Information and Education: Other Cultures, Other Views

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

I’ve had the good fortune to be able to start finding out about how other cultures deal with information and education. This is important for several reasons. Firstly, it helps to remind me that the perception of the dominant monoculture is both primarily a perception and an accident of history, geography and timing. Secondly, it reminds me how easy it is to slip into the monocultural assumption. Finally, it helps me to prepare my students for a world that could be very different from this one.

I’m not a true relativist, I think that some cultural practices (including but not limited to formalised child abuse and female circumcision) are indefensible because they are far too great an imposition on the individual. So let me get that cultural bias onto the table to allow you to frame what I say next. Some ideas, especially when we start dealing with the value of wisdom, and the specific roles of the knowledge keepers in the dispensation and passage of that wisdom, fascinate me but I am still not sufficiently versed to be able to discuss it with any authority or detail. I can, however, discuss ideas with my students such as secret knowledge, without being a Mason, or gendered knowledge, without being of a practising culture, because to do so allows them to realise that there is more to the world than European-derived cultural norms. We don’t have to necessarily agree with all of these other ideas, especially where gender discrimination is preventing access to essential knowledge or limiting advancement, but it is important to understand that it exists.

The role of the knowledge keeper varies with culture and it can be quite confronting for my students to encounter a situation where a single person has the knowledge and may not be available all the time. At the recent Adelaide Computing Education Conventicle that I ran, two presenters from the University of South Australia presented work on integrating Australian Indigenous Culture into ICT project work and discussed the way that it changed the projects. The person needed is in hospital for treatment? Then you’ll have to wait until they get back because they are the person that you have to talk to. A friend has told me about this before in the context of geological information in the Australian Outback. You want to know about this section of the land? Well, you can’t ask the men about it, it’s not their land. If you want to ask the women, then you’re going to have to work out who can ask it and what can be told in a way that can be viewed from people outside (and men).

Just because we want to know something from a specific culture does not give us the right to demand it and getting this across to students is, I think, one of the most important steps in establishing a mutual respect between cultures and a way of avoiding misunderstandings in the future. It’s easy to start jumping up and down in that tiresome Western manner about this kind of information management but I think we can be pretty sure that the majority of the indigenous population of Australia would have quite a lot to say about having to conform to our cultural norms, so we should think pretty carefully before we start placing our rule sets over their knowledge.

Uncle Lewis O’Brien, Elder of the Kaurna people, noted once that it was common to welcome newcomers to your land, to show them around so that they could see how good the land was and how much care was being taken of it, but it was always done in the understanding that, one day, the visitor would go home. As he noted, wryly, perhaps his people should have been clearer on that last bit with the original white settlers. But we were here now.

Cultural issues are important to the people in that culture and working out how we can marry these requirements allows us to demonstrate our maturity as people and our level of comfort with our own beliefs. If, one day, somebody shows me something so amazing and truthful that I start believing in a new belief system or an entirely new way of living, then I hope that I would be able to cope with it and make sense of it. In New Zealand, Maori medical researchers are working through the cultural taboo of handling the dead in order to meet the educational requirements of working with tissue samples. If we can work with closing shops on Saturday or Sunday for Synagogue or Church (as we did for centuries), then we can have some thinking about incorporating the living beliefs of other cultures without dying of shock or making racist statements about ‘backwards cultures’. You go and thrive in the middle of Australia for a while and tell me how much knowledge it required to avoid dying of thirst on the third day.

I’m always worried when we start rejecting other cultures because monocultures are not strong, they’re weak. By definition, they are static and immutable – the rock, not the water. They’re prone to a single attack vector and, if they fail, they fail on the massive scale. I’m not talking just about our unnatural dependency on one banana or one wheat, I’m talking about real disasters that have occurred because of a lack of resistance to animal-borne diseases. The current thinking is that both North America and Australia were far more heavily populated than the original European explorers thought, but that earlier contact had introduced devastating levels of disease that almost wiped out the populations – making the subsequent colonisation and seizure of land easier. These were accidental resistance monocultures, caused by geographical isolation. Now we are connected and we have no excuse for this.

What my students have to understand is that the world of three hundred years ago was not the world of two hundred or one hundred years ago. Empires rise and fall. Cultures come and go. Today’s leader is tomorrow’s footnote. Learning how to work with other cultures and how to reduce the dependency on a single strand may be what changes the way that our history unfolds. I’m not naive enough to believe that we’re at the end of history (the end of conflict) but I think that we’re sufficiently well connected and well informed that we can tell our students that not everything different is wrong and scary, and that not everything familiar is right and just.

I wonder what they’ll be saying about us, in 2112?

The Invisible Fragility of our World of Knowledge

Posted: December 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

If I were to mention that I was currently researching Rongorongo, as background for a story in which the protagonists communicated in a range of reverse boustrophedonic texts, there are three likely outcomes.

  1. You would roll your eyes and close the browser, or,
  2. You would think “Aha, that’s what I was talking about last night at the Friends of Rapanui Quiz Night. How apt!”, or,
  3. You would go and look up Rongorongo and boustrophedon in Wikipedia.

What I am fairly sure that most of you will not do, is to go and look up the information in a book, go to a library or even ask another human. (Some of you will have used physical means such as books or libraries because you are being deliberate physical users. I am after the usage patterns that your adopt unconsciously, or as a matter of actual habit, then those that are employed because of a deliberate endeavour to use another source.) There is no doubt that we live in an amazing world of immediately available information and that it has changed the way that we use, store and retrieve information but this immediacy has come at a cost: we tend not to use or consult physical media as much. As a result, there is less of the physical to hand, most of the time. I have noticed a major change in the way that I use information and, while I tend to read and annotate material on printed paper (using a fountain paper, no less, so I am not judging anyone for their affectations), I search and edit in the digital form. Why? Each form has its own efficiencies.

A physical artefact that we can no longer read.

A physical artefact that we can no longer read.

