The Kids are Alright (within statistical error)

Posted: April 21, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

You may have seen this quote, often (apparently inaccurately) attributed to Socrates:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” (roughly 400BC)

Apparently this is either a paraphrase of Aristophanes or misquoted Plato – like all things attributed to Socrates, we have to remember that we don’t have his signature to any of them. However, it doesn’t really matter if Socrates said it because not only did Hesiod say something in 700BC:

“I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint”

And then we have Peter the Hermit in 1274AD:

“The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress.”

(References via the Wikiquote page of Socrates and a linked discussion page.)

Let me summarise all of this for you:

You dang kids! Get off my lawn.

As you know, I’m a facty-analysis kind of guy so I thought that, if these wise people were correct and every generation is steadily heading towards mental incapacity and moral turpitude, we should be able to model this. (As an aside, I love the word turpitude, it sounds like the state of mind a turtle reaches after drinking mineral spirits.)

I can hear the colour blue!

I can hear the colour blue!

So let’s do this, let’s assume that all of these people are right and that the youth are reckless, disrespectful and that this keeps happening. How do we model this?

It’s pretty obvious that the speakers in question are happy to set themselves up as people who are right, so let’s assume that a human being’s moral worth starts at 100% and that all of these people are lucky enough to hold this state. Now, since Hesiod is chronologically the first speaker, let’s assume that he is lucky enough to be actually at 100%. Now, if the kids aren’t alright, then every child born will move us away from this state. If some kids are ok, then they won’t change things. Of course, every so often we must get a good one (or Socrates’ mouthpiece and Peter the Hermit must be aliens) so there should be a case for positive improvement. But we can’t have a human who is better than 100%, work with me here, and we shall assume that at 0% we have the worst person you can think of.

What we are now modelling is a random walk, starting at 100 and then adding some combination of -1, 0 or 1 at some regular interval. Let me cut to the chase and show you what this looks like, when modelled. I’ve assumed, for ease of modelling, that we make the assessment of the children every year and we have at most a 1 percentile point shift in that year, whatever other assumptions I made. I’ve provided three different models, one where the kids are terrible – we choose very year from no change or a negative shift. The next model is that the kids have some hope but sometimes do nothing, and we choose from an improvement, no change or steady moral decline! The final model is one where we either go up or down. Let’s look at a random walk across all three models over the span of years from 700BC to today:

Blue is the bad children, red is the kids who sometimes do nothing and green is the good/bad.

Blue is the bad children, red is the kids who sometimes do nothing and green is the good/bad.

As you can see, if we take the dire predictions of the next generation as true, then it is only a few hundred years before everything collapses. However, as expected, random walks over this range move around and hit a range of values. (Right now, you should look up Gambler’s Ruin to see why random walks are interesting – basically, over an infinite time, you’d expect to hit all of the values in the range from 0 to 100 an infinite number of times. This is why gamblers with small pots of money struggle against casinos with effectively infinite resources. Maths.)

But we know that the ‘everything is terrible’ model doesn’t work because both Socrates and Peter the Hermit consider themselves to be moral and both lived after the likely ‘decline to zero’ point shown in the blue line. But what would happen over longer timeframes? Let’s look at 20,000 and 200,000 years respectively. (These are separately executed random walks so the patterns will be different in each graph.)

Here is 20,000 years of the same data.

Here is 20,000 years of the same data.

And 200,000 years.

And 200,000 years.

What should be apparent, even with this rather pedantic exploration of what was never supposed to be modelled is that, even if we give credence to these particular commentators and we accept that there is some actual change that is measurable and shows an improvement or decline between generations, the negative model doesn’t work. The longer we run this, the more it will look like the noise that it is – and that is assuming that these people were right in the first place.

Personally, I think that the kids of this generation are pretty much the same as the one before, with some different adaptation to technology and societal mores. Would I have wasted time in lectures Facebooking if I had the chance? Well, I wasted it doing everything else so, yes, probably. (Look around your next staff meeting to see how many people are checking their mail. This is a technological shift driven by capability, not a sign of accelerating attention deficit.) Would I have spent tons of times playing games? Would I? I did! They were just board, role-playing and simpler computer games. The kids are alright and you can see that from the graphs – within statistical error.

Every time someone tells me that things are different, but it’s because the students are not of the same calibre as the ones before… well, I look at these quotes over the past 2,500 and I wonder.

And I try to stay off their lawn.

SIGCSE 2013: Special Session on Designing and Supporting Collaborative Learning Activities

Posted: March 31, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Katrina and I delivered a special session on collaborative learning activities, focused on undergraduates because that’s our area of expertise. You can read the outline document here. We worked together on the underlying classroom activities and have both implemented these techniques but, in this session, Katrina did most of the presenting and I presented the collaborative assessment task examples, with some facilitation.

The trick here is, of course, to find examples that are both effective as teaching tools and are effective as examples. The approach I chose to take was to remind everyone in the room of what the most important aspects were to making this work with students and I did this by deliberately starting with a bad example. This can be a difficult road to walk because, when presenting a bad example, you need to convince everyone that your choice was deliberate and that you actually didn’t just stuff things up.

My approach was fairly simple. Break people into groups, based on where they were currently sitting, and then I immediately went into the question, which had been tailored for the crowd and for my purposes:

“I want you to talk about the 10 things that you’re going to do in the next 5 years to make progress in your career and improve your job performance.”

And why not? Everyone in the room was interested in education and, most likely, had a job at a time when it’s highly competitive and hard to find or retain work – so everyone has probably thought about this. It’s a fair question for this crowd.

Well, it would be, if it wasn’t so anxiety inducing. Katrina and I both observed a sea of frozen faces as we asked a question that put a large number of participants on the spot. And the reason I did this was to remind everyone that anxiety impairs genuine participation and willingness to engage. There were a large number of frozen grins with darting eyes, some nervous mumbles and a whole lot of purposeless noise, with the few people who were actually primed to answer that question starting to lead off.

I then stopped the discussion immediately. “What was wrong with that?” I asked the group.

Well, where do we start? Firstly, it’s an individual activity, not a collaborative activity – there’s no incentive or requirement for discussion, groupwork or anything like that. Secondly, while we might expect people to be able to answer this, it is a highly charged and personal areas, and you may not feel comfortable discussing your five year plan with people that you don’t know. Thirdly, some people know that they should be able to answer this (or at least some supervisors will expect that they can) but they have no real answer and their anxiety will not only limit their participation but it will probably stop them from listening at all while they sweat their turn. Finally, there is no point to this activity – why are we doing this? What are we producing? What is the end point?

