Science, Technology, and Education

Governors at London Met announce their resignation

2009-12-16T03:20:00.000-08:00

The following message was sent today from the Coordinating Committee of UCU at London Metropolitan University to all members:

The Board of Governors finally announced resignations at their meeting

yesterday. The Chair of the Governors has resigned with effect by end of

March. The other lay governors specifically associated with the Audit

Sub-Committee (effectively we understand virtually all the lay governors)

will resign in the summer. We assume an entirely new Audit Committee will

be in place by April 2010.

UCU understands that the formal announcement will be made today in the

form of an agreed joint communication from the Chief Executive of HEFCE

and the Chair of the Governors. We understand that the announcement will

include a statement that the new Vice Chancellor Professor Gillies will be

taking forward the action against members of the Executive group who were

in post during the period covered by the Melville/Deloitte Report and this

could include disciplinary action with the possibility of individual

suspension whilst his inquiries are proceeding.

Of course, as you will know from the Melville Report it was Sir David's

view that all members of the Executive group in post at the time should

take 'collective responsibility' for the failings that he identifies. UCU

shares this view.

Whilst UCU welcomes the announcements of the impending resignations of the

Board of Governors (clearly members will understand that this is a

considerable victory for the unions and, more importantly, for the

university), we are unable to commend the agreed order of their departure.

In current circumstances a delayed and staggered resignation is utterly

inappropriate.

We include below the statement from our Staff Governor Dr Kay Dudman that

was read out at the meeting itself.

"It is clear that London Metropolitan University's future and safety is at

stake. HEFCE has made apparent that there is a clear and immediate risk

that funding will be withdrawn unless they are convinced that their

financial support of the university with public funds is safeguarded to

their satisfaction. It is noted that HEFCE itself is not without blame,

as cited in the Melville report, in particular for failing to make a

written record of meetings.

London Metropolitan University cannot survive without public funds. The

honourable, and indeed the only, course of action is for the members of

the Board of Governors who were serving during the period in question to

resign, and that the Executive, as highlighted in the Melville report,

should follow suit. Their sacrifice will be for the good of the

institution as whole, and allow London Metropolitan University the

opportunity to flourish once again under the leadership of a new Vice

Chancellor, a new Board of Governors, and a new Executive.

I know that the driving force behind those who offer their services to the

Board of Governors is the ultimate welfare of the institution, and I am

therefore certain that the necessary steps will be taken in order to

ensure the University's survival. Resignation is the price that has been

demanded, and the price that must be paid. Resignation is now a

necessity."

UCU entirely agrees with this. An immediate resignation was the only

acceptable action that the governors and the executive (or at least the

named members of the executive) could have taken yesterday. The Board of

Governors and the named members of the Executive were required to

‘consider their position’ in the letter from Sir Alan Langlands 20th

November following HEFCE’s receipt and acceptance of the Melville/Deloitte

Report. It is clear that the Governors were initially very reluctant to

comply with this and have only done so as a result of HEFCE threatening

immediate withdrawal of further funding to the university. It is also

clear that HEFCE were specific in requiring the departure of Peter Anwyl

as Chair and any members of the Governors who had served on the Audit

Committee. This, we understand, included Sir Michael Snyder.

In office the Board have not at any point acted in the wider interests of

the university. The slow drawn out manner of their departure is

transparently a face saving exercise and is entirely consistent with their

previous actions and inactions that have been governed by narrow personal

self interest and self-esteem and not in any way and in any time the wider

good of London Met.

The next year is likely to be critical for the university. In previous

emails we referred to the announced short fall of £600 million from the HE

sector as a result of a public funding cuts. We also pointed up the

failure of London Met to secure any specific funding from HEFCE’s

Strategic Development Fund (potentially £10 million) despite the Interim

Vice Chancellor announcing this as one of his specific ambitions last

summer. How can the retention of a discredited Board of Governors until

the spring and summer be anything but counterproductive to the future of

the university? How can we hope to secure any new funding until they go?

How also their retention do anything but handicap Professor Gillies in any

action he finds it necessary to take against the Executive? What possible

benefit can be served to the university by them remaining in office?

Clearly London Met needs new governors, new management and a new start

now. This is an imperative not an impatient demand. UCU and UNISON

officers will be meeting Professor Gillies on Friday morning. We will

obviously be relaying this message to him and we will be putting to him

our views regarding new structures of governance and management at the

university. Specifically we will be asking him to announce immediately a

suspension of any further job losses that have already been announced for

July 2010 under the Cost Improvement Plan.

We include below the link to the video of the chaotic scenes outside

Moorgate at yesterday’s meetings. Speakers at the rally included Alaisdair

Hunter President of UCU, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Paul Mackney, ex-General

Secretary of UCU and representatives from Unison and from national and

local NUS. As you will see from the video, students at London Met took

action themselves and were right to do so, but it should not have taken

all this to get rid of the governors.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AymfQib2Yg

A further statement will be made later this week.

Mark Campbell UCU Chair

Cliff Snaith UCU Secretary

Debbie Rees UCU Membership Secretary

Yaz Djebbour UCU North Chair

Peter Cambridge UCU H & S Officer

David Hardman UCU City Chair

Jane Holgate UCU City Secretary

All that jazz

2009-11-20T15:34:00.000-08:00

A bulletin from the Psychonomics Society 50th annual meeting in Boston, MA.

