Silk Purses and Pig’s Ears

Posted: August 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

There’s an old saying “You can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s (or sow’s) ear”. It’s the old chestnut that you can’t make something good out of something bad and, when you’re talking about bad grapes or rotten wood, then it has some validity (but even then, not much, as I’ll note later). When it’s applied to people, for any of a large range of reasons, it tends to become an excuse to give up on people or a reason why a lack of success on somebody’s part cannot be traced back to you.

I’m doing a lot of reading in the medical and general ethics as part of my preparation for one of the Grand Challenge lectures. The usual names and experiments show up, of course, when you start looking at questionable or non-existent ethics: Milgram, the Nazis, Stanford Prison Experiment, Unit 731, Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, Little Albert and David Reimer. What starts to come through from this study is that, in many of these cases, the people being experimented upon have reached a point in the experimenter’s eyes where they are not people, but merely ‘subjects’ – and all too often in the feudal sense as serfs, without rights or ability to challenge what is happening.

But even where the intention is, ostensibly, therapeutic, there is always the question of who is at fault when a therapeutic procedure fails to succeed. In the case of surgical malpractice or negligence, the cause is clear – the surgeon or a member of her or his team at some point made a poor decision or acted incorrectly and thus the fault lies with them. I have been reading up on early psychiatric techniques, as these are full of stories of questionable approaches that have been later discredited, and it is interesting in how easy it is for some practitioners to wash their hands of their subject because they had a lack of “good previous personality” – you can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear. In many cases, with this damning judgement, people with psychiatric problems would often be shunted off to the wards of mental hospitals.

I refer, in this case, to William Sargant (1907-1988), a British psychiatrist who had an ‘evangelical zeal’ for psychosurgery, deep sleep treatment, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and insulin shock therapy. Sargant used narcosis extensively, drug induced deep sleep, as he could then carry out a range of procedures on the semi- and unconscious patients that they would have possibly learned to dread if they have received them while conscious. Sargant believed that anyone with psychological problems should be treated early and intensively with all available methods and, where possible, all these methods should be combined and applied as necessary. I am not a psychiatrist and I leave it to the psychiatric and psychotherapy community to assess the efficacy and suitability of Sargant’s methods (they disavow them, for the most part, for what it’s worth) but I mention him here because he did not regard failures as being his fault. It is his words that I am quoting in the previous paragraph. People for whom his radical, often discredited, zealous and occasionally lethal experimentation did not work were their own problem because they lacked a “good previous personality”. You cannot, as he was often quoted to have said, make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.

How often I have heard similar ideas being expressed within the halls of academia and the corridors of schools. How easy a thing it is to say. Well, one might say, we’ve done all that we can with this particular pupil, but… They’re just not very bright. They daydream in class rather than filling out their worksheets. They sleep at their desks. They never do the reading. They show up too late. They won’t hang around after class. They ask too many questions. They don’t ask enough questions. They won’t use a pencil. They only use a pencil. They talk back. They don’t talk. They think they’re so special. Their kind never amounts to anything. They’re just like their parents. They’re just like the rest of them.

“We’ve done all we can but you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

As always, we can look at each and every one of those problems and ask “Why?” and, maybe, we’ll get an answer that we can do something about. I realise that resources and time are both scarce commodities but, even if we can’t offer these students the pastoral care that they need (and most of those issues listed above are more likely to be social/behavioural than academic anyway), let us stop pretending that we can walk away, blameless, as Sargant did because these students are fundamentally unsalvageable.

Yeah, sorry, I know that I go on about this but it’s really important to keep on hammering away at this point, every time that I see how my own students could be exposed to it. They need to know that the man that they’re working with expects them to do things but that he understands how much of his job is turning complex things into knowledge forms that they can work with – even if all he does is start the process and then he hands it to them to finish.

Do you want to know how to make great wine? Start with really, really good grapes and then don’t mess it up. Want to know how to make good wine? Well, as someone who used to be a reasonable wine maker, you can give me just about anything – good fruit, ok fruit, bad fruit, mouldy fruit – and I could turn it into wine that you would happily drink. I hasten to point out that I worked for good wineries and the vast quantity of what I did was making good wine from good grapes, but there were always the moments where you had something that, from someone else’s lack of care or inattention, had got into a difficult spot. Understanding the chemical processes, the nature of wine and working out how we could recover  the wine? That is a challenge. It’s time consuming, it takes effort, it takes a great deal of scholarly knowledge and you have to try things to see if they work.

In the case of wine, while I could produce perfectly reasonable wine from bad grapes, simple chemistry prevents me from leaving in enough of the components that could make a wine great. That is because wine recovery is all about taking bad things out. I see our challenge in education as very different. When we find someone who is need of our help, it is what we can put in that changes them. Because we are adding, mentoring, assisting and developing, we are not under the same restrictions as we are with wine – starting from anywhere, I should be able to help someone to become a great someone.

