Recursive Tutorial: A tutorial on writing a tutorial

Posted: October 24, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I assigned the Grand Challenge students a slightly strange problem for yesterday’s tutorial: “How would you write an R tutorial for Year 11 High School Students?” R is an open source statistics package that is incredibly powerful and versatile but it is nowhere near as friendly to use or accessible as traditional GUI tools such as Microsoft Excel. R has some menus and buttons on it but most of these are used to control the environment, rather than applying the statistical and mathematical functions. R Studio is an associated Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that makes working with R easier but, at its core, R relies upon you knowing enough R to type the right commands.

Discussing this with students, we compared Excel and R to find out what the core differences were and some of them are not important early on but become more important later. Excel, for example, allows you to quickly paste and move around data, apply some functions, draw some graphs and come to a result quickly, mostly by pushing buttons and using on-line help with a little typing. But, and it’s an important but, unless you write a program in Excel (and not that many people do), re-applying all of that manipulation to a new data source requires you to click and push and move across the screen all over again. You have to recreate a long and complicated combination of mechanical and cognitive functions. R, by contrast, requires you to type commands to get things to happen but it remembers them by default and you can easily extract them. Because of how R works, you drag in data (from a file, say) and then execute a set of manipulation steps. If you’re familiar with R then this is straight-forward. If not, then steep learning curve. However, re-using these instructions and manipulations on a new data source is trivial. You change the file and re-run all of the steps.

Why am I talking about new data sources? Because it’s often the case that you want to do the same thing with new data OR you realise that the data you were working with was incomplete or in error. Unless you write a lot of Visual Basic in Excel (and that no longer works on Macs so it’s not a transferable option), your Excel spreadsheet with changed data requires you to potentially reapply or check the application of everything in the spreadsheet, especially if there is any sorting of data, creation of new columns or summary data – and let’s not even start talking about pivot tables! But, for single run, for finance, for counting stuff, Excel is almost always going to be more easy to teach people to use than R. For scientists, however, R is better to use for two very important reasons: it is less likely to do something that is irreversible to your data and the vast majority of its default choices are sensible.

The students came up with a list of things that Excel does (good and bad): it’s strongly visual, lay-user friendly, tells you what you can do, does what it damn well wants to, data changes may require manual reapplication. There’s a corresponding list for R: steep learning curve, visual display for R environment but command-line interface for commands, does what you tell it to do (except when it’s too smart). I surveyed the class to find out who was using R rather than Excel and the majority of students were using R for their analysis but, and again it’s an important but, only because they had to. In situations where Excel was enough (simple manipulation, straight forward analysis), then Excel got used because Excel is far easier to use and far friendlier.

The big question for the students was “How do I start doing something?” In Excel, you type numbers into the spreadsheet and then can just start selecting things using a relatively good on-line help system. In R you are faced with a blinking prompt and you have to know enough to type streams of commands like this:

newtab <-read.csv("~/days.txt",header=FALSE)
plot(seq(1,nrow(newtab)),newtab$V1) 
boxplot(newtab) 
abline(a=1500,b=0) 
mean(newtab)

And, with a whole set of other commands, you can get graphs like this. (I realise that this is not a box plot!)

Once you’re used to it, this is meaningful, powerful and re-applicable. I can update the data and re-run this to my heart’s content, analysing vast quantities of data without having to keep mouse clicking into cells. But let’s remember our context. I’m not talking about higher education students, I’m talking about school students and it’s important to remember that teaching people something before they’re ready to use it or before they have an opportunity to use it is potentially not the best use of effort.

My students pointed out that the school students of today are all learning how to use graphing calculators, with giant user manuals, and (in some cases) the students switch on their calculators to see a menu rather than the traditional calculator single line. But the syntax and input modes for calculators vary widely. Some use ( ) for operations like sin, so a student will see sin(30) when they start doing trig, whereas some don’t. This means that some of the students I might want to teach R to have not necessarily got their head around the fact that functions exist, except as something that Excel requires them to do. Let’s go to the why here, because it’s important. Why are students learning how to use these graphing calculators? So they can pass their exams, where the competent and efficient use of these things will help them. Yes, it appears that students may be carrying out the kind of operations I would like them to put into a more powerful tool, but why should they?

If a teach a high school student about Excel then there are many places that they might use this kind of software: micro-budgeting, keeping track of things, the ‘simple’ approximation of a database storing books or things like that. However, the general practice of using Excel is familiarisation with a GUI interface that is very, very common and that most students need experience with. If I teach them R then I might be extending their knowledge but (a) the majority are probably not yet ready for it and (b) they are highly unlikely to need to use it for anything in the near future.

The conclusion that my students reached was that, if we really wanted to provide exposure to an industry-like scientific or engineering tool at the earlier stage, then why not use one that was friendlier, more helpful but still had a more scientific focus. They suggested Matlab (as a number of them had been exposed) or Mathematica. Now this whole exercise was designed to get them to practice their thinking about outreach, community, communication and sharing knowledge, so I wasn’t ever actually planning to run an R tutorial at Year 11. But these students thought through and asked the very important questions:

  • Who is this aimed at?
  • What do they already know?
  • What do they need to know?
  • Why are we doing this?

