Musing on Industrial Time

Posted: April 20, 2015 | Author: nickfalkner | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, curriculum, design, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, higher education, in the student's head, learning, measurement, principles of design, reflection, resources, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, time banking, universal principles of design, work/life balance, workload | 3 Comments

I caught up with a good friend recently and we were discussing the nature of time. She had stepped back from her job and was now spending a lot of her time with her new-born son. I have gone to working three days a week, hence have also stepped back from the five-day grind. It was interesting to talk about how this change to our routines had changed the way that we thought of and used time. She used a term that I wanted to discuss here, which was industrial time, to describe the clock-watching time of the full-time worker. This is part of the larger area of time discipline, how our society reacts to and uses time, and is really quite interesting. Both of us had stopped worrying about the flow of time in measurable hours on certain days and we just did things until we ran out of day. This is a very different activity from the usual “do X now, do Y in 15 minutes time” that often consumes us. In my case, it took me about three months of considered thought and re-training to break the time discipline habits of thirty years. In her case, she has a small child to help her to refocus her time sense on the now.

Modern time-sense is so pervasive that we often don’t think about some of the underpinnings of our society. It is easy to understand why we have years and, although they don’t line up properly, months given that these can be matched to astronomical phenomena that have an effect on our world (seasons and tides, length of day and moonlight, to list a few). Days are simple because that’s one light/dark cycle. But why there are 52 weeks in a year? Why are there 7 days in a week? Why did the 5-day week emerge as a contiguous block of 5 days? What is so special about working 9am to 5pm?

A lot of modern time descends from the struggle of radicals and unionists to protect workers from the excesses of labour, to stop people being worked to death, and the notion of the 8 hour day is an understandable division of a 24 hour day into three even chunks for work, rest and leisure. (Goodness, I sound like I’m trying to sell you chocolate!)

If we start to look, it turns out that the 7 day week is there because it’s there, based on religion and tradition. Interestingly enough, there have been experiments with other week lengths but it appears hard to shift people who are used to a certain routine and, tellingly, making people wait longer for days off appears to be detrimental to adoption.

If we look at seasons and agriculture, then there is a time to sow, to grow, to harvest and to clear, much as there is a time for livestock to breed and to be raised for purpose. If we look to the changing time of sunrise and sunset, there is a time at which natural light is available and when it is not. But, from a time discipline perspective, these time systems are not enough to be able to build a large-scale, industrial and synchronised society upon – we must replace a distributed, loose and collective notion of what time is with one that is centralised, authoritarian and singular. While religious ceremonies linked to seasonal and astronomical events did provide time-keeping on a large scale prior to the industrial revolution, the requirement for precise time, of an accuracy to hours and minutes, was not possible and, generally, not required beyond those cues given from nature such as dawn, noon, dusk and so on.

After the industrial revolution, industries and work was further developed that was heavily separated from a natural linkage – there are no seasons for a coal mine or a steam engine – and the development of the clock and reinforcement of the calendar of work allowed both the measurement of working hours (for payment) and the determination of deadlines, given that natural forces did not have to be considered to the same degree. Steam engines are completed, they have no need to ripen.

With the notion of fixed and named hours, we can very easily determine if someone is late when we have enough tools for measuring the flow of time. But this is, very much, the notion of the time that we use in order to determine when a task must be completed, rather than taking an approach that accepts that the task will be completed at some point within a more general span of time.

We still have confusion where our understanding of “real measures” such as days, interact with time discipline. Is midnight on the 3rd of April the second after the last moment of April the 2nd or the second before the first moment of April the 4th? Is midnight 12:00pm or 12:00am? (There are well-defined answers to this but the nature of the intersection is such that definitions have to be made.)

But let’s look at teaching for a moment. One of the great criticisms of educational assessment is that we confuse timeliness, and in this case we specifically mean an adherence to meeting time discipline deadlines, with achievement. Completing the work a crucial hour after it is due can lead to that work potentially not being marked at all, or being rejected. But we do usually have over-riding reasons for doing this but, sadly, these reasons are as artificial as the deadlines we impose. Why is an Engineering Degree a four-year degree? If we changed it to six would we get better engineers? If we switched to competency based training, modular learning and life-long learning, would we get more people who were qualified or experienced with engineering? Would we get less? What would happen if we switched to a 3/1/2/1 working week? Would things be better or worse? It’s hard to evaluate because the week, and the contiguous working week, are so much a part of our world that I imagine that today is the first day that some of you have thought about it.

Back to education and, right now, we count time for our students because we have to work out bills and close off accounts at end of financial year, which means we have to meet marking and award deadlines, then we have to project our budget, which is yearly, and fit that into accredited degree structures, which have year guidelines…

But I cannot give you a sound, scientific justification for any of what I just wrote. We do all of that because we are caught up in industrial time first and we convince ourselves that building things into that makes sense. Students do have ebb and flow. Students are happier on certain days than others. Transition issues on entry to University are another indicator that students develop and mature at different rates – why are we still applying industrial time from top to bottom when everything we see here says that it’s going to cause issues?

Oh, yes, the “real world” uses it. Except that regular studies of industrial practice show that 40 hour weeks, regular days off, working from home and so on are more productive than the burn-out, everything-late, rush that we consider to be the signs of drive. (If Henry Ford thinks that making people work more than 40 hours a week is bad for business, he’s worth listening to.) And that’s before we factor in the development of machines that will replace vast numbers of human jobs in the next 20 years.

I have a different approach. Why aren’t we looking at students more like we regard our grape vines? We plan, we nurture, we develop, we test, we slowly build them to the point where they can produce great things and then we sustain them for a fruitful and long life. When you plant grape vines, you expect a first reasonable crop level in three years, and commercial levels at five. Tellingly, the investment pattern for grapes is that it takes you 10 years to break even and then you start making money back. I can’t tell you how some of my students will turn out until 15-25 years down the track and it’s insanity to think you can base retrospective funding on that timeframe.

You can’t make your grapes better by telling them to be fruitful in two years. Some vines take longer than others. You can’t even tell them when to fruit (although can trick them a little). Yet, somehow, we’ve managed to work around this to produce a local wine industry worth around $5 billion dollars. We can work with variation and seasonal issues.

One of the reasons I’m so keen on MOOCs is that these can fit in with the routines of people who can’t dedicate themselves to full-time study at the moment. By placing well-presented, pedagogically-sound materials on-line, we break through the tyranny of the 9-5, 5 day work week and let people study when they are ready to, where they are ready to, for as long as they’re ready to. Like to watch lectures at 1am, hanging upside down? Go for it – as long as you’re learning and not just running the video in the background while you do crunches, of course!

Once you start to question why we have so many days in a week, you quickly start to wonder why we get so caught up on something so artificial. The simple answer is that, much like money, we have it because we have it. Perhaps it’s time to look at our educational system to see if we can do something that would be better suited to developing really good knowledge in our students, instead of making them adept at sliding work under our noses a second before it’s due. We are developing systems and technologies that can allow us to step outside of these structures and this is, I believe, going to be better for everyone in the process.

Conformity isn’t knowledge, and conformity to time just because we’ve always done that is something we should really stop and have a look at.

Is this a dress thing? #thedress

Posted: March 1, 2015 | Author: nickfalkner | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, blue and black dress, colour palette, community, data visualisation, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, feedback, higher education, improving perception, learning, Leonard Nimoy, llap, measurement, perception, perceptual system, principles of design, teaching, teaching approaches, thedress, thinking | 1 Comment

For those who missed it, the Internet recently went crazy over llamas and a dress. (If this is the only thing that survives our civilisation, boy, is that sentence going to confuse future anthropologists.) Llamas are cool (there ain’t no karma drama with a llama) so I’m going to talk about the dress. This dress (with handy RGB codes thrown in, from a Wired article I’m about to link to):

A picture of a dress taken in a way that confounds human colour sense.

