Moral Luck and Voluntary Action: Is There a Corresponding Pedagogical Luck?

Posted: October 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Moral luck (sometimes described as moral accident) describes a situation where someone is assigned moral blame or praise for something happening, even though the person was either not in control of what was happening or could not affect its consequences. There are many examples, including the traffic accident scenario described in the Moral Luck link, and there are several different classifications of moral luck but let me focus on one: the situation where you either take no positive steps to address a situation, or actively take negative steps, yet the outcome is still positive. To a consequentialist, this is a beneficial outcome and constitutes an example of Resultant Moral Luck. One of the most extreme examples is that you randomly stick your foot out, hoping to trip someone in the street, and accidentally bring down a criminal being pursued by the police. The outcome is good, you are possibly a hero, but any assignation of a moral intention to your actions is deeply flawed: you weren’t in control of the situation, you did not intend the outcome and, in fact, you had hoped to cause harm. The voluntary action that you took was in no way intended to cause this outcome. Yet, you are a hero.

When we look at methods and practices of teaching, it quickly becomes apparent that there are many different approaches and, upon doing some reading, that these have different utilities and efficacies. Your choice of pedagogy is rarely a one-size-fits-all approach and, especially if your institution takes a relatively traditional approach, we have to start to wonder exactly which part of the evolutionary selection stage we are in. Have we, by chance and/or design, arrived at an elegant and efficient design years ago that cannot be improved upon by recent findings or are we ripe for new development, new directions and entirely different ways of teaching?

I would argue that, if we are not taking steps to confirm where we are in the developmental timeline or we are not taking steps to examine what we do with the intention of improving,  then we are wandering in an area that we could call pedagogical luck, where any positive teaching outcomes that may arise cannot be attributed to our voluntary actions and intentions. Are we in the territory that Feynman was referring to when he quoted Gibbon:

“The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous”?

The notion of pedagogical luck, much like moral luck, raises questions of responsibility and accountability. It also explains how we can misattribute blame, because we risk not having a clear ethical framework that can ascribe intention, action and outcome in a meaningful way. In moral luck two people can speed through the same red light, yet only one causes an accident because a child runs into an intersection and the other one may receive a fine for running the light. The outcomes could almost not be any more starkly different: in one a human is injured or killed, the other is a purely administrative outcome. We certainly will attribute more blame to the first driver than the second, despite the fact that both had no desire to kill, nor did they act any differently – the reason that this is resultant is because this is just the way things turned out.

If an academic works with a class and, as it happens, everyone passes, then we would usually assume some intention and voluntary action was involved on the part of that academic. The outcome, for the students and the academic, are both beneficial. It is… unlikely… that said academic would then walk around stating “I’m amazed that they all passed – I barely even showed up to class and I didn’t revise the notes.” However, where someone has done nothing (or has not taken a voluntary action to cause change) and all of the students fail, we can expect (with a reasonable certainty) that the usual statements of blame shifting may start to occur: the students were stupid, lazy, unprepared, insufficiently attentive, the material was pitched at the right level but the students didn’t work hard enough, et cetera. “I have kept the course the same, it is obviously the students who are at fault.” Of course, it’s easy to see why if we have not taken any active steps to change anything – why should we be held responsible for an action that has had either neutral or positive outcomes in the past? Why should we judge the killer-driver any more harshly than the red-light-runner? The outcome is a matter of luck.

This is highly undesirable behaviour so how can we avoid the issues involved in depending upon pedagogical luck? I’m tempted to delve into virtue ethics here and argue that, of all places, that if you can’t find a virtuous seeker of knowledge in a University then perhaps we should all go back to a simple agrarian existence and wait to die of some horrifically mutated bovine disease that we no longer have the wit or wisdom to cure. However, I suspect that we don’t need to all be virtuous, all the time, to adopt a simple maxim that commits us to seeking improvement in our learning and teaching, or to confirming that our approaches are still valid. Where possible, such endeavours should be public and shared widely, so that our lessons can be learned elsewhere. Yes, we’ve wandered fairly heavily into Kant because I’m effectively arguing good will as a stand-alone virtue, regardless of what is achieved. In the absence of a guarantee of virtuous people, and we all have bad days, then perhaps it is a commitment to scholarship, review and reflection that can allow us to take that fresh approach to pedagogical development and implementation that will cause us to be less susceptible to blame shifting where it is inappropriate and less likely to form cargo-cultish ideas as to why certain courses are succeeding or failing.

It is a simple idea: claiming beneficial outcomes as caused by us when we have done nothing is questionable, ethically, especially when we refuse to accept negative outcomes under the same scenario. By identifying that pedagogical luck is possible and readily identifiable in certain practices around the world, we clearly identify the need to avoid the situations where it can dominate.

Let the Denial Begin

Posted: October 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

It is an awful fact that women are very underrepresented in my discipline, Computer Science, and as an aggregate across my faculty, which includes Engineering and Mathematics (so we’re the Technology, Engineering and Mathematics of STEM). I have heard almost every tired and discredited excuse for why this is the case but what has always angered me is the sheer weight of resistance to any research that (a) clearly demonstrates that bias exists to explain why this occurs, (b) identifies how performance can be manipulated through preconceptions and (c) requires people to consider that we are all more similar than current representation would indicate.