The Psychonomics Society conference is pretty big and covers many topics relating to human and animal cognition. Almost every year something fairly novel catches my eye. This year, it was a talk by Michael Schober and Michelle Levine (presented by the former), concerning the relationship between onstage coordination and improvisational quality in jazz musicians.

Now, this brief account is necessarily sketchy as I didn't manage to note every single detail, but I think the basic finding here is very interesting. In jazz, the improviser has to make a series of musical choices in relation to what the other players are doing. There is apparently a whole lore about coordination in jazz, with an emphasis on the necessity to coordinate section changes, but also the need for players to focus and concentrate whilst improvising a solo.

The study reported here recruited 30 experienced jazz and saxophone duos, and asked them to play a specially composed piece which included two improvised solos of 20 bars each. After an opportunity to rehearse the duos played in one of three conditions: (a) together - the face-to-face condition, (b) in separate spaces but with a video and audio connection, and (c) in separate spaces with only an audio connection. Audio recordings of their performances were rated on several criteria by three professional performing musicians, each with over thirty years' playing experience and previous experience of sitting on musical juries.

On a post-performance questionnaire, the face-to-face players reported being better able to concentrate than did the players in the other conditions. However, their improvisations were given the lowest ratings by the judges (who, remember, were blind to the conditions). The most highly-rated performances were those in the audio condition.

Among the other findings was that the sax players improved with practice whereas the pianists did not. However, the performance of the saxophonists was highly dependent on the pianists, who clearly laid the foundation that enabled the sax players to shine.

Top 10 learning tools for 2009

2009-11-07T16:36:00.000-08:00

Jane Hart, a social learning consultant, compiles an annual list of popular learning technologies, as voted for by other learning professionals. The top 100 tools for 2008 can be found here. My own top 10 for 2009 (below) is slightly embarrassing because of the emphasis on Google products. I have in fact made some use of the Zoho suite of applications, but there is a terrific level of convenience in having iGoogle set up as my web page, with the other Google products embedded within, many of which synchronise with my phone (an HTC Magic). I can hardly believe that GMail has been squeezed out of my top 10, not to mention YouTube (to which I sometimes upload screencasts that are recorded in Screentoaster), or Google Sites.

Blogger. My final year students have each set up blogs where they regularly record their thoughts about the material we cover. I also use blogger to record occasional research updates that might be of interest to readers of my textbook, and with a view to incorporating these into a future edition.
Google search.
Google calendar. This is particularly useful because it synchs with my Google Android phone and sends reminders to my phone.
Screentoaster.
Google Docs.
Googer Reader.
iGoogle. This is an excellent way of organising your desktop.
Twitter.
Google Android.
MacBook Air - this is about half the weight of the regular laptops I have previously had and offers the speed of operation that Apple products have become known for. Particularly useful is the facility to record screencasts that is built into the operating system. This could possibly challenge my use of Screentoaster, which I have mostly used up until now.

Measuring utility

2009-11-02T05:53:00.000-08:00

This posting is for the benefit of the students taking my class "Judgment and Decision Making". I set the exercise of measuring your utility function for a certain range of monetary values, using two different methods: The Certainty Equivalence Method and the Probability Equivalence Method. Of key interest is whether the two functions look the same when plotted graphically. I did this exercise myself and the results are shown above.

When you do this, I'd like you to insert the graphs into your blog and include some commentary - especially if you find that the two curves look different. The website for plotting the graph is here. Select the option for coordinates plotting. Say you want to enter 5 coordinates, and then select . On the page that appears enter the monetary amounts in the column for X and the utility values in the column for Y. From the menu options to the right enter a short title in the

Review: The greatest show on earth

2009-09-13T08:54:00.000-07:00

Review: The greatest show on earth: The evidence for evolution, by Richard Dawkins. London: Bantam Press. 2009.