Of course, I have also learned a great deal from this as well – I had no idea that the calculators had quite got to this point, nor that there were schools were students would have to select through a graphical menu to get to the simple “3+3 EXE” section of the calculator! Don’t tell my Grand Challenge students but I think I’m learning roughly as much as they are!

Sources of Knowledge: Stickiness and the Chasm Between Theory and Practice.

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

Like all sources, it helps to know the origin and the purity.

My head is still full of my current crop of research papers and, while I can’t go into details, I can discuss something that I’m noticing more and more as I read into the area of Computer Science Education. Firstly, how much I have left to learn and, secondly, how difficult it is sometimes to track down ideas and establish novelty, provenance and worth. I read Mark Guzdial’s blog a lot because Mark has spent a lot of time being very clever in this area (Sorry, Mark, it’s true) but he is also an excellent connecter of the reader to good sources of information, as well as reminding us when something pops up that is effectively a rehash of an old idea. This level of knowledge and ability to discuss ideas is handy when we keep seeing some of the same old ideas pop up, from one source or another, over time. I’ve spoken before about how the development of the mass-accessible library didn’t end the importance of the University or school, and Mark makes a similar note in a recent post on MOOCs when he points us to an article on mail delivery lessons from a hundred years before and how this didn’t lead to the dissolution of the education system. Face-to-face continues to be important, as do bricks and mortar, so while the MOOC is a fascinating new tool and methodology with great promise, the predicted demise of the school and college may (once again) turn out to be premature.

If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point”, you’ll be familiar with the notion that ideas need to have certain characteristics, and certain human agents, before they become truly persuasive and widely adopted. If you’ve read Dawkin’s “Selfish Gene” (published over a decade before) then you’ll understand that Gladwell’s book would be stronger if it recognised a debt to Dawkins’ coining of the term meme, for self-replicating beliefs and behaviours. Gladwell’s book, as a source, is a fairly unscientific restatement of some existing ideas with a useful narrative structure, despite depending on some now questionable case studies. In many ways, it is an example of itself because Gladwell turned existing published information into a form where, with his own additions, he has identified a useful way to discuss certain systems of behaviour. Better still, people do (still) read it.

(A quick use of Google Trends shows me that people search for “The Tipping Point” roughly twice as much as “The Selfish Gene” but for “Richard Dawkins” twice as much as “Malcolm Gladwell”. Given Dawkins’ very high profile in belligerent atheism, this is not overly surprising.)

Gladwell identified the following three rules of epidemics (in terms of the spread of ideas):

  1. The Law of the Few: There are a small group of people who make a big difference to the proliferation of an idea. The mavens accumulate knowledge and know a lot about the area. The connectors are the gregarious and sociable people who know a lot of other people and, in Gladwell’s words, “have a gift for bringing the word together”. The final type of people are salespeople or (more palatably) persuaders, the people who convince us that something is a good idea. Gladwell’s thesis is that it is not just about the message, but that the messenger matters.
  2. The Stickiness Factor: Ideas have to be memorable in order to spread effectively so there is something about the specific content of the message that will determine its impact. Content matters.
  3. The Power of Context: We are all heavily influenced by and sensitive to our environment. Context matters.

Dawkins’ meme is a very sticky idea and, while there’s a lot of discussion about the Selfish Gene, we now have the field of memetics and the fact that the word ‘meme’ is used (almost correctly) thousands, if not millions, of times a day. Every time that you’ve seen a prawn running on a treadmill while Yakity Sax plays, you can think of Richard Dawkins and thank him for giving you a word to describe this.

My early impressions of some of the problem with the representation of earlier ideas in CS Ed, as if they are new, makes me wonder if there is a fundamental problem with the stickiness of some of these ideas. I would argue that the most successful educational researchers, and I’ve had the privilege to see some of them, are in fact strong combinations of Gladwell’s few. Academics must be, by definition, mavens, information specialists in our domains. We must be able to reach out to our communities and spread our knowledge – is this enough for us to be called connectors? We have to survive peer review, formal discussions and criticism and we have to be able to argue our ideas, on the reasonable understanding that it is our ideas and not ourselves that is potentially at fault. Does this also make us persuaders? If we can find all of these “few” in our community, and we already a community of the few, where does it leave us in terms of explaining why we, in at least some areas, keep rehashing the same old ideas. Do we fail to appreciate the context of those colleagues we seek to reach or are our ideas just not sticky enough? (Context is crucial here, in my opinion, because it is very easy to to explain a new idea in a way that effectively says “You’ve been doing it wrong all these years. Now fix it or you’re a bad person.” This is going to create a hostile environment. Once again, context matters but this time it is in terms of establishing context.)