Yes, if I were to look around and say “Women are not going to graduate in large numbers because I see so few of them” then I would be accurate and yet, at the same time, completely missing the point. If I were to turn that around and ask “Why are so few women coming in to my degree?” then I have a useful question and, from various branches of research, the more rocks we turn over, the more we seem to find bias (conscious or otherwise) in both industry and academia that discourages women from participation in STEM.

A paper was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS, to its friends), entitled “Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students”. (PNAS has an open access option but the key graphs and content are also covered in a Scientific American blog article.) The study was simple. Take a job application for  a lab manager position. Assign a name where half of the names are a recognisably male name, the other half are female. (The names John and Jennifer were chosen for this purpose as they had been pre-tested to be equivalent in terms of likability and recogniseability.) Get people to rate the application, including aspects like degree of mentoring offered and salary.

Let me summarise that: the name John or Jennifer is assigned to the same application materials. What we would expect, if there is no bias, is that we would see a similar ranking and equivalent salary offering. (All figures from the original paper, via the SciAm link.)

Oh. It appears that the mere presence of a woman’s name somehow altered reality so that an objective assessment of ability was warped through some sort of … I give up. Humour has escaped me. The name change has resulted in a systematic and significant downgrading of perceived ability. Let me get the next graph out of the way which is the salary offer.

And, equally mysteriously, having the name John is worth over $3,500 more than having the name Jennifer.

I should leap to note that it was both male and female scientists making this classification – which starts to lead us away from outright misogyny and towards ingrained and subtler prejudices. Did people resort to explicitly sexist reasoning to downgrade the candidates? No, they used sound reasoning to argue against the applicant’s competency. Except, of course, we draw back the curtain and suddenly reveal that our sound reasoning works one way when the applicant is a man, another if they are a woman.

Before you think “Oh, they must have targeted a given field, age group or gone after people who do or don’t have tenure”, the field, age and tenure status of the rating professors had no significant effect. This bias is pervasive among faculty, field, age, gender and status. The report also looked at mentoring and, regardless of the rater’s gender, they offered less mentoring to women.

Let’s be blunt. Study after study shows that if there are any gender differences at all, they are so small as to not even vaguely explain what we see in the representation of female students in certain fields and completely fails to explain their reduced progress in later life. However, the bias and stereotypes that people are operating under do not so much predict what will happen as shape what will happen. We are now aware of effects such as Stereotype Threat (Wiki link) that allows us to structure important situations in someone’s life so that the framing of the activity leaves them in a position where they reinforce the negative stereotype because of higher anxiety, relative to a non-stereotyped group. As an example, look at Osborne, Linking Stereotype Threat and Anxiety, where you can actually reduce the performance of girls on a maths test through reminding them that they are girls and that girls tend to do worse on test than boys. Osborne then compared this with a group where the difference was identified but a far more positive statement was made (the participants were told that despite the difference, there were situations where girls performed as well or better). The first scenario (girls do worse) was a high Stereotype Threat scenario (high ST), the second is low ST. Here’s the graph from Wikipedia that is a redrawing of the one in the paper that shows the results.

The effect of Stereotype Threat (ST) on math test scores for girls and boys. Data from Osborne (2007) (via Wikipedia)

That is the impact of an explicit stereotype in action – suddenly, when framed fairly and without an explicit stereotype or implicit bias, we see that people are far more similar than we thought. If anything, we have partially inverted the stereotype.

To return to my first paragraph, I said:

what has always angered me is the sheer weight of resistance to any research that (a) clearly demonstrates that bias exists to explain why this occurs, (b) identifies how performance can be manipulated through preconceptions and (c) requires people to consider that we are all more similar than current representation would indicate.

The PNAS paper, among others, clearly shows that the biasses exist. A simple name change is enough, as long as it’s a woman’s name. The demonstrated existence of stereotype threat shows us how performance can be manipulated through preconception. (And it’s important to note that stereotype threat is as powerful against minorities as woman – anyone who is part of a stereotype can be manipulated through their own increased or reduced anxiety.) So let me finally discuss the consideration of all of this and the title of this post.

I am expecting to get at least one person howling me down. Someone who will tear apart all of this because this cannot, possibly, under any circumstances be true. Someone who will start talking about our “African ancestors” to start arguing the Savanna-distribution of roles, as if our hominid predecessors ever had to apply to be a lab manager anywhere. Most of you, I hope, will read this and know all of this far too well. Some of you will reflect on this and, like me, examine yourself very carefully to find out if you have been using this bias or if you have been framing things, while trying to help, in a way that really didn’t help at all.

Some of you, who are my students, will read this and will see that research that you have done is reflected in these figures. Yes, we treat women differently and we appear, in these circumstances, to treat them less well. This does not, under any circumstances, mean that we have to accept this or, in any way, respect this as an established tradition or a desirable status quo. But the detection of an insidious and pervasive bias, that spans a community, shows us how hard my point (c) actually is.

We must first accept that there is a problem. There is a problem. Denying it will achieve nothing. Arguing minutiae will achieve nothing. We have to change the way that we react and be honest with ourselves that, sometimes, our treasured objectivity is actually nothing of the kind.

