Who Knew That the Slippery Slope Was Real?

Posted: June 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Take a look at this picture.

Dan Ariely. Photo: poptech/Flickr, via wired.com.

One thing you might have noticed, if you’ve looked carefully, is that this man appears to have had some reconstructive surgery on the right side of his face and there is a colour difference, which is slightly accentuated by the lack of beard stubble. What if I were to tell you that this man was offered the chance to have fake stubble tattooed onto that section and, when he declined because he felt strange about it, received a higher level of pressure and, in his words, guilt trip than for any other procedure during the extensive time he spent in hospital receiving skin grafts and burn treatments. Why was the doctor pressuring him?

Because he had already performed the tattooing remediation on two people and needed a third for the paper. In Dan’s words, again, the doctor was a fantastic physician, thoughtful, and he cared but he had a conflict of interest that meant that he moved to a different mode of behaviour. For me, I had to look a couple of times because the asymmetry that the doctor referred to is not that apparent at first glance. Yet the doctor felt compelled, by interests that were now Dan’s, to make Dan self-conscious about the perceived problem.

A friend on Facebook (thanks, Bill!) posted a link to an excellent article in Wired, entitled “Why We Lie, Cheat, Go to Prison and Eat Chocolate Cake” by Dan Ariely, the man pictured above. Dan is a professor of behavioural economics and psychology at Duke and his new book explores the reasons that we lie to each other. I was interested in this because I’m always looking for explanations of student behaviour and I want to understand their motivations. I know that my students will rationalise and do some strange things but, if I’m forewarned, maybe I can construct activities and courses in a way that heads this off at the pass.

There were several points of interest to me. The first was the question whether a cost/benefit analysis of dishonesty – do something bad, go to prison – actually has the effect that we intend. As Ariely points out, if you talk to the people who got caught, the long-term outcome of their actions was never something that they thought about. He also discusses the notion of someone taking small steps, a little each time, that move them from law abiding, for want of a better word, to dishonest. Rather than set out to do bad things in one giant leap, people tend to take small steps, rationalising each one, and after each step opening up a range of darker and darker options.

Welcome to the slippery slope – beloved argument of rubicose conservative politicians since time immemorial. Except that, in this case, it appears that the slop is piecewise composed on tiny little steps. Yes, each step requires a decision, so there isn’t the momentum that we commonly associate with the slope, but each step, in some sense, takes you to larger and larger steps away from the honest place from which you started.

Ariely discusses an experiment where he gave two groups designer sunglasses and told one group that they had the real thing, and the other that they had fakes, and then asked them to complete a test and then gave them a chance to cheat. The people who had been randomly assigned into the ‘fake sunglasses’ group cheated more than the others. Now there are many possible reasons for this. One of them is the idea that if you know that are signalling your status deceptively to the world, which is Ariely’s argument, you are in a mindset where you have taken a step towards dishonesty. Cheating a little more is an easier step. I can see many interpretations of this, because of the nature of the cheating which is in reporting how many questions you completed on the test, where self-esteem issues caused by being in the ‘fake’ group may lead to you over-promoting yourself in the reporting of your success on the quiz – but it’s still cheating. Ultimately, whatever is motivating people to take that step, the step appears to be easier if you are already inside the dishonest space, even to a degree.

[Note: Previous paragraph was edited slightly after initial publication due to terrible auto-correcting slipping by me. Thanks, Gary!]

Where does something like copying software or illicitly downloading music come into this? Does this constant reminder of your small, well-rationalised, step into low-level lawlessness have any impact on the other decisions that you make? It’s an interesting question because, according to the outline in Ariely’s sunglasses experiment, we would expect it to be more of a problem if the products became part of your projected image. We know that having developed a systematic technological solution for downloading is the first hurdle in terms of achieving downloads but is it also the first hurdle in making steadily less legitimate decisions? I actually have no idea but would be very interested to see some research in this area. I feel it’s too glib to assume a relationship, because it is so ‘slippery slope’ argument, but Ariely’s work now makes me wonder. Is it possible that, after downloading enough music or software, you could actually rationalise the theft of a car? Especially if you were only ‘borrowing’ it? (Personally, I doubt it because I think that there are several steps in between.) I don’t have a stake in this fight – I have a personal code for behaviour in this sphere that I can live with but I see some benefits in asking and trying to answer these questions from something other that personal experience.

Returning to the article, of particular interest to me was the discussion of an honour code, such as Princeton’s, where students sign a pledge. Ariely sees it as benefit as a reminder to people that is active for some time but, ultimately, would have little value over several years because, as we’ve already discussed, people rationalise in small increments over the short term rather than constructing long-term models where the pledge would make a difference. Sign a pledge in 2012 and it may just not have any impact on you by the middle of 2012, let alone at the end of 2015 when you’re trying to graduate. Potentially, at almost any cost.

In terms of ongoing reminders, and a signature on a piece of work saying (in effect) “I didn’t cheat”, Ariely asks what happens if you have to sign the honour clause after you’ve finished a test – well, if you’ve finished then any cheating has already occurred so the honour clause is useless then. If you remind people at the start of every assignment, every test, and get them to pledge at the beginning then this should have an impact – a halo effect to an extent, or a reminder of expectation that will make it harder for you to rationalise your dishonesty.

