Leonard Cohen Dead at 82 – Rolling Stone

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Another sad piece of news in a year of much sad news.

To be fair, it does not come as a great surprise. He had been preparing for this for a long time, approaching death with the same style, creativity, and elegance as he approached his life. Cohen said in a recent interview that he was ready to die and, following much the same theme, in his final letter to Marianne Ihlen as she lay dying earlier this year –  ‘We are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon’. It pleases me greatly that, on his 80th birthday, he followed through on his long-held intention to take up smoking once more.

 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/leonard-cohen-dead-at-82-w449792

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Commons In A Box

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Landing-like software from CUNY, based on Buddypress, intended to provide a learning commons with relatively little effort or configuration. It’s a nice bit of packaging, slick, with good collaboration tools and a simple, activity-stream-oriented social network. Commons in a Box is definitely worth looking at if you need a site to support a bottom-up social community or network, and you don’t have a wealth of resources to put into building your own. 

I came across this software because it is being used in the University of Brighton’s newly reborn community site at https://community.brighton.ac.uk which, until it was killed off last year, used to run on Elgg.  I remain a fan of Elgg for building such things, which has a lot more options than BuddyPress available by default, richer access control, and a much more elegant technological design that makes customization more robust and flexible, but this seems to be a great simple solution that just works without demanding much effort, and that, thanks to its WordPress foundations, could be customized to do pretty much anything you’d want a bit of social software to do. 

Address of the bookmark: http://commonsinabox.org/

Understanding the response to financial and non-financial incentives in education: Field experimental evidence using high-stakes assessments

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What they did

This is a report by, Simon Burgess, Robert Metcalfe, and Sally Sadoff on a large scale study conducted in the UK on the effects of financial and non-financial incentives on GCSE scores (GCSEs are UK qualifications usually taken around age 16 and usually involving exams), involving over 10,000 students in 63 schools being given cash or ‘non-financial incentives’. ‘Non-financial incentives’ did not stretch as far as a pat on the back or encouragement given by caring teachers – this was about giving tickets for appealing events. The rewards were given not for getting good results but for particular behaviours the researchers felt should be useful proxies for effective study: specifically, attendance, conduct, homework, and classwork. None of the incentives were huge rewards to those already possessing plenty of creature comforts but, for poorer students, they might have seemed substantial. Effectiveness of the intervention was measured in terminal grades. The researchers were very thorough and were very careful to observe limitations and concerns. It is as close to an experimental design as you can get in a messy real-world educational intervention, with numbers that are sufficient and diverse enough to make justifiable empirical claims about the generalizability of the results.

What they found

Rewards had little effect on average marks overall, and it made little difference whether rewards were financial or not. However, in high risk groups (poor, immigrants, etc) there was a substantial improvement in GCSE results for those given rewards, compared with the control groups.

My thoughts

The only thing that does surprise me a little is that so little effect was seen overall, but I hypothesize that the reward/punishment conditions are so extreme already among GCSE students that it made little difference to add any more to the mix.  The only ones that might be affected would be those for whom the extrinsic motivation is not already strong enough. There is also a possibility that the demotivating effects for some were balanced out by the compliance effects for others: averages are incredibly dangerous things, and this study is big on averages.

What makes me sad is that there appears to be no sense of surprise or moral outrage about this basic premise in this report.

dogs being whipped, from Jack London's 'Call of the Wild' It appears reasonable at first glance: who would not want kids to be more successful in their exams? When my own kids had to do this sort of thing I would have been very keen on something that would improve their chances of success, and would be especially keen on something that appears to help to reduce systemic inequalities. But this is not about helping students to learn or improving education: this is completely and utterly about enforcing compliance and improving exam results. The fact that there might be a perceived benefit to the victims is a red herring: it’s like saying that hitting dogs harder is good for the dogs because it makes them behave better than hitting them gently. The point is that we should not be hitting them at all. It’s not just morally wrong, it doesn’t even work very well, and only continues to work at all if you keep hitting them. It teaches students that the end matters more than the process, that learning is inherently undesirable and should only done when there is a promise of a reward or threat of punishment, and that they are not in charge of it.

The inevitable result of increasing rewards (or punishments – they are functionally equivalent) is to further quench any love of learning that might be left at this point in their school careers, to reinforce harmful beliefs about how to learn, and to further put students off the subjects they might have loved under other circumstances for life.  In years to come people will look back on barbaric practices like this much as we now look back at the slave trade or pre-emancipation rights for women.

