Thinking About Students: What a Student DOES Rather Than What a Student IS.
Posted: March 27, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: education, higher education, reflection, teaching, teaching approaches 1 CommentYesterday’s post briefly discussed Alfred Korzybski and, today, I wanted to talk a bit more about some of his ideas, applied as a method for describing students.
“Why do I need a new way to describe students?” you might well ask. After all, we all know that there are good students, bad students, hard-working students, lazy students…
Or do we?
I only have read a relatively small amount of Korzybski but what struck me was his discussion of the verb ‘to be’ and the way that it could be used in a way that confused someone’s actions with their fundamental identity. For example, if I do something foolish, you could say “Nick is a fool” but what you really mean is “I am calling Nick a fool because he did something foolish.” (There is an old, and obscene, joke along these lines that I shall say no more on.) Committing one foolish act no more makes me a fool than the word “Nick” actually reflects the entirety of my identity.
Similarly, let us consider the movie “Green Lantern”. If I say “the movie is bad”, what I am really saying is “I did not enjoy the movie Green Lantern and would not watch it again, even for free on a plane.” The latter is a fact, based on a subjective opinion, but it is clearly identified as such. Anyone else sharing the longer form would clearly be saying that “I heard Green Lantern was not enjoyable to Nick and, given that I have similar tastes, I believe that I would not enjoy it either.”
How does this apply to students?
It’s easy to talk about good, bad, hard-working and lazy students but this often confuses the facts of a student’s actions with the student themselves. How do we characterise a good student? Michael hands up all of his work on time, has never cheated and achieves high marks. Does that make him a good student? These are all characteristics of a good student, certainly, but by listing these actions in full I make it clear how other students can achieve this aim. If I tell someone to be a good student – or to work harder (to be hard-working effectively) – I don’t actually tell them what to so, I ask them to match an identity or fulfil a predicate, rather than clearly showing them what I expect them to achieve. Of course, there is no guarantee that Michael is a ‘good’ student – but by listing our perceptions of his actions we explain why we might apply such a categorisation.
Referring to a student with ‘This student is…’ risks hiding a factual statement inside a statement that appears much stronger and has much wider impact, but without qualification. Now this goes beyond identity and simple statements and extends to the way that we interact with students as well.
“The student is responsible for handing up their work on time” – sounds good, but just saying it is an assertion of what you want to occur. What I mean when I think this is “We expect students to read the deadlines for submission, allow enough time to complete the assignments and submit their work on time, to the correct locations, in the correct format. If you don’t do this, then you will lose some or all of the marks for the assignment and may not be allowed to continue with the course.”
This is, by definition, a discussion of semantics and it is a little bit of me thinking aloud. As a mental exercise, I find it very useful because whenever I want to classify a student as ‘this student is…’ I force myself to think about what the student has done to make me think that way. Quite often, in review, I find terms like ‘bad, lazy, hard-working, good, indifferent, difficult’ dropping away because such simple classifications are beyond me – although not always. You’ll note that a recent post of mine dealt with the ‘rude student’, although I went on to describe why this may or may not be a fair description. Sometimes, for brevity or ease of reference, we may use this form to describe a group or a type, especially where people know what we mean. The problem arises when we make absolute statements about someone from smaller, and occasionally ephemeral, information. Extrapolating to a strong statement when we do not have enough information to do so. And some of these labels will stick – and stick hard – throughout a student’s life.
I suppose that the benefit for me lies in considering everything, good and bad, that a given student has done because it makes me regard them as a person, rather than a simple “is a…” – a being who has taken a number of actions, and may take any of the other possibilities in the future. Somebody that DOES rather than somebody that just IS. Someone with a great deal of unrealised potential and untapped energy. Someone who could do anything rather than being stuck in a box from the misapplication of a strong label somewhere back in their past.
The Map is not the Territory.
Posted: March 26, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: education, higher education, Korzybski, measurement, reflection, teaching, teaching approaches 4 CommentsI’m writing a paper on visualising Internet network topologies with my PhD student and some colleagues at the moment and an old friend, who is one of the student’s other supervisors, looked at some of the work we’d been doing and mentioned a great quote from Alfred Korzybski in 1931:
“The map is not the territory.”
