“We are not providing an MIT education on the web…”

Posted: December 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve been re-watching some older announcements that describe open courseware initiatives, starting from one of the biggest, the MIT announcement of their OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative in April, 2001. The title of this post actually comes from the video, around the 5:20 mark, (Video quoted under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence, more information available at: http://ocw.mit.edu/terms)

“Let me be very clear, we are not providing an MIT education on the Web. We are, however, providing core materials that are the infrastructure that undergirds that information. Real education, in our view, involves interaction between people. It’s the interaction between faculty and students, in our classrooms and our living group, in our laboratories that are the heart, the real essence, of an MIT education. “

While the OCW was going to be produced and used on campus, the development of OCW was seen as something that would make more time available for student interaction, not less. President Vest then goes on to confidently predict that OCW will not make any difference to enrolment, which is hardly surprising given that he has categorically excluded anyone from achieving an MIT education unless they enrol. We see here exactly the same discussion that keeps coming up: these materials can be used as augmenting materials in these conventional universities but can never, in the view of the President or Vice Chancellor, replace the actual experience of obtaining a degree from that institution.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I still think that the OCW initiative was excellent, generous and visionary but we are still looking at two fundamentally different use cases: the use of OCW to augment an existing experience and the use of OCW to bootstrap a completely new experience, which is not of the same order. It’s a discussion that we keep having – what happens to my Uni if I use EdX courses from another institution? Well, ok, let’s ask that question differently. I will look at this from two sides with the introduction of a new skill and knowledge area that becomes ubiquitous,  in my sphere, Computer Science and programming. Let’s look at this in terms of growth and success.

What happens if schools start teaching programming to first year level? 

Let’s say that we get programming into every single national curriculum for secondary school and we can guarantee that students come in knowing how to program to freshman level. There are two ways of looking at this and the first, which we have probably all seen to some degree, is to regard the school teaching as inferior and re-teach it. The net result of this will be bored students, low engagement and we will be wasting our time. The second, far more productive, approach is to say “Great! You can program. Now let’s do some Computer Science.” and we use that extra year or so to increase our discipline knowledge or put breadth courses back in so our students come out a little more well-rounded. What’s the difference between students learning it from school before they come to us, or through an EdX course on fundamental programming after they come to us?

Not much, really, as long as we make sure that the course meets our requirements – and, in fact, it gives us bricks-and-mortar-bound entities more time to do all that face-to-face interactive University stuff that we know students love and from which they derive great benefit. University stops being semi-vocational in some aspects and we leap into knowledge construction, idea generation, big projects and the grand dreams that we always talk about, yet often don’t get to because we have to train people in basic programming, drafting, and so on. Do we give them course credit? No, because they’re assumed knowledge, or barrier tested, and they’re not necessarily part of our structure anymore.

What happens if no-one wants to take my course anymore?

Now, we know that we can change our courses because we’ve done it so many times before over the history of the Academy – Latin, along with Greek the language of scholarship, was only used in half of the University publications of 1800. Let me wander through a classical garden for a moment to discuss the nature of change from a different angle, that of decline. Languages had a special place in the degrees of my University with Latin and Greek dominating and then with the daring possibility of allowing substitution of French or German for Latin or Greek from 1938. It was as recently as 1958 that Latin stopped being compulsory for high school graduation in Adelaide although it was still required for the study of Law – student demand for Latin at school therefore plummeted and Latin courses started being dropped from the school curriculum. The Law Latin requirement was removed around 1969-1970, which then dropped any demand for Latin even further. The reduction in the number of school teachers who could teach Latin required the introduction of courses at the University for students who had studied no Latin at all – Latin IA entered the syllabus. However, given that in 2007 only one student at all of the schools across the state of South Australian (roughly 1.2-1.4 million people) studied Latin in the final year of school, it is apparent that if this University wishes to teach Latin, it has to start by teaching all of Latin. This is a course, and a discipline, that is currently in decline. My fear is that, one day, someone will make the mistake of thinking that we no longer need scholars of this language. And that worries me, because I don’t know what people 30 years from now will actually want, or what they could add to the knowledge that we already have of one of our most influential civilisations.

This decline is not unique to Latin (or Greek, or classics in general) but a truly on-line course experience would allow us to actually pool those scholars we have left and offer scaled resources out for much longer than isolated pockets in real offices can potentially manage but, as President Vest notes, a storehouse of Latin texts does not a course make. What reduced the demand for Latin? Possibly the ubiquity of the language that we use which is derived from Latin combined with a change of focus away from a classical education towards a more job- and achievement-oriented (semi-vocational) style of education. If you ask me, programming could as easily go this way in about 20 years, once we have ways to let machines solve problems for us. A move towards a less go-go-go culture, smarter machines and a resurgence of the long leisure cycles associated with Science Fiction visions of the future and suddenly it is the engineers and the computer scientists who are looking at shrinking departments and no support in the schools. Let me be blunt: course popularity and desirability rises, stabilises and falls, and it’s very hard to tell if we are looking at a parabola or a pendulum. With that in mind, we should be very careful about how we define our traditions and our conventions, especially as our cunning tools for supporting on-line learning and teaching get better and better. Yes, interaction is an essential part of a good education, no argument at all, but there is an implicit assumption of critical mass that we have seen, time and again, to implicitly support this interaction in a face-to-face environment that is as much a function of popularity and traditionally-associated prestige as it is of excellence.

