It's now five years since I left academia. Which is weird, as time went by extremely quickly. And, somehow I still feel part-academic. Not only in that I approach many issues the way I would have done when working as a researcher, but also because I am still in touch with many academics on social media; mostly from the time I first started out on twitter, and with colleagues (often from other universities) working in the same field as me.
One issue that always is at the forefront of my mind is that I have no regrets. Life outside the ivory tower is maybe a bit less certain, but it feels a lot more sensible: No periods of binge-marking essays twice a year, or being dependent on anonymous student feedback. No trying to apply for promotion when management constantly pushes the goalposts around. No pointless teaching/research assessments. No wasting time on writing grant applications with an 80+% failure rate. And a lot fewer emails. Up to the point that I sometimes wonder if my email is broken.
In short, I'm happy to be where I am. It was an interesting time working in academia, and sometimes I miss it, but overall I'm glad I left when I did.
Thursday, 30 August 2018
Tuesday, 28 March 2017
Two Years Later...
After two years, I am no longer a 'Whisker'. Instead, I now have a new job which is a much better fit for my original (academic) background.
The company I now work at is Artificial Solutions, building bespoke virtual assistants for commercial websites (but also self-standing bots such as Indigo (available as an iOS app) and Elbot. My official job title is Knowledge Engineer, and I work designing dialogue flows and general backend NL components.
To be honest, I'm glad that I am no longer at a start-up. The culture is a bit wearing, especially if you're about the oldest person in the office (at least among the developers). I also didn't like to be bossed about by people who were less experienced and knew everything better...
So, who knows, maybe I'll post again in two years about what happened since. In the meantime, I have a new blog which is updated more frequently.
To be honest, I'm glad that I am no longer at a start-up. The culture is a bit wearing, especially if you're about the oldest person in the office (at least among the developers). I also didn't like to be bossed about by people who were less experienced and knew everything better...
So, who knows, maybe I'll post again in two years about what happened since. In the meantime, I have a new blog which is updated more frequently.
Sunday, 10 May 2015
Two Years Later...
There has been quite a quiet patch on this blog, so I thought I'd give a quick update, even though I suspect my readership has now dwindled away altogether.
I'm no longer a free-lancer, but instead I'm now a fully employed member of Whisk. The work is still fun and challenging, the colleagues are great, and I now regret that I didn't take the leap earlier. My heart aches when I think of all the years I wasted in academia, thinking conditions would improve.
So, in retrospect it has been the right choice to quit lecturing and to go out and work in the wild world...
Monday, 15 July 2013
Changing Places... and Names
The observant among my two readers might have noticed the name of this blog has changed. While in a sense I'm still learning and doing research, I'm no longer teaching as part of my job. So a name change seemed only appropriate.
As for teaching, that was the one aspect of my previous job that I was going to miss. However, as it turns out, I will be speaking at two conferences already in September, iOSDevUK in Aberystwyth, and BrightonSEO in, erm, Brighton. And unlike academic conferences, the organiser actually pays you to speak (in the form of accommodation/travel, or both).
One big worry when freelancing is that there won't be any work available. However, after 6 weeks I have pretty much had the opposite experience (though it might be a bit early to draw any conclusions yet). I'm currently working at a Birmingham start-up, Whisk, improving their linguistic analysis. It turns out, there is quite a demand for linguistic analysis 'in the wild' world of business. At the moment I'm doing about 8hrs a day of research, and no teaching or admin. Compared to the past years at the university, this seems like paradise. And of course, no pressure to produce publications no-one will read.
But as with the fairy-story paradise, it remains to be seen whether I will get chucked out at some point, when I have to do a boring contract to pay the bills. Or sit at home waiting for a phone call from a recruiter. At the moment though I'm optimistic that this will not happen anytime soon.
Stay tuned...
As for teaching, that was the one aspect of my previous job that I was going to miss. However, as it turns out, I will be speaking at two conferences already in September, iOSDevUK in Aberystwyth, and BrightonSEO in, erm, Brighton. And unlike academic conferences, the organiser actually pays you to speak (in the form of accommodation/travel, or both).
One big worry when freelancing is that there won't be any work available. However, after 6 weeks I have pretty much had the opposite experience (though it might be a bit early to draw any conclusions yet). I'm currently working at a Birmingham start-up, Whisk, improving their linguistic analysis. It turns out, there is quite a demand for linguistic analysis 'in the wild' world of business. At the moment I'm doing about 8hrs a day of research, and no teaching or admin. Compared to the past years at the university, this seems like paradise. And of course, no pressure to produce publications no-one will read.
But as with the fairy-story paradise, it remains to be seen whether I will get chucked out at some point, when I have to do a boring contract to pay the bills. Or sit at home waiting for a phone call from a recruiter. At the moment though I'm optimistic that this will not happen anytime soon.
Stay tuned...
Sunday, 10 March 2013
Career Change
Interesting times... after 19 years at my current university, from Research Associate to Computer Officer to Lecturer, I have finally decided to leave academia to work as a contractor/consultant in IT and NLP.
I was thinking of writing a post about my reasons for this rather radical step, but I think it would quickly turn into a rant, and I don't want to dwell too much on negative things. To summarise, I am no longer happy with the way higher education is developing in this country. It's less and less focused on what I believe to be the point of academia, namely broadening people's horizons, and preparing them to be adaptable to anything life will throw in their way. But with the rise in costs students increasingly just care about assessments, and I can't really blame them. A further aspect is the importance of targets, especially in recruiting PG students, where bums on seats are all that counts. And the continuous fragmentation of the job, where there are so many little tasks to deal with at the same time that it is difficult to concentrate on one thing only at a time.
There have also been many positive aspects to it: curious students, friendly colleagues, interesting topics to work with. But I no longer feel that working in academia makes best use of my skills. It was a tough decision to make, but I don't want to say to myself in 20 years time "why did you not do something when there still was time?" And, given that I originally came on a one-year contract I think I managed to stay on for quite a long time.
Anyway, from June 1st this year I will be looking at HE from the outside only.
I was thinking of writing a post about my reasons for this rather radical step, but I think it would quickly turn into a rant, and I don't want to dwell too much on negative things. To summarise, I am no longer happy with the way higher education is developing in this country. It's less and less focused on what I believe to be the point of academia, namely broadening people's horizons, and preparing them to be adaptable to anything life will throw in their way. But with the rise in costs students increasingly just care about assessments, and I can't really blame them. A further aspect is the importance of targets, especially in recruiting PG students, where bums on seats are all that counts. And the continuous fragmentation of the job, where there are so many little tasks to deal with at the same time that it is difficult to concentrate on one thing only at a time.
There have also been many positive aspects to it: curious students, friendly colleagues, interesting topics to work with. But I no longer feel that working in academia makes best use of my skills. It was a tough decision to make, but I don't want to say to myself in 20 years time "why did you not do something when there still was time?" And, given that I originally came on a one-year contract I think I managed to stay on for quite a long time.
Anyway, from June 1st this year I will be looking at HE from the outside only.
Wednesday, 4 July 2012
Education Emptiness
I have read too much Roger Schank. And I've been thinking too much. This is something best avoided, especially when marking student essays. Why? Because it makes you question what it is we're doing in Higher Education.
