More Thoughts on Partnership: Teacher/Student

Posted: August 23, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve just received some feedback on an abstract piece that is going into a local educational research conference. I talked about the issues with arbitrary allocation of deadlines outside of the framing of sound educational design and about how it fundamentally undermines any notion of partnership between teacher and student. The responses were very positive although I’m always wary when people staring using phrases like “should generate vigorous debate around expectations of academics” and “It may be controversial, but [probably] in a good way”. What interests me is how I got to the point of presenting something that might be considered heretical – I started by just looking at the data and, as I uncovered unexpected features, I started to ask ‘why’ and that’s how I got here.

When the data doesn’t fit your hypothesis, it’s time to look at your data collection, your analysis, your hypothesis and the body of evidence supporting your hypothesis. Fortunately, Bayes’ Theorem nicely sums it up for us: your belief in your hypothesis after you collect your evidence is proportional to how strongly your hypothesis was originally supported, modified by the chances of seeing what you did given the existing hypothesis. If your data cannot be supported under your hypothesis – something is wrong. We, of course, should never just ignore the evidence as it is in the exploration that we are truly scientists. Similarly, it is in the exploration of our learning and teaching, and thinking about and working on our relationship with our students, that I feel that we are truly teachers.

All your Bayes are belong to us. (Sorry.)

Once I accepted that I wasn’t in competition with my students and that my role was not to guard the world from them, but to prepare them for the world, my job got easier in many ways and infinitely more enjoyable. However, I am well aware that any decisions I make in terms of changing how I teach, what I teach or why I teach have to be based in sound evidence and not just any warm and fuzzy feelings about partnership. Partnership, of course, implies negotiation from both sides – if I want to turn out students who will be able to work without me, I have to teach them how and when to negotiate. When can we discuss terms and when do we just have to do things?

My concern with the phrase “everything is negotiable” is that it, to me, subsumes the notions that “everything is equivalent” and “every notion is of equal worth”, neither of which I hold to be true from a scientific or educational perspective. I believe that many things that we hold to be non-negotiable, for reasons of convenience, are actually negotiable but it’s an inaccurate slippery slope argument to assume that this means that we  must immediately then devolve to an “everything is acceptable” mode.

Once again we return to authenticity. There’s no point in someone saying “we value your feedback” if it never shows up in final documents or isn’t recorded. There’s no point in me talking about partnership if what I mean is that you are a partner to me but I am a boss to you – this asymmetry immediately reveals the lack of depth in my commitment. And, be in no doubt, a partnership is a commitment, whether it’s 1:1 or 1:360. It requires effort, maintenance, mutual respect, understanding and a commitment from both sides. For me, it makes my life easier because my students are less likely to frame me in a way that gets in the way of the teaching process and, more importantly, allows them to believe that their role is not just as passive receivers of what I deign to transmit. This, I hope, will allow them to continue their transition to self-regulation more easily and will make them less dependent on just trying to make me happy – because I want them to focus on their own learning and development, not what pleases me!

One of the best definitions of science for me is that it doesn’t just explain, it predicts. Post-hoc explanation, with no predictive power, has questionable value as there is no requirement for an evidentiary standard or framing ontology to give us logical consistency. Seeing the data that set me on this course made me realise that I could come up with many explanations but I needed a solid framework for the discussion, one that would give me enough to be able to construct the next set of analyses or experiments that would start to give me a ‘why’ and, therefore, a ‘what will happen next’ aspect.

 

Reflection on Work Load: I may have been too convincing

Posted: August 22, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’m a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to taking my own advice on exercise. “Start easy,” I say, as I come back from injury with a fast 10 mile run. “Don’t over do it!” I admonish as I try to lift my own body weight in a gym. I have two knee surgeries, multiple calf strains and a torn plantar fascia to bear witness to this. For this, and many other reasons, I have a personal training for the gym stuff who I see once a week and a running partner who (facetiously) threatens to slap me if I run too hard or too far. I’m more scared of her than I am my personal trainer but don’t tell her that.

To fit everything in, I train in the gym at 6am on Wednesdays and, while this gives me a long day it allows me to get some good core and upper body work in to balance my legs and overall fitness – strength is useful in many ways as a day-to-day thing but balance, the other effect of good core strength, is incredibly useful and makes me a much better runner. I also take the opportunity to talk to someone who doesn’t work with me, isn’t related to me and knows what I do, but not in much detail. It’s very relaxing to talk to someone like that, especially when you have things on your mind.