My approach to collaborative activity is pretty simple and you can read any amount of Perry, Dickinson, Hamer et al (and now us as well) to look at relevant areas and Contributing Student Pedagogy, where students have a reason to collaborate and we manage their developmental maturity and their roles in the activity to get them really engaged. Everyone can have difficulties with authority and recognising whether someone is making enough contribution to a discussion to be worth their time – this is not limited to students. People, therefore, have to believe that the group they are in is of some benefit to them.

So we stepped back. I asked everyone to introduce themselves, where they came from and give a fact about their current home that people might not know. Simple task, everyone can do it and the purpose was to tell your group something interesting about your home – clear purpose, as well. This activity launched immediately and was going so well that, when I tried to move it on because the sound levels were dropping (generally a good sign that we’re reaching a transition), some groups asked if they could keep going as they weren’t quite finished. (Monitoring groups spread over a large space can be tricky but, where the activity is working, people will happily let you know when they need more time.) I was able to completely stop the first activity and nobody wanted me to continue. The second one, where people felt that they could participate and wanted to say something, needed to keep going.

Having now put some faces to names, we then moved to a simple exercise of sharing an interesting teaching approach that you’d tried recently or seen at the conference and it’s important to note the different comfort levels we can accommodate with this – we are sharing knowledge but we give participants the opportunity to share something of themselves or something that interest them, without the burden of ownership. Everyone had already discovered that everyone in the group had some areas of knowledge, albeit small, that taught them something new. We had started to build a group where participants valued each other’s contribution.

I carried out some roaming facilitation where I said very little, unless it was needed. I sat down with some groups, said ‘hi’ and then just sat back while they talked. I occasionally gave some nodded or attentive feedback to people who looked like they wanted to speak and this often cued them into the discussion. Facilitation doesn’t have to be intrusive and I’m a much bigger fan of inclusiveness, where everyone gets a turn but we do it through non-verbal encouragement (where that’s possible, different techniques are required in a mixed-ability group) to stay out of the main corridor of communication and reduce confrontation. However, by setting up the requirement that everyone share and by providing a task that everyone could participate in, my need to prod was greatly reduced and the groups mostly ran themselves, with the roles shifting around as different people made different points.

We covered a lot of the underlying theory in the talk itself, to discuss why people have difficulty accepting other views, to clarify why role management is a critical part of giving people a reason to get involved and something to do in the conversation. The notion that a valid discursive role is that of the supporter, to reinforce ideas from the proposer, allows someone to develop their confidence and critically assess the idea, without the burden of having to provide a complex criticism straight away.

At the end, I asked for a show of hands. Who had met someone knew? Everyone. Who had found out something they didn’t know about other places? Everyone. Who had learned about a new teaching technique that they hadn’t known before. Everyone.

My one regret is that we didn’t do this sooner because the conversation was obviously continuing for some groups and our session was, sadly, on the last day. I don’t pretend to be the best at this but I can assure you that any capability I have in this kind of activity comes from understanding the theory, putting it into practice, trying it, trying it again, and reflecting on what did and didn’t work.

I sometimes come out of a lecture or a collaborative activity and I’m really not happy. It didn’t gel or I didn’t quite get the group going as I wanted it to – but this is where you have to be gentle on yourself because, if you’re planning to succeed and reflecting on the problems, then steady improvement is completely possible and you can get more comfortable with passing your room control over to the groups, while you move to the facilitation role. The more you do it, the more you realise that training your students in role fluidity also assists them in understanding when you have to be in control of the room. I regularly pass control back and forward and it took me a long time to really feel that I wasn’t losing my grip. It’s a practice thing.

It was a lot of fun to give the session and we spent some time crafting the ‘bad example’, but let me summarise what the good activities should really look like. They must be collaborative, inclusive, achievable and obviously beneficial. Like all good guidelines there are times and places where you would change this set of characteristics, but you have to know your group well to know what challenges they can tolerate. If your students are more mature, then you push out into open-ended tasks which are far harder to make progress in – but this would be completely inappropriate for first years. Even in later years, being able to make some progress is more likely to keep the group going than a brick wall that stops you at step 1. But, let’s face it, your students need to know that working in that group is not only not to their detriment, but it’s beneficial. And the more you do this, the better their groupwork and collaboration will get – and that’s a big overall positive for the graduates of the future.

To everyone who attended the session, thank you for the generosity and enthusiasm of your participation and I’m catching up on my business cards in the next weeks. If I promised you an e-mail, it will be coming shortly.

Humans: We Appear To Be Stuck With Them

Posted: March 24, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve just presented a paper with the ‘lofty’ title of “Computer Science Education: The First Threshold Concept” and the fundamental question I ask is “Why are certain ideas in learning and teaching in Computer Science just not getting any traction?” I frame this in the language of Threshold Concepts, which allows us to talk about certain concepts as being far more threatening than others but far more useful when we accept them. It doesn’t really matter why we say that people aren’t accepting these things, the fact is that they aren’t. Is it because of authority issues, from Perry’s work, where people aren’t ready to accept more than one source of truth? Is it because of poor role management, which leads us to the work of Dickinson? Is it because many people struggle in the pre-operational stages of Neo-Piagetian theory and, even if they can realise some concrete goals, they can’t apply things to the abstract?

It doesn’t matter, really, because we all have colleagues who, on reading the above, would roll their eyes and reject the notion that this is even a valid language of discourse. Why, some will wonder, are we making it so hard when we talk about teaching – “I know how to teach, it’s just sometimes that the students aren’t working hard enough or smart enough”.  When I mentioned to a colleague that I was giving this paper, he said “Feeling sensitive, are you?” and what he meant was, possibly with a slightly malign edge, that I was taking all of this criticism personally.

Yes, well, probably I am, but let’s talk about why. It’s because it’s important that students are taught well. It’s because it’s important that students get the best opportunities. It’s important that my assumptions about the world, my presumptions of my own ability and that of my students, do not have a detrimental effect on the way that I do my job. I’m taking money to be a teacher, a researcher and an academic administrator – I should be providing real value for that money.

But I am not, by any stretch, the best ‘anything’ in the world. I am not the best teacher. I am not the best researcher. I am not the best speaker. If you are looking for an expert in this area, look elsewhere, because I am a tolerable channel for the works of much better scholars. And, yes, I’m sensitive about some of this because, like many people I speak to in this community, I’m getting tired of having good, solid, scientific work rejected because people feel threatened by it or are dismissive of it. I’m sick of rubbish statements like “we can’t tell people how to teach” because, well, yes, actually we can but it requires us to define what teaching quality is and what our learning environments should look like – what we are trying to do, what we actually do and what we should be doing. Lots of work has been done here, lots of work is yet to occur, and, let me be clear, I am not now, or ever, saying that the “Nick way” is the only way  or the desired way – I’m saying that the discussion is important and that we should be able to say what good teaching is and then we must require this.

