For America to find her groove
Average Joe's lot needs to improve.
All that we ask
Make this the task.
Visionaries, this does us behoove.
* * * * *
A little snip at this piece by Jim Manzi, The New American System, which I found via Joe Nocera's column yesterday. (Nocera focuses only on the first half of the piece. My trouble with it is in the second half, which has all the old Conservative canards, based on trickle down economics.) It is also a response to Frank Bruni's piece today, America the Shrunken. It is a very depressing, if accurate, essay.
Sunday, May 04, 2014
Friday, May 02, 2014
Kvetching about language use in IT for Higher Ed
Below is my reaction on the use of certain buzzwords that are in current vogue among IT practitioners, particularly at the level of campus CIO. Many of these words bother me, both in their use and in the implicit ideas behind their use. This particular critique is based on a recent piece from Educause Review on the top-ten IT issues. Following my critique there is a snip from that piece that lists the issues and a backlink to the article.
Change and Change Agent
Change is a neutral word regarding consequences. Some change is for the better. Other change may be of no real consequence. Still other change may be detrimental. A blanket embrace of change signifies an inability to tell what will happen as a result or an indifference to unintended pernicious consequences. Here is a specific example to illustrate.
The physicists at Illinois who developed iClicker (hence they are certainly not against the use of technology in instruction) have adopted a practice where cell phones are forbidden in their classrooms. Their view, informed by quite a bit of experience, is that students get distracted from class activities when their phones are out. Personally, I think the physicists' solution is draconian. The point here is not to identify the "right answer." The point is that reasonable people will likely disagree on that. I have seen IT pros have no tolerance for the position the physicists have articulated. That is a problem, a big one.
This Ted Talk by Peter Doolittle on Working Memory gives the conclusions from the psychology research that support the physicists' position. In a nutshell, working memory is limited in capacity and a student on a cellphone while in class therefore has less working memory to devote to what the class is doing. Further, the possible distraction created means that other students bothered by this cellphone use also have less working memory to devote to the class. My disagreement with the physicists isn't on this point. It is with using a hard rule to get students to put away their phones. Implicitly, that is telling the students it is okay to have their phones out in other classes where there is no hard rule present. That's the wrong message.
Student Outcomes, Learning Outcomes
This is the same sort of rhetoric one associates with No Child Left Behind, Teach to the Top, and the associated emphasis on standardized testing. Do the CIOs really want to promote a teach to the test mindset in college instruction beyond what is already happening? Do the CIOs know about the "Disengagement Compact" that George Kuh described 10+ years ago? Do they understand that adjuncts are under more pressure than tenure track faculty to uphold their side of the bargain in this unholy agreement - because their jobs depend on students being satisfied. So do the CIOs understand it is quite possible for outcomes to show improvement but actual learning to be less?
Last week I was at a symposium for folks in writing studies. The keynote speaker, Steve Lamos, was making just this point. I am not making it up. (See also below in the section on Analytics.)
Technology Delivering
I've been railing about this one for years. (For example, see my essay in EQ from 5 years ago, Dis-Integrating the LMS.) Technology is a facilitator, at best, and a pernicious influence at worst, such as when students have their cell phones out for personal use while in class. Technology coupled with effective practice can deliver good consequences. The rhetoric CIOs use should be peppered with the expression, "effective practice."
This is of no small consequence, even within the IT organization. The primary job of the Academic Technologies unit is not to be a second help desk, one specific to those applications used in instruction. The primary job of the Academic Technologies unit is to promote effective use and thereby encourage better teaching and learning.
Given that mission, there is then the question of whether Academic Technologies should also provide some help-desk support for instructors, because instructors are more comfortable dong one-stop shopping, or if for comparative advantage reasons all the help-desk function should be in a single place. (See items 3 and 4 of the top-ten issues list.) The answer to this might vary by the nature of the institution, its history, and the mechanism by which the faculty view gets factored into IT decisions. So I don't want to presume the answer here. But to discuss the issue, the rhetoric needs to include effective use and to make it an important goal.
Analytics
There are two different uses of this term, one specific to learning, the other to institutional research. I will take each of these in turn.
We should be encouraging students to write more in the courses they take. (That I believe this to be true is why I get invited to attend a symposium on writing studies.) Writing online greatly eases the ability to share the written work as well as to share feedback on the written work. So there is certainly a role to be played by technology in promoting writing. Yet comparisons across pieces of written work - this one shows more maturity of thought than that one - are inherently analog in nature and hence lie outside the scope of analytics. We should be about encouraging growth in student thinking over the duration of a course. Privileging quantifiable information - scores on multiple choice tests, for example - simply because they are quantifiable is a fundamental mistake that CIOs should not make. Yet even if that is not intended by item 5 on the top-ten list - the intent is to further develop early warning signs for at risk students so appropriate interventions can be done in a time fashion - isn't it possible, even likely, that privileging quantifiable information will be the unintended consequence?
The use of the term analytics as it pertains to institutional research suggests a view that says - let the data tell the story. We'll learn simply by looking at the data, given today's sophisticated tools to mine the data. I am extremely suspicious of that view. I'd like to present an alternative here. But before I do I need to make a brief disclaimer.
I don't want to get on the case of the folks who do institutional research officially. They do yeoman's work and do it well, especially given the limited resources available to them.
The questions that this institutional research addresses typically have a historical basis and/or are driven by the Provost's office. At issue here is whether there are other places on campus now that can make legitimate claims to ask institutional research questions, because the tools to answer those questions are now good enough to decentralize the process.
Here is an example to illustrate. Suppose the Center for Teaching on campus is making a push to help adjunct faculty who teach high enrollment courses, so their instruction becomes both more effective and more rigorous and therefore less teach to the test in approach. Further, suppose the anticipation of all involved is that there will be a learning curve with the new approach and that early on the students might not do as well under it, but after a few iterations students will do better. This means that early on in the implementation the class grade distribution may produce more mediocre grades and the student course evaluations may produce more dissatisfaction than has been the historical pattern. To help the instructors navigate through this initial phase, the Center for Teaching, which owns the course evaluation data, but has no such ownership over grade information, would like to produce reports based on aggregate data of each sort derived from similar classes taught around campus. Can the Center for Teaching do this? Whose blessing is needed to okay this use? And what if there are many alternative such requests from other units on campus - specific colleges, campus human resources, student government, etc.
If analytics comes to mean that now there will be a second institutional research group, one that reports to the CIO instead of the the Provost, because there are transactions data in the LMS, for example, that may be interesting to a broad audience but that aren't within the scope of traditional institutional research, this will end up as rather disappointing to many on campus as their research questions will remain unanswered. One needs an approach where the generation of research questions is done in a decentralized manner. The term analytics simply doesn't convey that.
Wrap-Up
Language is not neutral. Item 2 on the top-ten list, about an effective partnership between IT leadership and the rest of campus leadership, I embrace but in my experience it has been an elusive goal. People within IT need to understand that the language they use will have an impact on whether Item 2 can be realized. If through the use of language the implicit message conveyed is that the IT folks are first and foremost tech nerds, they will not be able to deliver on item 2. They will be showing the rest of campus that IT lives in its own bubble.
Isn't it time for that bubble to burst?
Change and Change Agent
Change is a neutral word regarding consequences. Some change is for the better. Other change may be of no real consequence. Still other change may be detrimental. A blanket embrace of change signifies an inability to tell what will happen as a result or an indifference to unintended pernicious consequences. Here is a specific example to illustrate.
The physicists at Illinois who developed iClicker (hence they are certainly not against the use of technology in instruction) have adopted a practice where cell phones are forbidden in their classrooms. Their view, informed by quite a bit of experience, is that students get distracted from class activities when their phones are out. Personally, I think the physicists' solution is draconian. The point here is not to identify the "right answer." The point is that reasonable people will likely disagree on that. I have seen IT pros have no tolerance for the position the physicists have articulated. That is a problem, a big one.
This Ted Talk by Peter Doolittle on Working Memory gives the conclusions from the psychology research that support the physicists' position. In a nutshell, working memory is limited in capacity and a student on a cellphone while in class therefore has less working memory to devote to what the class is doing. Further, the possible distraction created means that other students bothered by this cellphone use also have less working memory to devote to the class. My disagreement with the physicists isn't on this point. It is with using a hard rule to get students to put away their phones. Implicitly, that is telling the students it is okay to have their phones out in other classes where there is no hard rule present. That's the wrong message.
Student Outcomes, Learning Outcomes
This is the same sort of rhetoric one associates with No Child Left Behind, Teach to the Top, and the associated emphasis on standardized testing. Do the CIOs really want to promote a teach to the test mindset in college instruction beyond what is already happening? Do the CIOs know about the "Disengagement Compact" that George Kuh described 10+ years ago? Do they understand that adjuncts are under more pressure than tenure track faculty to uphold their side of the bargain in this unholy agreement - because their jobs depend on students being satisfied. So do the CIOs understand it is quite possible for outcomes to show improvement but actual learning to be less?
Last week I was at a symposium for folks in writing studies. The keynote speaker, Steve Lamos, was making just this point. I am not making it up. (See also below in the section on Analytics.)
Technology Delivering
I've been railing about this one for years. (For example, see my essay in EQ from 5 years ago, Dis-Integrating the LMS.) Technology is a facilitator, at best, and a pernicious influence at worst, such as when students have their cell phones out for personal use while in class. Technology coupled with effective practice can deliver good consequences. The rhetoric CIOs use should be peppered with the expression, "effective practice."
This is of no small consequence, even within the IT organization. The primary job of the Academic Technologies unit is not to be a second help desk, one specific to those applications used in instruction. The primary job of the Academic Technologies unit is to promote effective use and thereby encourage better teaching and learning.
Given that mission, there is then the question of whether Academic Technologies should also provide some help-desk support for instructors, because instructors are more comfortable dong one-stop shopping, or if for comparative advantage reasons all the help-desk function should be in a single place. (See items 3 and 4 of the top-ten issues list.) The answer to this might vary by the nature of the institution, its history, and the mechanism by which the faculty view gets factored into IT decisions. So I don't want to presume the answer here. But to discuss the issue, the rhetoric needs to include effective use and to make it an important goal.
Analytics
There are two different uses of this term, one specific to learning, the other to institutional research. I will take each of these in turn.
We should be encouraging students to write more in the courses they take. (That I believe this to be true is why I get invited to attend a symposium on writing studies.) Writing online greatly eases the ability to share the written work as well as to share feedback on the written work. So there is certainly a role to be played by technology in promoting writing. Yet comparisons across pieces of written work - this one shows more maturity of thought than that one - are inherently analog in nature and hence lie outside the scope of analytics. We should be about encouraging growth in student thinking over the duration of a course. Privileging quantifiable information - scores on multiple choice tests, for example - simply because they are quantifiable is a fundamental mistake that CIOs should not make. Yet even if that is not intended by item 5 on the top-ten list - the intent is to further develop early warning signs for at risk students so appropriate interventions can be done in a time fashion - isn't it possible, even likely, that privileging quantifiable information will be the unintended consequence?
The use of the term analytics as it pertains to institutional research suggests a view that says - let the data tell the story. We'll learn simply by looking at the data, given today's sophisticated tools to mine the data. I am extremely suspicious of that view. I'd like to present an alternative here. But before I do I need to make a brief disclaimer.
I don't want to get on the case of the folks who do institutional research officially. They do yeoman's work and do it well, especially given the limited resources available to them.
The questions that this institutional research addresses typically have a historical basis and/or are driven by the Provost's office. At issue here is whether there are other places on campus now that can make legitimate claims to ask institutional research questions, because the tools to answer those questions are now good enough to decentralize the process.
Here is an example to illustrate. Suppose the Center for Teaching on campus is making a push to help adjunct faculty who teach high enrollment courses, so their instruction becomes both more effective and more rigorous and therefore less teach to the test in approach. Further, suppose the anticipation of all involved is that there will be a learning curve with the new approach and that early on the students might not do as well under it, but after a few iterations students will do better. This means that early on in the implementation the class grade distribution may produce more mediocre grades and the student course evaluations may produce more dissatisfaction than has been the historical pattern. To help the instructors navigate through this initial phase, the Center for Teaching, which owns the course evaluation data, but has no such ownership over grade information, would like to produce reports based on aggregate data of each sort derived from similar classes taught around campus. Can the Center for Teaching do this? Whose blessing is needed to okay this use? And what if there are many alternative such requests from other units on campus - specific colleges, campus human resources, student government, etc.
If analytics comes to mean that now there will be a second institutional research group, one that reports to the CIO instead of the the Provost, because there are transactions data in the LMS, for example, that may be interesting to a broad audience but that aren't within the scope of traditional institutional research, this will end up as rather disappointing to many on campus as their research questions will remain unanswered. One needs an approach where the generation of research questions is done in a decentralized manner. The term analytics simply doesn't convey that.
Wrap-Up
Language is not neutral. Item 2 on the top-ten list, about an effective partnership between IT leadership and the rest of campus leadership, I embrace but in my experience it has been an elusive goal. People within IT need to understand that the language they use will have an impact on whether Item 2 can be realized. If through the use of language the implicit message conveyed is that the IT folks are first and foremost tech nerds, they will not be able to deliver on item 2. They will be showing the rest of campus that IT lives in its own bubble.
Isn't it time for that bubble to burst?
Thursday, May 01, 2014
Video Entertainment - Pure Diversion Or For Our Edification
During one summer in the late 1980s I spent a month as a visiting scholar at the Nova University in Lisbon. My hosts were very gracious but one weekend I was left on my own and the weather was not conducive to tourist activities. I had previously found a bookstore that sold paperbacks in English and that weekend devoured Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. It is the last I can recall of me reading science fiction, until I read Farenheit 451 not too long ago. I'd like to point out that Bradbury's dystopian vision surely is intended as social commentary on the society in which he lived. (The original copyright of the novel is 1951 and Bradury was living in Los Angeles at the time.) My recollection of Asimov's work, in contrast, is that it was pure fantasy. This contrast is what I'd like to get at here, both my own preferences as indicated by recent viewing, and some commentary on what seems to engage others I know.
(My immediate memory is too selective. I set the above paragraph aside to think about what I would say next. While I was doing that it occurred to me that I had read Carl Sagan's Contact after having seen the movie. I would characterize that as something of a 'tweener. The science in it is correct and the book is partly to make plausible space travel to far away star systems. But it is also about the impurity in the schism between those scientists who are atheists and others who believe in God. This example notwithstanding, I think it safe to say I don't read much science fiction as an adult.)
As a kid I associated the genre with two names - Jules Verne and H.G. Wells - and I read multiple books by both authors and saw some of the movies too. Titles include Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the Word in 80 Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, The Time Machine, and War of the Worlds. Surely there were other science fiction titles that I read and/or saw in the movies.
