Do the maths: 7 reasons why the obsession with maths doesn’t add up

I'd much rather employ this smart, innovative, humorous and creative person than someone who actually knows how to apply Pythagoras's Theorem. Maths has never been the sole touchstone for being 'smart' or 'employable'. So I'm annoyed that maths has become a weapon of mass distraction in education, a topic full of bluster and exaggeration. Maths is hard to learn, hard to teach and easy to test, in other words the ideal recipe for mass failure. Everyone seems to agree that we have a huge problem in maths. The problem, it seems to me, is a lack of a basic understanding of maths by politicians, employers, even experts in education. So here’s some FAILS, or failures to do the simple maths.

FAIL 1 Numeracy not maths

There is persistent exaggeration in the size of the so-called maths problem. This is caused by people shooting arrows, drawing a chalk circle around the arrow and calling it a bullseye. Typical is the recently formed National Numeracy charity, which claims we have 17 million (nearly half the working population) with poor numeracy. They do this by relying on one ‘survey’ and conflating numeracy with maths, as their definitions are based on GCSE achievement.

This exaggeration is endemic and a simple failure in statistics. The actual needs in the real world match what we call ‘functional maths’: basic numeracy, use of a calculator, some understanding of statistics etc. This is not congruent with what is actually taught in GCSE maths. If they were represented as sets there would be a small overlap. When employers talk about poor maths, they are largely talking about poor numeracy. These are two different things. In fact, almost invariably people conflate and confuse maths with numeracy (or functional maths). A simple Venn diagram is all that’s needed to make this clear.

FAIL 2 Most maths quantifiably irrelevant

What’s the quadratic equation? What’s a surd? When was the last time you divided two fractions? When did you last use algebra? The recent report into the teaching of maths confirmed, yet again, that the curriculum is largely irrelevant to most students, as they are unlikely to use much of it in later life. They rightly recommend a new qualification in functional maths. If GCSE maths were a pie chart, most of it will not be used by the vast majority of people in later life. In any case, if we do need the more complex stuff, we can learn it later. Do the maths. It doesn’t add up.

FAIL 3 Maths is easy to test

Rather than test what really matters in problem solving and real life, we’ve stuck to a lazy and often irrelevant method of testing that puts maths at the top of the tree. Why because it’s easy to test. Maths problems have single solutions and are therefore easy to test. Nevertheless, problems, largely of calculation, are perceived as being a good test of one’s ability in a general sense. This is nonsense. Maths problems are rarely realistic. Nobody goes around using maths to share marbles, split up pizzas, share out cakes at parties or dilute orange juice. There is a critical failure to ‘bridge’ between the real world and its representation in mathematical language. But in an age of perpetual testing, maths is an easy option.

Fail 4 Maths a transferable skill

If knowing maths teaches you to think clearly, how come the world has been plunged into a financial crisis by people who are good at maths but couldn’t see the problems they were causing. The answer to this problem was identified by Thorndike over a century ago. ‘Transfer’, the degree to which learning transfers to actual performance in the real world is still a largely misunderstood or ignored issue in education. Learning is largely (not always) a means to an end, namely the application of that knowledge or skills, yet few educators know or care much about transfer. They assume it exists where it doesn’t (for example in maths and Latin) and make little effort to make sure it happens. Thorndike showed that transfer depends on the similarity of the situations or domains. This principle of ‘identical elements’ led him to recommend problem solving and practice in real-world contexts, so that the learning tasks and context matched the real world. Has this lesson been leant in the teaching of maths, or Latin? No.

FAIL 5 Calculators calculate

Almost everyone has a calculator in their pocket, as it’s a native app on almost every mobile phone and computer. Yet we insist on teaching people how to ‘calculate’ as opposed to useful, functional numeracy. Experts, like Wolfram and others, have pointed to the crude culture of ‘calculation’ in school maths, at the expense of real, functional and conceptual maths. Richard Norris has shown that maths in the workplace is intimately tied up with computers, spreadsheets and others forms of software. Yet maths and ICT are treated as two separate subjects. Isolating ‘maths’ in this way presents it as a purely abstract and often irrelevant subject.

FAIL 6 Miscalculation on teachers

Statistically, your child was, is or will be, almost certainly taught by someone whose knowledge of maths is rather poor. We know, with mathematical certainty, that primary school teachers have poor maths skills. The recommendation of the recent Government report into Maths teaching is a minimum B pass in GCSE before you’re allowed to teach the subject. This sounds like a bad joke until you realise that our children are being taught by largely primary school teachers with an absurdly low competence in maths. It claims that, “Almost all of those on primary PGCE courses gave up studying mathematics at age 16. So, by the time they taught their first classes, they had not studied mathematics to any meaningful level for at least six years.” Only about 2% of primary school teachers have a degree in science or any STEM subject. Another shocker is the fact that in secondary schools, “24% of all children in secondary schools are not taught by specialist mathematics teachers”. Read that again. Most maths is not taught by maths teachers or even by teachers with a solid grasp of the subject.

FAIL 7 PISA ‘standards’

The PISA results show plummeting performance in maths by our young people. The Chinese have screamed to the top. We’ll be an economy the equivalent of Bangladesh in a few years if we don’t get our maths scores up.  This is all baloney. A more detailed analysis of why PISA is wrong.

This is a common mathematical problem among politicians, employers, even so called experts in education. Our performance has remained stable. There is no ‘drop’ in standards. If you construct a league table, you can, mathematically, rise and fall in that table while remaining the same in terms of competence. That’s the problem with league tables – they create the illusion of winners and losers.