In my talk, I mentioned the use of social capital – the investment into our social networks that leads to real and future benefits – and how we spend a lot of time on bonding but too little time on bridging. In other words, we don’t have great ways to reach out and we miss opportunities but, a lot of the time, once we bring someone into the educational community, we can build those relationships. Unfortunately, this is not always true and politics, the curse of academia, too often raises its ugly head and provides too many possible venues, or excludes people, or drives wedges between the community when we should be bonding. I was saddened to discover that politics was traipsing around my current activity, as I was hoping that this would be a launchpad for more and more collaborative work – now we are in the middle of a field of politics.

*sigh*

So much energy – so much lost opportunity unless we use that energy to connect, build and work together. It’s not as if we don’t have enough people saying “Why are you bothering with that? I don’t see the need therefore it’s not important.” But this is humans, after all. My paper opened with a quote from Terence in 163BC,

“Homo sum, humani a me nihil alienum puto (I am a [human], nothing human is foreign to me)”

and I then proceeded to shoot this down because threshold concept theory says that one of our key problems is that so much is foreign to us that, unless we recognise this, we are in trouble. However, some things are horribly familiar to us and the unpleasantries of academic politics are one that is not foreign to anyone who has spent more than a couple of years post-PhD.

When I looked at the recent ACM/IEEE Curriculum, the obvious omission was any real attempt to provide a grounding for pedagogy in the document. Hundreds, if not thousands, of concepts were presented with hours attached to them as if this was a formal scientific statement of actual time required to achieve the task. I see this as a wasted bridging opportunity to share, with everyone who reads that document, the idea that certain ideas are trickier, however we frame that statement. If we say “You might have some trouble with this”, we give agency to teachers to think about how they prepare and we also give them a licence to struggle with it, without being worried that they are fundamentally flawed as teachers. If we say “Students may find this challenging”, then the teachers can understand that they do not have a class of bad or lazy students, they have a class of humans because some things are harder to learn than others.

My point from the talk was that, however we slice it, we are fighting an uphill battle and need to focus on bringing in more and more people, which means focusing on bridging rather than division and, where possible, bridging with the same vigour as we bond with our current friends and colleagues. As for politics, it will always be with us, so I suppose the question now is how much energy we give to that, when we could be giving it to to bridging in new people and consolidating our bridges with other people? Bridges are fundamentally hard to build, because it’s so easy for them to fall down, and that’s why the maintenance, the bonding energy, is so important.

I don’t have a solid answer to this but I hope that someone else has some good ideas and feels like sharing them.

SIGCSE 2013: The Revolution Will Be Televised, Perspectives on MOOC Education

Posted: March 17, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Long time between posts, I realise, but I got really, really unwell in Colorado and am still recovering from it. I attended a lot of interesting sessions at SIGCSE 2013, and hopefully gave at least one of them, but the first I wanted to comment on was a panel with Mehram Sahami, Nick Parlante, Fred Martin and Mark Guzdial, entitled “The Revolution Will Be Televised, Perspectives on MOOC Education”. This is, obviously, a very open area for debate and the panelists provided a range of views and a lot of information.

Mehram started by reminding the audience that we’ve had on-line and correspondence courses for some time, with MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) streaming video from the 1990s and Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) starting in 2008. The SEE lectures were interesting because viewership follows a power law relationship: the final lecture has only 5-10% of the views of the first lecture. These video lectures were being used well beyond Stanford, augmenting AP courses in the US and providing entire lecture series in other countries. The videos also increased engagement and the requests that came in weren’t just about the course but were more general – having a face and a name on the screen gave people someone to interact with. From Mehram’s perspective, the challenges were: certification and credit, increasing the richness of automated evaluation, validated peer evaluation, and personalisation (or, as he put it, in reality mass customisation).

Nick Parlante spoke next, as an unashamed optimist for MOOC, who has the opinion that all the best world-changing inventions are cheap, like the printing press, arabic numerals and high quality digital music. These great ideas spread and change the world. However, he did state that he considered artisinal and MOOC education to be very different: artisinal education is bespoke, high quality and high cost, where MOOCs are interesting for the massive scale and, while they could never replace artisinal, they could provide education to those who could not get access to artisinal.

It was at this point that I started to twitch, because I have heard and seen this argument before – the notion that MOOC is better than nothing, if you can’t get artisinal. The subtext that I, fairly or not, hear at this point is the implicit statement that we will never be able to give high quality education to everybody. By having a MOOC, we no longer have to say “you will not be educated”, we can say “you will receive some form of education”. What I rarely hear at this point is a well-structured and quantified argument on exactly how much quality slippage we’re tolerating here – how educational is the alternative education?

Nick also raised the well-known problems of cheating (which is rampant in MOOCs already before large-scale fee paying has been introduced) and credentialling. His section of the talk was long on optimism and positivity but rather light on statistics, completion rates, and the kind of evidence that we’re all waiting to see. Nick was quite optimistic about our future employment prospects but I suspect he was speaking on behalf of those of us in “high-end” old-school schools.

I had a lot of issues with what Nick said but a fair bit of it stemmed from his examples: the printing press and digital music. The printing press is an amazing piece of technology for replicating a written text and, as replication and distribution goes, there’s no doubt that it changed the world – but does it guarantee quality? No. The top 10 books sold in 2012 were either Twilight-derived sadomasochism (Fifty Shades of Unncessary) or related to The Hunger Games. The most work the printing presses were doing in 2012 was not for Thoreau, Atwood, Byatt, Dickens, Borges or even Cormac McCarthy. No, the amazing distribution mechanism was turning out copy after copy of what could be, generously, called popular fiction. But even that’s not my point. Even if the printing presses turned out only “the great writers”, it would be no guarantee of an increase in the ability to write quality works in the reading populace, because reading and writing are different things. You don’t have to read much into constructivism to realise how much difference it makes when someone puts things together for themselves, actively, rather than passively sitting through a non-interactive presentation. Some of us can learn purely from books but, obviously, not all of us and, more importantly, most of us don’t find it trivial. So, not only does the printing press not guarantee that everything that gets printed is good, even where something good does get printed, it does not intrinsically demonstrate how you can take the goodness and then apply it to your own works. (Why else would there be books on how to write?)  If we could do that, reliability and spontaneously, then a library of great writers would be all you needed to replace every English writing course and editor in the world. A similar argument exists for the digital reproduction of music. Yes, it’s cheap and, yes, it’s easy. However, listening to music does not teach you to how write music or perform on a given instrument, unless you happen to be one of the few people who can pick up music and instrumentation with little guidance. There are so few of the latter that we call them prodigies – it’s not a stable model for even the majority of our gifted students, let alone the main body.

