Post 300 – 2012, the Year of the Plague

Posted: September 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

As it turns out, this is post 300 and I’m going to use it to make a far more opinionated point than usual. I’m currently in Auckland, New Zealand, and there is a warning up on the wall about a severe outbreak of measles. This is one of the most outrageously stupid signs to see on a wall, anywhere, given that we have had a solid vaccine since 1971 and, despite ill-informed and unscientific studies that try to contradict this, the overall impact of the MMR vaccine is overwhelmingly positive. There is no reasonable excuse for the outbreak of an infectious, dangerous disease 40 years after the development of a reliable (and overwhelmingly safe) vaccine.

Is this really what we want?

My fear is that, rather than celebrating the elimination of measles and polio (under 200 cases this year so far according to the records I’ve seen) in the same way that we eradicated smallpox, we will be seeing more and more of these signs identifying outbreaks of eradicable and controllable diseases, because ignorance is holding sway.

Be in no doubt, if we keep going down this path, the risk increases rapidly that a disease will finish us off because we will not have the correct mental framing and scientific support to quickly respond to a lethal outbreak or mutation. The risk we take is that, one day, our cities lie empty with signs like this up all over the place, doors sealed with crosses on them, a quiet end to a considerable civilisation. All attributable to a rejection of solid scientific evidence and the triumph of ignorance. We have survived massive outbreaks before, even those with high lethality, but we have been, for want of a better word, lucky. We live in much denser environments and are far more connected than we were before. I can step around the world in a day and, with every step, a disease can follow my footsteps.

One of my students recently plotted 2009 Flu cases relative to air routes. While disease used to rely upon true geographical contiguity, we now connect the world with the false adjacency of the air route. Outbreaks in isolated parts of the world map beautifully to the air hubs and their importance and utilisation: more people, higher disease.

So, in short, it’s not just the way that we control the controllable diseases that is important, it is accepting that the lower risk of vaccination is justifiable in the light of the much greater risk of infection and pandemic. This fights the human tendency to completely misunderstand probability, our susceptibility to fallacious thinking, and our desperate desire to do no harm to our children. I get this but we have to be a little bit smarter or we are putting ourselves at a much higher risk – regrettably, this is a future risk so temporal discounting gets thrown into the mix to make it ever harder for people to make a good decision.

Here’s what the Smallpox Wikipedia page says: “Smallpox was an infectious disease unique to humans” (emphasis mine). This is one of the most amazing things that we have achieved. Let’s do it again!

I talk a lot about education, in terms of my thoughts on learning and teaching, but we must never forget why we educate. It’s to enlighten, to inform, to allow us to direct our considerable resources to solving the considerable problems that beset us. It’s helping people to make good decisions. It’s being aware of why people find it so hard to accept scientific evidence: because they’re scared, because someone lied to them, because no-one has gone to the trouble to actually try and explain it to them properly. Ignorance of a subject is the state that we occupy before we become informed and knowledgable. It’s not a permanent state!

That sign made me angry. But it underlined the importance of what it is that we do.

And more on the Harvard Scandal: Scandal? Apparently it’s not?

Posted: September 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve just read a Salon article regarding the Harvard cheating issue. Apparently, according to Farhad Manjoo, these students should be “celebrated for collaborating“.

Note that word? It’s the one that I picked on in the Crimson article and the reason that I did so is that it’s a very mild word, and a very positive one at that. However, this article, while acknowledging that the students were prevented from any such sharing, Manjoo then asks, to me somewhat disingenuously, “What’s the point of prohibiting these students from working together?”

Urm, well, for most of the course, they don’t. At the end of the course, when they want to see how much each individual knows, they attempt to test them individually. That’s not an unusual pattern.

Manjoo’s interpretation of the other articles goes well beyond anything else that I’ve seen, including putting all of the plagiarism claims together as group work and tutor consultation. I can’t speak to this as I don’t have his sources but, given that this was explicitly forbidden anyway, he’s making an empty argument. It doesn’t matter how you slice it, if students worked together, they did something that they weren’t supposed to do. However Manjoo argues that their actions are justified, I’m not sure that this argument is.

The author obviously disagrees with the nature of the open book test and, to my reading, has no real idea of what he’s talking about. Sentences like “But if you want to determine how well students think, why force them to think alone?” are almost completely self-defeating. It also ignores the need to build knowledge in a way that functions when the group isn’t there. We don’t use social constructivism in the assumption that we will always be travelling in packs, we do it to assist the construction of knowledge inside the individual by leveraging the advantages of the social structure. To evaluate how well it has happened, and to isolate group effects so that we can see the individual performing, we use rules such as Harvard clearly defined to set these boundaries.