Gove is an English graduate with scant knowledge of maths and science. I know because I challenged him on a shared platform at the Tory Party Conference in Blackpool when he claimed that all schoolchildren should know that the orbit of an electron relies on the same force as the orbit of the planets around the sun! There were guffaws from the audience, so I suggested he needed a new example as the forces at work here couldn’t be more different (true story). He went apeshit but he was still hopelessly wrong. His EBacc has all the hallmarks of a PISA-led curriculum, far too academic, and exclusive. His greatest crime is to have moved the goalposts after goals have been scored. If you change the goalposts so dramatically and quickly, you simply condemn 85% of students as failures (only 15% currently meet the Ebacc standard). What’s worse, Gove is applying the measure retrospectively. This is like moving the goalposts at the end of the game and disallowing goals scored. It’s madness. Do the maths. You can have schools with high achievement in Maths and English plummet down the new league tables from near the top to near the bottom, as they haven’t focused on humanities or languages. One weird consequence is that a student who does Latin and Ancient History will be judged above those who do Business Studies, Engineering, psychology, a third science and lots of other subjects. It’s worse than bad, it’s perverse.

Conclusion

We don’t actually live in a more mathematical world. We live in a world where most maths is done by calculators, computers and machines, or a relatively small number of experts. The vast majority of us need little actual maths, other than ‘functional maths’. To funnel all young people into a path that demands a mostly irrelevant, maths curriculum is to turn them off school and learning. This obsession with maths may, mathematically, be the very things that lowers our general educational attainment.

3D printers: gimmick or game changer? Next big thing or expensive way to produce lots of ‘small, useless, plastic things’?

OK, if you have a spare grand or so for a 3D printer. Are they the ‘next big thing’ or merely an expensive way to produce lots of ‘small, useless, plastic things’? Apart from adding considerably to planetary waste, what impact will 3D printers have in learning?

Not a game changer

Technology is unpredictable. When Gutenberg produced his 2D printing press it led to massive social and political changes, and a shift towards putting learning literally in the hands of learners. This was to drive a religious reformation, scientific revolution and a rich cultural life based around writing and reading. In education, books and text remain the mainstay in most subjects.

Could the 3D printing press have a similar result? Well no. Books had been around for 12 centuries in learning prior to being printed. Little plastic objects have also been around for a long time but are not used that much in learning. Sure, there will be some applications in learning but this may not be a game changer.

What’s available?

Technology starts out expensive, experiments with formats, then prices plummet as the technology settles and becomes an affordable product. Laser printers, when invented  1969, were $20,0000but are now around 0.5% of that price, $100. This already happening with 3D printers. Sure, you can buy a $20,000 professional HP 3D printer but a $1200 3D printer is already available.

First came Cupcake  and Thing-o-matic then Makerbot Replicator with a single or dual head so that two colours or two different materials can be used in one object. Repraps such as Prusa, Mendel, Darwin etc are hacker designed using open source. Ultimaker, originally a student Msc project in Holland is now a viable $1194 machine. Makerbot, has had $10m VC funding, and its Replicator2 comes in a box. The market is still young, with a wide price range, different types of technology, using different materials producing different levels of quality.

How do they work?

Depends. Some squirt molten plastic or resin from a nozzle in layer after layer as both a table and nozzle move in three dimensions. Others use powder, ceramics even metal. Formlab’s laser plus resin is $3000 but resin is expensive $150 a litre, three times the price of plastic. Plastic around $50 per kilo but you can make hundreds of objects

Printers can print themselves

This is exaggerated, but it is true that some of these printers can print off some of their own components. The more they can print the cheaper they will be to replicate in other locales. More interesting is that the technology has benefited from the open source movement, in both software, hardware and the sharing of3D objects.

What do you do with them?

You can clone, create, prototype, share and replicate objects. Clone objects using a 3D scanner then print as many off as you wish. This has already happened in Metropolitan Museum of Art hackathon, where exhibits were scanned and cloned. Greek statuary from the British Museum has also been 3D printed. Create new objects, anything from new art to practical devices. Prototype objects, so that they can be refined, tested ergonomically and aesthetically, even presented to raise funds. Share objects, as they are all ultimately, relatively small packets of data, that can be shared, uploaded and download like any text, audio, image or video music file. Tens of thousands of 25000 objects can be downloaded from sites such as thingiverse.com and grabcad.com. Replicate objects on site or closer to their point of sale. Why ship objects when they can be manufactured on demand? It gives a whole new meaning to just-in-time production.

Long tail attached to one large beast?

This is a Chris Anderson, long-tail product that caters for all sorts of small batch, even one off objects for design development and actual delivery. This is interesting for a retailer, such as Amazon, where you can satisfy long tail demand in books. However, it’s likely the Amazon model will prevail, namely domination by a major player. For example, a new factory was opened this year in New York, the Mayor opened it with a pair of 3D printed scissors. This factory will 3D print any object you want in whatever colours and numbers, prototypes or finished products. It prints 3D 50 industrial printers.

How can they be used in learning?

Isn’t it odd, however, that we teach and learn people about the 3D world largely in 2D? Yes, but how often do you actually need a 3D object to learn or understand something?

Art & design

Museums are already using these printers to replicate some of their objects. The creative possibilities are endless, where students create forms and prototypes for sculptures, jewellery etc. It is likely to spawn new art in itself.

Archaeology

Archaeology in 3D is revolutionising the copying of bones of early. Louise Leakey’s African fossils. But other rare objects such as cuneiform tablets, coins, almost anything we pull out of the ground can be replicated on demand.

Engineering

Unfortunately, we in the UK have started with the rather cumbersome £6m research centre Engineering and Physics research Council, which says it is working with industry. What this lacks is real entrepreneurial push. However, it is clear that 3D design, prototyping and testing will benefit from this relatively cheap technology.

Maths & physics

Maths can be visualised, from simple geometric shapes, volumes, surface areas, intersections,  to sophisticated topographies. In general it offers huge opportunities to teach maths using real maths problems with real object creation as the goal. This could surely add a welcome boost in motivation for students who fail to see the connection between abstract maths and real world applications. The physicality of the process has been shown to instil curiosity and understanding. Interesting paper on this.

Medicine

In medicine, there are niche applications, such as anatomy, rare physiological conditions etc. However, it is likely that the real practice of medicine has more to gain than learning such as customised hearing aids, dental implants and so on.. Prosthetics can be created anywhere at anytime in remote places, customised legs, arms, hand etc. What’s more, with a scan of your existing leg an exact mirror copy from the digital file can be created.

