Aside: My New York Story
Posted: January 15, 2016 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: authenticity, blogging, cavafy, education, ithaka, New york, reflection, thinking Leave a commentI’m a story-teller. It infuses my work. I share the stories and realities of my life in order to explain points that I think other people could appreciate. Today, I’m telling you my New York story. It’s not rags-to-riches and I’m only triumphing over my own stupidity rather than terrible obstacles. I fight to give opportunity to others but my own tales are infused with my own levels of privilege. If that bothers you, probably best to stop reading now.
Like many New York stories, this one is all about how I never lived in New York. Losing both Bowie and Alan Rickman in a few days has made me think about that city again. This is the story of how I loved a city but we never ended up together.
Oh, Oh! New York!
Even in the home counties towns in the UK, the adults spoke about New York as if it were Olympus, Shangri-La and a wild west town all rolled into one. You could be incredibly cool in Hampshire just by having been to America. If you had been to New York, and survived, you were some kind of god. They had different music, different cars, different money. In a Britain collapsing under the 1970s, America was a golden place.
I grew up in the 70s and was fortunate enough to hear Bowie hit the UK scene hard, to see early Doctor Who, to be mentally invigorated by very demanding progressive UK kids’ TV, to hear a Police album when they were just starting out and then, even more fortunately, we left the home counties and, because my Mum was amazingly brave and strong, we made it across the sea to Australia, where a better life awaited us.
I shrugged off Britain in weeks but New York never left me.
I continued to grow up in one of the Australian state capitals (Australian population is mostly concentrated into cities on the ocean) and it was nice, but it was no New York. I’m not sure I’ve told anyone this but, in my head, I was always going to America. That’s what success was defined as when I was a boy: you were a traveller, you did interesting things and that meant America. When every other Brit was going to the Costa del Sol and baking their skin, the interesting people were pale, thin and had walked around in magical places like Central Park, Times Square and along Broadway. They knew about music and understood what the Tarkus artwork meant on that ELP album. They even knew what “prog-rock” meant. They were art, life and wonder.
When I finished University, I started to think seriously about America. I had visited by then, and that is a story in itself, and finally seen New York. Mid-winter. Just after Christmas. Quiet and grey, on the cusp of 1995 and 1996. It did not quite amaze but it do not disappoint, even though I was walking around with a bung knee after slipping in unfamiliar snow. I began to think about how I could get there.
But one thing became clear as I thought about it. I didn’t know how to get to the New York that I wanted to be part of. I was creative but I wasn’t an amazing artist or musician and the New York I wanted to be part of was the bubbling, creative, amazing community of 1970s. I was a middling rhythm guitarist, a karaoke-tolerable singer, an abstract artist (I still can’t draw very well), an enthusiastic poet, but, mostly, I was a computer guy. I could go and get a job but all I would be doing would be living in (or near, most likely) New York and never becoming part of my vision of NYC. Tech support in Shangri-La was not what I wanted.
I had kept an idea of where I wanted to go in my head but I had never turned that into an intention to actually go there. A goal with no plans had turned into a life without much direction. (I was lucky enough to fall in love and start a real journey and adventure locally, just as I realised that I had never set my cap for New York, but that’s another story.)
There’s a poem I love, Ithaka by C. P. Cavafy, and it talks of setting out on a magnificent journey, full of adventures and monsters, in search of the island of Ithaka as part of a glorious ancient Greek adventure. But the most important part of the poem, for me, is the end:
Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
As Cavafy and all of the Greek authors of myth before him note, the journey is the thing. When you arrive at your goal, if you have thought about it for long enough, then you may find it was not as good as you thought it would be. Memory may have tricked you, things may have changed. But if it caused you to start a wonderful journey, then it was worthwhile. No, not just worthwhile, it was magical. It was transcendence and enlightenment.
But, by not seeing New York as a goal and leaving it as a dream, I never set myself upon the journey and thus I deprived myself of both the adventure and the chance of achieving my dream one day.
Let’s be realistic, I was never going to live in the 1970s New York that I idolised, unless I found a time machine, but if I had actually made some career and life choices that would have seen me head to America in the 90s, I still would have made it there. It would have seen me experiencing a New York that, while not the one I thought of, would have been a capstone to an amazing journey. But, because I didn’t align myself to realise my New York dream, it didn’t happen.