Assessing Essays
Marking essays is a soul-destroying task, as you have too little time to spend on each essay, and you have a large pile of essays to process. Most students spend days and weeks on preparing their essays, so it always feels wrong to read and assess them in about half an hour, including writing up your feedback. This is very unsatisfactory, but otherwise one simply cannot turn around the marking in the allocated time.
But the worst thing about marking is its reductionist nature. An essay is a complex piece of writing, comprised of style, argument, expression of knowledge, understanding, interpretation, analysis, discussion etc etc. And all these different dimensions get conflated into a single point on a one-dimensional scale: a grade between about 40 and 70. This is just not right.
Many essays end up having the same numerical grade assigned to it, but they are not really comparable. One student might write eloquently but superficially, another provides deep insights with terrible grammar. One student might have a great idea, but not much understanding of the underlying concepts. Another one has solidly learned all what was required but lacks the creativity to apply the principles to a given problem. Yet, they all get the same numerical value. Different feedback, sure, but that does not really count for anything.
School children get detailed reports (besides a few simple letter grades), but in HE there are simply not the resources to do this, as there are too few staff and too many students, unless you are in Oxbridge. In principle that should not be an insurmountable problem.
You're doing it wrong!
After grading a mathematical crime is committed: the numerical grades are added up and averaged. This is simply not possible. The numbers are not numbers, they are labels that look like numbers. If we assigned the essays letters, then it would be more obvious: what is the average of A and B? But that is a completely different issue to be discussed on another day...
Essentially, then, after a lot of adding and averaging, the whole three years a student spends at university is reduced to a single label again, the degree classification. This is again an enormous reduction of a multitude of information into a single point out of four. And this point decides what possible career a student can then pursue...
As the degree class is so important (and expensive, especially for the incoming cohorts of students), this tends to be at the forefront of students' minds. This is of course a wild generalisation, and there are many exceptions, but from my experience a lot of students are primarily interested in getting good grades. Learning becomes secondary, and only the means to the end of achieving good grades. That means, curiosity, a central ingredient for successful learning, suffers, or rather, is redirected into finding out how to get grades. One cannot really blame students for trying to game the system, which is essentially what they learn to do in the end.
It does work elsewhere...
Postgraduate work is different, though, as it is less regimented. And, more importantly I think, PhD students do not get a grade. It's pass or fail. You either get a PhD, or you don't. There are of course, differences: you could get through with major corrections, minor correction, or no corrections. But nobody will know whether you scraped through with a 'revise and re-submit' or sailed through without any required corrections. If it works for PhDs, why not for UGs as well?
The problem is that we've got too many undergraduates, so there needs to be some differentiation. But why? Who wants it? Presumably those who employ graduates, so that they can see who is better or worse. But does the degree class really reflect vocational ability? I would doubt that, but in the end it is just another filter to reduce the 52 applications for each graduate job to a manageable number. With PhDs this is not so much of an issue, as you can get a more rounded picture by looking at their previous grades or even publications.
In-Conclusion
So what is the solution to this dilemma? It basically requires a system change, which is probably not feasible. Employers want differentiation, universities want to climb up the league tables (which nowadays tend to include employability metrics), and students want to have something that distinguishes them from the crowd. But in the process, education suffers. Learning is not really the focus of HE, and we're just churning out graduates who are good at spotting what is needed to get a good grade and doing just that.
We're assessing far too much, and it destroys what I think universities are all about: expanding your horizons, applying your knowledge and curiosity to interesting problems, be able to fail tasks without jeopardising your future career, and generally maturing and learning stuff.
Assessing Essays
Marking essays is a soul-destroying task, as you have too little time to spend on each essay, and you have a large pile of essays to process. Most students spend days and weeks on preparing their essays, so it always feels wrong to read and assess them in about half an hour, including writing up your feedback. This is very unsatisfactory, but otherwise one simply cannot turn around the marking in the allocated time.
But the worst thing about marking is its reductionist nature. An essay is a complex piece of writing, comprised of style, argument, expression of knowledge, understanding, interpretation, analysis, discussion etc etc. And all these different dimensions get conflated into a single point on a one-dimensional scale: a grade between about 40 and 70. This is just not right.
Many essays end up having the same numerical grade assigned to it, but they are not really comparable. One student might write eloquently but superficially, another provides deep insights with terrible grammar. One student might have a great idea, but not much understanding of the underlying concepts. Another one has solidly learned all what was required but lacks the creativity to apply the principles to a given problem. Yet, they all get the same numerical value. Different feedback, sure, but that does not really count for anything.
School children get detailed reports (besides a few simple letter grades), but in HE there are simply not the resources to do this, as there are too few staff and too many students, unless you are in Oxbridge. In principle that should not be an insurmountable problem.
You're doing it wrong!
After grading a mathematical crime is committed: the numerical grades are added up and averaged. This is simply not possible. The numbers are not numbers, they are labels that look like numbers. If we assigned the essays letters, then it would be more obvious: what is the average of A and B? But that is a completely different issue to be discussed on another day...
Essentially, then, after a lot of adding and averaging, the whole three years a student spends at university is reduced to a single label again, the degree classification. This is again an enormous reduction of a multitude of information into a single point out of four. And this point decides what possible career a student can then pursue...
As the degree class is so important (and expensive, especially for the incoming cohorts of students), this tends to be at the forefront of students' minds. This is of course a wild generalisation, and there are many exceptions, but from my experience a lot of students are primarily interested in getting good grades. Learning becomes secondary, and only the means to the end of achieving good grades. That means, curiosity, a central ingredient for successful learning, suffers, or rather, is redirected into finding out how to get grades. One cannot really blame students for trying to game the system, which is essentially what they learn to do in the end.
It does work elsewhere...
Postgraduate work is different, though, as it is less regimented. And, more importantly I think, PhD students do not get a grade. It's pass or fail. You either get a PhD, or you don't. There are of course, differences: you could get through with major corrections, minor correction, or no corrections. But nobody will know whether you scraped through with a 'revise and re-submit' or sailed through without any required corrections. If it works for PhDs, why not for UGs as well?
The problem is that we've got too many undergraduates, so there needs to be some differentiation. But why? Who wants it? Presumably those who employ graduates, so that they can see who is better or worse. But does the degree class really reflect vocational ability? I would doubt that, but in the end it is just another filter to reduce the 52 applications for each graduate job to a manageable number. With PhDs this is not so much of an issue, as you can get a more rounded picture by looking at their previous grades or even publications.
In-Conclusion
So what is the solution to this dilemma? It basically requires a system change, which is probably not feasible. Employers want differentiation, universities want to climb up the league tables (which nowadays tend to include employability metrics), and students want to have something that distinguishes them from the crowd. But in the process, education suffers. Learning is not really the focus of HE, and we're just churning out graduates who are good at spotting what is needed to get a good grade and doing just that.
We're assessing far too much, and it destroys what I think universities are all about: expanding your horizons, applying your knowledge and curiosity to interesting problems, be able to fail tasks without jeopardising your future career, and generally maturing and learning stuff.
Thursday, 12 January 2012
On-line Education?
So I got 79%, but did I learn anything? And do the 79% reflect my achievements? And what was the overall learning experience like?
First, the learning experience: the module was delivered as a series of short low-tech video lectures, interspersed with multiple-choice or number-entry quizzes. Then there was homework (multiple-choice and number-entry quizzes) and a mid-term and final exam (both multiple choice and... you get the idea).