What are MIT doing now?

I look at the original OCW release and I agree that, at time of production, you could not reproduce the interaction between people that would give you an MIT education. But our tools are better now. They are, quite probably not close enough yet to give you an “MIT of the Internet” but should this be our goal? Not the production of a facsimile of the core materials that might, with MIT instructors, turn into a course, but the commitment to developing the tools that actually reproduce the successful components of the learning experience with group and personal interaction, allowing the formation of what we used to call a physical interactive experience in a virtual side? That’s where I think the new MIT initiatives are showing us how these things can work now, starting from their original idealistic roots and adding the technology of the 21st Century. I hope that other, equally prestigious, institutions are watching this, carefully.

Is It Called Ranking Because It Smells Funny?

Posted: December 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Years ago, I was a professional winemaker, which is an awesome job but with very long hours (that seems to be a trend for me). One of the things that we did a lot in winemaking was to assess the quality of wine to work out if we’d made what we wanted to but also to allow us to blend this parcel with that parcel and come up with a better wine. Wine judging, for wine shows, is an important part of getting feedback on the quality of your wine as it’s perceived by other professionals. Wine is judged on a 20 point scale most of the time, although some 100 point schemes are in operation. The problem is that this scale is not actually as wide as it might look. Wines below 12/20 are usually regarded as faulty or not at commercial level – so, in reality, most wine shows are working in the range 12-19.5 (20 was relatively rare but I don’t know what it’s like now). This gets worse for the “100 point” ranges, where Wine Spectator claim to go from 50-100, but James Halliday (a prominent wine critic) rates from 75-100, where ‘Good’ starts at 80. This is really quite unnecessarily confusing, because it means that James Halliday is effectively using a version of the 16 available ranks (12-19.5 at 0.5 interval) of the 20 point scale, mapped into a higher range.

Of course, the numbers are highly subjective, even to a very well trained palate, because the difference between an 87 and an 88 could be colour, or bouquet, or flavour – so saying that the wine at 88 is better doesn’t mean anything unless you know what the rater actually means by that kind of ranking. I used to really enjoy the wine selections of a wine writer called Mark Shields, because he used a straightforward rating system and our palates were fairly well aligned. If Mark liked it, I’d probably like it. This is the dirty secret of any ranking mechanism that has any aspect of subjectivity or weighting built into it – it needs to agree with your interpretation of reasonable or you will always be at odds with it.

In terms of wine, the medal system that is in use really does give us four basic categories: commercially sound (no medal), better than usual (bronze), much better than usual (silver) and “please pass me another bottle” (gold). On top of that, you have the ‘best in show’ effectively which says that, in this place and from these tasters, this was the best overall in this category. To be frank, the gold wines normally blow away the bronzes and the no-awards, but the line between silver and gold is a little more blurred. However, the show medals have one advantage in that a given class has been inspected by the same people and the wines have actually been compared (in one sense) and ranked. However, if nothing is outstanding then no medals will be awarded because it is based on the marks on the 20 point scale, so if all the wines come in at 13, there will be no gongs – there doesn’t have to be a gold or a silver, or even a bronze, although that would be highly unusual. More subtly, gold at one show may not even get bronze at another – another dirty little secret of subjective ranking, sometimes what you are comparing things to makes a very big difference.

Which brings me to my point, which is the ranking on Universities. You’re probably aware that there are national and international rankings of Universities across a range of metrics, often related to funding and research, but that the different rankings have broad agreement rather than exact agreement as to who is ‘top’, top 5 and so on. The Times Higher Education supplement provides a stunning area of snazzy looking graphics, with their weightings as to what makes a great University. But, when we look at this, and we appear to have accuracy to one significant figure (ahem), is it significant that Caltech is 1.8 points higher than Stanford? Is this actually useful information in terms of which university a student might wish to attend? Well, teaching (learning environment) makes 30% of the score, international outlook makes up 7.5%, industry income makes up 2.5%, research is 30% (volume, income and reputation) and citations (research influence) make up the last 30%. If we sort by learning environment (because I am a curious undergraduate, say) then the order starts shifting, not at the very top to the list, but certainly further down – Yale would leap to 4th in the US instead of 9th. Once we get out of the top 200, suddenly we have very broad bands and, honestly, you have to wonder why we are still putting together the numbers if the thing that people appear to be worrying about is the top 200. (When you deem worthiness on a rating scale as only being a subset of the available scale, you rapidly turn something that could be considered continuous into something with an increasingly constrained categorical basis.) But let’s go to the Shanghai rankings, where Caltech is dropped from number 1 to number 6. Or the QS World Rankings, who rate Caltech as #10.

