ICER 2012 Day 1 Keynote: How Are We Thinking?

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

We started off today with a keynote address from Ed Meyer, from University of Queensland, on the Threshold Concepts Framework (Also Pedagogy, and Student Learning). I am, regrettably, not as conversant with threshold concepts as I should be, so I’ll try not to embarrass myself too badly. Threshold concepts are central to the mastery of a given subject and are characterised by some key features (Meyer and Land):

  1. Grasping a threshold concept is transformative because it changes the way that we think about something. These concepts become part of who we are.
  2. Once you’ve learned the concept, you are very unlikely to forget it – it is irreversible.
  3. This new concept allows you to make new connections and allows you to link together things that you previously didn’t realise were linked.
  4. This new concept has boundaries – they have an area over which they apply. You need to be able to question within the area to work out where it applies. (Ultimately, this may identify areas between schools of thought in an area.)
  5. Threshold concepts are ‘troublesome knowledge’. This knowledge can be counter-intuitive, even alien and will make no sense to people until they grasp the new concept. This is one of the key problems with discussing these concepts with people – they will wish to apply their intuitive understanding and fighting this tendency may take some considerable effort.

Meyer then discussed how we see with new eyes after we integrate these concepts. It can be argued that concepts such as these give us a new way of seeing that, because of inter-individual differences, students will experience in varying degrees as transformative, integrative, and (look out) provocative and troublesome. For this final one, a student experiences this in many ways: the world doesn’t work as I think it should! I feel lost! Helpless! Angry! Why are you doing this to me?

How do you introduce a student to one of these troublesome concepts and, more importantly, how can you describe what you are going to talk about when the concept itself is alien: what do you put in the course description given that you know that the student is not yet ready to assimilate the concept?

Meyer raised a really good point: how do we get someone to think inside the discipline? Do they understand the concept? Yes. Does this mean that they think along the right lines? Maybe, maybe not. If I don’t think like a Computer Scientist, I may not understand why a CS person sees a certain issue as a problem. We have plenty of evidence that people who haven’t dealt with the threshold concepts in CS Education find it alien to contemplate that the lecture is not the be-all and end-all of teaching – their resistance and reliance upon folk pedagogies is evidence of this wrestling with troublesome knowledge.

A great deal to think about from this talk, especially in dealing with key aspects of CS Ed as the threshold concept that is causing many of our non-educational research oriented colleagues so much trouble, as well as our students.

 

And more on the Harvard Scandal: Scandal? Apparently it’s not?

Posted: September 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve just read a Salon article regarding the Harvard cheating issue. Apparently, according to Farhad Manjoo, these students should be “celebrated for collaborating“.

Note that word? It’s the one that I picked on in the Crimson article and the reason that I did so is that it’s a very mild word, and a very positive one at that. However, this article, while acknowledging that the students were prevented from any such sharing, Manjoo then asks, to me somewhat disingenuously, “What’s the point of prohibiting these students from working together?”

Urm, well, for most of the course, they don’t. At the end of the course, when they want to see how much each individual knows, they attempt to test them individually. That’s not an unusual pattern.

Manjoo’s interpretation of the other articles goes well beyond anything else that I’ve seen, including putting all of the plagiarism claims together as group work and tutor consultation. I can’t speak to this as I don’t have his sources but, given that this was explicitly forbidden anyway, he’s making an empty argument. It doesn’t matter how you slice it, if students worked together, they did something that they weren’t supposed to do. However Manjoo argues that their actions are justified, I’m not sure that this argument is.

The author obviously disagrees with the nature of the open book test and, to my reading, has no real idea of what he’s talking about. Sentences like “But if you want to determine how well students think, why force them to think alone?” are almost completely self-defeating. It also ignores the need to build knowledge in a way that functions when the group isn’t there. We don’t use social constructivism in the assumption that we will always be travelling in packs, we do it to assist the construction of knowledge inside the individual by leveraging the advantages of the social structure. To evaluate how well it has happened, and to isolate group effects so that we can see the individual performing, we use rules such as Harvard clearly defined to set these boundaries.

Manjoo waxes rhetorical in this essay. “Rather than punishing these students, shouldn’t we be praising them for solving these problems the only way they could? ” Well, no, I think that we shouldn’t. There were many ways that, if they thought this approach was unreasonable or unfair, they could have legitimately protested. I note that half the class managed to not (apparently, as far as the number suspected) cheat during this test – what do we say about these people? Are these people worthy of double-plus-praise for somehow transcending the impossible test, or are they fools for not collaborating?

I’m not sure why these articles are providing so much padding for these students, if they have actually done nothing wrong (I hasten to add that they are merely suspected at the moment but if they are to be martyrs then let us assume a bleak outcome). At least, unlike the writers in the Crimson, Manjoo is a Cornell alumnus so he has some distance. I do note that he has a book called “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” which, according to the reviews, is about the media establishing views of reality that aren’t necessarily the facts so he’s aware of the impact that his words have on how people will see this issue. He is also writing in a column with, among its bylines, “The Conventional Wisdom Debunked”, so it’s not surprising that this article is written this way.