The quizzes, however, were rather limited. There was the problem of turning quite complex material into a simple format, and also (which I found hardest) missing context. As a result the questions were often trivial side-aspects, or impossible to answer due to ambiguity (judging from the few forum posts I looked at, many other people had the same issue). You can interpret a question in many different ways, especially if you need to take into account external constraints which have not been clearly specified.
Quite often you get an answer wrong, and then look at the explanation of the proper outcome, and you think "oh right, that's how they meant it".
I quite struggled with Bayes networks, and I consistently got the wrong answers when asked how many independent parameters I would need to describe one. To this day I do not know why I need to know this. I can guess, but it wasn't really explained. Formal logic was one of the things I felt very comfortable with, as I had covered that in my own UG studies as a computational linguist, but I only got 1 out of 4 points in the final exam question, as I made one small error; based on that the subsequent answers were also wrong.
My best results were in computer vision–100%. And that's even though I'm short-sighted! But do I really understand computer vision so much better than all the other areas of AI? No. Thing is, all that was asked in the relevant quizzes was basic maths. There was a simple formula, relating various parameters such as focal length and distances to each other, and all you had to do was resolve the equation for different values and work out the result. I would have been able to do this beforehand, and didn't even learn that in the course. Still, I was assessed on it and scored 100%. But anybody with basic maths would have been able to do that, even without watching a single minute of any of the class videos.
So my first criticism is: the quizzes were not designed properly. There is a lot more one can do with multiple choice question, but Thrun and Norvig didn't do it. The assessments felt like an ad-hoc addition, along the lines of "I need a quiz now, so what could I ask?".
My second criticism is the way the scoring worked. One slight mistake, nil points. In a real exam you would get points for results which are wrong, but only because of a mistake in an intermediate step. An all-or-nothing approach is not very helpful.
Did I learn anything I would not have learned from reading a book? Probably not. The main advantage for me was to have the pressure of getting through the weekly session before the hand-in date, which makes you put aside time you would otherwise spend on something else. So in that respect it is alright; and the fact that it was delivered on-line was convenient as you could choose the time when you wanted to study it. But while this is good for a supplementary course, I am glad I did have proper seminars and lectures when I went to university.
While you can't argue with a free course (you did get more than you paid for!), there is still a lot of scope for improvement for this particular type of course, an on-line distance course, and I cannot see it replacing 'proper' seminars any time soon. But it was overall an interesting experience, if only to find out what 'real' teaching should be like.
Thursday, 8 December 2011
Pointless Quizzes
This morning I completed the University's on-line Diversity Training. In principle a good idea, as it raises awareness about disadvantaging students (or members of staff) where you didn't think you were, but in practice just another thing to do during an already full schedule. And much of it was not relevant for me anyway, as I am not in a position to determine the level of pay of my fellow members of staff, either male or female.
What struck me, however, was a particularly bad quiz. I've been thinking about this in the context of the Stanford AI-Class (on which I will post soon - it'll be finished in two weeks' time), and here it came up again: there were two short on-line multiple-choice quizzes embedded in the course.
The first one was so simple that I could just guess the right answers without having needed to read the previous text. If they are so glaringly obvious that anybody can get them right just with a bit of common sense then it does not really contribute to a good view on the course as a whole - it just comes across as—literally!—a box-ticking exercise.
But the second quiz was even worse, and not only because I got some of the answers wrong. There were various scenarios given, and the four choices you had to choose from were: was this case a) victimisation b) direct discrimination c) indirect discrimination or d) nothing illegal.
Why on Earth do I need to know the difference between 'direct' and 'indirect' discrimination? As far as I am concerned, I need to know what is legal, and what is not, in other words there are only two relevant categories for me: 'discrimination' or 'no discrimination'. So I got several answers wrong because I chose 'direct' when the answer was clearly 'indirect' or the other way round. This was just plain annoying. I can see that I need this when wanting to work in the legal field of employment tribunals, but as a simple bod delivering seminars and lectures about language to students I couldn't care less—as long as I know that I'm not doing anything that would count as illegal discrimination.
But this seems to be a frequent pattern with many on-line tests. Because the people creating such tests have not thought about them properly they come up with spurious details that they ask for, just so that they can have four possible choices, when ideally you should start at the learning outcomes—what do the people taking the quiz need to have learned, and how can we test this?
It is perfectly possible to do really good and useful on-line multiple-choice quizzes, but it requires work and thinking about the purpose of it. Otherwise it just annoys people and makes them want to do things to you that I could not possibly mention on this blog.
More on this topic in a few weeks when I will be discussing my experiences with the on-line AI course...
Sunday, 25 September 2011
Why I deleted my FaceBook account
I have just deleted my Facebook account. I cannot remember exactly when I joined, but it was probably 5 or 6 years ago. A while ago I already removed most information about me (such as what music or books I liked), as I felt increasingly uncomfortable with FB's way of making more and more of your information about you available to other people, unless you explicitly disallowed it. This did not feel very honest to me.
And then today came the proverbial straw: I read two (unrelated) posts about FB in direct succession which convinced me that it was finally time to cut the cord. The first [1], showed how FB does not really 'log you out' when you log out - it keeps certain cookies in place which can identify you. I don't use many public computers (especially not with FB) so this does not overly concern me, but I see this as yet a further violation of default expectable privacy.
The second article was vaguely similar, and shows how FB can track where you have been, and other sites can post on your 'wall' when you simply read a webpage. This is just silly. I'm - again - not overly concerned about this (along the lines that I don't generally do things which are illegal or immoral), but on top of that it just contributes to the already existing information overload. If I need to care that person X read webpage Y then I would expect X to tell me. I don't want a stream of activities swamped with reports what websites people I know have visited.
Anyway, those two articles were enough to sway me far enough to permanently delete my account. Not sure what 'permanently' means in this context. For at least the next 14 days FB keeps my account in case I'll change my mind, and I don't exactly trust it to delete anything for real anyway. Remember, in the FB business model, FB's assets are you, its users and their data, which they mine and sell on to other people.
Will I miss FB? I haven't really used it that much in the first place. I'm much more active on Twitter, which is somewhat less intrusive and has fewer opportunities to do stuff with my data. I won't now not as easily be updated on what some family members who live abroad are doing, but there are other ways of keeping in touch. The main issue is our postgraduate students (I am coordinating our English Language PG students) - they have recently set up a FB page, which I now won't be able to see. But most things are still posted on a traditional mailing-list anyway.
On the positive side, I no longer need to deliberate whether I accept somebody who wants to be my friend or snub them if I only vaguely know them. Fewer decisions to make equals more happiness.
It feels weird, cutting the cord, as it did with any account on any system I spent a reasonable amount of time on, but in the long run I don't think I will shed any tears over it. I'm just concerned that FB will spread its tentacles out further, so that at some point in the future everybody is expected to have a FB account, and you cannot do certain things without one. Matrix, anyone?
[1] Apologies for the shortened (and thus opaque) links - they're directly copied from the corresponding tweets
And then today came the proverbial straw: I read two (unrelated) posts about FB in direct succession which convinced me that it was finally time to cut the cord. The first [1], showed how FB does not really 'log you out' when you log out - it keeps certain cookies in place which can identify you. I don't use many public computers (especially not with FB) so this does not overly concern me, but I see this as yet a further violation of default expectable privacy.