But I read a lot as a kid and science fiction was only a sliver of that. Much of the rest was biography of famous Americans, particularly by Clara Ingram Judson, and also quite a bit of related history. There were other genres too. The first adventure stories I remember were the books by Walter Farley. Somebody had given me the Black Stallion's Sulky Colt as a gift. I read it, liked it, and went on from there. That was my pattern. I did something similar with The Hardy Boys, though I believe the first one of those I read I did so because I was stuck in the Infirmary at Camp Oxford, and that's what they had in their collection. For a while I got on a jag about Norse Mythology. Later I read a bunch of baseball fiction by Duane Decker.
In the NY Times Series, Writers on Writing, E.L. Doctorow has a very interesting essay where he argues that the movies have overtaken the written novel as the dominant form, where now fiction is written in the style of a movie, and possibly with the anticipation of the remake into film form. Of course there is the flip side of Doctorow's argument. Most of us get our recreation from movies or TV most of the time. Reading fiction for entertainment happens, but far less frequently.
This was true for me as a kid with spy stories, in particular. For kids my age there was was one movie that got us hooked, Goldfinger. Oddjob's hat and the ejector seat in James Bond's Aston Martin were among the more memorable of the many things in the movie that would titillate the mind of a 9-year old boy. This was the first case I recall where I read some of Ian Fleming's books after seeing the James Bond movies. Something similar happened with the TV show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Following that, there began a journey into the genre that was TV only - Get Smart, The Avengers, and Mission Impossible. The latter two of these began conveying the sense that covert action required intelligence - not secret information as the word is normally used in this context, but high skill and insight on how to pull it off. That part was at least as compelling to view as the undercover work itself.
At the same time there was science fiction that emanated from the TV. We watched some old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers that may have been showing on WOR, a local TV station in New York City. Then, of course, there was Star Trek, which was on network TV. My sense of these is that they were not so different from Westerns, meaning they were adventure stories, though obviously with a different setting.
I'm not sure how to classify the TV show Superman, which was based on the DC Comics, though I believe with original story lines. Is it science fiction? Fantasy fiction? Neither but rather a still separate category - comic book fiction? I don't know. If comic books don't count as fantasy fiction then I didn't read any fantasy fiction as a kid. I never read Tolkein nor C.S. Lewis. I did read comic books quite a lot, mainly at summer camp. I don't want to minimize that. But I definitely associate it with time when we're not at school. The Superman TV show, of course, was a different matter.
* * * * *
I want to do a quick segue to when my kids were young. Then I'll discuss my adult viewing in the next section.
The comics-ification of the movies began with Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope and Indiana Jones - Raiders of the Lost Ark. Fifteen years later my kids first went through an animated film viewing stage - Mulan, The Lion King, etc. When they were ready to leave that for movies that had people in them, science fiction in comic book form was one of the acceptable genres. The other was fantasy fiction, notably Harry Potter.
Before getting to why, let me say at the outset that adventures stories had a fighting chance to be an acceptable genre as well. The boys and I watched the made for TV version of Kidnapped multiple times and likewise for The Last of the Mohicans. And I believe I read aloud to them a condensed version of Treasure Island. But my wife wasn't so into this sort of fiction and she couldn't sit through these movies. Parallel to this were two work related issues. When my younger son was about to start first grade, my wife decided she wanted to spend more time with the kids and took a hiatus from her job to become a stay at home mom. Then, too, my career in learning technology was heating up and I was putting in yeoman's hours at the office as well as not infrequently going on the road. Since the kids reading and viewing was still substantially parent mediated at the time, this put the kibosh on the adventure stories as an acceptable form for the kids.
While that particular explanation is idiosyncratic to my family, the Harry Potter craze was not. It "solved" the problem of getting kids interested in reading. My wife read aloud the first book or two to the boys and then the older one may have been far enough along to start reading the third one on his own. I'm not sure of the details here.
What I do know is that at the time I thought this entirely benign and the big deal was the reading itself. Seeing the subsequent path, however, I'm less sure. It includes many of the Artemis Fowl books, The Lord of The Rings and all things Tolkein, both in book and movie form, many of the works of Michael Crichton, and more recently the Game of Thrones books and TV show. I don't know whether a straight line can be drawn through all of this, but surely there is far less diversity in genre than I experienced doing pleasure reading as a kid. In this respect, I wonder how much my son typifies his generation. I suspect this pattern is not unusual at all.
Hollywood seems to reinforce this big time. Most of the blockbusters are movie versions of the comics, science fiction in comic book form, or fantasy fiction. Then there are the various imitations, also made in this manner, though less spectacular at the box office.
Whether video games also reinforce this, I don't know. Video games represent a significant time investment for kids nowadays where there was no parallel to that when I was growing up. Conceivably it could be a source of diversity in genre. What is clear is that it is social - to a degree - in a way reading or watching a movie is not. On the plus side that is apt to make the kids more cooperative with one another. On the minus side it may contribute to a herd mentality.
The last time the family as a whole went to the movies to see a film was Lincoln and it was incredibly unusual to do that. We did it in part because I was getting over my rotator cuff repair and I wanted to see it, so the rest accommodated that wish. Otherwise, we rarely watch a movie or TV show together these days, even when the kids are home on vacation. We used to watch The West Wing together, when it was being reprised on the AMC channel. More recently, my wife and I would watch The Newsroom together when that aired or sometimes from the DVR for a repeat viewing of an episode or because we missed it the first time. Ditto for Homeland, from a DVD. We may have watched the mini-series John Adams together, I can't recall.
But the Big Bang Theory might be more typical. I tired of it after the first few episodes. If the kids were around, they'd watch it with my wife. Their tastes are more in common. I can do perfectly well without situation comedy, particularly when the subject is dating and mating. I also never became a regular of Colbert or The Daily Show. While the occasional interview is good, I found the jokes too low level for the most part. The last comedy I remember liking was Men in Black. Bruce Almighty was okay. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is enjoyable lighthearted fare, but I wouldn't call it a comedy. These are films we watched together at home when the kids were younger.
I watched the first Lord of the Rings movie in its entirety with the family, when the DVD came out. Ca suffit! I now react to those sort of movies in much the same way that my wife reacted to the adventure films the boys and I saw when they were young.
* * * * *
When I first thought to write this piece I had in mind a review of The State Within. I might comment on it a bit below, but my topic morphed as I was thinking about this. When I was a kid if I was into something I'd stick with that same subject until I neared satiation. Then there might be a fallow period after which something new would get presented to me, either by pure happenstance or because somebody (an adult) pointed me in that direction. If I glommed onto that then the process would repeat. Now I select the content for myself, most recently from Amazon Prime Instant Video. I want to think through the process I use for making a selection. Does it make sense? Is there some better way to go about this?
This is how I found the State Within. If you go to that Amazon Instant Video link, do a search for David Hare. (I'll explain why in a bit.) Alternatively, do a Google search for David Hare. In the right sidebar there are excerpts from the Wikipedia entry. One category is Movies. I watched the three most recent: Page Eight, The Reader, and The Hours. Each of these films I'd describe as thoughtful and thought provoking. Hare's role in them varies. He directed Page Eight. On the other two films he wrote the screenplay.
Page Eight is in the spy thriller genre and the story is similar to those by John le Carré. Indeed the protagonist of Page Eight, the character's name is Johnny Worricker, bears some resemblance in demeanor to George Smiley. They both show sparks of intuition from time to time, but are mainly engaged doing quiet empirical work to confirm the intuition or fill in gaps in their knowledge where there are puzzles as to what happened. They take their time to assemble all the pieces before they make their case. They avoid going off half cocked at all costs. But when the puzzle is solved they show us how to stand up and use what they have learned to very good effect. There is moral uplift in watching the entire process. This is how a superb professional should operate.
These characters stand in contrast to recent characters in American made dramas in the spy thriller genre, in particular Jack Bauer in 24 and Carrie Mathison in Homeland. These characters have fantastic intuition which they use all the time, while they do respond to data the response is quick and often loud rather than slow and deliberate, and while they screw up their personal lives in a variety of ways they make almost no mistakes on the work issues, which are life and death. This makes them kind of super beings - beyond superb professionals - so while they are compelling to view there is no moral uplift. The rest of us are not super beings. There is also much more overt violence in the American made series than there is in their British counterparts. That contributes to the unreality of the stories as they relate to us viewers.
Having enjoyed Page Eight, I then watched The Reader, a different sort of story altogether, and followed that with The Hours, still a different sort of story. As I said, each challenged the viewer and I liked that. So I was looking for more. But then a different challenge presented itself. There is quite a gap, time-wise, between The Hours and David Hare's next most recent movie. Further, it seemed those others weren't freely available on Amazon Prime Instant Video and I have an aversion to paying for content when there is other content I might very well like as much that is freely available. So what to do?
In this case I did something that I otherwise don't do much at all. I trusted crowd sourcing the question. For each Amazon Instant Video, below the video itself (and if it is a TV series, the links to other videos in the series) there are a set of links under the category - Customers who watched this video also watched... I did that for Page Eight. One of the entries there was to The State Within. The title grabbed me, so I had a look see. (Note that the link to The State Within from the Page Eight site is no longer there, but there is a backlink to Page Eight from The State Within site.)
There is a bit more to it than that, something I'd like to see happen in my searches, if is is possible. There is a different show, The Hour (not to be confused with The Hours) that I watched and liked. I learned about that show from my friend Deanna, who said it was the closest thing she had seen to The West Wing. The Hour is a BBC production as is The State Within. So I was more favorably disposed to The State Within as a result and conceivably might have found it by searching the BBC site. It can be found by looking within the Drama category.
The State Within is set in Washington DC. While the hero is the British Ambassador to the U.S., the show is Americanized, both in its loudness and its pacing. For the first 2 + episodes or so, it is hard to figure out what is going on. The various threads of the story don't seem to fit. Then there is a rather remarkable coalescence and things make much more sense, with still some surprises in the last two episodes. (There are 7 episodes in the Americanized version.) I thought it was a good but not great show, for these reasons.
Now I'm looking for what's next. I learned about David Hare by watching an interview with him on Charlie Rose many years ago, where he said things that I liked, particularly about being able to articulate a point of view and that being attractive to viewers. I filed that away mentally, to be used when I needed it. I have used other writers as a means to find content to view. When I was having withdrawal pains from The West Wing (which also provided moral uplift, in my opinion, though not all the time), I found Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, by searching on Aaron Sorkin. It is not a great show, but watching it helped me to move onto other things than Sorkin authored content. Earlier I found The Unit, by searching on David Mamet, though that was before streaming video was so readily available so I bought the DVD of the first season and got into the show thereafter. The stories in The Unit are tightly constructed, though there is more independence in story from one episode to the next than in the other series I've cited here.
If I'm to find still other content by doing an author search, I need some other authors to use. Does anyone have a suggestion?
(My immediate memory is too selective. I set the above paragraph aside to think about what I would say next. While I was doing that it occurred to me that I had read Carl Sagan's Contact after having seen the movie. I would characterize that as something of a 'tweener. The science in it is correct and the book is partly to make plausible space travel to far away star systems. But it is also about the impurity in the schism between those scientists who are atheists and others who believe in God. This example notwithstanding, I think it safe to say I don't read much science fiction as an adult.)
As a kid I associated the genre with two names - Jules Verne and H.G. Wells - and I read multiple books by both authors and saw some of the movies too. Titles include Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the Word in 80 Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, The Time Machine, and War of the Worlds. Surely there were other science fiction titles that I read and/or saw in the movies.
But I read a lot as a kid and science fiction was only a sliver of that. Much of the rest was biography of famous Americans, particularly by Clara Ingram Judson, and also quite a bit of related history. There were other genres too. The first adventure stories I remember were the books by Walter Farley. Somebody had given me the Black Stallion's Sulky Colt as a gift. I read it, liked it, and went on from there. That was my pattern. I did something similar with The Hardy Boys, though I believe the first one of those I read I did so because I was stuck in the Infirmary at Camp Oxford, and that's what they had in their collection. For a while I got on a jag about Norse Mythology. Later I read a bunch of baseball fiction by Duane Decker.
In the NY Times Series, Writers on Writing, E.L. Doctorow has a very interesting essay where he argues that the movies have overtaken the written novel as the dominant form, where now fiction is written in the style of a movie, and possibly with the anticipation of the remake into film form. Of course there is the flip side of Doctorow's argument. Most of us get our recreation from movies or TV most of the time. Reading fiction for entertainment happens, but far less frequently.
This was true for me as a kid with spy stories, in particular. For kids my age there was was one movie that got us hooked, Goldfinger. Oddjob's hat and the ejector seat in James Bond's Aston Martin were among the more memorable of the many things in the movie that would titillate the mind of a 9-year old boy. This was the first case I recall where I read some of Ian Fleming's books after seeing the James Bond movies. Something similar happened with the TV show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Following that, there began a journey into the genre that was TV only - Get Smart, The Avengers, and Mission Impossible. The latter two of these began conveying the sense that covert action required intelligence - not secret information as the word is normally used in this context, but high skill and insight on how to pull it off. That part was at least as compelling to view as the undercover work itself.
At the same time there was science fiction that emanated from the TV. We watched some old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers that may have been showing on WOR, a local TV station in New York City. Then, of course, there was Star Trek, which was on network TV. My sense of these is that they were not so different from Westerns, meaning they were adventure stories, though obviously with a different setting.
I'm not sure how to classify the TV show Superman, which was based on the DC Comics, though I believe with original story lines. Is it science fiction? Fantasy fiction? Neither but rather a still separate category - comic book fiction? I don't know. If comic books don't count as fantasy fiction then I didn't read any fantasy fiction as a kid. I never read Tolkein nor C.S. Lewis. I did read comic books quite a lot, mainly at summer camp. I don't want to minimize that. But I definitely associate it with time when we're not at school. The Superman TV show, of course, was a different matter.
* * * * *
I want to do a quick segue to when my kids were young. Then I'll discuss my adult viewing in the next section.
The comics-ification of the movies began with Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope and Indiana Jones - Raiders of the Lost Ark. Fifteen years later my kids first went through an animated film viewing stage - Mulan, The Lion King, etc. When they were ready to leave that for movies that had people in them, science fiction in comic book form was one of the acceptable genres. The other was fantasy fiction, notably Harry Potter.
Before getting to why, let me say at the outset that adventures stories had a fighting chance to be an acceptable genre as well. The boys and I watched the made for TV version of Kidnapped multiple times and likewise for The Last of the Mohicans. And I believe I read aloud to them a condensed version of Treasure Island. But my wife wasn't so into this sort of fiction and she couldn't sit through these movies. Parallel to this were two work related issues. When my younger son was about to start first grade, my wife decided she wanted to spend more time with the kids and took a hiatus from her job to become a stay at home mom. Then, too, my career in learning technology was heating up and I was putting in yeoman's hours at the office as well as not infrequently going on the road. Since the kids reading and viewing was still substantially parent mediated at the time, this put the kibosh on the adventure stories as an acceptable form for the kids.
