Your love is like bad measurement.

Posted: June 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

(This is my 200th post. I’ve allowed myself a little more latitude on the opinionated scale. Educational content is still present but you may find some of the content slightly more confronting than usual. I’ve also allowed myself an awful pun in the title.)

People like numbers. They like solid figures, percentages, clear statements and certainty. It’s a great shame that mis-measurement is so easy to do, when you search for these figures, and so much a part of our lives. Today, I’m going to discuss precision and recall, because I eventually want to talk about bad measurement. It’s very easy to get measurement wrong but, even when it’s conducted correctly, the way that we measure or the reasons that we have for measuring can make even the most precise and delicate measurements useless to us for an objective scientific purpose. This is still bad measurement.

I’m going to give you a big bag of stones. Some of the stones have diamonds hidden inside them. Some of the stones are red on the outside. Let’s say that you decide that you are going to assume that all stones that have been coloured red contain diamonds. You pull out all of the red stones, but what you actually want is diamonds. The number of red stones are referred to as the number of retrieved instances – the things that you have selected out of that original bag of stones. Now, you get to crack them open and find out how many of them have diamonds. Let’s say you have R red stones and D1 diamonds that you found once you opened up the red stones. The precision is the fraction D1/R: what percentage of the stones that you selected (Red) were actually the ones that you wanted (Diamonds). Now let’s say that there are D2 diamonds (where D2 is greater than or equal to zero) left back in the bag. The total number of diamonds in that original bag was D1+D2, right? The recall is the fraction of the total number of things that you wanted (Diamonds, given by D1+D2) that you actually got (Diamonds that were also painted Red, which is D1). So this fraction is D1/(D1+D2),the number you got divided by the number that there were there for you to actually get.

Sorry, Logan5, your time is up.

If I don’t have any other mechanism that I can rely upon for picking diamonds out of the bag (assuming no-one has conveniently painted them red), and I want all of the diamonds, then I need to take all of them out. This will give me a recall of 100% (D2 will be 0 as there will be nothing left in the bag and the fraction will be D1/D1). Hooray! I have all of the diamonds! There’s only one problem – there are still only so many diamonds in that bag and (maybe) a lot more stones, so my precision may be terrible. More importantly, my technique sucks (to use an official term) and I have no actual way of finding diamonds. I just happen to have used a mechanism that gets me everything so it must, as a side effect, get me all of the diamonds. I haven’t actually done anything except move everything from one bag to another.

One of the things about selection mechanisms is that people often seem happy to talk about one side of the precision/recall issue. “I got all of them” is fine but not if you haven’t actually reduced your problem at all. “All the ones I picked were the right ones” sounds fantastic until you realise that you don’t know how many were left behind that were also the ones that you wanted. If we can specify solutions (or selection strategies) in terms of their precision and their recall, we can start to compare them. This is an example of how something that appears to be straightforward can actually be a bad measurement – leave out one side of precision or recall and you have no real way of assessing the utility of what it is that you’re talking about, despite having some concrete numbers to fall back on.

You may have heard this expressed in another way. Let’s assume that you can have a mechanism for determining if people are innocent or guilty of a crime. If it was a perfect mechanism, then only innocent people would go free and only guilt people would go to jail. (Let’s assume it’s a crime for which a custodial sentence is appropriate.) Now, let’s assume that we don’t have a perfect mechanism so we have to make a choice – either we set up our system so that no innocent person goes to jail, or we set up our system so that no guilty person is set free. It’s fairly easy to see how our interpretation of the presumption of innocence, the notion of reasonable doubt and even evidentiary laws would be constructed in different ways under either of these assumptions. Ultimately, this is an issue of precision and recall and by understanding these concepts we can define what we are actually trying to achieve. (The foundation of most modern law is that innocent people don’t go to jail. A number of changes in certain areas are moving more towards a ‘no one who may be guilty of crimes of a certain type will escape us’ model and, unsurprisingly, this is causing problems due to inconsistent applications of our simple definitions from above.)

The reason that I brought all of this up was to talk about bad measurement, where we measure things and then over-interpet (torture the data) or over-assume (the only way that this could have happened was…) or over-claim (this always means that). It is possible to have a precise measurement of something and still be completely wrong about why it is occurring. It is possible that all of the data that we collect is the wrong data – collected because our fundamental hypothesis is in error. Data gives us information but our interpretative framework is crucial in determining what use we can make of this data. I talked about this yesterday and stressed the importance of having enough data, but you really have to know what your data means in order to be sure that you can even start to understand what ‘enough data’ means.

One example is the miasma theory of disease – the idea that bad smells caused disease outbreaks. You could construct a gadget that measured smells and then, say in 18th Century England, correlate this with disease outbreaks – and get quite a good correlation. This is still a bad measurement because we’re actually measuring two effects, rather than a cause (dead mammals introducing decaying matter/faecal bacteria etc into water or food pathways) and the effects (smell of decomposition, and diseases like cholera, E. Coli contamination, and so on). We can collect as much ‘smell’ data as we like, but we’re unlikely to learn much more because any techniques that focus on the smell and reducing it will only work if we do things like remove the odiferous elements, rather than just using scent bags and pomanders to mask the smell.

