Why am I here?

I’m currently in Singapore, teaching an intensive course as 3 hours Friday night, 6 hours Saturday and 7 hours Sunday. Obviously a course like this poses challenges for both staff and students, given the intensive nature, so I try to make it very interactive, full of peer activity and very little ‘just listening to Nick speak’. (Sometimes I succeed better than others.)

On Friday night, I wrote two lines up on the board:

“Why are you here?”

“Why am I here?”

My first discussion with the class, at 7pm on a Friday night after they’d been at work all day, was on these questions. As always, initial participation was guarded. Most students are in classes to meet requirements, pass exams and get pieces of paper – asking questions about this can cause some soul searching. So I switched to a discussion about why I was there.

Pause. Then a cautious suggestion.

“Money?” (Class laughter)

This gave me a more relaxed class to talk to and the chance to talk about all the reasons I could be there. After a minute or two’s (guided) discussion, I heard:

“You’re here to share your knowledge?”

Which then guided us to the next stage of the intro discussion – the important bit. The fact that if they know the work then passing the exam will be relatively easy. The fact that I care about what they know and that, when they leave, they should be able to practise their art with confidence.

The whole activity took about 5 minutes and set the tone for highly engaged discussion in and around 28 people, late on a Friday night, that happened to include a lot of information on Distributed Systems. It’s an ice breaker, a warm-up and it also tells the students what I need them to know: that I need them to know.

False praise but I love your journal (random number)

You’ll excuse me writing a post that is reaction to my comment spam but a recent spate of spam reminded me of something important.

False or insincere praise is worse than no praise at all.

I use WordPress’s ARMY OF AUTOMATION to detect and corral my spam comments into an area where I can inspect them and delete them, without all of you having to read about false Google page rank updates, or notes saying things like “Wow, I loved this, keep it up 782346”. Things designed to take you to trap blogs or URLs to give some person somewhere some money. But I still manually review the spam to ensure that some poor ‘fan’ hasn’t written something that tipped the false positive scale. What this all reminded me of was my disappointment when I realised that something that I thought was personalised praise was actually automated nonsense, designed to suck me in. It’s deflating.

Some years ago, when I was just starting out, I received an e-mail from the chair of a relatively highly ranked conference inviting me to be on the program committee. Given that I’d published a bit in the area, I thought it was personal recognition and was really chuffed until my wife, very, VERY delicately, pointed out that it had gone to a giant mailing list called DBWORLD. (Yes, I should have noticed, but in those days I read the content before author and subject. These days, I do a lot more pre-filtering.) Every single person on that list had received that e-mail. This was a not a personal e-mail in recognition of any achievement on my part, it was a seat-filling exercise that had hit me as part of a wave.

There is a big difference between addressing small groups of people within the large, while openly admitting that you’re speaking in the large, and sending something that appears to be personal, but is secretly in the large. If you’re sending out messages of congratulations to the top performers in your class, why not spend the extra effort to send each person a message? They probably are going to talk about it and may notice how similar your message is – some may not care, of course, but some might. People who aren’t showing up? You can probably use blind carbon copy to send out the initial reminder, because it’s not SUCH a personalised message, and then personalise as they respond, or you can start personal, if you can manage it.

If you have a group of top students, but each one has nailed down a specific aspect of the course, noting the specific achievement as part of genuine and personal praise is, I suspect, going to have a far greater effect than a blanket e-mail saying “You’ve all done well”. “You’ve all done well” means I sorted the marks, selected the top 5 and pasted their e-mail into a mail merger. Specific praise, to reinforce that you have read it, you do know it, and you know at least some of that student’s mind, is going to reinforce the reality that you did mark it, what was submitted was noted, the work that went into it mattered.

This is what we’re saying when we produce genuine praise: “what you did mattered and it was good”

That’s why all feedback should be genuine and grounded in the work. Even if you’re giving general feedback to a class, I think it’s really helpful to find as much ‘resonant truth’ as possible – the feedback that everyone nods along to and goes ‘yes’. I could talk about authenticity and the importance of being genuine for hours but, once again, that’s another post.

Don’t get me wrong. Genuine praise and follow-up on the mass scale is better than none at all. If you have the time and resources, then we can probably all agree that personalised is better than general.

However, false praise, or insincere or misdirected praise, is counter-productive and really doesn’t have much place in our practices. It’s false and, ultimately, we’re about truth.

You Can’t Believe You Did So Badly?

A common e-mail comment I’ve had from students who didn’t get the mark that they were expecting is often “I can’t believe I did so badly” or words to that effect. “I knew I did well in the exam.” “I answered all of the questions correctly.” All of these are the same and, expect for the rare occasion when we have made an administrative error in assembling the mark, it usually indicates one thing.