While that particular explanation is idiosyncratic to my family, the Harry Potter craze was not. It "solved" the problem of getting kids interested in reading. My wife read aloud the first book or two to the boys and then the older one may have been far enough along to start reading the third one on his own. I'm not sure of the details here.
What I do know is that at the time I thought this entirely benign and the big deal was the reading itself. Seeing the subsequent path, however, I'm less sure. It includes many of the Artemis Fowl books, The Lord of The Rings and all things Tolkein, both in book and movie form, many of the works of Michael Crichton, and more recently the Game of Thrones books and TV show. I don't know whether a straight line can be drawn through all of this, but surely there is far less diversity in genre than I experienced doing pleasure reading as a kid. In this respect, I wonder how much my son typifies his generation. I suspect this pattern is not unusual at all.
Hollywood seems to reinforce this big time. Most of the blockbusters are movie versions of the comics, science fiction in comic book form, or fantasy fiction. Then there are the various imitations, also made in this manner, though less spectacular at the box office.
Whether video games also reinforce this, I don't know. Video games represent a significant time investment for kids nowadays where there was no parallel to that when I was growing up. Conceivably it could be a source of diversity in genre. What is clear is that it is social - to a degree - in a way reading or watching a movie is not. On the plus side that is apt to make the kids more cooperative with one another. On the minus side it may contribute to a herd mentality.
The last time the family as a whole went to the movies to see a film was Lincoln and it was incredibly unusual to do that. We did it in part because I was getting over my rotator cuff repair and I wanted to see it, so the rest accommodated that wish. Otherwise, we rarely watch a movie or TV show together these days, even when the kids are home on vacation. We used to watch The West Wing together, when it was being reprised on the AMC channel. More recently, my wife and I would watch The Newsroom together when that aired or sometimes from the DVR for a repeat viewing of an episode or because we missed it the first time. Ditto for Homeland, from a DVD. We may have watched the mini-series John Adams together, I can't recall.
But the Big Bang Theory might be more typical. I tired of it after the first few episodes. If the kids were around, they'd watch it with my wife. Their tastes are more in common. I can do perfectly well without situation comedy, particularly when the subject is dating and mating. I also never became a regular of Colbert or The Daily Show. While the occasional interview is good, I found the jokes too low level for the most part. The last comedy I remember liking was Men in Black. Bruce Almighty was okay. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is enjoyable lighthearted fare, but I wouldn't call it a comedy. These are films we watched together at home when the kids were younger.
I watched the first Lord of the Rings movie in its entirety with the family, when the DVD came out. Ca suffit! I now react to those sort of movies in much the same way that my wife reacted to the adventure films the boys and I saw when they were young.
* * * * *
When I first thought to write this piece I had in mind a review of The State Within. I might comment on it a bit below, but my topic morphed as I was thinking about this. When I was a kid if I was into something I'd stick with that same subject until I neared satiation. Then there might be a fallow period after which something new would get presented to me, either by pure happenstance or because somebody (an adult) pointed me in that direction. If I glommed onto that then the process would repeat. Now I select the content for myself, most recently from Amazon Prime Instant Video. I want to think through the process I use for making a selection. Does it make sense? Is there some better way to go about this?
This is how I found the State Within. If you go to that Amazon Instant Video link, do a search for David Hare. (I'll explain why in a bit.) Alternatively, do a Google search for David Hare. In the right sidebar there are excerpts from the Wikipedia entry. One category is Movies. I watched the three most recent: Page Eight, The Reader, and The Hours. Each of these films I'd describe as thoughtful and thought provoking. Hare's role in them varies. He directed Page Eight. On the other two films he wrote the screenplay.
Page Eight is in the spy thriller genre and the story is similar to those by John le Carré. Indeed the protagonist of Page Eight, the character's name is Johnny Worricker, bears some resemblance in demeanor to George Smiley. They both show sparks of intuition from time to time, but are mainly engaged doing quiet empirical work to confirm the intuition or fill in gaps in their knowledge where there are puzzles as to what happened. They take their time to assemble all the pieces before they make their case. They avoid going off half cocked at all costs. But when the puzzle is solved they show us how to stand up and use what they have learned to very good effect. There is moral uplift in watching the entire process. This is how a superb professional should operate.
These characters stand in contrast to recent characters in American made dramas in the spy thriller genre, in particular Jack Bauer in 24 and Carrie Mathison in Homeland. These characters have fantastic intuition which they use all the time, while they do respond to data the response is quick and often loud rather than slow and deliberate, and while they screw up their personal lives in a variety of ways they make almost no mistakes on the work issues, which are life and death. This makes them kind of super beings - beyond superb professionals - so while they are compelling to view there is no moral uplift. The rest of us are not super beings. There is also much more overt violence in the American made series than there is in their British counterparts. That contributes to the unreality of the stories as they relate to us viewers.
Having enjoyed Page Eight, I then watched The Reader, a different sort of story altogether, and followed that with The Hours, still a different sort of story. As I said, each challenged the viewer and I liked that. So I was looking for more. But then a different challenge presented itself. There is quite a gap, time-wise, between The Hours and David Hare's next most recent movie. Further, it seemed those others weren't freely available on Amazon Prime Instant Video and I have an aversion to paying for content when there is other content I might very well like as much that is freely available. So what to do?
In this case I did something that I otherwise don't do much at all. I trusted crowd sourcing the question. For each Amazon Instant Video, below the video itself (and if it is a TV series, the links to other videos in the series) there are a set of links under the category - Customers who watched this video also watched... I did that for Page Eight. One of the entries there was to The State Within. The title grabbed me, so I had a look see. (Note that the link to The State Within from the Page Eight site is no longer there, but there is a backlink to Page Eight from The State Within site.)
There is a bit more to it than that, something I'd like to see happen in my searches, if is is possible. There is a different show, The Hour (not to be confused with The Hours) that I watched and liked. I learned about that show from my friend Deanna, who said it was the closest thing she had seen to The West Wing. The Hour is a BBC production as is The State Within. So I was more favorably disposed to The State Within as a result and conceivably might have found it by searching the BBC site. It can be found by looking within the Drama category.
The State Within is set in Washington DC. While the hero is the British Ambassador to the U.S., the show is Americanized, both in its loudness and its pacing. For the first 2 + episodes or so, it is hard to figure out what is going on. The various threads of the story don't seem to fit. Then there is a rather remarkable coalescence and things make much more sense, with still some surprises in the last two episodes. (There are 7 episodes in the Americanized version.) I thought it was a good but not great show, for these reasons.
Now I'm looking for what's next. I learned about David Hare by watching an interview with him on Charlie Rose many years ago, where he said things that I liked, particularly about being able to articulate a point of view and that being attractive to viewers. I filed that away mentally, to be used when I needed it. I have used other writers as a means to find content to view. When I was having withdrawal pains from The West Wing (which also provided moral uplift, in my opinion, though not all the time), I found Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, by searching on Aaron Sorkin. It is not a great show, but watching it helped me to move onto other things than Sorkin authored content. Earlier I found The Unit, by searching on David Mamet, though that was before streaming video was so readily available so I bought the DVD of the first season and got into the show thereafter. The stories in The Unit are tightly constructed, though there is more independence in story from one episode to the next than in the other series I've cited here.
If I'm to find still other content by doing an author search, I need some other authors to use. Does anyone have a suggestion?
Monday, April 28, 2014
Start of the week Limerick
The forecast today is more rain.
The early blooms stand to gain.
But when it's so wet
Sometimes we forget
Our good humor we must sustain.
The early blooms stand to gain.
But when it's so wet
Sometimes we forget
Our good humor we must sustain.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Thinking one thing, typing another
Among the daily diversions there is Sudoku. I got my start watching my son do one from the newspaper. I soon was competing with him for who would get to the puzzle first. Then my wife bought me a book. As I used to do the NY Times Crossword in pen, a habit partly begat by arrogance but also by the practical reality that I was more prone to chew on a pencil than a pen, the oral fixation quite strong at the time, this was also the path chosen for doing the Sudoku puzzles. There is a lot of pattern recognition in becoming proficient completing these puzzles. As I was still early in the habit formation, I didn't have all the patterns as part of my repertoire and would make the occasional conceptual mistake as a consequence, not detect it till some time later, and result with a screwed up puzzle that I put a big X through.
After a while the big X's became demoralizing and I looked for online alternatives (also the book was getting pretty much done and as a cheapskate I didn't want to pay for another book). Web sites that offer free Sudoku seem to come and go. I'm on my third one. They allow one to erase entries without messing up the rest of the board. They also include a button to check whether the current entries are correct. Some offer a hint button, a way to find the full solution to the puzzle, and possibly other "features," though I consider the timer function that many include more a detriment than anything else. This is not a race. It is enjoyable to find entries that to attain require substantial logical deduction. That's why one does the puzzles, not to get a good time.
I play a different game with myself as I complete the puzzle. It's where the trouble begins. I keep my right hand on the mouse and use it to position the cursor into the right cell in the grid and to click in the cell when I want to insert an entry. Either the index finger or middle finger of my left hand starts on a number key (usually I begin with the number 1 and see if I can find a place for that to be inserted). I visually position the finger onto that first key. Thereafter I try not to look at the keyboard but instead explicitly move to the next appropriate key by sliding my finger to the adjacent key and counting the number of times I need to do that till I've reached the destination key. This game within a game I do probably for the same reason that some people knit when they attend a seminar (which I witnessed on Friday at the Center for Writing studies Colloquium). There are two different types of mistakes I make while doing this.
Sometimes my finger moves too quickly and doesn't touch the adjacent key, so I screw up the count that way. Other times my brain resets and I start the count on a number that doesn't match the key I'm currently on. Both sort of errors I've made since I started to play Sudoku online. But the frequency has increased in the last couple of months. I'm wondering why and dreading the possible explanation. I should also note that something similar is happening in writing these blog posts. I have made typos since I've started. But they seem to be getting worse as of late, errors with greater frequency and more egregious in the commission. Some of that is spelling, which seems to come and go. But more frequently I'm seeing that I type a real word or phrase, just not the one I spoke to myself as I was composing the prose. The fingers and the brain seem less in sync.
I have always been sloppy about my physical environs. Some of this is the badge of the absent minded professor, books strewn all over the floor, desktop cluttered with papers. Another part is simply not caring about neatness. A third is that in living a life of the mind a conscious choice has been made to devote my attention to other things. And yet one more is that when younger I used to be able to keep track of many balls in the air, with them only occasionally tumbling down when I wasn't yet ready, so for the most part I could deal with practical reality when necessary and otherwise handle it in an autonomous way. I haven't yet learned to alter my approach.
I did once ruin a perfectly good laptop during a presentation I was giving by spilling Diet Coke on the laptop, the can placed precariously on the edge of a counter with the laptop sitting aside, only to see an unintended demonstration of potential energy converted into motion, as in reaching for the can without looking at it so as to keep my head in the presentation, I knocked the can over. During the period where I made such presentations I had an absolutely wonderful secretary, Mary Barker, who dealt with much of the practical reality that was part of my Campus job, so the balls I did juggle could be of the strategic variety.
My guess is that while working much practical reality needed to be confronted, even with Mary's wonderful assistance or later when I moved to the College of Business and tried to put buffers in place to keep the practical stuff in the background. With what did creep through I was getting adequate practice to maintain proficiency. I suspect that between dealing with less practical stuff now and with aging there lies the explanation.
But there is an additional fear. My mom, who passed away in December 2012 at age 92, showed evidence of dementia (measured by doctors) while she was in her mid 70s, and the last five years or so she was totally out of it. I'm afraid that I'm genetically disposed to ending up the same way and that what I'm writing about here is actually early warning signs.
I've already mentally scripted how it will happen. My logical processes will remain intact throughout, perhaps slowing some but otherwise remaining strong. My ability to cope with practical reality will steadily decline. As that happens more and more clutter will appear in all aspects of life, eventually enveloping me. It's as if dust starts to stick to the windows of the house and after a time one can no longer see outside.
I hope this is a nightmare only, not an accurate prognostication. How does one tell?
After a while the big X's became demoralizing and I looked for online alternatives (also the book was getting pretty much done and as a cheapskate I didn't want to pay for another book). Web sites that offer free Sudoku seem to come and go. I'm on my third one. They allow one to erase entries without messing up the rest of the board. They also include a button to check whether the current entries are correct. Some offer a hint button, a way to find the full solution to the puzzle, and possibly other "features," though I consider the timer function that many include more a detriment than anything else. This is not a race. It is enjoyable to find entries that to attain require substantial logical deduction. That's why one does the puzzles, not to get a good time.
I play a different game with myself as I complete the puzzle. It's where the trouble begins. I keep my right hand on the mouse and use it to position the cursor into the right cell in the grid and to click in the cell when I want to insert an entry. Either the index finger or middle finger of my left hand starts on a number key (usually I begin with the number 1 and see if I can find a place for that to be inserted). I visually position the finger onto that first key. Thereafter I try not to look at the keyboard but instead explicitly move to the next appropriate key by sliding my finger to the adjacent key and counting the number of times I need to do that till I've reached the destination key. This game within a game I do probably for the same reason that some people knit when they attend a seminar (which I witnessed on Friday at the Center for Writing studies Colloquium). There are two different types of mistakes I make while doing this.
Sometimes my finger moves too quickly and doesn't touch the adjacent key, so I screw up the count that way. Other times my brain resets and I start the count on a number that doesn't match the key I'm currently on. Both sort of errors I've made since I started to play Sudoku online. But the frequency has increased in the last couple of months. I'm wondering why and dreading the possible explanation. I should also note that something similar is happening in writing these blog posts. I have made typos since I've started. But they seem to be getting worse as of late, errors with greater frequency and more egregious in the commission. Some of that is spelling, which seems to come and go. But more frequently I'm seeing that I type a real word or phrase, just not the one I spoke to myself as I was composing the prose. The fingers and the brain seem less in sync.
I have always been sloppy about my physical environs. Some of this is the badge of the absent minded professor, books strewn all over the floor, desktop cluttered with papers. Another part is simply not caring about neatness. A third is that in living a life of the mind a conscious choice has been made to devote my attention to other things. And yet one more is that when younger I used to be able to keep track of many balls in the air, with them only occasionally tumbling down when I wasn't yet ready, so for the most part I could deal with practical reality when necessary and otherwise handle it in an autonomous way. I haven't yet learned to alter my approach.
