Where do universities fit?

Young people still go to university in large numbers, despite educational policy having raised the price to the point where many question whether it is worth it. And there is questioning among policy makers as to whether or not too many are going to university. This frames the purpose of universities as being to fit the workforce for the needs of the economy. There are other good reasons for having universities and an educated population, but let us stick with this one for now. The answer to that question depends on what you want to do in your society and economy. When Tony Blair wanted 50% of the population to go to university, he had in mind a future economy which depended on large numbers of smart and agile people.

He was also working with rather than against the grain of this country’s entrenched snobbery towards vocational training. This snobbery is one of the main factors in the disjointed quality of our policy on higher education. Changing our minds about the value of vocational education would be a large and long term job, involving major culture shifts, but it would enable us to look more clearly at what a university education is actually for.

Standard economics points us in one of two directions. The first is that we compete as a country by shifting upwards. We become a high value added economy, competing constantly against other highly developed economies to produce extra added value in services, manufacturing, scientific achievement and so on. We have created an education system in which only our universities can produce such people in large numbers.

The second is that we compete by shifting downwards. We become an economy that siphons profit up towards the elite by cost cutting wherever possible and keeping the bulk of the workforce either in precarious conditions, or close enough to precarious conditions to be too scared to do anything different.

While Tony Blair was in office we had a brief stab at the first option. Since he stopped being Prime Minister, we have headed towards the second. But there is a problem, a conundrum for employers and those who would wield power in our neoliberal world. Even employers of precarious workers need them to be active thinkers and to use their initiative in their jobs. The problem is to instil that without the workers then using their skills to contest the system. What is required is an active docility, in which people learn to use considerable skill and initiative to make profits for their employers, but who do not use their skills and their know how to create power for themselves. What is wanted is a university educated population living in or near precarity. And we seem to be heading that way. (It should be noted that precarity is not just about conditions of employment. It is an entire political system. It accounts for the reluctance of our politicians to take any effective action to reduce house prices – high prices keep people worried. The massive changes in our benefit system, and the way in which any claimant may be routinely hounded and demonised is part of precarity. The massive changes in our immigration system, and the way in which any immigrant may be routinely hounded and demonised is part of precarity – and is a taint, a personal stain on Theresa May’s political record.)

Currently, populations are disciplined by the need to keep working harder and harder at wage labour in order to be able to live, let alone to live well. But soon a new reality will be upon us, one that requires a new economics, and a different approach to both economy and society. At some point in the future, possibly not too distant, there will be a giant collision between people’s need to work harder and harder, and the capacity of technology to supplant labour for producing so many of the goods and services that we want. Then an entirely new settlement will be needed, based on an entirely different relationship between people, income and work. Britain is an advanced economy in which automated working will take hold more quickly than many other places. But our nineteenth century insistence on the ethic of alienated work might make us one of the least well prepared countries in the world for that collision. We should start thinking about that now.

How the OU needs to change

My first contribution to the debate about the post-Horrocks Open University. This was first published in the OU's Associate Lecturers' newsletter Snowball (behind the OU's password system) in January this year.

The challenges now facing the university are not solely external, says Rob Parsons

By the time you read this, I will be sitting on a warm sunny beach sipping Martini… well, OK, retired. In England. In January. A decision forced on me by life circumstances rather than a wish to leave teaching behind. I was enjoying teaching. I was also enjoying, though often with gritted teeth, my ability to contribute via the AL Assembly to the university’s navigation of the challenges it faces.

The biggest challenge the OU faces comes from outside – educational policy in the UK, which favours short-term market thinking over any other principle. We have to live with that, or die with it. I remain hopeful that the OU will live and maybe will even live well. But to do that, it must overcome three great internal challenges – pedagogical, cultural and managerial.

The pedagogical challenge is the key. Not everybody appreciates the radical effect the internet has on teaching in general and the OU model in particular. Learning has always been collegiate as well as individual. But when the OU started, distance students had to learn alone because it was not possible for them to learn together. The OU’s model fitted that circumstance with brilliant success.

But now people can learn together via the internet. People can learn perfectly well in isolation, but not as well as when they are learning with others. The internet provides that opportunity. We can debate whether the experience online is as good as face to face. In my view it is different – sometimes better, sometimes worse than collaborative learning face to face, but almost always better than learning alone.

Some people in the OU have grasped this, others have not, and some remain implacably opposed to ideas and practices which must revolutionise the construction of modules, particularly at level 1; the relationship between those who write the modules and those who teach them; and assessment structure, particularly the assessment of process as much as product. And other ideas, such as peer assessment (which students can do early in their careers if they are properly prepared for it) will have to come in to the mix as well. If we do not do this, we will be left far behind by universities all over the world which are already adapting more quickly than us.

The cultural challenge is a requirement for co-operation in a world of barriers. There remain, despite goodwill and effort on the part of many people, massive barriers between central academics and associate lecturers. Much of it is fuelled by ignorance. Central academics are ignorant of what ALs can do, ALs are ignorant of what central academics do do. In addition, the OU has for a long time been a terrain of mini-empires, where faculties, departments and teams often erect and maintain magnificent walls and moats to prevent ideas sneaking in from outside. Many do not. Many will happily collaborate with anyone useful, but it remains the case that for everyone building bridges, there is someone else digging a new moat.

This is well symbolised by our lack of a functioning knowledge management system. We have, as many organisations do, mistaken a knowledge storage system for a knowledge management system. We store knowledge in places where nobody else can ever find it. Knowledge management is a collegiate approach to freeing knowledge so that it can be used by anyone else within the system. Our inability to produce something that actually works is testament to the fractures within the totality of the OU community. To overcome these fractures and get everyone working together within a common culture is a massive endeavour, not just for our leaders but for everyone within the system.

The managerial challenge is one we share with many other institutions. It derives mainly from larger movements in the world, and particularly the rise of neoliberalism from the 1980s onwards, with the growth of a managerialist class who were encouraged to believe that, having equipped themselves with the skills of management, they could manage anything. They carpetbag their way from one highly paid job to another, often in completely different sectors, usually leaving mixed results behind them.

Managerialism has now infected, well and truly, the higher education sector in the world in general and the UK in particular. It is founded on a certain truth, that there are skills and attitudes which make a good manager in any setting. But it has gone too far. The belief that it is not necessary to be able to do a job in order to be able to manage it has turned into the belief that it is necessary not to be able to do a job in order to be able to manage it. The baby has been flung out with the bathwater and far beyond it.

This is not an accusation of incompetence, though incompetence has been evident in some of the activities of the OU’s senior management team. It is more a question of arrogant self-belief and lack of understanding of the sector one moves into. To continue the bathwater metaphor, our managers have very effectively up-ended the bath, but there is no plan to turn it back the right way up because they do not understand that it is supposed to hold water.

