ICER 2012: Day 0 (Workshops)

Posted: September 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Well, it’s Sunday so it must be New Zealand (or at least it was Sunday yesterday). I attended that rarest of workshops, one where every session was interesting and made me think – a very good sign for the conference to come.

We started with an on-line workshop on Bloom’s taxonomy, classifying exam questions, with Raymond Lister from UTS. One of the best things about this for me was the discussion about the questions where we disagreed: is this application or synthesis? It really made me think about how I write my examinations and how they could be read.

We then segued into a fascinating discussion of neo-Piagetian theory, where we see the development stages that we usually associate with children in adults as they learn new areas of knowledge. In (very rough) detail, we look at whether we have enough working memory to carry out a task and, if not, weird things happen.

Students can indulge in some weird behaviours when they don’t understand what’s going on. For example, permutation programming, where they just type semi-randomly until their program compiles or works. Other examples include shotgun debugging and voodoo programming and what these amount to are the student not having a good consistent model of what works and, as a result, they are basically dabbling in a semi-magic approach.

My notes from the session contain this following excerpt:

“Bizarro” novice programmer behaviours are actually normal stages of intellectual development.
Accept this and then work with this to find ways of moving students from pre-op, to concrete op, to formal operational. Don’t forget the evaluation. Must scaffold this process!

What this translates to is that the strange things we see are just indications that students having moved to what we would normally associate with an ‘adult’ (formal operational) understanding of the area. This shoots several holes in the old “You’re born a programmer” fallacy. Those students who are more able early may just have moved through the stages more quickly.

There was also an amount of derisive description of folk pedagogy, those theories that arise during pontification in the tea room, with no basis in educational theory or formed from a truly empirical study. Yet these folk pedagogies are very hard to shake and are one of the most frustrating things to deal with if you are in educational research. One “I don’t think so” can apparently ignore the 70 years since Dewey called the classrooms prisons.

The worst thought is that, if we’re not trying to help the students to transition, then maybe the transition to concrete operation is happening despite us instead of because of us, which is a sobering thought.

I thought that Ray Lister finished the session with really good thought regarding why students struggle sometimes:

The problem is not a student’s swimming skill, it’s the strength of the torrent.

As I’ve said before, making hard things easier to understand is part of the job of the educator. Anyone will fail, regardless of their ability, if we make it hard enough for them.

Conference Blogging! (Redux)

Posted: September 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I’m about to head off to another conference and I’ve taken a new approach to my blogging. Rather than my traditional “Pre-load the queue with posts” activity, which tends to feel a little stilted even when I blog other things around it, I’ll be blogging in direct response to the conference and not using my standard posting time.

I’m off to ICER, which is only my second educational research conference, and I’m very excited. It’s a small but highly regarded conference and I’m getting ready for a lot of very smart people to turn their considerably weighty gaze upon the work that I’m presenting. My paper concerns the early detection of at-risk students, based on our analysis of over 200,000 student submissions. In a nutshell, our investigations indicate that paying attention to a student’s initial behaviour gives you some idea of future performance, as you’d expect, but it is the negative (late) behaviour that is the most telling. While there are no astounding revelations in this work, if you’ve read across the area, putting it all together with a large data corpus allows us to approach some myths and gently deflate them.

Our metric is timeliness, or how reliably a student submitted their work on time. Given that late penalties apply (without exception, usually) across the assignments in our school, late submission amounts to an expensive and self-defeating behaviour. We tracked over 1,900 students across all years of the undergraduate program and looked at all of their electronic submissions (all programming code is submitted this way, as are most other assignments.) A lot of the results were not that unexpected – students display hyperbolic temporal discounting, for example – but some things were slightly less expected.