The pig’s ears are safe because I think that we can make silk purses out of just about anything that we set our minds to.

(ultimately) Racism: Vivian Chum Writes About Her Seventh Grade Experience

Posted: August 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

I’m reading a book called “The Moment”, which claims to contain “Wild, Poignant, Life-Changing Stories” and, you’ll be relieved to hear, this book is delivering what it promises on the cover. It’s put out by Smith Magazine and is 125 of the pivotal life moments of “famous & obscure” writers and artists. Each story is short, pithy and (so far) worth reading.

Fair warning, this is a post about one person’s account of an event that may never have happened – but here is my reaction to it. One of my definitions of a writer is that they can react to an event that may never have happened and show you something interesting, perhaps even useful.

Today, I am writing in reaction to Vivian Chum’s ‘moment’ about the time that she, and all other non-white students in her Texas public school, were called to a meeting with the public address announcement “All seventh-grade minority students, report to the cafeteria.” There is no date on this story but, given that (according to the bio I’ve found) Chum graduated from Rice in 2002, we can work backwards and put this in the late 80s to early 90s – not the 50s or 60s. So we’ll start from the fact that a segregated announcement drew all of the non-whites to the cafeteria – African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American.

The point of the assembly was to instruct the students in the importance of reducing their underperformance on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills set, compared to white students. It is, of course, bar graphs on a screen time because nothing shows students how to achieve more than a dry PowerPoint presentation of underperformance and an exhortation to work harder, study more, be more focused. After all, school funding is tied to performance in this test – here is a battery of graphs showing African-American and Hispanic student performance. For some reason, Asian-Americans aren’t on these particular underperformance graphs.

Chum, looking around the room, notices that some of the best performers in the seventh-grade are sitting here – but because they are non-white, they are here regardless of their actual achievement. She’s thinking about the lessons they’ve learned about racism, and the KKK and the Nazis, about the slave trade and she’s uncomfortable being here and, increasingly, angry, but she’s 11 or 12 and she’s not sure why she’s feeling this way.

No-one is in chains.

No one has thrown a rope over a tree branch.

No-one is even explicitly calling anyone a bad word.

And, yet, she knows that this is wrong. This is unfair. She wants to tear up every award or recognition that she’s ever been given because, of course, today the truth is finally out. She’s not the same. She’s a statistic in terms of test compliance and her race is more important than her individuality.

The (positive) lesson that Chum takes away from this is that this is the last time that she will ever take anything like this without speaking up, without walking out or not even going to things like this.

But, if her account is to be believed, then this is a tale of ignorance, racism, wrongheadedness and unthinking compliance with imposed test standards that is shocking enough, but frankly appalling when we place it into the last 20 years.

When I was at HERDSA, a speaker talked about providing support for those students who were struggling, or were having trouble adapting because of family background, and stressed the importance of making time to talk to every student. Instead of forcing the under-achievers to make more time in their schedule to fit in pastoral care and to drag themselves out of classes to go to ‘under achiever’ events, every student had a scheduled time to talk about things. Yes, this is a large investment of time but this addresses all of the arguments about ‘ignoring the big achievers’ or ‘focusing on the outliers’ and allow a much greater sense of community and ‘wholeness’ across the class.

When I was at school, we had an active remedial mathematics and english program run, very discreetly, across all of the years of secondary school. At the same we had a very active extension and stretch program, too. To be honest, to this day, I would not know how many (or who) of my classmates were in either. It was an accepted fact that across all of the boys (yes, single sex) in the school, there would be a range and it was up to the school, which was full fee-paying (thanks, Mum), to provide support to lift up those who were struggling and to provide interest and extension for those who could go further.

This, of course, has had a major impact upon me and this is what I expect of education: for everyone, regardless of their background and abilities, and according to their needs. Reading Chum’s account of how stupid we can be on occasion, it only drives home how lucky I was to be at such a school and the overall responsibility of educators to look at some of the things that we are asked to do and, where appropriate, say “No” so that we don’t force 12 year olds to have to stand up to protect their own rights as individuals, rather than indistinguishable pawns of a race.

Grand Challenges Course: Great (early) progress on the project work.

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

While I’ve been talking about the project work in my new “Grand Challenge”-based course a lot, I’ve also identified a degree of, for want of a better word, fearfulness on the part of the students. Given that their first project is a large poster with a visualisation of some interesting data, which they have to locate and analyse, and that these are mostly Computer Science students with no visualisation experience, they are understandably slightly concerned. We’ve been having great discussions and lots of contributions but next week is their first pitch and, suddenly, they need a project theme.

I’ve provided a fair bit of guidance for the project pitch, and I reproduce it here in case you’re interested:

Project 1: First Deliverable, the Pitch

Due 2pm, Wednesday, the 8th of August Because group feedback is such an important part of this project, you must have your pitch ready to present for this session and have the best pitch ready that you can. Allocate at least 10 hours to give you enough time to do a good job.