In The God delusion Richard Dawkins stated that he was not writing with the intent of converting committed theists but, rather, with the aim of influencing those who were undecided between belief and atheism. After reading The greatest show on earth, I imagine that Dawkins is likewise trying to convince the undecided rather than the hard-core creationists. On the opening page he compares the teacher of evolution to a teacher of Roman history whose class is continually disrupted by "a baying pack of ignoramuses" who vociferously assert that the Roman empire did not exist.
Some might wonder whether a less confrontational tone would be more effective in getting the reader on board. I'm not so sure. Dawkins gives the example of Wendy Wright, the president of 'Concerned Women for America', who was interviewed for the Channel Four documentary The Genius of Charles Darwin. She repeatedly questions the existence of "intermediate" fossils, whilst Dawkins repeatedly ripostes that they are in the museums if only she would care to look. When one listens to Wendy Wright and the many people like her (see some of the risible creationist videos on YouTube) one feels that they are a lost cause.
However, for anyone who is unsure about the case for evolution and is willing to actually read about the evidence, then The greatest show on earth is a brilliant exposition. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of the case and then asks how this could be explained by young earth creationism (creationists who believe that the world was created within the last 10,000 years) or intelligent design (creationism dressed up in the clothing of science).
Along the way Dawkins exposes many of the myths propounded by creationists. For example, although most evolution occurs over millions of years, some evolutionary change can be observed and, indeed, experimentally induced. In one key study, the coloration of guppies evolved to be more or less bright, depending on whether they had been placed in non-predated (or weakly-predated) pools rather than highly-predated pools. Likewise, artifical selection (e.g. dog breeding) is a de facto demonstration that animal forms can change, as opposed to all forms having been place on earth by a creator.
Another myth exposed by Dawkins is that of the "missing" link in the fossil record. Dawkins points out that evolution would be true even if we had no fossils; molecular analyses of existing species demonstrates more clearly than fossils just how different species are related to each other. But we are lucky that any fossil record has survived, and since Darwin's time many "intermediate" fossils have been found, showing the ancestral forms of many living species. Occasionally, some of the fossils in the pre-human lineage get reclassified as an earlier or a later form. However, this actually supports the evolutionary case by showing how close some of the different forms are to each other. In fact, if we had an entirely complete fossil record then it would be impossible to actually classify different forms because the changes between successive generations would be imperceptible.
Dawkins shows throughout how the creationist case has to fall back either on flat denial of the facts or on implausible forms of special pleading. A case in point is the use of radioactive clocks to determine the age of the earth's rocks. Radioactive clocks depend on the half-life of isotopes - the time taken for half the atoms to decay. Potassium-40 has a half-life of 1.26 billion years, but perhaps a creationist could argue that its half-life was different prior to Noah's flood. Special pleading, yes, but the pleading is worse when you bear in mind that other isotopes have different half-lives, so God would need to fiddle all of these in order to show that the earth was created about 6,000 years ago.
One of the most amusing arguments against creationism is that of our interior physiologies. In contrast to the impressive exteriors of all creatures, the insides are frequently a shambles. For example, in mammals the laryngeal nerve does not pass directly from the brain to the larynx but, rather, takes a detour. Most dramatically, in the giraffe the laryngeal nerve passes right down the neck and back up again, a detour of about 15 feet. The reason for this absurdity lies in the evolution that transformed fish ancestors into mammals, which involved the stretching of the neck and the development of other structures.

Throughout The greatest show on earth the writing is crystal clear. The footnotes - so often a distraction in many books - are either illuminating or amusing. Although I knew the basics of evolution, I still learned a lot from this book. Anyone else who is willing to actually be exposed to the evidence for evolution would be well advised to read it.

Derren Brown and the lottery prediction

2009-09-12T13:55:00.000-07:00

On 9th September, Derren Brown appeared to predict the results of the UK National Lottery on Channel 4 television. Two days later, he purported to explain this in terms of the "wisdom of crowds". He referred to a study reported by Francis Galton in 1907, in which many people attempted to guess the weight of an ox at a country fair. Although many different estimates were made, the average of these was staggeringly close to the true weight. Brown claimed to have averaged the guesses of a panel of people in order to produce the lottery prediction (the explanation was also mixed up with some stuff about automatic writing and group bonding).

On the blog site of the Guardian newspaper, some people expressed their doubts about the whole wisdom of crowds concept, including the Galton study. I posted the following response (I've corrected a small error in this reprinting):

Regarding the wisdom of the crowds argument, which some people have doubted, aggregating imperfect judgments can improve accuracy but it doesn't apply to the case of lottery numbers. Let's take Galton's example of people guessing the weight of an ox, mentioned in the programme (Galton's paper was published in Nature). In reality, the ox weighed 1198 lbs. If person A guesses the weight to be 1178 lbs then s/he is inaccurate by 20 lbs. Person B guesses the weight to be 1208 lbs and is inaccurate by 10 lbs. Thus, the average level of inaccuracy is 15 lbs. But suppose we average their two guesses; this gives an estimate of 1193 lbs, which is inaccurate by only 5 lbs. Thus, the level of error obtained by averaging the estimates is less than the average error of each individual estimate.

There are a couple of things to note here. First, the two estimates in the example fell either side of the actual weight, a phenomenon called 'bracketing'. With multiple estimates, at least one instance of bracketing is necessary in order that averaging estimates will improve overall reliability. When making estimates about something where knowledge can be applied, even imperfectly, multiple estimates are likely to cluster either side of the true answer. In the case of the lottery, knowledge cannot be applied. Because numbers are randomly determined, there is nothing "real" for guesses to cluster around. Indeed, the numbers 1 and 49 cannot even be bracketed, as guesses can only fall to one side of them.

Second, even where bracketing can occur, thus leading to greater reliability of the averaged estimates, greater reliability does not mean pinpoint accuracy. Rather, it simply means a reduced level of error. In the case reported by Galton, 787 people guessed the weight of the ox and the average of their estimates fell 1 lb short of the correct weight. Thus, even if it were possible to apply the wisdom of crowds to the National Lottery, the notion that this would lead to seven correct answers is risible.

I don't know how Brown did it, but having viewed the video of the "jumping ball" I'm inclined to agree that there was something along the lines of the split screen trickery that many have suggested.

As someone who teaches the psychology of judgment, it does concern me a little that mixing up genuine science with a barrel-load of hokum could damage people's understanding of, or trust in, the former.

UK government's apology for Turing's mistreatment

2009-09-11T02:48:00.000-07:00

The online petition (link below) for an official apology over the treatment of Alan Turing has produced the following response from Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Cutting and pasting from the original email led to a few formatting errors, which I've tried to fix, but some may remain.

Understandably, the message focuses on Turing's codebreaking work during the second world war, but many of us also celebrate his contributions to cognitive science.