Fred Martin spoke next and reminded us all that weaker learners just don’t do well in the less-scaffolded MOOC environment. He had used MOOC in a flipped classroom, with small class sizes, supervision and lots of individual discussion. As part of this blended experience, it worked. Fred really wanted some honest figures on who was starting and completing MOOCs and was really keen that, if we were to do this, that we strive for the same quality, rather than accepting that MOOCs weren’t as good and it was ok to offer this second-tier solution to certain groups.

Mark Guzdial then rounded out the panel and stressed the role of MOOCs as part of a diverse set of resources, but if we were going to do that then we had to measure and report on how things had gone. MOOC results, right now, are interesting but fundamentally anecdotal and unverified. Therefore, it is too soon to jump into MOOC because we don’t yet know if it will work. Mark also noted that MOOCs are not supporting diversity yet and, from any number of sources, we know that many-to-one (the MOOC model) is just not as good as 1-to-1. We’re really not clear if and how MOOCs are working, given how many people who do complete are actually already degree holders and, even then, actual participation in on-line discussion is so low that these experienced learners aren’t even talking to each other very much.

It was an interesting discussion and conducted with a great deal of mutual respect and humour, but I couldn’t agree more with Fred and Mark – we haven’t measured things enough and, despite Nick’s optimism, there are too many unanswered questions to leap in, especially if we’re going to make hard-to-reverse changes to staffing and infrastructure. It takes 20 years to train a Professor and, if you have one that can teach, they can be expensive and hard to maintain (with tongue firmly lodged in cheek, here). Getting rid of one because we have a promising new technology that is untested may save us money in the short term but, if we haven’t validated the educational value or confirmed that we have set up the right level of quality, a few years now from now we might discover that we got rid of the wrong people at the wrong time. What happens then? I can turn off a MOOC with a few keystrokes but I can’t bring back all of my seasoned teachers in a timeframe less than years, if not decades.

I’m with Mark – the resource promise of MOOCs is enormous and they are part of our future. Are they actually full educational resources or courses yet? Will they be able to bring education to people that is a first-tier, high quality experience or are we trapped in the same old educational class divisions with a new name for an old separation? I think it’s too soon to tell but I’m watching all of the new studies with a great deal of interest. I, too, am an optimist but let’s call me a cautious one!

False Dichotomy: If I don’t understand it, then either I am worthless or it is!

Posted: December 29, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve been reading an interesting post on Metafilter about the “Minima Moralia: Reflections from the Damaged Life“, by Theodor Adorno. While the book itself is very interesting, two of the comments on the article caught my eye. An earlier commenter had mentioned that they neither understood nor appreciated this kind of thing, and made the usual throwaway remark about postmodernism being “a scam to funnel money from the productive classes to the parasitical academy” (dydecker). Further down, another commenter, Frowner, gently took this statement to task, starting by noting that Adorno would have been appalled by being labelled a post-modernist, and then discussing why dydecker might have felt the need to attack things in this way. It’s very much worth reading Frowner’s comments on this post, but I shall distil the first one here:

  1. Just because a text is difficult to obscure does not mean that it is postmodern. Also post-modernist is not actually an insult and this may be a politically motivated stance to attacks  group of people who are also likely to identify as status quo critical or (gasp) Marxist.

  2. Not all texts need to be accessible to all audiences, not is something worthless, fake or elitist if it requires pre-readings or some effort to get into. Advanced physics texts can be very difficult to comprehend for the layperson. This does not make Quantum Field Theory wrong or a leftist conspiracy.
  3. You don’t need to read books that you don’t want to read.
  4. You don’t need to be angry at difficult books for being difficult. To exactly quote Frowner,

    Difficult books only threaten us if we decide to feel guilty and ashamed for not reading them.

    If you’re actually studying an area, and read the books that the work relies upon, difficult books can become much clearer, illustrating that it was perhaps not the book that was causing the difficulty.

  5. Sometimes you won’t like something and this has nothing to do with its quality or worth – you just don’t like it.
  6. Don’t picture a perfect reader in your head who understands everything and hold yourself to that standard. If you’re reading a hard book then keep plugging away and accept your humanity.

Frowner then goes on to beautifully summarise all of this in a later comment, where he notes that we seem to learn to be angry at, or uncomfortable with, difficult texts, because we are under pressure to be capable of understanding everything of worth. This is an argument of legitimacy: if the work is legitimate and I don’t understand it, then I am stupid, however if I can argue that the work is illegitimate, then this is a terrible con job, I am not stupid for not understanding this and we should attack this work! Frowner wonders about how we are prepared for the world and believes that we are encouraged to see ourselves as inadequate if we do not understand everything for ourselves, hence the forced separation of work into legitimate and illegitimate, with am immediate, and often vicious, attack on those things we define as illegitimate in order to protect our image of ourselves.

I spend a reasonable amount of time in art galleries and I wish I had a dollar for everyone who stood in front of a piece of modern art (anything from the neo-impressionists on, basically) and felt the need to loudly state that they “didn’t get it” or that they could “have painted it themselves.” (I like Rothko, Mondrian and Klee, among others, so I am often in that part of the gallery.) It is quite strange when you come to think about it – why on earth are people actually vocalising this? Looking more closely, it is (less surprisingly) people in groups of two or more who seem to do this: I don’t understand this so, before you ask me about, I will declare it to be without worth. I didn’t get it, therefore this art has failed me. We go back to Frowner’s list and look at point 2: Not all art (in this case) is for everyone and that’s ok. I can admire Grant Wood’s skill and his painting “American Gothic” but the painting doesn’t appeal as much to me as does the work of Schiele, for example. That’s ok, that doesn’t make Schiele better than Wood in some Universal Absolute Fantasy League of Painters (although the Schiele/Klimt tag team wrestling duo, with their infamous Golden Coat Move, would be fun to watch) – it’s a matter of preference. I regularly look at things that I don’t quite understand but I don’t regard it as a challenge or an indication that it or I are at fault, although I do see things that I understand completely and can quite happily identify reasons that I don’t like it!

Klee's "The Goldfish". Some will see this as art, others will say "my kids could do that". Unless you are Hans Wilhelm Klee, no, probably not.

Klee’s “The Goldfish”. Some will see this as art, others will say “my kids could do that”. Unless you are Hans Wilhelm Klee, no, probably not.

I am, however, very lucky, because I have a job and lifestyle where my ability to think about things is a core component: falsely dichotomous thinking is not actually what I’m paid to do. However, I do have influence over students and I need to be very careful in how I present information to them. In my last course, I deliberately referred to Wikipedia among other documents because it is designed to be understood and is usually shaped by many hands until it reaches an acceptable standard of readability. I could have pointed my students at ethics texts but these texts often require more preparation and a different course structure, which may have put students off actually reading and understanding them. If my students go into ethics, or whatever other area they deem interesting, then point 4 becomes valid and their interest, and contextual framing, can turn what would have been a difficult book into a useful book.