The absence of the physical artefact is often not noticeable unless we are cut off from the Internet or from our stored versions of the material. Last week, my laptop decided that it would no longer boot and I realised, with mounting horror, that my only copies of certain works in progress were sitting on this ‘dead’ machine. Why weren’t they backed up? Because I was not connected to the Internet for a few hours and I had left my actual backup device at home, to reduce the risk of losing both laptop and backup in the same localised catastrophe.

The majority of the on-line information repositories are remarkable in their ease of use and sheer utility – as long as you can connect to them .We, however, have an illusion of availability and cohesion that is deceptive and it is the comfortable analogue of the printed page that lulls us into this. Wikipedia, for example, presents a single page full of text, just like a book does. It is only when you look at the History and the Discussion that it dawns on you that each character on the page could have been contributed by a difference source. While the printed page is the final statement of a set of arguments between the authors, the editors and their mutual perceptions of reality, it is static once printed. In Wikipedia, its strength and its weakness is that the argument never ends. Anything on a publicly editable page is inherently fragile and ephemeral. What is there today may not be there tomorrow and there is no guarantee that what appears sound now will be anything other than horrible and deliberately broken in a second.

The fragility doesn’t stop there, however, because we don’t actually have any part of Wikipedia inside our offices, unless you happen to be Jimmy Wales. (Hi!) Wikipedia.org, the domain name of Wikipedia, is registered in California, but the server I was connected to (for the queries I put above) was in Washington State, and there were some 17 active network devices involved in routing traffic from me (in Adelaide) to the server (in Washington) and then getting the information back. This doesn’t count the active electronic devices that I can’t see in this path and, believe me, there will be a lot of them. Now we build a lot of redundancy into the global network that we call the Internet (the network of networks of networks) but a major catastrophe on the West Coast will quickly force so much traffic onto those backup links that information flow will stop and, for some good technical reasons, it will then start to fall over.

So the underlying physical pathways that actually shunt the network information from point to point could fall over. At that point, if I had a book on the linguistics of Easter Island, I could read it by torchlight even if I had no local power. A severe power failure here or in enough places along the way, or at Wikipedia’s data centres? Suddenly, my ability to find out anything is blocked.

But let’s look at the information itself. People have been editing the Rongorongo page for over 10 years. The first version (that we can see, Wikipedia can invisibly delete revisions) is recorded for the 25th of November, 2002. Happy double digits, Rongorongo page! Since then there have been roughly 3000 edits. Are all of them the same quality? Hmm. Here are some comments:

14 April 2006, “reinstate link to disambiguate Rongorongo, wife of Turi, NZ”

18 May 2006, “If I want to be blocked, why do I improve these pages? REMEMBER LIUVIGILD! TRY BLOCKING ME!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA” (sic)

18 May 2006, “Excuse my insolence. This is not vandalism, as it is all true. Why do you insist on reverting it? Please send a PERSONAL message of explanation. Sincerely, 64.107.172.130”

28 April 2007, “Inhabitants of Easter Island have many names for it.”

7 April 2011, “A picture of a banana leaf is not helpful here. I looked on this banana leaf for scribblings. I know what one looks like, and if someone doesn’t, they can read about it at banana.”

12 November, 2012, “What’s wrong, Kwamikagami? It is what it is, isn’t it? Just a straight up comparison of rongorongo and Indus Valley glyphs, nothing more. I’d love to know which ones are ‘not true”‘according to you”

There are periods when this page is changing every few minutes and sometimes the data is the same for days or even months. But most people don’t know this because they never think to look in the history or talk sections. Right now, it appears that someone is disputing the authority of Kwamikagami, a person who has carried out a lot of edits on this page. This is important because if you say to someone “Hey, look at this page” then 3000 edits over 10 years says that the chances of the page changing in a day is something like 80%. The burstiness would have an impact on this but the general idea is that the simple page on a dead text(?) is more likely to change on a daily basis than not.

Does this make Wikipedia any better or any worse than the printed page? I think it makes it different because we have to treat it as an evolving discussion that we have walked in on, because of its inherent fragility and ephemeral nature.

We live in amazing times, where I can use a small hand-held device to access almost everything that our species has created. And yet, when I go to look at how robust this knowledge source is and how vulnerable we are to losing our connection to that knowledge, I am reminded that we are going to have to work out how to do this properly. If we give up the fixed physical forms (books, CDs, DVDs), then so be it, but we must make sure that we deal with this fragility before we become too seduced by the immediacy.  We have to think about this for our students too. How do we provide them with artefacts that they can consult down the line, when they need to look something up? Books have no licensing agreements, never expire and do not have to be abandoned when a digital format changes. Yet, they have none of the advantages.

I mention this because I am really looking forward to seeing how people address and solve this challenge – how can we have the best of the immediate and convenient, while having the enduring presence and guarantee of future access? Rongorongo itself is a physical artefact for which we have lost the knowledge of reading, or if it is even a text at all. It’s a reminder that we have faced this problem before and we have not solved it sufficiently well. Perhaps this time.

AAEE 2012 – Yes, Another Conference

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

In between writing up the conventicle (which I’m not doing yet), the CI Conference (which I’m doing slowly) and sleep (infrequent), I’m attending the Australasian Association for Engineering Education 2012 conference. Today, I presented a paper on e-Enhancing existing courses and, through a co-author, another paper on authentic teaching tool creation experiences.

My first paper gave me a chance to look at the Google analytics and tracking data for the on-line material I created in 2009. Since then, there have been:

  • 11,118 page views
  • 2.99 pages viewed/visit
  • 1,721 unique visitors
  • 3,715 visits overall

The other thing that is interesting is that roughly 60% of the viewers return to view the podcasts again. The theme of my talk was “Is E-Enhancement Worth It” and I had the pleasure of pointing out that I felt that it was because, as I was presenting, I was simultaneously being streamed giving my thoughts of computer networks to students in Singapore and (strangely enough) Germany. As I said in the talk and in the following discussion, the podcasts are far from perfect and, to increase their longevity, I need to make them shorter and more aligned to a single concept.

Why?

