Communities Vs. Networks: To Which Do You Belong? | The Art of Manliness

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I am often surprised at the occasional academic depth, reflectiveness and perspicuity of articles in the Art of Manliness website, which does have a slight tendency to (manly) frivolity much of the time and is as likely to discuss shaving as it is the meaning and value of ritual. This is article is definitely on the academic side and it’s a good read although, as this is an area I am a little familiar with, I do see a few flaws, fuzzy thoughts and shortcuts here and there. The authors Brett & Kate McKay, appear to draw rather heavily on John Taylor Gatto who, in his fine book ‘Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling‘, makes a rather curious distinction between networks, communities and institutions (that are, in his terminology, actually networks). While the book has many strengths and some excellent and powerful points to make, its curious and rather puzzling terminology, that perhaps made a little sense in the early 90s before the study of networks became a significant field, is not one of them. I don’t think this is a great starting point.

The distinction made by the McKays and Gatto between communities and networks is superficially the same as that made by Wenger, Trayner and de Laat, and seems similar to the distinction that Terry Anderson and I (and others, such as Barry Wellman and Stephen Downes) have made between groups and networks. However, the differences appear very early on. For the authors of this post, a community is an organic and autonomous entity made up of families bound together by geography and shared values – in short, they are talking about a community of place, in its traditional village/tribal sense, though they confuse the issue later on by blurring this a little with communities of interest and communities of practice when they exhort us to go and make our own tribes. While a community of this sort is easy to identify, and such communities do tend to share a few common features, the similarities between them are skin deep. Such communities can and do exhibit and encompass a wide variety of social forms, including actual networks, as well as groups and sets, along with clusters of those forms. Empirically, there is no idealized form or pattern that all exhibit – it depends on the context. They can be violent, exclusionary, isolating, and many other things that are far from healthy. While there is value in examining communities of place/practice/interest, they are really a starting point for further investigation, not an endpoint, and certainly not a particular kind of thing to be extolled in its own right.  The McKays (following Gatto to some extent) are using the term ‘community’ as a shorthand for a rose-tinted idealized kind of supportive, nurturing, small-scale society that has probably seldom if ever existed. It’s a thinly veiled ‘good old days’ argument that is based on belief rather than research. Dunbar’s Number doesn’t imply warm cuddly coziness of the sort described here.

Conversely, the McKays’ (and Gatto’s) concept of networks appears much closer to what I would recognize as a hierarchically structured group (in some of its guises) or a group-like set such as a religion or tribe.  The concept is used a bit fuzzily and appears to include sets and nets that result from product marketing as well as more formally organized tribal forms that certainly includes schools and universities, and that I’m guessing should also include religions, cities and nations. For the McKay’s, a network is designed for a purpose, has leaders, is deliberately nurtured, and is to some extent dehumanizing, inasmuch as it is not much concerned with caring and is deliberately divisive along functional/interest lines. The concept is elided with networks of the sort companies try to develop around their products, which is carrying things a bit far and a few miles from what I think Gatto had in mind when he used the term. I think this is a bit of an invented straw man. It is easy to define a kind of social collection that we don’t much like and point to many examples, but I don’t think it helps. It is self-confirming. Moreover, this is not the kind of network most of us mean when we think of networks. A network, for most of us researching in the field, does not have boundaries, nor purposes, nor imposed hierarchies, and is different depending on whose perspective you take: everyone has different networks from everyone else, though we may be share membership of the same groups and sets.  Networks operate through and beyond those idealized communities and, to a large extent, are what drive and bind them. We have strong (very strong) as well as weak ties, and these are as human and personal as they get.  I think that the McKays are actually talking about the difference between intimate bands and designed organizations/institutions here, though it is a bit blurry. Following a little from Dunbar, they are talking about ways that people organize communities when the communities become too large for everyone to know everyone else and so begin to develop organizational strata and foci that are designed (or evolve) to let people live together productively and safely.