The second article was vaguely similar, and shows how FB can track where you have been, and other sites can post on your 'wall' when you simply read a webpage. This is just silly. I'm - again - not overly concerned about this (along the lines that I don't generally do things which are illegal or immoral), but on top of that it just contributes to the already existing information overload. If I need to care that person X read webpage Y then I would expect X to tell me. I don't want a stream of activities swamped with reports what websites people I know have visited.
Anyway, those two articles were enough to sway me far enough to permanently delete my account. Not sure what 'permanently' means in this context. For at least the next 14 days FB keeps my account in case I'll change my mind, and I don't exactly trust it to delete anything for real anyway. Remember, in the FB business model, FB's assets are you, its users and their data, which they mine and sell on to other people.
Will I miss FB? I haven't really used it that much in the first place. I'm much more active on Twitter, which is somewhat less intrusive and has fewer opportunities to do stuff with my data. I won't now not as easily be updated on what some family members who live abroad are doing, but there are other ways of keeping in touch. The main issue is our postgraduate students (I am coordinating our English Language PG students) - they have recently set up a FB page, which I now won't be able to see. But most things are still posted on a traditional mailing-list anyway.
On the positive side, I no longer need to deliberate whether I accept somebody who wants to be my friend or snub them if I only vaguely know them. Fewer decisions to make equals more happiness.
It feels weird, cutting the cord, as it did with any account on any system I spent a reasonable amount of time on, but in the long run I don't think I will shed any tears over it. I'm just concerned that FB will spread its tentacles out further, so that at some point in the future everybody is expected to have a FB account, and you cannot do certain things without one. Matrix, anyone?
[1] Apologies for the shortened (and thus opaque) links - they're directly copied from the corresponding tweets
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
Plagiarism - setting an example
Being a conservative, Guttenberg could count on the support of the conservative press, such as BILD, which ran articles in which it was emphasised that he was a good minister, doing a splendid job for the boys in Afghanistan, and that he shouldn't resign because a couple of academics have lost all sense of proportion and demand his resignation over a piddly little academic infelicity. Those people in their ivory towers, out of touch with the real world of our troops dying in the Hindukush, how dare they ruin the career of this brilliant man... just because of some stupid footnotes!
But he finally resigned; and his PhD was taken away earlier by Bayreuth University, which is none too happy about the PR implications. And now we have a good example that we can show our students: even the powerful can fall if they commit plagiarism! While plagiarism should indeed reason enough to not be fit for public office, Guttenberg himself of course states it was not the only reason... showing that he doesn't seem to bothered about his integrity.
There is also an interesting linguistic side-aspect to this: in English we talk about plagiarism, meaning the process of plagiarising something. In German you talk about the Plagiariat, the product of copying, rather than the process. Of course you can 'verb' it into Er plagiarisierte seine Doktorarbeit, but that sounds rather awkward. The offender, a plagiarist, is also not directly lexicalised in German.
And to end on a happy note, here's a joke I heard on Twitter:
Fragt der Praktikant im Verteidigungsministerium "Wo ist denn der Kopierer?" Antwort: "Auf Truppenbesuch in Afghanistan" (Intern at the ministry of defence asks "where's the copier[*]?" Answer: "Visiting the troops in Afghanistan"). Who says Germans don't have a sense of humour?!
[*] Kopierer in this usage would generally be understood to mean 'photocopier'
Sunday, 30 January 2011
Numerical illiteracy
I had a look at our free local newspaper, the Birmingham Mail Extra. In this issue is an article titled "Suburb is now crime hotspot". This article has several problems, which are indicative of the problems of representing what happens 'out there' in the form of a newspaper article.
Quinton had very little burglaries, "averaging just one or two burglaries a month" over the last nine years. But now, crime has "shot up by 29%", more than the rest of Birmingham where crime only rose by 21%.
I find this rather misleading, and I worked through an example with the kids at the dinner table, which illustrates the problem:
Suburb A had 10 burglaries in 2009, and 12 in 2010. That is an increase of 20%.
Suburb B had 4 burglaries in 2009, and 5 in 2010. Increase of 25%.
Suburb C had one burglary in 2009, and two in 2010. A whopping 100% increase.
First lesson: percentage increase is meaningless unless everybody started in the same place. Why do developing economies have higher growth rates than Europe and the US? Because the percentage looks bigger. If you double your output from 100 cars to 200 cars you increase by 100%, but to maintain that rate you will have to produce an additional 200 cars the year after, and then 400, 800 etc.
Second lesson: without a fixed reference point (such as burglaries per 1000 inhabitants) you have no idea whether the risk of your house being burgled is high or low. Everything is relative, but you still need a fixed point to evaluate things.
Third lesson: this is not mentioned, but is that difference between 29% and 21% statistically significant? With "one or two burglaries a month", the variation seems rather high, given those small numbers. So if there was one extra or one fewer burglaries, how would the 29% change?
Final lesson: be careful with calling places "crime hotspot" when your statistics are that shaky.
Now I don't expect a staff reporter at the Birmingham Mail to apply the same rigour as a scientist (or any other, non-science researcher), but the way the article is presented is simply misleading. To me this sounds like a scare story being created out of some random statistics. I don't know whether that is the case, and maybe Quinton is really a crime-ridden area, but I cannot tell from the few facts given to me in the article. The reason for this development given in the paper is that there are now 5 fewer policemen covering Quinton. Is there really such a cast-iron correlation between policemen and crime rate? How about the influence of the recession on crime?
I now have more questions and know less than I did before reading that article!
Quinton had very little burglaries, "averaging just one or two burglaries a month" over the last nine years. But now, crime has "shot up by 29%", more than the rest of Birmingham where crime only rose by 21%.
I find this rather misleading, and I worked through an example with the kids at the dinner table, which illustrates the problem:
Suburb A had 10 burglaries in 2009, and 12 in 2010. That is an increase of 20%.
Suburb B had 4 burglaries in 2009, and 5 in 2010. Increase of 25%.
Suburb C had one burglary in 2009, and two in 2010. A whopping 100% increase.
First lesson: percentage increase is meaningless unless everybody started in the same place. Why do developing economies have higher growth rates than Europe and the US? Because the percentage looks bigger. If you double your output from 100 cars to 200 cars you increase by 100%, but to maintain that rate you will have to produce an additional 200 cars the year after, and then 400, 800 etc.
Second lesson: without a fixed reference point (such as burglaries per 1000 inhabitants) you have no idea whether the risk of your house being burgled is high or low. Everything is relative, but you still need a fixed point to evaluate things.
Third lesson: this is not mentioned, but is that difference between 29% and 21% statistically significant? With "one or two burglaries a month", the variation seems rather high, given those small numbers. So if there was one extra or one fewer burglaries, how would the 29% change?
Final lesson: be careful with calling places "crime hotspot" when your statistics are that shaky.
Now I don't expect a staff reporter at the Birmingham Mail to apply the same rigour as a scientist (or any other, non-science researcher), but the way the article is presented is simply misleading. To me this sounds like a scare story being created out of some random statistics. I don't know whether that is the case, and maybe Quinton is really a crime-ridden area, but I cannot tell from the few facts given to me in the article. The reason for this development given in the paper is that there are now 5 fewer policemen covering Quinton. Is there really such a cast-iron correlation between policemen and crime rate? How about the influence of the recession on crime?
I now have more questions and know less than I did before reading that article!
Wednesday, 12 January 2011
The cuts start now...