My best hope is that those of our managers who have that set of beliefs will soon carpetbag their way on to other jobs in other sectors and that, when they do, the OU Council will have the wit and wisdom to appoint new managers who not only have the skills to manage but also understand that education is not a commodity but a relationship.

These challenges are now behind me but in front of you. I wish you as much success as possible with them.

The Tao of Reflection

If you're going to learn properly you have to go beyond what the module teaches you. You have to do stuff beyond the letter of the learning outcomes. Reflective work is an area where this is very often the case. To learn properly, you need to go back over what you have learned. You need to give it time to germinate. You need to sketch in mentally where connections are beginning to occur. Many modules do not build this in specifically, but you need to make it part of your habits of learning.

Time is always a problem. No sooner have you finished this chapter than the module calendar is beckoning you to the next. You can still build in some time for reflection, and it will repay you many times over. Often when you start out doing things like this, you wonder where the time is going to come from. When you have made it a habit, you wonder how you ever did without it.

Reflection may be just a fancy word for what you do already. You may sit and work over notes you have made. You might move bits of paper around on a table. You might be staring out of a train window pondering the connection between Plato and the Dalai Lama. A study session might turn into a prolonged pause as you consider how the subject matter is changing the way you think. Allowing those moments is important. It is also important to structure some time in so that turning over and piecing together what you have done becomes habitual.

You can structure your reflection according to the study material. Most of our modules deliver their content in books, and books have chapters. Different modules organise their material differently, so you can take a cue from what the module does.

For instance, on AA100 there are four books each with a number of chapters. Each chapter has aims at the beginning. I advise my students to spend some time with the aims before embarking on reading the chapter. Then, when they have finished reading, I advise going back to the aims and spending half an hour working on whether and how far the aims have been fulfilled. I advise keeping a journal and making some notes in the journal at the end of each chapter.

On DD102 the chapters do not have aims, and the introductions are not very useful for the purpose of planning the reading. But the chapters are divided into sections and each section has an excellent summary at the end. So I advise my students to read the book backwards – to start by reading the summary at the end of each section, and then read the section. When they get to the summary again, I advise a pause for thought as to whether the section does what the summary says, and again make some journal notes. Whichever module you are on, look at the structure of the books and figure out the best way to read them intelligently, and where the natural pauses for reflection are.

The journal is important as a way of collecting and structuring your thinking. There is endless advice as to how to structure the journal itself. I do mine in a web page that I keep on my computer. That does not require any great technical skill – in fact, you'd be surprised how simple it is. It has the virtue of being able to use links to connect pieces of the journal, and also of being infinitely expandable, so I can go back and make more notes on any particular topic. If you prefer hand writing, then I suggest a loose leaf folder, and write your journal on one side only of the paper. You can then use the other side for jottings, tags, connections that you make later, additions, doodles and so on.

And on occasion you can take a spare hour or half hour and look back over your reflections, and be amazed at how far you have come. You will also see pieces of the jigsaw beginning to relate to each other, and you will see insights that have been on the edge of your vision come into focus.

Occasionally we actually teach reflection. On AA100, for instance, we have two assignments which could be called reflective. But students often just treat them as hoops to jump through. That's fair enough, because, to be honest, we present them as hoops to jump through. I have taught quite a few modules for the OU now, and only one has systematically got students to do reflective work. But if you only do what the modules tell you, you are selling yourself short. The essence of being a student is that you decide what you are learning and how. And in particular we revisit things:

"As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives." (Henry David Thoreau, in Walking .)

G K Chesterton wrote a rhyme:

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,

The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

The Roman road is the module materials. They take you straight as an arrow towards the goal of fulfilling all the learning outcomes, boxes neatly ticked, goals achieved. The English road is the one the student takes. It gets pulled back to the Roman road sometimes, usually by assignments, but in between times the module unleashes the student to do what they will with the material on offer.

This is not only OK, it is actually the way things should happen. Teaching should never corrall you onto a straight and narrow path: that way you never get to see the lush vegetation on either side. Reflection is one of the ways in which you see all that is going on around, and you begin to transcend the learning outcomes. You take direction from the module materials, but you should never be limited by it. At some point you *must* leave the module material behind if the learning is to be your own. It is not the OU's knowledge and ideas you want in your head, it is your own. Reflection is the key that turns knowledge acquisition into deep learning when you understand differently and make new realities with your new knowledge. Dewey says, “We state emphatically that, upon its intellectual side education consist in the formation of wide-awake, careful, thorough habits of thinking. Of course intellectual learning includes the amassing and retention of information. But information is an undigested burden unless it is understood. It is knowledge only as its material is comprehended. And understanding, comprehension, means that the various parts of the information acquired are grasped in their relations to one another – a result that is attained only when acquisition is accompanied by constant reflection upon the meaning of what is studied.” (Dewey, J. (1933) How We Think Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, pp78-9)

Nietzsche puts it more poetically. “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!” (See “Nietzsche on How to Find Yourselfand the True Value of Education”.) He is referring to life in general, but it describes perfectly the act of learning – it is your road, yours alone, and the act of reflection helps you to find it.

You should take the initiative, and build reflective time habitually into your study routine. 

Ravens

Ravens have social abilities previously only seen in humans.

Henry says, "I told you".

On the subject of cheap essays

Dear Albert Jacson, James Anderson et al “Cheap Essays”

Thank you for your complimentary comments on my blog post on educational policy. I am afraid I cannot reciprocate about the Cheap Essay service that you offer. I have not published your comments. I have placed them in the spam box where they belong. (Actually they belong in a box marked “Roast the sender slowly over an open fire”, but I don't have one of those.) I will also place there any subsequent comments I get from you or your colleagues. Perhaps you are in fact all one person, suffering the Grant Shapps illusion that using another name makes you somehow invisible, or perhaps more plausible than you really are.  I picture you as a sharp faced individual with a expression that you think displays worldly cunning but which actually looks shifty to everybody else. You make a reasonable income out of connecting the immoral with the unfortunate, enough to enable you to keep drinking premium lager and to fuel your patio heater. You probably want to drive a BMW but you can't afford one yet. I hope you never do. In the educational world you are the worst kind of parasite, making your living out of encouraging students to cheat. There's a line in that piece about Grant Shapps that suits you nicely: “it’s hard to escape the sense of a bloke who has always felt the need for deceit in order to get on”.

You only exist because in most of the world educational policy, like society in general, has become obsessed with measurement rather than development. You already live in the world the neoliberals are trying to create for the rest of us, a world with no soul, with no ethics, with no hint of humanity, a world intended for the 1% with a loaf or two thrown overboard to the technical and managerial classes the owners need to maintain their grip on the entire population's information and production. Their mission ultimately is to destroy creativity, because creativity is the one thing needed for disruption and revolution, and you are the anaesthetic to their scalpel. For them schooling is necessary because skills are needed to run the world, but the problem with schooling for them is that it enables people to think. So they employ two means to prevent people thinking too much. The first is the obsession with measurement that has gripped our political classes for the last thirty years, and has squeezed the soul out of any kind of teaching relationship from kindergarten on. The second is the propensity of neoliberal thinking to remove any hint of ethics from consideration of human behaviour, so that all that matters is the achievement of a position regardless of the means by which you got there. For so many students the destination has become everything, the journey nothing, robbed of substance  by the vacuous febrility of a money obsessed world. And it is only because of that that you exist. Otherwise there would be as much use for you as there is for a pimple on a teenager's acned face.