Obviously, there is no doubt about the general class of these universities, but it does appear that the judges are having some difficulty in consistently awarding best in class medals. This would be of minor interest, were it not for the fact that these ratings do actually matter in terms of industry confidence in partnership, in terms of attracting students from outside of your home educational system and in terms of who get to be the voices who decide what constitutes a good University. It strikes me that broad classes are something could apply quite well here. Who really cares whether Caltech is 1, 6 or 10 – it’s obviously rating well across the board and, barring catastrophe, always will.

So why keep ranking it? What we’re currently doing is polishing the door knob on the ranking system, devoting effort to ranking Universities like Caltech, Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford, who could not, with any credibility be ranked low – or we’d immediately think that the ranking mechanism was suspect. So let’s stop ranking them, because it’s compressing the ranking at a point where the ranking is not even vaguely informational. What would be interesting was more devotion to the bands further down, where a University can assess its global progress against its peers to find out if it’s cutting the mustard.

If I put a bottle of Grange (one of Australia’s best red wines and it is pretty much worthy of its reputation if not its price) into a wine show and it came back with less than 17/20, I’d immediately suspect the rating system and the professionalism of the judges. The question is, of course, why would I put it in other than to win gold medals – what am I actually achieving in this sense? If it’s a commercial decision to sell more wine then I get this but wine is, after all, just wine and you and I drink it the same way. Universities, especially when ranked across complex weighted metrics and by different people, are very different products to different people. The single figure ranking may carry prestige and probably attracts both students and money but should it? Does it make any sense to be so detailed (one significant figure, indeed) about how one stacks up against each other, when in reality you have almost exponentially separated groups – my University will never ‘challenge’ Caltech, and if Caltech ‘drops’ to the graded level of the University of Melbourne (one of our most highly ranked Unis), I’m not sure that the experience will tell Caltech anything other than “Ruh oh!”

The Scooby Gang, stunned that Caltech was now in the range 50-100.

The Scooby Gang, stunned that Caltech was now in the range 50-100.

If I could summarise all of this, it would be to say that our leader board and ranking obsession would be fine, were it not for the amount of time spent on these things, the weight placed upon what is ultimately highly subjective even in terms of the weighting, and is not clearly defined as to how these rankings can be used to make sensible decisions. Perhaps there is something more useful we could be doing with our time?

Taught for a Result or Developing a Passion

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

According to a story in the Australian national broadcaster, the ABC, website, Australian school children are now ranked 27th out of 48 countries in reading, according to the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, and that a quarter of Australia’s year 4 students had failed to meet the minimum standard defined for reading at their age. As expected, the Australian government  has said “something must be done” and the Australian Federal Opposition has said “you did the wrong thing”. Ho hum. Reading the document itself is fascinating because our fourth graders apparently struggle once we move into the area of interpretation and integration of ideas and information, but do quite well on simple inference. There is a lot of scope for thought about how we are teaching, given that we appear to have a reasonably Bloom-like breakdown on the data but I’ll leave that to the (other) professionals. Another international test, the Program for International School Assessment (PISA) which is applied to 15 year olds, is something that we rank relatively highly in, which measures reading, mathematics and science. (And, for the record, we’re top 10 on the PISA rankings after a Year 4 ranking of 27th. Either someone has gone dramatically wrong in the last 7 years of Australian Education, or Year 4 results on PIRLS doesn’t have as much influence as we might have expected on the PISA).We don’t yet have the results for this but we expect it out soon.

The PISA report front cover (C) OECD.

The PISA report front cover (C) OECD.

What is of greatest interest to me from the linked article on the ABC is the Oslo University professor, Svein Sjoberg, who points out the comparing educational systems around the globe is potentially too difficult to be meaningful – which is a refreshingly honest assessment in these performance-ridden and leaderboard-focused days. As he says:

“I think that is a trap. The PISA test does not address the curricular test or the syllabus that is set in each country.

Like all of these tests, PIRLS and PISA measure a student’s ability to perform on a particular test and, regrettably, we’re all pretty much aware, or should be by now, that using a test like this will give you the results that you built the test to give you. But one thing that really struck me from his analysis of the PISA was that the countries who perform better on the PISA Science ranking generally had a lower measure of interest in science. Professor Sjoberg noted that this might be because the students had been encouraged to become result-focused rather than encouraging them to develop a passion.

If Professor Sjoberg is right, then is not just a tragedy, it’s an educational catastrophe – we have now started optimising our students to do well in tests but be less likely to go and pursue the subjects in which they can get these ‘good’ marks. If this nasty little correlation holds, then will have an educational system that dominates in the performance of science in the classroom, but turns out fewer actual scientists – our assessment is no longer aligned to our desired outcomes. Of course, what it is important to remember is that the vast majority of these rankings are relative rather than absolute. We are not saying that one group is competent or incompetent, we are saying that one group can perform better or worse on a given test.