Not even going to try to describe the colour.

When I first saw it, and I saw it early on, the poster was asking what colour it was because she’d taken a picture in the store of a blue and black dress and, yet, in the picture she took, it sometimes looked white and gold and it sometimes looked blue and black. The dress itself is not what I’m discussing here today.

Let’s get something out of the way. Here’s the Wired article to explain why two different humans can see this dress as two different colours and be right. Okay? The fact is that the dress that the picture is of is a blue and black dress (which is currently selling like hot cakes, by the way) but the picture itself is, accidentally, a picture that can be interpreted in different ways because of how our visual perception system works.

This isn’t a hoax. There aren’t two images (or more). This isn’t some elaborate Alternative Reality Game prank.

But the reaction to the dress itself was staggering. In between other things, I plunged into a variety of different social fora to observe the reaction. (Other people also noticed this and have written great articles, including this one in The Atlantic. Thanks for the link, Marc!) The reactions included:

Genuine bewilderment on the part of people who had already seen both on the same device at nearly adjacent times and were wondering if they were going mad.
Fierce tribalism from the “white and gold” and “black and blue” camps, within families, across social groups as people were convinced that the other people were wrong.
People who were sure that it was some sort of elaborate hoax with two images. (No doubt, Big Dress was trying to cover something up.)
Bordering-on-smug explanations from people who believed that seeing it a certain way indicated that they had superior “something or other”, where you can put day vision/night vision/visual acuity/colour sense/dressmaking skill/pixel awareness/photoshop knowledge.
People who thought it was interesting and wondered what was happening.
Attention policing from people who wanted all of social media to stop talking about the dress because we should be talking about (insert one or more) llamas, Leonard Nimoy (RIP, LLAP, \\//) or the disturbingly short lifespan of Russian politicians.

The issue to take away, and the reason I’ve put this on my education blog, is that we have just had an incredibly important lesson in human behavioural patterns. The (angry) team formation. The presumption that someone is trying to make us feel stupid, playing a prank on us. The inability to recognise that the human perceptual system is, before we put any actual cognitive biases in place, incredibly and profoundly affected by the processing shortcuts our perpetual systems take to give us a view of the world.

I want to add a new question to all of our on-line discussion: is this a dress thing?

There are matters that are not the province of simple perceptual confusion. Human rights, equality, murder, are only three things that do not fall into the realm of “I don’t quite see what you see”. Some things become true if we hold the belief – if you believe that students from background X won’t do well then, weirdly enough, then they don’t do well. But there are areas in education when people can see the same things but interpret them in different ways because of contextual differences. Education researchers are well aware that a great deal of what we see and remember about school is often not how we learned but how we were taught. Someone who claims that traditional one-to-many lecturing, as the only approach, worked for them, when prodded, will often talk about the hours spent in the library or with study groups to develop their understanding.

When you work in education research, you get used to people effectively calling you a liar to your face because a great deal of our research says that what we have been doing is actually not a very good way to proceed. But when we talk about improving things, we are not saying that current practitioners suck, we are saying that we believe that we have evidence and practice to help everyone to get better in creating and being part of learning environments. However, many people feel threatened by the promise of better, because it means that they have to accept that their current practice is, therefore, capable of improvement and this is not a great climate in which to think, even to yourself, “maybe I should have been doing better”. Fear. Frustration. Concern over the future. Worry about being in a job. Constant threats to education. It’s no wonder that the two sides who could be helping each other, educational researchers and educational practitioners, can look at the same situation and take away both a promise of a better future and a threat to their livelihood. This is, most profoundly, a dress thing in the majority of cases. In this case, the perceptual system of the researchers has been influenced by research on effective practice, collaboration, cognitive biases and the operation of memory and cognitive systems. Experiment after experiment, with mountains of very cautious, patient and serious analysis to see what can and can’t be learnt from what has been done. This shows the world in a different colour palette and I will go out on a limb and say that there are additional colours in their palette, not just different shades of existing elements. The perceptual system of other people is shaped by their environment and how they have perceived their workplace, students, student behaviour and the personalisation and cognitive aspects that go with this. But the human mind takes shortcuts. Makes assumptions. Has biasses. Fills in gaps to match the existing model and ignores other data. We know about this because research has been done on all of this, too.

You look at the same thing and the way your mind works shapes how you perceive it. Someone else sees it differently, You can’t understand each other. It’s worth asking, before we deploy crushing retorts in electronic media, “is this a dress thing?”

The problem we have is exactly as we saw from the dress: how we address the situation where both sides are convinced that they are right and, from a perceptual and contextual standpoint, they are. We are now in the “post Dress” phase where people are saying things like “Oh God, that dress thing. I never got the big deal” whether they got it or not (because the fad is over and disowning an old fad is as faddish as a fad) and, more reflectively, “Why did people get so angry about this?”

At no point was arguing about the dress colour going to change what people saw until a certain element in their perceptual system changed what it was doing and then, often to their surprise and horror, they saw the other dress! (It’s a bit H.P. Lovecraft, really.) So we then had to work out how we could see the same thing and both be right, then talk about what the colour of the dress that was represented by that image was. I guarantee that there are people out in the world still who are convinced that there is a secret white and gold dress out there and that they were shown a picture of that. Once you accept the existence of these people, you start to realise why so many Internet arguments end up descending into the ALL CAPS EXCHANGE OF BALLISTIC SENTENCES as not accepting that what we personally perceive as being the truth could not be universally perceived is one of the biggest causes of argument. And we’ve all done it. Me, included. But I try to stop myself before I do it too often, or at all.

We have just had a small and bloodless war across the Internet. Two teams have seized the same flag and had a fierce conflict based on the fact that the other team just doesn’t get how wrong they are. We don’t want people to be bewildered about which way to go. We don’t want to stay at loggerheads and avoid discussion. We don’t want to baffle people into thinking that they’re being fooled or be condescending.

What we want is for people to recognise when they might be looking at what is, mostly, a perceptual problem and then go “Oh” and see if they can reestablish context. It won’t always work. Some people choose to argue in bad faith. Some people just have a bee in their bonnet about some things.

“Is this a dress thing?”

In amongst the llamas and the Vulcans and the assassination of Russian politicians, something that was probably almost as important happened. We all learned that we can be both wrong and right in our perception but it is the way that we handle the situation that truly determines whether we’re handling the situation in the wrong or right way. I’ve decided to take a two week break from Facebook to let all of the latent anger that this stirred up die down, because I think we’re going to see this venting for some time.

Maybe you disagree with what I’ve written. That’s fine but, first, ask yourself “Is this a dress thing?”

Live long and prosper.

That’s not the smell of success, your brain is on fire.

Posted: February 11, 2015 | Author: nickfalkner | Filed under: Education | Tags: authenticity, collaboration, community, curriculum, design, education, educational problem, educational research, Henry Ford, higher education, in the student's head, industrial research, learning, measurement, multi-tasking, reflection, resources, student perspective, students, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, time banking, work/life balance, working memory, workload | Leave a comment

Would you mind putting out the hippocampus when you have a chance?

I’ve written before about the issues of prolonged human workload leading to ethical problems and the fact that working more than 40 hours a week on a regular basis is downright unproductive because you get less efficient and error-prone. This is not some 1968 French student revolutionary musing on what benefits the soul of a true human, this is industrial research by Henry Ford and the U.S. Army, neither of whom cold be classified as Foucault-worshipping Situationist yurt-dwelling flower children, that shows that there are limits to how long you can work in a sustained weekly pattern and get useful things done, while maintaining your awareness of the world around you.

