One of two related articles by the ever-wonderful Alfie Kohn. The other, on ‘growth mindsets’ is at http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/mindset/

Both are cutting attacks on a couple of terrible education fads that appear to be gaining sway with politicians and that are both, as Kohn explains very well, not about supporting creative, interested, engaged learners but instead about ensuring conformity and control. As it often the case in Kohn’s articles, both swing round to Kohn’s central agenda of promoting self-determination theory, both are well informed by substantial research. Kohn is kinder to Carol Dweck’s growth mindset research than to the appallingly unsupported and unsupportable ‘grit’ nonsense promoted by appropriately named Paul Tough, but the results are much the same: the focus on making individuals fit the structure rather than changing the poisonous structure of educational systems themselves.

Read one, read both.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/grit/

Stephen Downes questions Adeline Koh’s questioning of the lecture form for keynotes. He’s right to question.

In a classroom, the lecture is imposed, regularly scheduled, controlled, and it epitomizes all that is wrong in regulated institutional learning. A classroom lecture is about making people learn what you want to make them learn. At least, that’s the norm. And a lecture is incredibly bad at playing that role – much worse than a book or a decent website. That’s why, for the most part, most good teachers don’t habitually do lectures or, if they do, they keep them very short and situate them in other activities, as Koh suggests they should, and/or use them as ignition points for the real learning that goes on outside the classroom.

A keynote at a conference is not like that at all. With very few exceptions, every attendee makes a deliberate choice to attend and to devote a small chunk of time to being inspired and/or challenged. At least, we hope that’s what will happen. That is at least why we try to get keynotes with interesting things to say. It’s not a means of drumming facts into people. It’s a voluntarily chosen opportunity to see the world a bit differently, not unlike choosing to see a movie that you suspect will affect you. Personally, I do like to provide a bit of variety and audience engagement in my keynotes, especially if I can encourage attendees to engage face-to-face or onine, but that’s really just to keep the interest rolling and to find ways of helping people take ownership of the things that matter to them in whatever it is that I am rabbiting on about. I do so because it’s pretty hard to spend an hour being consistently inspiring and it seems a pity to waste the opportunity to engage with a bunch of smart, interested, like-minded people if they have taken the trouble to attend.

A bad keynote is tedious. I have been bored to sleep by those, who were otherwise some of the greatest thinkers with really interesting things to say, that just stood up and read at me or, worse, read at their notes while barely looking up. Why bother doing that? I’d much rather watch a movie. Even a bad keynote, though, is not entirely a waste of time. The real value of such a thing is not the boringly delivered lecture itself, but that you are sitting there with a load of other bored people with whom you can talk about it afterwards. It’s a shared focal point. This can help spark some interesting conversations, especially if some people managed to overcome their boredom and found inspiration in the words.

If lectures at schools and universities were run like keynotes, with voluntary attendance and carefully chosen inspirational speakers, it might not be a bad thing at all, though the rest of the accreditation framework would have to change too. There were some optional lectures in my first degree but I attended only one in the whole time I was there. I still remember that lecture quite vividly – it did change how I think and it really was inspiring – but there were dozens of others that I missed because they wouldn’t be on the exam (nor was the one I attended – it was just really interesting and someone I respected had suggested I might like it). I attended dozens of such lectures in my second degree because I was a far more mature learner and I was there to learn, not to pass the test: I attended because I was interested, not because I had to do so, and I got a huge amount out of them and the surrounding conversations. This is what we need – people that learn because they want to, not because we tell them they must, and not because we will punish them if they do not. Disaggregation of teaching and assessment is the crucial next step we absolutely have to take if we are to make institutional education as useful as it should, and easily could, be.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.downes.ca/post/64322

From the ironically named Taylor & Francis journal ‘Open Learning’ (which is closed), an interesting attempt to come up with a means to measure transactional distance. Regular readers will know that I am a fan of Moore’s theory of transactional distance, a systems theory that explains some of the central the dynamics of educational systems and that can be extremely valuable in both designing and predicting the effects of distance learning, but that is susceptible to multiple interpretations and that is fuzzy around the edges. Coming up with a reliable instrument to measure it would therefore be quite useful.

Abstract:

“This study was an initial attempt to operationalise Moore’s transactional distance theory by developing and validating an instrument measuring the related constructs: dialogue, structure, learner autonomy and transactional distance. Data were collected from 227 online students and analysed through an exploratory factor analysis. Results suggest that the instrument, in general, shows promise as a valid and reliable measure of the constructs related to transactional distance theory. Potential refinement of the instrument and future research directions are included at the end of the article.”