Manjoo has created (another) Harvard bogeyman: scared of collaboration, unfair to students, and out of step with reality. However, his argument is ultimately a series of misdirections and Manjoo’s opinion that don’t address the core issue: if these students worked with each other, they shouldn’t have. Until he accepts that this, and that this is not a legitimate course, I’m not sure that his arguments have much weight with me.

 

(Reasonable) Argument, Evidence and (Good) Journalism: Is “Crimson” the Colour of Their Faces?

Posted: September 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I ran across a story on the Harvard Crimson about a surprisingly high level of suspected plagiarism in a course, Government 1310. The story opens up simply enough in the realms of fact, where the professor suspected plagiarism behaviour in 10-20 take home exams, which was against published guidelines, and has now expanded to roughly 125 suspicious final exams. There was a brief discussion of the assessment of the course and the steps taken so far by the faculty.

Then, the article takes a weird turn. Suddenly, we have a student account, an anonymous student who doesn’t wish their name to be associated with the plagiarism, who “suspected that  Government 1310 was the course in question”. Hello? Why is this… ahhh. Here’s some more:

Though she said she followed the exam instructions and is not being investigated by the Ad Board, she said she thought the exam format lent itself to improper academic conduct.

“I can understand why it would be very easy to collaborate,” said the student

Oh. Collaborate. Interesting. Next we get the Q Guide rating for the course and this course gets 2.54/5 versus the apparent average of 3.91. Then we get some reviews from the Q Guide that “spoke critically of the course’s organisation and the difficulty of the exam questions”.

Spotting a pattern yet?

Another student said that he/she had joined a group of 15 other students just before the submission date and that they had been up all night trying to understand one of the questions (worth 20%).

I submitted this to my students to read and then asked them how they felt about it. Understandably, by the end of the reading, while my students were still thinking about plagiarism, they were thinking that there may have been some… justification. Then we started pulling the article apart.

When we start to look at the article, it becomes apparent that the facts presented all have a rather definite theme – namely that if cheating has occurred, that it has a justification because of the terrible way the course was taught (low Q Guide rating! 16 students confused!)

Now, I can not see the Q Guide data, because when I go to the page I get this information (and I need a Harvard login to go further):

Q Guide
The Q Guide was an annually published guide that reported the results of each year’s course evaluations. Formerly called the CUE Guide, it was renamed the Q Guide in 2007 because the evaluations now include the GSAS and are no longer run solely by the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE). In 2009, in place of The Q Guide, Harvard College integrated Q data with the online course selection tool (at my.harvard.edu), providing a simple and easy way to access and compare course evaluation data while planning your course schedule.

So if the article, regarding an exam run in 2012, is referring to the Q Guide for Gov 1310, then it’s one of two things: using an old name for new data (admittedly, fairly likely) or referring to old data. The question does arise, however, whether the Q Guide rating refers to this offering or a previous offering. I can’t tell you which it is because I don’t know. It’s not publicly available and the article doesn’t tell me. (Although you’ll note that the Q Guide text refers to this year‘s evaluations. There’s a part of me that strongly suspects that this is historical data but, of course, I’m speculating.)

However, the most insidious aspect is the presentation of 16 students who are confused about content in a way that overstates their significance. It’s a blatant example of emotive manipulation and encourages the reader to make a false generalisation. There were 279 students enrolled in Gov 1310. 16 is 5.7%. Would I be surprised in somewhere around 5% of my students weren’t capable of understanding all of the questions or thought that some material wasn’t in the course?

No, of course not. That’s roughly the percentage of my students who sometimes don’t know which Dr Falkner is teaching their class. (Hint: one is male and one is female. Noticeably so in both cases.)

I presented this to my Grand Challenge students as part of our studies of philosophical and logical fallacies, discussing how arguments are made to mislead and misdirect. The terrible shame is that, with a detected rate of plagiarism that is this high, I would usually have a very detailed look at the learning and teaching strategies employed (how often are exams being rewritten, how is information being presented, how is teaching being carried out) because this is an amazingly high level of suspected plagiarism.

Despite the misleading journalism presented in the Crimson, the course and its teachers may have to shoulder some responsibility here. As always, just because someone’s argument is badly made, doesn’t mean that it is actually wrong. It’s just disappointing that such a cheap and emotive argument was raised in a way that further fogs an important issue.

As I said to my students today, one of the most interesting way to try to understand a biassed or miscast argument is to understand who the bias favours – cui bono? (To whom the benefit? I am somewhat terrified, on looking for images for this phrase, that it has been highjacked by extremists and conspiracy theorists. It’s a shame because it’s historically beautiful.)

So why would the Crimson run this? It’s pretty manipulative so, unless this is just bad journalism, cui bono?