Like anything, to excel at a particular task, you need to focus on it, practise it, and (most likely) prioritise it above something else. What Professor Sjoberg’s analysis might indicate, and I realise that I am making some pretty wild conjecture on shaky evidence, is that certain schools have focused the effort on test taking, rather than actual science. (I know, I know, shock, horror) Science is not always going to fit into neat multiple choice questions or simple automatically marked answers to questions. Science is one of the areas where the viva comes into its own because we wish to explore someone’s answer to determine exactly how much they understand. The questions in PISA theoretically fall into roughly the same categories (MCQ, short answer) as the PIRLS so we would expect to see similar problems in dealing with these questions, if students were actually having a fundamental problem with the questions. But, despite this, the questions in PISA are never going to be capable of gauging the depth of scientific knowledge, the passion for science or the degree to which a student already thinks within the discipline. A bigger problem is the one which always dogs standardised testing of any sort, and that is the risk that answering the question correctly and getting the question right may actually be two different things.

Years ago, I looked at the examination for a large company’s offering in a certain area, I have no wish to get sued so I’m being deliberately vague, and it became rapidly apparent that on occasion there was a company answer that was not the same as the technically correct answer. The best way to prepare for the test was not to study the established base of the discipline but it was to read the corporate tracts and practise the skills on the approved training platforms, which often involved a non-trivial fee for training attendance. This was something that was tangential to my role and I was neither of a sufficiently impressionable age nor strongly bothered enough by it for it to affect me. Time was a factor and incorrect answers cost you marks – so I sat down and learned the ‘right way’ so that I could achieve the correct results in the right time and then go on to do the work using the actual knowledge in my head.

However, let us imagine someone who is 14 or 15 and, on doing the practice tests for ‘test X’ discovers that what is important is in hitting precisely the right answer in the shortest time – thinking about the problem in depth is not really on the table for a two-hour exam, unless it’s highly constrained and students are very well prepared. How does this hypothetical student retain respect for teachers who talk about what science is, the purity of mathematics, or the importance of scholarship, when the correct optimising behaviour is to rote-learn the right answers, or the safe and acceptable answers, and reproduce those on demand. (Looking at some of the tables in the PISA document, we see that the best performing nations in the top band of mathematical thinking are those with amazing educational systems – the desired range – and those who reputedly place great value in high power-distance classrooms with large volumes of memorisation and received wisdom – which is probably not the desired range.)

Professor Sjoberg makes an excellent point, which is that trying to work out what is in need of fixing, and what is good, about the Australian education system is not going to be solved by looking at single figure representations of our international rankings, especially when the rankings contradict each other on occasion! Not all countries are the same, pedagogically, in terms of their educational processes or their power distances, and adjacency of rank is no guarantee that the two educational systems are the same (Finland, next to Shanghai-China for instance). What is needed is reflection upon what we think constitutes a good education and then we provide meaningful local measures that allow us to work out how we are doing with our educational system. If we get the educational system right then,  if we keep a bleary eye on the tests we use, we should then test well. Optimising for the tests takes the effort off the education and puts it all onto the implementation of the test – if that is the case, then no wonder people are less interested in a career of learning the right phrase for a short answer or the correct multiple-choice answer.

“You Will Never Amount to Anything!”

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

I am currently reading “When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin” by Mick Wall. I won’t go into much of the detail of the book but the message presented around the four members of the group is that most of them did not have the best experiences in school and that, in at least two cases, the statements written on their reports by their teachers were profoundly dismissive. Now, it is of course entirely possible the that the Led Zep lads were, at time of leaving school, incapable of achieving anything – except that this is a total nonsense as it is quite obvious that they achieved a degree of musical and professional success that few contemplate, let alone reach.

You’ll often read this kind of line in celebrity biographies – that semi-mythical reforging of the self after having been judged and found wanting. (From a narrative perspective, it’s not all that surprising as it’s an easy way to increase the tension.) But one of the reasons that it pops up is that such a statement is so damning that it is not surprising that a successful person might want to wander back to the person who said it and say “Really?” But to claim that such a statement is a challenge (as famously mocked in the Simpsons where Principal Skinner says that these children have not future and is forced to mutter, with false bonhomie, ‘Prove me wrong, kids, prove me wrong.’) is confused at best, disingenuous and misdirecting at worst. If you want someone to achieve something, provide a clear description of the task, the means to achieve that task and then set about educating and training. No-one has ever learned brain surgery by someone yelling “Don’t open that skull” so pretending that an entire life’s worth of motivation can be achieved by telling something that they have no worth is piffle. Possibly even balderdash.

You! Prove me wrong!

You! Prove me wrong!

The phrase “You Will Never Amount To Anything” is, in whatever form it is uttered, a truly useless sentiment. It barely has any meaning (isn’t just being alive being something and hence amounting to a small sort of anything?) but, of course, it is not stated in order to achieve an outcome other than to place the blame for the lack of engagement with a given system squarely at the feet of the accused. You have failed to take advantage of the educational opportunities that we have provided and this is such a terminal fault, that the remaining 90% of your life will be spent in a mobile block of amber, where you will be unable to affect any worthwhile interaction with the universe.