More ambitiously, Professor Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow has been working on models downloadable chemistry sets that can make complex drugs. The3D printer created the chambers and tubes which you fill with the correct, commonly found ingredients, and out pops a drug.

Bioprinting uses bioink (cells) to build layer upon layer to create tissue. Ultimately it is hoped that entire organs, heart valves or bone implants could be created this way. In the short term a 3D printer could print skin cells directly on to a wound. Printed meat could also be used by pharmaceutical companies for testing, saving huge amounts of money.

Science

The real world is in 3D (well maybe more but let’s put esoteric maths and physics aside until 6D printers come along) yet science is taught in 2D, largely in print or from 2D PowerPoint presentations. Molecules in chemistry, organic forms in biology, planets and comets in astronomy the list is endless…..

Music
You can even print your own flute! See this video. Other instruments are also possible.
Fun stuff

The Cube is a Chinese 3D plug and play printer for kids/families which can produce small toys, such as figures, robots, dinosaurs etc. in many colours for $1299. You buy cartridges just like a normal printer. You can print off clothes and accessories, such a bikinis, plastic shoes and purses. Rather worryingly, you can create replica keys really easily and a 22 calibre handgun has already been created! I feel a film script coming on…

Serious stuff

This is exciting, 3D objects for the developing world. Water pumps, frames for eye glasses (which break more often than the lenses), replacement parts on vital machines, such as sewing machines etc. are all possible. The problem with poor and remote economies is that the cost of shipping is often prohibitively expensive. By simply shipping the software, objects can now be printed at the point of need.

Conclusion

Every educational institution could have a 3D printer that can create objects across the curriculum, on demand. STEM subjects are often the first port of call, but many other subjects can benefit, especially art and design. While it is true that the potential of a technology is often realised once people start to use it in anger, 3D printers are in danger of being the ‘next big thing’ when they are, in fact, just expensive machines that churn out ‘lots of useless small things’, more gimmick than game changer. Time will tell. What is clear is that 3D printing is a game changer in the real world outside of learning.
PS
Thanks to Carlo at the wonderful International Centre of Theoretical Physics for his excellent recorded seminar on this topic that can be found here.

Values as ‘crap acronyms’?

I was on a conference panel last week, when someone flaunted their ‘values’ approach to training. Now whenever values and training collide inside the ‘round and round the table’ Hadron collider of HR, the net result is usually a ‘crap acronym’.

Bacronyms: values created to fit word

Chances are that some wag in HR or training has shoehorned some abstract nouns into a word that sounds vaguely positive, completely losing sight of the original intention. Are they telling me that their values ‘just happened to fall into this acronym’? Actually, what happens is that at least some of the values emerge from the acronym.

How about this for banality from a Cheshire voluntary group: FLUID: Freedom 2 Love Ur Identity. Or another real example of a crap acronym: VALUE: This HR person went online as she could only think of Value Added….. and wanted others to fill it out! They did, and she was delighted with, Value Added Local, User friendly Experience. What a load of guff. When values are created to fit a word you want to say – shove your course….

Using middle, lower case letter in acronym

PEOPLE: Positive Spirit and Fun, HonEsty and Integrity, Opportunties Based on Merit, Putting the Team first, Lasting value for Clients and People, Excellence through Professionlism. One overlong, impossible to remember acronym with eleven nouns, and I love the way they have to use the ‘E’ in the middle of HonEsty to make it work! This, by the way, is from an HR consultancy.

AAAA (Association Against Acronym Abuse)

It’s not that I don’t like acronyms (Abbreviated Coded Rendition Of Name Yielding Meaning). They’re great as memorable cues. For example, I rather like ABC (Airways, Breathing, Circulation) in first aid and the customer care acronym GREAT, as an aide memoire, where five simple things can be recalled on the job:

Greet all customers & make them feel comfortable

Respect cultural & other personal differences

Evaluate how your customers want to be served

Adjust your approach to match your customer's needs

Thank your customers for their business.

I also have a soft spot for funny acronyms, such as ALITALIA (Airplane Lands In Turin And Luggage In Ancona), BAAPS (British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeon) unbelievably a real organisation and DIMWIT (Don't Interrupt Me While I'm Talking).

…it’s just that I’m a fully paid up member of AAAA, the Association Against Acronym Abuse.

Conclusion

This type of ‘affective’ training is delivered by sincere people who don’t know the slightest thing about how people learn, so we get poor presentation-driven pedagogy. Values need to be believed and felt emotionally. You need pretty sophisticated experiential training, through scenarios or fist-person-thinker simulations to do this well. It can be done and one of the best I’ve seen was for Apple, which was seriously scenario-led.

Injecting values into an organisation is hard and most often fails. It failed in the banks (catastrophically), it failed with politicians (expenses, morals, snobbery etc.), it failed in journalism (watch Levinson). I have a confession, I’ve delivered a fair number of these programmes into banks and similar organisations. They’re always the same, some fatuous acronym and values that stand no chance of widespread adoption through training. Why? You can’t teach values from a flipchart of PowerPoint. The acronym is usually a flipchart and PowerPoint gimmick. A list of abstract nouns is not a list of values. People see through the artificiality of this stuff as it doesn’t relate to them personally.

Calculators: Education stuck in pre-calculator age

Archaeological evidence for an abacus goes back to 5th century BC Greece, however, there is indirect evidence of their use in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Persia. It is still widely used in Asia. The humble electronic calculator was the first computer to impact teaching and learning. It quickly replaced mechanical slide rules and mechanical calculators in the 1970s. Calculators now include scientific, algebraic, trigonometric  and graphing functions.

Education is still stuck in pre-calculator age

Everyone’s miserable about maths: employers, politicians, teachers and especially learners, many who fail and hate the subject with a passion. Indeed, governments have become obsessed with the subject, largely on the hysteria surrounding the PISA rankings.

One issue that is receiving intense attention is ‘calculation’, which is kicking up a storm in maths education. The ubiquity of calculators has led some to question the way we teach maths in schools. They claim that the world has changed from analogue to digital and the teaching of maths needs to respond accordingly.