Time Banking has been on my mind, as has my own time management, so I’ve talked a lot about making my life more effective, working less and working better, all those good things. So imagine my surprise when my trainer wrote to me asking if we could move sessions a little, if possible, as he’d been listening to what I’d been saying and realised that he’d been working reactively by not allowing himself enough time to plan and structure his day, especially as he’s now managing the gym I train at.

I’ve been thinking about changing away from the Wednesday 6 slot and this means that this is great timing for me. I’d like to keep training with him but I could train with someone else who doesn’t have his burdens or schedule quite easily and still have a really good experience – I’ve trained with other people before there, it’s a good gym. But what I really like is the thought process – contemplative and transformative.

Now, either this is the greatest con job that I’ve been privy to or I may have actually helped someone else to see a new way of thinking about their own life. Either way, there appears to be some knowledge transfer going on.

One person at a time. It’s slow but I can work with that. 🙂

 

Short and Sweet

Posted: August 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Well, it’s official. I’ve started to compromise my ability to work through insufficient rest. Despite reducing my additional work load, chewing through my backlog is keeping me working far too much and, as you can tell from the number and nature of the typos in these posts, it’s affecting me. I am currently reorganising tasks to see what I can continue to fit in without compromising quality, which means this week a lot of e-mail is being sent to sort out my priorities.

This weekend, I’m sitting down to brainstorm the rest of 2012 and work out what has to happen when – nothing is going to sneak up on me (again) this year.

In very good news, we have 18 students coming back for the pilot activity of “Our students, their words” where we ask students who love ICT an important question – “what do you like and why do you think someone else might like it?” We’re brainstorming with the students for all of Friday morning and passing their thoughts (as research) to a graphic designer to get some posters made. This is stage 1. Stage 2, the national campaign, is also moving – slowly but surely. This is why I really need to rest: I’m getting to the point where it’s important that I am at my best and brightest. Sleeping in and relaxing is probably the best thing I can do for the future of ICT! 🙂

Rather than be a hypocrite, I’m switching to ultra-short posts until I’m rested up enough to work properly again.

See you tomorrow!

The Road Lines and the Fences

Posted: August 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Teaching is a highly rewarding activity and there are many highs to be had along the way: the students who ‘get it’, the students that you help back from the edge of failure, the ones who you extend opportunities to who take them, and the (small) group who come back some years later and thank you. They’re all great. One of the best ways to spot those students are at risk or already in trouble is, of course, to put in some structure and assessment to give you reports on when people are having trouble. A good structure will include things like a set of mechanisms that allow the student to determine where they are, and mechanisms that alert you if the student is in terrible trouble. Of course, the first set can also be viewed by you, as you are probably instrumental in the feedback, but we’re not really talking summative and formative, we’re talking guidance and then disaster prevention.

This is “Don’t Park Here”, “Don’t Cross Here” or “We Are Very Close to a Naval or Cavalry Officer”.

It’s like driving on the roads. They paint lines on the roads that tell you where to go and sometimes you even get the things that go “BARRUMP BARRUMP BARRUMP” which is secret code for “You are driving in a country that drives on the other side from you, back into your lane.” However, these are for the driver to use to determine which position they should hold on the road. In this case, it’s not just a personal guidance, it’s a vital social compact that allows us to drive and not have it look like The Road Warrior.

Mel Gibson looks upset – has he seen his press in the early 21st Century?

But the key point for these lines is that they do not actually have any ability to physically restrain your car. Yes, we can observe people swerving over the road, whether police or cameras are viewing, but that little white or yellow line doesn’t do anything except give you a reference point.

When we are serious about the danger, we put up large pieces of steel and concrete – we build fences. The fences stop people from heading over into the precipice, they stop people from crossing into oncoming traffic and they even can deflect noise away from houses to help other people. Again, we have an individual and a social aspect to these barriers but these are no ‘ignore it’ mechanism – this is physics!

The analogy is excellent for the barriers and measures that we can use in teaching. An aware student, one who needs the occasional reminder, will see themselves moving over the white lines (perhaps not doing the work to a previous standard) and maybe even hear the lane markers (get a low mark on a mid-term) but they can usually be relied upon to pull themselves back. But those students who are ‘asleep at the wheel’ will neither see the lines nor hear the warnings and that’s where we have a problem.

