The St John’s Incident: The Shaking of the Stones

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

I recently wrote of a New South Wales University-affliated college where hazing had reached dangerous and thuglike levels. It now appears that the publicity that these events have been granted in some parts of the media (I say some because the ‘Australian’ main news site, news.com.au, is carrying very little on this, and almost all of this is coming via the Sydney Morning Herald) is now having a desirable effect upon those who can change the College’s direction. Both the Archbishop of Sydney and the Premier (State government leader) of New South Wales have come out swinging. Cardinal Pell has requested that all of the Catholic priests associated with the College council resign their positions, leaving the council unable to function, and the Premier has made some (what must be very ominous) statements to the effect that the government may consider changing the acts that define and control the College.

Remember that incident I mentioned where the teenage girl had to be hospitalised? The 33 students who were directly involved were originally assigned community service, suspension and were barred from holding committee positions or offices for the rest of the term. After a rather interesting appeals process, most of these requirements were quashed, including the “no office” requirement. Of course, now this means that seven of the nine members of the student house committee will come from the 33 students who nearly killed a girl by intimidating her into drinking a rather unpleasant cocktail of things designed to make someone sick. I should mention, however, that this drinking incident was seen as ‘justice’ for the terrible crime that this girl, and four others, had committed.

Her crime? She had walked forwards at a time when she should have been walking backwards. That is, of course, worth public degradation and a night in the hospital!

One of the other Council members, Roslyn Arnold, resigned her position earlier this year, in disgust at the actions she was seeing and the way that the council was not acting to address the issue. In this article, she says, quite sensibly, that the current toxicity of the student environment at the College is nothing that a sane parent would wish on their children. But it’s also about stretngth of leadership and having the guts to say when something is wrong. As she says in the article:

“In whatever sphere of influence you function, part of the price of being a truly good leader is speaking out.”

One of the less pleasant things that has emerged from all of this is that the culture of initiation and inappropriate behaviour at St John’s has apparently been going on for many years. The Honourable Joe Hockey, MP, a federally elected politician and the Shadow Treasurer, is a Johnsman (a previous college attendee) and he had this to say, in this article, after confirming that rituals had been in place when he was at St John’s:

”Let’s not gild the lily on this sort of stuff,” he said.

”I think if you open the lid on colleges and campuses and frat houses right around the world … by the general standard of behaviour, it would be deemed to be pretty lewd and inappropriate.”

Hang on – everyone’s doing it so it’s ok? No wonder there’s a discipline problem at St John’s, if the likely outcome of involving previous alumni is that they are so convinced that ritual abuse if just something that happens around the world. I should note that another article, found here, registers Mr Hockey’s support for the clean-up, although he ducks the issue as to whether he was ever directly involved in initiation. As he coyly puts it, “I’ve been initiated in the school of life”. Funny, but a simple “No” would have cleared that question up, wouldn’t it? Is this the real power of St John’s? You can no longer answer a simple yes/no question because you would either be complicit in vile and questionable acts, or you might just possibly offend your old school chums by saying “no” as if you disapproved of something? Excuse me for putting words in the Minister’s mouth but he seems to have left the answer hanging.

No wonder the Premier is looking at this because, right now, it appears that anyone who has been through St John’s may just not have the right level of objectivity to deal with it. Before you accuse me of overreacting on the basis of a single comment from Joe Hockey, I am looking at this in the light of the actions of those alumni who have already reduced the penalties against the 33 students from earlier and who continue to erode the “pro reform” approach that the new Rector is taking. I read an interesting comment from a former Johnsman who claimed that he left the college before third year so that he wouldn’t have to take part in inflicting the bastardisation.

Are we in any doubt the victimisation and intimidation are bad? That producing hierarchies out of fear form the imagination crippling extrinsic cages that we all know just don’t work for cognitive activities? That people who are abused tend to become abusers?

To be honest, it’s a little late for people to discover how bad this is, as Roslyn Arnold quickly realised when she left a poisonous culture and was told that she was overreacting. (Good to see that gaslighting is still going strong!) But a strong statement from the associated Church and Government are the first part of what is required to restore confidence that children and students are safe from harm when in our schools, Universities and associated institutions. The second part is real, lasting change to stamp out these activities and send the message that the people who do these things are not guardians of tradition or, in any way, to be respected.

Thugs are thugs. The sooner that the defenders of ritual humiliation and intimidation realise this, grow up and let it go, the sooner we can get back to education and building something better. I would apologise for lecturing on this subject except that, as Professor Arnold reminds us, part of being a good leader of any kind is speaking out, supporting those who oppose stupidity such as this, and taking a stand for something better. Be in no doubt, we need something better than this!

Being a Hypnoweasel and Why That’s a Bad Idea.

Posted: November 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I greatly enjoy the television shows and, as it turns out, the writing of Derren Brown. Mr Brown is a successful conjurer, hypnotist and showman who performs stage magic and a range of deceits and experiments, including trying to turn a random member of the public into an assassin or convincing people that they committed a murder.

This is Derren hypnotising you into believing that this is the best post ever.

His combination of trickery, showmanship, claimed psychology/neurolinguistic programming and hypnotism makes for an interesting show – he has been guilty of over claiming in earlier shows and, these days, focusses on the art of misdirection, with a healthy dose of human influence to tell interesting stories. I am reading his book “Tricks of the Mind” at the moment and the simple tricks he discusses are well informed by the anecdotes that accompany them. However, some of his Experiments and discussions of the human aspects of wilful ignorance of probability and statistics are very interesting indeed and I use these as part of my teaching.