My long-time love affair with New York was a fantasy and we’re both lucky that we never moved it beyond that point. I would have ended up being bitter and resentful, New York didn’t need another tech support person pretending to be an artist. You need more than attraction and the frisson of distance to have a relationship.
This year, I have reassessed my goals and dreams. I am deciding which of these will define my journey and give my life structure for the next decade or two. Where can I find new wisdom? Where can I find the experiences that will take me to new and amazing places, physically or mentally? I have been successful in a number of things but I really need to focus on the goal to make sure that I get the most out of the journey.
I’m not the same person I was back in the 90s. A lot of thinking has happened, a lot of growing has happened, a lot of love has happened. I’m more comfortable with the softer definition of myself as a communicator, an educator, an artist and even a philosopher. This small journey was triggered by the realisation that I had never chosen what to do or where to go. There’s a natural pause at this stage and it’s time to set a new heading. Where do I go from here?
The point of my New York Story is a simple one: assuming that nothing else gets in the way, you’re unlikely to get somewhere unless you actually set out for it. We often mistake what we’re doing with what we want to do, the necessary aims of our work with our real goals in life. We do something today because we did it yesterday and that means we’ll do it again tomorrow. Perhaps we should only do it tomorrow if it’s the best thing to do.
There are many things in my life that I don’t want (and don’t need) to change. But I look at Cavafy’s poem and I can smell the sea winds, hear the sails fill, and the helm is asking me where to go next.
Can we do this? We already have.
Posted: January 15, 2016 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, aesthetics, authenticity, beauty, brown, community, competency, competency-based assessment, design, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, Harvey Mudd, higher education, in the student's head, learning, mastery, mit, principles of design, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking Leave a commentHow does one actually turn everything I’ve been saying into a course that can be taught? We already have examples of this working, whether in the performance/competency based models found in medical schools around the world or whether in mastery learning based approaches where do not measure anything except whether a student has demonstrated sufficient knowledge or skill to show an appropriate level of mastery.
An absence of grades, or student control over their grades, is not as uncommon as many people think. MIT in the United States give students their entire first semester with no grades more specific than pass or fail. This is a deliberate decision to ease the transition of students who have gone from being leaders at their own schools to the compressed scale of MIT. Why compressed? If we were to assess all school students then we would need a scale that could measure all levels of ability, from ‘not making any progress at school’ to ‘transcendent’. The tertiary entry band is somewhere between ‘passing school studies’ to ‘transcendent’ and, depending upon the college that you enter, can shift higher and higher as your target institution becomes more exclusive. If you look at the MIT entry requirements, they are a little coy for ‘per student’ adjustments, but when the 75th percentile for the SAT components is 800, 790, 790, and 800,800,800 would be perfect, we can see that any arguments on how demotivating simple pass/fail grades must be for excellent students have not just withered, they have caught fire and the ash has blown away. When the target is MIT, it appears the freshmen get their head around a system that is even simpler than Rapaport’s.
Pictured: A highly prestigious University with some of the most stringent entry requirements in the world, which uses no grades in first semester.
Other universities, such as Brown, deliberately allow students to choose how their marks are presented, as they wish to deemphasise the numbers in order to focus on education. It is not a cakewalk to get into Brown, as these figures attest, and yet Brown have made a clear statement that they have changed their grading system in order to change student behaviour – and the world is just going to have to deal with that. It doesn’t seem to be hurting their graduates, from quotes on the website such as “Our 85% admission rate to medical school and 89% admission rate to law school are both far above the national average.”
And, returning to medical schools themselves, my own University runs a medical program where the usual guidelines for grading do not hold. The medical school is running on a performance/competency scheme, where students who wish to practise medicine must demonstrate that they are knowledgable, skilful and safe to practice. Medical schools have identified the core problem in my thought experiment where two students could have the opposite set of knowledge or skills and they have come to the same logical conclusion: decide what is important and set up a scheme that works for it.
When I was a solider, I was responsible for much of the Officer Training in my home state for the Reserve. We had any number of things to report on for our candidates, across knowledge and skills, but one of them was “Demonstrate the qualities of an officer” and this single item could fail an otherwise suitable candidate. If a candidate could not be trusted to one day be in command of troops on the battlefield, based on problems we saw in peacetime, then they would be counselled to see if it could be addressed and, if not, let go. (I can assure you that this was not used often and it required a large number of observations and discussion before we would pull that handle. The power of such a thing forced us to be responsible.)