In terms of contribution and assessment, a student who is not showing up to class can’t get reports on what they’re failing, because they’ve submitted nothing to be marked. This is one of the reasons I try to chase students who don’t submit work, because otherwise they’ll get no feedback. If I’m using a collaborative mode to structure knowledge, students won’t realise what they’re missing out on if they just download the lecture notes – and they may not know because all of the white line warnings are contained in the activity that they’re not showing up for.

This places a great deal of importance on finding out why students aren’t even awake at the wheel, rather than just recording that they’ve skipped one set of lines, another, wow, they’re heading towards the embankment and I hope that the crash barrier holds.

Both on the road and in our classes, those crash barriers are methods of last resort. We have an ‘Unsatisfactory Academic Progress’ system that moves students to different level of reporting if they start systematically under performing – the only problem is that, to reach the UAP, you already have to be failing and, from any GPA calculation, even one fail can drag your record down for years. Enough fails to make UAP could mean that you will never, ever be perceived as a high performing student again, even if you completely turn your life around. So this crash barrier, which does work and has saved many students from disappearing off with fails, is something that we should not rely upon. Yes, people live through crash barrier collisions but a lot don’t and a lot get seriously injured.

Where are warning lines in our courses? We try to put one in within a week of starting, with full feedback and reporting in detail on one assessment well within the first 6 weeks of teaching. Personally, I try to put enough marking on the road that students can work out if they think that they are ready to be in that course (or to identify if they can get enough help to stay in), before they’ve been charged any money and it’s too late to withdraw.

I know a lot of people will read this and think “Hey, some people fail” and, yes, that’s perfectly true. Some people have so much energy built up that nothing will stop them and they’ll sail across the road and flip over the barrier. But, you know what? They had to start accelerating down that path somewhere. Someone had to give them the idea that what they were doing was ok – or they found themselves in an environment where that kind of bad reasoning made sense.

Someone may have seen them swerving all over the road, 10 miles back, and not known how to or had the ability to intervene. On the roads, being the domain of physics, I get that. How do you stop a swerving drunk without endangering yourself unless you have a squad of cars, trained officers, crash mats and a whole heap of water? That’s hard.

But the lines, markers and barriers in our courses aren’t dependent on physics, they are dependent upon effort, caring, attentiveness, good design and sound pedagogy. As always, I’m never saying that everyone should pass just for showing up but I am wondering aloud, mostly to myself, how I can construct something that keeps the crashes to a minimum and the self-corrections minor and effective.

A (measurement) league of our own?

Posted: August 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

As I’ve mentioned before, the number of ways that we are being measured is on the rise, whether it’s measures of our research output or ‘quality’, or the impact, benefits, quality or attractiveness of our learning and teaching. The fascination with research quality is not new but, given that we have had a “publish or perish” mentality where people would put out anything and be called ‘research active’, a move to a quality focus (which often entails far more preparation, depth of research and time to publication) from a quantity focus is not a trivial move. Worse, the lens through which we are assessed can often change far faster than we can change those aspects that are assessed.

If you look at some of the rankings of Universities, you’ll see that the overall metrics include things like the number of staff who are Nobel Laureates or have won the Fields Medal. Well, there are less than 52 Fields medallists and only a few hundred Nobel Laureates and, as the website itself distinguishes, a number of those are in the Economics area. This is an inherently scarce resource, however you slice it, and, much like a gallery that prides itself on having an excellent collection of precious art, you are more likely to be able to get more of these slices if you already have some. Thus, this measure of the research presence of your University is a bit of feedback loop.

Similarly the measurement of things like ‘number of papers in the top 20% of publications’. This conveniently ignores some of the benefits of being at better funded institutions, being part of an established community, being invited to lodge papers, and so on. Even where we have anonymous submission and evaluation, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to spot connections, groups, and, of course, let’s not forget that a well-funded group will have more time, more resources, more postdocs. Basically, funding should lead to better results which leads to better measurement which may lead to better funding.

In terms of high prestige personnel, and their importance, or a history of quality publication, neither of these metrics can be changed overnight. Certainly a campaign to attract prestigious staff might be fruitful in the short term but, and let us be very frank here, if you can buy these staff with a combination of desirable locale issues and money, then it is a matter of bidding as to which University they go to next. But trying to increase your “number of high end publications in the last 5 years” is going to take 5 years to improve and this is kind of long-term thinking that we, as humans, appear to be very bad at.