Some argue that calculators have led to a reduction in numeracy and maths skills. They recommend not using calculators in schools until a certain level of competence in mental arithmetic is reached. Others argue that the traditional focus on ‘calculation’ needs to be replaced by a more sophisticated curriculum of solving problems using maths. Why teach long division, when you are unlikely to ever use it in real life? Calculators can also be used to do the necessary calculation spadework on algebra, trigonometry and graphics.

Maths need exaggerated

Some, like Roger Schank, believe that the need to learn maths is grossly exaggerated as only a tiny proportion of adults will use the maths that is taught, beyond basic arithmetic. His point is that most of what is taught, especially algebra, is of no real practical use and does not help people to think logically. He often asks highly educated audiences to tell him the quadratic formula – few ever answer. Sure, some will need maths in their later career, so says Roger, let them learn it later. Roger has traced this obsession with maths back to early 19^th century curriculum choices and claims that this is a historical problem, fuelled by the fact that maths is easy to test, especially ‘calculation’

Too much calculation

Conrad Wolfram decries the focus on ‘calculation’ in school maths. We spend most of our time teaching calculations by hand, which any calculator and computer can do better than any human. Practical, mental arithmetic is fine, but what are these numeracy basics? Automation pushes the user towards using the tools in more sophisticated ways. Maths is not calculation and over the last thirty years calculation has been automated by calculators. Education is still stuck in a pre-calculator age.

Far better to understand what you’re trying to achieve. He recommends that programming is a better way to do maths. It makes maths more practical and academic at the same time. He goes further and argues that the obsession with calculation in maths kills off the initiative, intuition and perseverance that maths needs. In other words we’re turned off maths by maths. Students learn to look for and apply formula, which they then proceed to calculate. Text books are full of primitive, dry, exercises that seem like chores. Many now argue that real life problems should stimulate mathematical enquiry through the use of more word based problems.

Calculators and computers

A calculator is pretty standard as a native application on PCs, Macs and mobile devices. Tills automatically calculate the correct change for customers. Calculators are therefore embedded in newer forms of technology making them more readily available. This is one potential use of mobile devices in schools that teachers should consider.

Conclusion

Maths is forced, by law, upon people who see it as lacking relevance and don’t want to learn it, taught by people who, because they’re good at maths, often don’t know how to teach it. Yet the curriculum is aimed, largely at those very few who will use high-level maths professionally.

Radio education: huge and hugely underestimated

For over 80 years it’s been quietly delivering formal and informal learning to millions worldwide, especially the poor and marginalised. Far from being an old technology it is now transforming itself through podcasts, digital and internet radio.

Formal learning

Radio is a broadcast medium and so has several practical, educational advantages:

·         has huge geographic reach

·         reaches very large numbers of people

·         audio is cheap to produce

·         audio is cheap to transmit

·         radios are cheap

·         local languages can be used

·         can be self-sustaining

Formal learning, where radio is used on its own or is integral to a blend of distance learning materials that deliver formal courses, has been delivered for many decades. Unsurprisingly, it has long been used In large, sparsely populated rural areas, where schooling is difficult to organise, such as Australia and in most developing countries. Radio remains the most popular and accessible form of educational technology in Africa.

International Educational Systems has taken radio into marginal populations, such as refugees, nomads and those who simply cannot afford to go to school. Women have also been reached in some societies, where schooling is impossible or difficult, for example the Somalia Distance Education Literacy Programme (Somdel) supported by the BBC Worldwide Education Trust, where 70% of those who passed the course were women.

However, much radio in rural areas is used directly by schools, as it can deliver consistent and high quality content. Radio has been of particular use in health education, especially HIV/AIDS. Farming and food distribution has been taught in 39 African countries through Farm Radio International.

There has been radio delivered teacher training in Mali and training for health and education stakeholders in Sudan. One of the features of many of these initiatives is their delivery in local languages and their sensitivity to local cultures. In some cases, such as the Sudan Radio Services, radio time has been sold to pay for the educational services making it truly sustainable.

However, one of the criticisms of radio education is its focus on outside originated content, abstracts life skills and a lack of practical vocation content, especially farming, as the majority of children are the sons and daughters of farmers. Cheap wind-up or solar powered radios are now widely available from developers such as The Freeplay Foundation. This gives radio a real edge over TV and computer technology. Typical target audiences are in the tens or hundreds of thousands, some in their millions.

Audio and learning

Audio also has several cognitive advantages in learning:

·         listening is a universal skill

·         note taking is easy

·         imagination has to be used

·         great for visually impaired

·         easy to deliver in multiple languages

·         good in language learning

·         obviously essential for music

The use of the imagination is a fascinating point as it has been argued that this leads to deeper processing and higher retention in some subjects. The obvious downside is the lack of images and the fact that broadcast media are not under the control of the learner. The lack of control has been remedied by recording and podcasts have significantly improved the power of radio to teach and inform at the learner’s own pace.

A whole culture has developed around radio learning to include ‘listening groups’ and support materials such as comics and workbooks. In Australia, short-wave radio was used to transmit and receive between farmsteads and therefore among groups of teachers and learners, sometimes mimicking traditional teacher-classroom arrangements. Increasingly, for example in Zambia, we have seen radio’s power amplified by the supplementary use of iPods and mobile phones.

Informal learning

Radio is still used to educate in formally. The BBC’s R4 has over 10 million listeners a week and purely educational broadcasts, such as the highly academic ‘In Our Time’ have been running for years with many hundreds of podcasts now free on iTunes, covering science, philosophy and history. Radio has also been used, by the likes of the Open University and others for successful local advertising.

Radio and propaganda

Of course educational radio is not always worthy as it has also been used for propaganda. Major and minor powers still use radio as a form of educational colonialism. The Nazis were the first to see the totalitarian power of radio with Goebbels claim that, "radio will be to the twentieth century what the press was to the nineteenth". The Japanese used ‘Tokyo Rose’ and the North Vietnamese "Hanoi Hannah" against US troops and the Nazis Lord Haw-haw, against the British. The US has used radio for propaganda against many countries including Panama, Cuba and Iraq.

