Workshop report: ALTC Workshop “Assessing student learning against the Engineering Accreditation Competency Standards: A practical approach”

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

I was fortunate to be able to attend a 3 hour workshop today presented by Professor Wageeh Boles, Queensland University of Technology, and Professor Jeffrey (Jeff) Froyd, Texas A&M, on how we could assess student learning against the accreditation competency standards in Engineering. I’ve seen Wageeh present before in his capacity as an Australian Learning and Teaching Council ALTC National Teaching Fellowship and greatly enjoyed it, so I was looking forward to today. (Note: the ALTC has been replaced with the Office for Learning and Teaching, OLT, but a number of schemes are still labelled under the old title. Fortunately, I speak acronym.)

Both Wageeh and Jeff spoke at length about why we were undertaking assessment and we started by looking at the big picture: University graduate capabilities and the Engineers Australia accreditation criteria. Like it or not, we live in a world where people expect our students to be able to achieve well-defined things and be able to demonstrate certain skills. To focus on the course, unit, teaching and learning objectives and assessment alone, without framing this in the national and University expectations is to risk not producing the students that are expected or desired. Ultimately if the high level and local requirements aren’t linked then they should be because otherwise we’re probably not pursuing the right objectives. (Is it too soon to mention pedagogical luck again?)

We then discussed three types of assessment:

  • Assessment FOR Learning: Which is for teachers and allows them to determine the next steps in advancing learning.
  • Assessment AS Learning: Which is for students and allows them to monitor and reflect upon their own progress (effectively formative).
  • Assessment OF Learning: Which is used to assess what the students have learned and is most often characterised as summative learning.

But, after being asked about the formative/summative approach, this was recast into a decision making framework. We carry out assessment of all kinds to allow people to make better decisions and the people, in this situation, are Educators and Students. When we see the results of the summative assessment we, as teachers, can then ask “What decisions do we need to make for this class?” to improve the levels of knowledge demonstrated in the summative. When the students see the result of formative assessment, we then have the question “What decisions do students need to make” to improve their own understanding. The final aspect, Assessment FOR Learning, is going to cover those areas of assessment that help both educators and students to make better decisions by making changes to the overall course in response to what we’re seeing.

This is a powerful concept as it identifies assessment in terms of responsible groups: this assessment involves one group, the other or both and this is why you need to think about the results. (As an aside, this is why I strongly subscribe to the idea that formative assessment should never have an extrinsic motivating aspect, like empty or easy submission marks, because it stops the student focussing on the feedback, which will help their decisions, and makes it look summative, which suddenly starts to look like the educator’s problem.)

One point that came out repeatedly was that our assessment methods should be varied. If your entire assessment is based on a single exam, of one type of question, at the end of the semester then you really only have a single point of data. Anyone who has ever drawn a line on a graph knows that a single point tells you nothing about the shape of the line and, ultimately, the more points that yo can plot accurately, the more you can work out what is actually happening. However, varying assessment methods doesn’t mean replicating or proxying the exam, it means providing different assessment types, varying questions, changing assessment over time. (Yes, this was stressed: changing assessment from offering to offering is important and is much a part of varying assessment as any other component.)

All delightful music to my ears, which was just was well as we all worked very hard, talking, discussing and sharing ideas throughout the groups. We had a range of people who were mostly from within the Faculty and, while it was a small group and full of the usual faces, we all worked well, had an open discussion and there were some first-timers who obviously learned a lot.

What I found great about this was that it was very strongly practical. We worked on our own courses, looked for points for improvement and I took away four points of improvement that I’m currently working on: a fantastic result for a three-hour investment. Our students don’t need to just have done assessment that makes it look like they know their stuff, they have to actually know their stuff and be confident with it. Job ready. Able to stand up and demonstrate their skills. Ready for reality.

As was discussed in the workshop, assessment of learning occurs when Lecturers:

  • Use evidence of student learning
  • to make judgements on student achievement
  • against goals and standards

And this identifies some of our key problems. We often gather all of the evidence, whether it’s final grades or Student Evaluations, at a point when the students have left, or are just about to leave, the course. How can we change this course for that student? We are always working one step in the past. Even if we do have the data, do we have the time and the knowledge to make the right judgement? If so, is it defensible, fair and meeting the standards that we should be meeting? We can’t apply standards from 20 years ago because that’s what we’re used to. The future, in Australia, is death by educational acronyms (AQF, TEQSA, EA, ACS, OLT…) but these are the standards by which we are accredited and these are the yardsticks by which our students will be judged. If we want to change those then, sure, we can argue this at the Government level but until then, these have to be taken into account, along with all of our discipline, faculty and University requirements.

I think that this will probably spill over in a second post but, in short, if you get a chance to see Wageeh and Jeff on the road with this workshop then, please, set aside the time to go and leave time for a chat afterwards. This is one of the most rewarding and useful activities that I’ve done this year – and I’ve had a very good year for thinking about CS Education.

Offering a Way Forward: Saying “No” Constructively

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

I was a shockingly bad undergraduate student. I am rather ashamed of this, in hindsight, because it could have been the most dreadful squandering of the opportunities that had been made available to me. Fortunately, intervention at a later time allowed me to recover from this mis-step and I arrived at the lofty heights that you know now: a semi-anonymous blogger with logorrhoea, employed as a low level academic at a good University. 🙂

One of the experiences that sticks in my mind, and I believe I’ve mentioned it before, was a point when I was refused supplementary examination for a course. It was, to be honest, completely reasonable that my request was refused as I had achieved the lofty score of zero for that examination and, although I was sick on the day, I had done no work at all during that term. There is no argument that my request was anything other than a small part in my continuing quest to scrape by and do as little as possible. However, what I will address is what happened next.

Nothing.