Manjoo waxes rhetorical in this essay. “Rather than punishing these students, shouldn’t we be praising them for solving these problems the only way they could? ” Well, no, I think that we shouldn’t. There were many ways that, if they thought this approach was unreasonable or unfair, they could have legitimately protested. I note that half the class managed to not (apparently, as far as the number suspected) cheat during this test – what do we say about these people? Are these people worthy of double-plus-praise for somehow transcending the impossible test, or are they fools for not collaborating?

I’m not sure why these articles are providing so much padding for these students, if they have actually done nothing wrong (I hasten to add that they are merely suspected at the moment but if they are to be martyrs then let us assume a bleak outcome). At least, unlike the writers in the Crimson, Manjoo is a Cornell alumnus so he has some distance. I do note that he has a book called “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” which, according to the reviews, is about the media establishing views of reality that aren’t necessarily the facts so he’s aware of the impact that his words have on how people will see this issue. He is also writing in a column with, among its bylines, “The Conventional Wisdom Debunked”, so it’s not surprising that this article is written this way.

Manjoo has created (another) Harvard bogeyman: scared of collaboration, unfair to students, and out of step with reality. However, his argument is ultimately a series of misdirections and Manjoo’s opinion that don’t address the core issue: if these students worked with each other, they shouldn’t have. Until he accepts that this, and that this is not a legitimate course, I’m not sure that his arguments have much weight with me.

 

(Reasonable) Argument, Evidence and (Good) Journalism: Is “Crimson” the Colour of Their Faces?

Posted: September 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I ran across a story on the Harvard Crimson about a surprisingly high level of suspected plagiarism in a course, Government 1310. The story opens up simply enough in the realms of fact, where the professor suspected plagiarism behaviour in 10-20 take home exams, which was against published guidelines, and has now expanded to roughly 125 suspicious final exams. There was a brief discussion of the assessment of the course and the steps taken so far by the faculty.

Then, the article takes a weird turn. Suddenly, we have a student account, an anonymous student who doesn’t wish their name to be associated with the plagiarism, who “suspected that  Government 1310 was the course in question”. Hello? Why is this… ahhh. Here’s some more:

Though she said she followed the exam instructions and is not being investigated by the Ad Board, she said she thought the exam format lent itself to improper academic conduct.

“I can understand why it would be very easy to collaborate,” said the student

Oh. Collaborate. Interesting. Next we get the Q Guide rating for the course and this course gets 2.54/5 versus the apparent average of 3.91. Then we get some reviews from the Q Guide that “spoke critically of the course’s organisation and the difficulty of the exam questions”.

Spotting a pattern yet?

Another student said that he/she had joined a group of 15 other students just before the submission date and that they had been up all night trying to understand one of the questions (worth 20%).

I submitted this to my students to read and then asked them how they felt about it. Understandably, by the end of the reading, while my students were still thinking about plagiarism, they were thinking that there may have been some… justification. Then we started pulling the article apart.

When we start to look at the article, it becomes apparent that the facts presented all have a rather definite theme – namely that if cheating has occurred, that it has a justification because of the terrible way the course was taught (low Q Guide rating! 16 students confused!)

Now, I can not see the Q Guide data, because when I go to the page I get this information (and I need a Harvard login to go further):

Q Guide
The Q Guide was an annually published guide that reported the results of each year’s course evaluations. Formerly called the CUE Guide, it was renamed the Q Guide in 2007 because the evaluations now include the GSAS and are no longer run solely by the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE). In 2009, in place of The Q Guide, Harvard College integrated Q data with the online course selection tool (at my.harvard.edu), providing a simple and easy way to access and compare course evaluation data while planning your course schedule.

So if the article, regarding an exam run in 2012, is referring to the Q Guide for Gov 1310, then it’s one of two things: using an old name for new data (admittedly, fairly likely) or referring to old data. The question does arise, however, whether the Q Guide rating refers to this offering or a previous offering. I can’t tell you which it is because I don’t know. It’s not publicly available and the article doesn’t tell me. (Although you’ll note that the Q Guide text refers to this year‘s evaluations. There’s a part of me that strongly suspects that this is historical data but, of course, I’m speculating.)