The myth won’t die, sadly, because physical presence and hours attending work are very easy to measure, while productive outputs and their origins in a useful process on a personal or group basis are much harder to measure. A cynic might note that the people who are around when there is credit to take may end up being the people who (reluctantly, of course) take the credit. But we know that it’s rubbish. And the people who’ve confirmed this are both philosophers and the commercial sector. One day, perhaps.

But anyone who has studied cognitive load issues, the way that the human thinking processes perform as they work and are stressed, will be aware that we have a finite amount of working memory. We can really only track so many things at one time and when we exceed that, we get issues like the helmet fire that I refer to in the first linked piece, where you can’t perform any task efficiently and you lose track of where you are.

So what about multi-tasking?

Ready for this?

We don’t.

There’s a ton of research on this but I’m going to link you to a recent article by Daniel Levitin in the Guardian Q&A. The article covers the fact that what we are really doing is switching quickly from one task to another, dumping one set of information from working memory and loading in another, which of course means that working on two things at once is less efficient than doing two things one after the other.

But it’s more poisonous than that. The sensation of multi-tasking is actually quite rewarding as we get a regular burst of the “oooh, shiny” rewards our brain gives us for finding something new and we enter a heightened state of task readiness (fight or flight) that also can make us feel, for want of a better word, more alive. But we’re burning up the brain’s fuel at a fearsome rate to be less efficient so we’re going to tire more quickly.

Get the idea? Multi-tasking is horribly inefficient task switching that feels good but makes us tired faster and does things less well. But when we achieve tiny tasks in this death spiral of activity, like replying to an e-mail, we get a burst of reward hormones. So if your multi-tasking includes something like checking e-mails when they come in, you’re going to get more and more distracted by that, to the detriment of every other task. But you’re going to keep doing them because multi-tasking.

I regularly get told, by parents, that their children are able to multi-task really well. They can do X, watch TV, do Y and it’s amazing. Well, your children are my students and everything I’ve seen confirms what the research tells me – no, they can’t but they can give a convincing impression when asked. When you dig into what gets produced, it’s a different story. If someone sits down and does the work as a single task, it will take them a shorter time and they will do a better job than if they juggle five things. The five things will take more than five times as long (up to 10, which really blows out time estimation) and will not be done as well, nor will the students learn about the work in the right way. (You can actually sabotage long term storage by multi-tasking in the wrong way.) The most successful study groups around the Uni are small, focused groups that stay on one task until it’s done and then move on. The ones with music and no focus will be sitting there for hours after the others are gone. Fun? Yes. Efficient? No. And most of my students need to be at least reasonably efficient to get everything done. Have some fun but try to get all the work done too – it’s educational, I hear. 🙂

It’s really not a surprise that we haven’t changed humanity in one or two generations. Our brains are just not built in a way that can (yet) provide assistance with the quite large amount of work required to perform multi-tasking.

We can handle multiple tasks, no doubt at all, but we’ve just got to make sure, for our own well-being and overall ability to complete the task, that we don’t fall into the attractive, but deceptive, trap that we are some sort of parallel supercomputer.

We don’t need no… oh, wait. Yes, we do. (@pwc_AU)

Posted: February 11, 2015 | Author: nickfalkner | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, Australia, community, education, educational research, ethics, feedback, G20, higher education, learning, measurement, pricewaterhousecoopers, pwc, reflection, resources, science and technology, thinking, tools | Leave a comment

The most important thing about having a good idea is not the idea itself, it’s doing something with it. In the case of sharing knowledge, you have to get good at communication or the best ideas in the world are going to be ignored. (Before anyone says anything, please go and review the advertising industry which was worth an estimated 14 billion pounds in 2013 in the UK alone. The way that you communicate ideas matters and has value.)

Knowledge doesn’t leap unaided into most people’s heads. That’s why we have teachers and educational institutions. There are auto-didacts in the world and most people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps to some extent but you still have to learn how to read and the more expertise you can develop under guidance, the faster you’ll be able to develop your expertise later on (because of how your brain works in terms of handling cognitive load in the presence of developed knowledge.)

When I talk about the value of making a commitment to education, I often take it down to two things: ongoing investment and excellent infrastructure. You can’t make bricks without clay and clay doesn’t turn into bricks by itself. But I’m in the education machine – I’m a member of the faculty of a pretty traditional University. I would say that, wouldn’t I?

That’s why it’s so good to see reports coming out of industry sources to confirm that, yes, education is important because it’s one of the many ways to drive an economy and maintain a country’s international standing. Many people don’t really care if University staff are having to play the banjo on darkened street corners to make ends meet (unless the banjo is too loud or out of tune) but they do care about things like collapsing investments and being kicked out of the G20 to be replaced by nations that, until recently, we’ve been able to list as developing.

The current G20 flags. How long will Australia be in there?

PricewaterhouseCoopers (pWc) have recently published a report where they warn that over-dependence on mining and lack of investment in science and technology are going to put Australia in a position where they will no longer be one of the world’s 20 largest economies but will be relegated, replaced by Vietnam and Nigeria. If fact, the outlook is bleaker than that, moving Australia back beyond Bangladesh and Iran, countries that are currently receiving international support. This is no slur on the countries that are developing rapidly, improving conditions for their citizens and heading up. But it is an interesting reflection on what happens to a developed country when it stops trying to do anything new and gets left behind. Of course, science and technology (STEM) does not leap fully formed from the ground so this, in terms, means that we’re going to have make sure that our educational system is sufficiently strong, well-developed and funded to be able to produce the graduates who can then develop the science and technology.

We in the educational community and surrounds have been saying this for years. You can’t have an innovative science and technology culture without strong educational support and you can’t have a culture of innovation without investment and infrastructure. But, as I said in a recent tweet, you don’t have to listen to me bang on about “social contracts”, “general benefit”, “universal equity” and “human rights” to think that investing in education is a good idea. PwC is a multi-national company that’s the second largest professional services company in the world, with annual revenues around $34 billion. And that’s in hard American dollars, which are valuable again compared to the OzD. PwC are serious money people and they think that Australia is running a high risk if we don’t start looking at serious alternatives to mining and get our science and technology engines well-lubricated and running. And running quickly.

The first thing we have to do is to stop cutting investment in education. It takes years to train a good educator and it takes even longer to train a good researcher at University on top of that. When we cut funding to Universities, we slow our hiring, which stops refreshment, and we tend to offer redundancies to expensive people, like professors. Academic staff are not interchangeable cogs. After 12 years of school, they undertake somewhere along the lines of 8-10 years of study to become academics and then they really get useful about 10 years after that through practice and the accumulation of experience. A Professor is probably 30 years of post-school investment, especially if they have industry experience. A good teacher is 15+. And yet these expensive staff are often targeted by redundancies because we’re torn between the need to have enough warm bodies to put in front of students. So, not only do we need to stop cutting, we need to start spending and then commit to that spending for long enough to make a difference – say 25 years.

The next thing, really at the same time, we need to do is to foster a strong innovation culture in Australia by providing incentives and sound bases for research and development. This is (despite what happened last night in Parliament) not the time to be cutting back, especially when we are subsidising exactly those industries that are not going to keep us economically strong in the future.

But we have to value education. We have to value teachers. We have to make it easier for people to make a living while having a life and teaching. We have to make education a priority and accept the fact that every dollar spent in education is returned to us in so many different ways, but it’s just not easy to write it down on a balance sheet. PwC have made it clear: science and technology are our future. This means that good, solid educational systems from the start of primary to tertiary and beyond are now one of the highest priorities we can have or our country is going to sink backwards. The sheep’s back we’ve been standing on for so long will crush us when it rolls over and dies in a mining pit.

I have many great ethical and social arguments for why we need to have the best education system we can have and how investment is to the benefit of every Australia. PwC have just provided a good financial argument for those among us who don’t always see past a 12 month profit and loss sheet.