We know that limited scale, mastery-based approaches are not just working in the vocational sector but in allied sectors (such as the military), in the Ivy league (Brown) and in highly prestigious non-Ivy league institutions such as MIT. But we also know of examples such as Harvey Mudd, who proudly state that only seven students since 1955 have earned a 4.0 GPA and have a post on the career blog devoted to “explaining why your GPA is so low” And, be in no doubt, Harvey Mudd is an excellent school, especially for my discipline. I’m not criticising their program, I’ve only heard great things about them, but when you have to put up a page like that? You’re admitting that there’s a problem but you are pushing it on to the student to fix it. But contrast that with Brown, who say to employers “look at our students, not their grades” (at least on the website).
Feedback to the students on their progress is essential. Being able to see what your students are up to is essential for the teacher. Being able to see what your staff and schools are doing is important for the University. Employers want to know who to hire. Which of these is the most important?
The students. It has to be the students. Doesn’t it? (Arguments for the existence of Universities as a self-sustaining bureaucracy system in the comments, if you think that’s a thing you want to do.)
This is not an easy problem but, as we can see, we have pieces of the solution all over the place. Tomorrow, I’m going to put in a place a cornerstone of beautiful assessment that I haven’t seen provided elsewhere or explained in this way. (Then all of you can tell me which papers I should have read to get it from, I can publish the citation, and we can all go forward.)
Not just videos!
Posted: January 14, 2016 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, aesthetics, education, educational research, higher education, moocs, on-line learning, principles of design, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, video Leave a comment
Just a quick note that on-line learning is not just videos! I am a very strong advocate of active learning in my face-to-face practice and am working to compose on-line systems that will be as close to this as possible: learning and doing and building and thinking are all essential parts of the process.
Please, once again, check out Mark’s CACM blog on the 10 myths of teaching computer science. There’s great stuff here that extends everything I’m talking about with short video sequences and attention spans. I wrote something ages ago about not turning ‘chalk and talk’ into ‘watch and scratch (your head)’. It’s a little dated but I include it for completeness.
Collaboration and community are beautiful
Posted: January 14, 2016 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, aesthetics, authenticity, beauty, collaboration, collaborative learning, community, design, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, good, higher education, Ilove21C, in the student's head, learning, moocs, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, truth Leave a commentThere are many lessons to be learned from what is going on in the MOOC sector. The first is that we have a lot to learn, even for those of us who are committed to doing it ‘properly’ whatever that means. I’m not trying to convince you of “MOOC yes” or “MOOC no”. We can have that argument some other time. I’m talking about we already know from using these tools.
We’ve learned (again) that producing a broadcast video set of boring people reading the book at you in a monotone is, amazingly, not effective, no matter how fancy the platform. We know that MOOCs are predominantly taken by people who have already ‘succeeded’ at learning, often despite our educational system, and are thus not as likely to have an impact in traditionally disadvantaged areas, especially without an existing learning community and culture. (No references, you can Google all of this easily.)
We know that online communities can and do form. Ok, it’s not the same as twenty people in a room with you but our own work in this space confirms that you can have students experiencing a genuine feeling of belonging, facilitated through course design and forum interaction.
“Really?” you ask.
In a MOOC we ran with over 25,000 students, a student wrote a thank you note to us at the top of his code, for the final assignment. He had moved from non-coder to coder with us and had created some beautiful things. He left a note in his code because he thought that someone would read it. And we did. There is evidence of this everywhere in the forums and their code. No, we don’t have a face-to-face relationship. But we made them feel something and, from what we’ve seen so far, it doesn’t appear to be a bad something.
But we, as in the wider on-line community, have learned something else that is very important. Students in MOOCs often set their own expectations of achievement. They come in, find what they’re after, and leave, much like they are asking a question on Quora or StackExchange. Much like you check out reviews on-line before you start watching a show or you download one or two episodes to check it out. You know, 21st Century life.
Once you see that self-defined achievement and engagement, a lot of things about MOOCs, including drop rates and strange progression, suddenly make sense. As does the realisation that this is a total change from what we have accepted for centuries as desirable behaviour. This is something that we are going to have a lot of trouble fitting into our existing system. It also indicates how much work we’re going to have to do in order to bring in traditionally disadvantaged communities, first-in-family and any other under-represented group. Because they may still believe that we’re offering Perry’s nightmare in on-line form: serried ranks with computers screaming facts at you.
