Kohlberg's moralising and its revival - character education

The Nazis and the Holocaust led Lawrence Kohlberg to focus on the moral dimension of education. Drawing on the Socratic interest in values and virtue, and John Dewey’s view of education as the development of the individual, he saw education not as moral instruction but as the development of moral judgement and behaviour. His inspiration was Piaget’s stages of development, which he applied to the moral development of children and adults. His theoretical work was matched by practical recommendations around the concept of a ‘just community’. These could be schools, professions, social groups, even prisons.

Three types of educational theory

For Kohlberg there are three movements in educational thinking:

1. Romanticism

2. Cultural transmission

3. Progessivism

Romanticism’s formative figure is Rousseau and this movement sees the child as a natural learner, with institutions that often inhibit their progress. Cultural transmission, the transfer of knowledge and values from one generation to the next, attempts to preserves cultural capital. He saw focus on the psychological aspects of learning, especially behaviourism, as well as the use of technology, as typical of this movement. Progressivism, exemplified by William James and John Dewy, sees education as an important contributor to society, it’s cultural and democratic dimensions. Kohlberg was a ‘progressive’.

Six stages of moral development

Building on Piaget’s (now discredited) stages of development:

Level 1 - Preconventional

1. Punishment and obedience orientation

2. Instrumental relativist orientation

Children think and behave egoistically, acting on potential consequences, such as punishment. This self-interest can then develop into a more instrumental outlook, where you see how others may help you promote your own interests, as in receiving rewards for good behaviour.

Level 2 - Conventional

3. Interpersonal concordance orientation

4. Society maintaining orientation

Adolescents mature into this stage by obeying society’s rules but without much reasoned reflection. Wanting to be liked or respected by others makes one behave in ways in which groups approve. Recognition of the ‘good’ and ‘bad in relation to adherence to the law also emerges.

Level 3 - Postconventional

5. Social contract orientation

6. Universal ethical principles

At this level, individuals use their own ethical principles to make judgement and do not simply adhere to external norms. There is a recognition of diversity of moral perspectives and the resolution of moral issue through democracy or other mechanisms of agreement. This may move on to higher levels of abstraction about moral principles, such as justice and rights, where individuals see themselves as like others in mutually agreed action.

Individuals move through these stages, none are skipped, we hardy ever go back, we can hold back but not accelerate stage development. He used Piaget’s notion of changing schemata, mental constructs that make sense of experience, that determine the limits of moral reasoning. New experiences are either assimilated (integrated without major change) or accommodated (new schemata created). 

New stages are more complex and high-level. Cognitive disequilibrium forces change as new experiences cause cognitive conflict. The conflict is resolved by the creation of new cognitive schemata.

In addition to drawing upon theoretical ideas from Piaget and John Rawls, he researched the hypothetical stages using Moral Judgement Interviews (MJI) where moral problems are presented and the reasoning, not conclusions, studied. Interviews were conducted every three years over twenty years and, he claims, confirmed his six-stage theory. Further research across forty countries also conformed, he claimed, its cross-cultural validity.

These six stages of moral development were highly influential and teachers were encouraged to use teaching tactics appropriate to these stages, curriculum recommendations were made and a real movement emerged around staged moral development.

Criticism

The basic idea that moral reasoning lies at the root of or plays the primary role in moral behavior is rejected by many intuitionists. Many came to see Kohlberg’s interpretation as no more than that, the ‘interpretation’ of basically intuitive moral judgment. Subsequent research showed that both Paiget’s and Kohlberg’s stages were wrong, so wrong that the very idea of the Kohlberg framework had to be adjusted. However, the adjustments proved so extreme that the framework had to be abandoned in favour of other possible approaches. Elliot Turiel thought that the moral development process was also massively fuelled by social convention. There was an amusing interlude when Carol Gillighan took a huge gender swiped at Kohlberg in her book "In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development" (1982). She made the reasonable point that his research had only involved males and that Kohlberg was simply reinforcing stereotypical male character traits. She had a point but simply replaced Kohlberg with another set of character traits around a morality of care. It had all gone to pot. There is also the tricky issue that multiple stages can be observed in the same individuals.