Korzybski was a philosopher and scientist who developed the theory of general semantics, which I’m not going to talk more about here, but a lot of his work revolved around the idea that all we have access to is perceptions and beliefs, which we confuse with a knowledge of actual reality. This is a simple quote and a powerful concept: one of my favourite combinations.
What brought me to this was that, as part of our paper, we were looking at the London Underground map – the famous Tube Map.
The focus of the Tube map is getting around London by Tube. Designed in 1931 by Harry Beck, a draughtsman with experience in laying out electrical circuits, it replaced a large number of incomplete and more geographically focused maps. What is most interesting about this map is that some licence is taken with the geography in order to make this the simplest map to use for Tube travel. Above ground, this map is not only not as useful, in some areas it’s completely wrong. (Suburbs on the opposite side shown, distances completely inaccurately represented for ease of reading.)
This has had an effect on the way that people travel around London – making decisions above ground that make sense on the Tube map but are downright silly when on foot on the streets. To combat this, Transport for London have developed the Legible London project with above-ground signage to assist the navigation of London Above, with signs and images showing you directions and landmarks.
Whether it’s maps of networks, maps of London or course pre-requisite diagrams, maps are only useful if you design them correctly for their primary use. Looking at the work on prerequisites that I’ve been talking about recently, it’s becoming more apparent that my desire for a good visualisation of pathways stems from my desire for a map that correctly reflects what we want students to do, reinforces the correct behaviour and is also going to be fit for purpose. Rather than using one diagram for many things, I need to check to make sure if I have the best diagram for a given situation.
Sometimes I need to release my grip on the accuracy of geography (precise location) to focus on the detail of topology (arrangement and connectivity). Sometimes it’s the other way around. Particularly when I insert a temporal aspect, I need to make sure that this “fourth dimension” doesn’t make my maps so complex that they’re useless. However, I always need a reason to relax a requirement: I’m certainly not saying that you can scribble randomly on a piece of paper and call it the NYC Subway map!
But, taking this concept further, how many pieces of work are out there that confuse a good diagram or a flowchart with the real thing? Is this just our confirmation of our perceptions and, as as result, it’s strongly sensible only when viewed from within our context? Or are we producing transferrable and shareable maps, focused on the right detail, showing the correct view of the terrain for the purpose, and accepting that there are an almost infinite set of views of the true territory?
A good map helps us to navigate territory but it can never replace it. What I always need to remember is that if I produce a map from a map, I can add no more detail than was in the original and I cannot correct mistakes in the original, without reference to the territory itself. And that’s something I think that is always worth remembering.
Beautiful, Interesting and Good: Information Storage for a New Age
Posted: March 25, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: education, higher education, mcny, reflection, teaching approaches, truman capote 1 CommentI have just received some information from the Museum of the City of New York. I had been searching for some information on Truman Capote in 1966 and, after being unsuccessful in my original web search, located a reference to it in one of the blogs of the researchers of the Museum of the City of New York. I sent a query about the possible availability of what I was looking for, received more information on who to contact and, just after midnight on the 24th of March, I received not only what I was after but also the accompanying information that was the obvious companion piece. Of course, not knowing until I received one that I needed the other, this saved me time but, as well, left me slightly awestruck that I am roughly 24 hours away from almost the entire visual, social and literary history of New York. I have, at the other end of my e-mail, someone who will not only give me answers but fill in the holes in my knowledge to give me the answers to questions that I should have asked!
This is, quite frankly, amazing. The sheer amount of work, technology, indexing, curation, information management and money that has gone into making this happen is slightly terrifying – yet, here we are.
Ten years ago, I might have been able to find out the name of the librarian, who probably would have had e-mail but perhaps not the knowledge or the ability to send me an upload link to a temporary file holding server. I probably would have had to use a fax to request information, to provide follow-up to e-mail and assert which organisation was my umbrella, and then negotiate access to file transfer services to get the files across. I don’t think that I would have been able to read a blog, follow-up with a post, get the right e-mail by automated reply and then, in less than 18 hours, be downloading from a cloud-based share site!
Twenty years ago, it may have been a personal visit or a fax – and, even then, we may have had to be part of an ongoing formal or financial arrangement for me to waste the time of remote staff searching the stacks for a particular card in a given box. (Roughly 11 years ago, I couldn’t even look inside the NY Public Library without a library card and had to content myself with looking at lions.)
Thirty years ago, this would have been just too hard.