We offer our students a lot of choice but, as Universities, we mostly work on the idea of ‘follow this program to achieve this qualification’. Despite notionally being in the business of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, our non-award and ‘not for credit’ courses are dwarfed in enrolments by the ‘follow the track, get a prize’ streams. And that, of course, is where the diminishing bags of dollars come from. That’s why retention is such a hot-button issue at Universities because even 1% more retained students is worth millions to most Universities. A hunt and peck community? We don’t even know what retention looks like in that context.
Pretending that this isn’t happening is ignoring evidence. It’s self-deceptive, disingenuous, hypocritical (for we are supposed to be the evidence junkies) and, once again, we have a failure of educational aesthetics. Giving people what they don’t want isn’t good. Pretending that they just don’t know what’s good for them is really not being truthful. That’s three Socratic strikes: you’re out.
We had better be ready to redirect that energy or explode.
We have a message from our learning community. They want some control. We have to be aware that, if we really want them to do something, they have to feel that it’s necessary. (So much research supports this.) By letting them run around in the MOOC space, artificial and heavily instrumented, we can finally see what they’re up to without having to follow them around with clipboards. We see them on the massive scale, individuals and aggregates. Remember, on average these are graduates; these are students who have already been through our machine and come out. These are the last people, if we’ve convinced them of the rightness of our structure, who should be rocking the boat and wanting to try something different. Unless, of course, we haven’t quite been meeting their true needs all these years.
I often say that the problem we have with MOOC enrolments is that we can see all of them. There is no ‘peeking around the door’ in a MOOC. You’re in or you’re out, in order to be signed up for access or updates.
If we were collaborating with all of our students to produce learning materials and structures, not just the subset who go into MOOC, I wonder what we would end up turning out? We still need to apply our knowledge of pedagogy and psychology, of course, to temper desire with what works but I suspect that we should be collaborating with our learner community in a far more open way. Everywhere else, technology is changing the relationship between supplier and consumer. Name any other industry and we can probably find a new model where consumers get more choice, more knowledge and more power.
No-one (sensible) is saying we should raze the Universities overnight. I keep being told that allowing more student control is going to lead to terrible things but, frankly, I don’t believe it and I don’t think we have enough evidence to stop us from at least exploring this path. I think it’s scary, yes. I think it’s going to challenge how we think about tertiary education, absolutely. I also think that we need to work out how we can bring together the best of face-to-face with the best of on-line, for the most people, in the most educationally beautiful way. Because anything else just isn’t that beautiful.
Teaching for (current) Humans
Posted: January 13, 2016 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, briana morrison, community, design, education, educational research, edx, ethics, higher education, in the student's head, lauren margulieux, learning, mark guzdial, moocs, on-line learning, principles of design, reflection, resources, student perspective, subgoals, teaching, teaching approaches, technology, thinking, tools, video 5 Comments
Leonardo’s experiments in human-octopus engineering never received appropriate recognition.
I was recently at a conference-like event where someone stood up and talked about video lectures. And these lectures were about 40 minutes long.
Over several million viewing sessions, EdX have clearly shown that watchable video length tops out at just over 6 minutes. And that’s the same for certificate-earning students and the people who have enrolled for fun. At 9 minutes, students are watching for fewer than 6 minutes. At the 40 minute mark, it’s 3-4 minutes.
I raised this point to the speaker because I like the idea that, if we do on-line it should be good on-line, and I got a response that was basically “Yes, I know that but I think the students should be watching these anyway.” Um. Six minutes is the limit but, hey, students, sit there for this time anyway.
We have never been able to unobtrusively measure certain student activities as well as we can today. I admit that it’s hard to measure actual attention by looking at video activity time but it’s also hard to measure activity by watching students in a lecture theatre. When we add clickers to measure lecture activity, we change the activity and, unsurprisingly, clicker-based assessment of lecture attentiveness gives us different numbers to observation of note-taking. We can monitor video activity by watching what the student actually does and pausing/stopping a video is a very clear signal of “I’m done”. The fact that students are less likely to watch as far on longer videos is a pretty interesting one because it implies that students will hold on for a while if the end is in sight.