In our school we have an electronic submission system that require students to use to submit their assignments. It has boiler plate ‘anti-plagiarism’ text and you must accept the conditions to submit. However, this is your final act before submission and you have already finished the code, which falls immediately into the trap mentioned in the previous paragraph. Dan Ariely’s answers have made me think about how we can change this to make it more of an upfront reminder, rather than an ‘after the fact – oh it may be too late now’ auto-accept at the end of the activity. And, yes, reminder structures and behaviour modifiers in time banking are also being reviewed and added in the light of these new ideas.

The Wired Q&A is very interesting and covers a lot of ground but, realistically, I think I have to go and buy Dan Ariely’s book(s), prepare myself for some harsh reflection and thought, and plan for a long weekend of reading.

Time Banking: Foundations

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

Short post today because I’ve spent so much time looking at research and fixing papers and catching up on things that I haven’t left myself much time to blog. Sorry about that! Today’s post is talking about one of the most vital aspects of time banking and one that I’ve been working on slightly under the radar – the theoretical underpinnings based on work in education, psychology and economics.

Foundations: More complex than they first appear.

Today we’ve been looking at key papers in educational psychology on motivation – but the one that stood out today was Zimmerman (90), “Self-regulated learning and academic achievement: An overview.” in Educational Psychologist, 25.  I want my students to become their own time managers but that’s really just a facet of self-regulation. It’s important to place all of this “let’s get rubber with time” into context and build on the good science that has gone before. I want my students to have the will to learn and practice, and the skill to do so competently – one without the other is no good to me.

This is, of course, just one of the aspects that we have to look at. Do I even know how I’m planning to address the students? Within an operant framework of punishment and reward or a phenomenological framework of self-esteem? How am I expecting them to think? These seem like rather theoretical matters but I need to know how existing timeliness issues are being perceived. If students think that they’re working in a reward/punishment framework then my solution has to take that into account. Of course, this takes us well into the world of surveying and qualitative analysis, but to design this survey we need sound theory and good hypotheses so that we can start in the ballpark of the right answer and iteratively improve.

We’re looking at motivation as the key driver here. Yes, we’re interested in student resilience and performance, but it’s the motivation to move to self-regulation that is what we’re trying to maximise. Today’s readings and sketching will be just one day out of many more to come as we further refine our search from the current broader fan to a more concentrated beam.

What of the economic factors? There is no doubt that the time bank forms a primitive economy out of ‘hours’ of a student’s time but it’s one where the budget doesn’t have to balance across the class, just across an individual student. This makes things easier to an extent as I don’t have to consider a multi-agent market beyond two people: the student and me. However, the student still has private information from me, the quality, progress and provenance of their work, and I have private information from them, in terms of the final mark. Can I make the system strategy proof, where students have no incentive to lie about how much work they’ve done or don’t try to present their private information in a way that is inherently non-truthful? Can I also produce a system where I don’t overly manipulate the system through the construction of the oracle or my support mechanisms? There’s a lot of great work out there on markets and economies so I have a great deal of reading to do here as well.

So, short post – but a long and fascinating day.

Transparency: Our universal requirement

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

There’s been a lot of discussion recently on the removal of Teresa Sullivan as the President of the University of Virginia. You can read about it here or Mark’s excellent summary and commentary here, for a couple of summaries, or just search for more details because there is certainly no shortage of information. There are many theories as to why it may have happened but, what is completely clear from almost every source, Teresa Sullivan had managed to make impressive levels of positive change happen and with the agreement and support of a large percentage of her faculty and administrators.

Of course, all of us want to know the real reasons ‘why’ behind this decision because if an apparently successful President can get fired there must be a good reason. Right?

An unbiassed lens. Value this – they’re rare.

Despite wanting to speak to the Board of Visitors in open session, Sullivan has only been offered a closed session and, from what both she and the board have released, we have no real information to go on.

This is a catastrophic failure of transparency – one of the qualities that we (should) cherish as educators because it is the core of our objectivity, our ability to replicate results and of a fair system. At the start of every semester, I tell the students how they can earn their marks, what I expect, what their deadlines are, what the penalties are, where they can find our policies, what these policies mean to them and, believe me, I consider myself as bound to these statements as I do to my marriage vows. (And I am exceedingly married.) If I don’t tell my students what they need to do, then they have a black box model – they try inputs, see outputs and try to map one to the other. I don’t want them to waste time on this because I want them to learn the important stuff. By being open and transparent in my approach to teaching, we focus on the right things and work out how to do what I want, rather than guessing (and probably getting it wrong).

We can talk about the influence of boards, or unpopular decisions, as much as we want but the issue here is that the next President of UVa had better work out pretty quickly what the secret transformation is concealed inside that Black Box or they will join Teresa Sullivan on the outside. How can you attract someone with the values that you should expect to have in this position, if you can’t even tell the world how they didn’t meet a secret set of rules, apparently put in place by a small group of people.