Speaking of thinking in the long term, a number of the measures that would be most useful to us are not collected or used for assessment because they are over large timescales and, as I’ll discuss, may force us to realise that some things are intrinsically unmeasurable. Learning and teaching quality and impact is intrinsically hard to measure, mainly because we rarely seem take the time to judge the impact of tertiary institutions over an appropriate timescale. Given the transition issues in going from high school to University, measuring drop-out and retention rates in a student’s first semester leaves us wondering who is at fault. Are the schools not quite doing the job? Is it the University staff? The courses? The discipline identity? The student? Yes, we can measure retention and do a good job, with the right assessment, of maturing depth and type of knowledge but what about the core question?

How can we measure the real impact of undertaking studies in our field at our University?

After all, this is what these metrics are all about – determining the impact of a given set of academics at a given Uni so you can put them into a league table, hand out funding in some weighted scheme or tell students which Uni they should be going to. Realistically, we should come back in twenty years and find out how much was used, where their studies took them, whether they think it was valuable. How did our student use the tools we gave them to change the world? Of course, how do we then present a control to determine that it was us who caused that change. Oh, obviously a professional linkage is something we can think of as correlated – but not every engineer is Brunel and, most certainly, you don’t have to have gone to University to change the world.

This is most definitely not to say that shorter term measures of l&t quality aren’t important but we have to be very careful what we’re measuring and the reason that we’re measuring – and the purpose to which we put it. Measuring depth of knowledge, ability to apply that knowledge and professionally practice in a discipline? That’s worth measuring if we do it in a way that encourages constructive improvement rather than punishment or negative feedback that doesn’t show the way forward.

I don’t mind being measured, as long as it’s useful, but I’m getting a little tired of being ranked by mechanisms that I can’t change unless I go back in time and publish 10 more papers over the last 5 years or I manage to heal an entire educational system just so my metrics improve for reducing first-year drop out. (Hey, just so you know, I am working on increasing number of ICT students on a national level – you do have to think on the large scale occasionally.)

Apart from anything else, I wouldn’t rank my own students this way – it’s intrinsically arbitrary and unfair. Food for thought.

You Are Reading This on My Saturday

Posted: August 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Ah, time zones. Because of these divisions of time, what publishes at 4:00am Saturday morning, Australian Central Standard Time, will be read by some of you on Friday. It is, however, important to realise that I am writing this on Friday evening, around 8:30pm, so that will help you to determine the context. You may not need it because my question is simple:

“What are you doing this weekend?”

If your answer is anything along the lines of spending time with the kids, sports, reading, writing the world’s worst screen play, going to the theatre, checking out the new cafe down on market – then bravo! If your answer is anything along the lines of “working” then, while I don’t doubt that you feel the genuine need to work, I do have to wonder about any weekend that features as much, if not more, work than a weekday.

I’m very guilty in this particular exchange. My wife has returned home after only two weeks away and I’ve already started to slip back into bad habits – not just doing work on weekends because I needed to, but assigning work to weekends as if they were weekdays.

See the difference there? It’s the difference between the reserve chute and the main chute, the emergency petrol in the jerry can to the fuel tank – it’s the difference between a temporary overload and workaholism.

I understand that many of you are under a great deal of pressure to perform, to put marks on a well-define chalkboard, to bring in money, to publish, to teach well, to do all of that and, right now, there aren’t enough hours in the week let alone the day. However, how you frame this mentally makes a big difference to how you continue to act… and I speak from bitter, bitter experience here.

Yesterday, I talked about things that I hadn’t achieved. Yet, today, I talk about taking the weekend off. No work. Minimal e-mail. Fun as a priority. Why?

Because the evidence clearly indicates that the solution to my problem lies in getting rest and sleep, not by reducing my ability to work effectively by working longer hours, less effectively. If I am to get the whole concept of student time management right, then it should work for me as well – as I’ve said numerous times. My dog food. Here’s a spoon. Eat it up.

Are you working so hard that you can’t focus? Is it actually taking you twice as long to get things done?

Then rest. Sleep in. Take a day off. By simple arithmetic, skipping a day to get back to higher efficacy is a good investment. Stop treating the weekends as conveniently quiet days where nobody bothers you – because everyone else has taken the day off.

