What language means

I was listening to Fresh Air with Terri Gross on NPR this morning (the podcast). She was interviewing a consultant that works with politicians and businesses to help them develop and use “words that work” (his book title). He was talking about the difference between climate change and global warming. His point was that climate change was more accurate and less extreme than global warming. He made this same sort of comparison for a number of other politically charged terms (e.g. death tax vs. estate tax, drilling vs. exploring in ANWAR). What I found so ironic is that he is arguing that his language is more true than the other choices. The idea that his ideas are expressed accurately without the bias of value. It is a fundamental of constructivist learning theory that each individual constructs their own understanding. You (as a teacher or a politician) can only introduce things into the environment, not transmit them into another person’s head. This means that when I say death tax it can not possibly mean the same thing to you as it does to someone else. Saying that death tax is more accurate than estate tax is just absurd on the face of it. Each phrase is chosen to make a particular type of argument about the value of the tax. The main goal of language is essentially rhetorical – an attempt to have others see the world as we do. In this way language does not have an absolute meaning, only a meaning grounded in the experiences, context and interpretation of the people speaking and hearing it.

This is the difficulty I have with absolutists of all stripes. The idea that there are right answers in the area of human interactions (like teaching). Malcomb Gladwell (author of Blink and The Tipping Point) has a great talk at TED about this very issue. He manages to make some profound points about the nature of scientific reserach on human behavior while using chunk tomato sauce as a exemplar. Great stuff.

Google, the new information bank?

The 12.23.06 issue of the Economist has an interesting article about the migration of Arizona State University’s technology infrastructure (starting with email) to Google’s Apps for Your Domain. My friend, Cole, talks about this much more articulately and thoughtfully, so check out his blog if you want deep thinking on these issues. I really liked one of the analogies used by Google’s Dave Girouard, when talking about security issues. He said that is going to be an “evolution in trust” similar to the one that occurred when “people reluctantly accepted that their money was safer in a bank than under a mattress”. To me this makes perfect sense. As we increasingly want to access data anywhere, it is going to become the information management companies like Google that will have to make a convincing case that the data is safe with them, because if they can’t make it safe their business will collapse. I don’t know if PSU is headed down this road, but it seems like an inevitable part of Web 2.0. Interestingly, the other implication of this is that IT bosses will disappear as their functions are increasingly done by information management firms. The Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com implies in the article that this may be one reason universities are moving so slowly to this notion of email and application management offsite — the IT bosses are simply protecting their own jobs.

Google Docs

Last semester I used Google Docs as a key tool in my class.  It was a course on learning theory as applied in Science Education.  I had them create a Wikipedia type of glossary of terms that they were responsible for keeping accurate.  One of the things I like most about Google Docs was what I could use it for in small groups.  I had student in groups and asked them to do their work in Google Docs.  They spread out around the building, wherever they felt they could work best.  I asked them to each include me as a collaborator on their document.  I sat in front of my laptop and could watch as groups developed their ideas by click between documents.  I could give on-the-fly feedback right into their document.  I could call them back to the classroom by typing a quick note in their document.  And when they came back to class I could share out their work my just clicking between documents that were already on my machine (or at least displayed there), without any “collecting”.  It seems a trivial thing that I actually stumbled onto by accident, but I think it points to the incredible power of the unexpected opportunities provided by ubiquitous computing in a networked environment.

iPhone

How can you not comment on this one. The must have device of 2007. It made me think of this quote:

Invention is the mother of necessity.
- Thorstein Veblen

I think that just says it all.

Ironic Children

This is not a profound one, but one of those stories you just want to remember. My daughters and two of their friends were up in the playroom playing their current favorite game, school. While they were doing this they were blasting the radio tuned to a classic rock station that happened to be playing Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”. Playing school to “we don’t need no education”, does it get any better than that?

Even computers need context

I was reading an aricle in Wired about machine translation and was struck by the connection to learning theory. The upshot was that new, much more accurate translation software is being written by creating context for the language being translated. The software takes a section of text in Spanish, say 8 words long, generates a list of possible translations in English and looks on the web for the frequency of each translations appearance in English as a measure of likelihood it is the best translation. It then moves one word ahead and repeats the process with seven words from the last set, plus the next one in the sequence. It continues like this selecting the most likely candidates for each set of 8 words and then produces a translation based on the most likely of all possibilities. Essentially what the algorithm does through brute force is create an understanding of language in context.

The reason that I think this is so interesting is that it supports the idea language is contextual. As language is the primary tool for learning, by extention this means that learning (or knowledge) is contextual as well. If you can’t learn the word “bank” without having a context for the word, then you can’t learn about sedimentation collecting on the bank of a stream without that taking place in a context. The context of the learning is as critical as the content. For me this shatters the idea that is fundamental to so much of how we assess learning (e.g. NCLB & standardized tests) — that knowledge out of context has meaning and that measuring knowledge out of context is a meaningful way of understanding what a student knows. If a computer cannot understand things well without a context, must it not be even more true of people?