DH

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank you for signing this petition. The Prime Minister has written a response. Please read below.

Prime Minister: 2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance forBritain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama tohonour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to takeup arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists,historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark andcelebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness ofdictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work onbreaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that,without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two couldwell have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we canpoint to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, thathe was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison - was chemicalcastration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealtwith under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBTcommunity. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s mostfamous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and longoverdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united,democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices– that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism,people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total warare part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

Gordon Brown

If you would like to help preserve Alan Turing's memory for futuregenerations, please donate here: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

Petition information - http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/turing/

Attending to dual-screen presentations

2009-09-04T04:26:00.000-07:00

Large classrooms now often have not one, but two, screens onto which slide shows are presented. The idea (presumably) is that people on the left hand side of the room will find it easier to look at the left hand screen and those on the right will look at the right hand screen. But before implementing this design, did anyone do any research into how audience and speakers will actually behave?

Whilst at a conference yesterday, I noticed that the speaker spent the whole time standing to the left of the left-hand screen (as viewed by the audience). Every now and again I glanced at the audience, the vast majority of whom were also looking at the left hand screen. Even those in the front-most rows on the right were mainly looking at the left-hand screen. I myself found it very difficult to watch the screen on the right whilst listening to a speaker on the far left of the room. Perhaps this is because every now and again you want to switch attention from screen to speaker and vice versa, and this is easier if you are looking at the screen closest to the speaker.

More than this, however, the head and hand movements of the speaker him/herself are also a guide for the audience. When the speaker shifts his/her gaze from the audience to the screen, or waves a hand towards something on the screen, this is a cue for the audience to direct their own attention to the same thing. And if the speaker is using a laser pointer, that of course will only be pointed at one screen.

I began to wonder whether the learning experience may actually be slightly harder for the audience on the far side of the room from the speaker. Could the screen in front of you be a distraction? You glance at it occasionally, but then it feels uncomfortable so you switch your attention to the other screen or the speaker? This may be an idle worry, but has anyone researched this?

Obviously, the way the speaker positions him/herself may matter. What happens if the speaker stands in the centre of the room, between the two screens? In a different talk yesterday, I noticed that a centrally-positioned speaker still seemed to only look at the screen to his right (the audience's left), and consequently this was where the audience mostly looked. However, this may have been partly determined by the positioning of the computer screen on the desk in front of the speaker. From the speaker's viewpoint, this was positioned to the right of the desk and also with a tilt such that the speaker would have naturally looked rightwards to see the computer screen.

If the majority of an audience only look at one of the two screens, then surely having two is actually a waste of money. This is even worse if the non-focal screen is actually a distraction. However, I don't know of any research and would be interested to know if there is any.

Practice Makes Perfect

2009-07-06T15:34:00.001-07:00

This is my presentation for the 2009 Teaching and Learning Conference at London Metropolitan University, 7th July.

Practice Makes Perfect

View more documents from davidkhardman.

Bad service, UK

2009-07-03T18:00:00.000-07:00

This post has nothing to do with academia, except to the extent that I was engaged in academic matters in each situation described. It's just a post where I want to get something off my chest, but I'll try not to do this too often... maybe a separate website is needed (unless I find that someone has already created a relevant site).

Why is the service culture in the UK still so poor? There's no doubt it's improved beyond measure over the past decade or two, and is better than in many of our EU neighbours, but compared to many parts of the US - my benchmark - we still just don't get it. Here are my gripes from this week alone. I'm writing this in the hope, probably vain, that other Brits (or visitors) will either feel inspired to complain or act with their feet about these and other annoyances visited upon consumers in this country.

Saturday 27th June. Starbucks, Stratford, East London. In most coffee houses, including this particular place normally, when you order hot food they bring it to your table. Indeed, many places give you a little flag to take to your table, so that the waiter/waitress can identify where food needs to be delivered. Last Saturday, no chance - my food was left at the counter to go cold. Why create an expectation through your usual practice (table service) and then fail to see it through on one specific occasion?

Wednesday 1st July. Penderel's Oak pub in High Holborn, London - a branch of the Wetherspoons chain. Myself and others arrived early to see the scientist/journalist Ben Goldacre speak at a public event downstairs. Being early, we decided to order food (burgers). We waited 50 minutes before complaining and demanding our money back. By then, the downstairs area was full and so we left without seeing what we had come for.

Thursday 2nd July. 5th floor bar, Waterstones bookshop, Piccadilly, London. An otherwise pleasant visit was spoiled when a waitress came up just after I'd finished eating, and informed me that my window seat - to which I had been ushered - had been reserved for other people who had just arrived early. I pointed out that there had been no reservation notice at the table, and the waitress apologised, telling me that her colleague had neglected to do this. She then told me that I could stay at the table if I wanted to, so I told her I did want to - and stayed, but feeling less happy than I had been previously. Why not either offer me a free drink if I move, or apologise to the other party and offer them free drinks, but without bothering me? Useless, clueless service, that I thought London in particular had moved beyond.

London Underground - tonight, 3rd/4th July. I was late travelling back from Clerkenwell, and getting close to last Tube time. I hopped off at Liverpool Street, expecting that I would be able to catch a mainline train, although I noticed that the tubes were delayed on the line I was leaving, and there was still another train to come. At Liverpool Street there were no mainline trains, so I dashed back to the underground, only to have a functionary tell me there were no more tube trains. I told him I'd just come from the platform and so knew there was one more train. He asked me "You mean the Hammersmith train?" and I said "yes", upon which he let me through -- the fact that he referred to a specific trainline meant that his previous statement was a lie. I was in too much of a rush to challenge him.