However, the most insidious aspect is the presentation of 16 students who are confused about content in a way that overstates their significance. It’s a blatant example of emotive manipulation and encourages the reader to make a false generalisation. There were 279 students enrolled in Gov 1310. 16 is 5.7%. Would I be surprised in somewhere around 5% of my students weren’t capable of understanding all of the questions or thought that some material wasn’t in the course?

No, of course not. That’s roughly the percentage of my students who sometimes don’t know which Dr Falkner is teaching their class. (Hint: one is male and one is female. Noticeably so in both cases.)

I presented this to my Grand Challenge students as part of our studies of philosophical and logical fallacies, discussing how arguments are made to mislead and misdirect. The terrible shame is that, with a detected rate of plagiarism that is this high, I would usually have a very detailed look at the learning and teaching strategies employed (how often are exams being rewritten, how is information being presented, how is teaching being carried out) because this is an amazingly high level of suspected plagiarism.

Despite the misleading journalism presented in the Crimson, the course and its teachers may have to shoulder some responsibility here. As always, just because someone’s argument is badly made, doesn’t mean that it is actually wrong. It’s just disappointing that such a cheap and emotive argument was raised in a way that further fogs an important issue.

As I said to my students today, one of the most interesting way to try to understand a biassed or miscast argument is to understand who the bias favours – cui bono? (To whom the benefit? I am somewhat terrified, on looking for images for this phrase, that it has been highjacked by extremists and conspiracy theorists. It’s a shame because it’s historically beautiful.)

So why would the Crimson run this? It’s pretty manipulative so, unless this is just bad journalism, cui bono?

Having looked up how disciplinary boards are constituted at Harvard, I found a reference that there are three appointed faculty members and:

There are three students appointed to the board as full voting members. Two of these will be assigned to specific cases on a case-by-case basis and will not be in the same division as the student facing disciplinary action.

In this case, the Crimson’s story suddenly looks a lot… darker. If, by publishing this article, they reach the right students and convince them the action of the suspected plagiarists may have been overly influenced by academics who are not performing their duties – then we risk suddenly having a deadlocked board and a deleterious effect on what should have been an untainted process.

The Crimson has further distinguished itself with a follow-up article regarding the uncertainty students are feeling because of the process.

“It’s unfair to leave that uncertainty, given that we’re starting lives,” said the alumnus, who was granted anonymity by The Crimson because he said he feared repercussions from Harvard for discussing the case.

Oh, Harvard, you giant monster, unfairly delaying your decision on a plagiarism case because the lecturers were so very, very bad that students had to cheat. And, what’s worse, you are so evil that students are scared of you – they “fear the repercussions”!

Thank you, Crimson, for providing so much rich fodder for my discussion on how the words “logical argument”, “evidence” and “good journalism” can be so hard to fit into the same sentence.

Time Banking: More and more reading.

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

I’ve spent most of the last week putting together the ideas of time banking, reviewing my reading list and then digging for more papers to read and integrate. It’s always a bit of a worry when you go to see if what you’ve been thinking about for 12 months has just been published by someone else but, fortunately, most people are still using traditional deadlines so I’m safe. I read a lot of papers but none more than when I’m planning or writing a paper: I need to know what else has happened if I’m to frame my work correctly and not accidentally re-invent the wheel. Especially if it’s a triangular wheel that never worked.

My focus is Time Banking so that’s what I’ve been searching for – concepts, names, similarities, to make sure that what I’m doing will make an additional contribution. This isn’t to say that Time Banking hasn’t been used before as a term or even a concept. I’ve been aware of several universities who allow a fixed number of extra days that students can draw on (Stanford being the obvious example) and the concept of banking your time is certainly not new – there’s even a Dilbert cartoon for it! There are papers on time banking, at low granularity and with little student control – it’s more of a convenient deadline extender rather than a mechanism for developing metacognition in order to promote self-regulating learning strategies in the student. Which is good because that’s the approach I’m taking.

The reasoning and methodology that I’m using does appear to be relatively novel and it encompasses a whole range of issues: pedagogy, self-regulation, ethics and evidence-based analysis of how deadlines are currently working for us. It’s a lot to fit into one paper but I have hope that I can at least cover the philosophical background of why what I’m doing is a good idea, not just because I want to convince my peers but because I want volunteers for when pilot schemes start to occur.

It’s not enough that something is a good idea, or that it reads well, it has to work. It has to be able to de deployed, we have to be able to measure it, collect evidence and say “Yes, this is what we wanted.” Then we publish lots more papers and win major awards – Profit! (Actually, if it’s a really good idea then we want everyone to do it. Widespread adoption that enhances education is the real profit.)