While I find the conceptual distinctions fuzzy, the general thinking behind the article is likeable: that we should not exchange our physical communities for a technologized substitute for real human interaction. Such communities of real, supportive people are part of what make us human. As the authors admit, there is great value to be had from larger organizational forms, online communities, and relationships  at a distance, and such things can be a great supplement to, cradle for and sustainer of rich human connections, but that does not mean such things should replace our connections with those around us. Happily, most of the research I have read on the subject suggests that they do not and, if anything, they strengthen traditional bonds of friendship and kinship. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/07/01/communities-vs-networks-to-which-do-you-belong/

Widening access, student retention and success national programmes

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Another recommendation from a recent conference presentation that I attended in the UK. The Higher Education Academy of the UK commissioned this large-scale study and intervention to explore factors affecting retention and engagement in UK universities. The full report is at Building student engagement and belonging in higher Education at a time of change: Final report from the What Works? Student Retention & Success programme but this page leads to a useful set of summaries and recommendations that are a bit more easily digested. The summary report is great.

Amongst the key issues that impressed me are (original emphases):

“At the heart of successful retention and success is a strong sense of belonging in HE for all students. This is most effectively nurtured through mainstream activities that all students participate in. “

“Specific interventions cannot be recommended over and above each other. Rather the institution, department, programme and module should all nurture a culture of belonging through the way they function and relate to people. “

“Student belonging is achieved through:

  • Supportive peer relations

  • Meaningful interaction between staff and students

  • Developing knowledge, confidence and identity as successful HE learners

  • An HE experience relevant to students’ interests and future goals “

     

I really like the notion of a ‘culture of belonging’ and the holistic approach recommended in this report. At Athabasca University we do well in some of these areas but less well in others. I think we are often over-focused on subjects and specific competences, especially in undergraduate programs, to the exclusion of other vital pieces of the educational machine, which greatly inhibits the sense of belonging that the HEA project identifies as so central. We lose too many students before they even start. Though we tend to be at least on par with other institutions for keeping them on specific courses once they have submitted their first assignments, we don’t have as many moving on through programs as we might. But this is just symptomatic of a broader malaise, that it is very hard to feel a part of a learning community in our isolated online spaces. Interactions tend to be limited to tutor-student communication much of the time, and the various tools (notably Moodle) that we use for teaching are intentionally isolated from one another. There’s little cohesion or sense of the broader community, and not much that is obvious that we can feel we can belong to.  

All of this helps to explain some of the key motivations behind why we created the Landing. It is meant as a space where academic identities can be explored, reflected upon and discovered, where we can feel that we belong to a real and vibrant community, where we can meet peers, see how others think and learn, and engage in meaningful interactions with them. It’s kind of like a virtual campus or learning commons, a space where many things happen, people meet, post information, engage in dialogue.

The Landing has been a success in very many ways and has helped many (including me) to achieve a greater sense of belonging. In retrospect, though, it would have been better to have seamlessly built its social richness and conrollable engagement into all of our other systems rather than as yet another loosely linked monolith. This is not impossible to retrofit. Since earlier this year it has been possible to integrate the Landing fairly well with other pages, such as those provided via Moodle, through its embedding functionality (simply make an iframe and add ‘?view=embed’ to most Landing URLs to separate a post from the surrounding site). This is, however, still not as seamless as it should be and requires some skill and deliberate intent on the part of people embedding it. We’ve not seen much uptake yet, though we have not promoted it at all actively, and we probably should. The Elgg technology behind the Landing does, however, have the capability of being embedded far more deeply as a web service to other applications, so that it can appear to be part of a quite different site (Moodle, say, or the main website, or MyAU, or pretty much anything). To make this happen needs a lot of carefully coordinated effort and clear communication between developers and managers of disparate systems that might use such a service, and plenty of planning, so it is not trivial to do. I’d be interested in doing such a project that either built on the Landing (makes sense, especially as it has other roles too) or started afresh to embed cross-cutting social engagement, sharing, connection and communication into all our student-facing sites, with all the same features and strengths (like discretionary access control, persistence, ownership, etc) of the Landing but without the need to go out of your way to visit it. I think I feel a research proposal coming on.