Conclusion

Kohlberg’s developmental psychology, as applied to the moral sphere, brought an important, dynamic dimension into moral education. Yet, like many staged processes, it proved to be too rigid and has crumbled somewhat due to subsequent research. The role of institutional education in the teaching of ethics remains problematic, as religious pressures and the roles of other agents, such as families, peer-groups and the media play important roles.

Morph into character teaching

More recently the moral issue has changed into an interest in ‘character’ education. In practice, deep, political roots of moral and character education really lie in conservative worries about cultural and moral decline. Every older generation has its views that the world is going to the dogs and that we must bring back some golden age of high character (usually theirs) to tame this feral, new, non-conformist generation.

In the US the character education movement is often pushed by conservative and religious sources that see the creep of liberal values as equivalent to moral decline. The religious lobby, in particular, has been successful in pushing this agenda. The most recent Federal example was G. W. Bush, who saw it as essential component of educational policy. In the UK we have an entirely different, and hugely influential stream of thought that comes originally from Thomas Arnold and the public school system. Let’s call it the ‘playing fields of Eton’ complex, but anyone who has experience in the UK system knows exactly what this is. With a hugely disproportionate number of politicians and civil servants coming from a public-school background, this tradition is stronger in the UK than almost any other comparable nation. There is constant pressure to see the state system as dysfunctional and if we could only take some of the magic dust from the private schools and scatter it down upon the teachers in the state system, all would be well.

Character as a subject

The Dfe talks of “the teaching of character as a separate subject”. However, there is no evidence for this at all. In fact there is plenty of evidence to show that this type of teaching has no effect whatsoever. The teaching of character and values, if they can be ‘taught’ at all is a bold claim.

Let’s start with the big one, certainly the one with the biggest title, ‘Efficacy of Schoolwide Programs to Promote Social and Character Development and Reduce Problem Behavior in Elementary School Children’ a report from the Social and Character Development Research Program  (2010). It looked at seven SACD programs and 20 student and school outcomes, all on social and character development and concluded that school-based character education programs produce no measurable improvements in student behaviour or academic performance. This was an astonishing result from a large and well designed piece of research. In fact there are no peer-reviewed studies that support the idea that character teaching has a positive, measurable effect.

Character as conformity

Character and conformity are easily confused. Far from shaping ‘character’ in schools, we should be doing the opposite and encouraging students to question these norms and become autonomous learners, able to distinguish between moral inculcation, based on assumed social norms, from more open tolerant approaches to education. It is by no means clear that the character traits of teachers is the right model or that teachers know what character traits are and how to teach them.

Character and schools

In fact, character education has been a feature of many totalitarian, religious and repressive systems, as character is moulded to match particular ideologies. In the US this of often a route for conservative, religious education. In China, the Confucian system, which is strongly character driven, pushes students towards a highly conformist, non-critical form of rote learning. In Islamic states a strictly conformist and literal form of the Koran is used to shape character. Private schools with a narrow socio-economic group is likely to promote character in terms of that group. In truth, unless a school system is truly secular (and arguably even then) character education reflects the cultural norms of that school. In the UK, with the rise of faith schools, this has already caused considerable problems.

Conclusion

When a politician talks about ‘character’, my heart sinks. It’s like Jimmy Saville taking a line on sex education – he’s an expert of sorts, just the wrong sort. Politicians love to meddle in educational practice, in a way they would never in say, medical practice. That’s because they think of themselves as ideals and whatever ‘they’ experienced in education must be good for the rest of us. This explains their obvious disengagement from the voters and blindness when it comes to judgments on the role of character in education, even the world at large. Let’s put this rather odd ‘C-word’ back where it came from, in the files marked ‘bad theory’, ‘old-school thinking’ and ‘political conceit’.

Understanding Carol Dweck - queen of growth mindsets

Carol Dweck’s work on ‘growth mindsets’ has had wide-reaching influence. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006) took motivational theory in a specific direction around a specific attitude that, she claims, leads to accelerated learning. For Dweck, students can too often see school as the place where they perform for teachers, who then judge them, whereas, for Dweck, growth is what education should be about and keeping the momentum by encouraging grow mindsets, is an essential teaching skill. 