There’s lots of good discussion of previous work in this paper and some fair attempts to dismantle the mechanisms and meanings of transactional distance, as well as a good research process capable of revealing some interesting insights. However, I am unconvinced by some of the very basic assumptions, so the instrument remains a bit blunt. I am a bit disappointed that one of my papers is cited for its minor criticism of the fuzziness of the theory, but the authors do not consider the major point of the paper (and a solution to much of that fuzziness) that the fundamental dynamic of transactional distance is concerned with control. I have a very strong suspicion that they might have found far more useful things in this study if they had explicitly taken that on board and tried to examine the exchange of control in the system.  Instead, they got caught in the well-known trap of seeing autonomy as a personal and unsituated characteristic, and made rough assumptions about structure/dialogue that take no account of the scale (or, as the late John Holland would have more accurately put it the boundaries) of the systems being looked at. These are not separate or separable categories – the dynamics shift according to where and when you place the boundaries. They would also have benefitted greatly from considering the various presences in the community of inquiry model, which would have made it easier to lose that very arbitrary one-to-one correspondence of teacher, student and content roles that constrains the model in quite artificial ways. Teachers are also other students, writers of content, and the creators of the surrounding physical and organizational environment. Again, the boundaries are not fixed, nor are they mutually exclusive. The most disappointing thing, though, is that that their initial hypotheses about the nature of transactional distance (which is, after all, what it was supposed to be about and that might have been a really valuable contribution, if validated) got completely lost in the process. The one thing that they really needed to show is the one thing that they did not. This is not a bad thing at all, and it is a discovery that is worthy of discussion. However, that is not quite how they see it:

“Transactional distance included learner–instructor transactional distance and learner–learner transactional distance. The original closeness, shared understanding and perceived learning did not merge; yet, the related items merged into the learner–instructor transactional distance and learner–learner transactional distance, respectively.”

This rather begs the question – if their initial model was not correct, what is that transactional distance that they are talking about and that they are attempting to measure? Their initial model, though fuzzy, was interesting and based on some thoughtful analysis but, in the final model, all they have done is to say that there are two different kinds of transactional distance depending on whether you are a learner or a teacher, without saying what they are, coming up with a sweeping sub-categorization that is just an artefact of the initial assumptions.  I think another closely related part of the problem is that they assumed at the start that transactional distance is in some way additional and separate to structure, dialogue and autonomy, rather than strictly following Moore’s meaning that it is a function of them. Their worthwhile attempt to analyze it further, by unpicking aspects of that, turned out to be fruitless because the aspects they picked were not the right ones.

This is not to suggest that the results are valueless. Far from it. This is a nicely conducted study that models a little of the complexity of learning transactions in a useful, if fuzzy, way, that explores the various meanings of transactional distance expressed in the literature pretty well, and, as well, helps to show some relatively unfruitful lines of enquiry. It’s just that it doesn’t meet the objectives set out in its own title, and it does not really do much to reduce the fuzziness of the construct that is the main problem that it set out to solve.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02680513.2015.1065720#.Vco2kbcgpf9

The title of this post is the title of the paper, and very much not a statement of my opinion. The paper explains how. The questions that immediately spring to mind are ‘effective for what?’ and ‘compared with what?’ The answers from the paper are that it is effective (ish) for making children behave the way you want them to behave, if done in the recommended manner for a limited subset of contexts and people, compared with explaining to kids why their behaviour is unacceptable. Sigh.

Behaviourist approaches do often work as a way of producing the desired behaviour – that is their appeal and that is their point. They do not work at all well when compared with alternatives (explaining is only one of thousands of alternatives, the choice of which depends entirely on context), and they almost always have extremely undesirable side-effects. There are many subsidiary lessons that punishment teaches, including that you should obey those with more power, that you are less worthy than those with more power, that forcible manipulation is an acceptable thing to do to other people, etc. The same applies to rewards.

When I was young, untutored, and overwhelmed with the hassles of parenthood I did sometimes use punishment for my kids in much the same way that this research recommends as well as, occasionally, in anger. I am not proud of that. I think it is entirely understandable but it is a thing to be ashamed of, not to be celebrated. It is a lazy, short-termist short cut that has far more unpleasant side-effects than the benefits it brings. There is always an alternative and, though it may take longer, may be uncomfortable and it may take more patience, that alternative is almost always better in the long run. If we treat children like dogs (and behaviourist methods aren’t even that great for dogs) they will likely grow up obedient – unless they react against it, which is a strong possibility – and, like dogs, if we let the leash slip or they spot a way to avoid punishment while doing something bad, they are likely to take it. Even if they don’t, if the only reason they don’t do the bad thing is habitual fear, the world will be a much sadder place.

Address of the bookmark: http://apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/08/punishing-child.aspx

Brilliant piece by our own George Siemens on his thoughts on visiting the White House for a special meeting on higher education. There’s a strong US-centric focus to George’s report, understandably enough, but many of the issues he speaks of resonate internationally. Things are changing, and the change is coming soon, and George is very good at pinning down the implications of that. A worthwhile read for anyone with an interest in the future of higher education.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2015/08/03/white-house-innovation-in-higher-education/

Unwanted gift: a few careless owners, many botched repair jobs, not firing on all cylinders, tarnished reputation, some wheels missing, but only slightly used.

A bargain for anyone with a 19th Century attitude to education, seeking thousands of locked-in, resentful customers who will continue to complainingly pay through the nose for any old rubbish because it is too difficult and expensive to move to a different platform. Get it before they all go!

Address of the bookmark: http://www.businessinsider.com/education-software-company-blackboard-is-looking-to-sell-for-3-billion-2015-7