I got off the tube at West Ham, where normally you can change for the Stratford tube train. However, all the entrances to the platform had been cordoned off, indicating that the last tube had gone. As I stepped out into the street, however, the Stratford train appeared at the platform that I would have gone to, and then departed. I then spent £10 on a taxi. Another case of the underground staff acting in their own interests rather than those of the customer.

This persistent strain of customer neglect/abuse in the UK makes me sick. We should all complain more. Visitors beware.

Study guides - do students read them?

2009-07-03T05:18:00.001-07:00

Whenever I browse the academic shelves in bookshops, I am struck by the proliferation of student study guides. These books are full of advice on time management, writing essays, referencing, analysing arguments, and so on. They usually include numerous exercises that students are invited to engage with in order to develop their skills. In Waterstones yesterday, I saw an addition to this oeuvre, a book advising psychology students about doing their final year projects. Among other things, this advised about all the different methodologies that are open to researchers.

I can't help wondering: do students actually read these books? I find it easy to imagine that students purchase these books because they obviously want to get good grades, but given that it is often something of a challenge to get students to read materials for seminar groups I can't help suspecting that study guides do little more than gather dust. To be fair, even for the most diligent student an undergraduate degree tends to keep them more than busy enough if they do all the things they're meant to do for their modules. Some study guides are thicker than the other textbooks we steer them towards. I'm not dissing the contents of study guides, which mostly seem fine to me. I just wonder whether they really get used (excepting perhaps where such books are required reading on a study skills module).

Blended Learning

2009-07-01T08:54:00.000-07:00

I have just created two videos (screencasts) that may be of interest to people engaged in blended learning, or trying to persuade colleagues to adopt alternative methods of teaching and assessment.

The first video is Online Tools for Blended Learning.

The second video is about creating multiple-choice quizzes in WebLearn - the virtual learning environment that my university uses, but which is known elsewhere as WebCT Vista.

Findings in popular areas may be less reliable

2009-06-24T14:53:00.000-07:00

An interesting new paper has appeared in the online journal PLoS One, authored by Thomas Pfeiffer and Robert Hoffman. To access the article, just click on the title below. The abstract of the article is reprinted below.

===================================================

Large-Scale Assessment of the Effect of Popularity on the Reliability of Research

Based on theoretical reasoning it has been suggested that the reliability of findings published in the scientific literature decreases with the popularity of a research field. Here we provide empirical support for this prediction. We evaluate published statements on protein interactions with data from high-throughput experiments. We find evidence for two distinctive effects. First, with increasing popularity of the interaction partners, individual statements in the literature become more erroneous. Second, the overall evidence on an interaction becomes increasingly distorted by multiple independent testing. We therefore argue that for increasing the reliability of research it is essential to assess the negative effects of popularity and develop approaches to diminish these effects.
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When you want something, talk into the right ear - Short Sharp Science - New Scientist

2009-06-24T12:15:00.001-07:00

When you want something, talk into the right ear - Short Sharp Science - New Scientist

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Sleeping on a complex decision may be a bad choice - life - 19 June 2009 - New Scientist

2009-06-19T06:09:00.001-07:00

Further evidence against the idea that unconscious thinking benefits decision making:

Sleeping on a complex decision may be a bad choice - life - 19 June 2009 - New Scientist

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The experience of boredom in universities

2009-06-19T03:50:00.000-07:00

New research by Sandi Mann and Andrew Robinson has found that boredom during classes may be a regular experience for most university students, and one which is exacerbated in lectures by the use of PowerPoint presentations.

Most previous research into the experience of boredom in education has focused on schoolchildren. This shows that some people are more prone to boredom than others, but also that unstimulating teaching methods can exacerbate the experience of boredom. Being bored increases the likelihood of skipping classes, and this can become a slippery slope, with boredom being associated with poorer grades.

To extend the earlier work to university students, Mann and Robinson surveyed 211 students from various courses at a univerity in the North-West of England. Based on previous research into lecturers' use of PowerPoint slides, they expected this mode of presentation to be one of the main causes of boredom.

Thirty-nine percent of students said 'some' of their lectures were boring, 29% said 'half' were boring, and another 30% said 'most' or 'all' their lectures were boring. Both boredom proneness and the use of PowerPoint were associated with boredom in lectures, and higher levels of boredom were associated with an increased number of missed classes. However, there was no association between boredom and skipping classes once individual differences in boredom proneness were controlled for. Boredom-prone students were more likely to engage in daydreaming, doodling, "switching off", colouring in letters on the handout, and so on.

Surprisingly, the classes that were associated with the highest levels of boredom were ones in which the students were engaged in tasks: laboratory classes and computer classes. However, the authors note that the mere fact of something being a 'doing' activity is not enough to prevent it from being boring. Lab classes are often controlled environments intended to simply verify something that is already known, and this predictability may detract from the level of interest. Likewise, computer classes may include tasks that are not very interesting, and boredom may also result if there are not enough computers for everyone present or if there are not enough staff to assist students in a timely fashion.