Always remember, the buggy whip manufacturers are the last person to tell you not to invest in buggy whips.

In Praise of the Beautiful Machines

Posted: February 1, 2015 | Author: nickfalkner | Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, AI, artificial intelligence, authenticity, beautiful machine, beautiful machines, Bill Gates, blogging, community, design, education, educational problem, ethics, feedback, Google, higher education, in the student's head, Karlheinz Stockhausen, learning, measurement, Philippa Foot, self-driving car, teaching approaches, thinking, thinking machines, tools | Leave a comment

Some mechanisms are more beautiful than others.

I posted recently about the increasingly negative reaction to the “sentient machines” that might arise in the future. Discussion continues, of course, because we love a drama. Bill Gates can’t understand why more people aren’t worried about the machine future.

…AI could grow too strong for people to control.

Scientists attending the recent AI conference (AAAI15) thinks that the fears are unfounded.

“The thing I would say is AI will empower us not exterminate us… It could set AI back if people took what some are saying literally and seriously.” Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI.

If you’ve read my previous post then you’ll know that I fall into the second camp. I think that we don’t have to be scared of the rise of the intelligent AI but the people at AAAI15 are some of the best in the field so it’s nice that they ask think that we’re worrying about something that is far, far off in the future. I like to discuss these sorts of things in ethics classes because my students have a very different attitude to these things than I do – twenty five years is a large separation – and I value their perspective on things that will most likely happen during their stewardship.

I asked my students about the ethical scenario proposed by Philippa Foot, “The Trolley Problem“. To summarise, a runaway trolley is coming down the tracks and you have to decide whether to be passive and let five people die or be active and kill one person to save five. I put it to my students in terms of self-driving cars where you are in one car by yourself and there is another car with five people in it. Driving along a bridge, a truck jackknifes in front of you and your car has to decide whether to drive ahead and kill you or move to the side and drive the car containing five people off the cliff, saving you. (Other people have thought about in the context of Google’s self-driving cars. What should the cars do?)

One of my students asked me why the car she was in wouldn’t just put on the brakes. I answered that it was too close and the road was slippery. Her answer was excellent:

Why wouldn’t a self-driving car have adjusted for the conditions and slowed down?

Of course! The trolley problem is predicated upon the condition that the trolley is running away and we have to make a decision where only two results can come out but there is no “runaway” scenario for any sensible model of a self-driving car, any more than planes flip upside down for no reason. Yes, the self-driving car may end up in a catastrophic situation due to something totally unexpected but the everyday events of “driving too fast in the wet” and “chain collision” are not issues that will affect the self-driving car.

But we’re just talking about vaguely smart cars, because the super-intelligent machine is some time away from us. What is more likely to happen soon is what has been happening since we developed machines: the ongoing integration of machines into human life to make things easier. Does this mean changes? Well, yes, most likely. Does this mean the annihilation of everything that we value? No, really not. Let me put this in context.

As I write this, I am listening to two compositions by Karlheinz Stockhausen, playing simultaneously but offset, “Kontakte” and “Telemusik“, works that combine musical instruments, electronic sounds, and tape recordings. I like both of them but I prefer to listen to the (intentionally sterile) Telemusik by starting Koktakte first for 2:49 and then kicking off Telemusik, blending the two and finishing on the longer Kontakte. These works, which are highly non-traditional and use sound in very different ways to traditional orchestral arrangement, may sound quite strange and, to an audience familiar with popular music quite strange, they were written in 1959 and 1966 respectively. These innovative works are now in their middle-age. They are unusual works, certainly, and a number of you will peer at your speakers one they start playing but… did their production lead to the rejection of the popular, classic, rock or folk music output of the 1960s? No.

We now have a lot of electronic music, synthesisers, samplers, software-driven music software, but we still have musicians. It’s hard to measure the numbers (this link is very good) but electronic systems have allowed us to greatly increase the number of composers although we seem to be seeing a slow drop in the number of musicians. In many ways, the electronic revolution has allowed more people to perform because your band can be (for some purposes) a band in a box. Jazz is a different beast, of course, as is classical, due to the level of training and study required. Jazz improvisation is a hard problem (you can find papers on it from 2009 onwards and now buy a so-so jazz improviser for your iPad) and hard problems with high variability are not easy to solve, even computationally.

So the increased portability of music via electronic means has an impact in some areas such as percussion, pop, rock, and electronic (duh) but it doesn’t replace the things where humans shine and, right now, a trained listener is going to know the difference.

I have some of these gadgets in my own (tiny) studio and they’re beautiful. They’re not as good as having the London Symphony Orchestra in your back room but they let me create, compose and put together pleasant sounding things. A small collection of beautiful machines make my life better by helping me to create.

Now think about growing older. About losing strength, balance, and muscular control. About trying to get out of bed five times before you succeed or losing your continence and having to deal with that on top of everything else.

Now think about a beautiful machine that is relatively smart. It is tuned to wrap itself gently around your limbs and body to support you, to help you keep muscle tone safely, to stop you from falling over, to be able to walk at full speed, to take you home when you’re lost and with a few controlling aspects to allow you to say when and where you go to the bathroom.

Isn’t that machine helping you to be yourself, rather than trapping you in the decaying organic machine that served you well until your telomerase ran out?

Think about quiet roads with 5% of the current traffic, where self-driving cars move from point to point and charge themselves in between journeys, where you can sit and read or work as you travel to and from the places you want to go, where there are no traffic lights most of the time because there is just a neat dance between aware vehicles, where bad weather conditions means everyone slows down or even deliberately link up with shock absorbent bumper systems to ensure maximum road holding.

Which of these scenarios stops you being human? Do any of them stop you thinking? Some of you will still want to drive and I suppose that there could be roads set aside for people who insisted upon maintaining their cars but be prepared to pay for the additional insurance costs and public risk. From this article, and the enclosed U Texas report, if only 10% of the cars on the road were autonomous, reduced injuries and reclaimed time and fuel would save $37 billion a year. At 90%, it’s almost $450 billion a year. The Word Food Programme estimates that $3.2 billion would feed the 66,000,000 hungry school-aged children in the world. A 90% autonomous vehicle rate in the US alone could probably feed the world. And that’s a side benefit. We’re talking about a massive reduction in accidents due to human error because (ta-dahh) no human control.

Most of us don’t actually drive our cars. They spend 5% of their time on the road, during which time we are stuck behind other people, breathing fumes and unable to do anything else. What we think about as the pleasurable experience of driving is not the majority experience for most drivers. It’s ripe for automation and, almost every way you slice it, it’s better for the individual and for society as a whole.

But we are always scared of the unknown. There’s a reason that the demons of myth used to live in caves and under ground and come out at night. We hate the dark because we can’t see what’s going on. But increased machine autonomy, towards machine intelligence, doesn’t have to mean that we create monsters that want to destroy us. The far more likely outcome is a group of beautiful machines that make it easier and better for us to enjoy our lives and to have more time to be human.

We are not competing for food – machines don’t eat. We are not competing for space – machines are far more concentrated than we are. We are not even competing for energy – machines can operate in more hostile ranges than we can and are far more suited for direct hook-up to solar and wind power, with no intermediate feeding stage.

We don’t have to be in opposition unless we build machines that are as scared of the unknown as we are. We don’t have to be scared of something that might be as smart as we are.

If we can get it right, we stand to benefit greatly from the rise of the beautiful machine. But we’re not going to do that by starting from a basis of fear. That’s why I told you about that student. She’d realised that our older way of thinking about something was based on a fear of losing control when, if we handed over control properly, we would be able to achieve something very, very valuable.

