By George, I Think She’s Got I… No, She Hasn’t: Threshold Concepts and Oscillation

Posted: November 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

“Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?” marks the end of the musical “My Fair Lady” and, in many ways, sets the stage for a new set of developments in the life of the former-flowergirl Eliza Doolittle and the curmudgeonly and misogynistic Henry Higgins. (A far more romantic end in many ways than the original Shaw but, as one the producers noted, the public were happier with the upbeat ending. In fact, one of the producers observed to Shaw that “Your ending is damnable; you ought to be shot.” O tempora, o mores!) Much of this play/film, about the re-education of a Cockney flower girl into the speech patterns and behaviours of the wealthy English upper class, focused on Eliza’s transition and her ability to apply all of the knowledge that Higgins and Pickering sought to impart. Eliza, for dramatic value, had grand successes and major set-backs. Having mastered some fundamental phonemes, her exuberant nature was her undoing at the racetrack. Convinced that she had now absorbed the speech patterns so well that Cockney was now behind her, the entrance of her father immediately undid everything and brought her back to her birth speech.

Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews from the Broadway production. The film version featured Audrey Hepburn as the studio wanted a ‘name’. Not only did Hepburn have to be dubbed for singing but Julie Andrews went on to take the Oscar for Mary Poppins in the same year. Ouch.

This is a play, so let’s not read too much into the educational presentation, but as an introduction to the phenomenon of oscillation, it’s quite a nice one. Threshold concept theory holds that there are certain concepts in every area of knowledge that are fundamentally challenging to the learner. These concepts are alien or counter-intutitive, they link together a great many concepts from within the area or subarea, but upon reaching a level of understanding of the concept, it transforms the way that we think from that time on. These threshold concepts mark a boundary between areas and ways of thinking: truly mastering a threshold concept will open up new vistas and change forever how we regard that area of knowledge. The problem is that the progress that a learner makes towards mastering the threshold concept is not guaranteed to be a smooth path: this is a road towards a challenge and it is often a hard road to travel. When a learner starts trying to master the new concept, they enter what is referred to as the liminal state and it is during this state that they can experience oscillation and risk developing fragile knowledge.

Oscillation is the movement backwards and forwards in terms of developing and understanding components of the concept, and is frustrating to both learner and educator as the learner appears to be ‘getting it’ then moves backwards. An obvious misinterpretation of this is that the learner has “stopped trying” or is either “’lazy” or “stupid”, when in fact this reflects the intrinsic cognitive difficulty in the underlying concept. Fragile knowledge is where the learner has some notions of how to solve problems but cannot construct a clean solution, which may allow excellent participation in certain activities and assessments but not others. Along with these, it’s important to remember that  sometimes learners will resort to mimicry: turning around what the learner has already seen and presenting it back to us, again giving a false impression of understanding.

We have, I suspect, all faced the student who appears to have (after much effort) achieved the understanding that we both sought and, as we probe their knowledge, we only see confirmation of mastery until, oh no, suddenly it all falls apart and we realise that what we were seeing was built upon fragile knowledge and couldn’t really function as a foundation for all of the concepts, or that we had unwittingly provided an environment where the student could parrot our own wisdom back to us and give us the impression of understanding. We must, however, remember how frustrating it must be for the student to suddenly discover that all of the progress that they thought they had made was not actually sustainable or all that solid. Taking an accusatory or judgemental stance at this point is really not going to help anyone but, if we accept that threshold concepts exist and provide this level of challenge, we have a way to think about these kinds of setbacks that say “We’re in the liminal state. This is just what happens.”

One of the reasons that I think threshold concept theory resonates with me so deeply is that gives me a basis for a quiet stoicism in the face of these kinds of setbacks. You probably shouldn’t set out on a cross-country trip and expect to see no red lights or roadworks, or to never get lost taking a turn off to go and buy lunch, because you will be deeply unhappy and frustrated by the first reversal of fortune. You also would not build in enough time to reach your destination! (One time I was driving about 6 hours across the US to see my family and the GPS took me the ‘fast’ way, which turned out to be DC to the Tennessee/VA border via West Virginia. Fortunately my family love me, so showing up 30 minutes late wasn’t a big deal, but the fault was mine because I had not allowed enough time to handle 30-60 minutes of delay, and that’s pretty much the amount of delay I get over time on that trip.) Sometimes things will take longer because these concepts are hard to grasp and we are on uncertain ground. This isn’t about learning 2×2, 2×3 and so on, this is going to transform the way that someone thinks. That makes it important.

These ideas have huge implications on everything we do with students that have deadlines or any form of time restriction. If these concepts are so counter-intutitive and challenging, then we would expect to see variation in how quickly people pick things up. Maybe that one-hour lecture slot isn’t enough? This is where the new materials and media that we have really start to look useful. Suddenly, your lecture recordings give people the chance to think and digest, rolling forwards and backwards to get a really good grip. Scaffolded on-line materials, with increasing conceptual difficulty that allows the student to stage their self-testing and establish that they are thinking along the right lines, become much more important and are worth a lot more invested time.

Accepting threshold concept theory, however, may be a threshold concept itself – it may be a while before we see really widespread acceptance of this simple idea.