Online lecture notes, copying overheads in class, and the use of PowerPoint without handouts, were the next factors most associated with boredom. However, PowerPoint presentations with handouts were not so strongly associated with boredom. Presumably this combination allows students to focus more on what is being said rather than trying to write everything down.

There are some limitations to the study that the authors discuss. These include the use of self-report methods for assessing the frequency of boring classes. Could boredom-prone students be more likely remember more classes as being boring than was actually the case? But overall, the study indicates the importance of adopting stimulating teaching methods and not assuming that 'interactive' classes will automatically be interesting.

Reference

Mann, S., and Robinson, A. (2009). Boredom in the lecture theatre: an investigation into the contributors, moderators and outcomes of boredom amongst university students. British Educational Research Journal, 35 (2), 243-258.

Evolution and learning

2009-06-11T16:28:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I put a link to an article, on another blog site, which briefly reported a paper by David Geary concerning evolution and education. This has actually been reported on several blogs, but the reports are all very similar and appear to be based on a press release. David Geary has actually published several pieces on evolution and education, but the recent blogs are based on a target article that appeared in Educational Psychologist (issue for October - December 2008). This article was followed by some commentaries and a response by Geary.

I've now read the original article and found it very interesting and thought-provoking. It is not, in fact, an empirical study. Rather, David Geary uses evolutionary theory to make predictions about the nature of learning and to explain the findings of previously-published research. At the most basic level, Geary argues that children find it much easier to learn about the things that would have been important for survival throughout most of human (and pre-human) history, as compared to many of the topics we try to teach in schools and universities. The former kind of learning is what he refers to as "primary learning".

Primary learning falls into the categories of folk psychology, folk, biology, and folk physics. Examples of folk psychology include learning and thinking about oneself, about others (e.g. the meaning of facial expressions, understanding language, etc.), and about groups (who is kin, who is part of your in-group or out-group). Folk biology includes learning about plants, prey, and predators. Folk physics involves understanding the ecology, including learning to navigate and to construct basic tools. Much of the learning and reasoning in these domains is fast, unconscious, and automatic, because the mind has evolved over millions of years to respond to these problems.

However, the human mind has also evolved a degree of plasticity; that is, it has evolved a capacity to engage with novel problems that are encountered in the environment. This is what Geary calls "secondary learning". Novel problems require people to construct internal models of the environment that they then manipulate in an attempt to reach solutions or decisions. This kind of thinking is slower, more controlled, and conscious, although sufficient practice in a domain can lead to processes becoming automatic (as with reading and writing). It is this kind of thinking where we would expect to find the most variation between individuals.

As Geary notes, throughout most children's development language is quickly learned, as is the ability to understand the expressions of others, one's own status within a group, and so on. Consistent with this evolutionary perspective on learning, children are most happy when chatting with friends and engaging in sporting activities (in-group/out-group competition), and least happy when engaged in school activities (lessons, homework, etc.). Furthermore, between childhood and adulthood the best predictor of global self-esteem is not performance at school, but one's perceived physical attractiveness.

One implication of this perspective is that we should not rely on children's "natural curiosity" to guide their secondary learning. Indeed, we should not assume a smooth transition between primary learning and secondary learning. Children themselves need to be taught that the topics of secondary learning will not be learned as effortlessly as the topics of primary learning. If they do not realise this, then the inevitable failures that occur when children engage in secondary learning may lead to disengagement. This is often the case in mathematics, where children frequently believe (and are encouraged by parents to believe) that unless you have innate talent then you can't do maths.

Geary also cautions against uncritical acceptance of currently-popular social constructivist approaches to learning, which emphasise group learning over individual learning. The fact that children learn a great deal of social knowledge through their participation in groups does not mean that group participation will have the same effect for secondary learning. This is an area where more research is needed, as was noted by the American National Mathematics Advisory Panel (cited in Geary's response to commentaries):

"All-encompassing recommendations that instruction should be entirely "child-centred" or "teacher-directed" are not supported by research. If such recommendations exist, they should be rescinded. If they are being considered, they should be avoided. High-quality research does not support the exclusive use of either approach".

Although Geary talks about school age children through his paper, for those of us teaching in higher education the evolutionary perspective must still be salient. Many of our students are still in their teenage years, are still learning about themselves, learning about new people and groups that they encounter, and about their position within those groups. It is not always clear that students appreciate the effort that must be made in order to learn much of the material that is encountered, and some topics are percieved as harder than others. In addition, there is much pressure to move towards a "student-centred" model of teaching, just as schools have been encouraged to use "child-centred" teaching. But as Geary shows us, on the basis of current evidence it is far from clear whether one model is superior to the other, or should be used to the exclusion of the other.

Addendum, June 12th

In relation to group learning, I should have also made reference to my posting about "The Apprentice" on June 9th. There I referred to the research on brainstorming, which has found that it is more effective for members of a group to generate their ideas individually rather than within the context of a group. Along similar lines, research into group decision making has found that people in groups tend to share information that is already known to all members, whilst information that is unique to a given member often goes unshared. Thus groups may fail to take advantage of any diversity among their members (one qualification here is that the research to date is largely based on groups created by the researchers, rather than long-standing groups whose members are familiar to each other and who may feel more at ease sharing). I talk about this work in my textbook Judgment and Decision Making: Psychological Perspectives.

