A Wired magazine article from Rhett Allain that is big on metaphor (courses are the chocolate chips, the cookie is the on-campus experience) but very small on critical thinking. What it does highlight, though, is the failure of imagination lurking in much online and in-person learning discussion and literature, and I give credit to Allain for recognizing the obvious elephant in the room: that education is about learning to be, not about learning to do/learning stuff. As he puts it, “the whole cookie is about becoming more mature as a human. It’s about leveling up in the human race”. I couldn’t agree more. What we explicitly teach and what students actually learn are utterly different things, and our own little contributions are at best catalysts, at worst minor diversions. To simply compare the chocolate chips is a variant on the McNamara Fallacy, and well done to Allain for pointing this out in a mainstream publication. Where I profoundly disagree is the bizarre notion that colleges somehow bake better cookies, or that cookies are the only (or even the best) medium in which to embed chocolate chips.

Allain’s confusion is shared by a great many professional educators and educational researchers so, assuming he is not a professional researcher in the field, his ignorance is forgivable. If we are being persnickety, there is no such thing as either online or in-person learning: learning is something that is done by people (individually and collectively) and it resides in both people and the environments/objects they co-create and in which they live. It is not done online or in-person. It is done in the connections we make, in our heads and between one another. 

It is fair to observe that there are huge differences between online and on-campus learning. There is no doubt that removing people from the rest of the human race, and shoving a bunch of them who share an interest in learning together in one concentrated space does result in some interesting and useful side effects, and it does lead to a distinctive set of benefits. When done well (admittedly rarely) it gives people time to dream, time to explore, time to do nothing much apart from reflect, to discover, to connect, and to talk, to grow. For kids who have lived dependent lives in schools and their homes this can be a useful transition phase. So, yes, there are things learned in physical colleges that are not the same as things learned in other places. But that’s a trite truism. There are things learned in pubs, on planes, while swimming, in fields, etc, etc, etc that are distinctive too.

There is equally no doubt that those that don’t go to college can and do get at least the same diversity and richness in their learning experience: it’s just a different set of things that result from the complex interactions and engagements with where they happen to be and who they happen to know. Being less removed from the rest of life and the community has its own benefits, situating learning in different contexts, enabling richer connections between all aspects of human life. The online folk have (innately) much more control of their learning experience and, on the whole, therefore need to work harder to make the most of the environments they are in – it doesn’t come in a neat, self-contained, packaged box. But to suggest that it is any the less rich and meaningful is to do online learners a deep disservice. My own institution, Athabasca University, doesn’t have online learners. We just have learners, who live somewhere, in communities and in regions, among people and places that matter to them. We provide another (online) place to dwell but, unlike a traditional campus-based institution, it’s not an either/or alternative: our online place coexists with and extends into myriad other physical places, that reach back into it and enrich it as much as we reach out and enrich them. At least, that’s how it works when we do it right.

Analogies and metaphors can be useful jumping-off points for understanding things, and I’m OK with the cookie idea because it emphasizes the intimate relationship between teaching and learning. A more useful analogy, though, might be to compare and contrast online vs in-person learning with the experiences of those who watch movies on a home theatre via Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Mubi, etc vs those who watch movies at the cinema. There’s a great deal to be said for the cinema – the shared experience, the feeling of belonging to a crowd and, of course, the big benefits of being able to hang out with fellow movie-goers before and after the movie. There’s also the critical value of the rituals, and the simple power of the event. I love going to movie theatres. On the other hand, if you have a decent enough rig at home (technologies matter) there’s also a lot to be said for the control (stop when you need a break, rewind to catch things you missed or want to see again, adjust the volume to your needs, eat the food you want, drink what you wish, etc), the vast choice (tens of thousands of movies rather than a handful), the flexibility (when you want, with whom you want, at a pace to suit you), the focus (no coughing, chatting, phone-using idiots around you, etc), the diversity and range of social connectedness (from looking up reviews on IMDB to chatting about it on social media or with others in the room), and the comfort of watching movies at home.

Can one replace the other? Not really. Is one better than the other? It depends. I’m glad I don’t have to make a final binary choice in the matter, and I think that’s how we should think about online and in-person teaching. I don’t mean that a single institution should offer alternative online and in-person routes: that’s way too limiting, like only getting movies from one organization. I mean that education can and should be a distributed experience, chosen by the learners (with guidance if they wish), not tied to one place and one method of learning. Just as I can watch YouTube, Netflix, Mubi, Crave, Amazon Prime, Apple, or whatever, as well as go to any one of several movie theatres nearby (not to mention open-air movie events etc), so should I be able to choose my ways to learn.