Like this but with less underpants collecting and more revolutionising education.

More seriously, I love writing papers because I really have to think deeply about what I’m saying. How does it fit with existing research? Has this been tried before? If so, did it work? Did it fail? What am I doing that is different? What am I really trying to achieve?

How can I convince another educator that this is actually a good idea?

The first draft of the paper is written and now my co-authors are scouring it, playing Devil’s advocate, and seeing how many useful and repairable holes they can tear in it in order to make it worthy of publication. Then it will go off at some point and a number of nice people will push it out to sea and shoot at it with large weapons to see if it sinks or swims. Then I get feedback (and hopefully a publication) and everyone learns something.

I’m really looking forward to seeing the first actual submission draft – I want to see what the polished ideas look like!

Let’s Transform Education! (MOOC Hijinks Hilarity! Jinkies!)

Posted: September 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

I had one of those discussions yesterday that every one in Higher Education educational research comes to dread: a discussion with someone who basically doesn’t believe the educational research and, within varying degrees of politeness, comes close to ignoring or denigrating everything that you’re trying to do. Yesterday’s high point was the use of the term “Mr Chips” to describe the (from the speaker’s perspective) incredibly low possibility of actually widening our entrance criteria and turning out “quality” graduates – his point was that more students would automatically mean much larger (70%) failure rates. My counter (and original point) is that since there is such a low correlation between school marks and University GPA (roughly 40-45% and it’s very noisy) that successful learning and teaching strategies could deal with an influx of supposedly ‘lower quality’ students, because the quality metric that we’re using (terminal high school grade or equivalent) is not a reliable indicator of performance. My fundamental belief is that good education is transformative. We start with the students that schools give us but good, well-constructed, education can, in the vast majority of cases, successfully educate students and transform them into functioning, self-regulating graduates. We have, as a community, carried out a lot of research that says that this works, provided that we are happy to accept that we (academics) are not by any stretch of the imagination the target demographic or majority experience in our classes, and that, please, let’s look at new teaching methods and approaches that actually work in developing the knowledge and characteristics that we’re after.

The “Mr Chips” thing is a reference to a rather sentimental account of the transformative influence of a school master, the eponymous Chips, and, by inference, using it in a discussion of the transformative power of education does cast the perception of my comments on equality of access, linked with educational design and learning systems as transformative technologies, as being seen as both naïve and (in a more personal reading) makes me uncomfortably aware that some people might think I’m talking about myself as being the key catalyst of some sort. One of the nice things about being an academic is that you can have a discussion like this and not actually come to blows over it – we think and argue for a living, after all. But I find this dismissive and rude. If we’re not trying to educate people and transform them, then what the hell are we doing? Advocating inclusion and transformation shouldn’t be seen as grandstanding – it should be seen as our job. I don’t want to be the keystone, I want systems that work and survive individuals, but that individuals can work within to improve and develop – we know this is possible and it’s happening in a lot of places. There are, however, pockets of resistance: people who are using the same old approaches out of laziness, ignorance and a refusal to update for what appear to be philosophical reasons but have no evidence to support them.

Frankly, I’m getting a little irritated by people doubting the value of the volumes of educational research. If I was dealing with people who’d read the papers, I’d be happier, but I’m often dealing with people who won’t read the papers because they just don’t believe that there’s a need to change or they refuse to accept what is in there because of a perceived difficulty in making it work. (A colleague demanded a copy of one of our papers showing the impact of our new approaches on retention – I haven’t heard from him since he got it. This probably means that he’s chosen to ignore it and is going to pretend that he never asked.) Over coffee this morning, musing on this, it occurred to me that at the same time that we’re not getting the greatest amount of respect and love in the educational research community, we’re also worried about the trend towards MOOCs. Many of our concerns about MOOCs are founded in the lack of evidence that they are educationally effective. And I saw a confluence.

All of the educational researchers who are not able to sway people inside their institutions – let’s just ignore them and surge into the MOOCs. We can still teach inside our own places, of course, and since MOOCs are free there’s no commercial conflict – but let’s take all of the research and practice and build a brave new world out in MOOC space that is the best of what we know. We can even choose to connect our in-house teaching into that system if we want. (Yes, we still have the face-to-face issue for those without a bricks-and-mortar campus, but how far could we go to make things better in terms of what MOOCs can offer?) We’re transformers, builders and creators. What could we do with the infinite canvas of the Internet and a lot of very clever people, working with a lot of very other clever people who are also driven and entrepreneurial?