To look at another example, let’s talk about the number of women in Computer Science at the tertiary level. In Australia, it’s certainly pretty low in many Universities. Now, we can measure the number of women in Computer Science and we can tell you exactly how many are in a given class, what their average marks are, and all sorts of statistical data about them. The risk here is that, from the measurements alone, I may have no real idea of what has led to the low enrolments for women in Computer Science.

I have heard, far too many times, that there are too few women in Computer Science because women are ‘not good at maths/computer science/non-humanities courses’ and, as I also mentioned recently when talking about the work of Professor Seron, this doesn’t appear to the reason at all. When we look at female academic performance, reasons for doing the degree and try to separate men and women, we don’t get the clear separation that would support this assertion. In fact, what we see is that the representation of women in Computer Science is far lower than we would expect to see from the (marginally small) difference that does appear at the very top end of the data. Interesting. Once we actually start measuring, we have to question our hypothesis.

Or we can abandon our principles and our heritage as scientists and just measure something else that agrees with us.

You don’t have to get your measurement methods wrong to conduct bad measurement. You can also be looking for the wrong thing and measure it precisely, because you are attempting to find data that verifies your hypothesis, but rather than being open to change if you find contradiction, you can twist your measurements to meet your hypothesis, you can only collect the data that supports your assumptions and you can over-generalise from a small scale, or from another area.

When we look at the data, and survey people to find out the reasons behind the numbers, we reduce the risk that our measurements don’t actually serve a clear scientific purpose. For example, and as I’ve mentioned before, the reason that there are too few women studying Computer Science appears to be unpleasantly circular and relates to the fact that there are too few women in the discipline over all, reducing support in the workplace, development opportunities and producing a two-speed system that excludes the ‘newcomers’. Sorry, Ada and Grace (to name but two), it turns out that we seem to have very short memories.

Too often, measurement is conducted to reassure ourselves of our confirmed and immutable beliefs – people measure to say that ‘this race of people are all criminals/cheats/have this characteristic’ or ‘women cannot carry out this action’ or ‘poor people always perform this set of actions’ without necessarily asking themselves if the measurement is going to be useful, or if this is useful pursuit as part of something larger. Measuring in a way that really doesn’t provide any more information is just an empty and disingenuous confirmation. This is forcing people into a ghetto, then declaring that “all of these people live in a ghetto so they must like living in a ghetto”.

Presented a certain way, poor and misleading measurement can only lead to questionable interpretation, usually to serve a less than noble and utterly non-scientific goal. It’s bad enough when the media does it but it’s terrible when scientists, educators and academics do it.

Without valid data, collected on the understanding that a world-changing piece of data could actually change our data, all our work is worthless. A world based on data collection purely for the sake of propping up, with no possibility of discovery and adaptation, is a world of very bad measurement.

The Internet is Forever

Posted: June 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

I realise that, between this blog and my other blog, I have a lot of ‘Nick” out there and there is always a chance that this may come back to haunt me. Well, given that I’m blogging under my own name and I have a vague idea of how this whole Internet thing works, I was ready for this possibility. What always amazes me, however, is when people don’t realise that the Internet is neither memoryless nor able to be reformatted through fiat, no matter how much you want it to be so. Anything that goes out into the Internet is, for most reasonable definitions, going to be there forever. Trying to act against the Internet… ooh… look up the Streisand Effect (Wikipedia link), if you don’t know what that is.

You may have read about the 9-year old Scottish school girl, Martha Payne, who was a bit disappointed about the range and quantity of school lunches she was receiving so, with her dad’s help and with her teachers’ knowledge, started a blog about it. You can read the whole story here (Wired link), with lots of tasty links, but the upshot is this:

  1. Martha wasn’t happy with her lunches because she wanted a bit more salad, to go along with the fried food, pizza and croquettes that made up her lunch.
  2. Very politely, and without a huge axe to grind, she started putting up pictures of her lunch.
  3. Within two weeks, unlimited salads had been added for children at her school. (This is just one of the improvements that took place over time.)
  4. To make better use of the positive feedback and publicity, after about 20 posts, she asked people who liked and followed her blog to donate money to a group that fund school meals in Africa.
  5. People started following her in greater numbers. Other students started sending in pictures of their lunches.
  6. People started writing about her.
  7. Martha was pulled out of class to be told that she could no longer photograph her school meals because of something that showed up in a newspaper.

This was one of the first school lunches that Martha posted about (picture from her blog). Yes, that’s the lot. The rabid sausage looking thing is potato covered in stuff. That is also MAXIMUM ALLOWABLE CORN.

At this point, the people who were directing the school, the Argyll and Bute Council, went ever so slightly mad and forgot everything I just told you about the Internet. Firstly, because it was now obvious to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people that the A&B Council had censored a little girl from publishing pictures of her lunch. Secondly, because they posted an inaccurate and rather unpleasant statement about it, seeming to forget that everyone else could see what Martha had said and what the newspaper had said. This, of course, led to far more people knowing about the original blog than any other action that they could have taken. (I’m jealous, here, because Katrina had been following the blog before the shutdown!)