You are the ultimate neoliberal. (In my house that is a term of abuse, in case you didn't quite get it.) You know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. You will have to travel a long way, a long long way, to get from where you are to any point where you might understand that the value of learning is in the effort, the struggle to put one's own thought on paper, something earned with sweat, brain muscle, sometimes actual hurt and disappointment, but ultimately joy in knowing that you achieved something yourself, and are a better person for having figured out yourself where this particular piece of the jigsaw fits. It's not just something bought with the cash value of a cheque or a credit card.

If I ever meet you, I will shove a rhinoceros up your fundament pointy end first. You probably don't know the meaning of the word “fundament” do you. Look it up. Oh, of course. You don't do “looking things up”.

If you are in any way hurt or offended by what I have said, this picture is for you.

(The picture belongs to Rentokil, by the way - http://www.rentokil.co.uk/blog/my-big-fat-rat-is-back/  - which gives me another option for dealing with your verminous self, should I ever meet you.)

The Tao of the Midnight Assignment

Time pressure has always been a problem for OU students (Who am I kidding? All students.) Perhaps it is becoming more prevalent as students try to maximise their investment, juggling work, family and one or more modules. I have known students work full time and do two modules, which is effectively full time study. “Foolhardy” is a word that springs to mind, but they do seem to survive, and even prosper. Inevitably there are times when there is no time, when a book has to be read, a forum digested, an online session devoured, and an assignment produced in the space of three days, or less. So this post is about the best way of approaching an assignment when you have limited time.

Using your time 
When you have time available, concentrate. Richard Nixon, famous for Watergate, did have some good qualities. One of them was an ability to focus. Like all managers he rarely got more than a few minutes for any one decision, but he had an immense ability to concentrate. He would be given a problem and he would focus fully on it for the few minutes he had, till he reached a decision. Then he would put that one out of his mind, and focus fully on the next one. This is an admirable trait for an OU student to copy. If you have only half an hour now, don't try to pack too much in to that half hour. Decide what you can do properly in that time, then focus fully on it. You may not cover as much ground, but what you do you will do well.

- go fast and slow. Something being urgent doesn't mean it has to be done as fast as possible. That may sound paradoxical, but let me explain. Some points in the genesis of an assignment are pivotal.

Reading the question

Planning the reading

Planning the assignment

Writing it

Submitting it

Each of these needs your concentration when you get to it, and you need to think about the thing you are doing rather than thinking about the time you don't have available.

Reading the question
Let's say you have an assignment due in four weeks time, and little study time available. At the beginning of the sequence of work, read the question that you will be answering in four weeks time. Do spend some time with it. Make sure you understand what the question wants. If it is short enough, print it out in very big type and stick it where you can easily see it. For OU students, read the guidance or student notes that come with the question. They usually point you to key parts of the module material. Then you know what you need to read. Don't start reading till you are sure you have grasped what the question is about.


Planning the reading
It still amazes me how many university students fail to read intelligently. They start at page 1 and work their way to the end of the chapter, then go on to the next chapter.....  If you're in time trouble you need to decide what to read - the stuff that you need for the assignment. So do some planning. Be realistic about the amount of time you will have available to read, and list the chapters and sections you need in order: essential, important, desirable. Before you start reading the essential stuff, look at the context. Take note of the chapter introduction, and its structure. This is important for understanding, and it will dictate how you read. It is different in different books. One module I teach on has aims at the start of each chapter, so I tell my students to spend some time with the aims so that they are clear about what they will be reading. Then when they have finished the chapter, they go back to the aims and determine how far the aims have been achieved. I recommend writing a reflective paragraph or two about that. On another module the chapters do not have an aims section at the beginning, but each section has an excellent summary at the end. So I recommend reading the book backwards. Read the section summary first, so that you know what the section is about, then read the section, then compare what you have read with what the summary says. Whatever the structure of the chapters is, there will be some natural method of appraising it, then reading it, then reflecting on it.

The point about doing this in a hurry is that you can't hurry learning too much. It is very important not to compromise this process - appraise, read, reflect - just because you have limited time. You will do better to read one section thoroughly and use it well in your assignment, than to read two sections hurriedly and make only shallow use of them. So that is the business about going fast and slow. You have a limited amount of time, so you will feel rushed. But do not rush. Whatever the time is that you have available, slow down when you reach it so that you make best use of it.


Planning the assignment
You have done the reading. You still need to plan the assignment. All the advice about planning still holds. Collect together your theories and your evidence. Figure out what the answer to the question is going to be, and then figure out how your argument gets you there. Like the other parts of the process, this needs time. You may have only half an hour for it, but you should still do it. And in that half hour you should focus utterly on what the question is and how the evidence bears on it. Let it take you off the topic if it will: that way learning occurs which will emerge in the assignment, even if you don't see it there.


Writing it
Everyone is different. Everyone has their own writing method. Some methods work better than others under time pressure. For what it's worth, if you have been staring at a blank sheet for five minutes, and can only think about the time ticking away, I suggest employing the fifteen minute method. You have done the plan, so you know what you're writing about. If you have a timer, set it for fifteen minutes. Start writing. It doesn't matter if it is not grammatical, logical or even coherent, just write. When the buzzer buzzes, stop writing, and set the timer again for ten minutes. Spend ten minutes editing what you have written.

If you are then part way through the assignment, give yourself a break then do more fifteen minute writing sessions and ten minute edits, until you finish or until you run out of time.


Submitting it
The submission process has its own importance. Submission includes things like spell check, proof read, add the references (in the correct format). Read through the question and make sure you have answered all the bits. On one module I teach, the students have to write around 50 words of reflection on two questions they are given with each assignment. They do not get marks for the quality of the reflection, but they lose five marks if the reflection is not there. It takes two minutes to write 50 words, but so many students forget to do it, and lose five marks. It is not that they don't want to, they do just forget. So, even when you're in a hurry - in fact especially when you're in a hurry - take a few minutes to read right through the question, every paragraph, every word of it, and make sure you have done everything you are required to do, before you press the submit button.

Other people's ideas:

How to write a paper at the last minute (And still pass!)

How to Write an Assignment in a Hurry

Unplugged schools

Quote of the day:

"The efforts to label and sort children while constantly seeking technical means to accelerate, enhance, and otherwise tinker with their intellectual, emotional, and physical development are acts of mechanistic abuse (there is really no other name for it) committed against children’s nature."

