Ebb and Flow – Monitoring Systems Without Intrusion

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

I’ve been wishing a lot of people “Happy Thanksgiving” today because, despite being frightfully Antipodean, I have a lot of friends and family who are Thanksgiving observers in the US. However, I would know that something was up in the US anyway because I am missing about 40% of my standard viewers on my blog. Today is an honorary Sunday – hooray, sleep-ins all round! More seriously, this illustrates one of the most interesting things about measurement, which is measuring long enough to be able to determine when something out of the ordinary occurs. As I’ve already discussed, I can tell when I’ve been linked to a higher profile blog because my read count surges. I also can tell when I haven’t been using attractive pictures because the count drops by about 30%.

A fruit bat, in recovery, about to drink its special fruit smoothie. (Yes, this is shameless manipulation.)

This is because I know what the day-to-day operation of the blog looks like and I can spot anomalies. When I was a network admin, I could often tell when something was going wrong on the network just because of the way that certain network operations started to feel, and often well before these problems reached the level where they would trigger any sort of alarm. It’s the same for people who’ve lived by the same patch of sea for thirty years. They’ll look at what appears to be a flat sea on a calm day and tell you not to go out – because they can read a number of things from the system and those things mean ‘danger’.

One of the reasons that the network example is useful is because any time you send data through the network to see what happens, you’re actually using the network to do it. So network probes will actually consume network bandwidth and this may either mask or exacerbate your problems, depending on how unlucky you are. However, using the network for day-today operations, and sensing that something is off, then gives you a reason to run those probes or to check the counters on your networking gear to find out exactly why the hair on the back of your neck is going up.

I observe the behaviour of my students a lot and I try to gain as much information as I can from what they already give me. That’s one of the reasons that I’m so interested in assignment submissions, because students are going to submit assignments anyway and any extra information I can get from this is a giant bonus! I am running a follow-up Piazza activity on our remote campus and I’m fascinated to be able to watch the developing activity because it tells me who is participating and how they are participating. For those who haven’t heard about Piazza, it’s like a Wiki but instead of the Wiki model of “edit first, then argue into shape”, Piazza encourages a “discuss first and write after consensus” model. I put up the Piazza assignment for the class, with a mid-December deadline, and I’ve already had tens of registered discussions, some of which are leading to edits. Of course, not all groups are active yet and, come Monday, I’ll send out a reminder e-mail and chat to them privately. Instead of sending a blanket mail to everyone saying “HAVE YOU STARTED PIAZZA”, I can refine my contact based on passive observation.

The other thing about Piazza is that, once all of the assignment is over, I can still see all of their discussions, because that’s where I’ve told them to have the discussion! As a result, we can code their answers and track the development of their answers, classifying them in terms of their group role, their level of function and so on. For an open-ended team-based problem, this allows me a great deal of insight into how much understanding my students have of the area and allows me to fine-tune my teaching. Being me, I’m really looking for ways to improve self-regulation mechanisms, as well as uncovering any new threshold concepts, but this nonintrusive monitoring has more advantages than this. I can measure participation by briefly looking at my mailbox to see how many mail messages are foldered under a particular group’s ID, from anywhere, or I can go to Piazza and see it unfolding there. I can step in where I have to, but only when I have to, to get things back on track but I don’t have to prove or deconstruct a team-formed artefact to see what is going on.

In terms of ebb and flow, the Piazza groups are still unpredictable because I don’t have enough data to be able to tell you what the working pattern is for a successful group. I can tell you that no activity is undesirable but, even early on, I could tell you some interesting things about the people who post the most! (There are some upcoming publications that will deal with things along these lines and I will post more on these later.) We’ve been lucky enough to secure some Summer students and I’m hoping that at least some of their work will involve looking at dependencies in communication and ebb and flow across these systems.

As you may have guessed, I like simple. I like the idea of a single dashboard that has a green light (healthy course), an orange light (sick course) and a red light (time to go back to playing guitar on the street corner) although I know it will never be that easy. However, anything that brings me closer to that is doing me a huge favour, because the less time I have to spend actively probing in the course, the less of my students’ time I take up with probes and the less of my own time I spend not knowing what is going on!

Oh well, the good news is that I think that there are only three more papers to write before the Mayan Apocalypse occurs and at least one of them will be on this. I’ll see if I can sneak in a picture of a fruit bat. 🙂

Verbs and Nouns: Designing a Design

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

(Via the frequently delightful but often scatological Lolbrary.)

We have a very bad habit in Computing of ‘verbing the noun’, where we take a perfectly good noun and repurpose it as a verb. If, in the last few weeks, you’ve googled, face booked, photoshopped or IMed, then you know what I mean. (Coining new words like this, often genericised trademarks, is not new, as anyone who has hoovered the rug will tell you!) In some cases, we use the same word for the action (to design) as we do for the product (a design) and, especially in the case of design, this can cause trouble because it becomes very easy to ask someone for the product when what you want is the process.