In a lecture, we think students fade after about 15-20 minutes but, because of physical implications, peer pressure, politeness and inertia, we don’t know how many students have silently switched off before that because very few will just get up and leave. That 6 minute figure may be the true measure of how long a human will remain engaged in this kind of task when there is no active component and we are asking them to process or retain complex cognitive content. (Speculation, here, as I’m still reading into one of these areas but you see where I’m going.) We know that cognitive load is a complicated thing and that identifying subgoals of learning makes a difference in cognitive load (Morrison, Margulieux, Guzdial) but, in so many cases, this isn’t what is happening in those long videos, they’re just someone talking with loose scaffolding. Having designed courses with short videos I can tell you that it forces you, as the designer and teacher, to focus on exactly what you want to say and it really helps in making your points, clearly. Implicit sub-goal labelling, anyone? (I can hear Briana and Mark warming up their keyboards!)
If you want to make your videos 40 minutes long, I can’t stop you. But I can tell you that everything I know tells me that you have set your materials up for another hominid species because you’re not providing something that’s likely to be effective for current humans.
At least they’re being honest
Posted: January 13, 2016 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, assessment, authenticity, community, competency-based assessment, education, educational research, ethics, higher education, learning, reflection, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, time banking, time management, tools 2 CommentsI was inspired to write this by a comment about using late penalties but dealing slightly differently with students when they owned up to being late. I have used late penalties extensively (it’s school policy) and so I have a lot of experience with the many ways students try to get around them.
Like everyone, I have had students who have tried to use honesty where every other possible way of getting the assignment in on time (starting early, working on it before the day before, miraculous good luck) has failed. Sometimes students are puzzled that “Oh, I was doing another assignment from another lecturer” isn’t a good enough excuse. (Genuine reasons for interrupted work, medical or compassionate, are different and I’m talking about the ambit extension or ‘dog ate my homework’ level of bargaining.)
My reasoning is simple. In education, owning up to something that you did knowing that it would have punitive consequences of some sort should not immediately cause things to become magically better. Plea bargaining (and this is an interesting article of why that’s not a good idea anywhere) is you agreeing to your guilt in order to reduce your sentence. But this is, once again, horse-trading knowledge on the market. Suddenly, we don’t just have a temporal currency, we have a conformal currency, where getting a better deal involves finding the ‘kindest judge’ among the group who will give you the ‘lightest sentence’. Students optimise their behaviour to what works or, if they’re lucky, they have a behaviour set that’s enough to get them to a degree without changing much. The second group aren’t mostly who we’re talking about and I don’t want to encourage the first group to become bargain-hunting mark-hagglers.
I believe that ‘finding Mr Nice Lecturer’ behaviour is why some students feel free to tell me that they thought someone else’s course was more important than mine, because I’m a pretty nice person and have a good rapport with my students, and many of my colleagues can be seen (fairly or not) as less approachable or less open.
We are not doing ourselves or our students any favours. At the very least, we risk accusations of unfairness if we extend benefits to one group who are bold enough to speak to us (and we know that impostor syndrome and lack of confidence are rife in under-represented groups). At worst, we turn our students into cynical mark shoppers, looking for the easiest touch and planning their work strategy based on what they think they can get away with instead of focusing back on the learning. The message is important and the message must be clearly communicated so that students try to do the work for when it’s required. (And I note that this may or may not coincide with any deadlines.)
We wouldn’t give credit to someone who wrote ‘True’ and then said ‘Oh, but I really meant False’. The work is important or it is not. The deadline is important or it is not. Consequences, in a learning sense, do not have to mean punishments and we do not need to construct a Star Chamber in our offices.
Yes, I do feel strongly about this. I completely understand why people do this and I have also done this before. But after thinking about it at length, I changed my practice so that being honest about something that shouldn’t have happened was appreciated but it didn’t change what occurred unless there was a specific procedural difference in handling. I am not a judge. I am not a jury. I want to change the system so that not only do I not have to be but I’m not tempted to be.
Ugliness 101: late punishments
Posted: January 13, 2016 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, aesthetics, authenticity, bandura, beauty, community, design, education, educational problem, educational research, ethics, higher education, in the student's head, instrumentality, lateness, learning, penalties, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, time banking, time management, tools 4 CommentsBefore I lay out the program design I’m thinking of (and, beyond any discussion of competency, as a number of you have suggested, we are heading towards Bloom’s mastery learning as a frame with active learning elements), we need to address one of the most problematic areas of assessment.
Late penalties.
Well, let’s be accurate, penalties are, by definition, punishments imposed for breaking the rules, so these are punishments. This is the stick in the carrot-and-stick reward/punish approach to forcing people to do what you want.