Because while the way I present concepts may change, because of sequencing and scaffolding changes, the way that I present an individual concept is more likely to remain the same over time. My next step is to make up a series of conceptual podcasts that are maybe 3-5 minutes in duration. Then the challenge is how to assemble these – I have ideas but not enough time.

One of the ideas raised today is the idea that we are seeing the rise of the digital native, a new type of human acclimatised to a short gratification loop, multi-tasking, and a non-linear mode of learning. I must be honest and say that everything I’ve read on the multi-tasking aspect, at least, leads me to believe that this new generation don’t multi-task any better than anyone else did. If they do two things, then they do them more slowly and don’t achieve the same depth: there’s no shortage of research work on this and given the limits of working memory and cognition this makes a great deal of sense. Please note, I’m not saying that I don’t believe that Homo Multiplexor can’t emerge, it’s just that I have not yet any strong scientific evidence to back up the anecdotes. I’m perfectly willing to believe that default searching activities have changed (storing ways of searching rather than the information) because that is a logical way to reduce cognitive load but I am yet to see strong evidence that my students can do two things at once well and without any loss of time. Either working memory has completely changed, which we should be able to test, or we risk confusing the appearance of doing two things at once with actually doing two things at once.

This is one of those situations that, as one of my colleagues observed, leaves us in that difficult position of being told, with great certainty, about a given student (often someone’s child) who can achieve great things while simultaneously watching TV and playing WoW. Again, I do not rule out the possibility of a significant change in humanity (we’re good at it) but I have often seen that familiar tight smile and the noncommittal nod as someone doesn’t quite acknowledge that your child is somehow the spearhead of a new parallelised human genus.

It’s difficult sometimes to express ideas like this. Compare this to the numbers I cited above. Everyone who reads this will look at those numbers and, while they will think many things, they are unlikely to think “I don’t believe that”. Yet I know that there are people who have read this and immediately snorted (or the equivalent) because they frankly disbelieve me o the multi-tasking, with no more or less hard evidence than that supporting the numbers. I’m actually expecting some comments on this one because the notion of the increasing ability of young people to multitask is so entrenched. If there is a definitive set of work supporting this, then I welcome it. The only problem is that all I can find supports the original work on working memory and associated concepts – there are only so many things you can focus on and beyond that you might be able to function but not at much depth. (There are exceptions, of course, but the 0.1% of society do not define the rule.)

The numbers are pasted straight out of my Google analytics for the learning materials I put up – yet you have no more reason to believe them than if I said “83% of internet statistics are made up”, which is a made up statistic. (If is is true, it is accidentally true.) We see again one of the great challenges in education: numbers are convincing, evidence that contradicts anecdote is often seen as wrong, finding evidence in the first place can be hard.

One more day of conference tomorrow! I can only wonder what we’ll be exposed to.

David and Goliath: Who Needs The Strategy? (CI 2012 Masterclass)

Posted: December 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I attended a second masterclass on the first day of Creative Innovations, this one entitled “Strategic Diagnosis and Action”, given by Richard Rumelt from UCLA. Richard gave a fascinating and well-polished presentation on how you can actually get a strategy that you can use, as oppose to something that you can print up, put on the wall, and completely ignore. Richard’s definition of strategy is pretty straightforward:

A strategy is a coherent mix of policy and action designed to surmount a high-stakes challenge.

As I believe I’ve noted before, having a strategy is not just useful in terms of knowing where you’re going, it also allows you to make a choice between two (apparently) equal choices. Richard’s question is “What are we going to do in order to meet a challenge?” and, in my application, this makes any choice a matter of “which of these choices will give me the greatest assistance in meeting the challenge?”

As Richard said in his talk, when David met Goliath, if you’re Goliath you don’t think you need a strategy. David, however, has a high-stakes challenge and better be as fast with his mind as he is with his feet. Goliath winning? That’s not a strategy story; a strategy story is about the discovery or creation of strength (where we’re surprised to see it).

David has a post-negotiation debrief with the head of Goliath industries.

David has a post-negotiation debrief with the head of Goliath industries.

Another point that was clearly emphasised is that if you take a challenge focus to your strategy, your strategy can be specific to that challenge and, as a result, clearer and more goal focused. The example of Apple was given. When Steve Jobs returned in 1997, he had to implement a new strategy but it wasn’t one of growth or market domination, it was a survival strategy. Cutting 15 desktops to 1? Survival. Cutting 5 of the 6 national retailers? Survival? Off-shoring everything possible  to reduce expenditure? Survival. This is a coherent strategy with clear and sharp action – this is a survival strategy. The strategy is all about addressing the most important challenge that you have. If it’s survival, fix that first.

The speaker had apparently spoken to Jobs in 1998 and Jobs had said that he was going to “wait for the next big thing”. Well, in 1998 that made sense. Rather than being a second-rate (or small share) PC producer, Apple’s approach was to find a new market where they could dominate. The survival strategy kept the company going for long enough that they could switch to a new strategy of dominating the new music and mobile markets. And, of course, by doing this, Jobs got to set the new rules for that area. There’s a reason that iPods, by default, only work with iTunes and that Apple has complete vertical control. That reason is predominantly because it allows Apple to totally control that market, to avoid having to go through the hard lessons of 1997 and 1998 again.

So, taking this into my Educational Sector setting, what is the strategy that Universities should be employing? Well, first of all, the global tertiary sector is not one business so we’re restricted to individual institution decision making, even where state and federal guidelines are in play. The survival strategy is, to me, effectively off the table. If global education is under an extinction threat then we are facing a catastrophe of such proportion that human survival is probably the requisite strategy. If the MOOC is so successful, and of the required quality, that it can replace the University then a survival strategy for the Unis is ethically questionable as we are spending more money to achieve the same result, assuming that when MOOCs are fully costed they end up being cheaper.

So, either way we slice it, a survival strategy for Universities doesn’t actually look like a valid one. But what does a strategy for a University look like anyway? Let’s step back and ask what Richard things a general strategy is and isn’t.