Now, I realise that I do enjoy linguistic shenanigans (anyone who plays with which syllable to stress when saying interstices is spending too much time thinking about language) but this is not some syntactic mumbo jumbo, this is a genuine concern. If I ask a student to submit a design for their program, then I am usually assuming that the artefact submitted will be the product of the design process. However, I have to realise that a student must understand what the design process actually is in order for my instruction (give me a design) to be mapped into the correct action (undertake the design process). We’ve collected a lot of first-year student reflections on design and it is becoming increasingly apparent that there is not a clear link between the verb and noun forms of this very simple word. We can now start to understand why a student would feel frustrated if, when asked for a design, they submit what is effectively a re-writing of their final written program on a separate document with some arrows and we turn around and tell them that “this is not a design”. Well, what did we want? The student has given us a document with stuff on it and the word ‘design’ at the top – what did we expect?

The same is, more subtly, true of the word program. After all the practise of programming is the production of programs (and the consumption and elimination of problems but that’s another post). Hence, when I ask a student for a program, or for a solution, I am often not explicitly placing the written instructions into a form that clearly elucidates the process and, as a result, I may miss important constructive steps that could assist the student in understanding and applying the process.

Let’s face it, if you don’t know what you’re doing, or don’t understand that there is a process to follow (the verb form), then any instructions I give you “Make sure you use diagrams”, “clearly label your variables”, “use UML” are going to be perceived in a way that is grounded in the final product, not the steps along the way. If I can use neo-Piagetian terminology briefly, then we’re looking at the magical thinking that we’d normally associate with the pre-operational stage. Not only is the knowledge not sinking in but we will engender a cargo-cult like inclusion of features that are found in the artefact but have no connection back to the process at all. We have potentially reached the unpleasant point where students now think that we are deliberately, or unfairly, ignoring the work that they provided in direct accordance with our instructions!

Anyone who has ever looked at a design with the steady sinking feeling that comes from reading poorly translated programming language, marked with superfluous arrows and dogged, yet unnecessary, underlining of the obvious, will probably be feeling a pang of empathy at the moment.

So what to do? How do we address this problem? The first step is to remember how fiendishly ambiguous language actually is (if English were easy, we wouldn’t need constrained and artificial programming languages to unambiguously assign meaning for computers) and be precise about the separation between the process and the product. The design process, which we provide guidance and steps for, will produce a design document. We are luckier in programming because while you can program and produce a program, you cannot produce a programming! In this case, the clarification is that you have assigned a programming task in order to produce a program. In our heads, we are always clear about what we mean but it is still amazing how often we can resort to asking for a product that is the final stage of a long and difficult process, which we are intending to teach, without realising that we are describing the desirable characteristics of the end point without considering the road that must be travelled!

On reviewing my own teaching, I’m intending to add more process-based instructions, on the grounds that encouraging a certain behaviour in the production process is more likely to lead to a successful product, than specifying an end product and hoping that the path taken is the ‘right’ one. This isn’t exactly rocket science, it’s well established in how we should be constructing these activities, but it does require the educator to keep a clear head on whether we are discussing the product or process.

When a student has established enough understanding, and hopefully all will by the end of the process, then I can ease back on these linguistic scaffolds and expect a little more “this means that” in their everyday activity, but at the start of the educational process, it is probably better if I always try consider how I specify these potentially ambiguous noun/verb pairs. After all, if a student could pick this up by osmosis or plain exposure to the final product (or even by neurolinguistic programming through the mere mention of the name of the artefact) then I would be thoroughly unnecessary as an educator!

I strive to reduce ambiguity and this requires me to think, very carefully, about how my words are read by students who are not even in the foothills of mastery. Reorienting my own thinking to clearly separate product from process, and labelling and treating each clearly and separately, is an important reminder to me of how easy it is to confuse students.

Wrapping up Grand Challenges

Posted: November 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

We had the final ‘farewell’ function for the end of my Grand Challenges course on Friday. While I would normally see most of these students again, as this is a first year course, one of them was a US exchange student who is flying home this morning to return to his own college system. I wanted to bring everyone together, in an informal setting, to say well done and farewell. It has been a remarkable semester. For me, now, digging through the student comments and feedback will drive a lot of my thinking for the next version of the course and the comments are very, very interesting. Students reflecting on the fact that they didn’t quite understand why they learned about the grand challenges in the first place, until we were knee deep in questionable ethics and the misapplication of Science, and then *bang* it all settled into place. Yes, this is what I intended but, frankly, it’s a little bit of a high risk strategy to construct scaffolding in that way and I had to carefully monitor the group dynamics, as well as making sure that the group had enough elements in it that we could achieve a good environment in which to reflect and develop. I, by myself, cannot be a full member of the group and I’m always going to be the outsider because, well, I have to be in order to function in the course coordinator and marker role.

Next year, we already have a lot of interest in the new course and this is very exciting. I’m not sure how many will roll up but I do know that I cannot handle a group larger than 8 with the current approach – hence, as I’ve said before, I now need to take all of the comments and work on scaling it up. Sitting around the table on Friday night, talking to all of the students, it really sank in that we (as a group) had achieved something pretty special. I couldn’t have done it without them and (I suspect) a lot of them weren’t quite ready to do it without me. What I saw around the table was passion, confidence, enthusiasm and curiosity. There was also some well-deserved pride when the final poster prints were handed out. I had their first projects professionally printed on Tyvek, a plastic material that is waterproof, hard to tear and really tough, so that their posters will go anywhere and hang up, without risking becoming sad and daggy old faded relics with tears and dog ears. The posters were the result of 6 weeks of work, hence some respect was due to their construction.