I was in an academic’s office, I had scored zero on the exam and I had not done any work. If someone showed up in my office under those conditions, I’d at least ask “Why?” Ok, sure, you’re not getting a supp from me, because I’m not a soft touch by any stretch of the imagination, but I can’t help feeling that I’m just not doing my job unless I work out what has gone on and whether I need to step in or refer you to someone else. This probably explains why I’m so prone to jumping up and down when people talk about bad students, as if this is a permanent and immutable condition, because while I completely accept that some students (a small group) will resist all efforts to bring them into a culture, I strongly believe that it is far more likely that little effort has been spent to try and recover these students in the first place.

Was the academic right to refuse my application? Yes, no argument, but the methodology sucked. No follow-up. No identification of problems. Did I learn from this? No, I didn’t. I distanced myself from the mark because I had expended no effort – this may sound familiar from my discussion of pedagogical luck from yesterday. The same self-destructive patterns played out until someone (a big group of someones actually) took enough interest in me to make me explain what I was doing, make me realise what I was doing and show me the way forward. (And, for the record, thank you to all my friends and my wife, Katrina, but I’d like to specifically note Cathy and Andrew, where poor Cathy had to basically help me focus while I tried to learn what being a real student was about. And thanks to KJM for suggesting that I start doing the new degree in the first place.)

The reason that this is back in my mind is that our Summer Research Scholarships are being advertised at the moment, where students come and work on a research project for 6 weeks over Summer with a small stipend. Competition for these scholarships is surprisingly fierce and I am lucky enough to be offering some interesting projects, both in networking and education research, that people find attractive. Most of the students who have applied for my support have had a level of interest and academic achievement that I can easily support them in what is a highly competitive environment (University ranking systems, not mine, I hasten to add). However, one of the applicants was not all that competitive, so I had to say that I really couldn’t support them in their application. Yet. But here are some ways to be ready for this next year. What was the problem for this year? How are you going at the moment? Ok, keep working on this and I look forward to seeing you come back to me next year, but here’s another suggestion.

The way of saying “No” is important, and I believe that this student can reach the required level, they’re just not there yet. So we discussed how they could improve their overall eligibility, including coming up with their own ideas to fit in with their thoughts on research, so that when they come back next year, they come back not only more eligible but with a strong idea of what they want to do with us. I expect to see this student back next year because I’ve done similar things before and, more often than not, the student comes back: purposeful, more focused and much, much more ready to undertake the kind of projects involved. I have already loosely allocated some resources in case the student does what I’ve suggested for improvement in the shorter term. Next time, I hope that I’m in a position where I must support this student’s application but I can only claim to have helped here if I’ve taken the time to think about what is going on and how I might be able to help.

In the spirit of charity, I must confess that I have no idea if the lecturer, who didn’t ask me about what I was up to, was just having a bad day or if my performance was so poor that he just decided that I was one of the small number who wasn’t ever going to come good. You can’t judge someone on a single event or interaction and it would be ridiculous to not admit to the human failing of the ‘bad day’. However, my overall experience, as a bad student, was that I was not worth wasting time on. I was not worth the risk. And, yet, no-one ever asked me if there was a reason for it or why I was doing it, or if there was something that I needed help with.

I’m happy to say that I believe that a culture like that is now, rightly, judged and found wanting. That people are far more likely to ask why and suggest how or who to see next. But it’s not universal. We may not always achieve universality, people are people and bad days are bad days, but the first step, for me, is looking at how we say “No.”

 

Moral Luck and Voluntary Action: Is There a Corresponding Pedagogical Luck?

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

Moral luck (sometimes described as moral accident) describes a situation where someone is assigned moral blame or praise for something happening, even though the person was either not in control of what was happening or could not affect its consequences. There are many examples, including the traffic accident scenario described in the Moral Luck link, and there are several different classifications of moral luck but let me focus on one: the situation where you either take no positive steps to address a situation, or actively take negative steps, yet the outcome is still positive. To a consequentialist, this is a beneficial outcome and constitutes an example of Resultant Moral Luck. One of the most extreme examples is that you randomly stick your foot out, hoping to trip someone in the street, and accidentally bring down a criminal being pursued by the police. The outcome is good, you are possibly a hero, but any assignation of a moral intention to your actions is deeply flawed: you weren’t in control of the situation, you did not intend the outcome and, in fact, you had hoped to cause harm. The voluntary action that you took was in no way intended to cause this outcome. Yet, you are a hero.

When we look at methods and practices of teaching, it quickly becomes apparent that there are many different approaches and, upon doing some reading, that these have different utilities and efficacies. Your choice of pedagogy is rarely a one-size-fits-all approach and, especially if your institution takes a relatively traditional approach, we have to start to wonder exactly which part of the evolutionary selection stage we are in. Have we, by chance and/or design, arrived at an elegant and efficient design years ago that cannot be improved upon by recent findings or are we ripe for new development, new directions and entirely different ways of teaching?

I would argue that, if we are not taking steps to confirm where we are in the developmental timeline or we are not taking steps to examine what we do with the intention of improving,  then we are wandering in an area that we could call pedagogical luck, where any positive teaching outcomes that may arise cannot be attributed to our voluntary actions and intentions. Are we in the territory that Feynman was referring to when he quoted Gibbon:

“The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous”?

The notion of pedagogical luck, much like moral luck, raises questions of responsibility and accountability. It also explains how we can misattribute blame, because we risk not having a clear ethical framework that can ascribe intention, action and outcome in a meaningful way. In moral luck two people can speed through the same red light, yet only one causes an accident because a child runs into an intersection and the other one may receive a fine for running the light. The outcomes could almost not be any more starkly different: in one a human is injured or killed, the other is a purely administrative outcome. We certainly will attribute more blame to the first driver than the second, despite the fact that both had no desire to kill, nor did they act any differently – the reason that this is resultant is because this is just the way things turned out.

