r – De Profundis the Musée Condé, Chantilly. (Another form of expression of this Psalm.)

Now, don’t worry, I’m not planning to rewrite Wilde but this raises a point in terms of the occasionally unhappy union of the language of profundity and the wisdom that it seeks to impart. You will note the irony that I am using a heavily structured, formal English, to write this and that there is very little use of slang here. This is deliberate because I am trying to be precise while still being evocative and, at the same time, illustrating that accurate use of more ornate language can obscure one’s point. (Let me rephrase that. The unnecessary use of long words and complex grammar gets in the way of understanding.)

When Her Majesty the Queen told the Commonwealth of her terrible year, her words were:

“1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an Annus Horribilis.”

and I have difficulty thinking of a more complicated way of saying “1992 was a bad year” than to combine a complicated grammatical construction with a Latin term that is not going to be on the lips of the people who are listening to the speech. Let me try: “Looking back on 1992, it has been, in the words of one of my friends, a terrible year.” Same content. Same level of imparted knowledge. Much less getting in the way. (The professional tip here is to never use the letters “a”, “n”, “s” and “u” in one short word unless you are absolutely sure of your audience. “What did she say about… nahhh” is not the response you want from your loyal subjects.) [And there goes the Knighthood.]

I love language. I love reading. I am very lucky that, having had a very broad and classically based education, I can read just about anything and not be intimidated or confused by the language forms – providing that the author is writing in one of the languages that I read, of course! To assume that everyone is like me or, worse, to judge people on their ability because they find long and unfamiliar words confusing, or have never had the opportunity to use these skills before, is to leap towards the same problem outlined in the quote at the top. If we seek to label people unintelligent when they have not yet been exposed to something that is familiar to us, then this is just as bad as lauding someone’s intelligence because you don’t understand what they’re talking about.

If my students need to know something then I have to either ensure that they already do so, by clearly stating my need and being aware of the educational preparation in my locale, or I have to teach it to them in forms that they can understand and that will allow them to succeed. I may love language, classical works and big words, but I am paid to teach the students of 2012 to become the graduates, achievers and academics of the future. I have to understand, respect and incorporate their context, while also meeting the pedagogical and knowledge requirements of the courses that I teach.

No-one said it was going to be easy!

The Narrative Hunger: Stories That Meet a Need

Posted: September 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I have been involved in on-line communities for over 20 years now and, apparently, people are rarely surprised when they meet me. “Oh, you talk just like you type.” is the effective statement and I’m quite happy with this. While some people adopt completely different personae on-line, for a range of reasons, I seem to be the same. It then comes as little surprise that I am as much of storyteller in person as I am online. I love facts, revel in truth, but I greatly enjoying putting them together into a narrative that conveys the information in a way that is neither dry nor dull. (This is not to say that the absence of a story guarantees that things must be dry and dull but, without a focus on those elements of narrative that appeal to common human experience, we always risk this outcome.)

One of Katrina’s recent posts referred to the use of story telling in education. As she says, this can be contentious because:

stories can be used to entertain students, to have them enjoy your lectures, but are not necessarily educational.

The shibboleth of questionable educational research is often a vaguely assembled study, supported by the conjecture that the “students loved it”, and it is very easy to see how story telling could fall into this. However, we as humans are fascinated by stories. We understand the common forms even where we have not read Greek drama or “The Hero With a Thousand Faces”. We know when stories ring true and when they fall flat. Searching the mental engines of our species for the sweet spots that resonate across all of us is one way to convey knowledge in a more effective and memorable way. Starting from this focus, we must then observe our due diligence in making sure that our story framework contains a worthy payload.

Not all stories are of the same value.

I love story telling and I try to weave together a narrative in most of my lectures, even down to leaving in sections where deliberate and tangential diversion becomes part of the teaching, to allow me to contrast a point or illuminate it further by stripping it of its formal context and placing it elsewhere. After all, an elephant next to elephants is hardly memorable but an elephant in a green suit, as King of a country, tends to stick in the mind.

The power of the narrative is that it involves the reader or listener in the story. A well-constructed narrative leads the reader to wonder about what is going to happen next and this is model formation. Very few of us read in a way where the story unfolds with us completely distant from it – in fact, maintaining distance from a story is a sign of a poor narrative. When the right story is told, or the right person is telling it, you are on the edge of your seat, hungry to know more. When it is told poorly, then you stifle a yawn and smile politely, discreetly peering at your watch as you attempt to work out the time at which you can escape.

Of course, this highlights the value of narrative for us in teaching but it also reinforces that requirement that it be more than an assemblage of rambling anecdotes, it must be a constructed narration that weaves through points in a recognisable way and giving us the ability to conjecture on its direction. O. Henry endings, the classic twist endings, make no sense unless you have constructed a mental model that can be shaken by the revelations of the last paragraphs. Harry Potter book 7 makes even less sense unless one has a model of the world in which the events of the book can be situated.

As always, this stresses the importance of educational design, where each story, each fact, each activity, is woven into the greater whole with a defined purpose and in full knowledge of how it will be used. There is nothing more distracting than someone who rambles during a lecture about things that not only seem irrelevant, but are irrelevant. Whereas a musing on something that, on first glance, appears irrelevant can lead to exploration of the narrative by students. Suddenly, they are within a Choose Your Own Adventure book and trying to work out where each step will take them.

Stories are an excellent way to link knowledge and problems. They excite, engage and educate, when used correctly. We are all hungry for stories: we are players within our own stories, observers of those of the people around us and, eventually, will form part of the greater narrative by the deeds for which we are written up in the records to come. It makes sense to use this deep and very human aspect of our intellect to try and assist with the transfer of knowledge.

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