I wonder if this is compounded in Computer Science by the ability to separate theory from practice, and to draw in new practice from both an educational research focus and an industrial focus? To explain why teamwork actually works, we move into social constructivism and to Vygotsky, via Ben-Ari in many cases, Bandura, cognitive apprenticeship – that’s an educational research focus. To say that teamwork works, because we’ve got some good results from industry and we’re supported by figures such as Brooks, Boehm and Humphrey and their case studies in large-scale development – that’s an industrial focus. The practice of teamwork is sticky, that ship has sailed in software development, but does the stickiness of the practice transfer to the stickiness of the underlying why? The answer, I believe, is ‘no’ and I’m beginning to wonder if a very sticky “what” is actually acting against the stickiness of the “why”. Why ask “why?” when you know that it works? This seems to be a running together of the importance of stickiness and the environment of the CS Ed researcher as a theoretical educationalist, working in a field that has a strong industrial focus, with practitioner feedback and accreditation demands pushing a large stream of “what do to”.

It has been a thoughtful week and, once again, I admit my novice status here. Is this the real problem? If so, how can we fix it?

 

Making Time For Students

Posted: October 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I was reminded of my slightly overloaded calendar today as students came and went throughout the day, I raced in and out of project meetings and RV and I worked on some papers that we’re trying to get together for an upcoming submission date in the next few months. I wish I could talk about the research but, given that it will all have to go into peer review and some of the people reading this may end up being on those panels, it will all have to wait until we get accepted or it comes back on fire with a note written in blood saying “Don’t call us…”

For those following the Australian Research scene, you might know that the Australian Federal Government had put a hold on releasing information on key research funding schemes and that this has led to uncertainty for those people whose salaries are paid by research grants. Why is this important in a learning and teaching blog? Because the majority of Higher Education academics are involved in research, teaching and administration but it’s not too much of a generalisation to say that those who are the most successful have substantial help on the research front from well-established groups and staff who are paid to do research full-time.

Right now, as I write this, our postdoc (RV) is reviewing the terminology of certain aspects of the discipline to allow us to continue our research. RV is running citation analyses, digging through papers, peering at my scrawl on the whiteboard and providing a vital aspect to the project: uninterrupted dedication to the research question. I’m seeing students, holding meetings, dealing with technical problems, worrying about my own grants, preparing for a new course roll-out on Monday… and writing this. RV’s role is rapidly becoming critical to my ability to work.

There are thousands of dedicated researchers like RV across Australia and it is easy to quantify their contribution to research, but easy to overlook their implicit benefit in terms of learning and teaching. Every senior academic who is involved in research and teaching will most likely only still be teaching because they someone to carry on the research and maintain the focus and continuity that only comes from having one major area to work on.

I think of it in terms of gearing. When I’m talking to other researchers, I use one set of mental gears. Inside my own group, I use another because we are all much more closely aligned. I use a completely different set when I talk to students and this set varies by year level, course and student! Making time for students is not just a case of having an hour in my calendar. Making time for students is a matter of making the mental space for a discussion that will be at the appropriate level. It’s having enough time to have a chat rather than a rapid-fire exchange. I don’t always succeed at this because far too many of my students apologise to me for taking up my time. Argh! My time is student time! It’s what I get a good 40% of my salary for! (Not that we’re counting. Like most academics, when asked what percentage of my time I spent on the three areas of research, teaching and admin, I say 50,50,40. 🙂 )

Now I am not, by any means, a senior academic and I am very early on in this process, so you can imagine how important those research staff are going to be in keeping projects going for senior staff who are having to make those gear changes at a very rapid speed across much larger domains. Knowledge workers need the time and headspace to think and switching context takes up valuable time, as well as tiring you out if you do it often enough.

On that basis, the recent news that the Government is unfreezing the medical research schemes and at least some of the major awards for everyone else is good news. My own grant in this area is highly unlikely to get up – my relief is not actually for myself, here – but we are already worried about an increased rate of departure for those researchers who are concerned about having a job next year and are, because of their skills and experience, highly mobile. The impact of these people leaving will not just be felt in terms of research output, which has a multi-year lag, but will be felt immediately wherever learning and teaching depended upon someone having the time and mental space to do it, because they had a member of the research staff supporting their other work. Universities are a complex ecosystem and there are very important connections between staff in different areas and areas of focus that are not immediately apparent when you make the simplistic distinction of staff (professional and academic) and, for academics, research/teaching/admin, research/admin, teaching/admin, pure research and pure teaching. The number of courses that I have to teach depends upon the number of staff available to teach, as well as the number of courses and students, and the number of staff (or their available hours) is directly affected by the number of people who help them.

It’s good news that the research funds are starting to unfreeze because it will say to the people who are depending upon grant money that an answer is coming soon. It’s also saying to the rest of us that we can start to think about planning and allocation for 2013 with more certainty, because the monies will be coming at some point.

This, in turn, stops me having to worry about things like contingency plans, who is going to be working with me, and how I will fund research assistants into 2014 because now I have a possibility of a grant, rather than a placeholder in a frozen scheme. This reduces my  current overheads (for a while) and frees up some headspace. With any luck, the next student who walks into my office will not realise exactly how busy I am – and that’s the way that I like it.

A Study in Ethics: Lance Armstrong and Why You Shouldn’t Burn Your Bracelet.

