Grand Challenges and the New Car Smell

Posted: July 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

It has been a crazy week so far. In between launching the new course and attending a number of important presentations, our Executive Dean, Professor Peter Dowd, is leaving the role after 8 years and we’re all getting ready for the handover. At time of writing, I’m sitting in an airport lounge in Adelaide Airport waiting for my flight to Melbourne to go and talk about the Learning and Teaching Academy of which I’m a Fellow so, given that my post queue is empty and that I want to keep up my daily posting routine, today’s post may be a little rushed. (As one of my PhD students pointed out, the typos are creeping in anyway, so this shouldn’t be too much of a change. Thanks, T. 🙂 )

The new course that I’ve been talking about, which has a fairly wide scope with high performing students, has occupied five hours this week and it has been both very exciting and a little daunting. The student range is far wider than usual: two end-of-degree students, three start-of-degree students, one second year and one internal exchange student from the University of Denver. As you can guess, in terms of learning design, this requires me to have a far more flexible structure than usual and I go into each activity with the expectation that I’m going to have to be very light on my feet.

I’ve been very pleased by two things in the initial assessment: firstly, that the students have been extremely willing to be engage with the course and work with me and each other to build knowledge, and secondly, that I have the feeling that there is no real ‘top end’ for this kind of program. Usually, when I design something, I have to take into account our general grading policies (which I strongly agree with) that are not based on curve grading and require us to provide sufficient assessment opportunities and types to give students the capability to clearly demonstrate their ability. However, part of my role is pastoral, so that range of opportunities has to be carefully set so that a Pass corresponds to ‘acceptable’ and I don’t set the bar so high that people pursuing a High Distinction (A+) don’t destroy their prospects in other courses or burn out.

I’ve stressed the issues of identity and community in setting up this course, even accidentally referring to the discipline as Community Science in one of my intro slides, and the engagement level of the students gives me the confidence that, as a group, they will be able to develop each other’s knowledge and give them some boosting – on top of everything and anything that I can provide. This means that the ‘top’ level of achievements are probably going to be much higher than before, or at least I hope so. I’ve identified one of my roles for them as “telling them when they’ve done enough”, much as I would for an Honours or graduate student, to allow me to maintain that pastoral role and to stop them from going too far down the rabbit hole.

Yesterday, I introduced them to R (statistical analysis and graphical visualisation) and Processing (a rapid development and very visual programming language) as examples of tools that might be useful for their projects. In fairly short order, they were pushing the boundaries, trying new things and, from what I could see, enjoying themselves as they got into the idea that this was exploration rather than a prescribed tool set. I talked about the time burden of re-doing analysis and why tools that forced you to use the Graphical User Interface (clicking with the mouse to move around and change text) such as Excel had really long re-analysis pathways because you had to reapply a set of mechanical changes that you couldn’t (easily) automate. Both of the tools that I showed them could be set up so that you could update your data and then re-run your analysis, do it again, change something, re-run it, add a new graph, re-run it – and it could all be done very easily without having to re-paste Column C into section D4 and then right clicking to set the format or some such nonsense.

It’s too soon to tell what the students think because there is a very “new car smell” about this course and we always have the infamous, if contested, Hawthorne Effect, where being obviously observed as part of a study tends to improve performance. Of course, in this case, the students aren’t part of an experiment but, given the focus, the preparation and the new nature – we’re in the same territory. (I have, of course, told the students about the Hawthorne Effect in loose terms because the scope of the course is on solving important and difficult problems, not on knee-jerk reactions to changing the colour of the chair cushions. All of the behaviourists in the audience can now shake their heads, slowly.)

Early indications are positive. On Monday I presented an introductory lecture laying everything out and then we had a discussion about the course. I assigned some reading (it looked like 24 pages but was closer to 12) and asked students to come in with a paragraph of notes describing what a Grand Challenge was in their own words, as well as some examples. The next day, less than 24 hours after the lecture, everyone showed up and, when asked to write their description up on the white board, all got up and wrote it down – from their notes. Then they exchanged ideas, developed their answers and I took pictures of them to put up on our forum. Tomorrow, I’ll throw these up and ask the students to keep refining them, tracking their development of their understanding as they work out what they consider to be the area of grand challenges and, I hope, the area that they will start to consider “their” area – the one that they want to solve.

If even one more person devotes themselves to solving an important problem to be work then I’ll be very happy but I’ll be even happier if most of them do, and then go on to teach other people how to do it. Scale is the killer so we need as many dedicated, trained, enthusiastic and clever people as we can  – let’s see what we can do about that.

Environmental Impact: Iz Tweetz changing ur txt?

Posted: July 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Please, please forgive me for the diabolical title but I have been wondering about the effects of saturation in different communication environments and Twitter seemed like an interesting place to start. For those who don’t know about Twitter, it’s an online micro-blogging social media service. Connect to it via your computer or phone and you can put a message in that is up to 140 characters, where each message is called a tweet. What makes Twitter interesting is the use of hashtags and usernames to allow the grouping of these messages by area by theme (#firstworldproblems, if you’re complaining about the service in Business Class, for example) or to respond to someone (@katyperry – Russell Brand, SRSLY?). Twitter has very significant penetration in the celebrity market and there are often “professional” tweeters for certain organisations.

There is a lot more to say about Twitter but what I want to focus on is the maximum number of characters available – 140. This limit was set for compatibility with SMS messages and, unsurprisingly, a lot of abbreviations used in Twitter have come in from the SMS community. I have been restricting myself to ~1,000 words in recent posts (+/-10%, if I’m being honest) and, with the average word length of approximately 5 for English then, by adding spaces and punctuation to take this to 6, you’d expect my posts to be somewhere in the region of 6,000 characters. Anyone who’s been reading this for a while will know that I love long words and technical terms so there’s a possibility that it’s up beyond this. So one of my posts, as the largest Tweets, would take up about 43 tweets. How long would that take the average Twitterer?