For example, while 39% of my students hand in everything on time, 30% of people who hand in their first assignment late then go on to have a blemish-free future record. However, students who hand up that first assignment late are approximately twice as likely to have problems – which moves this group into a weakly classified at-risk category. Now, I note that this is before any marking has taken place, which means that, if you’re tracking submissions, one very quick and easy way to detect people who might be having problems is to look at the first assignment submission time. This inspection takes about a second and can easily be automated, so it’s a very low burden scheme for picking up people with problems. A personalised response, with constructive feedback or a gentle question, in the zone where the student should have submitted (but didn’t), can be very effective here. You’ll note that I’m working with late submitters not non-submitters. Late submitters are trying to stay engaged but aren’t judging their time or allocating resources well. Non-submitters have decided that effort is no longer worth allocating to this. (One of the things I’m investigating is whether a reminder in the ‘late submission’ area can turn non-submitters into submitters, but this is a long way from any outcomes.)

I should note that the type of assignment work is important here. Computer programs, at least in the assignments that we set, are not just copied in from text. They are not remembering it or demonstrating understanding, they are using the information in new ways to construct solutions to problems. In Bloom’s revised taxonomic terms, this is the “Applying” phase and it requires that the student be sufficiently familiar with the work to be able to understand how to apply it.

Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

I’m not measuring my students’ timeliness in terms of their ability to show up to a lecture and sleep or to hand up an essay of three paragraphs that barely meets my requirements because it’s been Frankenwritten from a variety of sources. The programming task requires them to look at a problem, design a solution, implement it and then demonstrate that it works. Their code won’t even compile (turn into a form that a machine can execute) unless they understand enough about the programming language and the problem, so this is a very useful indication of how well the student is keeping up with the demands of the course. By focusing on an “Applying” task, we require the student to undertake a task that is going to take time and the way in which they assess this resource and decide on its management tells us a lot about their metacognitive skills, how they are situated in the course and, ultimately, how at-risk they actually are.

Looking at assignment submission patterns is a crude measure, unashamedly, but it’s a cheap measure, as well, with a reasonable degree of accuracy. I can determine, with 100% accuracy, if a student is at-risk by waiting until the end of the course to see if they fail. I have accuracy but no utility, or agency, in this model. I can assume everyone is at risk at the start and then have the inevitable problem of people not identifying themselves as being in this area until it’s too late. By identifying a behaviour that can lead to problems, I can use this as part of my feedback to illustrate a concrete issue that the student needs to address. I now have the statistical evidence to back up why I should invest effort into this approach.

Yes, you get a lot of excuses as to why something happened, but I have derived a great deal of value from asking students questions like “Why did you submit this late?” and then, when they give me their excuse, asking them “How are you going to avoid it next time?” I am no longer surprised at the slightly puzzled look on the student’s face as they realise that this is a valid and necessary question – I’m not interested in punishing them, I want them to not make the same mistake again. How can we do that?

I’ll leave the rest of this discussion for after my talk on Monday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spotting a pattern yet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Precipice of “Everything’s Late”

Posted: September 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

I spent most of today working on the paper that I alluded to earlier where, after over a year of trying to work on it, I hadn’t made any progress. Having finally managed to dig myself out of the pit I was in, I had the mental and timeline capacity to sit down for the 6 hours it required and go through it all.

Climbers, eh?

In thinking about procrastination, you have to take into account something important: the fact that most of us work in a hyperbolic model where we expend no effort until the deadline is right upon us and then we put everything in, this is temporal discounting. Essentially we place less importance on things in the future than the things that are important to us now. For complex, multi-stage tasks over some time this is an exceedingly bad strategy, especially if we focus on the deadline of delivery, rather than the starting point. If we underestimate the time it requires and we construct our ‘panic now’ strategy based on our proximity to the deadline, then we are at serious risk of missing the starting point because, when it arrives, it just won’t be that important.

Now, let’s increase the difficulty of the whole thing and remember that the more things we have to think about in the present, the greater the risk that we’re going to exceed our capacity for cognitive load and hit the ‘helmet fire’ point – we will be unable to do anything because we’ve run out of the ability to choose what to do effectively. Of course, because we suffer from a hyperbolic discounting problem, we might do things now that are easy to do (because we can see both the beginning and end points inside our window of visibility) and this runs the risk that the things we leave to do later are far more complicated.

This is one of the nastiest implications of poor time management: you might actually not be procrastinating in terms of doing nothing, you might be working constantly but doing the wrong things. Combine this with the pressures of life, the influence of mood and mental state, and we have a pit that can open very wide – and you disappear into it wondering what happened because you thought you were doing so much!