The MOOC community will probably have a lot to say about this, which is why we shouldn’t see this as a hijack or a take-over, and I think it’s helpful to think of this very much as a confluence – a flowing together. I am, not for a second, saying that this will legitimise MOOCs, because this implies that they are illegitimate, but rather than keep fighting battles with colleagues and systems that can defeat 40 years of knowledge by saying “Well, I don’t think so”, let’s work with people who have already shown that they are looking to the future. Perhaps, combining people who are building giant engines of change with the people who are being frustrated in trying to bring about change might make something magical happen? I know that this is already happening in some places – but what if it was an international movement across the whole sector?

Jinkies! (Sorry, the title ran to this and I get to use a picture of a t-shirt with Velma on it!)

Relma!

The purpose of this is manifold:

  1. We get to build the systems that we want to, to deliver education to students in the best ways we know.
  2. We (potentially) help to improve MOOCs by providing strong theory to construct evidence gathering mechanisms that allow us to really get inside what MOOCs are doing.
  3. More students get educated. (Ok, maybe not in our host institutions, but what is our actual goal anyway?)
  4. We form a strong international community of educational researchers with common outputs and sharing that isn’t necessarily owned by one company (sorry, iTunesU).
  5. If we get it right, students vote with their feet and employers vote with their wallets. We make educational research important and impossible to ignore through visible success.

Now this is, of course, a pipe dream in many ways. Who will pay for it? How long will it take before even not-for-pay outside education becomes barred under new terms and conditions? Who will pay my mortgage if I get fired because I’m working on a deliberately external set of courses for students who are not paying to come to my institution?

But, the most important thing, for me, is that we should continue what has been proposed and work more and more closely with the MOOC community to develop exemplars of good practice that have strong, evidence-based outcomes that become impossible to ignore. Much as students use temporal discounting to procrastinate about their work, administrators tend to use a more traditional financial discounting when it comes to what they consider important. If it takes 12 papers and two years of study to justify spending $5,000 on a new tool or time spent on learning design – forget about it. If, however, MOOCs show strong evidence of improving student retention (*BING*), student attraction (*BING*), student engagement (*BING*) and employability – well, BINGO. People will pay money for that.

I’ve spoken before about how successful I had to be before I was tolerated in my pursuit of educational research and, while I don’t normally talk about it in detail because it smacks of hubris and I sincerely believe that I am not a role model of any kind, I  hope that you will excuse me so that I can explain why I think it’s crazy as to how successful I had to be in order to become tolerated – and not yet really believed. To summarise, I’m in three research groups, I’ve brought in (as part of a group and individually) somewhere in the order of $0.5M in one non-ed research area, I’ve brought in something like $30-50K in educational research money, I’ve published two A journals (one CS research, one CS ed), two A conferences (both ed) and one B conference (ed/CS) and I have a faculty level position as an Associate Dean and I have a national learning and teaching presence. All of the things on that line – that’s 2012. 2011 wasn’t quite as successful but it wasn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination. I think that’s an unreasonably high bar to pass in order to be allowed the luxury of asking questions about what it is that we’re doing with learning and teaching. But if I can leverage that to work with other colleagues who can then refer to what we’ve done in a way that makes administrators and managers accept the real value of an educational revolution – then my effort is shared over many more people and it suddenly looks like a much better investment of my time.

This is more musing that mission, I’m afraid, and I realise that any amount of this could be shot down but I look forward to some discussion!

 

 

Musing on scaffolding: Why Do We Keep Needing Deadlines?

Posted: August 29, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

One of the things about being a Computer Science researcher who is on the way to becoming a Computer Science Education Researcher is the sheer volume of educational literature that you have to read up on. There’s nothing more embarrassing than having an “A-ha!” moment that turns out to have been covered 50 years and the equivalent of saying “Water – when it freezes – becomes this new solid form I call Falkneranium!”

Ahem. So my apologies to all who read my ravings and think “You know, X said that … and a little better, if truth be told.” However, a great way to pick up on other things is to read other people’s blogs because they reinforce and develop your knowledge, as well as giving you links to interesting papers. Even when you’ve seen a concept before, unsurprisingly, watching experts work with that concept can be highly informative.

I was reading Mark Guzdial’s blog some time ago and his post on the Khan Academy’s take on Computer Science appealed to me for a number of reasons, not least for his discussion of scaffolding; in this case, a tutor-guided exploration of a space with students that is based upon modelling, coaching and exploration. Importantly, however, this scaffolding fades over time as the student develops their own expertise and needs our help less. It’s like learning to ride a bike – start with trainer wheels, progress to a running-alongside parent, aspire to free wheeling! (But call a parent if you fall over or it’s too wet to ride home.)