However, it may be that using the new social media applications (blogs, wikis, Twitter, etc.) may overcome some of the limitations of traditional group interaction. Just as electronic brainstorming has been found to work better than face-to-face brainstorming, so asynchronous electronic communication may allow for a more beneficial exchange of information; for example, by allowing students to consider what they want to say before posting a message, as opposed to feeling pressurised to provide a fast response in a face-to-face situation. Clearly this is an area where more research is needed.

Reference

Geary, D.C. (2008). An evolutionarily informed education science. Educational Psychologist, 43 (4), 179-195.

Geary, D.C. (2008). Whither evolutionary educational psychology? Educational Psychologist, 43 (4), 217-226.

The More Followers You Have, The More You Tweet. Or Is It The Other Way Around?

2009-06-10T16:53:00.001-07:00

The More Followers You Have, The More You Tweet. Or Is It The Other Way Around?

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MU study finds connection between evolution, classroom learning | Science Blog

2009-06-10T15:52:00.001-07:00

MU study finds connection between evolution, classroom learning | Science Blog

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Male hummingbirds break speed record for love - life - 10 June 2009 - New Scientist

2009-06-10T01:11:00.001-07:00

Male hummingbirds break speed record for love - life - 10 June 2009 - New Scientist

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Reflections on "The Apprentice"

2009-06-09T06:39:00.000-07:00

I have been meaning to try and write an essay about The Apprentice, the TV show that has just reached the end of its fifth run in the UK. However, the pressures of the university exam period have somewhat scuppered that, so here are a few quick thoughts...

The one part of every series that really drives me crazy is the interviews just prior to the final of the show. These interviews have always seemed to have no purpose other than to make the candidates squirm as much as possible. But this time, the cat has been let out of the bag, when one of the interviewers appeared on The Apprentice - Your Fired and admitted that you would never interview like that in real life. In other words, they are just trying to make fun telly. However, even when interviewers are trying to do a sensible job, the psychological research indicates that interviews are a pretty dismal way of trying to predict how well someone will perform in any kind of future situation (and I don't mean just job interviews, but interviews for university places, parole board interviews, etc.). A recent enquiry to the mailing list of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making asked whether there was anything positive to be said for interviews. Nobody did have anything positive to say. Nonetheless, we all still use interviews, presumably for want of reliable evidence and because people still have misgivings about psychometric testing. Also, many interviewers will regard themselves as amateur psychologists, giving themselves a pat on the back for their ability to understand people and identify talent (see note below on overconfidence).

Something that happens on almost every episode of The Apprentice is the group brainstorming session, where the teams throw around ideas, a process which leads to the occasional tantrum or sulk as personalities clash and people don't get their own way. Again, there has been a lot of research into brainstorming and it points in one direction: It is more effective for people to generate ideas individually before engaging in evaluation than it is to do so in a group. Even when groups brainstorm properly (i.e. avoid poo-pooing ideas that are proposed), some people may be afraid of exposing their ideas to public scrutiny, they may be unable to get a productive train of thought going whilst listening to other people, they may forget what they were going to say because of what someone else is saying, they may slack off and let others do the work, or they may just match their individual level of productivity to what they perceive as the norm.

Some ways have been proposed to improve the effectiveness of brainstorming, such as having trained facilitators guide a session or alternating between private and group sessions. This also wouldn't be such good television, of course.

Finally, the thing I love about The Apprentice, and what makes it such compulsive viewing, is the incredible overconfidence of the candidates. Of course, you don't know to what extent the programme-makers gee them up to say the boastful things they do, but one of the great pleasures is watching people with apparently huge egos making a big mess of things. I fully appreciate that the tasks involved are difficult, that there is great time pressure, and so on, but that's all the more reason the candidates shouldn't be so cocky! Not that they will always admit to having made mistakes; the usual attitude, to quote the title of a book by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, is "Mistakes were made (but not by me)". And as this book title suggests, research into both experts and laypeople indicates not just a widespread tendency towards overconfidence, but also a tendency to believe that failures were somebody else's fault.

On the other hand, the candidates are perhaps in something of a dilemma. Admitting to having made a mistake is clearly seen as a risky thing to do. It's often hard for Sir Alan Sugar (in the UK version) to decide who should go, and admitting to a mistake obviously provides a clear reason for why you should be fired. At the same time, candidates are supposed to show that they can learn from experience! So, presumably the best strategy is to say that someone else made a mistake and you have learned from it...

Anyway, here's looking forward to the next series.

Do multimedia presentations improve understanding?

2009-06-08T02:29:00.000-07:00

A new study by Stefan Münzer and colleagues in Germany suggests that the benefits of animations in presentations are not restricted to subgroups of viewers, such as those with superior visual-spatial processing abilities or those with weaker prior knowledge.

Although animations are widely believed to enhance the learning of dynamic processes, research has not decisively found an advantage for animations over static images. One suggestion is that animations require the use of the viewer's visual-spatial processes, and thus benefit those who have stronger visual-spatial abilities but not necessarily those who are weaker in this kind of processing. Another suggestion is that animations benefit mainly those who have lower prior knowledge about the area being taught.

An alternative view of visual-spatial thinking is that this is more important for comprehending static images that are intended to convey some process. This is because the viewer must animate the static image in his or her head, a procedure which certainly does require visual-spatial processes.