I note that, with some near misses, I have been spared this kind of statement but I do feel very strongly that it is really not anything that you can with any credibility or useful purpose. If you happen to be Death, the Grim Reaper, then you can stand at the end of someone’s life and say “Gosh, you didn’t do a great deal did you” (although, again, what does it mean to do anything anyway?) but saying it when someone is between the ages of 16 and 20? You might be able to depend upon the statistical reliability that, if rampant success in our society is only given to 1%, 99% of the time, everyone you say “You will not be a success” will accidentally fall into that category. It’s quite obvious that any number of the characteristics that are worthy of praise in school contribute nothing to the spectacular success enjoyed by some people, where these characteristics are “sitting quietly”, “wearing the correct uniform” or “not chewing gum”. These are excellent facets of compliance and will make for citizens who may be of great utility to the successful, but it’s hard to see many business leaders whose first piece of advice to desperate imitators is “always wear shiny shoes”.

If we are talking about perceived academic ability then we run into another problem, in that there is a great deal of difference between school and University, let along school and work. There is no doubt that the preparation offered by a good schooling system is invaluable. Reading, writing, general knowledge, science, mathematics, biology, the classics… all of these parts of our knowledge and our society can be introduced to students very usefully. But to say that your ability to focus on long division problems when you are 14 is actually going to be the grand limiting factor on your future contribution to the world? Nonsense.

Were you to look at my original degree, you might think “How on Earth did this man end up with a PhD? He appears to have no real grasp of study, or pathway through his learning.” and, at the time of the degree, you’d be right. But I thought about what had happened, learned from it, and decided to go back and study again in order to improve my level of knowledge and my academic record. I then went back and did this again. And again. Because I persevered, because I received good advice on how to improve and, most importantly, because a lot of people took the time to help me, I learned a great deal and I became a better student. I developed my knowledge. I learned how to learn and, because of that, I started to learn how to think about teaching, as well.

If you were to look at Nick Falkner at 14, you may have seen some potential but a worry lack of diligence and effort. At 16, you would have seen him blow an entire year of school exams because he didn’t pay attention. At 17 he made it into Uni, just, but it wasn’t until the wheels really started to fall off that he realised that being loquacious and friendly wasn’t enough. Scurrying out of Uni with a third-grade degree into a workforce that looked at the evidence of my learning drove home that improvements were to be made. Being unemployed for most of a year cemented it – I had set myself up for a difficult life and had squandered a lot of opportunities. And that is when serendipity intervened, because the man who has the office next to me now, and with whom I coffee almost every morning, suggested that I could come back and pursue a Masters degree to make up for the poor original degree, and that I would not have to pay for it upfront because it was available as a government deferred-payment option. (Thank you, again, Kevin!)

That simple piece of advice changed my life completely. Instead of not saying anything or being dismissive of a poor student, someone actually took the time to say “Well, here’s something you could do and here’s how you do it.” And now, nearly 20 years down the track, I have a PhD, a solid career in which I am respected as an educator and as a researcher and I get to inspire and help other students. There’s no guarantee that good advice will always lead to good outcomes (and we all know about the paving on the road to Hell) but it’s increasingly obvious to me that dismissive statements, unpleasant utterances and “cut you loose” curtness are far more likely to do nothing positive at all.

If the most that you can say to a student is “You’re never going to amount to anything”, it might be worth looking in a mirror to see exactly what you’ve amounted to yourself…

I Can’t Find My Paperless Office For All The Books

Posted: December 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I tidied up my office recently and managed to clear out about a couple of boxes full of old paper. Some of these were working drafts of research papers, covered in scrawl (usually red because it shows up more), some were book chapter mark-ups, and some were things like project meeting plans that I could scribble on as people spoke. All of this went into either the secure waste bins (sekrit stuff) or the general recycling because I do try to keep the paper footprint down. However, my question to myself is two-fold:

  • Why do I still have an office full of paper when I have a desktop, (two) laptops, an iPad and an iPhone, and I happily take notes and annotate documents on them?
  • Why am I surrounded by so many books, still?

I don’t think I’ve ever bought as many books as I have bought this year. By default, if I can, I buy them as the electronic and paper form so that I can read them when I travel or when I’m in the office. There are books on graphic design, books on semiotics, books on data visualisation and analysis, and now, somewhat recursively, books on the end of books. My wife found me a book called “This is not the end of the book”, which is a printed conversation between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière, curated by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac. I am looking forward to reading it but it has to wait until some of the other books are done. I have just finished Iain M. Banks latest “The Hydrogen Sonata”, am swimming through an unauthorised biography of Led Zeppelin and am still trying to finish off the Derren Brown book that I have been reading on aeroplanes for the past month or so. Sitting behind all this are “Cloud Atlas” and “1Q84”, both of which are officially waiting until I have finished my PhD application portfolio for creative writing. (Yes, dear reader, I’m nervous because they could as easily say ‘No’ as ‘Yes’ but then I will learn how to improve and, if I can’t take that, I shouldn’t be teaching. To thine own dogfood, be as a consumer.)

A book that I hope to read soon!

A book that I hope to read soon!

Why do I still write on paper? Because it feels good. I select pens that feel good to write with, or pencils soft enough to give me a good relationship to the paper. The colour of ink changes as it hits the paper and dries and I am slightly notorious for using inks that do not dry immediately. When I was a winemaker, I used black Bic fine pens, when many other people used wet ink or even fountain pens, because the pen could write on damp paper and, even when you saturated the note, the ink didn’t run. These days, I work in an office and I have the luxury of using a fountain pen to scrawl in red or blue across documents, and I can enjoy the sensation.