That’s what I noticed when I started working weekends. The reason it was quieter is that, most of the time, no-one else was there. Ok, maybe they didn’t ‘achieve’ as much as I did – but how did they look? Were they grey, or jaundiced, tired and listless, possibly even angry and frustrated on Monday morning? Or were they bright and happy, full of weekend chatter? Did you, pale and wan, resent them for it?

Look, we all have to work weekends now and then and pull the occasional all-nighter, but making it a part of your schedule and, worse, cancelling your life in order to work because you tell yourself that this is a permanent thing? That’s not right. If it was right, your office would be full on weekends and at 10pm. (p.s. if that’s your company, and you’re working 80 hours a week, you’re terribly inefficient. Pass it on.)

Now, I’m going off to sleep. I will post some more over this weekend but most of it is scheduled. Let’s see if I can practice what I preach.

Talk to the duck!

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

I’ve had a funny day. Some confirmed acceptances for journals and an e-mail from a colleague regarding a collaboration that has stalled. When I set out to readjust my schedule to meet a sustainable pattern, I had a careful look at everything I needed to do but I overlooked one important thing: it’s easier to give the illusion of progress than it is to do certain things. For example, I can send you a ‘working on it’ e-mail every week or so and that takes me about a minute. Actually doing something could take 4-8 hours and that’s a very large amount of time!

So, today was a hard lesson because I’ve managed to keep almost all of the balls in the air, juggling furiously, as I trim down my load but this one hurts. Right now, someone probably thinks that I don’t care about their project – which isn’t true but it fell into the tough category of important things that needs a lot of work to get to the next stage. I’ve sent an apologetic and embarrassed e-mail to try and get this going again – with a high prioritisation of the actual work – but it’s probably too late.

The project in question went to a strange place – I was so concerned about letting the colleague down that I froze up every time I tried to do the work. Weird but true and, ultimately, harmful. But, ultimately, I didn’t do what I said I’d do and I’m not happy.

So how can I turn this difficult and unpleasant situation into something that I can learn from? Something that my students can benefit from?

Well, I can remember that my students, even though they come in at the start of the semester, often come in with overheads and burdens. Even if it’s not explicit course load, it’s things like their jobs, their family commitments, their financial burdens and their relationships. Sometimes it’s our fault because we don’t correctly and clearly specify prerequisites, assumed knowledge and other expectations – which imposes a learning burden on the student to go off and develop their own knowledge on their own time.

Whatever it is, this adds a new dimension to any discussion of time management from a student perspective: the clear identification of everything that has to be dealt with as well as their coursework. I’ve often noticed that, when you get students talking about things, that halfway through the conversation it’s quite likely that their eyes will light up as they realise their own problem while explaining things to other people.

There’s a practice in software engineering that is often referred to as “rubber ducking”. You put a rubber duck on a shelf and, when people are stuck on a problem, they go and talk to the duck and explain their problem. It’s amazing how often that this works – but it has to be encouraged and supported to work. There must be no shame in talking to the duck! (Bet you never thought that I’d say that!)

TELL ME YOUR SECRETS!

I’m still unhappy about the developments of today but, for the purposes of self-regulation and the development of mature time management, I’ve now identified a new phase of goal setting that makes sense in relation to students. The first step is to work out what you have to do before you do anything else, and this will help you to work out when you need to move your timelines backwards and forwards to accommodate your life.

This may actually be one of the best reasons for trying to manage your time better – because talking about what you have to do before you do any other assignments might just make you realise that you are going to struggle without some serious focus on your time.

Or, of course, it may not. But we can try. We can try with personal discussions, group discussions, collaborative goal setting – students sitting around saying “Oh yeah, I have that problem too! It’s going to take me two weeks to deal with that.” Maybe no-one will say anything.

We can but try! (And, if all else fails, I can give everyone a duck to talk to. 🙂 )

Group feedback, fast feedback, good feedback

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

We had the “first cut” poster presentation today in my new course. Having had the students present their pitches the previous week, this week was the time to show the first layout – put up your poster and let it speak for itself.

The results were, not all that surprisingly, very, very good. Everyone had something to show, a data story to tell and some images and graphs that told the story. What was most beneficial though was the open feedback environment, where everyone learned something from the comments on their presentation. One of my students, who had barely slept for days and was highly stressed, got some really useful advice that has given him a great way forward – and the ability to go to bed tonight with the knowledge that he has a good path forward for the next two weeks.