Disclaimer: this is not a perfect metaphor by any means. Perhaps it would be fairer to compare watching a live play with watching streaming TV, and it certainly doesn’t begin to capture the significant differences in engagement, interaction, activity, and creativity involved in the educational processes compared with ‘passive’ watching of entertainment. But it’s still better than chocolate chip cookies.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.wired.com/story/you-can-learn-everything-online-except-for-the-things-you-cant

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/3469833/you-can-learn-everything-online-except-for-the-things-you-cant

An article for Aeon by Jon Tennant on the heinous state of affairs that gives unscrupulous publishers profit margins that put Apple to shame while hiding publicly funded research from the public that pays for it. It is a shamefully broken system that stands in the way of human progress. It has to change.

The ground this (open access) article goes over is much the same as the ground many of us have been tilling for many years, but it’s well expressed, and good to see it aired in a non-academic (though intellectually vigorous) journal like Aeon. It winds up with a set of six recommendations for things that all academics can do to improve our lot, which all make sense to me:

1. Sign, and commit to, the Declaration on Research Assessment, and demand fairer evaluation criteria independent of journal brands. This will reduce dependencies on commercial journals and their negative impact on research.
2. Demand openness. Even in research fields such as global health, 60 per cent of researchers do not archive their research so it is publicly available, even when it is completely free and within journal policies to do so. We should demand accountability for openness to liberate this life-saving knowledge.
3. Know your rights. Researchers can use the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Rights Coalition (SPARC) Author Addendum to retain rights to their research, instead of blindly giving it away to publishers. Regain control.
4. Support libraries. Current library subscription contracts are protected from public view by ‘non-disclosure clauses’ that act to prevent any price transparency in a profoundly anti-competitive practice that creates market dysfunction. We should support libraries in renegotiating such contracts, and in some cases even provide support in cancelling them, so that they can reinvest funds in more sustainable publishing ventures.
5. Help to build something better. On average, academics currently spend around $5,000 for each published article – to get a PDF and some extra sides. A range of different studies and working examples exist that show the true cost of publishing an article can be as low as $100 using cost-efficient funding schemes, community buy-in, and technologies that go a step further than PDF generation. We can do better.
6. Use your imagination. What would you want the scholarly communication system to look like? What are all the wonderful features you would include? What can you do to help turn a vision into reality?

Address of the bookmark: https://aeon.co/ideas/scholarly-publishing-is-broken-heres-how-to-fix-it

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/3388817/scholarly-publishing-is-broken-here%E2%80%99s-how-to-fix-it

Sadly published behind a paywall (but, happily, also available at SciHub) this is a fascinating sequence of studies from Hafenbrack & Voh that, firstly, appears to demonstrate that mindfulness (meditative practice) actively reduces motivation to perform a wide range of cognitively taxing or repetitive tasks, then shows that (despite this, and contrary to what might be expected) the loss of motivation has little or no effect on performance. The studies seem well-designed and well integrated, involving a very wide range of participants across continents, a wide variety of activities, and lots of good meta-analysis to pull them together. I’ll talk about why there are none-the-less very good reasons to be cautious in wholeheartedly accepting the results later on but, even with my provisos, the fact that such an effect can be seen at all is really interesting. Hafenbrack & Voh hypothesize (and provide evidence) that, because mindfulness tends to result in improvements in many other areas of cognition and performance, the overall effect is more or less neutral on actual task performance. The researchers partly explain this by citing other studies showing meditation-mediated improvements in empathy, reading comprehension, resilience to unpleasant images, resistance to distraction, negotiation effectiveness, and improved health indicators, though they only attempt to find out about reduced levels of distraction in their own experiments. They conclude that the effects of mindfulness on performance are complex and nuanced, and that employers and organizers of meditation/mindfulness sessions should therefore look carefully into their timing in the context of the working day.

What I find especially interesting about this study are the suggested reasons that mindfulness might impair motivation, which provided the initial justification for the research:

1. mindfulness tends to focus on valuing the ‘now’ rather than dwelling on the future.
2. mindfulness aims to reduce arousal (though, interestingly, many forms of it used in the Western mainstream actually seem to stoke the ego).

I’m not totally convinced by (1), inasmuch as it seems to me that the researchers believe that motivation is about desiring (or wishing to avoid) a future state, which is only partly true, notably in the case of simple extrinsic motivation (especially when externally regulated, as in these studies). It is far less likely to be true in the case of intrinsic motivation. Indeed, high levels of intrinsic motivation tend to be very focused on the ‘now’ and, in many cases, can result in a state of flow that can be very closely akin to mindfulness. For me, for instance, playing music can (sometimes) be a highly meditative pursuit with very little future focus. The same can (sometimes) be true when I get into the flow of most things, from writing to sailing to playing with my grandson. It can even be true for at least a couple of the tasks the researchers used to test their theory, when actively chosen by people as fun things to do rather than given to them as part of a research study.