Acutely combines the issue of pigeon holing (by testing), and the processes used in schools. It's a long, long article, but worth reading all the way down.

The Tao of Wikipedia

Strange things sometimes happen to some tutors. They turn into large toothy dragons (think Game of Thrones but bigger, scalier and hotter), their scales glow molten red, and they unleash gobbets of green fire from their nostrils which incinerate any poor student standing in front of them, leaving only enough ash to be put into a small cup and made into Greek coffee to be served to their unsuspecting relatives. What did you do to deserve this? You uttered one small word: “Wikipedia”.

So what are the problems with Wikipedia? And is it ever permissible to use it in an assignment?

Wikipedia is a wonderful tool. If I want to know about a topic, I generally start with Wikipedia. If I want to know more, I follow the links from the Wikipedia article (and often there is more than one article), or I google. But quite often Wikipedia is enough. I have what I want to do. And it is nearly always accurate. Probably as often as academically authoritative publications - though that is subject to much dispute and febrile deployment of numbers. The problem for students using Wikipedia to rely on in academic assignments is the problem of authority. So the issue is what does authority mean and what counts as authoritative.

Authority is what an expert has - someone who has studied the field for many years and produced research and material that is valued by their peers. Authority is socially constructed - there is no absolute definition, no set of criteria by which we can all be impartially measured. That is one of the reasons why theories and ideas come and go. That is also why the pinnacle of academic achievement is not writing books as you might think. It is having articles published in peer reviewed journals. You write an article; it is vetted by other experts in the field and if, in their view, it passes muster, it gets published.

When we look at material in a book or an article, we want to know how reliable it is. We can do this by examining the text in itself. We ask for instance whether what is said is coherent - do all the bits fall into a structure that makes sense. We ask if it is comprehensive - do the statements or suggestions offered cover all of the examples in the field or just some of them. We ask if it is consistent - does it work the same way in different circumstances; are the conclusions followed through properly. That is the kind of thinking that you as students are supposed to be practising. We talk a lot about active reading, and you may have been listening when we talked about it. Active reading is always asking this kind of question of the text.

Authorship also matters, though. Not just what is said, but who said it. Authorship is a proxy for reliability in the text. If this text was written by an expert acknowledged by their peers, then we can assume reasonably safely that what is said on the page is reliable. We can use it to back up our ideas in the reasonable certainty that no horrible accidents will occur.

If we had the time, we would read every paragraph of every page with proper, active thinking attention. We would examine every word, every nuance. We would test everything. We do not have that amount of time. Also, very often, we do not have the necessary level of skill or knowledge to be able to test the material rigorously. So we rely on proxies. We assume that what is in an OU textbook or web page is authoritative. We assume that what has been said by an acknowledged expert, or what has been published in a reputable journal, is reliable. We can still disagree with it. I give a hearty inward - and sometimes outward - cheer when a student for the first time disagrees with something they have read in an OU text (and gives reasons). It shows they are thinking independently.

But here is the problem with Wikipedia. We can test the words on the page in the same way as we test the words on the page of a book. But we struggle when it comes to authorship. We can examine the history of the Wikipedia page, and we can see exactly who has written what. But that does not necessarily leave us any the wiser, as we have no idea who Chris Bloggs is or what their record of achievement in the field is. Most Wikipedia pages are in fact, I would argue, authoritative, certainly reliable enough for all normal purposes. For instance, much medical information is now available via Wikipedia that would not normally reach the general public, and is put there by people who know what they're talking about. (See “Wikipedia: Meet the men and women who write the articles”) But to use it as a source for an academic argument, you would need to test both the text and its author in a way which you will not usually have the time or the tools for.

The overall temperature of academic debate about Wikipedia is changing. Here is a list of articles about various aspects.  I think the academic world is gradually getting used to the idea that they cannot control knowledge, and certainly cannot control students. But the deal is that students need to learn, from day one, that they must use their judgement on everything they meet, not just on the web but everywhere. You should read Wikipedia critically: you should read everything else just as critically.

Much of the learning students do never gets into their assignments. That is a good thing; I would hate us to kill our students with test fatigue. In my view much vital learning is interstitial: it happens in the spaces between assignments, when learners are using their own resources and their own roadmap to direct their studies. But testing, particularly via assignments, is also a valuable learning tool - it provides for different kinds of learning, the kind where distillation, selection and the making of arguments come to the fore. For the purposes of in between learning, Wikipedia is brilliant, provided you treat it in the way you should treat everything you read, keeping your wits about you when you use it. For the purposes of assignment learning, it is best left behind, underneath the text you write, unless you are confident you can defend the reliability of the evidence you use from it. That would also be a kindness: it will prevent some of my colleagues from imploding.

On teaching about black people

In 1970 Frank Snowden published a pioneering work “Blacks in Antiquity”, examining the presence and lives of dark skinned people in Greek and Roman times. I began my degree in classics at Cambridge in 1970, and sailed (well, plodded) through the entire degree without ever being made aware of Snowden's work, or of any of his successors. I am not sure what to make of that now, apart form it being an interesting snippet of history. But there may be more to it, in the sense that I can remember learning that Roman historians tended to concentrate on Rome and on the doings of great men. (I am pretty sure I was not even aware at the time of the gender limitations implicit in the word “men”.) What seems apparent to me now is that the syllabus, though providing that critique of Tacitus' limitations, reflected it. Black people did not get a look in, any more than did women, slaves or indigenous peasants. And of course that was true of much of our teaching about the world at that point. The turn to oral traditions and of history from below has done much to widen perceptions, which I am thankful for. I am sure we are as much culture and time centric as we used to be, but today, I think, there is no excuse for not being aware of that fact.

Benin bronzes and African music

A parallel to the west's culture-centric response to the Benin bronzes can be found in the history of our appreciation of jazz and African music. Jazz was originally seen as primitive, as “natural” for the kind of people who had a natural sense of rhythm. Any sophistication in it was simply missed to begin with. It was particularly difficult for western students of music as it challenged the resources of traditional notation, as well as traditional ways of playing instruments. If you can't write something down, in our western research tradition, it is very difficult to study it.

The same problem was evident with African music. Western musical notation did not deal well with the “complicated polyphonies of African ensemble music, in which often each of twelve of more voices will go its separate way, weaving and interweaving.... nor could European ears catch the small rhythmic differences that were crucial to the correct notation of African song, as intervals of a twelfth of a second or less were routinely deployed by the African performer. European music simply did not operate with such small rhythmic intervals, so European-trained notators made errors.” Quote from Nussbaum, M (1998), Cultivating Humanity, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, p 163.