Fixed and growth mindsets

She has observed that many educators still believe that praising intelligence builds esteem, confidence and motivation to learn. This, she claims is false. There is also the belief that innate intelligence is the main factor in achievement. This, she believes is harmful, even for successful students. Teachers and learners have two forms of mindset: fixed or growth. With fixed mindsets, you believe in innate abilities, fear failure and often stop prematurely in learning and development. With a growth mindset, you welcome failure and persist at work, in learning and life, through hard work and effort. She doesn’t deny that nature is important but believes, through the evidence of her own research, that nurture wins out most of the time. This may seem rather obvious but the orthodoxy in parenting books was to pump up a child’s self-esteem by praising them as talented individuals not as hard working learners. Dweck is careful to see this as a complex problem in that beliefs about intelligence are not the only factor at work and that context matters. 

Reaction to failure

For Dweck, a learner’s beliefs on intelligence and goals significantly influences their learning success. What happens when you come across an error – fight or flight? Using models of goal-directed behaviour, she sees the reaction to problems and failure as a key marker for success in learning. Her conclusions are drawn from cognitive psychology, especially attention and reactions to feedback (negative, positive and type). When she gave 10 year-olds problems that were challenging, some reacted with relish and got stuck in, others reacted badly and failed. On analysis, she found that those with fixed mindsets found it harder to overcome setbacks and failures, compared to those with growth mindsets, who are more resilient. 

Fixed mindset students, who believe in intrinsic ability and intelligence, on encountering problems, can avoid opportunities to learn further. Their beliefs may lead them to be discouraged, setbacks as a reason to halt effort. They may even hide their mistakes. In addition, 'effort’ is seen as a weakness, to be disparaged and avoided, leading to a lack of progress. Fixed mindset learners see cheating and identifying people weaker than them as strategies. 

Growth mindset learners, learn from errors. It’s when learners encounter challenges and difficulties that the mindsets swing into action. They persist and develop resilience when faced with challenges and difficulties. This can be a debilitating problem, when young people believe that ‘talent’ is the key criterion for success, the ones who feel they lack talent fail as they simply stop. In this sense they are following, often what they are told and taught, then their own beliefs and reason. They are taught that talent matters and signs of failure are punished. This denigrates the idea that effort, application and persistence are what really matter. If effort is disparaged and a culture develops when learners, for example, pretend they don’t study hard for exams, real damage is done to others. Acceptable failure is the key to good practice. Failure is an opportunity to adapt and grow. High quality learning experiences focus on deliberate improvement. This means encouraging a culture of deliberate failure and environments where it’s acceptable and safe to fail. She has also looked at the sort of self-handicapping that hold back women and people of colour, when faced with challenge and failure.

Feedback

In research with 4 year-olds to adolescents, growth feedback through praising effort (You must have worked hard at these problems) leads to consistently better outcomes than fixed feedback, praising ability (You must be smart at these problems). The language of teachers is therefore important. Growth mindsets can be encouraged and fixed mindsets avoided by the judicious use of appropriate feedback. Don’t praise intelligence, abilities or talent but effort, strategy, focus, improvement. Don’t praise the child, praise the work and effort. For example You really tried hard in preference to You’re really good at this. Process-oriented praise should also focus on specific feedback about that task. This joint strategy of effort and process praise is clear and prescriptive. Tell them what they’ve done to achieve the result is good and encourage that approach in the future. You really studied and … you really tried and…. you stuck to it… you took on…. As well as being precise in naming the process, task or approach they took, such as; research, reading, repeated tries, corrections, looking at alternatives, concentration, staying on task and so on. Even with high achievers, pushing these learners towards more challenge is important. 

Dweck has also developed a computer tool, Brainology, where students learn about the brain and learning through doing experiments and seeing how the brain changes with acquired memories to get smarter. This led to increased self-awareness of the value of effort and study.

Equality

This growth mindset results in better school transitions, for example from school to college. It is particularly relevant for students who struggle and underperform. Growth mindset classrooms result in practical equality as attitudes to failure are shifted from acceptance to resilience. She claims that schools in Harlem, the Bronx as well as native American students have all benefited from this approach. And it is not just achievement that results from growth mindsets but more enjoyment of learning and more respect for teachers.