That mindfulness may reduce arousal, and so in turn reduce motivation, is more believable though, again, it depends very much upon context whether that affects task performance positively or negatively. Sticking with a music theme, some pieces require intense concentration, physical effort, and mental agility, especially when learning a technically demanding new piece so, though it is usually bad to be tense when attempting such things, excessive relaxation might not be too great either. However, other kinds of music require you only to be at one with the sound and the instrument, and being in a relaxed mental state is really good for that. It is not a coincidence that many religious rituals involve music-making – especially that involving repetitive rhythmic sounds, chants, and drones – because it can lift you to exactly that detached, calm, yet spiritually heightened state of mindfulness. I find that the most fun and rewarding musical activities tend to be those which combine both modes at once – things like counterpoint or blues, in which the patterns are relatively easy to learn but remain infinitely rich in their expression. This hints that the real world of motivation, and other mental states, is way more complex than experiments like this suggest. I use music as a fairly unequivocal example, but similar diversity lies even in mundane bureaucratic form-filling, and certainly in complex creative behaviours like teaching or research.

Methodological concerns

One central problem with both hypotheses on reasons for reduced motivation, and with the researchers’ discussion and conclusions, is that they mistakenly assume motivation to be one thing – a very behaviourist orientation that looks at simple effects and ignores their complex causes – when, in reality, it is many things, often all at once, and the kind and strength of motivation varies enormously from one context to the next, often on a minute-by-minute basis, typically changing as a direct result of performance on a given task as well as other extrinsic factors. This study almost completely conceals such diversity.

Another problem is that the seemingly innocuous term ‘participants’ subtly and all too easily shifts from its actual meaning (the averaged behaviours of a particular group of people) to ‘all people’ in the description of the resultsm,the discussion, and the conclusion. It’s like saying ‘ripe bananas are yellow’ because (on average) if you examine any given square centimetre of a ripe banana in a batch, the chances are that it will mostly be yellow. This is despite the fact that virtually no bananas are wholly yellow, some are mainly red, a lot are partly green, and many are mainly black or brown. It bothers me that the consequent leap from ‘on average, people tend to be less motivated to perform researcher-imposed tasks after meditation’ to ‘meditation impairs task motivation’ is huge and unwarranted, especially in the absence of a truly plausible (or at least generalizable) model of why this might be so. In fairness, this is exactly the same form of flawed inductive thinking used in the vast majority of experimental studies in education, sociology, psychology, and related disciplines the world over. Knowing average tendencies can be extremely useful in all sorts of ways but to slip from ‘on average, X’ to ‘X’ as this and countless other studies do, is dangerous and counter-productive, especially when combined with a slip from ‘is’ to ‘ought’,  when suggesting ways the research can be applied.  This kind of experimental study is equally bad at discovering reasons for those averages because (unlike less fuzzy pseudo sciences) the range of possible inputs and outputs is vast, and highly interconnected: there’s irreversible complexity in the whole thing. Such studies can be at least partly saved by including rich qualitative information and analysis, but there’s none of that here. Smedlund offers a far subtler and more thorough critique of this kind of psychological experiment that I highly recommend anyone engaged in such studies should read.

Another way of interpreting the results

I like this paper and, for all my concerns, have found much that is thought-provoking within it. However, the simplistic implied behaviourist model of motivation and the lack of qualitative information that would help to better interpret the results does raise more questions than it answers. It also strikes me that, rather than drawing conclusions about ways to change the behaviour of people in organizations, it would make far more sense and have far more lasting value to look at ways to change the tasks expected of them so that they are (ideally) better aligned with intrinsic motivation, or (where that is difficult or impossible) are less externally regulated. Assuming at least a glimmer of truth in these findings (and there is more than a glimmer) I would hypothesize that, under such circumstances, mindfulness would be highly beneficial. Like so many things relating to human activity, it ain’t what you do it’s the way (and the where, and the when, and the why) that you do it that matters most.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074959781630646X

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/3365691/mindfulness-meditation-impairs-task-motivation-but-not-performance

The BBC’s Shipping Forecast is one of the great binding traditions of British culture that has been many a Brit’s lullaby since time immemorial (ie. long before I was born). Though I never once paid attention to its content in all the decades I heard it, eleven years after leaving the country I could still probably recite the majority of the 31 sea areas surrounding the British Isles from memory. 

For as long as I can recall, the gently soothing voice of the Shipping Forecast was Peter Jefferson (apparently he retired after 40 years in 2009) who, in this magnificently somnolent rendering, immortalizes exerpts from the General Data Protection Regulation that has recently come into force in the EU. My eyelids start drooping about 30 seconds in.

Address of the bookmark: https://blog.calm.com/relax/once-upon-a-gdpr

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/3327075/the-ultimate-insomnia-cure-new-gdpr-legislation-soothingly-read-by-peter-jefferson