Who’s an expert?

For academics expertise is something we have to care about. It is the coin of the realm. I have been thinking a lot about what expertise means in the days of social software and peer rating systems. What does expertise at a university look like if the classroom has students taking notes together in a shared system (e.g. Notemesh) and the lectures are available via enhanced podcast? Do classes start to look more like blogs with podcasts? Do we develop a system of courses that are culled like Technorati or Digg culls other blogs? Will faculty be evaluated on the number of Diggs their course gets rather than the SRTEs (Student Rating of Teaching Effectiveness)?

Right now our expertise system (at least in academia) relies on credentials. To be a faculty member you must, for the most part, have a PhD or similarly highest degree in field. Expertise in the social software universe is based on popularity, and presumably usefulness and interest of the information your share along with how regular you are with sharing it — blogs (like mine) with very erratic or infrequent posts have much less impact in the blogosphere. Will we see faculty hired based on their blogs and podcasts? On the faculty fear end of the spectrum — will faculty whose classes have few diggs loose their jobs? One of the original fears about video and audio of lectures is that you would only need the one expert in Chemistry that does a great job to replace all the Chemistry faculty in the country. I don’t believe that teaching can be replaced in this way, but it may force a change in the model of teaching.

For another day: the question of how all these issues with expertise play out in terms of the research part of a faculty members job.

Learning as judged by experts

I have been reading the new Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. In his introduction the editor, Keith Sawyer, mentions untested ideas about learning. One of the ones that I found most critical is the idea that the sequence and content of ideas children should learn is decided by (content) experts, not by studying how children actually learn. What this means is that high school Physics, for example, is taught based on how experts in the field of Physics see the organization of Physics as a discipline. This in no way represents any consideration of how these concepts are best learned. In fact it does not even represent how human beings, over the course of the development of Physics, have developed these ideas. So, for example, would it makes sense to start teaching kids Physics by starting with the ideas the Greeks had about it and then showing them how those ideas were overturned? Maybe or maybe not. The point is we are not basing our choices on how students learn best, but on how experts view their field. Who then should be making decisions about how Physics should be taught? Well (no surprise here), people like me. Those of us who instead of studying Physics study how people learn Physics and thus how to best teach it.

This highlights one of the most difficult things about expertise in education – it is widely considered to be part of everyones everyday experience, and thus true “expertise” in teaching and learning is suspect. Physics professors assume they know something about education because they are assigned to teach a section of introductory Physics. How do they usually choose to teach? The way they were taught. If you did this in Physics — do things just like your teacher had done them, without ever testing it empirically — we would still believe what Aristotle did about the world (or the cavemen). It simply does not makes sense as a way to improve our understandings of the world.

The counterintuitive notion for me is that the discipline (e.g. Physics) has taken decades if not centuries to develop, and it has changed over time as naïve or intuitive notions about the world have been emirically tested. Most students, however, have many of the same naive notions about the world, but we assume giving them the current structure of the field will clear all that up for them. We need to understand how people learn and use that understanding to help them move from naive conceptions to deep conceptual understanding of the ideas in a discipline. This is not the way that we think about schooling.

100% proficiency

In their column for the NYT magazine Freakonomics, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt discussed the problem of getting doctors to wash their hands in the hospital. For me there are clear parallels between this phenomenon and NCLB (No Child Left Behind). Doctors were given free Purell hand sanitizer as they pulled into the parking lot, they were “caught” being good (i.e. washing their hands before examining a patient) and given $10 Starbucks giftcards. All this led to an increase from 65% to 80% proficiency in hand washing. Finally, they cultured the doctors hands and then made a screen saver for every computer in the hospital with a picture of the massive bacterial colonies that resulted. This brought proficiency up to 100% (they claim) and it has stayed at that level since. Dubner and Levitt then point out how the solution to a seemingly simple problem (getting doctors to wash their hand before examining a patient) is often incredibly difficult and time consuming.

So, what has this to do with education and NCLB? Well, for me it brings out the massive underestimation of the complexity of learning and teaching on the part of almost everyone. This is exemplified in NCLB, which asks for 100% proficiency among students and proposes punitive measures based on standardized test scores as the motivation. If we compare the complexity of getting all american school children to 100% proficiency to getting doctors to wash their hands, it seems pretty obvious the differences in complexity. Yet, with the doctors all the cohersion (both rewards and punishments) could only get them to 80%. Do we really think that we can legislate a solution to the problem of schools failing to prepare our children? If there are kindergarten classrooms with 35+ students taught by someone with emergency certification (i.e. no preparation to teach), what is a realistic level of proficiency for those students? I don’t know what the equivilent of the dirty hand as screen saver is for our educational system, but NCLB is not it.