On teaching the humanities

From Nussbaum, M (1998), Cultivating Humanity, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, p147

“Our primary goal should be to produce students who have a Socratic knowledge of their own ignorance - both of other world cultures, and, to a great extent, of our own. These students, when they hear simplistic platitudes about cultural difference, will not be inclined to take them at face value; they will question, probe and inquire. Because they have a basic awareness of cultural and methodological issues, they will have a way of pursuing their questions further. They will approach the different with an appropriate humility, but with good intellectual equipment for the furthest pursuit of understanding. These traits, so important in a citizen of today's interdependent world, are very unlikely to be developed by personal experience alone. At present we are not doing well enough at the task of understanding, and these failures are damaging our nation - in business, in politics, in urgent deliberations about the environment and agriculture and human rights. We must, and we can, cultivate understanding through a liberal education; and an education will not be truly “liberal” (producing truly free and self-governing citizens) unless it undertakes this challenge.”

And she quotes from W. E. B. du Bois “A university in Spain is not simply a university. It is a Spanish university. It is a university located in Spain... It starts with Spanish history and make conditions in Spain the starting point of its teaching... In the same way, s Negro university in the United States of America begins with Negroes... it is founded on, or should be founded on, a knowledge of the history of their people in Africa and in the United States, and their present condition. Without whitewashing or translating wish into fact, it begins with that; and then it asks how shall those young men and women be trained to earn a living and live a life under the circumstances in which they find themselves or with such changing of those circumstances  as time and work and determination will permit” (from “The Negro College” 1933).

That simple task learning “ to earn a living and live a life” remains at the root of all university teaching, and especially the teaching of the humanities.

Challenges in HE

I was alerted to this by the effervescent Grainne Conole. Panos Vlachopoulos has asked these two questions:
1. What would you consider the top 3 challenges that the Higher Education sector faces in your country?
2. Do you see any value of the OER (Open Educational Resources) movement in trying to address any of the challenges?
He has posted a collection of answers on his blog.

My answers are as follows:
1. What would you consider the top 3 challenges that the Higher Education sector faces in your country?
The first challenge is that we are stuck with a certain kind of student arriving. I have no problem with them as people and their experiences so far. Similarly, I have no problem with the schools and teachers that turn them out at the age of 18. There is however something deeply wrong with the UK's educational policy, and has been for several decades. I have blogged about that in more detail here. In a nutshell students arrive having been taught entirely in a system which encourages only individual competitiveness and being told how to achieve grades. When they arrive with us, many of them don't have a clue how to take charge of their learning, or how to learn in a collaborative way. If we let them go on like that, they will emerge as stunted learners, not having achieved anything like their potential. So we need to put massive effort in during their first year to turn them into people who can take charge, and who understand and experience the value of working together with other students.

The second challenge is our obsession with technology. Many people will read that sentence and say either “Hooray, a man who likes pencils”, or “Oh dear, a man who likes pencils”. That's not my point at all. For the record I like what we call technology*, I work with it all the time. As my bio says, I live in my airing cupboard because that is where the computer is. But we tend to focus far too much on the technology and not enough on the teaching and learning that is going on regardless of the environment. As an example, I have done a bit of digging around on blended learning lately. Most of the discussions I have read base themselves on what forms of technology are being used, and are thus forced into the mould of whatever the technology is. We should start with the learning – blended learning is a combination of individual and collaborative learning. Once we have that firmly fixed as our base, we can consider how those forms of learning can be worked out with whatever student and teacher presence is available. I think we would get further than we do at the moment.

The third challenge is something specific to the UK, though it appears in other forms in other places. That is our class ridden obsession with the difference between “academic” and “vocational” learning. I've blogged about that before too. We have come a long way in this country since the beginning of the Thatcher era which finally prised loose the grip of deference from our economy. It hasn't worked so well on our society or on our politics unfortunately, and there is still a specific form which views anything manual as of secondary status compared to proper academic education. It is still evident in the solid support for bringing back grammar schools. (Nobody ever talks about bringing back secondary moderns, which are the inevitable twin of grammar schools, necessary resting places for the majority who fail the exams to get in to grammars.) It is not something that the HE sector on its own can do anything about – it is a society wide problem, but it is one which deeply affects the whole disciplinary structure, award structure and ethos of our profession.

2. Do you see any value of the OER (Open Educational Resources) movement in trying to address any of the challenges?
I cannot foresee what effect the OER movement is going to have. Other people seem to have a clearer vision, but I think predicting the future for OERs is fraught with imponderables. They are going to do things that we cannot possibly predict. Trying to target them would be like trying to target an atom bomb. To change metaphors rapidly midstream, suddenly a tiger has emerged. The best thing we can do is grab hold of the tail and hold on for the ride. Having said that, here are some things that I hope will happen.

It is a lot easier now for any teacher to produce learning material that is of high quality both intellectually and aesthetically. I have just learned how to make an e-book. Now that I know how to do it, I can produce one in five minutes – given that I have written the material – and have it loaded on my students' devices in ten. That has got to change the balance of power between the providers of content (the teachers) and the providers of distribution (the publishing houses etc). Not least, I suspect that there might eventually be a complete meltdown of the entire internal United States school textbook system, which will be watched with a certain amount of schadenfreude in many quarters.

But opening up competition doesn't deal with established interests. People who have power will hold on to it as long as possible. And nowadays knowledge is power. I don't expect to see the world opening up generally without a long and bitter fight. As an example I have an interest in the PACE trial, an investigation into the efficacy of treatments for people with ME. Published results suggest that CBT and Graded Exercise Therapy (GET) are the most efficacious treatments. They are, however, subject to controversy: considerable suspicion has been cast on the trial protocols and on the way the results were arrived at. The controversy could be resolved with publication of the raw data, which the authors are simply refusing to do. They have no interest in openness: they have an interest in keeping the results closed. Such interests will continue to work against openness in educational resources.

I work a little bit with people in Africa, primarily in the field of healthcare technology management (HTM). I (try to) produce learning materials which will enable technicians and engineers in low resource settings to become good managers. When we provide consultancy to hospitals and districts, the headline is about healthcare technology but the skills we pass on are the skills of generic management. A few years ago we wrote a policy manual. We did not realise at the time, but we were producing an OER, and one which is being used all over the world to help inform policy and train staff. We intend to build on this with more, and more specifically targeted, educational materials, which will perforce be OERs. For the organisation I work for, the advent of OERs is helping us to realise that the value in what we do is not in the content so much as in the process. I think that realisation is slowly percolating through many academic institutions, and I hope that it will eventually help us to move away from our reliance on assessment of product as the sole arbiter of the quality of a degree. This goes back to my first point about what students need to learn. They need to learn how to work collaboratively. Module teams in my institution recognise that this is important and work in various collaborative exercises, but many still provide marks only for written assignments. They need to twig that they should be marking process as well as product in order to make sure the students get the best out of it. An excellent example emerged the other day in some work on radiologists, and how they spot areas of concern. It built on the moonwalking gorilla video, which is still one of my all time favourites. I read a report on the BBC website: Why do radiologists miss dancing gorillas? The most important section was a side insert quoting from a senior radiologist Dr Antoni Toms “"How do you know when a radiologist has been trained? They sit an exam. But you could argue what you should do is get them to sit in front of an eye-tracking machine and if they have got a consultant pattern of movements they have seen enough cases. That's the future, but we're a long way off." Classic. It is a stretch from OERs to assessment methods, but the connection is there.