Posted: October 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

If you haven’t heard about the recent USADA release of new evidence against Lance Armstrong, former star of cycling and Chairman for his own LIVESTRONG Cancer Foundation, then let me summarise it: it’s pretty damning. After reviewing this and other evidence, I have little doubt that Lance Armstrong systematically and deliberately engaged in the procurement, distribution, promotion and consumption of banned substances while he was engaged in an activity that explicitly prohibited this. I also have very little doubt that he engaged in practices, such as blood transfusion, intimidation and the manipulation of colleagues and competitors, again in a way that contravened the rules of his sport and in a way that led the sport into disrepute. The USADA report contains a lot of the missing detail, witness reports, accounts and evidence that, up until now, has allowed Lance Armstrong to maintain that delightful state of grace that is plausible deniability. He has now been banned for life, although he can appeal, his sponsors are leaving him and he has stepped down as the Chairman of his charity.

I plan to use Armstrong in my discussions of ethics over the next year for a number of reasons and this is an early musing, so it’ll be raw and I welcome discussion. Here are my initial reasons and thoughts:

  1. It’s general knowledge and everyone knows enough about this case to have formed an opinion. Many of the other case studies I use refer to the past or situations that are not as widely distributed.
  2. It’s a scenario that (either way) is easy to believe and grounded in the experience of my students.
  3. Lance Armstrong appears to have been making decisions that impacted his team, his competitors, his entire sport. His area of influence is large.
  4. There is an associated entity that is heavily linked with Lance’s personal profile, the LIVESTRONG Cancer Charity.

Points 1 and 2 allows me to talk about Lance Armstrong and have everyone say “Oh, yeah!” as opposed to other classic discussions such as Tuskegee, Monster Study, Zimbardo, etc, where I first have to explain the situation, then the scenario and they try to make people believe that this could happen! Believing that a professional sports person may have taken drugs is, in many ways, far easier to get across than complicated stories of making children stutter. Point 3 allows me to get away from thee “So what if someone decides to do X to themselves?” argument – which is a red herring anyway in a competitive situation based (even in theory) on a level playing field. Rationalisations of the actions taken by an individual do not apply when they are imposed on another group, so many of the “my right to swing my arm ends at your nose” arguments that students effectively bring up in discussing moral and ethical behaviour will not stand up against the large body of evidence that Armstrong intimidated other riders, forced their silence, and required team members to follow the same regime. I expect that we’ll still have to have the “So what if everyone dopes” argument in terms of “are people choosing?” and “what are the ethical implications if generalised?” approaches.

But it is this last theme that I really wish to explore. I read a Gawker article telling everyone to rip off their yellow wristbands and that I strongly disagree with. Lance Armstrong is, most likely, a systematic cheat who has been, and still is, lying about his ongoing cheating in order to continue as many of his activities as possible, as well as maintaining some sense of fan base. The time where he could have apologised for his actions, stood up and taken a stand, is pretty much over. Sponsors who have stood by other athletes at difficult times have left him, because the evidence is so overwhelming.

But to say that this has anything to do with LIVESTRONG is an excellent example of the Genetic Fallacy – that is, because something came from Lance Armstrong, it is now somehow automatically bad. Would I drink from a Coke he gave me? Probably not. Do I still wish his large and influential cancer charity all the success in the world? Yes, of course. LIVESTRONG gave out roughly $30,000,000 last year across its programs and that’s a good thing.

It’s a terrible shame that, for so many years, Armstrong’s work with the charity was, more than slightly cynically, used to say what a good person he was despite the allegations. (There’s a great Onion piece from a couple of years ago that now seems bizarrely prescient). Much as LIVESTRONG is not guaranteed to be bad because Armstrong is a doper, running and setting up LIVESTRONG doesn’t absolve Armstrong from actions in other spheres. A Yahoo sports article describes his charity as being used as a ‘moral cloak’, although smokescreen might be the better word. But we need to look further.

To what does LIVESTRONG owe its success? Would it be as popular and successful if Armstrong hadn’t come back from cancer (he continues to be a cancer survivor) and then hadn’t won all of those tours? Given that his success was, apparently, completely dependent upon illegal activity, aren’t we now indebted to Armstrong’s illegal activity for the millions of dollars that have gone to help people with cancer?

We can talk about moral luck, false dichotomy and false antecedent/consequent (depending on which way around you wish to frame it) in this and this leads us into all sorts of weird and wonderful discussions, from a well-known and much discussed current affairs issue. But the core is quite simple: Armstrong’s actions had a significantly negative effect upon his world but at least one of the actions that he took has had a positive outcome. Whatever his motivation and intention, the outcome is beneficial. LIVESTRONG now has a challenge to see if it is big enough to survive this reversal of fortune but this is, most definitely, not the time to burn the bracelet. Turn it around, if you want, but, until it turns out that LIVESTRONG is some sort of giant front for clubbing baby harp seals, we can’t just lump this in with the unethical actions of one man.