Having looked up how disciplinary boards are constituted at Harvard, I found a reference that there are three appointed faculty members and:

There are three students appointed to the board as full voting members. Two of these will be assigned to specific cases on a case-by-case basis and will not be in the same division as the student facing disciplinary action.

In this case, the Crimson’s story suddenly looks a lot… darker. If, by publishing this article, they reach the right students and convince them the action of the suspected plagiarists may have been overly influenced by academics who are not performing their duties – then we risk suddenly having a deadlocked board and a deleterious effect on what should have been an untainted process.

The Crimson has further distinguished itself with a follow-up article regarding the uncertainty students are feeling because of the process.

“It’s unfair to leave that uncertainty, given that we’re starting lives,” said the alumnus, who was granted anonymity by The Crimson because he said he feared repercussions from Harvard for discussing the case.

Oh, Harvard, you giant monster, unfairly delaying your decision on a plagiarism case because the lecturers were so very, very bad that students had to cheat. And, what’s worse, you are so evil that students are scared of you – they “fear the repercussions”!

Thank you, Crimson, for providing so much rich fodder for my discussion on how the words “logical argument”, “evidence” and “good journalism” can be so hard to fit into the same sentence.

Gamification: What Happens If All Of The Artefacts Already Exist

Posted: September 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Win! Win! Win! (via mindjumpers.com)

I was reading an article today in May/June’s “Information Age”, the magazine of the Australian Computer Society, entitled “Gamification Goes Mainstream”. The article identified the gaming mechanics that could be added to businesses to improve engagement and work quality/productivity by employees. These measures are:

  1. Points: Users get points for achievements and can spend the points on prizes.
  2. Levelling: Points get harder to get as the user masters the systems.
  3. Badges: Badges are awarded and become part of the user’s “trophy page”, accompanying any comments made by the user.
  4. Leader Boards: Users are ranked by points or achievement.
  5. Community: Collaborative tools, contests, sharing and forums.

Now, of course, there’s a reason that things exist like in games and that’s because most games are outside of the physical world and, in the absence of the natural laws that normally make things happen and ground us, we rely upon these mechanics to help us to assess our progress through the game and provide us with some reward for our efforts. Now, while I’m a great believer in using whatever is necessary to make work engaging and to make like more enjoyable, I do wonder about the risk of setting up parallel systems that get people to focus on things other than their actual work.

Yes, yes, we all know I have issues with extrinsic motivations but let’s look again at the list of measures above, which would normally be provided in a game to allow us to make sense of the artificial world in which we find ourselves, and think about how they apply already in a workplace.

  1. Points that can be used to purchase things: I think that we call this money. If I provide a points system for buying company things then I’ve created a second economy that is not actually money.
  2. Levelling: Oh, wait, now it’s hard to spend the special points that I’ve been given so I’ve not only created a second economy, I’ve started down the road towards hyperinflation by devaluing the currency. (Ok, so the promotional system works here in my industry like that – our ranks are our levels, which isn’t that uncommon.)
  3. Badges: Plaques for special achievement, awards, post-nominal letters, Fellowships – anything that goes on the business card is effectively a badge.
  4. Leader Boards: Ok, this is something that we don’t often see in the professional world but, let’s face it, if you’re not on top then you’re not the best. Is that actually motivational or soul-destroying? Of course, if we don’t have it yet, then you do have to wonder why, given every other management trend seems to get a workout occasionally. I should note that I have seen leader boards at my workplace which have been ‘anonymised’ but given that I can see myself I can see where I sit – now not only do I know if am not top, I don’t know who to ask about how to get better, which has been touted as one of the reasons to identify the stars in the first place.
  5.  Community: We do have collaborative tools but they are focussed on helping us achieve our jobs, not on achieving orthogonal goals associated with a gaming system. We also have comment forums, discussion mechanisms such as mailing lists and the like. Contests? No. We don’t have contests. Do we? Oh wait, national competitive grant schemes, local teaching schemes, competitive bidding for opportunities.

Now if people aren’t engaging with the tasks that are expected of them (let’s assume reasonably) then, yes, we should find ways to make things more interesting to encourage participation. However, talking about all of the game mechanics above, it’s obviously going to take more thought than just picking a list of things that we are already doing and providing an alternative system that somehow makes everything really interesting again.

I should note that the article does sound a cautionary tone, from one of the participants, who basically says that it’s too soon to see how effective these schemes are and, of course, Kohn is already waggling a finger at setting up a prize/compliance expectation. So perhaps the lesson here is “how can we take what we already have and work out how to make it more interesting” rather than taking the lessons in required constructions of phenomena from a completely artificial environment where we have to define gravity in order to make things fall. Gamification shows promise in certain direction, mainly because there’s a lot of fun implicit in the whole process, but the approaches need to be carefully designed to make sure that we don’t accidentally reinvent the same old wheel.

 

 

Let’s Transform Education! (MOOC Hijinks Hilarity! Jinkies!)