Telling people what they need to do, giving them guidance on how to do it, being open and transparent about what these requirements are, for all comers and at all times, are the cornerstones of a fair, balanced and modern education system.

It’s a shame that the Board of Visitors at University of Virginia appear to have forgotten this.

Speaking of measurement

Posted: June 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

In a delightfully serendipitous alignment of the planets, today marks my 200th post and my 10,000th view. Given that posting something new every day, which strives if not succeeds at being useful and interesting, is sometimes a very demanding commitment, the knowledge that people are reading does help me to keep it going. However, it’s the comments, both here and on FB, that show that people can sometimes actually make use of what I’m talking about that is the real motivator for me.

via http://10000.brisseaux.com/ (This looked smaller in preview but I really liked its solidity so didn’t want to scale it)

Thank you, everyone, for your continued reading and support, and to everyone else out there blogging who is showing me how it can be done better (and there are a lot of people who are doing it much better than I am).

Have a great day, wherever you are!

Your love is like bad measurement.

Posted: June 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

(This is my 200th post. I’ve allowed myself a little more latitude on the opinionated scale. Educational content is still present but you may find some of the content slightly more confronting than usual. I’ve also allowed myself an awful pun in the title.)

People like numbers. They like solid figures, percentages, clear statements and certainty. It’s a great shame that mis-measurement is so easy to do, when you search for these figures, and so much a part of our lives. Today, I’m going to discuss precision and recall, because I eventually want to talk about bad measurement. It’s very easy to get measurement wrong but, even when it’s conducted correctly, the way that we measure or the reasons that we have for measuring can make even the most precise and delicate measurements useless to us for an objective scientific purpose. This is still bad measurement.

I’m going to give you a big bag of stones. Some of the stones have diamonds hidden inside them. Some of the stones are red on the outside. Let’s say that you decide that you are going to assume that all stones that have been coloured red contain diamonds. You pull out all of the red stones, but what you actually want is diamonds. The number of red stones are referred to as the number of retrieved instances – the things that you have selected out of that original bag of stones. Now, you get to crack them open and find out how many of them have diamonds. Let’s say you have R red stones and D1 diamonds that you found once you opened up the red stones. The precision is the fraction D1/R: what percentage of the stones that you selected (Red) were actually the ones that you wanted (Diamonds). Now let’s say that there are D2 diamonds (where D2 is greater than or equal to zero) left back in the bag. The total number of diamonds in that original bag was D1+D2, right? The recall is the fraction of the total number of things that you wanted (Diamonds, given by D1+D2) that you actually got (Diamonds that were also painted Red, which is D1). So this fraction is D1/(D1+D2),the number you got divided by the number that there were there for you to actually get.

Sorry, Logan5, your time is up.

If I don’t have any other mechanism that I can rely upon for picking diamonds out of the bag (assuming no-one has conveniently painted them red), and I want all of the diamonds, then I need to take all of them out. This will give me a recall of 100% (D2 will be 0 as there will be nothing left in the bag and the fraction will be D1/D1). Hooray! I have all of the diamonds! There’s only one problem – there are still only so many diamonds in that bag and (maybe) a lot more stones, so my precision may be terrible. More importantly, my technique sucks (to use an official term) and I have no actual way of finding diamonds. I just happen to have used a mechanism that gets me everything so it must, as a side effect, get me all of the diamonds. I haven’t actually done anything except move everything from one bag to another.

One of the things about selection mechanisms is that people often seem happy to talk about one side of the precision/recall issue. “I got all of them” is fine but not if you haven’t actually reduced your problem at all. “All the ones I picked were the right ones” sounds fantastic until you realise that you don’t know how many were left behind that were also the ones that you wanted. If we can specify solutions (or selection strategies) in terms of their precision and their recall, we can start to compare them. This is an example of how something that appears to be straightforward can actually be a bad measurement – leave out one side of precision or recall and you have no real way of assessing the utility of what it is that you’re talking about, despite having some concrete numbers to fall back on.

You may have heard this expressed in another way. Let’s assume that you can have a mechanism for determining if people are innocent or guilty of a crime. If it was a perfect mechanism, then only innocent people would go free and only guilt people would go to jail. (Let’s assume it’s a crime for which a custodial sentence is appropriate.) Now, let’s assume that we don’t have a perfect mechanism so we have to make a choice – either we set up our system so that no innocent person goes to jail, or we set up our system so that no guilty person is set free. It’s fairly easy to see how our interpretation of the presumption of innocence, the notion of reasonable doubt and even evidentiary laws would be constructed in different ways under either of these assumptions. Ultimately, this is an issue of precision and recall and by understanding these concepts we can define what we are actually trying to achieve. (The foundation of most modern law is that innocent people don’t go to jail. A number of changes in certain areas are moving more towards a ‘no one who may be guilty of crimes of a certain type will escape us’ model and, unsurprisingly, this is causing problems due to inconsistent applications of our simple definitions from above.)