Working as a group, we could agree as a group, discuss and disagree, suggest, counter-suggest, develop and enhance. My role in all of this is partially as a ‘semi-expert’ but also as a facilitator. Keep the whole thing moving, keep it to time, make sure that everyone gets a good opportunity to show their work and give and receive feedback.

The students all write down their key feedback, which is scanned as a whole and put on the website so that any good points that went to anyone can now be used by anyone in the group. The feedback is timely, personal and relevant. Everyone feels that these sessions are useful and the work produced reflects the advantages. But everyone talks to everyone else – it’s compulsory. Come to the session, listen and then share your thoughts.

This, of course, reveals one of my key design approaches: collaboration is ok and there is no competitiveness. Read anything about the grand challenges and you keep seeing the word ‘community’ through it. Solid and open communities, where real and effective sharing happens, aren’t formed in highly competitive spaces. Because the students have unique projects, they can share ideas, references and even analysis techniques without plagiarism worries – because they can attribute without the risk of copying. Because there is no curve grading, helping someone else isn’t holding you back.

Because of this, we have already had two informal workshop groups form to address issues of analysis and software, where knowledge passes from person to person. Before today’s first cut presentation, a group was sitting outside, making suggestions and helping each other out – to achieve some excellent first cut results.

Yes, it’s a small group so, being me, now I’m worrying about how I would scale this up, how I would take this out to a large first-year class, how I would get it to a school group. This groups need careful facilitation and the benefit of inter-group communication is derived from everyone in the group having a voice. The number of interactions scale with the square of the group size, so there’s a finite limit to how many people I can have in the group and fit it into a two-hour practical session. If I split a larger class into sub-groups, I lose the advantage of everyone see in everyone else’s work.

But this can be solved, potentially with modern “e-” techniques, or a different approach to preparation, although I can’t quite see it yet. There’s a part of me that thinks “Ask these students how they would approach it”, because they have viewpoints and experience in this which complements mine.

Every week that goes by, I wonder if we will keep improving, and keep rewarding the (to be honest) risk that we’re taking in running a small course like this in leaner times. And, every week, the answer is a resounding “yes”!

Here’s to next week!

Putting it all together – discussing curriculum with students

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

One of the nice things about my new grand challenges course is that the lecture slots are a pre-reading based discussion of the grand challenges in my discipline (Computer Science), based on the National Science Foundation’s Taskforce report. Talking through this with students allows us to identify the strengths of the document and, perhaps more interestingly, some of its shortfalls. For example, there is much discussion on inter-disciplinary and international collaboration as being vital, followed by statements along the lines of “We must regain the ascendancy in the discipline that we invented!” because the NSF is, first and foremost, a US-funded organisation. There’s talk about providing the funds for sustainability and then identifying the NSF as the organisation giving the money, and hence calling the shots.

The areas of challenge are clearly laid out, as are the often conflicting issues surrounding the administration of these kinds of initiative. Too often, we see people talking about some amazing international initiative – only to see it fail because nobody wants to go first, or no country/government wants to put money up that other people can draw on until everyone does it at the same time.

In essence, this is a timing and trust problem. If we may quote Wimpy from the Popeye cartoons:

A picture of Wimpy saying "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today!"

Via theawl.com. Click on the link for a very long discussion of Popeye and Wimpy related issues.

The NSF document lays bare the problem we always have: those who have the hamburgers are happy to talk about sharing the meal but there are bills to be paid. The person who owns the hamburger stand is going to have words with you if you give everything away with nothing to show in return except a promise of payment on Tuesday.

Having covered what the NSF considered important in terms of preparing us for the heavily computerised and computational future, my students finished with a discussion of educational issues and virtual organisations. The educational issues were extremely interesting because, having looked at the NSF Taskforce report, we then looked at the ACM/IEEE 2013  Computer Science Strawman curriculum to see how many areas overlapped with the task force report. Then we looked at the current curriculum of our school, which is undergoing review at the moment but was last updated for the 2008 ACM/IEEE Curriculum.