In “The System”, Derren shares his “100% successful horse race prediction system” with a member of the public. He also shows how, by force of will alone, he can flip a coin 10 times and have it come up heads – with no camera trickery. I first saw this on a rather dull plane flight and watched with interest as he did a number of things that, characteristically, showed you exactly what he was doing but cleverly indicated that he was doing something else – or let you believe that he was doing something else. “The System” is a great thing to show students because they have to consider what is and what isn’t possible at each stage and then decide how he did it, or how he could have done it. By combining his own skill at sleight of hand, his rather detailed knowledge of how people work and his excellent preparation, “The System” will leave a number of people wondering about the detail, like all good magic should.

The real reason that I am reading Derren at the moment, as well as watching him carefully, is that I am well aware how easy it is to influence people and, in teaching, I would rather not be using influence and stagecraft to manipulate my students’ memories of a teaching experience, even if I’m doing it unconsciously. Derren is, like all good magicians, very, very good at forcing cards onto people or creating situations where they think that they have carried out an act of their own free will, when really it is nothing of the kind. Derren’s production and writings on creating false memory, where a combination of preparation, language and technique leads to outcomes where participants will swear blind that a certain event occurred when it most certainly did not. This is the flashy cousin of the respectable work on cognition and load thresholds, monkey business illusion anyone?, but I find it a great way to step back critically and ask myself if I have been using any of these techniques in the showman-like manipulation of my students to make them think that knowledge has been transferred when, really, what they have is the memory of a good lecture experience?

This may seem both overly self-critical and not overly humble but I am quite a good showman and I am aware that my presentation can sometimes overcome the content. There is, after all, a great deal of difference between genuinely being able to manipulate time and space to move cards in a deck, and merely giving the illusion that one can. One of these is a miracle and the other is practise. Looking through the good work on cognitive load and transfer between memory systems, I can shape my learning and teaching design so that the content is covered thoroughly, linked properly and staged well. Reading and watching Derren, however, reminds me how much I could undo all of the good work by not thinking about how easy it is for humans to accept a strange personally skewed perspective of what has really happened. I could convince my students that they are learning, when in reality they are confused and need more clarification. The good news is that, looking back, I’m pretty sure that I do prepare and construct in a way that I can build upon something good, which is what I want to do, rather than provide an empty but convincing facade over the top of something that is not all that solid. Watching Derren, however, lets me think about the core difference between an enjoyable and valuable learning experience and misdirection.

There are many ways to fool people and these make for good television but I want my students to be the kind of people who see through such enjoyable games and can quickly apply their properly developed knowledge and understanding of how things really work to determine what is actually happening. There’s an old saying “Set a thief to catch a thief” and, in this case, it takes a convincing showman/hypnotist to clarify the pitfalls possible when you get a little too convincing in your delivery.

Deception is not the basis for good learning and teaching, no matter how noble an educator’s intent.

Traditions, Bad Behaviour and A Reasonable Expectation.

Posted: November 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

(Note: this is an evoking situation and I am heavily dependent upon the press for information. This story may evolve rapidly and I will update my posts as matters change.)

A subtly phrased headline from the Sun-Herald.

There is a lot of discussion in the New South Wales press regarding the behaviour of some students at St John’s College, a residential College within the University of Sydney. A tradition for ‘hazing’ now appears to have deteriorated to a culture of bastardisation that has led to some unpleasant incidents, including the hospitalisation of a young woman who was coerced into drinking a concoction of materials that were either not for human consumption or beyond the point of consumption. When disciplinary actions were applied by the new Rector, the actions of a group of old scholars and the parents of the students rapidly overturned the majority of punishments and the ‘guilty’ students reacted as one might expect. Freed of the outcomes of their actions, matters have deteriorated to the point that the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell (who holds an official role to the College as its Visitor), has stated that the loutish behaviour must stop or he may involve the police. That word beloved of the more excitable print media, ‘anarchy’, is being thrown around in a non-complimentary manner.

Do I have the guaranteed and final truth of all of this? No. All of this should be read in the context of an ongoing investigation where the final statements on what did and did not happen will take some time to uncover. Regrettably, comment from old Johnsmen who control parts of the College does not really inspire much confidence, with statements along the lines of ”Some of the fellows feel that certain traditions are to be protected and that protection means the rector must go.”

When the traditions involve 30+ people from higher years standing around a kneeling young woman, ‘encouraging’ her to drink, I think that we see a tradition that makes a great deal of sense to those who stand in control – but very little to anyone who would prefer it that our students not be viciously and systematically intimidated into carrying out potentially dangerous actions. Of course, now would be the time for a true voice of the students who are, supposedly, being victimised to come forward and tell us that it is all media beat-up. And Georgie did just that on a television interview. Georgie’s statements included quotes such as:

“I’m a fresher there and, like, I’ve never been intimidated or forced into drinking anything as they say. Like, all the rituals have been ruled out and all that kind of stuff. Like, the leaders of this college, like, they always sit us down, they’re like ‘you’re never forced into anything and all that kinda stuff.’’ (via SMH.com.au, link below)

Which would be great, if Georgie were not a third year student who is part of the house committee that looks after day-to-day matters in the college. So, to add to the excreting in public spaces, setting fire to furniture outside the Rector’s office and forcing young students to consume (under great peer pressure) stomach turning concoctions, we have the committee that is charged with dealing with these matters presenting a false public presence (at least according to the Sydney Morning Herald). The truth is unpalatable or has been brought into the open? Lie about it! What a splendid lesson for some of the future leaders of the 21st Century. (The current leader of the Federal Opposition and his finance spokesman are both former men of the College. It is not hyperbole to place the current students at the scalable foot of the ladder to the top.)

Things are, fairly obviously, pretty dire and the Vice-Chancellor for the University of Sydney had this to say:

“If I was reading these newspaper reports I would have serious questions about sending my children to a college at the University of Sydney at the moment.”