The Future of the Text Book: A Printbook, an eText and a Custom walk into a bar.

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

Well, it’s still Banned Books Week so I thought I’d follow up on this and talk about text books. I’ve just come from a meeting with a Leading Publishing House (LPH) who, in this fine age of diversification, have made some serious moves into electronic publishing and learning systems. This really doesn’t identify any of the major players because they’re all doing it, we just happen to have a long term relationship with LPH. My students are not the largest purchasers of text books, a fact that LPH’s agent confirmed. While Engineers buy a lot of books, Computer Scientists tend not to buy many and will, maybe, buy one serious text if they think it will be of use to them.

It’s not hard to see why. Many programming language or application books are obsolete within weeks or months, sometimes even before they arrive, and when the books cost upwards of $100 – why buy them when you can download all of the documentation for free? Unlike Humanities, where core texts can remain the same from year to year, or Engineering and Physics, where the principles are effectively established, my discipline’s principles are generally taught by exposure to languages and contextualisation in programming. There are obvious exceptions. Bentley’s Programming Pearls, almost anything by Knuth and certain key texts on algorithms or principles (hello, Dragon Book!) all deal with fundamentals and the things that don’t change from year to year – however, this is not the majority of recommended texts in CS, which tend to head towards programming language guides and manuals. With very few exceptions, any book on a specific programming language has a shelf-life and, if we are updating the course to reflect new content, then we really shouldn’t be surprised if students don’t feel the need to keep buying the new book.

Ah, the Dragon Book.

In other disciplines, the real text book is still being sold extensively and, interestingly, in Australia the eBook is generally sold in a bundle with the real text, even when we know that the student has some form of eBook reader. The model appears to be “work at home from the book and have the eCopy for skimming at Uni”. Both of these forms are still the text book and, if we’re talking about the text book, it appears to be that if students see the need, they’ll buy it. However, the price is becoming more and more important. Is there a widespread model where students can only buy the chapters they need, much as you can buy individual songs from the iTunes Store, and wait until later to see if they want to buy the whole thing? Well, yes, but it’s not widespread in the text book world and, as far as LPH is concerned, it’s not something that they do. Yet.

What is interesting is the growing market in textbook mash-ups. It is now possible to pick a selection of chapters from a range of a publisher’s offerings, add some of your own content, get it checked for copyright issues and then *voila* you have your own custom printed book with only the chapters that you need. All thriller, no filler. Of course, any costs involved in this, especially costly copyright issues, get passed on to the people who buy it. (The students.) This, fairly obviously, restricts the mash-ups to easy to mash materials – books only from one publisher where the IP issues are sorted, open-source images and the like. One problem that surfaces occasionally are people who put their own work in to be included in such a custom run and it turns out that some of the content is not actually original. This can be an oversight and even due to inheritability sometimes. Suppose that Person A created a course from a text, B inherited the course and made some changes based on the course, then continued to change it over the years. It’s a Boat of Theseus problem because the final work is the work of A and B but probably retains enough of the original text source to cause copyright issues when combined back into a new book. Copyright issues can often be overcome but it increases costs and, as stated, that costs the student more.

Given how expensive text books (still) are and that the custom market still operates at a high-ish price point, I’m still waiting for one of the LPHs to take the radical step of providing books at a price point that makes them effectively irresistible. Look at the Orange Penguin reprints, which I do often because I own a million of them, they cost $10 (cheaper in a bundle) and you can pick them up anywhere. Yes, there is an amelioration of the editing costs because these are all reprints of previous versions. Yes, there are no cover arts costs and they are using relatively mainline stock for the printing. But, hang on, isn’t this exactly what we can do in the custom sense, if we stick to jamming together existing chapters? Yet my early researches indicate that there is no large market of custom textbooks that are anywhere near this cost.

I’m going to put up the naïve and relatively ignorant flags here as I’m sure that LPH actuaries have been all over this so, rather than say “Surely…” (and have to kick myself), let me make this a wish.

“I wish that I could assemble a useful book for my students from key chapters of available works and, with low presentation costs, get a book together for under $40 that really nailed the content required for a year level.”  I’d be even happier if that $40 was $20. Or even free. There are some seriously successful free text book initiatives but, as always, there is that spectre of reimbursement for the effort expended by the author. I’m certainly not advocating doing authors out of their entitlements but I am wondering how we can do that and, with minimal overhead, make all of these books as useful and widespread as they need to be. 

There are some books and sets of chapters that I’d love my students to have, while respecting the author’s right to receive their entitlements for the work and setting a fair price. To be honest, it really seems like I’m expecting too much. What do you think?

Banned Books Week: Time to Hit the Library!

Posted: October 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

It’s Banned Books Week until October the 6th so what better time to talk about the freedom to read and go off and subversively read some banned or challenged books? There’s a great link on the American Library Association’s site with the top 100 Banned/Challenged Books 2000-2009. Some of them are completely predictable and some of them are more surprising. The reasons given for withdrawing books are, in the words of the ALA site:

Books usually are challenged with the best intentions—to protect others, frequently children, from difficult ideas and information.