What was pleasing was, rom the range of students, how many of the areas were being addressed throughout our course and how much overlap there was between the highlighted areas of the NSF Report and the Strawman. However, one of the key issues from the task force report was the notion of greater depth and breadth – an incredible challenge in the time-constrained curriculum implementations of the 21st century. Adding a new Knowledge Area (KA) to the Strawman of ‘Platform Dependant Computing’ reflects the rise of the embedded and mobile device yet, as the Strawman authors immediately admit, we start to make it harder and harder to fit everything into one course. Combine this with the NSF requirement for greater breadth, including scientific and mathematical aspects that have traditionally been outside of Computing, and their parallel requirement for the development of depth… and it’s not easy.

The lecture slot where we discussed this had no specific outcomes associated with it – it was a place to discuss the issues arising but also to explain to the students why their curriculum looks the way that it does. Yes, we’d love to bring in Aspect X but where does it fit? My GC students were looking at the Ethics aspects of the Strawman and wondered if we could fit Ethics into its own 3-unit course. (I suspect that’s at least partially my influence although I certainly didn’t suggest anything along these lines.) “That’s fine,” I said, “But what do we lose?”

In my discussions with these students, they’ve identified one of the core reasons that we changed teaching languages, but I’ve also been able to talk to them about how we think as we construct courses – they’ve also started to see the many drivers that we consider, which I believe helps them in working out how to give feedback that is the most useful form for us to turn their needs and wants into improvements or developments in the course. I don’t expect the students to understand the details and practice of pedagogy but, unless I given them a good framework, it’s going to be hard for them to communicate with me in a way that leads most directly to an improved result for both of us.

I’ve really enjoyed this process of discussion and it’s been highly rewarding, again I hope for both sides of the group, to be able to discuss things without the usual level of reactive and (often) selfish thinking that characterises these exchanges. I hope this means that we’re on the right track for this course and this program.

Access to Education Considered Against Depth of Wallet.

Posted: August 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

I’ve posted a bit recently about proposals to increase the cost of education in Australia and, coincidentally, I have to deal with the loss of some students for what amount to purely financial reasons. To maintain student privacy, I won’t go into any detail but the bottom line is… well, the bottom line. Over the years I’ve lost students because they had to take up full-time work to cover sick family members, to pay bills that were running out of control and to pay for the many costs of a delayed-cost education that is never actually free.

Today, I lost another student because they could no longer afford to stay at Uni – that’s disheartening and irritating (for me, that is, I can only imagine that it is devastating to the student).

However, this pales in comparison with recent changes to the American college system in states such as California, where slashed state budgets are causing an economically based decision to recruit international and out-of-state applicants, as the fees paid are at least triple that of in-state students. The in-state students used to receive a state subsidy, but this is now disappearing or is no longer actually being paid. What has, of course, happened, is that now in-state students are becoming the out-of-state students of other states – if they can afford it – as places are given to more financially rewarding students locally.

But what happens to California’s local production of students who will actually stay in the state after graduation and contribute to the local economy? Of course, this is a problem that will start to get worse over time, not better, if the graduates that would retire the economy take their expertise back to their home state or country.

One of my major arguments with the recent report that suggested increasing fees in Australia was that it failed to recognise the public and ongoing benefit of a more educated population. Education changes lives, lifts us higher, allows us to see to the horizon and then over it. Vast quantities of educated people improve the areas in which they work. Yes, we make more money on average. But we also contribute in many and varied ways. Education transforms and provides opportunity – to everybody involved, not just those who are directly educated.

One of the things I welcome in the new discussions on distance and discontinuous education is that we can bring education to people who are outside of our bricks and mortar. We can accommodate and keep connected to the people who are having to study at the rate of 1 course/year because they can’t afford any more. But this requires us to think about what it really means to have to walk away from your one chance of getting  out, because you have to work to keep yourself or your family alive. Yes, people can value our degrees and education without showing up every day – maybe they have to choose between doing that and eating? I’m not saying “pass people who don’t do the work”, I’m saying “how can we make the work available for people to do?”

I think that, reflecting on this, we should be thinking about flexibility, compassion and understanding. We can’t fix everything at the Uni level, but we can make it easier for people to come back and, when they leave, let them know that we will take them back when they have the opportunity to return. It is the least that we can offer  and, at the same time, one of the best things we can do to help people who are faced with an awful choice.

However, as we have seen in California, things could be much worse – but it’s important to remember that before we make any longterm decisions that bring us closer to such a deep and potentially inescapable maelstrom.

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