I did once ruin a perfectly good laptop during a presentation I was giving by spilling Diet Coke on the laptop, the can placed precariously on the edge of a counter with the laptop sitting aside, only to see an unintended demonstration of potential energy converted into motion, as in reaching for the can without looking at it so as to keep my head in the presentation, I knocked the can over. During the period where I made such presentations I had an absolutely wonderful secretary, Mary Barker, who dealt with much of the practical reality that was part of my Campus job, so the balls I did juggle could be of the strategic variety.
My guess is that while working much practical reality needed to be confronted, even with Mary's wonderful assistance or later when I moved to the College of Business and tried to put buffers in place to keep the practical stuff in the background. With what did creep through I was getting adequate practice to maintain proficiency. I suspect that between dealing with less practical stuff now and with aging there lies the explanation.
But there is an additional fear. My mom, who passed away in December 2012 at age 92, showed evidence of dementia (measured by doctors) while she was in her mid 70s, and the last five years or so she was totally out of it. I'm afraid that I'm genetically disposed to ending up the same way and that what I'm writing about here is actually early warning signs.
I've already mentally scripted how it will happen. My logical processes will remain intact throughout, perhaps slowing some but otherwise remaining strong. My ability to cope with practical reality will steadily decline. As that happens more and more clutter will appear in all aspects of life, eventually enveloping me. It's as if dust starts to stick to the windows of the house and after a time one can no longer see outside.
I hope this is a nightmare only, not an accurate prognostication. How does one tell?
Thursday, April 24, 2014
The silent "b"
Consistency, English ain't got. For example:
Particularly vexing is the "omb" combination.
The "b" plays the role of the ideal child, seen but not heard. If that starts seeming sensible to you, as the first two are both nouns and verbs consider their present participle and juxtapose that with trombone, where the "b" is blared out. Apart from the critical role played when in its musical presence, one wonders, is the "b" needed at all?
The answer requires subtlety, no doubt.
sing, sang, sung
ring, rang, rung
bring, brought, brought
Particularly vexing is the "omb" combination.
bomb is a homonym for balm.
comb rhymes with home.
tomb rhymes with zoom.
The "b" plays the role of the ideal child, seen but not heard. If that starts seeming sensible to you, as the first two are both nouns and verbs consider their present participle and juxtapose that with trombone, where the "b" is blared out. Apart from the critical role played when in its musical presence, one wonders, is the "b" needed at all?
The answer requires subtlety, no doubt.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Flying in from the left and other nonsense
Q: What automobile company and insects should a presenter worry about?
A: Audi ants. ;-)
Leading off with a bad joke that everyone else knows is bad too sets a tone - it's all downhill from here. Yet bad as that joke is, there is a point. When an instructor makes a presentation it is good or bad depending on what the audience gets from it. If the presenter has a good idea of what the audience wants, then that should be used in the presentation in a fundamental way, either to confound the expectation because there is more learning that way, or to comport with it so as to make the audience appreciative. Obviously, this is harder to do with a one-shot performance, e.g., giving a talk on the road, than it is with teaching a class. There will be more variability in what the audience wants with a one-shot presentation and the presenter must take a stab. Sometimes that will be off the mark.
I get turned off and very sick
Seeing presentations that are slick.
There are two parts to this. One dates back to when I was a graduate student going to the Sherry-Chase Lounge for a drink or two during the awful winter my second year and then debating with my friend Nick, for what seemed to be hours on hours, which was more important, form or content. Nick was the form guy. I was the content guy. Things haven't changed much since then. I'm a content guy. Most instructors are content guys. If the presentation has gratuitous animation in it (as distinct from animation that illustrates the content) what does that convey about the content itself?
The other part is whether the instructor should emulate either a corporate sales spiel or a professional actor delivering a monologue, perhaps utilizing props. I say no to both. A sales spiel is biased as to what conclusion the audience is meant to draw. Personally, I hate to be sold things this way because I want to make up my own mind. Likewise, in an academic setting the presenter should want to make a good argument and leave it to the audience to draw conclusions. The slickness of the presentation is orthogonal to whether the argument is compelling or not. As to emulating actors, there are a handful of people in the profession who can pull it off. (Lawrence Lessig and Michael Wesch come to mind.) Bully for them. For the rest of us, however, such emulation makes us appear both less genuine and also less professional, since ours will be a poor imitation. We are better off with a presentation that has a feel of "a home movie" because then our audience knows it is from us.
Death by PowerPoint is an error
Creating boredom more than terror.
The terror is with the presenter, who is afraid of boring the audience. It's what drives presenters to put gratuitous animation and other special effects into their presentations. Maybe that will keep the audience awake. It will, for about ten seconds. How about after that? What then to do?
My answer to this is to consider presentation in different aspects - face-to-face or online, technical or conceptual, on novel content or where the content is covered elsewhere, and possibly other ways to compartmentalize presentation. For online technical presentation, as an example, I've learned over the years that my lecture benefits students even if the subject is covered in the book, because the language I use in explaining the ideas coupled with going through the math derivations is something that the students themselves can't produce when they read the textbook, and it is that sort of thinking that they need. Might other students be bored with it? Yes they might. The success measure is that some benefit, not that all do. In contrast, since I like to write a lot, for conceptual stuff I ask whether I can produce an essay that conveys what I want to say, rather than deliver an online presentation. Alternatively, if there is a well written piece out there that covers the issue well, a snip with a link to the piece may be all that is necessary, though my sense is that if it won't be on the test then only a handful of students will read it.
Face-to-face presentation is a different matter. The rising popularity of flipped classrooms offers an indictment of face-to-face presentation in general, especially as the common fare in a class. Much of the time there needs to be some method to assure students participate. Canned presentation tends to block that, so it should be used sparingly. Perhaps a spot lecture is needed when students show they don't understand an important concept. But that is the exception, not the rule.
* * * * *
I was prompted to produce the above by seeing an ad for Prezi in my Facebook News this morning. When Prezi first came out, I took some interest in it as did many learning technologists. But I never became a Prezi aficionado the way I am an Excel aficionado. The reason, I suppose, is explained above.
Prezi offers, at least this is what I recollect from when I tried it, an approach based on zoom in and then zoom out, where all the zoomed out content resides on a single virtual canvas. In delivering a presentation, one zooms in to a bit of that canvas, and when that is done there is zooming out and back in again to some other bit of the canvas.
If you look at a PowerPoint presentation in slide sorter mode, it is one virtual canvas. Slides are numbered and normal presentation gives a linear progression of the slides. But one can do nonlinear moves by inserting hyperlinks to other slides within the presentation (or to content on the Web).
Soon after I first got exposed to PowerPoint, I explored slide transitions and animations. Over the last several years I've opted for no slide transitions and instead of animation to have several slides on the same topic, where a subsequent slide has the content of the previous slide and then some new stuff as well. When this is math, the older stuff is grayed out while the new stuff is in black, for contrast. This is easier to build than animation within a single slide and gives something of a similar effect when I make a screen capture movie of the presentation, without conveying any sense of it being slick.
Given this use, what does Prezi add? In general, what does Prezi add?
When I read a blog post and make some determination of its quality, that it is in a WordPress blog or a Blogger blog is entirely immaterial to me. Why should Prezi or PowerPoint matter?
Monday, April 21, 2014
Stop on a dime
Consider the juxtaposition of three recent articles. The most recent is Thomas Friedman's column from yesterday, How to Get a Job At Google, Part 2. It was written presumably as a result of the outpouring of interest in Part 1, which at the time was meant at a one and done piece. Its contents were snips from an interview with the head of Google's HR department, Lazlo Bock, getting his take on what applicants for a job should be bringing to the table to have a decent chance of getting hired.
The next is a piece from the Tomorrow's Professor blog called Mindsets Toward Learning. It argues that there are two views of intelligence. The more common view, promulgated by the widespread administration of IQ tests in early childhood, is that IQ is fixed, the luck of the draw determined by the kid's genetic makeup, and as such a prime determinant of how much the kid will learn later in life. The newer, alternative view is that anybody can learn and intelligence can grow with the learning. What is needed is commitment to personal growth and an awful lot of effort to buttress that commitment. Students with a fixed view of intelligence often block their own learning. They fear they are not smart enough to "get it." That's becomes self-fulfilling prophecy as they then don't put in nearly enough effort to master the subject matter.
The last piece is an essay by Hanna Rosin from The Atlantic, The Overprotected Kid. Parenting for Rosin's generation (and prior generations) meant that kids were often left on their own with other kids. They got their bumps and bruises that way, sure, but that way they learned to engage in their play, to take risks and all that is attendant with doing so, and to develop a sense of confidence from the accomplishments they achieved. Nowadays children are always in the presence of adults because good parenting has come to mean keeping kids harmless from the threats of the playground (or elsewhere). The adults initiate on behalf of the children, with a benevolent goal in mind. The adults want to ensure safe choices are made. But the consequence is children don't learn from their mistakes, because they are not allowed to make any. They lose a sense of agency that childhood should provide, which is the fundamental message of the Rosin piece. Add to this the ultimate in irony - childhood is not actually safer (in aggregate) in spite of all these parental efforts.
Take these three articles themselves as a whole and envision a letter written to rising high school seniors and their families based on the triumvirate. It might go something like this.
It used to be that college was about a search for the meaning of life, the age-old questions. The study of the liberal arts gave the right academic counterpart to that search. That hasn't gone away, of course, but now it is coupled with developing expertise in a field that will have value in the job market post-graduation. Further, the entering college freshman is expected to show prescience, both on the meaning of life questions and on finding the field that best matches the student's inclinations. Only with prescience can the student integrate the two. Thus, one might imagine the student responding:
The next is a piece from the Tomorrow's Professor blog called Mindsets Toward Learning. It argues that there are two views of intelligence. The more common view, promulgated by the widespread administration of IQ tests in early childhood, is that IQ is fixed, the luck of the draw determined by the kid's genetic makeup, and as such a prime determinant of how much the kid will learn later in life. The newer, alternative view is that anybody can learn and intelligence can grow with the learning. What is needed is commitment to personal growth and an awful lot of effort to buttress that commitment. Students with a fixed view of intelligence often block their own learning. They fear they are not smart enough to "get it." That's becomes self-fulfilling prophecy as they then don't put in nearly enough effort to master the subject matter.
The last piece is an essay by Hanna Rosin from The Atlantic, The Overprotected Kid. Parenting for Rosin's generation (and prior generations) meant that kids were often left on their own with other kids. They got their bumps and bruises that way, sure, but that way they learned to engage in their play, to take risks and all that is attendant with doing so, and to develop a sense of confidence from the accomplishments they achieved. Nowadays children are always in the presence of adults because good parenting has come to mean keeping kids harmless from the threats of the playground (or elsewhere). The adults initiate on behalf of the children, with a benevolent goal in mind. The adults want to ensure safe choices are made. But the consequence is children don't learn from their mistakes, because they are not allowed to make any. They lose a sense of agency that childhood should provide, which is the fundamental message of the Rosin piece. Add to this the ultimate in irony - childhood is not actually safer (in aggregate) in spite of all these parental efforts.
Take these three articles themselves as a whole and envision a letter written to rising high school seniors and their families based on the triumvirate. It might go something like this.
Dear Student -
Please don't be too upset with your parents. They meant well, with the organized games, the constant encouragement, the insistence that you get good grades whether you understood what you were studying or not, and the making of so many rules for you not to break that you hardly did anything on your own. It's time for all of that to stop on a dime. You must chart a new course, one of your own making. You must really go for it. Accept that you will struggle from time to time. But persevere. With perseverance will eventually come accomplishment. That's what you should build on. It's getting to the point where you won't be able to reverse course. You need to do this now.
We have confidence in you.
Very truly yours,
Authors of the Triumvirate
It used to be that college was about a search for the meaning of life, the age-old questions. The study of the liberal arts gave the right academic counterpart to that search. That hasn't gone away, of course, but now it is coupled with developing expertise in a field that will have value in the job market post-graduation. Further, the entering college freshman is expected to show prescience, both on the meaning of life questions and on finding the field that best matches the student's inclinations. Only with prescience can the student integrate the two. Thus, one might imagine the student responding:
Dear Authors of the Triumvirate -
Thank you very much for your timely letter. I understand. But if you were looking at this from my angle you'd know a letter alone will not suffice. I'm not sure what will.
I had angst about college before receiving your letter. Now it is overwhelming.
Respectfully yours,
Anxious Student
Saturday, April 19, 2014
Knowledge versus Intelligence - My Take
Doing it the hard way is always easier.
Corollary to Murphy's Law
It now seems fashionable to say that intelligence is malleable and can grow over time. Witness Mindsets Toward Learning from the Tomorrow's Professor blog. On the one hand, I was happy to see Mindsets... as it seemed to confirm that a recent post of mine, Personal Transformation for Average Students - A Hypothetical, was at least in the ballpark on the goal if not the method. On the other hand, I was unhappy with Mindsets... as it seems to confound knowledge with intelligence and treat them as one and the same. Below I will give my personal definitions of the two and then try to illustrate how they differ, but are related.
Mindsets... is written as an open letter to students, particularly those who are at least implicitly pessimistic about their own learning, because much of what they are studying seems over their heads. The goal of the piece is laudable. But because of the confounding I mentioned above, I found it less than satisfying. Much of the basis of the letter is the research of Carol Dweck. The difficulties I have with Mindsets... point to some issues in translating research results about learning into action plans for potential beneficiaries of that research. A couple of years ago I had similar issues when I wrote about Ellen J. Langer's book, The Power of Mindful Learning. It is not that I disagree that we should teach with a mindful learning approach. We should. It is that the experiments Langer reports about don't go far enough. So good implementation needs to go beyond known research into areas that likely will be beneficial but the research hasn't confirmed that yet and it may be a long time coming. (Atul Gawande's piece The Bell Curve has a very interesting presentation about going beyond known research in the practice of medicine.) Going beyond known research might simply be a stab in the dark, in which case it should be frowned upon. If it is done by expert practitioner's, however, it can be substantially better than mere trial and error. These practitioner's have educated guesses about what will work. Those guesses are a product of intelligence coupled with knowledge rather than a result of just knowledge alone.
One exemplar who is given for the students in Mindsets... is Thomas Edison. This well known quote of his, I believe, illustrates the issues at hand.
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
One big issue that Mindsets... correctly identifies with students, the ones who view intelligence as fixed, is that they don't put in nearly enough effort in their learning. They are (mistakenly) pessimistic that the effort will not be productive, because they are lacking in that one percent that is genius. Mindsets... is written as to put round-off error into that quote. In the revised form, it is one hundred percent perspiration. The message to the students is - you can learn as long as you put in the effort. One might envision a dialog between the students for whom Mindsets... is intended and the authors of the piece. The initial response by one of these students might be something like this: "Okay, I need to put in additional effort. How much do I need to put in? When will I know that I've done enough?" The authors, wanting to be truthful, might respond: "You'll know when you understand what you've been studying. It takes as long as it takes." That is surely correct. But it is an answer that won't please the student. It leaves too much uncertain, both the time to get there and what understanding means. In the presence of this uncertainty the student might fail, in spite of the effort. Thus, my reading of Mindsets.... is that it wouldn't be persuasive in getting students who believe that intelligence is fixed to change their opinions.
