Knowing the Tricks Helps You To Deal With Assumptions
Posted: September 10, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: authenticity, blogging, card shouting, collaboration, community, curriculum, data visualisation, design, education, educational problem, educational research, Heads Heads, higher education, Law of Small Numbers, random numbers, random sequence, random sequences, randomness, reflection, resources, students, teaching, teaching approaches, tools Leave a commentI teach a variety of courses, including one called Puzzle-Based Learning, where we try to teach think and problem-solving techniques through the use of simple puzzles that don’t depend on too much external information. These domain-free problems have most of the characteristics of more complicated problems but you don’t have to be an expert in the specific area of knowledge to attempt them. The other thing that we’ve noticed over time is that a good puzzle is fun to solve, fun to teach and gets passed on to other people – a form of infectious knowledge.
Some of the most challenging areas to try and teach into are those that deal with probability and statistics, as I’ve touched on before in this post. As always, when an area is harder to understand, it actually requires us to teach better but I do draw the line at trying to coerce students into believing me through the power of my mind alone. But there are some very handy ways to show students that their assumptions about the nature of probability (and randomness) so that they are receptive to the idea that their models could need improvement (allowing us to work in that uncertainty) and can also start to understand probability correctly.
We are ferociously good pattern matchers and this means that we have some quite interesting biases in the way that we think about the world, especially when we try to think about random numbers, or random selections of things.
So, please humour me for a moment. I have flipped a coin five times and recorded the outcome here. But I have also made up three other sequences. Look at the four sequences for a moment and pick which one is most likely to be the one I generated at random – don’t think too much, use your gut:
- Tails Tails Tails Heads Tails
- Tails Heads Tails Heads Heads
- Heads Heads Tails Heads Tails
- Heads Heads Heads Heads Heads
Have you done it?
I’m just going to put a bit more working in here to make sure that you’ve written down your number…
I’ve run this with students and I’ve asked them to produce a sequence by flipping coins then produce a false sequence by making subtle changes to the generated one (turns heads into tails but change a couple along the way). They then write the two together on a board and people have to vote on which one is which. As it turns out, the chances of someone picking the right sequence is about 50/50, but I engineered that by starting from a generated sequence.
This is a fascinating article that looks at the overall behaviour of people. If you ask people to write down a five coin sequence that is random, 78% of them will start with heads. So, chances are, you’ve picked 3 or 4 as you’re starting sequence. When it comes to random sequences, most of us equate random with well-shuffled, and, on the large scale, 30 times as many people would prefer option 3 to option 4. (This is where someone leaps into the comments to say “A-ha” but, it’s ok, we’re talking about overall behavioural trends. Your individual experience and approach may not be the dominant behaviour.)
From a teaching point of view, this is a great way to break up the concepts of random sequences and some inherent notion that such sequences must be disordered. There are 32 different ways of flipping 5 coins in a strict sequence like this and all of them are equally likely. It’s only when we start talking about the likelihood of getting all heads versus not getting all heads that the aggregated event of “at least one head” starts to be more likely.
How can we use this? One way is getting students to write down their sequences and then asking them to stand up, then sit down when your ‘call’ (from a script) goes the other way. If almost everyone is still standing at heads then you’ve illustrated that you know something about how their “randomisers” work. A lot of people (if your class is big enough) should still be standing when the final coin is revealed and this we can address. Why do so many people think about it this way? Are we confusing random with chaotic?
The Law of Small Numbers (Tversky and Kahneman), also mentioned in the post, which is basically that people generalise too much from small samples and they expect small samples to act like big ones. In your head, if the grand pattern over time could be resorted into “heads, tails, heads, tails,…” then small sequences must match that or they just don’t look right. This is an example of the logical fallacy called a “hasty generalisation” but with a mathematical flavour. We are strongly biassed towards the the validity of our experiences, so when we generate a random sequence (or pick a lucky door or win the first time at poker machines) then we generalise from this small sample and can become quite resistant to other discussions of possible outcomes.
If you have really big classes (367 or more) then you can start a discussion on random numbers by asking people what the chances are that any two people in the room share a birthday. Given that there are only 366 possible birthdays, the Pigeonhole principle states that two people must share a birthday as, in a class of 367, there are only 366 birthdays to go around so one must be repeated! (Note for future readers: don’t try this in a class of clones.) There are lots of other, interesting thinking examples in the link to Wikipedia that helps you to frame randomness in a way that your students might be able to understand it better.
10 pigeons into 9 boxes? Someone has a roommate.
I’ve used a lot of techniques before, including the infamous card shouting, but the new approach from the podcast is a nice and novel angle to add some interest to a class where randomness can show up.