Thirdly, they forgot that the Internet is forever – that their statements, their actions to try and stop the tide from rolling, their questionable interpretation of events that might, if I were less generous, look both disingenuous and condescending (although I would never accuse the Argyll and Bute Council of such actions, obviously), these actions, and everyone’s reactions to them, are now out there. Archived. Indexed. Contextualised. Remembered.

Of course, the outcomes are unsurprising. After the Scottish Education Minister’s jaw was retrieved from the carpet, I can only imagine the speed with which the council was rung and asked exactly why they thought it a good idea to carry out their actions against a polite 9 year old girl. I note that the ban has now been lifted, the charity that Martha was working with now has so much money from donations that they can now build four kitchens to feed African school children, and some councillors have had a rather quick lesson in what globally instantaneous persistent communication means in the 21st century.

The issue here is that one girl looked at her plate, thought about it, spoke to some people and then,very politely, said “Please ;, may I have some more ;?” More salad then ensued! Food got healthier! The people at the school had responded sensibly. Children in Africa were getting more food! This was a giant win-win for the school and A&B Council – but somebody in the council couldn’t resist the urge to take a silly action in response to something that was no more Martha’a fault than the reporting of the Titanic caused the iceberg to drift into the sea lane.

Well done, Martha! Good luck with your continued photography of your increasingly pleasant, nutritious and delightful Scottish school lunches.

A Disappointing Reality

Posted: June 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I read metafilter.com relatively regularly because aggregators help funnel information and their filter bias is not completely exclusive. An article that popped up recently dealt with the Kickstarter project of Anita Sarkeesian, who was asking for $6,000 to make a web series about “tropes vs women in video games”. There’s a New Statesman link here that you can follow for the whole unpleasant story but, assuming you’re in a hurry, let me summarise it for you.

  1. Blogger sees, from copious amounts of evidence, that video games seem to have trouble depicting women in reasonable and non-stereotyped ways.
  2. Blogger decides to set off Kickstarter to get money to produce a web series discussing this, money to cover research, playing more games and producing videos. (Blogger already has a track record in doing similar things for film.)
  3. Blogger becomes the target of attack, persistent, personal, vicious, violent, sick and twisted attacks from a skulking pit of suck that we call the Internet.

Anita Sarkeesian in her Kickstarter movie. (This image from newstatesmen.com.)

Here is a direct quote from Sarkeesian:

The intimidation and harassment effort has included a torrent of misogyny and hate speech on my YouTube video, repeated vandalizing of the Wikipedia page about me, organized efforts to flag my YouTube videos as “terrorism”, as well as many threatening messages sent through Twitter, Facebook, Kickstarter, email and my own website.  These messages and comments have included everything from the typical sandwich and kitchen “jokes” to threats of violence, death, sexual assault and rape.  All that plus an organized attempt to report this project to Kickstarter and get it banned or defunded.

You know what makes my heart sink? “The typical <x> jokes” because, of course, as a woman, I’m sorry, as a known woman on the Internet, she has seen and heard at least some of this before, just because she’s a woman. On her Wikipedia page, to quote the New Statesman article:

There are also references to Sarkeesian being “of Jewish descent”, an “entitled <racial epithet>” and having a “masters degree in Whining” (because why stick to one prejudice, when you can have them all?)

I can’t give you any more quotes because I try to keep this blog generally readable and there’s not much more I can say without having to ‘Adult rate’ this post.

Last year I attended a public seminar given by Professor Caroll Seron, who was a visiting international scholar in sociology and law at Flinders University, usually at UC Irvine, with talk entitled “The Changing Landscape of Women in the Professions: Why women study law and not engineering”. I went along, as an educator in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), I’m always looking for insight into why our female enrolments are so low and how we can improve them. What was most depressing about Professor Seron’s talk was that young women have similar reasons for going into engineering, they tend to do better financially but they tend to get relegated to gender roles once they go into work experience or work place environments, and then they leave. That is, a big group of mostly men will get the women to do what they think women should be doing, rather than letting them practice as engineers with their male counterparts.

It should come as no surprise that if you run a two-speed environment, or a free/constrained partitioning, the people that you are excluding will get the message and then they’ll leave. Which leaves fewer women in engineering, which gives us the same ‘women’s work’ nonsense workplaces.

So, much as I would like to think that it’s only the mindless Internet trolls that would act in such an obvious way, Professor Seron’s work suggests that the insidious attack on the validity of women in certain parts of the workplace is happening everywhere, every day. Until we address it, until we fix our culture, until we recognise that professional qualifications represent a capacity to do a job, regardless of which genitals we have, then what happened to Anita Sarkeesian is just a more obvious and, in some horrific ways, more honest account of how women are thought of every day, if they have the audacity to enter a ‘male sphere’.

Someone asked me for a name for a metadata repository today – for research and education. I suggested Hypatia. 2000 years and we haven’t got this rubbish sorted out yet? Seriously? Let’s strive for better.