What is the pitch?

A pitch is generally an introduction of a product or service to an audience who knows nothing about it but is often used to expand knowledge and provide a detailed description of something that the audience is already partially familiar with. The key idea is that you wish to engage your audience and convince them that what you are proposing is worth pursuing. In film-making, it’s used to convey an idea to people who need to agree to support it from a financial or authority perspective.

One of the most successful pitches in Hollywood history is (reputedly) the four word pitch used to convince a studio to fund the movie “Twins”. The pitch was “Schwarzenegger. De Vito. Twins.”

You are not trying to sell anything but you are trying to familiarise a group of people with your project idea and communicate enough information that the group can give you useful feedback to improve your project. You need to think carefully about how you will do this and I strongly suggest that you rehearse before presenting. Trust me when I say that very few people are any good at presentation without rehearsal and I will generally be able to tell the amount of effort that you’ve expended. An indifferent presentation says that you don’t care – and then you have to ask why anyone else would be that motivated to help you.

If you like the way I lecture, then you should know that I still rehearse and practice regularly, despite having been teaching for over 20 years.

How will it work?

You will have 10 minutes to present your project outline. During this time you will:

  • Identify, in one short and concise sentence, what your poster is about.
  • Clearly state the purpose.
  • Identify your data source.
  • Answer all of the key questions raised in the tutorial.
  • Identify your starting strategy, based on the tools given in the tutorial, with a rough outline of a timeline.
  • Outline your analysis methodology.
  • Summarise the benefits of this selection of data and presentation – why is it important/useful?
  • Show a rough prototype layout on an A3 format.

We will then take up to 10 minutes to provide you with constructive feedback regarding any of these aspects. Participants will be assessed both on the pitch that they present and the quality of their feedback and critique. Critique guides will be available for this session.

How do I present it?

This is up to you but I would suggest that you summarise the first seven points as a handout, and provide a copy of your A3 sketch, for reference during critique. You may also use presentations (PowerPoint, Keynote or PDF) if you wish, or the whiteboard. As a guideline, I would suggest no more than four slides, not including title, or your poster sketch. You may use paper and just sketch on that – the idea and your ability to communicate it are paramount at this stage, not the artfulness of the rough sketch.

Important Notes

Some people haven’t been getting all of their work ready on time and, up until now, this has had no impact on your marks or your ability to continue working with the group. If you don’t have your project ready, then I cannot give you any marks for your project and you miss out on the opportunity for group critique and response – this will significantly reduce your maximum possible mark for this project.

I am interested in you presenting something that you find interesting or that you feel will benefit from working with – or that you think is important. The entire point of this course is to give you the chance to do something that is genuinely interesting and to challenge yourself. Please think carefully about your data and your approach and make sure that you give yourself the opportunity to make something that you’d be happy to show other people, as a reflection of yourself, your work and what you are capable of.

END OF THE PITCH DESCRIPTION

We then had a session where we discussed ideas, looked at sources and started to think about how we could get some ideas to build a pitch on. I used small group formation and a bit of role switching and, completely unsurprisingly to the rest of you social constructivists, not only did we gain benefit from the group work but it started to head towards a self-sustaining activity. We went from “I’m not really sure what to do” to something very close to “flow” for the majority of the class. To me it was obvious that the major benefit was that the ice had been broken and, through careful identification of what to happen with the ideas and a deliberate use of Snow’s Cholera diagram as an example of how powerful a good (but fundamentally) simple visualisation could be, the group was much better primed to work on the activity.

The acid test will be next week but, right now, I’m a lot more confident that I will get a good set of first pitches. Given how much I was holding my breath, without realising it, that’s quite a good thing!

No Bricks Without Clay

Posted: August 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

“Data! Data! Data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without clay.” (Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

“And while we’re on the subject, Watson, you also can’t make those terrible ashtrays beloved of amateur potters, so it’s not all bad.”

I’ve used this quote before but, in this case, I’m talking about students. I cannot produce graduates without first year students, and I have no first year students unless interested students come in from the schools.I’ve just returned from a school visit to years 10-12 and, regrettably, I don’t have many bricks. Last night I attended a careers night that was a joint event between two fee-paying secondary schools, one all-girls, one co-educational. There were three presentation slots allocated across the night and, because of space limitations, the more interest you had, the more slots you got.

Medicine had all three slots filled, law had all three and teaching had all three – all with standing room only. Journalism had all three slots filled. Media studies had two, sports studies had two.  Information technology had one – right at the end of the night – and I only had eight people scheduled to attend. Of these, seven were male and one was female. And that is the total number of bricks that I have from two prominent, highly academic and well-resourced schools in my primary catchment. What puzzles me the most is that one of these schools has one of the richest IT environments in the state and these students are surrounded, every day, by the fruits of the labours of my students. But, as I’ve discussed before, Computing/IT/CS/ICT/IS has a loosely defined identity and doesn’t have the best image to start with.