I’m not a very reserved person, which will come as no surprise to any of you, and people generally know what I’m feeling (with the usual caveat that I can appear delighted by the questionable musical practices of children and fascinated in meetings). My students will therefore know that I am pleased by what they have achieved and what, by their enthusiasm and willingness to go with a non-traditional structure, we have managed to achieve together. Was it perfect? No. I need to cater for students who are in transition more and remember that just because students can perform well academically, it does not magically grant them the associated maturity or ability to handle the unforeseen. It could certainly have been better organised and that was really down to the experimental nature of the course combined with my schedule. I was too busy, sometimes, to be as forward looking as I should have been (I was looking weeks out, rather than months). That will not happen next year. What’s really interesting is what my colleagues assume about these students. “Oh, they’re smart so they must have done all this maths or love maths or something.” No, they don’t. They come in with the usual range of courses you’d expect from students and have the usual range of likes and dislikes. They are, in a nutshell, students who happen to have worked out how to perform well under assessment. As it turns out, a GPA or ATAR (SAT) mark does not summarise a student, nor does achieving the same grade make you the same person. Shocking, I know.

But, snark aside, what a great experience and, from early indications, I am pretty confident that some of these students now have a completely different set of lenses through which to view the world. Now, of course, it is up to them. You might think that my posturing on an apolitical stance is just that, a posturing facade, but I am deadly serious about not imposing my political beliefs on my students. Yes, I firmly believe that there are a set of ethical standards that people in my discipline (Computer Science) and my calling (Education) should adhere to, but how you vote? None of my business. Next year, I hope to bring in more people from industry, more entrepreneurs, possibly even some more ‘challenging’ viewpoints. The world is complicated and the intellectual challenges are many. Me training students in dogma does nothing. Me training students in how they can think for themselves and then genuinely standing back to say “That was the toolkit, it’s up to you what you build” will truly test me and them.

Far too many times I’ve held forth on silly little points where I was wrong, or misinterpreting, and it didn’t help anything. I’ve always learned more from discussion than argument, and from informed disagreement rather than blind agreement. That’s the fine print on the PhD, as I read it, “be prepared to be wrong and then work out how to be right.”

If I were ever to work myself almost to collapse again, taking on too much, striving to develop an entirely new course for a new type of student that we haven’t really catered to before, while doing everything else – I would hope that at the end of the year, I could look back on something like Grand Challenges and nod, with satisfaction, because it worked. I’m looking forward to bouncing ideas off the course members over the next 6 months to get their feedback on the new direction, possibly using these students as mentors and tutors (good idea, MH) to help me run the course and to keep building the community. That’s what it was always about, after all. Yes, it was a course for students who could handle the academics but it was always about the biggest Grand Challenge of them all: getting people to work together to solve problems.

Turn on the news and you’ll see lot of problems at the moment. Running up to (yet another) end of the world, we are once again taking the crazy pills and, bluntly, it scares me. We have a lot of problems to solve and that will take people, working together, sharing, talking and using available resources to try and deal with things that could potentially destroy our species. If you have the opportunity to tun any kind of program that could assist with this – problem solving, community building, team formation, outreach to other schools, or whatever – please consider doing so. I’ll tell you, honestly, it’s one of the most rewarding things that I’ve ever done and I’ve been privileged to be able to do a lot of cool things.

Winding up 2012: Dear Students…

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

Dear Students,

After this week I will not see many of you until February of next year and, some of you, I may not see again because you’ll go on to do other things. This is the time of the year when I reflect upon what I have achieved in terms of contributing to the knowledge and skills of my students and how I can do it better. I have to start from the presumption that I can always improve upon what have I done but, even without that, accepting that every year will bring a different group, with different needs, forces me to think about the core of my teaching – as opposed to what actually came out in the teaching activities. What I always want to achieve is to help you develop yourselves. I can’t change you but I can help you change. If you know more, understand more or can do more at the end of the year, then I’m happy. If you go on to help other people, then I’m ecstatic!

Many people throughout your lives will tell you big, shiny success stories and expect you to take a certain path because there’s a big brass ring at the end. I have walked that path and have known success but, if we are being honest, success is not the same as happiness. Throughout the year we have discussed many things, scholarly and secular, but we have rarely had the time or the opportunity to talk about some of the most important things in life: the reasons why we do things and, ultimately, how it will make us feel. But you shouldn’t be listening to me because of who I am or how you think of me, I’m just another voice from our species and I have one of the many opinions. My friends will (I hope) tell you that I am mostly a good man, with some occasional moments of selfishness and stupidity. You should realise that almost everyone is like this. It would be impossible for us to live as we do, where we do, were this not so. The majority of people are good, most of the time, with occasional moments of stupidity. What that means, of course, is that we have a terrific amount of force to act against those who are always stupid or unpleasant – the silent majority is powerful.

Firstly, let me tell you how much I love our magnificent, terrible and bizarre species. We are terrible and beautiful. We are capable of acts of tremendous selflessness and kindness, yet sometimes we taint it with greed, selfishness and cruelty. We are driven by so many things and, the more I read, the more it becomes apparent that who we are, as individuals, is as much about the world around us, our families and friends, our education and our overall exposure to reality, as it is about ourselves. I can think of several points in my life where the intervention of other people has held me back from a terrible and destructive course, explicit examples of changing direction, but there are so many examples that speak of casual intervention: a smile on a day when I needed one, someone holding the door, being let into traffic after waiting forever.