This is a terrible problem for students because, let’s be honest, in your teens there are a lot of important things that are not quite assignments or studying for exams. (Hey, it’s true later too, we just have to pretend to be grownups.) Some of my students are absolutely flat out with activities, a lot of which are actually quite useful, but because they haven’t worked out which ones have to be done now they do the ones that can be done now – the pit opens and looms.

One of the big advantages of reviewing large tasks to break them into components is that you start to see how many ‘time units’ have to be carried out in order to reach your goal. Putting it into any kind of tracking system (even if it’s as simple as an Excel spreadsheet), allows you to see it compared to other things: it reduces the effect of temporal discounting.

When I first put in everything that I had to do as appointments in my calendar, I assumed that I had made a mistake because I had run out of time in the week and was, in some cases, triple booked, even after I spilled over to weekends. This wasn’t a mistake in assembling the calendar, this was an indication that I’d overcommitted and, over the past few months, I’ve been streamlining down so that my worst week still has a few hours free. (Yeah, yeah, not perfect, but there you go.) However, there was this little problem that anything that had been pushed into the late queue got later and later – the whole ‘deal with it soon’ became ‘deal with it now’ or ‘I should have dealt with that by now’.

Like students, my overcommitment wasn’t an obvious “Yes, I want to work too hard” commitment, it snuck in as bits and pieces. A commitment here, a commitment there, a ‘yes’, a ‘sure, I can do that’, and because you sometimes have to make decisions on the fly, you suddenly look around and think “What happened”? The last thing I want to do here is lecture, I want to understand how I can take my experience, learn from it, and pass something useful on. The basic message is that we all work very hard and sometimes don’t make the best decisions. For me, the challenge is now, knowing this, how can I construct something that tries and defeats this self-destructive behaviour in my students?

This week marks the time where I hope to have cleared everything on the ‘now/by now’ queue and finally be ahead. My friends know that I’ve said that a lot this year but it’s hard to read and think in the area of time management without learning something. (Some people might argue but I don’t write here to tell you that I have everything sorted, I write here to think and hopefully pass something on through the processes I’m going through.)

Time Banking: More and more reading.

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

I’ve spent most of the last week putting together the ideas of time banking, reviewing my reading list and then digging for more papers to read and integrate. It’s always a bit of a worry when you go to see if what you’ve been thinking about for 12 months has just been published by someone else but, fortunately, most people are still using traditional deadlines so I’m safe. I read a lot of papers but none more than when I’m planning or writing a paper: I need to know what else has happened if I’m to frame my work correctly and not accidentally re-invent the wheel. Especially if it’s a triangular wheel that never worked.

My focus is Time Banking so that’s what I’ve been searching for – concepts, names, similarities, to make sure that what I’m doing will make an additional contribution. This isn’t to say that Time Banking hasn’t been used before as a term or even a concept. I’ve been aware of several universities who allow a fixed number of extra days that students can draw on (Stanford being the obvious example) and the concept of banking your time is certainly not new – there’s even a Dilbert cartoon for it! There are papers on time banking, at low granularity and with little student control – it’s more of a convenient deadline extender rather than a mechanism for developing metacognition in order to promote self-regulating learning strategies in the student. Which is good because that’s the approach I’m taking.

The reasoning and methodology that I’m using does appear to be relatively novel and it encompasses a whole range of issues: pedagogy, self-regulation, ethics and evidence-based analysis of how deadlines are currently working for us. It’s a lot to fit into one paper but I have hope that I can at least cover the philosophical background of why what I’m doing is a good idea, not just because I want to convince my peers but because I want volunteers for when pilot schemes start to occur.

It’s not enough that something is a good idea, or that it reads well, it has to work. It has to be able to de deployed, we have to be able to measure it, collect evidence and say “Yes, this is what we wanted.” Then we publish lots more papers and win major awards – Profit! (Actually, if it’s a really good idea then we want everyone to do it. Widespread adoption that enhances education is the real profit.)

Like this but with less underpants collecting and more revolutionising education.