Radio and new media

Podcasting is the true heir to radio. To timeshift an audio experience and put it in the hands of the learner, gives them is convenience and control. Internet radio has given many access to distant radio stations and led to growth in stations with a very specific focus. Far from being a dead or dying medium it is finding new purposes and new channels.

Conclusion

Radio is scalable, in the broadcasting sense. It’s low cost and reach have seen widespread use, not only in the developing world but in developed countries like the UK, where radio has long been respected as a source of high quality educational content. Video is very far from killing the radio star.

Flipped learning: training got there first with flipcharts!

Flip one’s lid

We’ve all been there. That collaborative event where you’re forced to sit at round tables and asked to select a chair The trainer then poses some questions which you’re expected to answer with the Chairs of each table feeding back to the group as a whole, while someone writes it up on flipchart sheets and pins them on the wall, so that it can be collated and sent out to everyone.

What actually happens is that the extrovert quickly volunteers to be the chair (or becomes chair by default as no one else can be bothered), the table spends too long deciding what the ill-formed question actually means or shoots off on obscure tangents, the question forgotten. The chair then feeds back their own thoughts, ignoring all other contributions. Sure the flip chart pages are pinned up on the wall with bluetac, ruining the paint work, but you never, ever get the feedback sent to you afterwards.

This is what passes for collaboration in training, an tired-old ritual that is generally a waste of time. It’s illusory learning, pretend collaboration and just one of those awful things that only happen on awful training courses. I really do want to flip my proverbial lid when these sessions are suggested.

Flipside

OK, the flipside of flipcharts is that they do have their uses. They’re a bit boring, but big enough to be seen by small audiences and small enough to be used by a presenter and a little more small scale and human than a massive projection. For small group brainstorming and sport’s coaching, they can be useful.

Of course, they don’t require batteries or computer technology, so many trainers see it as a safe bet. Unlike PowerPoint, paper is designed to be written upon, and so you can capture the thoughts of learners. Its popularity among trainers is due in some part to its suitability to small audiences in courses with fixed content.

Some flipchart tips include; writing straight by ruling faint lines before you start, write words or images in faint pencil and amaze learners with your free-flowing sketching skills or write faint notes to keep you on track.

Conclusion

Not much to them really but I do like this spoof entry under Flipcharts in Wikipedia,

“Recently, scientists have developed a digital self-writing flip chart which writes word for word everything it is instructed to record. The disability action group "Armless" has stated that this is a significant step forward for disabilities groups to have conferences with people without disabilities. Also being released into public sale is a flipchart which is self-heightening. This system is known as the POGO system.”

Lecterns: technology of teaching or preaching?

Educational furniture often has the whiff of pomposity and the ‘lectern’ stinks of the stuff. That most visible symbol of that disastrous carry-over from church to university, the lectern, speaks volumes about the pedagogic poverty of the lecture. It’s a phoney pulpit from which teachers play at being priests. What it encourages is the view that knowledge is fixed. The books that lay on the lectern were meant to be read aloud, the fixed scripture of the Bible, Koran or Torah. The lectern says “the book which is laid on this altar is holy and must be believed, or thou shall go to hell, or worse, fail thy exams”.

Lectures

What lecterns do is encourage dry lectures. That padded out, one hour (Babylonians had a 60-based number system) of relentless speech that has far more to do with lazy preparation than pedagogy. Give people who are inexperienced at teaching a prop and they'll use it and use it to literally prop up themselves and poor teaching, whether it be lecture notes or text-ridden Powerpoint.

Stand and deliver

The lectern fixes knowledge but it also fixes the speaker. It roots them to the spot and encourages that insidious practice of reading a lecture from notes or worse, verbatim from sheets of paper, or even more ghastly reading out a published paper. This destroys teaching in Higher Education, and kills conferences stone dead. Generation after generation of students get spoon-fed, or worse bored rigid, by this repetitive reading. When the lecturer lectures from a lectern, profession, practice and pomposity all meet on this one spot.

Speak don’t read

My heart sinks when a speaker stands stock still behind this wooden palisade, scared to come out and show themselves, fearful of the reaction. My heart sinks even deeper when I see the glasses go on and the sheaf of notes appear. I know I’m soon to experience psychological distress as the nodding movement from paper to audience casts the spell of indifference across the entire lecture or conference hall.

I’ve seen people step behind a lectern and say, “Good morning, my names is (glance down) Nigel Jobsworth, from the Department of Regurgitation or University of Dullsville, and I want to speak to you today about (glance down) this very exciting subject… (reading from paper). I’ve seen speakers reduced to sweaty, quivering wrecks because their notes have ended up in the wrong order. Without the written word they’re confused mutes. I’ve seen a Russian Professor at a UN conference talk for a full hour (to the minute) in a monotone voice, ignoring even punctuation, from her notes, announcing at the end that she was a Professor of Communication (I kid you not) from the University of Moscow. So hypnotised was I by this act of absurdist theatre that I neither understood nor remembered a single word.

Death of oratory

Academic and political oratory have been dealt a death blow by the steady retreat away from speaking honestly from your own mind, towards speaking literally from notes. In the case of politicians, it is notes written by flunkies, who strip life away leaving nothing but the banal bones of written prose or what they think are soundbites, but sound like the clichés they are. Just as bad are the academics who seem to think that lectern delivery exudes academic seriousness. It doesn’t. Reading is not teaching.

Conclusion

The lectern is only any good for holding a laptop. It’s something to walk away from, to avoid. Think TED and you can’t go far wrong.

Punishers – weird technology of punishment in schools

Technology of punishment in learning? Surely not. Blackboards have long been used as instruments of punishment where pupils are asked to write the same line a set number of times. ‘Lines’ often had to be written in detention, after school. Many claim that linking punishment to writing is a strong demotivator, as future writing talks are likely to be associated with punishment. Others argue that writing practice is both a punishment and useful exercise. The argument around corporeal punishment in schools - useful for discipline or child abuse - has been raging for two millennia.

Roman punishment

From Sparta and Rome to the public schools of England, punishment has been seen as a necessary condition for education, especially of boys. Spartan education was militaristic and punishment (flogging) was common. Indeed stealing was seen as a virtue, only being caught shameful, and the ability to take pain a mark of courage. In Rome schools had a range of technology for beating students including the ferula (birch branches), scotia (leather whip straps) and the hardest leather whip the flagellum.