Rules: As For Them, So For Us

Posted: November 17, 2014 | Author: nickfalkner | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, collaboration, community, Dog Eat Dog, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, feedback, games, Generation Why, higher education, learning, measurement, student, student perspective, students, teaching, teaching approaches, time banking | 1 Comment

In a previous post, I mentioned a game called “Dog Eat Dog” where players role-play the conflict between Colonist and Native Occupiers, through playing out scenarios that both sides seek to control, with the result being the production of a new rule that encapsulates the ‘lesson’ of the scenario. I then presented education as being a good fit for this model but noted that many of the rules that students have to be obey are behavioural rather than knowledge-focussed. A student who is ‘playing through’ education will probably accumulate a list of rules like this (not in any particular order):

Always be on time for class
Always present your own work
Be knowledgable
Prepare for each activity
Participate in class
Submit your work on time

But, as noted in Dog Eat Dog, the nasty truth of colonisation is that the Colonists are always superior to the Colonised. So, rule 0 is actually: Students are inferior to Teachers. Now, that’s a big claim to make – that the underlying notion in education is one of inferiority. In the Dog Eat Dog framing, the superiority manifests as dominance in decision making and the ability to intrude into every situation. We’ll come back to this.

If we tease apart the rules for students then are some obvious omissions that we would like to see such as “be innovative” or “be creative”, except that these rules are very hard to apply as pre-requisites for progress. We have enough potential difficulty with the measurement of professional skills, without trying to assess if one thing is a creative approach while another is just missing the point or deliberate obfuscation. It’s understandable that five of the rules presented are those that we can easily control with extrinsic motivational factors – 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 are generally presented as important because of things like mandatory attendance, plagiarism rules and lateness penalties. 3, the only truly cognitive element on the list, is a much harder thing to demand and, unsurprisingly, this is why it’s sometimes easier to seek well-behaved students than it is to seek knowledgable, less-controlled students, because it’s so much harder to see that we’ve had a positive impact. So, let us accept that this list is naturally difficult to select and somewhat artificial, but it is a reasonable model for what people expect of a ‘good’ student.

Let me ask you some questions before we proceed.

A student is always late for class. Could there be a reasonable excuse for this and, if so, does your system allow for it?
Students occasionally present summary presentations from other authors, including slides prepared by scholarly authors. How do you interpret that?
Students sometimes show up for classes and are obviously out of their depth. What do you do? Should they go away and come back later when they’re ready? Do they just need to try harder?
Students don’t do the pre-reading and try to cram it in just before a session. Is this kind of “just in time” acceptable?
Students sometimes sit up the back, checking their e-mail, and don’t really want to get involved. Is that ok? What if they do it every time?
Students are doing a lot of things and often want to shift around deadlines or get you to take into account their work from other courses or outside jobs. Do you allow this? How often? Is there a penalty?

As you can see, I’ve taken each of the original ‘good student’ points and asked you to think about it. Now, let us accept that there are ultimate administrative deadlines (I’ve already talked about this a lot in time banking) and we can accept that the student is aware of these and are not planning to put all their work off until next century.

Now, let’s look at this as it applies to teaching staff. I think we can all agree that a staff member who meets that list are going to achieve a lot of their teaching goals. I’m going to reframe the questions in terms of staff.

You have to drop your kids off every morning at day care. This means that you show up at your 9am lecture 5 minutes late every day because you physically can’t get there any faster and your partner can’t do it because he/she is working shift work. How do you explain this to your students?
You are teaching a course from a textbook which has slides prepared already. Is it ok to take these slides and use them without any major modification?
You’ve been asked to cover another teacher’s courses for two weeks due to their illness. You have a basis in the area but you haven’t had to do anything detailed for it in over 10 years and you’ll also have to give feedback on the final stages of a lengthy assignment. How do you prepare for this and what, if anything, do you tell the class to brief them on your own lack of expertise?
The staff meeting is coming around and the Head of School wants feedback on a major proposal and discussion at that meeting. You’ve been flat out and haven’t had a chance to look at it, so you skim it on the way to the meeting and take it with you to read in the preliminaries. Given the importance of the proposal, do you think this is a useful approach?
It’s the same staff meeting and Doctor X is going on (again) about radical pedagogy and Situationist philosophy. You quickly catch up on some important work e-mails and make some meetings for later in the week, while you have a second.
You’ve got three research papers due, a government grant application and your Head of School needs your workload bid for the next calendar year. The grant deadline is fixed and you’ve already been late for three things for the Head of School. Do you drop one (or more) of the papers or do you write to the convenors to see if you can arrange an extension to the deadline?

Is this artificial? Well, of course, because I’m trying to make a point. Beyond being pedantic on this because you know what I’m saying, if you answered one way for the staff member and other way for the student then you have given the staff member more power in the same situation than the student. Just because we can all sympathise with the staff member (Doctor X sounds horribly familiar, doesn’t he?) doesn’t that the student’s reasons, when explored and contextualised, are not equally valid.

If we are prepared to listen to our students and give their thoughts, reasoning and lives as much weight and value as our own, then rule 0 is most likely not in play at the moment – you don’t think your students are inferior to you. If you thought that the staff member was being perfectly reasonable and yet you couldn’t see why a student should be extended the same privileges, even where I’ve asked you to consider the circumstances where it could be, then it’s possible that the superiority issue is one that has become well-established at your institution.

Ultimately, if this small list is a set of goals, then we should be a reasonable exemplar for our students. Recently, due to illness, I’ve gone from being very reliable in these areas, to being less reliable on things like the level of preparation I used to do and timeliness. I have looked at what I’ve had to do and renegotiated my deadlines, apologising and explaining where I need to. As a result, things are getting done and, as far as I know, most people are happy with what I’m doing. (That’s acceptable but they used to be very happy. I have way to go.) I still have a couple of things to fix, which I haven’t forgotten about, but I’ve had to carry out some triage. I’m honest about this because, that way, I encourage my students to be honest with me. I do what I can, within sound pedagogical framing and our administrative requirements, and my students know that. It makes them think more, become more autonomous and be ready to go out and practice at a higher level, sooner.

This list is quite deliberately constructed but I hope that, within this framework, I’ve made my point: we have to be honest if we are seeing ourselves as superior and, in my opinion, we should work more as equals with each other.

Ending the Milling Mindset

Posted: November 17, 2014 | Author: nickfalkner | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, community, curriculum, design, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, failure rate, grand challenge, higher education, in the student's head, learning, measurement, reflection, resources, student perspective, students, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, universal principles of design | 7 Comments

This is the second in a set of posts that are critical of current approaches to education. In this post, I’m going to extend the idea of rejecting an industrial revolutionary model of student production and match our new model for manufacturing, additive processes, to a new way to produce students. (I note that this is already happening in a number of places, so I’m not claiming some sort of amazing vision here, but I wanted to share the idea more widely.)

Traditional statistics is often taught with an example where you try to estimate how well a manufacturing machine is performing by measuring its outputs. You determine the mean and variation of the output and then use some solid calculations to then determine if the machine is going to produce a sufficient number of accurately produced widgets to keep your employers at WidgetCo happy. This is an important measure for things such as getting the weight right across a number of bags of rice or correctly producing bottles that hold the correct volume of wine. (Consumers get cranky if some bags are relatively empty or they have lost a glass of wine due to fill variations.)

If we are measuring this ‘fill’ variation, then we are going to expect deviation from the mean in two directions: too empty and too full. Very few customers are going to complain about too much but the size of the variation can rarely be constrained in just one direction, so we need to limit how widely that fill needle swings. Obviously, it is better to be slightly too full (on average) than too empty (on average) although if we are too generous then the producer loses money. Oh, money, how you make us think in such scrubby, little ways.