More seriously, I love writing papers because I really have to think deeply about what I’m saying. How does it fit with existing research? Has this been tried before? If so, did it work? Did it fail? What am I doing that is different? What am I really trying to achieve?

How can I convince another educator that this is actually a good idea?

The first draft of the paper is written and now my co-authors are scouring it, playing Devil’s advocate, and seeing how many useful and repairable holes they can tear in it in order to make it worthy of publication. Then it will go off at some point and a number of nice people will push it out to sea and shoot at it with large weapons to see if it sinks or swims. Then I get feedback (and hopefully a publication) and everyone learns something.

I’m really looking forward to seeing the first actual submission draft – I want to see what the polished ideas look like!

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

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

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

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

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

“About 10%.”

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

“4 courses worth.”

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

…

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

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

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

Some close things are worth worrying about, however.

A Good Friday: Student Brainstorming Didn’t Kill Me!

Posted: August 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

We had 19 of last year’s Year 10 Tech School participants back for a brainstorming session yesterday, around the theme “What do you like about ICT/What would you say to other people about ICT.” I started them off with some warm-up exercises, as I only had three hours in total. We started with “One word to describe Tech School 2011”, “two words to describe anything you learnt or used from it”, and “three words to discuss what you think about ICT”. The last one got relaxed quickly as people started to ask whether they could extend it. We split them into tables and groups got pads of post-it notes. Get an idea, write it down, slam it on the table *thump*.

Nobody sketched Babbage and slammed it on the table. (I’m not all that surprised.)

After they had ideas all over the table, I asked them to start assembling them into themes – how would they make sentences or ideas out of this. The most excellent Justine, who did all of the hard work in setting this up (thank you!), had pre-printed some pages of images so the students could cut these out and paste them into places to convey the idea. We had four groups so we ended up with four initial posters.

Floating around, and helping me to facilitate, were Matt and Sami, both from my GC class and they helped to keep the groups moving, talking to students, drawing out questions and also answering the occasional question about the Bachelor of Computer Science (Advanced) and Grand Challenges.

We took a break for two puzzles (Eight Queens and combining the digits from 1 to 9 to equal 100 with simple arithmetic symbols) and then I split the groups up to get them to look at each other’s ideas and maybe get some new ideas to put onto another poster.

Yeah, that didn’t go quite as well. We did get some new ideas but it became obvious that we either needed to have taken a longer break, or we needed some more scaffolding to take the students forward along another path. Backtracking is a skill that takes a while to learn and, even with the graphic designer walking around trying to get some ideas going, we were tapping out a bit by the time that the finish arrived.

However, full marks to the vast majority of the participants who gave me everything that they could think of – with a good spread across schools and regions, as well as a female:male ratio of about 50%, we got a lot of great thoughts that will help us to talk to other students and let them know why they might want to go into ICT… or just come to Uni!

I didn’t let the teachers off the hook either and they gave us lots of great stuff to put into our outreach program. As a hint, I’ve never met yet a teacher at one of these events who said “Oh no, we see enough Uni people and students in the schools”, the message is almost always “Please send more students to talk to our students! Send more info!” The teachers are as, if not more, dedicated to getting students into Uni so that’s a great reminder that we’re all trying to do the same thing.

So, summary time, what worked:

  1. Putting the students into groups, armed with lots of creative materials, and asking them what they honestly thought. We got some great ideas from that.
  2. Warming them up and then getting them into story mode with associated pictures. We have four basic poster themes that we can work on.
  3. Giving everyone a small gift voucher for showing up after the fact, with no judging quality of ideas. That just appeals to my nature – I have no real idea what effect that had but I didn’t have to tell anyone that they were wrong (or less than right) because that wasn’t the aim of today.
  4. Getting teachers into a space where they could share what they needed from us as well.

What needs review or improvement:

  1. I need to look at how idea refinement and recombination might work in a tight time frame like this. I think, next time, I’ll get people to decompose the ideas to a mind map hexagon or something like that – maybe even sketch up the message graphically? Still thinking.
  2. I need more helpers. I had three and I think that a couple more would be good, as close to student age as possible.
  3. The puzzles in the middle should have naturally led to new group formation.
  4. Setting it an hour later so that everyone can get there regardless of traffic.