The reason that I brought all of this up was to talk about bad measurement, where we measure things and then over-interpet (torture the data) or over-assume (the only way that this could have happened was…) or over-claim (this always means that). It is possible to have a precise measurement of something and still be completely wrong about why it is occurring. It is possible that all of the data that we collect is the wrong data – collected because our fundamental hypothesis is in error. Data gives us information but our interpretative framework is crucial in determining what use we can make of this data. I talked about this yesterday and stressed the importance of having enough data, but you really have to know what your data means in order to be sure that you can even start to understand what ‘enough data’ means.

One example is the miasma theory of disease – the idea that bad smells caused disease outbreaks. You could construct a gadget that measured smells and then, say in 18th Century England, correlate this with disease outbreaks – and get quite a good correlation. This is still a bad measurement because we’re actually measuring two effects, rather than a cause (dead mammals introducing decaying matter/faecal bacteria etc into water or food pathways) and the effects (smell of decomposition, and diseases like cholera, E. Coli contamination, and so on). We can collect as much ‘smell’ data as we like, but we’re unlikely to learn much more because any techniques that focus on the smell and reducing it will only work if we do things like remove the odiferous elements, rather than just using scent bags and pomanders to mask the smell.

To look at another example, let’s talk about the number of women in Computer Science at the tertiary level. In Australia, it’s certainly pretty low in many Universities. Now, we can measure the number of women in Computer Science and we can tell you exactly how many are in a given class, what their average marks are, and all sorts of statistical data about them. The risk here is that, from the measurements alone, I may have no real idea of what has led to the low enrolments for women in Computer Science.

I have heard, far too many times, that there are too few women in Computer Science because women are ‘not good at maths/computer science/non-humanities courses’ and, as I also mentioned recently when talking about the work of Professor Seron, this doesn’t appear to the reason at all. When we look at female academic performance, reasons for doing the degree and try to separate men and women, we don’t get the clear separation that would support this assertion. In fact, what we see is that the representation of women in Computer Science is far lower than we would expect to see from the (marginally small) difference that does appear at the very top end of the data. Interesting. Once we actually start measuring, we have to question our hypothesis.

Or we can abandon our principles and our heritage as scientists and just measure something else that agrees with us.

You don’t have to get your measurement methods wrong to conduct bad measurement. You can also be looking for the wrong thing and measure it precisely, because you are attempting to find data that verifies your hypothesis, but rather than being open to change if you find contradiction, you can twist your measurements to meet your hypothesis, you can only collect the data that supports your assumptions and you can over-generalise from a small scale, or from another area.

When we look at the data, and survey people to find out the reasons behind the numbers, we reduce the risk that our measurements don’t actually serve a clear scientific purpose. For example, and as I’ve mentioned before, the reason that there are too few women studying Computer Science appears to be unpleasantly circular and relates to the fact that there are too few women in the discipline over all, reducing support in the workplace, development opportunities and producing a two-speed system that excludes the ‘newcomers’. Sorry, Ada and Grace (to name but two), it turns out that we seem to have very short memories.

Too often, measurement is conducted to reassure ourselves of our confirmed and immutable beliefs – people measure to say that ‘this race of people are all criminals/cheats/have this characteristic’ or ‘women cannot carry out this action’ or ‘poor people always perform this set of actions’ without necessarily asking themselves if the measurement is going to be useful, or if this is useful pursuit as part of something larger. Measuring in a way that really doesn’t provide any more information is just an empty and disingenuous confirmation. This is forcing people into a ghetto, then declaring that “all of these people live in a ghetto so they must like living in a ghetto”.

Presented a certain way, poor and misleading measurement can only lead to questionable interpretation, usually to serve a less than noble and utterly non-scientific goal. It’s bad enough when the media does it but it’s terrible when scientists, educators and academics do it.

Without valid data, collected on the understanding that a world-changing piece of data could actually change our data, all our work is worthless. A world based on data collection purely for the sake of propping up, with no possibility of discovery and adaptation, is a world of very bad measurement.

The Many Types of Failure: What Does Zero Mean When Nothing Is Handed Up?

Posted: June 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

You may have read about the Edmonton, Canada, teacher who expected to be sacked for handing out zeros. It’s been linked to sites as diverse as Metafilter, where a long and interesting debate ensued, and Cracked, where it was labelled one of the ongoing ‘pussifications’ of schools. (Seriously? I know you’re a humour site but was there some other way you could have put that? Very disappointed.)

Basically, the Edmonton Public School Board decided that, rather than just give a zero for a missed assignment, this would be used as a cue for follow-up work and additional classes at school or home. Their argument – you can’t mark work that hasn’t been submitted, let’s use this as a trigger to try and get submission, in case the source is external or behavioural. This, of course, puts the onus on the school to track the students, get the additional work completed, and then mark out of sequence. Lynden Dorval, the high school teacher who is at the centre of this, believe that there is too much manpower involved in doing this and that giving the student a zero forces them to come to you instead.

Some of you may never have seen one of these before. This is a zero, which is the lowest mark you can be awarded for any activity. (I hope!)