If an academic works with a class and, as it happens, everyone passes, then we would usually assume some intention and voluntary action was involved on the part of that academic. The outcome, for the students and the academic, are both beneficial. It is… unlikely… that said academic would then walk around stating “I’m amazed that they all passed – I barely even showed up to class and I didn’t revise the notes.” However, where someone has done nothing (or has not taken a voluntary action to cause change) and all of the students fail, we can expect (with a reasonable certainty) that the usual statements of blame shifting may start to occur: the students were stupid, lazy, unprepared, insufficiently attentive, the material was pitched at the right level but the students didn’t work hard enough, et cetera. “I have kept the course the same, it is obviously the students who are at fault.” Of course, it’s easy to see why if we have not taken any active steps to change anything – why should we be held responsible for an action that has had either neutral or positive outcomes in the past? Why should we judge the killer-driver any more harshly than the red-light-runner? The outcome is a matter of luck.

This is highly undesirable behaviour so how can we avoid the issues involved in depending upon pedagogical luck? I’m tempted to delve into virtue ethics here and argue that, of all places, that if you can’t find a virtuous seeker of knowledge in a University then perhaps we should all go back to a simple agrarian existence and wait to die of some horrifically mutated bovine disease that we no longer have the wit or wisdom to cure. However, I suspect that we don’t need to all be virtuous, all the time, to adopt a simple maxim that commits us to seeking improvement in our learning and teaching, or to confirming that our approaches are still valid. Where possible, such endeavours should be public and shared widely, so that our lessons can be learned elsewhere. Yes, we’ve wandered fairly heavily into Kant because I’m effectively arguing good will as a stand-alone virtue, regardless of what is achieved. In the absence of a guarantee of virtuous people, and we all have bad days, then perhaps it is a commitment to scholarship, review and reflection that can allow us to take that fresh approach to pedagogical development and implementation that will cause us to be less susceptible to blame shifting where it is inappropriate and less likely to form cargo-cultish ideas as to why certain courses are succeeding or failing.

It is a simple idea: claiming beneficial outcomes as caused by us when we have done nothing is questionable, ethically, especially when we refuse to accept negative outcomes under the same scenario. By identifying that pedagogical luck is possible and readily identifiable in certain practices around the world, we clearly identify the need to avoid the situations where it can dominate.

Brief Stats Update: I appear to have written two more books

Posted: October 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

On May 6th, I congratulated Mark Guzdial on his 1000th post and I noted that I had written 102,136 words, an average of 676 words per post, with 151 posts over 126 days. I commented that, at that rate, I could expect to produce about 180,000 more words by the end of the year, for a total of about 280,000. So, to summarise, my average posting level was at rate of 1.2 posts per day, and 676 words per post.

Today, I reanalysed the blog to see how I was going. This post will be published on Tuesday the 9th, my time, and the analysis here does not include itself. So, up until all activity on Monday the 8th, Central Australian Daylight Saving Time, here are the stats.

Total word count: 273,639. Total number of posts: 343. Number of words per post: 798. Number of posts per day: 1.23. I will reach my end of year projected word count in about 9 days.

I knew that I had been writing longer posts, you may remember that I’ve deliberately tried to keep the posts to around 1,000 where possible, but it’s obvious that I’m just not that capable of writing a short post! In the long term, I’d expect this to approach 1,000 words/post because of my goal to limit myself to that, with the occasional overshoot. I’m surprised by the consistency in number of posts per day. The previous average was a smidgen under 1.2 but I wanted to clarify that there has been a minor increase. Given that my goal was not to necessarily hit exactly 1/day but to set aside time to think about learning and teaching every day, I’m happy with that.

The word count, however, is terrifying. One of the reasons that I wanted to talk about this is to identify how much work something like this is, not to either over inflate myself or to put you off, but to help anyone out there who is considering such a venture. Let me explain some things first.

  1. I have been typing in one form or another since 1977. I was exposed to computers early on and, while I’ve never been trained to touch type, I have that nasty hybrid version where I don’t use all of my fingers but still don’t have to look at the keyboard.
  2. I can sustain a typing speed of about 2,500 words/hour for fiction for quite a long time. That includes the aspects of creativity required, not dictation or transcription. It is very tiring, however, and too much of it makes me amusingly incoherent.
  3. I do not have any problems with repetitive strain injury and I have a couple of excellent working spaces with fast computers and big screens.
  4. I love to write.

So, I’m starting from a good basis and, let me stress, I love to write. Now let me tell you about the problems that this project has revealed.

  1. I produce two kinds of posts: research focused and the more anecdotal. Anecdotal posts can be written up quickly but the moment any research, pre-reading or reformulation is required, it will take me about an hour or two to get a post together. So that cute high speed production drops to about 500-1000 words/hour.
  2. Research posts are the result of hours of reading and quite a lot of associated thought. My best posts start from a set of papers that I read, I then mull on it for a few days and finally it all comes together. I often ask someone else to look at the work to see how it sits in the queue.
  3. I’m always better when I don’t have to produce something for tomorrow. When the post queue is dry, I don’t have the time to read in detail or mull so I have to either pull a previous draft from the queue and see if I can fix it (and I’ve pretty much run out of those) or I have to come up with an idea now and write it now. All too often, these end up being relatively empty opinion pieces.
  4. If you are already tired, writing can be very tiring and you lose a lot of the fiero and inspiration from writing a good post.

I have probably spent, by all of these figures and time estimates, somewhere around 274 hours on this project. That’s just under 7 working weeks at 40 hours/week. No wonder I feel tired sometimes!

I am already, as you know, looking to change the posting frequency next year because I wish to focus on the quality of my work rather than the volume of my output. I still plan to have that hour or so put aside every day to contemplate and carry out research on learning and teaching but it will no longer be tied to an associated posting deadline. My original plan had an output requirement to force me to carry out the work. Unsurprisingly, oh brave new world that has such extrinsic motivating factors in it, I have become focused on the post, rather than the underlying research. My word count indicates that I am writing but, once this year is over, the review that I carry out will be to make sure that every word written from that point on is both valuable and necessary. My satisfaction in the contribution and utility of those posts I do make will replace any other quantitative measures of output.