So, thanks again to Justine and Joh for making this work and believing in it enough to give it a try – I believe it really worked and, to be honest, far better than I thought it would but I can see how to improve it. Thanks to Matt and Sami for their help and I really hope that seeing that I actually believe all that stuff I spout in lectures wasn’t too weird!

But. of course, my thanks to the students and teachers who came along and took part in something just because we asked if they’d like to come back. Yeah, I know the motives varied but a lot of great ideas came out and I think it’ll be very helpful for everyone.

Onwards to the posters!

The Road Lines and the Fences

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

Teaching is a highly rewarding activity and there are many highs to be had along the way: the students who ‘get it’, the students that you help back from the edge of failure, the ones who you extend opportunities to who take them, and the (small) group who come back some years later and thank you. They’re all great. One of the best ways to spot those students are at risk or already in trouble is, of course, to put in some structure and assessment to give you reports on when people are having trouble. A good structure will include things like a set of mechanisms that allow the student to determine where they are, and mechanisms that alert you if the student is in terrible trouble. Of course, the first set can also be viewed by you, as you are probably instrumental in the feedback, but we’re not really talking summative and formative, we’re talking guidance and then disaster prevention.

This is “Don’t Park Here”, “Don’t Cross Here” or “We Are Very Close to a Naval or Cavalry Officer”.

It’s like driving on the roads. They paint lines on the roads that tell you where to go and sometimes you even get the things that go “BARRUMP BARRUMP BARRUMP” which is secret code for “You are driving in a country that drives on the other side from you, back into your lane.” However, these are for the driver to use to determine which position they should hold on the road. In this case, it’s not just a personal guidance, it’s a vital social compact that allows us to drive and not have it look like The Road Warrior.

Mel Gibson looks upset – has he seen his press in the early 21st Century?

But the key point for these lines is that they do not actually have any ability to physically restrain your car. Yes, we can observe people swerving over the road, whether police or cameras are viewing, but that little white or yellow line doesn’t do anything except give you a reference point.

When we are serious about the danger, we put up large pieces of steel and concrete – we build fences. The fences stop people from heading over into the precipice, they stop people from crossing into oncoming traffic and they even can deflect noise away from houses to help other people. Again, we have an individual and a social aspect to these barriers but these are no ‘ignore it’ mechanism – this is physics!

The analogy is excellent for the barriers and measures that we can use in teaching. An aware student, one who needs the occasional reminder, will see themselves moving over the white lines (perhaps not doing the work to a previous standard) and maybe even hear the lane markers (get a low mark on a mid-term) but they can usually be relied upon to pull themselves back. But those students who are ‘asleep at the wheel’ will neither see the lines nor hear the warnings and that’s where we have a problem.

In terms of contribution and assessment, a student who is not showing up to class can’t get reports on what they’re failing, because they’ve submitted nothing to be marked. This is one of the reasons I try to chase students who don’t submit work, because otherwise they’ll get no feedback. If I’m using a collaborative mode to structure knowledge, students won’t realise what they’re missing out on if they just download the lecture notes – and they may not know because all of the white line warnings are contained in the activity that they’re not showing up for.

This places a great deal of importance on finding out why students aren’t even awake at the wheel, rather than just recording that they’ve skipped one set of lines, another, wow, they’re heading towards the embankment and I hope that the crash barrier holds.

Both on the road and in our classes, those crash barriers are methods of last resort. We have an ‘Unsatisfactory Academic Progress’ system that moves students to different level of reporting if they start systematically under performing – the only problem is that, to reach the UAP, you already have to be failing and, from any GPA calculation, even one fail can drag your record down for years. Enough fails to make UAP could mean that you will never, ever be perceived as a high performing student again, even if you completely turn your life around. So this crash barrier, which does work and has saved many students from disappearing off with fails, is something that we should not rely upon. Yes, people live through crash barrier collisions but a lot don’t and a lot get seriously injured.

Where are warning lines in our courses? We try to put one in within a week of starting, with full feedback and reporting in detail on one assessment well within the first 6 weeks of teaching. Personally, I try to put enough marking on the road that students can work out if they think that they are ready to be in that course (or to identify if they can get enough help to stay in), before they’ve been charged any money and it’s too late to withdraw.