To try and distill this species, into the “pull yourself up by your bootstrap” myths of Horatio Alger or to claim it is all emptiness and cynicism, is to sell us, and you, short. Fairy tales are conveniently small fictions, now separated from their original cautionary endings, that sell you a “happy ending” as a bill of goods, as if all you have to do is to kiss the frog, find the right name or have the right shoe size.

Nothing is that easy. If it is for you then, sadly, experience tells us that you will not really appreciate it that much. This is not a rationale for suffering but an observation of the bad behaviour that seems to come at certain levels of privilege. Be in no doubt, if you leave with a degree then you are privileged. This is not a matter of guilt or a burden, it’s just a fact. Some of you will never appreciate how lucky you were to go to University at a time of peace in a prosperous country because you do not quite realise how fortunate you were. You are no more or less entitled to be educated than the next person and it is pure accident that determines who enters school in a safe, highly educated, country, rather than trying to learn under gunfire in a cramped and broken classroom where you might be lucky to get to Year 6 before forced to go and work to keep your family alive. Some of you have made it through wars and fought your way to restart your education, surviving that and striving for more. Some of you represent minorities, first-in-family or face terrible ordeals that your peers will never quite understand. Many of you, facing no other impediment other than ignorance of a certain area, strive for more and to achieve a greater understanding. I salute all of you for your efforts, especially where you have reached out to help your peers. But why are you doing this?

We often fail to ask ourselves ‘why?’ “Why are you doing this degree?” “Why are you looking for this job?” “Why are you doing this?”

You will often be encouraged to believe that questions like “Am I happy?” or “Should I be doing this?” are somehow not appropriate questions – indicative of some sort of laziness when you should be seeking jobs and working harder, every single day. So, what are your plans? If your answer is “Get a job”, then which job are you looking for? If the answer to that is “a programming job”, then what kind of programming job? If you don’t know what you really want to do, then how will you know when you’ve found it? How can you search for something better? How will you say no to something that will make you miserable? What do you need to live and what do you need to make you happy? Can you combine them?  Many of you will have dependents and you will have to take the work that is offered, when it is offered. If you do have some freedom of movement now then I encourage you to make the best use of it so that, when people do depend upon you, you can support them with little or no resentment. Remember that rarely do the people we support ask for our help for any other reason than they need help. I always have to remember that when a student asks me a ‘silly’ question. It’s not about me – they just need my help and probably don’t yet realise what the question sounds like.

What makes you happy? Can you make it a job? Are you happy now? Do you actually want this degree? Why? Most students start University with no clear plan or understanding of why they’re doing it. Now, most students then end up finishing and having some idea of what they’re doing – and a Uni degree is a great thing to have when we teach it properly – but leaving after 3-5 years with a degree and no idea of direction means that finding something that you want to do is going to be a crap shoot. This must be tempered by the realities of your life because this is no fairytale.  You will give 5% of your time to some people and they will be so grateful in return that you will be embarrassed. You will try to give 200% to other people and they will only demand more. You will not necessarily know in advance which way this will go. Those of you have choice must remember that there are many, many more who don’t. Again, this is not about guilt but about perspective and valuing what you have, and what you can do.

I am, unashamedly, focused on actions taken for the good of us all: our community, our society and our home, which is far more than just a place for humans. I have spent time at a very low ebb over the years: depressed, deep in debt, terrible job or unemployed, living on almost no food for weeks, giving away my own books and CDs as gifts to not stand out at social gatherings, washing my clothes in the bathroom sinks at work to hide the fact that I couldn’t afford laundry powder or new clothes. I hope that none of this ever happens to you but you should be aware that this is happening, day after day, to people everywhere. Many of these people did not go to Uni, did not finish school, may not have basic literacy. How do you expect them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps when they have no boots and someone is standing on their toes (to quote Dr King).

I do not want to encourage you towards any movement, political, secular, religious or otherwise. It is none of my business what kind of “-ist” you become, if any, as long as you do so fairly, ethically and with respect and an appreciation of who you are and the people around you. I find myself constantly challenged to live up to my own beliefs and my ideals. Sometimes I do, sometimes I wish I had tried harder. That’s just how it is, for almost all of us.

My sincere wishes for a beautiful and happy future,

Nick.

Ethics and Opinion: Please Stop Confusing My Students

Posted: November 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

One of the sadly rather expected side benefits of the recent re-election of President Obama has been the predictable outpouring of racist sentiment. Of course, to listen to the people uttering racial slurs and unpleasant requests, they are not actually racists, they are just expressing their opinion. You know?

They’re just sayin’.

A woman is currently being investigated by the Secret Service for Tweeting a heavily charged racial epithet against the President, wrapped up in a paraphrased death threat, and appears puzzled about all of the fuss. After all, it’s just what she thinks and she’s not a racist. Australian former cricketer Greg Ritchie recently uttered some serious racial slurs that are highly inflammatory towards South Africans and can’t see what the big deal is either. He also managed to get in a joke about Muslims. When asked, however, Ritchie had this to say:

“If they take offence that’s their choice.”

His joke, involving Muslims, is in his own words “just a little humourous joke to indicate that they’re not my favourite people of my choice.” Hey, Greg, guess what, when you’re trying to defend yourself against charges of discrimination, perhaps it’s best to do so in a way that is not actually discriminatory? Of course, we’ve been tolerating Ritchie’s antics for years, so it’s not surprising that he is now confused that we don’t find him funny. He, in blackface as pseudo-Indian Mahatma Coate, was a regular on the Australian Rules Football sports variety show “The Footy Show” for years. And, thus we crawl, inexorably, towards my point.