However, it is always easy to see where such noble intentions have been subverted and politics or other overtones have come into play. Let’s look at the Top 10 from 1990-1999 as an example:

  1. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz (7)
  2. Daddy’s Roommate, by Michael Willhoite (-)
  3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou (6)
  4. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier (3)
  5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (14)
  6. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck (5)
  7. Forever, by Judy Blume (16)
  8. Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson (28)
  9. Heather Has Two Mommies, by Leslea Newman (-)
  10. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger (19)

Book 1 is scary and has gruesome illustrations. Book 2 deals with homosexual parents.Book 3 contains a rape involving an eight year old girl. Book 4 is about bullying and also contains a masturbation scene. Book 5 is … book 5 is Huckleberry Finn!!! Of course, HF is probably in here because of the fairly extensive use of racial pejoratives and stereotypes, even if argument can be made that the book itself is anti-racist. Book 6 is a magnificent book but, between the deaths and a dead puppy, it’s not exactly an easy book. Book 7 has teen sex in it but nowhere near the same tone or difficulty as some of the previous. Book 8 is a surprisingly depressing book that manages to balance a fantasy world with death and disappointment. Book 9, well, what a surprise, another book on homosexuality has made the list. Finally, we have Catcher, full of profanity and sexual depiction.

Looking at this list, we see sex, racism, homosexual relationships and death being the major themes. (Notably, to be banned for sex, depictions that range to the explicit are required for heterosexual activity, but it is merely the existence of the relationship that can suffice for homosexual relationships.) Those numbers at the end are, by the way, where they feature in the top 100 of 2000-2009. Let’s look at that to see what appals and is too complicated for children or library users in the first decade of the 21st Century, I’ve bolded the new entries:

1. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
2. Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
3. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
4. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
5. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
7. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
8. His Dark Materials (series), by Philip Pullman
9. ttyl; ttfn; l8r g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky

I’ll come back to Harry Potter in a moment. Number 2, the Alice series, covers a wide range of topics, including our old friend sex, so it’s for the sexual content that it made the list – topping the list in 2003. Number 4 is a children’s book based on the observed behaviour of two male penguins who became a couple and raised a hatchling. (You can read about Roy and Silo here.) Number 8 has some nasty moments across the trilogy but, in the main, has drawn most of its criticism because of a negative portrayal of religion in general, and Christianity specifically. Number 9 is on the list because, from a Banned Books story in 2010, “Preoccupied with sex and college, the teen girls encounter realistic situations that feature foul language, drugs and alcohol in a less than casual way.” Finally, the new number 10 contains references to suicide and death, as well as the usual teen cocktail of drugs, alcohol and sex that guarantee requests for banning. Oh, and there’s also a gay friend and there is a reference to child molestation. But none of it is graphic and it’s written up as a series of letters to a friend.

So the themes are now sex, drugs, bad language, homosexual penguins (Penguin Lust!), discussion of real teenagers and… fantasy novels? Let me return to Harry Potter which contains teens who are so heavily plasticised that they appear to have no real functioning genitalia, never smoke drugs, don’t swear seriously even when being threatened with death and are laughably vanilla in so many ways that the dominant fantasy conceit of the HP universe is not the magic, it’s that teenagers would actually function this way! This, and the inclusion of His Dark Materials, appear to show the direction that book banning has taken over the last decade: removing a point of view for reasons that appear to have little to do with protecting children from difficult ideas and information, but to remove them from ideas that have been stated as unacceptable by some form of organised body.

I strongly suggest looking at both lists, side-by-side, so that you too can have the moments that I had of cocking your head to one side and thinking “why is that on there?” Then coming to the slow, and unpleasant realisation, that the answer is not “because it’s too dark or encourages drug use” but “because of an organised campaign by a group who are trying to orchestrate the removal of a book that, ultimately, is a fairy tale and of no more harm to children than any other”.

There are sometimes good reasons to restrict access, by age or maturity, to certain materials and, definitely, there are lines that you can’t cross and expect to show up on a public library on the shelves – this is a far cry from completely removing or destroying a work. But what appears to be happening now is that the political reasons for banning are starting to dominate, with Internet and local organisation allowing a majority to form that can request a book’s withdrawal. Fortunately, the Internet can bring books to anyone but, with existing models, e-Books may not be as widely available as we often think so the local and school library forms a valuable point for students. I read voraciously when I was younger and, despite reading many of the banned books on the lists, I don’t appear to have turned out too badly. (I know, I know, anecdotal existential evidence doesn’t count. But I can say that not everyone who reads The Chocolate War turns into a psychopath, so why is it always in the top 5? If anything, it made me aware that the adult advice on bullying was generally an empty mechanism that never dealt with the real problem: bullies are not always cowards, don’t fear the same type of repercussions and, sometimes, are in charge. I know – how subversive!)

Let me leave you with an example of how things have changed in the last two decades. One inclusion on the banned book list only showed up in the last decade, despite being published decades earlier, and it’s number 69 on the 2000-2009 list. I’m scared how high it will be driven in the 2010-2019 list and it is yet another example of why we have to be very careful about how we construct any list of books that we wish to treat differently. Or ‘sanction’. You might have heard of it.