 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/what-works-retention

"Future time orientation predicts academic engagement among first-year " by Louise Horstmanshof and Craig Zimitat

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A study recommended during a recent conference that I attended that looks into student retention and engagement as a function of temporal orientation. In brief, Time Perspective (TP) theory predicts that

“students who are confident of their abilities (Past Positive) and who believe that their efforts produce results (low Present Hedonistic) are more likely than those who do not, to work towards a future goal (Future) to which they are committed and with which they can identify. Thus, by harnessing their time perspectives, they are able to regulate their behaviour to persist with their studies to achieve their educational goals”

The well-conducted study confirms the hypothesis but goes into a lot more detail, differentiates issues much further, and comes to some sophisticated conclusions that show that it is interestingly complicated. There is no silver bullet, behaviours are hugely interdependent and contextually situated, and multiple and diverse intervention strategies are needed to support students on their learning journeys through a university. It also provides some useful hints about how to help students improve their chances. It’s worth reading if you have any involvement with education, whether as a teacher or a learner. If you get overwhelmed by the tabular representations of the results of the study (thorough but turgid), after reading the theoretical background, skip to the discussion and implications sections.

Address of the bookmark: http://epubs.scu.edu.au/tlc_pubs/194/

There's a fitness tracker for your vagina. Quantifying your life has gone too far

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A Guardian article from  Jess Zimmerman. The arguments are inelligent and Zimmerman recognizes the value as well as the dangers of socially-enabled biofeedback devices. The kGoal (tagline ‘Fitbit for your vagina’) actually sounds like rather a good idea, but the cons are significant. I particularly like “But the pitfall of data devices … is that they hijack your reward pathways” and “The quantified self … takes theaggregate self out of the equation”. Good food for thought, and some important lessons for those seeking to gamify many things, including learning and teaching.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/14/fitness-tracker-vagina-quantified-life

The Distant Crowd: Transactional Distance and New Social Media Literacies

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This is a paper for IJLM that I wrote with Terry Anderson, exploring how the distributed nature of teaching and learning in social technologies significantly messes with Michael Moore’s theory of transactional distance in all sorts of interesting ways. In it, we ponder on the literacies learners need in order to take best advantage of social media; we describe the different social forms of groups, nets and sets, and the emergent collectives that develop around them, that together form the backbone of our forthcoming book;  and we discuss different kinds of teaching presence that emerge in each form, suggesting ways of addressing the potential lack of reliability and credibility when the teacher (and thus transactional distance) is distributed (in a net), anonymous (in a set), or emergent (in a collective).

According to the date of the special issue of which it is a part, MIT Press impressively managed to publish this paper nearly two years before we finished writing it. It is true that we sent them the first draft in 2012 but it was not actually published till this month. Hard to know how to cite this.

One of the things that the paper mentions is that learning through networks can, under the right conditions, be more effective, timely and relevant than traditional group-oriented methods. This was rather delightfully and self-referentially brought home to me by the fact that I learned of the paper’s actual publication (as opposed to predicted date) via Twitter. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/IJLM_a_00104#.U7Hmexb07EJ

Google Cardboard

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Genius.

At first this seems a little silly and then, after a second or two’s reflection, turns out to be profoundly marvellous.

Google Cardboard can be made at home. It consists of a cardboard box (a large pizza box is recommended), cheap lenses, a magnet, Velcro and a rubber band combined with the Cardboard app for Android and a moderately decent smartphone (most popular modern phones will work). The result is a full stereo virtual reality (VR) experience similar to that of the Oculus Rift but at a tiny fraction of the price. It uses things like motion sensors, NFC, magnetometers and other features built into most modern smartphones to work its magic, so moving your head changes your point of view. Note the cut-out for the camera – some great potential for augmented reality (AR) apps here, blending the real world with full 3D high resolution renderings of virtual objects.