My two elder daughters (who are at primary school) are currently getting free language tuition at a nearby secondary school. That school has specialist status for languages, and provides those additional classes for free as an after-school activity for the younger ones. Apart from teaching the kids Spanish/French/German/... I guess they also benefit themselves through advertising their school. No idea how much the kids actually learn, but it is a fun class, they enjoy it, and if they can speak a few French phrases in addition then that's great. It definitely gets them interested in foreign languages, and that is a bonus given the current attitude to those in England.
However, we yesterday got a letter from the school. The new coalition government has abolished the 'specialist status' scheme, and presumably that means that any funding that was connected to this status is going to disappear. From April onwards, the letter states, the school cannot afford to provide those additional language classes any longer.
This, of course, is not the school's fault. But it is really sad that foreign language classes for primary school kids are disappearing, and it shows that this government got its priorities wrong. I'm not too worried about my own kids, as they get a lot of exposure to other languages, but children from mono-lingual families are now losing out. Not all parents can afford to pay for language classes provided by, eg, Club Français, after school.
In my view, learning foreign languages is vital in the modern global world. Even though many people learn English as a second language it severely limits you if you can only speak one language. And since modern languages are no longer compulsory at A-level, recruitment for modern language departments at English universities has gone down.
Given that the British economy has little manufacturing left, languages are vital if we want to compete on the global market. Cutting down spending in education is the wrong way to move forward. But this cabinet of millionaires does seem to have other priorities.
Wednesday, 3 November 2010
Who wants to be a millionaire?
The schools secretary, Michael Gove, is quoted in today's Guardian with a comment on tuition fees (arguing that fees are not the barrier to university, it's a fault that lies with schools): "Someone who is working as a postman should not subsidise those who go on to become millionaires."
This is just wrong on so many levels.
Firstly, that also means that a postman should not enable students to train as teachers, nurses, doctors, engineers, and any number of necessary careers without which our society would not function. This leads straight on to the second point: a university degree does not make you a millionaire. On the contrary, I would guess that most millionaires do not have a degree, because they spent their time building a successful career in business rather than reading Shakespearian sonnets and analysing the intricacies of subject-verb agreement in different polynesian languages.
I do not have time to investigate the full Sunday Times Rich list (which is hidden behind a paywall in any case), and in some cases it would not help, as some people are already millionaires before they went to university (and soon will have to be...), but here is an unscientific overview of some prominent millionaires and what I could find out about them on Wikipedia:
Richard Branson, had a "poor academic record"; he holds an honorary degree from Loughborough. His first successful business venture started when he was just 16, so he did of course have better things to do than go to uni. Still, he's #212 in Forbes' list of rich people in the world.
Alan Sugar left school at 16. No academic career.
James Dyson: I assumed he started out as an engineer, but in fact he studied interior design at the Royal College of Art before moving into engineering. No mercy for people following in his footsteps with humanities teaching slashed.
Peter Jones, of Dragon's Den fame, ended his academic career after A-levels to become a businessman.
Theo Paphitis, "began his entrepreneurial activities by running his school tuckshop, at the age of 15." Again, no mention of an academic career.
Duncan Bannatyne - was in the navy for a while, but no sign of a university degree.
Rachel Elnaugh wanted to study art history, but was apparently rejected at 5 universities. That didn't stop her from becoming an entrepreneur. Not sure, though, if she still is a millionaire.
Simon Woodroffe went on the road with Rod Stewart etc after acquiring two O-levels.
Doug Richard is actually one of the 'Dragons' who has a degree, a BA in Psychology from University of California at Berkeley and a Juris Doctor at the school of Law, University of California at Los Angeles. (source). But Gove will be pleased to see it was not funded by UK taxpayers.
James Caan left school at the age of 16. His involvement with academia (Harvard Business School) only started after he made his fortune.
Deborah Meaden is the only other academic dragon: she studied business at Brighton Technical College, which is a further education college.
This of course is not a proper sample, but one gets the impression that most of those successful entrepreneurs have been too busy in their early adolescence to pursue degrees.
And finally, as I do not want to turn this into a long rant, with a large number of UK students going into higher education (though I believe Labour's target of 50% university attendance has not been achieved), our country should be awash with millionaires. And working at a university, I should be surrounded by them. Unless my colleagues are hiding something from me, I think I must live on another planet than the one Michael Gove is on...
Wednesday, 13 October 2010
Browne Sauce with your Cuts?
After a prolonged summer break, I'll kick off the new blogging term with a few comments on the Browne review, which seems to me to do to Higher Education what Beeching did to the railways. I haven't actually read the report, but am basing my comments on a summary from the THES.
The first thing that strikes me is that universities will now supposedly be exposed to the market -- that all-powerful benevolent force which has already just about wrecked our economy and is the root cause for the required cuts in funding. Market? Not quite, though: some subjects will be subsidised. So the market only works for the arts and humanities, where presumably not much is at stake, while all those important 'priority' subjects like maths and medicine will be propped up by taxpayers' money. Of course you can't have a philosopher operating on your kidney. But I guess a medic can still reason about the meaning of life.
This really gets me, how the arts are billed as a huge waste of time and money. But hey, Cameron is an arts student, he did philosophy/politics/economics at Oxford. Clegg studied social anthropology at Cambridge. You can see that those degrees did not equip them with the necessary competence to rule a small island state in Europe.
The arts are not about the luxury of appreciating 18C literature or being able to read Beowulf in the original, they are about general education. This old Humboldtian ideal of the humanist. I think we have too little of that in society and politics, and too much greed and hunger for power.
Removing the fee cap will have a devastating effect on the less affluent, and will turn back the clock a few decades when only the rich could afford to go to university. By the time my three kids are ready to go to university, we will probably have to re-mortgage our house to afford the fees, unless we want them to start off with huge debts, which will make it hard for them to get a mortgage themselves, let alone live a life without being anxious about money all the time.
The basic justification for this massive shake-up is that the students benefit from going to university, and taxpayers should not have to pay for them to have three leisurely years away from home, partying and getting drunk every day. I don't believe that is what student life is like. It wasn't when I was a student. It's a bit like saying that all benefit claimants are basically lazy cheats who buy flat-screen tvs and watch day-time television, while their neighbour works 10 hrs a day and pays for all this: a few spectacular cases make it into the news, while the large majority of students lives a boring life sitting in the library and writing essays.
The real benefit of a well-educated population goes to society in general. This is what's called 'civilisation', and Nick Clegg should have heard that term during his studies of anthropology. It is of course hard to measure and put a price on, and that makes it hard to argue. Somebody has to pay, but it should be society.
And while £4.9bn pounds are cut from Higher Education, the navy get £5bn to build new aircraft carriers. Maybe we can put all our arts students to service here: all those decks will need to be washed, and the shiny planes will need polishing. Even with an arts degree you should be able to do that...
The first thing that strikes me is that universities will now supposedly be exposed to the market -- that all-powerful benevolent force which has already just about wrecked our economy and is the root cause for the required cuts in funding. Market? Not quite, though: some subjects will be subsidised. So the market only works for the arts and humanities, where presumably not much is at stake, while all those important 'priority' subjects like maths and medicine will be propped up by taxpayers' money. Of course you can't have a philosopher operating on your kidney. But I guess a medic can still reason about the meaning of life.