Studies like this make me feel a bit sick.

 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/economics/working_papers/pdffiles/dp16678.pdf

Sole and Despotic Dominion

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Cory Doctorow is on excellent form discussing the evils of DRM and the meaning of ownership. The title is lifted from William Blackstone, referring to what it means to own something –  “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.” Doctorow’s central argument here is that, at least in the US (where DMCA 1201 denies people the right to break DRM locks), the presence of copyrighted DRM’d code in almost every object manufactured, from books to rectal thermometers, means that they cannot ever be owned by anyone other than their manufacturer, protected by law and unaccountable to anyone. 

“DMCA 1201 gave publishers and movie studios and game companies the power to make up their own private laws and outsource their enforcement to the public courts and police.”

Among the results of this are that security researchers cannot reveal flaws that may be dangerous or even deadly (think cars, insulin pumps, etc, not to mention the Internet of Hackable Things) while criminals can exploit them freely. It means that companies like Volkswagen can conceal cheating on emissions tests, that makers of thermostats can prevent you from controlling heat in your own home, that books you bought can be taken away from you on a whim or an error, that printer manufacturers can introduce code to break your printer if you don’t use their cartridges the way they want you to use them, that security agencies can demand that manufacturers let them use your webcam to spy on you, that abandoned games on a long extinct platform cannot be ported to modern hardware, that your watch will stop working if its manufacturer goes bust, and so on. It means that, mostly without our consent or knowledge, we no longer own what we own. As Doctorow puts it:

“There’s a word for this: feudalism. In feudalism, property is the exclusive realm of a privileged few, and the rest of us are tenants on that property. In the 21st century, DMCA-enabled version of feudalism, the gentry aren’t hereditary toffs, they’re transhuman, immortal artificial life-forms that use humans as their gut-flora: limited liability corporations.”

Address of the bookmark: http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2016/11/cory-doctorow-sole-and-despotic-dominion/

Talky

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Very interesting – a real-time, largely browser-based video, audio, chat, screen-sharing, etc system requiring no sign-up, no fees, no persistent data. Just pick a URL for a web meeting (webinar), and share it with 15 or more other people. It’s not exactly Adobe Connect, but it has all the main features needed for quick, easy web conferencing with no need for proprietary plugins.

There are no ads, it runs on most browsers that support WebRTC (best on Chrome, Firefox, or one of their many derivatives) and there are mobile apps for it. It’s not just a connection service for WebRTC – there are TURN and STUN servers involved too, so this costs a fair bit for the company to develop and run. It took me a while to figure out how they ever intend to make any money but I think it seems to involve a model much like that of BigBlueButton, with paid-for services like recording, app integration, broadcast etc available through TalkyCore. 

Like all WebRTC implementations, much depends on the browser and router, so this might not work for everyone all the time, but I think it looks very promising, especially now that Firefox has removed Hello from its browser.

Address of the bookmark: https://talky.io/

Udacity Partners with IBM, Amazon for Artificial Intelligence 'Degree'

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http://fortune.com/2016/10/25/udacity-ibm-amazon-ai/

Udacity is now valued at over $1b. This seems a long way from the dream of open (libre and free) learning of the early MOOC pioneers (pre-Thrun):

“Earlier this year, Udacity’s revenue from Nanodegrees was growing nearly 30% month over month and the initiative is profitable, according to Thrun. According to one source, Udacity was on track to make $24 million this year. Udacity also just became a unicorn—a startup valued at or above $1 billion—in its most recent $105 million funding round in 2015.”

This should also be a wake-up call to universities that believe their value is measurable by the employability of their graduates. Udacity has commitments from huge companies like IBM, BMW, Tata and others to accept its nanodegree graduates. Nanodegrees are becoming a serious currency in the job market, at lower cost and higher productivity than anything universities can match, with all the notable benefits of online delivery and timeframes that make lifelong learning of up-to-date competencies a reality, not an aspiration. If we don’t adapt to this then universities are, if not dead in the water, definitely at risk of becoming of less relevance.