Well, yes. A culture of thuggery and bastardisation such as this is, of course, completely at odds with the notion of how we should generally treat our students. With everything that is currently coming out of this scandal, it requires only a fraction of it to be true to make St John’s College a massive liability to USyd.

Dealing with students is pretty straight forward. Don’t lie to them. Don’t bully them. Don’t have sex with them. Try to educate them. Finally, protect them from any elements in your own system that can’t follow these simple rules. I don’t want broken students in my classes, press-ganged into hierarchical conformance. I don’t want bullies and people who think that rules basically apply to everyone except them. This way sociopathy lies. While the actions of Georgie are the action of an individual, if this is indicative of the way that thought runs in the College, then it will be hard to see any remorse (if that is ever shown) as anything other than a cynical exercise in presenting a new version of the truth for a suddenly observant public.

Not all traditions are good traditions, and bad behaviour of many sorts is often excused with statements along the lines of “but we’ve always done it this way”. Students should have a reasonable expectation that an organisation with any connection at all to a University should adhere to similar standards of behaviour. The College is an independent college but it is still at the University of Sydney. I do not envy the University this situation, as it does raise questions of pastoral care and ongoing support and affiliation.

Any student deserves to live and work in an environment that neither allows this to happen to the victims, nor encourages or in any way rewards students in becoming the kind of people who would take such an unpleasant approach to fellow humans. When you send your son or daughter to one of a nation’s most prestigious University-aligned or affiliated institutions, you would expect them to be safe, valued and to be in a community designed to foster their successful advancement in terms of their own merits, rather than anything approaching what is currently coming out in the media regarding this college. It is, quite simply, a reasonable expectation.

369 (+2)

Posted: November 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

( +2 )

The post before my previous post was my 369th post. I only saw because I’m in manual posting mode at the moment and it’s funny how my brain immediately started to pull the number apart. It’s the first three powers of 3, of course, 3, 6, 9, but it’s also 123 x 3 (and I almost always notice 1,2,3). It’s divisible by 9 (because the digits add up to 9), which means it’s also divisible by 3 (which give us 123 as I said earlier). So it’s non-prime (no surprises there). Some people will trigger on the 36x part because of the 365/366 number of days in the year.

That’s pretty much where I stop on this, and no doubt there will be much more in the comments from more mathematical folk than I, but numbers almost always pop out at me. Like some people (certainly not all) in the fields of Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics, numbers and facts fascinate me. However, I know many fine Computer Scientists who do not notice these things at all – and this is one of those great examples where the stereotypes fall down. Our discipline, like all the others, has mathematical people, some of whom are also artists, musicians, poets, jugglers, juggalos, but it also has people who are not as mathematical. This is one of the problems when we try to establish who might be good at what we do or who might enjoy it. We try to come up with a simple identification scheme that we can apply – the risk being, of course, that if we get it wrong we risk excluding more people than we include.

So many students tell me that they can’t do computing/programming because they’re no good at maths. Point 1, you’re probably better at maths than you think, but Point 2, you don’t have to be good at maths to program unless you’re doing some serious formal and proof work, algorithmic efficiencies or mathematical scientific programming. You can get by on a reasonable understanding of the basics, and yes, I do mean algebra here but very, very low level,  and focus as you need to. Yes, certain things will make more sense if your mind is trained in a certain way, but this comes with training and practice.

It’s too easy to put people in a box when they like or remember numbers, and forget that half the population (at one stage) could bellow out 8675309 if they were singing along to the radio. Or recite their own phone number from the house they lived in when they were 10, for that matter. We’re all good for about 7 digit numbers, and a few of these slots, although the introduction of smart phones has reduced the number of numbers we have to remember.

So in this 369(+2)th post, let me speak to everyone out there who ever thought that the door to programming was closed because they couldn’t get through math, or really didn’t enjoy it. Programming is all about solving problems, only some of which are mathematical. Do you like solving problems? Did you successfully dress yourself today?

Did you, at any stage in the past month, run across an unfamiliar door handle and find yourself able to open it, based on applying previous principles, to the extent that you successfully traversed the door? Congratulations, human, you have the requisite skills to solve problems. Programming can give you a set of tools to apply that skill to bigger problems, for your own enjoyment or to the benefit of more people.

A Troubling Reflection: The Fall of Jonah Lehrer

Posted: November 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Jonah Lehrer was, until recently, a wildly successful writer, blogger and lecturer, who wrote about many things involving neuroscience. However, as it transpires, a lot of what he published in books and blogs and other locations was shoddy science, insight-driven pattern fitting, unattributed or outright stolen. You can read about it here at the NYMag website.

This made me think about my own blog and whether I’m meeting the standards that I would like to. (Except in terms of ending sentences with prepositions.)  I’m very honest about not presenting anything here as being the double-blind passed rock-solid research reports of an expert, although there’s a big chunk of the empirical and some of my research interests do creep in. I’m also committed to citing the original authors, giving credit where credit is due and quoting correctly. If you want to see what my actual research looks like, you can find my papers on the Internet, having gone through peer review and then public presentation. This is where I think, share my thoughts and work on that elusive animal, community.

But is what I write here actually good science or do I spend too much time going “A-ha!” and then searching for supporters, or is my insight reflecting the amount of reading that I’m doing? I do read a lot of papers and references, I have to as I’m reading into a new area, but I look at Jonah’s critics and I wonder how much of what I write here is adding to the works that I discuss, or clarifying issues in a valid and reproducible way? What is anyone, including me, learning from this?