Criticism

There is some evidence that the growth approach may suffer over time or, if too premature and overcooked, lead to an expectation of unwarranted praise or, as Hyland and Hyland (2006) found, early and inappropriate praise led to puzzlement in students, Skipper & Douglas (2011) found that person praise did inded have a negative effct but that process praise had no significant effect compared to the no praise control group. On the whole, however, these may be tactical issues that need to be solved within an overall successful growth mindset strategy .

Conclusion

Hattie confirms that Dweck’s research is exactly what has been found to have a significant effect on learner performance and she has similar theories to Black & Wiliam research and recommendations on feedback. The work of Anderson on deliberate practice can also be seen as an extension of her theories. Teachers, in particular, have found her recommendations ethical, practical and leading to marked changes in motivation and improved results.

John Gatto: the best teacher in New York who walked out on 'schooling'

John Taylor Gatto was an award winning teacher who became a fierce critic of contemporary schooling. As New York City ‘Teacher of the Year’ for three consecutive years, he had been a teacher for 30 years, when he suddenly resigned, in 1991, disillusioned with his profession and the education system in the US.

I Quit, I Think

His resignation letter to the Wall Street Journal attacked the curriculum of class and dependency, where children were locked into a pyramidal sorting structure. Confinement, tests, bells, fixed periods, standardization; all forced teachers to play the role of master to the children as disciples. Parents and families, he thought, were deliberately excluded and treated as adverseries, with children robbed of their time and childhood. To be clear, he was a conservative, libertarian who supports home schooling and open source learning, doesn't  believe in state-trained teachers and thinks that the market should be allowed to flourish as the agent of change.

History of US Education

The full title ‘The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling’ is an unflinching history and critique of US schooling. In a somewhat fragmented style, he takes us though the many influences on US education. In particular, however, the Prussian provenance of US schooling is exposed, where the aim was to regiment people into being loyal citizens of the state. Aided by Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843, the Prussian idea of order, a fixed curriculum and certification was firmly established. He fingers James Bryant Conant and Alexander Inglis for imposing the strict subject divisions, age-grading, ranking by constant testing and other subtler strictures. In the late nineteenth and twentieth century the demands for labour encouraged this warehousing into large schools with standardized process and product. The system, he thinks, has become fossilized and unfit for purpose. In his sights are also religion, behaviourism, Taylorism, business, bureaucracies, centralised control, adjunct staff and administrators in schools and many other supposedly false gods. He identifies 22 agencies; Government agencies, special interest groups and the knowledge industry, who control and distort education to their own ends.

An important hteme is the way capitalism demands a malleable workforce.

Critique of schooling

In 'Dumbing Us Down' he sees both teachers and children are infantilized by the rigid structures of schools and schooling, “virtual factories of childishness” where boredom is the norm. Teachers have to teach everything out of context and age segregation is applied in a way that contradicts the normal mix of ages outside of school. School, for Gatto, is a sorting mechanism that creates a culture of acceptance, indifference and emotional dependency. You are taught to accept your place in life, your class and fixed destiny, you have no privacy, no place to hide. By being drilled, you become indifferent to many subjects and mentally depended on teachers. Additionally, the curriculum and rules confuse children, who never really grasp the crazy sequence  of subjects and knowledge, which they learn but quickly forget. Above all, it robs them of their free time. The solution to problems is often more pre-school, more homework, more schooling. The consequence of all this is that children become indifferent to the adult world and its achievements and wonders. Curiosity is crushed, the future ignored and compassion supressed as the weak are preyed upon. No one , he things, escapes from school with their humanity intact, students, teachers or parents.

In an unorthodox fashion, he recommends plenty of solitude for children so that they can learn to live with themselves and conduct internal dialogue and not become addicted to company, the crowd and peer groups, which schools promote. This is far from the current social contructivist orthodoxy.