We've reached a good juncture to give my definitions. I want to offer my disclaimer first. I am not an education researcher. I'm a practitioner. These definitions might not concur with what scholars in the field would say. They do make sense to me.
Knowledge - the concept is fundamentally retrospective. Knowledge is acquired through experience of one sort or another. It is exhibited primarily through recall, especially when it is quite clear what is being asked for ahead of time.
Intelligence - the concept is fundamentally prospective. Intelligence is about "seeing" possibility in the presence of uncertainty. There is prior knowledge of two and two. Intelligence is about putting two and two together. Intelligence is exhibited by showing a possible result that other knowledgeable people don't see.
The two often interplay. Expression of knowledge in a novel context requires intelligence, because it must be determined whether that knowledge is appropriate for the context and the appropriateness is uncertain. Conversely, it is already in the definition that expression of intelligence requires some prior knowledge. That the two concepts interplay doesn't make them one and the same. They are two different concepts.
From this there arises two questions. a) How is new knowledge acquired? We call this generation of new knowledge invention. (Mindsets... talks about how Edison invented the light bulb.) b) How is already confirmed knowledge transferred from an expert to a novice? There seem to be two possible answers to question (b). One is via imitation. The apprentice imitates the master. After enough training of this sort, the apprentice becomes a master. The other possibility is that the novice behaves as an inventor-in-waiting. The novice discovers the knowledge as if it were fundamentally new. After all, the knowledge is new to the novice.
The apprentice approach aims to establish competence in the novice, but it doesn't require expressions of intelligence. One key component of the inventor-in-waiting approach is an expression of intelligence. Learning this way requires expressions of intelligence on an on-going basis. A third idea, related to the other two, is creativity. As with the other two definitions, I will give my practitioner notion.
Creativity - the concept is distinct from intelligence but follows from it. Intelligence is about generating the Aha! moment. Creativity is about producing something useful, given the Aha.
Invention clearly requires both intelligence and creativity. It also requires prior knowledge. Otherwise there will be repetitions of reinventing the wheel.
Mindsets.... ignores the issue of whether students who view intelligence as malleable act as apprentices or as inventors-in-waiting. That is one deficiency in the piece. But there is an implied bias in Mindsets... toward the latter because it is a piece directed at the students, not at their teachers. The authors clearly have in mind that students can change their mindsets on their own.
Let me close with the other problem in the way Mindsets... is written. If, indeed, we want to encourage students to pursue a "discovery" approach to their own learning, but the students are skeptical that they're able to do this, a direct argument is unlikely to be persuasive. Better would be to identify a context, quite possibly outside the school setting, where students already do use discovery methods to learn. For example, one might have a conversation with students asking them about playing computer games. Have they ever used cheat codes? Why? Have they had the experience where they've made good progress without the cheat codes? What did it take to do that? After a conversation of this sort one can pop the meta question? What fundamental difference, if any, is there between playing a computer game and going about school work?
Let us get back to Edison. The authors of Mindsets... do use this quote.
I have not failed 700 times. I've succeeded in proving 700 ways how not to build a light bulb.
The quote is clear evidence of Edison's optimistic outlook. Might it show something else as well? Although each of those times entailed some perspiration, could it be that the experiences were fun for Edison as well? In other words, did Edison treat these experiments much the same way as current day kids treat playing computer games?
It may end up that it takes 700 tries before the result is attained, but at each try until the last one the inventor is looking for that short cut which will get him to the promised land in one fell swoop. The finding of that short cut is fun. And it requires intelligence.
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
The real change of seasons
Wind blows.
Who knows
What shows
Tomorrow will bring?
Much sun
Kids run
Such fun.
True signs of spring.
Early morn
Near dawn
Coffee on
Nesting birds sing.
The news
We choose
Ensues
Baseball's the thing.
Who knows
What shows
Tomorrow will bring?
Much sun
Kids run
Such fun.
True signs of spring.
Early morn
Near dawn
Coffee on
Nesting birds sing.
The news
We choose
Ensues
Baseball's the thing.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
A Complaint about the Facebook Notes Tool - A repost of a Status Update
The last post I wrote - Untutored Big Hitters - was composed using the Facebook Notes editor. It is a pretty crappy writing tool because it is not WYSIWYG about the line spacing. A single return produces a line space in the actual note but no line space in the editor. It is very hard to proofread without enough white space for the text - so you go back and forth between editor mode and preview mode while proofreading. That is a pain.
As I posted in a Status Update yesterday, the instructions for how to report a bug in Facebook don't seem to actually work. You click the little triangle, but there is no item to report the problem. So I'm going to repost this Status Update on my blog and hope that somebody who works at Facebook actually reads it and then forwards it to the right people.
The Notes tool used to accommodate some html. Now it doesn't. It is not good now. If it doesn't get fixed soon, this is the sort of thing that would drive me to make Google+ my primary tool. I've got friends in Facebook and it is easier to communicate with them via the Notes tool. But if the tool is sub par, that becomes too much of a burden.
As I posted in a Status Update yesterday, the instructions for how to report a bug in Facebook don't seem to actually work. You click the little triangle, but there is no item to report the problem. So I'm going to repost this Status Update on my blog and hope that somebody who works at Facebook actually reads it and then forwards it to the right people.
The Notes tool used to accommodate some html. Now it doesn't. It is not good now. If it doesn't get fixed soon, this is the sort of thing that would drive me to make Google+ my primary tool. I've got friends in Facebook and it is easier to communicate with them via the Notes tool. But if the tool is sub par, that becomes too much of a burden.
Untutored Big Hitters...
...In Golf And In Life
I watched a good bit of the coverage of the Masters Golf Tournament last week. It was entertaining. Bubba Watson, the winner of The Green Jacket, is a fascinating character, in part because his drives go for so much distance, whether in baseball or in golf the long ball is captivating, in part because he is self-taught and his swing is unorthodox though quite effective, and in part because he wears his emotions on his sleeve. Most other professional golfers try hard to be inscrutable. Bottling up the emotional side is necessary for that. Bubba Watson's demeanor is unlike most other pro golfers. He is much more what you see is what you get.
One of the surprises for me in all the commentary abut the Masters that I heard on TV and in what I read online is that there was no mention of John Daly. To me, Daly's story is similar to Watson's. Both came to the fore as players who could outdrive the field. Both developed driving styles that were unorthodox and they were self-taught in doing so. Ultimately it is the relationship between the self-teaching and the prodigious driving that I want to focus on. Both learned to also have good touch around the green, which in combination with the driving made them formidable competitors. Both now have two major championships to their credit. Both also demonstrate their inner demons publicly on occasion in a way most other players never do. Both also rose from rather humble backgrounds and that may very well have contributed to their later development.
Of course there are differences too. Watson is tall and lean. Daly in his prime was average height and chunky - keeping his weight under control was a constant battle. Watson is now quite a family man. Daly has been married multiple times and is currently unmarried. These differences notwithstanding, to me it seems these players are of a type. Let me consider now a third ball player who seems to be of the same type, though he was far more successful than Watson or Daly. I'm talking about Babe Ruth. The following is from a piece I wrote in 2005, a few months after I had started to blog.
So it would seem that while most players in sports benefit from having a lot of coaching, there are a handful of big hitters who were better off developing on their own. I'd like to see if I can get at why that is. Then I'd like to translate that story into settings other than professional sports.
I will take as my starting point this essay by Ericsson et. al. on developing expertise. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice%28PsychologicalReview%29.pdf. The key, according to these authors, is a regime of "deliberate practice" where at each step the individual tries to do something just out of reach. This is the immediate challenge. As the person practices performance improves and eventually the challenge is met. When that happens a new challenge is needed and when that is found the cycle repeats.
Most of us don't become experts in areas that at one time we were interested in. The reasons are multiple. One is fear of not being able to rise to the next challenge. Another is getting bored with practice so not putting in enough time to master the current step. A third might be what is called the Goldilocks problem. How big should the next step be, in what direction should it be taken, and what criteria determine that? Too small a step or a step in too familiar a direction and the person will feel unchallenged and get bored. Too large a step or a step in a too alien a direction and the person will become frightened by the likelihood of failing. What is required is a step that is just right right. How is that step found?
Two possible answers to that question are: (1) by coaching and (2) by self-experimentation. The coach is himself an expert who matches the orthodoxy of the sport (or perhaps his idiosyncratic view of that orthodoxy) to the talents of the player and the player's current performance level. The matching process then generates the next step, with the thought in mind that following a sequence of such steps will bring the player to the top of the profession and demonstrate excellence in accordance to the orthodoxy. Self-experimentation is different. The player develops an intuition for the next step to try and goes with that intuition on what to practice. The intuition, in turn, is part of an inventive process. It is based on enormous self-knowledge but it is less dependent on the current orthodoxy. Bubba Watson's initial stance and footwork through the golf swing, for example, are completely non-standard (though one commentator I read mentioned that they are something like what Jack Nicklaus used to do). Yet his method works for him, very well. He wouldn't have found it via coaching. He had to try it on his own, see what results he got from it, and then tweak it till it was quite effective.
The coaching approach is more likely to produce progress that ultimately results in expertise. Self-experimentation will generate more failure along the way and thus likely be slower. But once in a while it will produce surprisingly good results. Thus someone who is talented and persists in a regime of self-experimentation is more likely to produce outlier great performance than would his counterpart who relies on a coach.
There is another piece to the puzzle, I believe. This has to do with live performance, not practice, and what approach the player is most comfortable with when, "the pressure is on." Most of us choke in such circumstance. The pressure gets to us. But some of us can stay in the moment and continue to perform at a very high level. What allows the person to do that? On this, the following quote from Jordan Spieth, Watson's playing partner in the final round of the Masters, who ultimately tied for second for second place is quite revealing (the source is here http://espn.go.com/golf/masters14/story/_/id/10785511/2014-masters-jordan-spieth-says-sting-loss-last-awhile):
In other words, Spieth represents one view of high-level performance - have a good script at the outset and then stay on script. Don't improvise. Elsewhere in the linked piece Spieth said that while he had a bit of nerves, he was mainly calm out there. The staying on script approach goes hand in hand with somebody who can remain calm under pressure.
Bubba Watson's personality is the diametrical opposite of Spieth's. Jim Nantz referred to Watson as a creative golfing genius, meaning he was constantly improvising on the golf course. But Nantz also referred to Watson's soft underbelly - he can get fidgety and lose his concentration. One might conjecture that Watson is an ADHD type and the creativity becomes a way for him to manage that. Staying on script would produce horrible results for Watson, because he'd soon stop paying attention and his performance would suffer.
ADHD may not be the only driver for why others like to improvise in the live moment, but then I believe feeling a sense of boredom from staying on script has to be at least part of the reason. In any event, I believe it a reasonable conjecture that there is a strong relationship between the preferred method of live performance and the way performers prefer to engage in deliberate practice. Those who like to stay on script in the clutch opt for coaching with deliberate practice. Those who want to improvise under pressure opt for self-experimentation.
Now let's segue from sports to medicine. This essay by Atul Gawande called the Bell Curve is one of my favorites. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/12/06/041206fa_fact?currentPage=all. It is about treating cystic fibrosis, where a good chunk of the issue is whether the patient sticks to the regime of treatment through thick or thin. Many do not, because the treatment is arduous, so the patients cut corners, ultimately to the detriment of their own health. The doctor who has achieved the best results on treatment, by far, is Warren Warwick. He improvises a great deal and is quite aggressive about it! Others go more by established best practice.
When you first think about improvisation you probably think about Jazz or off Broadway Theater. I don't know how to tell who the big hitters are in those environments. But there is a myth, which surely has some basis in fact, that many of the star performers live (or lived) life on the edge, particularly in regard to alcohol and drug use. This need for extremity outside the performance setting seems to be correlated with the personality that craves improvisation. Billie Holiday and John Belushi are two names that exemplify this view. One wonders if that edgy feeling can be generated but in a more healthful way. Recently I've become taken with the music of Melody Gardot. Her story is quite unusual, to say the least. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melody_Gardot. She is committed now to using music to improve the health of others. If she can do that and continue to be a big hitter with her compositions and her performances, maybe it will point a way to finding this more healthful alternative.
Perhaps then, all of us amateurs who play at improvisation can become big hitters.
I watched a good bit of the coverage of the Masters Golf Tournament last week. It was entertaining. Bubba Watson, the winner of The Green Jacket, is a fascinating character, in part because his drives go for so much distance, whether in baseball or in golf the long ball is captivating, in part because he is self-taught and his swing is unorthodox though quite effective, and in part because he wears his emotions on his sleeve. Most other professional golfers try hard to be inscrutable. Bottling up the emotional side is necessary for that. Bubba Watson's demeanor is unlike most other pro golfers. He is much more what you see is what you get.
One of the surprises for me in all the commentary abut the Masters that I heard on TV and in what I read online is that there was no mention of John Daly. To me, Daly's story is similar to Watson's. Both came to the fore as players who could outdrive the field. Both developed driving styles that were unorthodox and they were self-taught in doing so. Ultimately it is the relationship between the self-teaching and the prodigious driving that I want to focus on. Both learned to also have good touch around the green, which in combination with the driving made them formidable competitors. Both now have two major championships to their credit. Both also demonstrate their inner demons publicly on occasion in a way most other players never do. Both also rose from rather humble backgrounds and that may very well have contributed to their later development.
Of course there are differences too. Watson is tall and lean. Daly in his prime was average height and chunky - keeping his weight under control was a constant battle. Watson is now quite a family man. Daly has been married multiple times and is currently unmarried. These differences notwithstanding, to me it seems these players are of a type. Let me consider now a third ball player who seems to be of the same type, though he was far more successful than Watson or Daly. I'm talking about Babe Ruth. The following is from a piece I wrote in 2005, a few months after I had started to blog.
A little side story. Not too long ago I read Robert Cramer's biography of Babe Ruth. Cramer cites Ty Cobb on how Ruth learned his swing. Since Ruth started as a pitcher, nobody coached him on his hitting. He therefore learned to hit in an uninhibited way. Since "small ball" was the approach to baseball at that time, if Ruth had started as an outfielder he would through coaching have been forced to learn a more compact swing and would have never become the prodigious home run hitter and savior of baseball. I'll get to the relevance of this story in a bit.
So it would seem that while most players in sports benefit from having a lot of coaching, there are a handful of big hitters who were better off developing on their own. I'd like to see if I can get at why that is. Then I'd like to translate that story into settings other than professional sports.