Ethics and Opinion: Please Stop Confusing My Students

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

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

They’re just sayin’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schopenhauer is Bogarting the Chopstick: Resource Scarcity in a Time of Sufficiency.

Posted: November 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Schopenhauer holding invisible chopstick and waiting for Heidegger to put his down.

There’s a classic problem in Computer Science called the Dining Philosophers’ problem and I’m going to introduce it here for those who haven’t heard it before. The original formulation (Tony Hoare after Dijkstra’s basic problem) used forks and spaghetti. I’m Australian so I’m going bow to the delight of fusion cuisine and use chopsticks and rice (I didn’t invent this, let me hasten to add, this has been a common restatement for years now). For those who don’t know, to pick anything up, you need two chopsticks. Here’s the problem:

Five philosophers are sitting around a circular table, silently, with a chopstick between each pair of philosophers. There is a bowl of rice on that table that every philosopher can reach (or they each have a bowl, it doesn’t matter, the rice is infinite but cannot be consumed without chopsticks). These philosophers aren’t talking: they either think (silently) or eat. If they wish to eat they need to pick up the chopsticks on either side of them. A philosopher will eat for a while, then stop and put down the chopsticks on the table. A philosopher can pick up the chopsticks separately or at the same time, as long as they are on the table. He or she cannot start eating without having both chopsticks.

The problem that is presented in terms of philosophers who think or eat, in a world of rice and chopsticks, is actually a very good example of competing access to shared resources and it very neatly and quickly identifies how such a simpler set-up can quickly fail if we don’t think carefully about how we control access. What we want is way that the philosophers can behave that allows them all to eat and think alternately without having to provide some sort of fixed schedule or perfect knowledge of what every other philosopher is going to do.

There are enough chopsticks for at most two philosophers to eat at the same time (there must be five chopsticks and we need two to eat) so we know that it is possible that the philosophers can eat, given how the chopsticks are arranged. (If we had stated the problem the same way but included only 1 chopstick, or 2 in a way that no philosopher could grab both, then we could determine that everyone would starve.) What might be less obvious is that it is possible to enter a state called deadlock, where our system reaches a state where no progress is possible. What would happen, for example, if after a period of thinking, every philosopher decided to pick up their left hand chopstick, pausing before picking up the right? In this case, every philosopher holds one chopstick, which is not enough to allow eating, but now there are none left on the table! If we have not thought about how we will give that resource back then we are at risk of leaving the system in that state. If, more subtly, we haven’t thought about the possibility that we can’t start eating (and we know that eating has a duration), then we will wait indefinitely for a second chopstick that will never come, because we didn’t consider that waiting for a chopstick could also have a finite duration.

Of course, just putting in a time interval that we wait before putting the fork down is not necessarily going to work either. If all philosophers pick up their left chopstick at the same time, but put it down after 10 minutes, then this behaviour will cycle forever – now we’re seeing livelock. (I won’t go into the technical detail but the key difference between deadlock and live lock is that deadlock sticks in one state, where livelock switches between states but still makes no progress in this transition. Deadlock is a brick wall in the corridor, livelock is the dance between you and a coworker as you try to sidestep each other in the same corridor until you both die of politeness.)

This problem is at the core of Computer Science and Operating Systems, in particular, as modern systems are made up of lots and lots of activity being conducted over one set of resources. There are several very interesting solutions to these types of problems and it illustrates one very important point in communicating ideas to students: the analogy that we use (if we use one) has to be familiar to the students and robust enough to correctly demonstrate the idea.

The original version of the problem, as I heard it as well, involved forks and spaghetti. Philosophers needed two forks to eat. That’s fine, but most of my students then say “but I only need one fork to eat spaghetti” and you then have the choice of saying “Ah, but you need two forks to lift spaghetti” or you start making the model arbitrarily fixed (“you just need two in this case”). If you make it a knife and a fork, which is how many people eat, then you immediately have a problem as you cannot require a knife and a fork pair and expect anything sensible to happen with an odd number. For an odd number of pieces of cutlery, one philosopher is sitting there with either two forks (default problem) or two knives (and commits seppuku rather than wait to die a slow longer death of starvation).

The other interesting thing that we lead into, when we present this problem, is that we can talk about two very important ideas: safety and liveness. Safety constraints stop anything bad from happening and are sometimes placed on to systems to protect them (from us, or us from them). Liveness goals require us to try and make something good happen whenever we can do so, so that we may make as much progress as possible towards our goal. Adding these two new considerations adds new dimensions to our original problem, which amounted to “let the philosophers think and eat without starving”. Now we have to think about how to potentially protect the philosophers from each other and from themselves but this is balanced against a requirement to ensure that we actually allow the philosophers to make as much progress as possible.

In discussing “Dining Philosophers” and the reason that we might use chopsticks, we immediately start to get the students thinking about what they do, with an example that matches what the real experience is. Of course, in Australia, we use chopsticks a lot. The restatement (which is both commonly used and effectively global) takes a good abstraction that conceals some clever thinking and makes it even better. Like many things that start well, more thought and the involvement of more people can often be beneficial. Of course, many of my students ask “why can’t they just speak to each other?’ which is a perfectly reasonable question but then requires co-ordination and communication burden – but it’s worth noting that the Chandy / Ayushi solution does add that as well! This question gives us a way to talk about how the real systems work in more detail but, more subtly, it’s a question and that means that someone is potentially interested in the answer, even if they thought they were being flippant.