If you’re opinion is actually racism, then it’s a racist opinion. I can completely understand why people don’t want to be labelled as racists because we all know that’s bad but, and here’s the tricky thing, racists are people who believe and say racist things or act in a manner than discriminates against people based on their race. Calling someone a racial epithet because of the race that they belong to counts here and, before we get all ‘classification theory’ about this, there is a world of difference between any classifications of ethnicity that are scientific in nature and slurs. There is also a great deal of difference in how we use this information. The moment that you start saying things like “they’re not my favourite people of choice”, you are saying that you don’t like an entire group that is defined by a given characteristic and, wow, it’s not hard to see where that leads. (Now, no doubt, there is someone who is itching to leap and tell me that ‘aha – Muslims are not a race’. Spare me the sophistry, especially where the Muslims that appear to catch the most problems here are (surprise!) not Caucasian.)

Whenever anyone leaps in and says “statement – I’m just sayin'” or “statement that challenges movements that are egalitarian – playing devil’s advocate” then I really must wonder ‘why?’ I have heard a number of people trying to sneak in sexist comments based on poor evidence or by playing the “Devil’s Advocate” card. “Wow, but what if women aren’t as good at X as men, playing Devil’s advocate/just sayin’/just askin’.” You know, that’s a good question. But it’s not the one that you’re asking. The question that I’m hearing (and I apologise because I have weird ears) is “How can I make a sexist statement with plausible deniability because I am not yet convinced that women are equal?”

This is about fundamental human rights, not an opinion on whether Picard or Kirk would win in a jello-wrestling competition. The questions that we ask, however they are framed, reveal what it is that we believe to be true. And right. And, by extension, what we consider false or wrong.

My real problem with all of this is that my students are like big mobile sponges. They hear a whole heap of stuff before they come to me and, if most of it is opinionated nonsense that magically escapes classification, they will learn that this is how the world works and come to me with a head full of garbage. They’ll recite rubbish at me that they’ve picked up from the world, politics, media, television and their own families that has no place in a University environment. I don’t give a hoot how entitled you feel to have a racist, sexist or discriminatory opinion, it’s going to get called as one and you can argue until you’re blue in the face that saying discriminatory things doesn’t make you discriminatory but, important point, you are almost never as ironically funny as you think you are. (And, yes, we all have to be aware of that. To my shame, I have occasionally gone too far in trying to mock discrimination and I apologetically confess that I have on occasion been less than funny and just plain dumb.) The important thing to ask is why are you trying to set up the situation in the first place?

My students have to think about these things all the time. They cannot guess how people will react to their dumb jokes and supposed ‘irony’. Worse, as people who have had the benefits of more education, other people will look to them (explicitly or not) as thought leaders and the best of my students will have a very wide-ranging impact. I can’t stop people saying silly and hurtful things, but let’s stop the pretence that there are special “get out of jail free” textual containers that allow people to utter the phrasings of discrimination and, yet, mysteriously escape being labelled as such.

(And, for the record, the Internet indicates that Picard would most likely take the match, given that he has mud wrestling experience.)

A brief contemplation on a captured moment.

Posted: November 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

You will all have seen the picture of the man standing in front of the tanks near Tiananmen Square. (Those of you who haven’t are probably also not seeing this post. What a coincidence!) What you may not have seen is one of the shots prior to this moment, captured by Terril Jones, which shows the Unknown Rebel (Tank Man) standing patiently, well before the tanks reached him. If you look at the picture, you’ll see him on the vertical midline, just left of centre, with his trousers hitched awkwardly and holding two shopping bags. As far as we know, from this point on, he stops the column, walks in front of the tanks to stop them, climbs on, chats to some of the people on the tank, gets down, blocks them again and is then seized by two men and propelled into the crowd.

(C) Terril Jones. Low quality image used for reference.

This photograph is important. This clearly shows that this action was not spur of the moment – Tank Man didn’t rush out of the crowd – but it also shows the mundanity of the whole scene. Tanks are rolling in the street but, from what it looks like, this man is on his way back from the shops. The bags were never used against the tanks and they’re not exactly military issue. The most likely explanation is that this is someone who, walking back from the shops around lunchtime, possibly with lunch for his colleagues or food for his family, saw the people fleeing Tiananmen square, heard the tanks and suddenly realised that he was going to have to stand in front of them and stop them advancing.

I have had two moments in my life where I have realised that I am about to try and disarm someone with a knife. Both of them were terrifying as hell but both of them required action. Fortunately for me, both people had little idea what they were doing and I managed to avoid getting hurt, which means that (a) I was profoundly lucky and (b) do not recommend this course to anyone. However, sometimes, you just realise that something has to happen and that you are going to be the person who does it. But actions on this scale (taking on a stream of Type 59 Chinese tanks) defy standard human reaction and are almost completely incomprehensible.

Many theories have been advanced about Tank Man’s actions. Was he mentally unstable? Well, this is hardly the action we’d expect of a sane man, certainly. But he seems so unprepared and so determined at the same time. He hasn’t even put the bags down to adjust his trousers! My belief is that this man is completely sane, except that he is about to do something that, by any definition, is crazy. We can’t ask Tank Man because he has never shown up again. Anywhere.