The student doesn’t have enough knowledge to be able to assess their level of knowledge.

It would be glib to talk about Dunning-Kruger here, so I suspect it would be even more glib to mention it in passing and not discuss it! The Dunning-Kruger effect is a bias in your thinking that leads people with lower skill level to have an artificially high assessment of their own skills. The converse is that the highly skilled often underrate their ability.

When these students look at their exam scripts or assessments again, as I encourage them to do, the illusory has to confront reality. They see where I drew a red line across a page to indicate that they didn’t answer, say, question 2 at all, which cost them up to 30 marks. They see the places where I asked them to explain an unlabelled diagram, or to give me the detail underneath their broad brush statements. Sometimes, it’s seeing where I’ve written ‘sorry, no’  beside where they’ve answered both true and false to the same question. Without explanation. Then again, some students look at what I’ve said and try to find any possible wriggle room to get extra marks. Where it’s trying it on, it won’t get them anywhere, but I understand it. Where it’s a genuine lack of understanding as to why what they’ve provided is not a complete answer? That’s sadder, because they’re now functioning at a level where, until they advance, they will fail and not understand why they’re failing.

Worse, they may not realise even that they need help, or what kind it will take, to improve their skills. They’re fine – it’s the rest of the world, including me, that’s wrong.

You only have to speak to some students who have been around a little too long, or who left without their degrees, to realise that among those who have genuine problems, but are aware of them and striving to fix them, there are those who have equally genuine problems but assume that it’s nothing they can fix because it’s not their fault.

Does anyone out there have suggestions as to how we can help or approach these students, dealing with the delicate matter of their feelings as well as the cognitive bias? Please share them!

Those Dang Kids and Their Phones, Computers and iPads.

Some my students use computers in my lectures and, while I’m sure that a number of them are writing notes or looking at the notes, I’m sure that many are ‘multi-tasking’ with social media or the like. They’re not playing games, because I know what they looks and sounds like (wwwwwwwddaaaaa*click**click*wwww *DAMN*) but these mobile platforms are more powerful and more pervasive so this will happen a lot. Now, despite the presence of computers, I can usually get the students with gadgets to participate, answer questions and do all of those good things. If I have a question, I don’t have to repeat the previous 5 minutes of speaking to get an answer. They’re mostly listening. But, whenever the gadgets are out, there’s always a worry that those dang kids are surfing the internet rather than listening to you.

Now, I’m sure that some of you have very strong opinions about this. Why do students do this given they’ve bothered to show up?

I have, in recent experience, attended meetings which had an obligatory nature to them and, among my colleagues, seen a lot of iPads, notebooks, laptops and phones in use during these meetings. Now you’d expect that someone would be most active on this mobile reference and presentation platform when it was their turn to talk or be talked to, but generally it seemed to be when the person in question wasn’t required to do anything. In fact, these gadgets get the most workout when the person holding them hasn’t done anything in the meeting nor is expected to. Armed with a gadget, these people (who may have been colleagues) had tuned out because the major reason that they were in the meeting was because someone had told them that they had to be. If they didn’t have gadgets they’d probably be sleeping (quietly), doodling or talking to the person next to them.

Every time someone complains about students who focus on the gadgets rather than the lecture, I think about those meetings where I’ve checked my mail during a dull patch in a meeting. Or done some other (useful and real) work that had nothing to do with the event that I was in.

I know, I’m a terrible human being with a short atten… what? But the thing is, give me a reason that I should be somewhere and a reason to participate, interact and listen? I’ll be there, armed with my knowledge and my supporting fleet of tech. THEN, the gadgets are only used as they should be. I don’t doodle. I stay focused. No doubt everyone reading this has a better attention span than I do and has never, ever been bored in a compulsory meeting on new OH&S standards for refrigerator cleanliness or has tuned out while trying to listen to someone reading tiny-font info-dense slides to you, regarding new research standards.

Hmmm.

We want our students to be like us. In many ways they already are. Yes, some students are very hard to engage but, for most of them, if they have a reason to be there and a reason to listen and take part, chances are they will.