Posted: September 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

I had one of those discussions yesterday that every one in Higher Education educational research comes to dread: a discussion with someone who basically doesn’t believe the educational research and, within varying degrees of politeness, comes close to ignoring or denigrating everything that you’re trying to do. Yesterday’s high point was the use of the term “Mr Chips” to describe the (from the speaker’s perspective) incredibly low possibility of actually widening our entrance criteria and turning out “quality” graduates – his point was that more students would automatically mean much larger (70%) failure rates. My counter (and original point) is that since there is such a low correlation between school marks and University GPA (roughly 40-45% and it’s very noisy) that successful learning and teaching strategies could deal with an influx of supposedly ‘lower quality’ students, because the quality metric that we’re using (terminal high school grade or equivalent) is not a reliable indicator of performance. My fundamental belief is that good education is transformative. We start with the students that schools give us but good, well-constructed, education can, in the vast majority of cases, successfully educate students and transform them into functioning, self-regulating graduates. We have, as a community, carried out a lot of research that says that this works, provided that we are happy to accept that we (academics) are not by any stretch of the imagination the target demographic or majority experience in our classes, and that, please, let’s look at new teaching methods and approaches that actually work in developing the knowledge and characteristics that we’re after.

The “Mr Chips” thing is a reference to a rather sentimental account of the transformative influence of a school master, the eponymous Chips, and, by inference, using it in a discussion of the transformative power of education does cast the perception of my comments on equality of access, linked with educational design and learning systems as transformative technologies, as being seen as both naïve and (in a more personal reading) makes me uncomfortably aware that some people might think I’m talking about myself as being the key catalyst of some sort. One of the nice things about being an academic is that you can have a discussion like this and not actually come to blows over it – we think and argue for a living, after all. But I find this dismissive and rude. If we’re not trying to educate people and transform them, then what the hell are we doing? Advocating inclusion and transformation shouldn’t be seen as grandstanding – it should be seen as our job. I don’t want to be the keystone, I want systems that work and survive individuals, but that individuals can work within to improve and develop – we know this is possible and it’s happening in a lot of places. There are, however, pockets of resistance: people who are using the same old approaches out of laziness, ignorance and a refusal to update for what appear to be philosophical reasons but have no evidence to support them.

Frankly, I’m getting a little irritated by people doubting the value of the volumes of educational research. If I was dealing with people who’d read the papers, I’d be happier, but I’m often dealing with people who won’t read the papers because they just don’t believe that there’s a need to change or they refuse to accept what is in there because of a perceived difficulty in making it work. (A colleague demanded a copy of one of our papers showing the impact of our new approaches on retention – I haven’t heard from him since he got it. This probably means that he’s chosen to ignore it and is going to pretend that he never asked.) Over coffee this morning, musing on this, it occurred to me that at the same time that we’re not getting the greatest amount of respect and love in the educational research community, we’re also worried about the trend towards MOOCs. Many of our concerns about MOOCs are founded in the lack of evidence that they are educationally effective. And I saw a confluence.

All of the educational researchers who are not able to sway people inside their institutions – let’s just ignore them and surge into the MOOCs. We can still teach inside our own places, of course, and since MOOCs are free there’s no commercial conflict – but let’s take all of the research and practice and build a brave new world out in MOOC space that is the best of what we know. We can even choose to connect our in-house teaching into that system if we want. (Yes, we still have the face-to-face issue for those without a bricks-and-mortar campus, but how far could we go to make things better in terms of what MOOCs can offer?) We’re transformers, builders and creators. What could we do with the infinite canvas of the Internet and a lot of very clever people, working with a lot of very other clever people who are also driven and entrepreneurial?

The MOOC community will probably have a lot to say about this, which is why we shouldn’t see this as a hijack or a take-over, and I think it’s helpful to think of this very much as a confluence – a flowing together. I am, not for a second, saying that this will legitimise MOOCs, because this implies that they are illegitimate, but rather than keep fighting battles with colleagues and systems that can defeat 40 years of knowledge by saying “Well, I don’t think so”, let’s work with people who have already shown that they are looking to the future. Perhaps, combining people who are building giant engines of change with the people who are being frustrated in trying to bring about change might make something magical happen? I know that this is already happening in some places – but what if it was an international movement across the whole sector?

Jinkies! (Sorry, the title ran to this and I get to use a picture of a t-shirt with Velma on it!)

Relma!

The purpose of this is manifold:

  1. We get to build the systems that we want to, to deliver education to students in the best ways we know.
  2. We (potentially) help to improve MOOCs by providing strong theory to construct evidence gathering mechanisms that allow us to really get inside what MOOCs are doing.
  3. More students get educated. (Ok, maybe not in our host institutions, but what is our actual goal anyway?)
  4. We form a strong international community of educational researchers with common outputs and sharing that isn’t necessarily owned by one company (sorry, iTunesU).
  5. If we get it right, students vote with their feet and employers vote with their wallets. We make educational research important and impossible to ignore through visible success.