In short, my three problems were: students' ability to learn collaboratively, our obsession with technology and our snobbishness about vocational qualifications. I don't think we will overcome these with OERs, but OERs are going to blow a lot of things up, and they will undoubtedly be part of the process.

*People keep telling me they "don't like technology". My reply is always "A pencil *is* technology".

What people read

I have two blogs.

On Really Useful Knowledge I blog about educational things – pedagogy, philosophy of teaching and learning, stuff like that. On this blog one post is the runaway winner in terms of all time views. It could be about why we learn the humanities, the politics of education, the connections between history and geography, the place of elearning, the difference between deep and surface learning, media power, different tutorial techniques and their effects. It could be about any of these things, but it is not. It's about sodding word count.

On A Comfortable Place I blog about politics, disability, religion, civil liberties, driving, film, the NHS, Tottenham Hotspur and a whole variety of other things. I've done several posts lately on how Iain Duncan Smith's poisonous policies are hurting the most vulnerable people in our society. I am liberal, politically committed, religious, thoughtful, and I like to think my blog reflects this. So which is the most read post of all time on this blog? Well, for a while, it was “Spartacus – what next?” about how to handle the afore mentioned hypocrite and his policies. I was quite pleased about that – not about the policies, which I am very sad that my party supports, but about having made some sort of meaningful contribution to the debate. But it has been overtaken by the slow steady march of a consumerist rant about cavity wall insulation, my experiences when a certain company came to do mine, and my exhortation to my readers not to use that company. O tempora.

Educational policy

As a first year tutor with the Open University,  I am used to students arriving with a whole range of abilities and learnings.  What strikes me more forcefully as time goes by is that there are enormous variations in their ability to think for themselves and to take charge of their learning. I am driven more and more to the conclusion that where they have learned to think, it is in spite of rather than because of any education they have received.

Age is not a significant variable as far as I can see.  Like most generalisations that has lots of nuances, but the nub of it is that most new students, of whatever age, arrive expecting to be taught rather than expecting to learn. The result is that I spend a lot of my time trying to get them to engage with the module material and their own learning in an entirely new way. Some take to it fine, some resist – sometimes quite strongly. I have never had the experience that many of my colleagues apparently have of students assuming they have bought the marks they want, but it takes a lot sometimes to break down the expectation that they should be told what to think rather than how to think.

I don't blame the students for this. I remember my own trajectory through learning, primarily in the 60s and 70s, a golden age according to some, a mess of political correctness according to others. The school and the university I attended were among the “finest”, but it was only in my third year at university that I began to get a glimmer of how I could actually learn rather than just absorbing what I was told to absorb. I spent another couple of decades gradually understanding more and more that I could think for myself.

My students are smart, almost without exception. Even those whose modes of expression are, well, basic. The smartness has not been channelled, and in many cases has actually been compromised by the system in which they have been taught. This remains true with those whose schooling is very recent. Constant improvements in grades does not seem to be matched by students' ability to make use of their innate gifts.

It may seem paradoxical, but I don't blame schools or teachers for this. I think we have a lot of good schools, and I think we have a lot of good teachers. What we have, however, is a failure of educational policy, and a failure that has been persistent, probably for three decades. The be all and end all of a school's life is the league tables. The easy and false assumption that has been made by every education minister since Kenneth Baker is that good grades mean good learning. But the problem with target driven systems is that if you set people targets, they will ignore everything else in their determination to reach the target. It's bad enough if the target is just a bonus, as it is in so many flawed employee performance schemes, but when the institution stands or falls by whether it meets its targets, as is now the case with schools, everything else will go to pot. The average teachers, the good teachers, and the best teachers all know it doesn't matter a stuff what their pupils learn as long as they pass the exam. The result is pupils who are well versed in how to pass an exam without having having learned all they could of the unexaminable skills that good schools could give them. One student of mine last year, straight from A-levels, said that he didn't learn anything in his last three months at school - he and his classmates were getting nothing other than coaching in how to pass the exam. So much gets lost to the tyranny of measurement. And in fact I'm not sure that any recent education minister, Michael Gove being an egregious example, knows what education is for.

We need good citizens and good workers. That is, if there are any jobs left for them. Citizens need to be able to think. (A good citizen is a critical one, although the government thinks a good citizen is a compliant one.) Workers need, above all these days, to be able to think. The league table system seems designed to iron the thinking out of them, while ironing in the ability to pass exams, and to recite Cromwell's dates. Creativity, which used to be an optional extra, but is now a requirement of modern life, is stifled too often by inappropriate targets. It doesn't work. Not nearly as well as it should do. As I said, we have a lot of good schools and a lot of good teachers. They often succeed. But they do so in spite of educational policy, not because of it.

On history and geography

For me history and geography are twins. I mean human geography, which is the kind I am concerned with. Those who look for an oxbow lake whenever they hear the word “geography” will be disappointed by this post.

In changemooc we've been working on a variety of issues about the openness of education.   E.g. the whole idea of connectivism, which breaks disciplinary boundaries by organising according to student experience. In H812 we've been working on disciplinary differences. There's a big movement in education to define and privilege the differences between disciplines with the implication that this must have profound impacts on teaching methods. To an extent I can see that this is true. If you're teaching things to which there is an exact answer, such as a mathematical problem or a chemical formula, then you must teach exactness of method, and intolerance for inaccuracy, except where defined as permissible. If you're teaching sociology then you must teach the primacy of viewpoint and relativity as a method, or the whole thing goes to pot.  But many things also remain the same. Students still have to learn how to learn, how to study, how to approach answers, how to become independent. Perhaps the implications are bigger for teaching than they are for learning, but I do wonder how big they are. Maths - exactness, sociology - relativity. The difference is so obvious that it can be taken as obvious. I'm not convinced of the need to build a superstructure around it of disciplinary method which is wholly and exclusively owned by that discipline, and must, really, really must, be differentiated from what other disciplines do. Some suggest (e.g. Healey, M (2000) Developing the Scholarship of Teaching and learning in higher Education: a discipline-based approach, Higher Education Research and Development, Vol 19, 3, pp 169 – 189) that this is to do with academic training, that people are brought up within a discipline and get thoroughly and forcefully socialised in that discipline's ways, and also taught some kind of exclusivity, that this is how we do it, and it's completely different from the way everybody else does it. It's the idea that difference has to be exclusive that bothers me. I don't have a problem with methodical rigour, I do have a problem with exclusivity that prevents people from working across boundaries.
I never got this kind of exclusive training. I didn't get trained beyond undergraduate status, and in any case my first degree was in classics, which is multidisciplinary. Thirty years later I got a degree in social sciences which has always been my first love. Social science is pretty multidisciplinary too. I've done research, and had it published, on the basis of my jack-of-all-trades skills, and it has been reasonably well received, so I don't feel lost without the kind of disciplinary loyalties that some of my colleagues display.