Here’s an interesting site that lists some statistics, from 2009 – things will have changed but it’s a pretty thorough snapshot. Firstly, the more followers you have the more you tweet (cause and effect not stated!) but even then, 85% of users update less than once per day, with only 1% updating more than 10 times per day. With the vast majority of users having less than 100 followers (people who are subscribed to read all of your tweets), this makes two tweets per day the dominant activity. But that was back in 2009 and Twitter has grown considerably since then. This article updates things a little, but not in the same depth, and gives us two interesting facts. Firstly, that Twitter has grown amazingly since 2009. Secondly, that event reporting now takes place on Twitter – it has become a news and event dissemination point. This is happening to the extent that a Twitter reported earthquake can expand outwards in the same or slightly less time than the actual earthquake itself. This has become a bit of a joke, where people will tweet about what is happening to them rather than react to the event.

From Twitter’s own blog, March, 2011, we can also see this amazing growth – more people are using Twitter and more messages are being sent. I found another site listing some interesting statistics for Twitter: 225,000,000 users, most tweets are 40 characters long, 40% if users don’t tweet but just read and the average user still has around 100 followers (115 actually). If the previous behaviour patterns hold, we are still seeing an average of two tweets for the majority user who actually posts. But a very large number of people are actually reading Twitter far more than they ever post.

To summarise, millions of people around the world are exposed to hundreds of messages that are 4o characters long and this may be one of their leading sources of information and exposure to text throughout the day. To put this in context, it would take 150 tweets to convey one of my average posts at the 40 character limit and this is a completely different way of reading information because, assuming that the ‘average’ sentence is about 15-20 words, very few of these tweets are going to be ‘full’ sentences. Context is, of course, essential and a stream of short messages, even below sentence length, can be completely comprehensible. Perhaps even sentence fragments? Or three words. Two words? One? (With apologies to Hofstadter!) So there’s little mileage in arguing that tweeting is going to change our semantic framework, although a large amount of what moves through any form of blogging, micro or other, is going to always have its worth judged by external agents who don’t take part in that particular activity and find it wanting. (I blog, you type, he/she babbles.)

But is this shortening of phrase, and our immersion in a shorter sentence structure, actually having an impact on the way that we write or read? Basically, it’s very hard to tell because this is such a recent phenomenon. Early social media sites, including the BBs and the multi-user shared environments, did not value brevity as much as they valued contribution and, to a large extent, demonstration of knowledge. There was no mobile phone interaction or SMS link so the text limit of Twitter wasn’t required. LiveJournal was, if anything, the antithesis of brevity as the journalling activity was rarely that brief and, sometimes, incredibly long. Facebook enforces some limits but provides notes so that longer messages can be formed but, of course, the longer the message, the longer the time it takes to write.

Twitter is an encourager of immediacy, of thought into broadcast, but this particular messaging mode, the ability to globally yell “I like ice cream and I’m eating ice cream” as one is eating ice cream is so new that any impact on overall language usage is going to be hard to pin down. As it happens, it does appear that our sentences are getting shorter and that we are simplifying the language but, as this poster notes, the length of the sentence has shrunk over time but the average word length has only slightly shortened, and all of this was happening well before Twitter and SMS came along. If anything, perhaps this indicates that the popularity of SMS and Twitter reflects the direction of language, rather than that language is adapting to SMS and Twitter. (Based on the trend, the Presidential address of 2300 is going to be something along the lines of “I am good. The country is good. Thank you.”)

I haven’t had the time that I wanted to go through this in detail, and I certainly welcome more up-to-date links and corrections, but I much prefer the idea that our technologies are chosen and succeed based on our existing drives tastes, rather than the assumption that our technologies are ‘dumbing us down’ or ‘reducing our language use’ and, in effect, driving us. I guess you may say I’m a dreamer.

(But I’m not the only one!)

The Early-Career Teacher

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

Recently, I mentioned the Australian Research Council (ARC) grant scheme, which recognises that people who have had their PhDs for less than five years are regarded as early-career researchers (ECRs). ECRs have a separate grant scheme (now, they used to have a different way of being dealt with in the grant application scheme) that recognises the fact that their track records, the number of publications and activity relative to opportunity, is going to be less than that of more seasoned individuals.

What is interesting about this is that someone who has just finished their PhD will have spent (at least) three years, more like four, doing research and, we hope, competent research under guidance for the last two of those years. So, having spent a couple of years doing research, we then accept that it can take up to five years for people to be recognised as being at the same level.

But, for the most part, there is no corresponding recognition of the early-career teacher, which is puzzling given that there is no requirement to meet any teaching standards or take part in any teaching activities at all before you are put out in front of a class. You do no (or are not required to do any) teaching during your PhD in Australia, yet we offer support and recognition of early status for the task that you HAVE been doing – and don’t have a way to recognise the need to build up your teaching.

We discussed ideas along these lines at a high-level meeting that I attended this morning and I brought up the early-career teacher (and mentoring program to support it) because someone had brought up a similar idea for researchers. Mentoring is very important, it was one of the big HERDSA messages and almost everywhere I go stresses this, and it’s no surprise that it’s proposed as a means to improve research but, given the realities of the modern Australian University where more of our budget comes from teaching than research, it is indicative of the inherent focus on research that I need to propose teaching-specific mentoring in reaction to research-specific mentoring, rather than vice versa.

However, there are successful general mentoring schemes where senior staff are paired with more junior staff to give them help with everything that they need and I quite like this because it stresses the nexus of teaching and research, which is supposed to be one of our focuses, and it also reduces the possibility of confusion and contradiction. But let’s return to the teaching focus.

The impact of an early-career teacher program would be quite interesting because, much as you might not encourage a very raw PhD to leap in with a grant application before there was enough supporting track record, you might have to restrict the teaching activities of ECTs until they had demonstrated their ability, taken certain courses or passed some form of peer assessment. That, in any form, is quite confronting and not what most people expect when they take up a junior lectureship. It is, however, a practical way to ensure that we stress the value of teaching by placing basic requirements on the ability to demonstrate skill within that area! In some areas, as well as practical skill, we need to develop scholarship in learning and teaching as well – can we do this in the first years of the ECT with a course of educational psychology, discipline educational techniques and practica to ensure that our lecturers have the fundamental theoretical basis that we would expect from a school teacher?

