Wasting Talent

Evolution is something we should always have in the back of our mind but we should always also remember that it can be horribly wasteful and inefficient. We should learn the positive lessons from the world about us but we should do our best to avoid the negatives.

In particular the social sciences should not try too hard to mimic evolution. That especially means politicians who should do their best to reduce the effects of natural selection.

Our biggest waste is talent. We fail to identify what we need and who would be best to meet that need. We all work too long and too hard when we could work less and be much more productive and efficient because we do not optimise. Take women who have had children and the flexibility of the work force. We waste all of that knowledge and experience because we have not adapted our working practices to meet what is needed. We can change where and when we work, how we work, what hours we work, we can change our economy, we can do whatever we want. We just have to think bigger and we have to use the opportunity of the current down-turn to realign what we do.

Is Biology Teaching Just About Facts?

I just read an article in The Scientist that made me see that there is a long way to go before biology will be taught properly. The article is called "Facts First" and the tag-line is "In my youth, I designed a cell biology course that I thought grad students would love. they hated it."

This is written by a senior US researcher who had responded to complaints by students that they hated the "rote memorization" of courses. To replace it he devised a course based on concepts and not the textbook facts. He expected students to enjoy learning how to think but the response was very negative in their feedback and the course was withdrawn and they returned to rote learning.

Stories like this make me want to scream. These are grad school students. If you are a post-graduate and you need to be spoon-fed facts you should not be there. If you are planning an academic career then you might make a PhD and you might make a post-doc but you will never ever get any further because you have no initiative. You can be directed but you cannot direct so you will never be able to initiate research.

The problem for the students is that they are pushed out of their comfort zone if they have to think. In the UK at the minute this is particularly galling. Students come from a background where the facts are not the main focus but when they get to under-graduate level they often find themselves being forced into the rote learning style. So that all of the good work of secondary education is lost. By the time I see them at masters level they have lost all their ability to think for themselves. I teach students who have fist class degrees from top institutions whose criteria for getting this degree specifies this level of synthesis and understanding, so why can't I see it in any of them?

Ultimately in the case described in the article should they have listened to the student feedback? The proof of teaching is the outputs. If the course was not properly aligned so that assessment had not been changed to reflect the new style of teaching then the students had a point, but with the appropriate assessment in place the next test of output is how effective they are at getting jobs and having successful careers. Sometimes students cannot appreciate the pain they have to go through for the gain in the future.

I would argue that most of those who were negative about the course and who want to fall back on facts will not have very successful careers and that their employers will not find that they are independent workers, and will find they have to spend a significant amount of time and resources on skills training. These are the hidden costs of taking the rote learning approach.

What is happening to the Bumble Bees?

There have been several articles about the problems bees are facing for example this one from the Guardian last year.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jun/27/society.conservation1

There are more cases of empty hive disease but I was not concerned that there was a problem when all the Bumble Bees were buzzing around the Dandelions in the garden but then I started to notice bumble bees struggling.

They were on the ground crawling along the pathways as they sometimes do when they are cold and when they want to sun themselves to restore their energy. But these bees just sit there or crawl unhappily and often they end up stepped on or run over. So there does seem to be something going wrong as I have seen three bumble bees with these sysmptoms in the last week. I am wondering if anyoen else has noticed anything?

Perhaps the Greatest Statement About our Place in the World

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee..." 

John Donne – Meditation 17 - Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions

We should never forget our place in society and we should never forget our duty to mankind. We are the trustees of our children's future and we should not allow the self to engulf our wider views. We are a social ape and that is our strength and our weakness, but it is something that none of us would give up, the free and open society is what most of us strive for. Nobody should believe in their own self-importance, all of us are created equal and each of our lives contributes such an infinitesimal, but nevertheless significant part to our world. Donne was so prescient and it is so ironic that he called it an Emergent Occasion, as now we are starting to appreciate mergence and how everything is connected to everything else.

Knowledge Transfer is Power

Apologies to Francis Bacon for mincing his words. I was just reading Terence Kealey's book Science, Sex and Profits - a much more interesting title than the book itself, and a much more racy cover than any of the prose. The sex is just there to try and titillate rather than for any justifiable reason. Sex sells and he makes a profit. So what is my excuse for having a copy? Well my book club sent me a copy and I could not be bothered to send it back. I wish I had. Anyway I digress.

This is a book that could do with a serious edit. First to remove the typographical errors - Khutu and not Khufu etc. and second to sort out his ideas about history. He starts one chapter discussing Petrarch and the Renaissance and finishes discussing Plutarch and the Renaissance. Sorry but Plutarch was long dead before then.