It wouldn't bother me much what other people do except for the preciousness which they sometimes display in defending their disciplinary turf against some outside interference, and the petty level to which this can descend. It has, however, begun to bother me lately, because I love teaching both geography (of the human variety) and history. But it's very difficult to cross those (in my view, artificially exaggerated) disciplinary boundaries. In my view you can't teach one without the other. You can't do time without space or space without time. Yet, not only are they different disciplines, in the OU as in many universities, they are in completely different faculties. History is in humanities and geography is in social science. History is deemed to have more to with music, philosophy and art appreciation than with geography. Geography is deemed to have more to do with psychology and social policy than with history. Go figure.

This is a big problem for openness in education, to return to my changemooc theme, because openness in learning requires moving across disciplinary boundaries in response to the demands of the real, complex world. And that means having to leap across trenches which some of my colleagues are assiduously deepening and widening as we try to make connections. There has to be a better way to preserve the necessary skills for each discipline without digging those trenches.. I don't know what it is, but there has to be.

The TMA song

This deserves a very wide audience:

Elearning and digital (not)natives

I read an inspiring piece at Online College the other day: Emergence of the new learner.   It suggested that the characteristics of the new learner are that they create and broadcast content, they are connected and networked, that they are used to critique and need feedback. Furthermore the new learning environment is peer-to-peer collaborative and process-oriented. This is great stuff and it describes in  nutshell some of the key features of 21st century learning.

Inspiring as I say. Or it would be if I'd ever met a learner like that. OK, I exaggerate a tiny, tiny bit. I've tutored several hundred students in the last ten years, and I've lost count of the thousands who've been in forums I have moderated. I reckon I could count the new learners, as described above, on the fingers of both hands. I have no criticism personally of any of the students I have taught or moderated over the years: it's the way they've been taught.  As the Online College article goes on to say: “We are brought up, educationally speaking, sitting in neat rows and columns of chairs, listening to instructor-driven lectures, and completing multiple-choice exams at pre-determined intervals.” So people do what they have always done. And it's comfortable to do that. This is connected with my previous post about deep and surface learning. Surface learning is alienated learning, in my opinion – it is personally distant, irrelevant, useful only for jumping through hoops and is often jettisoned as soon as the hoop has been jumped. It's boring and the student can often be resentful and less than fully engaged in a task that is necessary because one is in school, but otherwise meaningless. On the other hand, the student is given little opportunity to explore ways in which the tasks might become meaningful, and no incentive either – surface learning is monotonous and featureless, but on the other hand it makes no personal demands. Real learning can shake your soul, and that is a step too far for many people.

Paradoxically, I don't think I can blame their teachers either. Primary and secondary teaching in the UK has improved greatly since I was at school decades ago. My children were much better taught than I was, which suggests that the teachers and the methods are better. But I don't think many teachers get a chance to teach as they are capable of teaching because they like everybody else in the primary and secondary education system, are focused on grades and league tables. It doesn't matter how good or bad a teacher you are, your one and only job is to get good grades, and as many as possible. So they teach for the exam, which is not necessarily the same as teaching for the learning. And that rubs off on the children who get the message that learning is a) not under their control b) not interesting in its own right and c) aimed at getting grades rather than having any intrinsic value. Perhaps I exaggerate. I'm sure I'll upset many a secondary school teacher if they read this. I don't intend to; I think they are genuinely trying to do a good job, but in a situation that militates against children ever being able to take control of their own learning – a key prerequisite for deep learning, and for thinking.

Also, learning happens in the context of a person's whole world. It's not just the teachers that are responsible, but the whole of society. Teachers don't stand a chance if the child they've been teaching goes home and hears what the teacher is doing rubbished by their family, their friends and their media. Our society teaches us how to do things and what things to do – and by “our society” I mean us, not some mythical thing for which nobody can take any responsibility. Driving is a good example. We get taught the mechanics,and a bit about manners, then we go off and drive the way everybody else does, which causes both chaos and carnage on the roads. More on that here and here. I don't want to get into the ins and outs of how we learn to drive, just to use it as an example of how powerful the learning is that we do from those around us.

I teach level 1 modules for the Open University. Most of my students have done no formal learning since school, regardless of what age they are. We get more and more young-ish people coming to us. Out of 25 current students 7 are under 25. That is they left school less than ten years ago. They, like everyone else, still need to learn how to learn. That is the first and most important aspect of my teaching relationship with them. Linked to that is the fact that they do not know how to learn online, and in fact are completely unfamiliar with the online environment as a place of learning. So I need to address both of these issues – learning how to learn, and learning how to learn online.

Learning how to learn is relatively easy to deal with. Every student arrives with their own motivation. There are some who will listen to me and some who will not. I don't mind that, as long as they get what they want. I can enthuse and inspire those who will listen and are open to being inspired. And I can start to teach them the benefits of critical thinking – the ability to look for the bigger picture, the habit of always asking why, the habit of never taking the taken-for-granted for granted, the habit of questioning everything, habits of honesty and objectivity, openness to new ideas, learning to base judgement on evidence. Interesting, isn't it, how many of these characteristics are personal rather than intellectual ones. It's hard work, it's a tough job, but it's relatively easy to conceptualise.

The elearning thing is a bit trickier though. Generally speaking students are not taking to elearning like ducks to water. They do what they have to, and they otherwise tend to ignore it. This is treated by some as a bit of a puzzle, particularly if you subscribe to the digital natives theory, which says that new generations of learners grow up with the online world. They're used to it, so they should naturally be able to learn in it. Doesn't seem to be the case with my students. Doesn't seem to be the case with other students either – there is an interesting survey from Canada – If Students Are Digital Natives, Why Don’t They Like E-Learning? – the conclusions of which are summed up by the title. And in fact the idea doesn't hold water, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, assuming that they know how to learn online assumes that they know how to learn. This doesn't seem to be the case. That is to say, they use a method of learning (everybody does) – usually the surface method, unless they have a reason for getting involved in something when they may well switch to the deep method. But using the deep method involves developing the skills and practices mentioned earlier on, and if people haven't developed those skills through repeated practice, then they won't be as good at it as they could be. That will be less satisfying for them, and it may be that they will drop back to the old, less effective but less demanding ways of learning. Unless they're consistently and enthusiastically taught to learn in this way. (I'll return to that.)

Secondly the assumption is made that if people are comfortable “being” online,  they will be comfortable “learning” online.  It ain't necessarily so. Being online for many people is about chatting and pursuing leisure interests. It is specifically not a place to engage the brain. Engaging the brain involves an entirely different set of habits and attitudes, and it takes an effort of will to move from one to the other – until you get used to it, and then the students will switch from Facebook friends to Facebook tutor groups with the same facility with which I do it. But the point is that they have to learn how to do it, and if they are not given the room and motivation to do it, they won't.