I’m neither looking for, or wanting, supporting comment or reassurance here, so I’m happy for the comments to stay tumbleweeds. This is a rhetorical question to allow me to link you to a sad tale of a young man overreaching himself, to his great and probably lasting detriment, and then to think about how I can use this to improve what I write here.

It is very easy to look at feedback in terms of “number of students who stayed in lecture” or “positive comments from the 10% of students who bothered to hand in their evaluations”, but the former could be an accident of cold weather, late class and bus timetables, while the latter is most likely a statistical anomaly. Feedback is the thing that you can use to help you improve and it doesn’t really matter where that comes from. The feedback that someone else gets, the places that are identified as where they are lacking, is also something that I can learn from. I don’t have formal teachers anymore. I have mentors, guides, students, peers, friends, partners and … the rest of the world.

I’m not sure how much good science I’ve been putting in here but I am aware that I am falling into what I shall refer to as the Pratchett/Vetinari Newspaper Conundrum a little too often. From my recollection, in “The Truth” by Terry Pratchett, the tyrant of Ankh-Morkpork (Lord Vetinari) notes how convenient it is that the paper always contains enough news to fill the pages. The implication being that the truth is being cut to fit the cloth, not the other way around. I am required to fill one post a day, somewhere between 500-1000 words, and I always seem to find a convenient research issue, story, anecdote or review to hold that space.

What would I do if I actually had nothing to say? Do I write a short piece on the trigger subjects of the gutter press, as they would, or do I publish nothing? I suspect that there have been times when my ‘insight’ posts have been fluff, with little substance, although I would hope that they are still enjoyable to read.

Let me, therefore, commit to maintaining the science/enjoyment separation and making it very clear when and where I am being rigorous and when I am not. And let me also commit to something that may have helped Jonah Lehrer. If I actually find one day that I have nothing to say, then I will try my hardest to say nothing. And I hope that, on that day, you’ll understand why.

A Difficult Argument: Can We Accept “Academic Freedom” In Defence of Poor Teaching?

Posted: October 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Let me frame this very carefully, because I realise that I am on very, very volatile ground with any discussion that raises the spectre of a right or a wrong way of teaching. The educational literature is equally careful about this and, very sensibly, you read about rates of transfer, load issues, qualitative aspects and quantitative outcomes, without any hard and fast statements such as “You must never lecture again!” or “You must use formative assessment or bees will consume your people!”

Not even your marching bands will be safe!

I am aware, however, that we are seeing a split between those people who accept that educational research has something to tell them, which may possibly override personal experience or industry requirement, and those who don’t. But, and let me tread very carefully indeed, while those of us who accept that the traditional lecture is not always the right approach realise that the odd lecture (or even entire course of lectures) won’t hurt our students, there is far more damaging and fundamental disagreement.

Does education transform in the majority of cases or are most students ‘set’ by the time that they come to us?

This is a key question because it affects how we deal with our students. If there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ students, ‘smart’ and ‘dumb’ or ‘hardworking’ and ‘lazy’, and this is something that is an immutable characteristic, then a lot of what we are doing in order to engage students, to assist them in constructing knowledge and placing into them collaborative environments, is a waste of their time. They will either get it (if they’re smart and hardworking) or they won’t. Putting a brick next to a bee doesn’t double your honey-making capacity or your ability to build houses. Except, of course, that students are not bees or bricks. In fact, there appears to be a vast amount of evidence that says that such collaborative activities, if set up correctly in accordance with the established work in social constructivism and cognitive apprenticeship, will actually have the desired effect and you will see positive transformations in students who take part.

However, there are still many activities and teachers who continue to treat students as if they are always going to be bricks or bees. Why does this matter? Let me digress for a moment.

I don’t care if vampires, werewolves or zombies actually exist or not and, for the majority of my life, it is unlikely to make any difference to me. However, if someone else is convinced that she is a vampire and she attacks me and drain my blood, I am just as dead as if she were not a vampire – of course, I now will not rise from the dead but this is of little import to me. What matters is the impact upon me because of someone else’s practice of their beliefs.

If someone strongly believes that students are either ‘smart enough’ to take their courses or not, they don’t care who fails or how many, and that it is purely the role of the student to have or to spontaneously develop this characteristic then their impact will likely be high enough to have a negative impact on at least some students. We know about stereotype threat. We’re aware of inherent bias. In this case, we’re no longer talking about right or wrong teaching (thank goodness), we’re talking about a fundamentally self-fulfilling prophecy as a teaching philosophy. This will have as great an impact to those who fail or withdraw as the transformation pathway does to those who become better students and develop.

It is, I believe, almost never about the bright light of our most stellar successes. Perhaps we should always be held to answer (or at least explain) for the number and nature of those who fall away. I have been looking for statements of student rights across Australia and the Higher Education sites all seem to talk about ‘fair assessment’ and ‘right of appeal’, as well as all of the student responsibilities. The ACARA (Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority) website talks a lot about opportunities and student needs in schools. What I haven’t yet found is something that I would like to see, along these lines:

“Educational is transformational. Students are entitled to be assessed on their own performance, in the context of their opportunities.”

Curve grading, which I’ve discussed before, immediately forces a false division of students into good and bad, merely by ‘better’ students existing. It is hard to think of something that is fundamentally less fair or appropriate to the task if we accept that our goal is improvement to a higher standard, regardless of where people start. In a curve graded system, the ‘best’ person can coast because all they have to do is stay one step ahead of their competition and natural alignment and inflation will do the rest. This is not the motivational framework that we wish to establish, especially when the lowest realise that all is lost.