My experience in this can be summarised quite simply. Setting a posting schedule that is too restrictive risks you putting the emphasis on the wrong component, where setting aside a regular time to study and contemplate the issues that lead to a good post is a far wiser investment. If you want to write this much, then it cannot be too much of a chore and, honestly, loving writing is almost essential, I feel. Fortunately, I have more than enough to keep the post queue going to the end of the year, as I’m working on a number of papers and ideas that will naturally end up here but I feel that I have, very much, achieved what I originally set to to do. I now deeply value the scholarship of learning and teaching and have learned enough to know that I have a great deal more to learn.

From a personal perspective, I believe that all of the words written have been valuable to me but, from next year, I have to make sure that the words I write are equally valuable to other people.

I’ll finish with something amusing. Someone asked me the other day how many words I’d written and, off the top of my head, I said “about 140,000” and thought that I was possibly over-claiming. The fact that I was under claiming by almost a factor of two never would have occurred to me, nor the fact that I had written more words than can be found in Order of the Phoenix. While I may wish to reclaim my reading time once this is over, for any fiction publishers reading this, I will have some free time next year! 🙂

The Earth Goes Around the Sun or the Sun Goes Around the Earth: Your Reaction Reflects Your Investment

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

There is a rather good new BBC version of Sherlock Holmes, called Sherlock because nobody likes confusion, where Holmes is played by Benedict Cumberbatch. One of the key points about Holmes’ focus is that it comes at a very definite cost. At one point, Cumberbatch’s Holmes is being lightly mocked because he was unaware that the Earth goes around the Sun. He is completely unfazed by this (he may have known it but he deleted it) because it’s not important to him. This extract is from the episode “The Great Game”:

Sherlock Holmes: Listen: [gets up and points to his head] This is my hard-drive, and it only makes sense to put things in there that are useful. Really useful. Ordinary people fill their heads with all kinds of rubbish, and that makes it hard to get at the stuff that matters! Do you see?

John Watson: [brief silence; looks at Sherlock incredulously] But it’s the solar system!

Sherlock Holmes: [extremely irritated by now] Oh, hell! What does that matter?! So we go around the sun! If we went around the moon or round and round the garden like a teddy bear, it wouldn’t make any difference! All that matters to me is the work!

Sherlock’s (self-described) sociopathy and his focus on his work make heliocentricity an irrelevant detail. But this clearly indicates his level of investment in his work. All the versions of Sherlock have extensive catalogues of tobacco types, a detailed knowledge of chemistry and an unerring eye for detail. If someone had walked up to him and said “Captain Ross smokes Greenseas tobacco” and they were wrong then Sherlock’s agitation (and derision) would be directed at them: worse if he had depended upon this fact to draw a conclusion.

We are all well aware that such indifference to whether Sun or Earth occupies the centre of the Solar System has not always been received so sanguinely. As it turns out, while there is widespread acceptance of the fact of heliocentricity, there is still considerable opposition in some quarters and, in the absence of scientific education, it is easy to see why people would naturally assume by simple (unaided) observation that the Sun is circling us, rather than the reverse. You have to accept a number of things before heliocentricity moves from being a sound mathematical model for calculation (as Cardinal Bellarmine did when discussing it with Galileo, because it so well explains things hypothetically) to the acceptance of it as the model of what actually occurs (as it makes the associated passages of scripture much harder to deal with). And the challenge of accepting this often lies in the degree to which that acceptance will change your world.

Your reaction reflects your investment.

Sherlock didn’t care either way. His world was not shaken by which orbited what because it was not a key plank of his being, nor did it force him to revise anything that he cared about. Cardinal Bellarmine, in discussions with Galileo, had a much greater investment, acting as he was on behalf of the Church and, one can only assume, firm in his belief in scripture while retaining his sensibilities to be able work in science (Bellarmine was a Jesuit and worked predominantly in theology). As he is quoted:

If there were a real proof that the Sun is in the center of the universe, that the Earth is in the third sphere, and that the Sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and we should rather have to say that we did not understand them than declare an opinion false which has been proved to be true. But I do not think there is any such proof since none has been shown to me.

It’s easy to think that these battles are over but, of course, as we deal with one challenging issue, another arises. This battle is not actually over. The 2006 General Social Survey showed that 18.3% of those people surveyed thought that the Sun went around the Earth, and 8% didn’t know. (0.1% refused. I think I’ve read his webpage.) (If you’re interested, all of the GSS data and its questions are available here. I hope to run the more recent figures to see how this has trended but I’ve run out of time this week.) That’s a survey run in 2006 in the US.

Why do nearly a quarter of the US population (or why did, given that this is 2006) not know about the Earth going around the Sun? As an educator, I have to look at this because if it’s because nobody told them, then, boy, do we have some ‘splaining to do. If it’s because they deleted it like Sherlock, then we have some seriously focused people or a lot of self-deleting sociopaths. (This is also not that likely a conjecture.) If it’s because someone told them that believing this meant that they had to spit in the face of one god or another, then we are seeing the same old combat between reaction and investment. There are a number of other correlations on this that, fortunately, indicate that this might be down to poor education, as knowledge of heliocentricity appears to correlate with the number of words that people got correct in the vocabulary test. Also, the number of people who didn’t accept heliocentricity decreased with increasing education. (Yes, that can also be skewed culturally as well but the large-representation major religions embrace education.)

So, and it’s a weird straw to clutch at and I need to dig more, it doesn’t appear that heliocentricity is, in the majority of cases, being rejected because of a strong investment in an antithetical stance, it’s just a lack of education or retention of that information. So, maybe we can put this one down, give more money to science teachers and move on.