I’m disappointed by the level of interest but I’m not surprised. The attendees were almost all from Year 10 – the peak of interest in our school body, with one Year 12 signed up to attend but, I believe, who didn’t show up. Regrettably, it because obvious that my placement at the end of the night put me into the burnout zone for several of the students. One attended, put their head down on the table before I’d started speaking and only raised it to leave at the end of the talk. Even the parents looked a little glazed over at the start and it took a lot of showmanship to bring people back into the activity. However, I think that we had a good showing for those people who were there. As always, the problem is that vast number of people who weren’t there.

Tomorrow, I disrupt my schedule completely to fly to Sydney to discuss a systematic, sponsored outreach activity into schools to try and fix this. What I would like to see, in 2-3 years time, is full sessions and standing room only for Computing and ICT sessions, with a strong showing from both genders and under-represented groups. It was useful to be on the ground to see the problem face-to-face but I’d be lying if I said that today wasn’t starting on a demoralised note.

Tomorrow, we try again to fix the problem.

Wading In: No Time For Paddling

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

I’m up to my neck in books on visualisation and data analysis at the moment. So up to my neck that this post is going to be pretty short – and you know how much I love to talk! I’ve spent most of the evening preparing for tomorrow’s visualising data tutorial for Grand Challenges and one of the things I was looking for was bad visualisations. I took a lot away from Mark’s worked examples posts, and I look forward to seeing the presentation, but visualisation is a particularly rich area for worked ‘bad’ examples. With code, it has to work to a degree or manifest its failure in interesting ways. A graphic can be completely finished and still fail to convey the right information.

(I’ve even thrown in some graphics that I did myself and wasn’t happy with – I’m looking forward to the feedback on those!) (Ssh, don’t tell the students.)

I had the good fortune to be given a copy of Visual Strategies (Frankel and DePace) which was designed by one of the modern heroes of design – the amazing Stefan Sagmeister. This is, without too much hyperbole, pretty much the same as being given a book on painting where Schiele had provided the layout and examples. (I’m a very big fan of Egon Schiele and Hundertwasser for that matter. I may have spent a little too much time in Austria.) The thing I like about this book is that it brings a lot of important talking and thinking points together: which questions should you ask when thinking about your graphic, how do you start, what do you do next, when do you refine, when do you stop?

Thank you, again, Metropolis Bookstore on Swanston Street in Melbourne! You had no real reason to give a stranger a book for free, except that you thought it would be useful for my students. It was, it is, and I thank you again for your generosity.

I really enjoy getting into a new area and I think that the students are enjoying it too, as the entire course is a new area for them. We had an excellent discussion of the four chapters of reading (the NSF CyberInfrastructure report on Grand Challenges), where some of it was a critique of the report itself – don’t write a report saying “community engagement and visualisation are crucial” and (a) make it hard to read, even for people inside the community or (b) make it visually difficult to read.

On the slightly less enthusiastic front, we get to the crux of the course this week – the project selection – and I’m already seeing some hesitancy. Remember that these are all very good students but some of them are not comfortable picking an area to do their analysis in. There could be any number of reasons so, one on one, I’m going to ask them why. If any of them say “Well, I could if I wanted to but…” then I will expect them to go and do it. There’s a lot of scope for feedback in the course so an early decision that doesn’t quite work out is not a death sentence, although I think that waiting for permission to leap is going to reduce the amount of ownership and enjoyment that the student feels when the work is done.

I have no time for paddling in the shallows, personally, and I wade on in. I realise, however, that this is a very challenging stance for many people, especially students, so while I would prefer people to jump in, I recognise my job as life guard in this area and I am happy to help people out.

However, these students are the Distinction/High Distinction crowd, the ones who got 95-100 on leaving secondary school and, as we thought might occur, some of them are at least slightly conditioned to seek my approval, a blessing for their project choice before they have expended any effort. Time to talk to people and work with them to help them move on to a more confident and committed stance – where that confidence is well-placed and the commitment is based on solid fact and thoughtful reasoning!

 

The 1-Year Degree – what’s your reaction?

Posted: July 30, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I’m going to pose a question and I’d be interested in your reaction.

“Is there a structure and delivery mechanism that could produce a competent professional graduate from a degree course such as engineering or computer science, which takes place over a maximum of 12 months including all assessment, without sacrificing quality or content?”

What was your reaction? More importantly, what is the reasoning behind your reaction?

For what it’s worth my answer is “Not with our current structures but, apart from that, maybe.” which is why one of my side projects is an attempt to place an entire degree’s worth of work into a 12-month span as a practice exercise for discussing the second and third year curriculum review that we’re holding later on this year.