Why do I still read on paper? Because it is enjoyable and I have a long relationship with the book, which began from a very early age. The book is also, nontrivially, one of the few information storage devices that can be carried on to a plane without having to be taken from one’s bag or shut down for the periods of take off and landing. I am well aware of the most dangerous points in an aircraft’s cycle and I strongly prefer to be distracted by, if not in-flight entertainment, then a good solid book. But it is also the pleasure of being able to separate the book from the devices that link me into my working world, yet without adding a new data storage management issue. Yes, I could buy a Kindle and not have to check my e-mail, but then I have to buy books from this store and I have to carry that charger or fit it next to my iPad, laptop and phone when travelling. Books, once read, can either be donated to your hosts in another place or can be tossed into the suitcase, making room for yet more books – but of course a device may carry many books. If I have no room in my bag for a book, then I don’t have to worry about the fragility of making space in my carry-on by putting it into the suitcase.

And, where necessary, the book/spider interaction causes more damage to the spider than the contents of the book. My thesis was sufficiently large to stun a small mammal, but you would not believe how hard it was to get ethical approval for that!

The short answer to both questions is that I enjoy using the physical forms although I delight in the practicality, the convenience and the principle of the electronic forms. I am a happy hybridiser who wishes only to enjoy the experience of reading and writing in a way that appeals to me. In a way, the electronic format makes it easier for me to share my physical books. I have a large library of books from when I was younger that, to my knowledge, has books that it is almost impossible to find in print or libraries any more. Yet, I am in that uncomfortable position of being a selfish steward, in that I cannot release some of these books for people to read because I hold the only copy that I know of. As I discover more books in electronic or re-print format (the works of E. Nesbit, Susan Cooper in the children’s collection of my library, for example) then I am free to use the books as they were intended, as books.

What we have now, what is emerging, certainly need not be the end of the book but it will be interesting to look back, in fifty years or so, to find out what we did. If the book has become the analogue watch of information, where it moved from status symbol for its worth, to status symbol for its value, to affectation and, now, to many of my students, an anachronism for those who don’t have good time signal on their phones. I suspect that a watch does not have the sheer enjoyability of the book or the pen on paper, but, if you will excuse me, time will tell.

Ebb and Flow – Monitoring Systems Without Intrusion

Posted: November 23, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve been wishing a lot of people “Happy Thanksgiving” today because, despite being frightfully Antipodean, I have a lot of friends and family who are Thanksgiving observers in the US. However, I would know that something was up in the US anyway because I am missing about 40% of my standard viewers on my blog. Today is an honorary Sunday – hooray, sleep-ins all round! More seriously, this illustrates one of the most interesting things about measurement, which is measuring long enough to be able to determine when something out of the ordinary occurs. As I’ve already discussed, I can tell when I’ve been linked to a higher profile blog because my read count surges. I also can tell when I haven’t been using attractive pictures because the count drops by about 30%.

A fruit bat, in recovery, about to drink its special fruit smoothie. (Yes, this is shameless manipulation.)

This is because I know what the day-to-day operation of the blog looks like and I can spot anomalies. When I was a network admin, I could often tell when something was going wrong on the network just because of the way that certain network operations started to feel, and often well before these problems reached the level where they would trigger any sort of alarm. It’s the same for people who’ve lived by the same patch of sea for thirty years. They’ll look at what appears to be a flat sea on a calm day and tell you not to go out – because they can read a number of things from the system and those things mean ‘danger’.

One of the reasons that the network example is useful is because any time you send data through the network to see what happens, you’re actually using the network to do it. So network probes will actually consume network bandwidth and this may either mask or exacerbate your problems, depending on how unlucky you are. However, using the network for day-today operations, and sensing that something is off, then gives you a reason to run those probes or to check the counters on your networking gear to find out exactly why the hair on the back of your neck is going up.

I observe the behaviour of my students a lot and I try to gain as much information as I can from what they already give me. That’s one of the reasons that I’m so interested in assignment submissions, because students are going to submit assignments anyway and any extra information I can get from this is a giant bonus! I am running a follow-up Piazza activity on our remote campus and I’m fascinated to be able to watch the developing activity because it tells me who is participating and how they are participating. For those who haven’t heard about Piazza, it’s like a Wiki but instead of the Wiki model of “edit first, then argue into shape”, Piazza encourages a “discuss first and write after consensus” model. I put up the Piazza assignment for the class, with a mid-December deadline, and I’ve already had tens of registered discussions, some of which are leading to edits. Of course, not all groups are active yet and, come Monday, I’ll send out a reminder e-mail and chat to them privately. Instead of sending a blanket mail to everyone saying “HAVE YOU STARTED PIAZZA”, I can refine my contact based on passive observation.