Now, of course, this has split people into two fairly neat camps – those who believe that Dorval is the “hero of zero” and those who can see the benefit of the approach, including taking into account that students still can fail if they don’t do enough work. (Where do I stand? I’d like to know a lot more than one news story before I ‘pick a side’.) I would note that a lot of tired argument and pejorative terminology has also come to the fore – you can read most of the buzzwords used against ‘progressives’ in this article, if you really want to. (I can probably summarise it for you but I wouldn’t do it objectively. This is just one example of those who are feting Dorval.)

Of course, rather than get into a heated debate where I really don’t have enough information to contribute, I’d rather talk about the basic concept – what exactly does a zero mean? If you hand something in and it meets none of my requirements, then a zero is the correct and obvious mark. But what happens if you don’t hand anything in?

With the marking approach that I practice and advertise, which uses time-based mark penalties for late submission, students are awarded marks for what they get right, rather than have marks deducted for what they do wrong. Under this scheme, “no submission” gives me nothing to mark, which means that I cannot give you any marks legitimately – so is this a straight-forward zero situation? The time penalties are in place as part of the professional skill requirements and are clearly advertised, and consistently policed. I note that I am still happy to give students the same level of feedback on late work, including their final mark without penalty, which meets all of the pedagogical requirements, but the time management issues can cost a student some, most or all of their marks. (Obviously, I’m actively working on improving engagement with time management through mechanisms that are not penalty based but that’s for other posts.)

As an aside, we have three distinct fail grades for courses at my University:

  • Withdraw Fail (WF), where a student has dropped the course but after the census date. They pay the money, it stays on their record, but as a WF.
  • Fail (F), student did something but not enough to pass.
  • Fail No Submission (FNS), student submitted no work for assessment throughout the course.

Interestingly, for my Uni, FNS has a numerical grade of 0, although this is not shown on the transcript. Zero, in the course sense, means that you did absolutely nothing. In many senses, this represents the nadir of student engagement, given that many courses have somewhere from 1-5, maybe even 10%, of marks available for very simple activities that require very little effort.

My biggest problem with late work, or no submission, is that one of the strongest messages I have from that enormous data corpus of student submission that I keep talking about is that starting a pattern of late or no submission is an excellent indicator of reduced overall performance and, with recent analysis, a sharply decreased likelihood of making it to third year (final year) in your college studies. So I really want students to hand something in – which brings me to the crux of the way that we deal with poor submission patterns.

Whichever approach I take should be the one that is most likely to bring students back into a regular submission pattern. 

If the Public School Board’s approach is increasing completion rates and this has a knock-on effect which increases completion rates in the future? Maybe it’s time to look at that resourcing profile and put the required money into this project. If it’s a transient peak that falls off because we’re just passing people who should be failing? Fuhgeddaboutit.

To quote Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle, naturally): 

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. (A Scandal in Bohemia)

“Data! Data! Data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without clay.” (The Adventure of the Copper Beeches)

It is very easy to take a side on this and it is very easy to see how both sides could have merit. The issue, however, is what each of these approaches actually does to encourage students to submit their assignment work in a more timely fashion. Experiments, experimental design, surveys, longitudinal analysis, data, data, data!

If I may end by waxing lyrical for a moment (and you will see why I stick to technical writing):

If zeroes make Heroes, then zeroes they must have! If nulls make for dulls, then we must seek other ways!

The Internet is Forever

Posted: June 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

I realise that, between this blog and my other blog, I have a lot of ‘Nick” out there and there is always a chance that this may come back to haunt me. Well, given that I’m blogging under my own name and I have a vague idea of how this whole Internet thing works, I was ready for this possibility. What always amazes me, however, is when people don’t realise that the Internet is neither memoryless nor able to be reformatted through fiat, no matter how much you want it to be so. Anything that goes out into the Internet is, for most reasonable definitions, going to be there forever. Trying to act against the Internet… ooh… look up the Streisand Effect (Wikipedia link), if you don’t know what that is.

You may have read about the 9-year old Scottish school girl, Martha Payne, who was a bit disappointed about the range and quantity of school lunches she was receiving so, with her dad’s help and with her teachers’ knowledge, started a blog about it. You can read the whole story here (Wired link), with lots of tasty links, but the upshot is this:

  1. Martha wasn’t happy with her lunches because she wanted a bit more salad, to go along with the fried food, pizza and croquettes that made up her lunch.
  2. Very politely, and without a huge axe to grind, she started putting up pictures of her lunch.
  3. Within two weeks, unlimited salads had been added for children at her school. (This is just one of the improvements that took place over time.)
  4. To make better use of the positive feedback and publicity, after about 20 posts, she asked people who liked and followed her blog to donate money to a group that fund school meals in Africa.
  5. People started following her in greater numbers. Other students started sending in pictures of their lunches.
  6. People started writing about her.
  7. Martha was pulled out of class to be told that she could no longer photograph her school meals because of something that showed up in a newspaper.

This was one of the first school lunches that Martha posted about (picture from her blog). Yes, that’s the lot. The rabid sausage looking thing is potato covered in stuff. That is also MAXIMUM ALLOWABLE CORN.