Our ‘standard’ estimate for any normal degree program is that a student is expected to have a per-semester load of four courses (at 3 units a course, long story) and each of these courses will require 156 hours from start to finish. (This is based on 10 hours per week, including contact and non-contact, and roughly 36 hours for revision towards examination or the completion of other projects.) Based on this estimate, and setting up an upper barrier of 40 hours/week, for all of the good research-based reasons that I’ve discussed previously, there is no way that I can just pick up the existing courses and drop them into a year. A three-year program has six semesters, with four courses per semester, which gives an hour burden of 24*156 = 3,744. At 40 hours per week, we’d need 93.6 weeks (let’s call that 94), or 1.8 years.

But, hang on, we already have courses that are 6-unit and span two semesters – in fact, we have enormous projects for degree programs like Honours that are worth the equivalent of four courses. Interestingly, rather than having an exam every semester, these have a set of summative and formative assignments embedded to allow the provision of feedback and the demonstration of knowledge and skill acquisition – does this remove the need to have 36 hours for exam study for each semester if we build the assignments correctly?

Let’s assume that it does. Now we have a terminal set of examinations at the end of each year, instead of every semester. Now I have 12 courses at 120 hours each and 12 at 156 hours each. Now we’re down to 3,312 – which is only 1.6 years. Dang. Still not there. But it’s ok, I can see all of you who have just asked “Well, why are you so keen on using examinations if you’re happy with summative assignments testing concepts as you go and then building in the expectation of this knowledge in later modules?” Let’s drop the exam requirement even further to a final set of professional level assessment criteria, carried out at the end of the degree to test high-level concepts and advanced skills. Now, of the 24 courses that a student sits, almost all assessment work has moved into continuous assessment mode, rich in feedback, with summative checkpoints and a final set of examinations as part of the four capstone courses at the end. This gives us 3,024 hours – about 1.45 years.

But this is also ignoring that the first week of many of these courses is required revision after some 6-18 weeks of inactivity as the students go away to summer break or home for various holidays. Let’s assume even further that, with the exception of the first four courses that they do, that we build this continuously so that skills and knowledge are reinforced as micro slides, scattered throughout the work, supported with recordings, podcasts, notes, guides and quick revision exercises in the assessment framework. Now I can slice maybe 5 hours off 20 of the courses (the last 20) – cutting me down by another 100 hours and that’s half a month saved, down to 1.4 years.

Of course, I’m ignoring a lot of issues here. I’m ignoring the time it takes someone to digest information but, having raised that, can you tell me exactly how long it takes a student to learn a new concept? This is a trick question as the answer generally depends upon the question “how are you teaching them?” We know that lectures are one of the worst ways to transfer information, with A/V displays, lectures and listening all having a retention rate less than 40%. If you’re not retaining, your chances of learning something are extremely low. At the same time, somewhere between 30-50% of the time that we’re allocating to those courses we already teach are spent in traditional lectures – at time of writing. We can improve retention (of both knowledge and students) when we use group work (50% and higher for knowledge) or get the students to practice (75%) or, even better, instruct someone else (up to 90%). If we can restructure the ’empty’ or ‘low transfer’ times into other activities that foster collaboration or constructive student pedagogy with a role transfer that allows students to instruct each other, then we can potentially greatly improve our usage of time.

If we use this notion and slice, say, 20 hours from each course because we can get rid of that many contact hours that we were wasting and get the same, if not better, results, we’re down to 2,444 hours, about 1.18 years. And I haven’t even started looking at the notion of concept alignment, where similar concepts are taught across two different concepts and could be put in one place, taught once, consistently and then built upon for the rest of the course. Suddenly, with the same concepts and a potentially improved educational design – we’re looking the 1-year degree in the face.

Now, there will be people who will say “Well, how does the student mature in this time? That’s only one year!” to which my response is “Well, how are you training them for maturity? Where are the developing exercises? The formative assessment based on careful scaffolding in societal development and intellectual advancement?” If the appeal of the three-year degree is that people will be 19-20 when they graduate, and this is seen as a good thing, then we solve this problem for the 1-year degree by waiting two years before they start!

Having said all of this, and believing that a high quality 1-year degree is possible, let me conclude by saying that I think that it is a terrible idea! University is more than a sequence of assessments and examinations, it is a culture, a place for intellectual exploration and the formation of bonds with like-minded friends. It is not a cram school to turn out a slightly shell-shocked engineer who has worked solidly, and without respite, for 52 weeks. However, my aim was never actually to run a course in a year, it was to see how I could restructure a course to be able to more easily modularise it, to break me out of the mental tyranny of a three- or four-year mandate and to focus on learning outcomes, educational design and sound pedagogy. The reason that I am working on this is so that I can produce a sound course structure with which students can engage, regardless of whether they are full-time or not, clearly outlining dependency and requirements. Yes, if we break this up into part-time, we need to add revision modules back in – but if we teach it intensively (or on-line) then those aren’t required. This is a way to give students choice and the freedom to come in at any age, with whatever time they have, but without sacrificing the quality of the underlying program. This is a bootstrap program for a developing nation, a quick entry point for people who had to go to work – this is making up for decades of declining enrolments in key areas.