The carboard box is low-threshold enough to kick-start development using the new VR Toolkit that makes it all work. This means there will likely soon be a flood of apps for this, and it is almost certain that more polished versions of the viewer will soon start to appear on the market for those who don’t want to make their own or advertise their pizza-eating habits to the world. And, assuming it takes off (which I think it should) there will then be dedicated VR glasses that make use of it. Indeed, it seems logical that this is what Google Glass will evolve into. Taking the long view, this could be an extremely disruptive innovation, providing a simple and already-available set of standards to drive VR and AR development.

Address of the bookmark: https://developers.google.com/cardboard/

Nostalgia and Newspapers: Clay Shirky (and an idea of my own)

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Clay Shirky makes a very forceful claim that physical newspapers and attempts to save old newspaper business models through paywalls are a lost cause, and we are doing students of journalism a serious disservice if we do not help to prepare them for a world with much less print and much more open access and diversity. As he puts it,

“If you want to cry in your beer about the good old days, go ahead. Just stay the hell away from the kids while you’re reminiscing; pretending that dumb business models might suddenly start working has crossed over from sentimentality to child abuse.”

Of course, there are always exceptions, and Shirky may be a tad overstating things. While the vast majority of wood-based newspapers are on their last legs, it is almost certain that a handful will survive for at least a few decades in some form, and there are still a few benefits to paper. As someone who has almost entirely given up print-based newspapers, I have a hell of a time lighting fires, protecting floors and mopping up spills, for instance (and I have a few other reasons for just occasionally preferring print, for now). The jury is also still out on business models relying on paywalls or, more accurately, the technologies to support such things are in flux and there are some highly motivated people seeking new ways to make a profit from online news, so it would be unwise to declare the game over yet. I have some ideas about that which I present below.

Babies and bathwater

Kushner’s attempts to inject new spirit into local communities via print media are almost certainly misguided, as Shirky claims, but the general principle and intentions behind it are mostly pretty sound. Something is lost when everything is equalized on a single screen. While there are plenty of locally-focused spaces to be found almost everywhere on web and on mobile devices, on a single screen they tend to blend and coincide in ways that may not be uniformly beneficial and that lack the cohesive power of centralized media. There is something socially binding about physical objects like newspapers. Their benefits don’t outweigh the relative disadvantages and risks, but they have something going for them. In a related way, centralized media of all kinds can bind us. As a kid growing up in the UK, my first experience of TV involved only 2 channels, which meant a large number of people were sharing the same experience, and talked about it with one another. This did not mostly lead to brainwashing, at least in the way it was done in the UK, but it provided a catalyst for negotiating meaning and exploring our identities, a centre around which we could co-develop a shared culture. We could equally find things to disagree with as well as to agree with. The same is true of newspapers, especially local ones – they are (or were) objects around which people create and share culture and connection, inhabit shared common ground and make sense of it together. They make it easier to feel we are a part of a shared physical community, with a shared commons. The Internet and diversification of centralized media have diluted that, reducing the things we share with those around us and distributing social attention more broadly and less evenly. Meanwhile, they have amplified and redistributed the common ground in new and not unequivocally good ways, in the form of filter bubbles (we see more and more of what we want to see, that we agree with or that interests us, to the exclusion of everything else, so we increasingly separate into isolated online communities of interest or affinity) and memes (our universally shared objects become the lowest common denominators, like cat pictures and Korean dance videos). Swings and roundabouts – this does lead to a great deal of good in a great many ways that I reckon far outstrip the things we are losing, but that doesn’t change the fact that something worth keeping is lost in the process.