It’s called Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury.

The Reputation of Australian IT IS Enhanced: A Closing Point

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

Professor Gernot Heiser has released the second part of his response to my blog post and the originating Australian IT article, and you can find it here. On reading both parts, I have amended my original posts to include links to Gernot’s responses, because they address both of the key questions from the original posts: by identifying why a process like this would be followed and how national benefit is served by it. The most important point to realise is that NICTA still owns a great deal of associated work from this project – rather than the cloak-and-dagger fire sale that was alluded to in the newspaper piece.

You can find the whole discussion still on my blog as I feel that the ongoing and evolving discussion illustrates one of the key advantages of the new technological models that we have: the ability to exchange ideas, update our published text and construct more accurate representations of knowledge. I would like to thank Professor Heiser for his responses, especially as it would have been very easy to either ignore them or be very dismissive. Instead, he’s provided a great deal more information that has certainly informed me as to how these decisions are made and what they mean.

I hope that you have enjoyed reading this as well, and that you have found the whole exchange useful.

Educating about Evil

Posted: October 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

While we focus on our discipline areas for education, we can never lose sight of the important role that teachers have in a student’s life. As I’ve said (in ones way or another) repeatedly, we have large footprints and a deep shadow: thinking that we are only obliged to worry about mathematics or the correct location of the comma is to risk taking actions that have a far greater impact than intended.

This is why I have no time for educators who sleep with their students, because they have reduced anything positive or supportive that they ever said to the student into a part of the seduction and it contaminates the relationship that the student will have with authority, possibly for the rest of their life. In the strongest terms I condemn this, not the least because it is almost always illegal, immoral and wrong, but because it is, at its heart, unscholarly, unthinking and anti-educational. If you want to teach, then you’ve put yourself in a position where your voice is going to carry more weight – and this brings responsibilities. Naively enough, one of the key responsibilities for me is that we must think carefully about our actions so that, by our thoughtless action or inaction, we do not facilitate evil.

I do not have a belief system that gives me a convenient Devil so, for me, evil is a concept that is very abstract, but no less real for not having a trident and cloven hooves. I know it when I see it. I know it when I see its hand at work and it is the shape of evil’s hand that I generally discuss with my students. Let me show you.

Elizabeth Eckford, girl in dark sunglasses, attempting to enter Central High in the Little Rock School District. (Photo: Will Counts)

Can you see it? Let me show you from another angle.

The girl screaming racist abuse is Hazel Massery. The year is 1957. (Photo: Will Counts)

That’s a 15 year old girl standing at the front who is, under established legal precedent, trying to enter a previously all-white school. The girl behind her, about the same age, is yelling this: “Go home, n____! Go back to Africa.” Those soldiers you see are national guardsman, stationed not to help an isolated 15 year old girl but, instead, to keep her and the other 8 students who haven’t shown up today, from bringing their black selves into this white classroom.

I see the hand of evil all over this incident but, via these photographs, but I see it most with its scaly digits clutched around Hazel Massery’s mouth. She had a family with troubles and a background entrenched racism, and Hazel was a troubled girl but, in this moment, she was a hysterical, screaming puppet, baying for the blood of a 15-year old girl who was just another human being. The people around Elizabeth are yelling “Lynch her!” “Drag her away!” Women who look like your grandma are spitting on her. But look at Hazel Massery. It’s hard to find a more spectacular example of the evil of the mob than this?

Fifty-five years ago this month, nine students tried to make it into the school and, finally, after being turned away three times by National Guardsman, they managed to enter, escorted by soldiers of the 101st Airborne. Some of the people in that crowd, smiling, chuckling, taking pictures – they are teachers. Elizabeth’s ongoing problems at school, and they were many, included one teacher who would not even take anything directly from Elizabeth’s hands because of the colour of Elizabeth’s skin. Elizabeth was systematically abused, isolated and bullied up until the time that the school got closed and she had to try and complete her studies by herself.

After months of abuse, one entry from Elizabeth’s experience reads: “She said that except for some broken glass thrown at her during lunch, she really had had a wonderful day.”

When I was a teenager, I attended a talk where a minister said that he had always expected the test of his faith and integrity to be a suave man with horns and a tail, wearing a good suit, who offered him a dollar to smoke a cigarette and spit on the Bible. As he got older, he realised that evil, in many forms, was much harder to recognise and, of course, that sometimes doing nothing counted as evil, if you didn’t take the opportunity to do good. (As I later realised, in the style of Edmund Burke!)

You know, I don’t expect that much of a lot of people, if no-one has gone to the trouble to actually educate them and shake those xenophobic beliefs that seem to accumulate when we’re in small, scared bands and huddled in the dark. But I do expect a great deal of anyone who takes up the role of educator. I expect them to stand up for the truth. To go looking for the light if they realise that they’re in the dark. To treat all students as what they could be rather than what they have been assumed to be.

But, base level, in any activity regarding students and mobs, formed from stupidity and bigotry, I expect the teachers to be in a circle around the students and facing out, standing between the mob and their charges, certainly not facing in and taking part in the discrimination.