MOOCs and the on-line Masters Degree
Posted: September 10, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: blogging, community, education, educational research, georgia tech, higher education, measurement, moocs, on-line learning, resources, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking Leave a commentThere’s been a lot of interest in Georgia Tech’s new on-line masters degree in Computer Science, offered jointly with Udacity and AT&T. The first offering ran with 375 students, and there are 500 in the pipeline, but readmissions opened again two days ago so this number has probably gone up. PBS published an article recently, written up on the ACM blog.
I think we’re all watching this with interest as, while it’s neither Massive at this scale or Open (fee-paying and admission checked), if this works reasonably, let alone well, then we have something new to offer at the tertiary scale but without many of the problems that we’ve traditionally seen with existing MOOCs (retention, engagement, completion and accreditation.)
Right now, there are some early observations: the students are older (11 years older on average) and most are working. In this way, we’re much closer to the standard MOOC demographic for success: existing degree, older and practised in work. We would expect this course to do relatively well, much as our own experiences with on-line learning at the 100s scale worked well for that demographic. This is, unlike ours, more tightly bound into Georgia’s learning framework and their progress pathways, so we are very keen to see how their success will translate to other areas.
We are still learning about where MOOC (and its children SPOC and the Georgia Tech program) will end up in the overall scheme of education. With this program, we stand a very chance of working out exactly what it means to us in the traditional higher educational sector.
An inappropriate picture of a bricks-and-mortar campus for an article on on-line learning.
CodeSpells! A Kickstarter to make a difference. @sesperu @codespells #codespells
Posted: September 9, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, blockly, blogging, Code Spells, codespells, community, education, educational problem, educational research, games, Generation Why, higher education, in the student's head, learning, principles of design, resources, Sarah Esper, Stephen Foster, student perspective, students, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, UCSD, universal principles of design Leave a commentI first met Sarah Esper a few years ago when she was demonstrating the earlier work in her PhD project with Stephen Foster on CodeSpells, a game-based project to start kids coding. In a pretty enjoyable fantasy game environment, you’d code up spells to make things happen and, along the way, learn a lot about coding. Their team has grown and things have come a long way since then for CodeSpells, and they’re trying to take it from its research roots into something that can be used to teach coding on a much larger scale. They now have a Kickstarter out, which I’m backing (full disclosure), to get the funds they need to take things to that next level.
Teaching kids to code is hard. Teaching adults to code can be harder. There’s a big divide these days between the role of user and creator in the computing world and, while we have growing literary in use, we still have a long way to go to get more and more people creating. The future will be programmed and it is, honestly, a new form of literacy that our children will benefit from.
If you’re one of my readers who likes the idea of new approaches to education, check this out. If you’re an old-timey Multi-User Dungeon/Shared Hallucination person like me, this is the creative stuff we used to be able to do on-line, but for everyone and with cool graphics in a multi-player setting. If you have kids, and you like the idea of them participating fully in the digital future, please check this out.
To borrow heavily from their page, 60% of jobs in science, technology,engineering and maths are computing jobs but AP Computer Science is only taught at 5% of schools. We have a giant shortfall of software people coming up and this will be an ugly crash when it comes because all of the nice things we have become used to in the computing side will slow down and, in some cases, pretty much stop. Invest in the future!
I have no connection to the project apart from being a huge supporter of Sarah’s drive and vision and someone who would really like to see this project succeed. Please go and check it out!
The Earth Magic Sphere image, from the Kickstarter page.
Funding Education: Trust me, you want to. #stem #education #csed
Posted: September 8, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, Australian Universities, blogging, community, education, ethics, higher education, in the student's head, learning, luddites, reflection, resources, student perspective, students, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, universities Leave a commentSome very serious changes to the Higher Education system of Australia are going to be discussed starting from October 28th – deregulating the University fee structure, which will most likely lead to increasing fees and interest rates, leading to much greater student debt. (Yes, there are some positives in there but it’s hard to get away from massive increase of student debt.) While some university representative organisations are in favour of this, with amendments and protections for some students, I am yet to be convinced that deregulating the Universities is going to do much while we labour under the idea that students will move around based on selected specialisations, the amount of “life lessons” they will accumulate or their perception of value for money. We have no idea what price sensitivity is going to do to the Australian market. We do know what happened in the UK when they deregulated fees:
‘Professor Byrne agreed, but said fee deregulation would have to be “carefully thought through so as to avoid what happened in the UK when they did it there – initially, when the fees were uncapped, all the universities just charged the maximum amount. It’s been corrected now, but that was a complete waste of time because all it did was transfer university costing from the public to the private sphere.”’
But, don’t worry, Professor Byrne doesn’t think this will lead to a two-tier system, split between wealthy universities and less-well-off regionals:
“I’d call it an appropriately differentiated system, with any number of levels within it.”