At this point, the people who were directing the school, the Argyll and Bute Council, went ever so slightly mad and forgot everything I just told you about the Internet. Firstly, because it was now obvious to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people that the A&B Council had censored a little girl from publishing pictures of her lunch. Secondly, because they posted an inaccurate and rather unpleasant statement about it, seeming to forget that everyone else could see what Martha had said and what the newspaper had said. This, of course, led to far more people knowing about the original blog than any other action that they could have taken. (I’m jealous, here, because Katrina had been following the blog before the shutdown!)

Thirdly, they forgot that the Internet is forever – that their statements, their actions to try and stop the tide from rolling, their questionable interpretation of events that might, if I were less generous, look both disingenuous and condescending (although I would never accuse the Argyll and Bute Council of such actions, obviously), these actions, and everyone’s reactions to them, are now out there. Archived. Indexed. Contextualised. Remembered.

Of course, the outcomes are unsurprising. After the Scottish Education Minister’s jaw was retrieved from the carpet, I can only imagine the speed with which the council was rung and asked exactly why they thought it a good idea to carry out their actions against a polite 9 year old girl. I note that the ban has now been lifted, the charity that Martha was working with now has so much money from donations that they can now build four kitchens to feed African school children, and some councillors have had a rather quick lesson in what globally instantaneous persistent communication means in the 21st century.

The issue here is that one girl looked at her plate, thought about it, spoke to some people and then,very politely, said “Please ;, may I have some more ;?” More salad then ensued! Food got healthier! The people at the school had responded sensibly. Children in Africa were getting more food! This was a giant win-win for the school and A&B Council – but somebody in the council couldn’t resist the urge to take a silly action in response to something that was no more Martha’a fault than the reporting of the Titanic caused the iceberg to drift into the sea lane.

Well done, Martha! Good luck with your continued photography of your increasingly pleasant, nutritious and delightful Scottish school lunches.

A Disappointing Reality

Posted: June 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I read metafilter.com relatively regularly because aggregators help funnel information and their filter bias is not completely exclusive. An article that popped up recently dealt with the Kickstarter project of Anita Sarkeesian, who was asking for $6,000 to make a web series about “tropes vs women in video games”. There’s a New Statesman link here that you can follow for the whole unpleasant story but, assuming you’re in a hurry, let me summarise it for you.

  1. Blogger sees, from copious amounts of evidence, that video games seem to have trouble depicting women in reasonable and non-stereotyped ways.
  2. Blogger decides to set off Kickstarter to get money to produce a web series discussing this, money to cover research, playing more games and producing videos. (Blogger already has a track record in doing similar things for film.)
  3. Blogger becomes the target of attack, persistent, personal, vicious, violent, sick and twisted attacks from a skulking pit of suck that we call the Internet.

Anita Sarkeesian in her Kickstarter movie. (This image from newstatesmen.com.)

Here is a direct quote from Sarkeesian:

The intimidation and harassment effort has included a torrent of misogyny and hate speech on my YouTube video, repeated vandalizing of the Wikipedia page about me, organized efforts to flag my YouTube videos as “terrorism”, as well as many threatening messages sent through Twitter, Facebook, Kickstarter, email and my own website.  These messages and comments have included everything from the typical sandwich and kitchen “jokes” to threats of violence, death, sexual assault and rape.  All that plus an organized attempt to report this project to Kickstarter and get it banned or defunded.

You know what makes my heart sink? “The typical <x> jokes” because, of course, as a woman, I’m sorry, as a known woman on the Internet, she has seen and heard at least some of this before, just because she’s a woman. On her Wikipedia page, to quote the New Statesman article:

There are also references to Sarkeesian being “of Jewish descent”, an “entitled <racial epithet>” and having a “masters degree in Whining” (because why stick to one prejudice, when you can have them all?)

I can’t give you any more quotes because I try to keep this blog generally readable and there’s not much more I can say without having to ‘Adult rate’ this post.

Last year I attended a public seminar given by Professor Caroll Seron, who was a visiting international scholar in sociology and law at Flinders University, usually at UC Irvine, with talk entitled “The Changing Landscape of Women in the Professions: Why women study law and not engineering”. I went along, as an educator in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), I’m always looking for insight into why our female enrolments are so low and how we can improve them. What was most depressing about Professor Seron’s talk was that young women have similar reasons for going into engineering, they tend to do better financially but they tend to get relegated to gender roles once they go into work experience or work place environments, and then they leave. That is, a big group of mostly men will get the women to do what they think women should be doing, rather than letting them practice as engineers with their male counterparts.

It should come as no surprise that if you run a two-speed environment, or a free/constrained partitioning, the people that you are excluding will get the message and then they’ll leave. Which leaves fewer women in engineering, which gives us the same ‘women’s work’ nonsense workplaces.

So, much as I would like to think that it’s only the mindless Internet trolls that would act in such an obvious way, Professor Seron’s work suggests that the insidious attack on the validity of women in certain parts of the workplace is happening everywhere, every day. Until we address it, until we fix our culture, until we recognise that professional qualifications represent a capacity to do a job, regardless of which genitals we have, then what happened to Anita Sarkeesian is just a more obvious and, in some horrific ways, more honest account of how women are thought of every day, if they have the audacity to enter a ‘male sphere’.