Firstly, strategy is not a set of goals and, according to Richard, you know it’s a bad strategy when it’s all performance goals and no diagnosis and analysis. “We will increase revenue by 20%.” Great. How?

You know it’s a bad strategy when it’s all fluff. “Our fundamental strategy is one of customer-centric intermediation” from a bank. Good, you’re a retail bank, now what? How do you apply a values statement meaningfully to 30,000 people? Richard sees this as a childish approach – a third grade recitation of “I will not chew gum in school” and not productive when contaminating a strategy.

If no-one has bothered to diagnose what the problem is – bad strategy. To act with intelligence and to get a good strategy, you need to define the nature of the problem. (One of the most refreshing things about the new strategy that is about to be released for my Uni is that I know that a great deal of problem definition underpins it – so I’m quite looking forward to reading it when it’s released shortly. I am quite hopeful that little or any of the critique here will apply.)

What about if you have 47 strategies, 178 Action items and Action Item #122 is “Develop a strategic plan”? It’s a dog’s dinner that everything has gone into that you could find in the fridge, with no discipline, diagnosis, analysis or thought.

So how do we make a good strategy? Diagnose the challenge. Provide guiding policy. Build a set of coherent actions into the strategy and don’t just provide goals as if they are self-solving problem elements.

In terms of Universities, and the whole higher education sector, this means that we not only have to work out what our challenges are, but we have to pick challenges that we can solve. (A previous Prime Minister of Australia famously declared that “by 1990, no Australian child will be living in poverty.” Given that the definition of poverty in Australia is relative to the affluence enjoyed by other sectors, rather than the ‘true’ international definition of subsistence, this is declaring war on an unwinnable challenge. The goal “Stop the drug trade” is equally fraught as it requires legal powers that do not, and may not, exist.)

What are the key challenges facing Universities? Well, if we take survival off the table for the institutions, we change the challenge focus to “what are the key challenges facing the post-school education market in Australia?” and that gives us an entirely new lens on the problem.

I have a lot of thinking to do but, as I said, I’m looking forward to what our new strategic plan will look like for the next 5 years, because I hope that it will help me to identify a subset of challenges that I can look at. Having done that, then I can ask “which are the ones I can help to solve?”

Killing Your Darlings: The Cost of Innovation (CI 2012)

Posted: December 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’m going to take a little more informal approach to some of the themes expressed at CI 2012, because I have a lot of things to do, and you have a lot of things to do, so we can’t sit here waiting for me write everything up and you most certainly don’t want to read 100,000 words about What Nick Did In Late Spring In Melbourne. So let’s go forward.

Innovation is the introduction of the new, whether product, service or idea, but we know what this really means – it means that we have to let go of something old. Letting go of something old is not going to be easy, and how difficult it is can be a very complicated and emotional calculus, so innovation, which can already be hard, is made harder because change can hurt.

If you’re a writer, you may have heard the term “Kill your darlings”, which is attributed to Faulkner (the other one) and is a recasting of the following quote from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch:

“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – whole-heartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings”

On shallow reading, it appears that any attachment to something makes it eligible for extinction when what is really meant is that sentimentality is the enemy of objectivity. Innovative change is full of situations where your attachment to elements of your existing situation, or an entrenched commitment to the status quo (no, not the band), will compromise your ability to objectively assess whether you are making a correct decision.

There is a statement that every industry will go away at some stage – we’ve seen the rise and fall of so many that such a statement appears to have some credibility. But what about education? We have changed a great deal but will the industry of education every truly disappear? I honestly can’t say but I can talk about a simpler problem, which is what the “darlings” are in the traditional Higher Education system. And, sure enough, when we start talking about innovation and the threat of the new, we see these darlings protected in a way that doesn’t necessarily always seem objective. Now, we don’t have to kill any of them but change is inevitable and, if change is to come in, something has to go out. I have a starting list, which I’m planning to work on over time.

  1. Darling #1, The Lecture:

    We know that the traditional 1-to-many broadcast lecture is a successful way to occupy the time of everyone in the room but it is most certainly not the best way to get certain types of information across. There are many different aspects to this but conference talks and seminars are a world away from the traditional “today I will talk slowly about differential equations while I flash hundreds of slides past you at a speed that you can’t record and no you can’t have any notes or recording”.

    Yes, some lecturers are better than others but when information transfer and retention is important, the lecture is not the right delivery mechanism. Yet, it’s almost unassailable in its ubiquity. It’s a darling.

  2. Darling #2, The Exam:

    I was looking back at my Grand Challenges course, which had a 20% final examination of some of the core topics, and thought about what it had achieved. From my marking of the exam and review of how students prepared, my goal for the exam worked for most of the class. Most had reviewed all of the core material and organised it in a useful way to be able to summarise the core content of the course.

    But did it have to be assigned as a 1 hour exam in a giant examination hall? Did it anything to the course?

    You know, I’m not sure that it did. Next time, I might just assign an exercise to provide a portfolio of work from the course in an organised form and then have an assessment of that which is effectively a viva voce examination to assess that students had done enough work to produce a useful index and had sufficient familiarity to rapidly contextualise problems and knowledge. But, and this is important, far more conversationally.

    The examination can be made highly objective and has the advantage that you are really pretty sure that the student is doing the work – but we’re already seeing cheating technology that we will have more and more trouble dealing with. If the only supporting argument for the exam is that it’s harder to cheat, we need a better reason. If the argument is that it will force the student to learn the work, then we’ve got that around the wrong way. We need to bring motivation back into the rest of the course. Right now, the vast majority of learning happens 2-3 days before the exam and is forgotten by the following weekend.

    And yet, exams are everywhere. They’re entrenched institutional artefacts. Hello, darling.

  3. Darling #3, Me and my University:

    Oh no! Apostasy! But let’s be honest, the primary question around MOOC is whether we need the Universities that we’ve had for so many hundreds of years. If we’re questioning the University, then we’re starting to question the role and future of the teaching academic. Teacherless education was a theme that popped up occasionally at CI 2012 and, while I instinctively react to this in terms of ‘well, who builds these experiences’, we can still learn a lot by looking at what we actually need to make things work.