We have four classes! That must be better than have/have not. That’s… wait…
The core of this argument is that, somehow, it is not the role of Universities to provide the same thing as every other university, which is a slashing of services more usually (coyly) referred to as “playing to your strengths”. What this really is, however, is geographical and social entrapment. You weren’t born in a city, you don’t want to be saddled with huge debt or your school wasn’t great so you didn’t get the marks to go to a “full” University? Well, you can go to a regional University, which is playing to its strengths, to offer you a range of courses that have been market-determined to be suitable. But it will be price competitive! This is great, because after 2-3 generations of this, the people near the regional University will not have the degree access to make the money to work anywhere other than their region or to go to a different University. And, of course, we have never seen a monopolised, deregulated market charging excessive fees when their consumer suffers from a lack of mobility…
There are some quite valid questions as to why we need to duplicate teaching capabilities in the same state, until we look at the Australian student, who tends to go to University near where they live, rather than moving into residential accommodation on campus, and, when you live in a city that spans 70km from North to South as Adelaide does, it suddenly becomes more evident why there might be repeated schools in the Universities that span this geographical divide. When you live in Sydney, where the commute can be diabolical and the city is highly divided by socioeconomic grouping, it becomes even more important. Duplication in Australian Universities is not redundancy, it’s equality.
The other minor thing to remember is that the word University comes from the Latin word for whole. The entire thing about a University is that it is most definitely not a vocational training college, focussed on one or two things. It is defined by, and gains strength from, its diversity and the nature of study and research that comes together in a place that isn’t quite like any other. We are at a point in history when the world is changing so quickly that predicting the jobs of the next 20 years is much harder, especially if we solve some key problems in robotics. Entire jobs, and types of job, will disappear almost overnight – if we have optimised our Universities to play to their strengths rather than keeping their ability to be agile and forward-looking, we will pay for it tomorrow. And we will pay dearly for it.
Education can be a challenging thing for some people to justify funding because you measure the money going in and you can’t easily measure the money that comes back to you. But we get so much back from an educated populace. Safety on the road: education. Safety in the skies: education. Art, literature, music, film: a lot of education. The Internet, your phone, your computer: education, Universities, progressive research funding and CSIRO.
Did you like a book recently? That was edited by someone who most likely had a degree that many wouldn’t consider worth funding. Just because it’s not obvious what people do with their degrees, and just because some jobs demand degrees when they don’t need them, it doesn’t mean that we need to cut down on the number of degrees or treat people who do degrees with a less directly vocational pathway as if they are parasites (bad) or mad (worse). Do we need to change some things about our society in terms of perceptions of worth and value? Yes – absolutely, yes. But let’s not blame education for how it gets mutated and used. And, please, just because we don’t understand someone’s job, let us never fall into the trap of thinking it’s easy or trivial.
The people who developed the first plane had never flown. The people who developed WiFi had never used a laptop. The people who developed the iPhone had never used one before. But they were educated and able to solve challenges using a combination of technical and non-technical knowledge. Steve Jobs may never have finished college (although he attributed the Mac’s type handling to time he spent in courses there) but he employed thousands of people who did – as did Bill Gates. As do all of the mining companies if they actually want to find ore bodies and attack them properly.
Education will define what Australia is for the rest of this century and for every century afterwards. To argue that we have to cut funding and force more debt on to students is to deny education to more Australians and, ultimately, to very much head towards a permanently divided Australia.
You might think, well, I’m ok, why should I worry? Ignoring any altruistic issues, what do you think an undereducated, effectively underclass, labour force is going to do when all of their jobs disappear? If there are still any History departments left, then you might want to look into the Luddites and the French Revolution. You can choose to do this for higher purposes, or you can do it for yourself, because education will help us all to adjust to an uncertain future and, whether you think so or not, we probably need the Universities running at full speed as cradles of research and ideas, working with industry to be as creative as possible to solve the problems that you will only read about in tomorrow’s paper.
Funding Education: Trust me, you want to.
Rage Against the Machine
I have a new book out: A Guide to Teaching Puzzle-based learning. #puzzlebasedlearning #education
Posted: September 5, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: blogging, colleagues, curriculum, design, Ed Meyer, education, educational problem, Generation Why, higher education, in the student's head, raja sooriamurthi, reflection, resources, shameless self-promotion, student perspective, students, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, universal principles of design, work/life balance, workload, Zbyszek Michalewicz Leave a commentTime for some pretty shameless self-promotion. Feel free to stop reading if that will bother you.
My colleagues, Ed Meyer from BWU, Raja Sooriamurthi from CMU and Zbyszek Michalewicz (emeritus from my own institution) and I have just released a new book, called “A Guide to Teaching Puzzle-based learning.” What a labour of love this has been and, better yet, we are still still talking to each other. In fact, we’re planning some follow-up events next year to do some workshops around the book so it’ll be nice to work with the team again.