I will take as my starting point this essay by Ericsson et. al. on developing expertise. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice%28PsychologicalReview%29.pdf. The key, according to these authors, is a regime of "deliberate practice" where at each step the individual tries to do something just out of reach. This is the immediate challenge. As the person practices performance improves and eventually the challenge is met. When that happens a new challenge is needed and when that is found the cycle repeats.
Most of us don't become experts in areas that at one time we were interested in. The reasons are multiple. One is fear of not being able to rise to the next challenge. Another is getting bored with practice so not putting in enough time to master the current step. A third might be what is called the Goldilocks problem. How big should the next step be, in what direction should it be taken, and what criteria determine that? Too small a step or a step in too familiar a direction and the person will feel unchallenged and get bored. Too large a step or a step in a too alien a direction and the person will become frightened by the likelihood of failing. What is required is a step that is just right right. How is that step found?
Two possible answers to that question are: (1) by coaching and (2) by self-experimentation. The coach is himself an expert who matches the orthodoxy of the sport (or perhaps his idiosyncratic view of that orthodoxy) to the talents of the player and the player's current performance level. The matching process then generates the next step, with the thought in mind that following a sequence of such steps will bring the player to the top of the profession and demonstrate excellence in accordance to the orthodoxy. Self-experimentation is different. The player develops an intuition for the next step to try and goes with that intuition on what to practice. The intuition, in turn, is part of an inventive process. It is based on enormous self-knowledge but it is less dependent on the current orthodoxy. Bubba Watson's initial stance and footwork through the golf swing, for example, are completely non-standard (though one commentator I read mentioned that they are something like what Jack Nicklaus used to do). Yet his method works for him, very well. He wouldn't have found it via coaching. He had to try it on his own, see what results he got from it, and then tweak it till it was quite effective.
The coaching approach is more likely to produce progress that ultimately results in expertise. Self-experimentation will generate more failure along the way and thus likely be slower. But once in a while it will produce surprisingly good results. Thus someone who is talented and persists in a regime of self-experimentation is more likely to produce outlier great performance than would his counterpart who relies on a coach.
There is another piece to the puzzle, I believe. This has to do with live performance, not practice, and what approach the player is most comfortable with when, "the pressure is on." Most of us choke in such circumstance. The pressure gets to us. But some of us can stay in the moment and continue to perform at a very high level. What allows the person to do that? On this, the following quote from Jordan Spieth, Watson's playing partner in the final round of the Masters, who ultimately tied for second for second place is quite revealing (the source is here http://espn.go.com/golf/masters14/story/_/id/10785511/2014-masters-jordan-spieth-says-sting-loss-last-awhile):
"In the long run, it's probably better that it worked out that way than if I pulled it off, because now I'll sit back and look at it and realize you just have to stick to that original game plan out there and you can't get greedy, and that's what I did just on that one swing."
In other words, Spieth represents one view of high-level performance - have a good script at the outset and then stay on script. Don't improvise. Elsewhere in the linked piece Spieth said that while he had a bit of nerves, he was mainly calm out there. The staying on script approach goes hand in hand with somebody who can remain calm under pressure.
Bubba Watson's personality is the diametrical opposite of Spieth's. Jim Nantz referred to Watson as a creative golfing genius, meaning he was constantly improvising on the golf course. But Nantz also referred to Watson's soft underbelly - he can get fidgety and lose his concentration. One might conjecture that Watson is an ADHD type and the creativity becomes a way for him to manage that. Staying on script would produce horrible results for Watson, because he'd soon stop paying attention and his performance would suffer.
ADHD may not be the only driver for why others like to improvise in the live moment, but then I believe feeling a sense of boredom from staying on script has to be at least part of the reason. In any event, I believe it a reasonable conjecture that there is a strong relationship between the preferred method of live performance and the way performers prefer to engage in deliberate practice. Those who like to stay on script in the clutch opt for coaching with deliberate practice. Those who want to improvise under pressure opt for self-experimentation.
Now let's segue from sports to medicine. This essay by Atul Gawande called the Bell Curve is one of my favorites. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/12/06/041206fa_fact?currentPage=all. It is about treating cystic fibrosis, where a good chunk of the issue is whether the patient sticks to the regime of treatment through thick or thin. Many do not, because the treatment is arduous, so the patients cut corners, ultimately to the detriment of their own health. The doctor who has achieved the best results on treatment, by far, is Warren Warwick. He improvises a great deal and is quite aggressive about it! Others go more by established best practice.
When you first think about improvisation you probably think about Jazz or off Broadway Theater. I don't know how to tell who the big hitters are in those environments. But there is a myth, which surely has some basis in fact, that many of the star performers live (or lived) life on the edge, particularly in regard to alcohol and drug use. This need for extremity outside the performance setting seems to be correlated with the personality that craves improvisation. Billie Holiday and John Belushi are two names that exemplify this view. One wonders if that edgy feeling can be generated but in a more healthful way. Recently I've become taken with the music of Melody Gardot. Her story is quite unusual, to say the least. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melody_Gardot. She is committed now to using music to improve the health of others. If she can do that and continue to be a big hitter with her compositions and her performances, maybe it will point a way to finding this more healthful alternative.
Perhaps then, all of us amateurs who play at improvisation can become big hitters.
Monday, April 14, 2014
Personal Transformation for Average Students - A Hypothetical
Can average students be remade into deep learners through a regime that aims to alter their habits of mind, in addition to teaching them specific subject matter? I submit that we don't know the answer to this question. The hypothetical presented in what follows is meant not so much as a program to jump into (since it is highly idiosyncratic to me - my strengths, my competencies, and my views about teaching) as it is intended to provoke others to ask what like programs might be done to get at an answer to this question.
Before going further, let's suppose that we learn the answer to the question is yes, it can be done, but the costs are quite high to achieve that end. The following question then becomes operative. Whose call is it to make whether to incur those costs or not? I will give an idealistic answer here, based on the current University of Illinois Strategic Plan. Goal two is to provide transformative learning experiences. That should be for all students. Then, in the Principles part of the plan, there are multiple lines about keeping tuition from exploding. Taken together this means that either taxpayers or donors have to want to incur these costs, so indirectly it is their call, one that the rest of the community embraces. In the rest of this piece, I'm going to assume that support will be forthcoming. Otherwise, why stir up trouble with this sort of investigation?
There is a puzzle to be solved by any successful intervention. Deep learners are largely self-directed in their learning, even when taking classes. The instructor may provide launch points, via the choice of readings, topics emphasized in lecture, and the assignments given. The student is grateful for being provided with them and considers all of these. But then the baton passes to the student who explores the subject in the student's own manner, who makes up further questions to be answered as early ideas are discovered, and who is largely unconcerned with grades in the entire process. The inquiry itself is its own reward. Average students are much more externally directed, will do what they think they are being told but not venture beyond that, and are extraordinarily concerned with grades as passport to whatever good things come after school. The puzzle is how via external direction average students can be encouraged to be internally directed about their own learning.
I have a better sense of what won't work than what will, based on my teaching experience. Since the mid 1990s I have tried many different interventions at the course level aimed at getting students to learn better. Sometimes these have had positive effect that were evident to me. Yet none, taken individually or in combination, have led to the type of personal transformation I asked about in the opening question. None of the interventions have been sufficiently intensive to achieve that.
It is pretty easy to understand why. Students are taking on average four other courses. If those other courses encourage the student to act in an externally directed manner that is a much larger force in favor of stasis. Further, since now I teach upper level courses rather than freshman classes, the students have had substantial reinforcement for an externally directly approach before I get to see them in my class. Much of the behavior I witness in my students comes from habits developed in taking these earlier courses.
This suggests what is needed is a substantial curricular innovation that happens quite early in the students' college experience. I experienced the requisite intensity twice as a student.
The first time was a six weeks math summer program at Hampshire College that I attended between my junior and senior years in high school. My recollection of the experience is imperfect but it went something like this. We had three hours of class each morning. For the first four weeks (out of six) I was in a class on number theory and group theory taught by Marty Arkowitz. We were given rather extensive homework to do each day. After lunch there was time either for R&R, for me that mainly meant playing tennis, or for working on the homework. At 5:17 (1717 in military time, the number 17 figured prominently as a symbol of our nerd behavior) there was a theorem given for the entire program by the director, David C. Kelley. After dinner there was a regular volleyball game, some socializing, and possibly more work on homework. That was Monday - Friday. On the weekends there were often field trips. I recall one to Tanglewood that was delightful and another one, hiking in the Berkshires, that I found rather dreadful. If memory serves we also saw a Red Sox game on a different weekend.
A few years back Kelley made an inquiry to alums from the program about the impact the experience had. I wrote a long missive back. The following is an excerpt from that which shows that in spite of the intensity, the program in itself was not personally transformative.
This issue of "a student hitting a wall" and what to do about it is a big one. Any limited duration program that is intensive will have to squarely confront the issue.
The other experience was my first year in graduate school at Northwestern. The doctoral program in economics was quite intensive. This time I experienced personal transformation. But many of my classmates did not and the experience for them was quite brutal. Indeed, Robert Eisner's macroeconomics class the very first quarter bore some similarity to Kingsfield's contract law class in The Paper Chase. Aside from many of my classmates hitting a wall intellectually, it turned out there was inadequate funding to support us all on fellowship the second year. I initially thought my fellowship was guaranteed as long as I was a student in good standing. Apparently not. The scarce funding led to competition among the students that increased the brutality of that first year and in my mind did nothing to contribute to the learning.
Undergraduate Engineering education has a reputation for being brutal in this sense. Many students wash out. At Illinois, those students are fortunate to be able to transfer to other colleges on campus. A survival of the fittest approach might produce personal transformation in a few of the middle tier economics students, but at what sort of batting average? And then what of the students who wash out?
I have also experienced this sort of intensity in an adult education context both as an attendee, The Frye Leadership Institute (now Leading Change Institute), and as a provider, Faculty Summer Institute where I was the Head Facilitator for the first ten years, and in the Educause Institute - Learning Technology Leadership Program where I was one of the faculty for three years. These were different to my student experiences in several respects. The attendees were mid career professionals, so much more rooted in their work. The duration was less, not quite a fortnight in the case of Frye, a work week in the case of FSI and LTL. And essentially all the work done outside of plenary session was in groups. Further, in LTL in particular, there was monitoring of the group work by the faculty so nobody would go over the deep end. I have a sense that these experiences were largely successful (I wrote about the first LTL experience voicing that opinion) with the impact as much emotional as intellectual, maybe more so.
In the program I suggest below there is a hybrid design based on these experiences and on what I've learned from my teaching.
* * * * *
Two issues need to be addressed before getting to the program itself. I want to take those seriously here. A third issue arises that I will simply wave my hands at, but mention here so it is understood that with any real intervention this issue will have to be dealt with seriously as well.
The first is how to identify the students. Intensive interventions typically appeal to elite students, but they are not the intended audience. We're looking for average students who don't know they should be seeking personal transformation in college but are not a priori negatively disposed to the idea when it is brought to their attention. It is hard to envision a non-coercive way to select those students who are negatively disposed. For those who are already positively disposed to the idea, one expects that they are the better students who don't require this sort of intervention. The ones in neutral who are invited to participate will need some sort of inducement. That may create its own selection bias. C'est la vie. Purely random selection violates human subject protocols.
The second issue is when the intervention should occur. Candidates are a summer intervention, perhaps between the senior year in high school and the first semester of college, or during the first semester in college, when the intervention would have to substitute for the talking of regular classes. An add on in addition to regular classes during that first semester couldn't possibly be intensive enough. A summer intervention might ultimately prove desirable and popular, especially if the various experiments that this post is supposed to engender generate positive results. But in the experimental phase it might be perceived as a cost add to attending students and their families. (Whether it is or not depends ultimately on the time to degree. If the students can cut off a semester during their senior year because of that leading summer, then there really wouldn't be a cost add. Yet who will know this in advance?) For this reason, the envisioned program is taken to happen in the fall semester of the first year.
The third issue is how to go from a collection of courses taught in that first semester to a single program that is perceived holistically and what institutional barriers must be broken through to attain that goal. One conception would be a set of Discovery classes that the students would take in lock step and where the instructors had done substantial coordination via pre-planning and subsequent activities that entailed all of them ensemble. This conception speaks to the expense of the intervention. It also suggests the actual program would emerge from an extended negotiation by these instructors, the outcome of which is hard to anticipate in advance. An alternative is for a single instructor to teach all of these courses, but to fewer students so as to keep the effort from being too overwhelming. That instructor must then have a vision of what the program would be like. On the bureaucratic side, permission would have to be granted by the departments who normally offer these courses when, as typically would be the case, that solo instructor is not a department member. The permission would assert that this program is indeed a worthy substitute for the offered course so students should receive credit for it. As I said, here I'm just going to wave my hands about this issue.
The program I have in mind entails four real courses and one fictitious course, which I will explain momentarily. The four courses are: (1) principles of microeconomics, (2) calculus of a single variable, (3) the first required writing course, and (4) learning and memory. Of these, the first three are general education courses. The fourth is offered as a mid level psychology course. It's inclusion here is to make the students study their own learning and do so part and parcel with everything else they are studying. The fictitious course I'll call Intervention. It is there for two reasons. First, each of the listed real courses carries 3 credit hours and I want the program to be 16 credit hours, to convey the requisite intensity. The program will meet two hours before lunch and two hours after lunch Monday through Thursday. With a little arithmetic, one can see we need an additional four credit hours and the fictitious course supplies that. Also, credit in Intervention will be given only to students in this program. So it can be used as an identifier in the student transcript when comparing subsequent performance with other like students who have not had Intervention. That would provide one sort of metric on whether the program was successful.
My certified expertise is in economics and my undergraduate degree is in math. I have taught principles of microeconomics before and I believe the undergraduate degree sufficient to claim expertise for teaching calculus. But I've never taken a psychology class and I stopped taking English after my senior year in high school. I have acquired knowledge in these areas mainly since I became interested in learning technology. That began in 1995 after I had been at Illinois for fifteen years by then. Both subjects remain as ongoing areas of interest even now. I believe I would do better in teaching writing and learning to my students than I would do in teaching math and economics, because I would take a "natural approach" to the former based on my own self-discovery, while I'm prone to take a more formal approach to the latter given the disciplinary training I've had. My recent teaching suggests this. It is how others should consider a program such as this. If other research faculty after reading this piece find they are inclined to try a similar program, they likely will encounter the same sort of issue. I would encourage such efforts though, as I said above, the bureaucracy likely would hold them back.