One of my key areas of interest is self-regulation in students – producing students who no longer need me because they are self-aware, reflective, critical thinkers, conscious of how they fit into the discipline and (sufficiently) expert to be able to go out into the world. My thinking around Time Banking is one of the ways that students can become self-regulating – they manage their own time in a mature and aware fashion without me having to waggle a finger at them to get them to do something.

Today, R (postdoc in the  Computer Science Education Research Group) and I were brainstorming ideas for upcoming papers over about a 2 hour period. I love a good brainstorm because, for some time afterwards, ideas and phrases come to me that allow me to really think about what I’m doing. Combining my reading of Mark’s blog and the associated links, especially about the deliberate reduction of scaffolding over time, with my thoughts on time management and pedagogy, I had this thought:

If imposed deadlines have any impact upon the development of student timeliness, why do we continue to need them into the final year of undergraduate and beyond? When do the trainer wheels come off?

Now, of course, the first response is that they are an administrative requirement, a necessary evil, so they are (somehow) exempt from a pedagogical critique. Hmm. For detailed reasons that will go into the paper I’m writing, I don’t really buy that. Yes, every course (and program) has a final administrative requirement. Yes, we need time to mark and return assignments (or to provide feedback on those assignments, depending on the nature of the assessment obviously). But all of the data I have says that not only do the majority of students hand up on the last day (if not later), but that they continue to do so into later years – getting later and later as they progress, rather than earlier and earlier. Our administrative requirement appears to have no pedagogical analogue.

So here is another reason to look at these deadlines, or at least at the way that we impose them in my institution. If an entry test didn’t correlate at all with performance, we’d change it. If a degree turned out students who couldn’t function in the world, industry consultation would pretty smartly suggest that we change it. Yet deadlines, which we accept with little comment most of the time, only appear to work when they are imposed but, over time, appear to show no development of the related skill that they supposedly practice – timeliness. Instead, we appear to enforce compliance and, as we would expect from behavioural training on external factors, we must continue to apply the external stimulus in order to elicit the appropriate compliance.

Scaffolding works. Is it possible to apply a deadline system that also fades out over time as our students become more expert in their own time management?

I have two days of paper writing on Thursday and Friday and ‘m very much looking forward to the further exploration of these ideas, especially as I continue to delve into the deep literature pile that I’ve accumulated!

Marcus Aurelius: Says It All, Really.

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

I’m reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which I read years ago but had the opportunity to pick up again for $8.33. (Woohoo, cheap Penguins!) The book is full of great thoughts and aphorisms but there are three, from Book 12, that have always appealed to me:

13, How absurd – and a complete stranger to the world – is the man who is surprised at any aspect of his experience in life!

15, The light of a lamp shines on and does not lose its radiance, until it is extinguished. Will then the truth, justice, and self-control which fuel you fail before your own end?

17, If it is not right, don’t do it; if it is not true, don’t say it.

I feel 13 a lot – and it’s rather embarrassing because I am often surprised by the world but I suspect that’s because I’m in my own head a lot. 15 is something I’ve said before, in different ways and never as elegantly, and it’s a great image.

17, however, says it all to me. It’s incredibly, naïvely simple but that is part of its appeal. It is probably one of the greatest maxims for teaching, in terms of commitment, in terms of content and in terms of bravery when faced with the choice of presenting something that you know to be true – and something that you’ve been told to teach.

Marcus Aurelius  was an Emperor, philosopher (philosopher king, even, a reputation he gained in his own life time) and the Emperor Hadrian, his sponsor, had a special nickname for him – “Verissimus”, the most true. Herodian wrote: “he gave proof of his learning not by mere words or knowledge of philosophical doctrines but by his blameless character and temperate way of life.”

I spoke earlier this week of champions. It’s nice to read Marcus Aurelius and be reminded of how many amazing thinkers have been contributing to our shared literary legacy over 2000 years.

“If it is not right, don’t do it; if it is not true, don’t say it.”

The Most Terrifying Compliance: The Inert Student

Posted: August 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

I’ve been doing a lot with schools recently – enough that I won’t be identifying any particular students with this next post – and I’ve had an opportunity to see how students react when they haven’t yet made it into Uni. My first-years are a pretty energetic lot and, for the most part, it’s more of a challenge to get them to stop talking than to get them to start. (Part of that might be me, I’m un petite peu de Energiser Bunny.)