I recently posted a response to Dave Cormier’s question about the goals of education in which I suggested that our educational institutions play an important sustaining and generative role in cultures  – not just in large-scale societal level culture, but in the myriad overlapping and contained cultures within societies. Though I have reservations about the risks of government involvement in education, I am a little fearful but also a little intrigued about what happens when private organizations start to make a substantial contribution to that role. There have always been a few such cases, and that has always been a useful thing. Having a few alternatives nipping around your heels and introducing fresh ideas helps to keep an ecosystem from stagnating. But this is big scale stuff, and it’s part of a trend that worries me. We are already seeing extremely large contributions to traditional education from private donors like the Gates and Zuckerberg foundations that reinforce dreadful misguided beliefs about what education is, or what it is for. With big funding, these become self-fulfilling beliefs. As long as we can sustain diversity then I think it is not a bad thing, but the massive influence of a few (even well-meaning) individuals with the spending power of nations is  very, very dangerous.

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‘Rote learning, not play, is essential for a child’s education’ – seriously?

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https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/rote-learning-essential-a-childs-education-play-isnt-says-expert

An interesting observation…

“Helen Abadzi, an expert in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, who was an education specialist at the World Bank, said that pupils who “overlearn” and repeatedly practise tasks, such as mental arithmetic, free up their working memory for more “higher order” analytical thinking.”

Yes, they do, good point. We should not forget that. Unfortunately, she goes way beyond her field of expertise and explicitly picks on Sir Ken Robinson in the process…

“Go out and play, well sure – but is that going to teach me mental math so I can go to a store and instantly make a decision about what is the best offer to buy?” she said.

I cannot be certain but, as far as I know, and although he has made the occasional wild assertion, Sir Ken has never for one moment suggested that overlearning should be avoided. In fact, that’s rather obvious from the examples he gives in what the article acknowledges is the most popular TED talk of all time. I’ve yet to meet a good ballerina that has not practiced until it hurt. When you get into the flow of something and truly play, rote learning is exactly what you do. I have practiced my guitar until my fingers bled. Indeed, for each of my many interests in life, I have very notably repeatedly practiced again, again, and again, doing it until I get it right (or at least right enough). I’m doing it right now. I am fairly certain that you have done the same. To suggest that play does not involve an incredible amount of gruelling repetition and rote learning (particularly valuable when done from different angles, in different contexts, and with different purposes, a point Abadzi fails to highlight but I am sure understands) is bizarre. Even my cats do it. It is even more bizarre to leap from suggesting that overlearning is necessary to a wildly wrong and completely unsubstantiated statement like:

“People may not like methods like direct instruction – “repeat after me” – but they help students to remember over the long term. A class of children sitting and listening is viewed as a negative thing, yet lecturing is highly effective for brief periods.”

Where the hell did that come from? A scientist should be ashamed of such unsupported and unsupportable tripe. It does not follow from the premises. We need to practice, so extrinsic motivation is needed to make students learn? And play is not essential? Seriously? Such idiocy needs to be stamped on, stamped out, and stamped out hard. This is a good case study in why neuroscience is inadequate as a means to explain learning, and is completely inadequate as a means to explain education.

In the interests of fairness, I should note that brief lectures (and, actually, even long lectures) can indeed lead to effective learning, albeit not necessarily of what is being lectured about and only when they are actually interesting. The problem is not lectures per se, but the fact that people are forced to attend them, and that they are expected to learn what the lecturer intends to teach.

Activity trackers flop without cash motivation – Futurity

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http://www.futurity.org/activity-trackers-motivation-1281832-2/

Another from the annals of unnecessary and possibly harmful research on motivation. Unsurprisingly, fitness trackers do nothing for motivation and, even less surprisingly, if you offer a reward then people do exercise more, but are significantly less active when the reward is taken away…

“…at the end of twelve months, six months after the incentives were removed, this group showed poorer step outcomes than the tracker only group, suggesting that removing the incentives may have demotivated these individuals and caused them to do worse than had the incentives never been offered.“

This effect has been demonstrate countless times. Giving rewards infallibly kills intrinsic motivation. When will we ever learn?

One interesting take-away is that (whether or not the subjects took more steps) there were no noticeable improvements in health outcomes across the entire experimental group. Perhaps this is because 6 months is not long enough to register the minor improvements involved, or maybe the instrument for measuring improved outcomes was too coarse. More likely, and as I have previously observed, subjects probably did things to increase their step count at the expense of other healthy activities like cycling etc.