But let me get to the meat of my real argument here, which is that a suitably alien or counter-intuitive proposition will be met with hostility, derision and rejection. When things matter, for whatever reason, we take them more seriously. When we take things so seriously that they shape how we live, consciously or not, then there is a problem when those underpinnings are challenged. We can make empty statements like “well, I suppose that works in theory” when the theory forces us to accept that we have been wrong, or at least walking on the less righteous path. When someone says to me “well, that’s fine in theory” I know what they are really saying. I’ve heard it before from Cardinal Bellarmine and it has gained no more weight since then. So it’s hard? Our job is hard. Constantly questioning is hard, tiring and often unrewarding. Yet, without it, we would have achieved very, very little.

People of all colours and races are equal? Unthinkable! Against our established texts! Supported by pseudo-science and biased surveys! They appear to be more similar than we thought! But they can’t marry! Wait, they can! They are equal! How can you think that they’re not?!

How many times do we have to go through this? We are playing out the same argument over and over again: when it matters enough (or too much), we resist to the point where we are being stubborn and (often) foolish.

And, that, I believe is where we stand in the middle of all of these revelations of unconscious and systematic bias against women that I referred to in my last post. People who have considered themselves fair and balanced, objective and ethical, now have to question whether they have been operating in error over all these years – if they accept the research published in PNAS and all of the associated areas. Suddenly, positive discrimination hiring policies become obvious as they now allow the hiring of people who appear to be the same, that the evidence now says have most likely been undervalued. This isn’t disadvantaging a man, this is being fair to the best candidate.

When presented with something challenging I find it helpful to switch the focus or the person involved. Would I be so challenged if it were to someone else? If the new revelation concerned these people or those people? How would I feel about if I read it in the paper? Would it matter if someone I trusted said it to me? Where are my human frailties and how I can account for them?

But, of course, as an educator, I have to think about how to frame my challenging and heretical information so that I don’t cause a spontaneous rejection that will prevent further discussion. I have to provide an atmosphere that exemplifies good practice, a world where people eventually wonder why this part of the world seems to be better, fairer and more reasonable than that part of the world. Then, with any luck, they take their questioning and new thinking to another place and we seed better things.

Banned Books Week: Time to Hit the Library!

Posted: October 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

It’s Banned Books Week until October the 6th so what better time to talk about the freedom to read and go off and subversively read some banned or challenged books? There’s a great link on the American Library Association’s site with the top 100 Banned/Challenged Books 2000-2009. Some of them are completely predictable and some of them are more surprising. The reasons given for withdrawing books are, in the words of the ALA site:

Books usually are challenged with the best intentions—to protect others, frequently children, from difficult ideas and information.

However, it is always easy to see where such noble intentions have been subverted and politics or other overtones have come into play. Let’s look at the Top 10 from 1990-1999 as an example:

  1. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz (7)
  2. Daddy’s Roommate, by Michael Willhoite (-)
  3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou (6)
  4. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier (3)
  5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (14)
  6. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck (5)
  7. Forever, by Judy Blume (16)
  8. Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson (28)
  9. Heather Has Two Mommies, by Leslea Newman (-)
  10. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger (19)

Book 1 is scary and has gruesome illustrations. Book 2 deals with homosexual parents.Book 3 contains a rape involving an eight year old girl. Book 4 is about bullying and also contains a masturbation scene. Book 5 is … book 5 is Huckleberry Finn!!! Of course, HF is probably in here because of the fairly extensive use of racial pejoratives and stereotypes, even if argument can be made that the book itself is anti-racist. Book 6 is a magnificent book but, between the deaths and a dead puppy, it’s not exactly an easy book. Book 7 has teen sex in it but nowhere near the same tone or difficulty as some of the previous. Book 8 is a surprisingly depressing book that manages to balance a fantasy world with death and disappointment. Book 9, well, what a surprise, another book on homosexuality has made the list. Finally, we have Catcher, full of profanity and sexual depiction.

Looking at this list, we see sex, racism, homosexual relationships and death being the major themes. (Notably, to be banned for sex, depictions that range to the explicit are required for heterosexual activity, but it is merely the existence of the relationship that can suffice for homosexual relationships.) Those numbers at the end are, by the way, where they feature in the top 100 of 2000-2009. Let’s look at that to see what appals and is too complicated for children or library users in the first decade of the 21st Century, I’ve bolded the new entries:

1. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
2. Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
3. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
4. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
5. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
7. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
8. His Dark Materials (series), by Philip Pullman
9. ttyl; ttfn; l8r g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky

I’ll come back to Harry Potter in a moment. Number 2, the Alice series, covers a wide range of topics, including our old friend sex, so it’s for the sexual content that it made the list – topping the list in 2003. Number 4 is a children’s book based on the observed behaviour of two male penguins who became a couple and raised a hatchling. (You can read about Roy and Silo here.) Number 8 has some nasty moments across the trilogy but, in the main, has drawn most of its criticism because of a negative portrayal of religion in general, and Christianity specifically. Number 9 is on the list because, from a Banned Books story in 2010, “Preoccupied with sex and college, the teen girls encounter realistic situations that feature foul language, drugs and alcohol in a less than casual way.” Finally, the new number 10 contains references to suicide and death, as well as the usual teen cocktail of drugs, alcohol and sex that guarantee requests for banning. Oh, and there’s also a gay friend and there is a reference to child molestation. But none of it is graphic and it’s written up as a series of letters to a friend.

So the themes are now sex, drugs, bad language, homosexual penguins (Penguin Lust!), discussion of real teenagers and… fantasy novels? Let me return to Harry Potter which contains teens who are so heavily plasticised that they appear to have no real functioning genitalia, never smoke drugs, don’t swear seriously even when being threatened with death and are laughably vanilla in so many ways that the dominant fantasy conceit of the HP universe is not the magic, it’s that teenagers would actually function this way! This, and the inclusion of His Dark Materials, appear to show the direction that book banning has taken over the last decade: removing a point of view for reasons that appear to have little to do with protecting children from difficult ideas and information, but to remove them from ideas that have been stated as unacceptable by some form of organised body.