Time Banking III: Cheating and Meta-Cheating

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

One of the problems with setting up any new marking system is that, especially when you’re trying to do something a bit out of the ordinary, you have to make sure that you don’t produce a system that can be gamed or manipulated to let people get an unfair advantage. (Students are very resourceful when it comes to this – anyone who has received a mysteriously corrupted Word document of precisely the right length and with enough relevant strings to look convincing, on more than one occasion from the same student and they then are able to hand up a working one the next Monday, knows exactly what I’m talking about.)

As part of my design, I have to be clear to the students what I do and don’t consider to be reasonable behaviour (returning to Dickinson and McIntyre, I need to be clear in my origination and leadership role). Let me illustrate this with an anecdote from decades ago.

In the early 90s, I helped to write and run a number of Multi User Dungeons (MUDs) – the text-based fore-runners of the Massively Multiplayer On-line Role Playing Games, such as World of Warcraft. The games had very little graphical complexity and we spent most of our time writing the code that drove things like hitting orcs with swords or allowing people to cast spells. Because of the many interactions between the software components in the code, it was possible for unexpected things to happen – not just bugs where code stopped working but strange ‘features’ where things kept working but in an odd way. I knew a guy, let’s call him K, who was a long-term player of MUDs. If the MUD was any good, he’d not only played it, he’d effectively beaten it. He knew every trick, every lurk, the best way to attack a monster but, more interestingly, he had a nose for spotting errors in the code and taking advantage of them. One time, in a game we were writing, we spotted K walking around with something like 20-30 ’empty’ water bottles on him. (As game writers, wizards, we could examine any object in the game, which included seeing what players were carrying.)

A bit like this, but all on one person’s shoulders and no wheels.

This was weird. Players had a limited amount of stuff that they could carry, and K should have had no reason to carry those bottles. When we examined him, we discovered that we’d made an error in the code so that, when you drank from a bottle and emptied it, the bottle ended up weighing LESS THAN NOTHING. (It was a text game and our testing wasn’t always fantastic – I learnt!) So K was carrying around the in-game equivalent of helium balloons that allowed him to carry a lot more than he usually would.

Of course, once we detected it, we fixed the code and K stopped carrying so many empty bottles. (Although, I have no doubt that he personally checked each and every container we put into the game from that point on to see if could get it to happen again.) Did we punish him? No. We knew that K would need some ‘flexibility’ in his exploration of the game, knowing that he would press hard against the rubber sheet to see how much he could bend reality, but also knowing that he would spot problems that would take us weeks or months of time to find on our own. We took him into our new and vulnerable game knowing that if he tried to actually break or crash the game, or share the things he’d learned, we’d close off his access. And he knew that too.

Had I placed a limit in play that said “Cheating detected = Immediate Booting from the game”, K would have left immediately. I suspect he would have taken umbrage at the term ‘cheating’, as he generally saw it as “this is the way the world works – it’s not my fault that your world behaves strangely”. (Let’s not get into this debate right now, we’re not in the educational plagiarism/cheating space right now.)

We gave K some exploration space, more than many people would feel comfortable with, but we maintained some hard pragmatic limits to keep things working and we maintained the authority required to exercise these limits. In return, K helped us although, of course, he played for the fun of the game and, I suspect, the joy of discovering crazy bugs. However, overall, this approach saved us effort and load, and allowed us to focus on other things with our limited resources. Of course, to make this work required careful orientation and monitoring on our behalf. Nothing, after all, comes for free.

If I’d asked K to fill out forms describing the bugs he’d found, he’d never have done it. If I’d had to write detailed test documents for him, I wouldn’t have had time to do anything else. But it also illustrates something that I have to be very cautious of, which I’ve embodied as the ‘no cheating/gaming’ guideline for Time Banking. One of the problems with students at early development stages is that they can assume that their approach is right, or even assert that their approach is the correct one, when it is not aligned with our goals or intentions at all. Therefore, we have to be clear on the goals and open about our intentions. Given that the goal of Time Banking is to develop mature approach to time management, using the team approach I’ve already discussed, I need to be very clear in the guidance I give to students.

However, I also need to be realistic. There is a possibility that, especially on the first run, I introduce a feature in either the design or the supporting system that allows students to do something that they shouldn’t. So here’s my plan for dealing with this:

  1. There is a clear no-cheating policy. Get caught doing anything that tries to subvert the system or get you more hours in any other way than submitting your own work early and it’s treated as a cheating incident and you’re removed from the time bank.
  2. Reporting a significant fault in the system, that you have either deduced, or observed, is worth 24 hours of time to the first person who reports it. (Significant needs definition but it’s more than typos.)

I need the stick. Some of my students need to know that the stick is there, even if the stick is never needed, but I really can’t stand the stick. I have always preferred the carrot. Find me a problem and you get an automatic one-day extension, good for any assignment in the bank. Heck, I could even see my way clear to making this ‘liftable’ hours – 24 hours you can hand on to a friend if you want. If part of your team thinking extends to other people and, instead of a gifted student handing out their assignment, they hand out some hours, I have no problem with that. (Mr Pragmatism, of course, places a limit on the number of unearned hours you can do this with, from the recipient’s, not the donor’s perspective. If I want behaviour to change, then people have to act to change themselves.)