Are we dancing around the point and, extending the heresy, require something much closer to the Diploma of Education to certify academics as teachers, moving the ECR and the ECT together to give us an Early Career Academic (ECA), someone who spends their first three years being mentored in research and teaching? Even ending up with (some sort of) teaching qualification at the end? (With the increasing focus on quality frameworks and external assessment, I keep waiting for one of our regulatory bodies to slip in a ‘must have a Dip Ed/Cert Ed or equivalent’ clause sometime in the next decade.)

To say that this would require a major restructure in our expectations would be a major understatement, so I suspect that this is a move too far. But I don’t think it’s too much to put limits on the ways that we expose our new staff to difficult or challenging teaching situations, when they have little training and less experience. This would have an impact on a lot of teaching techniques and accepted practices across the world. We don’t make heavy use of Teaching Assistants (TAs) at my Uni but, if we did, a requirement to reduce their load and exposure would immediately push more load back onto someone else. At a time when salary budgets are tight and people are already heavily loaded, this is just not an acceptable solution – so let’s look at this another way.

The way that we can at least start this, without breaking the bank, is to emphasise the importance of teaching and take it as seriously as we take our research: supporting and developing scholarship, providing mentoring and extending that mentoring until we’re sure that the new educators are adapting to their role. These mentors can then give feedback, in conjunction with the staff members, as to what the new staff are ready to take on. Of course, this requires us to carefully determine who should be mentored, and who should be the mentor, and that is a political minefield as it may not be your most senior staff that you want training your teachers.

I am a fairly simple man in many ways. I have a belief that the educational role that we play is not just staff-to-student, but staff-to-staff and student-to-student. Educating our new staff in the ways of education is something that we have to do, as part of our job. There is also a requirement for equal recognition and support across our two core roles: learning and teaching, and research. I’m seeing a lot of positive signs in this direction so I’m taking some heart that there are good things on the nearish horizon. Certainly, today’s meeting met my suggestions, which I don’t think were as novel as I had hoped they would be, with nobody’s skull popping out of their mouth. I take that as a positive sign.

 

The Heart of Darkness

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

My friend, fellow educator and cousin, Liz, commented on yesterday’s post where I (basically) asked why we waste educational opportunities by being unpleasant or bullying. Here’s something that she wrote in the comments:

How we respond to young people is vitally important. How a parent or teacher responds is so important to the self-esteem of a child/student. There is rarely a call for being brutally blunt or thoughtlessly cruel. But bashing is in style. It’s been in style a long time, long enough for an entire generation to think it is the norm.

The emphasis of that phrase “But bashing is in style” is mine because I couldn’t agree with it more. You can see it where we knock people down for being good in ways that we think that we may not be able to attain, while feting people who are wealthy, because somehow we can see ourselves being millionaires. Steinbeck, unsurprisingly, said it best and we paraphrase is longer thoughts on this as:

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” as given in A Short History of Progress (2005) by Ronald Wright.

So there’s surprisingly little bashing of the “haves that we might attain if we are really lucky or play the game in the right way”, but there is a great deal of bashing of visionaries, dreamers, risk-takers, experimenters, those who challenge the status quo and those who dare to dabble within a field in which we consider ourselves expert. I think that list of ‘types’ pretty much describes every single good student I’ve ever had so it’s not that surprising that a large number of the experiences that these students have are negative.

This has not always happened – the forward thinking, the intellectual, the artistic manifesto maker have been highly prized before but, somehow, this seems to have faded away. (I know that every generation complains about this but, with our media saturation and our near-instantaneous communication, I think that the impact of negative feedback and bashing has a far wider reach, as well as being less focused on debate and more on cruelty, destruction and brutality.)

Let me give you an example. I am an artist, across a few different outlets but mainly writing and design, and I am creating a manifesto to describe my intentions in the artistic space, my motives in doing so, and my views on the fusion between creativity and the more rigid aspects of my discipline. The reaction to this, if I tell people, is predominantly negative. Firstly, due to a certain famous manifesto, most people assume that I am making some sort of revolutionary political statement. (The book “100 Artistic Manifestos” is an excellent reference to get a different view on this.)  Secondly, most people assume that I am somehow incapable of doing this – I suspect it’s because they believe that my job is me or that Computer Scientists can’t be creative. The general reaction is one of “knocking”, a gentle form of dismissive undermining common in Australia, but this is just a polite version of bashing. People don’t believe I can do this and have no problem expressing this in a variety of ways. Fortunately, I’ve reached the point in my career and my art that the need to write a manifesto is based on a desire to explain and to share, so people not understanding why I would do it just tells me that I need to do it. (Of course, calling yourself an artist is a hard one, as well. Am I published? No. Do I have any works on display? No. Do I make my living from it? No. Am I driven to create art? Yes. By my definition, I’m an artist. If I ever sell two paintings, of any kind, I’ve doubled Van Gogh’s lifetime sales. 🙂 )

This is the environment in which my students are learning and growing – and it’s a dark one. If I have noted nothing else from working with the young, it is that they are amazingly fragile at some points. The moments that you have to work with people, when they feel comfortable enough to be open and honest with you, are surprisingly few and far between – being cruel, taking a cheap shot, not having the time, cutting them down, not listening… it’ll have an effect, alright, and it may even be an effect that stays with that student for life. Going back over your memory of your teachers and lecturers, I bet you can remember every single one that changed your life, whether for good or for ill.

I don’t really want to harden my students, to make them into living armour, because I think that is really going to get in the way of them being people. Yes, I need them to be resilient but that’s a very different thing to rigid or tough. I need them to be able to commit to a particular set of ideas, that they choose, and to be able to withstand reasonable argument and debate, because this is the burden of the critical thinker. But I’m always worried that making them insensitive to criticism risks making them easily manipulable and ignorant of useful sources. It’s far too easy to respond to people you see as bashers with bashing – Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens both spring to mind as people who wield words and ideas as weapons in an (on occasion) unnecessarily cruel, dismissive or self-satisfied way. There is a particular smugness of “basher-bashing” that is as repellent as the original action and this is also not a great way to train people that you wish to be out there, sharing and discussing ideas. If I wanted repellently smug and self-serving prose, I’d read Jeremy Clarkson, who is (at least) occasionally funny.