I was thinking about what Armstrong could do now and, while I believe that he will never be able to do many of the things that he used to do (pro cycling/speaking arrangements/public figure), we know that he is quite good at two things:

  1. Riding a bike
  2. Getting drugs into difficult places.

One of the major problems in the world is getting the right pharmaceuticals to the right people because of government issues, instability and poverty. There are probably worse things for Armstrong to do than cycle from point to point, sneaking medicine past border guards, shinning down drain pipes to provide retrovirals to the poor in the slums of a poor city and hiking miles so that someone doesn’t die today. (I know, that’s all a bit hair shirt –  I’m not suggesting that seeking atonement is either required or sensible.) More seriously, the end of my ethical study in Armstrong will only be written when he works out what he wants to do next. Then my students can look at it, scratch their heads and try to work out where that now places him in terms of morality and ethics.

Authenticity and Challenge: Software Engineering Projects Where Failure is an Option

Posted: October 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

It’s nearly the end of semester and that means that a lot of projects are coming to fruition – or, in a few cases, are still on fire as people run around desperately trying to put them out. I wrote a while about seeing Fred Brooks at a conference (SIGCSE) and his keynote on building student projects that work. The first four of his eleven basic guidelines were:

  1. Have real projects for real clients.
  2. Groups of 3-5.
  3. Have lots of project choices
  4. Groups must be allowed to fail.

We’ve done this for some time in our fourth year Software Engineering option but, as part of a “Dammit, we’re Computer Science, people should be coming to ask about getting CS projects done” initiative, we’ve now changed our third year SE Group Project offering from a parallel version of an existing project to real projects for real clients, although I must confess that I have acted as a proxy in some of them. However, the client need is real, the brief is real, there are a lot of projects on the go and the projects are so large and complex that:

  1. Failure is an option.
  2. Groups have to work out which part they will be able to achieve in the 12 weeks that they have.

For the most part, this approach has been a resounding success. The groups have developed their team maturity faster, they have delivered useful and evolving prototypes, they have started to develop entire tool suites and solve quite complex side problems because they’ve run across areas that no-one else is working in and, most of all, the pride that they are taking in their work is evident. We have lit the blue touch paper and some of these students are skyrocketing upwards. However, let me not lose sight of one our biggest objectives, that we be confident that these students will be able to work with clients. In the vast majority of cases, I am very happy to say that I am confident that these students can make a useful, practical and informed contribution to a software engineering project – and they still have another year of projects and development to go.

The freedom that comes with being open with a client about the possibility of failure cannot be overvalued. This gives both you and the client a clear understanding of what is involved- we do not need to shield the students, nor does the client have to worry about how their satisfaction with software will influence things. We scaffold carefully but we have to allow for the full range of outcomes. We, of course, expect the vast majority of projects to succeed but this experience will not be authentic unless we start to pull away the scaffolding over time and see how the students stand by themselves. We are not, by any stretch, leaving these students in the wilderness. I’m fulfilling several roles here: proxying for some clients, sharing systems knowledge, giving advice, mentoring and, every so often, giving a well-needed hairy eyeball to a bad idea or practice. There is also the main project manager and supervisor who is working a very busy week to keep track of all of these groups and provide all of what I am and much, much more. But, despite this, sometimes we just have to leave the students to themselves and it will, almost always, dawn on them that problem solving requires them to solve the problem.

I’m really pleased to see this actually working because it started as a brainstorm of my “Why aren’t we being asked to get involved in more local software projects” question and bouncing it off the main project supervisor, who was desperate for more authentic and diverse software projects. Here is a distillation of our experience so far:

  1. The students are taking more ownership of the projects.
  2. The students are producing a lot of high quality work, using aggressive prototyping and regular consultation, staged across the whole development time.
  3. The students are responsive and open to criticism.
  4. The students have a better understanding of Software Engineering as a discipline and a practice.
  5. The students are proud of what they have achieved.

None of this should come as much of a surprise but, in a 25,000+ person University, there are a lot of little software projects on the 3-person team 12 month scale, which are perfect for two half-year project slots because students have to design for the whole and then decide which parts to implement. We hope to give these projects back to them (or similar groups) for further development in the future because that is the way of many, many software engineers: the completion, extension and refactoring of other people’s codebases. (Something most students don’t realise is that it only takes a very short time for a codebase you knew like the back of your hand to resemble the product of alien invaders.)

I am quietly confident, and hopeful, that this bodes well for our Software Engineers and that we still start to seem them all closely bunched towards the high achieving side of the spectrum in terms of their ability to practice. We’re planning to keep running this in the future because the early results have been so promising. I suppose the only problem now is that I have to go and find a huge number of new projects for people to start on for 2013.

As problems go, I can certainly live with that one!

Dealing with Plagiarism: Punishment or Remediation?

Posted: October 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

I have written previously about classifying plagiarists into three groups (accidental, panicked and systematic), trying to get the student to focus on the journey rather than the objective, and how overwork can produce situations in which human beings do very strange things. Recently, I was asked to sit in on another plagiarism hearing and, because I’ve been away from the role of Assessment Coordinator for a while, I was able to look at the process with an outsider’s eye, a slightly more critical view, to see how it measures up.