Dunces hats

The pointed ‘dunces’ hat, sometimes with a ‘D’ on it, was put on the heads of pupils who misbehaved and they were made to stand in the corner, sometimes with their face to the wall. The name comes from the Scottish theologian Duns Scotus, whose followers stubbornly refused to adopt to the new humanities and so ‘Duns’ became a byword for stubbornness and stupidity. The word dunce first appears I the middle of the 17^th century and ‘dunces cap’ first appears in The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens. In Europe there was an equivalent, a headdress resembling a donkey’s ears, to indicate ‘stupidity’.

Canes

Spanking buttocks with canes was widespread, especially in English speaking public schools until relatively recently and is quite clearly responsible for what the French call the ‘vice anglais’ or ‘spanking’ on the bare or clothed buttocks. It was widely represented in novels, films, as a key aspect of British schooling. Rattan spanking canes, used for corporeal punishment came into common use in the late 19t century, when it was found they could deliver seething pain, even through clothes. The practice continued, largely in the English speaking public schools, usually by the headmaster but also by prefects, and although banned in most countries, still exists today.

Corporeal punishment was banned in England & Wales in 1999, Scotland 2000 and Northern Ireland in 2004. Although it still lingers and is still commonly used in Iran, many sub-Saharan and African countries, such as Zimbabwe and in Singapore and Malaysia.

Paddles

In the US spanking on the buttocks with a foot long wooden or fibreglass paddle is legal in 19 states, mostly in the mid-west and south; Alabama Arizona Arkansas Colorado Florida Georgia Idaho Indiana Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Mississippi Missouri North Carolina Oklahoma South Carolina Tennessee Texas and Wyoming. Up to 20,000 students a year request medical help after being paddled. Some see it as a distasteful hangover, all too common in ‘black’ states. Others see it as child abuse and there are on-going legal cases.

Leather straps

The ‘strap’ or ‘belt’ was the mainstay of corporeal punishment in Scottish Schools. It was a thick leather strap, forked at the end and applied to the outstretched hands. I can still vividly remember the pain, burst blood vessels on my wrist and injustice for being late for school (it was the bus not me that was late!). The Lochgelly Tawse had the largest share of the market as it had no sharp edges, didn’t wrap round the hand and was lighter and easier to use. As a piece of technology it was exquisitely designed as an instrument of pain and punishment.

Whips

Whips have been used for centuries in schools. A worrying trend, however, is its routine contemporary use in Koranic schools, not just for bad behaviour but for failing on simple recitations, reading and writing tasks. Punishment in this context is largely around routine, rote memorisation tasks.

Technology twist

In an interesting technology twist, mobiles in classrooms have exposed some of the excessive brutality inflicted by teachers in some countries and have led to prosecutions and changes in government policy. Take these horrific examples from Thailand and South Korea. There are many others.

Pedagogy of punishment

Even in Roman times, the debate raged over the corporeal punishment of children. Quintilian (35-95 AD, was "entirely against corporal punishment in education... it is disgusting and slavish…the pupil whose mind is too coarse to be improved by censure will become as indifferent to blows. Finally, these chastisements would be entirely unnecessary if the teachers were patient and helpful…..And consider how shameful, how dangerous to modesty are the effects produced by the pain or fear of the victims. This feeling of shame cripples and unmans the spirit, making it flee from and detest the light of day."

Quintilian addresses the main issues, 1) it’s degrading; 2) victims become indifferent; 3) teachers need to find better methods; 4) demotivates and cripples the mind. Other arguments against include the possibility of showing that hitting others is acceptable, increasing aggression in children and possible trauma. These arguments were to eventually win the day and corporeal punishment is now banned in many developed countries.

The technology of punishment, based on the pedagogy of retribution and deterrence has long been part of education systems around the world. It was long believed to be an effective tool, especially for bad behaviour among boys. Interestingly, corporeal punishment is highly selective on gender. It has also been used to punish failure and at its most extreme to instil fear and push rote learning of set texts.

Conclusion

The argument for corporeal punishment in schools still rages, however, the practice has been banned in many countries and the general move is towards its eradication. It’s useful to remind ourselves that technology in schools is used for a very wide range of practices, some less palatable than others.

Manuscripts and the collapse of learning

This is St Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin, and it speaks volumes about the medieval, monastic scribe. Note the lined parchment, where a plumb line was used to draw parallel lines. The codex is on a lectern, at an angle to control the flow of ink, and the curtain is drawn back to give more light. In his hands are a quill pen and a knife for scraping away errors and sharpening eth quill. Paper only became common in the 1400s and at three to four pages per day even the best scribe made a mistake per page (erased by scraping with knife or pumice stone). This was painstaking work but it’s the illuminations that took the real artistry, time and effort.

Manuscripts and learning

Widely admired, these illustrated manuscripts are much admired by book lovers. But what effect did they have on the dissemination of knowledge and learning?

Manuscript literally means written by hand but this meant that books were scarce and existed in a culture of fixed knowledge and deference. At the end of the Roman era literacy plummeted and for over a thousand years civilisation, especially the culture of writing and reading, was reduced to a small number of scribes and a medium available largely to elites. Illustrated manuscripts are the luxury goods of religion and royalty. Their scarcity was their strength.

We must remember that books like this were rare. Incredibly expensive to produce, they were owned and treasured by the elite. Indeed, the manuscripts are overwhelmingly about the two great institutions of the state - Church and Monarchy. Print is power and politics, so a manuscripts is never just a manuscript, it is a device for religious certainty, conviction, conversion, dogma, flattery, preferment, a claim to legitimacy, a contract, a confirmation of status. This has little to do with learning.

However, what manuscript culture gave us was the shift from reading ‘aloud’ to devotional ‘silent’ reading. This led to the development of spaces between words, punctuation, paragraphs, capitalisation, page numbers, contents pages and indexes. This demand for books was to lead to technological advances that were to free texts from the the age of the manuscript.