    I have a small office in a big and old University, with my academic robes hanging on the door for when I walk into the graduation ceremony in the giant old sandstone building once or so every year to farewell and congratulate my graduating students. How much of this is necessary recognition of achievement and how much is a darling?

    Let’s face it – we’re darlings ourselves.

Let me stress that I am not saying that everything must go, but innovation needs space and that means something else has to go. Rather than saying that everything is sacrosanct, we should really be looking at what can and should go, which will drive a search for the new and innovative. My hope would be that by looking at these things, we find the reasons why some of these could stay and belong in the future, rather than propping them up with sentimentality and an ultimately weak approach to necessary change and reinvigoration.

What are your darlings?

By George, I Think She’s Got I… No, She Hasn’t: Threshold Concepts and Oscillation

Posted: November 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

“Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?” marks the end of the musical “My Fair Lady” and, in many ways, sets the stage for a new set of developments in the life of the former-flowergirl Eliza Doolittle and the curmudgeonly and misogynistic Henry Higgins. (A far more romantic end in many ways than the original Shaw but, as one the producers noted, the public were happier with the upbeat ending. In fact, one of the producers observed to Shaw that “Your ending is damnable; you ought to be shot.” O tempora, o mores!) Much of this play/film, about the re-education of a Cockney flower girl into the speech patterns and behaviours of the wealthy English upper class, focused on Eliza’s transition and her ability to apply all of the knowledge that Higgins and Pickering sought to impart. Eliza, for dramatic value, had grand successes and major set-backs. Having mastered some fundamental phonemes, her exuberant nature was her undoing at the racetrack. Convinced that she had now absorbed the speech patterns so well that Cockney was now behind her, the entrance of her father immediately undid everything and brought her back to her birth speech.

Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews from the Broadway production. The film version featured Audrey Hepburn as the studio wanted a ‘name’. Not only did Hepburn have to be dubbed for singing but Julie Andrews went on to take the Oscar for Mary Poppins in the same year. Ouch.

This is a play, so let’s not read too much into the educational presentation, but as an introduction to the phenomenon of oscillation, it’s quite a nice one. Threshold concept theory holds that there are certain concepts in every area of knowledge that are fundamentally challenging to the learner. These concepts are alien or counter-intutitive, they link together a great many concepts from within the area or subarea, but upon reaching a level of understanding of the concept, it transforms the way that we think from that time on. These threshold concepts mark a boundary between areas and ways of thinking: truly mastering a threshold concept will open up new vistas and change forever how we regard that area of knowledge. The problem is that the progress that a learner makes towards mastering the threshold concept is not guaranteed to be a smooth path: this is a road towards a challenge and it is often a hard road to travel. When a learner starts trying to master the new concept, they enter what is referred to as the liminal state and it is during this state that they can experience oscillation and risk developing fragile knowledge.

Oscillation is the movement backwards and forwards in terms of developing and understanding components of the concept, and is frustrating to both learner and educator as the learner appears to be ‘getting it’ then moves backwards. An obvious misinterpretation of this is that the learner has “stopped trying” or is either “’lazy” or “stupid”, when in fact this reflects the intrinsic cognitive difficulty in the underlying concept. Fragile knowledge is where the learner has some notions of how to solve problems but cannot construct a clean solution, which may allow excellent participation in certain activities and assessments but not others. Along with these, it’s important to remember that  sometimes learners will resort to mimicry: turning around what the learner has already seen and presenting it back to us, again giving a false impression of understanding.

We have, I suspect, all faced the student who appears to have (after much effort) achieved the understanding that we both sought and, as we probe their knowledge, we only see confirmation of mastery until, oh no, suddenly it all falls apart and we realise that what we were seeing was built upon fragile knowledge and couldn’t really function as a foundation for all of the concepts, or that we had unwittingly provided an environment where the student could parrot our own wisdom back to us and give us the impression of understanding. We must, however, remember how frustrating it must be for the student to suddenly discover that all of the progress that they thought they had made was not actually sustainable or all that solid. Taking an accusatory or judgemental stance at this point is really not going to help anyone but, if we accept that threshold concepts exist and provide this level of challenge, we have a way to think about these kinds of setbacks that say “We’re in the liminal state. This is just what happens.”

One of the reasons that I think threshold concept theory resonates with me so deeply is that gives me a basis for a quiet stoicism in the face of these kinds of setbacks. You probably shouldn’t set out on a cross-country trip and expect to see no red lights or roadworks, or to never get lost taking a turn off to go and buy lunch, because you will be deeply unhappy and frustrated by the first reversal of fortune. You also would not build in enough time to reach your destination! (One time I was driving about 6 hours across the US to see my family and the GPS took me the ‘fast’ way, which turned out to be DC to the Tennessee/VA border via West Virginia. Fortunately my family love me, so showing up 30 minutes late wasn’t a big deal, but the fault was mine because I had not allowed enough time to handle 30-60 minutes of delay, and that’s pretty much the amount of delay I get over time on that trip.) Sometimes things will take longer because these concepts are hard to grasp and we are on uncertain ground. This isn’t about learning 2×2, 2×3 and so on, this is going to transform the way that someone thinks. That makes it important.

These ideas have huge implications on everything we do with students that have deadlines or any form of time restriction. If these concepts are so counter-intutitive and challenging, then we would expect to see variation in how quickly people pick things up. Maybe that one-hour lecture slot isn’t enough? This is where the new materials and media that we have really start to look useful. Suddenly, your lecture recordings give people the chance to think and digest, rolling forwards and backwards to get a really good grip. Scaffolded on-line materials, with increasing conceptual difficulty that allows the student to stage their self-testing and establish that they are thinking along the right lines, become much more important and are worth a lot more invested time.

Accepting threshold concept theory, however, may be a threshold concept itself – it may be a while before we see really widespread acceptance of this simple idea.