This is going on a war footing against the forces of ignorance.

There are many successful “Open” universities that use similar approaches but I wanted to go through the exercise myself, to allow me the greatest level of intellectual freedom while looking at our curriculum review. Now, I feel that I can focus on Knowledge Areas for my specifics and on the program as a whole, freed of the binding assumption that there is an inevitable three-year grind ahead for any student. Perhaps one of the greatest benefits for me is the thought that, for students who can come to us for three years, I can put much, much more into the course if they have the time – and these things, of interest, regarding beauty, of intellectual pursuits, can replace some of the things that we’ve lost over the years in the last two decades of change in University.

Brief but good news

Posted: July 29, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

A happy surprise in my mailbox today, but first the background. We’ve been teaching Puzzle Based Learning at Adelaide for several years now, based on Professor Zbigniew Michalewicz’s concept for a course that encouraged problem solving in a domain-free environment. (You can read more details about it by searching for Puzzle Based Learning with the surnames Falkner, Michalewicz and Sooriamurthi – we’ve had work published on this in IEEE Computer and as a workshop at SIGCSE, among several others.) Zbyszek (Adelaide), Raja (Sooriamurthi, a Teaching Professor at CMU) and I teamed up with Professor Ed Meyer (Physics at Baldwin-Wallace) to put together a textbook proposal to help people teach this information.

Great news – our proposal has been accepted by an excellent publishing house who appear to be genuinely excited about the book! As this is my first book, I’m very excited and pleased – but it’s a great reflection on the strength of the team and our composite skills and background, especially with the inter-disciplinary aspects. I’ve seen a lot of exciting work come out of Baldwin-Wallace and, while this is my first time working with Ed, I’m really looking forward to it. (Zbyszek, Raja and I have worked together a lot but I’m still excited to be working with them again!)

Good news after a rather difficult week.

Reflecting on rewards – is Time Banking a reward or a technique?

Posted: July 29, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Reward As It Is Often Implemented
(In Advance and Starting With a B)

Enough advocacy for a while, time to think about research again! Given that I’ve just finished Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards, and more on that later, I’ve been looking very carefully at everything I do with students to work out exactly what I am trying to do. One of Kohn’s theses is that we tend to manipulate people towards compliance through extrinsic tools such as incentives and rewards, rather than provide an environment in which their intrinsic motivational aspects dominate and they are driven to work through their own interest and requirements. Under Kohn’s approach, a gold star for sitting quietly achieve little except to say that sitting quietly must be so bad that you need to be bribed, and developing a taste for gold stars in the student. If someone isn’t sitting quietly, is it because they haven’t managed sitting quietly (the least rewarding unlockable achievement in any game) or that they are disengaged, bored or failing to understand why they are there? Is it, worse, because they are trying to ask questions about work that they don’t understand or because they are so keen to discuss it that they want to talk? Kohn wants to know WHY people are or aren’t doing things rather than just to stop or start people doing things through threats and bribery.

Where, in this context, does time banking fit? For those who haven’t read me on this before, time banking is described in a few posts I’ve made, with this as one of the better ones to read. In summary, students who hand up work early (and meet a defined standard) get hours in the bank that they can spend at a later date to give themselves a deadline extension – and there are a lot of tuneable parameters around this, but that’s the core. I already have a lot of data that verifies that roughly a third of students hand in on the last day and 15-18% hand up late. However, the 14th highest hand-in hour is the one immediately after the deadline. There’s an obvious problem where people aren’t giving themselves enough time to do the work but “near-missing” by one hour is a really silly way to lose marks. (We won’t talk about the pedagogical legitimacy of reducing marks for late work at the moment, that’s a related post I hope to write soon. Let’s assume that our learning design requires that work be submitted at a certain time to reinforce knowledge and call that the deadline – the loss, as either marks or knowledge reinforcement, is something that we want to avoid.)

But, by providing a “reward” for handing up early, am I trying to bribe my students into behaviour that I want to see? I think that the answer is “no”, for reasons that I’ll go into.

Firstly, the fundamental concept of time banking is that students have a reason to look at their assignment submission timetable as a whole and hand something up early because they can then gain more flexibility later on. Under current schemes, unless you provide bonus points, there is no reason for anyone to hand up more than one second early – assuming synchronised clocks. (I object to bonus points for early hand-in for two reasons: it is effectively a means to reward the able or those with more spare time, and because it starts to focus people on handing up early rather than the assignment itself.) This, in turn, appears to lead to a passive, last minute thinking pattern and we can see the results of that in our collected assignment data – lots and lots of near-miss late hand-ins. Our motivation is to focus the students on the knowledge in the course by making them engage with the course as a whole and empowering themselves into managing their time rather than adhering to our deadlines. We’re not trying to control the students, we’re trying to move them towards self-regulation where they control themselves.