When it comes to producing items, rather than filling, we often use a machine milling approach, where a block of something is etched away through mechanical or chemical processes until we are left with what we want. Here, our tolerance for variation will be set based on the accuracy of our mill to reproduce the template.

In both the fill and the mill cases, imagine a production line that travels on a single pass through loading, activity (fill/mill) and then measurement to determine how well this unit conforms to the desired level. What happens to those items that don’t meet requirements? Well, if we catch them early enough then, if it’s cost effective, we can empty the filled items back into a central store and pass them through again – but this is wasteful in terms of cost and energy, not to mention that contents may not be able to be removed and then put back in again. In the milling case, the most likely deviance is that we’ve got the milling process wrong and taken away things in the wrong place or to the wrong extent. Realistically, while some cases of recycling the rejects can occur, a lot of rejected product is thrown away.

If we run our students as if they are on a production line along these lines then, totally unsurprisingly, we start to set up a nice little reject pile of our own. The students have a single pass through a set of assignments, often without the ability to go and retake a particular learning activity. If they fail sufficient of these tests, then they don’t meet our requirements and they are rejected from that course. Now some students will over perform against our expectations and, one small positive, they will then be recognised as students of distinction and not rejected. However, if we consider our student failure rate to reflect our production wastage, then failure rates of 20% or higher start to look a little… inefficient. These failure rates are only economically manageable (let us switch off our ethical brains for a moment) if we have enough students or they are considered sufficiently cheap that we can produce at 80% and still make money. (While some production lines would be crippled by a 10% failure rate, for something like electric drive trains for cars, there are some small and cheap items where there is a high failure rate but the costing model allows the business to stay economical.) Let us be honest – every University in the world is now concerned with their retention and progression rates, which is the official way of saying that we want students to stay in our degrees and pass our courses. Maybe the single pass industrial line model is not the best one.

Why carve back to try to reveal people, when we could build people up instead?

Enter the additive model, via the world of 3D printing. 3D printing works by laying down the material from scratch and producing something where there is no wastage of material. Each item is produced as a single item, from the ground up. In this case, problems can still occur. The initial track of plastic/metal/material may not adhere to the plate and this means that the item doesn’t have a solid base. However, we can observe this and stop printing as soon as we realise this is occurring. Then we try again, perhaps using a slightly different approach to get the base to stick. In student terms, this is poor transition from the school environment, because nothing is sticking to the established base! Perhaps the most important idea, especially as we develop 3D printing techniques that don’t require us to deposit in sequential layers but instead allows us to create points in space, is that we can identify those areas where a student is incomplete and then build up that area.

In an additive model, we identify a deficiency in order to correct rather than to reject. The growing area of learning analytics gives us the ability to more closely monitor where a student has a deficiency of knowledge or practice. However, such identification is useless unless we then act to address it. Here, a small failure has become something that we use to make things better, rather than a small indicator of the inescapable fate of failure later on. We can still identify those students who are excelling but, now, instead of just patting them on the back, we can build them up in additional interesting ways, should they wish to engage. We can stop them getting bored by altering the challenge as, if we can target knowledge deficiency and address that, then we must be able to identify extension areas as well – using the same analytics and response techniques.

Additive manufacturing is going to change the way the world works because we no longer need to carve out what we want, we can build what we want, on demand, and stop when it’s done, rather than lamenting a big pile of wood shavings that never amounted to a table leg. A constructive educational focus rejects high failure rates as being indicative of missed opportunities to address knowledge deficiencies and focuses on a deep knowledge of the student to help the student to build themselves up. This does not make a course simpler or drop the quality, it merely reduces unnecessary (and uneconomical) wastage. There is as much room for excellence in an additive educational framework – if anything, you should get more out of your high achievers.

We stand at a very interesting point in history. It is time to revisit what we are doing and think about what we can learn from the other changes going on in the world, especially if it is going to lead to better educational results.

Data: Harder to Anonymise Yourself Than You Might Think

Posted: October 18, 2014 | Author: nickfalkner | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: Black Static, blogging, community, curriculum, data, data visualisation, education, feedback, higher education, Interzone, measurement, reflection, submission, submission system, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, universal principles of design | Leave a comment

There’s a lot of discussion around a government’s use of metadata at the moment, where instead of looking at the details of your personal data, government surveillance is limited to looking at the data associated with your personal data. In the world of phone calls, instead of taping the actual call, they can see the number you dialled, the call time and its duration, for example. CBS have done a fairly high-level (weekend-suitable) coverage of a Stanford study that quickly revealed a lot more about participants than they would have thought possible from just phone numbers and call times.

But how much can you tell about a person or an organisation without knowing the details? I’d like to show you a brief, but interesting, example. I write fiction and I’ve recently signed up to “The Submission Grinder“, which allows you to track your own submissions and, by crowdsourcing everyone’s success and failures, to also track how certain markets are performing in terms of acceptance, rejection and overall timeliness.

Now, I have access to no-one else’s data but my own (which is all of 5 data points) but I’ll show you how assembling these anonymous data results together allows me to have a fairly good stab at determining organisational structure and, in one case, a serious organisational transformation.

Let’s start by looking at a fairly quick turnover semi-pro magazine, Black Static. It’s a short fiction market with horror theming. Here’s their crowd-sourced submission graph for response times, where rejections are red and acceptances are green. (Sorry, Damien.)

Black Static – Response Time Graph

Black Static has a web submission system and, as you can see, most rejections happen in the first 2-3 weeks. There is then a period where further work goes on. (It’s very important to note that this is a sample generated by those people who are using Submission Grinder, which is a subset of all people submitting to Black Static.) What this looks like, given that it is unlikely that anyone could read a lot 4,000-7,000 manuscripts in detail at a time, is that the editor is skimming the electronic slush pile to determine if it’s worth going to other readers. After this initial 2 week culling, what we are seeing is the result of further reading so we’d probably guess that the readers’ reviews are being handled as they come in, with some indication that this is one roughly weekly – maybe as a weekend job? It’s hard to say because there’s not much data beyond 21 days so we’re guessing.

Let’s look at Black Static’s sister SF magazine, Interzone, now semi-pro but still very highly regarded.

Interzone – Response Time Graph

Lots more data here! Again, there appears to be a fairly fast initial cut-off mechanism from skimming the web submission slush pile. (And I can back this up with actual data as Interzone rejected one of my stories in 24 hours.) Then there appears to be a two week period where some thinking or reading takes place and then there’s a second round of culling, which may be an editorial meeting or a fast reader assignment. Finally we see two more fortnightly culls as the readers bring back their reviews. I think there’s enough data here to indicate that Interzone’s editorial group consider materials most often every fortnight. Also the acceptances generated by positive reviews appear to be the same quantity as those from the editors – although there’s so little data here we’re really grabbing at tempting looking straws.

Now let’s look at two pro markets, starting with the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Fantasy & Science Fiction – Response Time Graph

This doesn’t have the same initial culling process that the other two had, although it appears that there is a period of 7-14 days when a lot of work has been reviewed and then rejected – we don’t see as much work rejected again until the 35 day mark, when it looks like all reader reviews are back. Notably, there is a large gap between the initial bunch of acceptances (editor says ‘yes’) and then acceptances supported by reviewers. I’m speculating now but I wonder if what we’re seeing between that first and second group of acceptances are reviewers who write back in and say “Don’t bother” quickly, rather than assembling personalised feedback for something that could be salvaged. Either way, the message here is simple. If you survive the first four weeks in F&SF system, then you are much less likely to be rejected and, with any luck, this may translate (worse case) into personal suggestions for improvement.

F&SF has a postal submission system, which makes it far more likely that the underlying work is going to batched in some way, as responses have to go out via mail and doing this in a more organised fashion makes sense. This may explain why this is such a high level of response overall for the first 35 days, as you can’t easily click a button to send a response electronically and there’re a finite number of envelopes any one person wants to prepare on any given day. (I have no idea how right I am but this is what I’m limited to by only observing the metadata.)