My design needs to keep the load down, the rewards up but, most importantly, the rewards have to move the students towards the same goals as the primary activity or I will cause off-task optimisation and I really don’t want to do that.

I’m working on a discussion document to go out to people who think this is a great idea, a terrible idea, the worst idea ever, something that they’d like to do, so that I can bring all of the thoughts back together and, as a group of people dedicated to education, come up with something that might be useful – OR, and it’s a big or, come up with the dragon slaying notion that kills time banking stone dead and provides the sound theoretical and evidence-based support as to why we must and always should use deadlines. I’m prepared for one, the other, both or neither to be true, along with degrees along the axis.

 

Thoughts from the house of enquiry.

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

Today we renamed the building that is at the heart of the Faculty of Engineering, Computer and Mathematical Sciences. The new name for our new eight-storey, highly efficient and environmentally sustainable building, only 18 months old, is Ingkarni Wardli. This name comes from the original custodians of the land upon which the University is built, the Kaurna people, one of the indigenous people of Australia. The name means “place of learning or enquiry” but another reading of the name is “house of enquiry“, which is my favourite.

Ingkarni Wardli
The University of Adelaide

At today’s ceremony, there were the usual speeches that ones would expect at an event of this nature but the big difference for me was the sincerity and genuine recognition that accompanied the renaming. The Kaurna people are extremely pleased to have a building named in this way, and that it is this building, because they value education and enquiry and place a strong emphasis in local cultural and educational leadership. Our Executive Dean, Professor Peter Dowd, has been strongly committed to this for some time and, to do it properly, it has taken some time. (Our Vice Chancellor, Professor James McWha, has made our reconciliation week events, recognising the custodianship and contribution of the indigenous communities, a significant part of our University culture for over a decade, and has also been strongly supportive of this initiative.)

Why did it take time? Because it would have been easy to do it quickly and get it wrong. The unthinking or uninformed use of words from another language are the source of much derision on the Internet and there are even web sites devoted to it. (Don’t even ask about that unfortunate town in Europe whose name is an obscenity in English.) It would have been easy to drag together a few smatterings of language from various peoples across the region, or from the larger groups in the East of Australia, and jam this name on to the building.

Of course, it would have been a meaningless and empty gesture – potentially even insulting in its ignorance – while giving a number of people that nice warm feeling that they had used a ‘native’ name.

I work at a University. Knowledge is our business. To be more precise, the correct use of knowledge is our business. For us, this would have been far worse than launching a Nova car in a Spanish speaking country – this would have revealed us to be shallow and insular, uncaring and insensitive. Ignorant.

So it took a while. We approached the Kaurna community and quickly discovered that our original suggestion was a word that made no sense by itself – it had to be combined with another word to become a sensible phrase. Approval was sought and granted. Plans were made. Signage was changed. Today, however, the building’s name actually changed. From now on, it is Ingkarni Wardli.

I felt privileged to be a part, even in a very minor way, in today’s ceremony. The Dean’s speech emphasised the importance of the name, why we had chosen it and how it brought our cultures together. He made a point that there are many synonyms for recognition but that the two most common antonyms are ignorance and forgetfulness. By recognising the Kaurna people and asking them for a name, to work with us on providing a name, we show our awareness, our remembrance and our knowledge of their presence in the past and in the present. The representatives of the Kaurna, among them a senior Kaurna elder who gave a wonderful speech, and other peoples present clearly felt recognised, acknowledged and remembered and this cemented the importance of the ceremony. This was not a segregated event – it was all of us together, bound by our love of learning and knowledge. Seekers all, together.

I have, with some regret, seen people sniping at the name, pulling faces, making comment about how long it took, even suggesting that no-one would use the name. To them, I say, grow up. Our students learn from us (the good and the bad things we do) and we have no time for such facile and, ultimately, useless gestures. If you genuinely want to change the name, state your case, make a stand and work to change it. If not, then start using it without the eye-rolling or deliberate mis-pronunciation. Names change all the time, for far less significant reasons than this. To snipe at a name just because of the race of the people it came from? I’m sure that there’s a word for that – and it’s not one that I would ever want to see associated with someone involved in the formation of new people and the development of emerging thinkers.

There are great divides between many cultures and it is rare to be able to find a bridge that connects two disparate cultures in a way that aligns their most treasured characteristics. The naming of our new building is a bridge between the learning culture that we all value at our University and the learning culture so valued, and recognised, by the Kaurna people.

This is a good name. I look forward to using it.

Codes of Conduct: Being a Grown-Up.

Posted: May 31, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I always hope that my students are functioning at a higher level, heading towards functional adulthood, to some extent. After all, if they need to go to the bathroom, they can usually manage that in a clean and tidy manner. They dress themselves. They can answer questions. So why do some of them act like children when it comes to good/bad behaviour?

I searched for “adult child” and found this. I think Craig Ferguson should sue.