Secondly, the same amount of work has to be done. There is no ‘reduced workload’ for handing in early, there is only ‘increased flexibility’. Nobody gets anything extra under this scheme that will reinforce any messages of work as something to be avoided. The only way to get time in the bank is to do the assignments – it is completely linked to the achievement that is the core of the course, rather than taking focus elsewhere.

Thirdly, a student can choose not to use it. Under almost every version of the scheme I’ve sketched out, every student gets 6 hours up their sleeve at the start of semester. If they want to just burn that for six late hand-ins that are under an hour late, I can live with that. It will also be very telling if they then turn out to be two hours late because, thinking about it, that’s a very interesting mental model that they’ve created.

But how is it going to affect the student? That’s a really good question. I think that, the way that it’s constructed, it provides a framework for students to work with, one that ties in with intrinsic motivation, rather than a framework that is imposed on students – in fact, moving away from the rigidly fixed deadlines that (from our data) don’t even to be training people that well anyway is a reduction in manipulate external control.

Will it work? Oh, now, there’s a question. After about a year of thought and discussion, we’re writing it all up at the moment for peer review on the foundations, the literature comparison, the existing evidence and the future plans. I’ll be very interested to see both the final paper and the first responses from our colleagues!

To Leave or Not To Leave (Academia)

Posted: July 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

There’s a post that’s been making the rounds from a University of New Mexico academic who is leaving to go to Google. Mark has blogged on it, and linked to a more positive post that reinforces why you would stay in the job, but my reaction to the original post is that there are far too many solid, scoring, points being made and, while it’s not gloom for the whole sector yet, there are large storm clouds hanging heavily over our heads.

I think that we’ve made some crucial mistakes that, on reflection, we need to address if we want to stop people leaving. Be in no doubt, when the storms come, yes, the casual workforce takes it in the neck but a lot of other people jump as well. They go somewhere else that supports them, inspires them, challenges them and does not make them wonder why they’re doing the job. It takes 10-20 years to produce a “useful” academic. Get the University climate wrong and they will pick up and leave. Will that work for everyone? No. It will work for your passionate, knowledgable, personable, approachable and amazing staff who will easily find work elsewhere.

Which, of course, leaves your schools and departments gutted of the firebrands, the doers, the visionaries and those who can inspire and lead the rest of us to the same level. I believe that we can all lift to the level of these great people – if we can remain in contact with them. Take them away and we stagnate. We all know, deep down, that bad cultures come from uninspired people, and uninspired people are uninspiring. Gut a school enough and you will have a terrible time of rebuilding it. But what happened?

I think that we made three terrible mistakes.

  1. We let people cut our funding and we all just worked harder.
    If you can cut the amount that you pay the worker, while keeping the same productivity level, why on earth would you pay them any more? You separate the worth of the activity or the person from the value that they produce and then you try to maximise your profits. Why do people keep cutting University and school funding? Because we just step up and work harder because we are committed to our jobs.
    What is worse, we not only work harder at our real jobs, we do all of the extra stuff as well.
  2. We did all of the admin on top of our real jobs, which include mentoring, guidance, teaching, learning, research, and so on.
    This is the crazy thing – not only are we all working harder meeting imposed metrics and standards, we’re also filling out countless forms, sitting around in meetings arguing about paperclip purchase optimisation (or similar) or sitting through yearly regurgitations of what we’ve done, delivered by other academics who can’t manage, and we do it almost as hard as we do the things that we get paid to do as academics.
  3. We didn’t sit down and weigh up the future cost of steps 1 and 2.
    And here’s the killer. Because we’re doing 1 and 2, and because the sky hasn’t fallen and education is still happening, administrators and funding bodies would be crazy to not try and push this further in order to see if they can get even more savings out and still maintain the same levels. This is fundamental business practice – pay the least that you have to for your supplies, charge the most that you can for your product.
    Ultimately, this will kill us. We are have gone from comfortable, to lean and mean – now we’re heading towards starvation. Rather than worrying about this, we stand and admire ourselves in the mirror like mentally ill thirteen year-olds, congratulating ourselves on how good we look when we are starting to lose important function – irreversibly. The fat, such as it was (and I think that has been overplayed for political reasons), is gone. Now we’re cutting muscle and organs.
    Governments talked about tight times, funding bodies talked about financial crises, business found cheaper overseas workers, off-shoring meant that local investment started to dry up – we listened, we nodded, we said “Ok, we’ll keep going” and we sent completely the wrong message.
    Universities take 10-20 years to train academics, but the impact of a drop in educated populace takes about the same time to really have an impact on the workforce. This is well beyond the average lifespan of an elected official and it’s not as direct as the “in your face” nature of a tax increase. But this is our fault, to and extent, because we know that this is a problem and, as a group, we took it.