I have a possible solution. It’s a slightly wild idea and I don’t know whether it has already been done, but it seems plausible.

Blending the physical and virtual

 

With tumbling hardware prices making dedicated e-reading devices almost a throwaway commodity and it becoming the norm for individuals and families to possess multiple devices, a more acceptable approach for newspaper companies, especially those running local presses, might be to sell a subscription hidden in the cost of a simple single-purpose single-news-source-reading device. This might be returned for recycling at the end of its life (when purchasing a new one, say) and/or it might be sold at a loss then topped up with pay-as-you-go cards.  So, rather than firing up an app on a general-purpose device, you would pick up the ‘newspaper’ device itself to read and perhaps interact with or contribute to its news. Branding and maybe sponsored adverts could be physically inscribed on the device itself. It could add value such as instant access to latest news (even when abroad), allowing browsing of links, and enabling interaction with other subscribers. Accessibility options would allow for things like large/different fonts and colour schemes, as well as text-to-speech. Annotation features (perhaps shareable) could be provided. It would not take up the space or resources needed to print newspapers. Its single-purpose nature would mean it could be optimized for speed and ease of use. Perhaps it might even double as an e-reader for other things that might even be sold as a revenue generating stream, though because part of the value of it would be its specialist nature, which is what would differentiate it from other locked-in and more general-purpose ecosystems (iOS, Kindle, Android, etc), this should perhaps not be taken too far. For chains like Freedom, perhaps it could offer access to other local newspapers in the chain too, or local library books, or suchlike. If the model spread, one might imagine you could purchase a physical ‘deviceshelf’ that would act rather like a bookshelf, in which you keep your different devices for different content and media from different publishers. In short, it would have many of the benefits of both the Internet and print technologies, occupying a middle ground between them, with most of the advantages (to publishers and readers) of both.

All of the functionality and access to news or other content would be embedded in the original purchase price or through tokens for add-ons that would be akin to pay-as-you-go phone cards. This is not a typical digital subscription model as such inasmuch as it is not simply rental of a service. Content would be downloaded and persistent, even after the original period has elapsed, and available for archive purposes. You could even purchase a new device every year and keep old ones on your deviceshelf for reference. Another significant difference is that, as long as vendors were sensible about avoiding the tempting but ultimately counter-productive path of linking you to the machine, you could lend the device to someone else, or sell it on (with remaining subscription), just as you might with a physical paper text. You could send one as a gift to a family member living in another town. There would be no need to sign up to anything or give away your personal information – indeed, that would reduce the value of the device for resale. By associating the payment with a device rather than a person, you could neatly sidestep the ugliness of subscriber models and even of visible DRM. The temptation to grab personal information might be high, but publishers would be wise to resist it. There would still be plenty of really useful and mostly anonymous data that could be garnered from device usage without having to do the greedy thing.

Some obstacles

This idea is kind of wasteful (though recycling benefits would be significant) inasmuch as all of the digital content could just as easily fit on a single device with far greater efficiency. It is antithetical to or, at best, complementary to the trend to generalization in which everything fits in one small pocket-sized device. Although it bypasses some of the ugliest issues with explicit DRM, it is some way from the open access model that I would normally be promoting. Having access to content through a single device is a bit of a retrograde step, and may sometimes be inconvenient. E-paper (with its long battery life) would likely be necessary until battery technologies improve, which would limit the range of media it could display to text, graphics and maybe podcasts. Even then, assuming a typical month-long charge life, charging multiple devices on the bookshelf might be a pain. Simple wireless power technologies are widely available, but the cost might be a bit high for now and standards are still emerging. Having said that, benefits to the manufacturers of not requiring any sockets for input or output would be quite high, reducing the chances it might get hacked to some extent (if it breaks, it could simply be exchanged for a new one and recycled) and making it possible to read in the rain or bathtub. There are environmental and human costs in the production of electronics, especially given that many of the cheap ones (in particular) are produced under oppressive and poorly monitored conditions. It would be helpful if standards were developed: as such devices became popular, it would be more than a slight nuisance to have to use different adaptors, have differently sized device shelves, and wildly differing device formats. More significantly, standards would also contribute to ease of recycling – standard parts like cases, screens, batteries and so on would often be re-usable, perhaps across multiple devices from different manufacturers. Some major infrastructure would be needed to handle recycling, distribution, and so on, but it is fairly unlikely that this would be as environmentally unfriendly and expensive as the cost of printing, distributing and recycling newspapers. I am not sure that I trust publishers not to try to harvest personal user information for more targeted advertising, to sell on, etc. It would ultimately be self-defeating for them to do so and would reduce one of the main unique selling points of the idea, but short-term gains might be tempting and history does not make me optimistic about this. I’m similarly distrustful that they would exercise restraint and avoid the easy path of adding more and more features and for-purchase add-ons, even though they would inevitably wind up competing with (and losing against or being sucked into) the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