I was reading Darlena’s blog post about one of Rafe Esquith’s books and she referred to Rafe’s referral to Kohlberg’s Six Levels of Moral Development, which I ‘quote-quote’ here:

  1. I do not want to get into trouble.
  2. I want a reward.
  3. I want to please someone.
  4. I always follow the rules.
  5. I am considerate of other people.
  6. I have a personal code of behaviour.

I’ve been talking around these points for a while, in terms of the Perry classifications of duality, multiplicity and commitment. What disappoints me the most is when I have to deal with students who are either trying not to get into trouble or only work for reward – and these are their prime motivations. There’s a world of difference between having students who do things because they have worked through everything we’ve talked about and decided to commit to that approach (step 6 in this scale) and those who only do it because they feel that they will get punished if they don’t.

I always say that I expect a lot of my students and, fairly early on, I do expect them to have formed a personal code of conduct. Yes, I expect them to be timely in their submissions, but because they understand that assignment placement is deliberate and assists them in knowledge formation. Yes, I expect them to not plagiarise or cheat, but because to do so deprives them of learning opportunities. I expect them not to talk in class because they don’t want to deprive other people of learning opportunities (which is a bit of points 5 and 6).

I press this point a lot. I say that I reward what they know, as long as it’s relevant, rather than punishing them for getting things wrong. I encourage them to participate, to be aware of other people, to interact and work with me to make the knowledge transfer more effective – to allow them to construct the mental frameworks required to produce the knowledge for themselves.

I really don’t think it’s good enough to say “Well, students always do X and what can you do?” I have a number of people in my classes who have discovered, to their mounting amazement, that I basically won’t accept behaviour that doesn’t meet reasonable standards. I mean what I say when I say things and I don’t change my mind just because someone asks me. I’m tough on plagiarism and cheating. I don’t let people bully me or other people. And, amazingly, I don’t see many of these behaviours in my class.

I encourage a constructive and positive approach for all of my students – but the basis of this is that they have to establish a personal code of conduct that I can work with. If they go down this path, then everything else tends to follow and we can go a fantastic educational journey together. If they’re still stuck, doing the minimum they can get away with, because they don’t want to get yelled at, then my first (and far more difficult) task is to reach them, try and get them to think beyond using this as their only motivator.

Now, of course, the golden rule is that if you want a student to do something, then giving marks for it is the best way to go – and that’s a technique I use, and I’ve discussed it before. But it’s never JUST the marks. There’s always  reward in terms of scaffolding, or personal satisfaction, or insight. I want fiero! I also don’t want the students to do things just because I ask them to, because they want to please me. I have a middling amount of lecturing charisma but I’m always aware that I have to be content first/showmanship second. If I do that, then students are less likely to fall into the trap of trying to do things just because I ask them to.

I’m really not the kind of teacher who needs an apple on the desk. (I already have two iMacs and a MacBook Air. Ba-dum-*ting*)

Number 4 is one that I really want to steer people away from. Yes, rules should be followed – except where they shouldn’t. You may not know this but it is completely legitimate for a solider in the Australian Army to refuse to follow an illegal order. (Yes, it will probably not go very well but it’s still an option.) If a soldier, who is normally bound by the chain of command to follow orders, believes the order to be illegal (“No prisoners” being one of them) they don’t have to follow it. Australian soldiers are encouraged to exercise discretion and thought because that makes them better soldiers – they can fill in the blanks when the situation changes and potentially improve things. The price, of course, is that a thinker thinks.

Same for students. I want students who change the world, who make things better, who may occasionally walk on the grass to get to that bright new future even when the signs say ‘stay off the grass’. However, without a personal code of conduct, which rules you can bend or break are going to be fairly arbitrarily selected and are far more likely to have a selfish focus. We want rule bending in the face of sound ethics, not rationalisation.

As I said, it’s a lot to ask of students but, as I’ve always said, if I don’t ask for it, and tell people what I want, I can’t expect it and I certainly can’t build on it.

E-Library: Electronic or Ephemeral?

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

My technical and professional library is a strange beast. Part Computer Science, part graphic design, part fiction, it’s made up of new books, books I had in Uni, books that I have inherited from other academics and books that I salvaged from libraries before they disappeared. But, of course, there is a new and growing section of my library, which you can’t see on the shelves – my E-Library. I realised that, this week, I now have started an E-Library collection that grows on a monthly basis as I add more content. I shall use the term eBooks for the rest of this post, but I’m not referring to a specific format – it’s just the digitised and electronically transferable image of a book that I’m concerned with.

Why am I buying eBooks? Because they arrive within minutes. I talk about this from a student perspective in tomorrow’s main post but, for me, I buy physical+electronic where I can because I will end up with a copy that I can use right now and a copy that I can add to my physical library.