The obvious rejoinder to this is that “well, we need people on our side who are as tough as the opponents” and, frankly, I don’t buy it. That sounds more like revenge to me, with a side order of schaudenfreude. If we don’t act top stop it, then we make an environment in which bashing is tolerated and, if we do that, then the most successful basher will win. I’ll tell you right now that it won’t have to be the person who is smartest, most correct, most well-prepared – it is far more likely that it is the person who is willing to be the most cruel, the utterly vindictive and the inescapable persecutor who will win that battle.

So, longwindedly, I complete agree with Liz and want to finish by emphasising the start of her quote: “How we respond to young people is vitally important. How a parent or teacher responds is so important to the self-esteem of a child/student. There is rarely a call for being brutally blunt or thoughtlessly cruel.”

I am convinced that the majority of educators and parents are doing everything that needs to be done to give a good environment, but we also have to look at the world around us and ask how we can make that better.

 

 

A Missed Opportunity: Miles Davis and “Little Miles”

Posted: July 22, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

(Edit: someone claiming to be “Little Miles” has now commented on this and said that he was fine with it. That’s great, but he also says that he accepted Miles’ comments in the face of him being known for being curt. It’s worth a read and, of course, I was speculating but my comments on the utility of Miles’ comments stand. Miles was known for being like this and I don’t see talent, even talent as great as Miles’, as being an excuse for bad behaviour. Jazz people may feel differently. I’m in the business of education, not torturing students. I would suggest that this is something all exemplars in a field should keep in mind if they want their area to flourish.)

If you click on this linked video (SFW) (YouTube), you’ll see a young trumpet player, who goes by the nickname “Little Miles”, play “On Green Dolphin Street” in front of Miles Davis. Now, it appears that, if I’ve done my detective work correctly, it’s a 1986 interview conducted by Bill Boggs (corrections welcome!).

Now, if you’ve watched that video, you’ve seen three things.

  1. You’ve seen a young trumpet player, who really isn’t that good, do a tolerable version of a song with a couple of mistakes.
  2. You’ve seen Miles Davis sit all the way back in his chair, then, finally, in a dismissive tone offer the advice of “Get some more practice” and “It’s in E Flat, you’re playing it in D Natural”, which is about as close to telling the kid to go back to wherever he came from and take up the tambourine as you can without actually going to the effort of doing so.
  3. You’ve seen a young trumpet player who, more than likely, is not going to keep playing the trumpet for much longer. The host quickly gets him off stage before anything more unpleasant can happen to him.

Now there is a world of wrong-thinking going on here to even let a young boy, who is called (whether he calls it himself or not) “Little Miles”, anywhere within fifty metres of Miles Davis, unless that young trumpet player is so, SO, good that Miles is going to have to accept that it’s not that much of an insult. And, being honest, the kid’s not that good. When you look at Miles Davis’ past, he was playing professionally for 3-4 years and studying at Juilliard before he went out and hunted down his idol, Coltrane. (Edit: my apologies, it was, of course, Charlie Parker. Thank you, Lewis, for noticing this!) When you think about it like that, wandering into a television studio calling yourself “Little Bird” after playing the sax for a few years and, obviously, not at a standard where you could play professionally – that’s a pretty silly thing to do.

But, of course, Miles’ reaction was pretty toxic. It was unnecessary. The kid wasn’t a threat to anyone and, after playing that way, “Little Miles” was going to fade away, unless he practiced a whole heap more. Taking Miles’ comments at face value, could they have been educational? Ehhhh, not in that tone and with that delay and posture. It was a “Buzz off, kid” if it was anything.

The funny thing is that this is a cascade of bad decision making, which resulted in the worst kind of outcome – no-one actually learned anything.

  1. Whoever was putting the boy up should have either prepared him better or held him back until he was. He shouldn’t have been here.
  2. Whoever gave the kid the name or encouraged him to use it should really had thought twice about it, if proximity to the real thing was even on the horizon.
  3. Someone let this train-wreck happen in front of Miles Davis.
  4. Someone didn’t get the kid off or go to commercial when it was (blatantly) obvious what was about to happen.
  5. Miles was offensively honest in a way designed to injure.

So, someone had put together a view of jazz trumpet playing and exposed the student to it so that they thought that their version of “On Green Dolphin Street” was good enough that they could stand on a stage, called “Little Miles” and expect anything else. That’s a problem with the teacher, for me.

That name… Oh! That name! The hubris required to call yourself that, unless you are so, so, very good that the comparisons leap to all lips. Somebody didn’t sit back and look at that from enough perspectives to work out that it was sending completely the wrong message.

What could the boy learn from listening to Miles? Practice more and stay on key. Wow. Thanks. It was, as I’ve said, not designed to be educational but hurtful – and of course it had no real educational value. It was a punishment and, like any punishment, it’s designed to make you avoid a behaviour, not train you into a new behaviour. Stay away from the trumpet, Kid.

The boy learned nothing that he couldn’t have known by playing with some echo. He certainly didn’t learn anything from one of the finest horn players in the world. What worries me the most is that, after this all happened, his parents or his teacher came up to him and said something “Well, what does that Miles Davis know, anyway?”

“What does he know? I named myself (or you named me) after him as a nickname. I’ve been looking forward to this for three months (say). And now you say it’s nothing?”

Little Miles now has two extreme options, as well as the continuum of compromise in the middle. Either he’s crazy enough to believe that Miles Davis was wrong and that he’s going to be the best ever, spending his life pursuing a vindictive dream where  any intrinsic motivation is swamped by a burning hatred for Gold Lamé, or he suddenly realises that his teachers and his parents don’t know that much about music – and that everything that they’ve said has been wrong.

I started out talking about education, but I’m coming to finish up talking about joy. Yes, there was a failure to educate, a failure of guardianship, many failures of judgement but there has also been a loss of joy. That young man was happy, mistakes and all, until Miles Davis slammed his angry fist down on him and I can’t really see how his love of trumpet would have survived that, without being at least a little bent and mangled.

It’s really easy to be unpleasantly critical and it’s hard to be constructively critical, especially when people are washed in the warm milk of low expectations, but I really wonder sometime why more people just don’t try a little harder to do it.

Relationship Management: Authenticity

Posted: July 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

(Edit note: I tried to use a formatting mechanism that would make the e-mail examples stand out but in broke things for people with different browsers and for me on mobile browsers. I’ve switched it back to normal text and indented for clarity.)