There’s a Vanity Fair article where you can read more about this. We have, I am thankful to say, come a very long way but it is quite obvious that there is still some way to go. The VF article talks a lot about the good people of the community, who stood up, who helped up, who realised that this was wrong and you should read it because it is a story of hope. But let us never lose sight of what evil looks like, because I need to train my students to see it so that they can stamp on it.

Push it back into the darkness where it belongs and blind it with truth, facts, science, reasoning, enlightenment and goodness. In 100 years time I want someone who sees that picture to not even be able to understand why this would have happened. I want cute kids to cock their heads to one side and look confused – because they can see an obviously visual difference but not inequality or divide, and hence not establish it as in immutable categorical statement of worth or ability. I think we’re all part of the glorious pathway that will lead to that great and wonderful time. Naive? Yes. But we have to start somewhere and, fifty-five years ago, Elizabeth and eight other brave young people did just that. We’re just carrying it on.

Fragile Relationships: Networks and Support

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

I’ve been working with a large professional and technical network organisation for the past couple of days and, while I’m not going to go into too much detail, it’s an organisation that has been around for 28 years and, because of a major change in funding, is now having to look at what the future holds. What’s interesting about this organisation is that it doesn’t have a silo problem in terms of its membership across Australia and New Zealand, which makes it almost unique in terms of technology networks in this neck of the woods. There’s no division between academic and professional staff, there are representatives from both. Same for tech and non-tech, traditional and new Unis, big and small players. It’s a bizarrely egalitarian and functional organisation that has been developing for 28 pretty good years.

Now, for some quite understandable reasons, the original funds provider is withdrawing and we have to look at the future and decide what we’re going to do. I’ve been out talking to possible organisation sponsors or affiliates but, until we decide what form we’re going to take, I’m trying to sell a beast behind a curtain by offering a dowry. This is not a great foundation for a future direction. As it turns out, trying to find a parent organisation that will be a good host is challenging because there’s nothing quite like us in the region. So, we’re looking at other alternatives. I have, however, just moved on to the executive of the organisation to try and help steer it through the next couple of years and, with any luck, into a form that will be self-sustaining and continue to give the valuable contribution to the ANZ community that it has been making for so many years.

The problem is that it takes 28 years to produce a network this strong and, if we get it wrong, relationships are inherently fragile and the disintegration of a group is far easier (and requires zero effort) than the formation. I have one of those composite stone benches in my house and I often ponder the amount of work it took to produce it and get that particular shape up on my bench top.

And how easily it could be broken, irrevocably, with one strike of a sledgehammer.

Knock knock!

(This is why my wife won’t let me use the sledgehammer to cook with.)

Human networks don’t need a sledgehammer strike to fall apart, they just need neglect. There are many examples of good low-cost networks that manage to keep people linked up, regardless of their level of resource, and I often think of the computing education community in the US, made of the regional committees, the overarching groups like SIGCSE and how the regional groups provide sustenance and a focus point, with the large conference coming into town every so often to bring everyone together.

2012 is an interesting year in so many ways and, every time I turn around, there seems to be a new challenge, something to look at, something to review to see if it’s worth keeping and, in many cases, something new to steward or assist. But I suppose that it’s important to remember that all of these things take energy and, at some stage, I’m going to have to sit down and organise how all of these tasks will go together in a way that I can make this work effectively for 2013.

Our Obligations: Moral and Legal?

Posted: September 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mark Guzdial raises an interesting point over at a BLOG@CACM article, namely that, if we don’t keep up to to date with contemporary practice in learning and teaching, can be considered unprofessional or even negligent or unethical? If we were surgeons who had not bothered to stay up to date then our patients, and certifying bodies, would be rightly upset. If we are teachers – then what?

The other issue Mark discusses is that of the legal requirement. The US has Title IX, which should extend the same participation rights to all genders for any education program or activity that attracts federal funding. If we do not construct activities that are inclusive (or we design activities that, by their nature, are exclusive) would we be liable under US law?

Mark’s final question is: If we know a better way to teach computing, are we professionally (and even legally) required to use it?

That is a spectacularly good question and, of course, it has no easy answer. Let me extend the idea of the surgeon by building on the doctors’ credo: primum non nocere (first, do no harm). Ultimately, it requires us to consider that all of our actions have outcomes and, in the case of medical intervention, we should be sure that we must always consider the harm that will be caused by this intervention.

Let us consider that there are two approaches that we could take in our pursuit of knowledge of learning and teaching: that of true scholarship of learning and teaching, and that of ignorance of new techniques of learning and teaching. (We’ll leave enthusiasm and ability to the side for the time being.) While this is falsely dichotomous, we can fix this by defining scholarship as starting at ‘knowing that other techniques exist and change might not kill you’, with everything else below that as ‘ignorance of new techniques’.

Now let us consider the impact of both of these bases, in terms of enthusiasm. If someone has any energy at all, then they will be able to apply techniques in the classroom. If they are more energetic then they will apply with more vigour and any effect will be amplified. If these are useful and evidentially supported techniques, then we would expect benefit. If these are folk pedagogies or traditions that have long been discredited then any vigour will be applied to an innately useless or destructive technique. In the case of an inert teacher, neither matters. It is obvious then that the minimum harm is to employ techniques that will reward vigour with sound outcomes: so we must either use validated techniques or explore new techniques that will work.