When I am gone, or when I retire, my professional library will be stripped for those things that will be kept, by me or my wife, and the rest will go out into the corridor, onto a table, for the rest of my colleagues and students to pick through. The remainder will probably be offered to a school, as the main library is not really interested in my 1950s Engineering texts. But what of texts that only exist in the Ephemeral Library? There are so many questions about this form of my library:

  1. Will I even be able to transfer all of my books? I buy mostly from suppliers who allow me to legitimately transfer the electronic copies but there are some of my books that are locked to my identity or my machine.
  2. How will I advertise them? Put up a webpage with a download link? That immediately breaches most publishers restrictions. Asking people to register their interest and then provide it to them takes effort and, most likely, means that it will be a low priority.
  3. Will the formats that I am buying today be a working format in 30 years time? We have a tendency to think in the now, forgetting that 78s are gone, 8-track is gone, cassette is mostly gone and vinyl is more fringe oriented than mainstream these days. Beta is buried deep in the ground with VHS buried just above it. The physical formats are being obliterated in the face of the relentless march of digitised containers but, remember, standards change and, worse, standards evolve within the standards themselves. At some stage BluRay X will break BluRay 1.2, most likely. In the same way, PDF 22 may lose the ability to handle earlier versions. Backwards compatibility is a grand goal but, time and again, we have eventually abandoned it on the argument that it is no longer necessary.
  4. Will I maintain the burden of updating my media to make sure that 3 doesn’t happen? How much spare time do you have?
  5. Finally, what happens when I die? I don’t think I’m allowed to transfer my iTunes account details to my wife – so over 260 songs will, at some stage, disappear from our shared iPods. The same for my library. Suddenly, books disappear. Possibly books that have not been published for years and will never be published again. Gutenberg dies and all of his Bibles spontaneously combust? Not the most robust model.

Obviously, part of the whole management process that will have to be recognised is the difference between renting, leasing and owning a digital property. If we are actually going to own things, and most people think that they own things but would be surprised if they read the fine print, we have to come up with a form of identity management that allows transfer of property to occur across legally recognisable lines. One can only hope that we’ve sorted out the simple things like child rearing, marriage, hospital visitation and social security access before we attempt to push through a global, trans-corportate, persistent rights management system that allows us to keep our collections together, even after we die.

 

Rule 0: Read Your Sources Before You Cite Them

Posted: May 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

(This, once again, is a little more opinion/political but it does touch on some important teaching points and might be useful for a class in ethics. However, some of you might find my editorial stance disagrees with your perspective.)

Some of you will have seen that the Chronicle of Higher Education recently fired one of their blogging staff because she “did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles”. You can find the story in a number of places, and there’s a reasonable summary here, but, despite people trying to turn this into a debate on “left-wing victimisation clap trap” versus “freedom of speech” versus any number of the quite offensive straw men that were put up in the original blog, Naomi Schaefer Riley committed the cardinal sin.

She published work that made a claim which could not be substantiated by the references.

The title of her blog was “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.” but, as it turned out, she hadn’t. The dissertations weren’t available to read so she wrote a scathing, dismissive and quite unpleasant article on incomplete knowledge. Then, when called on it, she claimed that she didn’t need to read them to write a 500 word blog post.

Regardless of everything else in the post, regardless of who is right, this is just not acceptable. Had she started from a position of assessing the abstracts, drawing a long bow and then saying “But, of course, we have to see the dissertations”, I suspect she’d still have her job. Journalists do this all the time. However, like scientists, there comes a point where you have to be able to pick up the grain of truth that you’re standing on and point to it. If it turns out that you’ve, effectively, made something up or, worse, misrepresented what you’ve read, then that’s unacceptable and in this case, quite rightly, the Chronicle asked her to go.

A book by Donald Knuth (which I won’t be speaking about today but there are not that many good Knuth shots. Don’t Google Image Search for him at work, because you’ll get an underwear model as well. [WHO IS NOT DONALD KNUTH, I HASTEN TO ADD.])

Years ago, when I was a junior PhD student, I needed to look up a paper that is seminal in our field “On the Translation of Languages from Left to Right” by Knuth. It is a cracker of a paper. Concise, accurate, well-written and easy to understand. I went to get it from the library, because it wasn’t on the Internet back then (*gasp*), and discovered that the volume that held it was stored in the joint store – a warehouse with a long delay for retrieving works. No matter, I arranged for it to be pulled and discovered that I was the first person in many years to grab that volume. So what people been using? Their own photocopies? Other sources? As it turns out, most people were citing a paper that cited Knuth. A survey paper, which I won’t name and that’s good camouflage because there are at least 712 other papers that cite this paper, that pulled together some other key papers and people referred to it as the resource. That, in itself, isn’t a problem. The problem occurs when you read the survey paper and then place a citation reference to the original paper.

Of course, you know that I discovered that people had done this. How? The survey paper, to avoid plagiarising Knuth, had rephrased one of the clear and concise explanations – and they had introduced a distinctive way of representing the problem. (I still found the original much clearer.) It got to the stage that I could tell who had read the original or the survey from which twist they had in their framing paragraph for a key point, without having to spend time looking at the references.

Why had people done this? Because Knuth wasn’t readily available. Being in a 1965 publication meant that many libraries had shunted these ‘old books’ to stores as newer volumes came in and it required a week or two to get it back, sometimes longer. Sometimes these volumes were lost forever. (These days, I’m happy to say, there are many on-line sources for this paper. So there’s no excuse, if you’re in CS, you go off now and read yourself some Knuth.) The survey paper was easy to find and was pretty well written. It was just unfortunate that a wrinkle had crept in that allowed us to tell Knuth from Knuth-prime.