Anyway his biggest mistake and one that actually leads to some insight is confusing science with technology. He is trying to argue that public funding of science is bad as it does not stimulate economic growth and actually delays it (apparently the OECD has also come to this conclusion). So he says events that public science does not stimulate GDP but only commercial pressures can deliver the scientific paradigm shifts. What he means is shifts in levels of technology and that is why I have named this Blog entry as I have. He looks at how Francis Bacon concluded knowledge is power based on the growth of the Portuguese economy under Henry the Navigator and saw that Henry used science to create his nation's wealth. Kealey argues that the desire to conquer was the wealth generating effect and the science came from these commercial desires.

Whatever.

The real point is that what actually creates the wealth is knowledge transfer. In the knowledge based economy you make money by exploiting that knowledge by transferring it to the commercial world. I do not mean by creating intellectual property, I mean by actually doing something useful, making something, having ideas, creating businesses, commercialising and creating products and services that people want. This does not mean more off-shored manufacturing which is what is killing our balance of payments. For now the countries with the worst balance of payments often have the biggest knowledge resources but they are very poor at exploiting them. So if they do not want to be swamped by the Asian tigers they better start thinking about what to do with all that knowledge and start translating it into something useful.

Why people misunderstand evolution

I was just reading an article in Computer Magazine about evolution and how it is central to business and to the development of computer software and this is a perfect example of confusion progress with evolution. Evolution does not have a final cause - it is not directed towards progress. It is random and then there is selection where the fittest are carried forward to future generations and the less good fade away. This does not necessarily mean that progress has been made and in most cases where ideas and businesses are involved there is no random element.

There is an element of luck or serendipity which can be confused with random mutation but this is wrong, this luck is that the current discovery, software etc. fits with the current environment. This is the question of selection and nothing to do with the process of generating the new "product". Random generations of products and selection is incredibly wasteful and Darwinian evolution is a hopeless way of achieving a good product. Business and ideas follow a Lamarckian model where better solutions are acquired during their lifetime by modification to fit the environment. We do not have random ideas that are not determined by our experiences. We see patterns and rules that Darwinian evolution can never find. In this way we make our own luck.

The supreme irony is that Darwin's view rejects progress and final causes for random change and selection and this was why there were the strongest objections as this would deny the presence of perfection and the possibility of God. Now we are in more pragmatic times but if you are going to use the term evolution for change do not invoke Darwin.

Destructive Feedback

Background

Once a long time ago in an institution far far away I had to develop an online MSc Programme. So I dutifully sorted out the funding with a national body and matched funding in the institution and the involvement of the institutions online learning development team. So far so good. We already had a regular face-to-face course so of I went to try and put this online. Now that was early in online education and so putting materials online was just converting your PowerPoint to html wasn't it?

What happened

So anyway I gave them my lessons webbed up with more exercises but still very similar to how I delivered the face-to-face course. Then comes the feedback from the learning technologist. Well students cannot learn from this. Ok fine so what do we need to do to get it to work? Well I need to see the lectures and we need sound, yes we need sound so record the lectures.

So now we had them recorded and the technologist came to see a lecture and saw there was lots of pointing and that they were very non-linear and he shook his head and said I do not see how we can put that online.

Back to drafting so we prepare a statistics course which is some material to read and then lots of exercises and we prepare a CD with flash animation to take them through linux. We go back for our next meeting with these materials and the recordings.

Technologist: Well I do not know what you are going to do with the recordings.
My thoughts: Then why the $@! did you ask us to do this.
Technologist: No I do not know how the students are going to learn from this, there is no advantage of making it online over print and multimedia.
My thoughts: Well then why can't we use print and multimedia - this is distance and resource based learning and you use what methods fit.

The main problem I had with this particular technologist was that while they were sure what bad materials looked like they had no idea what would make good materials and so every time we had a meeting we would give them something we had done and they would say it was not pedagogically sound without giving any positive input.

The conclusions

The entire project descended into shambles and recriminations with reports being sent up through the university management by the learning technology department that the project was a disaster and that I was responsible. The fact is that the learning technologists never gave the project any support. They said there was inadequate reporting after never providing the forms to report with. What was most catastrophic was that they never gave any positive input and never helped someone who was new to developing online learning. Their destructive no this will not work feedback destroyed the project.

If you are ever going to undertake a project like this make sure you have the support you need and that they really have the skills they profess to have. A project like this is a team game not a one person show, the academic can write all the materials but the learning technologist must be there constructively all the way with their input about how things can be done. They should not be afraid to say have you thought about using this. The question then is always about time and resources because there is always how you would like to to look and then there is what you have the time to do.

It is still new technology so they cannot be expected to have all the answers but you need a good and close relationship between all involved.