The other thing about Piazza is that, once all of the assignment is over, I can still see all of their discussions, because that’s where I’ve told them to have the discussion! As a result, we can code their answers and track the development of their answers, classifying them in terms of their group role, their level of function and so on. For an open-ended team-based problem, this allows me a great deal of insight into how much understanding my students have of the area and allows me to fine-tune my teaching. Being me, I’m really looking for ways to improve self-regulation mechanisms, as well as uncovering any new threshold concepts, but this nonintrusive monitoring has more advantages than this. I can measure participation by briefly looking at my mailbox to see how many mail messages are foldered under a particular group’s ID, from anywhere, or I can go to Piazza and see it unfolding there. I can step in where I have to, but only when I have to, to get things back on track but I don’t have to prove or deconstruct a team-formed artefact to see what is going on.

In terms of ebb and flow, the Piazza groups are still unpredictable because I don’t have enough data to be able to tell you what the working pattern is for a successful group. I can tell you that no activity is undesirable but, even early on, I could tell you some interesting things about the people who post the most! (There are some upcoming publications that will deal with things along these lines and I will post more on these later.) We’ve been lucky enough to secure some Summer students and I’m hoping that at least some of their work will involve looking at dependencies in communication and ebb and flow across these systems.

As you may have guessed, I like simple. I like the idea of a single dashboard that has a green light (healthy course), an orange light (sick course) and a red light (time to go back to playing guitar on the street corner) although I know it will never be that easy. However, anything that brings me closer to that is doing me a huge favour, because the less time I have to spend actively probing in the course, the less of my students’ time I take up with probes and the less of my own time I spend not knowing what is going on!

Oh well, the good news is that I think that there are only three more papers to write before the Mayan Apocalypse occurs and at least one of them will be on this. I’ll see if I can sneak in a picture of a fruit bat. 🙂

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.

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!

The Limits of Time

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

I’m writing this on Monday (and Thursday night), after being on the road for teaching, and I’ve been picking up the pieces of a hard drive replacement (under warranty) compounded by the subsequent discovery that at least one of my backups is corrupted. This has taken what should have been a catch-up day and turned it into a “juggle recovery/repair disk/work on secondary machine” day but, hey, I’m not complaining too much – at least I have two machines and took the trouble to keep them synchronised with each other. The worst outcome of today’s little backup issue is that I have a relatively long reinstallation process ahead of me, because I haven’t actually lost anything yet except the convenient arrangement of all of my stuff.

It does, however, reinforce one of the lessons that it took me years to learn. If you have an hour, you can do an hour’s worth of work. I know, that sounds a little ‘aw shucks’ but some things just take time to do and you have to have the time to do them. My machine recovery was scheduled to take about four hours. When it had gone for five, I clicked on it to discover that it had stopped on detecting the bad backup. I couldn’t have done that at the 30 minute mark. Maybe I could have tried to wake it up at the 2 hour mark, and maybe I would have hit the error earlier, but, in reality that wasn’t going to happen because I was doing other work.

Why is this important? Because I am going to get 1, maybe 2, attempts per day to restore this machine until it finally works. It takes hours to do it and there’s nothing I can do to make it faster. (You’ll see down the bottom that this particular prediction came true because the backup restoration has now turned out to have some fundamental problems).

When students first learn about computers, they don’t really have an idea about how long things take and how important it is to make their programs work quickly. Computational complexity describes how we expect programs to behave when we change the amount of data that they’re working on, either in terms of how much space they take up or how long they take to compute. The choice of approach can lead to massive differences in performance. Something that takes 60 seconds on one approach can take an hour on another. Scale up the size of data you’re looking at and the difference is between ‘will complete this week’ and ‘I am not going to live that long’.

When you look at a computing problem, and the resources that you have, a back of an envelope calculation will very rapidly tell you how long it will take (with a bit of testing and trial and error in some cases). If you don’t allow this much time for the solution, you probably won’t get it. Worse case is that you start something running and then you stop it, thinking it’s not going to finish, but you actually stopped it just before it was going to finish. Time estimation is important. A lot of students won’t really learn this, however, until it comes back and bites them when they overshoot. With any luck, and let’s devote some effort so it’s not just luck, they learn what to look for when they’re estimating how long things actually take.

I wasn’t expecting to have my main machine back up in time to do any work on it today, because I’ve done this dance before, but I was hoping to have it ready for tomorrow. Now, I have to plan around not having it for tomorrow either (and, as it turns out, it won’t be back before the weekend). Worst case is that I will have to put enough time aside to do a complete rebuild. However, to rebuild it will take some serious time. There’s no point setting aside the rebuild as something that I devote my time or weekend to, because it doesn’t require that much attention and I can happily work around the major copies in hour-long blocks to get useful work done.

When you know how long something takes and you plan around that, even those long boring blocks of time become something that can be done in parallel, around the work that also must happen. I see a lot of students who sit around doing something that’s not actually work while they wait for computation or big software builds to finish. Hey, if you’ve got nothing else to do then feel free to do nothing or surf the web. The only problem is that very few of us ever have nothing else to do but, by realising that something that takes a long time will take a long time, we can use filler tasks to drag down the number of things that we still have left to do.