Now this is, of course, a pipe dream in many ways. Who will pay for it? How long will it take before even not-for-pay outside education becomes barred under new terms and conditions? Who will pay my mortgage if I get fired because I’m working on a deliberately external set of courses for students who are not paying to come to my institution?

But, the most important thing, for me, is that we should continue what has been proposed and work more and more closely with the MOOC community to develop exemplars of good practice that have strong, evidence-based outcomes that become impossible to ignore. Much as students use temporal discounting to procrastinate about their work, administrators tend to use a more traditional financial discounting when it comes to what they consider important. If it takes 12 papers and two years of study to justify spending $5,000 on a new tool or time spent on learning design – forget about it. If, however, MOOCs show strong evidence of improving student retention (*BING*), student attraction (*BING*), student engagement (*BING*) and employability – well, BINGO. People will pay money for that.

I’ve spoken before about how successful I had to be before I was tolerated in my pursuit of educational research and, while I don’t normally talk about it in detail because it smacks of hubris and I sincerely believe that I am not a role model of any kind, I  hope that you will excuse me so that I can explain why I think it’s crazy as to how successful I had to be in order to become tolerated – and not yet really believed. To summarise, I’m in three research groups, I’ve brought in (as part of a group and individually) somewhere in the order of $0.5M in one non-ed research area, I’ve brought in something like $30-50K in educational research money, I’ve published two A journals (one CS research, one CS ed), two A conferences (both ed) and one B conference (ed/CS) and I have a faculty level position as an Associate Dean and I have a national learning and teaching presence. All of the things on that line – that’s 2012. 2011 wasn’t quite as successful but it wasn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination. I think that’s an unreasonably high bar to pass in order to be allowed the luxury of asking questions about what it is that we’re doing with learning and teaching. But if I can leverage that to work with other colleagues who can then refer to what we’ve done in a way that makes administrators and managers accept the real value of an educational revolution – then my effort is shared over many more people and it suddenly looks like a much better investment of my time.

This is more musing that mission, I’m afraid, and I realise that any amount of this could be shot down but I look forward to some discussion!

 

 

Warning: Objects in Mirror May Appear Important Because They Appear Closer

Posted: August 31, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I had an interesting meeting with one of my students who has been trying to allocate his time to various commitments, including the project that he’s doing with me. He had been spending most of his time on an assignment for another course and, while this assignment was important, I had to carry out one of the principle duties of the supervisor: pointing out the obvious when people have their face pressed too close to the window, staring at the things that are close.

There are three major things a project supervisor does: kick things off and give some ideas, tell the student when they’re not making good progress and help them to get back on track, and stop them before they run off into the distance and get them to write it all down as a thesis of some sort.

So, in our last meeting, I asked the student how much the other assignment was worth.

“About 10%.”

How much is your project work in terms of total courses?

“4 courses worth.”

So the project is 40 times the value of that assignment that has taken up most of your time? What’s that – 4,000%?

…

To his credit, he has been working along and it’s not too late yet, by any stretch of the imagination, but a little perspective is always handy. He has also started to plan his time out better and, most rewardingly, appreciates the perspective. This, to be honest, is the way that I like it: nothing bad has happened, everyone’s learned something. Hooray!

I sometimes wonder if it’s one of the crucial problems that we face as humans. Things that are close look bigger, whether optically because of how eyes work or because of things that are due tomorrow seem to have so much more importance than much, much bigger tasks due in four weeks. Oh, we could start talking about exponential time distributions or similar things but I prefer the comparison with the visual illusion.

Just because it looks close doesn’t mean it’s the biggest thing that you have to worry about.

Some close things are worth worrying about, however.

Vale, Neil Armstrong (or, What Happened to my Moon Base?)

Posted: August 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Neil Alden Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the Moon, has left us at the age of 82. I don’t remember the moonwalk although, as a baby, I was placed in front of the television to ‘watch’ as, on July 21st, we walked on another world. Growing up, of course, it quickly became apparent that we didn’t go to the Moon anymore, the last walk being when I was 4ish. Apollo 17, the last mission, was in December, 1972, and the planned Apollos (out to 20) were scrubbed. Yes, we got Skylab up into orbit and that was really exciting, as were the docking missions, but it wasn’t THE MOON.

(The Silence are standing behind the large Moon to the rear.)

But we were still in space! After all, it was only 8 years later that we all watched as the Space Shuttles started to go into the sky. Well, we were in space. It was obvious that other countries were doing things as well (for those who didn’t grow up with this, it’s fair to say that the USA and USSR didn’t get on for a while so information sharing was limited and often heavily propagandised by both parties) but that glorious shuttle, climbing up into the sky, had taken the baton and we even (finally) managed to get a space station in orbit that was bigger than a breadbox. But, by Moon shot comparisons, it wasn’t quite in the same league.

Now, I’m not for a moment suggesting that space travel has been the best use of our time and money but, goodness, has it been inspirational! We’ve developed some amazing things along the way and we’ve learned a great deal about ourselves – one of which, sadly, is that the future that I am living is not the future that I thought I would inhabit.

Growing up, I made a number of assumptions, based on the talk of the time and the books I read (a lot of which were science fiction) and, looking back on it now, these ideas were very inspirational. Growing up in the England of the early-mid 70s (a cold, lean and unpleasant place) having heroes from space was an important thing for me to have. The messages from the real-life stories of achievement (we went to the Moon! We’re getting rid of smallpox! We’re pushing back disease!) were, and still are, an important part of me. Even where we had dystopia presented to us, it was in order to learn. (The Earth has finite resources, for example, so perhaps we should be living within our means a little better – this is the message of so many works from the mid-late 20th century.)

An Eagle Transporter from the UK television series Space:1999. Note almost complete lack of aerodynamic features, including wing-based control surfaces, because (wait for it) there is no air on the Moon!

But, of course, we have no moon base. We have carried out an incredible and technologically staggering feat to gently drop the new Mars explorer on Mars – but there are no people there. I’m not sure how many times we’ll go back there and my fear is that, within 10 years, we abandon that too. But we aren’t just losing space. A number of our achievements in the face of disease and social equality, for example, are being undermined by deliberate dissemination of disinformation and the shameful exploitation of fear and ignorance.

Sadly, at least some of the people who read this will scoff at the idea that we even went to the Moon. “You rube,” they’re thinking, “Everyone knows it was a giant hoax and cover-up.” The same thing applies to vaccines, where the human failing regarding probability and modelling comes to the fore and the fearful and anecdotal are treasured over the science. Don’t even get me started on the climate change denial movement.

Is this our fault? As scientists did we presume too much in our certainty and, after so many mistakes, have we earned this distrust? Frankly, while scientists have been responsible for some shameful acts of wilful destruction or negligence, I don’t think we deserve to be viewed in such a harsh light. What I believe we’re seeing is the snake oil merchant at its finest – preying on the weak, undermining reality for their own ends, looking into the near term future of the wallet rather than the long term future of us all.

What scares me is that we may be losing our knowledge. That the simplest of ideas in science, that you collect and observe evidence in order to allow you to confirm or contradict your hypotheses, is being overrun by a mad dash towards a certainty based on wilful ignorance where you only see the evidence that agrees with your hypothesis, after the fact, and truth be damned. Should we be spending the money required to go back to the Moon? Perhaps not as it is a lot of money and, goodness knows, we have things to spend it on. But if our reason for not going back to the Moon is that we lack the drive, the imagination, the tenacity or the vision to achieve it – then we are in serious trouble.

People sometimes ask me how many students I need to have in my classroom in order to deliver a lecture. I like to have 80-95%, of course, but my answer is always the same: one. I will not consider it a waste of my time if I spend an hour with a student discussing the ideas and sharing knowledge with them. I want my students to be imaginative, driven, to be able to hang on like a terrier as they search for the truth and to understand that the search for knowledge is important – so I have to try to live that. I have to live it all the time because, all too often, there are too many examples of people ignoring the truth for a comfortable lie, for being famous for being famous, for being famous for being thoughtlessly reactive (shock jock, anyone), for changing their minds for political expediency, for outright lying, and for only valuing quantities and dollars rather than people and knowledge.

What gets me out of bed in the morning is my own set of heroes: my wife, my friends, those in my family who have overcome adversity, the real educators who do their job because they have to and because of their deep and enduring relationship with knowledge, the stars in my firmament. I looked to my own heroes growing up and those heroes wouldn’t have let the world resemble “Silent Running”, “Soylent Green” or “The Omega Man” – they, like me, wanted our children to grow up in a better world. Those films of the 60s and 70s were the product of SF writers looking forward and saying “We don’t want this.” In the absence of vision, in the attack upon science and in the minimisation of majestic and inspirational events, we get ever closer to these stinking, diseased, dying worlds that should only ever exist in our nightmares.

The green in this still from Silent Running is, in theory, almost all of what is left of Earth’s greenery. Not very large, is it?

I grew up thinking that “Silent Running”, a movie where companies ordered the destruction the last of Earth’s biomass because it was too expensive to keep, was hyperbole – at most a cautionary tale. Now, every day, I get out of bed to try and educate a new generation of scientists so that we don’t accidentally or deliberately end up going over exactly that precipice. Thought is the greatest tool that we have and, like any tool, it can work for us and against us. Guiding thought along constructive paths is challenging and it always helps to have a large and visible goal to aim for: navigators need stars or ships get lost.

We need champions. We need champions so large that even our other champions look to them – we need ideas so beautiful and so huge and so captivating that the vast majority of people, when exposed to them, roll up their sleeves and say “I can help.” We need people for your children to aspire to be, because of what they did, not who they are. However, while we have many champions, the giant blazing comets that I had growing up are all dying or dead and it makes me very sad. Yes, there is incredible achievement going on and there are many, many great stories but what does the future look like to someone growing up now?