Now let us look at ability. If a teacher is ‘gifted’ (or profoundly experienced)  then he or she will be more likely to carry the class, pretty much regardless. However, what if a teacher is not so much of a star? Then, in this case, we start to become dependent once again upon the strength of the underlying technique or pedagogy. Otherwise, we risk harming our students by applying bad technique because of insufficient ability to correct it. Again, do no harm requires us to provide techniques that will survive the average or worse-than-average teacher, which requires a consideration of load, development level, reliance upon authority and so on – for student and teacher.

I believe that this argues that, yes, we are professionally bound to confirm our techniques and approaches and, if a better approach is available, evaluate it and adopt it. To do anything else risks doing harm and we cannot do this and remain professional. We are intervening with our students all the time – if we didn’t feel that our approach had worth or would change lives then we wouldn’t be doing it. If intervention and guidance are at our core then we must adopt something like the first, do no harm maxim because it gives us a clear signpost on decisions that could affect a student for life.

One of the greatest problems we face is potentially those people who are highly enthused and deeply undereducated in key areas of modern developments of teaching. As Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord would have said:

One must beware of anyone who is [undereducated] and [very enthusiastic] — [s/he] must not be entrusted with any responsibility because [s/he] will always cause only mischief.

If your best volunteer is also your worst nightmare, how do you resolve this when doing so requires you to say “This is right but you are wrong.” Can you do so without causing enormous problems that may swamp the benefit of doing so?

What about the legal issues? Do we risk heading into the murky world of compliance if we add a legal layer – will an ethical argument be enough?

What do you think about it?

Let Me Eat Some Humble Pie First.

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

I’m, once again, sitting in an airport lounge and about to fly to Melbourne to discuss a challenging transition project. I have a very strange job in some ways. If you ask me what I am doing today it can vary from ‘teaching’ to ‘research’ (which says everything and nothing) or ‘flying to a meeting to look at something interesting’, because higher education is a damn funny beast in many ways.

Two days ago, however, what I was doing was “making an ass of myself”. Fortunately, the impact of this was that I ended up looking over-reactive and foolish, rather than any real damage, but this is something that I want to share with all of you because I am constantly aware of the aura of competence that we ascribe to the people in our societies who can communicate well. I regularly state (and it’s on my about page) that I expose my thinking processes in order to educate but there is something more than this, in that dissecting my own activities and reactions allows me to learn from myself.

I have read a great deal of literature on trying to bring change to areas that are steeped in tradition and burdened by history and, if you ask me, I can tell you that trying to force people to change won’t work. The best way to enact change is to provide an environment in which change can occur, providing pathways and good examples and by not wasting your time and effort bashing away at the unchanging stone faces of the looming statuary. The problem is, when you believe that you’re doing the right thing, that you get caught up in your own rhetoric. Worse, if you’ve been fighting these battles for years, you build up two highly destructive emotions: frustration, which then can lead to anger.

Two days ago, I let accumulated frustration out and I snapped at someone when, to be honest, I should have basically ignored it or, more positively, interpreted it generously and then guided the discussion towards the more generous interpretation. Instead of doing this, where I could have been positive, I took a negative stance and, boy, did I look like a schmuck when the dust settled.

And rightly so! I was a schmuck! The important thing now is for me to remember that my role is not to assume some level of authoritarian control over everything – I am not the evidence or the work of experts, I am a conduit that can help other people become more educated about these things. I tried to take control of something that not only could I not control but that it was not my job to control. Let’s call this a failure of humility – a hubris issue – and I shall make a delightful pie from it.

That’s “Pahh” for some of you.

The night of the aftermath and yesterday were very, very difficult for me because I had to review where I had gone wrong, how I could have handled it and what it meant for me in terms of ongoing relationships with people. I spent a lot of time in e-mail looking at constructive ways forward, with a lot of discussion and thought, and I believe that all the good avenues of dialog are open and, once again I’m still a schmuck, but no long term damage is done.

In the end, however, I have to apply the same spirit to myself that I apply to my students. I have to determine why I acted as I did (and, ultimately, it was over-protectiveness combined with fatigue). I have to work out how I could have done it better. I have to explain, in detail, to myself how I can change it and put steps in place to make sure that I change it. Then I move forward, with a new perspective and (I hope) a better way of dealing with things.

I am concerned with some of the information that has surfaced during this issue, as I am now worried that I am seriously out of step with some of my colleagues – a lot of what I’m trying to do revolves around how much mental adjustment someone can make and it is now obvious that there are far fewer usable foundations in some areas than I had hoped. This does not mean that I should become strident, shrill and militant because it won’t work. It does mean that I have some rethinking to do, a time to regroup and consider how I can go forward with the same message (educational research is useful, scientific and essential for our future) in a way that works for an even wider range of people.

Yes, if I had a time machine, I’d probably try and go back to not initiate the problems of two days ago. I prefer not to look like a raving idiot. But it’s not the end of the world and, as long as I’m learning from it, it’s a valuable reminder of how much more I have to learn, how much thinking is required to make good change happen and the fact that sometimes we all make mistakes.