The aim would be to have 4 or 5 students in the program. By my count, that would produce either 64 or 80 "instructional units" (IUs are the product of credit hours and number of students enrolled) and therefore be comparable in production to my teaching last fall where I had 23 students and produced 70 IUs (one student was a grad, which counts for 4 credit hours instead of 3). The reason for this sizing, apart from not over taxing me as the instructor, is the need to monitor each student on a daily basis for how the student is doing - whether insufficiently stimulated or hitting a wall or more or less properly engaged. While the goal is to keep the group in lock step, there is also a need to coach at the individual level to get the student to rise and meet the next challenge. This is what will generate the intensity. It simply can't be done with large numbers of students.
Students would get credit for the program as long as they demonstrated sufficient effort. This would translate into a satisfactory grade for each of the component courses. There would be no letter grades. The idea here is to explicitly lessen the impact of extrinsic motivation and get the students to see what it feels like when they get intense feedback from the instructor but no letter grade. Ultimately the goal will be for the students to provide the feedback for themselves about their own performance as part of being self-directed in their learning. Let them first see what feedback feels like when it comes from an interested outsider. There is also an aspect of insurance to this approach. The experiment with this program might fail completely. In this case the students will remain externally directed thereafter and will pursue their studies accordingly. The students should be held harmless grade-wise if this is the outcome, as long as they have put in solid effort during the program.
Students would be recruited for the program from among those who have been admitted as econ majors or are undeclared in their major but have indicated an interest in economics. Among this population one wants students who haven't already placed out of the required courses that are part of the program. One also wants middle students. If one arrayed this entire population by standardized test scores, for example, one would want to recruit from the middle two quartiles.
The obvious carrot offered in such recruiting is the high degree of interaction with the instructor that results from having only 5 students. The obvious stick is that these students will be expected to work quite hard and be under substantial scrutiny to ensure that outcome. Students who will be living away from home for the first time may very well not want that scrutiny and prefer the freedom to decide their own academic commitment for themselves. There may also be indirect penalties from participating in the program. For example, many econ majors are business major wannabes. Transferring into the College of Business is a difficult thing and typically require very good grades during the first year. With the program offering no grades whatsoever, that may make these students look less attractive than their peers who did well in regular courses. Potential recruits need to be made aware of these sort of issues ahead of time.
The students who do apply for the program should do so knowing the program description and understanding both the upside and the downside. It is hoped that this would generate at least 5 applicants. (I believe there are around 225 new Econ majors each year.) Assuming there were more applicants than that other criteria would need to be used to select the 5 who get admitted to the program. One idea would be for the students to appear academically similar in their preparation. So if there were several applicants near the 50th percentile and one or two near the 70th percentile the former would be preferred. This would facilitate keeping the class in lock step. Given that, diversity of the students in their backgrounds would also be a plus. For example, I'd prefer to have two students of one gender and three of the other to either four-one or five-zero.
* * * * *
In this section of the essay I'd like to talk about the habits/ways-of-going-about-things we'd like to see cultivated in the students and the methods by which that might be achieved.
Normally, I abhor lists but here I think it useful to organize ideas. So I will list the big picture goals that I envision.
In class time would prepare the students both technically and content-wise to make the next set of objects, to discuss the previous set that has been made, and to discuss the general academic themes that the objects are aimed at illustrating. Some of the readings done, out of necessity, will have no parallel object that the students make and will simply be discussed for themselves. After a fashion the class as a whole will try to get at the question whether the understanding of such readings differs whether there were objects assigned for the readings or not and/or whether the students come to make, implicitly or explicitly, objects for those readings to facilitate their understanding although they were not assigned to do so.
While there would be an ongoing light informal evaluation of how things were going, to make necessary tweaks in process and content and to adjust the pace of the class to match how the students seem to be doing, not until the end of the fifth week would there be a formal evaluation of what had gone before. The formal evaluation is aimed at first, getting students to consider their learning and their effort and come to some sense of what a cost-benefit analysis would produce as a conclusion, and then to have the students consider how things have gone and compare that to the way they went about their learning in high school. That part of the evaluation is meant to feed the middle third of the class.
In the first third the subject matter would only be economics, math, and writing. The learning theme would be introduced in the middle third. Two important issues would be made paramount. The first is transfer. What mechanism do the students opt for to achieve transfer? (Memorization is particularly bad here as it only allows the students to reproduce the ideas as they were presented originally. To use the ideas in a novel context requires a deeper form of understanding.) The second is motivation. When the program is fun, what makes for that? What do the students look forward to? What do they dread but they know they must do? Why isn't that part fun? Coupled with introducing learning into the program, the class as a whole will become involved in modest program redesign, with the aim of taking the lessons from learning and modifying program activities to make the learning better. And some evaluation of those modifications will be done to see if things did improve, remained unchanged, or got worse.
During the last third, students would be given more freedom to read pieces of their own choosing, write on topics they found relevant, and, from time to time, where they take over direction of the class as a whole, perhaps by first making a presentation on a subject they have researched and then leading a discussion afterward. The idea is to give more control and responsibility to each student. I have done this sort of thing in the past in teaching campus honors classes, where the students giving the presentation did so as a group. Here because of the small numbers, I'd expect each student to do this individually, aided by my coaching. It is meant as a push toward self-direction with the learning.
While the formal program is meant to happen entirely during that first semester, to help the students in the subsequent semester adjust to taking regular classes and yet to continue to practice the deep learning ideas they got in the previous semester, one hour per week should be set aside for the group to meet and discuss what is going on. As this would not be for credit it would not be possible to make those meetings mandatory, but they should be strongly encouraged. If the students prefer to meet without the instructor present, that would be fine. And if individual students would prefer one-on-one meetings with the instructor on an as needed basis, mentoring is not otherwise a part of undergraduate instruction, that should be available too.
In this regard I'd like to note here that when I started at Northwestern in grad school I felt disadvantaged relative to my classmates, because I didn't major in economics as an undergraduate and felt under prepared as a consequence. It took some time for me to compensate for those shortcomings in economics preparation and to also realize that my math preparation, which was better than what my classmates had as undergraduates, was ultimately more important than the economics preparation. I suspect something similar will happen with this program, if it is successful. Having completed the program the students may feel disadvantaged relative to their classmates, because they haven't yet experienced what taking a large lecture class is like while their classmates have. I hope they come to the same sort of conclusion that I did, that their preparation from participating in the program is ultimately more valuable to them and that they end up learning more as a consequence. I don't know if that learning more will immediately show up in good performance on exams. If not, my hope is that it will show up in course grades down the road, and in non-graded learning situations thereafter.
* * * * *
If the program were modestly successful, either a few students were transformed while others were not or the students were in some gray area where the outcome could not be determined with any certainty, I probably would want to try it again. The hope would be to learn from my mistakes and see if I could improve performance the next time. If the program were highly successful, I probably would not want to try again and instead move entirely into proselytize mode and encourage others to try it. The program is meant as a proof of concept. Once the concept is demonstrated to be plausible next steps need to be taken.
It is easy to write the previous paragraph. This one is harder. If the program were a complete failure - all the students dropped out after a few weeks because it was just too intensive for them without them finding suitable rewards to match the intensity, or the students stuck it out but collectively forced me to teach in a way that I was sure wouldn't be transformative by threatening to drop out otherwise - I would become very depressed indeed. I might then abandon my interest in undergraduate education, for the experiment would have demonstrated that the profound change I want to see is not attainable, at least not by methods I can envision. I view this outcome as unlikely. But unlikely is not the same as impossible. I wonder who else might be interested in this sort of experiment and what their expectations would be regarding outcomes.
Let me conclude here by noting that in its imagery associated with the Strategic Plan there is a tendency for the Campus to: (a) focus on non-course experiences such as internships or working in a faculty member's lab, (b) concentrate on experience in the STEM disciplines, and (c) emphasize the accomplishments of the best students. It seems to me there are interesting and legitimate questions that need to be asked: (d) Can courses themselves be transformative? (e) What of the many students who major in the social sciences? and (f) What are we doing for more typical students regarding personal transformation?
I hope others can take up these questions as well. They are questions that need answers.
Before going further, let's suppose that we learn the answer to the question is yes, it can be done, but the costs are quite high to achieve that end. The following question then becomes operative. Whose call is it to make whether to incur those costs or not? I will give an idealistic answer here, based on the current University of Illinois Strategic Plan. Goal two is to provide transformative learning experiences. That should be for all students. Then, in the Principles part of the plan, there are multiple lines about keeping tuition from exploding. Taken together this means that either taxpayers or donors have to want to incur these costs, so indirectly it is their call, one that the rest of the community embraces. In the rest of this piece, I'm going to assume that support will be forthcoming. Otherwise, why stir up trouble with this sort of investigation?
There is a puzzle to be solved by any successful intervention. Deep learners are largely self-directed in their learning, even when taking classes. The instructor may provide launch points, via the choice of readings, topics emphasized in lecture, and the assignments given. The student is grateful for being provided with them and considers all of these. But then the baton passes to the student who explores the subject in the student's own manner, who makes up further questions to be answered as early ideas are discovered, and who is largely unconcerned with grades in the entire process. The inquiry itself is its own reward. Average students are much more externally directed, will do what they think they are being told but not venture beyond that, and are extraordinarily concerned with grades as passport to whatever good things come after school. The puzzle is how via external direction average students can be encouraged to be internally directed about their own learning.
I have a better sense of what won't work than what will, based on my teaching experience. Since the mid 1990s I have tried many different interventions at the course level aimed at getting students to learn better. Sometimes these have had positive effect that were evident to me. Yet none, taken individually or in combination, have led to the type of personal transformation I asked about in the opening question. None of the interventions have been sufficiently intensive to achieve that.
It is pretty easy to understand why. Students are taking on average four other courses. If those other courses encourage the student to act in an externally directed manner that is a much larger force in favor of stasis. Further, since now I teach upper level courses rather than freshman classes, the students have had substantial reinforcement for an externally directly approach before I get to see them in my class. Much of the behavior I witness in my students comes from habits developed in taking these earlier courses.
This suggests what is needed is a substantial curricular innovation that happens quite early in the students' college experience. I experienced the requisite intensity twice as a student.
The first time was a six weeks math summer program at Hampshire College that I attended between my junior and senior years in high school. My recollection of the experience is imperfect but it went something like this. We had three hours of class each morning. For the first four weeks (out of six) I was in a class on number theory and group theory taught by Marty Arkowitz. We were given rather extensive homework to do each day. After lunch there was time either for R&R, for me that mainly meant playing tennis, or for working on the homework. At 5:17 (1717 in military time, the number 17 figured prominently as a symbol of our nerd behavior) there was a theorem given for the entire program by the director, David C. Kelley. After dinner there was a regular volleyball game, some socializing, and possibly more work on homework. That was Monday - Friday. On the weekends there were often field trips. I recall one to Tanglewood that was delightful and another one, hiking in the Berkshires, that I found rather dreadful. If memory serves we also saw a Red Sox game on a different weekend.
A few years back Kelley made an inquiry to alums from the program about the impact the experience had. I wrote a long missive back. The following is an excerpt from that which shows that in spite of the intensity, the program in itself was not personally transformative.
My take aways from that at this point are first some factoids - a linkage between Mersenne Primes and Perfect Numbers, though I'd have to look it up to recall the exact relation - 945 is the smallest odd abundant number - and some stuff about Cosets. The larger lessons were two. There were students who were much brighter than I was or much further along than I was at approximately the same age, a very useful thing to discover early on in life. In addition to Paul, Marcia and Henry were in this category. One day I recall Henry doing a proof of his own result in the front of the room. I had no clue what he was talking about. (Along with the intelligence there was the ego part of this and Hampshire was my first experience of ego battles by bright students showing off.) The other lesson was that things could get hard and that I needed some mechanism of ratcheting up my own thinking to manage that. I didn't have it at Hampshire. I developed something of that sort as a junior in College, but not completely then. More of that happened in grad school. In Marty's group I believe the first two weeks or so went reasonably well for me but then I sort of hit a wall and I didn't know what to do about it. I floundered in his group after that.
This issue of "a student hitting a wall" and what to do about it is a big one. Any limited duration program that is intensive will have to squarely confront the issue.
The other experience was my first year in graduate school at Northwestern. The doctoral program in economics was quite intensive. This time I experienced personal transformation. But many of my classmates did not and the experience for them was quite brutal. Indeed, Robert Eisner's macroeconomics class the very first quarter bore some similarity to Kingsfield's contract law class in The Paper Chase. Aside from many of my classmates hitting a wall intellectually, it turned out there was inadequate funding to support us all on fellowship the second year. I initially thought my fellowship was guaranteed as long as I was a student in good standing. Apparently not. The scarce funding led to competition among the students that increased the brutality of that first year and in my mind did nothing to contribute to the learning.
Undergraduate Engineering education has a reputation for being brutal in this sense. Many students wash out. At Illinois, those students are fortunate to be able to transfer to other colleges on campus. A survival of the fittest approach might produce personal transformation in a few of the middle tier economics students, but at what sort of batting average? And then what of the students who wash out?
I have also experienced this sort of intensity in an adult education context both as an attendee, The Frye Leadership Institute (now Leading Change Institute), and as a provider, Faculty Summer Institute where I was the Head Facilitator for the first ten years, and in the Educause Institute - Learning Technology Leadership Program where I was one of the faculty for three years. These were different to my student experiences in several respects. The attendees were mid career professionals, so much more rooted in their work. The duration was less, not quite a fortnight in the case of Frye, a work week in the case of FSI and LTL. And essentially all the work done outside of plenary session was in groups. Further, in LTL in particular, there was monitoring of the group work by the faculty so nobody would go over the deep end. I have a sense that these experiences were largely successful (I wrote about the first LTL experience voicing that opinion) with the impact as much emotional as intellectual, maybe more so.
In the program I suggest below there is a hybrid design based on these experiences and on what I've learned from my teaching.
* * * * *
Two issues need to be addressed before getting to the program itself. I want to take those seriously here. A third issue arises that I will simply wave my hands at, but mention here so it is understood that with any real intervention this issue will have to be dealt with seriously as well.
The first is how to identify the students. Intensive interventions typically appeal to elite students, but they are not the intended audience. We're looking for average students who don't know they should be seeking personal transformation in college but are not a priori negatively disposed to the idea when it is brought to their attention. It is hard to envision a non-coercive way to select those students who are negatively disposed. For those who are already positively disposed to the idea, one expects that they are the better students who don't require this sort of intervention. The ones in neutral who are invited to participate will need some sort of inducement. That may create its own selection bias. C'est la vie. Purely random selection violates human subject protocols.