I agree with this (effectively) anonymous poster and his or her summary of an ongoing issue: we make it hard for people to admit that they are learning, that they haven’t quite worked something out yet, because we make “not getting something immediately” a sign of slowness (informally) and often with negative outcomes (in assessment or course and career progression). We do not have to be experts at everything, nor should we pretend to be. We risk not actually learning some important and beautiful things because we feel obliged to reject it before it rejects us – and some things, of great worth that will be long appreciated, take longer to ‘get’ then just the minute or two that we feel we can allocate.

Adelaide Computing Education Conventicle 2012: “It’s all about the people”

Posted: December 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

acec 2012 was designed to be a cross-University event (that’s the whole point of the conventicles, they bring together people from a region) and we had a paper from the University of South Australia:  ‘”It’s all about the people”; building cultural competence in IT graduates’ by Andrew Duff, Kathy Darzanos and Mark Osborne. Andrew and Kathy came along to present and the paper was very well received, because it dealt with an important need and a solid solution to address that need, which was inclusive, insightful and respectful.

For those who are not Australians, it is very important to remember that the original inhabitants of Australia have not fared very well since white settlement and that the apology for what happened under many white governments, up until very recently, was only given in the past decade. There is still a distance between the communities and the overall process of bringing our communities together is referred to as reconciliation. Our University has a reconciliation statement and certain goals in terms of representation in our staff and student bodies that reflect percentages in the community, to reduce the underrepresentation of indigenous Australians and to offer them the same opportunities. There are many challenges facing Australia, and the health and social issues in our indigenous communities are often exacerbated by years of poverty and a range of other issues, but some of the communities have a highly vested interest in some large-scale technical, ICT and engineering solutions, areas where indigenous Australians are generally not students. Professor Lester Irabinna Rigney, the Dean of Aboriginal Education, identified the problem succinctly at a recent meeting: when your people live on land that is 0.7m above sea level, a 0.9m sea-level rise starts to become of concern and he would really like students from his community to be involved in building the sea walls that address this, while we look for other solutions!

Andrea, Kathy and Mark’s aim was to share out the commitment to reconciliation across the student body, making this a whole of community participation rather than a heavy burden for a few, under the guiding statement that they wanted to be doing things with the indigenous community, rather than doing things to them. There’s always a risk of premature claiming of expertise, where instead of working with a group to find out what they want, you walk in and tell them what they need. For a whole range of very good and often heartbreaking reasons, the Australian indigenous communities are exceedingly wary when people start ordering them about. This was the first thing I liked about this approach: let’s not make the same mistakes again. The authors were looking for a way to embed cultural awareness and the process of reconciliation into the curriculum as part of an IT program, sharing it so that other people could do it and making it practical.

Their key tenets were:

  1. It’s all about the diverse people. They developed a program to introduce students to culture, to give them more than one world view of the dominant culture and to introduce knowledge of the original Australians. It’s an important note that many Australians have no idea how to use certain terms or cultural items from indigenous culture, which of course hampers communication and interaction.

    For the students, they were required to put together an IT proposal, working with the indigenous community, that they would implement in the later years of their degree. Thus, it became part of the backbone of their entire program.

  2. Doing with [people], not to [people]. As discussed, there are many good reasons for this. Reduce the urge to be the expert and, instead, look at existing statements of right and how to work with other peplum, such as the UN rights of indigenous people and the UniSA graduate attributes. This all comes together in the ICUP – Indigenous Content in Undergraduate Program

How do we deal with information management in another culture? I’ve discussed before the (to many) quite alien idea that knowledge can reside with one person and, until that person chooses or needs to hand on that knowledge, that is the person that you need. Now, instead of demanding knowledge and conformity to some documentary standard, you have to work with people. Talking rather than imposing, getting the client’s genuine understanding of the project and their need – how does the client feel about this?

Not only were students working with indigenous people in developing their IT projects, they were learning how to work with other peoples, not just other people, and were required to come up with technologically appropriate solutions that met the client need. Not everyone has infinite power and 4G LTE to run their systems, nor can everyone stump up the cash to buy an iPhone or download apps. Much as programming in embedded systems shakes students out of the ‘infinite memory, disk and power’ illusion, working with other communities in Australia shakes them out of the single worldview and from the, often disrespectful, way that we deal with each other. The core here is thinking about different communities and the fact that different people have different requirements. Sometimes you have to wait to speak to the right person, rather than the available person.

The online forum has four questions that students have to find a solution to, where the forum is overseen by an indigenous tutor. The four questions are:

  1. What does culture mean to you?
  2. Post a cultural artefact that describes your culture?
  3. I came here to study Computer Science – not Aboriginal Australians?
  4. What are some of the differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians?

The first two are amazing questions – what is your answer to question number 2? The second pair of questions are more challenging and illustrate the bold and head-on approach of this participative approach to reconciliation. Reconciliation between all of the Australian communities requires everyone to be involved and, being honest, questions 3 and 4 are going to open up some wounds, drag some silly thinking out into the open but, most importantly, allow us to talk through issues of concern and confusion.

I suspect that many people can’t really answer question 4 without referring back to mid-50s archetypal depictions of Australian Aborigines standing on one leg, looking out over cliffs, and there’s an excellent ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) exhibit in Melbourne that discusses this cultural misappropriation and stereotyping. One of the things that resonated with me is that asking these questions forces people to think about these things, rather than repeating old mind grooves and received nonsense overheard in pubs, seen on TV and heard in racist jokes.

I was delighted that this paper was able to be presented, not least because the goal of the team is to share this approach in the hope of achieving even greater strides in the reconciliation process. I hope to be able to bring some of it to my Uni over the next couple of years.

 

The Emperor’s New Clothes Redux: The Sokal Hoax

Posted: December 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Making way in a new area of scholarship can be challenging for many reasons, no matter how welcoming the community. One of the reasons for this is that there are points in our life where we are allowed to make larger mistakes, or be ignorant, but it is rarer for adults, especially those who are already employed within a job, to be allowed the latitude to say “I have no idea”. As I discussed yesterday, the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes explains this dilemma well, because children have more licence to be honest to the point of tactlessness where an adult is always weighing up the implications of admitting that they cannot quite see what everyone else is talking about.