(Yes, the decade boundaries are a little fuzzy and I am aware that Library Science and Information Science have been doing a lot that most people are unaware of, yet perception is important here and not knowing whether something is available, or not knowing how to get to it, are almost as bad as it not being there or available in the first place.)
The fact that this is now available every day doesn’t make it any less amazing – it just means that every day we stay in this technologically advanced place, where beautiful, interesting and good things are stored, index, curated and watched over by a combination of people and… of course, machines of loving grace… is amazing.
When I talk to my students about what it is we do as Computer Scientists, I talk about handling scale, solving problems, developing algorithms and doing amazing things. My students have grown up with things like this and, if I don’t point out some of the amazing things that today just happen, then they miss out on some of the rich heritage of computing – the world before the Internet, the frontier of the early Internet, before the Web, before the Commercial Web, before mobile computing, before you could wonder something in Australia and have an answer from America with no special training or knowledge beyond how to type and send an e-mail.
I don’t focus on good old days – I have to talk and live in the amazing now, training students for the unimaginable future. Today, I have another example of something that is amazing now, and I look forward to an opportunity to teach about it, sometime soon.
I Ran Out Of Time! (Why Are Software Estimates So Bad?)
Posted: March 24, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: curriculum, design, education, higher education, reflection, resources, teaching approaches Leave a commentI read an interesting question on Quora regarding task estimation. The question, “Engineering Management: Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?“, had an answer wiki attached to it and then some quite long and specific answers. There is a lot there for anyone who works with students, and I’ll summarise some of them here that I like to talk about with my students:
- The idea that if we plan hard enough, we can control everything: Planning gives us the illusion of control in many regards. If we are unrealistic in assessment of our own abilities or we don’t account for the unexpected, then we are almost bound for failure. Making big plans doesn’t work if we never come up with concrete milestones, allocate resources that we have and do something other than plan.
- Poor discovery work: If you don’t look into what is actually required then you can’t achieve it. Doing any kind of task assessment without working out what you’re being asked to do, how long you have, what else you have to do and how you will know when you’re done is wasted effort.
- Failure to assess previous projects: Learn from your successes and your failures! How much time did you allocate last time? Was it enough? No? ADD MORE TIME! How closely related are the two projects – if one is a subset of another what does this say for the time involved? Can you re-use elements from the previous project? Be critical of your previous work. What did you learn? What could you improve? What can you re-use? What do you need to never do again?
- Big hands, little maps: There’s a great answer on the linked web page of drawing a broad line on Google maps at a high-level view and estimating the walking time for a trip. The devil is in the details! If you wave your hands in a broad way across a map it makes the task look simple. You need to get down to the appropriate level to make a good estimate – too far down, you get caught up in minutiae, too far up, you get a false impression of plain sailing.
I found it to be an interesting question with lots of informative answers and a delightful thought experiment of walking the California coast. I hope you like it too!
How Do I Model The Students Who Leave?
Posted: March 23, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: education, educational research, higher education, reflection, statistics, teaching, teaching approaches Leave a commentThis is a quick note on one of the problems I face in trying to analyse student data: dealing with students who are only in the system so briefly that I can’t capture much data on them. In my other educational research work I can look at student behaviour in terms of final grades and on-time assignment submission but, in order to try and see the impact of what we’re doing on behaviour, I really have to be able to capture data before and after a change. I then have to try and eliminate all other factors to find a correlation that looks like it’s significant.
In yesterday’s post, I didn’t mention that one of the issues that the Baldwin-Wallace researchers noted was trying to deal with students who gave some initial data and then left the system – how do you incorporate these students in a way that allows you to infer behaviour without introducing the spectre of bias because you’ve inserted dummy data into your system. They had discussed adding another grade type, W or PW, that would allow them to keep students in their data who had left the program early – can you spot the situation that will lead to people leaving early and can we predict the withdrawal from the course based on earlier performance?
I face the same problem in a lot of my assignment submission data. I have 17,000 students in the initial dataset but, after cleaning and removing students who withdraw, that shrinks a lot. Regrettably, this also removes the students that I really want to work with – those who have withdrawn. We use a binary notation as an overview for on-time and late submission, so extending the sequence is straight-forward, but any time we extend the sequence we have to justify it very, very well to make sure that we haven’t introduced too much noise or bias.