Let’s throw the Greek trinity at this and see how it shapes up. A student produces an otherwise perfect piece of work for an assessment task. It’s her own work. She has spent time developing it. It’s really good. Insightful. Oh, but she handed it up a day late. So we’re now going to say that this knowledge is worth less because it wasn’t delivered on time. She’s working a day job to pay the bills? She should have organised herself better. No Internet at home? Why didn’t she work in the library? I’m sure the campus is totally safe after hours and, well, she should just be careful in getting to and from the library. After all, the most important thing in her life, without knowing anything about her, should be this one hundred line program to reinvent something that has been written over a million times by every other CS student in history.
Have an owl, while you think about that.
That’s not truth. That’s establishing a market value for knowledge with a temporal currency. To me, unless there’s a good reason for doing this, this is as bad as curve grading because it changes what the student has achieved for reasons outside of the assignment activity itself.
“Ah!” you say “Nick, we want to teach people to hand work in on time because that’s how the world works! Time is money, Jones!”
Rubbish. Yes, there are a (small) number of unmovable deadlines in the world. We certainly have some in education because we have to get grades in to achieve graduations and degrees. But most adults function in a world where they choose how to handle all of the commitments in their lives and then they schedule them accordingly. The more you do that, the more practice you get and you can learn how to do it well.
If you have ever given students a week, or even a day’s, extension because of something that has stopped you being able to accept or mark student work, no matter how good the reason, you have accepted that your submission points are arbitrary. (I feel strongly about this and have posted about it before.)
So what would be a good reason for sticking to these arbitrary deadlines? We’d want to see something really positive coming out of the research into this, right? Let’s look at some research on this, starting with Britton and Tesser, “Effects of Time-Management Practices on College Grades”, J Edu Psych, 1991, 83, 3. This reinforces what we already know from Bandura: students who feel in control and have high self-efficacy are going to do well. If a student sits down every day to work out what they’re going to do then they, unsurprisingly, can get things done. But this study doesn’t tell us about long-range time planning – the realm of instrumentality, the capability to link activity today with success in the future. (Here are some of my earlier thoughts on this, with references to Husman.) From Husman, we know that students value tasks in terms of how important they think it is, how motivated they are and how well they can link future success to the current task.
In another J Edu Psych paper (1990,82,4), Macan and Shahani reported that participants who felt that they had control over what they were doing did better but also clearly indicated that ambiguity and stress had an influence on time management in terms of perception and actuality. But the Perceived Control of Time (author’s caps) dominated everything, reducing the impact of ambiguity, reducing the impact of stress, and lead to greater satisfaction.
Students are rarely in control of their submission deadlines. Worse, we often do not take into account everything else in a student’s life (even other University courses) when we set our own deadlines. Our deadlines look arbitrary to students because they are, in the majority of cases. There’s your truth. We choose deadlines that work for our ability to mark and to get grades in or, perhaps, based on whether we are in the country or off presenting research on the best way to get students to hand work in on-time.
(Yes, the owl above is staring at me just as hard as he is staring at anyone else here.)
My own research clearly shows that fixed deadlines do not magically teach students the ability to manage their time and, when you examine it, why should it? (ICER 2012, was part of a larger study that clearly demonstrated students continuing, and even extending, last-minute behaviour all the way to the fourth year of their studies.) Time management is a discipline that involves awareness of the tasks to be performed, a decomposition of those tasks to subtasks that can be performed when the hyperbolic time discounting triggers go off, and a well-developed sense of instrumentality. Telling someone to hand in their work by this date OR ELSE does not increase awareness, train decomposition, or develop any form of planning skills. Well, no wonder it doesn’t work any better than shouting at people teaches them Maxwell’s Equations or caning children suddenly reveals the magic of the pluperfect form in Latin grammar.
So, let’s summarise: students do well when they feel in control and it helps with all of the other factors that could get in the way. So, in order to do almost exactly the opposite of help with this essential support step, we impose frequently arbitrary time deadlines and then act surprised when students fall prey to lack of self-confidence, stress or lose sight of what they’re trying to do. They panic, asking lots of (what appear to be) unnecessary questions because they are desperately trying to reduce confusion and stress. Sound familiar?
I have written about this at length while exploring time banking, giving students agency and the ability to plan their own time, to address all of these points. But the new lens in my educational inspection loupe allows me to be very clear about what is most terribly wrong with late penalties.