Some of you will be familiar with the Sokal Hoax, where Professor Alan Sokal, from physics at NYU, submitted an article to a journal of postmodern cultural studies. The work, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, was accepted by the journal Social Text, which was (at the time) not practising academic peer review. Sokal did not intend for this article to be taken seriously or even expect it to published, although he did produce an article that he described it (in a follow-up article) as:

“a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense . . . structured around the silliest quotations … he could find about mathematics and physics”

The entire affair is worth reading and you can find the Wikipedia summary here and a good critique about some of Sokal’s less intended consequences here (transcript of a New York Review of Books article). Regrettably, what is less clear is whether Sokal actually achieved very much, in real terms, by carrying out this action. Yes, Social Text moved to an academic peer review system and that’s generally better for all concerned. For those who don’t know, peer review is the process by which submitted articles go to a number of other people in the field and they review the work to see if it is fit to publish. This reduces the load on the editors and allows for more, and more specific, areas of expertise to be involved. It is not, however, faultless as a poor combination of peers can still lead to substandard, or plain wrong, work getting through, especially if reviewers farm the work out to their grad students or review under time constraints. It is, therefore, not all that surprising that Sokal’s deliberately targeted paper, which identified how to get a paper published by these editors in this journal, succeeded, and less surprising when you hear the editors’ account that they thought the paper needed revisions (removing much of the handwaving and contradictory footnotes) and were concerned about the article but, as the journal at the time was one of opinion, they published it anyway.

Such generosity on the part of the editors does not forgive the publication of some of the deliberate misuse of terminology and physics that Sokal uses to highlight the lack of rigour in the journal and the editorial review process. However, one of the problems I have with this is that, as a Computer Scientist speaking to Educational researchers, people often take what I say as a true account of my field, especially given that they do not have the expertise in my discipline to know (or care) about things like computability or algorithmic performance. If I were to submit a scholarly paper to a journal of education, am I doing anyone any favours by deliberately misrepresenting the aspects of my field, given that I am identified by discipline and school on submission?

Yes, people should use terms correctly and there is a great deal of misuse of science for uninformed or nefarious purposes, with some of the writings coming from post-modernist inspired writers being completely wrong. However, when one is not a physicist, one depends upon the knowledge gained from other people as to what physics is. There is a part of me that thinks that Sokal wasted an opportunity to actually fix a number of misunderstandings – for example, making a clear distinction between linear in strict mathematical and physical terms and linear, in post-Derridan terms, where the meaning is (quite deliberately) less well-defined and often pejorative. Words change. Terms change. Knowledge can still exist and continue to connect terms if we make the effort to bridge, rather than to mock or deride.

The post-modernists, especially Derrida, have attracted a great deal of negative interest, often for what appear to be semi-religious objects to their approach, although I would be the first to say that Derrida’s obsession with repurposing words, redefining concepts when it suits him, and providing grammatical constructions that further, rather than reduce, ambiguity do make him a valid target for at least a raised eyebrow on many occasions. I do not have a strong opinion as to whether the Emperor, in this case, is clothed or not, but I must be honest and say that I do not believe that the outputs and constants of science are a purely cultural construction, although I do agree that the mechanism of the scientific academy is very much a cultural artefact and if anything deserves to be reduced to its components for inspection, it is an institution that almost systematically seems to avoid recognising the contribution of women and non-western people except where unavoidable. I mention Derrida here, mostly because Derrida was the first point of media attack when Sokal’s hoax was revealed. This speaks volumes for the bravery of Sokal’s attack – when the media will leap up and put a face on a stick to wave it about because “philosophy X is all mumbo-jumbo and here is the head witch doctor” you really have to wonder what a non-peer reviewed opinion piece in a journal dedicated to same is actually achieving. Derrida thought that the major problem with the piece was that it would make a later, serious, attempt to discuss such issues impossible to achieve.

Of course, although Sokal’s Hoax is a triumph of exposing the publication of works based on their source. authority and obscurity, this is most certainly not restricted to post-modernist journals of opinion. A friend of mine called me in once to read through a paper that used such unusual terminology, for him, that he was unsure as to whether it was good or bad. Fortunately, it was in my discipline and, because I know and can use the word ontology without dying, I was able to identify it as a low-level rehash of some basic work in the field. It was sound work, using the correct terminology, but it certainly wasn’t at the level of the conference it had been sent to – to my friend, however, it was as meaningless as anything that Sokal mocked from Derrida. I am well aware that some of my areas, including knowledge management and educational research, are seen by others to be exactly the same as the post-modernist repurposing of scientific terminology that Sokal attacks.

The point is not who is lying to whom, or whether there is anything behind some of the more obscure utterings of the Post-Modernists, but it is whether deliberately winding people up with a hoax would achieve more than a genuine attempt to reach out to and correct a community, using your expertise and developing a voice in the other discipline to provide a sound translation. Epistemology, theory of knowledge, is important and I’m really not sure that hoaxing and mockery really achieves all that much, especially as, like any extrinsic punishment approach, it tells you not to do something but not how not to do it.

The Emperor’s New (Insert Noun Here)

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

I’ve always enjoyed the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, because it has a number of different readings. We can speak of the tactless honesty of the innocent, the child who sees the emperor as he is, or of the willingness to uphold the status quo when it is imposed from a sufficiently high point, in the people who pretend that the emperor is clothed. We can also look at the villains of the piece, who weave a suit that is invisible to those who are stupid, incompetent or unfit to hold a position. This is, of course, genius because it forces the viewer of the suit into that most difficult of decisions: do I speak up (and force someone to explicitly work out if I have sufficient worth to counter the prevailing interpretation) or do I stay silent (to not be seen to be a fool).

There are some quite entertaining logical issues to wrestle with, starting from some fairly reasonable assumptions. Imagine that you are Courtier X, arriving in the room after Courtier 1, and you observe the Emperor. Now you know, full well, that the Emperor has always been up to this point clothed, and in the finest clothes of the land, and he is not know for his propensity for streaking. Walking into the room, you would expect the Emperor to be clothed. Let us assume that, out of a sense of survival and fellow-feeling, Courtier X-1, the one who arrived before you, hisses “He’s wearing a suit that is only invisible to idiots.” Surviving in the Royal Court would have prepared X for a life of rapid adjustment to changes of circumstance brought about by pique and the accidental collision of coronial concerns, so this information would immediately have shot through his mind and, whether you believed that the suit was there or not, behaving otherwise has some quite obvious downsides. Firstly, the Emperor obviously believes that he is wearing this suit. Secondly, there are X-1 other courtiers in the room who have now gone along with it. Thirdly, you have a family to feed and it’s not as if you could go off to another court.

The child’s voice is unaffected by such concerns. The child sees, he thinks, he speaks. Children are very frank when they deal with difficult matters such as the apparent ugliness or facial eructations of an aged relative, the apparent size or adiposity of strangers, or the details with which bodily functions are announced. (I can, however, see a Romulan reading of the tale where the child is sent into battle for his outspokenness and fails to achieve victory – but cultures always vary in these matters.) However, everyone is now embarrassed – doubly so because not only is the Emperor nude, but everyone around him has lied to him. With any luck the Imperial Executioner was in on the lie as well, so that he can run off ashamed before he has to behead everyone else.