There are a lot of good existing techniques and, of course, Bayesian analysis is once again our friend in many ways but I’m now looking at machine learning to provide a very simple two-component partitioning – can I learn to predict who will be in the incomplete group and who won’t? I have to do something about the ‘length’ of the submission history or the most obvious thing the machine will probably learn is that ‘short history == fail’. I’m looking forward to getting onto this research in the very near future, especially if it ca give me insight into those students who are only with us for a short time. I really need a tool and a model that will work within the first 2-3 weeks – it’s a challenge but a fun one.
Graphs, DAGS and Inverted Pyramids: When Is a Prerequisite Not a Prerequisite?
Posted: March 22, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: curriculum, design, education, higher education, sigcse, teaching, teaching approaches, tools 1 CommentI attended a very interesting talk at SIGCSE called “Bayesian Network Analysis of Computer Science Grade Distributions” (Anthony and Raney, Baldwin-Wallace College). Their fundamental question was how could they develop computational tools to increase the graduation rate of students in their 4 year degree. Motivated by a desire to make grade predictions, and catch students before they fall off, they started searching their records back to 1998 to find out if they could get some answers out of student performance data.
One of their questions was: Are the prerequisites actually prerequisite? If this is true, then there should be at least some sort of correlation between performance and attendance in a prerequisite course and the courses that depend upon it. I liked their approach because it took advantage of structures and data that they already had, and to which they applied a number of different analytical techniques.
They started from a graph of the prerequisites, which should be able to be built as something where you start from an entry subject and can progress all the way through to some sort of graduation point, but can only progress to later courses if you have the prereqs. (If we’re being Computer Science-y, prereq graphs can’t contain links that take you around in a loop and must be directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), but you can ignore that bit.) As it turns out, this structure can easily be converted to certain analytical structures, which makes the analysis a lot easier as we don’t have to justify any structural modification.
Using one approach, the researchers found that they could estimate a missing mark in the list of student marks to an accuracy of 77% – that is they correctly estimate the missing (A,B,C,D,F) grade 77% of the time, compared with 30% of the time if they don’t take the prereqs into account.
They presented a number of other interesting results but one that I found both informative and amusing was that they tried to use an automated network learning algorithm to pick the most influential course in assessing how a student will perform across their degree. However, as they said themselves, they didn’t constrain the order of their analysis – although CS400 might depend upon CS300 in the graph, their algorithm just saw them as connected. Because of this, the network learning picked their final year, top grade, course as the most likely indicator of good performance. Well, yes, if you get an A in CSC430 then you’ve probably done pretty well up until now. The machine learning involved didn’t have this requirement as a constraint so it just picked the best starting point – from its perspective. (I though that this really reinforced what the researchers were talking about – that finding the answer here was more than just correlation and throwing computing power at it. We had to really understand what we wanted to make sure we got the right answer.)
Machine learning is going to give you an answer, in many cases, but it’s always interesting to see how many implicit assumptions there are that we ignore. It’s like trying to build a pyramid by saying “Which stone is placed to indicate that we’ve finished”, realising it’s the capstone and putting that down on the ground and walking away. We, of course, have points requirements for degrees, so it gets worse because now you have to keep building and doing it upside down!
I’m certainly not criticising the researchers here – I love their work, I think that they’re very open about where they are trying to take this and I thought it was a really important point to drive home. Just because we see structures in a certain way, we always have to be careful how we explain them to machines because we need useful information that can be used in our real teaching worlds. The researchers are going to work on order-constrained network learning to refine this and I’m really looking forward to seeing the follow-up on this work.
I am also sketching out some similar analysis for my new PhD student to do when he starts in April. Oh, I hope he’s not reading this because he’s going to be very, VERY busy. 🙂
What Do I Study? What Do I Do? Showing the Path
Posted: March 21, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: education, higher education, reflection, teaching, teaching approaches 3 CommentsOne of the things I’ve learned from flying a lot is that it’s never as easy to get from one point to another as you think. There are regional hubs, legal connections, affiliations and the many intricacies of which routes are allowed into which countries. There’s a reason that you can either retain the services of a travel agent for a fee or spend a lot of your own time trying to work out the best way to get from A to B. It would be nice if you could fit everything onto one simple diagram and see the best way to go but, even without the commercial concerns, it’s a very hard problem to solve if you’re worried about efficiency rather than connectivity.