Our policy is now called an Academic Honesty Policy and is designed to support one of our graduate attributes: “An awareness of ethical, social and cultural issues within a global context and their importance in the exercise of professional skills and responsibilities”. The principles are pretty straight-forward for the policy:

  • Assessment is an aid to learning and involves obligations on the part of students to make it effective.
  • Academic honesty is an essential component of teaching, learning and research and is fundamental to the very nature of universities.
  • Academic writing is evidence-based, and the ideas and work of others must be acknowledged and not claimed or presented as one’s own, either deliberately or unintentionally.

The policy goes on to describe what student responsibilities are, why they should do the right thing for maximum effect of the assessment and provides some handy links to our Writing Centre and applying for modified arrangements. There’s also a clear statement of what not to do, followed by lists of clarifications of various terms.

Sitting in on a hearing, looking at the process unfolding, I can review the overall thrust of this policy and be aware that it has been clearly identified to students that they must do their own work but, reading through the policy and its implementation guide, I don’t really see what it provides to sufficiently scaffold the process of retraining or re-educating students if they are detected doing the wrong thing.

There are many possible outcomes from the application of this policy, starting with “Oh, we detected something but we turned out to be wrong”, going through “Well, you apparently didn’t realise so we’ll record your name for next time, now submit something new ” (misunderstanding), “You knew what you were doing so we’re going to give you zero for the assignment and (will/won’t) let you resubmit it (with a possible mark cap)” (first offence), “You appear to make a habit of this so we’re giving you zero for the course” (second offence) and “It’s time to go.” (much later on in the process after several confirmed breaches).

Let me return to my discussions on load and the impact on people from those earlier posts. If you accept my contention that the majority of plagiarism cheating is minor omission or last minute ‘helmet fire’ thinking under pressure, then we have to look at what requiring students to resubmit will do. In the case of the ‘misunderstanding’, students may also be referred to relevant workshops or resources to attend in order to improve their practices. However, considering that this may have occurred because the student was under time pressure, we have just added more work and a possible requirement to go and attend extra training. There’s an old saying from Software Development called Brook’s Law:

“…adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” (Brooks, Mythical Man Month, 1975)

In software it’s generally because there is ramp up time (the time required for people to become productive) and communication overheads (which increases with the square of the number of people again). There is time required for every assignment that we set which effectively stands in for the ramp-up and, as plagiarising/cheating students have probably not done the requisite work before (or could just have completed the assignment), we have just added extra ramp-up into their lives for any re-issued assignments and/or any additional improvement training. We have also greatly increased the communication burden because the communication between lecturers and peers has implicit context based on where we are in the semester. All of the student discussion (on-line or face-to-face) from points A to B will be based around the assignment work in that zone and all lecturing staff will also have that assignment in their heads. An significantly out-of-sequence assignment not only isolates the student from their community, it increases the level of context switching required by the staff, decreasing the amount of effective time that have with the student and increasing the amount of wall-clock time. Once again, we have increased the potential burden on a student that, we suspect, is already acting this way because of over-burdening or poor time management!

Later stages in the policy increase the burden on students by either increasing the requirement to perform at a higher level, due to the reduction of available marks through giving a zero, or by removing an entire course from their progress and, if they wish to complete the degree, requiring them to overload or spend an additional semester (at least) to complete their degree.

My question here is, as always, are any of these outcomes actually going to stop the student from cheating or do they risk increasing the likelihood of either the student cheating or the student dropping out? I complete agree with the principles and focus of our policy, and I also don’t believe that people should get marks for work that they haven’t done, but I don’t see how increasing burden is actually going to lead to the behaviour that we want. (Dan Pink on TED can tell you many interesting things about motivation, extrinsic factors and cognitive tasks, far more effectively than I can.)

This is, to many people, not an issue because this kind of policy is really treated as being punitive rather than remedial. There are some excellent parts in our policy that talk about helping students but, once we get beyond the misunderstanding, this language of support drops away and we head swiftly into the punitive with the possibility of controlled resubmission. The problem, however, is that we have evidence that light punishment is interpreted as a licence to repeat the action, because it doesn’t discourage. This does not surprise me because we have made such a risk/reward strategy framing with our current policy. We have resorted to a punishment modality and, as a result, we have people looking at the punishments to optimise their behaviour rather than changing their behaviour to achieve our actual goals.

This policy is a strange beast as there’s almost no way that I can take an action under the current approach without causing additional work to students at a time when it is their ability to handle pressure that is likely to have led them here. Even if it’s working, and it appears that it does, it does so by enforcing compliance rather than actually leading people to change the way that they think about their work.

My conjecture is that we cannot isolate the problems to just this policy. This spills over into our academic assessment policies, our staff training and our student support, and the key difference between teaching ethics and training students in ethical behaviour. There may not be a solution in this space that meets all of our requirements but if we are going to operate punitively then let us be honest about it and not over-burden the student with remedial work that they may not be supported for. If we are aiming for remediation then let us scaffold it properly. I think that our policy, as it stands, can actually support this but I’m not sure that I’ve seen the broad spread of policy and practice that is required to achieve this desirable, but incredibly challenging, goal of actually changing student behaviour because the students realise that it is detrimental to their learning.