Recommendations

Education is not the same as schooling, and as a libertarian, he recommends less not more schooling and homeschooling but not in the sense of simply doing that to pass the standardized tests. He wants young people to have more contact with the adult world outside of school, do something they excel at, be challenged, do community work, learn to be autonomous learners, encouraged to use their imagination, problem solve, deal with set-backs. He makes an interesting distinction between communities and networks, which really masquerade as communities.

Criticism

His writing can often seem polemical, even hyperbolic, yet he marshals an astonishing amount of evidence and testimonies for his positions, as well his own considerable, personal experience. Another common criticism is that he he high on criticism, low on solutions. His libertarian alternatives have been attacked as unworkable or worse, putting large numbers of disadvantaged children at further disadvantage. To be fair, a libertarian, by definition, does not posit full and fixed systematic solutions. Nevertheless, in practice, many aspects of learning and education seem to need the organization and structures that Gatto wants to dismantle.

Conclusion

Immersed in teaching and schooling, Gatto’s critiques have more power because of his background as an outstanding teacher in disadvantaged schools. His critique of compulsory schooling is at times convincing, at times a diatribe. In line with Illich, and to a degree with Ken Robinson, he forces teachers, parents and educationalists to face up to some disturbing aspects of schools and schooling. What he perhaps fails to do it solve the problems.

Bibliography

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992).

The Exhausted School (1993).

A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling (2000)

The Underground History of American Education (2001)

'Against School' (2003)

Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling (2008)

Why Salman Khan is a more important educational theorist & practitioner than Ken Robinson or Sugata Mitra

Why do I think Salman Khan is a far more important educational theorist and practitioner than Ken Robinson or Sugata Mitra? First, his ideas are concrete and innovative; second, he actually practices what he preaches, on scale, globally. Like Google, Salman Khan’s Khan Academy, a not-for-profit, has an ambitious mission statement, to provide “A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere”. He is an outsider in education, in that he comes from business, namely hedge-fund management and attributes his success, to not being art of the educational establishment. It is this that allowed him to get on and do what he did, which was create a large set of YouTube videos and learning management software, now used by millions around the world.

1. YouTube videos

Khan’s work started by accident, when his cousin Nadia failed a maths test. Others, such as her brothers joined in and word spread. He tried Skype but it was too unwieldy for four or more students, so he recorded sessions and uploaded them to YouTube. The YouTube videos have proved immensely popular. There would be no Khan Academy without YouTube, a good example of how synergistic online services can mutually support each other. Innovation begets innovation.

He decided, boldly and deliberately, to keep the background black, like a chalkboard and eliminate the talking head. This was to make students feel as though he were sitting next to them not talking ‘at’ them. Faces, he thinks, are a distraction from the content. The advantages of recorded videos include the ability to stop, rewind, replay, take notes, hear again (especially if it is in your second language), and for practice and revision.

Khan does feel that educators fail to act upon their best research. Recognising that the standard lecture is an arbitrary time period, based on the Sumerian base-6 number system, and overlong, his videos are relatively short. He discovered that lessons of about ten minutes were long enough. He is particularly scathing about the lectures he received at MIT, many of which he decided to skip. In fact, by deciding to skip the “tired old habit of the passive lecture” he managed to do many more courses, double in fact. His anti-lecture stance was confirmed by his time at Harvard Business School, where case-based learning is the norm.

2. Flipped classroom

Having content on YouTube led to another innovation. On homework he is highly critical of teacher training and the fact that most teachers ‘wing-it’ on the design and setting of homework, with too much focus on quantity not quality. This led to the idea of the Flipped classroom, the idea that homework could do what was traditionally done in the classroom, deliver core content, leaving teachers free to do what they do best in class, teach and help students understand things they’re having difficulty with. He acknowledges that it wasn’t his idea but his work allowed it to happen in practice.

3. Mastery learning

From the start the Khan Academy included question software and, in adding a database early in its development, he found that the data was a useful learning management tool. His ‘knowledge map’ concept laid out subjects showing what depends on what, allowing recommendations on what should be taught next, not in a strictly linear way, but based on dependencies, not moving on until you had mastered the prerequisite learning. Mastery learning was his adopted teaching method, and he recognises that Benjamin Bloom was an important precursor. Self-paced learning was the means to deliver this mastery, competence-based learning. 