Tor.com has a very interesting graph, which I’ll show below.

Tor.com – Response Time Graph

Tor.com pays very well and has an on-line submission system via e-mail. As a result, it is positively besieged with responses and their editorial team recently shut down new submissions for two months while they cleared backlog. What interested me in this data was the fact that the 150 day spike was roughly twice as high as the 90 and 120. Hmm – 90, 120, 150 as dominant spikes. Does that sound like a monthly editors’ meeting to anyone else? By looking at the recency graph (which shows activity relative to today) we can see that there has been an amazing flurry of activity at Tor.com in the past month. Tor.com has a five person editorial team (from their website) with reading and support from two people (plus occasional others). It’s hard for five people to reach consensus without discussion so that monthly cycle looks about right. But it will take time for 7 people to read all of that workload, which explains the relative silence until 3 months have elapsed.

What about that spike at 150? It could be the end of the initial decisions and the start of “worth another look” pile so let’s see if their web page sheds any light on it. Aha!

Have you read my story? We reply to everything we’ve finished evaluating, so if you haven’t heard from us, the answer is “probably not.” At this point the vast majority of stories greater than four months old are in our second-look pile, and we respond to almost everything within seven months.

I also wonder if we are seeing previous data where it was taking longer to get decisions made – whether we are seeing two different time management strategies of Tor.com at the same time, being the 90+120 version as well as the 150 version. Looking at the website again.

Response times have improved quite a bit with the expansion of our first reader team (emphasis mine), and we now respond to the vast majority of stories within three months. But all of the stories they like must then be read by the senior editorial staff, who are all full-time editors with a lot on our plates.

So, yes, the size of Tor.com’s slush pile and the number of editors that must agree basically mean that people are putting time aside to make these decisions, now aiming at 90 days, with a bit of spillover. It looks like we are seeing two regimes at once.

All of this information is completely anonymous in terms of the stories, the authors and any actual submission or acceptance patterns that could relate data together. But, by looking at this metadata on the actual submissions, we can now start to get an understanding of the internal operations of an organisation, which in some cases we can then verify with publicly held information.

Now think about all the people you’ve phoned, the length of time that you called them and what could be inferred about your personal organisation from those facts alone. Have a good night’s sleep!

MOOCs and the on-line Masters Degree

Posted: September 10, 2014 | Author: nickfalkner | Filed under: Education | Tags: blogging, community, education, educational research, georgia tech, higher education, measurement, moocs, on-line learning, resources, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking | Leave a comment

There’s been a lot of interest in Georgia Tech’s new on-line masters degree in Computer Science, offered jointly with Udacity and AT&T. The first offering ran with 375 students, and there are 500 in the pipeline, but readmissions opened again two days ago so this number has probably gone up. PBS published an article recently, written up on the ACM blog.

I think we’re all watching this with interest as, while it’s neither Massive at this scale or Open (fee-paying and admission checked), if this works reasonably, let alone well, then we have something new to offer at the tertiary scale but without many of the problems that we’ve traditionally seen with existing MOOCs (retention, engagement, completion and accreditation.)

Right now, there are some early observations: the students are older (11 years older on average) and most are working. In this way, we’re much closer to the standard MOOC demographic for success: existing degree, older and practised in work. We would expect this course to do relatively well, much as our own experiences with on-line learning at the 100s scale worked well for that demographic. This is, unlike ours, more tightly bound into Georgia’s learning framework and their progress pathways, so we are very keen to see how their success will translate to other areas.

We are still learning about where MOOC (and its children SPOC and the Georgia Tech program) will end up in the overall scheme of education. With this program, we stand a very chance of working out exactly what it means to us in the traditional higher educational sector.

An inappropriate picture of a bricks-and-mortar campus for an article on on-line learning.

ITiCSE 2014, Day 3, Keynote, “Meeting the Future Challenges of Education and Digitization”, #ITiCSE2014 #ITiCSE @jangulliksen

Posted: June 25, 2014 | Author: nickfalkner | Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, community, computer science education, digital learning, digitisation, education, educational problem, educational research, higher education, ITiCSE, ITiCSE 2014, Jan Gulliksen, learning, measurement, Professor Gulliksen, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking | Leave a comment

This keynote was presented by the distinguished Professor Jan Gulliksen (@jangulliksen) of KTH. He started with two strange things. He asked for a volunteer and, of course, Simon put his hand up. Jan then asked Simon to act as a support department to seek help with putting on a jacket. Simon was facing the other way so had to try and explain to Jan the detailed process of orientating and identifying the various aspects of the jacket in order. (Simon is an exceedingly thoughtful and methodical person so he had a far greater degree of success than many of us would.) We were going to return to this. The second ‘strange thing’ was a video of President Obama speaking on Computer Science. Professor Gulliksen asked us how often a world leader would speak to a discipline community about the importance of their discipline. He noted that, in his own country, there was very little discussion in the political parties on Computer Science and IT. He noted that Chancellor Merkel had expressed a very surprising position, in response to the video, as the Internet being ‘uncharted territory‘.

Professor Gulliksen then introduced himself as the Dean of the School of Computer Science and communication in KTH, Stockholm, but he had 25 years of previous experience at Uppsala. Within this area, he had more than 20 years of experience working with the introduction of user-centred systems in public organisations. He showed two pictures, over 20 years apart, which showed how little the modern workspace has changed in that time, except that the number of post-it colours have increased! He has a great deal of interest in how we can improve the design for all users. Currently, he is looking at IT for mental and psychological disabilities, finder by Vinnova and PTS, which is not a widely explored area and can be of great help to homeless people. His team have been running workshops with these people to determine the possible impact of increased IT access – which included giving them money to come to the workshop. But they didn’t come. So they sent railway tickets. But they still didn’t come. But when they used a mentor to talk them through getting up, getting dressed, going to the station – then they came. (Interesting reflection point for all teachers here.) Difficult to work within the Swedish social security system because the homeless can be quite paranoid about revealing their data and it can be hard to work with people who have no address, just a mobile number. This is, however, a place where our efforts can have great societal impact.

Professor Gulliksen asks his PhD students: What is really your objective with this research? And he then gives them three options: change the world, contribute new knowledge or you want your PhD. The first time he asked this in Sweden, the student started sweating and asked if they could have a fourth option. (Yes, but your fourth is probably one of the three.) The student then said that they wanted to change the world, but on thinking about it (what have you done), wanted to change to contribute new knowledge, then thought about it some more (ok, but what have you done), after further questioning it devolved to “I think I want my PhD”. All of these answers can be fine but you have to actually achieve your purpose.

Our biggest impact is on the people that we produce, in terms of our contribution to the generation and dissemination of knowledge. Jan wants to know how we can be more aware of this role in society. How can we improve society through IT? This led to the committee for Digitisation, 2012-2015: Sweden shall be the best country in the world when it comes to using the opportunities for digitisation. Sweden produced “ICT for Everyone”, a Digital Agenda for Sweden, which preceded the European initiative. There are 170 different things to be achieved with IT politics but less than a handful of these have not been met since October, 2011. As a researcher, Professor Gulliksen had to come to an agreement with the minister to ensure that his academic freedom, to speak truth to power, would not be overly infringed – even though he was Norwegian. (Bit of Nordic humour here, which some of you may not get.)

The goal was that Sweden would be the best country in the world when it came to seizing these opportunities. That’s a modest goal (The speaker is a very funny man) but how do we actually quantify this? The main tasks for the commission were to develop the action plan, analyse progress in relate to goals, show the opportunities available, administer the organisations that signed the digital agenda (Nokia, Apple and so on) and collaborate with the players to increase digitisation. The committee itself is 7 people, with an ‘expert’ appointed because you have to do this, apparently. To extend the expertise, the government has appointed the small commission, a group of children aged 8-18, to support the main commission with input and proposals showing opportunities for all ages.