We allow our students a lot of latitude in picking their path through their degrees. Although we offer programs that have a core of prerequisites, there are many opportunities for electives – courses that they can pick and choose from. But, on many occasions, students look at the total number of points they require, and the year level, and pick based on interest or short-term goals, rather than any form of long-term vision.
Going back to our airline model, it’s like trying to get to to New York from Sydney by picking the cheapest flight that goes east. Thinking in one-step-ahead terms prevents you from realising the benefits of flights into longer-range hubs, special deals and the round-the-world flight. Technically, optimising your solution so that your next step is the ‘best’ from those available is a greedy algorithm – each step will be optimal but it’s not guaranteed to give you the best overall solution, just a solution.
What would be great is if we could present students with a simple flight path, a map, a poster or an interactive tool that allows them to see where they want to go, where they’re starting from, and how they could get there based on our courses. I’ve started sketching out some ideas based on this but complexity is proving to be a problem – as expected. I have some sketches of solutions and, when I have something that might be useful, I’ll share it here.
The ACID test: Teaching With Examples From Other Areas
Posted: March 20, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: collaboration, education, higher education, principles of design, resources, teaching, teaching approaches, tools 2 CommentsI’ve just returned from teaching an intensive module on Distributed Systems – no, don’t go, I have a point for everyone, not just the Computer Scientists in the audience. Dealing with computations that take place over several computers can be tricky because it can be difficult for everyone to agree whether all the things that they wanted to happen have actually happened. Combine that with the problems that occur when two or more people try to change the same thing at the same time and we need a strong mechanism to deal with it. The properties that refer to this are usually represented with the acronym ACID.
We use something called a transactional model – what we’re trying to achieve either happens or, if there’s a problem, we make it as if it never occurred (we call this atomicity). When we make change we want to keep the overall system consistent with regard to some key requirements (consistency). If two things are happening at once, but could fail, we set it up so that they don’t take account of each other’s changes until we’re sure that they’ve finished and are going to hang around (isolation). Finally, speaking of hanging around, once we’ve made something stick, we want it to stay stuck – that’s durability.
Why have I covered this? Because I want you to understand how I can take ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) out of computer science and make students think about it in a different framework – that of the legal system. Here’s the question I posed to my students as part of a tutorial:
“Using Transaction Properties (ACID), discuss whether a person simultaneously accused of two crimes should be tried, in both cases, as if only one crime had been committed.”
Now this doesn’t seem related, but the complex issues in the presumption of innocence, not declaring previous crimes until sentencing and the nature of appeal can lead to a quite complicated and involved discussion. I like to start students off by getting them to think about the problem individually and asking questions to clear up any definitional problems. Then they go to their neighbour, then into small groups of 4-5. By the time we’re done the rooms full of discussion and we bring it together to illustrate that thinking about the problem in this way gets us away from memorised jargon inside the originating discipline and forces students to describe the situation based on their understanding of the concept.
This is a third year course so the question is designed to make people think – there are some answers that are better than others but almost all pathways based on careful thought will head towards a good answer.
Stepping outside the original discipline can be fun and useful – just make sure that you’re keeping the analogies accurate, precise and not too far from the original material. Hope this is useful to you!
Fixing Misdirected Effort: Guiding, with the occasional shove.
Posted: March 19, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: education, educational problem, frankenstein, higher education, resources, teaching, teaching approaches Leave a comment
My students have a lot of questions and my job is often as much about helping them find the right questions as it is about finding the answers. One of the most frustrating aspects of education is when people fixate on the wrong thing, or invest their effort into the wrong ventures. I talked before how I believed that far more students were procrastinators versus lazy, they invest their effort without thinking about the time that they need or all of the responsibilities that they have.
That’s why it gets frustrating when all of the effort that they can expend goes into the wrong pathway. I’ll give you a couple of examples. We run a forum where students receive e-mail notification and, because the forum is an official dissemination point, students are compulsorily enrolled into certain forums and will receive mail whenever discussion takes place. Every year, there’s at least one student who starts complaining about receiving ‘all this e-mail’. (Generally not more than 10 messages a week, except during busy times when it might rise to 20-30. Per week.) We then reply with the reasons we’re doing it. They argue. Of course, the e-mail load of the forum then does rise, because of the mailed complaints about the e-mail load – not to mention the investment of time. The student who complains that mail is wasting their time generally spends more time in that one exchange than processing the mail for the semester would have cost.