First Class Service from a Classless Medium

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

The summary of today’s post is that I’m not a fan of curve grading. If you’ve read enough from me about this before, feel free to skip this post. 🙂 Now, I should note that a lot of what is in here is based on my observations of Facebook from the outside – there may be technical stuff that I’m missing because I haven’t had the time to dig down. Clarifications and corrections are welcome.

If you read yesterday’s post, you’ll see a lot of discussion about how people use (or misuse) Facebook but one thing that is becomingly increasingly apparent is that Facebook is trying to do a very difficult thing: offer different tiers of service on a system that is fundamentally not tiered. If you’ve been on a plane recently, you’ll know that you all get to the destination at the same time, regardless of how much you paid. The fundamental service of the airlines, getting you from A to B in a giant metal tube, is such that passengers on the same plane will all have the same experience in terms of travel time. This is, of course, why the differentiators in service revolve around the overall pleasure and comfort of the experience. Flying long-haul economy is a transport miracle but, that aside, it’s not a very pleasant experience. The seats are cramped, you’ll get at least a stiff neck and most likely ballooned legs from being jammed into the seated position for hours. Up in Premium, Business and First, passengers are stretching out, getting more food, have a higher ratio of staff to passenger and enjoy more access to much nicer toilets. But where did all of that extra space and service come from? Here’s a hint: the next time you’re in economy and wonder why you can’t stretch your legs, it’s because someone is paying more to enjoy some of that space up the front of the plane.

Facebook is, at its core, really simple. You create an account. People who are your ‘friends’ decide to monitor the things that you type. You monitor theirs. If you have an interest in a group or page, you’ll ask to see their updates as well. Updates can be displayed in date/time order (newest first) or by level of interest (how many people are talking about it). Well, it was that simple. Now, as you will know, there is an ongoing move towards restricting the degree to which information naturally flows from one person to another. Now, my friends will see most of my posts (unless they take some steps to change the way that they view me) and if I happen to watch a page from a business, the business needs to pay some money to FB to ensure that all of their followers receive all of their updates.

Facebook, in its simplest form, sends updates to interested people but, as the Facebook people have worked out, this does not allow you to easily impose a premium service over the top. You have a free water fountain that serves chilled water. Why would you buy a bottle of water from the guy standing next to the fountain? In this case, the guy owns the fountain and he decides that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Want to guarantee that you’ll never go thirsty? Better buy my water.

I wouldn’t have a problem with any of this if the base service was kept at a reasonable standard. I’m looking to shift my frequent flyer status for airlines to one of Air New Zealand or Singapore because, in all my experiences, their economy experience is absolutely fine. Plane goes from A to B. Seat is comfortable enough for 15 hours. Staff are nice. Food is fine. On my usual carrier, which shall remain nameless, it takes me longer to recover from the cramped conditions of their economy and aggravates my surgically altered left knee. (For the record, I’m 5’11” and about 190lbs so I should fit into a seat without too much fuss.) Having flown premium and business on nameless airways, I can tell you that it’s fantastic but we have flipped from a below acceptable standard to above acceptable standard (in fact, the food in Business is excessive and gluttonous, in my opinion) without ever having settled on the minimum standard of acceptability for what is, ultimately, all of us flying together in the same metal tube.

Facebook used to have a base, acceptable service, that revolved around reliably showing me things from my friends. Where do sponsored links fit into this? They don’t, unless FB can inject unasked for content into my stream when someone pays them to. So, now, I am reading things from people who are not my friends, that I cannot control, because someone else is paying for it. Of course, the kicker on this is ‘why would you pay FB to do this?’ and the answer is ‘Only if FB would not guarantee universal delivery if you didn’t’. Now, people being people, if FB said “Hey, commercial accounts have to pay this but private individuals wouldn’t” then there would be a surprisingly large number of ‘private individuals’ trying to sell you stuff. So, because of human nature, when FB cuts down on people seeing everything that you post (requiring sponsorship to push ideas or to guarantee universal subscription) this is going to apply pretty much across the board.

Now, I am not paying for Facebook but it is becomingly apparent that I am being sold by Facebook because all of the downgrades that I am seeing are intended to provide a reason for people to pay to reach me as a consumer. My problem is, free or not, the way that Facebook is altering the service to make me as a product more attractive to a consumer is affecting my experience. They are forcing a vast majority of people into a second-class experience in order to be able to sell the default set-up as a first-class experience. There always will be some kind of load filtering on a system like this but this one, so blatantly and explicitly linked to selling reach, really makes you wonder what their long term plans are for their community.

Now, you’ll either be agreeing with me or disagreeing with me by now, as if you stopped reading out of boredom you won’t see this! So let me give you a first/second-class analogy from education: curve grading. If I have a fixed number of A slots in my class then, by extension, anyone extra who would have got an A MUST get a B in order to be able to grant the A’s to other people. Yes, we’ve sorted them by degree of A but, under our original terms, the student has done A-level work, we’re just not giving it to him or her because someone else is being prioritised up and, to preserve the experience of the A people, someone has to get Bs. More insidiously, somebody has to fail. We’ve now gone further than the airline or Facebook examples, because now the people in Business can require that someone be kicked off the plane. You don’t click on enough sponsored links, your login is rescinded and you have to leave Facebook. You may not care about air travel and, let’s be honest, it’s a giant privilege in any way you look at it. You might think “Hey, FB isn’t my life and it’s not like I’m paying for it” and that’s very true.

But carving out a new ‘premium’ experience that is the old ‘fair and general’ experience and doing so by forcing other people into a second-class experience is a pretty lousy way to treat people and, in my opinion, it’s worse when those people are your students and you make them competitive through an artificial resource scarcity, based around some mistaken notion that this is a reasonable thing to do. You don’t have to think hard to come up with examples that quickly demonstrate how broken this kind of system is. Facebook bugs me but it won’t cause me too much grief if it goes away tomorrow. A student’s academic progress, GPA and their own confidence? All too important to put into an artificially imposed additional classification scheme that forces classes where they may not belong.

A brief contemplation on a captured moment.