I belong to the Qantas Frequent Flyer program and have a reasonable amount of status. The last time I hit ‘Gold’, they sent me a letter telling me about all of the perks if I then went to ‘Platinum’. This struck me as curious because, by doing so, they immediately reduced the reward of ‘going Gold’ (because it was now second best) and completely failed to show me that they had looked at my flying habits. To go to ‘Platinum’, I would have had to take all of the flights I just took – AGAIN. So, now, thanks to an ill-thought out letter I’m aware of two things: firstly, that Gold is for dummies and that the cool kids are Platinum, and, secondly, that the airline I’ve been flying with since the mid-90s doesn’t regard me as serious enough to track. It makes you question the relationship.

Now it’s not as if I’d actually expended any effort to go ‘Gold’, I’d just sat on a lot of Qantas planes, watched a lot of Futurama and Big Bang Theory, and accumulated points. What Qantas sent me was a message that basically said “Hey, just fly twice as often as you and, because you fly discount economy and we don’t give you that much for it, that means we want you to spend about 3 months of the year in the air. In Economy long haul.” That’s a bit irritating because, as someone who works with computers, it’s pretty easy to look at things like accrual rate, current time of the year and my flying pattern and realise that you were sending me the aviation equivalent of “Hey, you made your mortgage payment, want to buy Paris?”

There’s a lot of lip service given to the idea of relationship management and, while it’s easy to talk about, it’s hard to do. There’s a great deal of difference between sending students an e-mail if they’re not attending and trying to actually make a connection with the student. One of these can be done with a message like this:

From: Nick Falkner
To: Nick Falkner
BCC: list of students but put in to the mail message in a way that doesn’t show up.

Hey, I noticed that you haven’t been showing up in class for a while and that you also haven’t handed up a number of assignments. If you’d like to get in touch, please see me after class or send me an e-mail to organise a time.

Regards, Nick.

Now, this is, to me, disingenuous, because while it may all be true, it looks like it’s a personal message when it’s really a form letter. Hand on heart, yes, I’ve done this but, on reflection, it’s not really good enough. Yes, any attempt to get in touch with a student is better than nothing, but this has no personalisation to it. (Yes, large classes can be hard to personalise. We ran a course for 360 engineers and we had weekly assignments with a marking load of 36 hours. We had to use team marking, with me as quality control and arbiter. Because each student got the same marker each time, we managed to maintain a relationship through personalised feedback and consistency that would have been hard to manage with only one person – but, obviously, students in different blocks could have different experiences and we did have to swap in/out more than one marker.)

I spend a lot of time establishing relationships with my students but that means that I then have to spend a lot of time maintaining the relationships with my students. Even in large classes, if I’ve spoken to someone once, they expect me to remember their names! (And I certainly try to – I don’t always succeed but I’ve got better at it with practice.)

Even those students I haven’t yet managed to develop a relationship with can benefit from my attempts to try. So this is probably much closer to what I try to send. (My explanatory notes on this are also attached after two dashes — and in italics.)

From: Nick Falkner
To: Student Name — E-mail is to the student, not an anonymous list
CC: Any other lecturers in the course — This is so that the student knows that all lecturers are getting this info.

Dear Firstname, — This can be hard to know, even when you can see the full name, due to cultural issues. If you make a fair stab, most people help you out.
I was looking at the course “Underwater Knitting in Perl” and you haven’t submitted any work for assignments 2 and 3. I was wondering if you there was something that you wanted to talk about? If you have medical or compassionate extension requests for this time, then you do need to let me know, as we need to work out an alternative submission schedule if that’s appropriate. As a reminder, you do need to obtain at least 40% of the available marks in the assignment work component to pass but you can easily get back on track if you start doing the work again now.
— It’s not too late but it can be too late! You may need help! Can I help you?
If you’d like to talk to me in person, I have an office drop-in time from 2-4pm on Friday, and you can find me in office 9.99, Building 4, Third Circle, or you can call me on xxxxx if that’s easier. Obviously, e-mail is always great as that gets me wherever I am – but I don’t promise to reply immediately to e-mail sent at midnight! — How to get me! I also reserve the right to be inject humour randomly. 🙂
Are you available on Friday at 2pm? If so, please let me know.
— Easy question to answer. Last thing the student reads. Need to keep it short so it can be read quickly and easily. This may, actually, be slightly too long.

This isn’t perfect, obviously, and I’m sure I’ve broken any number of good rules by doing this but the most important thing is that the tone is very different. I’ve thought about this student and my concern appears more authentic because it is more authentic. Of course, it took me much longer to write but the chances of having a positive response are far greater. It’s also based on my knowledge of the student which, right now, is a little limited but at least I’ve dug up as much as I can. I’ve reminded them of the mechanisms that are in place to help, as an introductory step, without saying that there’s anything wrong with them and I’ve given them a reason to respond (you may put yourself at risk but it’s not too late) and a direct question (can you see me on Friday) to respond to.

 Unsurprisingly, the students who respond and stay in touch are usually the ones that I have the best relationship with – but the first e-mail and your demonstration of knowledge of the student, as well as the personalisation of the message, makes a difference. Today, I received an e-mail from someone who came to me with problems but, with some good e-mail and meetings, we got him through to a solid B – when he was on his way to an F. Here’s what he wrote:
[…] thanks for your help during the semester, without it I wouldn’t have been able to pass [the course]. I really appreciate it. I was actually a bit surprised to even manage a [B], so again cheers.
And that, I think, is all I really need to say on this.

The Extrinsic Reward: As Seen in the Wild.

Posted: July 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Why should I do it? What’s in it for me?”

How many times have you heard, said or thought the above sentiment, in one form or another? I go to a lot of meetings so I get to hear this one a lot. Reanalysing my interactions with people over the past 12 months or so, it has become apparent how many people are clearly focused on the payoff, and this is usually not related to their intrinsic reward mechanisms.