Seriously? Victimising Other Students is Not Letting Your Hair Down

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

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

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

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

“Boys will be boys.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Traditions, Bad Behaviour and A Reasonable Expectation.

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

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

A subtly phrased headline from the Sun-Herald.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Planning Spontaneity

Posted: November 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Whenever I teach an intensive mode class, as I’ve just finished doing, I have to face the fact that I just don’t have the same level of ‘slack’ time between classes that I’m used to. In a traditional model of 2-3 lectures a week, I usually get a break of up to 5 or so days between each teaching activity to make changes based on student feedback, to rehearse and to plan. When you’re teaching 3 hours on Friday, 6 hours on Saturday and 7 hours on Sunday, and adding a good hour of extra time per session on for student questions, you have no slack.

I like to able to take the class in a wide range of directions, where student questions and comments allow the exploration of the knowledge in a way that recognises how the students appear to be engaging with it. I still get all of the same content across (and it’s in the notes and probably podcasts as well) but we may meander a fair bit on our path through it. I learned, very early on, that being able to be spontaneous like this and still cover everyone was not something that I could achieve without planning.

The New Caledonian Crow can spontaneously solve problems without planning. I’m guessing that this doesn’t include teaching Computer Networks to humans.

If I don’t ask students any questions, or they don’t ask me any, then I can predict how the lecture will roll out. I can also predict that most students will end up asleep and that they will learn very little. Not a good solution. I like to be able to try different things, other activities, focus on issues of direct concern to the students but, given that I have almost no reaction time in a tight teaching mode like this, how can I do it? Here are five things that I’ve found are useful. There are more but these are my top five and I hope that they’re helpful – there’s nothing really earth-shattering here but there’s a tweak here and there.

  1. Get any early indications you can of what students are interested in. Use this to identify areas that might get explored more.

    Have you set an assignment on ‘subject X’? Students will be interested in subject X. Has something been in the news? Is there something on the student’s mind? In the previous post, I used a question board to find out what each student was really curious about. A quick scan of that every now and then gave me an idea of what the students would talk about, ask questions about and care about. It also allowed me to do some quick looking up to confirm areas that weren’t on the traditional course that could add more interest.

  2. Review the course and know what can be dropped. Plan not to but have it as a safety valve.

    Ok, this is Teaching 101, but it’s essential in an intensive course. Once it’s over, you’ve missed the chance to add new content and you only have 2.5 days to get it across. I know which areas I can reduce depth on if we’ve gone deep elsewhere but, sometimes, I’m in a section where nothing can be dropped. Therefore I use that knowledge to say “I can’t drop anything” so I have to use a different strategy like…

  3. Have a really good idea of how long everything will take. Be prepared to hold to time if you have to.

    If you run 10 minutes over in a traditional lecture, the next lecturer will grumble, the students will grumble, but the end of the day resets the problem. Do that in intensive mode and you lose an hour for every six lectures. On the course I just did, you’d lose nearly three lectures (worst case). Yes, yes, we’re all rehearsing our content and re-reading it before we present, but intensive mode students have different demands, and may keep asking you questions because they know this is one of their few chances to talk to you face-to-face, which brings me to…

  4. Understand your students.

    My intensive students have full-time jobs when they’re not in my classroom. They’re so dedicated to their studies that they work 5 days, spend Friday night with me, work Saturday morning, and then spend Saturday and Sunday afternoon with me. What does this mean? It means that I can’t just run over on Friday night because I feel like it. I need to respect the demands on their time. Some of them might be late because of public transport or work running over and things like that – because we’re all jamming stuff in. I don’t condone students not caring about things but I do try to understand my students and respect the amount of effort they’re putting in. What else does this mean? I have to be very interesting and very clear in my explanations on Sunday, preferably with lots of interactive activities of one form or another, because everyone is really, really tired by then.

  5. Understand yourself.

    The whole reason I plan really carefully for these activities is that, by Sunday, I’m pretty tired myself. University courses do not usually run at this pace and this is not my usual approach. I’m rounding out a 10 day week at a pace that’s faster than usual. While I will still be quite happily able to teach, interact and work with my students, there’s no way that I’m going to be very creative. If I want to support interesting activities on Sunday, I need to plan them early and identify their feasibility on Friday and Saturday. However, I plan with the assumption that it will go ahead.

This Sunday I ran a collaborative activity that I had planned earlier, foreshadowed to the students and used as a driver for thinking about certain parts of the course. It ran, and ran well, but there’s no way that I could have carried it out ‘off the cuff’ and everything good that happened on Sunday had been planned at least a few days in advance, with some of it planned weeks before.

I love being spontaneous in the classroom but it has taken me years to realise that the best opportunities for the kind of spontaneity that builds useful knowledge are almost always very carefully planned.

 

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →