Beauty Attack I: Assessment
Posted: January 8, 2016 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: aesthetics, beauty, design, discipline, education, educational research, ethics, foucault, higher education, in the student's head, principles of design, punishment, reflection, resources, teaching, teaching approaches 3 CommentsFor the next week, I’m going to be applying an aesthetic lens to assessment and, because I’m in Computer Science, I’ll be focusing on the assessment of Computer Science knowledge and practice.
How do we know if our students know something? In reality, the best way is to turn them loose, come back in 25 years and ask the people in their lives, their clients, their beneficiaries and (of course) their victims, the same question: “Did the student demonstrate knowledge of area X?”
This is not available to us as an option because my Dean, if not my Head of School, would probably peer at me curiously if I were to suggest that all measurement of my efficacy be moved a generation from now. Thus, I am forced to retreat to the conventions and traditions of assessment: it is now up to the student to demonstrate to me, within a fixed timeframe, that he or she has taken a firm grip of the knowledge.
We know that students who are prepared to learn and who are motivated to learn will probably learn, often regardless of what we do. We don’t have to read Vallerand et al to be convinced that self-motivated students will perform, as we can see it every day. (But it is an enjoyable paper to read!) Yet we measure these students in the same assessment frames as students who do not have the same advantages and, thus, may not yet have the luxury or capacity of self-motivation: students from disadvantaged backgrounds, students who are first-in-family and students who wouldn’t know auto-didacticism if it were to dance in front of them.
How, then, do we fairly determine what it means to pass, what it means to fail and, even more subtly, what it means to pass or fail well? I hesitate to invoke Foucault, especially when I speak of “Discipline and Punish” in an educational setting, but he is unavoidable when we gaze upon a system that is dedicated to awarding ranks, graduated in terms of punishment and reward. It is strange, really, that were many patients to die under the hand of a surgeon for a simple surgery, we would ask for an inquest, but many students failing under the same professor in a first-year course is merely an indicator of “bad students”. So many of our mechanisms tell us that students are failing but often too late to be helpful and not in a way that encourages improvement. This is punishment. And it is not good enough.
Foucault: thinking about something very complicated, apparently.
Our assessment mechanisms are not beautiful. They are barely functional. They exist to provide a rough measure to separate pass from fail, with a variety of other distinctions that owe more to previous experience and privilege in many cases than any higher pedagogical approach.
Over the next week, I shall conduct an attack upon the assessment mechanisms that are currently used in my field, including my own, in the hope of arriving at a mechanism of design, practice and validation that is pedagogically pleasing (the aesthetic argument again) and will lead to outcomes that are both good and true.
Getting it wrong
Posted: January 7, 2016 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, design, education, educational problem, educational research, higher education, john c. dewey, learning, pragmatism, principles of design, reflection, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, william james Leave a commentIt’s fine to write all sorts of wonderful statements about theory and design and we can achieve a lot in thinking about such things. But, let’s be honest, we face massive challenges in the 21st Century and improved thinking and practice in education is one of the most important contributions we can make to future generations. Thus, if we want to change the world based upon our thinking, then all of our discussions have no use if we can’t develop something that’s going to achieve our goals. Dewey’s work provide an experimental, even instrumental, approach to the American philosophical school of pragmatism. To briefly explain this term in the specific meaning, I turn to William James, American psychologist and philosopher.
Pragmatism asks its usual question. “Grant an idea or belief to be true,” it says, “what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?”
William James, Pragmatism (1907)
(James is far too complex to summarise with one paragraph and I am using only one of his ideas to illustrate my point. Even James’ scholars disagree on how to interpret many of his writings. It’s worth reading him and Hegel at the same time as they square off across the ring quite well.)
Portrait of William James by John La Farge, circa 1859
What will be different? How will we recognise or measure it? What do we gain by knowing if we are right or wrong? This is why all good education researchers depend so heavily on testing their hypotheses in the space where they will make an impact and there is usually an obligation to look at how things are working before and after any intervention. This places further obligation upon us to evaluate what has occurred and then, if our goals haven’t been achieved, change our approach further. It’s a simple breakdown of roles but I often think as educational work in three heavily overlapping areas: practice, scholarship and research. Practice should be applying techniques that achieve our goals, scholarship involves the investigation, dissemination and comparison of these techniques, and research builds on scholarship to evaluate practice in ways that will validate and develop new techniques – or invalidate formerly accepted ones as knowledge improves. This leads me to my point: evaluating your own efforts to work out how to do better next time.
There are designers, architects, makers and engineers who are committed to the practice of impact design, where (and this is one definition):
“Impact design is rooted in the core belief that design can be used to create positive social, environmental and economic change, and focuses on actively measuring impact to inform and direct the design process.” Impact Design Hub, About.
Thus, evaluation of what works is essential for these practitioners. The same website recently shared some designers talking about things that went wrong and what they learned from the process.
If you read that link, you’ll see all sorts of lessons: don’t hand innovative control to someone who’s scared of risk, don’t ignore your community, don’t apply your cultural values to others unless you really know what you’re doing, and don’t forget the importance of communication.
Writing some pretty words every day is not going to achieve my goal and I need to be reminded of the risks that I face in trying to achieve something large – one of which is not actually working towards my own goals in a useful manner! One of the biggest risks is confusing writing a blog with actual work, unless I use this medium to do something. Over the coming weeks, I hope to show you what I am doing as I move towards my very ambitious goal of “beautiful education”. I hope you find the linked article as useful as I did.
Dewey’s Pedagogic Creed
Posted: January 6, 2016 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: aesthetics, authenticity, beauty, design, dewey, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, higher education, in the student's head, john c. dewey, learning, pragmatism, reflection, teaching, thinking Leave a commentAs I’ve noted, the space I’m in is not new, although some of the places I hope to go with it are, and we have records of approaches to education that I think fit well into an aesthetic framing.
As a reminder, I’m moving beyond ‘sensually pleasing’ in the usual sense and extending this to the wider definition of aesthetics: characteristics that define an approach or movement. However, we can still see a Cubist working as both traditionally aesthetically pleasing and also beautiful because of its adherence to the Cubist aesthetic. To draw on this, where many art viewers find a large distance between them and an art work, it is often attributable to a conflict over how beauty is defined in this context. As Hegel noted, beauty is not objective, it is our perspective and our understanding of its effect upon us (after Kant) that contributes greatly to the experience.
John C. Dewey. Psychologist, philosopher, educator, activist and social critic. Also, inspiration.
Dewey’s Pedagogic Creed was published in 1897 and he sought to share his beliefs on what education was, what schools were, what he considered the essential subject-matter of education, the methods employed, and the essential role of the school in social progress. I use the word ‘beliefs’ deliberately as this is what Dewey published: line after line of “I believe…” (As a note, this is what a creed is, or should be, as a set of beliefs or aims to guide action. The word ‘creed’ comes to us from the Latin credo, which means “I believe”.) Dewey is not, for the most part, making a religious statement in his Creed although his personal faith is expressed in a single line at the end.
To my reading, and you know that I seek characteristics that I can use to form some sort of object to guide me in defining beautiful education, many of Dewey’s points easily transfer to characteristics of beauty. For example, here are three lines from the work:
- “I believe that education thus conceived marks the most perfect and intimate union of science and art conceivable in human experience.“
- “I believe that with the growth of psychological science, giving added insight into individual structure and laws of growth; and with growth of social science, adding to our knowledge of the right organization of individuals, all scientific resources can be utilized for the purposes of education.“
- “ I believe that under existing conditions far too much of the stimulus and control proceeds from the teacher, because of neglect of the idea of the school as a form of social life.“
Dewey was very open about what he thought the role of school was, he saw it as the “fundamental method of social progress and reform“. I believe that he saw education, when carried out correctly, as being a thing that was beautiful, good and true and his displeasure with what he encountered in the schools and colleges of the late 19th/early 20th Century is manifest in his writings. He writes in reaction to an ugly, unfair, industrialised and mechanistic system and he wants something that conforms to his aesthetics. From the three lines above, he seeks education that is grounded in the arts and science, he wants to use technology in a positive way and he wants schools to be a vibrant and social community.
And this is exactly what the evidence tells us works. The fact that Dewey arrived at this through a focus on equity, opportunity, his work in psychology and his own observations is a testament to his vision. Dewey was rebelling against the things he could see were making children hate education.
I believe that next to deadness and dullness, formalism and routine, our education is threatened with no greater evil than sentimentalism.
John Dewey, School Journal vol. 54 (January 1897), pp. 77-80
Here, sentimentalism is where we try to evoke emotions without associating them with an appropriate action: Dewey seeks authenticity and a genuine expression. But look at the rest of that list: dead, dull, formal and routine. Dewey would go on to talk about schools as if they were prisons and over a hundred years later, we continue to line students up into ranks and bore them.
I have a lot of work to do as I study Dewey and his writings again with my aesthetic lens in place but, while I do so, it might be worth reading the creed. Some things are dated. Some ideas have been improved upon with more research, including his own and we will return to these issues. But I find it hard to argue with this:
I believe that the community’s duty to education is, therefore, its paramount moral duty. By law and punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way. But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.
ibid.
Maximise beauty or minimise …?
Posted: January 4, 2016 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, beauty, charlie brown, education, educational research, ethics, higher education, in the student's head, peanuts, peppermint patty, principles of design, reflection, teaching, teaching approaches 3 CommentsThere is a Peanuts comic from April 16, 1972 where Peppermint Patty asks Charlie Brown what he thinks the secret of living is. Charlie Brown’s answer is “A convertible and a lake.” His reasoning is simple. When it’s sunny you can drive around in the convertible and be happy. When it’s raining you can think “oh well, the rain will fill up my lake.” Peppermint Patty asks Snoopy the same question and, committed sensualist that he is, he kisses her on the nose.
This is the Amphicar. In the 21st century, no philosophical construct will avoid being reified.
Charlie Brown, a character written to be constantly ground down by the world around him, is not seeking to maximise his happiness, he is seeking to minimise his unhappiness. Given his life, this is an understandable philosophy.
But what of beauty and, in this context, beauty in education? I’ve already introduced the term ‘ugly’ as the opposite of beauty but it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the notion of ‘minimising ugliness’; ugly is such a strong term. It’s also hard to argue that any education, when it covers any aspects to which we would apply that label, is ever totally ugly. Perhaps, in the educational framing, the absence of beauty is plainness. We end up with things that are ordinary, rather than extraordinary. I think that there is more than enough range between beauty and plainness for us to have a discussion on the movement between those states.
Is it enough for us to accept educational thinking that is acceptably plain? Is that a successful strategy? Many valid concerns about learning at scale focus on the innate homogeneity and lack of personalisation inherent in such an approach: plainness is the enemy. Yet there are many traditional and face-to-face approaches where plainness stares us in the face. Banality in education is, when identified, always rejected, yet it so often slips by without identification. We know that there is a hole in our slippers, yet we only seem to notice when that hole directly affects us or someone else points it out.
My thesis here is that a framing of beauty should lead us to a strategy of maximising beauty, rather than minimising plainness, as it is only in that pursuit that we model that key stage of falling in love with knowledge that we wish our students to emulate. If we say “meh is ok”, then that is what we will receive in return. We model, they follow as part of their learning. That’s what we’re trying to make happen, isn’t it?
What would Charlie Brown’s self-protective philosophy look like in a positive framing, maximising his joy rather than managing his grief? I’m not sure but I think it would look a lot like a dancing beagle who kisses people on the nose. We may need more than this for a sound foundation to reframe education!
Exploring beauty and aesthetics
Posted: January 3, 2016 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: aesthetics, beauty, education, educational problem, educational research, hegel, higher education, Kant, learning, reflection, suits, teaching, teaching approaches, The Grasshopper, thinking, tools, wittgenstein Leave a comment
“Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.” Hegel
- the ability to state the goal of any educational activity as separate from the activity,
- the awareness of evidence-based practice and its use in everyday teaching, and
- a willingness to accept that it is correct goal setting and using techniques that work, and can be shown to work, that will lead to better outcomes.
Beauty from the ages
Posted: January 2, 2016 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: aesthetics, authority, beauty, education, educational research, ethics, higher education, quintilian, reflection, teaching, thinking 1 Comment
Captured from Pompeii. The elusive moment of thought before writing.
In focusing on beauty, I spoke about moving away from authority and I then, rather swiftly, mentioned a lot of importantly famous dead people who had said a lot of (what could be interpreted as) portentous things. Wait – am I making an argument to authority to support me as an authority? Let me explain and, at the same time, discuss why I can refer to some aspects of an ancient writer, while neatly skirting some of (usually) his less progressive ideas.
When we look in details at the writings on Quintilian, he is so heavily focused in his time that the thought of a tutor who wasn’t male is incomprehensible. Marcus Aurelius is very, forgive me, old-fashioned in some of his thinking on a number of issues. For both of these authors, progressive and visionary thinking is interspersed with older ideas. How do I separate one from another, especially where we are trying to step away from the sheer weight of authority?
The issue, for me, is what do we keep seeing in the literature over the years. What I am trying to point out are those sentiments that are repeated as things we could fix in education, whatever the context or experience of the writer. When we see the same problem repeated over time, we can start to believe that there is a problem that has not yet been addressed. Or, even, one that has not been perceived to have been fixed.
We don’t have to step back to the time before universal suffrage to agree with Quintillian on the potential of people. We can see this theme repeated: Rousseau, Hegel, Dewey and so on. This is a significant change of perspective. Instead of listening to one opinion, we listen for echoes and repetition where it indicates ongoing problems.
Much as we attach more weight to events that reach statistical validity through repetition and predictability, we can move beyond the sayings of famous people and identify the similarities of the saying.
By thinking this way, and by looking across thousands of years of human thought, we can consistently extract important lessons from the ages while winnowing out the temporally contextual chaff that we have left behind. We can identify aesthetics. We can seek beauty.
A Year of Beauty
Posted: January 1, 2016 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, beauty, blogging, design, education, educational problem, educational research, good, higher education, plato, principles of design, reflection, socrates, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, truth, vygotsky, workload 5 Comments
Plato: Unifying key cosmic values of Greek culture to a useful conceptual trinity.
Ever since education became something we discussed, teachers and learners alike have had strong opinions regarding the quality of education and how it can be improved. What is surprising, as you look at these discussions over time, is how often we seem to come back to the same ideas. We read Dewey and we hear echoes of Rousseau. So many echoes and so much careful thought, found as we built new modern frames with Vygotsky, Piaget, Montessori, Papert and so many more. But little of this should really be a surprise because we can go back to the writings of Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (Quinitilian) and his twelve books of The Orator’s Education and we find discussion of small class sizes, constructive student-focused discussions, and that more people were capable of thought and far-reaching intellectual pursuits than was popularly believed.
“… as birds are born for flying, horses for speed, beasts of prey for ferocity, so are [humans] for mental activity and resourcefulness.” Quintilian, Book I, page 65.
I used to say that it was stunning how contemporary education seems to be slow in moving in directions first suggested by Dewey a hundred years ago, then I discovered that Rousseau had said it 150 years before that. Now I find that Quntilian wrote things such as this nearly 2,000 years ago. And Marcus Aurelius, among other stoics, made much of approaches to thinking that, somehow, were put to one side as we industrialised education much as we had industrialised everything else.
This year I have accepted that we have had 2,000 years of thinking (and as much evidence when we are bold enough to experiment) and yet we just have not seen enough change. Dewey’s critique of the University is still valid. Rousseau’s lament on attaining true mastery of knowledge stands. Quintilian’s distrust of mere imitation would not be quieted when looking at much of repetitive modern examination practice.
What stops us from changing? We have more than enough evidence of discussion and thought, from some of the greatest philosophers we have seen. When we start looking at education, in varying forms, we wander across Plato, Hypatia, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, in addition to all of those I have already mentioned. But evidence, as it stands, does not appear to be enough, especially in the face of personal perception of achievement, contribution and outcomes, whether supported by facts or not.
Evidence of uncertainty is not enough. Evidence of the lack of efficacy of techniques, now that we can and do measure them, is not enough. Evidence that students fail who then, under other tutors or approaches, mysteriously flourish elsewhere, is not enough.
Authority, by itself, is not enough. We can be told to do more or to do things differently but the research we have suggests that an externally applied control mechanism just doesn’t work very well for areas where thinking is required. And thinking is, most definitely, required for education.
I have already commented elsewhere on Mark Guzdial’s post that attracted so much attention and, yet, all he was saying was what we have seen repeated throughout history and is now supported in this ‘gilt age’ of measurement of efficacy. It still took local authority to stop people piling onto him (even under the rather shabby cloak of ‘scientific enquiry’ that masks so much negative activity). Mark is repeating the words of educators throughout the ages who have stepped back and asked “Is what we are doing the best thing we could be doing?” It is human to say “But, if I know that this is the evidence, why am I acting as if it were not true?” But it is quite clear that this is still challenging and, amazingly, heretical to an extent, despite these (apparently controversial) ideas pre-dating most of what we know as the trappings and establishments of education. Here is our evidence that evidence is not enough. This experience is the authority that, while authority can halt a debate, authority cannot force people to alter such a deeply complex and cognitive practice in a useful manner. Nobody is necessarily agreeing with Mark, they’re just no longer arguing. That’s not helpful.
So, where to from here?
We should not throw out everything old simply because it is old, as that is meaningless without evidence to do so and it is wrong as autocratically rejecting everything new because it is new.
The challenge is to find a way of explaining how things could change without forcing conflict between evidence and personal experience and without having to resort to an argument by authority, whether moral or experiential. And this is a massive challenge.
This year, I looked back to find other ways forward. I looked back to the three values of Ancient Greece, brought together as a trinity through Socrates and Plato.
These three values are: beauty, goodness and truth. Here, truth means seeing things as they are (non-concealment). Goodness denotes the excellence of something and often refers to a purpose of meaning for existence, in the sense of a good life. Beauty? Beauty is an aesthetic delight; pleasing to those senses that value certain criteria. It does not merely mean pretty, as we can have many ways that something is aesthetically pleasing. For Dewey, equality of access was an essential criterion of education; education could only be beautiful to Dewey if it was free and easily available. For Plato, the revelation of knowledge was good and beauty could arose a love for this knowledge that would lead to such a good. By revealing good, reality, to our selves and our world, we are ultimately seeking truth: seeing the world as it really is.
In the Platonic ideal, a beautiful education leads us to fall in love with learning and gives us momentum to strive for good, which will lead us to truth. Is there any better expression of what we all would really want to see in our classrooms?
I can speak of efficiencies of education, of retention rates and average grades. Or I can ask you if something is beautiful. We may not all agree on details of constructivist theory but if we can discuss those characteristics that we can maximise to lead towards a beautiful outcome, aesthetics, perhaps we can understand where we differ and, even more optimistically, move towards agreement. Towards beautiful educational practice. Towards a system and methodology that makes our students as excited about learning as we are about teaching. Let me illustrate.
A teacher stands in front of a class, delivering the same lecture that has been delivered for the last ten years. From the same book. The classroom is half-empty. There’s an assignment due tomorrow morning. Same assignment as the last three years. The teacher knows roughly how many people will ask for an extension an hour beforehand, how many will hand up and how many will cheat.
I can talk about evidence, about pedagogy, about political and class theory, about all forms of authority, or I can ask you, in the privacy of your head, to think about these questions.
- Is this beautiful? Which of the aesthetics of education are really being satisfied here?
- Is it good? Is this going to lead to the outcomes that you want for all of the students in the class?
- Is it true? Is this really the way that your students will be applying this knowledge, developing it, exploring it and taking it further, to hand on to other people?
- And now, having thought about yourself, what do you think your students would say? Would they think this was beautiful, once you explained what you meant?
Over the coming year, I will be writing a lot more on this. I know that this idea is not unique (Dewey wrote on this, to an extent, and, more recently, several books in the dramatic arts have taken up the case of beauty and education) but it is one that we do not often address in science and engineering.
My challenge, for 2016, is to try to provide a year of beautiful education. Succeed or fail, I will document it here.
Making a Statement
Posted: October 11, 2015 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, education, higher education, reflection, thinking Leave a commentThe Internet is full of posts and comments that reflect an overwhelming desire to judge people and tell them that they are wrong, twinned with intellectual cowardice. We see people saying “Oh, that’s wrong” without ever having the courage to put up anything that says “This is what I believe. This is my statement. This is my truth.”
You cannot achieve your potential when all you do is react. The echo is not the statement.
This has inspired me to clearly state what I believe about what I do. I regularly make comment on what I believe we should be doing in education so, to be consistent and to remove all uncertainty about my intentions, the next post on this blog is my educator’s statement. A statement of what I believe you need to know to understand my work, derived from the concept of the artist’s statement.
Put up your own. Share your truth. Be brave.
Musings of an Amateur Mythographer I: Islands of Certainty in a Sea of Confusion
Posted: June 23, 2015 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, Claude Lévi-Strauss, design, education, educational problem, educational research, evidence, higher education, Karl Popper, Lévi-Strauss, learning, moocs, myth, mythographer, reflection, resources, scientific thinking, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools Leave a comment
If that’s the sea of confusion, I’ll be floating in it for a while. (Wikipedia – Mokoli’i)
I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently on the classification of knowledge, the development of scientific thinking, the ways different cultures approach learning, and the relationship between myths and science. Now, some of you are probably wondering why I can’t watch “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” like a normal person but others of you have already started to shift uneasily because I’ve talked about a relationship between myths and science, as if we do not consider science to be the natural successor to preceding myths. Well, let me go further. I’m about to start drawing on thinking on myths and science and even how the myths that teach us about the importance of evidence, the foundation of science, but for their own purposes.
Why?
Because much of what we face as opposition in educational research are pre-existing stereotypes and misconceptions that people employ, where there’s a lack of (and sometimes in the face of) evidence. Yet this collection of beliefs is powerful because it prevents people from adopting verified and validated approaches to learning and teaching. What can we call these? Are these myths? What do I even mean by that term?
It’s important to realise that the use of the term myth has evolved from earlier, rather condescending, classifications of any culture’s pre-scientific thinking as being dismissively primitive and unworthy of contemporary thought. This is a rich topic by itself but let me refer to Claude Lévi-Strauss and his identification of myth as being a form of thinking and classification, rather than simple story-telling, and thus proto-scientific, rather than anti-scientific. I note that I have done the study of mythology a grave disservice with such an abbreviated telling. Further reading here to understand precisely what Lévi-Strauss was refuting could involve Tylor, Malinowski, and Lévy-Bruhl. This includes rejecting a knee-jerk classification of a less scientifically advanced people as being emotional and practical, rather than (even being capable of) being intellectual. By moving myth forms to an intellectual footing, Lévi-Strauss allows a non-pejorative assessment of the potential value of myth forms.
In many situations, we consider myth and folklore as the same thing, from a Western post-Enlightenment viewpoint, only accepting those elements that we can validate. Thus, we choose not to believe that Olympus holds the Greek Pantheon as we cannot locate the Gods reliably, but the pre-scientific chewing of willow bark to relieve pain was validated once we constructed aspirin (and willow bark tea). It’s worth noting that the early location of willow bark as part of its scientific ‘discovery’ was inspired by an (effectively random) approach called the doctrine of signatures, which assumed that the cause and the cure of diseases would be located near each other. The folkloric doctrine of signatures led the explorers to a plant that tasted like another one but had a different use.
Myth, folklore and science, dancing uneasily together. Does this mean that what we choose to call myth now may or may not be myth in the future? We know that when to use it, to recommend it, in our endorsed and academic context is usually to require it to become science. But what is science?
Karl Popper’s (heavily summarised) view is that we have a set of hypotheses that we test to destruction and this is the foundation of our contemporary view of science. If the evidence we have doesn’t fit the hypothesis then we must reject the hypothesis. When we have enough evidence, and enough hypotheses, we have a supported theory. However, this has a natural knock-on effect in that we cannot actually prove anything, we just have enough evidence to support the hypothesis. Kuhn (again, heavily summarised) has a model of “normal science” where there is a large amount of science as in Popper’s model, incrementing a body of existing work, but there are times when this continuity gives way to a revolutionary change. At these times, we see an accumulation of contradictory evidence that illustrates that it’s time to think very differently about the world. Ultimately, we discover the need for a new coherency, where we need new exemplars to make the world make sense. (And, yes, there’s still a lot of controversy over this.)
Let me attempt to bring this all together, finally. We, as humans, live in a world full of information and some of it, even in our post-scientific world, we incorporate into our lives without evidence and some we need evidence to accept. Do you want some evidence that we live our lives without, or even in spite of, evidence? The median length for a marriage in the United States is 11 years and 40-50% of marriages will end in divorce yet many still swear ‘until death do us part’ or ‘all of my days’. But the myth of ‘marriage forever’ is still powerful. People have children, move, buy houses and totally change their lives based on this myth. The actions that people take here will have a significant impact on the world around them and yet it seems at odd with the evidence. (Such examples are not uncommon and, in a post-scientific revolution world, must force us to consider earlier suggestions that myth-based societies move seamlessly to a science-based intellectual utopia. This is why Lévi-Strauss is interesting to read. Our evidence is that our evidence is not sufficient evidence, so we must seek to better understand ourselves.) Even those components of our shared history and knowledge that are constructed to be based on faith, such as religion, understand how important evidence is to us. Let me give an example.
In the fourth book of the New Testament of the Christian Bible, the Gospel of John, we find the story of the Resurrection of Lazarus. Lazarus is sick and Jesus Christ waits until he dies to go to where he is buried and raise him. Jesus deliberately delays because the glory to the Christian God will be far greater and more will believe, if Lazarus is raised from the dead, rather than just healed from illness. Ultimately, and I do not speak for any religious figure or God here, anyone can get better from an illness but to be raised from the dead (currently) requires a miracle. Evidence, even in a book written for the faithful and to build faith, is important to humans.
We also know that there is a very large amount of knowledge that is accepted as being supported by evidence but the evidence is really anecdotal, based on bias and stereotype, and can even be distorted through repetition. This is the sea of confusion that we all live in. The scientific method (Popper) is one way that we can try to find firm ground to stand on but, if Kuhn is to be believed, there is the risk that one day we stand on the islands and realise that the truth was the sea all along. Even with Popper, we risk standing on solid ground that turns out to be meringue. How many of these changes can one human endure and still be malleable and welcoming in the face of further change?
Our problem with myth is when it forces us to reject something that we can demonstrate to be both valuable and scientifically valid because, right now, the world that we live in is constructed on scientific foundations and coherence is maintained by adding to those foundations. Personally, I don’t believe that myth and science have to be at odds (many disagree with me, including Richard Dawkins of course), and that this is an acceptable view as they are already co-existing in ways that actively shape society, for both good and ill.
Recently I made a comment on MOOCs that contradicted something someone said and I was (quite rightly) asked to provide evidence to support my assertions. That is the post before this one and what you will notice is that I do not have a great deal of what we would usually call evidence: no double-blind tests, no large-n trials with well-formed datasets. I had some early evidence of benefit, mostly qualitative and relatively soft, but, and this is important to me, what I didn’t have was evidence of harm. There are many myths around MOOCs and education in general. Some of them fall into the realm of harmful myths, those that cause people to reject good approaches to adhere to old and destructive practices. Some of them are harmful because they cause us to reject approaches that might work because we cannot find the evidence we need.
I am unsurprised that so many people adhere to folk pedagogy, given the vast amounts of information out there and the natural resistance to rejecting something that you think works, especially when someone sails in and tells you’ve been wrong for years. The fact that we are still discussing the nature of myth and science gives insight into how complicated this issue is.
I think that the path I’m on could most reasonably be called that of the mythographer, but the cataloguing of the edges of myth and the intersections of science is not in order to condemn one or the other but to find out what the truth is to the best of our knowledge. I think that understanding why people believe what they believe allows us to understand what they will need in order to believe something that is actually, well, true. There are many articles written on this, on the difficulty of replacing one piece of learning with another and the dangers of repetition in reinforcing previously-held beliefs, but there is hope in that we can construct new elements to replace old information if we are careful and we understand how people think.
We need to understand the delicate relationships between myth, folklore and science, our history as separate and joined peoples, if only to understand when we have achieved new forms of knowing. But we also need to be more upfront about when we believe we have moved on, including actively identifying areas that we have labelled as “in need of much more evidence” (such as learning styles, for example) to assist people in doing valuable work if they wish to pursue research.
I’ll go further. If we have areas where we cannot easily gain evidence, yet we have competing myths in that space, what should we do? How do we choose the best approach to achieve the most effective educational outcomes? I’ll let everyone argue in the comments for a while and then write that as the next piece.
Designing a MOOC: how far did it reach? #csed
Posted: June 10, 2015 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, collaboration, community, computer science education, constructivist, contributing student pedagogy, curriculum, data visualisation, design, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, feedback, higher education, in the student's head, learning, measurement, MOOC, moocs, principles of design, reflection, resources, students, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools Leave a commentMark Guzdial posted over on his blog on “Moving Beyond MOOCS: Could we move to understanding learning and teaching?” and discusses aspects (that still linger) of MOOC hype. (I’ve spoken about MOOCs done badly before, as well as recording the thoughts of people like Hugh Davis from Southampton.) One of Mark’s paragraphs reads:
“The value of being in the front row of a class is that you talk with the teacher. Getting physically closer to the lecturer doesn’t improve learning. Engagement improves learning. A MOOC puts everyone at the back of the class, listening only and doing the homework”
My reply to this was:
“You can probably guess that I have two responses here, the first is that the front row is not available to many in the real world in the first place, with the second being that, for far too many people, any seat in the classroom is better than none.
But I am involved in a, for us, large MOOC so my responses have to be regarded in that light. Thanks for the post!”
Mark, of course, called my bluff and responded with:
“Nick, I know that you know the literature in this space, and care about design and assessment. Can you say something about how you designed your MOOC to reach those who would not otherwise get access to formal educational opportunities? And since your MOOC has started, do you know yet if you achieved that goal — are you reaching people who would not otherwise get access?”
So here is that response. Thanks for the nudge, Mark! The answer is a bit long but please bear with me. We will be posting a longer summary after the course is completed, in a month or so. Consider this the unedited taster. I’m putting this here, early, prior to the detailed statistical work, so you can see where we are. All the numbers below are fresh off the system, to drive discussion and answering Mark’s question at, pretty much, a conceptual level.
First up, as some background for everyone, the MOOC team I’m working with is the University of Adelaide‘s Computer Science Education Research group, led by A/Prof Katrina Falkner, with me (Dr Nick Falkner), Dr Rebecca Vivian, and Dr Claudia Szabo.
I’ll start by noting that we’ve been working to solve the inherent scaling issues in the front of the classroom for some time. If I had a class of 12 then there’s no problem in engaging with everyone but I keep finding myself in rooms of 100+, which forces some people to sit away from me and also limits the number of meaningful interactions I can make to individuals in one setting. While I take Mark’s point about the front of the classroom, and the associated research is pretty solid on this, we encountered an inherent problem when we identified that students were better off down the front… and yet we kept teaching to rooms with more student than front. I’ll go out on a limb and say that this is actually a moral issue that we, as a sector, have had to look at and ignore in the face of constrained resources. The nature of large spaces and people, coupled with our inability to hover, means that we can either choose to have a row of students effectively in a semi-circle facing us, or we accept that after a relatively small number of students or number of rows, we have constructed a space that is inherently divided by privilege and will lead to disengagement.
So, Katrina’s and my first foray into this space was dealing with the problem in the physical lecture spaces that we had, with the 100+ classes that we had.
Katrina and I published a paper on “contributing student pedagogy” in Computer Science Education 22 (4), 2012, to identify ways for forming valued small collaboration groups as a way to promote engagement and drive skill development. Ultimately, by reducing the class to a smaller number of clusters and making those clusters pedagogically useful, I can then bring the ‘front of the class’-like experience to every group I speak to. We have given talks and applied sessions on this, including a special session at SIGCSE, because we think it’s a useful technique that reduces the amount of ‘front privilege’ while extending the amount of ‘front benefit’. (Read the paper for actual detail – I am skimping on summary here.)
We then got involved in the support of the national Digital Technologies curriculum for primary and middle school teachers across Australia, after being invited to produce a support MOOC (really a SPOC, small, private, on-line course) by Google. The target learners were teachers who were about to teach or who were teaching into, initially, Foundation to Year 6 and thus had degrees but potentially no experience in this area. (I’ve written about this before and you can find more detail on this here, where I also thanked my previous teachers!)
The motivation of this group of learners was different from a traditional MOOC because (a) everyone had both a degree and probable employment in the sector which reduced opportunistic registration to a large extent and (b) Australian teachers are required to have a certain number of professional development (PD) hours a year. Through a number of discussions across the key groups, we had our course recognised as PD and this meant that doing our course was considered to be valuable although almost all of the teachers we spoke to were furiously keen for this information anyway and my belief is that the PD was very much ‘icing’ rather than ‘cake’. (Thank you again to all of the teachers who have spent time taking our course – we really hope it’s been useful.)
To discuss access and reach, we can measure teachers who’ve taken the course (somewhere in the low thousands) and then estimate the number of students potentially assisted and that’s when it gets a little crazy, because that’s somewhere around 30-40,000.
In his talk at CSEDU 2014, Hugh Davis identified the student groups who get involved in MOOCs as follows. The majority of people undertaking MOOCs were life-long learners (older, degreed, M/F 50/50), people seeking skills via PD, and those with poor access to Higher Ed. There is also a small group who are Uni ‘tasters’ but very, very small. (I think we can agree that tasting a MOOC is not tasting a campus-based Uni experience. Less ivy, for starters.) The three approaches to the course once inside were auditing, completing and sampling, and it’s this final one that I want to emphasise because this brings us to one of the differences of MOOCs. We are not in control of when people decide that they are satisfied with the free education that they are accessing, unlike our strong gatekeeping on traditional courses.
I am in total agreement that a MOOC is not the same as a classroom but, also, that it is not the same as a traditional course, where we define how the student will achieve their goals and how they will know when they have completed. MOOCs function far more like many people’s experience of web browsing: they hunt for what they want and stop when they have it, thus the sampling engagement pattern above.
(As an aside, does this mean that a course that is perceived as ‘all back of class’ will rapidly be abandoned because it is distasteful? This makes the student-consumer a much more powerful player in their own educational market and is potentially worth remembering.)
Knowing these different approaches, we designed the individual subjects and overall program so that it was very much up to the participant how much they chose to take and individual modules were designed to be relatively self-contained, while fitting into a well-designed overall flow that built in terms of complexity and towards more abstract concepts. Thus, we supported auditing, completing and sampling, whereas our usual face-to-face (f2f) courses only support the first two in a way that we can measure.
As Hugh notes, and we agree through growing experience, marking/progress measures at scale are very difficult, especially when automated marking is not enough or not feasible. Based on our earlier work in contributing collaboration in the class room, for the F-6 Teacher MOOC we used a strong peer-assessment model where contributions and discussions were heavily linked. Because of the nature of the cohort, geographical and year-level groups formed who then conducted additional sessions and produced shared material at a slightly terrifying rate. We took the approach that we were not telling teachers how to teach but we were helping them to develop and share materials that would assist in their teaching. This reduced potential divisions and allows us to establish a mutually respectful relationship that facilitated openness.
(It’s worth noting that the courseware is creative commons, open and free. There are people reassembling the course for their specific take on the school system as we speak. We have a national curriculum but a state-focused approach to education, with public and many independent systems. Nobody makes any money out of providing this course to teachers and the material will always be free. Thank you again to Google for their ongoing support and funding!)
Overall, in this first F-6 MOOC, we had higher than usual retention of students and higher than usual participation, for the reasons I’ve outlined above. But this material was for curriculum support for teachers of young students, all of whom were pre-programming, and it could be contained in videos and on-line sharing of materials and discussion. We were also in the MOOC sweet-spot: existing degreed learners, PD driver, and their PD requirement depended on progressive demonstration on goal achievement, which we recognised post-course with a pre-approved certificate form. (Important note: if you are doing this, clear up how the PD requirements are met and how they need to be reported back, as early on as you can. It meant that we could give people something valuable in a short time.)
The programming MOOC, Think. Create. Code on EdX, was more challenging in many regards. We knew we were in a more difficult space and would be more in what I shall refer to as ‘the land of the average MOOC consumer’. No strong focus, no PD driver, no geographically guaranteed communities. We had to think carefully about what we considered to be useful interaction with the course material. What counted as success?
To start with, we took an image-based approach (I don’t think I need to provide supporting arguments for media-driven computing!) where students would produce images and, over time, refine their coding skills to produce and understand how to produce more complex images, building towards animation. People who have not had good access to education may not understand why we would use programming in more complex systems but our goal was to make images and that is a fairly universally understood idea, with a short production timeline and very clear indication of achievement: “Does it look like a face yet?”