Religious censorship

As writing became the medium of religion, Buddhism in China and Asia, Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the Middle East and Europe, so manuscripts became, not objects of open learning, but texts to be read aloud, memorised by rote learning and believed. Beautiful as they were, they were the instruments of fixed thought, orthodoxy and control.

Islam – stuck in manuscript age

We have an interesting example in the history of written culture with Islam. Islam was a conduit for many ancient texts but remained stubbornly fixated with 'written' and copied texts, so remained in the manuscript ‘written by hand’ age well into the 19^th century. The Ottoman Sultan Bayazid banned printing completely across the entire empire in 1485. It wasn’t until 1727 that this law was repealed, even then only for secular books. This eventually had a devastating effect on the Islamic world’s contribution to knowledge, science and learning. It wasn’t until the second half of the 19^th century that printing became commonplace.

Koran means ‘recitation’. It was meant to be read aloud and endless recitation and memorising of the book, through repeated spoken readings, has always been highly prized in the Islamic world. But this comes at a price. This repeated repetition is massively effective in learning and results in the deep processing and retention of the text, and the dogmatic convictions that come with deeply held knowledge and belief.

Catholic censorship

Manuscripts were largely objects of religious dogma and therefore the enemy of learning in the sense of new ideas and critical analysis. Remember that the Catholic Church still had a prohibited books list until 1966. To be clear, the list included; Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, André Gide, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Milton, John Locke, Galileo Galileo and Blaise Pascal. Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for his writings. So religious control really meant control and censorship.

Spanish conquerors burnt one civilisation’s entire literary output. Writing had been invented, independently, in Mesoamerica and there was a rich tradition of religious, astronomical and other literature, yet Bishop Diego de Landa ordered the collection and destruction of all Mayan manuscripts. Only four survived.

Royal censorship

It was not just religious groups who were suspicious of manuscripts. Henry VIII was a censor who tried to ban reading, even of the Bible, by apprentices and women. Elizabeth I did the same through The Stationer’s Company. So Royalty, far from being bibliophiles promoting reading and writing, were narcissistic owners and censors. fGutenberg, and Caxton, did truly revolutionised the replication and scalability of the writing and reading of books.

Conclusion

Magnificent manuscripts give us a direct causal link with the past. The Book of Kells is a masterpiece. There’s even annotations in Henry VIIIs own hand in the margins. The Mathew Paris 13^th C journey to the Holy Land is an intriguing strip map, as he certainly never did the journey himself. You can wallow in the few books that did exist over these many centuries but don’t fall for this being in any way a golden age for books and learning. Manuscript culture was in many ways the enemy of learning. It fixed learning in a pattern of endless copying and repetition. Manuscripts fossilised knowledge and kept it in the hands of church and rulers.

From stone axe to mobile: hand-held learning

One of my most prized objects is a Neolithic handaxe, picked up on the Downs close to where I live. For me, it's similar, but more exciting, to hold than an iPhone, as to handle this object is to touch the mind of someone who lived tens, even hundreds of thousands of years ago. It’s not only an object you can learn from but a lesson in learning. To watch an axe being made with a hammerstone, then antler or soft hammer for edging, is to see a masterclass in manufacture. But what have we to learn about the minds of our ancestors and how these skills were taught and learnt?

Tools as technology

James Hutton and Charles Lyle had opened up the vastness of the past, through geological fieldwork with the concept of deep time. The history of the earth was pushed back from thousands to millions then billions of years. Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of the Species by Natural Selection (1859) supported the idea that the evolution of life had to be seen in this context of deep time.

Part of the re-evaluation of the origins and evolution of life was the re-evaluation of our own species. Almost immediately Prehistoric Times (1865) by John Lubbock defined and split the Stone Age into Palaeolithic and Neolithic. The Palaeolithic was characterised by flaked stone artefacts and the Neolithic by polished stone axes. Technology, hand axes, were already defining the epochs of human evolution.

Axes and pedagogy

Hand axes are the primary evidence for learning in prehistory. Stone tools show intent and are a window into the minds of our ancestors and their ability to learn. We have been making these axes for one and a half million years. What is astounding is how similar they are over such a huge geographical area (three continents) and over a million and a half years, the same teardrop shape and cutting edge.

First, they are difficult to make. It requires knowledge, decision making and sophisticated skills that take time to learn and, importantly, skills that must have been taught. Defined as learning objectives, we can first assume hand-eye co-ordination, the ability to imagine a future three dimensional shape and the ability to conceive the tool as having a purpose.

Suitable local material had to be found and the right shaped nodules selected. Then there’s the fiendishly, difficult knapping skills. This involves the use of tools to make tools, as later axes required hard hammers and soft hammers for edging.  As one knapps, constant adaption and problem solving is needed, as it is not just a matter of applying a set of fixed rules. Over and above these skills is the mathematical skill of transformation. Gowlett (1993) has inferred, from the fact that they were able to make axes of the same shape at different sizes, the mathematical ability to scale. These are complex cognitive abilities and acquired skills. Few people, even today, master the skills of prehistoric knappers.

Wynne (1979) has used the idea that early human cognitive development reflects what we know about child development and so placed axe manufacture into a Piagian development model. He argued that the earliest axes use the simple the cognitive skill of striking a blow next to the fracture left by the first blow. This only demands a ‘one thing at a time’ skill, a pre-operational intelligence. Later axes show the ability to imagine a three dimensional shape and work towards symmetry, an operational intelligence. However, Piaget’s stages have not withstood the test of time and the earliest axes seem to show more skill than the pre-operative concept allows. It would seem that considerable knowledge and skills are required for even the earliest forms of axe production and that these skills are likely to have been taught by skilled experts.