Someone asked me for a name for a metadata repository today – for research and education. I suggested Hypatia. 2000 years and we haven’t got this rubbish sorted out yet? Seriously? Let’s strive for better.

Personal Reflection on Time Management: Why I Am a Bad Role Model.

Posted: June 15, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Do any of you remember that scene from “Pretty Woman”, when Richard Gere’s character Edward asks his ex-girlfriend Susan if she had spent more time talking to his secretary than to him? Her reply was, simply, “she was one of my bridesmaids”. Any time in a relationship of any kind that you don’t meet the needs of the people in the relationship, it’s going to cause problems. (Not all problems have to end with you scaling a ladder to patch up your relationship with Julia Roberts but there will be problems.) Now, before anyone is wondering (or my friends are worried), my marriage is still great, I’m talking about my professional relationship with my students.

Ah, the old Time == Money equivalence, via an article on portfoliosc.blogspot.sg

While I’ve been critical of myself and my teaching this semester, where I’ve done a good job but not necessarily excelled across the board, I haven’t identified one of the greatest problems that has crept in – no-one in their right mind should be emulating what I laughingly refer to as my work ethic, time commitment or current pursuit of success. Right now, I am not a good role model for students. While I am still ethical, professional, knowledgable and I’m apparently doing a good job, I cannot present myself as a role model to my students because I am losing the time that I need to seize new opportunities, and to allow for the unrushed catch-up time with other people that is vital to doing a job such as mine and doing it well. At the moment, any student who comes to see me does so knowing that I will have 15-30 minutes, tops, and that I will then have to rush off, elsewhere, to go and do something else. It doesn’t matter when they come to see me – if I’m in at 7:30am it’s because the day is starting at 8. If I’m still there at 7pm at night it’s because I have to be in order to meet requirements for that day or the next. Let me give you an example from my lectures.

My Student Experience of Learning and Teaching results have come in and there have been a lot of warm and rewarding comments from my students, among a pleasing overall rating. But one of my students hit the nail on the head. “[Nick] always seems to have a lot to say and constantly looks at his watch. (I assume that it’s to keep within time constraints) the problem is that he feels like he’s rushing.”

Ouch. That’s far too true and, while only one student noted it, you bet every other student was watching me use my watch to check my time progress through a busy, informative but ultimately time constrained lecture and at least some of them thought “Hmm, I have a question but I don’t want to bother him.”

It’s my job to be bothered! It’s my job to answer questions! Right now, it’s pretty obvious that students are getting the vibe that I’m a good lecturer, I care about them, I’m working well to give them the right knowledge and they love the course that I built… but… they don’t want to bother me because I’m too busy. Because I look too busy.

Every student who comes to see does so in the one of the windows that I have in my day, often between meetings, my meetings back up on each other with monotonous regularity and, looking at my calendar for last, week, the total amount of time that was uncommitted prior to the week starting was…

75 minutes.

Including the fact that Tuesday started at 7:30am and went until 6:15pm.

Please believe me when I say that I’m not boasting – I’m not proud of this, I think it’s the sign of poor scheduling and workaholism. This should be read as what it is, a sign that I have let my responsibilities pile up in a way that means that I am running the risk of becoming a stereotypically “grumpy old Professor”, who is too busy to see students.

So when you read all of this stuff about Time Banking and think “Well, I guess I can see some of his point – for assignments…” I’m trying to work out how I can take the primary goal of time banking – to make people think about their time commitments in a way that allows them to approximate a manageable uniformity of effort across time to achieve good results – and to work out how I can think about my own time in the same way. How do I adjust my boundaries in time and renegotiate while providing my own oracle and incentives for change? If I can crack that, then solving the student problem should have been made much easier.

How do I become the kind of person that I would want my students to be? Right now, it requires me to think about my commitments and my time, to treat my time as a scarce and precious commodity, but in a way that allows me to do all of the things I need to do in my job and all of the things that I love to do in my job, yet still have the time to sit around, grab a slow coffee, make a lunch booking with someone with less than a month’s notice and to get my breathing room back.

I have one of the best jobs in the world but the way I’m doing it is probably unsustainable and it’s not really in the spirit of the job that I want to do. It’s more than just me, too. I need to be seen to be approachable and to do that I have to actually be approachable, which means finding a way that makes me worthy of being a good overall role model again.

Time Banking III: Cheating and Meta-Cheating

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

One of the problems with setting up any new marking system is that, especially when you’re trying to do something a bit out of the ordinary, you have to make sure that you don’t produce a system that can be gamed or manipulated to let people get an unfair advantage. (Students are very resourceful when it comes to this – anyone who has received a mysteriously corrupted Word document of precisely the right length and with enough relevant strings to look convincing, on more than one occasion from the same student and they then are able to hand up a working one the next Monday, knows exactly what I’m talking about.)

As part of my design, I have to be clear to the students what I do and don’t consider to be reasonable behaviour (returning to Dickinson and McIntyre, I need to be clear in my origination and leadership role). Let me illustrate this with an anecdote from decades ago.