It’s still no excuse. It’s a pretty basic rule for us – if you’ve only read the abstract, you haven’t read the paper. If you haven’t read the paper, you can’t cite the paper. If you’ve read a survey, then you can cite the survey but not one of the surveyed papers. But, categorically and set in stone, if you haven’t read the paper then you can’t criticise the paper.

Personally, I think that Naomi Schaefer Riley’s article was pretty badly written, unnecessarily vicious and was the kind of article I’d describe as “written by the food critic before they entered the restaurant”. But that’s only my opinion of the worth of the article. For that, should she lose her job? No, of course not – we differ, that’s life. But for writing an article that insinuated in the text, and stated in the heading, that she had read something, upon which she based a vitriolic criticism, which she then recanted, claiming she didn’t have enough time?

I could lose my job for that. I could even lose my PhD for that.

My Vice Chancellor could lose his job for that.

It’s a bit of a shame that it took some community nudging for the Chronicle to do something here, but I think they did the right thing. If you want to write about our world and our standards, then I think you pretty much have to exemplify them yourselves. It’s all about authenticity. Fairness. Ethics. Something that I hope Naomi Schaefer Riley can think about and learn from. I hope she’s had a chance to think about this and go forward constructively from it sometime in the future. Maybe no-one has every called her on it before? Either way, the next time she shows up, I’ll happily read what she’s written – but I will be checking her references.

 

Teaching Ethics: No Shortage of Examples

Posted: April 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , | 1 Comment

I’m giving a lecture on Ethics today, which I always enjoy. Before any professional ethicists get nervous, it’s an introductory lecture that talk about the concepts, ethics, morals, different approaches and introduces utilitarianism and the categorical imperative. I also show a picture of a monkey wearing an eye patch and a pirate bandanna because, well, that’s just me. One of the great things about this lecture is that some of my students have never really thought about what it means to live in a reasonably safe society before – and what that must mean in terms of social contracts, expectations of behaviour and ethical systems. The other great thing is that there is no shortage of examples.

Today, I’ll probably refer to the recent ruling from the US 2nd Circuit Appeals Court that “since computer code cannot be physically obtained, it doesn’t fit the legal description of a stolen good“. (There are lots of links on this but I’ve chosen the Australian Gizmodo link.) An ex-Goldman Sachs programmer spent a year in jail after downloading some source code from his ex-employer and was charged with theft. The Appeals Court ruling now says that he didn’t assume physical control and, as a result, never deprived anyone of the use of the software – which are the two requirements that should have been met for the charge to stick. (Here’s the full ruling.)

The reason that I will be bringing this is up is to start discussion on codes of behaviour, the ability to commit ‘crimes’, and the legal system and how it reacts to all of this. The summary of this case is not whether the employee did anything wrong, it’s whether the acts were illegal. The programmer, Mr Aleynikov, has been arguing since 2010 that his acts didn’t constitute a crime since and, with regard to the laws under which he was charged, he now turns out to be right and he has been released from custody, with his conviction reversed.

Now, the question can be put to the class from an ethical and moral perspective – under which circumstances would this be a correct act? Forget the criminality because it’s no longer relevant. Should this always be allowed to happen? How can we evolve laws to deal with this situation when it’s malicious and not over prosecute it? Can we use laws for this? Are we now in the area of compacts and contracts? If Mr Aleynikov had signed a document stating that he would not undertake this act, then he could be pursued for breach of contract. Depending on the penalty/reward ratio, however, given that the software that was alleged to have been stolen was valuable, it is fairly easy to see why a charge carrying a custodial sentence was pursued.

Much in the same way that the RIAA has an interesting mechanism for determining value of downloaded music, it appears that heavy prosecution is actively pursued in order “to discourage the others”. The ethical framework for the determination of how prosecution should be brought is also a very interesting area.

I will be watching with interest to see what happens in the light of this, especially if new codes are brought in to deal with it, or old codes are specifically adapted to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

For those not in Australia, there has been an anti-piracy campaign that makes statements like “You wouldn’t steal a car. You wouldn’t steal a DVD. Downloading is theft.” and so on. Almost all of the students I have spoken to have come to the same conclusion: they’re not the same because the ‘theft’ of the electronic version does not take total control of the artefact and deny someone else the use of it. It appears that the 2nd Circuit Appeals Court sides with them – the analogy is weak, at best. This, of course, does not make the deprivation of artists’, producers’ or distributors’ income a moral act – criminal laws do not have a one-to-one relationship with moral codes. This does illustrate that, in a world of easy and error-free duplication, we have to think of exactly what has occurred and be very careful that we don’t apply poor classifications and outdated codes to a new world.

And in the class, as always, discussion will ensue. The trick is to keep it flowing and avoid anyone getting too invested or ending up in a slanging match based on perceived immorality. That’s why I have the pirate monkey in there because it keeps it light. I’ll drop this example in and pull it out, for later discussion, at a hint of an increase in temperature. No doubt, there will be any number of students who will want to talk to me about this later.

I always enjoy teaching ethics!

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