Enhancing the Reputation of Australian IT Research – by giving it away?

Posted: September 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

(Update: Gernot has responded to this blog and has found fault with both it and the original article. I have responded to him. You can read his article here and my comment below that, or just look at the comments on this post. Thanks again, Gernot, for the clarifications.)

(Update 2: Gernot has put a further discussion of the points raised both in the previous post and this one, which you can find here. In this one, Gernot clearly explains why approaches were taken the way they were, how NICTA is benefiting from the ongoing work (as are we) and further identifies that the original article didn’t manage to capture a lot of the detail of what had happened. My thanks again to Professor Heiser for taking the time to respond to this so thoroughly and so patiently!

As I noted on his blog post, the article took a tone that I responded to and, with additional information, I can clearly see both the benefit as expressed and the reasons behind such a decision. I have left this and the follow-up posts intact, with these updates, to show the evolution of the discussion. Please make sure that you read both Parts 1 and 2 of Gernot’s response if you’re going to read this!)

I stumbled across this article in the Australian (Australia’s national newspaper) inside their AustralianIT section. In it, it was announced that the Australian research body National ICT Australia had sold “groundbreaking technologies” to a US company, for virtualisation security software that was used on 1.6 billion mobile devices worldwide. The spun-off company that was sold, Open Kernel (OK) Labs, was sold in its entirety and with no provision of royalties back to NICTA. Now, before we go any further, let’s talk about NICTA. NICTA is Australia’s Information and Communication Technology Research Centre of Excellence, employing about 700 people and funded by the Australian government. One of NICTA’s primary goals is to apply the high-impact research it develops to create national benefit and wealth for Australia. Remember this, it’s important.

Now let’s go back to the sale of OK Labs and, if you read the article carefully, you’ll see that there is some serious non-discussion of how much money changed hands and whether the Australian government, or NICTA, would receive any payment back at all from the sale. The former CTO and co-founder, Professor Gernot Heiser, has stated that while he couldn’t reveal the cost of the technology, it was about 25 person years of development. He then goes on to point out that the original micro-kernel was open source and hence no royalties accrued, but they had received some payments for it. (In the past, I think?) The second kernel was developed after the original OK Labs had been spun off, with NICTA retaining a minority share, but that NICTA didn’t have any share or role in its development, hence that had transferred wholesale to the new US owner and, again, no royalties. The third micro-kernel was a research outcome from NICTA but hadn’t been deployed commercially – but this was moot as OK Labs had received an exclusive licence to use it, then purchased it outright and NICTA had obtained some equity without cash in OK Labs as a result.

Got that? Now let’s get to the profit sharing. Firstly, there has been no indication whether NICTA would receive any payment back from the sale to balance against the initial investment of taxpayer funds.

Hmm.

Any profit from the deal went to OK Labs investors initially and “anything left” is distributed to shareholders, which included NICTA. (Remember that they traded valuable and NICTA developed research for a greater stake of the pie, which will be valuable if “anything is left”.)

Hmmm.

Let me add the final paragraph of the article here, because I can’t do it any better justice:

Professor Heiser said professional bankers were engaged to make the sale “and they didn’t do it for free”. He said the sale of OK Labs enhanced the reputation of Australian IT research.

Financially, this is pretty much what has happened.

I can only hope that this is the worst-written, hatchet-job of an article because, otherwise, I’m flabbergasted. It appears that a government funded body has managed to develop and deploy a technology while systematically ensuring that any actual benefit from IP developed on these monies was distributed to everyone else before a single dollar flowed back in to turn over the research cycle once more. The investors are making money, NICTA traded some valuable IP for magic beans and may not get any money, the bankers are making money and, somehow, in the scope of this operatically complex financial dance, where the private benefit is enormous, Professor Heiser then turns around and sticks a public benefit statement on the end. We’ve enhanced the reputation of Australian IT research.

How does this … situation enhance anyone’s opinion of our research? Who is going to know in a year’s time where that research came from and why will they ever have to know?

The standard shining light in Australian IT from public funding is the CSIRO WiFi patent which is scheduled to attract royalty payments of roughly $1 billion over the next 5-10 years. This is the model that everyone explains to you when you first get into University research and, if you have anything commercialisable, expect a knock on the door from your local research innovation group because everyone wants another CSIRO patent. A billion dollars buys a lot of research.

I don’t know how you can possible slice up 25 person years of time and trade that for a peppercorn in potentia, with federal funding and the dominant position of NICTA on the Australian academic research scene, and possibly call this enhancing the reputation of Australian IT Research. Why, yes, I’m sure investors will want to come back, get us to pay for it, trade it away, sell it to them with no hope of recouping our investment and then not require royalties. I have no doubt that this may bring more investors but in the same way that a wounded fish attracts sharks. The enhanced reputation of the fish is a fleeting experience and is hardly enjoyable.

If Professor Heiser is reading this, then I welcome any clarification that he can make and, in the Australian have miscast this, then I welcome and will publish any supported correction. I sincerely hope that this is merely a miscommunication because the alternative is really rather embarrassing for all concerned.

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