Constructivism and subjectivism

This is something I have experienced in online discussions recently. The discussions were about religion and extremism after Baroness Warsi and her complaints of militant secularism. There was a very volatile twitter debate and I was trying to be a non-militant, but the web is a place where arguments are easily polarised. This is the argument of the "Net Delusion", which I need to get around to reading. 

The problem is that people cannot accept that the way you perceive the world and the language you use and the descriptions you make and even the way you experience the world is not objective. Some scientists (in particular the ones that are most vocal, but often the least capable) will never accept that objective beliefs are not possible. They also argue that this view is not dogma, by defining dogma narrowly to mean the pig-headedness of those who do not share their views. 

Why does cognitive science still exist as a discipline when constructivist science does not? A computer is a metaphor for the brain, and not even a very good one, and certainly not a description. A computer can only do what it is programmed to do. It will never have the heuristics of intuition and imagination. At least we have moved on from behaviourism but this need for objective truth allows the "scientists" to try to undermine constructivism and phenomenological research. There is a suggestion that if research is not quantitative and objective then it is not rigorous. In reality even physics has had to accept the role of the observer in the experiment and maths has had to accept that there is no absolute truth where some aspects are not defined arbitrarily. 

The personal irony is that I have been moving steadily to the more quantitative end of science and that now I am mostly a statistician!

Vincent Hendricks - when trying to be cool fails.

This is an example of cultural failure in one Danish academic's attempts to try and "relate" to his students.

Vincent Hendricks getting down with his students

Comment on Hendricks

I partly agree and partly disagree with the second set of comments. There is a professional barrier between students and staff but academics should never appear intimidating.

Certainly when I started I was perhaps too informal and related too much with the students. I was clearing out my old files the other day and I found a birthday card my first cohort of MSc students had given me which had a picture of a guy with a snorkel on the front and the title "M**f Diver". So students can give as much as they take! Except that was mainly a male group and at Masters level.

I would also say that I find that Danish humour can be quite different to US or British humour and they can be pretty rude, both male and female. Humour is definitely a very cultural thing and very dangerous to use.

Search and Filter

James Gleick in The Information sums up what Google and most of the other Web 2.0 technologies do as search and filter. He is right that all around us we are surrounded with more and more information, which can overwhelm us. First we have to find the information we want and second we have to filter out the information we do not want.

These should be essential skills for students but I do not think that we spend enough time on them. Students can be good at finding information but they are not very discerning and so they tend to pick the lowest fruit. This will often be the worst possible data, or the least balanced opinion.

I use twitter to do search and filter of current news. By reading the twitter feeds I get a 140 character digest of what is going on so I can then follow up on anything interesting. This is a good way of finding new examples of statistics for classes from the news.

Serendipity in Learning

There is so much information in the world and there are so many leads that you could follow that accidents are often the best way to make connections between ideas.

I let Amazon suggest books to me based on the books I have bought. I have a rather eclectic reading list and so I get some quite wacky suggestions which sometimes I follow and sometimes I don't. You get suggestions of books that other people who have similar book interests have also liked or bought. Occasionally this means I get some very odd suggestions and sometimes these are just what I am looking for. My Chemistry Prof. said it is sometimes the article before the one you went to read in the journal that stimulates the new idea, rather than the article you went to find. As we construct knowledge there is a random aspect to it.

I also keep a list of the books I have read so that I can try and see how I have constructed my views and to see who has influenced me

The nice thing today was going to YouTube to see the video about student motivation, but on the side as a recommended video was another called The Big Mistake in E-learning and so I clicked on this (even before I finished watching what I should have been watching). It sums up perfectly what is wrong with not just e-learning but with most taught courses, certainly at University level. The focus on information and not on the meta-problem of dealing with that information and creating knowledge.

I think it is a great video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj5M4KCfTwo&feature=BFp&list=FLec-1FWMVXEaMcQTgpJutdw

Assessment an Epiphany

Today I was writing the exam questions for one of the course that I teach on and I found it so much easier to write the questions for lectures I had not given yet. As then I can fit the teaching to the assessment. My  wife pointed out that isn't that how we always teach - decide what the students have to learn and then teach them. Well it is sort of true but not really.

Teaching is driven by curriculum

When I arrived there were no materials for the course I was about to teach and so I was given a list of the lectures from last year and ideas for the lectures this year which made up the curriculum. I then made up the lectures under these headings aligning them to the recommended textbook. So this is completely content and curriculum driven teaching. The students have to learn what is in the syllabus and then the exam has to test this syllabus.

What should have happened

I should have asked, what do the students need to learn? What are we trying to get them to do? What should they be able to do when they finish the course? This is different to what should they know at the end of the course in a subtle way. In this learning the knowledge is less important than the ways students interact with that knowledge and in particular in what they get wrong. What are their misconceptions? Where do they struggle? What are the blocks to their understanding? What will they need to use the skills they learn in the course for? Is there learning or coaching to pass an exam.

What can I do now?

Find out what they cannot do. Find out what they need to do. I am running a session with last years students who are now in their final year doing their projects and who are struggling with the statistics. I need to find out what skills they missing and make sure they get help with this as well as making sure these skills have been covered. I am setting a formative assessment to see how much my current students know and where they are making mistakes.

Confidence is a big issue and the current students are worried about the formative assessment and would prefer to do more practice problems in class where I show them how to solve them. I am reluctant because this does not teach them the skills for joining techniques together. The biggest problem they have is not being able to recognise what sort of problem they are dealing with. This requires a "holistic" approach but I am devising a structured formative assessment to make the process less intimidating.

Possibly I need to combine the techniques and do some as they want but also have the formative assessment as we have five hours of contact time to go over the material.

Equations in browsers

For the online assessment and feedback it is important to be able to insert equations into the feedback but equations are a nightmare in web browsers. They can be displayed as images but this is not disability friendly. They can be entered as MathML but this requires special software to interpret the equations in Internet Explorer and different browsers look different. Then they can be displayed using a Java applet. This is what Blackboard does but it often crashes because of Java security issues!

The other choice is to use LaTex but I am not sure that is supported by all browsers but it does produce the best formatted equations.

The other major frustration is the need for images in questions and feedback and so I am going to have to use mash-ups and create a Flickr account and images to show the data and the graphs. This is all a major amount of work and shows that online learning can be very costly in terms of development time.

Laurillard's conversational framework and Socratic method

Laurillard makes a big point of the students eventually coming to an agreement with the tutor - the tutor teaches by bringing them to a shared view/opinion as Socrates did with his dialogues with students. The problem I have with this, is that it does not encourage personal learning. It is very teleological in that there is a right and wrong answer and there is a kind of "truth". I prefer knowledge as provisional on what we currently know, as students when they leave the University need to be able to approach the novel and situations that might be analogous to what they have seen before but not necessarily homologous. It also suggests that answers might not be multi-themed or that there might be cases where there is no right answer, which is what often happens in the literature. 

I wonder if there are ways to use games and simulations to make learning more open and perhaps more realistic in looking like everyday situations where students might use the material they are learning. Case-studies go some way towards this but role-play, such as mooting that they use in law can also be useful.

The problem is the cost of setting up these sorts of environments and also the danger that students will feel helpless and lost if they do not have a clear learning path to follow.