This is being challenged at the moment because the restoration is resolutely failing and, regrettably, I am now having to get actively involved because the ‘fix the backup’ regime requires me to try things, and then try other things, in order to get it working. The good news is I still have large blocks of time – the bad news is that I’m doing all of this on a secondary machine that doesn’t have the same screen real estate. (What a first world problem!)

What a fantastic opportunity to eat my own dog food. 🙂 Tonight, I’m sitting down to plan out how I can recover from this and be back up to date on Monday, with at least one fully working system and access to all of my files. I still need to allow for the occasional ‘try this on the backup’ and then wait several hours, but I need to make sure that this becomes a low priority tasks that I schedule, rather than one that interrupts me and becomes a primary focus. We’ll see how well that goes.

A Late Post On Deadlines, Amusingly Enough

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

Currently still under a big cloud at the moment but I’m still teaching at Singapore on the weekend so I’m typing this at the airport. All of my careful plans to have items in the queue have been undermined by having a long enough protracted spell of illness (to be precise, I’m working at about half speed due to migraine or migraine-level painkillers). I have very good parts of the day where I teach and carry out all of the face-to-face things I need to do, but it drains me terribly and leaves me with no ‘extra’ time and it was the extra time I was using to do this. I’m confident that I will teach well over this weekend, I wouldn’t be going otherwise, but it will be a blur in the hotel room outside of those teaching hours.

This brings me back to the subject of deadlines. I’ve now been talking about my time banking and elastic time management ideas to a lot of people and I’ve got quite polished in my responses to the same set of questions. Let me distill them for you, as they have relevance to where I am at the moment:

  1. Not all deadlines can be made flexible.

    I completely agree. We have to grant degrees, finalise resource allocations and so on. Banking time is about teaching time management and the deadline is the obvious focal point, but some deadlines cannot be missed. This leads me to…

  2. We have deadlines in industry that are fixed! Immutable! Miss it and you miss out! Why should I grant students flexible deadlines?

    Because not all of your deadlines are immutable, in the same way that not all are flexible. The serious high-level government grants? The once in a lifetime opportunities to sell product X to company YYPL? Yes, they’re fixed. But to meet these fixed deadlines, we move those other deadlines that we can. We shift off other things. We work weekends. We stay up late. We delay reading something. When we learn how to manage our deadlines so that we can make time for those that are both important and immovable, we do so by managing our resources to shift other deadlines around.

    Elastic time management recognises that life is full of management decisions, not mindless compliance. Pretending that some tiny assignment of pre-packaged questions we’ve been using for 10 years is the most important thing in an 18 year old’s life is not really very honest. But we do know that the students will do things if they are important and we provide enough information that they realise this!

I have had to shift a lot of deadlines to make sure that I am ready to teach for this weekend. On top of that I’ve been writing a paper that is due on the 17th of November, as well as working on many other things. How did I manage this? I quickly looked across my existing resources (and remember I’m at half-speed, so I’ve had to schedule half my usual load) and broke things down into: things that had to happen before this teaching trip, and things that could happen after. I then looked at the first list and did some serious re-arrangement. Let’s look at some of these individually.

Blog posts, which are usually prepared 1-2 days in advance, are now written on the day. My commitment to my blog is important. I think it is valuable but, and this is key, no-one else depends upon it. The blog is now allocated after everything else, which is why I had my lunch before writing this. I will still meet my requirement to post every day but it may show up some hours after my usual slot.

I haven’t been sleeping enough, which is one of the reasons that I’m in such a bad way at the moment. All of my deadlines now have to work around me getting into bed by 10pm and not getting out before 6:15am. I cannot lose any more efficiency so I have to commit serious time to rest. I have also built in some sitting around time to make sure that I’m getting some mental relaxation.

I’ve cut down my meeting allocations to 30 minutes, where possible, and combined them where I can. I’ve said ‘no’ to some meetings to allow me time to do the important ones.

I’ve pushed off certain organisational problems by doing a small amount now and then handing them to someone to look after while I’m in Singapore. I’ve sketched out key plans that I need to look at and started discussions that will carry on over the next few days but show progress is being made.

I’ve printed out some key reading for plane trips, hotel sitting and the waiting time in airports.

Finally, I’ve allocated a lot of time to get ready for teaching and I have an entire day of focus, testing and preparation on top of all of the other preparation I’ve done.

What has happened to all of the deadlines in my life? Those that couldn’t be moved, or shouldn’t be moved, have stayed where they are and the rest have all been shifted around, with the active involvement of other participants, to allow me room to do this. That is what happens in the world. Very few people have a world that is all fixed deadline and, if they do, it’s often at the expense of the invisible deadlines in their family space and real life.

I did not learn how to do this by somebody insisting that everything was equally important and that all of their work requirements trumped my life. I am learning to manage my time maturely by thinking about my time as a whole, by thinking about all of my commitments and then working out how to do it all, and to do it well. I think it’s fair to say that I learned nothing about time management from the way that my assignments were given to me but I did learn a great deal from people who talked to me about their processes, how they managed it all and through an acceptance of this as a complex problem that can be dealt with, with practice and thought.

 

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