My future was full of moon bases, flying cars, leisure time, robots, everyone well fed, no war, gender and race equality – what’s our scorecard looking like?

Soon there will be no-one left who walked on the moon. After 2099, there will probably be no-one alive when we did walk on the moon. What happens to the accounts of the Moon then? How long before it becomes a myth? How long before the real footage gets mixed up with Hollywood movies – or the MTV Logo becomes the 22nd century’s view of what happened on the Moon?

Of course, there is no real need to go back to the Moon. There are many other things that we can usefully do with that money and, ethically, we probably should. In terms of inspiration, it’s hard to beat, but that just makes it a challenge to find a problem that is equally big and put it together in a way that we can all see the rightness of it.

If you’ve read this far, thank you, but I have an additional favour to ask of you. This week, if possible, I’d like you to find an extra something, somewhere, that puts an extra champion into your life or into the life of someone else. It doesn’t have to be a person, it just has to be a star to set a course by. Something to look up to in high seas to know why you’re going where you’re going and that the risk is worth it. Have you told one of your living champions how much they mean to you? Have you made the time to share your (I know, precious) time and knowledge with someone else? Can you pin a picture of Hypatia to your pinboard? Rosa Parks? Jon Snow? Curie? Lister? Brunel? da Vinci? The SS Great Britain? Euler? Gauss? Florey? The Wrights? The 1902 Glider or the Wright Flyer 1? Crick/Watson/Franklin (bonus points if you have them in a wrestling ring wearing Luchador masks)? A Crab Canon? Telemann? Steve Kardynal?

“Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all,” Hypatia of Alexandria.

Have you taken your champion out of your head and told everyone else about them? When we landed on the Moon a vast number of us looked up and, for one moment, we all shared the same vision.

Neil Armstrong lived a good life, one that was useful and surprisingly humble given what he achieved and the position in which he found himself, but he’s gone now and we need more people and inspiration to fill the gap that he left. We need to look up once more.

Short and Sweet

Posted: August 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Well, it’s official. I’ve started to compromise my ability to work through insufficient rest. Despite reducing my additional work load, chewing through my backlog is keeping me working far too much and, as you can tell from the number and nature of the typos in these posts, it’s affecting me. I am currently reorganising tasks to see what I can continue to fit in without compromising quality, which means this week a lot of e-mail is being sent to sort out my priorities.

This weekend, I’m sitting down to brainstorm the rest of 2012 and work out what has to happen when – nothing is going to sneak up on me (again) this year.

In very good news, we have 18 students coming back for the pilot activity of “Our students, their words” where we ask students who love ICT an important question – “what do you like and why do you think someone else might like it?” We’re brainstorming with the students for all of Friday morning and passing their thoughts (as research) to a graphic designer to get some posters made. This is stage 1. Stage 2, the national campaign, is also moving – slowly but surely. This is why I really need to rest: I’m getting to the point where it’s important that I am at my best and brightest. Sleeping in and relaxing is probably the best thing I can do for the future of ICT! 🙂

Rather than be a hypocrite, I’m switching to ultra-short posts until I’m rested up enough to work properly again.

See you tomorrow!

A (measurement) league of our own?

Posted: August 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

As I’ve mentioned before, the number of ways that we are being measured is on the rise, whether it’s measures of our research output or ‘quality’, or the impact, benefits, quality or attractiveness of our learning and teaching. The fascination with research quality is not new but, given that we have had a “publish or perish” mentality where people would put out anything and be called ‘research active’, a move to a quality focus (which often entails far more preparation, depth of research and time to publication) from a quantity focus is not a trivial move. Worse, the lens through which we are assessed can often change far faster than we can change those aspects that are assessed.

If you look at some of the rankings of Universities, you’ll see that the overall metrics include things like the number of staff who are Nobel Laureates or have won the Fields Medal. Well, there are less than 52 Fields medallists and only a few hundred Nobel Laureates and, as the website itself distinguishes, a number of those are in the Economics area. This is an inherently scarce resource, however you slice it, and, much like a gallery that prides itself on having an excellent collection of precious art, you are more likely to be able to get more of these slices if you already have some. Thus, this measure of the research presence of your University is a bit of feedback loop.

Similarly the measurement of things like ‘number of papers in the top 20% of publications’. This conveniently ignores some of the benefits of being at better funded institutions, being part of an established community, being invited to lodge papers, and so on. Even where we have anonymous submission and evaluation, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to spot connections, groups, and, of course, let’s not forget that a well-funded group will have more time, more resources, more postdocs. Basically, funding should lead to better results which leads to better measurement which may lead to better funding.

In terms of high prestige personnel, and their importance, or a history of quality publication, neither of these metrics can be changed overnight. Certainly a campaign to attract prestigious staff might be fruitful in the short term but, and let us be very frank here, if you can buy these staff with a combination of desirable locale issues and money, then it is a matter of bidding as to which University they go to next. But trying to increase your “number of high end publications in the last 5 years” is going to take 5 years to improve and this is kind of long-term thinking that we, as humans, appear to be very bad at.