Any number of us, when faced with a much less challenging situation, would have looked at the shopping bags and thought “well, I can’t stop, the food will get cold/ice cream will melt/meat will spoil” and conveniently decamped in the direction that the two foreground sprinters are indicating. And that is completely reasonable! I have said before that I can admire the actions of people and yet not even begin to comprehend how they can set themselves with such resolve in the face of terrible things.

We talk about ethics, we teach ethics and, all too often, we discover that while our students can write down the differences between Kantian Maxims and Benthamite Utilitarianism, they still cheat on tests or copy work because they haven’t actually learned how to act ethically. The Tank Man, for me, is an example of the resolute commitment to one’s beliefs that we are really hoping for in all of this ethical teaching. This picture confirms the premeditation that was required – can you imagine how much resolve it took to stand there as tens of tanks rumbled towards you? I’ve been in the Armoured Corps and tanks are big, scary and loud. If I wasn’t in one, I wouldn’t want to be near them because they could crush you like a bug and not even notice. What we see in the picture above is resolve, despite having bags in your hand and slightly baggy trousers. The mundane transformed into something far less ordinary.

The shot itself is also far from ordinary both by intention and by accident. Accidentally, I believe, the photographer has captured true opposites in the shot and given it a spectacular level of contrast. On the left hand side, you have a man who is prepared to stand in front of tanks and not move. On the right is a sign bearing the Chinese character for ‘Yield’.

Not something that the Unknown Rebel was planning to do that day.

And yet more on St John’s but, please note, let’s not isolate this to just one of Sydney’s colleges.

Posted: November 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The St John’s College saga drags on, with the news that almost all of the Council have now resigned (and, goodness, here is a similar piece in The Australian). This follows the ‘requested’ resignation of the six sitting priests by Cardinal George Pell, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney. What is worth noting is that one member has remained (not the chair) and I’m slightly puzzled as to why: one can only hope it’s because they’ve been on a cruise and not yet read their e-mail! The Council itself will need to be complete reconstituted, and may change dramatically if the governing Act is altered, so remaining as the ‘last person standing’ doesn’t make much sense to me. (I admit my ignorance here as to the formal benefits and perquisites of Council membership so any who can inform me, please do!) I find the retiring chair’s comments interesting, for other reasons. Former chairman Christine Liddy has recognised that the Council no longer has quorum and also notes that the council ‘condemned the recent behaviour of “a minority of students” and supported any steps Cardinal Pell might take to address management of the college.

Well, that’s nice. The writing is on the wall so let’s all agree that the typeface is pleasing and that this is the shade that we wanted. What next, Ms Liddy, do you think that, after chairing this council over some of the most unseemly behaviour at a college seen for some time, including a near death due to intimidation, that perhaps some other actions are required?

She said the 1857 Act which governs the college was inadequate for a university college in the 21st century. (From the linked article from the ABC)

Now, my searching has turned up that Ms Liddy was a recent appointment to chair, as noted in a March document, so please allow me to genuinely generous in my comments that this may all revolve around particular poor timing for Ms Liddy’s commitment to modernising St John’s and that, had a group of students not decided that their 2012 theatrical production was to be a role-played 3D experimental version of “Lord of the Flies”, we would have seen requests for the government to consider revising the Act anyway. She is, of course, completely correct in that from almost any angle, the Acts that define the colleges do not address the realities of the late 20th Century, let alone the 21st.

Now, let us not forget that there are multiple colleges of this sort associated with the University of Sydney. A friend pointed out that we have been down similar paths before, with bad behaviour and loutish antics at the Presbyterian St Andrew’s College in the early 90s. One of the principals at the time, Dr Peter Cameron, tried very hard to modernise the culture, but as his book “Finishing School for Blokes: College Life Exposed” recorded, he had entered an atmosphere that was, to the vast majority, focused on activities that stagger the reader with their mindlessness and unpleasantness. Dr Cameron was, of course, famously convicted as a heretic in 1993 for having the audacity to preach that he supported the ordination of women and opposed the Church’s hardline on homosexuality. Fortunately, by the time that his colleagues had assembled the pyre, he had sensibly resigned his position and returned to Scotland, to join the Episcopalians, who appeared to be more agreeable.

And, yes, that was a heresy charge in 1993. In case you thought I got the year or the charge wrong. (You can read the sermon in Dr Cameron’s own, delightful, words at a piece here. He’s a far better writer than I am so please do take the time to read the sermon, whatever your religious leanings!)

Now, St Andrew’s, at least, has modified its Act (in 1998) to make the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney a Visitor, and hence allowing the University some voice and influence, but the unchanged Acts, designed to mandate separation from state influence in religion, now appear to be as archaic as they are. The freedom to practise Christianity will not be threatened by making the colleges more accountable to their University, but changing the Acts will start to address the poisonous and privileged atmosphere that surrounds these institutions.

It’s easy to label this as prudishness or, even, jealousy in that this appears to be about kids ‘having a good time’. However, and let me very clear, the good time stops the moment that you start to make someone else have a bad time. It appears, from the outside and from what leaks out, that a large number of the good times are purely had by inflicting a bad time on someone else. This all looks like a sad tale about older people, having been through a system, wanting to see it perpetuated and gazing through rose-colored glasses at a standard of behaviour that is repellant, unnecessary and, when regarded with any degree of criticality, fundamentally wrong.