4. Streak assessment

He is critical of traditional assessment and marking, claiming that partial success can be a problem. He calls it the ‘Swiss Cheese’ problem. He is not against testing but poor and inadequate testing. So on assessment he had streak tests of ‘ten-in-a-row’. He admits that ‘ten’ was an intuitive’ number but wanted the tests to be aspirational as well as motivational (when they got all ten right). In addition to tools for tracking progress, tools for teachers and exercises, there is also an adaptive online exercise system, that personalises the learning and provides useful analytics.

5. Khan Academy in schools

Khan Academy started to be used in schools, initially in the Peninsula Bridge project in San Francisco. Early work identified the need to identify who got ‘stuck’ where, which became a key and sophisticated mathematical feature later in the development of the software. One of his conclusions was that this approach could avoid the downside of streaming, which tends to bake inequality into the system. By allowing competence-based progress, this can be avoided. Another interesting finding was that students who struggled at first, sometimes streaked through when they had gained confidence, suggesting that Carol Dweck’s growth-mindset factor was at work in maths.

It was an email from a black student, that said “…can say without any doubt that you have changed my life and the lives of everyone in my family” that led Khan to leave his well-paid hedge-fund job. By this point he was getting more views on YouTube than Stanford and MIT OpenCourseware put together. Then, in 2010 Google, Ann Doerr and Bll Gates stepped in with finance and other pilot projects started in Los Altos with positive results. Use in schools started to expand significantly and globally. An interesting additional cohort of learners started to emerge – adults and professionals, who wanted to improve or close gaps in their knowledge of maths. Originally maths, the content has expanded into the sciences, finance, medicine, art history, computer science and continues to expand in terms of subjects and the number of videos and resources.

6. The One World Schoolhouse

His book, The One World Schoolhouse, sets out a vision for a free global education. Recognising that parents, and even teachers, may struggle with some subject matter, he sees reliable resources as essential for progress. In addition to the flipped classroom model, where students learn on their own through personalized software and content, then the teacher acts as a coach, enabler or facilitator, to do more sophisticated forms of teaching, the Khan Academy is available 24/7/365. He feels that this can free teachers and learners from the tyranny of time and location. Several other innovative ideas emerged in this text.

7. Multi-teacher classrooms

Khan favours multi-teacher classrooms on the basis that students and teachers are different and that variety on one side should be matched by variety on the other. Peer support and learning would also emerge, rather than isolating single teachers in their own classrooms. His vision is of large classes of a hundred or more, of varying age, without fixed periods doing a variety of tasks, including online learning.

8. Stop marking

He would get rid of letter grades, echoing Dweck, Black and William. Students would have a running appraisal narrative, helped by software, that leads to rich and fruitful feedback. Mixed age classes also allow students to help each other, allowing assessment of other social skills

9. Stagger holidays

The ‘agrarian relic’ of the long summer holiday leads to billions of dollars of infrastructure lying inert and empty. It is a period of forgetting, except for the richer students who get enhancement through support at home. He would rather see perpetual learning, with staggered holidays, as in most other organisations

10. Decouple learning from assessment

He also recommends that we “separate (or decouple) the teaching and credentialing roles of universities“. This would dampen out social inequality and open up access and opportunities for all, as well as lowering costs and student debt. Less lectures, frees time for more intern work, not just during the Summer and real projects. Subjects would have online support from services like the Khan Academy and others, namely good content plus adaptive software and student tracking.

Criticism

Errors appeared in some of the content, which he admits and corrects. and he has been criticised for teaching without a deep knowledge of pedagogy. However, every effort is made to re-record and correct errors and improve on teaching methods. The flipped classroom concept has also been criticized for being difficult to implement in practice, especially for students that are not compliant on the autonomous work demanded by the model.

Conclusion

Far from being short of pedagogic knowledge, Khan is highly reflective and critical of the failure of education to pick up on valid research on lectures, competences, homework, efficiencies, cost, forgetting and learning styles. Khan doesn’t like the way education ignores clear findings in research, as it hangs on to the past and fails to innovate. He is also critical of the cost of education pointing out the very high cost of traditional schooling with much of the budget spent, not on teachers but adjunct services. His belief is that the ‘enlightened’ use of technology through ‘technology enhanced teaching’ is the answer. Technology needs to “liberate teachers from…largely mechanical chores”.