(How to get it? This is the link to Springer, paperback and e-Book. This is the link to Amazon, paperback only I believe.)
Here’s a slightly sleep-deprived and jet-lagged picture of me holding the book as part of my “wow, it got published” euphoria!
See how happy I am? And also so out of it.
The book is a resource for the teacher, although it’s written for teachers from primary to tertiary and it should be quite approachable for the home school environment as well. We spent a lot of time making it approachable, sharing tips for students and teachers alike, and trying to get all of our knowledge about how to teach well with puzzles down into the one volume. I think we pretty much succeeded. I’ve field-tested the material here at Universities, schools and businesses, with very good results across the board. We build on a good basis and we love sound practical advice. This is, very much, a book for the teaching coalface.
It’s great to finally have it all done and printed. The Springer team were really helpful and we’ve had a lot of patience from our commissioning editors as we discussed, argued and discussed again some of the best ways to put things into the written form. I can’t quite believe that we managed to get 350 pages down and done, even with all of the time that we had.
If you or your institution has a connection to SpringerLink then you can read it online as part of your subscription. Otherwise, if you’re keen, feel free to check out the preview on the home page and then you may find that there are a variety of prices available on the Web. I know how tight budgets are at the moment so, if you do feel like buying, please buy it at the best price for you. I’ve already had friends and colleagues ask what benefits me the most and the simple answer is “if people read it and find it useful”.
To end this disgraceful sales pitch, we’re actually quite happy to run workshops and the like, although we are currently split over two countries (sometimes three or even four), so some notice is always welcome.
That’s it, no more self-promotion to this extent until the next book!
Talking Ethics with the Terminator: Using Existing Student Experience to Drive Discussion
Posted: September 5, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: authenticity, community, curriculum, education, educational problem, ethical issues, ethics, feedback, Generation Why, higher education, in the student's head, learning, principles of design, reflection, resources, student perspective, students, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking Leave a commentOne of the big focuses at our University is the Small-Group Discovery Experience, an initiative from our overall strategy document, the Beacon of Enlightenment. You can read all of the details here, but the essence is that a small group of students and an experienced research academic meet regularly to start the students down the path of research, picking up skills in an active learning environment. In our school, I’ve run it twice as part of the professional ethics program. This second time around, I think it’s worth sharing what we did, as it seems to be working well.
Why ethics? Well, this is first year and it’s not all that easy to do research into Computing if you don’t have much foundation, but professional skills are part of our degree program so we looked at an exploration of ethics to build a foundation. We cover ethics in more detail in second and third year but it’s basically a quick “and this is ethics” lecture in first year that doesn’t give our students much room to explore the detail and, like many of the more intellectual topics we deal with, ethical understanding comes from contemplation and discussion – unless we just want to try to jam a badly fitting moral compass on to everyone and be done.
Ethical issues present the best way to talk about the area as an introduction as much of the formal terminology can be quite intimidating for students who regard themselves as CS majors or Engineers first, and may not even contemplate their role as moral philosophers. But real-world situations where ethical practice is more illuminating are often quite depressing and, from experience, sessions in medical ethics, and similar, rapidly close down discussion because it can be very upsetting. We took a different approach.
The essence of any good narrative is the tension that is generated from the conflict it contains and, in stories that revolve around artificial intelligence, robots and computers, this tension often comes from what are fundamentally ethical issues: the machine kills, the computer goes mad, the AI takes over the world. We decided to ask the students to find two works of fiction, from movies, TV shows, books and games, to look into the ethical situations contained in anything involving computers, AI and robots. Then we provided them with a short suggested list of 20 books and 20 movies to start from and let them go. Further guidance asked them to look into the active ethical agents in the story – who was doing what and what were the ethical issues?
I saw the students after they had submitted their two short paragraphs on this and I was absolutely blown out of the water by their informed, passionate and, above all, thoughtful answers to the questions. Debate kept breaking out on subtle points. The potted summary of ethics that I had given them (follow the rules, aim for good outcomes or be a good person – sorry, ethicists) provided enough detail for the students to identify issues in rule-based approaches, utilitarianism and virtue ethics, but I could then introduce terms to label what they had already done, as they were thinking about them.
I had 13 sessions with a total of 250 students and it was the most enjoyable teaching experience I’ve had all year. As follow-up, I asked the students to enter all of their thoughts on their entities of choice by rating their autonomy (freedom to act), responsibility (how much we could hold them to account) and perceived humanity, using a couple of examples to motivate a ranking system of 0-5. A toddler is completely free to act (5) and completely human (5) but can’t really be held responsible for much (0-1 depending on the toddler). An aircraft autopilot has no humanity or responsibility but it is completely autonomous when actually flying the plane – although it will disengage when things get too hard. A soldier obeying orders has an autonomy around 5. Keanu Reeves in the Matrix has a humanity of 4. At best.