In the early 90s, I helped to write and run a number of Multi User Dungeons (MUDs) – the text-based fore-runners of the Massively Multiplayer On-line Role Playing Games, such as World of Warcraft. The games had very little graphical complexity and we spent most of our time writing the code that drove things like hitting orcs with swords or allowing people to cast spells. Because of the many interactions between the software components in the code, it was possible for unexpected things to happen – not just bugs where code stopped working but strange ‘features’ where things kept working but in an odd way. I knew a guy, let’s call him K, who was a long-term player of MUDs. If the MUD was any good, he’d not only played it, he’d effectively beaten it. He knew every trick, every lurk, the best way to attack a monster but, more interestingly, he had a nose for spotting errors in the code and taking advantage of them. One time, in a game we were writing, we spotted K walking around with something like 20-30 ’empty’ water bottles on him. (As game writers, wizards, we could examine any object in the game, which included seeing what players were carrying.)

A bit like this, but all on one person’s shoulders and no wheels.

This was weird. Players had a limited amount of stuff that they could carry, and K should have had no reason to carry those bottles. When we examined him, we discovered that we’d made an error in the code so that, when you drank from a bottle and emptied it, the bottle ended up weighing LESS THAN NOTHING. (It was a text game and our testing wasn’t always fantastic – I learnt!) So K was carrying around the in-game equivalent of helium balloons that allowed him to carry a lot more than he usually would.

Of course, once we detected it, we fixed the code and K stopped carrying so many empty bottles. (Although, I have no doubt that he personally checked each and every container we put into the game from that point on to see if could get it to happen again.) Did we punish him? No. We knew that K would need some ‘flexibility’ in his exploration of the game, knowing that he would press hard against the rubber sheet to see how much he could bend reality, but also knowing that he would spot problems that would take us weeks or months of time to find on our own. We took him into our new and vulnerable game knowing that if he tried to actually break or crash the game, or share the things he’d learned, we’d close off his access. And he knew that too.

Had I placed a limit in play that said “Cheating detected = Immediate Booting from the game”, K would have left immediately. I suspect he would have taken umbrage at the term ‘cheating’, as he generally saw it as “this is the way the world works – it’s not my fault that your world behaves strangely”. (Let’s not get into this debate right now, we’re not in the educational plagiarism/cheating space right now.)

We gave K some exploration space, more than many people would feel comfortable with, but we maintained some hard pragmatic limits to keep things working and we maintained the authority required to exercise these limits. In return, K helped us although, of course, he played for the fun of the game and, I suspect, the joy of discovering crazy bugs. However, overall, this approach saved us effort and load, and allowed us to focus on other things with our limited resources. Of course, to make this work required careful orientation and monitoring on our behalf. Nothing, after all, comes for free.

If I’d asked K to fill out forms describing the bugs he’d found, he’d never have done it. If I’d had to write detailed test documents for him, I wouldn’t have had time to do anything else. But it also illustrates something that I have to be very cautious of, which I’ve embodied as the ‘no cheating/gaming’ guideline for Time Banking. One of the problems with students at early development stages is that they can assume that their approach is right, or even assert that their approach is the correct one, when it is not aligned with our goals or intentions at all. Therefore, we have to be clear on the goals and open about our intentions. Given that the goal of Time Banking is to develop mature approach to time management, using the team approach I’ve already discussed, I need to be very clear in the guidance I give to students.

However, I also need to be realistic. There is a possibility that, especially on the first run, I introduce a feature in either the design or the supporting system that allows students to do something that they shouldn’t. So here’s my plan for dealing with this:

  1. There is a clear no-cheating policy. Get caught doing anything that tries to subvert the system or get you more hours in any other way than submitting your own work early and it’s treated as a cheating incident and you’re removed from the time bank.
  2. Reporting a significant fault in the system, that you have either deduced, or observed, is worth 24 hours of time to the first person who reports it. (Significant needs definition but it’s more than typos.)

I need the stick. Some of my students need to know that the stick is there, even if the stick is never needed, but I really can’t stand the stick. I have always preferred the carrot. Find me a problem and you get an automatic one-day extension, good for any assignment in the bank. Heck, I could even see my way clear to making this ‘liftable’ hours – 24 hours you can hand on to a friend if you want. If part of your team thinking extends to other people and, instead of a gifted student handing out their assignment, they hand out some hours, I have no problem with that. (Mr Pragmatism, of course, places a limit on the number of unearned hours you can do this with, from the recipient’s, not the donor’s perspective. If I want behaviour to change, then people have to act to change themselves.)

My design needs to keep the load down, the rewards up but, most importantly, the rewards have to move the students towards the same goals as the primary activity or I will cause off-task optimisation and I really don’t want to do that.

I’m working on a discussion document to go out to people who think this is a great idea, a terrible idea, the worst idea ever, something that they’d like to do, so that I can bring all of the thoughts back together and, as a group of people dedicated to education, come up with something that might be useful – OR, and it’s a big or, come up with the dragon slaying notion that kills time banking stone dead and provides the sound theoretical and evidence-based support as to why we must and always should use deadlines. I’m prepared for one, the other, both or neither to be true, along with degrees along the axis.

 

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