Speaking truth to power is a difficult matter and we often seem to confuse it with “saying any old thing because it’s our opinion” and the two are really not the same at all. I have previously referred to the “just saying'” mentality, where offensive or bigoted commentary is presented because it is truthful, when it is quite obvious that it is designed to be hurtful and the words are hiding behind a pretence of honesty. Telling the Emperor that he is naked is the duty of the Emperor’s staff, because it allows us to deal with the real villains of the piece, rather than the difficult (and more likely) outcome that a small child went to bed that night with no supper. Telling the Emperor that he is fat really doesn’t serve any purpose unless you are genuinely concerned for his health and attempting to reduce his adiposity.

The Emperor’s New Clothes is often used to refer to other situations of social hypocrisy or the collective agreement on something that is not true and, as such, it is so heavily used in some areas that its coinage is seriously debased. One reading that I find fascinating is that we can regard the suit as the “words we may use to cloak our fears” (Naomi Wood, KSU) but these words do not protect us from the reality of the situation. The child is free of adult corruption, certainly, but this is also a colder and harsher world, a situation at odds with our normal thoughts on childhood.

I strongly believe that one of the key problems some of my colleagues have with educational research, and its associated vocabulary, is that some of them are convinced that we are somehow playing the Emperor’s New Clothes with them. After all, we are asking them to look at the old fabric, find it wanting, and then we are talking of a new one, describing it in terms that may not be used that often in the standard discipline. Worse, every so often I bet we make it look like any sensible person would be able to understand that this was a better approach – and this is quite damning of whoever says it, whether they are talking to students or staff. Speaking truth to power is as important peer-to-peer as it is student-to-teacher or peasant-to-king but we must distinguish between being rude and dismissive and genuinely seeking answers. I may not always succeed but I do try to use evidence, published work and, of course, the far more influential work of the real leaders in this field! I am nowhere near attaining expertise here but at least I now know where to look and where to start the discussions. I do not yet have a suit of knowledge, but I have a pair of shorts that I can wear in the company of the besuited so that we can have some discussions without me exposing myself too badly! 🙂

The antithesis of the New Clothes phenomenon also occurs frequently: people are looking at a fully-clothed person and pretending that they cannot see the clothes. Obviously, neither approach is sensible when pushed to the extreme. Sometimes we just have to use our eyes and our brains and tell people what we see. And that can be one of the hardest things to do – as well as the most valuable.

Vitamin Ed: Can It Be Extracted?

Posted: December 22, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
Mmm. Taste the learnination.

Mmm. Taste the learnination.

There are a couple of ways to enjoy a healthy, balanced diet. The first is to actually eat a healthy, balanced diet made up from fresh produce across the range of sources, which requires you to prepare and cook foods, often changing how you eat depending on the season to maximise the benefit. The second is to eat whatever you dang well like and then use an array of supplements, vitamins, treatments and snake oil to try and beat your diet of monster burgers and gorilla dogs into something that will not kill you in 20 years. If you’ve ever bothered to look on the side of those supplements, vitamins, minerals or whatever, that most people have in their ‘medicine’ cabinets, you might see statements like “does not substitute for a balanced diet” or nice disclaimers like that. There is, of course, a reason for that. While we can be fairly certain about a range of deficiency disorders in humans, and we can prevent these problems with selective replacement, many other conditions are not as clear cut – if you eat a range of produce which contains the things that we know we need, you’re probably getting a slew of things that we also need but don’t make themselves as prominent.

In terms of our diet, while the debate rages about precisely which diet humans should be eating, we can have a fairly good stab at a sound basis from a dietician’s perspective built out of actual food. Recreating that from raw sugars, protein, vitamin and mineral supplements is technically possible but (a) much harder to manage and (b) nowhere near as satisfying as eating the real food, in most cases. Let’s nor forget that very few of us in the western world are so distant from our food that we regard it purely as fuel, with no regard for its presentation, flavour or appeal. In fact, most of us could muster a grimace for the thought of someone telling us to eat something because it was good for us or for some real or imagined medical benefit. In terms of human nutrition, we have the known components that we have to eat (sugars, proteins, fats…) and we can identify specific vitamins and minerals that we need to balance to enjoy good health, yet there is not shortage of additional supplements that we also take out of concern for our health that may have little or no demonstrated benefit, yet still we take them.

There’s been a lot of work done in trying to establish an evidence base for medical supplements and far more of the supplements fail than pass this test. Willow bark, an old remedy for pain relief, has been found to have a reliable effect because it has a chemical basis for working – evidence demonstrated that and now we have aspirin. Homeopathic memory water? There’s no reliable evidence for this working. Does this mean it won’t work? Well, here we get into the placebo effect and this is where things get really complicated because we now have the notion that we have a set of replacements that will work for our diet or health because they contain useful chemicals, and a set of solutions that work because we believe in them.

When we look at education, where it’s successful, we see a lot of techniques being mixed in together in a ‘natural’ diet of knowledge construction and learning. Face-to-face and teamwork, sitting side-by-side with formative and summative assessment, as part of discussions or ongoing dialogues, whether physical or on-line. Exactly which parts of these constitute the “balanced” educational diet? We already know that a lecture, by itself, is not a complete educational experience, in the same way that a stand-alone multiple-choice question test will not make you a scholar. There is a great deal of work being done to establish an evidence basis for exactly which bits work but, as MIT said in the OCW release, these components do not make up a course. In dietary terms, it might be raw fuel but is it a desirable meal? Not yet, most likely.

Now let’s get into the placebo side of the equation, where students may react positively to something just because it’s a change, not because it’s necessarily a good change. We can control for these effects, if we’re cautious, and we can do it with full knowledge of the students but I’m very wary of any dependency upon the placebo effect, especially when it’s prefaced with “and the students loved it”. Sorry, students, but I don’t only (or even predominantly) care if you loved it, I care if you performed significantly better, attended more, engaged more, retaining the information for longer, could achieve more, and all of these things can only be measured when we take the trouble to establish base lines, construct experiments, measure things, analyse with care and then think about the outcomes.

My major concern about the whole MOOC discussion is not whether MOOCs are good or bad, it’s more to do with:

  • What does everyone mean when they say MOOC? (Because there’s variation in what people identify as the components)
  • Are we building a balanced diet or are we constructing a sustenance program with carefully balanced supplements that might miss something we don’t yet value?
  • Have we extracted the essential Vitamin Ed from the ‘real’ experience?
  • Can we synthesise Vitamin Ed outside of the ‘real’ educational experience?