The second issue is when the intervention should occur. Candidates are a summer intervention, perhaps between the senior year in high school and the first semester of college, or during the first semester in college, when the intervention would have to substitute for the talking of regular classes. An add on in addition to regular classes during that first semester couldn't possibly be intensive enough. A summer intervention might ultimately prove desirable and popular, especially if the various experiments that this post is supposed to engender generate positive results. But in the experimental phase it might be perceived as a cost add to attending students and their families. (Whether it is or not depends ultimately on the time to degree. If the students can cut off a semester during their senior year because of that leading summer, then there really wouldn't be a cost add. Yet who will know this in advance?) For this reason, the envisioned program is taken to happen in the fall semester of the first year.
The third issue is how to go from a collection of courses taught in that first semester to a single program that is perceived holistically and what institutional barriers must be broken through to attain that goal. One conception would be a set of Discovery classes that the students would take in lock step and where the instructors had done substantial coordination via pre-planning and subsequent activities that entailed all of them ensemble. This conception speaks to the expense of the intervention. It also suggests the actual program would emerge from an extended negotiation by these instructors, the outcome of which is hard to anticipate in advance. An alternative is for a single instructor to teach all of these courses, but to fewer students so as to keep the effort from being too overwhelming. That instructor must then have a vision of what the program would be like. On the bureaucratic side, permission would have to be granted by the departments who normally offer these courses when, as typically would be the case, that solo instructor is not a department member. The permission would assert that this program is indeed a worthy substitute for the offered course so students should receive credit for it. As I said, here I'm just going to wave my hands about this issue.
The program I have in mind entails four real courses and one fictitious course, which I will explain momentarily. The four courses are: (1) principles of microeconomics, (2) calculus of a single variable, (3) the first required writing course, and (4) learning and memory. Of these, the first three are general education courses. The fourth is offered as a mid level psychology course. It's inclusion here is to make the students study their own learning and do so part and parcel with everything else they are studying. The fictitious course I'll call Intervention. It is there for two reasons. First, each of the listed real courses carries 3 credit hours and I want the program to be 16 credit hours, to convey the requisite intensity. The program will meet two hours before lunch and two hours after lunch Monday through Thursday. With a little arithmetic, one can see we need an additional four credit hours and the fictitious course supplies that. Also, credit in Intervention will be given only to students in this program. So it can be used as an identifier in the student transcript when comparing subsequent performance with other like students who have not had Intervention. That would provide one sort of metric on whether the program was successful.
My certified expertise is in economics and my undergraduate degree is in math. I have taught principles of microeconomics before and I believe the undergraduate degree sufficient to claim expertise for teaching calculus. But I've never taken a psychology class and I stopped taking English after my senior year in high school. I have acquired knowledge in these areas mainly since I became interested in learning technology. That began in 1995 after I had been at Illinois for fifteen years by then. Both subjects remain as ongoing areas of interest even now. I believe I would do better in teaching writing and learning to my students than I would do in teaching math and economics, because I would take a "natural approach" to the former based on my own self-discovery, while I'm prone to take a more formal approach to the latter given the disciplinary training I've had. My recent teaching suggests this. It is how others should consider a program such as this. If other research faculty after reading this piece find they are inclined to try a similar program, they likely will encounter the same sort of issue. I would encourage such efforts though, as I said above, the bureaucracy likely would hold them back.
The aim would be to have 4 or 5 students in the program. By my count, that would produce either 64 or 80 "instructional units" (IUs are the product of credit hours and number of students enrolled) and therefore be comparable in production to my teaching last fall where I had 23 students and produced 70 IUs (one student was a grad, which counts for 4 credit hours instead of 3). The reason for this sizing, apart from not over taxing me as the instructor, is the need to monitor each student on a daily basis for how the student is doing - whether insufficiently stimulated or hitting a wall or more or less properly engaged. While the goal is to keep the group in lock step, there is also a need to coach at the individual level to get the student to rise and meet the next challenge. This is what will generate the intensity. It simply can't be done with large numbers of students.
Students would get credit for the program as long as they demonstrated sufficient effort. This would translate into a satisfactory grade for each of the component courses. There would be no letter grades. The idea here is to explicitly lessen the impact of extrinsic motivation and get the students to see what it feels like when they get intense feedback from the instructor but no letter grade. Ultimately the goal will be for the students to provide the feedback for themselves about their own performance as part of being self-directed in their learning. Let them first see what feedback feels like when it comes from an interested outsider. There is also an aspect of insurance to this approach. The experiment with this program might fail completely. In this case the students will remain externally directed thereafter and will pursue their studies accordingly. The students should be held harmless grade-wise if this is the outcome, as long as they have put in solid effort during the program.
Students would be recruited for the program from among those who have been admitted as econ majors or are undeclared in their major but have indicated an interest in economics. Among this population one wants students who haven't already placed out of the required courses that are part of the program. One also wants middle students. If one arrayed this entire population by standardized test scores, for example, one would want to recruit from the middle two quartiles.
The obvious carrot offered in such recruiting is the high degree of interaction with the instructor that results from having only 5 students. The obvious stick is that these students will be expected to work quite hard and be under substantial scrutiny to ensure that outcome. Students who will be living away from home for the first time may very well not want that scrutiny and prefer the freedom to decide their own academic commitment for themselves. There may also be indirect penalties from participating in the program. For example, many econ majors are business major wannabes. Transferring into the College of Business is a difficult thing and typically require very good grades during the first year. With the program offering no grades whatsoever, that may make these students look less attractive than their peers who did well in regular courses. Potential recruits need to be made aware of these sort of issues ahead of time.
The students who do apply for the program should do so knowing the program description and understanding both the upside and the downside. It is hoped that this would generate at least 5 applicants. (I believe there are around 225 new Econ majors each year.) Assuming there were more applicants than that other criteria would need to be used to select the 5 who get admitted to the program. One idea would be for the students to appear academically similar in their preparation. So if there were several applicants near the 50th percentile and one or two near the 70th percentile the former would be preferred. This would facilitate keeping the class in lock step. Given that, diversity of the students in their backgrounds would also be a plus. For example, I'd prefer to have two students of one gender and three of the other to either four-one or five-zero.
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In this section of the essay I'd like to talk about the habits/ways-of-going-about-things we'd like to see cultivated in the students and the methods by which that might be achieved.
Normally, I abhor lists but here I think it useful to organize ideas. So I will list the big picture goals that I envision.
- Personal Commitment - When I started the graduate program at Northwestern I told myself I'd give it my all for one quarter before beginning to ask myself whether I like studying economics and is doing so suitable for me. Before the end of that quarter I was already hooked on the economics and understood that an intensive effort on my part was the only way I'd learn economics deeply. The undergrads in this program must make a similar promise, both to themselves and to the program. They must not question the effort level if the work is do-able given the effort level. They may reasonably question assigned work that is over their head even when putting in maximum effort or for which the volume required is clearly excessive. Alas, the only way to determine the latter is for the students to monitor their own time input and such monitoring can preclude engagement. So the hope is to encourage the commitment via carrots and making the initial experience enjoyable. This speaks to the next point.
- Intellectual Play - Much of the ensemble time needs to be spent on generating questions and then using discovery methods into providing tentative answers. Generating questions is fun. Going on an exploration is fun. Trying out possibilities is fun. Guessing at which possibilities to try first is more fun. The students are econ majors. Why? Is there anything about how the world works that they don't currently understand but would like to know? Why? How might they go about knowing it? Do they have some dreams of how that would happen? What would get the students to open up and talk about those dreams? Play needs a climate of trust. The students need to become unguarded during the ensemble time. The early part of the program must be devoted to creating the right sort of environment.
- The Reading Habit - Students must learn to read a lot, to read for meaning, and to read not just what is assigned but enough other things so they have a good picture of the ideas they are reading about. They must be able to take well written pieces aimed at a general audience and reconcile the message in those pieces with their own world view. Reading is not just getting what the author says but also testing whether what the author says is something the reader agrees with or not. What things are used for corroboration and what other things are used to dispute the author's point? These things must be found, either in what the student already knows or in something the student discovers.
- Getting Unstuck/Being Bothered Intellectually - Learning entails a lot of stumbles: misconceptions may precede good understanding, having no idea whatsoever on how to address a question, or making a foolish mistake and then basing subsequent ideas on that shaky foundation. The emotional response to such situations is equally as important as the intellectual one. Students must learn how to deal with their emotions when all is not flowing well. The initial response might well be panic, because there is an inappropriate expectation that all will be done quickly. The real issue is to produce a mature response thereafter. Does the student understand the question being asked? Is there a way to frame the same question differently so the student might make some progress on it? Can the student let go of this and get onto something else? Letting go should be very hard. Students should learn to feel they have it in them to answer the question and also feel it imperative to do so.
- Drill Down and Seeing the Forest - Sometimes there is one correct way at looking at things. But other times, and specifically in considering social science issues many of the times are these other times, the same issue needs to be considered in excruciating detail, on the one hand, and then again at the 60,000 foot level, where it is aggregated in with a bunch of related issues. Students need to be able to do both. When drilling down they need to understand why the detail is interesting and they need to have a feel for what questions to ask that might reveal interesting detail to look at. They also need to understand the big picture and how the piece they've been focusing on fits. The zooming in and zooming out are both necessary and reflects a more mature understanding than can be achieved by only one or the other.
- Making Formative Ideas Overt - Let's first consider writing. Many students operate under the impression that thinking happens first, over here, and then the results are written up afterward, over there. They are unaware of the power of writing to learn, where writing itself is used as the means to explore the ideas further. This blog post, long as it is, provides an example. The ideas are formative and surely could stand improvement. The piece suggests where my thinking is now, not where it will eventually end up, after getting the reaction of others and some reconsideration on my own. Students may be more used to the idea that formative ideas are expressed in discussion with others, but many classes may not encourage that sort of conversation and students might not find intellectual discussion outside a course setting. In this program they will get a lot of it. One hope is for them to become comfortable with a sense that their early ideas are unlike their more mature ideas. If they are to become self-directed in their learning, a good bit of that is to want to see their ideas grow (and then have some means for doing so).
In class time would prepare the students both technically and content-wise to make the next set of objects, to discuss the previous set that has been made, and to discuss the general academic themes that the objects are aimed at illustrating. Some of the readings done, out of necessity, will have no parallel object that the students make and will simply be discussed for themselves. After a fashion the class as a whole will try to get at the question whether the understanding of such readings differs whether there were objects assigned for the readings or not and/or whether the students come to make, implicitly or explicitly, objects for those readings to facilitate their understanding although they were not assigned to do so.
While there would be an ongoing light informal evaluation of how things were going, to make necessary tweaks in process and content and to adjust the pace of the class to match how the students seem to be doing, not until the end of the fifth week would there be a formal evaluation of what had gone before. The formal evaluation is aimed at first, getting students to consider their learning and their effort and come to some sense of what a cost-benefit analysis would produce as a conclusion, and then to have the students consider how things have gone and compare that to the way they went about their learning in high school. That part of the evaluation is meant to feed the middle third of the class.
In the first third the subject matter would only be economics, math, and writing. The learning theme would be introduced in the middle third. Two important issues would be made paramount. The first is transfer. What mechanism do the students opt for to achieve transfer? (Memorization is particularly bad here as it only allows the students to reproduce the ideas as they were presented originally. To use the ideas in a novel context requires a deeper form of understanding.) The second is motivation. When the program is fun, what makes for that? What do the students look forward to? What do they dread but they know they must do? Why isn't that part fun? Coupled with introducing learning into the program, the class as a whole will become involved in modest program redesign, with the aim of taking the lessons from learning and modifying program activities to make the learning better. And some evaluation of those modifications will be done to see if things did improve, remained unchanged, or got worse.
During the last third, students would be given more freedom to read pieces of their own choosing, write on topics they found relevant, and, from time to time, where they take over direction of the class as a whole, perhaps by first making a presentation on a subject they have researched and then leading a discussion afterward. The idea is to give more control and responsibility to each student. I have done this sort of thing in the past in teaching campus honors classes, where the students giving the presentation did so as a group. Here because of the small numbers, I'd expect each student to do this individually, aided by my coaching. It is meant as a push toward self-direction with the learning.
While the formal program is meant to happen entirely during that first semester, to help the students in the subsequent semester adjust to taking regular classes and yet to continue to practice the deep learning ideas they got in the previous semester, one hour per week should be set aside for the group to meet and discuss what is going on. As this would not be for credit it would not be possible to make those meetings mandatory, but they should be strongly encouraged. If the students prefer to meet without the instructor present, that would be fine. And if individual students would prefer one-on-one meetings with the instructor on an as needed basis, mentoring is not otherwise a part of undergraduate instruction, that should be available too.
In this regard I'd like to note here that when I started at Northwestern in grad school I felt disadvantaged relative to my classmates, because I didn't major in economics as an undergraduate and felt under prepared as a consequence. It took some time for me to compensate for those shortcomings in economics preparation and to also realize that my math preparation, which was better than what my classmates had as undergraduates, was ultimately more important than the economics preparation. I suspect something similar will happen with this program, if it is successful. Having completed the program the students may feel disadvantaged relative to their classmates, because they haven't yet experienced what taking a large lecture class is like while their classmates have. I hope they come to the same sort of conclusion that I did, that their preparation from participating in the program is ultimately more valuable to them and that they end up learning more as a consequence. I don't know if that learning more will immediately show up in good performance on exams. If not, my hope is that it will show up in course grades down the road, and in non-graded learning situations thereafter.
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If the program were modestly successful, either a few students were transformed while others were not or the students were in some gray area where the outcome could not be determined with any certainty, I probably would want to try it again. The hope would be to learn from my mistakes and see if I could improve performance the next time. If the program were highly successful, I probably would not want to try again and instead move entirely into proselytize mode and encourage others to try it. The program is meant as a proof of concept. Once the concept is demonstrated to be plausible next steps need to be taken.
It is easy to write the previous paragraph. This one is harder. If the program were a complete failure - all the students dropped out after a few weeks because it was just too intensive for them without them finding suitable rewards to match the intensity, or the students stuck it out but collectively forced me to teach in a way that I was sure wouldn't be transformative by threatening to drop out otherwise - I would become very depressed indeed. I might then abandon my interest in undergraduate education, for the experiment would have demonstrated that the profound change I want to see is not attainable, at least not by methods I can envision. I view this outcome as unlikely. But unlikely is not the same as impossible. I wonder who else might be interested in this sort of experiment and what their expectations would be regarding outcomes.
Let me conclude here by noting that in its imagery associated with the Strategic Plan there is a tendency for the Campus to: (a) focus on non-course experiences such as internships or working in a faculty member's lab, (b) concentrate on experience in the STEM disciplines, and (c) emphasize the accomplishments of the best students. It seems to me there are interesting and legitimate questions that need to be asked: (d) Can courses themselves be transformative? (e) What of the many students who major in the social sciences? and (f) What are we doing for more typical students regarding personal transformation?
I hope others can take up these questions as well. They are questions that need answers.
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