Prehistoric teaching

Imitation must surely have been the way learning took place but is there evidence for teaching? Boesch (1991) has observed occasional episodes of chimps being stimulated, facilitated and actively taught in the wild, where for example, an adult chimp repositioned a nut on a natural anvil for a younger chimp and rotated a stone hammer in the hand of a younger chimp to crack nuts. However, tool making and teaching by adult animals is almost non-existent in the wild. Assuming that early humans were cognitively superior to chimps, Kohn (1999) argues that axe production was a skill most likely taught by mothers to sons. Experiments have shown that it is not easy to teach by demonstration alone and that language, in the sense of the ability to teach, is also likely to have been used.
Utility
As homo sapiens emerged from Africa, we see the development of tool manufacture away from the one ax from one stone culture towards the production of blades, points and scrapers. This is often in response to the changing food sources, namely smaller animals in drier conditions. When large, obvious and plentiful sources of protein become depleted, smaller animals must be hunted and that requires more guile and smarter tools, especially projectiles.

Skills and selection

What remains a puzzle is the fact that many handaxes show manufacture beyond utility. The Boxgrove axes, just a short drive from my home, were manufactured on the spot for butchery and left there but huge hand axes, such as the Furze Platt Giant and many other finely worked examples seem to show axes for ‘show’. Kohn argues that symmetry reflects fitness and that sexual selection is at work here. Some evolutionary psychologists suggest that sexual selection in combination with imitation and teaching is needed to explain the reach and longevity of axe production. It would seem, however, that axe production went well beyond utility into cultural and social significance. The very act of acquiring the skill to make an axe may well have been a mark of fitness and social status.

Conclusion

We can fooolow the evolution oh hominoids as much by the trail of stone tools they left behind, as the rare fossil bones. When we link the fossil evidence with the stone tool evidence, we see a cognitive progression present in the toolsets, which become smaller, more sophisticated and more differentiated in use, a bit like mobile technology in the modern world.
Early humans developed a technical intelligence in the working of stone that is rarely matched, even today. Stone axe production was profligate and shows that we developed, not only the ability to use the technology of tools, but also the ability to teach and learn a wide range of high level cognitive and motor skills. There is also evidence that this technology was more than just practical tool production. Its role in social and cultural life was considerable. We, as a species, could be said to be defined by our teaching and learning skills. Although the stone axe is only obliquely a learning tool, it set our species on the road to massive advances in the use of tools and technology. From the stone axe to mobiles, hand-held tools have a long pedigree in learning and teaching; the brushes used in cave paintings, reed pens, clay tablets, books, pencils, chalk, cameras, calculators and mobiles have all been used to enhance and accelerate our ability to teach and learn. Above all, they put learning literally into the hands, and therefore minds, of the learner. 

Bibliography

Mithen, S. J. (1996).The prehistory of the mind: A search for the origins of art, religion, and science. London: Thames and Hudson.

Rudgley, R. (1998).Lost civilisations of the Stone Age. London: Century.

Kohn M. (1999) As We Know It: Coming to terms with the evolved mind. Granta.

Boesch, Christophe (1991) Teaching among wild chimpanzees.Animal Behaviour, Vol 41(3), Mar 1991, 530-532.

Wynn, J. (1979) The Intelligence of later Ascheulian Hominids. Man 14, 371-91.

Gowlett, J. (1993). Ascent to civilization: The archaeology of early humans. New York: McGraw-Hill.

IDI – 7 reasons why online degree students outperform University campus-based students

The Interactive Design Institute was a revelation when I visited. These guys deliver degree courses, accredited by an English University, to both UK and foreign students (full and part-time). The fact that you can deliver a real academic course with strong vocational ‘learn by doing’ components, online, is interesting, but the real story here is the fact that their students outperform the campus-based students doing the same course. Why?

I spent some time going through a learner journey and this, I think, is why they do so well.

1. Multiple intakes. IDI does three intakes a year, giving more flexibility to students and earnings to tutors in the academic ‘off-season’. This breaks the back of the archaic one intake a year model and makes teaching and learning a year-round activity. Not radical but necessary.

2. Superior feedback. Considered, detailed and constructive feedback is the pedagogic potion that makes them special. They really do follow the advice of Black and William through clear, point-by-point feedback designed to take the student forward. I’ve worked through their tutor feedback, which is brilliant and thorough. Nothing like the cursory, general, not written and recorded and therefore often forgotten advice in many face-to-face sessions.

3. Asynchronous feedback. ALL feedback is asynchronous. This is interesting. They have abandoned Skype, webcasts, videoconferencing and other synchronous, real-time forms of feedback in favour of asynchronous feedback, which they regard as superior. First, it takes away the awkwardness of academic/student face-to-face interactions. Second, it’s archived, giving the student and tutor a good audit trail to check, read, re-read and respond to. This is important, as the feedback si very detailed and needs a point-by-point detailed response. Verbal feedback is too transitory.

4. Exemplary content. Good course material, software tutorials, exemplars and other forms of useful content lie at the heart of the course, allowing the student to proceed at their own pace and get relevant teaching and help, whenever needed. Far too may University courses rely on thin, out of date content delivered in lecture series. The content is also kept bang up to date by dedicated ‘content update’ staff. Give the students access to good content, with strong tutor support and feedback, and they will learn.

5. Quality tutors. Given the quality of the content, the tutors can focus on what they do best – teach. Free from the constraints of lecturing, designing content and departmental politics, they can focus on feedback. It’s that simple.

6. Student support. Students need to be encouraged, helped and even rescued during a long course. IDI have a dedicated person, who really gets to know the students and cares about keeping them on track. She’s proactive, looking for signs and symptoms of fatigue or worry. It’s a vital safety net.

7. Lower costs. What’s surprising is how small their premises are, no sprawling campus, no lecture theatres, no monument building, just minimal administration and year round use. Given the low occupancy rates of most University buildings the savings are ENORMOUS.

Conclusion

What impressed me most about the IDI was the dedication of the staff to their students. This is a private sector organisation with the best of public sector values (they mostly came from that background). What they deliver is superior in many ways to the traditional campus degree, with real scalability, in several senses. First, it allows access to foreign students to complete courses with UK accreditation, free from VISA restrictions. Second, it copes with year round intakes. Third, it provides more flexibility for students. Fourth, it has much lower basic costs, where the money goes towards good teaching, not capital expenditure and the upkeep of expensive real-estate. Every University that has a design degree should consider using them. Given the demand and high costs of HE, this is surely the way forward.