I’ve been searching for a terminological separation that allows me to separate ‘real’/’conventional’ learning experiences from ‘virtual’/’new generation’/’MOOC’ experiences and none of those distinctions are satisfying – one says “Restaurant meal” and the other says “Army ration pack” to me, emphasising the separation. Worse, my fear is that a lot of people don’t regard MOOC as ever really having Vitamin Ed inside, as the MIT President clearly believed back in 2001.

I suspect that my search for Vitamin Ed starts from a flawed basis, because it assumes a single silver bullet if we take a literal meaning of the term, so let me me spread the concept out a bit to label Vitamin Ed as the essential educational components that define a good learning and teaching experience. Calling it Vitamin Ed gives me a flag to wave and an analogue to use, to explain why we should be seeking a balanced diet for all of our students, rather than a banquet for one and dog food for the other.

“We are not providing an MIT education on the web…”

Posted: December 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve been re-watching some older announcements that describe open courseware initiatives, starting from one of the biggest, the MIT announcement of their OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative in April, 2001. The title of this post actually comes from the video, around the 5:20 mark, (Video quoted under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence, more information available at: http://ocw.mit.edu/terms)

“Let me be very clear, we are not providing an MIT education on the Web. We are, however, providing core materials that are the infrastructure that undergirds that information. Real education, in our view, involves interaction between people. It’s the interaction between faculty and students, in our classrooms and our living group, in our laboratories that are the heart, the real essence, of an MIT education. “

While the OCW was going to be produced and used on campus, the development of OCW was seen as something that would make more time available for student interaction, not less. President Vest then goes on to confidently predict that OCW will not make any difference to enrolment, which is hardly surprising given that he has categorically excluded anyone from achieving an MIT education unless they enrol. We see here exactly the same discussion that keeps coming up: these materials can be used as augmenting materials in these conventional universities but can never, in the view of the President or Vice Chancellor, replace the actual experience of obtaining a degree from that institution.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I still think that the OCW initiative was excellent, generous and visionary but we are still looking at two fundamentally different use cases: the use of OCW to augment an existing experience and the use of OCW to bootstrap a completely new experience, which is not of the same order. It’s a discussion that we keep having – what happens to my Uni if I use EdX courses from another institution? Well, ok, let’s ask that question differently. I will look at this from two sides with the introduction of a new skill and knowledge area that becomes ubiquitous,  in my sphere, Computer Science and programming. Let’s look at this in terms of growth and success.

What happens if schools start teaching programming to first year level? 

Let’s say that we get programming into every single national curriculum for secondary school and we can guarantee that students come in knowing how to program to freshman level. There are two ways of looking at this and the first, which we have probably all seen to some degree, is to regard the school teaching as inferior and re-teach it. The net result of this will be bored students, low engagement and we will be wasting our time. The second, far more productive, approach is to say “Great! You can program. Now let’s do some Computer Science.” and we use that extra year or so to increase our discipline knowledge or put breadth courses back in so our students come out a little more well-rounded. What’s the difference between students learning it from school before they come to us, or through an EdX course on fundamental programming after they come to us?

Not much, really, as long as we make sure that the course meets our requirements – and, in fact, it gives us bricks-and-mortar-bound entities more time to do all that face-to-face interactive University stuff that we know students love and from which they derive great benefit. University stops being semi-vocational in some aspects and we leap into knowledge construction, idea generation, big projects and the grand dreams that we always talk about, yet often don’t get to because we have to train people in basic programming, drafting, and so on. Do we give them course credit? No, because they’re assumed knowledge, or barrier tested, and they’re not necessarily part of our structure anymore.

What happens if no-one wants to take my course anymore?

Now, we know that we can change our courses because we’ve done it so many times before over the history of the Academy – Latin, along with Greek the language of scholarship, was only used in half of the University publications of 1800. Let me wander through a classical garden for a moment to discuss the nature of change from a different angle, that of decline. Languages had a special place in the degrees of my University with Latin and Greek dominating and then with the daring possibility of allowing substitution of French or German for Latin or Greek from 1938. It was as recently as 1958 that Latin stopped being compulsory for high school graduation in Adelaide although it was still required for the study of Law – student demand for Latin at school therefore plummeted and Latin courses started being dropped from the school curriculum. The Law Latin requirement was removed around 1969-1970, which then dropped any demand for Latin even further. The reduction in the number of school teachers who could teach Latin required the introduction of courses at the University for students who had studied no Latin at all – Latin IA entered the syllabus. However, given that in 2007 only one student at all of the schools across the state of South Australian (roughly 1.2-1.4 million people) studied Latin in the final year of school, it is apparent that if this University wishes to teach Latin, it has to start by teaching all of Latin. This is a course, and a discipline, that is currently in decline. My fear is that, one day, someone will make the mistake of thinking that we no longer need scholars of this language. And that worries me, because I don’t know what people 30 years from now will actually want, or what they could add to the knowledge that we already have of one of our most influential civilisations.

This decline is not unique to Latin (or Greek, or classics in general) but a truly on-line course experience would allow us to actually pool those scholars we have left and offer scaled resources out for much longer than isolated pockets in real offices can potentially manage but, as President Vest notes, a storehouse of Latin texts does not a course make. What reduced the demand for Latin? Possibly the ubiquity of the language that we use which is derived from Latin combined with a change of focus away from a classical education towards a more job- and achievement-oriented (semi-vocational) style of education. If you ask me, programming could as easily go this way in about 20 years, once we have ways to let machines solve problems for us. A move towards a less go-go-go culture, smarter machines and a resurgence of the long leisure cycles associated with Science Fiction visions of the future and suddenly it is the engineers and the computer scientists who are looking at shrinking departments and no support in the schools. Let me be blunt: course popularity and desirability rises, stabilises and falls, and it’s very hard to tell if we are looking at a parabola or a pendulum. With that in mind, we should be very careful about how we define our traditions and our conventions, especially as our cunning tools for supporting on-line learning and teaching get better and better. Yes, interaction is an essential part of a good education, no argument at all, but there is an implicit assumption of critical mass that we have seen, time and again, to implicitly support this interaction in a face-to-face environment that is as much a function of popularity and traditionally-associated prestige as it is of excellence.

What are MIT doing now?

I look at the original OCW release and I agree that, at time of production, you could not reproduce the interaction between people that would give you an MIT education. But our tools are better now. They are, quite probably not close enough yet to give you an “MIT of the Internet” but should this be our goal? Not the production of a facsimile of the core materials that might, with MIT instructors, turn into a course, but the commitment to developing the tools that actually reproduce the successful components of the learning experience with group and personal interaction, allowing the formation of what we used to call a physical interactive experience in a virtual side? That’s where I think the new MIT initiatives are showing us how these things can work now, starting from their original idealistic roots and adding the technology of the 21st Century. I hope that other, equally prestigious, institutions are watching this, carefully.

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