Never Put The Roof Up First

I had a great coffee meeting on Friday with a friend and colleague (who will be feeling self-conscious if he’s reading this now) and we were talking about a number of things, some education related, some research, some relating to the fact that the coffee shop was closing early. He reminded me, however, of some of the most important lessons I learned last year when I finally got the chance to produce a new Computer Science course from the ground-up, with no previous offerings at our Uni. So, with thanks to Jono, here are the things I learned about how to build a course, in a building metaphor to allow me to draw pretty pictures:

1. Buildings Don’t Just Happen
   Fortunately for the building industry, bricks do not spontaneous leap together to form load-bearing structures. Resources need to be identified, plans need to be drawn, tasks need to be allocated. The fundamental requirement is that you know what kind of building you’re trying to construct!
   Similarly, for my course, I had to work out what I wanted to teach by looking at the curriculum to determine the scope and area. I had to figure out what students already knew by looking at previous courses and performance. I had to work out what people expected my students to know in terms of overall degree, courses that used mine as assumed knowledge and pre-requisites, and in terms of how much more each area would be taught. Once I knew that, I had my overall goal in my head and I had a much better idea of what I was supposed to be doing.
   Yes, I could have just put together a course on advanced C++ programming with some data structures but any meeting of the goals I was supposed to have been achieving would have been accidental. You don’t ask a builder just to build you ‘a house’.

   

2. Never Put The Roof Up First
   You can’t put the roof on a building until there are enough supporting structures. Same process in a course. You can’t build to advanced concepts without fundamentals. You can’t generalise in a meaningful manner without knowing when to use specifics. For me, having determined my goals, sketching out all of the concepts in turn allowed me to think about how I was going to relate them. How I would move from one to the other. We can generally all agree on what the key concepts are but there are some ways of ordering them which are better than others. Ultimately, don’t start with the capstones! Things without support fall down.

   

3. Think About The Occupant
   A well-designed and well-built building is a fantastic thing. Everything is in the right place, everything works. When all of the resources and plans have been assembled and used in a way that the final realisation is optimal for the occupant, happiness ensues. We’ve already talked about our goals and concept building – is this now set up in a way that works for your students? Are you building for one cohort or all of them? Is there space for different academic levels in the student body (because they will be there) or will people pass “if they’re smart enough”. Who will be in your course? Are your course features going to be appreciated as features? Are they even, being brutally honest with yourself, features… or rationalisations?

   

4. Get It In Writing
   The builder does not pass on instructions via psychic powers. Apart from anything else, there are too many people to talk to, some of whom may not even be on site. Your carpenters, plumbers, brick layers, electricians, inspectors… the list goes on and, if you had to constantly check every little thing every time, your building will never get built. Good, and large-scale, builders not only have plans, they have specific plans for specific jobs so that everyone who works for them knows what they need to do as part of the bigger picture, with the spotlight on their area of expertise. Once you know concepts, relationships and targets, you can put together a plan that anyone can follow, assuming that they have the skills, to build you the house (or the course) of your dreams.
   Your overall plan could include your examination scheme (what’s in it? what form does it take? how long is it?) which assesses all of your target concepts. Built around these are the details of examinations, assessments, exercises and the lectures and content required to pass all of this on. Do you need a course provided in Blackboard or Moodle? Any special requirements? You can spin off a sub-section and get it to the right person so that, instead of waiting until the beginning of term and doing it in a flat panic WHEN they can find you, the relevant people can create what you want from your plan. Got TAs? A good design and plan will show them what they are lecturing, when and what you expect them to highlight. Yes, you’ll still need management meetings along the way most likely, but this will save you a heap of work later.
   Time spent now will almost always save you more time later and make your life easier.
   Think about it. What happens if you get really sick and someone needs to sub in? What would you prefer? A phone call during your prostate surgery that screams “Your course is on C++, what do they know?” or an e-mail that says “I’ve got all of your notes and plan. I’ll run that in-class quiz from the scratchies you prepared. Did you want me to cover anything else?” (Hey, I know, chances are you’re going to get called anyway because people are people but good preparation and planning will make the call shorter. 🙂 )

   

5. Sometimes Things Go Wrong
   Builders are lovely people but, from my experience, if one told me that the work was going to be done tomorrow, I still wouldn’t buy the champagne until a week from now. Complex assemblies of things are prone to interruption – whether big builds or entire semesters of new content. You can’t expect everything to go to plan. You have to allow yourself some flexibility to cover those situations that will occur in a new course. You won’t necessarily pitch the course at exactly the right speed. Do you have additional activities if you get through lectures more quickly? Do you have a disposable slot in case you need to extend a lecture. Or you get sick. Knowing what your core material is allows you to quickly refactor the course and keep the good stuff in (which you’ve already identified and is already in the exam, maybe) and get rid of some fluff.
   What? No fluff? It’s ALL core? It’s going to be a long exam then! More seriously, can you move lecture content to tutorial, or extend an assignment a little, or put up a podcast, or arrange an extra session? If the answer to all of these is ‘No’ then you want to know this before you waste days of your time trying to make it happen. Sometimes things go wrong. A plan can help.
   

This is, most definitely, not the definitive list of things you should know but it’s certainly at least some of them! It was a fascinating process to go through. Next time I hope to make my attempts to live up to my own goals even better. Fingers crossed. 🙂