This really gets me, how the arts are billed as a huge waste of time and money. But hey, Cameron is an arts student, he did philosophy/politics/economics at Oxford. Clegg studied social anthropology at Cambridge. You can see that those degrees did not equip them with the necessary competence to rule a small island state in Europe.
The arts are not about the luxury of appreciating 18C literature or being able to read Beowulf in the original, they are about general education. This old Humboldtian ideal of the humanist. I think we have too little of that in society and politics, and too much greed and hunger for power.
Removing the fee cap will have a devastating effect on the less affluent, and will turn back the clock a few decades when only the rich could afford to go to university. By the time my three kids are ready to go to university, we will probably have to re-mortgage our house to afford the fees, unless we want them to start off with huge debts, which will make it hard for them to get a mortgage themselves, let alone live a life without being anxious about money all the time.
The basic justification for this massive shake-up is that the students benefit from going to university, and taxpayers should not have to pay for them to have three leisurely years away from home, partying and getting drunk every day. I don't believe that is what student life is like. It wasn't when I was a student. It's a bit like saying that all benefit claimants are basically lazy cheats who buy flat-screen tvs and watch day-time television, while their neighbour works 10 hrs a day and pays for all this: a few spectacular cases make it into the news, while the large majority of students lives a boring life sitting in the library and writing essays.
The real benefit of a well-educated population goes to society in general. This is what's called 'civilisation', and Nick Clegg should have heard that term during his studies of anthropology. It is of course hard to measure and put a price on, and that makes it hard to argue. Somebody has to pay, but it should be society.
And while £4.9bn pounds are cut from Higher Education, the navy get £5bn to build new aircraft carriers. Maybe we can put all our arts students to service here: all those decks will need to be washed, and the shiny planes will need polishing. Even with an arts degree you should be able to do that...
Thursday, 17 June 2010
A Publishing Revolution
On Thursday I attended a talk on publishing, mainly intended to give postgrads some information about what to look out for and think about when trying to get their thesis published as a book. However, there were some interesting thoughts about the publishing industry, and how in the 60s and 70s the commercial publishers moved in because they could see profit opportunities there, which are now somewhat on the way out.
Salient points that stuck in my head were the horrendous price hikes on journals (which I already knew about before from attending the library committee meetings) and the smaller print-runs on monographs, which nobody really wants to publish. Also, publishers have somewhat been given a role through the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and its successor, the ominous REF, which they are not comfortable with: by taking decisions based on economic grounds (which books will sell) they cause academic judgments to be made (this is research with high impact). Not good.
There are several relevant issues at stake, but in this post I'll stick to the two most important ones:
a) Peer review. This is one of my favourite pet hates. Many people believe that peer review is what sets us apart from monkeys sitting at typewriters. Peer review is supposedly essential quality control which stops rubbish from getting published (it doesn't) and somewhat guarantees that what you read is the truth (it doesn't). Instead, peer review stifles innovative ideas, as it is inherently conservative and averse to new (and risky) ideas. One counter argument is the unfettered wilderness of the web, where everybody can publish anything, and oh boy, they do. I just today came across some guy claiming that his god had created dinosaurs, probably on day 6 of creation. But, and that is the point, I can judge for myself whether I accept it or not. Nobody has pre-vetted it for me, and it means I have to think myself. Not a bad thing. Do you like Google filtering your search results? No? Thought so. So why are you happy with some random reviewers filtering what academic publications you can read? Quality control? That's a job for copy editors and the free market.
b) Prestigious journals. Publishing in some journals is worth more than in others. Why? I never quite understood that. It's harder to get into those journals, because everybody wants to publish in them, but I have never not read a paper because it was not published in a particular journal. In fact, the only time I look at where something has been published is when I want to check whether our library has a subscription to it (it usually hasn't). With many people putting their publications on their webpages, this is becoming increasingly irrelevant. I typically look for publications by a specific author, not for stuff published in a particular journal. And the run on a select few journals just means that stuff published there is already years old by the time one gets to read it. And ground-breaking research is often published in fringe journals anyway.
Publishers claim they add value to the academic process of disseminating knowledge through peer review and the production process. Peer review we can do without, so the production process remains. Copy editing, mainly. Making sure that what is written can also be understood. But surely there must be an easier way to do this?
Currently, academics write stuff, give it to publishers (mostly for free, or for very little money), these then package it up and sell it to other academics and libraries, in the case of text books also to students. So universities get a double whammy: they pay their staff to do research and write it up, and then they pay publishers so they get a printed copy of the research to put into their library. Why not by-pass the publishers? PhD theses are usually put into libraries (or now increasingly into electronic repositories) without extensive copy-editing by publishers. They are peer-reviewed in the sense that they have been examined, though they do of course have their own particular conventions of style. But are they unreadable? I think not. Maybe not something to read for leisure, but at least they're free.
There is a problem, though, and that is that academic life is so fixated on publications. For any job or project application, you need to submit a list of publications. And if they are all self-published papers on your private website, then you might as well not apply. Prejudice or what? True, there is no guarantee that the publications are any good, but at least they are openly accessible and everybody can read them and judge for themselves, and they are not hidden behind a paywall that means they are only available to the libraries of the richer universities that can afford them.
It will require a change in culture, and to be honest, I don't believe it is going to happen. There is too much at stake. But one can still dream...
Salient points that stuck in my head were the horrendous price hikes on journals (which I already knew about before from attending the library committee meetings) and the smaller print-runs on monographs, which nobody really wants to publish. Also, publishers have somewhat been given a role through the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and its successor, the ominous REF, which they are not comfortable with: by taking decisions based on economic grounds (which books will sell) they cause academic judgments to be made (this is research with high impact). Not good.
There are several relevant issues at stake, but in this post I'll stick to the two most important ones:
a) Peer review. This is one of my favourite pet hates. Many people believe that peer review is what sets us apart from monkeys sitting at typewriters. Peer review is supposedly essential quality control which stops rubbish from getting published (it doesn't) and somewhat guarantees that what you read is the truth (it doesn't). Instead, peer review stifles innovative ideas, as it is inherently conservative and averse to new (and risky) ideas. One counter argument is the unfettered wilderness of the web, where everybody can publish anything, and oh boy, they do. I just today came across some guy claiming that his god had created dinosaurs, probably on day 6 of creation. But, and that is the point, I can judge for myself whether I accept it or not. Nobody has pre-vetted it for me, and it means I have to think myself. Not a bad thing. Do you like Google filtering your search results? No? Thought so. So why are you happy with some random reviewers filtering what academic publications you can read? Quality control? That's a job for copy editors and the free market.
b) Prestigious journals. Publishing in some journals is worth more than in others. Why? I never quite understood that. It's harder to get into those journals, because everybody wants to publish in them, but I have never not read a paper because it was not published in a particular journal. In fact, the only time I look at where something has been published is when I want to check whether our library has a subscription to it (it usually hasn't). With many people putting their publications on their webpages, this is becoming increasingly irrelevant. I typically look for publications by a specific author, not for stuff published in a particular journal. And the run on a select few journals just means that stuff published there is already years old by the time one gets to read it. And ground-breaking research is often published in fringe journals anyway.
Publishers claim they add value to the academic process of disseminating knowledge through peer review and the production process. Peer review we can do without, so the production process remains. Copy editing, mainly. Making sure that what is written can also be understood. But surely there must be an easier way to do this?