I am a long distance runner and my performances will never set the world on fire. To come first in a race, I would have to be in a small race with very unfit people. But no-one can take away my actual times for my marathons and it is those times that have been used to allow me to enter other events. You’ll note that in the Olympics, too. Qualifying times are what are used because relative performance does not actually establish any set level of quality. The final race? Yes, we’ve established competitiveness and ranking becomes more important – but then again, entering the final heat of an Olympic race is an Olympian achievement. Let’s not quibble on this, because this is the equivalent of Nobel and Turing awards.

And here is the problem again. If I believe that education is transformative and set up all of my classes with collaborative work, intrinsic motivation and activities to develop self-regulation, then that’s great but what if it’s in third-year? If the ‘students were too dumb to get it’ people stand between me and my students for the first two years then I will have lost a great number of possibly good students by this stage – not to mention the fact that the ones who get through may need some serious de-programming.

Is it an acceptable excuse that another academic should be free to do what they want, if what they want to do is having an excluding and detrimental effect on students? Can we accept that if it means that we have to swallow that philosophy? If I do, does it make me complicit? I would like nothing more than to let people do what they want, hey, I like that as much as the next person, but in thinking about the effect of some decisions being made, is the notion of personal freedom in what is ultimately a public service role still a sufficiently good argument for not changing practice?

Polymaths, Philomaths and Teaching Philosophy: Why we can’t have the first without the second, and the second should be the goal of the third.

Posted: October 22, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

You may have heard the term polymath, a person who possesses knowledge across multiple fields, or if you’re particularly unlucky, you’ve been at one of those cocktail parties where someone hands you a business card that says, simply, “Firstname Surname, Polymath” and you have formed a very interesting idea of what a polymath is.  We normally reserve this term for people who excel across multiple fields such as, to drawn examples from this Harvard Business Review blog by Kyle Wiens, Leonard da Vinci (artist and inventor), Benjamin Franklin, Paul Robeson or Steve Jobs. (Let me start to address the article’s gender imbalance with Hypatia of Alexandria, Natalie Portman, Maya Angelou and Mayim Bialik, to name a small group of multidisciplinary women, admittedly focussing on the Erdös-Bacon intersection.) By focusing on those who excel, we do automatically associate a higher degree of assumed depth of knowledge across these multiple fields. The term “Renaissance [person]” is often bandied about as well.

Da Vinci, seen here inventing the cell phone. Sadly, it was to be over 500 years before the cell phone tower was invented so he never received a call. His monthly bill was still enormous.

Now, I have worked as a system administrator and programmer, a winemaker and I’m now an academic in Computer Science, being slowly migrated into some aspects of managerialism, who hopes shortly to start a PhD in Creative Writing. Do I consider myself to be a polymath? No, absolutely not, and I struggle to think of anyone who would think of me that way, either. I have a lot of interests but, while I have had different areas of expertise over the years, I’ve never managed the assumed highly parallel nature of expertise that would be required to be considered a polymath, of any standing. I have academic recognition of some of these interests but this changes neither the value (to me or others) nor has it ever been required to be well-lettered to be in the group mentioned above.

I describe myself, if I have to, as a philomath, someone who is a lover of learning. (For both of the words, the math suffix comes from the Greek and means to learn, but poly means much/many and philo means loving, so a polymath is ‘many learnéd’.) The immediate pejorative for someone who leans lots of things across areas is the infamous “Jack of all trades” and its companion “master of none”. I love to learn new things, I like studying but I also like applying it. I am confident that the time I spent in each discipline was valuable and that I knew my stuff. However, the main point I’d like to state here is that you cannot be a polymath without first having been a philomath – I don’t see how you can develop good depth in many areas unless you have a genuine love of learning. So every polymath was first a philomath.

Now let’s talk about my students. If they are at all interested in anything I’m teaching them, and let’s assume that at least some of them love various parts of a course at some stage, then they are looking to develop more knowledge in one area of learning. However, looking at my students as mono-cultural beings who only exist when they are studying, say, the use of the linked list in programming, is to sell them very, very short indeed. My students love doing a wide range of things. Yes, those who love learning in my higher educational context will probably do better but I guarantee you that every single student you have loves doing something, and most likely that’s more than one thing! So every single one of my students is inherently a philomath – but the problems arise when what they love to learn is not what I want to teach!

This leads me to the philosophy of learning and teaching, how we frame, study and solve the problems of trying to construct knowledge and transform it to allow its successful transfer to other people, as well as how we prepare students to receive, use and develop it. It makes sense that the state that we wish to develop on our students is philomathy. Students are already learning from, interested and loving their lives and the important affairs of the world as they see them, so to get them interested in what we want to teach them requires us to acknowledge that we are only one part of their lives. I rarely meet a student who cannot provide a deep, accurate and informative discourse on something in their lives. If we accept this then, rather than demanding an unnatural automaton who rewrites their entire being to only accept our words on some sort of diabolical Turing Tape of compliance, we now have a much easier path, in some respects, because accepting this means that our students will spend time on something in the depth that we want – it is now a matter of finding out how to tap into this. At this point, the yellow rag of populism is often raised, unfairly in most cases, because it is assumed that students will only study things which are ‘pop’ or ‘easy’. There is nothing ‘easy’ about most of the pastimes at which our students excel and they will expend vast amount of efforts on tasks if they can see a clear reason to do so, it appears to be a fair return on investment, and they feel that they have reasonable autonomy in the process. Most of my students work harder for themselves than they ever will for me: all I do is provide a framework that allows them to achieve something and this, in turn, allows them to develop a love. Once the love has been generated, the philomathic wheel turns and knowledge (most of the time) develops.