They’ve now filled the database up with their thoughts and next week we’re going to discuss all of their 0-5 ratings as small groups, then place them on a giant timeline of achievements in literature, technology, AI and also listing major events such as wars, to see if we can explain why authors presented the work that they did. When did we start to regard machines as potentially human and what did the world seem like them to people who were there?
This was a lot of fun and, while it’s taken a little bit of setting up, this framework works well because students have seen quite a lot, the trick is just getting to think about with our ethical lens. Highly recommended.
What do you think, Arnold? (Image from moviequotes.me)
Swearing with @cadigan, @gavingsmith & @cstross #worldcon #loncon3 Rat’s Monkey’s Ahem
Posted: September 4, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: authenticity, Battlestar Galactica, Charles Stross, community, education, Gavin Smith, genre fiction, Harry Harrison, higher education, literature, loncon3, Mihaela Marija Perkovic, Pat Cadigan, peer pressure, reluctant readers, school, science fiction, students, worldcon, young adult literature 2 CommentsOne of the other more interesting panels I went to at WorldCon was “Rat’s Monkey’s Ass”, a panel with Pat Cadigan, Gavin Smith, Mihaela Marija Perkovic, and Charles Stross on the use of swear words in genre fiction. Many pieces of work feature constructed swearing, such as frak in Battlestar Galactica and some of the more farcical attempts at science-oriented swearing in earlier science fiction. (Let’s not even start on Harry Harrison’s bowbidy-bowb.)
Image from tshirtbordello.com. It is a strangely satisfying word, though.
I’ve met Mihaela before, when she visited Australia, and she did a great job on keeping the panel going, as well as contributing some excellent swear words of her own. Of course, the authors present did a great job of swearing like a variety of troopers from a range of different timezones and militaries, but there are important aspects to this, which were also excellently covered.
The blurb for the panel reads:
Swearing in science fiction and fantasy is occasionally a minefield of anachronism, but then, there’s often nothing weirder than hearing someone yell “frak”. Or even worse, a teenage character that refuses to curse at all. This panel will explore swear words in the genres. What purpose does swearing have within a society? What purpose does it serve in fiction, and how important, or not, are profanities to the narrative? When are invented curses more (or less) effective than real (contemporary or historical) examples, and why?
The general feeling was that conveying emotion is important and that swearing is an important part of this. It feels really hollow when a hardened space pirate says something like “Oh, dash” and this matters when you’re trying to convey the sense of reality required to hold up the parachute silk of disbelief.
There is one issue, which I raised in question time. Given that many young people do not have the delightfully proper middle and upper-middle class upbringing we see so often in Young Adult fiction, it’s positively disingenuous to remove swearing from certain works because that is the world those kids are growing up in. When people have fewer words at their disposal, they make use of the ones that they have. We know that children in the US from non-educationally successful backgrounds, with few books, can have a vocabulary deficit measured in the thousands of words and, probably, a lot of their emotional conveyance is going to come from the use of swearwords, whether we like it or not.
When someone picks up a book, they have to have a reason to keep reading, either by seeing themselves in there or just being really interested. When YA is a sterile “Boy’s Own” adventure of “Gosh” and “Golly”, this would seem farcical to a teen who is told to take out the f-ing garbage at night or they’d be in the s*. (Bowdlerised to keep my blog’s general rating, embarrassingly enough.) There’s an important issue in reaching the reluctant reader and we’re already aware of how much certain areas of education, such as Computer Science, have to be hidden from peer groups for not being perceived as “cool” enough.
I’m not recommending that Harry Potter has to start calling Ron an *#&*&#$@ piece of #(*#$ that wouldn’t *&#($ in a (()#$# )()#$, but there is a wider world that swearing can constructively reach, if we’re going to try and engage some of these borderline readers. (Of course, the frequency of pseudo-racist slurs between pure bloods and non- in the Potter world is astoundingly awful when you come to think about it, but I’m not actually as positive on that. There’s a big difference between giving people a voice that sounds like theirs and having a large number of cheerful racists mostly getting away with constant, casual racism.)
Panellists may have a completely different opinion on this so I welcome followups! Thank you!
Memories in Amber: How I possibly mildly embarrassed Christopher Priest by Emphasising the Influence of His Writing. #loncon3 #worldcon
Posted: September 4, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: an infinite summer, christopher priest, contemplation, education, fiction, higher education, Infinite Summer, loncon3, students, summer, thinking, time travel, worldcon Leave a commentMany, many years ago, I read a short story about a young man and woman who, on an English Summer’s day, are frozen in time by visitors from elsewhere, probably the future. There’s a good story that follows, which I won’t go into here, and I really enjoyed it. The only problem was that I read it when I was about 10 and I was at someone else’s house, flicking through their book collection. After that point, although I remembered the story, I did not remember either the title or the author.