Most of the problems I can foresee in this can be largely overcome, and the benefits might be worth having. It would have very interesting sense-making benefits, would combine the benefits of physical objects with virtual content and, rather than competing head-on with open content, would offer a complementary and profitable approach that would sustain many of the benefits of traditional paper with relatively few of the disadvantages. I assume that most newspapers would still maintain a freely accessible online presence too – they would be foolish not to – so this would not subtract much from what we already have. This is not meant as a replacement for anything but paper’. And, of course, it is not limited to newspapers. Similar fixed-functionality devices might be provided by companies, universities, local councils and authorities, libraries, and organizations, with different customizations related to different needs. This is not a radical departure from existing practices, nor does it demand any major new invention. Indeed, it could all be done with off-the-shelf technologies and a little software customization. It is simply a means to reify social objects and to help organize our lives, of sustaining connection and shared understanding with communities that we live in. It’s a little counter-intuitive and goes against the existing flow, but it could work.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2014/06/nostalgia-and-newspapering/

Academic Publisher Fights Publication Of Paper Criticizing Publishers' Price Increases And Profits

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Taylor & Francis doing the evil thing, censoring, annotating with disclaimers and delaying publication of an article critical of the company and its greedy, exploitative brethren.

For-profit journals have no place in academia any more, if ever they did. They add no value at all compared with that provided by their not-for-profit and open cousins, while parasitically sucking vast quantities of money and resources that would be far better spent on education and research. They make use of public-funded labour for both content and editorial work then profit from the public purse by selling it back to the institutions that provide that work. This alone makes them superfluous and unsustainable but it is not their worst sin. Their worst sin is that they deliberately and with pre-meditation limit access to knowledge that we (you and I) have paid for in the first place. This is a sick system that needs to be cured, and the cure – open publishing – is widely available. 

Address of the bookmark: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140605/05175627467/academic-publisher-fights-publication-paper-criticizing-publishers-price-increases-profits.shtml

LearningLocker LRS – version 1.0 now available

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Learning Locker has left beta and is now at version 1.0. This may be a significant milestone in a series of developments that could profoundly affect the future of online learning and perhaps the whole educational system.  

Learning Locker is an open source implementation of a TinCan (xAPI) learning record store (LRS). It provides a repository to record information about learning activities and outcomes, using open standards for import and export. That’s about it: some sorting and search tools, some export facilities, and the means to store information about learning from other applications. While other xAPI LRSs already exist, this open source implementation seems the most promising so far, the most feature-complete, and the most likely to see widespread adoption. OK, unless you are a learning technology geek I realise that this might sound rather dull and arcane, but the potential for disruption, especially given widespread support for the experience API (xAPI) standard in a wide range of applications, is quite high. Amongst other things:

  • it is a critical part of the infrastructure to free us from the mediocre monolithic silos of learning management systems which, in educational systems till now, have typically been the place where learning activities occur, content is produced, and progress is recorded. By separating the function of recording progress from the means of delivery, it massively increases the range of information and applications that can be used in an integrated way for education, from games to social media systems, MOOCs to traditional classroom activities, and everything between. It allows a great many more forms of progress to be recorded at any level of granularity, from solving a puzzle in a game to looking at a web page, from doing an exam to writing a thesis. It makes it significantly easier to switch between platforms.
  •  it allows any and every kind of evidence of learning to be recorded, of great benefit to lifelong learners wishing to provide evidence of,  and to reflect on and to plan a learning journey. Freeing such data from guarded silos means learners can control their own learning records, keeping them in a cloud, on their own servers or their own computers, transferring them as and when they wish. This goes far beyond the basic functionality of an e-portfolio system, but integrates beautifully with one. It, or something very like it, is a vital piece in the move towards truly open learning at a level that has the potential to disrupt the traditional education and training system.
  •  it makes possible a wide range of analytics for the benefit of learners (and, potentially, for the benefit of teachers and organizations) that go far beyond the structured assessment and activity records that can be captured by an LMS. From finding people with a particular set of skills to analyzing holes in your own learning to organizational learning profiling, the possibilities are huge.

This just scratches the surface of the potential of this technology and standard, and it is just going to get better. More information about Learning Locker is available at http://learninglocker.net

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/learninglocker/learninglocker

Enough with the lecturing – US National Science Foundation (NSF)

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Here is a brief report on a somewhat less brief meta-study that claims to show lectures are less effective than active learning approaches in STEM subjects. The report makes a claim that this is an important study. Well, kind of – it will no doubt be cited a lot. This is one of those studies that most educational researchers, including me, would very much like to be correct. Most of our theories and models suggest that lecturing is a truly dumb way to teach. Unfortunately, however, this study does not really show that. We know, and this study confirms in its data, that some lectures work really well some of the time for some students. We also know that active learning approaches do not always work better and sometimes work worse. The study makes the claim that, on average, more active trumps more passive (there are very few blacks and whites in this, it is all on a spectrum, which the study does not very effectively cater for). Sadly, however, it uses a skewed sample because (as this perceptive article highlights very nicely) active approaches typically rely on great, passionate teachers who know how to educate in order to implement them well. And guess who gets to write studies comparing active learning and lecture approaches. Even comparative studies, such as the sort that typically compare a previous run of a course with a newly minted active version, are bound to show this bias. Compare what it is like to teach a course that feels stale with one that is not only new, based on ideas you believe in (which the study, to its credit, attempts to control for) but also (as active learning approaches do) allows your own skill as a teacher to shine. This is systemically biased data.

A message I have been trying to hammer home for some time is that it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it, that’s what gets results. The softer, more malleable, more student-led a course becomes, the more that is required of the skill and passion of the teacher to be responsive and helpful, which means that such courses can be truly awesome or terrifically awful, depending on the people involved. Published research tends to come from those who are more skillful and interested in teaching because those that are not do not normally publish papers about it, so the results available to meta-studies are inevitably skewed.

Lectures are hard, rigid teaching technologies that, together with technologies like textbooks, exams, designed outcomes and timetables, are built to cater for mediocrity in teachers. Great teachers can surpass the limitations an educational system imposes, but some learning happens as a result of process design even when the teacher is truly dire. A dire teacher in an active learning context will leave students confused, lacking direction and demotivated even more than one who just lectures badly.  Furthermore, lectures can have genuine value. I have no great objections in principle to occasional lectures as long as they take up no more than a few minutes of a learner’s day, and as long as lecturers start with the assumption that no direct learning will result from them. Lectures can be good catalysts, a reason to get together, and can help structure studies and thinking, even if they are almost useless for directly learning facts or skills. Just occasionally, not enough to justify their use, they can even inspire and motivate. It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.

Address of the bookmark: http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=131403&org=NSF&from=news