Münzer and colleagues examined the effectiveness of animations in the comprehension of ATP structure and synthesis (ATP is a kind of enzyme). Thirty-four students were shown an animation of ATP structure and process, 31 were shown static images, and 34 were shown enriched static images containing arrows and representations of intermediate states that illustrated the motion of particular elements. All participants were tested for their prior knowledge and for their spatial abilities. Following the presentation, the participants completed a computer-based test that assessed recall, comprehension, and transfer, using a combination of multiple-choice and open-ended questions.

On the questions about ATP structure, there was no effect of presentation mode and no effect of spatial ability. However, students with higher prior knowledge did better on the test.

On the questions about ATP processes, both animations and enriched static images led to better test performance than the ordinary static images. Spatial abilities did not predict performance in the animation condition, nor - unexpectedly - did they predict performance in the ordinary static images condition. The authors suggest that this last presentation mode may have just been too hard for everyone. However, stronger spatial ability was associated with better performance after seeing the enriched spatial images, suggesting that high spatial performers are better able to construct an internal model of a process when a diagram contains cues to motion.

Prior knowledge also predicted performance on the process questions, but did not interact with any of the other factors.

In sum, this study suggests that animations may indeed benefit the comprehension of process information, and that this is not dependent on the spatial abilities of the viewer. One factor that was not reported in the study, however, was whether animations benefited each individual component of the final test (i.e. recall, comprehension, and transfer).

Reference

Münzer, S., Seufert, T., and Brünken, R. Learning from multimedia presentations: Facilitation function of animations and spatial abilities. Learning and Individual Differences (2009), doi:101016/j.indif.2009.05.001.

Why is it so hard to do my work?

2009-06-06T15:21:00.000-07:00

In the modern workplace people are often required to work on multiple projects, often under time pressure and with changing priorities. The media often talk about "multi-tasking", in which people engage in more than one activity at the same time, yet much workplace activity involves moving from one task to another sequentially. New research by Sophie Leroy at the University of Minnesota shows that performance on a task can be detrimentally affected by having worked on a different task just before. Leroy proposes that this is due to attention residue, whereby a person is still thinking about the earlier task whilst working on the current one. More strikingly, the detrimental effect of attention residue does not only occur when the earlier task was left unfinished, but also when it was completed.

In Leroy's first study, 84 students were told that they would be doing two apparently different studies. The first involved attempting word problems and the second was said to be a study of how people evaluate job candidates but, having completed the first task the students were not actually asked to do the evaluation task. Instead, they were presented with a task specifically designed to measure the extent to which they were still thinking about the previous task. For the first task, involving the word problems, the students were allocated to one of four different conditions, whereby it was either possible or impossible to complete the task, and there was either high or low time pressure. Leroy reasoned that tasks that are finished under high time pressure should lead to less attention residue, because time pressure inhibits the ability to explore possibilities so there is less to reflect back on later.

This is exactly what she found. After having engaged on the word task, participants were asked to decide whether various letter strings shown on a computer screen were real words or not. Some of the letter strings shown were not words, some were "target" words that related to the first task, and some were "neutral" words (that served as a baseline measure).

The fastest response times occurred for the target words, except for the participants who had finished the first task under high time pressure. This indicates that in the other conditions the target words were already active in participants' minds, as would be expected if they were still thinking about the first task. By contrast, neutral words were identified more slowly.

In a second study Leroy had 78 students complete the job evaluation task straight after the initial word problems task, but without doing the lexical decision task. In the the job evaluation task the students were given 5 minutes to read four resumes (CVs). Then they were asked to recall as much as they could about each resume.

As predicted, the students recalled more about the resumes when they had previously completed the word problems task under high time pressure.

Leroy notes that in a real work context it will not always be possible to improve task performance simply by setting a deadline; a deadline needs to be a realistic one.

Further research should also examine a range of other factors, such as the degree of initial task completion (rather than simply completed vs. non-completed) and the individual's state of mind at the time of transitioning from one task to another (e.g. is the person at the peak of their concentration, fatigued, or in some other state).

Reference

Leroy, S. Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (2009), doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002

Keeping the libel law out of scientific disputes

2009-06-05T10:16:00.000-07:00

The British Chiropractic Association has taken out a libel action against scientist and best-selling author Simon Singh. The organisation Sense About Science is collecting signatures of those opposed to the use of the libel laws to settle essentially scientific disputes. Their statement and a link to the petition is here.

MMR and autism

2009-06-04T15:44:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, a former chairman of the British Medical Association, Sir Sandy Macara, proposed that children should not be allowed to attend school unless they had been innoculated with the MMR vaccine (the BBC's report is here). I have just been watching BBC television's Question Time programme, where most panellists - not all, sadly - supported the MMR vaccine, but declined to support Macara's position on the grounds that it was not fair to "take it out on the children". What none of them ventured to say was whether it would be fair on the other children in school to be exposed to a life-threatening contagious illness from an unvaccinated child.

The NHS has a very helpful vaccination website, where two particularly salient facts are given:

In the year before the vaccine was introduced in the UK, 86,000 children caught measles and 16 died.

Because of the MMR vaccine, no child has died from acute measles in the UK since 1992.

The graph to the right shows how measles cases have been rising since the media started printing scare stories about MMR. If we can ban smokers from pubs on the grounds that their smoke endangers the health of other patrons, why can't we ban unvaccinated children from school on the grounds that they are similarly endangering the health and life of their peers?