I am very pleased to see that the Council has resigned, not least because it now means that the Rector who has been advocating for change (and who has been stymied consistently) will not have to step down in the face of a mysteriously large group of complaints from students that all materialised in the last month or two. (This does not, of course, mean that he may not have valid complaints to face in future but, to be frank, his accusers have largely undermined themselves through their actions.) I am very pleased to see that the Premier of New South Wales, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney and Cardinal Pell have all stepped in to try and clean this mess up.

But.

As someone else commented on a previous post, wouldn’t it have been better if it had not come to this? Does it really take the near death of a girl to point out that gangs of roaming youths intimidating others, defecating in public, burning furniture and running riot is somehow not something that we associate with a University? One of my students commented  that I must have been really angry when I last posted about the “letting their hair down” comment and, yes, I was furious. I don’t want anyone, anywhere, exposed to this kind of intimidatory and vindictive violence, and I most certainly then don’t want it whitewashed away with linguistic niceties so that, once again, the offenders walk way snickering and the victims/whistleblowers are left standing there, feeling like idiots.

We can only keep watching and wait to see what happens and hope that we can achieving something lasting in terms of protecting all of our students.

The Hips Don’t Lie – Assuming That By Hips You Mean Numbers

Posted: November 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

For those who missed it, the United States went to the polls to elect a new President. Some people were surprised by the outcome.

Even Benedict Cumberbatch, seen here between takes on Sherlock Series 3.

Some people were not, including the new King of Quants, Nate Silver. Silver studied economics at the University of Chicago but really came to prominence in his predictions of baseball outcomes, based on his analysis of the associated statistics and sabermetrics. He correctly predicted, back in 2008, what would happen between Obama and Clinton, and he predicted, to the state, what the outcome would be in this year’s election, even in the notoriously fickle swing states. Silver’s approach isn’t secret. He looks at all of the polls and then generates a weighted average of them (very, very simplified) in order to value certain polls over others. You rerun some of the models, change some parameters, look at it all again and work out what the most likely scenario is. Nate’s been publishing this regularly on his FiveThirtyEight blog (that’s the number of electors in the electoral college, by the way, and I had to look that up because I am not an American) which is now a feature of the New York Times.

So, throughout the entire election, as journalists and the official voices have been ranting and railing, predicting victory for this candidate or that candidate, Nate’s been looking at the polls, adjusting his model and publishing his predictions. Understandably, when someone is predicting a Democratic victory, the opposing party is going to jump up and down a bit and accusing Nate of some pretty serious bias and poll fixing. However, unless young Mr Silver has powers beyond those of mortal men, fixing all 538 electors in order to ensure an exact match to his predictions does seem to be taking fixing to a new level – and, of course, we’re joking because Nate Silver was right. Why was he right? Because he worked out a correct mathematical model and  method that took into account how accurate each poll was likely to be in predicting the final voter behaviour and that reliable, scientific and analytic approach allowed him to make a pretty conclusive set of predictions.

There are notorious examples of what happens when you listen to the wrong set of polls, or poll in the wrong areas, or carry out a phone poll at a time when (a) only rich people have phones or (b) only older people have landlines. Any information you get from such biased polls has to be taken with a grain of salt and weighted to reduce a skewing impact, but you have to be smart in how you weight things. Plain averaging most definitely does not work because this assumes equal sized populations or that (mysteriously) each poll should be treated as having equal weight. Here’s the other thing, though, ignoring the numbers is not going to help you if those same numbers are going to count against you.

Example: You’re a student and you do a mock exam. You get 30% because you didn’t study. You assume that the main exam will be really different. You go along. It’s not. In fact, it’s the same exam. You get 35%. You ignored the feedback that you should have used to predict what your final numbers were going to be. The big difference here is that a student can change their destiny through their own efforts. Changing the mind of the American people from June to November (Nate published his first predictions in June) is going to be nearly impossible so you’re left with one option, apparently, and that’s to pretend that it’s not happening.

I can pretend that my car isn’t running out of gas but, if the gauge is even vaguely accurate, somewhere along the way the car is going to stop. Ignoring Nate’s indications of what the final result would be was only ever going to work if his model was absolutely terrible but, of course, it was based on the polling data and the people being polled were voters. Assuming that there was any accuracy to the polls, then it’s the combination of the polls that was very clever and that’s all down to careful thought and good modelling. There is no doubt that a vast amount of work has gone into producing such a good model because you have to carefully work out how much each vote is worth in which context. Someone in a blue-skewed poll votes blue? Not as important as an increasing number of blue voters in a red-skewed polling area. One hundred people polled in a group to be weighted differently from three thousand people in another – and the absence of certain outliers possibly just down to having too small a sample population. Then, just to make it more difficult, you have to work out how these voting patterns are going to turn into electoral college votes. Now you have one vote that doesn’t mean the difference between having Idaho and not having Idaho, you have a vote that means the difference between “Hail to the Chief” and “Former Presidential Candidate and Your Host Tonight”.

Nate Silver’s work has brought a very important issue to light. The numbers, when you are thorough, don’t lie. He didn’t create the President’s re-election, he merely told everyone that, according to the American people, this was what was going to happen. What is astounding to me, and really shouldn’t be, is how many commentators and politicians seemed to take Silver’s predictions personally, as if he was trying to change reality by lying about the numbers. Well, someone was trying to change public perception of reality by talking about numbers, but I don’t think it was Nate Silver.