Thoughts on the Fauxpology

Posted: October 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

We’ve had some major unpleasantness in the Australian political sphere recently and, while I won’t bore you with the details, a radio announcer has felt it necessary to apologise for a particularly unpleasant comment that he made about the Prime Minster, and the recent death of her father. It was not, I must say, either the most heartfelt or actually apologetic apology that has ever been delivered and the Prime Minster, who quite rightly has better things to do, has chosen not to take this man’s personal phone call for an apology. And, of course, neither should she feel that she has to. Let me state this in plain terms: the offender does not gain the right to demand the way in which an apology is presented, if they wish to proffer an apology. However, let me cut to the chase (for once) and say that an apology without a genuine sense that you have done something wrong, for which an apology is deserved and that will change your behaviour in future, is worthless.

In this case, the broadcaster has previously apologised for remarks, including that the legally elected and sitting Prime Minister of Australia be put in a ‘chaff’ bag and thrown out to sea. However, his apology for the chaff bag comment may have to be scrutinised, in light of what happened at the dinner function at which he made further deliberately offensive and unsubstantiable claims.  At this event he, in between scurrilous remarks, signed a jacket made out of, you guessed it, chaff bags. Therefore, at least in the chaff bag case, it would appear that his previously apology was without conviction and possible not heartfelt: hence, worthless. He did not feel genuine regret or change his behaviour. In fact, if anything, he was now extending his behaviour and disrespect by aligning his signature with a physical representation of his statements.

When public figures mouth the words of regret, yet do not change or feel regret, we are in the territory of what has been neologised as the fauxpology. (Wikipedia refers to this as the Non-apology apology, if it has the form of an apology but does not actually express the expected contrition.) Let me give you some example words (not from said broadcaster I hasten to add):

“My recent comments may have offended some people and, if they did, then I wish to apologise.”

You are not sorry for the action, but you are sorry only because someone has taken offence, or your actions have been uncovered. Ultimately, the idea here is to say ‘sorry’ in such a way that it appears that you have sought, and may be granted, forgiveness without having to actually express responsibility. Of course, if you aren’t responsible for the problem and can move this to being the problem of the people that you’ve offended, then why should you change your behaviour at all? The example above is an “If apology”, where you are only apologising on a conditional basis. Other fine examples include such delightful phrases as “Mistakes were made” because, of course, one is studiously avoiding saying who made the mistakes.

The major problem with the fauxpology is that it is effectively a waste of time. Without a genuine desire to actually avoid the problematic behaviour, the only thing that may change is that the offender is more careful not to get caught. What bothers me from an educational sense is how pervasive these unpleasant non-apologies are.

I have too many students who feel that some sort of fauxpology, where they are sorry that an action has occurred but it is mysteriously not connected to them, is going to make things all better. I’m pretty sure that they haven’t learned it from me because I try to be honest in my apologies and then change things so that it doesn’t happen again. Am I always up to that standard? I’m probably pretty close and I strive to be better at it – but then again, I strive not to be a schmuck and sometimes that doesn’t work either. This separation of responsibility from outcome is a dangerous disconnection. It is most definitely someone’s responsibility if work didn’t get handed in on time and, while there are obvious exceptions and the spirit of charitable interpretation is still alive and well, a genuine recognition of whose responsibility it is leads one towards self-regulation far better than thinking of the work as something that is associated by accidental proximity rather than deliberate production.

I’m lucky in that I rarely expect my students to do anything where they feel they should be contrite (although there are examples, including being rude or disrespectful to their peers, although I wouldn’t push them all the way to guilt on that) but apologising for something as a recognition that whatever it was is both undesirable and now something to be avoided is essential, when you are actually at fault. But it has to be genuine or there is no point. I loathe being lied to so a false apology, especially when immediately backed up by recidivism, is a great disappointment to me.

My students are responsible for their work. I am responsible for their programs, assessment, and ensuring that they can achieve what is required in a fair and equitable environment. If I get it wrong, then I have to admit it and change behaviour. Same for the students. If something has gone wrong, then we need to work out who was responsible because we can then work out who needs to change things so it doesn’t happen again. This isn’t about ascribing punishment or blame, it’s about making things work better. The false apology, like foolish punishment, is easy but useless. As an example. I cannot think of a more useless punishment than writing lines on a blackboard, especially as the simple mechanics of this action lends itself to a deconstruction of the sentence into a form where the meaning is lost by the fifth time you’ve written “I will not challenge the ontological underpinnings of reality” but have really written “I I I I I I …” “will will wll wll wl wl” and getting steadily more squiggly. But this is useless because it is not really tied to the original offence (whatever it happens to be – talking in class, making fart sounds, shuffling the desk) and it has no teaching value at all. This punishment is the equivalent of the fauxpology in many ways: it looks like it’s doing something but not only does it not achieve its aims, it actually works against positive alternatives by providing an easy out.