I know a lot of people will read this and think “Hey, some people fail” and, yes, that’s perfectly true. Some people have so much energy built up that nothing will stop them and they’ll sail across the road and flip over the barrier. But, you know what? They had to start accelerating down that path somewhere. Someone had to give them the idea that what they were doing was ok – or they found themselves in an environment where that kind of bad reasoning made sense.

Someone may have seen them swerving all over the road, 10 miles back, and not known how to or had the ability to intervene. On the roads, being the domain of physics, I get that. How do you stop a swerving drunk without endangering yourself unless you have a squad of cars, trained officers, crash mats and a whole heap of water? That’s hard.

But the lines, markers and barriers in our courses aren’t dependent on physics, they are dependent upon effort, caring, attentiveness, good design and sound pedagogy. As always, I’m never saying that everyone should pass just for showing up but I am wondering aloud, mostly to myself, how I can construct something that keeps the crashes to a minimum and the self-corrections minor and effective.

Talk to the duck!

Posted: August 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve had a funny day. Some confirmed acceptances for journals and an e-mail from a colleague regarding a collaboration that has stalled. When I set out to readjust my schedule to meet a sustainable pattern, I had a careful look at everything I needed to do but I overlooked one important thing: it’s easier to give the illusion of progress than it is to do certain things. For example, I can send you a ‘working on it’ e-mail every week or so and that takes me about a minute. Actually doing something could take 4-8 hours and that’s a very large amount of time!

So, today was a hard lesson because I’ve managed to keep almost all of the balls in the air, juggling furiously, as I trim down my load but this one hurts. Right now, someone probably thinks that I don’t care about their project – which isn’t true but it fell into the tough category of important things that needs a lot of work to get to the next stage. I’ve sent an apologetic and embarrassed e-mail to try and get this going again – with a high prioritisation of the actual work – but it’s probably too late.

The project in question went to a strange place – I was so concerned about letting the colleague down that I froze up every time I tried to do the work. Weird but true and, ultimately, harmful. But, ultimately, I didn’t do what I said I’d do and I’m not happy.

So how can I turn this difficult and unpleasant situation into something that I can learn from? Something that my students can benefit from?

Well, I can remember that my students, even though they come in at the start of the semester, often come in with overheads and burdens. Even if it’s not explicit course load, it’s things like their jobs, their family commitments, their financial burdens and their relationships. Sometimes it’s our fault because we don’t correctly and clearly specify prerequisites, assumed knowledge and other expectations – which imposes a learning burden on the student to go off and develop their own knowledge on their own time.

Whatever it is, this adds a new dimension to any discussion of time management from a student perspective: the clear identification of everything that has to be dealt with as well as their coursework. I’ve often noticed that, when you get students talking about things, that halfway through the conversation it’s quite likely that their eyes will light up as they realise their own problem while explaining things to other people.

There’s a practice in software engineering that is often referred to as “rubber ducking”. You put a rubber duck on a shelf and, when people are stuck on a problem, they go and talk to the duck and explain their problem. It’s amazing how often that this works – but it has to be encouraged and supported to work. There must be no shame in talking to the duck! (Bet you never thought that I’d say that!)

TELL ME YOUR SECRETS!

I’m still unhappy about the developments of today but, for the purposes of self-regulation and the development of mature time management, I’ve now identified a new phase of goal setting that makes sense in relation to students. The first step is to work out what you have to do before you do anything else, and this will help you to work out when you need to move your timelines backwards and forwards to accommodate your life.

This may actually be one of the best reasons for trying to manage your time better – because talking about what you have to do before you do any other assignments might just make you realise that you are going to struggle without some serious focus on your time.

Or, of course, it may not. But we can try. We can try with personal discussions, group discussions, collaborative goal setting – students sitting around saying “Oh yeah, I have that problem too! It’s going to take me two weeks to deal with that.” Maybe no-one will say anything.

We can but try! (And, if all else fails, I can give everyone a duck to talk to. 🙂 )

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