In terms of useful interaction, if someone wrote a single program that drew a face, for the first time – then that’s valuable. If someone looked at someone else’s code and spotted a bug (however we wish to frame this), then that’s valuable. I think that someone writing a single line of correct code, where they understand everything that they write, is something that we can all consider to be valuable. Will it get you a degree? No. Will it be useful to you in later life? Well… maybe? (I would say ‘yes’ but that is a fervent hope rather than a fact.)
So our design brief was that it should be very easy to get into programming immediately, with an active and engaged approach, and that we have the same “mostly self-contained week” approach, with lots of good peer interaction and mutual evaluation to identify areas that needed work to allow us to build our knowledge together. (You know I may as well have ‘social constructivist’ tattooed on my head so this is strongly in keeping with my principles.) We wrote all of the materials from scratch, based on a 6-week program that we debated for some time. Materials consisted of short videos, additional material as short notes, participatory activities, quizzes and (we planned for) peer assessment (more on that later). You didn’t have to have been exposed to “the lecture” or even the advanced classroom to take the course. Any exposure to short videos or a web browser would be enough familiarity to go on with.
Our goal was to encourage as much engagement as possible, taking into account the fact that any number of students over 1,000 would be very hard to support individually, even with the 5-6 staff we had to help out. But we wanted students to be able to develop quickly, share quickly and, ultimately, comment back on each other’s work quickly. From a cognitive load perspective, it was crucial to keep the number of things that weren’t relevant to the task to a minimum, as we couldn’t assume any prior familiarity. This meant no installers, no linking, no loaders, no shenanigans. Write program, press play, get picture, share to gallery, winning.
As part of this, our support team (thanks, Jill!) developed a browser-based environment for Processing.js that integrated with a course gallery. Students could save their own work easily and share it trivially. Our early indications show that a lot of students jumped in and tried to do something straight away. (Processing is really good for getting something up, fast, as we know.) We spent a lot of time testing browsers, testing software, and writing code. All of the recorded materials used that development environment (this was important as Processing.js and Processing have some differences) and all of our videos show the environment in action. Again, as little extra cognitive load as possible – no implicit requirement for abstraction or skills transfer. (The AdelaideX team worked so hard to get us over the line – I think we may have eaten some of their brains to save those of our students. Thank you again to the University for selecting us and to Katy and the amazing team.)
The actual student group, about 20,000 people over 176 countries, did not have the “built-in” motivation of the previous group although they would all have their own levels of motivation. We used ‘meet and greet’ activities to drive some group formation (which worked to a degree) and we also had a very high level of staff monitoring of key question areas (which was noted by participants as being very high for EdX courses they’d taken), everyone putting in 30-60 minutes a day on rotation. But, as noted before, the biggest trick to getting everyone engaged at the large scale is to get everyone into groups where they have someone to talk to. This was supposed to be provided by a peer evaluation system that was initially part of the assessment package.
Sadly, the peer assessment system didn’t work as we wanted it to and we were worried that it would form a disincentive, rather than a supporting community, so we switched to a forum-based discussion of the works on the EdX discussion forum. At this point, a lack of integration between our own UoA programming system and gallery and the EdX discussion system allowed too much distance – the close binding we had in the R-6 MOOC wasn’t there. We’re still working on this because everything we know and all evidence we’ve collected before tells us that this is a vital part of the puzzle.
In terms of visible output, the amount of novel and amazing art work that has been generated has blown us all away. The degree of difference is huge: armed with approximately 5 statements, the number of different pieces you can produce is surprisingly large. Add in control statements and reputation? BOOM. Every student can write something that speaks to her or him and show it to other people, encouraging creativity and facilitating engagement.
From the stats side, I don’t have access to the raw stats, so it’s hard for me to give you a statistically sound answer as to who we have or have not reached. This is one of the things with working with a pre-existing platform and, yes, it bugs me a little because I can’t plot this against that unless someone has built it into the platform. But I think I can tell you some things.
I can tell you that roughly 2,000 students attempted quiz problems in the first week of the course and that over 4,000 watched a video in the first week – no real surprises, registrations are an indicator of interest, not a commitment. During that time, 7,000 students were active in the course in some way – including just writing code, discussing it and having fun in the gallery environment. (As it happens, we appear to be plateauing at about 3,000 active students but time will tell. We have a lot of post-course analysis to do.)
It’s a mistake to focus on the “drop” rates because the MOOC model is different. We have no idea if the people who left got what they wanted or not, or why they didn’t do anything. We may never know but we’ll dig into that later.
I can also tell you that only 57% of the students currently enrolled have declared themselves explicitly to be male and that is the most likely indicator that we are reaching students who might not usually be in a programming course, because that 43% of others, of whom 33% have self-identified as women, is far higher than we ever see in classes locally. If you want evidence of reach then it begins here, as part of the provision of an environment that is, apparently, more welcoming to ‘non-men’.
We have had a number of student comments that reflect positive reach and, while these are not statistically significant, I think that this also gives you support for the idea of additional reach. Students have been asking how they can save their code beyond the course and this is a good indicator: ownership and a desire to preserve something valuable.
For student comments, however, this is my favourite.
I’m no artist. I’m no computer programmer. But with this class, I see I can be both. #processingjs (Link to student’s work) #code101x .
That’s someone for whom this course had them in the right place in the classroom. After all of this is done, we’ll go looking to see how many more we can find.
I know this is long but I hope it answered your questions. We’re looking forward to doing a detailed write-up of everything after the course closes and we can look at everything.
Nick Falkner 