I’m very disappointed by the public figures who recite these empty phrases, because the community and my students learn their empty words and think “If they can get away with it, so can I” and, ultimately, my students can’t. It’s a waste of their very valuable time and, at some stage, may lead to problems for the vast majority when someone demands more than a fauxpology and there is no real character substance to provide.

Workshop report: ALTC Workshop “Assessing student learning against the Engineering Accreditation Competency Standards: A practical approach. Part 2.

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

Continuing on from yesterday’s post, I was discussing the workshop that I went to and what I’d learned from it. I finished on the point that assessment of learning occurs when Lecturers:

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

but we have so many other questions to ask at this stage. What were our initial learning objectives? What were we trying to achieve? The learning outcome is effectively a contract between educator and student so we plan to achieve them, but how they fit in the context of our accreditation and overall requirements? One of the things stressed in the workshop was that we need a range of assessment tasks to achieve our objectives:

  • We need a wide variety
  • These should be open-entry where students can begin the tasks from a range of previous learning levels and we cater for different learning preferences and interests
  • They should be open-ended, where we don’t railroad the students towards a looming and monolithic single right answer, and multiple pathways or products are possible
  • We should be building students’ capabilities by building on the standards
  • Finally, we should provide space for student ownership and decision making.

Effectively, we need to be able to get to the solution in a variety of ways. If we straitjacket students into a fixed solution we risk stifling their ability to actually learn and, as I’ve mentioned before, we risk enforcing compliance to a doctrine rather than developing knowledgeable self-regulated learners. If we design these activities properly then we should find the result reduces student complaints about fairness or incorrect assumptions about their preparation. However, these sorts of changes take time and, a point so important that I’ll give it its own line:

You can’t expect to change all of your assessment in one semester!

The advice from Wageeh and Jeff was to focus on an aspect, monitor it, make your change, assess it, reflect and then extend what you’ve learned to other aspects. I like this because, of course, it sounds a lot like a methodical scientific approach to me. Because it is. As to which assessment methods you should choose, the presenters recognised that working out how to make a positive change to your assessment can be hard so they suggested generating a set of alternative approaches and then picking one. They then introduced Prus and Johnson’s 1994 paper “A critical review of Student Assessment Options” which provide twelve different assessment methods and their drawbacks and advantages. One of the best things about this paper is that there is no ‘must’ or ‘right’, there is always ‘plus’ and ‘minus’.

Want to mine archival data to look at student performance? As I’ve discussed before, archival data gives you detailed knowledge but at a time when it’s too late to do anything for that student or a particular cohort in that class. Archival data analysis is, however, a fantastic tool for checking to see if your prerequisites are set correctly. Does their grade in this course correlate with grades in the prereqs? Jeff mentioned a student where the students should have depended upon Physics and Maths but, while their Physics mark correlated with their final Statics mark, Mathematics didn’t. (A study at Baldwin-Wallace presented at SIGCSE 2012 asked the more general question: what are the actual dependencies if we carry out a Bayesian Network Analysis. I’m still meaning to do this for our courses as well.)

Other approaches, such as Surveys, are quick and immediate but are all perceptual. Asking a student how they did on a quiz should never be used as their actual mark! The availability of time will change the methods you choose. If you have a really big group then you can statistically sample to get an indication but this starts to make your design and tolerance for possible error very important.

Jeff stressed that, in all of this assessment, it was essential to never give students an opportunity to gain marks in areas that are not the core focus. (Regular readers know that this is one of my design and operational mantras, as it encourages bad behaviour, by which I mean incorrect optimisation.)

There were so many other things covered in this workshop and, sadly, we only had three hours. I suggested that the next time it was run that they allow more time because I believe I could happily have spent a day going through this. And I would still have had questions.

We discussed the issue of subjectivity and objectivity and the distinction between setting and assessment. Any way that I set a multiple choice quiz is going to be subjective, because I will choose the questions based on my perception of the course and assessment requirements, but it is scored completely objectively.

We also discussed data collection as well because there are so many options here. When will we collect the data? If we collect continuously, can we analyse and react continuously? What changes are we making in response? This is another important point:

If you collect data in order to determine which changes are to be made, tie your changes to your data driven reasons!

There’s little point in saying “We collected all student submission data for three years and then we went to multiple choice questions” unless you can provide a reason from the data, which will both validate your effort in collection and give you a better basis for change. When do I need data to see if someone is clearing the bar? If they’re not, what needs to be fixed? What do I, as a lecturer, need to collect during the process to see what needs to be fixed, rather than the data we collect at the end to determine if they’ve met the bar.

How do I, as a student, determine if I’m making progress along the way? Can I put all of the summative data onto one point? Can I evaluate everything on a two-hour final exam?

WHILE I’m teaching the course, are the students making progress, do they need something else, how do I (and should I) collect data throughout the course. A lot of what we actually collect is driven by the mechanisms that we already have. We need to work out what we actually require and this means that we may need to work beyond the systems that we have.

Again, a very enjoyable workshop! It’s always nice to be able to talk to people and get some really useful suggestions for improvement.

Offering a Way Forward: Saying “No” Constructively

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

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

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

Nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your reaction reflects your investment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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