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

You will all have seen the picture of the man standing in front of the tanks near Tiananmen Square. (Those of you who haven’t are probably also not seeing this post. What a coincidence!) What you may not have seen is one of the shots prior to this moment, captured by Terril Jones, which shows the Unknown Rebel (Tank Man) standing patiently, well before the tanks reached him. If you look at the picture, you’ll see him on the vertical midline, just left of centre, with his trousers hitched awkwardly and holding two shopping bags. As far as we know, from this point on, he stops the column, walks in front of the tanks to stop them, climbs on, chats to some of the people on the tank, gets down, blocks them again and is then seized by two men and propelled into the crowd.

(C) Terril Jones. Low quality image used for reference.

This photograph is important. This clearly shows that this action was not spur of the moment – Tank Man didn’t rush out of the crowd – but it also shows the mundanity of the whole scene. Tanks are rolling in the street but, from what it looks like, this man is on his way back from the shops. The bags were never used against the tanks and they’re not exactly military issue. The most likely explanation is that this is someone who, walking back from the shops around lunchtime, possibly with lunch for his colleagues or food for his family, saw the people fleeing Tiananmen square, heard the tanks and suddenly realised that he was going to have to stand in front of them and stop them advancing.

I have had two moments in my life where I have realised that I am about to try and disarm someone with a knife. Both of them were terrifying as hell but both of them required action. Fortunately for me, both people had little idea what they were doing and I managed to avoid getting hurt, which means that (a) I was profoundly lucky and (b) do not recommend this course to anyone. However, sometimes, you just realise that something has to happen and that you are going to be the person who does it. But actions on this scale (taking on a stream of Type 59 Chinese tanks) defy standard human reaction and are almost completely incomprehensible.

Many theories have been advanced about Tank Man’s actions. Was he mentally unstable? Well, this is hardly the action we’d expect of a sane man, certainly. But he seems so unprepared and so determined at the same time. He hasn’t even put the bags down to adjust his trousers! My belief is that this man is completely sane, except that he is about to do something that, by any definition, is crazy. We can’t ask Tank Man because he has never shown up again. Anywhere.

Any number of us, when faced with a much less challenging situation, would have looked at the shopping bags and thought “well, I can’t stop, the food will get cold/ice cream will melt/meat will spoil” and conveniently decamped in the direction that the two foreground sprinters are indicating. And that is completely reasonable! I have said before that I can admire the actions of people and yet not even begin to comprehend how they can set themselves with such resolve in the face of terrible things.

We talk about ethics, we teach ethics and, all too often, we discover that while our students can write down the differences between Kantian Maxims and Benthamite Utilitarianism, they still cheat on tests or copy work because they haven’t actually learned how to act ethically. The Tank Man, for me, is an example of the resolute commitment to one’s beliefs that we are really hoping for in all of this ethical teaching. This picture confirms the premeditation that was required – can you imagine how much resolve it took to stand there as tens of tanks rumbled towards you? I’ve been in the Armoured Corps and tanks are big, scary and loud. If I wasn’t in one, I wouldn’t want to be near them because they could crush you like a bug and not even notice. What we see in the picture above is resolve, despite having bags in your hand and slightly baggy trousers. The mundane transformed into something far less ordinary.

The shot itself is also far from ordinary both by intention and by accident. Accidentally, I believe, the photographer has captured true opposites in the shot and given it a spectacular level of contrast. On the left hand side, you have a man who is prepared to stand in front of tanks and not move. On the right is a sign bearing the Chinese character for ‘Yield’.

Not something that the Unknown Rebel was planning to do that day.

The Hips Don’t Lie – Assuming That By Hips You Mean Numbers

Posted: November 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

For those who missed it, the United States went to the polls to elect a new President. Some people were surprised by the outcome.

Even Benedict Cumberbatch, seen here between takes on Sherlock Series 3.

Some people were not, including the new King of Quants, Nate Silver. Silver studied economics at the University of Chicago but really came to prominence in his predictions of baseball outcomes, based on his analysis of the associated statistics and sabermetrics. He correctly predicted, back in 2008, what would happen between Obama and Clinton, and he predicted, to the state, what the outcome would be in this year’s election, even in the notoriously fickle swing states. Silver’s approach isn’t secret. He looks at all of the polls and then generates a weighted average of them (very, very simplified) in order to value certain polls over others. You rerun some of the models, change some parameters, look at it all again and work out what the most likely scenario is. Nate’s been publishing this regularly on his FiveThirtyEight blog (that’s the number of electors in the electoral college, by the way, and I had to look that up because I am not an American) which is now a feature of the New York Times.

So, throughout the entire election, as journalists and the official voices have been ranting and railing, predicting victory for this candidate or that candidate, Nate’s been looking at the polls, adjusting his model and publishing his predictions. Understandably, when someone is predicting a Democratic victory, the opposing party is going to jump up and down a bit and accusing Nate of some pretty serious bias and poll fixing. However, unless young Mr Silver has powers beyond those of mortal men, fixing all 538 electors in order to ensure an exact match to his predictions does seem to be taking fixing to a new level – and, of course, we’re joking because Nate Silver was right. Why was he right? Because he worked out a correct mathematical model and  method that took into account how accurate each poll was likely to be in predicting the final voter behaviour and that reliable, scientific and analytic approach allowed him to make a pretty conclusive set of predictions.

There are notorious examples of what happens when you listen to the wrong set of polls, or poll in the wrong areas, or carry out a phone poll at a time when (a) only rich people have phones or (b) only older people have landlines. Any information you get from such biased polls has to be taken with a grain of salt and weighted to reduce a skewing impact, but you have to be smart in how you weight things. Plain averaging most definitely does not work because this assumes equal sized populations or that (mysteriously) each poll should be treated as having equal weight. Here’s the other thing, though, ignoring the numbers is not going to help you if those same numbers are going to count against you.

Example: You’re a student and you do a mock exam. You get 30% because you didn’t study. You assume that the main exam will be really different. You go along. It’s not. In fact, it’s the same exam. You get 35%. You ignored the feedback that you should have used to predict what your final numbers were going to be. The big difference here is that a student can change their destiny through their own efforts. Changing the mind of the American people from June to November (Nate published his first predictions in June) is going to be nearly impossible so you’re left with one option, apparently, and that’s to pretend that it’s not happening.