I strongly suggest looking at both lists, side-by-side, so that you too can have the moments that I had of cocking your head to one side and thinking “why is that on there?” Then coming to the slow, and unpleasant realisation, that the answer is not “because it’s too dark or encourages drug use” but “because of an organised campaign by a group who are trying to orchestrate the removal of a book that, ultimately, is a fairy tale and of no more harm to children than any other”.

There are sometimes good reasons to restrict access, by age or maturity, to certain materials and, definitely, there are lines that you can’t cross and expect to show up on a public library on the shelves – this is a far cry from completely removing or destroying a work. But what appears to be happening now is that the political reasons for banning are starting to dominate, with Internet and local organisation allowing a majority to form that can request a book’s withdrawal. Fortunately, the Internet can bring books to anyone but, with existing models, e-Books may not be as widely available as we often think so the local and school library forms a valuable point for students. I read voraciously when I was younger and, despite reading many of the banned books on the lists, I don’t appear to have turned out too badly. (I know, I know, anecdotal existential evidence doesn’t count. But I can say that not everyone who reads The Chocolate War turns into a psychopath, so why is it always in the top 5? If anything, it made me aware that the adult advice on bullying was generally an empty mechanism that never dealt with the real problem: bullies are not always cowards, don’t fear the same type of repercussions and, sometimes, are in charge. I know – how subversive!)

Let me leave you with an example of how things have changed in the last two decades. One inclusion on the banned book list only showed up in the last decade, despite being published decades earlier, and it’s number 69 on the 2000-2009 list. I’m scared how high it will be driven in the 2010-2019 list and it is yet another example of why we have to be very careful about how we construct any list of books that we wish to treat differently. Or ‘sanction’. You might have heard of it.

It’s called Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury.

October Reflection: Planning for 2013

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

When I was younger, I used to play a science fiction role-playing game that was based in a near-ish future, where humans had widely adopted the use of electronic implants and computers were everywhere in a corporate-dominated world. The game was called “Cyberpunk 2013” and was heavily influenced by the work of William Gibson (“Neuromancer” and many other works), Bruce Sterling (“Mirrorshades” anthology and far too many to list), Walter Jon Williams (“Hardwired” among others) and many others who had written of a grim, depressing, and above all stylish near future. It was a product of the 80s and, much like other fashion crime of the time, some of the ideas that emerged were conceits rather than concepts, styles rather than structures. But, of course, back in the 1980s, setting it in 2013 made it far away and yet close enough. This was not a far future setting like Star Trek but it was just around the corner.

The game had some serious issues but was a great deal of fun. Don’t start me talking about it or we’ll be here all night.

And now it is here. My plans for the near future, the imminent and the inevitable, now include planning calendars for a year that was once a science fiction dream. In that dark dream, 2013 was a world of human/machine synthesis, of unfeeling and mercenary corporate control, of mindless pleasure and stylish control of a population that seeks to float as lotus eaters rather than continue to exist in the dirty and poor reality of their actual world.

Well, we haven’t yet got the cybernetics working… and, joking aside, the future is not perfect but it is far less gloomy and dramatic in the main that the authors envisioned. Yes, there are lots of places to fix but the majority of our culture is still working to the extent that it can be developed and bettered. The catastrophic failures and disasters of the world of 2013 has not yet occurred. We can’t relax, of course, and some things are looking bleak, but this is not the world of Night City.

In the middle of all of this musing on having caught up to the future that I envisioned as a boy, I am now faced with the mundane questions such as:

  • What do I want to be doing in 2020 (the next Cyberpunk release was set in this year, incidentally)
  • Therefore, what do I want to be doing in 2013 that will lead me towards 2020?
  • What is the place of this blog in 2013?

I won’t bore you with the details of my career musings (if my boss is reading this, I’m planning to stay at work, okay?) but I had always planned that the beginning of October would be a good time to muse about the blog and work out what would happen once 2012 ended. I committed to writing the blog every day, focussed on learning and teaching to some extent, but it was always going to be for one year and then see what happened.

I encourage my students to reflect on what they’ve done but not in a ‘nostalgic’ manner (ah, what a great assignment) but in a way that the can identify what worked, what didn’t work and how they could improve. So let me once again trot out the dog food and the can opener and give it a try.

What has worked

I think my blog has been most successful when I’ve had a single point to make, I’ve covered it in depth and then I’ve ducked out. Presenting it with humour, humility, and an accurate assessment of the time that people have to read makes it better. I think some of my best blogs present information and then let people make up their own minds. The goal was always to present my thought processes, not harangue people.

What hasn’t worked

I’m very prone to being opinionated and, sometimes, I think I’ve blogged too much opinion and too little fact. I also think that there are tangents I’ve taken when I’ve become more editorial and I’m not sure that this is the blog for that. Any blog over about 1,100 words is probably too long for people to read and that’s why I strive to keep the blog at or under 1,000 words.

Having to blog every day has also been a real challenge. While it keeps a flow of information going, the requirement to come up with something every, single, day regardless of how I’m feeling or what is going on is always going to have an impact on quality. For example, I recently had a medical condition that required my doctor to prescribe some serious anti-inflammatory drugs and painkillers for weeks and this had a severe impact on me. I have spent the last 10 days shaking off the effects of these drugs that, among other effects, make me about half as fast at writing and reduce my ability to concentrate. The load of the blog on top of this has been pretty severe and I’m open about some of the mistakes that I’ve made during this time. Today is the first day that I feel pretty reasonable and, by my own standards, fit for fair, complex marking of large student submissions (which is my true gauge of my mental agility).

How to improve

Wow, good question. This is where the thinking process starts, not stops, after such an inventory. The assessment above indicates that I am mostly happy with what came out (and my readership/like figures indicate this as well) but that I really want to focus on quality over quantity and to give myself the ability to take a day off if I need to. But I should also be focused on solid, single issue, posts that address something useful and important in learning and teaching – and this requires more in-depth reading and work than I can often muster on a day-to-day basis.