The Joy of Sex – my joyless journey into sex and tech

I produced the interactive version of The Joy of Sex in the late 90s. First we had to scan and digitise all of those original drawings. They were held in the publisher’s basement vault, so we had them couriered down from London. They needed insurance and security, as each drawing was worth a lot of money. The book had been a phenomenon, breaking taboos in media and publishing. Nobody ever owned up to buying it but it sold squillions. 

Big problem - one drawing was missing - the erect penis. So I commissioned 'Big Bill' (6'5"), a Brighton illustrator, to come up with the goods. It took longer than expected as he used himself (and a mirror) as the model, so whenever he turned to draw in detail, it drooped. Had staying power, did Bill but still took a couple of days.

People will do anything for money

The video shoot was even weirder. The young couple were great in a narcissistic sort of way, a couple in real life, they did what they had to do – for the money. The shoot for the old couple, in a swimming pool, in the section on ‘Sex for the older couple’ was toxic. They had broken up recently. She hated him, he still loved her. She feigned arousal and undying love in a worryingly, well practiced manner, while he was bitter with unrequited love. It was horrible.

Edutainment is neither fish nor fowl

This CD (pre-internet) was an educational product, commissioned by the publisher. I say ‘educational’ but the interactivity, which was quite smart, didn’t do what the book did – which was not educate, but titillate. I’ve been suspicious of edutainment, serious games and gamification ever since (see critique here).

People want porn

This project taught me that people are pure in their wants and when it comes to sex, they want porn. Sure enough, the internet exploded not long after this work and porn drove lots of the innovation in tech. It was ever thus. Read ‘The Erotic Engine: How Pornography has Powered Mass Communication from Gutenberg to Google” by Patchen Barrs. Payment models, methods of payment, streaming, biofeedback, driving up demand for broadband – and lots more. It made SnapChat a success, expect it to be central to the development of the VR market.

Expect the unpredictable

Despite what I said above about games, the best bit of the product was the ‘Mr & Mrs’ game. You could play this with your partner at home. First the presenter pops up and asks you a question, while your partner has earphones on or is out of the room. You write it down. Then you’re partner is asked the same question and you compare answers. Simple but a real hoot., especially at parties – if you want them to end in bitter accusations, acrimony and people heading for the door shouting abuse at each other.

If you don’t know the famous story about the TV version of this game, listen up. The husband was asked “What’s the strangest place you’ve ever had sex?” After lots of evasions the husband finally says “…in a bus shelter”. His partner comes out of the booth and is asked the same question. She is horrified and refuses to answer. Several times she refuses to answer. Then the presenter says “…but your husband has already given us an answer”. She looked horrified, thought for a moment and said, “OK…  it was up the bum”.

Rules of one medium don’t always apply to another

I worked with a really lovely guy, Peter, from the BBC, but TV production is different from interactive production. In games and sims, it’s POV, you are the director, so you have to break a lot of the traditional rules of TV and film production. These lessons apply to the new medium on the block – VR. Virtual reality has a grammar of its own and it’s not the grammar of TV and film. You need to think in terms of scenes, slow things up, understand that the viewer will look around, take their time and explore.

Lesson 7: When it comes to consumer buying nobody knows jack

We built this thing but it sold diddly squat. Wasn’t as bad as our foray into feature films, where we lost a fortune on funding “The Killer Tongue”. You can watch it on YouTube – if you have patience, resilience and the ability to watch plotless tat.

Conclusion

I’d like to say I came out of these experience s a better person but I didn’t. I came out wiser, more cynical and determined to avoid mistakes. Forget all that bullshit about failure being good for you - that’s usually mouthed by people who have a fall back position – rich parents.  It’s painful and to be avoided at all costs.