Another example is students trying to work out how much effort they can avoid in writing practical submissions. They’ll wait outside your office for an hour and talk for hours (if you let them) about whether they have to do this bit, or if they can take this shortcut, and what happens if I do that. Sitting down and trying it will take about 5 minutes but, because they’re fearful or haven’t fully understand how they can improve, they spend their time trying to dodge work and, anecdotally, it looks like some of these people invest more time in trying to avoid the work than actually doing the work would have required. This is, of course, ignoring the benefits of doing the work in terms of reinforcement and learning.
Then, of course, we have the curse of the Computer Science academic, that terror to the human eye – the plagiarised, patchwork monstrosity of Frankencode!
Frankencoding, my term for the practice of trying to build software by Googling sections (I’m a classicist, or I’d call it Googlecoding) and jamming them together, is a major time waster here as well. If you design your software and built it up, you understand each piece and can debug it to get it working. If you surf news groups and chuck together bits and pieces that you don’t understand, your monster will rise up and lurch off to the village trailing disaster in its wake. Oh, and for the record, it’s really obvious to a marker when it has happened and even more obvious when we ask you WHY you did something – if you don’t know, you probably didn’t write it and “I got it off the Internet” attracts nothing good in the way of marks.
What I want to do is get effort focused on the right things. I know that my students regard most of their studies as a mild inconvenience, so I don’t want them spending what time they do devote to academia on the wrong things. This means that I have to try and direct discussions into useful pathways, handle the ‘what if I do this’ by saying ‘why don’t you go and try it. It’ll take 5 minutes’ (framed correctly) and by regularly checking for plagiarised code – including tests of understanding that accompany practical coding exercises such as test reports and design documents. Once again, understanding is paramount and wasted effort is not useful to anyone.
I like to think of it a gentle guidance in the right direction. With the occasional friendly, but firmer, shove when someone looks like they’re going seriously off the rails. After all, we have the same goals: none of us want to waste our time!
Participation: The Price of Success
Posted: March 18, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: education, higher education, reflection, teaching, teaching approaches, tools, workload 2 CommentsIn my various roles I have to look at interesting areas like on-line learning and teaching delivery. One of the classic problems in this area is the success of the initiative to get educators and students alike to use the technology – at which point it melts because the level of participation rises so high that the finite underlying resources are exhausted. The resource was never designed as if everyone would want to, and then actually go on to, use it.
I have had someone, seriously, say to me that an on-line learning system would work much better if the students didn’t all try to use it at once.
The same problem, of course, occurs with educators. If no-one is participating in class then you’re pushing a giant rock up hill to make things happen and it’s more likely than not that a lot of what you’re saying and doing isn’t being taken in. If everyone is participating in class, you’ve jumped into the Ringmaster’s hat, you’re constantly fielding e-mails, forum messages and appointment requests. And, of course, at the end of the long day it’s easy to fall into that highly questionable, but periodically expressed, mode of thinking “universities would be great if there were fewer students around“.
Students are our bread and butter. (Not literally!)
I’ve attached a picture of bread and butter to drive this point home. Students are what makes the University. Their participation, their enthusiasm, their attendance, their passion, their ennui, the good and the bad things they do. If the systems we build don’t work with our students, or the volume of students, or automatically excludes a group of students because we can any provide resources for 70% of them, then I think that we’ve got something wrong.
Having said that, I get ‘tight budgets’, I understand ‘district funding shortfall’ and I certainly sympathise with ‘very high workloads’. I’m not saying that people are giving up or doing the wrong thing in the face of all these factors, I’m talking about the understanding I’ve come to that the measure of my success as an educator is almost always linked to how much students want to talk to me about constructing knowledge, rather than than just doing assignment work.
It’s one of those things that, if I prepare for, makes my life easier and I can then view that work blip as a positive indicator, rather than go down the curmudgeonly professorial path of resenting the intrusion on my time. Let’s face it, attitude management is as (if not more) important for the lecturers in the class as it is for the students. You want to feel like you’re doing something useful, you’d like some positive feedback and you want to think that you’re making a difference. Framing increased participation as desirable and something that you plan for has certainly helped me manage the increased workload associated with it – because I take is a sign that my effort is paying off.
Nick Falkner 