In short, I’m looking to change my blog style for next year to a shorter and punchier version that gives more important depth, maintains an overall high standard, but allows me to get sick or put my feet up occasionally. What is the advice that I would give a student? Make a plan that includes space for the real world and that still allows you to do your best work. Content matters more than frequency, as long as you meet your real deadline. So, early notice for 2013, expect a little less regularity but a much more consistent output.

It’s a work in progress. More as I think of it.

 

Six ‘Easy’ Pieces? Richard Feynman and the Undergraduate Lectures

Posted: September 30, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Richard P. Feynman was a Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist, who made great contributions to physics and the popularity of physics through his books and lectures. Among many other useful activities he developed Feynman diagrams, which provided a useful pictorial abstraction of the rather complicated mathematical expressions that govern the behaviour of subatomic particles.

Trust me when I tell you that this is easier to understand than the expressions.

This is a great tool in many ways because it makes the difficult more easy to understand, the abstract able to be represented in a (closer to) concrete manner and, above all, humans like pictures. Feynman was very interested in teaching as well because he felt that students could offer inspiration and because teaching could be a diversion when the well of theoretical physics creativity was running dry.  He was an opponent of rote learning and any approach to teaching that put the form before the function. He loved to explain and felt a strong duty to explain things clearly and correctly, with an emphasis on a key principle that if he couldn’t explain it at the freshman level, then it wasn’t yet understood fully.

In the 60’s Feynman was asked, by Caltech, to reinvigorate the teaching of undergraduates and, three years later, he produced the Feynman Lectures on Physics. I’ve read these before (I used to study Physics – I know, I seem so nice!) and so have many other people – it’s estimated that more than 3 million copies have been sold in various languages. I picked up a copy of the ‘cut-down’ version of the lectures “Six Easy Pieces”, recently re-published in Penguin (AU$ 9.95! Hooray for cheap books!)

Reading the 1989 Special Preface to the original lectures, re-printed in “Six Easy Pieces”, a strange fact emerges, which is that Feynman’s lectures did not necessarily succeed for their target audience, the undergraduates, but instead served to inspire the teachers. As Goodstein and Neugebauer noted, while the class started with 180 undergraduate students, many of the students dreaded the class and, over time, dropped out. While the class remained full, it was because of the increased occupation by faculty and graduate students.

In the original preface, by Feynman, he appears to have noticed that something was amiss because he reflects on the fact that he didn’t think it was a great success. One problem was that there was no feedback from the students to him to tell him how he was doing, whether they were keeping up. (Feynman provided very little outline and all of the homework assignments were created by other professors sitting in the class, furiously noting what had been covered and then creating the other work for recitation.) Feynman’s aim was to challenge and interest the best and brightest, he sought to not only direct the lecture at the smartest in the room  but to present work so that even the most brilliant in the room would be unable to cover it all. Feynman’s preface contains terms such as ‘sufficiently clever’, which may seem fine to some but to me indicate clearly that he, an astoundingly smart and still empathic human being, had at least an inkling that something had gone wrong between his vision and what happened in the classroom.

At the end of the preface, Feynman reflects, in a rather melancholy tone, “I don’t think I did very well by the students”. He is concerned that, based on the way that the the students handled the questions in the examination, that the system is a failure. A colleague points out that maybe 12-24 students appeared to really get it but you don’t have to be a very good mathematician to release that 24/180 (a nudge over 13%) is not the best rate of transfer. As Feynman gloomily responds (quoting Gibbon):

“The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous”

Feynman finishes, with his characteristic insight, that the direct individual relationship between student and teacher is paramount, where the student discusses things and works with, and discusses, ideas. That it is impossible to learn very much by sitting in a lecture. But he sees himself torn between what he sees as the right way to proceed and the number of students that we have to teach.

And, 49 years later, we, the inheritors of Sisyphus, are still trying to push that same rock up the same educational hill. Richard Feynman, a grand communicator and superlative thinker and scientist, tried his hardest to make the lecture work and even he couldn’t do it. He had mountains of support and he was unhappy with the result. He is clearly articulating all of the ideas for which we now have so much evidence and, yet, here we still are with 1000-person lectures and students who might be able to plug some numbers into formulas but don’t necessarily know what it means to think inside our discipline or discuss ideas in a meaningful dialogue.

From a personal perspective, Feynman’s Lectures on Physics are one the reasons why I gave up physics. I was struggling to see how it all fitted together and I went to seek help. (I was also a terrible student in those days but this was one of the rare occasions when I tried to improve.) One of my lecturers told me that I should read Feynman’s lectures and because it was designed for undergrads, if I couldn’t get that, I wouldn’t be able to catch up – basically, I didn’t have the Physics brain. I read it. I didn’t get it. I sorted the world into “physicists” and “non-physicists”, with me in the second group. (This is probably not a bad outcome for the physics community and, years later, while I can now happily read Feynman, it certainly doesn’t excite me as much as what I’m doing now.) I imagine that Feynman himself, while not lamenting me leaving the field, would probably be at least mildly perturbed at such a weaponisation of his work. From reading about him, his books and prefaces, I believe that he expected a lot of his students but he never actually wanted to be unpleasant about it. His own prefaces record his unease with the course he produced. He has no doubts about the physics and the aim – but his implementation was not what he wanted and not what he believed to be the best approach.

So, when someone questions your educational research supported ideas for improving learning and teaching, grab a copy of “Six Easy Pieces” and get them to read all of the preface material. Feynman himself regarded a lot of areas in educational research as cargo cult science, which applies as well to any poorly constructed scientific experimentation, but it is quite obvious that on at least some of the most important issues regarding knowledge transfer, he had a deep understanding and commitment to improvement, because of his direct experience with undergraduates and his ability to openly criticise himself in order to improve.