Speaking of thinking in the long term, a number of the measures that would be most useful to us are not collected or used for assessment because they are over large timescales and, as I’ll discuss, may force us to realise that some things are intrinsically unmeasurable. Learning and teaching quality and impact is intrinsically hard to measure, mainly because we rarely seem take the time to judge the impact of tertiary institutions over an appropriate timescale. Given the transition issues in going from high school to University, measuring drop-out and retention rates in a student’s first semester leaves us wondering who is at fault. Are the schools not quite doing the job? Is it the University staff? The courses? The discipline identity? The student? Yes, we can measure retention and do a good job, with the right assessment, of maturing depth and type of knowledge but what about the core question?

How can we measure the real impact of undertaking studies in our field at our University?

After all, this is what these metrics are all about – determining the impact of a given set of academics at a given Uni so you can put them into a league table, hand out funding in some weighted scheme or tell students which Uni they should be going to. Realistically, we should come back in twenty years and find out how much was used, where their studies took them, whether they think it was valuable. How did our student use the tools we gave them to change the world? Of course, how do we then present a control to determine that it was us who caused that change. Oh, obviously a professional linkage is something we can think of as correlated – but not every engineer is Brunel and, most certainly, you don’t have to have gone to University to change the world.

This is most definitely not to say that shorter term measures of l&t quality aren’t important but we have to be very careful what we’re measuring and the reason that we’re measuring – and the purpose to which we put it. Measuring depth of knowledge, ability to apply that knowledge and professionally practice in a discipline? That’s worth measuring if we do it in a way that encourages constructive improvement rather than punishment or negative feedback that doesn’t show the way forward.

I don’t mind being measured, as long as it’s useful, but I’m getting a little tired of being ranked by mechanisms that I can’t change unless I go back in time and publish 10 more papers over the last 5 years or I manage to heal an entire educational system just so my metrics improve for reducing first-year drop out. (Hey, just so you know, I am working on increasing number of ICT students on a national level – you do have to think on the large scale occasionally.)

Apart from anything else, I wouldn’t rank my own students this way – it’s intrinsically arbitrary and unfair. Food for thought.

Group feedback, fast feedback, good feedback

Posted: August 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

We had the “first cut” poster presentation today in my new course. Having had the students present their pitches the previous week, this week was the time to show the first layout – put up your poster and let it speak for itself.

The results were, not all that surprisingly, very, very good. Everyone had something to show, a data story to tell and some images and graphs that told the story. What was most beneficial though was the open feedback environment, where everyone learned something from the comments on their presentation. One of my students, who had barely slept for days and was highly stressed, got some really useful advice that has given him a great way forward – and the ability to go to bed tonight with the knowledge that he has a good path forward for the next two weeks.

Working as a group, we could agree as a group, discuss and disagree, suggest, counter-suggest, develop and enhance. My role in all of this is partially as a ‘semi-expert’ but also as a facilitator. Keep the whole thing moving, keep it to time, make sure that everyone gets a good opportunity to show their work and give and receive feedback.

The students all write down their key feedback, which is scanned as a whole and put on the website so that any good points that went to anyone can now be used by anyone in the group. The feedback is timely, personal and relevant. Everyone feels that these sessions are useful and the work produced reflects the advantages. But everyone talks to everyone else – it’s compulsory. Come to the session, listen and then share your thoughts.

This, of course, reveals one of my key design approaches: collaboration is ok and there is no competitiveness. Read anything about the grand challenges and you keep seeing the word ‘community’ through it. Solid and open communities, where real and effective sharing happens, aren’t formed in highly competitive spaces. Because the students have unique projects, they can share ideas, references and even analysis techniques without plagiarism worries – because they can attribute without the risk of copying. Because there is no curve grading, helping someone else isn’t holding you back.

Because of this, we have already had two informal workshop groups form to address issues of analysis and software, where knowledge passes from person to person. Before today’s first cut presentation, a group was sitting outside, making suggestions and helping each other out – to achieve some excellent first cut results.

Yes, it’s a small group so, being me, now I’m worrying about how I would scale this up, how I would take this out to a large first-year class, how I would get it to a school group. This groups need careful facilitation and the benefit of inter-group communication is derived from everyone in the group having a voice. The number of interactions scale with the square of the group size, so there’s a finite limit to how many people I can have in the group and fit it into a two-hour practical session. If I split a larger class into sub-groups, I lose the advantage of everyone see in everyone else’s work.

But this can be solved, potentially with modern “e-” techniques, or a different approach to preparation, although I can’t quite see it yet. There’s a part of me that thinks “Ask these students how they would approach it”, because they have viewpoints and experience in this which complements mine.

Every week that goes by, I wonder if we will keep improving, and keep rewarding the (to be honest) risk that we’re taking in running a small course like this in leaner times. And, every week, the answer is a resounding “yes”!

Here’s to next week!

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