And there I think we academics in higher education, with some notable exceptions, are failing our students. There is not enough alignment in our teaching practices, and not enough acknowledgement of the basic skills that need to be learned by most university entrants. Alignment in teaching practice has been a problem for a long time, and remains a problem. Back in the 70s it appeared that lecturers looked for critical thinking, but taught and assessed conformity in ideas and the acquisition of detailed factual knowledge. (Entwistle, N. (2005) 'Introduction'. In: Marton, F., Hounsell, D. and Entwistle, N., (eds.) The Experience of Learning: Implications for teaching and studying in higher education. 3rd (Internet) edition. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Centre for Teaching, Learning and Assessment. p6.

And now I teach two courses where the importance of working online and collaboratively is acknowledged, and the tutors are required to offer online tutorials, but all the marks are given for traditional written assignments. If you think it's important, you should mark it.

Secondly, we don't acknowledge the need for the majority of our students, of whatever age or background, for a proper introduction to what learning online really means – the ability and the need to both control and juggle the sources and the motivations of our learning. When to put effort into working collaboratively so as to get the benefit out of it and when and how to put the effort into and learning critically so as to be able to take full control of their own lives.

The only question that remains is – is it really that important? If students can still learn satisfactorily in the traditional ways, why not let them do it? Because, rather like all those schools that are only “satisfactory”, it's not good enough. Surface learning is an old skill, suited to a world in which you could be a good worker and a good citizen without ever thinking too much. Deep learning has become a necessity for surviving in this world, both as a worker and as a human being. Students can get by making use of their education in a second rate way just as they always have done. And in some ways governments would rather they did – they don't want questioning, persistent, well-informed citizens, they want compliant ones. But for us as individuals, we have two choices, we can stagnate, or we can take control of both the style and the environment in which we learn. That means getting on top of the manifold ways in which data and information are spread across the internet, and learning how to evaluate, manipulate and deploy them. Doing any less means second tier jobs for second tier citizens. So, yes, it is important – important enough for us to insist that our students get the best they can out of both learning and elearning.

Deep and surface learning

We've been considering issues about deep and surface learning on H812. Good course, H812, but deceptively quick. It's very part time,  takes two years, one assignment every three months or so – it's a doddle, I thought. But the weeks fly past with a new topic each week; blink and you miss one, and at my age I blink a lot. Deep and surface learning attracted a lot of chat, and at least one misconception.

There's a very good summary of deep and surface learning at the HEA: Deep and Surface Approaches to Learning.   It gets the distinction right between deep learning being critical and surface learning not. The misconception I referred to above was that some people thought that wide learning entailed surface learning, e.g. For a law student who needs to learn by heart a number of not very well connected cases, it would perforce be surface learning. I don't see it that way at all, and I don't think inventors of the distinction thought so either. Even if you're skating the surface, you can learn deeply. It's not about what you're learning so much as the way you do it. To take the law student example above, learning case law is a gritty but necessary undertaking. Broadly speaking, you can either learn a series of unconnected names, dates,  principles and applications, or you can learn each case as a contribution towards a (probably fuzzy) understanding of an area of law that may connect eventually to other areas, where you can see the principles operating in similar ways, although in completely different spheres. The first student may well turn into a competent lawyer. The second is likely to turn out to be better,because they understand better the way the law works.

It's interesting that the HEA page concentrates on the meaning of deep learning rather than surface learning. It has a list of the characteristics of surface learning, but, other than that, doesn't go into much detail about it. I would have thought that the primary concern for teachers was how to turn surface learning into deep learning wherever possible. For that we need to understand what surface learning is – what motivates it and embeds it into a student's practice.

For me the key characteristic seems to be that it is a disengaged form of learning, learning that does not involve the student, that is kept at a distance from the student's being. It enters their mind, in a special compartment, marked “Nothing to do with me”, and sits there until the student has been examined on it or leaves school, whereupon it instantly self destructs. But it never enters their soul.

In my view, far too many people learn to learn in a surface way. I'll sketch the reasons why this is in another post, but for now I'll just take it as a given – to go into the reasons in detail would take far too long. Regardless of what the reasons are, that fact is a big influence in determining how we need to teach. One of the big debates of course will be whose responsibility it is – there will be those who say that if a student is learning in a disengaged way, it's only their own fault – they should take responsibility for themselves. And there is a tendency then to say that they should dig themselves out of their own hole. I don't think that follows. To me it doesn't make any difference whose fault it is; we still have to teach in a way that will re-engage them if it is possible.

There are two elements. One is attitude, one is skill. To learn at a deep level, you need an attitude of engagement, and you need the skills to learn. Your attitude can be influenced by your teacher, and the skills can certainly be learned under your teacher's tutelage. So that's our job as teachers sorted.

Identity, place and Eastbourne

More pics from Eastbourne, this time of interest to DD101 students, on the creation of identity and difference. In this case what we're looking at is the manufacturing of identity, and of difference, through the artificial creation of individuality. I came upon this gated housing estate being built while I was out for a walk.

First, they picture the beach and the sea at Eastbourne. This estate is miles from the sea. The word "Heights" in the name is a bit of a giveaway.

This manufactured community is intended for the over 45s only. No audible children or music etc. (Click on the image to expand it, and you will see the legend on the side of the van.)

This is where it gets really artificial. The estate is still being built while some people are already living there. The bungalows are being built and sold with their own "individuality" already established. This one is sold with its Chinese themed decoration ready installed. The next one, difficult to see here, has, with calculated incongruity, a Beatrix Potter theme. And so on down the street.

I don't know how long this shed has been in place, but not long enough to grow all the creeper. That was installed along with the shed.

Part of this is about the manufacture of community by putting up buildings, putting a (admittedly porous) fence around them and artificially delineating who should live in them. All of those are grist to the mill of the social science student. But in this case there's a specific application to the first few chapters of DD101, where the theme is difference and inequality. In this case the developers, as well as manufacturing community, are manufacturing difference - or to put it another way, manufacturing individuality. Treat it as a street, like the streets you've been examining so far in DD101. But note that this time any differences or individualities you see in the exterior of the bungalows has been put there deliberately and randomly by the developers.

The seaside

Just some shots I took at Eastbourne the other day.

They make a different class of beach hut there (running water and gas supplied).

They have their own tea chalet round the back. The Union Jack provides an extra touch of something.

And a Dotto train.

There's a very nice pier, and some winches. These are not like the winches at Hastings, which will be illustrated later.

Judging from the rust on the wire, these winches don't get used much.

This is an exercise in the creation of a seaside place and experience. The tea chalet, the train, the pier, and the winches all recall the nineteenth century creation of the seaside atmosphere. It's soggy with nostalgia, to quote Tom Lehrer. For AA100 students there's a lot here than resonates with the material in Book Four.