I had an argument with someone the other day about the role of academics and they were, I think, angry with me because I placed pedagogy and learning quality as a higher priority than convenience of access to the students. Of course, I want everyone to have access to Uni but if what we are teaching is not of sufficient quality then there is no point coming! As a teaching academic, this should be my job. Social equity, access to University, increasing mobility and improving the school systems? That’s the government’s job, the government’s purse, working in association with the schools and universities – I welcome it! I support it! But I have neither the funds, the influence or the training to actually do this. Yet, because of shortfalls elsewhere, as our funding is cut, as the casual workforce grows, as we all work harder , more and more of the things that are not core fall on me and my colleagues.

This is a fantastic job. This is an important job. Universities, in whatever form, are vital to the future and development of our species – when they are run properly and to a high standard. I do not think that all is lost, but I am rapidly reaching a point where I think that we have to stop taking it, look at those crucial three mistakes and say “No more.” Funding bodies, administrators and, on occasion, we ourselves are devaluing ourselves through our professionalism, our dedication and our politeness. Yes, we need to be pragmatic but we have worth, we do a good job and we are part of an essential role: education must be maintained.

My priority is to my students and my colleagues, and to the future. I think that it’s time for some serious re-thinking.

A Flurry of Inauthenticity

Posted: July 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I’ve received numerous poorly personalised e-mails recently – today’s was from a company that published some of my work in a book and was addressed as “Dear *TITLE:FNAME*, which made me feel part of the family, I can tell you! Of course this is low hanging fruit because we’re all aware how mail outs actually work. No-one has the mind-numbingly and unnecessarily manual task of sitting down and actually writing these things anymore. They, very sensibly, use a computer to take a repetitive task and automate it. This would be fine, and I have no problem with it, except where we attempt to mimic a genuine concern.

One of the big changes I’ve noticed recently on Qantas, the airline that I do most of my flying with, is that they have noticed that my tickets say “Dr Falkner” and not “Mr Falkner”. For years, they would greet me at the entrance to the plane, look at my ticket and then promptly demonstrate the emptiness of the personal greeting by getting the title wrong. (The title, incidentally, is not a big deal. 99% of my students and colleagues call me ‘Nick’, the remainder resorting to “Dr Nick”. The issue here is that they are attempting to conduct an activity in greeting that is immediately revealed as meaningless.) Over the past two years, however, suddenly everyone is reading the whole ticket and, while it is still an activity akin to saying “Hello, Human”, this is much more reasonable facsimile of a personalised greeting. I note that they did distinguish themselves recently by greeting me as Dr Falkner and my wife, the original Dr Falkner, as (Miss or Mrs, I don’t quite recall) Falkner.

But my mailbox is full of these near misses. Letters from students addressed to Dr Rick Falkner. Many people who write to Professor Falkner, which I get because they’re trying not to offend me but it just goes to show that they haven’t really bothered to look me up. These are all cold calls – surface and shallow, from people who not only don’t know me but, I suspect, they don’t really want to get to know me – they’re just after the “Doctor” part of Nick Falkner. Much as Qantas looked at my Frequent Flyer status and changed their tone based on whether I was Silver or Gold (when you’re Gold, cabin crew come down to have a personal chat with you occasionally, especially if you’re part of a Gold couple flying together. I’m scared to ask what Platinum get), where my name and title were a convenient afterthought, most people who write to Professor Nick Falkner are after that facet of me which is useful to them. This is implicitly manipulative and thoroughly inauthentic.

This is, of course, why I try very hard not to do it with students. I do try to be genuinely concerned with the person, rather than their abilities. There are students I’ve known for years and, were I to walk up to them at a social gathering and be unable to recall anything about them other than their marks, they would have a right to feel exploited and ignored – a small cog in my glorious rise to an average career in Academia. This is, of course, not all that easy, especially when you have my memory but the effort is exceedingly important and a good attempt is often as valuable as a good memory – but a good memory generally comes from caring about something and paying attention. We ask of it our students when we present them with educational experiences. We say “This is important, so please pay attention and you’ll develop useful knowledge” so we’re very open about how we expect people to deal with important things. It is, therefore, much more insulting if we make it obvious that we remember nobody from our classes, or nothing of their lives, or we don’t realise the impact that we have from our privileged position at the centre of the web of knowledge. (Yeah, I think I just called us all spiders. Sorry about that. We’re cool spiders, if that helps.)

There are enough pieces of inauthentic e-mail, flyers, TV ads and day-to-day interactions that already bother us, without adding to the inauthenticity in our relationships with our students and our colleagues. Is it easy? No. Is it worthwhile? Yes. Is it what our students should expect of us to at least attempt? I think, yes, but I’d be interested to know what other people think about this – am I setting the bar too high for us or is this just part of our world?

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