Captured using a laser flash and 1/100000 second shutter.

What I saw in some of the school-aged children was the same: bouncy, participating, not quite getting the filter going between brain and mouth. All the good energy that I can work with, use in collaboration and build upon to teach. Culturally, of course, this varies wildly and some of my students from other cultures would rather be electrocuted than say something in class. (Note: No evidence to support this exists, nor have we even applied for ethics approval for this.) So what these differently-acculturated students often do is… nothing. (When they first come to u.s)

They just sit there. Ask them a question. They say nothing. You have to wait it out. Eventually, they’ll say something and doing this, with care, over time brings them into the collaborative zone where we can really start to work. What is interesting, however, is that they are still (if you watch carefully) involved in the class. They take notes. They discuss things between themselves, to a degree. They’re doing something – they just aren’t that keen on answering questions. That’s ok, I can deal with that.

However, there’s a more advanced form of doing nothing which I’ll talk about now, because it bothers me.

What chilled me the first time that I saw it was the students who actually do nothing. And, by this, I mean nothing at all. In between answering questions, if they answered to any degree, they sit there and they’re not surfing the internet, doodling, talking or doing anything else. They will sit, still, looking into space, for up to an hour. Maybe two. No apparent registration. Can talk. Can communicate well. But don’t. (Note: I’m not talking about isolated students, I’m talking about students grouped by school.)

I would really like to believe that they are thinking about other things but, especially in a space that is active, that is engaging other students, that is full of the sound of discussion, laughter and enjoyment… this inertia is terrifying.

In my experience these students are terribly polite. If you tell them to do something then they will. But step away or give them a moment and they stop doing anything. My apologies to the teachers in the space who are nodding wisely (if this is just a thing that I don’t often see) but all of my students do something else when they’re not doing what I ask them to do – even if it’s sleeping. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one sit there politely, staring into space, not doing anything that could get them into trouble but, because they don’t want to participate, not actually doing anything.

As far as I could tell, this wasn’t a cultural issue but what it does make me wonder is if I had run across compliant students from a particular school rather than interested students. After all, as I’ve said several times, I get the results of the Year 12 filter: the ones who really have behavioural issues don’t make it to me. The ones who couldn’t sit still, yelled out, played up – if they couldn’t rein it in then I don’t see them.

When some teachers receive a letter offering an opportunity for students to come to something or to bring them to something where I come to the school, do I see the ones that should be coming, or the ones that won’t embarrass the school?

I have no real idea how to even think about this but I sincerely hope that this inertia is an accidental construct and not something that has been engineered as anything desirable. Yes, iconoclasts and heretics can be really, really irritating to teach but – oh! the potential rewards to us and the rest of the world! More importantly, considerate behaviour to peers and educators does not start and stop with mindless and silent compliance.

Let’s hope that this was an unfortunate juxtaposition of very shy people who will all contact me later to ask me more – once they’ve thought about it. Because I’d really prefer that suggestion to the idea that there are schools out there who are engineering these kinds of zombies and sending them along just because they’ll sit still.

I’m happy for “The Midwich Cuckoos” to remain fictional.

Short and Sweet

Posted: August 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Well, it’s official. I’ve started to compromise my ability to work through insufficient rest. Despite reducing my additional work load, chewing through my backlog is keeping me working far too much and, as you can tell from the number and nature of the typos in these posts, it’s affecting me. I am currently reorganising tasks to see what I can continue to fit in without compromising quality, which means this week a lot of e-mail is being sent to sort out my priorities.

This weekend, I’m sitting down to brainstorm the rest of 2012 and work out what has to happen when – nothing is going to sneak up on me (again) this year.

In very good news, we have 18 students coming back for the pilot activity of “Our students, their words” where we ask students who love ICT an important question – “what do you like and why do you think someone else might like it?” We’re brainstorming with the students for all of Friday morning and passing their thoughts (as research) to a graphic designer to get some posters made. This is stage 1. Stage 2, the national campaign, is also moving – slowly but surely. This is why I really need to rest: I’m getting to the point where it’s important that I am at my best and brightest. Sleeping in and relaxing is probably the best thing I can do for the future of ICT! 🙂

Rather than be a hypocrite, I’m switching to ultra-short posts until I’m rested up enough to work properly again.

See you tomorrow!