ASU wants to be a new sort of University and they're getting there

Watched TED 2 last night (the drug-fuelled bear not the over-righteous talks) and ASU was the butt of the bear’s jokes. I thought– they’ve done it, ASU have achieved stardom by being referenced in the culture of ‘cool’. Actually, TED 2 is a lot less funny than TED, but back to ASU. I love ASU.

The ‘Crow’

Michael Crow has run ASU since 2002 and is a smarter than the average bear. His goal, well vision, even dream, was to create nothing less than the "New American University". It’s all in his Designing the New American University (2015). Here he explains how he wanted to do the unthinkable – grow research at a blistering pace and, at the same time, raise the bar on teaching in terms of both access and quality. Any one of these would have been difficult, all three at the same time, tricky.

Scaling-up

The key word for Crow is ‘scale’, a clever word on which to hang a vision. Scaling student numbers or bums on seats is easy enough but that is to focus on the wrong end of the learner. Quality has be scaled and attainment (less drop-out) also scaled – that’s a ball crusher. And its here that they have embraced a certain truth, that scale must come through the smart use of technology. They take this as an assumed truth, as self-evident. If you can get increased numbers of students over that first year undergraduate hurdle (in maths, writing and reasoning) you’re well on your way to sustaining subsequent quality.

Profs are doing it for themselves

But here’s the rub. Courses are almost universally owned by individual professors. They design, develop, deliver and assess their own courses. It’s their baby and so implementing technology is like threatening to pull their offspring from their arms and shove them into some sort of uniform collective nursery.

That’s why tech in HE remains a cottage industry. It’s stuck at the fragmented level of the individual. So when Blackboard is rolled out, all of these profs create stuff, but they don’t have the resources and skills to do it well, so we end up with lots of low quality, repository resources. It’s all a bit crap really.

The trick is to get a collegiate thing going with all of the profs involved in the teaching of say, maths. Now you have a posse of maths profs. Explain to them the power of adaptive learning and personalisation. They get it – it’s down to the power of maths. Maths is a touchstone here as it’s such a hurdle for many students.  It also happens to be well defined with clear dependencies. – ideal for adaptive learning. ASU manage to get approximately 85%  through developmental maths. The national standard for success is around 55% to 60%. They think the theoretical limit is around 95%. That’s smart, recognising that success should be real and not too utopian. At the same time they have to move faculty towards a different sort of coaching and supporting role. That’s the hard bit.

Global Freshman Academy

Now for the big bear hug. You’ve proved over five years that the technology has significant results on reducing drop-out and increasing attainment. You’ve shown that groups of academics, working together, can leverage this technology on the scale that’s needed. You now roll this out across all undergraduate courses and subjects – for free. Using EdX, they are producing a full slate of courses. – doing things on scale. The cultural change is immense but so are the benefits. To what problem is all of this a solution? Losing too many students. It was that simple. Once everyone focused on that one problem, the solution was obvious.

Next step is a step up

The next step is to match student expectations on the quality of online courses. They all have smartphones, good laptops and experience exemplary content on all of these devices. Education needs to meet those expectations. This is really hard. Learning is not entertainment and often damaged when it becomes too glitzy. The stuff that’s produced within Blackboard looks like the stuff that was done on computers before these kids were born. Within the next few years every high school leaver will have been born in the 21^st century and every teacher and academic in the 20th century. This is not an arbitrary decimal barrier. The turn of the millennium was when online really started to rocket. Over the last 15 years we’ve seen an eruption of services that these students use daily, if not hourly, even by the minute. That’s the new challenge and one I'm glad to be involved in, as I'm in an organisation that is providing adaptive courses in a range of subjects that ASU see as critical to their vision.

Conclusion

Michael Crow is not without his critics, some are as angry as a bear with a sore head at his effrontery – how dare he take responsibility away from the individual academic?  He has , after all, challenged the nay-saying power of academics who want to keep it all at their single cell level of evolution, whereas his vision is of a multicellular future. He can’t afford to let those attitudes win, as that is what keeps access low and costs high. What Crow rejects is that the system will always be built on scarcity and not abundance. He wants to scale out of scarcity into high quality abundance through technology and adaptive technology, which personalises the learning experience.  They are redefining the University as a scalable organization serving the public good. You may not like his vision, but a vision it is.