We get it from students when they ask “Will this be on the test?” (Should I study this? What’s in it for me?) We get it from our colleagues when they look at a new suggestion and say “Well, no-one’s going to do that.” (Which usually means “I wouldn’t do it. What’s in it for me?”) We get it from ourselves when we don’t do something because something else becomes more important – and this is very interesting as it often gives an indicator of where you sit on the work/life balance scale. Where I work, there are a large number of occasions where the rewards mechanisms used can result in actions and thinking patterns that, as an observer, I find both interesting and disturbing.

Let me give you some background on how research funding works in Australia (very brief). You have a research idea or are inside a group that has some good research ideas. You do research. You discover something. You write it up and get it published in conferences and journals. Repeat this step until you have enough publications to have a credible track record. You can now apply for funding from various bodies, so you spend 3-4 weeks writing a grant and you write up your great grant idea, write it up really well, attach your track record evidence as part of your CV, and then wait. In my discipline, ICT, our success rate is very low, and very few of the people who apply for Australian Research Council Discovery Grants get their grants. Now this is, of course, not a lottery – this is a game of skill! Your grant is rated by other people, you get some feedback, you can respond to this feedback (the rejoinder), and the ratings that you originally received, plus your rejoinder, go forward to a larger panel. Regrettably, there is not much money to go around (most grants are only funded at the 50% level of the 22% of grants that get through across the board), so an initial poor rating means that your grant is (effectively) dead.

This makes grants scarce and intrinsically competitive, as well as artificially inflated in their perceived value. Receiving a grant will also get you public congratulations, the money and gear (obviously) and an invitation to the best Christmas cocktail party in the University – the Winner’s Circle, in effect. The same is true if you bring in a heap of research cash of any other kind – public praise, money and networking opportunities.

Which, if you think about it, is rather curious because you have just been given a wodge (technical term) of cash that you can use to hire staff and buy gear, travel to conferences, and basically improve your chances of getting another grant – but you then get additional extrinsic rewards, including the chance to meet the other people who have risen to this level. This is, effectively, a double reward and I suppose I wouldn’t have much of a problem with it, except that we start to run into those issues of extrinsic motivation again which risks robbing people of their inclination to do research once those extrinsic rewards dry up. I note that we do have a scheme to improve the grant chances of people who just missed out on getting Australian Research Council (ARC) funding but it is literally for those people who just missed out.

Not getting a grant can be a very negative result, because the absence of success is also often accompanied by feedback that will force you to question the value of your performance to date, rather than just the work that has been submitted.

When an early career researcher looks at the ARC application process and thinks “What’s in it for me?” – the answer is far more likely to be “an opportunity to receive feedback of variable quality for the investment of several weeks of your life, from people with whom you are actively competing” rather than an actual grant. So this is obviously a point where mentoring, support and (yes) seed funding to be able to improve become very important – as it provides an ability to develop skill, confidence and (hopefully) the quality of the work, leading to success in the future. The core here, however, is not to bribe the person into improving, it’s to develop the person in order that they improve. Regrettably, a scheme that is (effectively) rewarding the rewarded does not have a built-in “and lifting up those who aren’t there” component. In fact, taking on a less experienced researcher is far more likely to hinder a more capable applicant’s chances. When a senior researcher looks at assisting a more junior researcher, under the current system, “What’s in it for me?” is mostly “Reduced chance of success.” Given that this may also cut you out of the Winner’s Circle, as funds dry up, as you are no longer successful, as it then gets harder to do the research and hence get grants, combined with the fact that you can only apply for these once a year… it’s a positive disincentive to foster emerging talent, unless that talent is so talented that it probably doesn’t need that much help!

So the extrinsic manipulation here has a built-in feedback loop and is, regrettably, prone to splitting people into two groups (successful and not) very early on, at the risk of those groups staying separated for some time to come.

If the large body of work in the area is to be believed, most people don’t plan with the long term outcomes in mind (hence, being told that if you work hard you might get a grant in five years is unlikely to change anyone’s behaviour) and on top of that, as Kohn posits, praising a successful person is more likely to cause envy and division than any real improvement. How does someone else being praised tell you how to improve from your current position?

So what does all of this hot air mean for my students?

I have just finished removing all ‘attendance-based’ incentive schemes from my courses – there are no marks being given just for showing up in any form, marks are only achieved when you demonstrate that you have acquired knowledge. Achievement will not generate any additional reward – the achievement will be the reward. Feedback is crucial but, and this will be challenging, everything I say or do must provide the students with a way to improve, without resorting to the more vague areas of general praise. I will be interested to see if this appears to have any (anecdotal) effect upon the number of times someone asks “What’s in it for me?”

Intervention and Risk: An Anonymised Anecdote

Posted: July 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Yesterday morning, we found some students sleeping in one of our computing labs. This isn’t that uncommon, especially during the crunch times, but it is uncommon to see people disrobed and obviously moved in, with food, clothes and the like. The initial reactions are almost always “Argh, what are you doing in here?” and “Grr, have you been getting in the way of other students.” However, and I can’t go into too much detail, as the story unfurled, with the intervention of some excellent staff members who managed to get the students talking, what appeared to be students taking advantage of our resources quickly turned out to be a situation where one student in extremis was being watched and cared for by another student – while both students were dealing with other, far more serious, problems.

To put it simply, one student had almost run out of hope and places to be. When you think about it, you’re not going anywhere good when you end up hiding in the corner of a lab that’s going through software rebuild and, hence, has no-one in it. The initial problem that we had was that, for mainly cultural reasons, the students had a great deal of difficulty talking to the first people to contact them – because we were lecturers and there is a great deal of potential embarrassment for certain people in admitting to problems in front of us. Fortunately, many heads knocked together to look at the problem, someone managed to start the students talking, we got more information and, as of this morning, a number of key problems have been solved. The major issue (stress regarding study) has been dealt with and the intervention to address other problems continues.

Reflecting upon this situation, I was reminded again of the burden that is placed upon the relationship between student and staff member when there is a cultural gap, especially one involving academic staff. I tried to talk to the students but, having been set up into fixed roles (in their heads), we couldn’t communicate. It was only once someone outside of the academic hierarchy got involved that information started to flow. Yes, there were linguistic issues but, ultimately, it didn’t come down to language, it came down to willingness to talk and these students didn’t want to open up. After they were reached, then the vast array of helpful resources that we do have were suddenly available to them.