The Road Lines and the Fences

Posted: August 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Teaching is a highly rewarding activity and there are many highs to be had along the way: the students who ‘get it’, the students that you help back from the edge of failure, the ones who you extend opportunities to who take them, and the (small) group who come back some years later and thank you. They’re all great. One of the best ways to spot those students are at risk or already in trouble is, of course, to put in some structure and assessment to give you reports on when people are having trouble. A good structure will include things like a set of mechanisms that allow the student to determine where they are, and mechanisms that alert you if the student is in terrible trouble. Of course, the first set can also be viewed by you, as you are probably instrumental in the feedback, but we’re not really talking summative and formative, we’re talking guidance and then disaster prevention.

This is “Don’t Park Here”, “Don’t Cross Here” or “We Are Very Close to a Naval or Cavalry Officer”.

It’s like driving on the roads. They paint lines on the roads that tell you where to go and sometimes you even get the things that go “BARRUMP BARRUMP BARRUMP” which is secret code for “You are driving in a country that drives on the other side from you, back into your lane.” However, these are for the driver to use to determine which position they should hold on the road. In this case, it’s not just a personal guidance, it’s a vital social compact that allows us to drive and not have it look like The Road Warrior.

Mel Gibson looks upset – has he seen his press in the early 21st Century?

But the key point for these lines is that they do not actually have any ability to physically restrain your car. Yes, we can observe people swerving over the road, whether police or cameras are viewing, but that little white or yellow line doesn’t do anything except give you a reference point.

When we are serious about the danger, we put up large pieces of steel and concrete – we build fences. The fences stop people from heading over into the precipice, they stop people from crossing into oncoming traffic and they even can deflect noise away from houses to help other people. Again, we have an individual and a social aspect to these barriers but these are no ‘ignore it’ mechanism – this is physics!

The analogy is excellent for the barriers and measures that we can use in teaching. An aware student, one who needs the occasional reminder, will see themselves moving over the white lines (perhaps not doing the work to a previous standard) and maybe even hear the lane markers (get a low mark on a mid-term) but they can usually be relied upon to pull themselves back. But those students who are ‘asleep at the wheel’ will neither see the lines nor hear the warnings and that’s where we have a problem.

In terms of contribution and assessment, a student who is not showing up to class can’t get reports on what they’re failing, because they’ve submitted nothing to be marked. This is one of the reasons I try to chase students who don’t submit work, because otherwise they’ll get no feedback. If I’m using a collaborative mode to structure knowledge, students won’t realise what they’re missing out on if they just download the lecture notes – and they may not know because all of the white line warnings are contained in the activity that they’re not showing up for.

This places a great deal of importance on finding out why students aren’t even awake at the wheel, rather than just recording that they’ve skipped one set of lines, another, wow, they’re heading towards the embankment and I hope that the crash barrier holds.

Both on the road and in our classes, those crash barriers are methods of last resort. We have an ‘Unsatisfactory Academic Progress’ system that moves students to different level of reporting if they start systematically under performing – the only problem is that, to reach the UAP, you already have to be failing and, from any GPA calculation, even one fail can drag your record down for years. Enough fails to make UAP could mean that you will never, ever be perceived as a high performing student again, even if you completely turn your life around. So this crash barrier, which does work and has saved many students from disappearing off with fails, is something that we should not rely upon. Yes, people live through crash barrier collisions but a lot don’t and a lot get seriously injured.

Where are warning lines in our courses? We try to put one in within a week of starting, with full feedback and reporting in detail on one assessment well within the first 6 weeks of teaching. Personally, I try to put enough marking on the road that students can work out if they think that they are ready to be in that course (or to identify if they can get enough help to stay in), before they’ve been charged any money and it’s too late to withdraw.

I know a lot of people will read this and think “Hey, some people fail” and, yes, that’s perfectly true. Some people have so much energy built up that nothing will stop them and they’ll sail across the road and flip over the barrier. But, you know what? They had to start accelerating down that path somewhere. Someone had to give them the idea that what they were doing was ok – or they found themselves in an environment where that kind of bad reasoning made sense.

Someone may have seen them swerving all over the road, 10 miles back, and not known how to or had the ability to intervene. On the roads, being the domain of physics, I get that. How do you stop a swerving drunk without endangering yourself unless you have a squad of cars, trained officers, crash mats and a whole heap of water? That’s hard.

But the lines, markers and barriers in our courses aren’t dependent on physics, they are dependent upon effort, caring, attentiveness, good design and sound pedagogy. As always, I’m never saying that everyone should pass just for showing up but I am wondering aloud, mostly to myself, how I can construct something that keeps the crashes to a minimum and the self-corrections minor and effective.

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