They are not just wrong, they satisfy none of anyone’s educational aesthetics. Because we don’t take a student’s real life into account, we are not being fair. Because we are not actually developing the time management abilities but treating them as something that will be auto-didactically generated, we are not being supportive. Because we downgrade work when it is still good, we are being intellectually dishonest. Because we vary deadlines to suit ourselves but may not do so for an individual student, we are being hypocritical. We are degrading the value of knowledge for procedural correctness. This is hideously “unbeautiful”.
That is not education. That’s bureaucracy. Just because most of us live within a bureaucracy doesn’t mean that we have to compromise our pedagogical principles. Even trying to make things fit well, as Rapaport did to try and fit into another scale, we end up warping and twisting our intent, even before we start thinking about lateness and difficult areas such as that. This cannot be good.
There is nothing to stop a teacher setting an exercise that is about time management and is constructed so that all steps will lead someone to develop better time management. Feedback or marks that reflect something being late when that is the only measure of fitness is totally reasonable. But to pretend that you can slap some penalties on to the side of an assessment and it will magically self-scaffold is to deceive yourself, to your students’ detriment. It’s not true.
Do I have thoughts on how to balance marking resources with student feedback requirements, elastic time management, and real assessments while still recognising that there are some fixed deadlines?
Funny you should ask. We’ll come back to this, soon.
A good goal
Posted: January 12, 2016 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: beauty, blogging, education, higher education, obama, president obama, reflection, teaching, thinking Leave a commentI set out to make this year an amazing year. A beautiful year for education. But it’s already challenging in some ways and I knew it was going to be.
You know what it feels like, sometimes.
What a great time to find this quote from President Obama. It’s one that I think everyone in education should try to remember and apply to what we’re doing because every time we have new students in our classes, we will never again get the chance to start well with them.
“I want us to be able when we walk out this door to say we couldn’t think of anything else that we didn’t try to do—that we didn’t shy away from a challenge because it was hard. That we weren’t timid, or got tired, or somehow were thinking about the next thing because there is no next thing. This is it. Never in our lives again will we have the chance to do as much good as we do right now. I want to make sure that we maximize it.”
State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama, 2016.
This is not a good day (Vale #Bowie)
Posted: January 12, 2016 Filed under: Opinion | Tags: blogging, bowie, burroughs, community, david bowie, passion, thinking 3 Comments
The Thin White Duke persona, 1976.
We all have heroes. One of mine was David Bowie. Innovator. Musician. Technologist. Visionary. Bowie took Burrough’s analogue techniques and brought them into the 20th, then 21st Century. But he did so much more. His (now) last album is wonderful. I listened to his previous album and it made my transition to middle-age easier, because I could hear him exploring the same issues. Now I have the album he recorded in the face of death. Undimmed. Unafraid. Strong.
Whatever I do, I want to help people to see things as they are. Truth, in the classical Greek sense of revelation of reality, is what I’ve been talking about. I have been a Bowie fan, follower, and later scholar, for decades. I have no doubt that when David Bowie looked at the world, he saw what it was, what it could be and what he could do with it.
He certainly influenced me and made me think about what could be, if I saw it truly and pursued it with passion.
A moment’s silence for the passing of a unique and important element of our culture.
A quick note on direction
Posted: January 11, 2016 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: aesthetics, authenticity, beauty, blogging, community, design, education, educational research, ethics, higher education, learning, lister, raymond lister, reflection, resources, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, truth Leave a comment
I’m getting some great comments, on and off the blog, about possible solutions to the problems I’m putting up, as well as thoughts on some of my examples.
Firstly, thank you, everyone! Secondly, I am deliberately starting slowly and building up, to reframe all of these arguments in terms of aesthetics, fitness for purpose and clarity. (Beauty, goodness and truth, again.) I am not trying to make anything appear worse than it is but I’m teasing out some points to show why we should be seeking to change practice that is both widespread and ingrained.
I will make a quick note that Raymond Lister raised about my thought experiment with the two students who split the knowledge, in that I don’t differentiate between skills and knowledge (true) and I am talking about an educational design where no work has been done to identify which areas have to be mastered in order to progress (also true). This is totally deliberate on my part, because it reflects a lot of current practice, not because I think it’s what we should be doing. I will be returning to, and extending this, example over time.
(Raymond does great work in a lot of areas dear to my heart and we will be returning to some of his work in our peregrinations, especially the SOLO taxonomy and Bloom’s mappings. Until then, here is his Google Scholar link for you to read some very interesting papers. And I could not agree more that there is no programming gene!)
Nick Falkner 