Currently, academics write stuff, give it to publishers (mostly for free, or for very little money), these then package it up and sell it to other academics and libraries, in the case of text books also to students. So universities get a double whammy: they pay their staff to do research and write it up, and then they pay publishers so they get a printed copy of the research to put into their library. Why not by-pass the publishers? PhD theses are usually put into libraries (or now increasingly into electronic repositories) without extensive copy-editing by publishers. They are peer-reviewed in the sense that they have been examined, though they do of course have their own particular conventions of style. But are they unreadable? I think not. Maybe not something to read for leisure, but at least they're free.
There is a problem, though, and that is that academic life is so fixated on publications. For any job or project application, you need to submit a list of publications. And if they are all self-published papers on your private website, then you might as well not apply. Prejudice or what? True, there is no guarantee that the publications are any good, but at least they are openly accessible and everybody can read them and judge for themselves, and they are not hidden behind a paywall that means they are only available to the libraries of the richer universities that can afford them.
It will require a change in culture, and to be honest, I don't believe it is going to happen. There is too much at stake. But one can still dream...
The No-Win Situation
As an academic committed to evaluation and feedback of one's teaching (aren't we all?) we frequently end up in no-win situations. This is when we try out a new innovative approach to teaching (or even an old, tried-and-tested one), solicit feedback from the students, and end up being stumped. Unlike the theoretical ideal, student feedback rarely ends up in a bell-shaped curve, where we have a few very positive, a few very negative, and a whole lot of indifferent plus/minus positive or negative bunch in the middle. Depending on whether the mean of that curve is more on the positive side or the negative one, we can judge the teaching innovation as having been a success or failure.
However, it more commonly seems (purely impressionistic non-scientific anecdotal impression) to end up with the 'Valley of Death', where roughly half the students are in favour of it, and the other half against. One such case was in last year's FREDA module, where I got the students to work in groups, and to write a formative essay as a group. Some students felt this was "not the way we work in English", as if group work was only suitable for those pesky science types, whereas others were initially skeptical, but realised that it was great because you'd get to see how others approach the same task and topic from a completely different direction.
So, what to do? The route of least resistance would be to drop the change, as then the negative comments have been taken into account, and the positives don't matter, as long as they don't state they wouldn't want to go back to the situation before the change. This, however, is deeply unsatisfactory, and my non-pc view is that we as qualified educators know better and that our views, based on sound pedagogy, are actually more worthy than those of the students. This attitude is of course not popular in a culture of constant evaluation and league tables, but then, it's a no-win situation anyway. Maybe I should just retrain as a merchant banker.
However, it more commonly seems (purely impressionistic non-scientific anecdotal impression) to end up with the 'Valley of Death', where roughly half the students are in favour of it, and the other half against. One such case was in last year's FREDA module, where I got the students to work in groups, and to write a formative essay as a group. Some students felt this was "not the way we work in English", as if group work was only suitable for those pesky science types, whereas others were initially skeptical, but realised that it was great because you'd get to see how others approach the same task and topic from a completely different direction.
So, what to do? The route of least resistance would be to drop the change, as then the negative comments have been taken into account, and the positives don't matter, as long as they don't state they wouldn't want to go back to the situation before the change. This, however, is deeply unsatisfactory, and my non-pc view is that we as qualified educators know better and that our views, based on sound pedagogy, are actually more worthy than those of the students. This attitude is of course not popular in a culture of constant evaluation and league tables, but then, it's a no-win situation anyway. Maybe I should just retrain as a merchant banker.
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
The Business of Learning
I just spent almost an hour watching a video from a presentation at the Business of Software 2009 conference. Why? I have a pile of unmarked essays on my desk.
The real reason was that the speaker is Kathy Sierra, who has a very good approach to teaching programming concepts & looking at things from different angles. I used to read through her "Creating Passionate Users" blog, which she unfortunately discontinued. In this presentation (see below) she discussed how you can make your users feel good about using your products. Users don't want to view your company or your product as 'awesome', they want to see themselves as great. And good products make the user feel awesome.
That clearly has applications to teaching. I always try to answer the question "so what?", to give the students some motivation for why they're sitting in a seminar looking at a text. I think next year I will try even harder with making the students feel awesome...
I do not yet know how many students will be in my modules next year, but I'm already thinking hard about how to change them further. My impression is that my modified teaching style has been very successful, only some things did not work out as well as I had planned them - mainly those which required student participation. I guess the way to get students to participate is to make them more motivated. Or to use a stick instead of a carrot?
The real reason was that the speaker is Kathy Sierra, who has a very good approach to teaching programming concepts & looking at things from different angles. I used to read through her "Creating Passionate Users" blog, which she unfortunately discontinued. In this presentation (see below) she discussed how you can make your users feel good about using your products. Users don't want to view your company or your product as 'awesome', they want to see themselves as great. And good products make the user feel awesome.
That clearly has applications to teaching. I always try to answer the question "so what?", to give the students some motivation for why they're sitting in a seminar looking at a text. I think next year I will try even harder with making the students feel awesome...
I do not yet know how many students will be in my modules next year, but I'm already thinking hard about how to change them further. My impression is that my modified teaching style has been very successful, only some things did not work out as well as I had planned them - mainly those which required student participation. I guess the way to get students to participate is to make them more motivated. Or to use a stick instead of a carrot?
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
Blogging is good for you. And for me, too!
Blog posts can be a valuable source of 'soft' or 'fuzzy' information. They allow you to partake in a huge number of conversations, sharing cultural information that is otherwise very hard to transmit.
At the weekend I suddenly had a 'flashback' about something that happened some 30 years ago: I remembered a series of children's sci-fi books that I got out of the public library, and which I was then fascinated by. They were brand-new, so the librarian didn't let me borrow the full series, and I seem to remember that I tried to chase those books over the coming weeks/months, but cannot remember whether I actually got them or not, as they were then obviously borrowed by other people and my scholarship was by that age not advanced enough that I made a note of either the author or the titles of those books. All I remembered was the covers, pastel coloured hard-backs.
The stories were about some kids aboard a space ship, with no adults (cannot remember why, I think they were off at work somewhere), going through space and having adventures. I read them in German, and it must have been around 1980 or so.
This elusive memory came back to me for some reason, and I thought that it was a pity that this kind of information is not enough to find those books. But then I thought again, and tried a web search with "seventies" (as I guessed they were English originals, and it would have taken some time for them to be translated), "children books kids spaceship no adults". And I got a result.
The first hit was a blog from just around the corner, Warwick Uni, where the writer asks a similar question. The comments on this post contain a few leads, and as it turns out, there was indeed a story of children trapped on a space ship, "Space Hostages" by Nicholas Fisk. Close but no cigar: this is a single book, not a series, and I was not too sure about the description of the story line. But then I looked up the author and found a reference to a series of books, called "Starstormers". Wikipedia says:
This seems a bit late, date-wise, but perhaps I only saw the first few, and maybe they got translated quickly. The story seems spot-on, even though I don't remember anything more specific.
Our local library has some of the books, but not the first one, so I bought that on ebay. I will see if this brings back memories, or whether it was a cul-de-sac. In the worst case I'll get my kids to read them, perhaps they are interested in science fiction. Would be an improvement over Harry Potter...
But the real lesson of this episode is that any blog post, no matter how trivial, carries some useful snippet of information. It is like somebody having a chat with their mates, reminiscing about some memories, and you are there, listening, and taking part. It also shows how powerful a simple keyword search is. I would not really have expected to find out this information so easily with just a few words.