This is, fundamentally, a victory for science, thinking and solid statistics. Nate put up his predictions in a public space and said “Well, let’s see” and, with a small margin for error in terms of the final percentages, he got it right. That’s how science is supposed to work. Look at stuff, work out what’s going on, make predictions, see if you’re right, modify model as required and repeat until you have worked out how it really works. There is no shortage of Monday morning quarterbacks who can tell you in great detail why something happened a certain way when the game is over. Thanks, Nate, for giving me something to show my students to say “This is what it looks like when you get data science right.”

Remind me, however, never to bet against you at a sporting event!

Seriously? Victimising Other Students is Not Letting Your Hair Down

Posted: November 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

The Sun-Herald newspaper has a column called “The Loaded Dog” that allows readers to explore the controversial (‘explosive’) issues of the week. Given that scandal that is still ongoing involving St John’s college, this is their question:

Does the university college system need a complete overhaul or should young people be allowed to be let their hair down in peace?

For the love of all that is good and educational, could there be a more disingenuous framing of a serious incident that has had and continues to have a major impact on young people? This is an ugly and false dichotomy that is yet more of the nonsensical victim blaming that is often used by bullies and their supporters. “Can’t you take a joke?” “I didn’t mean anything by it.” “You’ve got no sense of humour (,love)” “They’re just letting off steam.” and, my favourite piece of rank and festering non-contribution to any discussion that involves the male gender acting atrociously:

“Boys will be boys.”

No, rapists will be rapists. Thugs will be thugs. Bullies need victims but, of course, many people who are bullies don’t like to be called bullies and, especially when their own glittering futures may be at stake, they most certainly don’t want it recorded anywhere that their actions may be down to anything other than “they were asking for it” or, perhaps, “we’ve always done it this way.” Don’t say “Boys will be boys” to excuse the bad behaviour of yourself, your friends or your relatives. It’s a lie that we need to leave behind.

There is nothing about what happened at St John’s College that was even vaguely on the scale of “letting one’s hair down”. If an individual student drank too much and threw up on a tram – eh. It’s not attractive but that’s a dumb thing people do. If two students are caught having consensual sex on the statue of the (insert statue’s name here), well I hope that they practised safe sex, but that’s pretty much their business when they’re of age.

When over 30 students stand around kneeling people and coerce them into drinking something that is deliberately disgusting, to punish them, we are seeing abuse. When furniture is burned on campus, it is a message of defiant and repellant strength – tyranny signalled by flaming Ikea. This is about the victimisation of the weak. People do not “let their hair down” by organising gang rape or the Jonestown massacre. “Letting your hair down” is about you, not how you abuse other people.

Let’s not forget that the victims, like most abused, are more likely to inflict the same thing on the people that they gain control over. For the rest of their lives. This is never what we want for our children, our students or our citizens. Let’s be honest about violence, intimidation and thuggery. Let’s stop blaming the victims. ‘Let their hair down in peace?’ – for shame, Kate Cox, to put your name to such weasel words. Let me rewrite the sentence for you:

“Does the university college system need a complete overhaul or are the actions allegedly carried out at St John’s College an acceptable and expected part of University Life?”

I cannot quite believe how much writing I’ve managed to do on something that should have been a complete no-brainer. Students were identified as taking part in a heinous act, part of a series, that nearly killed someone. Why are we still talking about this in terms other than “the matter has been addressed, the victims are safe and we have changed the situation so that this cannot happen again.” I’ve got to the stage where I’ve realised that claiming that you can’t make punishments stick because you can’t identify the ringleader is very, very weak beer as an argument.

You lead when you step up and take control of a situation. If you hang back when something bad is happening and you could have acted to stop it, or withdrawn your participation, then you are complicit. If you were bullied or coerced into doing something then I have sympathy for you (obviously, or my anti-bullying stance makes no sense) but the students who have continued the acts of vandalism and anti-social behaviour at St John’s, and are proudly wearing t-shirts celebrating their acts,  are either some of the most effectively brainwashed people on the planet or they are active participants.

The Vice Chancellor the University associated with St John’s has already taken the slightly unprecedented step of contacting all of the students to reassure them and ask if any of them need help. Well, that’s nice and obviously well worth while but how could a College so closely associated with the University have been allowed to get to the point of this year’s activities in the first place? If I genuinely thought a student was at risk, you’d have a difficult time shutting me up. My academic freedom comes with a cost, that it must be exercised in the interests of my students, my colleagues and the truth. Let’s hope that this is the last that I have to write on this except for solid positive developments in the near future.

Brief: More on Reforming the Colleges

Posted: November 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

The Vice Chancellor (President) of the University of Sydney has now indicated that perhaps it is time to review all of the ‘separate’ religious colleges affiliated with the University. You can find the article here, but it’s a pretty simple idea that it’s worth reviewing something that was set up over a hundred years ago to see if it’s still meeting our fundamental requirements of being in the best interests of students. I suspect that, in the majority of cases, very little will change and that very little will have to change. However, it’s important that the University be able to act to protect the welfare and interests of their own students, it’s just a shame that it took such a sad and sordid series of events to bring about a sensible review of previously unquestioned tradition.

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