As was noted at HERDSA recently, students don’t look at the ‘where to go for help’ slides early on in a course because they don’t need help. If students do need help, but can’t ask for it or don’t know where to go, then all of our helpful and assistive systems just won’t be able to help. But, of course, expecting students to know when they need help does give us a convenient ‘out’. Given that we can see their marks, and to a large extent their academic performance in courses that we administer, we should be able to see students who are heading towards crisis points. (We do look at this in our Faculty but more on that later.)

My own research, to be presented at ICER in September, talks about the amount of information that appears to be contained in the first submission that a student makes. But let’s say that all I can see is a semester of Fail grades – given that performance like that wouldn’t have got them into my course, I’m looking at a problem. Now, we can and we do redirect students to our (very good) Transitions and Advisory Service but this is a manual step. I’ve been looking at automated solutions to this for some time, and I’m looking forward to talking to people in more detail about AWE (the Wellness Engine) at University of New England, because I should not have to use myself as a processing element in order to achieve something that can be done better by a computer.

A colleague and friend of mine was describing middleware to some people at the University. If you don’t know what it means, middleware is software that connects two or more other systems together. Rather than writing one big piece that does everything, or two pieces that fit together like a jigsaw, middleware allows you to bring together lots of different systems that weren’t necessarily designed to work with each other. Probably the example that you’ve seen, and not realised, is using a database through a web-page. The underlying data (like Amazon’s store) is one system. Your web browser is another. Middleware allows you to exchange data with the data store and buy books. Middleware sounds great, right? It is – but here comes the catch.

Dave’s killer question on this is “Why are we using our staff as middleware?”

He’s right, of course. We take data from our marking of assignments, put into another system (by changing format and restructuring it), then we put that into another system (with manual intervention and checking) and this is then finally made available to students. Now if I want to see how the students are doing, I need to remember to manually request that a search be made, showing me all students who have failed anything – and then give me their GPA for this semester. I note that we already do this at the Faculty level using a mechanism called the Unsatisfactory Academic Progress process, which has identified a lot of at-risk students and helped a lot of people back, but how is it done? People acting as middleware.

What I want is a system that alerts me to problems automatically. If I have to search, it takes time and (worse) it becomes a task to be prioritised because there many not always be problems. If I am contacted when there is a problem, the task is automatically high priority. That requires a good set of middleware that spans all of a University’s systems and can bring that data together, then get in touch with the right people when there’s a problem. We’re actually not that far away from it – the systems are all there, we just need to streamline some processes. Fewer people acting as middleware means more people doing the things that we actually pay them for, especially when it’s academics!

There are lots of things that can get in the way of a good working relationship between educator and student. We don’t have to be friends, but we do have to be willing and able to talk to each other. Taking that further, it would be nice if the systems all talked to each other as well, including yelling at us when a student hits a mark where we might be able to intervene and do something useful, sooner.

A Design Challenge, a Grand Design Challenge, if you will.

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

Question: What is one semester long, designed as a course for students who perform very well academically, has no prerequisites and can be taken by students with no programming exposure and by students with a great deal of programming experience?

Answer: I don’t know but I’m teaching it on Monday.

While I talk about students who perform well academically, this is for the first instance of this course. My goal is that any student can take this course, in some form, in the future.

The new course in our School, Grand Challenges in Computer Science, is part of our new degree structure, the Bachelor of Computer Science (Advanced). This adds  lot more project work and advanced concepts, without disrupting the usual (and already excellent) development structure of the degree. One of the challenges of dealing with higher-performing students is keeping them in a sufficiently large and vibrant peer group while also addressing the minor problem that they’re moving at a different pace to many people that they are friends with. Our solution has been to add additional courses that sit outside of the main progression but still provide interesting material for these students, as well as encouraging them to take a more active role in the student and general community. They can spend time with their friends, carry on with their degrees and graduate at the same time, but also exercise themselves to greater depth and into areas that we often don’t have time to deal with.

In case you’re wondering, I know that some of my students read this blog and I’m completely comfortable talking about the new course in this manner because (a) they know that I’m joking about the “I don’t know” from the Answer above and (b) I have no secrets regarding this course. There are some serious challenges facing us as a species. We are now in a position where certain technologies and approaches may be able to help us with this. One of these is the notion of producing an educational community that can work together to solve grand challenges and these students are very much a potential part of this new community.

The biggest challenge for me is that I have such a wide range of students. I have students who potentially have no programming background and students who have been coding for four years. I have students who are very familiar with the School’s practices and University, and people whose first day is Monday. Of course, my solution to this is to attack it with a good design. But, of course, before a design, we have to know the problem that we’re trying to solve.

The core elements of this course are the six grand challenges as outlined but he NSF, research methods that will support data analysis, the visualisation of large data sources as a grand challenge and community participation to foster grand challenge communities. I don’t believe that a traditional design of lecturing is going to support this very well, especially as the two characteristics that I most want to develop in the students are creativity and critical thinking. I really want all of my students to be able to think their way around, over or through an obstacle and I think that this course is going to be an excellent place to be able to concentrate on this.

I’ve started by looking at my learning outcomes for this course – what do I expect my students to know by the end of this course? Well, I expect them to be able to tell me what the grand challenges are, describe them, and then provide examples of each one. I expect them to be able to answer questions about key areas and, in the areas that we explore in depth, demonstrate this knowledge through the application of relevant skills, including the production of assignment materials to the best of their ability, given their previous experience. Of course, this means that every student may end up performing slightly differently, which immediately means that personalised assessment work (or banded assessment work) is going to be required but it also means that the materials I use will need to be able to support a surface reading, a more detailed reading and a deep reading, where students can work through the material at their own pace.

I don’t want the ‘senior’ students to dominate, so there’s going to have be some very serious scaffolding, and work from me, to support role fluidity and mutual respect, where the people leading discussion rotate to people supporting a point, or critiquing a point, or taking notes on the point, to make sure that everyone gets a say and that we don’t inhibit the creativity that I’m expecting to see in this course. I will be setting standards for projects that take into account the level of experience of each person, discussed and agreed with the student in advance, based on their prior performance and previous knowledge.