Now, this begin before the age of easy searching, I really had no simple way to find the story, unless someone else had read it and recognised my telling of it. When you tell your version of a story to someone else, it’s much like when you make a map – you put the things that interest you on there and this often reveals how much difference there is in interpretation.
Some years went by, probably about 25 or so, and I had taken to browsing collections of short stories in second hand book stores, looking for the work. It wasn’t a full-time occupation but, if I ran across a new store, I’d duck in and see what they had. I must have looked over about 10 countries, on three continents, idly looking for a story that I (by now) dimly remembered.
One day, I found it. The name of the story was “An Infinite Summer” by Christopher Priest, who was actually someone I had read and enjoyed for his novels, in a collection of the same name. I was so delighted after so many years of searching that the bookseller asked me what was up and, on hearing the story, gave the book to me for free.
This happens to be the version I have now. A simple cover belies a complex set of stories.
And it’s still a great story. Character driven, well-written and with just enough time travel to make it work, without bogging down in the unnecessary mechanics of impossible machines.
Let’s move forward to this year, some 10 years later, and I happen to be at LonCon3, the World Science Fiction Convention for 2014, in the room for the sessions “In Conversation: Naomi Alderman and Christopher Priest”. I’m rather excited as I’d never seen Priest in the flesh before and his story is a part of the unfolding of my life. It wasn’t exactly a Golden Fleece but it was definitely a plank on the ship!
So the conversation unfolds and, delightfully, Priest is fiery, smart, opinionated, unrepentantly definite about things that I also happen to be unapologetic about and then he talks about his writing.
“I don’t believe in aliens, space ships or time travel”, he says, which explains much of his work and its fascination with a very human future, devoid of most of the tricks that are used to bring tension into the narrative. But the time travel thing piqued my curiosity, because “An Infinite Summer” is a glorious tale of time and time lost, told within the mythical context of the endless English Summer.
Question time arrives and I pose a question: “You say you don’t believe in time travel but what about ‘An Infinite Summer’? That’s a fantastic time travel story!”
There’s a pause, some time for recollection, and he says” Well, yes, they stopped people in time.” A pause.
I went on, “But weren’t they people from the future?”
And he pauses again, nods, and there is a bit of a chuckle from the audience as the moderator notes that I appear to know that work better than he does now.
“Yes,” he says, “thank you.” I must be honest that his “thank you” sounded a little… cool but I suspect that this was because I was terribly embarrassed myself for putting him in that position.
And yet, what a testament to the strength of the original work and its concept! There I am, transfixed and frozen in time at a moment where a much younger Christopher Priest is writing this story – this story reaches out to me and holds itself in my memory and it is a part of the mythology of my own life. Yet, he, having set the tableau down, moves on to do other things. This is “An Infinite Summer”, told with new players, and possibly, having written this down, somewhere it will be told again.
You never know how people are going to remember you and, in the short span that I’ve been blogging, it’s come back to me how some of my posts resonate deeply with people (not many) and they remember the contents more than I do. Yet I’m already moving on and looking ahead to other things. I should have known this because, as an educator, I sometimes have a bigger place in someone’s world than they do in mine – which I’m trying to change by getting to know my students better. I’m an okay person but I’m a lousy creature of myth.
I don’t actually think I bothered Mr Priest with this and I still love that story – now it’s helped me to realise and appreciate how your works can be seen over a lifetime but also, before I actually get much older, to realise that what I have done is another set of steps towards what I’m going to do.
Thank you, Christopher Priest, for a wonderful story, an experience that echoed it, and being extremely willing to participate with a community that obviously enjoys your work.
WorldCon Panel: “We Have to Talk About TED” #loncon3 #worldcon
Posted: September 1, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: DUFF, education, fan, fandom, fannish, loncon3, London, panel, science fiction, TAFF, TED, TEDTalk, World Science Fiction Convention, worldcon 2 CommentsSorry for the belated report, I’ve been catching up and a little unwell. I was lucky enough to participate in a panel entitled “We Need To Talk About TED”, which was chaired by Chad Orzel and featured (in programme order) Dr Sarah Dillon, Andrea Phillips, Vanessa Harden, and me! The panel was split into two groups based on who had and who had not given a TED talk (and for the record, I haven’t) so we focussed on the experiences of people who had undertaken TED talks and, from the academic perspective, the impact, reach and curation issues of TED talks. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design and the basic idea is that TED is used to disseminate “Ideas worth sharing” and has been for about 30 years. In recent years, electronic delivery has increased the reach of TED and TED talks have a very high impact across the video streams of the world.