Fragile Relationships: Networks and Support

Posted: September 29, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve been working with a large professional and technical network organisation for the past couple of days and, while I’m not going to go into too much detail, it’s an organisation that has been around for 28 years and, because of a major change in funding, is now having to look at what the future holds. What’s interesting about this organisation is that it doesn’t have a silo problem in terms of its membership across Australia and New Zealand, which makes it almost unique in terms of technology networks in this neck of the woods. There’s no division between academic and professional staff, there are representatives from both. Same for tech and non-tech, traditional and new Unis, big and small players. It’s a bizarrely egalitarian and functional organisation that has been developing for 28 pretty good years.

Now, for some quite understandable reasons, the original funds provider is withdrawing and we have to look at the future and decide what we’re going to do. I’ve been out talking to possible organisation sponsors or affiliates but, until we decide what form we’re going to take, I’m trying to sell a beast behind a curtain by offering a dowry. This is not a great foundation for a future direction. As it turns out, trying to find a parent organisation that will be a good host is challenging because there’s nothing quite like us in the region. So, we’re looking at other alternatives. I have, however, just moved on to the executive of the organisation to try and help steer it through the next couple of years and, with any luck, into a form that will be self-sustaining and continue to give the valuable contribution to the ANZ community that it has been making for so many years.

The problem is that it takes 28 years to produce a network this strong and, if we get it wrong, relationships are inherently fragile and the disintegration of a group is far easier (and requires zero effort) than the formation. I have one of those composite stone benches in my house and I often ponder the amount of work it took to produce it and get that particular shape up on my bench top.

And how easily it could be broken, irrevocably, with one strike of a sledgehammer.

Knock knock!

(This is why my wife won’t let me use the sledgehammer to cook with.)

Human networks don’t need a sledgehammer strike to fall apart, they just need neglect. There are many examples of good low-cost networks that manage to keep people linked up, regardless of their level of resource, and I often think of the computing education community in the US, made of the regional committees, the overarching groups like SIGCSE and how the regional groups provide sustenance and a focus point, with the large conference coming into town every so often to bring everyone together.

2012 is an interesting year in so many ways and, every time I turn around, there seems to be a new challenge, something to look at, something to review to see if it’s worth keeping and, in many cases, something new to steward or assist. But I suppose that it’s important to remember that all of these things take energy and, at some stage, I’m going to have to sit down and organise how all of these tasks will go together in a way that I can make this work effectively for 2013.

Our Obligations: Moral and Legal?

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

Mark Guzdial raises an interesting point over at a BLOG@CACM article, namely that, if we don’t keep up to to date with contemporary practice in learning and teaching, can be considered unprofessional or even negligent or unethical? If we were surgeons who had not bothered to stay up to date then our patients, and certifying bodies, would be rightly upset. If we are teachers – then what?

The other issue Mark discusses is that of the legal requirement. The US has Title IX, which should extend the same participation rights to all genders for any education program or activity that attracts federal funding. If we do not construct activities that are inclusive (or we design activities that, by their nature, are exclusive) would we be liable under US law?

Mark’s final question is: If we know a better way to teach computing, are we professionally (and even legally) required to use it?

That is a spectacularly good question and, of course, it has no easy answer. Let me extend the idea of the surgeon by building on the doctors’ credo: primum non nocere (first, do no harm). Ultimately, it requires us to consider that all of our actions have outcomes and, in the case of medical intervention, we should be sure that we must always consider the harm that will be caused by this intervention.

Let us consider that there are two approaches that we could take in our pursuit of knowledge of learning and teaching: that of true scholarship of learning and teaching, and that of ignorance of new techniques of learning and teaching. (We’ll leave enthusiasm and ability to the side for the time being.) While this is falsely dichotomous, we can fix this by defining scholarship as starting at ‘knowing that other techniques exist and change might not kill you’, with everything else below that as ‘ignorance of new techniques’.

Now let us consider the impact of both of these bases, in terms of enthusiasm. If someone has any energy at all, then they will be able to apply techniques in the classroom. If they are more energetic then they will apply with more vigour and any effect will be amplified. If these are useful and evidentially supported techniques, then we would expect benefit. If these are folk pedagogies or traditions that have long been discredited then any vigour will be applied to an innately useless or destructive technique. In the case of an inert teacher, neither matters. It is obvious then that the minimum harm is to employ techniques that will reward vigour with sound outcomes: so we must either use validated techniques or explore new techniques that will work.

Now let us look at ability. If a teacher is ‘gifted’ (or profoundly experienced)  then he or she will be more likely to carry the class, pretty much regardless. However, what if a teacher is not so much of a star? Then, in this case, we start to become dependent once again upon the strength of the underlying technique or pedagogy. Otherwise, we risk harming our students by applying bad technique because of insufficient ability to correct it. Again, do no harm requires us to provide techniques that will survive the average or worse-than-average teacher, which requires a consideration of load, development level, reliance upon authority and so on – for student and teacher.

I believe that this argues that, yes, we are professionally bound to confirm our techniques and approaches and, if a better approach is available, evaluate it and adopt it. To do anything else risks doing harm and we cannot do this and remain professional. We are intervening with our students all the time – if we didn’t feel that our approach had worth or would change lives then we wouldn’t be doing it. If intervention and guidance are at our core then we must adopt something like the first, do no harm maxim because it gives us a clear signpost on decisions that could affect a student for life.

One of the greatest problems we face is potentially those people who are highly enthused and deeply undereducated in key areas of modern developments of teaching. As Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord would have said:

One must beware of anyone who is [undereducated] and [very enthusiastic] — [s/he] must not be entrusted with any responsibility because [s/he] will always cause only mischief.

If your best volunteer is also your worst nightmare, how do you resolve this when doing so requires you to say “This is right but you are wrong.” Can you do so without causing enormous problems that may swamp the benefit of doing so?

What about the legal issues? Do we risk heading into the murky world of compliance if we add a legal layer – will an ethical argument be enough?

What do you think about it?

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