What delights me most about this course is that I will be able to encourage people to learn from each other. Because the major assessment items are all unique to a student, then sharing knowledge will not actually lead to plagiarism or copying. Students will be actively discouraged from doing work for each other but, in this case, I have no problem in students helping each other out – as long as the lion’s share of the work is done by the main student. (The wording of this is going to look a lot more formal but that’s a Uni requirement. To quote “The Castle”, “It’s about the vibe.”) Students will regularly present their work for critique and public discussion, with their response to that critique forming a part of their assessment.

I’m trying to start these students thinking about the problems that are out there, while at the same time giving them a set of bootstrapping tools that can set them on the path to investigation and (maybe) solution well ahead of the end of their degrees. This then feeds into their project work in second and third year. (And, I hope, for at least some of them, Honours and maybe PhD beyond.)

Writing this course has been a delight. I have never had so much excuse to buy books and read fascinating things about challenging issues and data visualisation. However, I think that it will be the student’s response to this that will give me something that I can then share with other people – their reactions and suggestions for improvement will put a seal of authenticity on this that I can then pack up, reorganise, and put out into the world as modules for general first year and high school outreach.

I’m very much looking forward to Monday!

Good Design: Building In Important Features From the Start

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

The game “Deus Ex” is widely regarded as one of the best computer games that has been made so far. It has won a very large number of “best game” awards and regularly shows up in the top 5 of lists of “amazing games”. Deus Ex was released in 2000, designed and developed by Ion Storm under Warren Spector and Harvey Smith and distributed by Eidos. (I mentioned it before in this post, briefly.) Here is the description of this game from Wikipedia:

Set in a dystopian world during the year 2052, the central plot follows rookie United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition agent JC Denton, as he sets out to combat terrorist forces, which have become increasingly prevalent in a world slipping ever further into chaos. As the plot unfolds, Denton becomes entangled in a deep and ancient conspiracy, encountering organizations such as Majestic 12, the Illuminati, and the Hong Kong Triads throughout his journey.

Deus Ex had a cyberpunk theme, a world of shadowy corporations and many corruptions of the human soul, ranging from a generally materialistic culture to body implants producing cyborg entities that no longer had much humanity. While looking a lot like a First-Person Shooter (you see through the character’s eyes and kill things), the game also had a great deal of stealth play (sneaking around trying very hard not to get noticed, shot or both). However, what sets DE apart from most other games it that the choice of how you solved most of the problems was pretty much left up to you. This was no accident. The fact that you could solve 99% of the problems in the game by using different forms of violence, many forms of stealth or a combination of these was down to the way that the game was designed.

When I was at Game Masters at ACMI, Melbourne, over the weekend, I was able to read the front page of a document entitled “Just What IS Deus Ex” by Warren Spector. Now, unfortunately, they had a “no photographs” rule so I don’t have a copy of it (and, for what it’s worth, I also interpreted that to mean “no tiresome hand transcription onto the iPhone in order to make a replica” ) but one of the most obvious and important design features was that they wanted to be able to support player exploration: players’ actions had to have consequences and players needed to be able to make their plans, without feeling constrained by the world. (Fortunately, while not being the actual document, there is an article here where Warren talks about most of the important things. If you’re interested in design, have a look at it after you’ve finished this.) Because of this, a number of the items in the game can be used in a number of quite strange ways and, while it appears that this is a bug, suddenly you’ll run across an element of the game that makes you realise that the game designers knew that this was possible.

Do not climb if red lights active!

For example, in the Triad-run Hong Kong of 2052, there is a very tall tower on one edge of the explorable area. There are grenades (LAMs)in the game that adhere ‘magnetically’ to walls and then explode if armed and someone enters their proximity. However, it is possible to use these grenades to climb up walls, assuming you don’t arm them of course, by sticking them to walls, getting close enough to hop up, placing another grenade above you and then doing the same thing. With patience, you can climb quite high. Sounds like a bug, right? Yeah, well, that’s what I thought until I climbed to the top of the tower in Hong Kong and found a guy, one of the Non-Player Characters, standing on top.

This was a surprise but it shouldn’t have been. I’d already realised that there was always more than one way to do things and, because the game was designed to make it is as easy as possible for me to try many paths to achieve success, the writer had put in early hints designed to discourage a ‘blow everything up’ approach. The skill system makes it relatively easy for you to make your life a lot easier by working with what is already in the environment rather than trying to do it all yourself.

In terms of the grenades, rather than just being pictures on a wall, they became real world objects when placed and were as solid as any other element. This allowed them to be climbed and the designers/programmers recognised this by putting a guy on top of a tower that you had no other way to get to (without invoking cheats). The objects in Deus Ex were designed to be as generally usable as possible. The sword could open crates as well (Ok, well much better) than a crowbar could and reduced the need to carry two things. Many weapons came with multiple ammunition types, allowing you to customise your load out to the kind of game you wanted to play. Other nice features included the fact that there very few situations of ‘spontaneous creation’, where monsters appeared at some point in a scripted scene, which would have enforced a certain approach. If you were crawling in somewhere from completely the wrong side, everything would be there and ready, rather than all spontaneously reappearing when you happened to approach from the ‘triggering’ side.

In short, it felt like a real world. (With the usual caveat regarding it being a real world where you are a killer cyborg in 2052.)

The big advantage of this is that you feel a great deal of freedom in your planning and implementation and, combined with the fact that the game reacts and changes to the decisions that you make, this makes the endings of the game feel very personal – when you finally choose between the three possible endings, you do so feeling like the game is actually going along with the persona that you have set up. This increases the level of engagement, achievement and enjoyment.

One of Mark Guzdial’s recent posts talked about the importance of good design when it comes to constructing instructional materials and I couldn’t agree more. Good design at the start, with a clear idea of what you’re trying to achieve, allows you to build a consistent experience that will allow you and your students to achieve your objectives. Deus Ex is, in my opinion, considered one of the best games of the 21st century because it started from a simple and clear design document that was set out to maximise the degree of influence that the player could feel in the game – everyone who plays Deus Ex takes their own path through it, has their own experience and gets something slightly different out of it.

I’m not saying it’s that easy for educational design as a global issue, but it is a very good reminder of why we should be doing good design at the very beginning of our courses!

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