From those who have attended, a big TED event is an absolute blast. You do a full rehearsal the day before, it’s high production, you get a big haul of high-quality swag, and it’s a reputation booster. Vanessa, an artist who works in interventions (altering spaces to get people thinking and interacting with the space in new or other ways), made the really good point that there was such a big divide between those who had been part of TED and those who were looking in from it, as an academic perspective. This is a great point, because it helps us to remember that TED talks (the big ones) are something that you strive to get to present. The main conference is limited to a smallish number of people and is very expensive, so you have to be showing something pretty good to get there. Chad commented that, from his experience, TED talks were pretty well-balanced in terms of demography and inclusion and this was reiterated by other panellists as well.
My issue stems from my outsider’s view on TED, looking at what we are seeing, the impact of these highly professional and appealing videos and what has come from them. I’m a bit of a numbers guy so let’s look at the numbers. (The other panellists should feel positively inspired to jump and down in the comments to get their points further exposed too. Please!)
Overall, if we look at the top 20 TED talks, they are roughly 15:50 minutes long (on average), which is longer than the usual TED average of about 14:10, and they have, in total, over 88 million views. If people are watching them to the end, then that means we have spent:
416,000 years
watching the top 20 TED talks alone. That’s quite a lot of time, so are all of these videos worth watching? Well, a few of them deal with technology that has … for what of a better word … never quite worked outside of the TED talk or delivered on the scale promised. If we look at SixthSense technology, people have spent about 400 years watching videos on something that has never quite delivered. Why are these videos still in the top 20?
There’s something called the Matthew Effect, which basically means that success breeds success (you might know it as ‘accumulated advantage’). Because these talks made it on to the top 20 a few years back, they get watched more because they have made it on to the top 20. Now, within the top 20, we do some movement up and down the rankings, and, yes, the SixthSense stuff is dropping (about 5 places over the last 2 years) but it’s still there because you look for a list of top 20 videos (this one is from 2012) and that’s what comes out. New videos do make it on and make it higher up – the video on things you didn’t know about orgasm is (quell surprise) 5 places higher after 2 years – but, in terms of a video, success breeds success because of the way that our recommender and listicle based web culture works.
So, even thought TED can distribute ‘ideas worth sharing’, there is inertia in getting rid of “ideas that would have been worth sharing had they actually worked properly”. Don’t get me wrong, the tech world is full of “tried it, didn’t work, try something else” but the problem here is that the well-produced and lingering TED videos can make something look current and attractive when, in reality, it’s over and done. As far as I know (corrections below please), there is no TED expiry mechanism.
TED really shines at Entertainment and Design because TED is a platform for 15 minutes of inspirational wonder – there is no doubt that some of the best talks on the Internet can be found at TED. (My favourite is Dan Pink, to no-one’s surprise.) But as those who had given TED talks on the panel noted, if your rehearsal was too technical in nature, it was time to remove slides and keep the message moving along a little more simply. And this is where we started to head into murkier waters with technological issues.
There’s nothing special about technology and giving inspirational talks about technology, as long as we’re clear on what we’re talking about. There is a big difference between talking about something that works and talking about something that might work. An idea in entertainment and design can be realised by many people and shared widely. An idea based on technology and the development of a key platform will need that platform, which is where SixthSense appears to have fallen down.
So the next thing about TED that we really have to talk about is that it’s always going to be light on the detail of technology and it’s easy to confuse wishes with reality, presentations with progress. Not a problem if we’re clear but a real problem if we’re not.
The final thing that I wanted to address was the curation of TED because not every TED talk goes up on the web. It’s a big deal to make it up onto the TED site, or associated YouTube channel, especially if you’re coming from one of the TEDx local talks or something other than the big talks. And one thing that happens in that curation is a demographic shift. Suddenly, the balanced environment of the conference turns into a video presence that is only 27% women, and a vast over-representation of Californians. There also appears to be a (questionably subtle) bias against certain issues, including women’s reproductive health and some less conventional approaches. If we were getting all of the TED talks then we would see what was going on. Instead, what we see is a snapshot that appears to refine the TED message seen by people at the talk into something that we get to see from the outside. And that’s not ideal.
So, if TED inspires you, that’s great but you need to keep in mind the list of things I outlined above, which comes from the whole group of people on the panel:
- TED talks are popular, at least in some part, because they are popular and there’s no clear way of telling if a TED talk is a good presentation for an idea that is proven, yet to be proven or has in fact been found to need a lot more work.
- TED is great for the E and the D but the technology can be light on. That’s fine if you’re looking for inspiration but not always so great if you’re looking for platforms that work and work now.
- The curation of TED appears to have some bias issues and, whether that’s a deliberate or an accident, it’s skewing TED to being a bit of a “things Californian guys like” and, while that isn’t necessarily a problem, it doesn’t appear to reflect what TED is when you get inside.
- TED may not set out to be elitist but its exclusivity and curatorial approach appears to cultivate an elite aspect that could fall into that trap.