This is of course a trivial example, but I would assume that it can apply to professional blogging as well. I often chat to colleagues and friends about teaching or research, and we come up with interesting ideas. If they are put on a blog, they can be shared with the world. And most of them would not be suitably earth-shaking to make it into a journal article (and who's got time for writing everything up?) So the humble blog has a valuable role for disseminating knowledge with a much lower barrier of entry.
What's your excuse for not blogging?
At the weekend I suddenly had a 'flashback' about something that happened some 30 years ago: I remembered a series of children's sci-fi books that I got out of the public library, and which I was then fascinated by. They were brand-new, so the librarian didn't let me borrow the full series, and I seem to remember that I tried to chase those books over the coming weeks/months, but cannot remember whether I actually got them or not, as they were then obviously borrowed by other people and my scholarship was by that age not advanced enough that I made a note of either the author or the titles of those books. All I remembered was the covers, pastel coloured hard-backs.
The stories were about some kids aboard a space ship, with no adults (cannot remember why, I think they were off at work somewhere), going through space and having adventures. I read them in German, and it must have been around 1980 or so.
This elusive memory came back to me for some reason, and I thought that it was a pity that this kind of information is not enough to find those books. But then I thought again, and tried a web search with "seventies" (as I guessed they were English originals, and it would have taken some time for them to be translated), "children books kids spaceship no adults". And I got a result.
The first hit was a blog from just around the corner, Warwick Uni, where the writer asks a similar question. The comments on this post contain a few leads, and as it turns out, there was indeed a story of children trapped on a space ship, "Space Hostages" by Nicholas Fisk. Close but no cigar: this is a single book, not a series, and I was not too sure about the description of the story line. But then I looked up the author and found a reference to a series of books, called "Starstormers". Wikipedia says:
Published between 1980 and 1983 by Hodder, "'Starstormers'" consisted of five books; "'Starstormers'", "'Sunburst'", "'Catfang'", "'Evil Eye'" and "'Volcano'". Fed up of being left in a boarding school on earth while their parents colonize a new planet, a group of children decide to build their own spaceship out of scrap in order to join their parents, but in order to get there they will first have to deal with the mysterious Octopus Emperor.
This seems a bit late, date-wise, but perhaps I only saw the first few, and maybe they got translated quickly. The story seems spot-on, even though I don't remember anything more specific.
Our local library has some of the books, but not the first one, so I bought that on ebay. I will see if this brings back memories, or whether it was a cul-de-sac. In the worst case I'll get my kids to read them, perhaps they are interested in science fiction. Would be an improvement over Harry Potter...
But the real lesson of this episode is that any blog post, no matter how trivial, carries some useful snippet of information. It is like somebody having a chat with their mates, reminiscing about some memories, and you are there, listening, and taking part. It also shows how powerful a simple keyword search is. I would not really have expected to find out this information so easily with just a few words.
This is of course a trivial example, but I would assume that it can apply to professional blogging as well. I often chat to colleagues and friends about teaching or research, and we come up with interesting ideas. If they are put on a blog, they can be shared with the world. And most of them would not be suitably earth-shaking to make it into a journal article (and who's got time for writing everything up?) So the humble blog has a valuable role for disseminating knowledge with a much lower barrier of entry.
What's your excuse for not blogging?
Friday, 12 March 2010
Analytical Thinking
Yesterday I had a brief conversation with some of my first year students, who were asking me about the second year module choices. On the language side there are two choices: DAVE ("Development and Variation of English") and FREDA ("Frameworks of English Discourse Analysis"). I teach FREDA. This year we had about 90 students in DAVE, and 44 in FREDA.
The first years then said they had heard DAVE was easier. Where from, I asked. Some second year students they answered. It took me a while to work out at least two fatal flaws with this, and one unintended positive side-effect.
And now the positive side-effect: if students think DAVE is easier because it involves less work, then students who don't like the idea of work will obviously choose DAVE. Therefore, students who choose FREDA should be eager, keen, and willing to work hard for their money (that is the money they paid to come here). This is mostly the case, but I suspect there are also some other students in FREDA. However, those at least will know not to trust the second years and are able to think for themselves. Not all bad, then!
PS: The imbalance of student numbers (which I suspect is mostly due to such rumours and ignorance of what the module is about) is one of the reasons for producing this film about FREDA.
The first years then said they had heard DAVE was easier. Where from, I asked. Some second year students they answered. It took me a while to work out at least two fatal flaws with this, and one unintended positive side-effect.
- How on Earth is a second year student able to compare those two modules? I can't, and I'm teaching one. The only way to compare them is to attend both modules, and this is not possible, as they are mutually exclusive choices. It's a bit like claiming that this life on Earth is better or worse than the afterlife. Either you only know one of them, or you're dead.
- The next thought is a bit scarier: how can you believe/trust someone who claims something you know to be invalid/impossible? I don't want to push the religious analogies too far at this point, but I guess second year students must have quite a reputation amongst the first years when they can tell them this kind of stuff and get away with it. The first thing you learn at university, however, should be to never trust anybody just because they're older/have more authority/have published a book.
- "Easier". How do you apply this term to a module? Is it easier to get good marks? Is the subject material easier to understand? I don't know, but I would probably call a module easier if it didn't involve much work and you'd still get a good mark. But is that what you want from a module at uni? And I doubt that DAVE involves less work than FREDA, and I would also guess that the distribution of marks will not be so different either.
And now the positive side-effect: if students think DAVE is easier because it involves less work, then students who don't like the idea of work will obviously choose DAVE. Therefore, students who choose FREDA should be eager, keen, and willing to work hard for their money (that is the money they paid to come here). This is mostly the case, but I suspect there are also some other students in FREDA. However, those at least will know not to trust the second years and are able to think for themselves. Not all bad, then!
PS: The imbalance of student numbers (which I suspect is mostly due to such rumours and ignorance of what the module is about) is one of the reasons for producing this film about FREDA.
Friday, 5 March 2010
Marketing can be fun
In the second year students have the choice between two language modules, called DAVE and FREDA. Most students choose DAVE, even though they don't seem to have a lot of knowledge about what the modules are about. As I teach FREDA, I decided to do something about it: together with our web master Billy Fallows I did a promotional video:
This was a spontaneous idea after Billy mentioned to me that he was filming a colleague for some MA info-material. I went away and scripted it, and we then decided to go ahead.
Doing it was fairly easy: I asked for some student volunteers, and got some, then we filmed a few shots, put a mini-slideshow together in Keynote, recorded the audio, and put it together in iMovie. The result is obviously better than the above video, which is much reduced to be suitable for the web.
Now I wonder whether this will have any impact on the recruitment figures for next year...
UPDATE: A higher resolution version of this video is now available on YouTube.
This was a spontaneous idea after Billy mentioned to me that he was filming a colleague for some MA info-material. I went away and scripted it, and we then decided to go ahead.
Doing it was fairly easy: I asked for some student volunteers, and got some, then we filmed a few shots, put a mini-slideshow together in Keynote, recorded the audio, and put it together in iMovie. The result is obviously better than the above video, which is much reduced to be suitable for the web.
Now I wonder whether this will have any impact on the recruitment figures for next year...
UPDATE: A higher resolution version of this video is now available on YouTube.
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