I can pretend that my car isn’t running out of gas but, if the gauge is even vaguely accurate, somewhere along the way the car is going to stop. Ignoring Nate’s indications of what the final result would be was only ever going to work if his model was absolutely terrible but, of course, it was based on the polling data and the people being polled were voters. Assuming that there was any accuracy to the polls, then it’s the combination of the polls that was very clever and that’s all down to careful thought and good modelling. There is no doubt that a vast amount of work has gone into producing such a good model because you have to carefully work out how much each vote is worth in which context. Someone in a blue-skewed poll votes blue? Not as important as an increasing number of blue voters in a red-skewed polling area. One hundred people polled in a group to be weighted differently from three thousand people in another – and the absence of certain outliers possibly just down to having too small a sample population. Then, just to make it more difficult, you have to work out how these voting patterns are going to turn into electoral college votes. Now you have one vote that doesn’t mean the difference between having Idaho and not having Idaho, you have a vote that means the difference between “Hail to the Chief” and “Former Presidential Candidate and Your Host Tonight”.

Nate Silver’s work has brought a very important issue to light. The numbers, when you are thorough, don’t lie. He didn’t create the President’s re-election, he merely told everyone that, according to the American people, this was what was going to happen. What is astounding to me, and really shouldn’t be, is how many commentators and politicians seemed to take Silver’s predictions personally, as if he was trying to change reality by lying about the numbers. Well, someone was trying to change public perception of reality by talking about numbers, but I don’t think it was Nate Silver.

This is, fundamentally, a victory for science, thinking and solid statistics. Nate put up his predictions in a public space and said “Well, let’s see” and, with a small margin for error in terms of the final percentages, he got it right. That’s how science is supposed to work. Look at stuff, work out what’s going on, make predictions, see if you’re right, modify model as required and repeat until you have worked out how it really works. There is no shortage of Monday morning quarterbacks who can tell you in great detail why something happened a certain way when the game is over. Thanks, Nate, for giving me something to show my students to say “This is what it looks like when you get data science right.”

Remind me, however, never to bet against you at a sporting event!

Being a Hypnoweasel and Why That’s a Bad Idea.

Posted: November 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I greatly enjoy the television shows and, as it turns out, the writing of Derren Brown. Mr Brown is a successful conjurer, hypnotist and showman who performs stage magic and a range of deceits and experiments, including trying to turn a random member of the public into an assassin or convincing people that they committed a murder.

This is Derren hypnotising you into believing that this is the best post ever.

His combination of trickery, showmanship, claimed psychology/neurolinguistic programming and hypnotism makes for an interesting show – he has been guilty of over claiming in earlier shows and, these days, focusses on the art of misdirection, with a healthy dose of human influence to tell interesting stories. I am reading his book “Tricks of the Mind” at the moment and the simple tricks he discusses are well informed by the anecdotes that accompany them. However, some of his Experiments and discussions of the human aspects of wilful ignorance of probability and statistics are very interesting indeed and I use these as part of my teaching.

In “The System”, Derren shares his “100% successful horse race prediction system” with a member of the public. He also shows how, by force of will alone, he can flip a coin 10 times and have it come up heads – with no camera trickery. I first saw this on a rather dull plane flight and watched with interest as he did a number of things that, characteristically, showed you exactly what he was doing but cleverly indicated that he was doing something else – or let you believe that he was doing something else. “The System” is a great thing to show students because they have to consider what is and what isn’t possible at each stage and then decide how he did it, or how he could have done it. By combining his own skill at sleight of hand, his rather detailed knowledge of how people work and his excellent preparation, “The System” will leave a number of people wondering about the detail, like all good magic should.

The real reason that I am reading Derren at the moment, as well as watching him carefully, is that I am well aware how easy it is to influence people and, in teaching, I would rather not be using influence and stagecraft to manipulate my students’ memories of a teaching experience, even if I’m doing it unconsciously. Derren is, like all good magicians, very, very good at forcing cards onto people or creating situations where they think that they have carried out an act of their own free will, when really it is nothing of the kind. Derren’s production and writings on creating false memory, where a combination of preparation, language and technique leads to outcomes where participants will swear blind that a certain event occurred when it most certainly did not. This is the flashy cousin of the respectable work on cognition and load thresholds, monkey business illusion anyone?, but I find it a great way to step back critically and ask myself if I have been using any of these techniques in the showman-like manipulation of my students to make them think that knowledge has been transferred when, really, what they have is the memory of a good lecture experience?

This may seem both overly self-critical and not overly humble but I am quite a good showman and I am aware that my presentation can sometimes overcome the content. There is, after all, a great deal of difference between genuinely being able to manipulate time and space to move cards in a deck, and merely giving the illusion that one can. One of these is a miracle and the other is practise. Looking through the good work on cognitive load and transfer between memory systems, I can shape my learning and teaching design so that the content is covered thoroughly, linked properly and staged well. Reading and watching Derren, however, reminds me how much I could undo all of the good work by not thinking about how easy it is for humans to accept a strange personally skewed perspective of what has really happened. I could convince my students that they are learning, when in reality they are confused and need more clarification. The good news is that, looking back, I’m pretty sure that I do prepare and construct in a way that I can build upon something good, which is what I want to do, rather than provide an empty but convincing facade over the top of something that is not all that solid. Watching Derren, however, lets me think about the core difference between an enjoyable and valuable learning experience and misdirection.

There are many ways to fool people and these make for good television but I want my students to be the kind of people who see through such enjoyable games and can quickly apply their properly developed knowledge and understanding of how things really work to determine what is actually happening. There’s an old saying “Set a thief to catch a thief” and, in this case, it takes a convincing showman/hypnotist to clarify the pitfalls possible when you get a little too convincing in your delivery.

Deception is not the basis for good learning and teaching, no matter how noble an educator’s intent.

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