It was a fascinating panel to be on and I learned a great deal from talking to the other panellists! I’m sure that they will pull me up on things that I missed.
Being Honest About Stress, Challenge and Humanity: R U OK? Day #ruok
Posted: August 26, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, depression, education, ethics, higher education, honesty, learning, reflection, robin williams, ruok, students, teaching, thinking Leave a comment
The RUOK™ logo from https://www.ruok.org.au
R U Ok? Day (September the 11th) is coming up soon, with its focus on reaching out and starting conversations with people that you think might not be ok, or might benefit from a friendly conversation. It’s a great initiative and, as someone who has struggled with mental illness, I’m so happy to see us talking openly about this. For me to out myself as having suffered with depression is no big thing, as I discuss it in other parts of the ‘net, but I realise that some of you might now look at what I do and what I say in a different light.
And, if you do, I have to tell you that you need to change the way that you think about these things. A very large number of humans will go through some form of mental issue in their lives, unsurprisingly given the levels of stress that we put ourselves under, the struggle some people have just to survive and the challenges that lie ahead of us as a rather greedy species on a finite globe. So, yes, I’ve suffered from depression but it is an illness. It is treatable and, when it is treated and managed, then you can’t tell that I have problems. In fact, like many people with the problem, even when I’m suffering, you wouldn’t really know. Nobody asks to get mentally ill so stigmatising, isolating and discriminating against people with a treatable mental condition is not just wrong, it’s pretty stupid. So let’s get beyond this and start talking, openly.
That’s where RUOK? is great because it gives you a day and some agency to reach out to someone who seems a little … off and ask them if they’re ok. Trust me when I say that 99% of them will appreciate it. Yes, 1% might give you some grief but if I knew a bet would pay off 99% of the time, I’d take it. The web site has some great tips for starting conversations so please read them if you’re thinking about doing this. (Pro tip: starting a conversation with “You should just cheer up” is not a great way to start. Or finish. In fact, just scratch that and try again.)
I am very open with my students, which I know some people think is potentially unprofessional, and I am a strong believer in cognitive apprenticeship. We are, pretty much, all the same in many respects and me pretending that everything I do comes fully formed and perfect from my amazing brain is a lie. My wisdom, such as it is, is the accumulated memory of the mistakes I’ve made that haven’t killed me yet. My students need to know that the people around them struggle, wonder, stress out and, quite frequently, rise above it all to keep on doing wonderful and beautiful things. I am still professional but I am honest and I am human.
I want to share with all of you something that I wrote on the death of Robin Williams, which I’ve edited slightly for language, but it’s been shared a lot over my other social feeds so it obviously resonates with people. However, many of my students won’t have seen it because I keep my private social life and ‘work’ social media separated. So here it is. I hope that you find it useful and, if you need help, maybe nudges you to help, and if you know someone you’re worried about, it inspires you to ask them “R U OK?”
Mental illness is a poisonous and weird thing. If your eyes changed function, you’d see things differently. When your brain changes function, everything gets weird – and the only impression you have of the perceptual world is suddenly flawed and untrustworthy. But it’s a biochemical issue like diabetes – regulatory systems that aren’t working properly and cannot just be “got over” by thinking happily. Ask a diabetic whether they’ve “really tried” to handle their sugar and see how far that gets you. 🙂
I wrote something, years ago, that I’ve never posted, to try and explain why some people just can’t stay. The nastiest thing about mental illness is that it can show you a world and a way of thinking that makes suicide apparently logical and, even more sadly, necessary. If you saw that world, then maybe you wouldn’t stay either. This doesn’t make it easier on the survivors but it’s important to recognise the role that an actual illness plays here. That f***ing ba***rd, cancer, takes people from us all the time but it at least has the decency to wield the knife itself. Depression puts the knife in the hands of its victim and makes it look like calculated agency, which hurts the people left behind even more.
There is no magic bullet for helping people with mental illness. Some need visible support. Some need solitude. Some need to work. Some drown in it. That’s because mental illness affects people, in all of their variety and their glorious irrationality, and I am no more a poster child for depression than anyone else. I can’t even tell you how to help me and, given how much I communicate, that’s the most irritating thing of all. But I do know that the ongoing support of caring people who are watching and listening makes a big difference and those of you who are aware and supporting, you keep up that good work! (And thank you, on behalf of the people who are still here because other people helped.)
It’s a sad day with Robin WIlliams passing but this is only a part of him. It’s a sad and mad part of him and I wish it hadn’t happened but I won’t let it define him, because his struggles were a part of him and his contribution to laughter and joy were so much greater. The least I can do is to see past his ‘mental diabetes’ to celebrate his actual talent and contribution. And offer my deepest sympathies and condolences to his family and friends.
Rest well, Robin.
Nick Falkner 