The committee started with three different areas: digital inclusion and equal opportunities; school, education and digital competence; and entrepreneurship and company development. The digital agenda itself has four strategic areas in terms of user participation:

Easy and safe to use
Services that create some utility
Need for infrastructure
IT’s role for societal development.

And there are 22 areas of mission under this that map onto the relevant ministries (you’ll have to look that up for yourself, I can’t type that quickly.) Over the year and a half that the committee has been running, they have achieved a lot.

The government needs measurements and ranking to show relative progress, so things like the World Economics Forum’s Networked Readiness Index (which Sweden topped) is often trotted out. But in 2013, Sweden had dropped to third, with Finland and Singapore going ahead – basically, the Straits Tiger is advancing quickly unsurprisingly. Other measures include the ICT development Index (ID) where Sweden is also doing well. You can look for this on the Digital Commisson’s website (which is in Swedish but translates). The first report has tried to map out the digital Swedend – actions and measures carried, key players and important indicators. Sweden is working a lot in the space but appears to be more passive in re-use than active in creativity but I need to read the report on this (which is also in Swedish). (I need to learn another language, obviously.) There was an interesting quadrant graph of organisations ranked by how active they were and how powerful their mandate was, which started a lot of interesting discussion. (This applies to academics in Unis as well, I realise.) (Jag behöver lära sig ett annat språk, uppenbarligen.)

The second report was released in March this year, focusing on the school system. How can Sweden produce recommendations on how the school system will improve? If the school system isn’t working well, you are going to fall behind in the rankings. (Please pay attention, Australian Government!) In Sweden, there’s a range of access to schools across Sweden but access is only one thing, actual use of the resources is another. Why should we do this? (Arguments to convince politicians). Reduce digital divide, economy needs IT-skilled labours, digital skills are needed to be an active citizen, increased efficiency and speed of learning and many other points! Sweden’s students are deteriorating on the PISA-survey rankings, particularly for boys, where 30% of Swedish boys are not reaching basic literacy in the first 9 years of schools, which is well below the OECD average. Interestingly, Swedish teachers are among the lowest when it comes to work time spent on skills development in the EU. 18% of teachers spend more than 6 days, but 9% spend none at all and is the second worst in European countries (Malta takes out the wooden spain).

The concrete proposals in the SOU were:

Revised regulatory documents with a digital perspective
Digitally based national tests in primary/secondary
web based learning in elementary ands second schools
digital skilling of teachers
digital skilling for principals
clarifying the digital component of teacher education programs
research, method development and impact measurement
innovation projects for the future of learning

Universities are also falling behind so this is an area of concern.

Professor Gulliksen also spoke about the digital champions of the EU (all European countries had one except Germany, until recently, possibly reflecting the Chancellor’s perspective) where digital champion is not an award, it’s a job: a high profile, dynamic and energetic individual responsible for getting everyone on-line and improving digital skills. You need to generate new ideas to go forward, for your country, rather than just copying things that might not fit. (Hello, Hofstede!)

The European Digital Champions work for digital inclusion and help everyone, although we all have responsibility. This provides strategic direction for government but reinforces that the ICT competence required for tomorrow’s work life has to be put in place today. He asked the audience who their European digital champions were and, apart from Sweden, no-one knew. The Danish champion (Lars Frelle-Petersen) has worked with the tax office to force everyone on-line because it’s the only way to do your tax! “The only way to conduct public services should be on the Internet” The digital champion of Finland (Linda Liukas, from Rails girls) wants everyone to have three mandatory languages: English, Chinese and JavaScript. (Groans and chuckles from the audience for the language choice.) The digital champion of Bulgaria (Gergeana Passy) wants Sofia to be the first free WiFi capital of Europe. Romania’s champion (Paul André Baran) is leading the library and wants libraries to rethink their role in the age of ICT. Ireland’s champion (Sir David Puttnam) believes that we have to move beyond triage mentality in education to increase inclusion.

In Sweden, 89% of the population is on-line and it’s plateaued at that. Why? Of those that are not on the Internet, most of them are more than 76% years old. This is a self-correcting problem, most likely. (50% of two year olds are on the Internet in Sweden!) The 1.1 million Swedes not online are not interested (77%) and 18% think it’s too complicated.

Jan wanted to leave us with two messages. The first is that we need to increase the amount of ICT practitioners. Demand is growing at 3% a year and supply is not keeping pace for trained, ICT graduates. If the EU want to stay competitive, they either have to grow them (education) or import them. (Side note: The Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs)

The second thought is the development of digital competence and improvement of digital skills among ICT users. 19% of the work force is ICT intensive, 90% of jobs require some IT skills but 53% of the workforce are not confident enough in their IT skills to seek another job in that sphere. We have to build knowledge and self-confidence. Higher Ed institutions have to look beyond the basic degree to share the resources and guidelines to grow digital competence across the whole community. Push away from the focus on exams and graduation to concentrate on learning – which is anathema to the usual academic machine. We need to work on new educational and business models to produced mature, competent and self-confident people with knowledge and make industry realise that this is actually what they want.

Professor Gulliksen believes that we need to recruit more ICT experience by bringing experts in to the Universities to broaden academia and pedagogy with industry experience. We also really, really need to balance the gender differences which show the same weird cultural trends in terms of self-deception rather than task description.

Overall, a lot of very interesting ideas – thank you, Professor Gulliksen!

Arnold Pears, Uppsala, challenged one of the points on engaging with, and training for, industry in that we prepare our students for society first, and industrial needs are secondary. Jan agreed with this distinction. (This followed on from a discussion that Arnold and I were having regarding the uncomfortable shoulder rubbing of education and vocational training in modern education. The reason I come to conferences is to have fascinating discussions with smart people in the breaks between interesting talks.)

The jacket came back up again at the end. When discussing Computer Science, Jan feels the need to use metaphors – as do we all. Basically, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you can explain something as being simple when you’re drawing down on a very rich learned context for framing the knowledge. CS people can struggle with explaining things, especially to very new students, because we build a lot of things up to reach the “operational” level of CS knowledge and everything, from the error messages presented when a program doesn’t work to the efficiency of long-running programs, depends upon understanding this rich context. Whether the threshold here is a threshold concept (Meyer and Land), neo-Piaegtian, Learning Edge Momentum or Bloom-related problem doesn’t actually matter – there’s a minimum amount of well-accepted context required for certain metaphors to work or you’re explaining to someone how to put a jacket on with your eyes closed. 🙂

One of the final questions raised the issue of computing as a chore, rather than a joy. Professor Gulliksen noted that there are only two groups of people who are labelled as users, drug users and computer users, and the systematic application of computing as a scholastic subject often requires students to lock up more powerful computer (their mobile phones) to use locked-down, less powerful serried banks of computers (based on group purchasing and standard environments). (Here’s an interesting blog on a paper on why we should let students use their phones in classes.)

Nick Falkner

Learning and Teaching in ICT at The University of Adelaide and across Australia

Musing on Industrial Time

Is this a dress thing? #thedress

That’s not the smell of success, your brain is on fire.

We don’t need no… oh, wait. Yes, we do. (@pwc_AU)

In Praise of the Beautiful Machines

Rules: As For Them, So For Us

Ending the Milling Mindset

Data: Harder to Anonymise Yourself Than You Might Think

MOOCs and the on-line Masters Degree

ITiCSE 2014, Day 3, Keynote, “Meeting the Future Challenges of Education and Digitization”, #ITiCSE2014 #ITiCSE @jangulliksen

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