Whether you agree on the nature of the tasks or not, I hope that you can see why the love of learning should be a core focus of our philosophy. Our students should engage because they want to and not just because we force them to do so. Only one of these approaches will persist when you remove the rewards and the punishments and, while Skinner may disagree, we appear to be more than rats, especially when we engage our delightfully odd brains to try and solve tasks that are not simply rote learned. Inspiring the love of learning in any one of our disciplines puts a student on the philomathic path but this requires us to accept that their love of learning may have manifested in many other areas, that may be confusedly described as without worth, and that all we are doing is to try and get them to bring their love to something that will be of benefit to them in their studies and, assuming we’ve set the course up correctly, their lives in our profession.

A Study in Ethics: Lance Armstrong and Why You Shouldn’t Burn Your Bracelet.

Posted: October 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

If you haven’t heard about the recent USADA release of new evidence against Lance Armstrong, former star of cycling and Chairman for his own LIVESTRONG Cancer Foundation, then let me summarise it: it’s pretty damning. After reviewing this and other evidence, I have little doubt that Lance Armstrong systematically and deliberately engaged in the procurement, distribution, promotion and consumption of banned substances while he was engaged in an activity that explicitly prohibited this. I also have very little doubt that he engaged in practices, such as blood transfusion, intimidation and the manipulation of colleagues and competitors, again in a way that contravened the rules of his sport and in a way that led the sport into disrepute. The USADA report contains a lot of the missing detail, witness reports, accounts and evidence that, up until now, has allowed Lance Armstrong to maintain that delightful state of grace that is plausible deniability. He has now been banned for life, although he can appeal, his sponsors are leaving him and he has stepped down as the Chairman of his charity.

I plan to use Armstrong in my discussions of ethics over the next year for a number of reasons and this is an early musing, so it’ll be raw and I welcome discussion. Here are my initial reasons and thoughts:

  1. It’s general knowledge and everyone knows enough about this case to have formed an opinion. Many of the other case studies I use refer to the past or situations that are not as widely distributed.
  2. It’s a scenario that (either way) is easy to believe and grounded in the experience of my students.
  3. Lance Armstrong appears to have been making decisions that impacted his team, his competitors, his entire sport. His area of influence is large.
  4. There is an associated entity that is heavily linked with Lance’s personal profile, the LIVESTRONG Cancer Charity.

Points 1 and 2 allows me to talk about Lance Armstrong and have everyone say “Oh, yeah!” as opposed to other classic discussions such as Tuskegee, Monster Study, Zimbardo, etc, where I first have to explain the situation, then the scenario and they try to make people believe that this could happen! Believing that a professional sports person may have taken drugs is, in many ways, far easier to get across than complicated stories of making children stutter. Point 3 allows me to get away from thee “So what if someone decides to do X to themselves?” argument – which is a red herring anyway in a competitive situation based (even in theory) on a level playing field. Rationalisations of the actions taken by an individual do not apply when they are imposed on another group, so many of the “my right to swing my arm ends at your nose” arguments that students effectively bring up in discussing moral and ethical behaviour will not stand up against the large body of evidence that Armstrong intimidated other riders, forced their silence, and required team members to follow the same regime. I expect that we’ll still have to have the “So what if everyone dopes” argument in terms of “are people choosing?” and “what are the ethical implications if generalised?” approaches.

But it is this last theme that I really wish to explore. I read a Gawker article telling everyone to rip off their yellow wristbands and that I strongly disagree with. Lance Armstrong is, most likely, a systematic cheat who has been, and still is, lying about his ongoing cheating in order to continue as many of his activities as possible, as well as maintaining some sense of fan base. The time where he could have apologised for his actions, stood up and taken a stand, is pretty much over. Sponsors who have stood by other athletes at difficult times have left him, because the evidence is so overwhelming.

But to say that this has anything to do with LIVESTRONG is an excellent example of the Genetic Fallacy – that is, because something came from Lance Armstrong, it is now somehow automatically bad. Would I drink from a Coke he gave me? Probably not. Do I still wish his large and influential cancer charity all the success in the world? Yes, of course. LIVESTRONG gave out roughly $30,000,000 last year across its programs and that’s a good thing.

It’s a terrible shame that, for so many years, Armstrong’s work with the charity was, more than slightly cynically, used to say what a good person he was despite the allegations. (There’s a great Onion piece from a couple of years ago that now seems bizarrely prescient). Much as LIVESTRONG is not guaranteed to be bad because Armstrong is a doper, running and setting up LIVESTRONG doesn’t absolve Armstrong from actions in other spheres. A Yahoo sports article describes his charity as being used as a ‘moral cloak’, although smokescreen might be the better word. But we need to look further.

To what does LIVESTRONG owe its success? Would it be as popular and successful if Armstrong hadn’t come back from cancer (he continues to be a cancer survivor) and then hadn’t won all of those tours? Given that his success was, apparently, completely dependent upon illegal activity, aren’t we now indebted to Armstrong’s illegal activity for the millions of dollars that have gone to help people with cancer?

We can talk about moral luck, false dichotomy and false antecedent/consequent (depending on which way around you wish to frame it) in this and this leads us into all sorts of weird and wonderful discussions, from a well-known and much discussed current affairs issue. But the core is quite simple: Armstrong’s actions had a significantly negative effect upon his world but at least one of the actions that he took has had a positive outcome. Whatever his motivation and intention, the outcome is beneficial. LIVESTRONG now has a challenge to see if it is big enough to survive this reversal of fortune but this is, most definitely, not the time to burn the bracelet. Turn it around, if you want, but, until it turns out that LIVESTRONG is some sort of giant front for clubbing baby harp seals, we can’t just lump this in with the unethical actions of one man.

I was thinking about what Armstrong could do now and, while I believe that he will never be able to do many of the things that he used to do (pro cycling/speaking arrangements/public figure), we know that he is quite good at two things:

  1. Riding a bike
  2. Getting drugs into difficult places.

One of the major problems in the world is getting the right pharmaceuticals to the right people because of government issues, instability and poverty. There are probably worse things for Armstrong to do than cycle from point to point, sneaking medicine past border guards, shinning down drain pipes to provide retrovirals to the poor in the slums of a poor city and hiking miles so that someone doesn’t die today. (I know, that’s all a bit hair shirt –  I’m not suggesting that seeking atonement is either required or sensible.) More seriously, the end of my ethical study in Armstrong will only be written when he works out what he wants to do next. Then my students can look at it, scratch their heads and try to work out where that now places him in terms of morality and ethics.

Dealing with Plagiarism: Punishment or Remediation?

Posted: October 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

I have written previously about classifying plagiarists into three groups (accidental, panicked and systematic), trying to get the student to focus on the journey rather than the objective, and how overwork can produce situations in which human beings do very strange things. Recently, I was asked to sit in on another plagiarism hearing and, because I’ve been away from the role of Assessment Coordinator for a while, I was able to look at the process with an outsider’s eye, a slightly more critical view, to see how it measures up.

Our policy is now called an Academic Honesty Policy and is designed to support one of our graduate attributes: “An awareness of ethical, social and cultural issues within a global context and their importance in the exercise of professional skills and responsibilities”. The principles are pretty straight-forward for the policy:

  • Assessment is an aid to learning and involves obligations on the part of students to make it effective.
  • Academic honesty is an essential component of teaching, learning and research and is fundamental to the very nature of universities.
  • Academic writing is evidence-based, and the ideas and work of others must be acknowledged and not claimed or presented as one’s own, either deliberately or unintentionally.

The policy goes on to describe what student responsibilities are, why they should do the right thing for maximum effect of the assessment and provides some handy links to our Writing Centre and applying for modified arrangements. There’s also a clear statement of what not to do, followed by lists of clarifications of various terms.

Sitting in on a hearing, looking at the process unfolding, I can review the overall thrust of this policy and be aware that it has been clearly identified to students that they must do their own work but, reading through the policy and its implementation guide, I don’t really see what it provides to sufficiently scaffold the process of retraining or re-educating students if they are detected doing the wrong thing.

There are many possible outcomes from the application of this policy, starting with “Oh, we detected something but we turned out to be wrong”, going through “Well, you apparently didn’t realise so we’ll record your name for next time, now submit something new ” (misunderstanding), “You knew what you were doing so we’re going to give you zero for the assignment and (will/won’t) let you resubmit it (with a possible mark cap)” (first offence), “You appear to make a habit of this so we’re giving you zero for the course” (second offence) and “It’s time to go.” (much later on in the process after several confirmed breaches).

Let me return to my discussions on load and the impact on people from those earlier posts. If you accept my contention that the majority of plagiarism cheating is minor omission or last minute ‘helmet fire’ thinking under pressure, then we have to look at what requiring students to resubmit will do. In the case of the ‘misunderstanding’, students may also be referred to relevant workshops or resources to attend in order to improve their practices. However, considering that this may have occurred because the student was under time pressure, we have just added more work and a possible requirement to go and attend extra training. There’s an old saying from Software Development called Brook’s Law:

“…adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” (Brooks, Mythical Man Month, 1975)

In software it’s generally because there is ramp up time (the time required for people to become productive) and communication overheads (which increases with the square of the number of people again). There is time required for every assignment that we set which effectively stands in for the ramp-up and, as plagiarising/cheating students have probably not done the requisite work before (or could just have completed the assignment), we have just added extra ramp-up into their lives for any re-issued assignments and/or any additional improvement training. We have also greatly increased the communication burden because the communication between lecturers and peers has implicit context based on where we are in the semester. All of the student discussion (on-line or face-to-face) from points A to B will be based around the assignment work in that zone and all lecturing staff will also have that assignment in their heads. An significantly out-of-sequence assignment not only isolates the student from their community, it increases the level of context switching required by the staff, decreasing the amount of effective time that have with the student and increasing the amount of wall-clock time. Once again, we have increased the potential burden on a student that, we suspect, is already acting this way because of over-burdening or poor time management!

Later stages in the policy increase the burden on students by either increasing the requirement to perform at a higher level, due to the reduction of available marks through giving a zero, or by removing an entire course from their progress and, if they wish to complete the degree, requiring them to overload or spend an additional semester (at least) to complete their degree.

My question here is, as always, are any of these outcomes actually going to stop the student from cheating or do they risk increasing the likelihood of either the student cheating or the student dropping out? I complete agree with the principles and focus of our policy, and I also don’t believe that people should get marks for work that they haven’t done, but I don’t see how increasing burden is actually going to lead to the behaviour that we want. (Dan Pink on TED can tell you many interesting things about motivation, extrinsic factors and cognitive tasks, far more effectively than I can.)

This is, to many people, not an issue because this kind of policy is really treated as being punitive rather than remedial. There are some excellent parts in our policy that talk about helping students but, once we get beyond the misunderstanding, this language of support drops away and we head swiftly into the punitive with the possibility of controlled resubmission. The problem, however, is that we have evidence that light punishment is interpreted as a licence to repeat the action, because it doesn’t discourage. This does not surprise me because we have made such a risk/reward strategy framing with our current policy. We have resorted to a punishment modality and, as a result, we have people looking at the punishments to optimise their behaviour rather than changing their behaviour to achieve our actual goals.

This policy is a strange beast as there’s almost no way that I can take an action under the current approach without causing additional work to students at a time when it is their ability to handle pressure that is likely to have led them here. Even if it’s working, and it appears that it does, it does so by enforcing compliance rather than actually leading people to change the way that they think about their work.

My conjecture is that we cannot isolate the problems to just this policy. This spills over into our academic assessment policies, our staff training and our student support, and the key difference between teaching ethics and training students in ethical behaviour. There may not be a solution in this space that meets all of our requirements but if we are going to operate punitively then let us be honest about it and not over-burden the student with remedial work that they may not be supported for. If we are aiming for remediation then let us scaffold it properly. I think that our policy, as it stands, can actually support this but I’m not sure that I’ve seen the broad spread of policy and practice that is required to achieve this desirable, but incredibly challenging, goal of actually changing student behaviour because the students realise that it is detrimental to their learning.

Thoughts on the Fauxpology

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

We’ve had some major unpleasantness in the Australian political sphere recently and, while I won’t bore you with the details, a radio announcer has felt it necessary to apologise for a particularly unpleasant comment that he made about the Prime Minster, and the recent death of her father. It was not, I must say, either the most heartfelt or actually apologetic apology that has ever been delivered and the Prime Minster, who quite rightly has better things to do, has chosen not to take this man’s personal phone call for an apology. And, of course, neither should she feel that she has to. Let me state this in plain terms: the offender does not gain the right to demand the way in which an apology is presented, if they wish to proffer an apology. However, let me cut to the chase (for once) and say that an apology without a genuine sense that you have done something wrong, for which an apology is deserved and that will change your behaviour in future, is worthless.

In this case, the broadcaster has previously apologised for remarks, including that the legally elected and sitting Prime Minister of Australia be put in a ‘chaff’ bag and thrown out to sea. However, his apology for the chaff bag comment may have to be scrutinised, in light of what happened at the dinner function at which he made further deliberately offensive and unsubstantiable claims.  At this event he, in between scurrilous remarks, signed a jacket made out of, you guessed it, chaff bags. Therefore, at least in the chaff bag case, it would appear that his previously apology was without conviction and possible not heartfelt: hence, worthless. He did not feel genuine regret or change his behaviour. In fact, if anything, he was now extending his behaviour and disrespect by aligning his signature with a physical representation of his statements.

When public figures mouth the words of regret, yet do not change or feel regret, we are in the territory of what has been neologised as the fauxpology. (Wikipedia refers to this as the Non-apology apology, if it has the form of an apology but does not actually express the expected contrition.) Let me give you some example words (not from said broadcaster I hasten to add):

“My recent comments may have offended some people and, if they did, then I wish to apologise.”

You are not sorry for the action, but you are sorry only because someone has taken offence, or your actions have been uncovered. Ultimately, the idea here is to say ‘sorry’ in such a way that it appears that you have sought, and may be granted, forgiveness without having to actually express responsibility. Of course, if you aren’t responsible for the problem and can move this to being the problem of the people that you’ve offended, then why should you change your behaviour at all? The example above is an “If apology”, where you are only apologising on a conditional basis. Other fine examples include such delightful phrases as “Mistakes were made” because, of course, one is studiously avoiding saying who made the mistakes.

The major problem with the fauxpology is that it is effectively a waste of time. Without a genuine desire to actually avoid the problematic behaviour, the only thing that may change is that the offender is more careful not to get caught. What bothers me from an educational sense is how pervasive these unpleasant non-apologies are.

I have too many students who feel that some sort of fauxpology, where they are sorry that an action has occurred but it is mysteriously not connected to them, is going to make things all better. I’m pretty sure that they haven’t learned it from me because I try to be honest in my apologies and then change things so that it doesn’t happen again. Am I always up to that standard? I’m probably pretty close and I strive to be better at it – but then again, I strive not to be a schmuck and sometimes that doesn’t work either. This separation of responsibility from outcome is a dangerous disconnection. It is most definitely someone’s responsibility if work didn’t get handed in on time and, while there are obvious exceptions and the spirit of charitable interpretation is still alive and well, a genuine recognition of whose responsibility it is leads one towards self-regulation far better than thinking of the work as something that is associated by accidental proximity rather than deliberate production.

I’m lucky in that I rarely expect my students to do anything where they feel they should be contrite (although there are examples, including being rude or disrespectful to their peers, although I wouldn’t push them all the way to guilt on that) but apologising for something as a recognition that whatever it was is both undesirable and now something to be avoided is essential, when you are actually at fault. But it has to be genuine or there is no point. I loathe being lied to so a false apology, especially when immediately backed up by recidivism, is a great disappointment to me.

My students are responsible for their work. I am responsible for their programs, assessment, and ensuring that they can achieve what is required in a fair and equitable environment. If I get it wrong, then I have to admit it and change behaviour. Same for the students. If something has gone wrong, then we need to work out who was responsible because we can then work out who needs to change things so it doesn’t happen again. This isn’t about ascribing punishment or blame, it’s about making things work better. The false apology, like foolish punishment, is easy but useless. As an example. I cannot think of a more useless punishment than writing lines on a blackboard, especially as the simple mechanics of this action lends itself to a deconstruction of the sentence into a form where the meaning is lost by the fifth time you’ve written “I will not challenge the ontological underpinnings of reality” but have really written “I I I I I I …” “will will wll wll wl wl” and getting steadily more squiggly. But this is useless because it is not really tied to the original offence (whatever it happens to be – talking in class, making fart sounds, shuffling the desk) and it has no teaching value at all. This punishment is the equivalent of the fauxpology in many ways: it looks like it’s doing something but not only does it not achieve its aims, it actually works against positive alternatives by providing an easy out.

I’m very disappointed by the public figures who recite these empty phrases, because the community and my students learn their empty words and think “If they can get away with it, so can I” and, ultimately, my students can’t. It’s a waste of their very valuable time and, at some stage, may lead to problems for the vast majority when someone demands more than a fauxpology and there is no real character substance to provide.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →